cogwheeldogs's Last.fm Journal

Review: 'Far' by Regina Spektor -- Production kills songs

Thu, 2 Jul 2009 19:53:35 +0000

[This review was originally written for Heavy Soil, and appears there with sample mp3 downloads]

I always worry when I'm writing a review of an album and I find myself saying 'tracks' instead of 'songs'.

Regina Spektor's new album, Far, has – I'm sorry to say – tracks.

So, this is how this is going to go.

First, I'm going to rant for a while about the production of this album. Then, once I'm puce and quivering, with dilated pupils and bubblettes of saliva flecking my lip, I'll take a subhead-break and write about the music. Because, dressed up as tracks though they may be, there are some lovely songs mewling and scrabbling, trapped within.

So let's rescue the poor critters.

But first…

Those of you who've followed Heavy Soil for a while will (I hope) realise that clever production techniques are very much Okay By Us. Heavy Soil certainly does not believe that all music should be lo-fi 4-track recordings of rattling plywood guitars and cheese-grater vocals captured by a Fisher Price microphone.

Because brilliant production makes Heavy Soil very happy.

But here's the problem with Far. Regina Spektor has worked, on this album, with people who are (no doubt) considered frigging top-notch arrangers. Frigging top-notch producers. Frigging top-notch session musicians. All the ingredients, one might suppose, of frigging top-notch production.

Indeed, Pitchfork, in its impressively wrong-headed review, has its own boringly brown-nosed paragraph lauding the skills of the 'four top-flight producers'.

Top-flight. Top-notch. Blah blah, lick lick, suck suck. Whatever.

All very well. But sometimes the top notch is smooth and symmetrical and perfectly machine-hewn.

Fucking boring, in other words. A big, smug, satisfied swot of a notch.

Sometimes, it's the top notch but one that we actually want.

Think about the old Regina song 'Poor Little Rich Boy': a left-hand piano line and a drumstick being lashed like a whip into a bar-stool. Name me one 'top-notch' arranger who'd think to do that.

No, they'd be too busy with their sumptuous string lines, telephoning their fellow top-notch arranger mates to brag about their wonderfully recherche brass section motifs.

You see, I don't want Regina Spektor's playing and arrangements to sound like Ben Folds + Tori Amos + Elton John + Fiona Apple. And I like all the aforementioned. But Regina plays piano in a totally different way. Not necessarily better. But different. So I don't want it to be dragged into line with the standard 'piano-based artist' sound.

Allow Heavy Soil to Let You Into A Secret

Because the thing with the big music industry is: it's enormously conservative. It far more reliably elevates those who perfect conventional arrangement/production than it does those who innovate. Regina Spektor is leagues more innovative than anybody she's worked with on this album. Leagues. And I don't care if I set a load of muso geeks and production obsessives flapping and whinging by saying it. I don't care how many great artists these people have worked with. Just like I don't care how many artists have banked at fucking HSBC.

Because, on Far, Regina Spektor has been tamed by a horde of collaborators whose talent is in no doubt, but whose influence is radically normalising.

And on this album, I see – clearly – the fingerprints of sweaty-palmed men who get off on the glossily sterile sound of a perfect hi-hat. Fetishistic production myopia. And, sure, the hi-hats kick ass. But in the same way as a trillion immaculately-processed hi-hats have kicked ass before.

And there's all this processed human beat-boxing. Regina is very, very good at her own (organic) brand of human beatbox. Listen to her doing it live and see what I mean. By using digital techniques to mimic this, her producers TOTALLY DESTROY THE POINT OF IT. Human beat box is all about imitating electronic percussion. So using electronic production techniques to imitate human beat box is staggeringly pointless. Perhaps somebody thought it was wittily ironic.

It's not. It's stupid.

And, on the subject of production techniques, another thing that really annoys: the fact that this record is mastered so loud that, at not-particularly-rare intervals, the music clips on my (120-pound) headphones. So the climactically loud parts are spoilt by those irritating hisses/rattles that occur when the volume has been pushed so hard that it actually overloads the speakers through which it's playing. This is massively, massively annoying. If I want my music louder, mastering-man, I'll sodding well turn up my volume. I don't need you raising the floor until my neck is bent 90 degrees and my head is pressed against the ceiling.

And, um – the good bits?

Okay, so I've been fairly down on the production, so far. In fact, there's some good stuff to say about it. Regina's voice is very nicely captured, sweet-toned and characterful. And, on some songs, the production is imaginative and colourful – 'Machine', for instance, in which industrial clunks and whirrs mesh with bit-crushed kit and treated vocals to good effect.

[Download an mp3 of Machine by Regina Spektor]

I'm still not convinced, mind, that I'd not have preferred it raw. But at least the production is taking the song somewhere, and doing it in an interesting, valid way. Even if it's spiritually pretty close to the (superior) 'Apres Moi' from Begin To Hope – crashingly Slavic chord sequence, hip-hop stylings and all.

But what if I imagine these were all acoustic recordings, shorn of glossy effects and processing? What, in other words, about the songs?

