Mountain*7 - for the person with nothing better to do

Artist: Jack Rose
Album: Luck in the Valley
Label: Thrill Jockey

There was something close to the animalistic in some of the responses to Jack Rose’s horribly premature death at the age of 38 in the December of last year. This isn’t to say that all our responses to grief don’t involve some sort of pre-lingusitic animal reaction of course, just that in this case there seemed to be an undercurrent of pure animal expression – a reaching out to some part of Rose’s personality that defied or outstripped attempts at articulation. I didn’t meet Rose, but I can remember seeing him perform in the café area at the Green Man festival, a great bear of a man hunched over his steel-strung guitar in a light pall of rain. He played unamplified and was surrounded by a tense semi-circle of about 100 people, all tilting forward slightly in the gloom. It was as intense a performance as I’ve seen, Rose clawing at his guitar, producing a great thicket of sound, at times seemingly atonal and ragged, then spiralling into moments of near transcendent finger-picked beauty. As the set progressed, the crowd pressed in, drawn towards his heat. It was an extraordinary thing to witness, but it does seem to have been the way of things. He filled more than his allotted space, broke out and dragged the world towards him.

And now we’re left with this – in the face of such a loss, the frankly bleak task of laying an unfair weight on what is now a posthumous album. The temptation is to redraw the surrounds of this, map it backwards and go searching for sinews of meaning and tease out intimations of mortality that simply aren’t there. Rose was a prolific performer and writer, and in truth Luck in the Valley isn’t a remarkable record – it’s lit up by the depth of his passion and his at times ridiculous dexterity and talent for composition, but in the context of the body of his work it feels exploratory and is a further melding of what were his then preoccupations: the raga-inflected longer pieces that dominated his early releases and the raucous pre-war music he’d been playing both in a solo capacity (as Dr. Ragtime) and with the Black Twig Pickers – with a pointed lean towards the latter.

Luck in the Valley was in fact, loosely speaking, to be the third in a trilogy (which Rose had refereed to as his ‘Ditch Trilogy) – a trilogy which, along with his albums from last year with the Black Twig Pickers and the Dr. Ragtime band, was concerned with exploring the immediacy and spontaneity of pre-war music. It’s largely based on first-take recordings and revolves around rollocking rags and hoe-downs, 3 of which are covers of American classics (‘St Louis Blues’, ‘Everybody Ought to Pray Sometime’ and ‘West Coast Blues’), works by W.C. Handy, Blind Blake, and Dennis Crumpton and Robert Summer. The band itself is made up of a revolving cast of musicians including the incendiary Twig Pickers and the likes of Glenn Jones, Micah Smaldone and Harmonica Dan (what does he do?) – and as Rose had said in the past, they swing like a motherfucker. This is, for the most part, profoundly joyous, life-affirming music.

That said, the album does feature some of the ominous tones that Rose has explored from way back since his Pelt days, and that run throughout the body of his work. This is most notable on two tracks on Luck in the Valley – ‘Tree in the Valley’ and the opening track ‘Blues for Percy Danforth’, which will rightly be lifted into the pantheon of his best works. It’s a beautiful mix of picking and raga drones, and the key is how effortless it all sounds – those dextrous runs and the deep-pinned bass notes meshing perfectly into a whole that is so immediately the Rose sound that it near pierces the heart. As the track rises to its tumult and is met by a backgrounded jews harp and soft harmonica line you realise Rose, and his tight, tight band, were so in control of where they were going with all this that it seems impossible that there’ll be no more.

We wont talk of epitaphs and the like, for music of this ferocity and timelessness beats all that. Instead we should probably take it all in the manner it was intended – wild, on the way to some oblivion or other and reeking of animal sweat and joy.

Download: Jack Rose - Woodpiles On The Side of the Road

There was a lot of quite open grieving around the time of Rose's death, and some beautifully constructed tributes and paeans. One of the finest was David Morris's, over at Strangeglue. He also put together a fine radio tribute which you can still download.

