Random Release: A Beautiful Downgrade

I’ve always been a big fan of BBC Sessions, especially those for the late John Peel, and will jump at an opportunity to pick some up by any of my favorite artists. In fact, I think it should pretty much be a law that if you’ve recorded any sessions, again, especially for JP, that you should be required to release them to the public. Why? Well, oftentimes radio sessions capture a band in a spontaneous, whimsical or experimental mood, revealing a side to them that is not often found on official “this is who we are” releases or, because they’re pretty much recorded live, harnessing the essence of what the band is all about before (in many cases) producers with radio-friendly outcomes in mind tweak the rawness (and sometimes the edge) out of the music. Also, bands would use these sessions as an opportunity to showcase new material, often in embryonic form, or do covers, or perhaps “lesser” tracks that never made the final cut to official release on an album or even a b-side and so are a dusty lost gem tucked away in the vaults until either an after-the-fact notion to cash in brings them to the light of day or a bootlegger with a sense of what is right leaks them to the public.

With Bauhaus: Swing the Heartache: The BBC Sessions, you’ve got a little bit of all of that. As mentioned in a previous post, Bauhaus usually had their experimental on, and more often than not this is the case in their sessions for the BBC. Bare bones and minimal, the boys deliver some very powerful performances in some instances more biting and immediate than their album counterparts. St. Vitus Dance comes ripping out of the gate with pounding drums, chainsaw guitar, heavily phased bass jabs and P-Murphy’s indelibly sinister croon. The same can be said for Mask’s In Fear of Fear and the title track for this compilation, Swing the Heartache. All proof that the band was more than studio magic and just the right echo in production; they could set up quickly and bash it out to just as much if not greater affect than any mood-enhancing studio posturing.

There are also pensive, introspective moods, such as in the Three Shadows Part 2 (found only here) with its Renaissance flavors and Oedipus Rex imagery. As I’ve said before, Bauhaus are a band bent on setting a tone, an atmosphere, and a prime example can be found in Silent Hedges, as an ominous acoustic guitar builds in intensity while Murphy sings of madness and purple eyes before lamenting going to hell (again) and the rhythm section drives the point home (or rather down) with a fury controlled simply by the will of the band, to the ultimate satisfaction and salvation of the listener.

Other highlights are the chosen covers, of which there are several, the most recognizable to those within the musical spectrum being Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, this version of which was released as a single and subsequently became the band’s biggest hit (don’t ya hate that). Another standout is T. Rex’s Telegram Sam (the original of which I’m not familiar with), but one can hear in this blistering rendition that the band enjoys playing it and just playing in general, kicking the verses about with their own sense of panache. But to me the standout among these tracks (maybe even the entire album) is their take on Eno’s Third Uncle, visceral and acidic, a five minute watch-where-you’re-going, flange enveloped slug fest that also showed up as a proper release on their The Sky’s Gone Out album and notably one of the few instances when a cover version surpasses that of the original artist.

Some “light hearted” moments include a couple more experimental tracks. Bauhaus were intentionally -- and therefore first and foremost -- an “art rock” band (long before goth got pinned on them), changing bass notes into blips (The Spy in the Cab) or drumbeats into near mechanized (though in every way Kevin Haskins) pulse rhythms; but here there are two pieces of simple jazz influenced baselines with noodling leads, the first being Party of the First Part, with an overdub of the cartoon The Country Mouse and the City Mouse and the somewhat more entertaining, Departure, a narrative between David J and Peter Murphy about a man’s apparent attempt to escape an impending madness.

There are weaker moments, most evident in an abbreviated (yet otherwise lively) version of early fan favorite In the Flat Field, and Terror Couple Kill Colonel, which though leaner and faster, misses some of the forbidding slink of the single version.

Ultimately this is a flawed album, patchy and lacking a certain cohesiveness, but in a way that was always Bauhaus. Though this is compilation it’s in no way a greatest hits release (though some hits are here), but a collection of various time periods within the band, designed for completeists and those who are interested in hearing alternate takes on already familiar and well-loved versions. Explore those takes first, and then Swing the Heartache.

