New(ish) music - August 2023

Another roundup of 'Two for Joy' - a collaborative playlist with a group of friends, where we listen to and rate each other's musical picks. We're all rapidly approaching middle age.

Ah - the long, languid days of August - the perfect time to kick back with a spot o’ Two for Joy, and perhaps a glass of something cold. Except that August was a right old pudding of a month, and I don’t tend to take any time off anyway; I neither have children nor any natural resistance to the sun, and thus take my leave outside of the holiday season.

One thing I did do, however, was give TFJ a few spins - and so here are my impressions:

It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!) - Oasis

As a few of you know, Britpop almost entirely passed me by, so save for the big beasts of the genre I’m all at sea with this music. We’ve had a bit on TFJ, and as a matter of fact one of the Oasis tracks (‘Lyla’ I think) was ace. This ain’t ace. It’s alright, perfectly listenable, but it failed to set my heart aflame. I echo the sentiments so far observed, that this feels a little paint-by-numbers in terms of Oasis. Also, song length doesn’t usually feature in my plaints, but if I may bleat about it, this could be shorn by a minute or two and lose none of its impact.

The Narcissist - Blur

A marginally more musically inventive song than the Oasis track, except that I keep thinking it’s about to break into U2’s ‘Beautiful Day’. However, there’s one aspect of this track that really stinks it up for me, and it’s Damon Albarn’s lugubrious vocal delivery. Listen, there are a couple of sadsack singers out there who I actively like, but Albarn has such an unmusical, hangdog delivery that it hamstrings the entire track. Not that I am massively impressed with the whole kit and caboodle but, fuck me, Albarn’s voice belongs in a museum next to Glenn Hoddle’s.

Crows - Charlotte Greig

Lovely. Hard to say anything else, really; a beautiful, live and extremely human performance that manages to be both sweet and haunting. What do I think the crows represent? I genuinely have no idea, which is part of the appeal - there appears to be a deep mystery lurking at the heart of this little song. Is it about depression? Death? Psychosis? All of these? None of these? Am I going to continue writing solely in rhetorical questions? I’ve said it before, but the unadorned voice can be one of the more affecting instruments out there.

SLAY!! - Paledusk, Hideyoshi

When you’re in the right mood, this madcap mishmash of genre, instrumentation and mood can be an extremely fun white-knuckler, but equally it has the capacity to harrow. I don’t think I could take more than a track or two of this stuff in any given go, but one can’t deny the energy, animating spirit and sheer ambition to throw almost anything at the wall in the hope that some of it sticks. You can hear hip-hop, Pendulum, nu-metal and techno in the mix, all often within the span of a few seconds. Chalk me up as a (qualified) fan.

The Batman Theme - Danny Elfman

As I was driving into work one day, this came on; and the part where it ramps up into what sounds like a fanfare hit just as I was cresting a hill, and it made me feel invincible. Listening to film music divorced from its original context is a peculiar exercise - for example, I love Jarre’s music for both Dr Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia, but especially with the latter, I cannot hear the overture without the long-pan across the desert sands, sound and vision in perfect harmony. In this instance, though, I don’t have that same familiarity, to my listening benefit. What I get here is an urgent, goth-tinged fantasia that really stirs something within. Should I put an Oingo Boingo track on the playlist some day?

We Were Never Really Friends - Bruno Major

We’ve had Bruno Major on before now, yes? I vaguely recall a slightly jazzy, quiet-stormish track a few years ago. It didn’t leave much of an impression - as opposed to this, which is my favourite track of the month. I’ve enjoyed hearing it dissected - especially its structural kinship to ‘God Only Knows’ - but I’m also hearing a little George Harrison in the guitar, a bit of ELO balladry in the chord progression and, strangely, ‘Don’t Let It Show’ by the Alan Parsons Project. All to the good, because I’m the closest thing to an Alan Parsons Project ultra that exists. I bleed for I, Robot. I would kill a man over Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Anyway, this lilting slice of melancholia is gorgeous, and there’s a part of the guitar solo, right at the end, that is so tasty I skipped dinner.

