Real Estate - Suburban Beverage Live on the Radio | Underwater Peoples, 2010
Off to see Kurt Vile/ Sonic Boom/ Real Estate tomorrow night at Koko in London. It’s an NME thing, which I’ve never really read - I thought it was more of an outlet for landfill indie than American exports.
Anyway, I’ve been listening to Live on the Radio a lot lately, which sees Real Estate strip back songs from their first album for a campfire singalong vibe. ‘Suburban Beverage’s’ “Budweiser, Sprite, do you feel alright” becomes a beautiful mantra for slacking off, a feel that extends throughout this easygoing set.
The record is out of print, but you can find the MP3s in the darker corners of the internet.
Modest Mouse - Dramanine This Is A Long Drive For Someone With Nothing To Think About (1996)
One of the most exciting musical journeys is one in reverse, through the back catalogue of a great band. One of my favourites was working back from Modest Mouse’s Good News For People Who Love Bad News, realising this skewed pop album was born out of something more chaotic and unhinged that united ’80s hardcore, Built to Spill riffing, cheap speed and trailer trash wisdom. ‘Dramanine’ kicks off their second full album and feels like the beginning of Modest Mouse proper, where their scrappy early experiments coalesced into a sound as bracing as a toothache, giving urgency to Isaac Brock’s barked, pithy philosophy: “we kiss on the mouth but still cough down our sleeves”.
‘Dramanine’ is a kind of anti-road song, a further perversion of the classic rock imagery Modest Mouse draw on and subvert. I imagine some punchdrunk dude weaving across the road popping anti-sickness pills, churning over a nasty row - “I’ve said what I’d said and you know what I mean / But I still can’t focus on anything”.
New music wise, January started off slowly but gathered momentum with a few teaser tracks from veteran artists popping up ahead of full length releases in the coming months. I’m particularly looking forward to Lambchop’s Mr. M, which sees the Nashville collective taking a fresh approach to their well-worn soulful country template, partly inspired by Frank Sinatra and the passing of Vic Chesnutt. Also Sharon Van Etten’s Tramp, a document of a transient 14 month period in the Brooklynite’s life, where the only constant was recording with Aaron Dessner of The National.
This month I’ve been raiding used bins to fill gaps in my ‘mid-period’ indie rock collection, with tracks from Grandaddy’sThe Broken Down Comforter Collection and The Flaming Lips’Clouds Taste Metallic below.I’ve also finally started to get into Guided By Voices, a band I knew were essential but I found their prolific output daunting. I’m starting with Bee Thousand, commonly held to me their masterpiece - I’m smitten. John Sellers entertaining indie rock memoir Perfect From Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Lifereminded me to check them out.
Title inspired by re-watching season 9 of Seinfeldand the cover image was taken while visiting the Natural History Museum a couple of weeks back.
Cate Le Bon - Puts Me To Work (mp3 at rcrd lbl) From CRYK | Out Now (US)
Andrew Bird - Eyeoneye From Break It Yourself | Out 6 March
The Flaming Lips - Placebo Headwound From Clouds Taste Metallic | 1996
Guided By Voices - The Goldheart Mountaintop Queen Directory From Bee Thousand | 1994
Grandaddy - Fentry From The Broken Down Comforter Collection | 1999
Lambchop - If Not I’ll Just Die (mp3 at Soundcloud) From Mr M. | Out 20 February Palace Brothers - The Brute Choir From Viva Last Blues | Reissue out 27 February
Damien Jurado - Museum of Flight(mp3 via Secretly Canadian) From Maroqopa | Out 20 February Sharon Van Etten - Serpents (mp3 via Jagjaguwar) From Tramp | Out 7 February The War on Drugs - Don’t Fear The Ghost From Come To The City 7” | Out Now
Dirty Three - Rising Below (mp3 at rcrd lbl) From Toward The Low Sun | Out 28 February
This time next month (27 February), Domino will reissue the five albums Will Oldham recorded between ‘93 and ‘97 under the Palace alias he used before Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. All five, including mini album Hope, will be out on vinyl and record sleeve-style digipack CD, featuring new artwork and liner notes.
