Friday, 27 March 2015

Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell, album review



Juxtapositions

Sufjan Stevens’ latest beautiful album is both painful and pretty as it recalls a mother, Carrie, who left him as a child but re-entered his life with a step-father, Lowell, who took an interest in and supported Stevens’ musical ambitions as he grew up.

The album reminisces on his mother’s leaving and, more lamentably, her recent death. Whilst cathartic, it is full of the guilt and pain that comes with regret about being unable to change the past, and the grappling with understanding it. All of this is couched within the prettiest of melodies and harmonies as well as Stevens’ sweetly electronic pop orchestrations and plucked acoustic guitar or banjo. He has an uncanny ability to juxtapose the most explicit and/or poignant detail with the soothing beauty of these melodies, as he did stunningly in one of his earliest songs about serial killer John Wayne Gacy Jr, and then on this album in All of Me Wants All of You,

Shall we beat this or celebrate it?
You’re not the one to talk things through
You checked your texts while I masturbated
Menelich, I feel so used

and then another on this startling album, Fourth of July, where the brutal poetry of the lyrics are once again cushioned within the gorgeous tune

The evil it spread like a fever ahead
It was night when you died, my firefly
What could I have said to raise you from the dead?
Oh could I be the sky on the Fourth of July?

Well you do enough talk
My little hawk, why do you cry?
Tell me what did you learn from the Tillamook burn?
Or the Fourth of July?
We’re all gonna die

Sitting at the bed with the halo at your head
Was it all a disguise, like Junior High
Where everything was fiction, future, and prediction
Now, where am I? My fading supply

Did you get enough love, my little dove
Why do you cry?
And I’m sorry I left, but it was for the best
Though it never felt right
My little Versailles

The hospital asked should the body be cast
Before I say goodbye, my star in the sky
Such a funny thought to wrap you up in cloth
Do you find it all right, my dragonfly?

Shall we look at the moon, my little loon
Why do you cry?
Make the most of your life, while it is rife
While it is light

Well you do enough talk
My little hawk, why do you cry?
Tell me what did you learn from the Tillamook burn?
Or the Fourth of July?
We’re all gonna die

Once you have listened to this and then the next, The Only Thing, we too are fully a part of that most uncomfortable juxtaposition. It is difficult to recommend that someone else shares in this, but I think you should.


The penultimate song on this album No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross is another beautifully caustic rumination on the meaning of death, containing the line Like my mother/Give wings to a stone/It's only the shadow of a cross.

Other Vehicular Music 5








John Renbourn - 8th August, 1944 - 26th March, 2015


I am sorry to hear of yet another influential musician - both in terms of impact on other artists and those like me who grew up at the time of such musical influence - has died, of a suspected heart attack, aged 70. I have written before that there is a sad inevitability of those who were young adults and popular as musicians in the mid 60s onwards should now obviously be much older and vulnerable to leaving us.

Excusing the euphemisms, it may even sound a little twee to indulge in these postings, but I genuinely rue such passing. In a more celebratory tone, like many I recall John Renbourn firstly for his significant roll in the significant folk impact of Pentangle, and then also his solo work and dueting with Bert Jansch and Robin Williamson, just to name these few of many more collaborations and contributions. I saw John perform twice, and my favourite song he recorded is his gorgeous, plaintive version of the folk song Willy O Winsbury.


Thursday, 26 March 2015

Primal Instinct

She was expecting to receive a copy of her new book
about affection and relationships, but instead was sent
another from her publisher - Primates Communicate
so she assumed someone was monkeying around or
aping a sociobiological extrapolation on the behaviour
she had tried to unravel in her tome: how as humans we
fall and stay together tumbling, striving to survive as
paramours in the jungle we call Romantic Love. But
would anyone be so mischievous, shove the red
nucleus in her face like this when all she ever wanted
was her language and ideas bound together for the touch
and understanding of human hands? Answering that is

missing the link between those who joke and those who hunt,
like not seeing the difference in words and a copulatory grunt.

Other Vehicular Music 4







Wednesday, 25 March 2015

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion: Freedom Tower - No Wave Dance Party, album review

Upbeat Bluesblood Infusion

Unadulterated, raucous, joyous fuckrock blues. The same as it's always been, though if anything this is fun-spunkier, celebratory-spunkiest exploding blues. Searching now for superlative neologisms, I can do no better - if I say so myself - than my review for their previous here.


Other Vehicular Music 3








Tuesday, 24 March 2015

Be Alive

Woken by it, I tried explaining to her that sometimes in order
to make a noise downstairs that late you had to be alive –
you had to be breathing to open a bottle of rioja to let it
breathe too, and a corkscrew caught on the edge of this
porcelain pot will make a momentary din at around midnight.

What I didn’t mention were the many silent disasters over
the years. Whilst she slept through all of these, there was
that time I managed to divert the bear - who had intruded
as far as the living room - back out to the garden without
a smash or a growl, though it then mauled dead our dog, and
the following day I ended up announcing him missing, joining
in the despair and tears. I almost felt now like confessing
but who would believe someone starting to drink at that time
of night - using a corkscrew on a metal cap, almost quietly?

Pickup Truck Music 4







Monday, 23 March 2015

The Prefab Messiahs - Keep Your Stupid Dreams Alive, album review



Not All Bad in the 80s

Like so much music of the 80s, this band passed me by, my prejudices having automatic blinkers. Listening to this new release [apparently 32 years after their last] I am swayed by the sheer fun of it, the garage-psychedelia harking back now – and I’m guessing then – to a late 60s fundamental and experimental garage-pop that is bright, breezy and often weird. There are references in song titles and lyrics to their past that inevitably pass me by because of what I have already admitted, so this will have more of an impact for those who do recall. For now, it’s the immediacy of the driving if simple beats and distortion and 60s organ and occasional fuzzed vocals and sitar and other that I am enjoying. Like The Monkees on acid. Like early [though not R&B] Rolling Stones. Like The Fugs but straight-ish.

If only their picture with the [actual] car had been their album cover it could have been included…..