REVIEWS

Grateful Dead – Anthem For The Sun

Some music isn’t really music at all; it’s an aural expression of a state of mind (like, man), and Anthem For The Sun is one such example. To compare its sound to ‘normal’ music is as futile as trying to compare an abstract impressionist painting to a naturalistic one, or Marmite to a brick.

To fully embrace this classic Grateful Dead album some would say you have to drop some good acid and wait till it kicks in. But in truth, the music itself is just as likely to unlock your doors of perception as a tab of blotter. You need an open mind, but it is wonderfully disorientating, hypnotic and oddly emotional too.

It starts innocently enough, with ‘That’s It For The Other One’, a shuffling acid ballad which then shifts into the wild, freaky section where it all gets very strange. The sound crashes in and out and you can feel yourself being cut adrift from reality. Things start, then stop, and the quality of the air seems to change; sometimes soft and warm, sometimes almost frosty. The sound breaks onto the beaches of your synapses and then washes back like a tide of noise into your pineal glands. Bleeps, scratches, and tinkling bells sound like noises from the midnight forest of some gothic dream world. Is that something scratching at the window? Jerry Garcia’s voice occasionally emerges from the aural miasma, sings something cryptic, and then disappears again.

This is painting with sound, all manufactured from the spliced-together recordings of several gigs, artfully re-displayed as a collage. There are ‘songs’ (or at least sections which have titles) like ‘The Faster We Go The Rounder We Get’ but somehow it all unifies into a whole, despite being a billion flashes of different realities all bunched together into one handful of sand.

You need a specific mind-set to dig this experience. It’s strong medicine but repays you with an experience that will flare your nostrils and your mind. Difficult, but in the best of ways, you feel a more whole creature after hearing it.

JN

Fairport Convention – Liege & Lief

Fairport Convention’s fourth LP is a perfect distillation of all the elements that had been present in the bands preceding efforts, but surpasses all of them. It is a truly mature work that saw them move away from aping Jefferson Airplane or doing Bob Dylan covers to stake their claim as a unique, powerful and uncompromisingly British musical force. That it was born out of personal tragedy and recorded by a band in a state of flux makes it an eve more remarkable record.

A May 1969 bus crash claimed the lives of drummer Martin Lamble and the girlfriend of guitarist Richard Thompson. The band considered splitting up but instead began work on what would be their fourth album in the autumn. They searched through England’s musical past – literally – with Ashley Hutchings spending days and days looking through folk music archives as Cecil Sharp House for folk inspiration. This, in tandem with Sandy Denny’s maturation as a singer and writer, proved a source of huge inspiration. They were also bedding in the fiddler Dave Swarbrick, which gave the group a fresh energy, and a new drummer, Dave Mattacks. All drummers should have garden tools for surnames.

Only two of the tracks – the opener ‘Come All Ye’ and the closer ‘Crazy Man Michael’ were original compositions, the rest arrangements of traditional songs: the blend is seamless. The playing is flawless, inventive and driving; the vocals pure and timeless. An entirely new hybrid it was to inspire and influence the whole folk rock genre which continues to thrive today, often in the hands of the offspring of these early folk rockers. This summer will see an incarnation of the band playing their annual Cropredy Festival. 

Liege and Lief was the both birth of the electric folk genre and many consider it to be Fairport’s greatest work.

AT

Tim Blake – Blake’s New Jerusalem

What became known as ‘new age’ in the mid 90s was already 20 years old by the time people were putting dream catchers in their bedrooms and carrying crystals around. Long before it was a lifestyle choice for middle-England and women called Candida, it was the kind of cosmic world view that Tim Blake and others like him embraced in the mid 70s. It was all about recording when the moon was full, ley-lines, extra-terrestrials, tuning in to nature’s harmonies and generally being an electric gypsy, with the aid, in Tim’s case, of a lovely big bank of synths that looked more like a 1950s telephone exchange.

Now this might not sound like your wok of stir-fried bean sprouts, but believe me when I tell you, this album is a stone-gone wonderful thing.

Tim was an early adopter of electronic keyboards, working with Hawkwind and Gong in the early 70s. His breakthrough solo album, 1977’s Crystal Machine, showed him as one of a new breed of electronic artists using keyboards to create a whole new art form. By 1978, when this album was released, he was using EMS Custom synthesizers, Mini Moogs and a Roland 100, Korg Polyphonic Ensemble and something called an ARP Omni, which sounds more like a digestive affliction.

Armed with this battery of electronicalisationism, he created soundscapes of skittering, sweet noises to embellish highly melodic songs. Big, fat, analogue sequencers keep the heart-beat throb-throbbb-throbbing so much so that there are moments, on songs such as Lighthouse, when it’s easy to imagine you’ve somehow ended up on an inter-galactic spaceship, or after an especially hot curry have been transported by radio waves to an alternative space time continuum. 

