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 (belatedly) is what I listened to in April.
Brian Wilson, Presents SMiLE; the Beach Boys, The SMiLE sessions
I haven’t really got my head round the relationship between these two, one re-recorded and the other (subsequently) reassembled. They’re close enough that the 2011 reassembly essentially makes the 2004 re-recording redundant (unless you’re looking for the pathos of hearing a bruised 60-year-old sing songs that ring with hope and energy). They’re close enough, in fact, to make me puzzle over reports of Brian Wilson having composed small sections for the re-recorded version. Also, while Wilson evidently got the album pretty much how he wanted it, viewed with a cold eye the result is a bit of a mess; most of the sub-two-minute vignettes are pretty dispensable, as indeed is “Vega-Tables”. But then there’s “Heroes and Villains”/”Roll Plymouth Rock”; and then there’s “Good Vibrations”; and then in the middle of it all there’s a 14-minute sequence – from “Cabin Essence” to “Surf’s Up” – which is as sublimely beautiful as anything I’ve ever heard. For all its flaws and quiddities, this is a monumental piece of work.
David Bowie, Bowie at the Beeb
Bowie’s career was one of those ‘before and after’ things, although different people disagree as to when the ‘during’ was. This set is definitely ‘before’ and ‘after’, though. CDs 1 and 2 follow Bowie from 21 to 25, from psychedelic cockney cabaret to Peel-fave minor cult status and on to Ziggy Stardust, passing through Lou Reed and Jacques Brel on the way. On CD 3, Bowie at 53 shuffles the cards of his career, wandering from Earthling and 1. Outside back to Let’s Dance, Station to Station, Aladdin Sane, The Man Who Sold the World… (No Ziggy, though.)
Sheila Chandra, Quiet, The Struggle
Another couple of those ‘ex-library’ CDs, both dating from the 1980s – an extraordinary productive period for Chandra. The Struggle was a deliberate attempt to mould Chandra’s British-Asian sound to the requirements of the early-1980s pop charts, and has dated rather badly. Quiet – an album of wordless vocal instrumentals – is bolder and much more successful.
The Earlies, The Enemy Chorus
Wonderful, wonderful stuff. If I had a complaint it would be that lyrically it’s a bit dark – several tracks evoke an emotional crisis, and one of the more upbeat numbers documents a man’s decision to commit suicide. But the richness and depth of the music is extraordinary. For those not familiar with them, the Earlies were not a guitar/bass/drums outfit – more of a guitar/keyboards and samples/keyboards/keyboards/keyboards and flute/reeds, flute and keyboards/guitar and trumpet/percussion and trombone/cello/bass/drums sort of thing. Once seen, never forgotten (and I saw them several times). Probably my favourite band ever.
Radiohead, Kid A, A moon shaped pool
Everything… in its right place… After the first couple of tracks, Kid A never really reaches the same heights, but few albums do. AMSP is Radiohead’s tenth and probably their last album, and it sounds even better now than when it came out; very much a summation of the phase of their career that began with Kid A, combining the scale of OK Computer with the dogged weirdness of Kid A/Amnesiac.
FILE IN THE AREA OF: FOLK
Jon Boden, Songs from the floodplain; Ian Robb, Jiig; The Young Tradition, The Young Tradition, So cheerfully round, Galleries, The Holly Bears the Crown; Various, It was on a market day (1 and 2)
In the 1980s the Veteran label produced a series of cassettes of ‘source singers’, people who sang folk songs in social settings without thinking of themselves as artists; the ‘…market day’ anthologies consisted of extracts from those cassettes. Mostly traditional songs, invariably sung unaccompanied, by singers like Jeff Wesley, George Fradley and the great Bob Lewis; there’s nothing like it. The three singers of the Young Tradition picked up this tradition – the songs and the practice of singing unaccompanied – and took it somewhere a bit different, involving harmonies and some quite complex arrangements. By the time of the larky miscellany of Galleries and the unreleased Christmas album The Holly…, two-thirds of the Young Tradition (Heather Wood and the unrelated Royston Wood) were leaning towards ‘early music’ (both albums feature Adam and Roderick Skeaping); the third member (Peter Bellamy) went on to different things. Ian Robb is a fine singer and a very fine concertina player; Jiig is an eclectic album with a couple of striking traditional song choices. Jon Boden, lastly, probably requires no introduction, although this album may do; it’s the first in a series of three albums of original songs, set in a post-apocalyptic (or maybe just ‘post-fossil-fuel’) future. Songs of original songs by folkies is a thing with which I generally can’t be doing, but Boden’s use of folk-adjacent music to furnish a bleak dystopia is rather effective. Moving but chilling.
All that I can think about is wood smoke in the valley,
Kisses in the fall-out shelter, dancing in the factory
That closed so long ago, and no-one ever goes there now
FILE UNDER: 90s
Natacha Atlas, The Best of Natacha Atlas; The Charlatans, Up at the lake; Basement Jaxx, Kish Kash
I used to love Transglobal Underground – could not get enough of that British/Asian/dub/funk/Bollywood/qawwali sound. I can hear what Natacha Atlas is doing on this 2005 best-of – she’s doing that – but it leaves me a bit cold. In the case of Up at the Lake, I don’t think it’s me – I think it’s just a bit ordinary. Great first track, but after that it’s not so much “the Prisoners, if they weren’t revivalists” as “well, indie, kind of thing”. I did actually like Kish Kash, for what that’s worth – I liked Remedy, back in the day – but probably not enough to put it on again very soon, or often. You can’t go back.
Workers’ Playtime 