Q1-09 Update

Every good institution should have quarterly updates and GWILT is no different. And since this is a completely not-for-profit outfit, really the only thing I can report on here are the albums I’ve obtained so far in the year. I believe I’ve managed to pick up all the ones I’ve been looking forward to as well as a couple that I wasn’t aware of until the 11th hour, which always makes for a happy surprise.



The album I’ve been most anticipating, and which has in every way lived up to my expectations, is the latest offering from Robyn Hitchcock (here again with his Venus 3 supergroup), Goodnight Oslo. I still maintain that as brilliant has his career has been since his Soft Boys days and onward, his output of the past ten or so years has easily been his strongest. When he finally shed the Syd Barrett skin he’d been (perhaps unintentionally) wrapped in sometime in the late 80s, he was finally able to embrace the 60s as an era and not just one facet of it; though admittedly with albums as fantastically strong as Fegmania, I Often Dream of Trains and Gotta Let This Hen Out, etc, I know I’m really stepping out on a limb here (and please feel free to disagree if you like). While he may not be churning out as many quirky ditties along the lines of The Man with the Light Bulb Head, My Wife and My Dead Wife or Brenda’s Iron Sledge, there’s still enough head scratching oddness here to make his lyrics as equally obscure as they are poignant. RH has always been steeped in allegory and has learned well how to maintain the offbeat without becoming a washed parody of himself. I believe much of this has come with further maturity and an extreme comfort within his persona, as his recent releases have been much more relaxed (though no less excellently executed) as his frantic (almost violent) days with the Egyptians, etc. As always, he’s making commentary on the things he feels like, whether its relative or not to the immediate music/social environment is secondary or even in spite of, and the fact that he comments at his leisure makes his entire catalogue relevant whether it’s 1986 or 2013 (and yes, it’s coming kids). And as for the music on Goodnight Oslo, it’s all here -- the funky jaunt of the opener What You Is (complete with “hey, hey” female vocals), the achingly Beatlesesque (if in nothing else harmony) I’m Falling or a tune I’m sure Uncle Bob wishes he’d written himself, Hurry for the Sky. There’s also plenty of his neo-retro-pop-la-la, which could fit well with most any RH era: Your Head Here, Up to Our Nex, Intricate Thing and the bonus e.p. track I Just Wanna Be Loved. Even casual fans will at the very least enjoy this record for a background/party listen and true-to-the-faith believers, well, you know better than I…



One of this year’s surprises was a new release from Chris Isaak, Mr. Lucky, and his first since 2002’s Always Got Tonight (if you don’t count his Christmas and live albums), which I found to be a rather maudlin and tedious affair. Mr. Lucky, however, is Isaak back on form. Not that he ever much strays from his 50s crooner via Roy Orbison motif, but has been known to dabble in various styles and grooves (while maintaining his lyrical bent towards lost, forsaken and unrequited love) that don’t always mesh well (with this listener anyway). And while Mr. Lucky does have its slight flaws for this reason (and when I say that, I say it with the affection of a fan who’d rather hear a flawed CI song than anything by Big & Rich or the like…did I just compare Chris Isaak to Big & Rich?), there’s still a lot of classic, classic CI on here. If nothing else, Chris could have been a singles artist (had the world only picked up on more than Wicked Game), ‘cos he can definitely turn a hook and the album’s second track (and I believe lead single) We Let Her Down is one of those catchy, mid temp, downbeat pop slices that makes the late 30 something gals with the long hair and the low cut tops rock back and forth to a semblance of something called rhythm. And yes, that’s a good thing. We’ve Got Tomorrow digs back into Holly-like Crickets bounce and then incorporates a horn section that makes it an equal candidate for either the Porter Wagoner or Lawrence Welk Shows. Summer Holiday, We Lost Our Way and Very Pretty Girl are all standard though standout Isaak that could have been found on any of his “heyday” albums, with the latter almost sounding sinister enough to be an outtake from his 1987 self-titled sophomore effort. Of two duets, his retake with Trisha Yearwood of Speak of the Devil’s Breaking Apart is a competent but ultimately pointless affair as Yearwood’s presence does nothing to the overall interpretation of the song and would have served better as a surprise guest appearance live instead of taking up space here. His new to this album I Lose My Heart with Michelle Branch is old school CI in a country mood and the guitar lick is one of the best of the album. Casual fans probably won’t be interested in this album and would be better off picking up the flawless Forever Blue or “the one with the hit,” Heart Shaped World. But for big fans this is (to me) a return to form and a much appreciated “welcome back” after a seven-year silence. Also, check out the Chris Isaak Hour on A&E/Biography channel. It’s good stuff.