Some of them are very good indeed.

'Human of the Year' is probably the best. It's old-skool Regina – like 'Oedipus' (one of her very best), it is an embarrassment of thematic riches ... a song with about three potential choruses, none of which is milked to anything remotely approaching its capacity (meaning, to stretch a metaphor on my verbal rack, that instead of a pint of semi-skimmed, you end up with a few mouthfuls of Guernsey double cream.)

A pity, then, that somebody decided to whack in some wanky synths and gratuitous reverb (yes, I know the song mentions cathedrals. It's therefore the most fucking obvious production gimmick IN THE WORLD, EVER to add cathedral reverb onto the lead vocal. That's bloody Chris De Burgh territory, for Christ's sake).

Anyway, why don't you download an mp3 of Regina Spektor's Human of the Year and see if you agree with me?

Second track (yes, track) 'Eet', meanwhile, is enjoyable – though once again, I find myself unable to identify much in it that's not done at least as well in Begin To Hope (its equivalent on that record is probably 'On the Radio' – again, superior).

I'm not so convinced by the reggae-tinted album opening provided by 'The Calculation', which seems rather lite; nor by the frothy 'Folding Chair', which doesn't ever really transcend its (winkingly?) simplistic chord sequence. And, in all, I think there's less on this record that excites me from a songwriting point of view than on its predecessors. Of course, it's pretty hard to determine exactly to what degree this is down to production values that actively suppress pianistic innovation of the kind that's often my favourite aspect of Regina's music.

Then there are the vignettes. Take 'Genius Next Door'. Like others on the record, it's very affecting in places. But, to my ears, it doesn't especially benefit from the spangles of Disneyfication: reechoing reverb, glittering backing vocals, swooping strings. The vignette is more effective when dispensed casually. It lets a song shine (as this one should: it has a lovely melody) like an unexpected, unpolished pearl. Conversely, there's something about 'Big' production that endows songs like this with a grandiosity. Makes them seem as if they're Trying To Say Something. And I think that often undermines their power.

Have you noticed my problem, here, yet?

I try and write about the songs, but keep getting drawn back to the production. Because I really can't separate the two – so greatly does the latter seem to force its way into the former's territory.

If the songs on this album were to be released in a stripped-down, acoustic form, I suspect I'd gladly abandon in their favour all but two or three of these 'produced' versions.

But I suspect, too, that even then I'd not be calling 'Far' a triumph. Too many of these songs have their precedent in those on Begin To Hope – a record which far more successfully combined Big production with strong, original songwriting. Too few of them, taken as a whole, are exciting.

Review of Dragonslayer by Sunset Rubdown

Thu, 4 Jun 2009 12:12:48 +0000

This post was originally written for my music blog, Heavy Soil. Read the full review, complete with a couple of sample tracks to download

So – later this month, Sunset Rubdown release their new record, Dragonslayer.

My first acquaintance with Sunset Rubdown came in the form of their previous album, Random Spirit Lover. I still remember sitting on a dark coach (sadly, the petrol-propelled rather than horse-drawn variety) gazing at the smeared lights of London through a window lashed by the rain, with wildly cascading scales and arpeggios ringing in my ears, and feeling myself suddenly encaptivated.

(It was only later that the congruence between that view through my window and the album's artwork struck me.)

Amongst other things, I loved the witty juxtapositions of sound, key and lyric. Most of all, I loved its joyous haphazardness, its infectious mania. It was definitely one of my favourite albums of 2007 (2007? Bloody hell, that's two years ago!) – and sparked an ongoing admiration for the band.

So you may well imagine that I have been eagerly anticipating Dragonslayer. And I stubbornly refuse to apologise for the fact that I shall doubtless be measuring it up, herebelow, against the yardstick of Random Spirit Lover.

Okay then, Heavy Soil – get out your yardstick

First song 'Silver Moons' establishes the pace in the same way that the excellent 'The Mending of the Gown' did for 'Random Spirit Lover'. But where 'The Mending...' was helter-skelter, bubbling over, madly inventive, scarcely contained, 'Silver Moons' is measured, atmospheric, grandiloquent. There's a heaviness here that's quite a departure from Random Spirit Lover's flightiness.

To me, the record approaches, at times, the sound of Wolf Parade (one of lead vocalist Spencer Krug's several other musical outfits).

And with the move away from flightiness, there's also a move in the direction of higher-fi. That's not to say that this is a glossily produced release – but the rawness of Random Spirit Lover (with its grittily massive kick drum sounds and oh-so-brittle guitars) is decidedly tamed, here – resulting, perhaps, in a more balanced mix ... but (to Heavy Soil's ears) one that's also less charming, more conventional.

The band recaptures the thrill of the earlier album fitfully. 'You Go On Ahead (Trumpet Trumpet II)' kicks satisfyingly into its outro, with the sense of surging into a home straight ... And there's still musical wit in here. The little guitar soloed snatch of 'We Wish You A Merry Christmas' in 'Silver Moons', the pass-the-parcel countermelodies of 'Apollo And The Buffalo And Anna Anna Anaa Oh!'...

