S.F. Sorrow - The Pretty Things

Provenance: I can't imagine I bought this album without reading about it somewhere. It's very possible that it's another Classic Rock job, although what works against that theory is the fact that I like this album.

Review: I like this album, I love this album, and I think I instinctively knew I'd regard this as something special the moment I heard the weird bent note that serves as an introduction to S.F. Sorrow. As with many wonderful 1960s offerings, where the studio became a playground of the imagination, on this collection the Pretty Things conjured up a raft of sounds that I've yet to hear on any other recording. Thus, I can identify the song 'S.F. Sorrow Is Born' within about half a second.

It's worth noting at this stage that, alongside being a landmark in British psychedelia, S.F. Sorrow is a concept album - maybe the first concept album, as we recognise them, inasmuch as the songs are thematically linked and a narrative flows throughout. As with many of their counterparts dipping their two in the lysergic end of the pop spectrum, a debt is owed to Lewis Carroll's prism of surrealism. However, the biggest IOU needs to go to the Beatles. The Pretty Things went through quite some metamorphosis to reach this point; their first two albums were raw, almost troglodytic R&B, but third album Emotions combined this with a strain of freakbeat. S.F. Sorrow feels like a further filtering of sensibility, a dawning craftsmanship to go with their undoubted energy. Also thrown into the mix is Edwardiana, which no doubt coloured the decision to shape this album around the Great War.

As with the Small Faces, the Beatles, the Hollies and especially the Kinks (who would also look backwards with The Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)) there is a sensibility to all this that is peculiarly British - again, perhaps derived from the readiness of the Beatles to place Music Hall influences front and centre in their music. Even when sung in the mid-Atlantic voicing unique to popular music, it sounds British - nay, English - and never more so when you're yanked back to this dreary little island by accents that seem to have faded somewhat over the past half-century. The verses to the wonderful 'Baron Saturday', for example, are sung-spoke in an uptight, campy sneer that's most reminiscent of Peter Cook (of all people), whilst the plummy voice reading the names of those lost in action at the end of 'Private Sorrow' sounds like it belongs in a museum.

(It's probably worth a quick synopsis of the plot - halfway through my review (I'm good at structure!) - as far as I can make out: a boy called S.F. Sorrow is born; meets a girl; serves in the trenches; is then due to be reunited with the girl who is travelling to meet him on an airship that suffers the same fate as the Hindenburg; and finally, overcome with grief, retreats into a bizarre internal world until he dies alone.)

It can't be overstated how much of a sway the Beatles of Sgt. Pepper has over this album. Both 'She Says Good Morning' and 'Baron Saturday' feature choruses that would bring nods of approval from Lennon and McCartney, whilst 'Bracelets of Fingers' (superb title) starts with a harmonised intro of blissed-out "love, love, love" that suggests to the listener that, perhaps, love is all you need. However, whilst on Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band the Beatles' emotional lexicon ran as far as bittersweet, the Pretty Things embrace full on bleakness. 'I See You', a number that ebbs and swells like the Moody Blues at their most stately, describes a mind succumbing to dementia, and the pulsating 'Old Man Going', underscored by some Black Sabbath guitar (yes, really) is simply harrowing. The last few tracks on S.F. Sorrow are unutterably dark, and prefigure the boom of downer rock that signalled the sunset on the Age of Aquarius brought about by Altamont and too many bad trips.

However, if I've made it all sound rather derivative, don't be fooled; there's magic on this album. I mentioned Lewis Carroll early on, but the quasi-nonsense lyrics also tip a wink to Edward Lear (and there's even a mention of a 'runcible spoon' in 'Baron Saturday', the sneakiest track on here). As mentioned before, 'Old Man Going' does sound like an ur-Sabbath at times; 'Balloon Burning' feels like a journey to the centre of the mind with its nagging, horror-show lead guitar; and perhaps best of all is 'Private Sorrow', which combines a doddery martial beat with vocals so guileless and wide-eyed that the shrapnel flying overhead transform into objects of kaleidoscopic wonderment.

