Category: Indie / Alternative

34. MERCURY REV – YERSELF IS STEAM (1991)

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When Paul Rothchild was recording the first Doors album, he banned the group from using any effects. He felt this would keep the music timeless, not being sonically linked to any of the current fads or gimmicks. Mercury Rev achieved the same end on Yerself Is Steam, by different means. They use EVERYTHING. They had a flute player. They had a visionary producer (the scope of this record is so wide it had to be recorded on 35mm magnetic film). Their two guitar players are aware of the lineage of psychedelic punk rock history that led up to their particular place and time, but not enslaved or restricted by it in any way.  There’s never a feeling of them trying to ape anyone, looking over their shoulder saying “Are you sure Jimi did it this way?” No, they sound more in love with the sheer joy and chaos they are wringing out of their strings. They also had David Baker, a loose cannon credited with “vocals (when it sounds like something he would do)”. This wasn’t something that just happened on record. When I saw them in Glasgow around the release of this record, he’d climb off the stage and wander around the venue when not involved. The tension between his David Thomas-like bellowing, crooning, whispers and mumbles and Jonathan Donahue more melodic “vocals (when left to himself)” would only survive one more album (the equally great Boces), but for a couple of years there wasn’t another band like them.

Chasing A Bee opens the album. The line “my primitive words match my primitive heart” sums up an air of innocence that runs through the album. Starting slow and low with flute and acoustic guitar David Baker sings of mellow seducers meeting eager seekers. Jonathan Donohue takes over for the chorus, and the song builds beautifully until the 3 minute 10 mark when all holy hell is unleashed. A descending four note flute battles with screeching guitars, and the whole thing builds and decays into the two chord Seeds style stomper Syringe Mouth.

Coney Island Cyclone is sheer joy. The sound on this is as refreshing as a sea breeze in your face. The opening guitar sounds like its trying to work out The Creation’s The Girls are Naked. The refrain of “I won’t chicken out” will worm its way into your brain until it becomes your mantra for life. David Baker is back with an absurdly low voice on Blue and Black, as the band behind him channel side one of Neu! 75.

The brilliantly titled Sweey Oddysee Of A Cancer Cell T’Th’ Center Of Your Heart closes side one (or Rocket Side) which sounds like they’ve copped Billy Duffy’s guitars circa She Sells Sanctuary before galloping off like Black Sabbath at their most motorik (really!) or Will Sergeant jamming with Godspeed! You Black Emperor. This doesn’t do the song justice. Really, you need to hear this.

Just as Tommy Hall conceived Easter Everywhere as two complete halves, each side designed to be listened to on repeat, Yerself Is Steam works best on vinyl. The second side (or Harmony side) has a completely different atmosphere, more introspective and melancholy, like side two of On The Beach. Frittering is a meandering acoustic Sunday night come down of a song. Its beautiful chord progression isn’t a million miles away from the more conventional songs that would provide them with greater success on Deserters Songs, but here they just let it drift around, soothing your soul for nearly nine gorgeous minutes.

After a brief noise interlude, the twelve minute Very Sleepy Rivers closes the album. Live this would be played as part of a medley with Miles Davis’ Shhh/Peaceful, and gives you a good idea of where their heads were at. I’ve never really had a clue what this song was about, David Baker’s vocals, when he’s not whispering are very low in the mix, just another instrument. One of those songs where I’d rather leave its spooky mystery intact

This line up would only manage one more album together. David Baker would leave after Boces, and Suzanne Thorpe would leave after See You On The Other Side. The band that would record Deserters Songs, although great, were a different proposition altogether.  The genius of this record is that it sounds like it was either thrown together or meticulously planned. I suspect the latter, given the subsequent records they would go on to make. No band gets that lucky. (TT)

___________________________________________________________________________

Glasgow 1991
When David Baker, strolled nonchalantly through the sparse audience towards the bar, it was during the middle of a song. More specifically, it was during the middle bit of a song. Perhaps you remember the ‘middle bit’? For the uninitiated, the ‘middle bit’was the cacophonous (90 second or so) build up in the heart of the song, preceding the climax, and at the 1980s indie disco one regularly struggled to find the dance moves to fit this shapeless passage of sound. Sonic Youth were fine purveyors of the middle bit (think Expressway To Yr Skull or Silver Rocket) but by 1991 signed now to a major label, they were long past the godlike glory of their Sister and Daydream Nation albums. But Mercury Rev had stepped into fill the void and, to these ears at least. their first album remains their most satisfying. It may not have the refinement and poise of Deserters’ Songs. As their debut, it certainly had only a fraction of the audience. But it contains their original essence: meandering pulsating space rock (‘Chasing A Bee’) with some disturbingly eerie melodies (‘Frittering’, ‘Very Sleepy Rivers’) amidst the white noise. What’s more, it is one of only two album recordings to contain the mad ramblings of Mr. Baker – a true rock’n’roll eccentric. The later albums may have hit big but they missed his spooky charm. (JJ)

27. GRIZZLY BEAR – YELLOW HOUSE (2006) / (A) VECKATIMEST (2009)

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To propose that there might be a genius or two creating popular music in the 21st century may be anathema to those of a certain vintage. After all, Lennon, (Tim) Buckley, Van Vliet, and co. are no longer with us. Indeed one is liable to invite ridicule at the mere suggestion, but I would venture that if people are prepared to look hard enough there are at least a few, one of whom is Daniel Rossen, co-contributor to the wonderful NY foursome, Grizzly Bear.