So, yes, let's talk about more of the good stuff

'Idiot Heart' is a standout track – possibly the album's best (we've already written about the song in isolation, including an mp3). 'Black Swan' is also pretty kickin', with its eerily insistent taps, snaps and clicks, and sudden tempestuous gusts of sweeping melody. It's no coincidence, I suspect, that these are two of the record's most uptempo and dynamically varied songs.

The heavy sinuousness of closing track 'Dragon's Lair' (= Dragonslayer, if you say it aloud, see?) is handled well, and the song justifies its ten-and-a-half-minute length, as themes (both lyrical and melodic) are teased out and organically developed.

And there are still those ebullient surges into Casio toy keyboard tomfoolery – but they're somehow a bit more sensible, a bit less adventurous, a bit more subdued.

Subdued, you say?

Yes, subdued.

Everything about this record feels safer than Random Spirit Lover. And perhaps that means more people will like it [what do you mean, 'jadedly cynical'? This is a music blog, damn it: what did you expect?]. But Sunset Rubdown have taken a step away from the territory that made them so interesting to me.

That's not to say there's nothing new here. There's more extensive (and effective) use of Camilla Wynne Ingr's backing vocals, which often superbly offset Spencer Krug's reedy squawks. And there's perhaps more consideration given to the delicacies of arrangement and mix – a more transparent sound – which allows details to shine through.

But there's nothing here that surprises me.

And I like surprises.

(Surprise presents are particularly nice. Postal address provided on request.)

So what you're saying is ...?

What I'm saying is: this is quite a good album. If I hadn't been bewitched and betwitched by Random Spirit Lover and were coming at this afresh, it would certainly be strong enough to make me take notice. It's just that, relative to the slapdash brilliance of the band's earlier work, it's slightly disappointing.

Get this: not enormously disappointing. Just slightly.

Review: 'Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle' by Bill Callahan

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:01:05 +0000

This review was originally written for Heavy Soil

Bill Callahan (once Smog/(Smog)) is one of the relatively few songwriters who'll actually make me think about his lyrics. Because his delivery is so refreshingly opaque, so stripped of interpretative clues, listening to his work often approaches a literary experience.

That sounds fucking pretentious, doesn't it?

But it's true. The vast, vast majority of artists ram their meaning (such as it is) squarely in your face. Even those whose lyrics may be obscure or surreal will commonly deliver their performances in a way which offers precious little emotional ambiguity.

Bill Callahan is different. He performs as though he were reading poetry from a book, or covering someone else's songs. He does not presume, with his delivery, to govern the listener's response.

This endows his music with several a massive integrity. And makes interpreting it something of an endeavour.

... Which means, I suspect, that this review – of his 13th album, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle – is going to be like a bloody essay. Good news, eh?

Well, let's get started, shall we?

'Eid Ma Clack Shaw' is the most intelligent song I've heard so far this year.

All pert piano, sonorous horns and Eleanor Rigby strings, the song prepares us for the preoccupation of the record – the core to which so many of the songs may be nibbled down: coexistence of contradictory states. In Eid Ma Clack Shaw, it's dream-world and reality. The speaker dreams 'the perfect song / [that holds] all the answers' – the answers to his lonely desire to rid himself of memories (we presume of a departed lover). Waking, he 'scribbles it down' – but the words turn out to be incomprehensible.

(We'll come back to this.)

... Meanwhile (Christ a-fucking-live) I can't remember the last time I found a line of song as moving as the climax of Too Many Birds: 'If you could only stop your heartbeat for one hearbeat', sings Callahan, dispassionate as ever. Except that's not how we first hear it. The line is stoically repeated, eked out:

'If.
If you.
If you could.
If you could only ...'

– and so on.

As the line is painstakingly built and its meaning and emphasis shimmers and shifts, we witness the evolution of a beautiful melody, its character changing with each added word.

There's something of TS Eliot in this. The way in which a simple device (in this case repetition) is deployed in such a way (in concert with achingly dispassionate delivery) as to apply an emotional mace to the belly.

You're used to my grinding pretension, by now, I suppose – so you won't mind me illustrating my point with a quotation from the fucking excellent [that's a literary term] opening of Eliot's 'Ash Wednesday', will you?:

'Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn'

... Similar idea. Similar power.

Grand, Beautiful, Metaphorical.

And then there's the grand, beautiful metaphor that plays itself out across these songs. Like all good grand, beautiful metaphors, it is complex and not manifested outright. It doesn't govern the album, and it is not unambiguous. But it's all the better for that – and let's continue our jamboree of literary magpieism with a few lines from the wise and awesome Walt Whitman:

'Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)'

Well put, Mr Whitman.

So, with that in mind, I'm not about to elucidate what I take to be the grand, beautiful metaphor – except to say that the whole of the album flits around the push and pull of togetherness (horse & rider; flock of birds) versus independence (the eagle). Around the concept of belonging; of possession, fixity and ownership. But I don't want to start explicating and ascribing symbols (even those bracketed equations I've just made are jarringly black/white) ...

