HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Record shop wise, the last thing I remember is leaving Edinburgh's Avalanche records after bidding farewell to the owner. We chatted, he was less than hopeful about the future and the volume of stock Vs available space told a similar story. Plastic carrier in hand I nodded cordially at the attractive girl behind the counter and stepped out into a wet Scottish Summers day spying my wife and pram bound Son sat on a bench across the road.

Fast forward to January 1st 2012 and what's changed?

A huge chunk of last year was spent rediscovering the delights of late 80's to mid 90's (specifically 1993) Indie music, started as a US only obsession but soon blossomed to include acts as diverse as Felt and Chapterhouse. Sounds awful doesn't it? Well it's kept me pretty chuffed and I've spent approximately 100th of what I was caning on records this time last year.

The rest of my time was taken up by a shed load of personal and geographical change. It would also appear that I have walked away from a habit that has defined me for the past two or three decades.

I have quit record shopping.

Yes I still buy music, CDs mostly but that overwhelming urge to spend days on end trawling dead and dying record stores is gone. Just before Christmas I passed by Rat Records (It appears to be my de facto local and I wondered what was on offer). I don't doubt that five years back it would have been well worth a bi-weekly visit but now? Sure there were a few choice pieces on the counter but 99% of the shop was dry.

Am I saying that the game is up? That it's all about the internet? No. You just have to look further a field. Get creative. Go to the source like these guys...

http://www.dustandgrooves.com/

(Great, no exceptional site by the way Elion. If you don't do this full time you should)

But that's only going to work if you get off on Geographically specific music, and even then you can bet somebody got there well and truly before you. Just discovered the 70s Lagos scene or Trinidadian Funk? Guess what, so did somebody else, somebody with the air-miles and fiscal means to take home small chunks of the country in question. Anyway, I'm rambling, it's not even about that. Rat Records had a copy of Ornette Coleman's 'Of Human Feelings', the one with 'Times Square' on it for four quid. I could have turned it the same day but the thought of it flapping against my leg on the walk home was too much for me. I'm just done with it.

I mean, will I still stop by the occasional record shop on my travels? Yes. Will I obsess to the extent I used to? I hope not. I get my pleasures in a far more simple way now, my album of the year is freely available to buy for less than a fiver and the thing that's making me happiest at the moment is Shack's 'HMS Fable'. Besides, I may have developed a soft furnishings habit.

So what for the blog? Who knows, I'm still trying to work that out.

TANGERINE DREAM - EXIT

The problem with much of Tangerine Dream (apart from their name) is that the vast majority of the band's output from the late 70's to mid 8'0s can and does blur into one. Not to say that it's not massively listenable. I just wouldn't want to play a game of 'Name which album this Tangerine Dream track' is from because I'm guessing that not even Edgar Froese would get a perfect score.

So the source for the review is from one of the 'remastered' definitive CD's released by Virgin. They did a horrible job, flimsy sleeve, no notes and according to a mis-print on the spine this is a live album. That gripe aside the CD works and it sounds a lot better than a vinyl copy might.

What?

Oh come on. Do you really want the slightest crackle or pop to pepper the musics more quiet passages? I have much of the groups catalogue and can't think of an instance where I have preferred hearing it on vinyl. It's a case of the practicality of a situation outweighing the romance that might be involved in listening to this in it's original form.

Anyway, why am I reviewing this? Well somebody in the office just started playing M.I.A and it offended me to the point of having to drown out her racist hate-mongering ramblings with the closest thing to hand. Lucky for me it was this rather than a copy of the first Opeth album.

'Exit' starts off easy enough, the opener, imaginatively also called 'Exit' wrong-foots a little and ends up sounding like a reeled off list of holiday destinations bringing to mind mid-80's travel shows and that orange faced camera slut/reader's grandmother Judith Chalmers. Despite that it's not a bad way to kick off the album, suitably enigmatic and futuristic.

Much of the 'Exit' comes across as either Horror soundtrack or Porno music, maybe both, Horror/Porno. The type of sound that thanks to the like of Steve Moore and friends is well and truly en vogue. Basically it's like seedy new-age music.