Grizzly Bear began as a moniker for Ed Droste who, to little fanfare, released a low-fi debut entitled Horn of Plenty in 2004. For the second full-length feature, the ranks had swelled to include three other members, most significantly 23-year old Department of Eagles multi-instrumentalist, Rossen. Droste’s recruitment policy demonstrated shrewd judgement – in fact it was a masterstroke, Rossen’s widescreen West Coast sensibilities were less a musical appendage than the catalyst for a revolution in the band’s modus operandi.

The first fruits of this remoulding, Yellow House (recorded in Droste’s mother’s house), might sound at first like a bunch of (flamboyantly) half-baked ideas toiling in vain to find conventional form, and could be easily dismissed as such by the more casual, less discerning listener. But as the saying goes: ‘a new home slowly reveals it’s secrets’, so too with Yellow House.

Take the album’s opener for instance. ‘Easier’ patiently emerges from atmospheric woodwind and upright piano before being transfigured by Disneyesque harmonising and then an amalgam of sounds which I can only describe as a fantasia of bluegrass-flavoured Impressionism. Like much of the album, it features banjo, autoharp and glockenspiel, and if someone said to you that it was the most beautiful song they had ever heard, you could not feign surprise.

If Marla’s stalking waltzlike piano conveys a sense of foreboding, it is soon transfigured by a string arrangement which sounds like ghosts escaping from one of Debussy’s tone poems, weaving into the solemnity their alluring supernatural tapestries.

But it is not all rhapsody and capriccio. After a breezily acoustic beginning, the guitars on ‘On A Neck And A Spit’ hurtle, crash and collapse together causing an unnerving pile up, before Rossen raises the tempo with a buzzing (Roy) Harper-esque bastard-folk foot stomp. ‘Lullaby’ does what it says on the tin, until half way in it is violently ambushed by a gaggle of Grizzly guitars. While ‘Knife’ is at least more musically orthodox, and easily the closest to a ‘hit’ here, it’s lyrics  ( I want you to know / When I look in your eyes / With every blow / Comes another lie / You think it’s alright / Can’t you feel the knife?) mean it is unlikely it will find its way into your repertoire of songs to sing in the shower.

There is such a range of genre-hopping versatility on show here, that the result is the creation of something almost uncategorisable, and there is some evidence to suggest the band seek further afield than most for their musical inspiration, in particular to film soundtracks. Consider for example the unearthly harmonising on the incredibly complex ‘Central and Remote’, eerily redolent (3:24-4:03) of Krzysztof Komeda’s score for Polanski’s ‘Fearless Vampire Killers’. And is it just me, or does the achingly beautiful ‘interlude’ on the incomparable ‘Little Brother’ parallel Вячеслав Овчинников’s exquisite music for the ‘apples and horses’ dream sequence in Tarkovsky’s ‘Ivan’s Childhood’? In each case the meticulous craftsmanship, borrowed reference points or not, is to be admired and cherished.

The closer ‘Colorado’ with its densely layered vocal overdubs has to be heard to be believed. Imagine the Beach Boys ‘Smile’ version of ‘Cool Cool Water’ being recorded by Big Star during sessions for their ill-fated third album and you may get close. It’s a bewildering end to a bewitching album, one that ranks alongside ‘Forever Changes’ and ‘Spirit of Eden’ as one of music’s great documents of reinvention.

The last time of any note a group of precocious and wide-eyed musicians in their mid-20s retired to an old house to express with such versatility and virtuosity a new musical language, the result was Music From Big Pink’, an album that changed the course of popular music. No far-reaching influence was to follow from Yellow House but it is an historical document that will surely be blessed with similar longevity. It leaves you wondering: why isn’t all music this imaginative? The answer to that question is no secret. Put a sign up outside that Yellow House: ‘Daniel Rossen: Genius At Work’.

VECKATIMEST

What is implicit on Yellow House is made explicit on Veckatimest; what was alluded to is now clearly defined; what was hidden is now revealed; where there was a sophomoric air, there is now professorial authority; what sounded exploratory has now reached perfect distillation.
I can barely bring myself to talk about Veckatimest for fear of allowing some of it’s magic to somehow escape in a cloud of loquaciousness. It will suffice to mention that ‘Southern Point’ is the best one stop introduction to the band’s music, and that ‘I Live With You’ is one of the most impossibly beautiful things I have ever heard. So let me keep it simple: Veckatimest is very probably the greatest album of the 21st Century so far. (JJ)

