Top 10 Albums 19032014

Becoming X - Sneaker Pimps: It had to happen. As the Bristol crews who innovated trip hop into existence took their places at the top of the non-rock non-dance pyramids smaller outfits jumped up for attention, appropriating the new synthesis into what were otherwise good but generic rock songs. The best of these was Sneaker Pimps, a Hartlepool duo who realised that the fastest way of getting noticed with all that great cinematica they were cooking up was to get a sassy femme fatale in front of the mic. Kelli Dayton was all smirk and smoulder giving the earnestness of the Year 12 sex of the lyrics a real sense of autobiography. By turns shrewish (Spin Spin Sugar) girlish (6 Underground) or late night beautiful like Neneh Cherry (Post Modern Sleaze) Dayton played all the characters but remained recognisably herself. The musical set dressing remains impressive. Procressed beats blend with raw ones, guitar through tap dances of pedals play over double bass and a city's worth of murmurs, car screeches and atmosphere lays the ground on the street and in the gushing filth below it. And it goes down like dessert. They fired her after the first album, prefering the wobbly vocal stylings of one of the duo. No, I've never heard anything after the debut all the way through either.

The Great Annihilator - Swans: After the debacle of Bill Laswell turning them into icecream Swans recovered with two of their most convincing post brut era pieces yet. Great Annihilator stretched the new textures of Love of Life and White Light into the great cinema of what would be two more studio albums and a swag of pulverising live sets. The brutality has been sculpted into real music noir. After an exuberant intrumental fades with a loop of children laughing which grows odd with repetition I Am the Sun seems to lunge from a vaccuum only to be sucked violently back in, eventually featuring what almost sounds like a gang of schoolkids repeating Gira's chaotic manifesto.
Elsewhere the delicate and eerie Blood Promise tells of something we probably don't want to know about in the kind of epic background I imagine Roy Batty heard when he was at the Orion Gate. Celebrity Lifestyle drives like the hit single it wasn't allowed to be. My Buried Child pits a breathy horny 6/8 ryhthm against a terrifying description of the sexual act. Killing for Company is a dirge in horror and understanding of serial killer Dennis Nilsen which takes on one of the saddest and scariest choral passages I've heard in a rock song. This is a long album and I usually take a break after the uplifting instrumental Warm with its insistent fourths and girlish la-la vocal from Jarboe. Even with an intermission this is a long and varied album that feels all of a piece and it's one of Swans' most accomplished and accessible.

Nouvelle Vague: Mid-noughties and the listening was stale as last year's hot cross buns. Rock was cut by the metre and poured out in a huge textureless mass from the likes of JJJ all day and everyday. Bands sped down increasingly silly vortices of self definition and created ever more meaningless categories. The thing was to throw your hands up like you were hailing a taxi and just call the lot post-modern and get some more coronas from the bar. Then came Nouvelle Vague. They were French which made the name funnier still. Nouvelle Vague was the term applied to the iconoclastic young directors emerging in France in the late fifties who created new aesthetics from a field of broken rules. In English it means New Wave which was the term appropriated from the above application and applied to the music emerging from the British punk movement which not only challenged the same dinosaurs that punk did but punk itself. New Wave in Portugese is Bossa Nova, the dance craze of the fifties which tore up the floors of the world's clubs with its easy mood and heavy suggestion. So, why not find the musicality in 70s/80s British New Wave classics and do them Bossa Nova style. The French aspect is already there a couple of times over. Two middle aged Parisian clubbers amassed a choir's worth of comely filles de croogne to handle the likes of Joy Division and the Dead Kennedys and guess what? It works a treat. Apart from a smattering of jokey takes the experiment reveals not just the musical nature of the old Brit songs but adds a cool cinema to them, creating a set of cover versions that outdo the entire back catalogue of 90s tribute albums by daring to respect the music through reinvention. This beautiful album was scorned by a lot of people of my vintage who remembered the originals and thought it was a long pisstake. Nothing of the sort. It's just music. Don't believe me? Listen to the original and the NV versions of In a Manner of Speaking. Both carry their beauty and sadness to different effect, like two differently staged Shakespeare plays neither needs to be definitive. A masterpiece.

Twilight - Handsome Family: From the thick rock of Snow White Diner and its view of heart rending murder suicide from a clacking cafe to the eerie lilt about atrocity of Passenger Pigeons the jaunt of All the TV's in Town with its psychotics in the park and planes streaming silently above the genuinely chilling ghost story of Cold Cold Cold the weird hymn of I Know You Are There to .. well to all the rest of it Brett Sparks' haunting croon and Texan twang intoning Rennie Sparks' extraordinary lyrics (which can go from laugh out loud funny to heartstopping in the same song) take us to the America of Diane Arbus and Cormack McCarthy and whatever alarming thing Rennie made of seeing a catepillar that morning. There is no contemporary country music like the Handsome Family. It has an address but no nation, mental states but no sentimental ones, the warmth of church singing and the breathless despair of abandonment. Never have steel guitars, banjos or Lone Star voices made my hair stand on end like this.

