Current listening: Jon Redfern – “Don’t worry”

Beating all those year long favourites from out of nowhere. From 2008 in fact, and easily missed – but blimey, so good.

It is a strange fact that I know now that for so long as I am alive, and for so long as she is singing I will keep investigating and keep searching out music featuring the voice of Becky Unthank. She has a voice which is just timeless. It’s not that it is terribly technically competent or strident or that she is able to hold her notes, in fact it is none of those. It’s a voice which is strong and empowered and at the same time fragile and emotional. “Blue Bleezing Blind Drunk” is the epitome of the first, and this song the second, and yet both carry all of those elements. It’s an overused cliche but it is a voice which is like a force of nature.

This tune starts off with Jon Redfern singing his own song – a perfectly lovely fine little thing. Then there are these harmonies in the background which make you realise there is someone else in the room and then in comes Becky with that voice which turns the song into a lullaby and a celebration and a melancholy reminiscence but not crowded achieving all those things with so much space to breathe. Its a voice which goes straight to the marrow of your bones, a voice beyond its years, the voice of a young girl and a wise old woman, an innocent and a seer.

“I’ll always love you, love you forever, however long that is”

Current Listening: Gossip “Heavy Cross (Fred Falke Remix)”

I have been coming back to this one all year. Unlike so many things it does not get less powerful over time it just gets better. I expected to be slightly disappointed sticking it on for the first time for a month or so – those gut wrenching thumps and screams might have lost some of their impact. But no. I had it on in the car on the way to work this morning and it just lifted me up out and into some other beautiful space. Somewhere between a fist in the stomach and the thickest rush of mass unconditional communal celebration. Banishing the demons of this time of the year instantly. Nearly as good as the best beer fuelled mindless fuck you ever had. More intensity than you can almost bear – like you are going to explode with the sheer raw energy and lust involved.

It’s the nineteen eighties. It’s synths and more synths and a wailing banshee. It’s Joan Jett. It’s Blondie. It’s Pat Benatar. It’s Patti Smith fucking Giorgio Moroder in Cream in 1994.

It takes two its up to me and you to prove it.

I think I may have killed the car stereo system I played it so loud.

Current listening: The Unthanks “Sad February”

For me “Here’s the Tender Coming” is less consistently perfect than “The Bairns” which for me is nigh on impossible to better but it is still head and shoulders above 99.99999% of other releases which will come out this year. Just another wonderful feat of imagination and beauty and humour and honesty. This track is my current favourite. Another bleak moment in the Unthanks canon (and I do think of The Unthanks as they now are as the real successors to the Frost and Fire era Watersons – music of the seasons) but which post sung song heads off into a lush parallel world of brass and strings. Putting one in mind of Gone To Earth or Spirit of Eden. Like some of the hazier songs off At the Corner of Miles and Gil. Really beautiful.

Indie Disco 1991

Freak Scene
Debaser
The Only One I Know
Taste
Can’t Be Sure
Crash
Loads of Roses Carpets James
Step On
Pacific State
Some Weddoes
Probably Fine Time
You Made Me Realise / Feed Me With Your Kiss (Will the fringes please take to the dancefloor)

Fuck I miss the Festive Fifty

Current listening

Blimey. I can’t stop listening to this one. To say that just listening to it is like the last twenty years never passed is a major understatement. 19 years old. “Snowball” on the record player and expecting the latest missive from PO Box 691 Bristol any time. It was just the lo-fi home made politicised enthusiastic beauty of it all. Anger and melancholy combined. And the music (or at least some of it) was just great. Snowball Lyceum and the Sensitive era was for me the high point but there were loads of great singles from that point on as well. I never did the whole paisley shirt bowl hair “tonight Matthew I am Stephen Pastel” thing but I signed up fully to the whole spirit of the thing. In fact I wore my tartan dancing trousers a hangdog sheepskin coat and my Marlboro Hip Hop Queens t-shirt to a Heavenly gig just to be contrary and had an interesting conversation with Amelia Fletcher about Kylie, who was right then in her imperial “Better the devil you know, Step back in time, What do I have to do, Shocked” period. And Matt and Clare did plenty to avoid pandering to their tweecore following. I remember smiling for days when the Poppycocteau fanzine arrived. Always wondered what happened to Paul who wrote it and some wonderful fanzines afterwards and with whom I had much correspondence. We even swapped trash nrg covers tapes at one stage.