Ethan Miller also put together a fine tribute, and included a download of a relatively recent Rose show from Fredricksburg, Virginia. The show features tracks from Luck in the Valley.

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 14:42 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

The Tallest Man on Earth (photo by j9j9j9)

There is something wonderfully elemental and simple about The Tallest Man on Earth, a Swede with a belly-whine and a guitar, that it's easy to overlook just how damn good he is. The fact that he comes out of comparisons with Dylan circa Another Side of Bob Dylanwith a certain amount of ease and grace should be all you need to know. The fact that he remains unsigned in the UK is a strange oversight that needs to be remedied soon... Check out his recent Daytrotter session (which, ironically is pretty flawless except the Dylan cover) and the curious video (below) for 'The Gardener' he shot for Le Blogotheque.

Posted by poacher in music downloads at 19:40 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Sleeping States
Album: In the Gardens of the North
Label: Bella Union

Forest Fire review up over there (La Blogotheque gave this album of the year, Rough Trade album of the week. I must confess to feeling slightly bemused by it. OK, but a bit of a mess, generally); Sleeping States review over there too, and below.

The now mostly ignored English novelist Henry Green once described his writing style as like a ‘long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears’. All of which might be a good way to describe Markland Starkie’s vaulting ambition as Sleeping States where he seems to indulge an older literary sensibility and times a near abstract painterly tug at the emotions.

Opening an album with songs dedicated to WG Sebald and Kafka – ‘Rings of Saturn’ and ‘The Next Village’ – is something of a statement of intent; and as such In the Gardens of the North is overlain with a kind of weary melancholia; and though on the surface it appears to be about the potential of movement and discovery in reality it is about immersion: in perception and environment. It’s difficult and broadly speaking, very original. I suspect it’ll get a good deal of critical acclaim and also get largely ignored. Which is a shame as it’s a record that deserves to be heard.

Starkie’s sound is a difficult one to describe. At heart it comes from a pastoral folk tradition but it has elements of the baroque to it; he also possesses a classic pop sensibility. So: a kind of dowdier Sufjan perhaps? But whereas Starkie, who is originally from London, explored a kind of idealised pastoralism in his earlier work (These Open Spaces, the previous album, released in 2007, is certainly an escapist’s tract) In the Gardens of the North is very much a product of its environment. Starkie went as far as to record it in a shack in the woods around Bristol. And as much as the flat expanses of Suffolk infected Sebald’s prose, so has the sylvan nature of the writing and recording process of …Gardens had a major influence on the sound and texture of the end product. At times, such is the mix between recording and environment, it’s almost as if it isn’t there at all. It’s a peculiar sensation. Then a figure will present itself – a simple brushed drum or one of Starkie’s signature guitar lines (such as on ‘Breathing Space’) – and the whole sound will come into focus. And in some respects the record is like a landscape: not necessarily sensed as such, but, like Green’s slow appeal, absorbed unconsciously.

The other thing the immersion in environment seems to have done to the Sleeping States sound is give it an undercurrent of menace. ‘On the Beach at Aldeburgh’ (another nod to Sebald, not to mention Brian Eno who mythologised this part of the Suffolk Coast on Ambient 4: On Land) has a Tortoise-like lurch to it, the off key guitars and muted violins like wind in the offshore buoys; ‘Showers in the Summer’, before it resolves itself into a wide-sky hymnal, is, with its bed of arpeggiated guitars, a stumble through bracken-choked woods.

All this and I feel as if I’ve barely touched the surface of things, or mentioned Starkie’s odd haunting voice – in its naked state somewhere between a less histrionic Fyfe Dangerfield and Jeff Buckley, otherwise layered and doubled into something entirely Other. In the Gardens of the North is ultimately a dense, introspective record that follows no logic except its own internal quest for resolution. Heavy with literary allusion it gives the impression of needing time to absorb and decode. Here’s hoping people take the time to give it the attention it deserves.