And, in any case, the skill (and the magic) is not in the arraignment of neat symbols or allusions, but in their combination with one another and the shades of overlap and ambiguity. Take the song All Thoughts are Prey to Some Beast, which opens with the lines,

'The leafless tree looked like a brain
The birds within were all the thoughts and desires within me.'

To this tree flies an eagle – causing the birds scatter – leaving the the eagle to alight, powerful, independent but alone – and ushering the song to its climax:

'All thoughts are prey to some beast.
Sweet desires and soft thoughts: return to me.'

If we plod through this record as though we're dealing with simple metaphor/personification, we run into trouble. Where's Callahan in all this? What represents what? Tempting questions. But probably futile ones.

Let's return, then, to this idea of coexistence.

And let's think about the title of the record: Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle. In the context of 'All Thoughts Are Prey to Some Beast', that's clear enough. Independence and power (the eagle) are good; but togetherness is also good. Hence the desire that the contradictory states of independence and companionship be reconciled.

But – like the gibberish refrain of 'Eid Ma Clack Shaw' – this only makes sense in a dream world. And the speaker is left trying to pull together fistfuls of air.

The record's title, and the eagle's lament, and 'Eid Ma Clack Shaw' ... In all of these, there's the sense of Callahan the storyteller pushing together two repelling magnetic poles. Of straining at a metaphor or a narrative to try and make it contain and reconcile experience. Which it ultimately fails to do.

So what's the answer?

'I started telling the story without knowing the end', says the speaker of opening song Jim Cain. 'I used to be darker, then I got lighter, then I got dark again. And something too big to be seen was passing over and over me.'

The record ends up hinging upon storytelling. Running in counterpoint to 'Eid Ma Clack Shaw' and 'Too Many Birds' – with their ultimately futile struggle for comprehension of and control over emotion – is the notion of control through rationalisation and narrative:

'I looked all around
And it was not written down
I will always love you
My friend'

... is the opening of 'My Friend'. And there's something very touching about this – the sense of liberation by which the song is buoyed – the empowerment of the simple declaration. It's no coincidence, I'd argue, that this is the record's most upbeat, straightforward song.

... And this in turn makes a sort of sense of the album's expansive final song – 'Faith / Void' – and its gently insistent repetition: 'It's time to put God away.'

More than just a paean to atheism, isn't it a kind of epiphany? A realisation that there's not an external power to be found that will easily reconcile all contradictions, pull together all strands.

God, in this sense, is just another image, another entity onto which the speaker (is it Callahan, by now?) may project – and through which he may imagine completion (or 'peace'). And the song is about retreating from the struggle for resolution or control or comprehension – in favour, perhaps, of simple (bittersweet) reflection.

And it don't get much more Ash Wednesday than that.

Yeah, anyway.

What did I warn you? Like a bloody essay, I said. And that's what you got. Your fault for persevering, innit?

So, to summarise: if you haven't bought an album yet this year, end your streak (you fucking streaker, you) with Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle. And if you have bought albums already this year, add this one to your shiny horde.

Without any doubt at all, I say that this is the best album I have heard so far in 2009.

Read the original review together with trial mp3s on Heavy Soil

'Beware' by Bonnie Prince Billy. Light, perhaps, but not lite ...

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 21:37:32 +0000

This is a copy of my review as published on Heavy Soil

The Obligatory, Obliquely Self-Revelatory Anecdote Part

When I was a nipper, I used to have singing lessons.

And I was a fortunate nipper – to have been taught, successively, by two very pleasant singing teachers.

The latter of these – the magnificent Nicholas Perfect (magnificent, hear ye, not merely in name) – once posed an insightful rhetorical question that has stayed with me: 'But don't you think it's so much easier to write an interesting sad song than an interesting happy one?'

Remember that nugget of Perfect wisdom. It'll come up again later.

The Long-Have-Been-My-Struggles, Difficult-And-Painful-Is-My-Task Part

It's not particularly easy to review an artist such as Bonnie 'Prince' Billy (hereafter, 'BPB'). The last time I did so, I grappled with Ask Forgiveness – itself a tricksy wee album – and now I grapple with the newly-released Beware.

Perhaps you've read a review or two already. Who knows? You might be into that kind of thing. If so, you'll perhaps have observed that early reactions have been subdued. Drowned in Sound's Alexander Tudor isn't keen, for instance, damning the album with a slightly-worse-than-mediocre 4/10.

Straight off, I'm going to ask you to forget that (slightly smugly iconoclastic?) rating. No way is this album worth a paltry 4/10.

Indeed – [Here, Heavy Soil pauses for its own interlude of smug self-reflexion] – this is why Heavy Soil avoids any kind of rating system. Because it's all too easy for a reviewer's score to be warped beyond recognition by the forces of his or her expectation. A rating system works, perhaps, for new or unknown artists, simply as a filter. But applied to a superb, versatile and seasoned musician such as Will Oldham (the human behind Bonnie 'Prince' Billy), a rating is something of a joke. We need to be nuanced, here.