23. CRAZY RHYTHMS – THE FEELIES (1980)

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CRAZY RHYTHMS – THE FEELIES (1980)
Any record which features sandpaper, coat rack and shoes among its instrumental credits has emphatically earned the right to be called Crazy Rhythms. The rhythms, and the songs they inhabit, aren’t ostentatiously barmy – for which thanks – so much as markedly unorthodox, squatting in a territory somewhere on the road from skiffle to funk without remotely resembling either.
Taking their name from an undemanding, multi-sensory form of film in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World,  the Feelies appeared most likely to side with the Gamma, Delta and Epsilon classes of the book, with their unassuming – for want of a better word – preppy image and palpably un-rock ‘n’ roll demeanour, fitting with the most superficially obvious comparison of Jonathan Richman.
 A crude precis of Crazy Rhythms could be that it outlines how the Modern Lovers might have developed if Richman had continued to expand the Velvet Underground template of their first album, instead of proceeding to draw more heavily on rockabilly and doo-wop influences. This also puts them in proximity with the commotion of Josef K and even the early Go-Betweens, while on the Bolt-worthy sprint of Fa Ce La, they provide a blueprint for the sound of the Woodentops.
Repeatedly on Crazy Rhythms, the Feelies prove themselves to be masters of the slow build and slower burn. Many of the songs are one or two minutes down the line before vocals or hooks arrive, meaning that many self-proclaimed cutting edge radio stations
would play them – not that this would ever actually happen – in a severely truncated form, but this would be like skipping all that business with the apes  in 2001: A Space Odyssey and going straight to HAL’s breakdown. The full picture is needed for full power. Funny how this doesn’t seem to apply when the song in question is Stairway To Heaven or Champagne Supernova.
All of this is most explicit on opener The Boy With The Perpetual Nervousness, where hesitant-sounding claves and/or woodblock are spied on by a ticking guitar, which finally springs upon them when goaded by the tom-tom roll of future avant-garde voyager Anton Fier. What follows is a sketch of a silent recluse who either has depths too hidden to be traceable or is just completely withdrawn – a Boo Radley who’s never been allowed anywhere near scissors or a Sheldon Cooper plotting his world domination? Unclear – the Feelies put as little flesh on the bones of their lyrics as their music.
But don’t let this sparsity underestimate their capacity to scorch, particularly with Glenn Mercer and Bill Million proving to be the most quietly potent guitar duo of their era, Verlaine and Lloyd with silencers attached . The solo midway through the similarly elongated intro to Loveless Love – which they’re seen performing in Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild – would have the jocks meekly handing THEIR dinner money over, while another on Forces At Work – seven minutes, practically all one chord – is a proud descendant of Run, Run, run and All Tomorrow’s Parties. The abum’s sweetest melody is on Raised Eyebrows, where it almost feels like a copout for them to introduce lyrics, particularly when they’re so terse, and you feel that they should have had the courage of their convictions and gone for an instrumental. But it ends up structured like a 1930s dance band tune, which gives it a charm of its own.
There’s even a Beatles cover. Their interpretation of Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey is less drastic an overhaul than Devo’s version of Satisfaction but is conceived in a similar spirit – seemingly ambivalent towards its weighty source material but plainly a product of an utterly different time and culture.
It’s apt that ‘rhythms’ is close to being the longest vowelless word in the English language, as Crazy Rhythms withdraws what might be essential elements to some – big production, deep bass, bravado – and is vastly inventive with what’s left. French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles once likened the record to a UFO – it may come in peace but has little interest in being taken to your leader, as it would much rather take you on a path of its own (PG).

22. THE FALL – DRAGNET (1979) / (A) THE FALL – SLATES (1981)

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DRAGNET

It might seem odd to talk about a departure in the Fall’s sound but if there ever was such a moment, it came with Dragnet. Yvonne Pawlett had gone through the exit, on possibly the last occasion before the hinges needed fixed, dragging behind her the endearingly spooky organ that had been as central to their early sound as Tony Book had been to Manchester City a decade earlier.

Enter Craig Scanlon and Paul Hanley, neither of whom could ever be described as lieutenants to Mark E Smith- could anyone?- but who, as dramatically outlined in Hanley’s memoir The Big Midweek, stayed for the best part of two decades as the fist-close witnesses, and unceasingly compelling soundtrackers of, Smith’s, well, ownership of a band that previously borne a vague resemblance to a democracy.

It still (a word that always recurs in Fall reviews) stands as one of their most gripping statements, though I’m quite aware Smith is unlikely to take kindly to such a view about a record made as long ago as 1979. A Figure Walks is as terrifying as you’d expect a song about stalking to be and, along with Muzorewi’s Daughter, shows that tom-tom thunder is possibly the most thrilling sound yet discovered by scientists. They had never yet been so downright tuneful as they are on Your Heart Out and Flat Of Angles, despite reliably unsettling lyrics (“Then they take your heart out/ With a sharp knife, it wasn’t fake”) nor as plain brutal as on Spectre Vs Rector, which served notice that this band were probably not in music to make money and certainly weren’t in it to make friends. Before The Moon Falls sounds like the title of a lovely Al Bowlly-crooned ballad from somewhere around 1932. It isn’t. It’s classic Fall.

And what’s classic Fall? It would be more than slightly churlish to say that if you have to ask, you’ll never understand, so one listen to this song – and this album – should give you pretty shrewd idea. (PG)

SLATES

If I were allowed but one Fall record in my collection I would probably choose Slates. This primordial slab of Salford sludge finds MES at his most cryptically acerbic and blisteringly bewildering and the band making a glorious amphetamine-fuelled racket.

Slates was released in an unusual 10″ format, two years into Thatcher’s premiership at the height of the Brixton Riots of April 1981. It clocks in at a little over 22 minutes. In fact, it’s safer to say that it’s an EP rather than an LP, but with 6 tracks it’s just unclear enough to ignite a discussion on the matter.