The Suburbs - Arcade Fire: I resisted this when it came out but the more I heard of it the more I wanted it. A set of songs from amiable to serious and affecting tell the tale of a war in the west. The good part about that is that you never need to know that but if you do you'll be glad you found out. the mood is a kind of Alan Parsons Project without the drivel. You have heard all of these textures before but unlike most post 80s rock bands here the derivation is defeated by the style and invention applied to it.



big hits. [high tide and green grass] - The Rolling Stones: The overhang of Fabs vs Stones favoured the former in my household growing up. Both bands were absent from my primary memory, turning up only in the hits and memories moments of local radio and the memories of elder siblings. One day I got home from school and bummed around as usual with the radio on when an incredible rock song burst out of the afterschool dross. It drove with a constant engine, howled and groaned, noisy but compelling. My only thought was that I was ever in a rock band we would have to sound like that. Luckily it was back announced as 19th Nervous Breakdown. Cut to the week of my birthday that year. My sister Anita took me to Ken Hurfords Imports around the corner where I found this compilation in US quality deep dish vinyl. Nita asked gravely if I really wanted that one and I insisted. I got it home, put it on and blissed out.

From the mid 60s this compilation pushes the band as prime rockers growing out of their roots, alternating the roar of a Paint it Black with the Beatley strings of As Tears Go By. But most of what's on show is big driving harder pop, huge guitar tone, tireless lead voice from the young Jagger whose contempt for the world around him is only challenged by his desire for its affection. For the first time on a proper stereo (ie not the transistor radio in my room) I heard Satisfaction, Get Off Of My Cloud, The Last Time and the mighty 19th Nervous Breakdown in full force. It seems strange now to think of the Stones reputation prior to the big four albums as that of Beatle copyists. Yes there are exotic instruments here and there and an adherence to pop song craft but the sitar of Paint it Black is nothing like the one in Norwegian Wood, the Fabs didn't appropriate Dylan the way the Stones do with Satisfaction and they would never have allowed something like Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby to fall into such beautiful chaos as it does. Before they were the greatest rock band in the world they a tight, clever and essential one with only the biggest band in the world keeping them from the top. If you only ever get one compilation of the Rolling Stones, try this. It will keep coming back and never outstay its welcome.

Wilder - The Teardrop Explodes: While I found most of what I heard of this Liverpool outfit uninteresting this album brought what I did like about them to the fore and provided not tracks I'd like with a begrudging favour but ones that stopped me in my tracks. The best thing I noticed was the abandonment of the white boy funk in the rhythm section and short repetitive vocal melodies that made them barely distinguishable from Echo and the Bunnymen (who did that better). The retention of Julian Cope's whimsical melancholy also serves and what we get is a mix of glorious Summer of Love joy and expansion in Passionate Friend, Syd Barrett in quiet post shock lucidity in Tiny Children or the epic Copey in full magnificence with The Great Dominions which begins with a heartbeat which surrenders to a looped synth and distant clean guitar and emphatic tympani and Cope singing at the top of his game about something very serious and hopeless: Mummy I've been fighting again.... Great psychedelia nods to the 60s rather than stealing from it and sounds necessary to its own time. Well, this did but stretches to this one and well beyond.

Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band - The Beatles: This one used to be the Citizen Kane of rock albums, topping best-of lists without apparent examination. Eventually the title vanished from critics' lists and listeners' polls and common taste shifted from it to its predecessor, Revolver. Proportionally, Revolver is a bigger leap from what came before it than Sgt. Pepper.

Nevertheless what Revolver doesn't have to the same degree is Pepper's sense of moment. Even the opening of the sounds of a big important gig at the Albert Hall. The audience fades up. The orchestra tunes. Suddenly the band, sounding more epic than ever before with a guitar onslaught hammering a big progression with just enough breakup to sound unmistakably rocky but too gigantic to just be another pop outfit. Paul's vocal soars over a tide of screaming audience (lifted from one of the Hollywood Bowl gigs recorded a few years before). The chorus blares out like a fanfare over a big brass arrangment which sound both fustian and archly contemporary. Paul comes back to announce the next song and it starts without a gap.

Everything sounds bigger and more colourful than ever before. If they'd been heading towards albums being more important to them and concentrating on the possibilities of the recording studio as a compositional aid they made it here. It just sounds so mighty that the more modest pop of the band before it seems to dissolve. I can't quite imagine how it would have sounded to anyone who got hooked on She Loves You only four years before having this majesty coming out of the speakers.

And it doesn't stop. Some of the best lead and ensemble vocals they ever did finish the complexities of the recordings like gold leaf. Beneath them is a world of texture and colour that is not always easy to identify but always intriguing. Holding all of it up like marble columns is McCartney's bass that favours clear lines that are both thumping and sprightly. They keep the sense of the band through the most adventurous arrangements and add an odd stateliness to the album.

The other sense not forgotten here but heightened is that of fun. This platter moves. Where all the major UK psychedelia outings got bogged down here and there with directionless experimentation you get singalongs and a whole new world of invention. Best album ever? Who cares? This works. And keeps working.