I came to Oldham’s Palace work via his later, more refined albums under the Bonnie name and was astounded by their raw, ragged intimacy and the way they revel in their lo-fi settings. Can’t wait to drop the needle on ‘The Brute Choir’ from Viva Last Blues in particular.
Below, a Palace session recorded for John Peel, 5 June 1994:
The Houseboat Trudy Dies The Cross The Idol On The Bar Stable Will
P. Manasseh - ANA Wayside & Woodland Recordings, 2012 | Buy
I wouldn’t ordinarily post a press release verbatim, but I figure this is okay as I wrote it. ANA is the first Wayside and Woodland release I’ve been involved with.
ANA is the second album by P. Manasseh and sees the multi-instrumentalist working very much in isolation, crafting minimalist compositions that are an exploration of the way we see and interpret the world, an attempt to create sonic systems based on visual patterns and structures.
The rigid order found in the work of radical 20th Century minimalist artists Carmen Herrera and Donald Judd and the textile designs of Jacqueline Groag worked as catalysts for the project. Manasseh was attracted to the challenge of interpreting colour and pattern in music: “Approaching visual abstract motifs, patterns and colours in such a way is problematic…the system is as important as the interpretation, the various strategies taking on a life of their own”. The simplest, most eloquent expression of this is ‘Blanc Y Verde’: one isosceles triangle.
This obsession with form and tone manifests itself in the use of tuning forks, which Manasseh has used in his work for a decade or more. Their appeal lies in their precise, simple nature, forcing you to think about resonance on a fundamental level, the pure expression of cause and effect. The subtle use of field recordings on several pieces comes from a fascination with immersing oneself in sound and the intense desire to connect with the systems inherent in our world, which became acutely apparent to Manasseh while touring the barren white-out landscapes of Eastern Europe two winters ago with epic45.
ANA however, is far from bleak. The exploration of systemic music production has lead to truly beautiful compositions borne of repetition and the subsequent subversion of order; glistening melodies, outbursts of joyful chaos and the vibrant sounds of everyday life captured on tape. It is an album that is as likely to appeal to those taken with the arpeggioed soundscapes of Emeralds and Mountains as the minimalism of Elaine Radigue or Pauline Oliveros – all touchstones for Manasseh during the 18 months or so spent working on ANA.
One of my favourite discoveries of 2011 was the NBC show Friday Night Lights, which ended its run of five seasons in the US last February. I’m only at the beginning of season two, in large part because the show has been neglected by UK TV networks.
This subtle, intimate drama centres on the lives of high school football players, their coach and the small, football-obsessed town of Dillon, Texas. Its naturalistic observations of personal dramas are utterly riveting, with some of the best character development I’ve seen in a show since The Wire. It also convinced me that American football can be exciting and caused me to reappraise the music of Texas’s Explosions In The Sky, whose music features heavily in the first season.
Aside from a couple of songs, I’d previously - unfairly - written off the quartet as dull, po-faced post rock that was big on formula and emotional bombast. The use of ‘Remember Me as a Time of Day’ in the pilot of Friday Night Lights made already intense moments truly lump-in-throat and convinced me to start at the beginning with How Strange, Innocence (2000). Entirely instrumental, the album surprised me with understated, magisterial passages like ‘Magic Hours’ and the awesome thundercrack of ‘A Song For Our Fathers’. I’m looking forward to checking out their other albums albeit gradually.
My dear friend James Nash is an illustrator and comics artist based in London, who, alongside other projects, has been drawing a diary comic for years now. After a six month hiatus to “get a life worth drawing”, he’s restarting it for one year, serialised weekly. Through three panel daily strips, James captures the frustrations, failings and occasional emotional breakthroughs that define the life of a twentysomething.
