New(ish) music - June 2022

For the past few years, I and a group of friends have been using Spotify to turn each other on to new music. Each month we upload two songs each to create a playlist; we chat about the songs on WhatsApp, and at the end of each month we try to get together to review our picks.

On those occasions where I haven't been able to make our video chats, I've written short reviews of each song. Here is what I thought of June 2022's picks!

June 2022

And so we come onto the second most significant event of June 2022 - the summing up of a month’s listening on TFJ. I’ll refrain from any encomia about seeing you all at the weekend, because that’s pretty much a given - besides, I know you’re eager to see if the Sword of Damacles hovers over your selections, so without further ado, let’s begin.

JC, you’re a fine fellow and I admire your questing nature where song selections are concerned. I like the fact that you tend to push the envelope somewhat, guiding us into the darkest realms of the 6Music playlist. Yet this Kendrick Lamar and Taylour Paige collaboration has little aside from its sheer vehemence to commend it. I’m in that uncomfortable place of condemning something that’s quite worthy, namely a depiction of domestic abuse; but I can’t look past the execution, which at turns I find irksome, gratuitous and dull.

The other track that wore on me - only a little - was JS’s Garbage selection. A little surprising, as I’ve listened to Garbage lately due to the album review thing I do with my Stateside pals and dug it. My only real explanation is that it feels quite dated, its loud, shiny late-90s production ageing the track prematurely.

Happily, I had a few surprises in store, not least the Bouncing Souls. As one of the few pop-punk bands I’ve actually seen live I was expecting them to coast by on nostalgia fumes, but their knucklehead charm did a number on me. Even more eyebrow-raising was the offering from Minor Threat. Given their reputation I’d imagined their music to be near-unlistenable but ‘Salad Days’ is vying for my favourite track this month; bells, acoustic flourishes and a peculiarly ruminative air to proceedings hit the mark for me. Fantastic.

What of those that ever so slightly missed the mark? As in, joints that were good without knocking my socks off? ‘Cure for Pain’ by Morphine is one, and probably ‘This Much Is True’ by Rob Eckland and Brendan Reilly fall into this category. On the former, I really like the lugubrious saxophone and hangdog vocals; it’s certainly thick with atmosphere. The latter is an interesting one, because I dig a good pop song - and here one can draw a straight line between Michael Jackson and Bruno Mars to this; I feel it scrapes the firmament but doesn’t quite burst through the clouds. It’s missing one little signature or quirky factor to push it into the stratosphere. 

Sticking with pop music (after a fashion), how about that Ink Spots number? What a beautiful facility with a melody they demonstrate. This has been the chorus I find myself singing in the shower. JC, you’ve reached into the past before with cowboy music and early British blues before and uncovered the odd gem or two, and the same applies here.

MM, I’m going to take yours together because I appreciated them both in different ways. I have heard the name Neko Case before, but was unfamiliar with the music. The first twenty seconds made my heart sink; I thought we were in for another outing of a female singer trying to sound like Feist, which we were plagued with about ten years ago. Well, this was much, much better - a belter of a voice, no? And another sticky chorus. The one that really grabbed me, though, was the Mermen; listen, psychedelic surf guitar will always be fucking cool, no matter what other twists and turns the vagaries of popular music has for us. This is the kind of thing I pay £6 a ticket to see in small venues around Brighton, and I invariably have the best time. My ticket often costs less than my pint! Funny!

So, now we’re onto a trio that really broke through. I spoke with James about the Brant Bjork (the only Bjork I give a fig about) at the weekend, how he is essentially a Zelig figure in the desert rock scene ‘n’ all that. Now, I think the riffs and changes in ‘Chocolatize’ can be seen a mile away - in terms of groove, tempo and composition it’s as predictable as it gets - so why does it scratch the itch? Attitude, swagger, delivery, a kind of dusty, sleazy B-movie redolence? Is it just that indefinable quality of ‘cool’? Interested to hear what others think.