The first half kicks off with Middle Mass. Musically, a Velvets-y organ drone breaking into a jaunty Beefheartian guitar break, it is ostensibly a yarn about the drinking habits of football fans during the close season; while others have divined a tirade about Marc Riley (‘The boy is like a tape loop’). More likely the kicking is aimed at Mark’s favourite target the middle classes themselves. Just quite what Mark is getting at with his repeated declaration that ‘The Wermacht never got in here’ is anyone’s guess.

‘An Older Lover etc’ is probably about… well, his older lover (11 years older) at the time, Kay Carroll. Here his cerebral ponderings are rawly laid bare. It’s accompanied by one of those spookily amateurish guitar rumbles, like the Magic Band tuning up, and is punctuated by Mark’s indignant yelps…’Dr. Annabel Lies’ – she being the mythical agony aunt for Mark’s self therapy session

I must have listened to Prole Art Threat around 100 times but I’m none the wiser – one can surmise it has something to do with the surveillance or suppression of working class culture in Thatcher’s new Britain. Or is it? For a more extensive and insightful analysis I refer you to Taylor Parkes’ superb piece in the Quietus (http://thequietus.com/articles/03925-the-fall-and-mark-e-smith-as-a-narrative-lyric-writer) Musically, a magnificent Fall moment – driven by one of those ferocious cyclical riffs, rising, falling, FALL-ing – like only The Fall can – Hanley and Scanlon brutalising their collective ten strings, the groove intermittently suspended by the guitar squealing in protest at its ill treatment. The band were rarely if ever, tighter than on this track – every note sounds both harsh and wild and yet is delivered with military precision.

Mark sounds buoyant on Fit & Working Again, back observing the world around him after an unexplained layoff? For me it’s the slightest musical and lyrical achievement here, Mark chopping away on a solitary piano key over a skiffle-like rockabilly rhythm. But that only makes the final twosome sound even more spectacular.

A million words have been spent attempting to decode and deconstruct The Fall’s ‘definitive rant’ – who or what exactly are the Slags, Slates etc’ of the title? Accountants in suits, the pub bore, plagiarists, ‘dead publisher’s sons, material hardship pawns, The Beat, Wah! Heat – male slags…?’ I’ve even read some analysts identify the slates as vinyl records, particularly 7 inch reggae singles? To be honest one can only ‘have a bleedin’ guess.’ I am sure MES must get a kick out of reading ‘academic male slags’ trying to piece together his cryptic declamations. And their vain attempts no doubt conveniently provide him with useful material for his next rant. So forget the mystery of the subject matter and celebrate instead the vigorous kick in the gonads provided by the huge two chord guitar riff that – combined with Steve Hanley’s bowel bursting bass intro, never seems to relent. It makes for one of the greatest ever Fall tracks, enhanced further by Mark’s immortal interjection to the boys: ‘don’t start improvising for God’s sake’ – demonstrating both a natural flair for tyranny and a sensitive ear for musical purity. Bloody marvellous!

‘Leave The Capitol’ provides a fitting climax. It’s wiry and punchy and bouncily infectious in equal measure, as Mark’s invective spills over in this Arthur Machen inspired tirade at old ‘Lahndan Tahn, (‘this f-ing dump’) where he exhorts himself to ‘Exit this Roman Shell!!’ Holed up in his hotel room where the ‘maids smile in unison’ and where ‘the beds are too clean’ and the water ‘poisonous’ – you can just see him there can’t you? Pining desperately to return north to his fags’n’beer an’ a bit of proper culture…God Bless him!

Selecting one album from The Fall’s extensive repertoire is not a simple task. And the one I’ve picked is not even an album. But with prodigious economy, Slates – more than any other – is a one stop distillation of the Fall sound. Reasonable people may argue with this choice, but perhaps it would be most fitting to let the children of the Wermacht offer the final word on the matter. See below: (JJ)

18. SONIC YOUTH – SISTER (1987)

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When a bands career exceeds 20 years and sixteen plus albums it is difficult to know where to start. To any newcomer to the world of Sonic Youth I would point them in the direction of their fifth album Sister. This is an album often unfairly overlooked in favour of its big brother (Ha!) Daydream Nation or their more heavily promoted major label records released throughout the nineties. 

Sister was released in 1987, arriving in the middle of a perfect three album run (between EVOL and Daydream Nation) that rivals Bob Dylan’s similar run of albums in 1965-66 for inspiration to a rock underground. Recorded at Sears Sound in the middle of Times Square, it fits in perfectly to a line of New York rock that stretches from The Velvet Underground through Patti Smith and the Voidoids. But theres more to it than that. As a band they capture something of the American Night better than any band since the Doors. There is also a real classic psych/garage rock feel to a lot this record – imagine the frantic Feathered Fish through a New York/No Wave Filter, or a post punk take on Voices Green and Purple. 

Sister finds The Sonic Youth (as they are called on the sleeve) moving away from their earlier sound into more arranged songs and sounding all the better for it. The twin guitars of Ranaldo and Moore still coil and snake around each other like Verlaine and Lloyd or Quine and Julian. A lot of Sister reminds me of those early Eno/Island Television demos when Richard Hell was still in the band, when the songs were not quite formed, the guitars still feeling their way into the songs and stripped of the raunch and polish that Andy Johns brought to Marquee Moon. The songs still ebb and flow often breaking down halfway through. That they hold together so well I think is down to Steve Shelley, now fully integrated into the band. 