Diamond Dogs - David Bowie: Alan Yentob's unwittingly effective documentary about Bowie, Cracked Actor was done at the time where the Ziggy block was dismantling into the Young Americans/Thin White Duke block and we got to see a transitional form (also it led to the casting of Div in The Man Who Fell to Earth). Here was discussed a very little of the pre-Ziggy time and concentrated on the new metamorphosis (scenes of the recording of Young Americans are pretty exciting in retrospect). The one album that seemed only represented by a few screenshots and a demonstration of cut-up method (after the fact) was this one and to this day it's the 70s original Bowie work that people need reminding of, one step above Pinups. But I was intrigued as I found the cover frightening and heard that it was a real move on from Ziggyworld, however much it still looked like Zig. There were two of its tracks on the magnificent changesonebowie compilation which nailed it. I needed the whole thing.

Late 1977 I took the gatefold sleeve home from Chandlers and shivered a little at the opening wolf wail and the scary phased voice telling us about the devastated city in the year of the Diamond Dogs. Title track with the audience sound and the yelled intro: "This ain't rock and roll, this is genocide" which I always heard as "this is David Bowie" (Bow rhyming with Now). But instead of the sharp bright riff of Rebel Rebel coming off that song everything sank beneath the sleazy rock of the title track to a decadance so present you can feel it stick to the soles of your shoes. The Sweet Thing mini-cycle takes us into some nihilistic hedonism and some of Bowie's most impressive vocals, going from a subterranean rumble in the opening couplet to the anguished Vegas tenor of the verse before it all freezes back down to the shivering chorus. A brief change of pace different enough to get its own name (Candidate) speaks of deals more fevered and troublingly organised sexual community before collapsing back down to the sleaze of the opening passages with some diseased sax notes and a pulsing beat on the piano, taken up by the bass and drums and smeared with delicious guitar distortion and THAT'S where the Rebel Rebel riff comes in, shining like sunshine after a nuclear winter, pur bright teenage trash with a two note riff that you just have to keep licking and a vocal of troubled young ones. Sixteen year olds can live in this song without coming out for days.

Side 2 on the vinyl starts the cycle of what remained of Bowie's project of making a musical version of George Orwell's 1984 (the album was recorded in 1974). It's fragmented but it works. Rock and Roll With Me is like a celebration of Winston and Julia abandoning themselves to each other away from the constant surveillance. We Are the Dead directly quotes the novel and tells in whimpers and whispers about the love that if uttered resulted in torture. 1984 comes on like the theme from Shaft and recalls the excitement of the revolution that led to the boot on the human face world of O'Brien and Room 101. Big Brother begins like totalitarian architecture but after the slogans freezes into a hate week chant that can only end in a repetition to a fade.

Unlike concept albums from the time like Genesis' Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Lou Reed's Berlin or the later War of the Worlds, Diamond Dogs brought to its tales of devastation, decadance and despair under opression a kind of British realism that felt cinematic and experienced. That's it, unlike Gabriel crooning about the slipper men or Lou snarling (or the completely bloody awful Jeff Wayne effort) Diamond Dogs sounds lived in and unlike all those others you can listen to all of it at once without skipping. Given the material I can think of no higher accolade.

 The Serpent's Egg - Dead Can Dance: Before I heard this album in the 80s I thought the only music that ever approached this was thrown at the screens of the then fashionable sword and sorcery film genre. This came from landscapes darker than Tolkein and more gloriously luminous than the first chapter of a sci-fi dytopia, The Serpent's Egg arrests the ear from its first seconds and leaves the listener both exhausted and craving more. Brendan Perry's strongly masculine vocals can be let down by his attempt to impress intellectually which is why Lisa Gerrard's Amazonian warrior singing works better in the setting for its glossolalian sonority which allows you to more fully imagine what delights or nightmares have inspired this powerful and seductive music. Never gets old and won't sound old in hundreds of years.

Peter Gabriel's Peter Gabriel (the Third One): I Liked Him When He Was a Fugitive

 Genesis were before my time but I tried to get into them after finding out that the guy who did this video used to be their singer.

I liked it because while it was mainstream rock it was funny and imaginative. Great chunky riff and no guitar solo to ruin it. When I found out he'd just knocked off from leading a big prog rock dinosaur band I was even more impressed.

I didn't get the album that song was on as I heard it was stylistically all over the place. The next album came out the year after and I tried that, hearing it was more disciplined and less commercial. It was. None of it sounded like prog. It was stark and depressing. The synths sounded like Brian Eno rather than Emerson Lake and Palmer and the guitar was subdued power chords and the weird little whines of Robert Fripp (who indeed played on it). I played it on a mild spring evening and when it came to the gentle but troubling Mother of Violence I heard the lawn sprinklers hiss outside and the two sounds combined in an eerie blend. I haven't been tempted to listen to the album since those days but the memory is a pleasant one.

I did eventually get the first album and apart from a very few tracks the thing was unlistenably over produced. There's a little block harmony that stabs out of Slowburn: "but don't get me wrong (aaaah!) I'll be strong" that could have come from a Toto song. It was 1978 and the punk statutes were still in force. That had fallen away like baby fat on the second one. So it looked at least like the guy had learned a thing or two.

Two years after that I was in Brisbane living with my brother's psycho marriage and keeping to myself, writing handwritten letters to my friends back home about how horrible the world had turned. I'd send and receive about two per week. My favourites came from my old friend Win who matched my cartoon versions of events with his own and our absurdist humour gave a lot of comfort. One phrase he wrote I remember really bolstering my resolve went: "why does your sister in law scream about the price of eggs when she doesn't even eat them." That really was a comfort. And it was Win who sent one of the best things I've ever got in the post. It wasn't a letter but came in a chunkier padded bag.

