December on my iPod!

I realise that the last two months' "reviews" were a tad on the long side. Call it beginners' enthusiasm.

Before getting into music, I do have to ask why so many Christians / other religious people quote Hitler as an example of the evils atheists are capable of? As this article: http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/opinion/?id=36341, but also Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion, demonstrate, he was no atheist, and used God as a means of propagating his politics of hatred.
By all means refer to Stalin if you want to use such poor logic to decry atheism, but get your facts straight and admit the truth - that the holocaust was partly a result of Hitler's -and indeed German/European society's- Christian background and of the Church's direct collaboration with Nazism.
As it is, you can no more attribute the evils of Mao, Pol Pot and Stalin to their atheism as you can to their rotund figures or taste for military uniforms. To my knowledge, no-one has killed in the name of atheism. But millions have died in the name of religion. People in Britain, with the not-too-distant Northern Irish past, should be wary of peddling to this kind of increasing religious fundametalism by undermining atheism so cheaply.

Rant over. On with the sounds!

December coming just after my birthday, and being the month of Christmas, there have been quite a few CDs popped into my iMac's reader over the last few weeks! Greedy!

Thanks to Wire magazine's January 2010 issue, in which they feature their top 50 albums of 2009, I've been spending a bit of time checking out some of the last year's most-heralded releases. Typically for The Wire, some are so obscure as to be unavailable even after such a short period, but I was able to find their number one, Broadcast and The Focus Group's Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of The Radio Age (Warp Records, October 2009), a peculiar and fascinating slice of what is apparently called "hauntology", and which is principally based around exploring the sounds created by the gaps between stations on FM radio (!). This has long been the focus of The Focus Group's label Ghost Box (home of the excellent Eric Zann album Ouroborinda) and here they add the shimmering psych-pop and dream-like vocals of Broadcast into the mix, creating an odd little album that is dense (23 tracks over 50-odd minutes), elusive and strangely melancholic, like a folk- and electro-tinged modern answer to The United States of America's superb 1968 debut. Not perhaps the classic The Wire says it is, but one of the strangest releases of the year for sure, and a very beautiful one.

Also on their list, at number 20, was ambient great William Basinski's 92982 (2062, April 2009), for me one of the real triumphs of the last 12 months. Basinski has found his niche, taking old recordings he made in the 80s and then relaying them to digital, recording the shifts and disintegrations of the tape that occur during the transfer and using all this as basis to create remarkable ambient soundscapes that are slow, monotonous and absorbing. This has already given us his marvelous Disintegration Loops series (the third one is one of the best ambient albums of all time), but 92982 is pretty darn fabulous as well, a gentle, drifiting series of mysterious synth drones, tape noise and random sound effects, which filter through the ether due to the fact that the original recordings were made live in his apartment with the windows open. You hear klaxons, sirens, fireworks... And all the time the quiet, sensual, dreamy ambient magic, drifting like a raft over tumultous Brooklyn. But don't for one second assume this is a dull album. It subtly pulsates and fluctuates, dragging you in and it takes a while to get over it. Remarkable, and a welcome return from Basinski.

At the other end of the pop spectrum (and coming in at a surprising number 21 in the Wire's list) were the current indie faves The XX, a very trendy-looking quartet of twenty-year-olds from London. Their debut, XX (Young Turks, August 2009) is a surprisingly superb little gem, and one of the rare times I will ever agree with the NME! The XX certainly have all the indy cool they need: black clothes, pouty mouths, cool hairdos. But they're also a damn smart pop band, taking their lyrical and musical approach from -wait for it- modern R'n'B (they even covered Aaliyah!) and plying it gently onto stripped down post-punk pop. Brittle rhytm tracks limp about over funky bass lines, jangly guitar and subtle synths, at times recalling a slower, dulled (but not dull, far from it) version of Interpol or Bloc Party. But the lyrics are all about sex and intimacy, hence the r'n'b references, and you feel the tracks lurching into robotic neo-funk, like kraftwerk backing Macy Gray. But their voices! The two singers, male and female (possibly a couple?) are shockingly, delighfully deadpan and emotionless, murmuring their lyrics of sex, loss and desire like teenagers reciting WH Auden in English class. As such, they are perhaps the most successful encapsulators of juvenile moodiness in quite some time, whilst their brittle electro tunes will always evoke Young Marble Giants, perhaps the only act they truly seem to ape. A nice, long-awaited addition to the pop scene.

But if The XX were everywhere come September, my discovery of Natural Snow Buildings was far more serendipitous, the result of lazy, semi-awake searching on www.rateyourmusic.com. NSB are a duo of folk musicians from France, who create lengthy folk-drone opuses in the tradition of Double Leopards, but with singing to boot. Their latest album, Shadow Kingdom (Blackest Rainbow, September 2009) is over two hours long, which may be a tad too much, but it still contains some of the most arresting sounds you will hear all year. The album alternates between vast (we're talking 15-to-20-minute pieces) drone epics, all fuzzed guitar and strings; and quieter acoustic ballads that evoke the kind of traditional folk played in medieval times. Singer Solange Gularte has a strong set of pipes, and the kind of gentle, affecting voice that made Linda Thompson so popular. Part dark gothic dronefest, part airy folk revival, Shadow Kingdom is a singular, and welcome release in these days of tiresome stadium acts. Tough to find on CD, NSB remain obscure, although my copy was purchased for me on www.secondlayer.co.uk. Ya gotta love Christmas!!

