Black Mountain - Wilderness Heart

Here's the sub-headline: After the epic In the Future, Black Mountain return to earth with some newly-discovered restraint.

On third album Wilderness Heart, Stephen McBean's hippy stoners have struck a balance between the direct pop of 'No Satisfaction' found on debut Black Mountain, and the drone-y, riffing, indulgences of 'Bright Lights' from the aforementioned second album.

While McBean is the de facto leader of the band, all the while also helming the twisted country of Pink Mountaintops, this album sees keyboardist and man responsible for the awesome cover art ,Jeremy Schmidt, and vocalist Amber Wells stealing the limelight.

Ignoring such signs as recruiting producer Dave Sardy* (the man responsible for overseeing some of the darkest moments in pop history: Oasis, Chris Cornell, Dandy Warhols and Jet to name just four acts he's produced), and appearing on the Spider-Man 3 soundtrack alongside The Killers, Wolfmother and Jet (again!!!), Black Mountain have come up trumps with a mix of riffing and country-blues.

Kicking off with 'The Hair Song', you can tell immediately that there's a brevity and freshness to the Black Mountain sound, Amber Well's tremulous, world-weary vocals interplaying brilliantly with gravelly McBean's. 'Old Fangs' quickly follows showcasing Schmidt's keyboard work. There's plenty of organ and mellotron to be found on this record, calling to mind Benmont Tench's work on the vastly underrated Dust, the final album by Screaming Trees.

Although one can still find heavy-rockin' moments (witness the ridiculous Black Sabbath stylings of 'Let Spirits Ride', proving that Black Mountain have always maintained a sense of humour) the highlights here are the countrified, folky and bluesy moments of 'Radiant Hearts', 'Buried By The Blues' and album closer/highlight 'Sadie'.

What's also noticeable is how McBean's and Wells's voices are now dissolving into one another where they once stood in stark contrast to each other - now they seem to have worked out how to blend their respective talents into a cohesive whole.

What direction Black Mountain takes next is anyone's guess; it's unlikely that the band will fully investigate the more acoustic route due to the existence of Pink Mountaintops, but they've certainly realised that they don't need to bludgeon the listener with incessant riffing. This is a record that confidently swaggers and that, dear readers, is a good thing.

*To be fair to D. Sardy, he has also been involved with some fine moments from LCD Soundsystem, Spoon and White Denim, and here he shares production duties with Randall Dunn, the man behind Sunn O))) and their magisterial heaviosity.

A Take Away Shows/La Blogotheque Top 10

By way of a hand of friendship to Vincent Moon after my rather scathing assessment of his Burning documentary in my last post about Mogwai, below are my ten favourite moments from his rather fine Take Away Shows site:



10. Grizzly Bear - this was in fact the tenth in the series, and featured the Grizzlers (as no-one calls them) performing songs from the magnificent Yellow House in a shower room and on the street like some kind of indie barbershop quartet....

9. Dean & Britta - delightful stuff from Dean Wareham (of Galaxie 500, Luna and Dean & Britta) and Britta Phillips, busking on the underground in their usual wistful, VU-indebted fashion.

8. Liars - more art-rock brilliance/nonsense, but with added elevators.

7. Port O'Brien - the seafaring folk-rockers take their rousing, shouty songs to the streets of Chinatown, with excellent results.

6. The Antlers - the miserable-but-beautiful, woozy, chiming ballads of this lot find strange bedfellows in the shape of a doll-repair shop. Spooky.....

5. Yeasayer - featuring vests and jumpsuits, but also - thankfully - prog pop brilliance in the form of an apartment singalong. Worth a watch just for the interruption when the band are told to keep the noise down.

4. Bon Iver - a communal folkly, sit-in turns out to be the perfect setting for the backwoods charm of Justin Vernon and co.

3. Doveman - the terminally underrated Thomas Bartlett performs walking about some buildings and uncovers a room full of pianos. Cue beautiful music.....

2. Sufjan Stevens - risking his life on a windy rooftop, covering Great Lake Swimmers. Wonderful.

1. The National - the band are filmed at some remote chateau or possibly chapel, channeling the spirit of The Rolling Stones and coming up with some intimate and gorgeous versions of the songs found on Boxer. Watch, if only for the spine-tingling version of "Ada."