Lovers of Steve Hillage and all other Gong-related activity will embrace this – but even if you’ve never heard of any of them and are familiar with modern-day trance music, much of the roots of that can be traced back to Tim Blake’s pioneering work on his first two solo albums. He was also the first to introduce visual lasers to a stage show, so run-of-the-mill now, but back in the mid 70s it was an astonishing and thrilling visual marvel.

It is hippy stuff, yes, but so thoroughly wacked out that it’s impossible not to love it and on the wonderfully titled, ‘Passage Sur La Cite De La Revelation’ he creates one of the most brilliant electronic music excursions; every bit the equal of the best Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream. Indeed, while others such as Eno have been credited with their pioneering work in this field, he is an innovator who is too often overlooked.

Still out there, mostly in Brittany, France, Tim is, as you would expect, currently working on something called Chomolithe (“light from stone”) which is light art that gives the impression that the buildings have been painted with glowing colours. And who can frown upon a man for doing that? Not I. That’s exactly what any self-respecting hippy should be doing in the 57th year of this incarnation. Next time round, I’m going to be synth wizard.

This is one of those records that still sounds futuristic, 31 years after it came out, perhaps because it was reaching for future dimensions we have yet to achieve. Put it this way, if I’m ever abducted by aliens, I shall be sorely disappointed if Tim Blake’s New Jerusalem isn’t being played on board their spaceship. 

JN

Neil Young – Fork In The Road

Neil Young is a tricky man to work out. For a while now he’s been contenting himself by putting out, for want of a phrase that doesn’t send a chill through your soul, concept albums. 

We had 2002’s ‘Are You Passionate’, basically a love letter to wife Pegi, then there was ‘Greendale’, a sort of ‘rock opera’ set around a fictional Californian town, and the hastily recorded ‘Living With War’, which did what it said on the tin, and contained the gloriously unsubtle ‘Let’s Impeach The President’.

And now we have ‘Fork In The Road’, a record fixated on all things automobile.

Man, it’s easy to be sniffy about this sort of thing. And plenty have taken that easy route, at best figuratively patting Neil on the shoulder like a doddery old boy who’s cracking out the old war stories again, at worst launching reams of stagnant bile, wondering how this relic dare still release records.

I’d bet a pound to a pinch of poo that half of these bile launchers haven’t actually heard the record. Not that I’d be arrogant enough to suggest that their taste is wrong, but the natural cynicism of many will kick in because it’s not particularly trendy to like Neil Young these days.

Had he released ‘Fork In The Road’ 15 years ago, when he was rockin’ in the free world with then-grungers de choix like Pearl Jam, then reviews would have been much more positive.

It’s full of pleasing, distorted chuggers with his trademark reedy wail (When Worlds Collide, Get Behind The Wheel), with the odd gorgeous acoustic country-tinged ballad (Light A Candle) that wouldn’t seem out of place on ‘After The Goldrush’.

It’s a record with a sense of humour too. ‘Got a pot belly/But it’s not too big/Gets in my way/When I’m driving my rig’ he sings on the title track. Endearingly silly stuff for a man who could be terribly earnest in his earlier years.

It’s a record that sounds like it was made by a man relaxed, happy with himself, and not in a bad way. Not at all. Often if you say an artist is laid back or relaxed it means they’re just phoning it in, with little care for the quality of the music as long as they’re still selling gig tickets. Not here. It has the sound of a man who’s making the records that he wants to, not anyone else.

Sure, perhaps he is never going to write another ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’ or ‘Old Man’, but he’s not standing still. It would be easy for Young to churn out the same old stuff, for him to sleepwalk through the latter years of his career, but he’s constantly changing. Perhaps innovating is too strong, but he’s not standing still.

Cyril Connolly, writer, publisher and friend of George Orwell once said: “Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.”

That’s Neil Young.

NM

Radiohead – In Rainbows

I’ve got a friend called Danny. He looks a bit like one of the Nazis from Indiana Jones (less so now since he purchased a pair of Gok Wan glasses), and doesn’t exactly wander round the streets with a coat hanger grin on his face. Because of this, lots of people write Danny off as grump in chief, a miserable bugger who will only bring you down.

But they’re not listening to him. Danny is erudite, intelligent and very funny, and what could be more uplifting than that? And because they can’t get past his sometimes-sullen exterior, loads of acquaintances just don’t get him, let alone know him.

It’s the same with music. One of the more irritating ‘criticisms’ of music is that a certain album or artist is ‘too miserable’. Fine, if a record makes you feel unhappy then chuck it into a burning oil drum, but one suspects that those who dismiss a band for not being happy clappy isn’t listening properly.