Beware is not I see a Darkness; not The Letting Go. It is considerably less dark (at least on the surface) than much of Oldham's work; more whimsical. It is also more lavish and expansive in its production. In these two respects, it moves away from what might be considered BPB heartlands – from the territory in which many of his fans may have cemented their raptness.

So let's beware [a ha!] of measuring Beware against a scale extrapolated from BPB's earlier work. For the moment, at least. Let's consider it on its own merits.

The Actually Talking About The Songs Part

Opener 'Beware your only friend' strikes out with an exuberance that characterises many of these songs – and (again, typically) the sense of ensemble and musicianship is strong. The whole record is peppered with jubilant instrumentals (provided, of course, by BPB's intimidatingly distinguished and extensive array of collaborators) – and these are carefully, neatly, sensitively combined, thanks to fine, transparent production (the kind that's good enough seldom to be noticeable).

So on 'You Don't Love Me', raucous fiddles swoop and peck, saw and squall; mandolins shimmer and accordians flutter on 'I Don't Belong To Anyone'. Meanwhile, 'Heart's Arms' opens with a wash of vibratoless fiddles and deep, buzzing, woodily resonant bass – but masterfully swells to a resounding series of fuller-textured climaxes, before ebbing away back to its original sparseness.

A good many of these songs, I might add, have rather splendid middle-8s/C-sections. 'You Can't Hurt Me Now', for instance, suddenly breaks from its leisurely, countrified swing into an affectingly direct injunction to 'Do it now and not let someday / Get in the way'. In my characteristic, achingly pretentious manner, I couldn't help but be reminded of Lambert Strether in Henry James' brilliant (but long) novel The Ambassadors:

'Live all you can – it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?'

Like Strether's impassioned outburst in the novel, its directness is striking in the light of what has gone before it – in James' novel, the mannered, restrained conversation of high society; in Oldham's song, the settled, predictable, conventional country swing.

Indeed, I suppose this is actually a symptom of one of the record's most pronounced qualities: its organicism. Whether its in terms of their structure (BPB commonly eschews or adapts familiar verse-chorus-verse-chorus sequences), or the fluctuation of their instrumentation, these songs feel natural. They feel like a conversation between friends – led not by the conventions of polite discourse, but by the desire to communicate.

This means that they develop in unpredictable yet uncontrived ways.

Often, you'll be swept away by a flurry of unexpected key-shifts, or drawn in by a sudden dynamic change. Thus, whilst the form of many of these songs is more accessible than BPB's bleaker and more experimental earlier work, it does not follow that they are simpler.

Want to hear what I'm blathering about?

Listen to 'I Won't Ask Again'.

Dig, first of all, that woozy, fluking fiddle line, and the way it subsides into the vocal entry. Then feel how the change begins at 0.57 with the unexpected, colourful move to minor (accompanied by the addition of the organ) ... is temporarily relaxed by the resolution at 1.10 ... before kicking into a beautiful change of key at 1.23, full of sunbathed backing vocals and flutes.

This is songwriting with the harmonic deftness and nuance of the Beatles at their best. Notice how superbly judged are the swells of dynamic and instrumentation – how the music gathers pace, density and urgency to keep pace with the motion of the chords – so just as the song is moving into new grounds of harmony and key, so the instrumentation and tempo are subtly augmented to further the impression of movement.

The Part Where He Seamlessly And Not Even Remotely Predictably Brings It All Back To The Anecdote From The Opening Part

So this is where Mr Perfect's words re-echo in our ears. Crack on some reverb, so he sounds like Obi Wan Kanobi talking to Luke Skywalker, if you like:

'Don't you think it's so much easier to write an interesting sad song than an interesting happy one?'

I think you're right, Mr Perfect. And I think – for all its apparent breeziness and countrified charm – this is a pretty damn intelligent album; a pretty damn sensitive album; a pretty damn worthwhile album. And it would be a grievous mistake to follow the likes of Drowned in Sound in equating light with lite.

(Heck, these days, it'd probably just be a mistake to follow Drowned in Sound, full stop. But I'll never learn.)

All that said, however, I will – as promised – return to the subject of Beware in the context of BPB's earlier work. And I will say this: personally, I do not find it quite as engaging as 'I See A Darkness' &c. Personally.

Somehow, these songs do not address me quite so directly, emblazon themselves quite so starkly upon my mind as I listen. There is that small degree of distance. A slight sensation of mutedness.

Less powerful, perhaps.

But I'd be very, very wary of saying less good.

Way To Mediocre: Ben Folds Disappoints

Sat, 11 Oct 2008 18:21:40 +0000

This review was originally written for Heavy Soil

Ben Folds has lost his ear

Not a single song on the recently released Way To Normal is truly memorable. Not a single chorus could I convincingly sing back to you, right now.

