20/03/2017

Chinchilla-Tone Real Civilised - David Thomas Broughton

Track list:

1. One Day

Running time: 5 minutes
Released: 2007
An odd singleton now. I don't think the album is by the artist, Googling it appears to be a compilation, but I only have the one track by the one guy, so I'll stick with this title. David Thomas Broughton covered a track for the special edition of James Yorkston's When the Haar Rolls In, I rather liked his effort apart from the end where it devolved into odd freak-folk discord. There was something about his voice though, and so when I found this as a freebie somewhere I downloaded it.

Broughton's voice is haunting. The tune opens with him repeating "That one day, you may go" again and again, no music behind him, and another voice joining him a bit in. It's surprisingly effective because his voice has a resonance. The other voices start to vary pitch and function as instruments, even whilst contributing parts of the central phrase. This would be a fine premise on which to build, and to be fair they do build up and vary how the voices interact, but it is not enough to sustain a 5 and a half minute tune. We get little strains of a guitar tune around the 3 minute mark, the first hints of instrumentation.  It's a nice, if mournful tune that is picked out, still over a chorus of "That one day, you may go". I find myself really liking the tune despite its repetition, and despite the disappointment that it doesn't really go anywhere. The guitar drops out suddenly, the tune pares back to Broughton, some other lyrics appear. This is the final minute. It then fades out rather than concluding cleanly.

It's a hot mess of a song, but there is something compelling about it too. A tugging, a longing, something. I think I'll hold on to it for now.

19/03/2017

China - Vangelis

Track list:

1. Chung Kuo
2. The Long March
3. The Dragon
4. The Plum Blossom
5. The Tao of Love
6. The Little Fete
7. Yin & Yang
8. Himalaya
9. Summit

Running time: 41 minutes
Released: 1979
Time for some music older than I am. At some point in the early/mid 2000s I decided to buy up a load of Vangelis albums to explore his work further. I had always loved the Blade Runner soundtrack, and had some things beyond that already, but acquired to fill in gaps. I don't recall ever spending much time or attention on the things I picked up though. China was one of these.

The opening sounds remind me not of Asia, but of helicopters and dystopian sci-fi or cyberpunk. That feeling is enforced further by the tinny electronic notes that carry the first semblance of tune. I rather like the dated darkness, very much of a kind with the Blade Runner score. I suspect this is not going to last as a theme throughout the disc but we'll see. A more recognisible oriental influence is not far behind this opening salvo - whilst still flavoured by our artist's penchant for synths, the patterns are instantly calling the region to mind. Stereotypical sounds, able to be thus because they are, presumably based on enough genuine material to take root.

My player categorises this as "New Age"; how quaint. I get it, but really? Hippy-ish? Akin to crystal healing and tie-dye?  OK, so now it is me being unfair with stereotype. Deliberately and to make that point.

As an aside, it occurs to me that Blade Runner is probably now the most oft-referenced post that I have made or have to make at this stage. I wouldn't be surprised if it remains so at the point I either finish, or more likely give up on, this endeavor.

After a pleasing predominantly keyboard piece we get a more urgent, insistent number, synth pulses evoking lasers, quick tight repeating notes bringing a tension, and a high pitched bell-like sounding of an alarm. I suppose it could represent the dangers of a dragon, but it doesn't evoke that very strongly in my view. Oddly the vision I get is some garish, epileptic-fit-inducing intro sequence to an anime show. But that is just me being mean with caricature and stereotype again. On the record, we get back to some more typical sounds, but they morph into a weird cross between synth prog-rock and a curtailed (I initially typed castrated for some reason) loop cut from a western classical composition.

It bears saying that most of these pieces are short, skipping by quickly and easily. There is one 10 minute plus epic on here, but only 2 more are over 5 minutes and there are a few below three. This makes the New Age tag even less of a genuine thing for me. This isn't pretentious and overlong, it isn't all out there, they are shorter, more purposeful compositions. Sure they have an odd tint to them with the waw and the synthesised sounds but they have a heart and soul, too. I am finding them rather enjoyable, though the sudden voice interposing itself over The Little Fete feels out of place and unwelcome. It is in English, spoken with a strong accent. It doesn't destroy the beauty of the simple background arrangement but it does rather dampen my enjoyment of the piece until I adjust to it a few sentences later.

There is a nice twang to the bassy sounds in Yin & Yang which follows, at least initially. I think I see the point, the aim, of the album in this tune. Reverence to an idea, but whilst still fundamentally producing a Vangelis record, marrying up the influences of Chinese composition to the synth wizardry and electronic sensibilities of the composer. Somewhere in there I lost my attention for a second, reading banning notices (other people's not mine) on a webforum. Silly me. Not what I am here for. In the meantime the epic has started, Himalaya.

