I've been listening to Future of the Left's Curses on almost unlimited repeat over the last few days. I think it's pretty great. There's biting lyrics, abrasive guitar, killer drums and genocidal bass.Plus the fresh addition to Andy Falkous's instrumentation - the Roland Juno-60 keyboard (produced from 1982-4), which has also been used by The Cure, Air and Faithless. So how can it work with ROCKrock? Very well, thank you.
'Manchasm' ('a chasm of men') is my favourite song on the album. The best part of a the song is the round at the end that goes 'Colin is a pussy, a very pretty pussy, Colin is a pussy, a very pretty pussycat'. I didn't notice the 'cat' at the end of the second bit, so I thought they were singing about some tosser from Cardiff.
It goes on for a while, with the absurdity increasing exponentially, which originally confirmed my notion that they were bagging out some bloke. However, it is actually about drummer Jack Egglestone's cat Colin. Falco wanted it to be about his cat called Chicken, but he'd already used the word 'chicken' on the album plus it does sound better to say 'Colin is a pussy'. Who'd have thought Welsh rockers would be so passionate about their pets? Does bass player Kelson Mathias (formerly of Jarcrew) have a cat he loves too? Is it mentioned surreptitiously on the album as well?
At the start of 'Manchasm' they do sing about someone from Cardiff. A bloke who co-owns the rehearsal studios they use who just happens to share a name with a disgraced US Congressman. All the lines go 'Mark Foley was right...' and then say things that Mark Foley has said, like 'there are no ghosts in this town', 'there is no reason to fear' and 'there are no barriers for medicine'. Cardiff Mark Foley had not said any of these quotes before the song was written, but Falco put him up to it before they recorded so the song was not a lie.
Lead single 'Adeadenemyalwayssmellsgood' brings paradiddles to the fore, no doubt impressing many drummers. Well not impressing, exactly, as 'there are no bold statements in the paradiddle', according to Falco. But there's a bold statement in the riff. It's vast, majestic and loud as.
'The Contrarian' is a quiet song featuring piano, sitting at the close of Curses as the surprise of the album. It has a great mood of optimistic melancholy, and is a very appropriate way to finish it off. Great that Falco is releasing new new things, rather than just new things. It pushes this album from 'awesome' to 'whoa'. Is 'whoa' actually above awesome on the exaggeration scale? It is for the purposes of this post.
All the info in this blog as distinct from opinion was sourced from the Too Pure podcast where BBC's Huw Stephens interviewed Falco. The second link is the audio of the interview. It contains a lot of snippets of the songs so you can have a listen before you commit to anything.
It is a very solid debut, with the best description delivered by Falco. Curses is 'a record of furious commitment'.
I'm a big fan of Falco and Egglestone's last band mclusky, as long time readers of this blog and pained friends alike will be aware. Recently I've gotten into Shellac, a band that make mclusky make more musical sense in the same way that listening to The Sonics makes sense of The Hives and The Black Keys (esp. 'Have Love Will Travel', of course, cos the Keys covered the Sonics on their Rubber Factory).
The Sonics, Shellac, The Black Keys, The Hives: Making Sense of Modern Rock and Roll
'Makes more musical sense' in that they're all still beautiful original artists, and children dancing under the sun, but when their influences become clearer you get more out of their music.
Just like to understand the Sonics, you've got to listen to Little Richard, and to understand Little Richard you have to listen to Mahalia Jackson, and then you do a U-turn and pass back through, going through Aretha Franklin, and then every single soul singer post-1956, by which time you should grab a cup of coffee and sit in the sun for a while.
Animal Collective - Strawberry Jam (Domino US)
Eighth album from Animal Collective Strawberry Jam has also hopped into my consciousness recently. It's glitchy, noisy and poppy, similar the rest of their work but with a clear progression towards self-actualisation as a band, which also involves them becoming more accessible. Or perhaps that's just because my tastes are getting extreme these days.Lead single 'Peacebone' sounds like an Atari shitting itself in a melodic way, and it feels like it would fall apart if not for the vocals.
'Unsolved Mystery' centres around a processed acoustic guitar sample turned into bass, turned into guitar, turned into magic. The start of 'Chores' almost sounds like a Ray Charles song, but it quickly turns into insane pop, and a section that says 'ever' lots. I'm talking downtown.