Next up is Steve Earle, who I’ve been tempted to put on TFJ for a while now. OH beat me to the punch! (Though that hasn’t stopped months with two Steely Dan tracks or, more peculiarly, two Dr Octagon tracks in the past.) Probably my favourite contemporary country musician, and you’re reading the words of a guy who’s very recently purchased a banjo. Earle namechecks Doc Watson in the intro, which gave me an insta-boner. Await the day I trade in my MG for a pickup.

Which leaves my clear favourite - HAZEY’s absolutely bonkers ‘Packs and Potions’. Without wishing to over-elaborate, everything works - the twisty waterslide rhymes delivered in thick demotic, the surreal references to footballers and the sparse musical backing, which almost acts as punctuation at times. Again, a surprise, a big surprise…but that’s TFJ, baby!

Metals - Feist

Provenance: Isn't it nice when you get turned onto something completely out of the blue? In this instance, this album came as part of a wedding gift from Noam Weinstein and his father Larry, two of the nicest people I think I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. Noam is a pretty fantastic musician himself, and I'm sure it won't be long before I review one of his albums on this blog.

Receiving albums as a wedding present isn't unprecedented in my family; when my parents got married one of their friends gave them a copy of Deep Purple's Stormbringer, Mk. III's inferior sequel to Burn.

Review: Feist is one of those artists I would never have discovered under my own steam. Too contemporary, too hip. I might hear the name in a conversation and I'll nod along affably before consoling myself that, really, I knew best and that it wouldn't be a patch on Jethro Tull. In short, I'm a total idiot under the sway of unshifting prejudices entirely of my own design. However, folk who don't know any better, such as the Weinstein family, chip away at my wall of ignorance and sometimes make small breakthroughs; I am now a confirmed Feist fan.

As for the music itself, I should probably start by saying that 'Graveyard' is one of my favourite songs - ever. Fragile, menacing, elegant and surreal, with an outro that boasts a brass arrangement that sounds as if it came off an early Alan Parsons Project long player. The quality doesn't dip on the next track either, 'Caught In A Long Wind', shimmering and poised, filigreed with oriental violin.

However, it would be wrong to characterise Metals as soporific (a term I don't use negatively, necessarily; I would happily describe John Martyn's Solid Air as soporific, inasmuch as half of the album conveys a sense of waking sleepiness). There are unabashedly quiet and delicate moments here, such as 'Bittersweet Melodies', 'Cicadas and Gulls' and 'Anti-Pioneer', but many of Feist's compositions are bursting with tension, threatening to unravel at the merest tug of the thread. At its most nervy, Metals inhabits that same weird nation of barely constrained emotion occupied by something like Stravinsky's Les noces. That's probably the most pretentious sentence I'm going to write this week.

Something else that stands out is the sound of the recordings themselves. In a world where clipping is a very real and stupid problem with recorded music, Feist and her producers have performed something of a minor miracle. The clarity given to each of the instruments used - and by the sounds of it, we're talking a whole heap of the damn things - gives an almost organic quality to the compositions. I'm especially taken with the percussion - in the best possible sense, the drums sound almost homemade, the bottom end rounded out with some really meaty rattles and clanks. My love for the Alan Parsons Project means that I would almost automatically be attracted by the brass arrangements, but it goes further than my prog predilections; one genuinely gets the impression of a colliery band, so full, so rich is the sound.

What else? One can't forget 'Comfort Me', by turns haunting and powerful, underscored by some swampy bayou guitar. It's such a good piece of music Feist could honestly sing me the words to the instruction manual of my vacuum cleaner and I'd be happy. Feist has a wonderful voice, incidentally - whispery and intimate without ever being truly warm. It sounds like the voice of someone alone, either living in their own head or cut adrift from the solid, mundane world. If, like me, you seek music to gift you that escapism from the quotidian and workaday, you may very well find it in Feist's strange, fractured universe.