I tore it open. A cassette. I didn't even check the writing on it before it was in the player while I read the letter. He'd remembered my birthday. It was June and so colder than normal. I made one of my long black Prince of Wales teas and hunched on my bed with the letter and the sound.

The first track had this big clunking percussion which sounded like someone moving a piano down a staircase. Whistles in the dark and an oafish whispered vocal. "I am the intruder..." it breathed. It was creepier than any movie I'd ever seen and sounded like it came from one. What?

Peter Gabriel's third album was just called Peter Gabriel same as the first and second. I thought that was cheeky. I'd already seen the vid for his single Games Without Frontiers which I thought was great. The video for it showed the same kind of imagination as Modern Love a few years before, mixing a kind of setpiece in the dinner party where the uppercrust guests talked to each other in complete ignorance of PG ranting into their ears and images from It's a Knockout which the song referenced in conjunction with the late Cold War politics it targeted. No Self Control was intense, a fevered vocal over restless marimbas. Kate Bush screamed in the distance and in the big noisy chorus. Family Snapshot was a shifting interior monologue about Lee Harvey Oswald.

Quite a lot of it was a slightly edgy reading of the predigested post punk that other old guarders were doing. The standout tracks were well above this and, apart from the puzzling muzak sax solo of Start, I happily left the whole thing on as it kept the screaming futile arguments that were happening outside my bedroom door. I hadn't brought any of my records down and there was nothing to play them on anyway and on the tough love $25/week my parents gave me to live on I wasn't about to buy any discs or player. I was alone.

Actually, I wasn't alone. While school had started feeling stark and unfriendly I quickly folded in and was part of its social realm within a month. At home, my brother's marriage involved a screaming match every morning and that was just the adults. My brother and his wife hated each other. The child between them somehow made it through this (a lot of assumptions there). My sister in law is  the most contentious person I have ever met. She fought with everybody and violently. She constantly accused my brother of keeping money from her (probably true) and reminding him of an affair so constantly you'd think he was still deep in it (definitely untrue) and anything else she could think of. The only reasons she stopped fighting with the other brother who lived there were because he fought back harder and eventually fell off Mount Coot-Tha on his oversized motorbike. For an upper middle class family that all sounds quite white trash, doesn't it? Well, it felt like it, too.

When it came my turn to own some blame she staged a situation...

I've written the account of this twice and I was shaking both times. All I say is that this incident ended in false witness, accusation and (most difficult for me to relive) my acquiesence. Now I step back and think of it, the lesson from it is never to accept undue blame, especially not to placate anyone. Also, all I really need to recall is that, years later, in a different location far from where I was, her neglect led to something far far worse. The solid, unbending hatred I feel for her knows that she has to live with that other thing. FOR. EV. ER.

So Win's letters were a great comfort. And when I and the others around me at school thawed out I rightly found comfort in the world beyond the walls and grew to enjoy my first year out of home. But there within those confines, that voice that told of torture and inner violence felt more like home than the place where I slept.

I saw Win every holiday. At one point he was even thinking of moving in. Those plans went fuzzy and were dropped (Dad's stern response to this was almost a relief after what I had grown used to) but we stayed friends and partied when we met.

And then the contact stopped. By the end of Uni the only time I'd see anyone from Townsville was when I went back up for Christmas and I recall even the letters trailing off. The year after uni was mostly a fun share house situation. We even got to know the girl sharehouse next door. It was like a sitcom. There were conflicts (see the post about the Capella Correlli) but mostly it was creative, productive and fun. And then one day I got a telegram which chilled me a little.

I threw it out decades ago so I'll have to paraphrase: "Arriving Saturday 8pm Cindy Lauper stop"

I didn't know anyone who would joke like that. At the end of my B.A. I was a self-designed sophisticate and except for the reprobates I shared with everone else I knew was a self-designed sophisticate, too. The lot of us were so incapable of unscripted humour that we would shudder at such an incursion.

So I ignored it.

Come Saturday, deep into a night of drinking and jamming and jibing and stuff we heard a thudding on the stairs and watched expectantly as the door opened and Win entered, alsmost collapsing under the weight of the ton of luggage he variously held or had tied to his body. He gathered himself and found a chair.

All of us knew Win, he was deeply set into the social whirl of the contemporary deep north. But no one had seen him for a while. We looked at him in silence and he looked back at us. We'd had a string of transient northerners through the place for months. They were all travellers and few stayed longer than a couple of days. Two weeks later, Win was still there staring out in front of him like a possum in a torch beam, saying weird things.

And he was getting taken by my brother (another one) at any opportunity that involved a night out or drinking. I carefully avoided joining them. Stephen was incapable of restraint once he'd been allowed to do something and was impossible to deal with. Meanwhile, Win was bleeding out.

At one point I wanted to show my old friend the second hand record shop I went to if only to see a little of the same spark we'd shared at school when we'd been awed by a musical discovery. He seemed so fragile it was hard to do anything with him. He perked a little at the Record Market, picking up a few old imports. Then when I went to the bank he tried to get money out of me, something completely invented. It wasn't much, a token of the plunder Stephen had conned (not itself amounting to a fortune but significant at our shared scale).

