Years – 1st Album

Years – First Album (2009)

Fresh from Toronto’s Arts & Crafts Label, Year’s debut plows the post rock furrow with gleeful abandon. Not afraid of melody and awash with acoustic and orchestral interludes, Do Make Say Think/Broken Social Scene member Ohad Benchetrit’s first solo release is a rich brew of organic and electronic soundscapes, often so tightly layered as to be almost impossible to discern.  Reference points include, inevitably, God Speed You, Black Emperor, but this is a much richer concoction, frothier in parts, but lacking none of the bite of Montreal’s finest.

 

Electric Light Orchestra – 1st Album

Electric Light Orchestra – 1st Album (1971)

Obscure – hardly, genius definitely. The brainchild of Roy Wood, multi instrumentalist and main songwriter in The Move,  a band whose peculiarly english take on psychedelia kicked off the first broadcast from Radio One with the immortal “Flowers in the Rain”.  This album was the only one to feature Roy Wood. The first single, “10538 Overture” foisted massively overdubbed cellos onto a bemused british public who nonetheless bought in sufficient numbers to propel the song to number 9 in the charts. Strange doesn’t even begin to describe the music – if there were such a thing as garage orchestra this record would be both genesis and revelation. By turn haunting, wistful and abrasive the album is a tour de force and marks Roy Wood, a man for whom radical change has been the only career constant, as a maverick genius. The band went on to stratospheric success under the stewardship of Jeff Lynne; Roy Wood went on to found Wizzard, no less strange in their own way, but sadly responsible for the dreadful “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday”

 

Peter Doherty – Grace/Wastelands

Peter Doherty – Grace/Wastelands (2009)

Love him or hate him, Peter Doherty is possessed of the most singular vision in England. Infuriatingly inconsistent and dogged by problems that on the evidence of the last Babyshambles album had all but leached the muse dry, Doherty has the potential to inherit the ‘greatest living englishman’ mantle worn for the last four decades by Ray Davies of the Kinks.

The album itself is excellent – sympathetic production from Stephen Street allows the songs to breathe – and these songs are uniformly splendid. My vote for album of the year so far. Forget the tabloid headlines, Peter Doherty is back and in some style.

 

Sparks – Number One Song In Heaven

Sparks – Number One Song In Heaven (1979)

The third reinvention of Sparks – this ethereal pop masterpiece highlights the twisted genius of the brothers Mael with the same audacious flourish that ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough For The Both Of Us’ brought to an unsuspecting public in the early seventies. The delirious confection of falsetto vocals, hysterical synths and swoonalicious strings swept all before it in 1979. The rest of the album was just as good, combining Ron Mael’s most acerbic lyrics with the transcendescent synth arrangements of Georgio Moroder and Harold Faltermeyer. In the process laying down a blueprint for the electropop revolution of the eighties that would be refined in 1980’s Terminal Jive featuring the incandescent ‘When I’m With You’. Sheer pop genius. Check out L’il Beethoven, Hello Young Lovers and this video for proof that Sparks are very much a living breathing pop phenomenon.

Remixed genius from the brothers Mael.

 

Mott the Hoople – Brain Capers

Mott the Hoople – Brain Capers (1970)

Mott the Hoople, along with the New York Dolls, Iggy Pop and Alice Cooper have a credible claim to have anticipated and directly influenced punk rock. This, their third album is a bona fide classic – bringing the adrenaline rush of their live performances (banned from the Royal Albert Hall for inducing a riot) ferociously to life. Originals such as ‘Death may Be Your Santa Claus’ and ‘Sweet Angeline’ jostle with gleeful and loutish abandon the more reflective ‘Darkness, Darkness’ and the Dion tribute ‘In Your Own Backyard’.  Promoted by the ‘Rock ‘n Roll Circus’ tour, this album should have propelled the band to the heights they would have to wait a further three years to scale.  The secret of Mott the Hoople’s subsequent and short lived success lay largely in Ian Hunter’s knack for writing about disaffected youth without appearing patronising – making a mythology out of the band’s travails and including his audience in a way that became a trademark but never quite descended into self-parody.  