My other purchases thus far in 2009 are Morrissey’s Years of Refusal, a true “true to form” return to his more halcyon days, especially pointing to Vauxhall and I (though some of my “die hard” Moz fan friends are still not impressed by his “comeback”), Pet Shop Boys’ Yes, which was another surprise and, the few times I’ve had a moment, a truly immediate and delightful listen and John Frusciante’s The Empyrean, which I’d really been looking forward to but as yet have not had (made) the time to give a listen. But stay tuned for possible updates on these and other albums as we continue to explore the music of 2009.

(As an aside, to be honest with you, the disc currently getting the most spins is the Rosebuds October 2008 release Life Like, which is everything retro pop music should be in today’s oversaturated age.)

I’m also going to take this opportunity to announce a new “series” of reviews called the Random Release Review. This is where I’ll be going to each shelf (20 in all) of my CD cabinet and (turning my head) picking a CD at random, be it album, ep, single, compilation or one of Karla’s that I’m in no way familiar with. The first five have already been selected and the first one begins with the letter B (or the band does at any rate). Stay tuned for that hopefully within the first week of April.

Until then, check out my friend Greg’s music blog, The Inconsiderate Mixtape, for his take on music that’s great and not just good. I know there’s a way to add his link to the side over here, but until I figure that out, just click above and bookmark.

Verse-Chorus-Verse, Phooey!

In the tradition of Brian Eno, John Cage (and Cale), Faust, Cluster, Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart, Roger O’Donnell and heck, even yours truly, George Harrison’s 1969 solo sophomore effort “Electronic Sound” is one of the earliest excursions into the experimental deconstruction of popular music and the fleshing of found sounds. And it’s a darn fine album to boot. If Harrison ever wanted to shed an audience in his or any other era, this was the record to do it. Recorded entirely with a moog synthesizer, these two lengthy pieces are less songs than they are disconnected ideas of what music is made of, and since the idea of the solo balladeer has been in existence for centuries, even what music could be. Aside from a few schools of drone or discordant contemporary classical, there wasn’t much out there that really challenged the verse-chorus-verse mentality of western music in any genre. Even free-form jazz had a semblance of structure, a beginning and an end, a key you could fine notes to whistle in and instruments you could recognize. But here is found little more than a collection of colored noise and a few stray notes following each other to nowhere. You will not find a melody, a beat, a rhythm, a pattern or anything resembling any sort of structure, but you will find textures, atmospheres and an overall mood. And really, isn’t that what music is about, the conveyance of a particular feeling? Joy, despair, regret, get-down-and-party, these are all emotive platforms from which thousands of songs have been built, so who says that you have to have two verse-choruses, a solo and a repetitive outro to make it any more or less a song?

One of my more recent listens to this album, and you really have to listen for it to be anything more than background banter, was around 2am while feeding Fox a bottle. The emotional package I received at this time was something akin to fear and there were moments when I thought some of these snaking non-patterns were literally, even purposefully splitting open my brain like an apple. It was possibly the closest I’ve come to a musically enhanced acid trip without ever dropping and I can imagine that anyone under the influence would be in for quite a ride (from which they may conceivably never return).