Onto the album's other stand out 'Pilots of the Purple Twighlight', why? Because of the awesome name? No, because if you listen to the keyboard in the background this is where James Earl Jones voiced wunderkind Tay Zonday got the loop for 'Chocolate Rain' from.

Despite my best efforts of turning this up to eleven M.I.A still seeps through the more silent parts and my teeth grind in time. Can't she be arrested for something? Inciting violence or just making criminally bad records comprised of half-arsed samples and utter gibberish and mono-tonal lyrics.

'Network 23' comes on and as I am transported back to the 'Blade Runner' inspired audio future/past of 'Exit' all thoughts of a juvenile public school girl glamorizing terrorism fall away in favor of a wide and empty soundscape inhabited by nothing other than electronic pan-pipes and a machine that generates keyboard riffs especially for midnight chase scenes.

Great album. Any better than the three before it or the four or five after it, who can really say for sure? Edgar?

No, thought not.

PRIDE - PRIDE

With a name like 'Pride' you expect something massively gay. What 'Pride' deliver is twee, jangly, Dan Fogelberg tinged blancmange... But it isn't particularly homosexual.

The reason for my listening to this album is mainly that it appeared on a 'beat head' acquaintance's 'want's' list and I decided to investigate. You know the type, flat-rimmed baseball cap, a vocabulary awash with Americanisms and an unhealthy knowledge of which track was sampled for which Hip Hop track and when. This in mind I shouldn't really be that surprised when it turned out to be not massively impressive.

Albums usually fall onto such lists because of a couple of drum fills or breaks, at best they are held up by a couple of half-decent tracks, one of which nearly always features that all important sound or instrument of the moment be it Fender Rhodes, fuzz guitar, Moog or the accordion.

Anyway, my point is that people become obsessed with these records for portions that they can dissect, play over, possibly loop and re-invent. The original body of the album cast aside, forgotten about and left un-played.

This however may not be the case with 'Pride'. Despite many of the tracks having some oh so tired 'break beat' or other rumbling along in the background there isn't really a stand out. Many of the songs are quite pleasant and the breezy and so laid-back it's horizontal sound that 'Pride' create is very listenable, if not over-inspiring.

It was produced by David Axelrod, the man behind The Electric Prunes always interesting soundtrack to a Christian Cult period ('Mass in F Minor' and 'Release of an Oath'). Sadly none of the stylings that made both of those records so catchy despite of their Xian content appear to have been employed here. It lacks quirk, it's mono-tonal, over sunshiny. I mean I can listen to it, I am listening to it now but it might as well be the soundtrack to a retirement home picnic.

Pride sound a bit like somebody has sucked all of the drugs, excitement and danger out of The Byrds with some kind of purpose-built soul vacuum-cleaner and instead replaced it with sand, sand and maybe a couple of shiny marbles. In fact I would go as far as to say that if ever there was an archetypal 5/10 record, this is it.

...5 1/2 if they said the word 'cunt' once in a while.

SALEM - KING NIGHT

I'm a bit late to the party with this one but given it's been on what can only be described as 'heavy rotation' for the past couple of months I felt I should do it the justice of at least a few column inches. I narrowly missed seeing them play at the weekend (sold out) and I was so gutted that the fine mexican food and cans of PBR at the Motor City Lounge that took a poor second place lost all of their taste.

I asked a few people what would make the top album's of 2010 list and aside of the long drawn out bouts of silence peppered with 'fuck me it was a shit year for music' the only other common denominator was this 'King Night' by Salem.

Personally I had managed to avoid all of the fuss surrounding this, mainly because I thought it was by Z-list metal band Salem but also because the people telling me to go listen to it couldn't really explain why I should or what it sounded like.

In time cool monikers for the genre apparently championed by Salem came along.

'It's Witch House'

'It's Rape-gaze'

Well what to say other than 'You had me at hello'.

I wasn't exactly sure what to expect other than some really dense, mid-fi beat based music and the first couple of times I played it that's exactly what I got. Kind of like sorry for it's self trip-hop (ugh) fed through the Kevin Shields machine. Then I started using it to calm number one son when he wouldn't stop crying, well okay mostly it was to calm me but as I did I started to get into it.