I tried to reason with Win but there was nothing in his dead blue eyes that suggested he was aware of it. He was just transferring one sin to someone else because ... well, because. I acquiesced and took him to the White Chairs for a drink so we could cool down about it. While I was at the bar he murmured something that I took to mean he'd find a table but when I turned around with the beer he was gone. (Remember that stuff about the life lesson of never accepting undue blame? It works if you aren't crushed by the sadness of the situation.)When I got back home he was out the back with the others, talking with more spirit than he'd shown all that time. When housemate Rick came in I told him what had happened and he said Win hadn't mentioned it. Finally, toward evening as I was changing the record Win came up, handed me my money back and said: "sorry, I was in a bad mood."

I accepted the note in silence. A day later he announced he'd be moving on, with a forced smile as though sharing our relief. He came back a week later and moved back in, having never asked once if he could move in at all. If you're young enough you will close something like this with cruelty. That's what we did. Rick and I went about the pasta ritual, chopping and preparing, boiling water and nurturing oil, bay leaf, mince, olives etc into a rich red sauce. This we did in front of Win who by now was reduced to barking out odd non sequiturs between great chasm-like stares. He sat at the table while we jibed each other and listened to whatever was blaring from the stereo. As planned we doled out the pasta between the two of us and in showy ignorance took it out to my balcony to eat.

Twenty minutes later he was packing his junk into a taxi and out of our lives.


A year later I was going to the shop and happened to look behind me and saw a figure come down the ski ramp curve of my street. A young male. He stopped as though he had seen me and though he was too far away he seemed to be looking at me.  I turned and continued but couldn't shake it and checked again. Again he stopped. I turned back for home and waited by the mail box for Win to catch up.

"How about a coffee?" I asked.

"That's what I'm here for."

None of the others were there which made it easier. He sat at the table while I put the coffee on. We said nothing at all while the drip filter bubbled and rasped. Our eyes met a couple of times and there was a sense that there was nothing to say but this was without tension. We just recognised it. Finally, he did speak.

"I left a few things here. Could I pick them up?"

"Of course!" I said too loudly and got up too quickly.

We went into the middle bedroom where he'd been but it was empty. I then took him downstairs to the room under the house in case they'd been put there. I tried the cupboard but found nothing. When I looked up he had gone.

My sister later commented on this, saying that it sounded as though he'd been profoundly hurt somewhere along the line and it made me think beyond the initial memory of his odd tense staring and silence. I went and found the tape and played it to the end.

That cassette of the Gabriel album was too short for one side. It ran out halfway through the seemingly inconsequential Lead a Normal Life and never got to Biko, the anthem most people remember it for. For me, though, the quiet whimper of the end of the tape feels like the legacy of its time as I experienced it: big and loud and troubling and then a sigh and then silence. A bed of marimbas, cooler and comforting this time play a pleasant cooing figure. Gabriel's voice enters: "It's nice here -" and the tape cuts out. No resolution, no anthem of defiance to follow, just the bright gold of Brisbane afternoon light and "it's nice here".  I gazed at the wall for a few seconds, flipped the tape out of the player and dropped it in the bin.

Top 10 110214

Kaleidoscope - Siouxsie and the Banshees: You're meant nominate the first album, The Scream, if any Banshees title makes the list. It's mix of punk snottiness and musical sophistication packed the punch of the attendant blend of the London of John Webster and the 1976 garbage strike. But to my ear, this third effort found the band free of the uniform but still pressing forward into what would soon be known as goth but for the moment went happily unclassified. Leslied guitars piping a minor key birdsong, distant whistling and the slightly offpitch humming and oddly busy drumming that built Happy House didn't seem to come from anywhere but scary movies. Siouxsie's lonely owl hoot and curlew whistle take us into the fade and a night that will feel eternal. That's just the first four minutes. Tenant broods, hi hats and dark bassy synth. Hybrid begins with an air of resignation, leading somewhere difficult, wounded saxophone trading off note wails with Siouxsie. I have never stopped to find out what this is about but it always fills me with the same sadness as anything crushing and inevitable. Christine with a humming bass and crisp acoustic guitar and another saddening vocal from Sioux from another dark room in a movie. Desert Kisses floats on heavy waves of synth and processed guitar, Siouxsie sighing through another tale of wrong. Red Light freezes its pornography rooms with a steady dark stepping, the rhythm aided by the click and wheeze of a camera motor wind and the vocal rising from a Dietrich croon to an angered wail. Neither before nor since did this unit come up with anything so accomplished, so unsettlingly light and nasty, so arresting and so saddening.

In a Silent Way - Miles Davis: At the other end of the 60s Miles and a new crew play one song per side. Delicious grooves by restless percussion and keyboards and Miles coming in like Gideon distant but gigantic. Sudden edits take us from moments of exhaustion to bright new paths. It's long and at some point it just ends but it always still feels like too little. An inspiration for the great local improv trio The Necks. No surprises there.