Opener Schizophrenia comes on like the Cramps covering I Worship The Sun, or is it Felt covering Can’t Find My Mind. Either way, two minutes in the song collapses in on itself the way only Sonic Youth seem to be able to do as Kim takes over vocals from Thurston and the song shifts somewhere else- “The future is static, it’s all in your mind”. It is really quite beautiful.

(I Got A) Catholic Block has such a killer riff. In the summer of 1988 I used to wake up every morning to the live version of this song on the Rhythm and Noise compilation cassette given away with Underground magazine. It was like waking up to someone throwing a firework in your bed. 

Beauty lies in the eye distills Patti Smiths first three albums into two minutes twelve seconds, and yet sounds nothing like her. Take the atmosphere and mood of We Three, add the turbulent guitars of Birdland and transmit it from the furthest reaches of Radio Ethiopia and you might get close to the beauty of this song.

Stereo Sanctity opens with Thurston and engineer Bill Titus trading “Seven”’s (and Seven and Seven is?) before taking us on a white knuckle ride through Phillip K. Dicks psyche. Side one closes with Pipeline/Kill Time – “Stretch me to the point where I stop” such a classic opening line to a rock and roll song.

Side two opens with Tuff Gnarl like folk rock gone wrong, Thurston cutting up fanzine reviews to form the lyrics. Kims Pacific Coast Highway is up next, sounding like the worst hitch hiking experience ever. Again after one minute the song shifts mood to somewhere prettier before grinding back.  A cover of Crimes “Hot Wire My Heart” makes perfect sense here. It took me about another fifteen years before I managed to hear the original and its influence on the Sonic Youth sound was not hard to spot.

Cotton Crown starts like the band trying to ape the Steve Miller Bands “Song For Our Ancestors”, relocating it from the San Francisco Bay to the the Hudson river, before becoming one of Sonic Youths more sensuous songs. Of course it doesn’t stay that way for long. I can never figure out if this is a love song to a person (“Angels are dreaming of you”) or a city (“New York City is forever kitty”) or something else entirely. The album closes with punker White Cross, another catholic guilt song. 

Flashback to Sunday 7 June 1987.  Sonic Youth are onstage at Rooftops in Glasgow, setting up their own gear. they look impossibly cool. Lee Ranado seems to have about half a dozen electric twelve string guitars behind him in cardboard boxes. This is my first time seeing them (I’d missed the Splash One gig the previous year). They kick off with Schizophrenia and end with Expressway To Your Skull. In between they blew my mind. When I picture them in my head this is what I see and Sister is what I hear. Remember them this way. (TT)

15. COCTEAU TWINS – TREASURE (1984) / (A) COCTEAU TWINS – BLUE BELL KNOLL (1988)

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TREASURE

There can hardly be a word in the English language more precisely defined, yet more persistently misused, than unique. It’s really not complicated – it simply means something is one of a kind, nothing more, nothing less. Yet more often than not, it’s used when the word that’s really required is distinctive or unusual. It’s rarely that something truly is unique and this means that the word shouldn’t be bandied about like it belongs in a chat about the weather – we should treasure things that genuinely are unique and, however frequently and hamfistedly they’ve been imitated, I contend that the Cocteaus were, and remain, among them.

You can detect the fingerprints of Siouxsie and the Banshees and, to a lesser extent, Joy Division on their first album, Garlands, but by the time of its follow-up, Head Over Heels, they’d grown to a point where it was hard to divine any obvious influences at all. Robin Guthrie was arguably reinventing the guitar even more thoroughly than Kevin Shields would half a decade later, creating labyrynthine textures from what very soon ceased to sound like guitars. Meanwhile, Liz Fraser sang like she had no choice and, as is well known, literally invented a new language as she strove to express the inexpressible. Even their drum machine was more versatile and dextrous than many of its peers – human or mechanical – and wasn’t there simply because it drank less and took up less room.

Treasure came at the end of a year which had seen the vast Pearly Dewdrops’ Drops – where Guthrie’s guitars are transformed into bagpipes playing a pibroch worthy of Culloden – give them a top 40 hit. Guthrie later furiously denounced the album but I’ve always heard it as the most fully-realised and downright beautiful thing they’d done up to that point, despite a tracklist composed entirely of quaint names that could double for a Hampstead school register.

Beatrix has a music-box sound that’s always put me in mind of cloisters, while Otterley plumbs depths of mystery that you’d need Sonar to penetrate and the almost Californian tinge to Pandora is an unexpected yet completely fitting counterpoint to Fraser’s voice tiptoeing up a spiral staircase.

At the risk of heresy, better versions of some songs were done elsewhere – opener Ivo, which had all the conditions for another hit, on an EP given away by the NME, Lorelei on Whistle Test and Beatrix, under the unrepentantly Scottish working title Wheesht, on a Peel session. But none of this dilutes the majesty of Treasure – they’re complementary to it and a reminder that a band who play a song the same way every time will be a very bored band and it will show.