Download: Sleeping States - Showers In The Summer

Download: Forest Fire - Slow Motion

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 13:38 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

I've not had a chance to listen to this as yet but it sounds intriguing - a whole bunch of odd noises from right across the mighty Australia available bi-monthly as a free download. You can get the first download here - The New Weird Australia Vol. 1.

Posted by poacher in music downloads at 15:31 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Boduf Songs
Album: There Is Something Hanging Above EP 2009
Label: Under The Spire

This was my first brush with Boduf Songs - the work of Mat Sweet. Since 2005 he's released three albums and a slew of EPs and CD-Rs, all exploring the primitive, blacker side of folk and drone music. On first listening to this limited edition EP, I assumed it was emanating from some Appalachian backwater, a mid-West hideaway; to discover it was conceived and recorded in Southampton somehow adds to the uncanny nature of it. This is of the old soil...

The EP begins with an ominous swamped drone, like the underside of something Windy and Carl might dream up, a drone that bleeds into 'Deathbed Triumps of Eminent Lackwits' a 6-minute hushed folk song - Sweet's signature style. Think of Nick Talbot's spookier moments, or perhaps the haunted sound explorations of Matt Elliott. At the halfway point, the song drops away to a single note pulse over which Sweet croons, his vocals layered and backtracked. Garbled effects gradually add to the soundscape, which conceivably could be a forest recording - a possibility confirmed by the buried background sounds on the dark final track, 'Peripheral Man' which sounds like a neolithic field recording.

Listening back to some of Sweet's older material - the likes of The Lion Devours The Sun and last years' How Shadows Chase The Balance (both released on Kranky) - 'Left Behind Like A Piece of Shit', the EPs centrepiece, might just be the most straightforward and accessible piece he's recorded. It's based around a relatively 'bright' guitar figure and brushed drums, and thematically it's a paean to movement, the song driven on by a incessant plucked bass string. Yet I wonder if perhaps the song is actually about the impossibility of movement, the bass string a ligature, a manacle... Sweet's lyrics here dwell on Sisyphean imagery and the clipping of wings and the temptation here is to map this onto the drab streets of Southampton and the mute horror of being trapped in the endless suburbs. And instead of escaping, Sweet has instead stayed and become mired - a pathway for the old voices.

This is a very limited EP but there should be copies out there and it, and Sweet's other records are well worth tracking down. There's more info on his website: Boduf Songs.

Download: Boduf Songs - Left Behind Like A Piece Of Shit

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 12:41 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Wise Children
Album: Wise Children EP
Label: Self Released

I saw Wise Children supporting Fanfarlo in the grotty interior of the Hamptons Bar in Southampton - an actually half-decent venue in what is generally a cultural wasteland. They quietly held the attention of most people in the place, despite the heat, and despite the low volume. I was intrigued enough to buy this, their first EP.

The band's sound is a fairly simple one, based around Robin Warren-Adamson's gentle voice and acoustic guitar, but there is a real depth to the sound in terms of instrumentation, and in the impact these 4 songs have. So alongside the guitar you have glockenspiels, Timothy Davies' cello plus sundry scrapings and bowings. Live this was supplemented by Jami Wilson's gorgeous backing vocals, and she is absent presence on this recording. The 4 songs were recorded in a bunch of different locations 'round Southampton - an old cinema, a bath (that makes sense in context) - and despite the fear that the pale wash of the city might have seeped into the body of the songs, it sounds great. For touchstones you might think of traditional folkies like Bert Jansch and certainly Nick Drake, yet the subtle dissonances take it beyond these comparisons. There are also elements of the modern creakier folk stuff we've yammered about on here before, like Gravenhurst or Matt Elliot- they share some of that inherent darkness. And their invocation of Efterklang might give you some idea of the direction they might take with a bigger budget...

'Paint' is a case in point. A 6 minute track that moves in four sections from a haunted opening sequence - ominous drones underpinning an odd minor-chord pattern - to a beautiful mid-section ('we've been lost from the start/let them see our deserted heart') that spirals skyward before returning to that darker central figure.