Special Moves

On 14th April 2001, at Rothesay Pavillion on the Isle of Bute, Mogwai almost made me vomit.

They had already scared the little old ladies manning the bar by opening with a double salvo of the glitch ‘Sine Wave’ from the Rock Action album, and followed it quickly with ‘Christmas Steps’. When the bass kicked in during the latter, those ladies nearly died on the spot thanks to the pure evil of the low-end on that track. Anyway, closing with ‘My Father My King’, their interpretation of an old Jewish hymn, and with me a few whisky and cokes and a few beers to the good, my stomach began to do somersaults when 13 minutes in the volume just increased to a level I have rarely experienced before or since (Boredoms, My Bloody Valentine and Sunn O))) apart). Luckily, dinner and drinks stayed down and I survived until the ferry ride home.

This is the Mogwai live experience. It’s probably the best way to hear Mogwai and it’s a surprise that it’s taken 13 years for the band to release a proper live record, Special Moves. In all honesty, as much as I love the band, they’ve not made a wholly cohesive record since 1999’s Come on Die Young - I could probably add 2003’s Happy Songs for Happy People to that one, but only just. I am, thankfully, happy to report that Special Moves, recorded in Williamsburg, is everything that you could want from a Mogwai album.

It takes tracks from each of the band’s full length releases, meaning that we get the classic brutal ‘Gwai of ‘Like Herod’ and ‘Mogwai Fear Satan’ from the early days, and also the more electronic and slowly-menacing-but-never-quite-exploding tracks such as ‘I’m Jim Morrison, I’m Dead’ and ‘Killing All the Flies’, from the later years.

It all hangs together brilliantly, slowly building to the middle of the record with ‘You Don’t Know Jesus’, taking a little breather before closing with the still frightening ‘Like Herod’, and ‘Glasgow Megasnake’. You know it’s a special Mogwai gig when the usual set highlight of the former is absolutely destroyed by the latter. It’s a breathless experience.

There’s also an accompanying DVD of the Williamsburg concert, filmed by the Take Away Show’s Vincent Moon and Nathanael Le Scouarnac. The less said about that the better.....but I’m going to anyway. While the music is once again fantastic, Moon ruins what could have been an excellent document of the Mogwai live experience by indulging in moody, grainy, black and white, out of focus, wonky-angled, art-for-art’s sake filmmaking. While the Take Away Shows are often fantastic, capturing bands playing live in out of the ordinary settings, Moon et al similarly wasted a fine opportunity with the DVD of A Skin, A Night, which was meant to document the making of The National’s Boxer album. Instead, we got the same arty nonsense and no insight into the creative process of the band.

I’d recommend without caveats the CD version of Special Moves as it perfectly captures what Mogwai is all about. This is a band that knows how to control the noise they make, and beyond the noise you'll find layers of melody and beauty that open themselves up through repeated listening.

By all means play the DVD, just don’t look at the screen while you’re doing it. Don’t give Vincent Moon the satisfaction or validation.

Missing in Action - Cannibal Ox

Missing in Action could be a semi-regular feature......

Now and again an artist seems to drift from your consciousness due to being absent for a period of time, and you’re shocked when you happen upon their music and think “how could I have forgotten about them?” In the age of MP3 players, Spotify and suchlike, the digital “record collections” that listeners have are so vast that you could go a significant period of time without hearing a particular singer or band.

I was shaken out of an iPod reverie recently by the atonal horn intro to “Iron Galaxy” by Cannibal Ox. The dark rhymes and grimy lo-fi beats were in stark contrast to the glorious sunshine of that particular day, but I was drawn into the dark New York underbelly thanks to the unique skills of Vast Aire:

“I've got that Eve's Bayou sense of touch

So I fought, to touch every hand of a fan to read their thoughts

Battered wives, molested children

Roaches on the floor, rats in the ceiling

Cats walk around New York with two fillin's

One is in their mouth the other, does the killin'”

It’s been almost ten years since Vast Aire and his partner Vordul Megilah (interesting MC names, much more inspired that the usual), with the help of producer EL-P and guests, released The Cold Vein, and there’s absolutely no sign of a follow-up. No confirmation of a break-up, or whether it’s an extended Fugazi-style hiatus (another contender for MIA at a later date) and very little solo output from either rapper.