Opener 'Hiroshima (B B B Benny Hit His Head)' establishes a pattern: it's well-produced, along interesting lines: studio-recorded parts are combined with live crowd sounds and suchlike. But, melodically, it's an emasculated 'Zak and Sara'. The hooks are stunted and malformed. And the humour - normally a strength of BF - is weak. The spoken outro is cringe-inducing.

Buoyant 'Dr Yang' continues this (practically album-wide) trend by which production techniques (this album is inventively, cleverly and extremely skillfully produced) and gimmickry utterly overshadow substance. The fuzzy choruses are hugely energetic and satisfyingly speaker-thrashing. But there's nothing there. The same is true, later, of pacy but empty 'Bitch Went Nuts'.

Diarrhoea in a sieve

Throughout the album, the embarrassment of riches in terms of wouldn't it be cool if we...-type ideas is matched by a very real embarrassment at the paucity of fundamentally strong material. Ben Folds has always been able to take a good song that bit further with a clever, outside-the-box musical device. One of the principal reasons for my intense admiration of Folds is his musical restlessness: his unwillingness to settle merely for a good song, but to add something unexpected and clever to make it great.

Unfortunately, in Way To Normal, he's doing the unexpected and clever things - but without the strong starting points.

So in 'The Frown Song' we have the kind of unprepared, abrupt, song-lifting key-changes that I normally applaud. But here they've nothing to lift. Or, rather, they're lifting a turd. No, wait ... Worse. They're lifting (if you'll pardon the horribly scatological extension of the metaphor) diarrhoea. In a sieve. Elsewhere, we have keyboard solos that cleverly doff a hat to multiple musical eras and genres in the space of 16 bars; hillbilly-parodying vocals; ring-modulated, crispily-synthesised piano-based beats (in 'Free Coffee') ... But what for?

'You Don't Know me', the single and duet with Regina Spektor is notable only insofar as it wastes to an almost criminal extent her vocal talents. I by no means object to the extremely poppy production and stylings of the song. BF is free, in my book, to go as pop as he likes. He has done it well before. But not here. The song is bland, featureless, bereft of direction. All the things that good pop has in abundance.

Poor Regina.

And let's talk lyrics

At times, listening to this album for the first time, I worried about Ben. He is perilously close to the deeply unbecoming: bitterness, slathering rhetoric, borderline misogyny. We don't want to hear lyrics that sound as though they're written in recriminatory tones with a particular individual in mind. It's not funny; it's embarrassing, and discomfitting. It puts me off big-style.

Cologne is affecting, lyrically. But only relative to the uninspired majority of these songs. On another BF album, it'd hardly be a standout track, as it is here: definitely sub-Jesusland (a song I didn't even much like, at the time). The chorus is pretty insipid, and, again, the melodies are not memorable. I'd challenge anyone to sing back more than a fragment of any of these songs after one or two listens.

Similarly, 'Kylie From Conneticut' is lovely, as a last track. But in the same way as a B-side might be lovely. Because you weren't expecting it. It is profoundly disappointing that a BF-ballad-by-numbers song such as this should be my favourite track on an album. At least it seems to be lyrically empathetic, rather than sneering.

What else? 'Errant Dog' is just rubbish. An unbelievably annoying song that also manages to murder a metaphor that Folds used far more effectively on the EP track 'Dog' (which is, incidentally, better than anything on this album, by leagues).

In conclusion

Folds has always been a musical shapeshifter, an ironist, an imitator and a satirist. He has always had fingers in many musical genrepies. And has happily juxtaposed styles with a charismatic, ironising wink. I know this is the kind of thing that some people find intrinsically annoying (as Fieldvole will perhaps attest) - but I've tended to feel that BF carries it off because he has always backed it up with strong musical techniques and, above all, songwriting skills.

On this album, that third leg of the stool (no link-in with my earlier scatological punning intended) - the songwriting - has disappeared.

Get Heavily Soiled

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:47:01 +0000

I should like, if I may, to introduce my newly-reinstated blog, Heavy Soil. Its manifesto is simple: to link to one song each work day (Mon-Fri), with a few words as to why said song is worth listening to.

The idea is to be the antidote to the bewildering array of music out there - with bytesized recommendations. Music discovery, lunch-hour-stylee.

Posts short enough to be read and digested as easily as your Pret a Manger sandwich ... But, with luck, somewhat more musically fulfilling.

On the Friday of each week, I summarise the five days' songs, and invite my esteemed readers to vote for their favourite song.

Please do shimmy on down to Heavy Soil and see the first week's fruits, which include Joanna Newsom covers, madrigal-meets-muezzin orchestrations and creaky lo-fi vignettes. The artists in question are Metric, Sholi, Ida Maria, Mirah and Shearwater.

Yes. And please cast your vote, when you're there ...

Caged birds and complimentary colours: Portishead's 'Third'

Sun, 4 May 2008 20:30:19 +0000

Beth Gibbons has a brilliant, extraordinary voice.

This does *not* mean "she sounds nice when she sings"; "she has the 'voice of an angel'", or "she'd do a mean aria".