Old Friend - Allman Brothers

Absolutely nothing new with this - it’s slide blues played on acoustic guitar. However, what’s novelty when the execution is so sublime? Derek Trucks is, like Warren Haynes, a guy I could listen to mithering away at the pentatonic scale all damn weekend. So, once we’re past the beautifully tasteful guitar, we’ve got, what? A vocal that combines honey and smoke in equal measure. When he sings “Can’t you hear the cold wind?” I swear I felt a little prickling of the skin.

10,000 Years - High On Fire

I have only seen High On Fire once. I was stood in the pouring rain, in a field in Sweden, hungover, clutching a rapidly cooling cup of coffee, with a miserable Swiss girl who, it seemed, had bought a ticket to a festival dedicated to music she actively disliked. The moment High On Fire slammed into the first couple of bars, everything changed - the coffee tasted great, the rain felt like a noble benediction, and who gives a hoot about Switzerland anyway? I have a rather particular sweet spot for this kind of doomy stoner metal, and 10,000 Years is to be found right in its nexus. I just love how it sounds like the notes are stacking on top of each other in the main riff, as if an edifice of heavy metal could be created by sheer force of will.

Can’t Kill Us All - No Man

This fella sure is exercised about something. This one grew on me. The first couple of listens felt like hard yards, but then there’s a kind of wavelength I found I tuned into that made sense of the noise and fury. I still can’t say it’s one I’d actively follow up with - it is a bit intense and splashy for my tastes - but again, it has a sincerity and almost brutal singularity of purpose that is probably easier to admire than it is to like.

Pain - The War on Drugs

If a song could be said to glimmer, or glisten, it’s this one. There’s a soft refulgence to the sound universe it inhabits, as if the swirl of guitars were able to emit a faint neon glow. Putting aside the rather gorgeous quality of the production, the song has a timeless quality that draws upon jangle-pop but also the laidback, sleep-eyed Americana of Tom Petty or Bob Seger. Yes, really! Which gives it quite a grown up quality, as I maintain that Bob Seger is an unknown pleasure until a person hits thirty. At which point you’re handed a crumbling spine, a working knowledge of the layout of your local IKEA and an instinctual understanding of ‘Night Moves’.

New Heart Design - Turnstile

One of this month’s highlights - but an odd duck, no? The verses sound like a slightly postmodern version of Duran Duran, but the chorus sounds like a snotty late 1990s pop-punker. And you can dance to it! There’s even a little wibbly-wobbly bit right at the end in case you were really craving some Mac DeMarco. A hard one to summarise, because just when you think you’ve got a handle on wuss’ bappin’, it’s over and done.

Point and Kill - Little Simz, Obongjayar

I confess that my first spin of this passed me by, and I imagine numbers two and three did as well. However, this has a really insidious quality to it - the insistence of the groove, the push-pull of the different vocals, Little Simz’s sinuous flow - which led to this track really getting under my skin. By the end of the month it was one of the tracks I eagerly anticipated in the shuffle. I love the brass coming in when it does, adding a different texture to proceedings, a kind of brightness and clarity to what is quite a moody, murky backing. A song I started off not caring for, but ultimately loving? That’s Two for Joy, baby.

Go My Way - Robin Trower

 

Provenance: I know why I bought this album - Classic Rock magazine told me to - but where I bought it is lost to the mists of time. I vaguely recall buying Go My Way at the branch of WHSmith where I held a weekend job, but that seems unlikely. We only stocked the top sixty (nice round number) in the album charts.

Incidentally, I checked the official charts site to see whether there was a chance that Trower snuck into the top sixty in the heady days of summer 2000, I was aghast to see that neither Twice Removed From Yesterday nor the majestic Bridge of Sighs cracked the top forty. Check for yourselves!

Review: If you want me to like your album, do you reckon the opening gambit should be a nine-minuter that mostly consists of wah-guitar going "weow weowoeoowooeoow"? Well buddy I've got great news - that's pretty much exactly what I'm after. For fuck's sake, why else am I buying a Robin Trower album? The percussion? The cover art? (Look at that typeface - is it from Ecco the Dolphin?).

