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On these late nights when I come
to face down spread eagled in front of the speakers feeling like
I’ve been on a long journey somewhere even though I haven’t
moved, it’s usually because I’ve been heavily self medicating
myself on 2 Texan bands who’s psyched sound encourages intense
pineal gland participation.
EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY are an instrumental quartet,
although you’ll lose count of the number of guitars that you’d
swear that you were hearing as they interlace cascade & go from
silence to violence in the blink of a synapse, who’s post
rifferama, post sonic youth drone stretches out & unwinds on
5 tracks that are never too long & make “THE WORLD IS
NOT A COLD DARK PLACE “ so intoxicating. The band is powered
at it’s core by the muscular flex of the drums that never
default to beat, but keep time perfectly, as the labyrinthine melodies
snake like a kundali serpent out of the speakers. There’s
unheard emotion & depth of feeling between the strings as the
seemingly formless pieces cohere into a drip, a trickle, a stream,
a torrent & then a cloudburst as you’re transported on
a trance journey through a hallucinatory world of endless possibilities.
From a not dissimilar state of no mind CHARALAMBIDES crawl out of
the sagebrush, a husband & wife team recently augmented by a
third member, their first record as a trio “UNKNOWN SPIN “
has them sounding like a bunch of backwoods primitives dosed on
infected mushrooms chiming out their arcane melodies melded from
guitar, pedal steel guitar & wordless vocals into long tangents
of improvised expressionism. At the same time rooted in the earth
& reaching for the celestial they explore a telepathic universe
of their own creation. I want to live there.
But when I’m kickin’ back with ma
ladee, upclose & personal, I reach for MESHELL NDEGEOCELLO “
COMFORT WOMAN “ an album that celebrates stoned love, sacred
& profane, the way Marvin & Al did it, you feel like you’re
making out with god.( which you are, but that’s another story
) In an age where female performers are pushed into the role of
slut or virgin, being a difficult woman who writes sings & plays
most of the instruments on her records Meshell has had an outlaw
career seemingly indifferent to trends or charts. Here she sings
of love, family, death, joy & the whole damn thing, quotes Bob
Marley in 2 songs & whispers, murmurs, slurs & talks her
way through a lush undergrowth of soul, funk. reggae & slowburn,
that works as a very personal statement of contented dissent.
Scott Walker recently described DAVID SYLVIAN
as having “chosen to live his life in a state of grace “
& in the course of his recorded career he has experimented with
a broad range of collaborators, leading us on a personal & spiritual
lyrical journey that culminated in his last release “Dead
Bees On A Cake “ a lush record that was like a devotional
prayer to his guru as much as to a lover. On “BLEMISH “
the first record on his Samhadi label Sylvian has stripped back
the sound to a spartan canopy of accompanying noises, bleeps, feedback,
improvised guitar & silence swarthed around his rich thick baritone
that literally throbs with emotion. There’s an intimate bleakness
about the sound, of profound sadness & loss, the lyrics giving
us fleeting glimpses into Sylvian’s emotional centre, the
record a map of his own circuitry, his nervous system, his voice
the breath, there are no beats. It sounds quite unlike any other
record you’ve heard, super high fidelity, super abstracted
& quite beautiful.
JOHN CALE has immense presence physically &
musically, he was only in the Velvet Underground Mark one for 2
albums but managed to drag Lou’s pop sensibilities into the
avant garde of dissonance & drone on tracks like European Son,
The Gift & Sister Ray creating a mythology & reputation
that has followed him ever since. But his solo career has been consistently
inconsistent, from early string experiments, a trio of albums on
Island Records that had him turn art college musicians like Eno
& Phil; Manzanera into slavering stripped down rockers, intensely
personal & beautifully sung discs like the classic “Songs
For A New Society “ to the rabid pitbull barks of “Sabotage
“, one of my top 20 great live albums list, through some embarrassingly
turgid misreadings & failed attempts at commerciality &
pseudo classical credibility. It’s tough to be a fan. I ‘ve
interviewed him & introduced him at a gig & was struck by
his size & gentlemanly demeanour but intimidated & invigorated
when watching him perform from close quarters, when from out of
the blue his deep soft burred baritone would be replaced by a powerful
savage beast that exploded out of his chest & into the microphone.
It was very impressive.
So it was with some trepidation that I tore the shrinkwrap off John
Cale’s new disc “HOBO SAPIEN “, the cover &
booklet show John trapped in a sealed off world, peering at himself
in a lab jar, laid out on a dissection table & squinting down
a microscope at himself. A metaphor for the album perhaps, but he
leavens his self-examination with literate lyrics that mention exotic
locales, art, literature & philosophy in nearly every song.
His voice is eloquently expressive, at times caressing the lyric,
at others a barely controlled rage & disgust colours his tone,
but all the time he is intensely present, expressing a world wonder
& weariness at the same time. Cale has produced seminal recordings
for Nico, The Stooges, Patti Smith, The Modern Lovers & Happy
Mondays amongst others, never imposing himself on the performance
but cultivating each performer’s own voice & here producer
Nick Franglen, one half of Lemon Jelly, aside from a couple of effective
sound effects, makes no attempt to mould Cale into anything other
than what he is, an adult evaluating himself & the world in
an entertaining & moving way. For grownups of any age.
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