The second and final release on Zapple Records (the other being John & Yoko’s “Unfinished Business No. 2: Life With the Lions”), fans at the time would, or at least should, have known that this record was not going to be “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” or “Piggies” or even “Within You Without You.” It’s no wonder that it didn’t chart, but in a time when stretching the boundaries of the mind through art was all the rage, you’d have thought it would have been a bit more well received critically. But with hindsight critics have warmed up quite nicely, hailing Harrison as a pioneer far ahead of his time. And what’s exceptional about this album is how well it’s held up over the years, simply because it was created for no time, to fit no style or conception of music, but to simply exist as it, an account of what can be done and considered if you only get out of the box.

Here’s a snippet, a vid clip montage from mainly the Beatles era and various interviews, including an extended one with Ravi Shankar. Odd, but will give you an idea.

This is a song of social and political importance and it was written especially for you…

Or something like that.

Today I'd like to say "Hi, hi," to Michael Stipe. I'm in that kind of mood. Karla and I happened to watch REM Tourfilm this morning (which I’d not seen since high school and enjoyed possibly more than I did back in the day), and it's held up very well I think. Also, my status message and pic on g-chat read “found it Myles Standish proud” with ol’ Michael looking over from a Murmur era snap shot.


I’ve had my ups and downs with Michael over the years and as my longtime readers know, pretty much disowned REM in my college “indie cool” days. I slowly began letting them back into my good graces about ten years ago and fully re-accepted them back into my life as a vital and important part of my musical identify during a car driving epiphany of sorts several months ago. Furthermore, I forgave M-Stipe for all past annoyances after he agreed to a week long online question-answer session about the meaning of REM’s lyrics, etc. It was a fun, candid and extremely enjoyable session that showed he was a very gracious and fan-appreciative guy, and probably not nearly as weird as we all think he is (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

As an enigmatic front man, you can't get much cooler, sleeker or diverse than our pal from Athens, who has always fronted his music with a sense of wit, grace and a smirking self-consciousness that makes him immediately everyman and his own man. Had I ever inclinations to be a lead singer (and who says I haven't), I'd have gladly used him as a blueprint.

Here are a couple of REM songs that Michael has claimed to be his “favorite” throughout the years…

Fall On Me

Get Up

Parakeet

And one of my favorite M-Stipe vocals...

The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonight

And a few quotes…

I really wanted to be on Six Feet Under as a corpse. That would be hysterical.

I think there were early critics who wanted us to change the world because the Sex Pistols failed.

I'm not homosexual, I'm not heterosexual, I'm just sexual.

If I'm tired of me, I'm sure the public is as well.

Never eat broccoli when there are cameras around.

There was never a golden era of American radio as far as I can tell.

When you meet a stranger, look at his shoes. Keep your money in your shoes. (from the song Good Advices)

Remember, this is the guy who at one time could have turned us inside out, but chose not too. Thanks, buddy!

And now you can go any place that you want to go...

I knew it was coming, and I’d been feeling it all day and I guess for several days, but the distractions of work and a young child and just the various ins and outs of a day can keep you from focusing on certain urges. And so it’s already late afternoon when I sit down knowing there’s something I need to blog about that’s important to me and as luck/irony/fate would have it, I stumbled upon it by a hunch.

The Triffids are/were probably the greatest example of the most unknown/best-kept-secret of all the 80s Aussie indie pop bands. The Church and even the Go-Betweens have a certain notoriety that lifts them up to at least the glowing edges of the mainstream. But the Triffids swept through the outback for their brief moment and never much made a dent on foreign soil, at least not in the US.

Having said that, they were one of those bands I’d heard tell of here and there throughout the years, and when the Church covered their “best known” song “Wide Open Road” on their latest acoustic album, I knew I needed to check them out. Shamelessly I downloaded a collection of “early singles.” Come to find out that this collection was fan-made, a gathering of out of print, hard to find, vinyl only releases of their earliest “official” singles and EPs dating between 1981 and 1983. I say “official” because this extremely prolific band released at least six or seven “tapes” of original music between 1978 and their first single “Stand Up” in July 1981, a prize for winning a song competition.