The Necks - Drive By: Thinking of the last one made me think of this one. Gently insistent percussion brings a softly rising bass to the surface and a languid piano figure follows. It all changes without you noticing. Spoken word samples mutter into either channel and then fall back beneath the swell. You can either concentrate on it or let it bear you as you drift. Both work.

 



Quasimodo's Dream - The Reels: Australian post punk was as rich a vein of exploration as the sounds coming from the U.K. There was no uniform nor primer, you did what you were inspired to. This second album from the demons of Dubbo remains not just their best but the apex of the Australian scene. From the bright pop of Colourful Clothes through the breezy instrumental Smokey Dawson Show to the mighty architectural beauty and epic melancholy of the title track, nothing else comes close.

 

Remain in Light - Talking Heads: I'm still a little afraid of The Overload, the landscape sized stasis and severe drone of the vocals coupled with the disjointed lyric give it the same unnerving feel as looking at one of De Chirico's night landscapes. I have always found funk easy to resist but here it's frozen solid and put to a travelogue of other influences and mental states in the lyrics. From the spooky desperate monologue of Listening Wind to the joyous estrangement of Once in a Lifetime. One to leave on.

 

Ocean Rain - Echo and the Bunnymen: After their first three platters of operatic doom the Rabbitohs came up with their most varied set yet. The Spector-scaled Killing Moon starts off with a delicious arch chorus and continues through smooth pop thills like Silver or Seven Seas to the epic title track whose melody alone somehow evokes every atmospheric seastory I've ever read. Their last great one is a more durable than the angst of the others which can get cloying and bratty. Here it's great writing, playing and singing.

Second Annual Report - Throbbing Gristle: I knew about musique concrete, John Cage and the whole avant gardist shower but nothing prepared me for the cheek and violence of TG. Synthesisers dub effects and terrifying monologues that actually seem to cause pain. Unpleasant listening but it opened doors.

Magical Mystery Tour - The Beatles: In which the fabs manage to sound both exploratory and firmly mainstream. Over a busy bed of twirling tape manipulations, radio broadcasts and whatever else they came across the Beatles deliver a set of perfectly contemporary pop songs about going on trips, Lewis Carol's walrus, being lost, flying and the village schizophrenic. The production is thick and orchestral and always on the verge of trippy. Usually unsung tracks Flying (great instrumental of big guitars through amp tremolo, organ and mellotron) and George's three in the morning slow-down ode to perdition Blue Jay Way. The original side two was all singles and b-sides but what singles and b-sides. Huge, brash Hello Goodbye, the flavoursome drugdrag of Strawberry Fields, the dazzling city morning of Penny Lane, the cool and funny Baby You're a Rich Man and the big summer anthem of All You Need is Love. Nothing says 1967 in swinging London so much as this except maybe The Stones' Satanic Majesties.

Blue Wonder Power Milk - Hooverphonic: I bought the debut of this Belgian duo plus changable singer in 97 because I wanted more Portishead until the next Portishead. I got one song which was a clear tribute and a host of others which went off in a completely different direction. This second album ought to suffer from the transition from one vocalist to the next but that ends up as one of its strengths. Some tracks have Lisje on lead tonsils, others have the incoming Geike and the rest are voiced by the lads themselves in a kind of whispering Fleming learning Anglais. This serves to present the set as a unified front of high pop sensibility and melancholy cinema. Battersea's lush strings and helium vocal singing images of a breakup administered by a dark manipulator who terrifies the narrator. One Way Ride glitters with synthesisers from old stereo demonstration records, a cor anglais from a 50s muzak LP and a whispered vocal. Someone is puzzled. Dictionary starts with the bell like keys of a two chord figure from a suspense film. Vocals are whispered but fresh rather than sinister. Club Montepulciano  breezes cool and drunken with cocktail names and characters so relaxing they fall asleep. And more. The mood shifts. The vocals change. The lyrics are range from naive to plaintive and you start to feel like you're watching the best French language movie ever made as Jeunet, Godard, Besson and Chabrol take turns at seducing you from the screen. Out Of Tune has a breathy wonder that I remember afresh every time I hear it and Eden's French horn figure melts my ears long enough for Geike to enter with her big sexy breathy sadness. I can never get sick of this album.

In The Aeroplane Over the Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel: I shouldn't like this album. It's made by a band around a magnetic central figure who are the type who change instruments every song when they play live just so you get to hear how crappy they can sound when they want to. But there is a strange confluence of eccentricity, melodism and eclectictricity in the approach to these songs which, when you listen to the words can make you cry or shiver. Jeff Mangum's writing, while his melodies return too often to the same figures, is like the best of David Lynch's imagery, short of total whimsy but long dropped overcontrol. From the opening track that sounds like a warm nostalgic thing until you notice lines about mum driving forks into dad's chest. The quiet and sinister O Comely, swinging between major and minor without formal modulation, the lines crammed with syllables as though turned musical from a rambling confession, Mangum's frequent springs to the height of his treble stave is like Syd Barrett without the affectation. "Your father made foetuses with flesh licking ladies ... smelling of semen all under the garden was all that you were needing ..." And through the album's obligatory Anne Frank reference we get to the coda: "Goldaline my dear we will fold and freeze  together far away from here there is sun and spring and green forever but now we move to feel
for ourselves inside some strangers stomach place your body here let your skin begin to blend itself with mine." Holy fuck! But somehow this album continues to comfort me. I have absolutely no idea why.