So yes. Released in 2009. The spirit of 1986. Channelling The Field Mice, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and early MBV. And utterly utterly derivative, but it still sounds wonderful. Nostalgia is for the lame, but it’s ability to transport means I cannot resist it. And I love the thought of hundreds of 19 year old New Yorkers discovering it and thinking they have found their own amazing new sounds. I wonder if there are fanzines to go with their scene as well. I hope so. Paper ones mind. A computer screen is just not the same as a small A5 sheaf of papers filled with love and hate and boys and girls and just the whole excitement of being young stapled together and hastily shoved in a small khaki army surplus shoulder bag. So this will be one of my favourite records from 2009. No question.

Current listening: Bon Iver “Wisconsin”

“For Emma For Ever Ago”  is up there at the top of the favourite records of the year for me next to “Sun Giant” and “Ark 1″. This is the b-side to the recently released “For Emma” single and I can’t believe that he left it off the album because it fits in there perfectly. World weary and intimate and beautiful and feeling like a walk through a leafless forest with twigs and branches underfoot. I gather that Wisconsin is his home state.  The album is so beautiful. Another of those great records that don’t give up their secrets immediately. Five or six listens at least to get there.

Current listening: Bella Hardy “Young Edmund”

Wow. Amazing. Bella Hardy was on the Folk at the Proms on the telly and BBC Radio 3 yesterday. And about time too. She got a bit of support from Mike Harding last year but not as much coverage as she should have done. Her album was one of my favourite Christmas presents of last year. And her home is just across the yard from my sisters house. So the album has been getting further airings since yesterday. I do hope this results in even more success. She is playing the folk festival circuit later in the summer so I should catch her live then.  Bellowhead were fucking ace as well. As usual.

Shuffleathon 2007. Part 9

Norma Waterson – Reply to Joe Haines

Joe Haines was a journalist who wrote, to quote the sleeve notes, “an iniquitous article …on the subject of Freddie Mercury’s disclosure that he was HIV positive (indeed that he had full blown AIDS) and which the Daily Mirror saw fit to print”.

This is a song written by Norma’s late sister Lal, all of whose songs were some of the most beautiful skewed lullabies written in the last fifty years. Occupying a middle ground of somehere between Syd Barrett, rural English folk and Leonard Cohen, if that can be imagined. There are far too few of them but those that there are are shining gems.

Norma Waterson does of course have one of the great voices of our age and of any age. Shes a modern day living breathing Piaf or Caruso and I wish more people would see it.

A sad song but very beautiful.

Current listening: Daft Punk “Superheroes”

Discovery was such a fantastic album wasn’t it ?

Shuffleathon 2007. Part 8

Shack – Finn, Sophie, Bobby and Lance

“What we see and what we seem, are but a dream, a dream within a dream”

I bought the “I Know You Well” twelve inch single for fifty pence from Our Price in Manchester’s Arndale Centre sometime as the eighties turned into the nineties and the Mondays and the Roses ruled the world. It was sublime, although it could have easily been mistaken as a Johnny Come Lately Stone Roses copy. But Shack had been raiding the nineteen sixties for years before then, ever since their Pale Fountains days with their hints of Love and Burt Bacharach. I liked the Pale Fountains and even bought their second single “Thank You” and in particular loved its wonderful soft focus b-side “Meadow Of Love”. But in retrospect I feel the Paleys were a mere rehearsal for what Shack were going to be. The first album Zilch was a sort of halfway house between the Pale Fountains sound and Shack proper but from then on they were motoring. Or not as the case may be what with lost albums, drug addictions and a baffling lack of commercial success. Their time nearly came in the mid nineties when their record company tried to tag them on to the Britpop phenomenon and while “HMS Fable” did reasonably well, it didn’t gain them the size of audience which was being enjoyed by the likes of The Verve or Oasis, which should have been their due. Maybe they were just too real and grounded for the 1990s. Of their six albums released since 1990, three are perfect. These are Waterpistol, The Magical World Of The Strands and On the Corner of Miles and Gil. My favourite is the The Magical World.. which was released under the name Michael and The Strands and is just a beautiful idyllic hazy dreamy summers day folk record.

Now I am the first person to admit that I know nothing about Home and Away. Apparently this song refers to characters from the long running Aussie soap. This shuffling, murmured song is so beautiful. It could easily be off The Magical World … but is from their last full studio release “On the corner of Miles and Gil” which was a return to form after the patchy “Here’s Tom With The Weather”. It sorts of sounds like some strung out beatnik poet landing in the world of daytime television and trying to make head or tail of it. It also namechecks “Dick and Judy”. ‘Tis good.