Top Ten Albums 11/05/2015

ABBA:

From the bouncy flouncy Mamma Mia to the hands-off strut of So Long this album is a wall to wall monument to the apex of pop music as it was in the mid-seventies. The second language lyrics, while keeping to the contemporary top forty formula, occasionally reach the borders and gaze across them. But it's the whole package of what pours into your ears that counts here and it's constantly gorgeous with classically-trained arrangements that seem to both deepen the songs and tighten them for the pubescent target buyer. There's a LOT going on but it never feels cluttered or too busy. And then there are the vocals, whether cascading in massive chorus like Hey Hey Helen, poignant and solo like S.O.S. or the whole gamut like Mamma Mia, the double barreled force of the two A's pull you into the big bright centre like the sirens of the glitz eon that they were. And then there's S.O.S. a pop song that goes from aching loss to bopbop chorus to the huge grieving loneliness of the after-chorus ("when you're gone..."). Perfect pop as gracefully aged as The Supremes or the Beatles. Ok, maybe Bjorn should have left his lead vocal tracks for a solo effort. See also Benny's Intermezzo No. 1. Still, none of these break the flow to any serious degree. Even the cover art works: so much of this era's big rock bands crassing out with opulence this might have joined them but here it just looks like just rewards. Wish I'd heard it when I was a kid!

Kaleidoscope/Siouxie and The Banshees:

After two powerful proto-goth excursions with the first recording lineup, The Banshees continued, replacing the ship jumping guitarist and drummer with percussion master Budgie and what would become a string of guest guitarists including The Cure's Robert Smith. For this outing it was Magazine's John McGeoch who brought his sax along as well. While the Siouxie Sioux wail and bellow are still there to link this to the previous there is an added whisper delivered with a confidence to assure you that this is not the white hat team. There is a sense of standing back from the canvas and starting over here with synthesisers, acoustic guitars and reeds added. In fact there is very little of the punk guitar onslaught that drove the first two as, overall, brute force has been replaced with creeping intrigue and the moods of psychological horror movies. Happy House, Tenant, Christine tell of the danger in the walls. Hybrid is one of the most gruelling life-on-the-road dirges ever but it's also strangely beautiful. The big weird dune scape of Desert Kisses with its rising and falling wash of flanged guitars and slowly swinging drums is frozen to interplanetary levels by La Sioux's vocals which travel from a weary confession to a soaring falsetto. Red Light clicks and tolls darkly, telling of a day in a pornographer's studio (a sampled camera motor wind adding a chill of its own as part of the rhythm) as a single insistent minor figure belts on. It really wasn't all Flocks of Seagulls back then, y'know.

Quasimodo's Dream/The Reels:

This shouldn't have worked. None of The Reels' albums should have worked but all of them did. Wall to wall synthesisers might put it on the shelf along with the rest of the second wave synth pop pretenders except that all of this playing, whether it is or not, sounds live rather than programmed. There is an edginess to this you won't feel when listening to those others as the sheer song craft isn't reliant on the sonic setting. All of the vocal songs could be performed pleasurably on zithers if need be. The other thing is the melancholy. From the massive mindscape of the title track to the bouncy For All We Know these soul and jazz tinged pieces speak of a daily grind that won't be solved with a few singalongs (Dubbo Go Go might offer a clue or two) but there are moments on this platter that suggest maybe it could. The self-contradictions flow on and never were they more worrying while still being fun.

Damien: Omen II: A Black Mass/Jerry Goldsmith:

I don't often include film soundtrack albums which is a shame as I've been listening to them for decades. A far more effective accompaniment to creative work than most other kinds of music, film scores primarily emote, which is just what you need when writing or drawing.

Jerry Goldsmith had already demonstrated his greatness many times over but his choice during the first Omen film was to use the sound of the Catholic liturgy and put Hail Satan in instead of Ave Maria. That album doesn't work so well for listening as it's constantly getting interrupted by schmaltzier fare. Omen II, is no such beast (nyuck nyuck). It hits the ground at a gallop, using a pumping ostenato from Carl Orff and a menacing wail from the choir. And then, after the opening credits music it just keeps going, whispering, screaming, howling, even cawing like a raven here and there. Distinct from both the Gothery of 60s horror music and the nursery tinkle of the era of The Exorcist and Suspiria this is film music writ so large that it compels whole new movies when you listen with closed eyes. It's never pretty but, boy does it motivate.