Top 10 Albums 28/01/14

I started this list and realised that all of the choices were albums I listen to all the way every time. No favourite tracks here, more soundtracks for occasions or the ol' quotidian.


Ambient 1 Music for Airports - Brian Eno: A series of sparse piano and mellotron themes loop until they start going out of synch and providing chance harmonies. After a few iterations (all of which sound like their own tracks) we are treated to a beautiful warm synthesiser version. I used to walk home after a night visiting friends or float away on it while the endone put some neural distance between me and my post op leg in 2012 and these days whenever I need to concentrate. I never get sick of it.

Ross Edwards/Symphony No. 3 (Da Pacem Domine): One of my first cds ever, it replaced one of my last tapings of the radio. This gentle plaintive theme builds to a gigantic climax before retreating back into something like acceptance. Unofficially for the sufferers of AIDS, seldom was such grave music used in celebration of life.

 




XX: I first heard this shy sounding UK band as a broadcast of a live show on 3RRR. At one point the make singer murmured, "fuck, it's hot," and transported this lonely cool sound through the heatwave I was escaping by lying in the dark of my loungeroom. I bought the album soon after. It's highly derivative (particularly of the Young Marble Giants) but has a quiet insistance that gets past all that early on.

 



Evol - Sonic Youth: Turn it on. Leave it on. SY's masterpiece, IMHO, the one that provided them with decades of more of the same. This is from when it wasn't. A cinematic journey through mental states and emotions, never afraid to get creepy, with each side of the LP ending in an endless grooveloop, it felt like falling into the Harkonnen planet in Dune.

The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society: Every single song is so good that the album all but protests if you try to stop it.

White Album - The Beatles: Often my fave fabs outing this double presents no problem at all in my hearing the lot at one sitting. This despite my disdain for some of the tracks and indifference to others. The whole creates a constantly shifting soundscape made out of great rock music until you get to the rock song that turned into a great soundscape, Revolution 9. Even when it mushes out at the very end it just feels complete. From the chunky rock of Back in the USSR to the sinister Happiness is a Warm Gun, through the singsong satire of Piggies or all out metal nightmare of Helter Skelter, and through so much more, you get the result of a few weeks spent in meditation in India. Wonder how serene those mantra whispering retreats were.

Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me soundtrack - Angelo Badalamenti: From the lilting jazzy sax playing under the starless synthesised sky of the titles, the psycho bebop rap, the metal clang and fragile beauty of the quieter moments, this highly evocative score suggests even more worlds than the hi calorie imagination of the movie it served. Always aches a little to know the final track has started.

Dummy - Portishead: From the time my first full hearing rendered the heatwave cool and mysterious to now I travel with this album along roads and landscapes not always pleasant but forever intriguing.

 









Singing Bones - The Handsome Family: Not necessarily my favourite songs from the Albuquerque Two but as a run of musical thoughts and textures, Brett's Grand Canyon baritone takes us through the shviery pictures of The Forgotten Lake to the reprise of the hymnlike Should the World End in Ice we are taken through the funny and freaky world of Rennie's mind. More than all the other albums this one rewards continuous play.

The Doors: The debut platter from the LA foursome blossomed in the first flush of hippy but couldn't have been less peace and love. When Morrison gets close with white boy blues he uses his tongue. While it took me a while of listening to allow that into my ears when I did this album became a continuous player. From the erectile blues through Sinatra like croons about masturbation fantasy, wild sex trips like Light My Fire that threw a few memento mori lines into the mix, through the icy End of the Night and finally arriving at the big beautiful and scary opera of The End, The Doors is of its time and one of the strangest wallflowers of its mainstream. Play it, Sam, play all of it!

Top 10 Albums 21/01/2014

This Year's Model - Elvis Costello: Caustic reports from the human swell spat into the microphone over something that sounds like 1965 but feels like 1978. Fave track: You Belong to Me







 

Station to Station - David Bowie: From the epic lumbering nightmare juggernaut of the title track, to the cool Gregorian funk, skyscraping prayer, horror bubblegum, and mighty pathos, this is frequently my favourite Bowie outing of all. Fave track: Wild is the Wind

Debut - Lamb: In the high tide of 90s electronica this Mancunian duo added song craft to the breakbeats and made something new and engaging. Didn't last long but it lasts all through this one. Fave track: Gorecki

Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols: Changed my life with its sheer force, cheek and fury and bade me sever the ties to the traditions of my older siblings as well as mainstream culture in general. Still love it just as a rock album. Fave track: Holidays in the Sun

The Kick Inside - Kate Bush: I was 16 when it was new and I found the spookiness of the lyrics and strong melodism as powerful as any punk. There was great light in the quiet moments. Fave track: L'amour Looks Something Like You

Let it Bleed - The Rolling Stones: At a time when the only Stones stuff I liked was their mid 60s pop era I was in a situation where I had to do a lot of waiting (film set 1982). The farmhouse we stayed in had a small record stack from which I chiefly remember Monty Python's Contractual Obligation and this which was a revelation. From the eerie guitar play of Gimme Shelter to the shivering swell of Can't Always Get as the choir comes in, this is my favourite of the big four. Fave track: Midnight Rambler

Wilder - The Teardrop Explodes: Of the early 80s UK acts with big voices and exploratory lyrics I easily favoured TTE for their high melodism and non-slavish links back to their 60s inspirations. Fave track: The Great Dominions.

