Penguin Cafe Orchestra - Union Cafe
Penguin Cafe Orchestra - Music From The Penguin Cafe
Bonnie Prince Billy - The Letting Go
Soft Hair - Soft Hair
Jerry Paper - Like A Baby
Bonnie Prince Billy - Summer In The Southeast
Bonnie Prince Billy's The Letting Go album fondly reminds me of his Lie Down In The Light album (which followed). Fairly down tempo and relaxed, as with most of his albums, The Letting Go contains one of my favourite Bonnie songs, the haunting Cursed Sleep, with its amazing video...
The beauty and eccentricity of The Letting Go doesn't provoke deep absorption or self-reflection so much as a kind of fond familiarity.
Pitchfork
Indeed, perhaps not Bonnie Prince Billy's most daring album but he is effortlessly great in almost anything he does. I haven't yet come across an album that has disappointed...
Which takes me on to the live album Summer In The Southeast. This is stunning. Not least as it was so unexpected. Whereas The Letting Go's easy vibe is typical Bonnie Prince Billy this noisy heavy warts and all rock gig from 2005 is a new Bonnie Prince Billy to me (in fact I'd never heard of the album until it popped up on a youtube feed I was listening to one evening).
Boosted by electric guitar from collaborator Matt Sweeney BPB reinvents his back catalogue with "a delightfully drunken racket of tangled guitars and thunderous percussion" (Pitchfork). The sound verges on grunge or even punk and reminds me of The Velvet Underground. So hardly representative of any of his albums I've heard, or I imagine most of his gigs, nevertheless an exciting addition to the Bonnie catalogue. A great find.
The other new entry this week comes from LA producer Jerry Paper. This came on to my radar via the unusual Soft Hair album. I was in a Brighton cafe one afternoon and this music came on and the weird distorted electronica sounded to me just like Soft Hair. I asked the patron and he told me it was Jerry Paper. Name lodged in notebook and album investigated forthwith.