february random music

Some more random shuffled music - 

 

“In The Clouds” from All About Eve. Brother Rob would be very happy with me! But this is a terrific track actually, really summery and cheery, and I’d forgotten what a lovely voice Julianne Regan has. Nice chiming guitars in a very 80s, almost Cocteau Twins way. 

 

“I Follow Rivers” from Scandanavian popster Lykke Li. Excellent and extremely catchy song, and an enjoyably unusual production too, with lots of percussion well to the fore.

 

“Secret Side” from Nico’s The End… very slightly mad, especially the hissing and wheezing of the harmonium, and with added white noise washes from Cale and Eno’s synth backings. Chilly stuff. 

“Endless Summer Of The Damned” – from Bauhaus’ last album Go Away White, an album that the band didn’t live to see released as they’d already fallen out and broken up, again, even before the sessions were complete. This one has a terrific glam riff and the Murph in full declamatory vocal mode. Rather wonderful actually. 

“The Apparent Chaos Of Stone” – Robert Fripp and Theo Travis live at Coventry Cathedral in 2009. This piece is more Theo than Robert as he noodles away on the flute for nearly ten minutes with the Venal One creating gentle wooshes and whirrs via the Lunar Module. This whole album is very good, the flutes really work well with the soundscapes, adding a warmth that the soundscapes can sometimes lack.

 

“Heroes” – Bowie live in Tokyo, December 1978. This was the very last show of the Stage tour and Japanese tv broadcast about an hour of the show, resulting in this excellent quality recording. Cracking rendition of “Heroes” with DB really going for it vocally. 

 

“Down Colorful Hill” – Cheer Up!!! Do Red House Painters ever smile I wonder? Or laugh? Having said that, this is a very lovely song. 

“I’m Not Satisfied” – from the Mothers Of Invention’s Cruisin’ With Ruben & The Jets – an album of doowop style greasy love songs. As the sleeve says, it was a last ditch attempt to fool DJ’s into playing the Mothers’ music on the radio. As with previous attempts it failed, as Zappa and the Mothers were seen by the upstanding moral guardians in radioland as being subversive, dirty and politically suspect. Can’t have them polluting the airwaves with their songs about how vegetables keep you regular (“Call Any Vegetable”), and songs about people with largish limbs - “Big Leg Emma” was actually on a list of banned records because, according to Zappa, a girl with a big leg ‘caused unease’ in the higher echelons of an LA radio station!

 

“Ali Click” – what a great song this is, lots of Enoid percussion and those weird almost nursery rhyme-like lyrics about Jolly Roger which are virtually impossible to understand but still, in Eno’s measured reserved English tones, somehow sound slightly rude.

  

“Flight Into Space” from the Moonraker soundtrack, which is one of the best soundtracks that John Barry ever did for the Bond films. This is quite an epic piece. 

"Sugar Hiccup” from the Cocteau Twins' second album Head Over Heels. This song, (and the equally excellent “From The Flagstones”) marks the exact point that the Twins moved from doing second rate Siouxsie knock offs with terrible drum machine beats, to giving us sprawling mini epics of full of reverb, spangly shimmery guitars and Elizabeth Fraser’s astonishing vocals. Musically “Sugar Hiccup” is almost a dry run for the following year’s “Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops”, but it’s a marvellous song in its own right. The only downside is that it very rapidly fades out halfway through a chorus, which gives the impression of someone saying ‘yeah, that’s long enough, next one please’ and just fading it out without any attempt to make it fit the song. 

 

“Everything” from Anathema’s superb 2010 album We’re Here Because We’re Here. This is a tremendous album, mixed by the ridiculously busy Steven Wilson. It’s a huge sounding record, every track is big and wide and sounds like it was meant for vast open spaces. This is a lovely ballad, starting off fairly intimately but expanding as the song progresses into another epic.

 

“Not A Young Man Anymore” in which Dean and Britta play a Lou Reed song far better than Lou and the Velvets ever did. Here, it’s not a bad song at all. The bootleg I have of the VU playing it in early 1967, well, it’s pretty awful. Lou’s singing is especially painful. 

“Reynard the Fox” – Julian Cope basically goes utterly loopy before your very ears. Yet, somehow, it’s still very entertaining. That whole Fried album is like that – clearly Mr Cope is a long way out of his tree (I mean just look at the album cover), yet the songs are cracking.

 

“Where Are We Now?” – I’ve not played this for a little while, but it’s still absolutely marvellous. I’m so excited about the new Bowie album. A couple of weeks to go now…

“Don’t You Get Me Down” – one of the brilliant set of songs that Charley recorded last year. Her tunes are very clever, slightly offbeat, some very unusual chords and stuff, yet the songs are nearly always incredibly catchy and very easy to sing along with. I wish she’d record more.

 

“Dominion” – the last part of Tangerine Dream’s Logos. Classic synth sounds. 

“Night School” – from Zappa’s Jazz From Hell. This was an all instrumental album that Zappa recorded on the Synclavier synth back in 1986. Just to satisfy the fans he added one guitar solo track. But this one is a jolly, very commercial sounding, tune that was originally intended as a tv theme for some late night educational programmes. The Synclavier sounds are horribly dated now, but it’s a fun little tune.

 

“Hong Kong Garden” – named after a Chinese restaurant favoured by the Banshees. What a song! This is just brilliant. And it was their debut single – it shows such confidence. Amazing. 

“Autobahn” recorded live in 1991 on The Mix tour. Not much else to say. It’s “Autobahn” – it runs for 11 minutes, it’s great. As always. 

“Neal And Jack And Me” – just the interlocking guitar parts, with some nice Frippian squeaky mouse overdubs. This must have been one of Dear Old Mr Stormy’s Monday Selections some time ago. These little snippets of rehearsals and workings are always pretty interesting. However some, the little 20 seconds fragments of Lizard tunes and such like are interesting once or twice and that’s it – but others, like this one, 2+ minutes long and recognizably part of a song, repay repeated listens and have thus made it onto the iPod.

“Pop Muzik”  - M's brilliant single which is of course one of the greatest ever pop songs in the history of the world. It’s also very cleverly produced: towards the end the stereo image suddenly expands – it starts off as a really tight little synth pop song but then suddenly it seems to cover the entire sky as everything is hugely opened up. I’d never really noticed this before and I would think you’d only really get this impression on headphones, but it’s very clever, and very effective.  

 

“Moss Garden” from Dave ‘n’ Brian. Love that Japanese Koto that DB plays, and the backing synths and atmosphere’s from BE are fab. 

“Black Metallic” from indie also-rans Catherine Wheel. They never really made it as big as everyone expected – this single and the accompanying album, Ferment, came out in 1992 and everyone seemed convinced that they’d be huge, but it never really happened and as far as I know they split some years ago. “Black Metallic” is however a monster of a tune and it sounded extremely good 20 years on. 

“Whole Lotta Rosie” from AC/DC. Rock doesn’t get much rockier than this! 

 

And finally - “The God Of Adverbs” from the recent David Sylvian collaboration with Jan Bang. We have DS’s calm, measured narration over some very odd squiddly backing ‘music’. “In Azerbaijan there are no adverbs, merely meandering circumlocutions. The God of Adverbs finds this deeply distressing.”

It's a really compelling record - and a strange one - but I love strange records...