I was 16 when Treasure came out, restless to move on from school and see more of the world. This didn’t necessarily mean far-off lands and was as much about people as place, people I knew nothing of who could be in towns just a few miles away – the Cocteaus’ native Grangemouth, for example. Their music was one of the foremost soundtracks to these times and that’s at least my perception of it – like your perception of it and like the music itself, it’s unique (PG)

(A) BLUE BELL KNOLL

Conventional wisdom identifies two distinct camps of Cocteaus fans. There are those who reckon Treasure their finest moment, and those who prefer Heaven or Las Vegas. Sandwiched between these two undoubted creative peaks are a couple of oft overlooked gems – which for a minority third camp, might well represent the summit of their achievements.

Victorialand is in some ways a transitional album – while it retains some of Treasure’s icy nerve (as on the closer The Thinner The Air) the listener is no longer made to feel like a worm stuck in a glacier. However, Victorialand, the Cocteau’s aural perestroika, was merely paving the way for the majesty of Blue Bell Knoll.

Blue Bell Knoll contains everything you need in a Cocteaus album. And you do need at least one. The song titles have reached new supra-semantic heights: Spooning Good Singing Gum; A Kissed Out Red Floatboat; Ella Megalast Burls Forever. The music itself is dense, playful, exultant. There is a vibrancy about it that sounds a million miles away from their dour gothic beginnings.

The album has a glowing heart. The outer sleeve with its blurry image of cold grey fingertips opens to reveal the same picture burning gently within. And that’s no accident. The one frosty moment – The Itchy Glowbo Blow – transforms itself in a gloriously chiming finale. Everywhere else, the ice has melted. On Phoebe Still A Baby, with its beautiful marimba accompaniment and Cico Buff, Liz is at her ecstatic best – while she recalls recording sessions for BBK as being particularly exhausting, the fruits of her efforts are plain for us to hear. On the magnificent single, Carolyn’s Fingers, and the aforementioned A Kissed Out Red Floatboat in particular, things come together in spectacular style. The latter features a remarkable keyboard part that strangely conjures images of a fluttering locomotive on its way to another solar system.

For some, Robin Guthrie is really more of a producer than a great guitarist. But here even the sumptuous trademark reverb cannot disguise his masterful playing. For me, this is Liz is at her absolute peak and words simply cannot do her performances justice. Indeed when it comes down to it, what do words matter? So if the opportunity to use the familiar adjectives (celestial, ethereal etc) seems wasted, it is only because Blue Bell Knoll transcends these cliches to feel like a meeting with God Himself. (JJ)

13. THE WOODENTOPS – LIVE HYPNOBEAT LIVE (1987)

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Sandwiched between their two studio albums, Live Hypnobeat Live is The Woodentops in peak form, recorded live at the Palace Theatre in Los Angeles. Drawn mostly from their first album and a couple of early singles, here the band take them at break-neck speed, one song blurring into another over a relentless groove. Stripped of the marimba, accordian, trumpet, strings etc that filled in the spaces on debut LP Giant, this is how these songs were meant to sound. But rather than pulverise you, it is a sound that just makes you want to move. Everything revolves around the highly caffeinated bass playing of Frank De Frietas which barely lets up from beginning to end. With the bass carrying the rhythm, this allows drummer Benny Staples to play rather than just hit the drums.

Well Well Well kicks things off with mainman Rolo McGintys frantically scrubbed acoustic guitar, the band builds the song through a series of crescendos punctuated by feedbacking electric guitar. Then we’re straight into Love Train, guitarist Simon Mawby tearing it up like Cliff Gallup on the early Gene Vincent records. Both Mawby and keyboard player Alice Thompson are great throughout, leaving space if necessary, every contribution elevating the sound. As Travelling Man turns into Get It On Rolo announces “Yeah were off now”. There’s no turning back now. Like James Browns first Live at The Apollo LP it is clear there is going to be no let up.

Good Thing (one of the most perfect pop singles of the eighties) provides something of a breather, until it too builds to an incredible climax, Rolo preaching now “Rave ON, Rave ON!” complete with heavenly na-na-nahs and a surging key change. Everything Breaks and Move Me bring this breathless album to a close too quickly, and the only option is to play it just one more time.

The Woodentops were a band that should have thrived during the Indie-Dance years that were just around the corner (Why had been an early Ibiza club hit). Unfortunately they were unable to take advantage of the shift in musical tastes that should have embraced them as much as the Happy Mondays. (TT)