 

Diary of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star – Ian Hunter

Also worth checking out Ian Hunter’s book, ‘Diary of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Star’ for a glimpse behind the scenes of the music industry in the seventies. No sex and very few drugs, this is the story of a gruelling American Tour leavened by a hilarious account of an attempted break in to Graceland and a ceaseless quest for rare guitars. Witty and self deprecating, this is an excellent account of a ‘make or break’ tour in a period when music was important and PR was an amateurish and haphazard nuisance tacked onto the real business of performing – and tracking down musical heroes and antique guitars.

 

Andrew Bird – Noble Beast

Andrew Bird – Noble Beast (2009)

Multi instrumentalist and notorious whistler Andrew Bird has a way with words that makes him pretty well irresistible to these ears, indeed, not since the heyday of Steely Dan has pop music sounded so….intelligent. This is an album as fascinating and compulsive as it is erudite, indeed once past the clever wordplay, the music is a beguiling confection of deep strangeness and considerable charm. Check this out for proof…

 

Jerry Dammers Spatial aka Orchestra – live at the Barbican

The legend of Sun Ra burns brightly. One of the most idiosyncratic composers in the history of jazz, his blend of big band swing and space fuelled mysticism has preserved him a place in the hearts of a fabulously varied audience. Paying tribute to such a revered artist is a risky business and it takes a very special performance indeed to carry it off.

Jerry Dammers, one time Special, carried it off with aplomb, a sixteen piece band augmented by a range of space suited dummies, mummies and what looked like a Bond bug, suspended precariously, high above the tympanist, swung like the suburbs in the seventies and in places rocked like a bastard – standout performances from drummer Patrick Illingworth in particular confirmed that this is no flash in the pan, the material was performed with real verve, vigour and vim.  An extraordinary version of Dammers own “Ghost Town”  stole the show, but the Sun Ra covers “Egypt Strut” and “We’re Gonna Unmask the Batman” showcased the band’s impeccable solo credentials as well as an irresistable rhythmic punch – best show of the year so far.

 

gUiLLeMoTs – Through the Windowpane

Guillemots – Through the Windowpane (2006)

When I’m feeling more than usually sour at the ghastly fare served up on the radio, I sometimes wonder whether it is actually possible these days for a band to write for the sake of writing, for the sheer wonder of creating original melody.  Or whether we are simply doomed to suffer the gyrings and gratings of Lily Allen and her gurning associates for the rest of time. When this mood comes upon me, I invariably reach for this Guillemots album, for here is a wonderful thing – a band who are signed to a major, releasing truly extraordinary, unashamedly romantic music apparently without fear or compromise. The absence of this band from the charts is a shameful blight on the history of pop.

 

Tindersticks feat. Lhasa de Sela

A sense of melancholy lingers around the music of Tindersticks like a wraith. Theirs are songs of loss, redemption and new beginnings. Stuart Staples has the voice, here matched with the incomparable Lhasa de Sela; add strings, a bottle of wine and a giant freshly laundered cotton handkerchief. The tears will flow. And if further proof were needed that these two make the sweetest music together, check this out…from the promo collection 9 Films by Martin Wallace – sheer unadulterated genius!

 

Empire Of The Sun – Walking On A Dream

Luke Steele, the Australian pop maverick whose prediliction for luscious harmonies and over the top production betrays a childhood spent in thrall to the eighties, here delivers the goods with his new project, Empire of the Sun. Teaming up with Nick Littlemore from Teenager, the duo deliver an album with all the pop sensibility of Sleepy Jacksons – “Personality”, aligned to eighties electropop beats. The result is as delightful as a visit to the chocolatier, a bitter patina of dark chocolat releasing the purest of pop liqueurs. Magnificently over the top, these boys bring a little bit more substance to the table than many would be electropop revivalists. No chance of success then.