At the beginning of this year I set myself a task: I’d listen to an album I owned, from start to finish, in one or at most two sessions, every day. Not only that, but the day’s album would be (as far as I could manage it) the first music I played that day, and the album would not be one that I’d previously listened to as part of the project.
Here’s what I listened to in February.
The Associates The Affectionate Punch
Apparently Alan Rankine came up with the piano figure for Party Fears Two while punk was still in the ascendant, and had to keep it stashed away until fashions had changed enough to make it acceptable. In the mean time, they channelled his extraordinary musical imagination – and Billy Mackenzie’s even more extraordinary voice – through the urgency and skronky edginess of post-punk. With, well, extraordinary results – this is a truly great album, even if it isn’t what they actually wanted to do.
David Bowie Young Americans, Station to Station
Bowie completism has its rewards: you may have spotted the deep soul influence on Young Americans, but how about the Latin rhythms, or the attempt to ‘do’ Springsteen? (And that’s just the title track.) A much better – and much odder – album than it appears at first. Bowie completism won’t help you get under the surface of Station to Station, though; I’m not sure what would, short of going on a diet of cocaine, sleep deprivation and Aleister Crowley. (But what a surface.)
Cornelius Point
This album is really nothing like Pet Sounds, or Chill Out, or The Faust Tapes. Even apart from being Japanese. It’s just that you feel you’ve wandered into someone’s multi-tracked musical dream, and that it’s rather a nice place to spend 45 minutes.
Eno Another green world
Hmm. A bit of a rag bag – less than the sum of its parts. (I’ll Come Running is wonderful, though.)
The Magnetic Fields Distant plastic trees, The wayward bus, The charm of the highway strip, Get lost, Distortion, Love at the bottom of the sea
Do you have a favourite band? More – much more – from Stephin Merritt. These are, respectively, the first, second, fourth, fifth, eighth and tenth albums by the Magnetic Fields, recorded between 1992 and 2012. Three of them can reasonably be called masterpieces, which is a pretty good hit rate (particularly when you consider that album #6 was 69 Love Songs, which absolutely is one). Different stylistic choices come to the fore on different albums – Phil Spector on TWB, Country and Western on TCOTHS, repeating loops on Get Lost, the Jesus and Mary Chain on Distortion; some feature few synthesisers or none (Get Lost, Distortion), some feature little or nothing else (TWB, LATBOTS – although, as Merritt noted, the synthesisers he used on the latter album hadn’t been invented at the time of TWB). The songwriting throughout is extraordinary: a dry, heartless wit, masking – and failing to mask – sorrow and yearning as deep as a well.
Scott Walker ‘Til the band comes in
If I was feeling cranky I’d say this was Scott Walker’s best collection of songs before Tilt; it’s certainly head and shoulders above Scott Four. It’s just a shame he only had 26 minutes’ worth of songs and had to pad the album out with covers.
Wire Object 47
The album that Read and Burn 03 is better than. It’s fine – there’s a lot to like about it – but it’s not a total return to form (see Red Barked Tree).
FILE UNDER: JAZZ
The Necks Vertigo; Soft Machine Hidden Details
Vertigo (a single 44-minute track) is one of the Necks’ edgier, more unsettling pieces; I should probably invest in a few more for comparison. What they do – extended trio improvisations, basically – is a very distinctive way of making music. As for the Softs, that band and I have history. I got this CD when I saw the Hidden Details band – John Etheridge, Theo Travis, Roy Babbington and John Marshall – playing live in 2019; only the second time I’d seen the band, the first time being with the lineup of Allan Holdsworth, Mike Ratledge, Karl Jenkins, Roy Babbington and John Marshall. They’ve drifted a bit further into jazz than I’m entirely keen on, and I’m not sure I’ll be following them any further – particularly now that the lineup consists of John Etheridge, Theo Travis, Fred Baker and Asaf Sirkis (John Marshall RIP). (The Venn circle for “long-term Soft Machine fans” is included within that of “lovers of Rock Family Trees”.) It’s a decent album, though, with a lovely version of The Man Who Waved At Trains.
FILE UNDER: FOLK
Bob Lewis The painful plough; Various Dark Holler; Brian Peters Songs of trial and triumph
Bob Lewis is an English traditional singer from whom I’ve learnt a great deal – I’ve learnt the extraordinary tunes to some of his traditional songs, and I’ve learnt to emulate his high, clear tenor, or at least to have the nerve to give it a go. (Indeed, it would be difficult to sing some of his tunes without emulating his singing voice.) Dark Holler is a Folkways compilation of unaccompanied singers from North Carolina, recorded in the 1960s: some strong and distinctive voices deliver what to a British folkie is some surprisingly familiar material, albeit in unusual forms: Dillard Chandler’s song Little Farmer Boy, for instance, appears on Brian Peters’ album of Child ballads, under the more familiar title of The Demon Lover. Brian sings The Demon Lover unaccompanied, but accompanies other songs on Anglo concertina, melodeon and guitar – electric guitar in the case of Twa Corbies. It’s a great selection, well delivered; I’ve already borrowed Brian’s versions of All Alone and Lonely (a.k.a. The Cruel Mother), Fause Foodrage and Six Nights Drunk (a.k.a. Our Goodman), although I’m not sure that Brian’s version of the last-mentioned is entirely traditional (“Who owns that crash helmet where my bobble-hat ought to be?”).
FILE UNDERIN THE REGION OF: FOLK
Alistair Anderson Corby Crag, Steel Skies; Jim Causley Cyprus Well II; Ed Kuepper Today Wonder
Two instrumental albums from the multi-instrumentalist (English concertina and Northumbrian pipes) Alistair Anderson, exemplifying the odd fact that ‘tunes’ – instrumental traditional music – can absorb new material in a way that ‘songs’ can’t. Perhaps it’s just that few people are as steeped in traditional song as someone like Anderson is in traditional music. Steel Skies is all original compositions, and it’s terrific. Jim Causley is a folk singer, but this CD – produced at home, in lockdown – is his second collection of settings of poems by his distant relative Charles Causley. It’s good stuff: sensitive arrangements of some memorable and moving poems. Lastly, my favourite Ed Kuepper album; also the (studio) album recorded the quickest and cheapest, and the one containing the most folk or folk-adjacent material (Pretty Mary (a.k.a. The Wagoner’s Lad); a terrific version of Tim Hardin’s If I were a carpenter; and the title track, a medley of the Animals’ White Houses and Donovan’s Hey Gyp – a song which in turn goes back to Taj Mahal’s Chevrolet and ultimately to a 1930 song, Can I do it for you by Memphis Minnie).
(I do like those Rock Family Trees…)
And that’s it for February. Round up of what happened in March coming soonwhen I get round to it.
Workers’ Playtime 