It was at this point that I realised I didn't have enough words to put across what I think of Animal Collective. So I mashed paragraphs into one so they seemed like they had more substance, and weren't just bullet points pretending to be coherent sentences.
Anywho, they still can't really sing, but they definitely work as their name suggests: more than the sum of their parts. Synergy. Dynamism. Groupwork. Animal Collective.
Adam Green - Gemstones (Rough Trade)
Additionally, I must put in a vote of support for Adam Green's Gemstones. It's not an Album of The Moment - it was released in 2005, but it's an album of my moment, which makes it okay to write about.Green sings about gross stuff, but does so in a old school croon that makes you constantly wonder to yourself: 'did he really just sing "red bricks drop from her vagina"?!!' I guess that would be the constant wonder if you were stuck in a moment listening to 'Carolina' in perpetuity, but you get what I mean.
Green's songwriting is great, very folky most of the time (though he was part of that whole anti-folk thing in New York, where people who were tired of not getting respected by folk clubs got together in one spot and performed to each other) and it is also reminiscent of Elvis and Neil Diamond at a couple of points, especially in 'Over The Sunrise'. Good times never seem so good.
I was listening to it in the car on a the beginning of a four hour trip to play with The Robot Invasion. You didn't really think I'd get through an entire blog without mentioning the band, did you? We've got over 1000 friends on MySpace now. We're a real band! Anyway, point is, it's a great car CD. It doesn't make you drive too fast like some rock albums do, but it makes you feel naughty. And that's a great thing in a long car trip.
If nothing else, Gemstones lets you feel like you're shouting 'are we there yet?' when you're the driver.
Regurgitator - Love and Paranoia (Valve/Regurgitator)
This Occasional Massive Music Review would go incomplete if I did not write about the new album from Regurgitator, the band that got me through my teenage years and was the topic of quite a few early Not The Herald Sun posts.That was back in the day when I thought Gosh! He's a bit weird, isn't he? was a pithy title for an entire blog. At least some things change for the better. But I digress!
Love and Paranoia is hugely electronic in the sense that it echoes 1980s music, which Gurge also did on their 1999 album Art. It is also like Art in that it takes a few listens to make sense of it, but is very worthwhile effort in the end.
Opener and lead single 'Blood and Spunk' does what singles should do. It embodies what makes Gurge great - ridiculously catchy songs and immature and slightly off-putting lyrics. Irrelevantly, I keep imagining that it sounds like LCD Soundsystem's 'North American Scum'. Just me then?
Over 1908s palm muted guitar Quan offers the opinion that 'Phil Collins is a fucking genius' in 'Destroy This Town', saying 'who knows if he really means it?' He goes on to laud 'Sussudio' - it makes his heart stop beating. It's very reminiscent of American Psycho, which I read very recently. In the movie Patrick Bateman talks about Genesis and Phil Collins for a couple of minutes, but in the book an entire chapter is devoted to it.
Gurge recorded this album in Rio De Janiero, with new member Seja Vogel from Brisbane's Sekiden. Seja's fingerprint is all over the album with her keys playing a fresh role in the band.
In 'Romance of the Damned', another album highlight, Quan and Seja sing a call-and-response duet about demented lovers stalking each other, intent on holding onto false hope that everything will work out when they're both clearly unhealthy. Cool.
Seja's solo song 'Magnetic' sounds like nothing has changed in the history of popular alternative song in Australia since 1996. Which, to shoehorn in a Morrissey reference for open-minded chic, is good or bad, all depending on my general mood.
'Drinking Beer is Awesome!' is Ben Ely's crappy political song of the album. It's not as bad as 'He's A Punk', the abysmal b-side to the single 'Bong In My Eye', but it's still pedestrian and obvious, referencing avian influence and probably trying to imitate drunken superficiality with the chorus 'We've got personality, charm and personality' but it just comes off as naff.
Ben tries the political thing again with 'Hurricane' and pulls it off very well. A multilayered job it walks the tightrope between silly lyrics and great music. 'Sun Comes Through My Window' was recorded by Ben at home and is Afro-Cuban nonsense of the highest order.
Love and Paranoia is not as diverse or as well realised as the best Regurgitator albums, but it's still a very interesting and worthwhile release. Hey, they're still awesome live.
Regurgitator are on tour throughout Australia from 4 October supported by New Pants from China and I Heart Hiroshima From Brisbane. They are also playing at the 2007 Falls Festival in Lorne and Marion Bay.