It sounds like this will have a slow build, I hope that it delivers a climax somewhere, because there is nothing (well, not very much) more frustrating than a long piece with time to build that settles instead for an elongated and unfulfilled tension instead. The early exchanges remind me of 1492: Conquest of Paradise though committed to record a decade and more earlier. It rumbles along with a steady rhythmic structure, a dark overall tone and top end themes that fade in and out. The most piano-like of them is actually really nice, but some of the other layers up there I am less keen on. Almost 7 minutes in, and I do not feel that it is building. This is no crescendo, alas. The music is pleasant enough, and as I start to type something about it stagnating, some louder, more Blade Runner-esque electronics cut in. It's great that they arrived, but it was a little sudden, rather than building organically to the volume and focus. They go again pretty quickly.

I think that last paragraph pretty much works as a generalisation of the composite Vangelis record from my perspective. A lot of good or nice elements, overall very pleasant, but ultimately frustrating in a number of cases - content to meander along, and light on lasting impact. Blade Runner is a notable exception in this, and I think on balance that is down to the fact we have visuals to pair it with - visuals that can be called to mind when hearing the soundtrack again. If that sounds like I am being down on things... well, no. I rather like what I have heard over the last 40 minutes. I just also feel pangs of disappointment that these compositions didn't quite deliver a lasting impression as strong as they might have done.

17/03/2017

Child Ballads - Anaïs Mitchell & Jefferson Hamer

Track list:

1. Willie o Winsbury (Child 100)
2. Willie's Lady (Child 6)
3. Sir Patrick Spens (Child 58)
4. Riddles Wisely Expounded (Child 1)
5. Clyde's Water (Child 216)
6. Geordie (Child 209)
7. Tam Lin (Child 39)

Running time: 39 minutes
Released: 2013
Americans take on British folk ballads. I would never have picked this up had I not heard and loved some of Anaïs Mitchell's music elsewhere. I have at least three of these tunes by other artists in very different forms - including a version of Willie o Winsbury that I really love by the late Charlotte Greig, whose At Llangennith (on which said version is found) is still one of my favourite albums.

Here it opens with Mitchell's somewhat strangled voice offset by Hamer's pitching higher. Its a strange role reversal, but it works. The tune here is simply and stripped back to give the duet the spotlight. Already I have had to correct too many typos in this post, I think my ability to type is dying. My hands are actually aching a bit in worrying fashion, despite my not having to work today and thus I haven't subjected them to a barrage of typing already. I discovered Anaïs Mitchell through this project, as she was included on a BBC Folk Awards album. I have picked up a fair bit since. Her voice is different, but pleasantly so. This version of the tune is so different from Greig's that without knowing it was the same song supporting both I would never have picked up on it. This is simple and acoustic, with nothing of the enveloping warmth on a dark winter night of Greig's take. Here it is nice but not woven into my psyche in the same way.

I find myself less enamoured of Willie's Lady. The tune that they pick out is rather... flat. The volume on the guitar is a more significant factor in the shaping of this song, and the line is just not engaging at all. Add to that a bit of forced jauntiness in rhythm and song and I find the effort tiresome. I wonder if I am bouncing off because of my mood, my expectations or some other reason, and I hope that it is just this track that annoys me.

I have 4 versions of Sir Patrick Spens, putting Mitchell and Hamer in the company of Yorkston, Boden and Fairport Convention. I was only consciously aware of the Yorkston version, and could not call the tune to mind. Happily I find I like this. The simple inclusion of a fiddle to offset the guitar lending a nice feel to the composition, and the dueting voices fit better here than on Willie's Lady - there is no forced happiness, no injected bounce, no annoying carry to the rhythm. There are swells and lulls, there is a top end from the violin. It is, I think, this last item that really helps shape the tune. You can't have British folk with no fiddle!*

We now head into a run of three tunes that I do not recognise by name. I dislike the conceit of construction in Riddles Wisely Expounded, where every other line cycles a 2-line call and answer, and the actual lyrics are on the odd lines. Its just dull and unnecessarily repetitive. I imagine this is reproduced faithfully so it can't be held against our performers, other than through their choice of ballads to include. That said, it is Child 1; the first amongst many. I am falling, again, into the blow-by-blow, failing to avoid short snippets about each track. So to digress deliberately, whilst Mitchell carries a verse without her partner, making a nice change, I have a long weekend, 4 days. I also have only 1 full week in 6, thanks to strategic holiday (carried from 2016) and Easter. I hope that this concentration of 4-day weeks will help me rediscover my energy after a long while of feeling enervated. I plan to get back on the bike I bought last September to get some exercise. I plan to enjoy the warmer weather if it arrives, the longer days. Maybe the sun will show up. We had a nice day on Wednesday, I think. I was working from home, and made several trips down the garden - taken out recycling - to feel sun on skin.