Babypop - France Gall: The sheer bomping joy of the bigger numbers and the surprisingly earnest kitsch of the slower sadder numbers do more for me than a swag of Beach boys albums to convey the teenage experience so that it's both serious and fab. Fave track: Attends Ou Va-T'en

Children of God - Swans: The junction of the version of the band that played headcrushing industrial manifestos and the band that calmed to refine those statements and find power in more intimate places, COG is one long celebration of religious charismatic preaching and condemnation of the religion itself. Gira's vocals found such power in the lower register, leaving Jarboe's cool mezzo space to add glowing light into the darkest and most brutal passages. Fave track: Our Love Lies

Closer - Joy Division: The album that launched a million scowling conversations about suicide remains an architecturally sound monument to anyone who has glimpsed the scars around every smile. Or a collection of great songs. You decide. Fave track: The Eternal

Top 10 Albums 13January14

The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society. My favourite of the late 60s concept albums bar none (even beats Tommy!), this often funny, bittersweet and melancholy reflection on passing timewins me every time. Ray 'n' co were never better.

The Ballasted Orchestra - Stars of the Lid. Recently recommended by a friend and now devoted to the Texas duo who make such dreamscapes possible. I could listen to this for days on end.

Tommy - The Who. It took me decades but I did finally come round to how enjoyable it is to ride on this one with its sunshine vocal harmonies, the genius orchestration of the rock trio and big boomy spaces where you can lose yourself as easily as in some fantastical woodcut from ages past. The 5.1 mix on hi res formats is even better. A great adventure holiday of an album.

Rubber Soul - The Beatles. The point at which it is easy to look forward and backward in time to know where the Fabs had been and where they would go. Shimmering harmonies and tight song structures look back to Love Me Do but the instrumentation was getting restless. Sitar, fuzz bass, sped up piano to sound like harpsichord, tough biting organ tints and a far greater range of electric guitar tone all added more colour to the pallette than ever before. And the songs themselves were breaking and entering. Drive My Car is self-effacingly funny, Norwegian Wood has one of the best opening lines of any mainstream pop song, Michelle had lines in French, long toking inhalations for the chorus of Girl. It might have sounded like it here and there but this was not the local folk club but a brash art directed Swinging London.

Hex Induction Hour - The Fall. It's easy to forget how much good guitar band riffing and playing happens on this album as the vocal assault from Mark E. Smith is always so pugilistic. Nevertheless a few listens in and these sides grow compelling and mesmerising. Once that's settled the combined forces of the harranging vocals and wandering music reveal hooks that surprise after years of repeats.

Replicas - Gary Numan. Though it was old at the time this was a big part of the soundtrack to Schoolies' Week 1980. The icy textures and densensitised tale of a society freezing itself to stasis seemed to reveal the undercurrent to all the often desperate surrounding revelry. I clearly recall  catching sight of the Coast's skyline as the huge and sombre Down in the Park boomed and a week later driving back to Brisbane through the rain while You Are In My Vision hammered from the stereo.

Ambient 4: On Land - Brian Eno. A series of atmospheres or textures of landscapes that put you in the middle of scenes that seem to change a little each time. One of the best dream-aids I've known and the pinnacle of Eno's Ambient series.

VI/Led Zepellin/Zoso/Untitled/? - Led Zepellin. From the warming up rotors of the first few seconds of Black Dog to the gigantic flooding wash of When The Levee Breaks we have a set of tracks leaves the era of their appearance back in the prog/country rock sludge and flies beyond the clouds of rock invention. From the storm of the rockers to the silvery middle-earth folk of Battle of Evermore, their Joni Mitchell tribute (Going to California) to the hugest drum sound on record (Levee) done simply with location mic-ing and a drummer who knew that slower meant bigger.

A brief soapbox moment: It's fashionable to point out the similarity between the opening of Stairway to Heaven and the instrumental track Taurus by Spirit. Personally, I think Page did lift it but to say that Stairway is a ripoff of Taurus ignores the facts that the simliarity ends after the first four chords and that part of the song is only played four times in the Led Zep piece before completely changing never to return. The vocal melody is absent from Taurus and the clever thing of it is that it is the same whether in a major or minor context. So apart from a passing similarity in a small slice of each song there really is no resemblance. Taurus was meant to be a brief instrumental. It's nice. Stairway, as numb as it became for me in the years before punk, is a mightier achievement. If you want to call ripoff be honest about it. Anyway...

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me Soundtrack - Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch & co. A towering effort of atmosphere built of dark corners, stormy interiors and aching pathos. Even if the movie wasn't to your taste you might find inspiration in the textures and colours of this music. I still draw to it.

Mezzanine - Massive Attack. After three genre-defining albums the Massies called off the search with this spatial odyssey that is born in a lightless pusling room, continues through quiet fields of brutality and cinematica to the final orgasmic exhaustion of the culture the group had nourished. It's still my favourite of theirs.