In 2001, when the top selling albums of the year included gems from Linkin Park, Shaggy and Staind, and one of the top five Billboard sellers was A Day Without Rain by Enya. In comparison, Cannibal Ox were positively revolutionaries.

Joking aside, this was something quite revolutionary in the hip hop world. With only the Wu-Tang Clan offering anything different to the big-pimping stylings of Snoop Dogg, Notorious BIG et al, Can-Ox were truly unique.

Even the source of their samples proved this crew were thinking outside of the box. Across The Cold Vein’s gargantuan 75mins running time we can hear snippets of new wavers Wall of Voodoo, Giorgio Moroder, Philip Glass, Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson and Jaco Pastorious. This was a hip hop album like no other – its centrepiece and meisterwerk was “The F-Word’, a rap about unrequited love for goodness sakes! The F-word in question was in fact “friend”.

The virtuoso rapping of Vast and Vordul was quite something, and married to the wondrous production skills of El-P – he created crackling beats which battled against the lush samples and analogue synth drones – it created an album that’s rarely been bettered in the ten years since. You can hear that pain of the two MC’s throughout the record and it’s hardly a surprise that they’ve struggled to make music thereafter.

In the world of hip hop only El-P’s own crew Company Flow, –thanks to 1997's Funcrusher Plus - the disparate entities of Anitcon and the unrivalled Anti-Pop Consortium have pushed the boundaries of what the genre could really achieve. It’s galling to think that dross from the Young Money label dominates the scene right now. Perhaps The Cold Vein came ten years too early....we could do with another Cannibal Ox right now to shake things up.

Album Review - Tamaryn: The Waves

Is it dream-pop now rather than shoegaze?

For a long time shoegazers were looked on as the scum of the earth. To quote Nicky Wire of Manic Street Preachers “we’ll always hate Slowdive more than Adolf Hitler”. If that’s not enough proof of shoegaze’s evil, pernicious influence, Nicky continues: “Boys and girls, mums and dads, I think you're at the wrong night. This isn't Slowdive or Chapterhouse or another one of those nothing bands, you lazy lazy people.”

I think old Nicky has a point, but only up to a point. It was all going so well when it was just My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive and Ride, but once Chapterhouse, Moose (Moose! For crying out loud...) and Adorable (is there a more twee name this side of Belle and Sebastian?) jumped on the bandwagon it became a case of “more for less”, and then the mid-1990s brought the Britpop years and shoegaze was forgotten.

The rehabilitation started slowly, but around 2004 it picked up largely in no small part to the success of the Sonic Cathedral club night and subsequent record label. What followed was a raft of shoegaze-y bands like The Radio Dept, Asobi Seksu, M83, Team Ghost, School of Seven Bells and many more. The difference this time appeared to be a more joyous, pop rush attached to the overuse of the effects pedal, general drone and guitar overdubs. Hence, “dream-pop”.

The term seems to have captured disparate artists such as Best Coast, Beach House, Grizzly Bear and High Places. None of these bands could be said to be particularly similar in style, other than sharing an ear for a cracking melody. There’s also the noisier end of the spectrum inhabited by A Place to Bury Strangers and the sadly-missed Dirty on Purpose.

All this is a rather long-winded intro to a review of one of the most vibrant albums of the year so far, Tamaryn’s The Waves.

Formed by New Zealander Tamaryn (voice, one name will do) and former Vue member Rex John Shelverton (instrumentation, three names), The Waves is a dusty, atmospheric experience, full of layers of fuzzed-out guitars and drawl-y vocals reminiscent of Hope Sandovaal and even, at times, Siouxsie Sioux.

Tamaryn describes the band as “...atmospheric, emotional and deliberate. It has a big range. But if you're talking more genre-specific, I think that's a little harder because there are a lot of different things involved. A lot of people say shoegaze, a lot of people say death rock with gothic overtones. I also hear dreampop. I think it's a mix of a lot of things. It's taking a lot of things I love and fusing it through my own interpretation.”