It would also be remiss of me not to return to the ultimate track on S.F Sorrow, which as I mentioned earlier, completes a trifecta of misery. Yes, 'Loneliest Person' is a glum meditation on solitude but it is also the most beautiful acoustic ballad I can recall hearing in a long while, flickering briefly like the flame of a matchhead before disappearing into smoke and silence.

Heavn - Jamila Woods

Provenance: My partner went to a Jamila Woods show and bought a copy of Heavn. They said that "I might like it", and it's ended up in our shared, monolithic CD collection (only Blue Oyster Cult and Michael Jackson are kept reverentially separate), so here goes.

Review: I'm really not qualified to talk about Heavn at all.

Now, regular readers of this benighted blog will no doubt be wondering why I've only awoken to my almost crippling limitations this far down the line. And it's fair, I don't consider myself a Robert Christgau (nice website mate) or anything of that calibre. I poke and pry, and sometimes alight on the odd insight or two; I tend to be more at home with metal than other genres; heaven forfend that I try and step up to the plate with a jazz review. I would suggest, humbly, that one of my strengths is that I know what I know, and correspondingly I have a fair idea of what I don't know.

So, I know that I don't know enough to appraise Jamila Woods' full-length solo debut Heavn in anything other than the most superficial aesthetic terms. Why? Because unlike the person I am sharing a life with, I have no idea what it's like to be raised as a black woman in America, and this notion of the beating heart of the song cycle. Okay, you might counter, what could I possibly share with the guys in Motley Crue or ZZ Top, or with Tom Waits? My answer - lots of cultural touchstones, a collective musical inheritance (which ironically appropriates tons from black-origin forms) and a society that is happy to propagate the notion that the least amongst us white folk is still better than someone else. And in the USA, that's black people, Latinx, indigenous peoples, queer folk - and good fucking luck if you intersect across any of these designations.

Here goes, then - this is pretty damn great. The production is whipsmart, all wobbly electro-dreamscapes and snappy beats. Woods is a rather lovely singer - sweet and mellifluous, which honeys some incredibly stark messages. Eric Garner's choking at the hands of the police is referenced in 'Vry Blck', a track that sounds like a playground chant, and I'm sure that the dazzling, swirling 'Heavn' slips in a reference to the slave trade with the same sly, allusory quality employed by Randy Newman on 'Sail Away'.

I like the way that Heavn swings between moods; at times it exhibits a playful, wilful strain of juvenilia that's also present on cuts by Tank and the Bangas; at others, there's a dense, layered jazz-tinged soul-pop sound that resembles KING's first album, which I properly loved. Collaborations are judicious, which makes a change; Chance the Rapper, to take one instance, shifts the pace nicely in 'LSD' with a dense, push-pull verse that abuts Woods' sleeker versifying very effectively.

Perhaps even more than the black female experience, however, is how strikingly personal Heavn is. Little nuggets of a life zoomed in at microscopic level shine through every now and again, to the extent that a line like "I be in my nightgown, chicken wings ready" feels both utterly humdrum and utterly voyeuristic. This intimacy is heightened by the spoken-word interludes studded throughout Heavn, which are made to sound as if Woods is talking down a phone line. It genuinely feels like engaging in a conversation, listening to Woods' joy at unexpectedly being able to bond with other black women through shared schoolyard games, or sharing the story of how she got her name, or musing about living a life true to oneself. It's all apiece conceptually with everything else on Heavn, and it's wonderful.

I'm very sorry if I've blundered through the album, missing any number of references that Woods has painstakingly woven into the tapestry of Heavn. For what it's worth, I'm smitten with this cerebral, passionate, reflective, sumptuously crafted offering. It feels apt that Heavn finishes up on a reprise of the most affirming track, 'Holy' - "woke up this morning with my mind set on loving me / I'm not lonely, I'm alone / And I'm holy by my own" - a message of self-love that everybody could do with, from time to time.