One band who have suffered from this lazy dismissal for a long time is Radiohead. Gloomy, drab Radiohead, who can’t write a chorus and are too busy twiddling around to bash out a proper pop song.

Of course that’s nonsense. Radiohead have been putting out the most interesting and innovative albums of the last couple of decades, starting in 1993 with Pablo Honey, and now with 2007’s In Rainbows.

It takes them years to make these albums, and boy does it show. Every second of In Rainbows is perfectly crafted, moulded into exactly the vision that singer Thom Yorke and the rest have. It’s a record that sounds as if it was put together by a cross between a genius bursting with artistic freedom and a perfect ear for melody, and a mathematician.

And that’s not a bad thing. While it might sound like that would lead to a sterile, passionless waste of your time and mine, In Rainbows – like every Radiohead record before it – is absolutely crammed with emotion.

Take ‘Weird Fishes/Arpeggi’. From the split hands drums, to the gently lilting guitar arpeggios, to the lightly maudlin melody, it’s five minutes of aural beauty. It’s a song that so subtly builds to a glorious crescendo that you don’t notice you’re crying until the second chorus, and then it carefully drops off, leaving you sighing and reaching for the repeat button.

Then there’s ‘Reckoner’, a track that at first listen sounds like a crashing mess of cymbals and assorted other percussion, but after a few times round reveals itself to be a delicate love song that Yorke initially didn’t want to sing because he thought it ‘too feminine’. Since when has that been a bad thing?

And ‘House of Cards’, the sound of the end of a really good party, when there’s just a few of you left swapping old stories and reminiscing about some phantom time when everything was brilliant.

I could go on, but deconstructing an album so beautiful as In Rainbows seems like a crime. You have to hear it to understand it.

And that’s the point. If, after listening - really listening – to In Rainbows you still can’t abide it then OK, we’ll agree to disagree, and maybe have a pint to celebrate the diversity of human opinion.

But give it a listen, please.

NM

Kirsty MacColl - Kite

It’s strange what you choose to care about. Well, perhaps not choose, but it’s odd how different things tug at your heart and make you sad.

Why do we care more about the deaths of rock stars than we do about the innumerable tragedies that befall the world around us? If asked, you’d probably be able to talk about how Elvis Presley or Janis Joplin or Mama Cass died for longer than you would about Zimbabwe or Darfur or Burma.

Kirsty MacColl was killed by a powerboat just before Christmas in 2000, and the ‘Justice For Kirsty’ campaign that her mother still keeps up interests me far more than most of the worthier causes around the globe. 

There’s a website (www.justiceforkirsty.org) with all the information, but the quick details are she was scuba diving near Mexico when a powerboat speeding through a restricted area of sea hit her. The owner of the boat, a businessman named Guillermo González Nova, claims one of his employees was at the helm, but the campaign says otherwise.

I shouldn’t really care more, but because music has given me a personal connection to her, I do care more.

And it’s because of albums like ‘Kite’. It’s a record full of perfect pop songs, ballads and one of the great covers (‘Days’). A record that is upbeat but melancholy, hopeful but wry, happy but angry. It’s damn near flawless.

Generally, records are either albums or collections of songs. They are either a set of ideas that work individually, or one single piece of work that can only exist properly as whole, that is more than the sum of its parts.

The best records, of course, are both, and ‘Kite’ fits this mystical third category. Bands split up over track-listings, how to fit a collection of tunes into a whole in the best way, but you could jumble the order of these songs and it would still all slot together perfectly. 

And what songs. ‘Innocence’ could well be the perfect pop song, relentless with bass drums and guitar all seemingly doing their own thing, but coming together beautifully. ‘Mother’s Run’, a sublimely sad lament, ‘Don’t Come The Cowboy With Me, Sonny Jim!’, a warning that most men who came into contact with MacColl would most likely have heeded – we could go on.

The tunes are great, obviously, but perhaps better are the lyrics. A great lyric – or indeed a great piece of poetry or prose – sums up a thought, or an emotion, or a time perfectly, requiring no further explanation, and that’s what MacColl does on ‘Tread Lightly’: “I curse the day I met you, but I won’t forget you, not in my lifetime.”

If you wished to explain a lost love, one who has caused joy and pain in equal measures, all you need to do is play them that song.

And on ‘No Victims’, the sad but rapier cutting down of a mystery antagonist: “I was seeing the world through your eyes/There was not much left not to despise/It's a shame but it's true/I started to feel things like you do.”

That she’s with us no more is a crime against nature. Bill Hicks said: ‘We live in a world where John Lennon was murdered, yet Milli Vanilli walks the planet….Bad choice’.

Well, replace Lennon with MacColl, and Milli Vanilli with most of the landfill pop that passes for inspiration these days, and you’ve summed it up neatly.

NM