The biggest surprise, if one is allowed to be shocked at the contents of a Robin Trower album, is hearing el jefe stepping up to the microphone for a few numbers. You wonder why he hasn't done it so much before - it's really pleasant, not dissimilar to that of Mark Knopfler's (with the added bonus that Trower doesn't use homophobic slurs on his most beloved songs). Then again, when your vocal foils have included Jack Bruce and the mighty Jimmy Dewar, perhaps it takes time to wind up the courage to give it the tonsils.

I may be committing a heresy here when I say that this might be my favourite Robin Trower album. Better than Twice Removed From Yesterday? I think so! Superior to Bridge of Sighs? Maybe! This does fit in with a pattern of deviancy that considers Trans a stellar Neil Young release, Recycler a worthwhile ZZ Top platter and Love and Theft to be Bob Dylan's finest collection. In some parts of the globe such opinions can have you thrown in jail. But! Listen!!

For a start, the production and musicianship are far sparkier than anything from Trower's 1970s heyday. Normally I'm a sucker for the slightly muddy, claggy atmosphere many records of the era had - it's warm, organic-sounding and tend to make harmony vocals sound amazing - but Trower's guitar playing is such that it works better with a background wrought in sharp contrast. The benefits of the production job are a revelation, revealing ever more shading to Trower's remarkable playing.

You see, I think Go My Way features Trower's best instrumental performances. He blazes through songs like 'This Old World' and 'Run with the Wolves' (the latter of which sounds like an early Blur track, of all things) but it's on the gentler numbers that the guitar work properly shines. 'Into Dust' is a gorgeous thing already, but Trower's playing here is stunning, fragile and aching and kaleidoscopic all at once. In my personal pantheon Trower is right up there with Blue Oyster Cult's Buck Dharma as a stylish, characteristic player anyway, but here it's like someone stuck a rocket up him. His tone is like liquid caramel, and he bends his luminous, fragmentary blues guitar abstractions around these numbers with an understated virtuosity. 

If I could make a guitar sound like anything, and the good Lord knows I've tried, it would be like the guitar on Go My Way.

Is there a weak point here, a moment that drags, any slips into territory filler? Nah. Trower tries on a few different moods, ranging from wistful to hard-nosed but there's a remarkable consistency on Go My Way both in terms of quality and the sound universe the album inhabits. Does it just boil down to sequencing that everything links so neatly together that it can trick the listener into thinking there must be some kind of underlying concept? Perhaps. Am I just over-egging it all because I love Go My Way without reservation? Very possibly.

However, nobody reads this blog for dispassionate perspectives. I likes what I likes, and Go My Way has never long been off my stereo these past twenty years. Anyone who wants to make halfway tasteful noises on guitar should get turned on to some Trower power in any case; and there are few better examples of how to do it than the eleven tracks on Go My Way.

Discipline - King Crimson

Provenance: I volunteered at Reading Festival in 2003 (I realise you're all clamouring to know whether I saw Sum 41 - the answer is yes), and my friend Simon, with whom I was camping (next to members of Linkin Park's extended entourage, some guys from the Datsuns and a former Deep Purple roadie) told me about a record fair that was taking place in the leisure centre next to the festival site.

Desperate to get away from the wretched swine who hemmed me in day and night, I readily agreed with Simon's suggestion to slip away for an hour or two.

I hadn't intended on buying anything, but that's been the perennial bleat I've made every time I've exited from a music shop or bookstore laden with purchases. Anyway, I kept my 'discipline' here, and bought a single album - King Crimson's Discipline(!), influenced jointly by my dad owning In the Court of the Crimson King and having seen the Discipline line-up on a Fridays rerun. They sounded pretty cool, and they had an odd looking fellow playing a Chapman stick. Sold!

Review: When I was growing up in Bournemouth it had a reputation as a place to go once you've given up on life; later on, thanks to the proliferation of clubs with names like Wiggle, Bliss and Toko, weekends in the town became one long bacchanal, if such revels solely consisted of guys in Ted Bakers getting in paggas at taxi ranks and driving modded hatchbacks very slowly around the 'Westover circuit'.