Back on the record we're hitting Geordie. As it starts I immediately remember the tune. I am not over-keen on the bright roll injected into the lines here, they trill up and down and it seems to go against the dark tale told by the song. There are some very nice points to the song - I like that Hamer carries most of it for instance, reversing the normal balance of the two voices - but it ends rather abruptly. Much shorter than the other numbers here, it feels incomplete as a result, pitching us into Tam Lin.

This I really like. Here the natural rhythm to word and playing feels like it fits, it lends a sense of personality, of point, to the opening verse. Mitchell's voice over the lightly-touched guitar is a wonderful combination. The way these two attack this classic is entirely in keeping with what little I know of the song, which mostly comes from the modernised tale narrated by Benjamin Zephaniah for The Imagined Village. They have the right sense of urgency, the right tone. It's a really strong closing track - easily my favourite from the seven presented. If you look up one ballad from this set, make it Tam Lin.
 
*Of course you can.

13/03/2017

Chiaroscuro - I Break Horses

Track list:

1. You Burn
2. Faith
3. Ascension
4. Denial
5. Berceuse
6. Medicine Brush
7. Disclosure
8. Weigh True Words
9. Heart to Know

Running time: 45 minutes
Released: 2014
I loved I Break Horses' first effort, Hearts, a lot, having been turned on to them by the festival listings for Latitude the one year I went. I forget the dates, but I didn't get to see them play in the end because it was so muddy, and the particular venue up a hill in the woods that the effort involved led me down a different path. Nevertheless, I bought that album, loved it, played it a lot and was excited when this was released but Chiaroscuro never grabbed me in the same way.

There is a throbbing about the opening, a pulse invoked by the combination of rhythm and repeated note. The modulated sound of keys is a contrast, and the voice that comes in is different again, untethered  compared to the other sounds. The pace is slow, it is a tone piece not an energy one. As the song grows there is a bit more life injected into the beats but this is introspective fare; there's nowt wrong with that. This post is - as most seem to be these days - overdue. Too much distraction, too little planning, too much tiredness, too little drive. I am not in the best of spaces, yet... everything is kinda alright. The first track isn't finished yet and I am simultaneously angry at myself for not getting to this sooner (it's a pause of an opening, a rest), and wishing it were done already. Oh, if things could be easy... they'd all be duller.

Faith is a cyberpunk-y electronic haze, tempo jacked and levels all... wrong? The rhythm drives it the right way but the emphasis is on the background. Like the wallflower trying to hide in plain sight at the back of the photo - you can't tear your eyes from the one person that didn't want to be there. I suppose this is apt for a band characterised with the horrendously acerbic "shoegaze" label. This is one of the worst music genre labels of them all and there are plenty of bad names floating around. It is dismissive, fundamentally - even if used in adoration. Introspection is no bad thing; wanting to create a more private or intimate experience is no bad thing. If all music was unabashedly extrovert there would be less interesting material out there, material for fewer people.

I rather like the sense of break this manages to create, even when the soundscapes are pretty busy - buzzes, pulses, beeps everywhere. It still lacks the immediacy, the personality, of Hearts but it has positioned itself so as to break up the monotony of a Monday night where plans fell through. The weird effects at the beginning of Denial are unwelcome - a nasty little insertion before a more tuneful piece takes over. It sounds like an 80s film soundtrack redone with modern sensibilities - a little more craft and self awareness, a lot less flash and celebrity. Not a bad switch up. I am less than 4 songs in, none of them over 5 minutes but it feels like I have been listening for a lot longer than that. I think this is down to them packing a lot into each tune. So many different sounds, layers, that can only really be achieved through embracing electronica.

I am seriously out of practice at these posts. My mind is racing now - fighting for things to type, but that is not helpful. Inside I am going a million miles an hour; the soundtrack is a succession of slow numbers, at odds with that. I am creating my own mental prison, a sense of entrapment, containment that is standing between me and the music. The opposite of the point.

Ironically I end up gazing at my slippers as I try to force my head to clear and my attention to the ethereal sounds. I feel bad for this.