If you're interested in getting hold of the EP then you'll find stuff on their MySpace page, or you can buy a download here. There's also some tracks on a BBC Hampshire page. There will hopefully be a new EP at the end of the summer.

Download: Wise Children - Paint

Download: Wise Children - I Found Her In The Bath

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 22:32 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

Until the 4th July Fanfarlo are offering their might fine debut record, Reservoir for $1. You'd be mad not to, frankly. You can read what I thought about the album over at TLOBF.

Hello. Because we want everyone to hear our album, and in the spirit of “why not”, we are now letting you download it, along with 4 exclusive bonus tracks, for a mere one dollar until July 4th (or, if you like, Independence Day.) After that, the madness will end and you will be able to get the CD, the vinyl and a beautiful new special edition at normal prices.

Download: Fanfarlo - Finish Line

Posted by poacher in music downloads at 09:37 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Here are a few recent downloads we've come across that are worth checking out...

Not sure how I missed this first time around (the curse of the RSS Reader I suspect) but an excellent compilation from the ever-superb Raven Sings The Blues blog - they're a top source for that seam of psych and plain weird folk music that's been dominating the American underground for the past couple of years. This compilation is like a summing up. It's also free. Their main site is here: Raven Sings The Blues

A FACT remix by the Caretaker, aka Leyland James Kirby - this is a trawl through the stranged haunted dancehalls of his discography so far. There are also some samples of his new stuff on the V/VM website - they sound immense and hugely ambitious. Kirby also has a new blog - History Always Favours The Winners - with links to various things and the odd downloadable track.

There's a fantastic Kryptic Minds and Loefah interview and exclusive download over at Blackdown's blog - this is the artform of the blog at it's height: freeform, wide-ranging, with the added bonus of a soundtrack. Print literature just can't compete with this stuff. (Edit: not 10 minutes after posting this I noticed that Plan B had gone. Shame - it was one of the best music magazines still going...)

Lastly, some ambient and post rock mixes - the first is from the ever excellent Low Light, combining Philip Glass and Mogwai to excellent effect; the second following a link of his, is a collection from The Bovine Life Support System, a whole host of arcane and haunted ambient mixes.

Posted by poacher in music downloads at 14:38 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Sleepy Sun
Album: Embrace
Label: ATP Recordings

This is now up at TLOBF...

One can argue about the relative influence of place on music without ever really proving anything beyond a kind of vague Romantic gesture towards landscape and upbringing. But the allure remains, and in the case of the San Francisco psyche scene, it’s difficult not to argue for some geographical or environmental effect on sound and tone so deep does it seem to run. Even without the historical antecedents of the mighty Blue Cheer, The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane there’s the modern scene nexus of Comets On Fire (or more precisely, Ethan Miller) who seem to be plugged into the fuzzed up emanations that cross the city’s troposphere like aircraft contrails. There must be something to all this, right?

Sleepy Sun are originally from Santa Cruz, an artist’s enclave 70 miles south of San Francisco and home to the aforementioned Comets on Fire. The band have been house mates for several years and moved en masse to San Francisco two or so years ago, primarily to give this thing a proper go but also clearly obeying some inner impulse to hook into the sonic wellspring at the centre of the scene. There is a relationship to Comets on Fire in the overall sound but much more has been made of the similarities to Black Mountain - whilst they might draw on comparable influences, Black Mountain aint done nothing this loose, this groovy….

The opening track, ‘New Age’ (oh yeah, you should see some of the press photos with the band lying on the grass/huddled in dark rooms cuddling lambs, calves) sets things up perfectly: the snubby bass and drums kick in and the bass-player goes on an almost Scott Reeder-esque run; deep, deep in the mix Rachel Williams is crooning to herself in tongues - the production is cavernous, and when the guitar finally arrives it comes as if from another universe. It’s so rare to talk about space in production these days, as if we’ve completely lost all concept of the depth of music, of the sonic possibilities of space and light. All this is perfectly managed on Embrace. ‘New Age’ is both big and dumb, but intricately pieced together, and structured with an intelligent sense of form. The whole album is. At the midway point of the song, a lacerating solo takes over the centre of the sound and Williams ‘whoops’ from somewhere deep - cue wide, dumb grin.