White Album/The Beatles:

Been listening to this a lot lately as I'm finishing an album and this is one of my touchstones (yes, I do have more recent ones but this is timeless). I first heard it as a teenager and, while I had an idea about the fractious state the band was in and the common wisdom that it was a group of track of each fab backed by the others, it just sounded like a great album. It sill does. From the chunky parodic Back in the USSR to the big concrete miasma of Revolution #9 what I still hear is constant invention and rock music bliss. Simply one ot the best.



The Pearl/Harold Budd and Brian Eno:

As effortlessly beautiful as the second Ambient album from the same partnership. This time, while we start with emulations of nature, birdcalls and sunshine on water, darker clouds begin moving slowly overhead until by the end you're in the part of the horror movie where you don't know if you're safe or right next to the monster and if you and the monster are separate things. An important recommendation I can make for this album is that for a tract of slow instrumentals this one feels too short.





Twilight/The Handsome Family:

When the singing half of the husband and wife team that make up the Handsome Family objected to the label alt country he went further than just insisting they were country pure and simple he cited these as some of his favourite country albums: Beggar's Banquet, Rubber Soul. Add this expansiveness to the dreamy and sometimes nightmarish lyrics his wife supplies and you've got why the Handsome Family would work before you've heard a note. They don't care about their place on the genre spectrum, they express and it's usually with a a twang. Twilight kicks off with the big slow rock sound of Snow White Diner in which the irritated narrator gradually relaxes into the clattering environment after initially resisting it as a vehicular murder-infanticide has happened outside and two deaf women are laughing too loud at their own jokes. Cold, Cold Cold tells a genuinely spooky ghost story. The rest is a weave of hymns, dirges or upbeat hoedowns all of which hit you sideways yet still sound like the best country music you've heard since the greats of the seventies except none of that, mighty though it be, is ever about invisible birds or contains accurate descriptions of bipolar episodes.

In the Aeroplane over the Sea/Neutral Milk Hotel:

In a simliar vein to the Handsome Family, Neutral Milk Hotel mixes things up and keeps the narration strange and head turning. Images of domestic torture or the quite literally seedy end of sex mulch up with shivering descriptions of the Nazi death camps (there is a strong Anne Frank theme running through) and magnificent redemptive visions. Musically we wander in and out of a kind of late nineties indy folk with distorted acoustic guitars, the brass section from Satanic Majesties, a bagpipe instrumental (which is really rousing) and on and on. At the centre is Jeff Mangum's mind and voice variously twanging like a teenager from Alabama and wailing at the highest edge of his range like Syd Barret. The central epic O Comely starts out sounding like stream of consciousness but soon takes shape at the edge of our worries and grief, using impressions rather than hard statements, and takes us down to the bottom of a garden of borrowed light where the earth is always damp and abused. And it's fun. I can't pin down why, but it's fun.

Colossal Youth/Young Marble Giants:

Still one of the freshest albums and one of the few that is never unwelcome in my ears. Fifteen tiny pleas, life lessons and declarations of strength set to musical cameos that, while sounding naive, are never twee. Searching for Mr Right and Brand-New-Life tear hearts out yest Alison Statton's delivery never lifts above a hesitant coo. The spare arrangements seem to emerge from the pitch black surrounding the serious young band on the cover. Why does this work so well? I'll leave that as a recommendation.




Bach: the Greatest Hits Album/Various:

Yes, the whole packaging concept has the scream of early seventies and a desperate bid to get groovy young things to dig J.S.B. But I wasn't a groovy young thing, I was a snobbish pubescent git who had destroyed the first LP he ever bought because he hadn't realised it was two sides of classical music with a drumkit (I bent the vinyl until it broke and buried it under the herb garden near the incinerator where I threw the pieces of the torn sleeve). This broke all the bounds of decency with orchestrations of organ works, piano performances of works written for harpsichord and tracks from Wendy (then Walter) Carlos' synthesiser arrangements. It took the first few seconds of the symphony orchestra playing the famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor for me to re-evaluate on the fly. Not my favourite version but the sheer ingenuity of how the arranger had assigned different voices for the range of a pipe organ and find all the colours anew completely disarmed me. The Carlos Switched On Bach versions of things like the sprightly third movement of the 3rd Brandenburg Concerto brought the dizzying counterpoint of that extraordinary music to life all over again. And the piano pieces?" Shoulda said. Glenn Gould. Bach not only lived beyond the original presentation, he thrived and grew. Later, as listened with a keen interest to the results of the growing purism in the performance and recording of baroque music I couldn't help remembering that this adventure (which didn't need a drumkit so sound fresh) opened my mind more widely than the often staid archeological efforts of the Gobels and Hogwoods could ever offer. It was a greatest hits because it was made for fans.