The advent of streaming music gifted me the amazing world of shuffling, where an unseen force plays DJ and on a good day magically comes up with a perfect playlist of earhole joy. iTunes and Spotify have pulled me ever-further from sitting down with a full album, and I do miss vinyl’s sense of pageantry, of being given a show with a side one-intermission-side two narrative arc; placing the needle; touching the vinyl with special care… not that I was all that careful with my vinyl back in the vinyl days. I guess my point is that I’ve become addicted to the high of that perfect tune; I consume music more like a teenager listening to Top 40 — although it’s my personal weirdo top 40 — going for the rush of musical poppers pleasure rather than the more subtle colors and textures of full albums and deep cuts.
How lovely then to fall into the wall to wall bangers that is Nilüfer Yanya’s Painless album. I’d had a flirtation with the unreasonably gorgeous Nilüfer a few years ago but somehow she didn’t make it into in my iTunes, and at first Painless got filed in the purgatory of like don’t love, but when I showed up ediblized for a second date I fell hard. It starts out with the Laura Nyro-esque “the dealer,”
then moves into more 80s-90s alt rock territory, with notes of Elastica and Sinead O’Connor in her cadence and her lyrics about love and bruises. She tells a story in a series of motion-blurred snapshots, which takes me back to the first Smiths album. She has the balls to smash and grab a Joy Division guitar riff on “stabilise.” I ordered it on vinyl.
I was playing Painless while writing the above, and ended up taking it on my sunrise walk up the quaint NELA stairways, and it occurred to me to listen to some real Joy Division. I got ridiculously amped on “Interzone,”
and it launched me into a set of all time favorites “What Difference Does It Make?” by the Smiths,
“Do It Clean” by Echo and the Bunnymen,
and a climactic “You Made Me Realize” by My Bloody Valentine,
which obliterates all consciousness and can’t really be followed, but I still had some walk left so I threw on my go-to hard jam “Black Steel” by Tricky. Mama got so fucking high, no substances required.
Take a breath Paul. Let’s get back to those special, quiet, International Coffees moments. I need to confess that in recent years there’s been quite a flow of adored-by-me albums by female American folk-rockers in the Joni Mitchell tradition, but I’ve been a little reluctant to come out of the closet about it. I guess there’s a connotation of quiet good taste that doesn’t feel like my brand. Torres, Jana Horn, Fenne Lily, Half Waif, Weyes Blood und zo. I’d had a no big deal flirtation with Tamara Lindeman aka The Weather Station a few years back, but there’s a stately simplicity to her new one, largely just voice and piano, that really hits my big sad girl pleasure center. “Endless Time” is lush and majestic like a renaissance painting, a breakup song about love as a rich and fertile flow of luxury that we take for granted. “We can still walk out on the street and buy champagne grapes / Strawberries and lilies in November rain / It never occurred to us to have to pay.”
The Boo Radleys put out an album, and it’s not really even the same band without guitarist and main songwriter Martin Carr, so you know, what-ever, but it inspired me to pick up Everything’s Alright Forever, which rocked my world back in ‘92. They aren’t exactly thought of as a seminal band, I guess because they weren’t quite in the forefront of creating shoegaze’s wall of bludgeoning guitar. And by the way — for my younger listeners — being called a shoegaze band back in the early ‘90s was not a compliment; it was British journalists taking the piss out of guitar bands that had no stage presence, so it’s kind of funny how the term re-emerged in the US in the ‘00s as a hallowed genre classification. Anyway, My Bloody Valentine are of course the Towering Rock Gods that created and defined that sound, leaving scorched earth in their wake, but The Boo Radleys jumped in undeterred and reveled in the joy of sculpting those great slabs of growling guitar, using them as raw material and bending them into a panoply of elegant shapes, and made that a bedrock for baroque arrangements and Sice’s babe-in-the-petrified-forest vocals. Everything’s Alright Forever is for sure their best album, but there’s this weird bias in the music press that favors more tame and polished, “mature” albums, and you’ll read that Giant Steps is their masterpiece, bla bla bla. It’s like the idea that Hounds of Love is Kate Bush’s best one, when it’s sooo obvious to me that The Dreaming is way more raw and fearless and also just has better tunes. The 14 songs on Everything’s Alright Forever consistently invent new wormholes into your brain’s reward circuit, and the show-stopper is “Firesky,” an overflowing of love, longing, desire and shoes being gazed at that’s expressed in the massive, careening guitar textures as much as the words: “I feel so alive, I feel so true / You would understand / If you were in me / I wish for things and I pray and hope / But there’s one thing I, I need more than most…”
Returning to the present tense, new release Skærgårdslyd by Astrid Øster Mortensen is a radical statement in a post-radical statement world — it seems to question the very concept of intention — a kind of abstract creative force from somewhere inside the earth or maybe outer space, in the process of taking hesitant, rough-hewn form. Recorded on the islands of the Gothenburg archipelago in Sweden, it starts with an attack of something like an analogue version of feedback, a white noisy sound of wind punctuated by a squall of flute. There’s a sense of accident; a stringed instrument gets plucked emphatically, repeatedly, without building up anything like a rhythm; a fiddle buzzes around it like a fly. A three-note cycle hesitantly emerges — nothing you could call a melody — with a kind of proto proto Philip Glass circularity. As the album progresses there’s a sense of an indoor field recording, like it’s taking place in a big remote house where there’s other stuff going on. There’s a sense of witnessing the delicate vulnerability of new physicality manifesting, gathering strength, capturing a quality of existence before any refinement takes place.
“All well and good,” say my avid listeners, cursors drifting toward more brightly-lit digital pastures, “but where’s the party?” My go-to dance jam for March has been “Lemon Chic” by Holodrum, a dazzled iteration of disco that emerges from an intro in the funky ether to swing your butt around with a throb of knowing horns; it has a whiff of The Human League about it, and for what it’s worth Holodrum are from Leeds, which according to Mrs. Google Maps is just 35 miles up the M1 from Sheffield. The lyrics sound like one stuttering side of a tangy lovers quarrel: “Do / it could be / nothing at all / Do you / clearly / means nothing at all / Do you / a value / is nothing at all / Do you / I see clearly / it means nothing at all.” Elsewhere on the band’s excellent self-titled mini-album the band shows its post-punk roots, with squalls of Fall and Gang of Four guitar dissonance, but “Lemon Chic” transcends all that for six minutes of Solid Gold. “Do me / the value / it’s on principle / If only you / could see.”
I’ll leave you with “Living on Video” by Trans-X (aka French Canadian Pascal Languirand), a nugget of paranoid party electro candy from 1983. You’ve probably heard it — a paragon of ‘80s futurism with an epic keyboard riff and an appropriately home-made-looking video. “Stop!” commands Languirand, with impressive power; “…living on video,” responds a fluffy-haired woman in period mall fashions.