‘Lord’ follows ‘New Age’ - a piano led track that starts out like some early 70s ballad, something that wouldn’t be out of place on Tapestry or the like. It’s underpinned with a similar sense of depth and grace and is evidence that the band are great songwriters on top of everything else. The two standout tracks though, are the epic twin centrepieces of ‘Sleepy Son’ and ‘White Dove’ - equal parts massive psych-jams and outrock voyages that sound at times like some of Spacemen 3’s more frazzled edges. Both tracks fizz with creative intensity and are based around two of the grooviest, heaviest bastard riffs I’ve heard in some time - and particularly on ‘Sleepy Son’ Williams reveals herself to have a gorgeous, adaptive voice, moving from Grace Slick croon to a high keening Beth Gibbons with ease. And ‘White Dove’ has a cowbell. It’s dazzling stuff.

What with this, the continuing presence of the Comets collective, the Sleep reformation for ATP and the Wooden Shjips record (another band who drawn to the psychic hub of SF) 2009 is proving to be something of a great year for psych rock. Maybe we should all get hairy and drag ourselves out West - West, where the white dove flies…

Download: Sleepy Sun - Lord
Download: Sleep Sun - White Dove

Also, check out the band's mighty Daytrotter Session.

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 14:18 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Artist: Nadja
Album: When I See The Sun It Always Shines On TV
Label: The End

Over at TLOBF...

Looking at the Nadja discography can induce a sense of vertigo in even the most committed of sludge and drone fans - there is a chasm of stuff out there (that’s without Aidan Baker’s solo material as well). So when an album of esoterically chosen covers turns up, it’s hard not to think, ah well, why not - something else will be along soon, right?

Which is to say I didn’t really hold out much hope for this. The very notion of a band of Nadja’s magma-heavy pedigree covering A-Ha and The Cure - pop songs, ostensibly, however obtuse - seemed a dud move, an empty gesture. But (isn’t there always a but?) there more I’ve lived with it, the more it has made sense; and the song choices more obvious with each successive listen.

So what of the choices? Well, now I look at them there is an obvious pattern, a kind of tectonic underpinning of the whole Nadja sound: MBV, Swans, Codeine (I’m amazed there’s no Godflesh, incidentally - but maybe that would have been an homage to far)… Even The Cure track is obvious on closer listening, as the drum sound is all Nadja in its sparseness, its relentlessness. The Elliot Smith cover is a bit of an anomaly, and yet the mood of the original is relevant here, and the dark romance at the centre of it, similarly with the cover of Slayer’s ‘Dead Skin Mask’ - it’s about an exploration of mood and tone. The A-Ha cover is the real odd one, and in honesty is the track that works least well in the context of the album. Indeed at times it sounds like Jesu on a stoner-rock trip, which isn’t a sentence I ever imagined writing…

What I’m reminded of most here is the Belong EP from last year, Colorloss Record - another covers collection, but one that entirely bent the originals to fit into a particular aesthetic framework. In Belong’s case, they totally scoured out and gutted the originals, leaving a brittle shell or a husk; Nadja have done the opposite so that the originals here are flattened out and inflated, filled with dense swells of sound. A good example is the Swans track ‘No Cure For The Lonely’ - the original’s creaking intimacy has been totally fleshed out, given a billowing grandeur, Gira’s baritone replaced with Baker’s skittering surface whispers. It’s very affecting.

And that pretty much sums up the album - it’s deep, dense and affecting, but in a different way to past Nadja albums. So if Thaumogenesis was a seminal seething epic of mountainous riffs and drones, and last years Desire in Uneasiness a lurching thing of bowel-quaking heaviness then When I See The Sun is comparatively bright in comparison, which is which I guess is partly the point, and an interesting departure for Baker and Leah Buckareff. It works.

Download: Nadja - No Cure For The Lonely

Posted by poacher in music reviews at 09:47 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)