10. THE BAND OF HOLY JOY – MORE TALES FROM THE CITY (1987)

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Now that we’re long past the 20th century, the vast changes – by no means all deserve to be called progress – it wrought can easily be taken for granted; if you stop to think about them, they defy belief, particularly considering the transformations witnessed by those who lived through them.
The post-war second half alone brought change beyond recognition but the paradox at the heart of More Tales From the City is that, while it sounds like it belongs in the pre-rock ‘n’ roll ’50s, it’s one of the most vivid and eloquent accounts of the fractured, fractious times in which it was made – declared by BoHJ frontman Johnny Brown, with some justification, as “the maddest time ever”; a time when the maddest policies ever somehow earned yet another public endorsement; a time when eminently preventable disasters showed up systematic failings with terrifying frequency; a time of wilfully misunderstood disease, of censorship suddenly and arbitrarily ratcheted up, of savagery in light entertainment as death and bereavement came to sit alongside the usual banality.
Amid all this, BoHJ’s brass and organ-heavy, rhumba-laden sound evoked a Shine On Harvey Moon demi-monde of national service, illicit encounters at the milkshake parlour and seaside towns already showing signs of wear. Morrissey was at this time preparing to touch on these themes but BoHJ delved even further and deeper with a vision that was universal more than it was regional or personal and the squabbling couples, stolen babies and forsaken misfits inhabiting their songs reflected, like those of the Smiths, timeless concerns.
The name of Bertolt Brecht followed BoHJ around like a benign fog but their sound was a complex, heavily loaded broth. Half of the songs on More Tales From the City are wholly or partly in waltz time but this never becomes wearing – why should it any more than an unvarying 4/4 tempo? – while a dancehall organ rhythm box is an equally frequent visitor. The piano that heralds opening track Who Snatched the Baby? brings a classical shade into the parlour, while Don’t Stick Knives In Babbies’ Heads takes a macabre folk standard and uses it to report soberly the facts of the grim case while reserving most of its judgement for the prurient fascination the crime attracts – a theme expanded on the lyric sheet, where the brief verses are compressed and inflated into a single, breathless Niagara of gossip.

Elsewhere among the snapshots of thwarted yet unavoidably resilient lives, Cities ponders “five minutes’ joy, a lifetime of shame” to exquisite mandolin and despairing strings and The Tide of Life ends its dissection of regret and resentment after six minutes but could conceivably carry on for millennia along with the waves it mimics.
The two most ‘modern’ sounding songs are among the best. Mad Dot puts bass in the foreground for the first and last time and, despite the striped t-shirts and anoraks favoured by the band, is the one song that could have galvanised an indie disco – if only there’d been one that had the nous to play it. Closing track (of course) Goodnight, God Bless, Goodbye, meanwhile, is genuinely heartbreaking, Johnny’s rueful memories – “in a way I’m glad what we had we swore was forever” – cushioned by rotating drums, subdued keyboards and a rare-going-on-unique instance of whistling being not only forgivable but essential.
They supported James. Carter USM insisted on quoting them as an influence despite using them to completely misguided ends. Robert Plant is a fan and would have been anyway even if they didn’t have practically the same name as his pre-Zeppelin band. For all this, BoHJ have been persistently forgotten and overlooked but they’ve returned- now sadly without founder member Karel van Bergen, who died in 2013 – and still have plenty to offer. More Tales From the City, though, remains the place to start, as potent and pointed as the day it came about – “I refuse to believe that those days are gone, that there was a time that was once upon”. (PG)

9. THE CLIENTELE – SUBURBAN LIGHT (2000)

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In the beginning was the word. And the word was…Felt. Alasdair Maclean saw the word, scribbled on his school chum James Hornsey’s pencil case. The friendship was sealed and The Clientele was born. Or so the legend goes. The band formed in London in 1991, while the boys were still at school. It would be almost a decade before their first fragile songs emerged to a politely indifferent world.

These songs, a compilation of early recordings including singles and B Sides were for the most part recorded on an eight-track portastudio above Innes Phillips’ flat in 1996. Phillips, guitarist and one of the founder members, would leave and go on to form his own band The Relict, before these songs eventually saw the light of day in 2000. As for the collection of songs assembled here on Suburban Light…well you have to trust me on this one…it is arguably one of the most perfect albums from any English band in the last twenty five years. Yes, it is that good.

Comparisons with Felt are obvious (‘We Could Walk Together’s guitar line for example), NZ’s The Chills perhaps less so (listen to the ghostly guitar on ‘An Hour Before The Light’, uncannily reminiscent of The Chills’ classic ‘Pink Frost’), but it is most often claimed the band are musically indebted to The Velvet Underground. Certainly ‘Reflections After Jane’ owes a nod to ‘Candy Says’ or ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’ but I wonder if the comparison is apt. Indeed, perhaps it’s a little lazy. In reality the two bands inhabit entirely different worlds. The Clientele’s reverb-drenched songs of wistful suburban ennui the perfect counterpoint to the urban brutality and debonaire perversions of the Velvets. The lyrical contrast is even more spectacular: compare The Velvets’ catalogue of junkies, transvestites and freaks who send themselves by long-distance post in cardboard boxes; to the Clientele’s preference for documenting rainy Sunday afternoons in the park, or walking through the crowds with “Miss Jones” (of whom nothing is revealed, but whom I imagine to be a rather pretty but stuffy English Literature student). Perhaps a more intuitive comparison than the Velvets could be made with Galaxie 500 (performing a cover of ‘Waterloo Sunset’). Whatever comparison one makes, the band would never sound quite like this again. The songs on their first album proper, The Violet Hour did not quite match up (with a few mis-steps along the way). Edges would be softened, the production become more sophisticated. The later albums with the exception of Strange Geometry (which is their other indisputably classic record) somehow strangely failed to recapture the thematic harmony of this first release. It is particularly unusual for a compilation to achieve such a singular vision, such a feeling of unity, but it’s there.