It means: she sings, and you listen. She sings, and she communicates. In my view, she has one of the most distinctive, affecting, expressive voices in modern music. (What a horrible phrase - "modern music".) Listening to her sing after any number of 'cool', 'trendy' vocalists, there really is (for me) a sunlight-breaking-through-clouds sensation. A fascinatingly three-dimensional voice, heavy with real, complex, organic emotion. Not a trace of artifice or empty posturing.

What do you do with a voice like that? If you're Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley (the other two members of Portishead), you throw it into relief. I've always found Portishead compelling because of the brilliantly-managed contrast between vocals and arrangements/instrumentation/production. And on 'Third', the contrast is starker than ever: listening to these songs might put one in mind of an exotic bird, enclosed in a stainless steel cage. Even on the more analogue, retro-tinged numbers, there is a pervading iciness and detachment to the arrangements. When, on previous records, beats and samples may've been infused with the warmth of vinyl, on 'Third', they're stripped to their raw essentials. The uncompromisingly mechanistic rhythms of Machine Gun exemplify this quality at its most extreme - but even the more 'rounded', woody instrumentation of songs such as Nylon Smile sounds filtered, cold -- desaturated. As if bathed in fluorescent laboratory lighting. Sounds may be treated with copious delay - but they reverberate in bleak, unfurnished spaces: cold, hard.

There's always been something 'designery' about Portishead - a strong aesthetic sensibility. And the combination of Gibbons' vocals with these arrangements is like the sonic equivalent of complimentary colours: a vibrant, powerful shade against a strongly contrasting backdrop that serves only to maximise its impact.

'Third' is to Portishead what 'Kid A' was to Radiohead. The two records - to my ears - share a striking degree of similarity. But 'Third' is the better album: Gibbons' performances are the more mature and weighty than Thom Yorke's.

And I'd go further - to say that this is Portishead's best album. Like its predecessors, it's aesthetically uncompromising. But, this time, it's that bit more convincing; more substantial; bolder in its juxtapositions and contrasts, yet hanging together absolutely unquestionably as a unified whole. There are few concessions to the easy listening, coffee-table crowd, as we might've predicted.

... But this is, nevertheless, a hugely dramatic record, and certainly not the po-faced affair the above might suggest. Plastic is a standout track, with its stuttering, stammering drum fills and tape warbles. When the bass kicks in, the power is huge - somewhat reminiscent of the climax to Radiohead's Exit Music [For A Film] (high praise indeed). And We Carry On and Machine Gun (masterfully separated by the breath of fresh (if still sanitised, hospital) air that is the Inkspots-tinted Deep Water) are shapely and mesmerising, despite their repeating, insistent, inhuman beats.

Flaws? Only one, really - that lyrics just *occasionally* veer into the realm of the slightly banal and cliched. I'm not, personally, convinced by lines such as "wounded and afraid inside my head", which are a little too much like the blandly extreme soundbites of MySpace emo kids for my liking. That said, my gripe is tiny - as there are also some incredibly memorable lyrics - notably, the closing "I never had the chance to explain exactly what I meant" of Nylon Smile.

This is an album that demands space and engagement. On headphones - or played loud through a good stereo - 'Third' is certainly no less immersive and atmospheric than its predecessors - even though it may lack their broad appeal. This is a brilliant album, and one which I recommend without hesitation to a listener drawn to a highly defined aesthetic - intrigued rather than deterred by a certain degree of austerity.

A piece of cress, growing up my kitchen wall. Yeah.

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 18:58:05 +0000

Cogwheel Dogs' debut single

We are releasing our first single on 8 February 2008 - a new, full band version of Cress (<- this is the old, acoustic version).

It's a song about the persistence of tiny things, in the face of near-insurmountable odds. Optimistically self-referential? Who knows.

We're making the song - along with B-sides Anticoagulant and Ghostwriter - available as a free download. There'll also be a limited run of CDs, for those who enjoy the old-fashioned notion of physicality as much as we do.

There's more information on the Cogwheel Dogs website - including the option to sign up to receive your free download, or to preorder a CD.

To whet your appetite, we've also put up a new free mp3 of the song Queues (to which you can also listen here on Last FM).

No Age - review. And horseshoes.

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 21:57:07 +0000

I've said it before. Boringly enough, I'll say it again. The following is my own opinion and not that of Cogwheel Dogs - the band in which I play. So it goes. This review is also published on my MOG page.

I'm struggling a bit with No Age's Weirdo Rippers.

Struggling because - while I think it's aesthetically bold, interesting, new, clever and challenging - I don't actually much enjoy listening to it.

Extremes of contrast

There's so much I appreciate - conceptually - about this record. The way the energetic, primitively direct riff of opener 'Every Artist Needs a Tragedy' only kicks in two thirds of the way into a song hitherto meandering and awash with fluttering hi-hats, distant, filtered guitar ambience and what sounds like traffic noise. Contrasts certainly don't come much more extreme than those of Weirdo Rippers - which, throughout its length, lurches fitfully from the raw, immediate and pummeling to the sparse, expansive and abstract. One minute, you're listening to the Beach Boys-do-thrash of 'Everybody's Down'; the next, you're pitched into the feedback-suffused drones and lo-fi pulsations of 'Sun Spots'.