To say the sound is dense is an understatement, Salem have succeeded in packing so much into their sound it plays like the needle is being dragged through a dirty old suitcase stuffed with shit-stained clothes salvaged from a hospital incinerator and I mean that in the nicest way possible. Its music that's so dirty that it smells. Really though, it does, of beer, of sex, of heroin shit on stone-washed denim.

High pitched keyboard squeals layered over budget drum machines with a voice at the back of the mix so smacked out and slowed down that if the singer needed a Black Metal name he would be called Mogadon. There's some orchestration in there as well and surprisingly, the entire thing managed in part at least to come across as anthemic. Something that despite of itself you could imagine a room full of people dancing to.

I now find myself in the same position that my much hipper friends found themselves in last year: Trying to recommend something to people without really being able to label the sound or explain the musical motive, but that's okay because it's about fucking time.

ROYAL TRUX - SWEET SIXTEEN

And another?

I'll be honest, I'm killing time while my wife paces the room, gets down on all fours or sits on a pile of cushions five feet high. She's slowly going in to labour. The plus side is that the house is spotless, apparently they call it 'nesting': Whilst I haven't woken up at 4.00am to find her scrubbing the kitchen ceiling (supposedly this is not unusual) everything is neat, tidy and in its place ready.

Ooooh! There goes another one. They are still a good 15 minutes apart at the moment as we are still coming out of 'False Labour'. No I'm not referring to those cunts led by the Hamburglar's body double that we only just ousted from power (arumpatish!) Apparently It's some kind of bodily fake-out. Labour but not labour. Anyway, I'm rambling. To be honest I am doing anything I can to take my mind off what's coming. Not in a bad way, I'm not in denial, it's more of a self preservation kind of way. I honestly think that if I sat sober in a cold room and dwelled on what happens next for more than a few minutes I'd shit my pants. Excited? Fuck yes. Prepared? What as in do we have a stroller? Yes. Prepared mentally? Fuck no!

Anyway, another great album that didn't get a look in on vinyl 'Sweet Sixteen' by Royal Trux. The fact that this bad boy never made it onto everybody's format of choice is nothing short of a mystery. In fact as and when I get to heaven and meet The Baby Jesus it's first on my list of questions.

'Come my child, you have led a kind and gentle life, now I welcome you to heaven, do you have any questions?'

'Well, there is just the one....'

(Two actually if you count Lembit Opik's unfathomable and continued success with the ladies)

That to this day 'Sweet Sixteen' is the only Royal Trux LP not available on....LP. It's fucking retarded. I mean didn't they think to reissue it around the time of the Weird's War album or the first RTX (Jennifer post Trux) record?

It's absence remains a crying shame.

Sonically 'Sweet Sixteen' is Royal Trux's most ambitions record. There is so much going on at any one time that multiple listens will identify layers that you didn't thing were there the first time.

'Is that a marimba?'

It's still dirty and somehow lo-fi but it's an all together different ball game from 'Twin Infinitives' era Trux. It's the same blueprint, it's made with the same fucked beyond fucked post-Stones 'up all week in the same clothes' stylings but this time out two heroes are joined by what sounds like a cast of thousands... well okay, four or five maybe. This is the '70s rock' record, stadium filling pomposities coated in coke and triple live concept albums.

Oh, we're going for a walk to try and induce real Labour....

Holy shit it's cold out there - Weather man says minus 17 and snow on it's way.

Anyway, where was I? The story goes that the Trux made this record deliberately over-baring and in-accessible in an attempt to get out of their record contract, a kind of 'Metal Machine Music' fuck you. But if that really is the case, they failed massively because the likes of 'Morphic Resident' and 'Golden Rules' are the band at their best.

How are you supposed to prepare mentally for father-hood? Well there's a million books out there, a few decent films like 'Away we Go' and okay, I can only think of 'Away we Go'. I'm sure there are seminars, counciling sessions and the like but really what's that actually going to do other than take up 'transitional time'? The last 'me time' until I'm pensioned off to some retirement home to piss my pants and argue over the remote.

Ha! I'm going to read this back in a few months and feel bad. In the meantime I'm going to listen to the Royal motherfucking Trux.