Back in October, 4AD finally did justice to Bauhaus' classic debut In The Flat Field (released 1980, also on 4AD), giving it a full sound-lift as well as providing it -and all their other early albums- with some truly lush packaging, complete with second disk of outtakes and a massive booklet. Not that this stellar bit of window-dressing overshadows the music! In The Flat Field may just be the first true "gothic" album, and whilst its legacy may be dubious (most "Goth" music is shite once you get past 1982 and The Virgin Prunes), the record itself is a classic, a dark, theatrical monsterpiece of post-punk insanity, the excessive, truly out-there answer to the austerity of Young Marble Giants, The Raincoats and Talking Heads. Bauhaus weren't subtle, but their excesses were still pretty curbed on this debut, with a monstrous punk drive hitting in at times to balance the pretention in some of the lyrics. And in Peter Murphy they had one of post-punk's most iconic vocalists, a demonic performer whose hoarse and baroque style was easily as genre-defining as Curtis' doomy moan and Devoto's acerbic sneer. A classic. 'Nuff said.

Stepping even further back in time, I've been wigging out with much joy to the infernal doom-prog sounds of mid-seventies King Crimson, thanks to the superb live set The Great Deceiver (Virgin, box set 1992, re-released by EGM as two 2xCD sets in 2002), which showcases the quartet of John Wetton (bass, vocals), Robert Fripp (guitar, effects), Bill Bruford (drums, percussion) and David Cross (violin, mellotron, flute) in all its unfettered glory. This is perhaps the most celebrated KC line-up by fans of the band, the one that gave fans the classic albums Lark's Tongues in Aspic, Starless and Bible Black and, sort of minus Cross, Red. The Great Deceiver, originally a 4-disk box set, now two separate and nicely packaged 2-disk jewel cases, is two-and-a-half hours of this brutal and elegant band at their height, surfing on the crest of the Larks' and Starless waves, and allowing the music to take them to wild and wondrous places, as they mixed familiar album tracks with exploratory improv pieces. It was this taste for the unknown, the desire to take risks, that set Crimson apart from their prog-rock contemporaries, the Yeses and Genesises of this world. Of course, with 4 full concerts (or so), some tracks are repeated, but never is this collection dull, as each version of each song carries subtle variations and shifts, something that highlights not only the band's experimental nature, but also their tight-knit musical understanding. Required listening for all Crim-heads, but also for anyone who thinks "progressive" rock is limited to grandiose Floydian concepts or ELP wankery.

But by far the band of the month has been the monumental Skullflower! Around since the early eighties, Skullflower is effectively the vehicle for Matt Bower, a British guitarist with a taste for free-form music and heavy, heavy noise. I discovered this lost treasure of a band through their third full album, and one of their only early ones to be available today, IIIrd Gatekeeper, released originally in 1992 on Justin K Broadrick's now-defunct indie HeadDirt, recently gloriously reissued by Crucial Blast (2007). This is certainly one of my all-time favourite albums. Thought I'd get that out of the way! If you think the birth of heavy sludge/doom/drone metal started with Earth's Earth 2, then think again! Over some of the most punishingly heavy drums you will ever hear (supplied by the superb Stewart Dennison - heavy as a God but with the necessary subtle touch to give his thudding feeling as well as weight) Matt Bower rips a new arsehole for his listeners with a tidal wave of savage guitar noise, lurching from Sabbathian doom-riffery to Brotzmann-inspired noise. It's the culmination of centuries of heathen rock explorations, touching on elements of Zappa, Takayanagi, Rallizes Denudes and Sabbath, without ever sounding derivative. And everyone from Melvins, to Boris, to SUNN O))) owe Skullflower a debt of gratitude for IIIrd Gatekeeper.
On a high, the band, usually more-versed in power electronics of the Whitehouse variety and unused to such a stable line-up (the Bower, Dennison duo being complimented on monster abss by Anthony di Franco), decided to stick to metal and release an almost immediate follow-up in the form of Last Shot at Heaven (Noiseville, 1993). Not as fully-formed as its predecessor, it is nonetheless an essential record (in fairness, it's hard to equal, let alone beat, IIIrd Gatekeeper). The cover picture shows a girl craning her neck backwards in ecstasy, and LSAH has a soaring, dramatic feel to it, at times evoking the harder side of My Bloody Valentine (think a crunchier "Only Shallow"). Bower's guitar is less bass-heavy and distorted than before, but don't for one second imagine that LSAH is mellow! This motherfucker still crunches, thunders and rages, and at times the gang (the perfect description for these three) unleash the kind of sheer noise that characterised both their earlier and later output.
And the noise was back in fine form for 1994's Carved Into Roses (VHF), yet another monumental album from Skullflower (minus DiFranco now, if I'm not much mistaken). The title does hint at moments of blissful ambient textures, with synths playing a greater -and more subtle- part than on the previous two records mentioned above, but mainly this is about the noise! The sounds are gritty, dark, buzzing and unpredictable. On some tracks, scattered drum patterns and rampaging solos from Bower clearly demonstrate a free-jazz influence, the kind of sophistication and variety that sets Bower and co. apart from the morass of metal and noise bands that formed in their wake. Both Carved Into Roses and Last Shot at Heaven are ahrd to get on CD, but are available to download from iTunes. So, the question remains - what the fuck are you waiting for, cunts???

I know for a fact that there are loads more Skullflower gems I need to discover and a couple are already winging their way to me. Certainly, the free-form noise of their later output, which more closely resembles the work Bower does with Hototogisu, is something I'm less familiar with (though if it's anything like Hototogisu, I can't wait!). Matt Bower (the sole remaining member from the early 90s) is an underrated rock genius and rebel, and deserves as much praise (and money) as geeks like me can sling his way.

So, a belated Merry Christmas to any who happen to stumble upon this blog, and a Happy New Year to you all! With more Skullflower, Krautrock, Jazz and metal to look forward to, I know mine's set to be a cracker!!

xx