While a lot of music in this genre seems on the verge of floating away into the air, much of The Waves is given a dynamic, solid body by the low-end sounds of the bass and, possibly, programmed drums. There’s the guitar-laden pop rush of “Love Fade”, and the more sedate and ethereal “Choirs of Winter”, and Tamaryn sound like a band confident in turning their hand to whatever mood fits.

Could be best as a headphones record, but play the album as night falls and you might experience the gothic world that Tamaryn and The Waves inhabits.

All Delighted People

It’s okay people, stand down. Sufjan Stevens’ existential crisis is over.

Out of nowhere, following sound collages and multimedia paeans to disasters in architecture, everyone’s favourite God fearin’ troubadour is back with an EP to remind us why we fell in love with him in the first place.

All Delighted People has been described as a “dramatic homage to the Apocalypse, existential ennui and Paul Simon’s ‘The Sounds of Silence’”. What’s Art Garfunkel ever done to upset Sufjan? Anyway, it’s a return to the Sufjan Stevens found on the 50 States project and perhaps the greatest album of the last ten years, Seven Swans.

At 60 minutes, it’s hardly worthy of the title “EP”. Based around two versions of the title track, and the 17 minute closer ‘Djohariah’, it mixes the more “traditional” work of Stevens found on Illinoise, Michigan and The Avalanche with the glitch electronica of ‘You Are the Blood’ found on the compilation Dark Was the Night. Lyrically, it embraces the religious imagery found on Seven Swans and this seems to be hinted at in the title of the EP. For “delighted” read “enraptured”, or even The Rapture. Perhaps this much talked about crisis of confidence has sent Sufjan Stevens back to the semi-comfort he finds when singing to, or about, God.

The EP opens with the original version of ‘All Delighted People’, amounting to about four songs in one. It begins in gentle style, with Stevens not wanting to be alone, and warning of an impending end:

“And I took you by the sleeve
No other reason than to be you leading man
And you woke up with a fright
Our lives depended on the visions through the night
All we had always, all we had always wanted to before”
The hurricane inclined us, grappling on the floor
All delighted people raise their hands.”

There’s reference to the storm within one’s self, and the more traditional, but it’s clear that these are the end of days. The song moves to a magnificent climax, choirs of voices and instruments reaching a crescendo. It’s the most ambitious that Stevens has sounded, there’s so much going on in there.

As this is a digital-only release at the moment, it’s hard to know who else contributes to this EP, but I’m sure I can hear the distinctive soprano of My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Wordren in the choir of voices.

The “Classic Rock” version of the track is more straight-ahead Sufan, and can be filed alongside the alternative versions of ‘Chicago’ found on The Avalanche. Lots of banjo and brass, almost Sufjan-by-numbers.

Moving on, ‘Enchanting Ghost’, the gorgeous ‘Heirloom’ and the creepy/beautiful ‘The Owl and the Tanager’ all reference religion, death and spiritual dilemmas. It’s the slower moments on the EP that really stand out and none are better than ‘Arnika’.

That track begins detailing what seems to be the day-to-day machinations of a married couple (“Bruno, your wife shakes her bedclothes as she makes up the bed”) and then detours into what might be the most personal lyrics Sufjan Stevens has ever written:

“I’m tired of life; I’m tired of waiting for someone
I’m tired of prices; I’m tired of waiting for something……”

Stevens’ voice sounds at its most exposed, backed with faltering guitars (the rest of the EP sees his best work on the axe to date) and he seems close to breaking as the song climaxes:

“No I’m not afraid of death or strife or injury, accidents they are my friends.”

Closing with the 17 minute tribute to his sister, ‘Djohariah’, Stevens pushes the boat out with psychedelic guitar solos, horn breaks and what really sounds like something that Parliament might have come up with if they had a penchant for folk music. It actually acts as something of a companion piece to Seven Swans’ ‘Sister’, albeit extended to over twice the length.

All told, it’s a thrilling return to form and completely undeserving of this hatchet job, hastily-prepare by Drowned in Sound. With a tour scheduled for later in the year, and an LP with The National mooted, it’s great to see Sufjan Stevens back and sounding as good as he does.

Is this the greatest song ever written about orange juice?

Courtesy of renowned quantum physicist Dr Richard P Feynman:



Man, I want some of that orange juice!