A couple of brief and soon forgotten aural discomforts aside this has been... alright. There are some really nice sounds buried in there too. However much of it is just not grabbing me and I am left wondering if they haven't tried to take introspection too far. Oh, just as I finish that thought the music gets a little more life, a little more volume. That is an element that has been largely missing. Everything is soft, muted, and distant. Some more dominant elements are welcome. Unfortunately the piece then settles too easily into a repeating pattern and does not really use the sense of difference that was briefly there after the first strong notes hit my ears. It rather drifts then dies out - some minutes later - with my sudden enthusiasm well and truly bled away.

There is more promise in the opening of Disclosure though. A snap to the rhythm, a pointedness. A purpose. It grows its sound a bit, but I can't help but feel it grows in the wrong way and loses some of the immediacy that I found in the opening bars. I think this would be best with headphones, late night, out in the middle of nowhere with a big sky open above you. It has that sensation of staring off into space, of vastness and insignificance. Some of the relevance comes back as the piece progresses; it may be the best track since the opener.

I would have to go back and listen to Hearts to be sure of this but I think there is a fundamental difference between these albums. The first is introspection aimed at a small space; this feels like it is broadcast out into an expanse by contrast. Wide open spaces filled with very personal sounds, rather than speaking directly to an audience. Perhaps that is why this works less than brilliantly. The final track is 7 and a half minutes long and... oh my god is it sleepy. It's so laid back as to be horizontal. It is, also, incredibly dull. Long, slow pieces have a place, but they need to have a little more to them than this. Droning low notes, a repetitive vocal and none of the busy sound work from earlier tracks. This is a soul-sucking morass of a last track, bleeding off any good will.

Any positive impression I built over the first couple of tracks is definitely gone now. A surprising little injection of actual sound into this snooze-fest feels out of place - moreso because it is not followed up on. What a terrible end to a record that really wasn't that bad. Yes, it is lacking in places, and yes it suffers a lot in comparison with their prior effort, but it had its moments. Those are rather obliterated by the dirge with which it leaves us though. A pity about that.

Edit: I started Hearts out of curiosity. It's still electronic, ethereal, introspective but it's also bolder about it. Louder, more vibrant, with more personality and, importantly, still really good.

05/03/2017

Checkmate Savage - The Phantom Band

Track list:

1. The Howling
2. Burial Sounds
3. Folk Song Oblivion
4. Crocodile
5. Halfhound
6. Left Hand Wave
7. Island
8. Throwing Bones
9. The Whole Is on My Side

Running time: 54 minutes
Released: 2009
This album really struck a chord with me when I first heard it. I discovered it, I believe, through LastFM - probably a Scottish tag radio or something like that. The thing that stands out is the way it veers from dark and brooding to happy-clappy or jaunty. It's a little bit unique.

Opening track The Howling was my introduction, a six minute work, with a sort of growling threat in the snappy drums and growling, electronic bass. There is more light in the clear, accented vocal. When the lead guitars come in, that light gets happy and bright, even as the lyrics get darker. The song, with its talks o ghosts, and the album as a whole (Halfhound is strongly suggestive of Werewolves) have an undertone of urban fantasy about them. As that is one of my favourite gaming genres, its fair to say I rather like this. So much so I bought the t-shirt; I still have it, but rarely wear it any more - a bit tight and a little faded, it had the classic "vase or two faces?" image in pink on a black field. 
 
The pace of the track drops for the final choruses, this has a more nervous atmosphere to it, the stately pace finding room for the darker tones in the music to prey on worries. I prefer the "full speed" pieces though, and find this a little tacked on. We dive into Burial Sounds, which suprirses me by reminding me of the Bastion soundtrack, with stark beats and a twang that evokes the wild west in places. In a similar vein, it sounds a bit like it could be a Borderlands soundtrack piece. Spoken works muttered over the evocative bass, top end with that sway and reverberating quality to evoke exoticism. There is, again, a snap to the drums that I find works really well, and the almost choral nature to the low end vocals - oohs, or ohs between the drums, bass and twangy top end - is very atmospheric.

My favourite track on the album, by a mile, is Folk Song Oblivion - this has a growl to the bass in the verses, a chanting vocal, a very nice darkness to it. Then we hit the chorus and that all bleeds out to be replaced by a nice melody, a lighter vocal, and a happier tone. I have written of this before, of  how I appreciate the contrast, but I genuinely feel like this is my go-to example of how to do it (to please me). Sitting and listening to it now, the song feels like it is lacking something though - I think because the majority of my listening is done whilst driving I get by on overall theme and tone rather than specifics. Sitting still doing nothing but listening and typing out words based on what I hear, I find myself thinking that each phase of the song maybe lasts a little too long, or that the base patterns are actually a little dull in their construction. The overall effect is still great, but don't over-analyze it.