“Stand Up” was the first ever song I heard by the Triffids, less than two minutes of jangle pop about youth standing up for itself, for its right to have a good time, to be in love, to listen to the music of their choice, yet realizing how fleeting it all really is because one day, we’re all dead.

And that’s what brings me here to this post, as today, February 2, 2009, marks the 10th anniversary of the death of the mastermind behind and face before the Triffids, David McComb, who died after complications from a liver transplant.

I am a Triffids fan but not much of an aficionado. Sure, I’ve read up on them, but I’ve not gone out and bought up their entire catalog (which is rather extensive). There are a couple of reasons for this. First, as I’ve learned and initially did with the Go-Betweens ten years ago, I like to savor the moments of a new, previously existing artist. I’ve almost always been a late comer, even to new/current bands, picking up on them around the second or third album or after the hype of the debut has started to fizzle out, and so rarely am I catching fire with that original spark-and-wonder along with everybody else. And for the most part, that’s fine. Usually an artist isn’t worth half the hype and if you find them on your own and can discover their worth without the external blah-blah, you’ll likely enjoy them far more because you’re doing so for your reasons, not someone else’s.

In a way this sorta brings me to the second reason… I’m not a “huge” fan, initially, of a lot of much of what I’ve heard of the Triffids latter output. The big problem here is production. Oh, 80s, you fickle canker on the lip of good music. You wowed us with your new and innovative sounds and then when you wore out your welcome, you left your mark with such a lasting impression that you give away your flaws before we can ever get to the meat of what you’re trying to show us. Rambling? Ok…well, long rant short, a lot of it is very dated sounding. You know what I mean, big drums, heavy strings, massive production, reverb-verb-verb, etc. And that’s really a shame for the Triffids ‘cos McComb’s songwriting is instantly witty, morose, self-loathing and in summary, heartbreaking. This is a man who lived the rock n roll lifestyle even if his band wasn’t burning up the charts. And the hearts he broke and bottles he shared and the visions he saw along the way, all made it into his songs. This is never more evident than in the group’s hallmark, critically acclaimed 1986 sophomore release “Born Sandy Devotional.” (And that’s said by folks much more in the know about it than I am.) Here you’ll find the aforementioned “Wide Open Road” (live video). If BSD is the album that sums up McComb in a nutshell, this is the song that does the same.

The Triffids fell apart somewhere in 1989 after releasing three more critically well received albums, the only other one which I own being “Calenture” (go here for a definition of that word). The lead track I sing to Fox when I’m trying to settle him down to fairly favorable results. (However, singing the “Stand Up” single’s b-side, “Farmers Never Visit Nightclubs,” just gets him worked up again…who knew?) After the band fell apart David McComb attempted a solo career as well as founded (then exited) the US college familiar band Blackeyed Susans (named for a Triffids song). As is so often the case with worthwhile music, the Triffids were never very successful even in their home country. Shortly after the band’s demise, the Western Australian Music Industry was having a big event, giving out awards and such, and one was for the most outstanding contribution to the national and international music scene. The Triffids won and the only member present at this black tie event to accept the award was Jill Birt, the group’s keyboardist, who was serving drinks at the event honoring her band. And yet to prove they’re not completely forgotten or unappreciated, all of their proper albums have seen reissue and re-release (with bonus tracks) over the past couple of years, including a vinyl box set of those early singles (which, regretfully, I could not justify the expense of purchasing). This is because fans of the band are loyal and, like so many bands of their caliber, ravenous. If you don't believe me, just check out the detail of the various entries on their wiki page.

Hooray for the underdog!!!

Though I’m not overly familiar with the bulk of his work, David McComb has influenced me as a songwriter and a lover of music in general. He wasn’t afraid to be who he was, to live his life and to express it in song for the world to hear. It’s that kind of open honesty that allows so many folks around the world to identify with the pain of living the life they’ve been given, the choices and circumstances and consequences of the daily strain. David McComb and the Triffids were one of those shining few.

So David, buddy, wherever you are out there, here’s a thought and a prayer just for you.