What was never apparent about Bournemouth in those days was its status as an incubator for many a prog-rock superstar. John Wetton (King Crimson, Asia), Greg Lake (Emerson Lake and Palmer) and Robert Fripp (King Crimson) all met each other at Bournemouth College, whilst the Giles brothers (King Crimson) were also local. During my late teens, quite a few then-current / former members of Hawkwind (honestly, they probably couldn't tell you whether they were in the group or not) used to hang around a pub I would frequent, and my mate Max and I would receive semi-regular thrashings on the pool table from these erstwhile psychonauts.

This should mean nothing when it comes to a sober appraisal of Discipline, but my take on their output is tempered with a small but significant - and no doubt idiotic - dose of hometown pride. We had sticky clubs pumping out DJ Otzi megamixes, a shite football team and our most famous residents were Max Bygraves and Jimmy Savile. King Crimson, at the very least, had a degree of credibility, even a touch of mystery - bandleader Fripp was a retiring, elusive presence, and their version of prog left no room for flummery or whimsy. To those of us of sound mind, pop music can't really hurt you, but for my money King Crimson's Red is about as unsettling and scary as the genre can get. Cool!

But Discipline is not Red. This is King Crimson meets Talking Heads, heavily influenced by the new wave and self-consciously arty. However, Robert Fripp is undoubtedly one of the more cerebral guitar slingers out there, and for Discipline he recruited other guys who weren't exactly slouches in the brains department either - Adrian Belew (guitar, vocals), Tony Levin (bass, Chapman stick) and the incomparable Bill Bruford on drums (the single holdover from King Crimson's previous studio album, the aforementioned Red). This adds up to an arch, clever-clever group of musos with the chops to pull off some complex ideas.

Two things at the outset - first, these guys can't sound convincingly playful. Not even wacky old Adrian in his pink suits can escape the po-faced pomposity of some of the subjects that Crimson tackle. I'm not expecting the kind of winking bawdiness that AC/DC do from King fucking Crimson, but even lighter themes are turned into somewhat byzantine word-and-rhythm games. I don't think anyone has ever referred to King Crimson - any line-up of King Crimson - as 'the lads'. The second point, slightly adjacent to the first, is that everything on Discipline is highly technical, highly strung and very buttoned up. Nothing on Discipline sounds at all organic (probably by design, given the name), so one has to be in a certain frame of mind to enjoy it. This isn't music to relax to - quite the opposite - it's tense, itchy, uncomfortable. This latter issue isn't necessarily a criticism.

In fact, when it comes together, Discipline is a marvel. For all that they've sacrificed any notions of looseness or vibe for technical ecstasy, the personnel involved mean that the level of playing is simply dazzling. Bruford is the standout for me, conjuring up polyrhythmic patterns of rare power and drive. I reckon an album solely of Bruford's contributions would be quite listenable. The word genius is tossed around a lot when a simple 'very good' would do, but he's worthy of the mantle.

Elsewhere, the strength in Discipline lies in the sheer range of weird and wonderful sounds the rest of the band coax from their instruments. For example, on opener 'Elephant Talk', some clever sod has got their guitar sounding like a pachyderm's trumpeting; and instrumental 'The Sheltering Sky' features a slew of guitars that have been pushed to their outer limits. Here, the effect is sometimes shrill and uncanny - but on the gorgeous, aching 'Matte Kudasai', the weeping violin effect is mesmerising, elevating an already plangent tune to greater depths of sensibility.

And where necessary, in between the Afrobeat guitars and paradiddles, King Crimson can still muster up a mighty roar. The first instance that the heavily overdriven guitar kicks in during the chorus of 'Thela Hun Ginjeet' is a startling, even overwhelming moment - so all-consuming is the sound that it knocks the wind out of the other instrumentation and almost takes on a physical dimension. Mostly the jump scares are absent, though it really doesn't matter whilst the arrangements ping and whizz around in a dizzying, whirling, triumphal demonstration of what happens when pure ability is harnessed to a singular, iron will. Discipline is whip-smart, deadly serious, a little pretentious - and perversely, a lot of fun.

Oh, and Blur were absolute pony at that year's Reading Festival. I gave up and went to watch Billy Bragg instead.