We are back to the soundtrack-like material again. Crocodile is instrumental, it has sounds that evoke crickets or cicadas to set the scene, and a driving combination of bass and drums to build upon it. Again we see the dark-light contrast, as the treble parts are very high against this thrumming backdrop, little lines of hope in the murk of the swampy sound built up by the structure. There is a nice progression to the melodies too, they start small and soft then grow into a bolder presence with greater clarity, more complexity and a stronger statement against the rigidity of the bottom end. It's a tune to get your feet tapping - it has one of those rhythms that you want to tap along to. When the driving climax appears and the bass structure changes, the tune takes off - like a camera zooming right out then panning over a forest scene, or following a break-through moment when it becomes clear everything is going to be alright. There is still a thrum in the bass at this point but it has been harnessed for the force of light. I almost forget the length of this tune, because it wraps me up so much.

This is a lazy Sunday morning, but I feel it is not really the ideal time for this album. The growl, the graphic violence of the lyrics for Halfhound... this is nighttime music. Darkness swirls around this track in particular, but there is a stridency to it, a firm, unwavering quality to some of the top end notes that give the impression of standing up to that beastliness. When I realised what the lyrics were for this tune, I guess I started looking for symbolism more in the rest of the album and noticed the running fantasy theme. It is gaming fodder, to the point that I would be quite surprised if the key creative elements of the band weren't roleplayers. The Howling has ghosts, Halfhound werewolves, Left Hand Wave references spectres... and on this listen I am finding little moments of triumph, like the soaring climax of Crocodile that fit the narrative beats of a game session. Of course, this could be me bringing my own biases to bear, but there is a layer of theme here that I haven't come across that much; I understand that is more common in some genres of Metal, but as much as I hate genre-typing, those have never really been my thing. Certainly I have found it rare in indie-rock like this (or perhaps more pertinently that I like).

Island drops the growling undertones, it goes stark - pleaful vocal and a lone lead guitar picking a loose melody. It feels more like a shipwreck than a bountiful paradise but it is a world away from what went before. There are Laika-like twangs to the strings - reminding me very much of the more Hawaiian themed tunes from Cosmopolis with respect to how out of place they sound given the origin of the band. Here it's more the context around this tune that makes it stand out, with Laika & the Cosmonauts its more of a clash of expectation (borne of lack of information on my part) against their Finnish nationality. For all that, I find this song very much the dullest of the songs on Checkmate Savage, exacerbated by its extraordinary length - almost 9 minutes. There is none of the grubby threatening drums, darkness-inspiring bass or sweet, sweet contrast here. There is little interest in the song content. There is not the tight, constrained by length, sharpness to offset the WTF feeling from the switch of tone. It feels less like a palette cleanser and more like an unwanted interlude.

Thankfully it is a single track problem. The energy comes back with Throwing Bones, and this definitely has more echoes of Laika and the Cosmonauts in the intro - less spangly, but similar energy. It also reminds me of the final track on The Good, The Bad & The Queen, with a subtle hint of a gradually building tempo, though I suspect that here it is more my mind being tricked, whilst in Albarn's masterful track it really is a picking up of pace. The similarities with that track end there, but it sets enough of a tone for this piece that even as it devolves into unwise use of nonsense vocals, the underlying structure retains the interest. I am fundamentally quite a lazy person; I love tracks like this that find a way to inject energy into my day and get me feeling like I want to be doing something.

The counterpoint to that is that when such tunes finish there is a danger that you feel enervated, drained and on a come down (with thanks to the lyrics of The Whole is On My Side). This last tune feels like an anticlimax with its slower pace and more gentle landscape. In some ways its a great thing for an outro to do - close things down in an ordered manner - but at least with the context of this morning, I would have rather ended on the high. Our closer is not a bad tune - I actually rather like the lazy rhythm it settles into around the 5 minute mark, with a drifting, loosely tethered top end and a regretful vocal, but the switch to this relaxed structure - especially with Throwing Bones snadwiched on the other side by the overlong and under-interesting Island - is a bit of a faux-pas to my mind. 

Overall though, I still really like this disc. Whilst this post became a bit too much of a blow-by-blow, I think that is actually a tribute to the group: each song provides something new or different to think about, and compelled me to pen something as a result. Even the shorter tunes had enough to support comparisons or ideas and enough interest to compel me to communicate that.