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Posted at 11:00 in advent 2017 | Permalink | Comments (0)
'Take Yourself With You’ from Stellular by Rose Elinor Dougall
For eager eagle eyed fans of Rose Elinor Dougall ‘Take Yourself With You’ was not exactly a new song (it surfaced on The Quietus’ Soundcloud page at the end of 2014), but it was dressed up in a subtly more seductive outfit that in a way summed up the entirety of her Stellular set. Now someone more in tune with the preoccupations of Younger Generations might be able to tease out some threads and references which connect to, um, whatever whoever whichever. But for Old Fogies like me the touchstones of Stellular were the likes of Broadcast, Saint Etienne and Laetitia Sadier: Pop infected with mild viruses that ensure the sounds fit within expected templates but only just and sometimes only just not quite. Perhaps some people underestimate the value of just not quite. Perhaps it is just me.
It’s to Sadier that ‘Take Yourself With You’ in particular most effectively sidles up to in my crowded, clouded brain. That’s a compliment, in case you were wondering, and you probably were. Dougall sings in a voice that is sweet but not saccharine, soft but not sentimental. There is a glamorous shallowness to the sound, and I mean that in the most positive of ways for it is a shallowness that allows surface patterns to glisten and beguile in the way that fabulous Pop always does. It facilitates slight shifts of rhythm and inflection, like rays of sunlight refracting and reflecting on golden sands. Squinting just so.
If I squint just so I can see Rose Elinor Dougall elegantly at home in a 1930s nightclub, singing siren songs shrouded in clouds of cigarette smoke drifting up, up and away from slickly dressed advertising executives and slimly pouting debutantes picking pockets for kicks. Equally she’s there in a Parisian Left Bank cafe sniggering at Sartre whilst crooning seditiously in Simone’s quivering ear or skimming around the dance floor of Studio 54 stealing Bianca’s doves and kicking stiletto heels through Andy’s entourage. Timeless and effortless.
Posted at 11:00 in advent 2017 | Permalink | Comments (2)
‘Money Never Dreams’ from ‘Imaginations' by Molly Nilsson
'Our Twisted Love’ from 'Our Twisted Love' E.P. by Rose McDowall
Does Molly Nilsson’s music belong to some snappily titled movement/genre/clique? I have no idea. Nor do I even know who might decide such things or invent such genres/cliques nowadays. Perhaps it is no-one. Perhaps it is everyone. Perhaps it does not even matter.
If I were to invent a genre for Molly Nilsson’s music it would be something along the lines of Monochrome ElectroPop for Digital Daydreamers. Black and White Bedroom TechnoPop for Analogue Auteurs. Pared Back SynthPop for 23rd Century Punks. You get the picture, and the picture would be angular two-dimensional black and white. Of course.
The Pop in all of those imaginary genres is crucial of course, for all of Molly Nilsson’s records have been infused with the spirit of Pop, where Pop is about being succinct and catchy. They are records locked in a universe of 1980 Eternal where Gary Numan is starring in Telekon and The Human League are Traveloguing into a future decorated with fading photographs of last tangos in Paris. ‘Imaginations’ then imagines all this and more, infusing songs with global and personal politics which simultaneously come across as intensely passionate and determinedly detached. Computer Love for Contemporary Activists. No more and certainly no less.
So fitting that Nilsson’s records have for some time been jointly issued by Night School records out of Glasgow, a label that has persistently shown itself to be of the highest calibre and the most excellent taste. No surprise then that Night School has also been the vehicle through which new recordings by Rose McDowall appeared this past year. ‘Our Twisted Love’ followed Night School’s reissue of McDowall’s glorious ‘Cut With The Cake Knife’ collection, and the release of delicious old Strawberry Switchblade demos on delectable transparent 7” vinyl. With more of a nod perhaps to the darker realms of Spell than the lighter textures of Strawberry Switchblade, ‘Our Twisted Love’ is an extended drone driven piece that mesmerises with a cool eye and a shadowy insistence. It draws us in, envelopes us in spirals of cloud and seduces us with squalls of snow. It’s like falling into a television screen tuned to static interference, helplessly following a eerily hypnotic refrain that haunts our reveries. Dark magic. No more and certainly no less.
Posted at 11:00 in advent 2017 | Permalink | Comments (0)
'Whyteleafe' from Home Counties by Saint Etienne
It is comforting to think that the notion of artists in any realm striving always to break new ground and to produce something radically different to their previous work has been universally debunked. I mean, that’s not just me is it? Comforting then to know that Saint Etienne's record for 2017 followed firmly in the tradition of other Saint Etienne records in being deliciously rooted within cultural, Pop and personal histories and obsessions. Surely we would not have it any other way?
Home Counties then is an album of delicious confection filled with centres of sweet suburbia and misty-eyed Arcadian mythology. That soul of Saint Etienne weaves most exquisitely through ‘Whyteleafe’, a song that strikes me as a hymn for the dispossessed progressive Internationalist middle classes increasingly isolated in contemporary Brexit Britain. It’s a song for and about the quiet gentleman slipping softly out of existence; a relict from the recent past that the song itself so charmingly references. Unsurprisingly ‘Whyteleafe’ is a song that uses the classic Pop theme of movement to great effect. Our imaginary gentleman travels on the train "from Whyteleafe to Caterham” and just in case we missed this notion of movement as being an essentially Pop phenonomnon it is cheekily framed with a Bowie-nod of “station to station”. You cannot help but smile.