It's a record you can reflect on - trying to work out what No Age is trying to do. And I've thought about this album an awful lot over the past few weeks - which, in one sense, may be all the "review" it needs.

I admire the album's defiance. The fact that a brilliant, infectious melody (good enough to carry a 3-minute pop-song, all on its own) is insulted by a lazily off-pitch vocal delivery, mauled by psychotic guitars and dumped unceremoniously after a single chorus. The fact that, when the guitars and drums tear their way through the paper-thin collages that surround them, they really could almost make you jump. The production may be deliberately lo-fi, but someone at the mixing desk certainly knows their dynamic manipulation techniques.

And I like the way that this is the first album review for which I've toyed with (even if only to reject, obviously) the idea of opening with a discussion inspired by a school history lesson.

The [laboured?] analogy

It went something like this. What's the difference between Communism and Fascism? One on the very far left of the political spectrum; one on the very far right. Ostensibly, then, two ideologies in polar opposition. About as far from one another as possible. Except they're not. As Mr Matthews (one of the good teachers) said, it's actually as if they're the two ends of a horseshoe - closer to one another than to the middle.

Obviously, it's simplistic. I'm no political scientist, but I certainly don't delude myself that this is the key to understanding political extremism. But it gets the point across. And No Age's record (see, the point is just on the horizon) reminds me that, perhaps, the same is true of 'classical', high art as opposed to punk - the former characterised by intellectualisation, the latter expressly rejecting the same. But - as Weirdo Rippers proves - the two shimmeringly coexist - can contain one another. Is the album in defiance of art - reducible to the aggressive, raw disdain of punk - or is it in fact a clever, artistically-aware manipulation of punk's aesthetically uncompromising energy? Neither. Both.

So what's the problem?

So - after all that - what am I complaining about? Something (I fear) resoundingly mundane. I can't live with persistently out-of-tune vocals. While I'm well aware that the (sometimes extreme) lack of attention to pitching is consistent with the musical style, I cannot help but find it grating. So it goes.

I also have some reservations about the 'instrumental' tracks - which, at times, meander a little too much for my taste. Obviously, the album's distinctive bipolarity depends to a significant degree upon the contrast between ambient, directionless instrumentals and punchy, direct and stripped-down songs - but, in fact, an instrumental needn't be very long at all to seem vast. Some of these could, I think, be trimmed and still retain every bit of their Gobi-like expansiveness.

Interesting. Very interesting.

I'm glad, in summary, that I'm not in the habit of rating albums. Because I'd find myself faced with a dilemma. Conceptually, Weirdo Rippers is one of the most interesting records of 2007. But, in practice, I don't actually enjoy listening to it very much.

Perhaps this is my own experience of the 'horseshoe phenomenon'?

Scout Niblett live at the Oxford Academy (Zodiac)

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 11:17:17 +0000

I’ve just returned from seeing (an evidently less than healthy) Scout Niblett playing at the Carling Academy in Oxford (UK). Her set was short, and, I was told, not up to her usual standard.

I thought it was brilliant.

Never previously having seen Niblett play live, I have no point of comparison. Obviously, she is pretty ill – but she still performed with a mesmerising confidence. Scout Niblett’s music somehow gives the impression of being ‘boiled down’ right to its key elements. She does not seem to be interested in the measured, slow-building transition, or, indeed, any real kind of musical synthesis. Much of what I find strong and compelling in her work is related to its raw juxtapositions and stubborn refusal to blur sharp dividing lines (no wonder Steve Albini chooses to produce her records). This music of extremes is very well served by the inherent drama of live performance: songs that might err on the side of willfulness on record make perfect sense in this context.

Although, as I’ve said, the set was relatively short, almost every musical base seemed to be covered. Dynamics ranged from the shimmering of barely-strummed clean guitar to pounding drums, banshee vocals and industrially-distorted chords. When Niblett and her (superb) drummer – who plays on about half of the songs – are at full tilt in schitzophrenic death-folk nursery rhyme Let Thine Heart Be Warmed (a stunning track), they make as powerful a sound as any number of axe-wielding metallers with Marshall stacks, Niblett spitting and twitching out her lyrics with almost disturbing intensity.

The sense of ensemble between Niblett and her drummer is powerful: even when the tempo is being stretched and moulded, the two are absolutely together – each drawn-out pause almost vertiginous; each accent impeccably placed.

The set closes with the excellent ‘Where are you?’. The first verse is lyrically extraordinary:

“We woke up late again
And walked into town
My hand held yours
But who was prouder to be with the other?
I think it was me,
I think it was me,
I think it was me.”

– Matter-of-fact, moving, disarmingly vulnerable. She is, evidently, too unwell to play an encore – but, charmingly, does return to the stage to acknowledge the persistent applause.