 

Despite greater, though still very limited success on the other side of the Atlantic, The Clientele remain as quintessentially English as an episode of Camberwick Green. Had they been children of a different era they would no doubt have been invited to compose the soundtrack for Bronco Bullfrog, Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush or some other cult late 1960s Brit youth film. The occasional backwards guitar loop alongside MacLean’s penchant for colourful cravats places the band at least spiritually and aesthetically in that era. So, right place, wrong time perhaps? Well, not exactly…there is nothing contrived about the Clientele’s Englishness. Neither gimmick nor motif, rather it emanates organically from their music like the dispersion of light through a prism.

“If we’re on Delancey Street at night,
In the after train ride quiet,
Barking dogs by Highgate Pond,
Something’s here but something’s gone’ McLean sings on ‘Joseph Cornell’ – it is a typically evocative mood piece and the album is littered with such examples:
‘The taxi lights were in your eyes
So warm against St. Mary’s spires
The carnival was over in the rain
And arm in arm through Vincent Street.
The evening hanging like a dream
I touched your face and saw the night again.” (‘Saturday’)

These lost and unrepeatable moments of nostalgia and yearning, moments so vivid and personal are detailed with such precision for time and place, yet somehow paradoxically become universally tangible and almost unbearably poignant for the listener, who immersed in their atmosphere, casts his own shadow upon those spaces and places. I saw The Clientele play to a sparse audience at The Woodside Social in Glasgow in 2005. Perhaps not an ‘I was there’ moment but imprinted on my memory nonetheless. A few members of Belle & Sebastian, one or two from Glasgow folkies Lucky Luke and a few shy-looking snappily dressed mods. Almost their perfect audience. I remember walking out in the cold air afterward, the hazy drunken glare of the street lights providing the backdrop to the band hurriedly throwing their gear into the back of the van. And walking away into the night. Clearly one of those time and place moments – the spell had worked.

Post-millennium there exists very little consensus of opinion on the greatest albums of our age. It would be more straightforward to ask George Galloway to publicly extol the virtues of US foreign policy than expect acquiescence from others in this regard. Perhaps in a progressively individualistic culture which is post-everything, with few recognisable musical genres or subcultures, we have reached that point where consensus is virtually impossible. So we claim precedence for our individual favourites. And they become all the more precious for it. Suburban Light is one of those to treasure. The Clientele are the great lost English band of the new millennium, as genteel yet vital as Nick Drake, as elusive and undervalued as The Television Personalities, and musically, comfortably the equal of Felt. Their early songs, reflective and melancholic possess an enduring appeal. They will haunt you. Let them into your life. (JJ)

6. GRANT HART – INTOLERANCE (1989)

Grant Hart - Intolerance (1989)
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grantGRANT HART – INTOLERANCE (1989)

Dropped by Warners, Grant Hart found himself back on SST, the label that had released Husker Du’s three best records. Stripped of Bob Mould’s fizzing guitar and his own skittering drums, Harts first release after the acrimonious split of Husker Du is a hypnotic meditation on regret and loss, full of mystery and magic, and littered with characters struggling to make sense of their chaotic lives, and which may include himself and his former band mates.

The opener All Of My Senses offers few clues as to what will follow, coming on like a lo-fi New Order. Warm keyboards and hand claps replace the harsh drones and groans that open the record. According to Michael Azzerad’s book Our Band Could Be Your Life, Hart was using methadone in an effort to conquer his heroin addiction when Husker Du split, although he was sober by the time Intolerance was recorded. Whether or not the song is auto-biographical, its hard to hear Hart singing “I’m using, I’m using” while the gospel backing singers sing “Pulling a plough but I don’t know how” without the feeling that he’s referring to his own struggles with addiction.

The guitars are back for Now That You Know Me. It wouldn’t have been out of place on Warehouse Songs And Stories (it was performed by Husker Du live), but a wailing harmonica gives it an almost Dylanish feel (they are both from Minnesota!).

Fanfare In D Major builds tension in the verses with rolling drums and sawing strings before exploding with one of Grants greatest pop choruses.

Drug references are most explicit on the junkie gospel sea shanty of The Main which creaks and sways like great big clipper ship (I avoided policemen when I went to cop, De Quincey, smack in the middle, the hell that I went through when I stuck it into etc). Grant seems to be saying the experience is universal – “Reeperbahn, Christiana, Pigalle all the same” (these being notorious drug dealing areas in Hamburg, Copenhagen and Paris).

Side two opens with Twenty Five Forty One, nostalgia for a shared apartment after a broken relationship. From the sound of it he’d rather be back where “we had to leave the stove on all night so the mice wouldn’t freeze” than where he is now. Given that the title is taken from the address of Husker Du’s rehearsal house where all the members had lived at some point, you wonder if he’s also missing his former band.

The inconsequential instrumental Roller Rink leads into the soulful You’re The Victim, the only song I can think of that combines jaunty whistling with what sounds like a dentists drill! Another one that has you wondering if it’s directed at a former band mate ”Every thing you do to hurt me makes you the victim”.

On Anything Hart sings of “climbing mountains in my sleep”. She Can See The Angels Coming could almost be a sequel to The Main. Organ drones and cymbals swell, giving the song an oceanic sense of lives pulled this way and that.  Reprise returns us full circle for a minute or so of the banging and clanking drones that open All Of My Senses.

Intolerance, on which Hart reputedly plays all the instruments himself is a warm, personal, confessional record, which despite its subject matter in the end is cathartic and uplifting . A triumph. (TT)