And it is of course something of an amusing/agonising/distressing/delightful (delete as the mood takes you) realisation too that such a character is no longer one of a distant generation but rather is most likely a contemporary. This character with his "Faber and Faber" and “sweet municpal dreams” could be me and any number of my friends, engrossed in copies of The Modernist and Antidote To Indifference or leafing through The Guardian. He is Ray Davies’ ‘Mr Pleasant’ whisked away and turned from a figure of ridicule to one of peculiarly peaceful rebellion; ‘I’m not like everybody else’ switched from rock’n’roll sneer to frustrated yet nevertheless completely comfortable self-awareness.
Posted at 11:00 in advent 2017 | Permalink | Comments (2)
''76: Hustle 76' from 50 Song Memoir by The Magnetic Fields
If Ray Davies recognises the limitation of Pop as a short-form medium then Stephin Merritt surely makes continued parries to suggest this need not necessarily be the case. His '50 Song Memoir’ set (wherein he writes a song about/for each of his 50 years on Earth) echoes his timeless '69 Love Songs' opus (referenced here in my own 50 year celebration project) in blending academic understanding of musical construction (it’s all beyond me, frankly) with instinctive pleasure (which I obviously delight in). To this splendid melange '50 Song Memoir' brings the added element of autobiography. Or at least it brings autobiography in Pop-shaped form in that there must by definition be a sense of fantasy, illusion, un-reality. Merritt’s songs playfully play up to the tropes and themes of the times they pass through, referencing both lyrically and aurally the shifting tides of history both personal and cultural. One wonders if the effect is lessened for anyone even slightly out of sync with the 50 year period Merritt moves through. Is the connection lessened to one not born within a year or two of Merritt? Perhaps, perhaps not.
Personal favourites change with the seasons, but I cannot help but keep coming back to ‘Hustle 76’. It acts as exemplary reminder that for most ten year olds of the times the predominant musical movement was not the but the blank generation of punk but the euphoric bliss of Disco. It reminds us too that the Year Zero hysteria of punk forced many who were ten in 1976 to later pretend disavowment of Disco (and later still to disavow that pretence). All of which means that ‘Hustle 76’ then is Disco seen through the exquisite lens of enforced detachment suffused with necessary theatrical distortion and illusion. No coincidence, surely, that it appears to reference Adam and The Ants glorious 'Prince Charming’ in its opening lines; a song from five years in the future that itself will cast punk’s re-invention of personal identity in extravagant outfits bedecked in gaudy paste jewels from the theatrical costumier. ‘Hustle 76’ is the sound of multi-coloured dance floors pulsing with the promise of a heady abandon which is tantalisingly out of reach, doomed to immediate unfashionable obsolescence yet irresistibly appealing. It’s the sound of looking backwards and forwards in the same moment, caught forever in the oscillation of a desire barely understood and simultaneously missed. How could I not love it?
Posted at 11:00 in advent 2017 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Ray Davies: 'Silent Movies' and 'Rock'n'Roll Cowboys' from 'Americana' LP.
‘Americana’ is a record riddled with cliches and nostalgia, but when was a Ray Davies record anything else? Long-time Unpopular readers (there may even be one or two of you who remember the halcyon days of Tangents. Anyone? Oh well…) will know well that Davies is in my top flight of artists, regularly topping out the list at those moments when guns are held to temples. He may well be the epitome of the curmudgeonly old man spouting dubious political views, but gosh darn it, I have thoroughly enjoyed listening to ‘Americana’ this year. Anyone criticising this record as being one-dimensional or of lacking the finesse required to properly reflect the complexities of contemporary America would be, I suspect, wilfully missing the point of the record in the first place. For Davies has never really been one for addressing complexities; has always recognised that Pop as essentially a short-form medium is really not best placed to do this. Instead Davies’ records have always relished in knowingly mediated tableau and I would aver that ‘Americana’ is thus firmly in the tradition of ‘Village Green’ in being a warm-hearted, intensely personal but essentially theatrical vision of place that exists primarily within other mediated experiences of those same countries. So if ‘Village Green’ is Constable and Coleridge then ‘Americana’ is Roy Rogers and Lichtenstein’s comic book heroines.
Nowhere is it finer that in the gorgeous sequence of ‘Silent Movie’ into ‘Rock ’n’ Roll Cowboys’ wherein Davies remembers a conversation with Alex Chilton and proceeds to sing about the notion of rock’n’roll singers as cowboys. Not as *real* cowboys, you understand, but those of the silver screen and the gun-slinging Elvis of Warhol’s silk. Davies resignedly accepts that the Golden Age of the rock’n’roll singer is now as much a historical punctuation mark in the tapestry of Popular culture as Will Eisner and Jack Binder, Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels. No more and no less.
Rock’n’roll, Davies seems to say, is no longer Rock’n’Roll in much the same way as the Western is no longer The Western. Threads may remain and the form vaguely recognisable, but the detail is different, themes sometimes gleefully inverted and perverted. And whilst Davies laments this he simultaneously grudgingly accepts that this is the way it is. He may grump about how Things Were Better In The Good Old Days, but the sadness is underpinned by the knowledge that his nostalgia is, as it has always been, just smoke and mirrors.
Posted at 08:00 in advent 2017 | Permalink | Comments (2)