The Laura Marling album is one of my favourite "nu-folk" (bit of a silly term) albums - one that has grown on me over the years. Good songs, interesting acoustic guitar chords, and a restrained voice thankfully void of those Joni Mitchell like vocal histrionics. Possessing a depth and longevity which I have found lacking in acts Marling has been associated with (Noah And The Whale, Johnny Flynn, Mumford and Sons anyone?) I Speak Because I Can has appeared in this blog several times over the last couple of years and will appear again. It lays claim as her best album; its predecessor Alas, I Cannot Swim is due a deeper dive too. Here's her plot on the tourist map of music...
Listening back now it is difficult to understand why Belle and Sebastian became such indie media darlings. If You're Feeling Sinister is pleasant enough acoustic whimsy which may have been fresh and original at the time (1996) but it's pretty lightweight stuff - a lightweight that is giving further airiness by simple nursery rhyme like melodies, that are echoed by trumpet on several tracks, and lead singer Stuart Murdoch's fey vocals.
I'd pass over this much admired album for the stronger (albeit less well received) follow up, The Boy With The Arab Strap.
More brothers this week - the Palace Bros joining the Felices. This Palace Brothers album actually being a solo acoustic guitar album pretty much from one Will Oldham, better known as Bonnie Prince Billy, plus real brothers Ned and Paul. Also slight and very short, like a few of his albums actually, but there's always quality with Oldham and I don't think I've ever heard a bad album from him: An artist of whom I could invest in many other albums, with confidence of not being disappointed. My personal favourite to date?: Lie Down In The Light.
Continuing to enjoy Picaresque. Having dipped into some other albums from the boys and girls I do conclude, as my friend told me, they all sound very different. This one shows The Decemberists' indie folk side, but I've also heard the band branch out into heavy rock, synth pop and even prog - a multi talented band. I will investigate further albums and examine whether they can really pull off these multiple styles. I suspect Picaresque will remain a favourite and probably their default sound (and I'm pleased I started here).
When listening to Robert Plant's solo music it is tempting to compare it to Led Zeppelin - a comparison Plant himself has been keen to distant himself from via ventures into different styles and collaborations with various world artists (his alternative takes on some classic Zeppelin tunes met with mixed reactions from fans). He has also reportedly been the sticking point in any attempts to reform the band, save for the famous O2 gig way back in 2007 now. However the voice is still strong and still his and particularly when playing with a rock band the comparisons are inevitable. When I hear a track I therefore find myself thinking where would this sit in the pantheon of Led Zep music? Which album would it suit, and indeed would it have been good enough to make any of the albums?
Would any Plant solo music make it on to a Led Zeppelin album?
The answer to the last question is on the whole positive. In both of the albums featured here there are songs that would have been good enough for the mighty Zep - although note that this whole premise is off the mark as both albums consist entirely of covers! Perhaps more valid to say the best performances or tracks are the equal of some Led Zeppelin tracks.
His Band of Joy project is probably Plant's most deliberate and closest approach to past glories (save for the Page/Plant reunions in the 90s).
Band of Joy were originally formed in Birmingham in 1965 with John Bonham (and Dave Pegg, later of Fairport Convention) before disbanding in 1968 without recording any albums (two albums were released by a new version of the band, without either of their Led Zeppelin members, in the late 70s and early 80s). Then Plant himself revived the band's name again in 2010 for this album and a tour, albeit without any of his original colleagues. The preceding country rock Raising Sand album with Alison Krauss came out in 2007 just before the fabled Zeppelin gig. Critically acclaimed it went on to pick up five Grammys including Album Of The Year for 2009. With a preponderance of Nashville session players in Band of Joy's ranks the expectation was for a follow up (further sessions with Krauss herself were apparently on the cards but never came to pass). There are indeed some up beat light touch R&B / country tinged tracks favoured by the mighty Zep themselves in later albums, but generally the album has an intense depth of distorted grungy guitars. There are a even a couple of covers from low-fi Minnestota rockers Low - Silver Rider is a magnificent slow burner which could have come off Neil Young's Zuma album:
This week's blog features three artists across the broad folk/rock spectrum. We have the first sighting of the accomplished acoustic guitar troubadour Laura Marling, sandwiched between the traditional yet original folk song of the Unthanks sisters and Midlake's easy going yet dark brand of Americana.
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1. Laura Marling - Alas I Cannot Swim
2. The Unthanks - Here's The Tender Coming
3. Fleetwood Mac - Rumours
4. Midlake - The Courage of Others
5. The War on Drugs - Slave Ambient
6. Robert Plant - Band of Joy
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With Thanks For The Unthanks
It is great to come across something very new and exceptional while researching and writing this blog. I was vaguely aware of The Unthanks via their stunning cover of Starless by King Crimson (both respectful of the original yet very different too). But hearing Here's The Tender Coming has taken my admiration to a whole new level.
It's this sort of music
The heavily accented folk singing took me a few plays to tune in to. On very first listen it sounds a bit twee and too much "finger in thy ear down the Irish pub" type stuff. But once I got it the power of the songs (mostly covers or trad. set to spare arrangements of strings, brass, and piano) quickly won me over.
Very strange to be reminded of King Crimson and Yes!
Strangely one of the bands they remind me of is actually Islands era King Crimson. Also equally strangely fellow proggers the Jon Anderson fronted Yes, and Efterklang and Philip Glass, plus more obviously a bit of early Fairport Convention too and the more edgy and discordant Incredible String Band. But overall it's the type of music that makes me think of pagan festivals and dancing around in animal masks in TheWicker Man.
.. and this sort of music
The title song refers to the name of the ship, "The Tender", coming to press gang men to sea:
Here's the tender coming, pressing all the men Oh dear hinny, what shall we do then? Here's the tender coming off at Shield's Bar Here's the tender coming full of men of war Hide thee canny hinny, hide thyself away Hide thee till the frigate makes for Druridge Bay If they take thee Geordie who's to win our bread? Me and little Jackie better off be dead
One of the best albums I've heard so far this year. The Unthanks will be making an appearance in the Best New Discovery section of my Year End Review when it comes around.
First Nu Folk From Laura
Purely coincidentally, in this week of suffragettes and women's rights celebrations, the delectable Unthanks singing is flanked by two other (mostly) female voices. First we have Laura Marling with her 2008 debut album Alas I Cannot Swim (I was surprised to learn this was her debut thinking she had been around a lot longer than ten years). She is no doubt a special talent with a nice voice and an original guitar technique employing interesting tunings.
This album is pretty good. Essentially just guitar and voice but some tracks are fleshed out with string arrangements and several more upbeat numbers employ a full band with bass and drums like the jaunty Cross Your Fingers. Occasionally she goes off into one of those "sing really fast and fit as many words into a breath as possible" type moments most annoyingly advocated by vocal gymnasts like Joni Mitchell.
Intriguing artwork from Laura Marling's debut album
There is a bit of the pagan tradition too in this music and some Alice in Wonderland like line drawings in the artwork but the imagery evoked by the music is not so vivid as that of the Unthanks. I think it's called nu-folk. Marling can be forgiven the close association with the very mainstream Mumford and Sons who appear in part on this album, but as folk music goes I actually find the traditional old-folk of Here's The Tender Coming much more appealing.
I've Now Heard Rumours
On the other side at slot 3 we have the first appearance in a CD player of mine of Rumours - the first Fleetwood Mac album with lead vocalist Stevie Nicks of course. I actually wrote a few months ago about having never heard this album before. Well now I have and it is pretty good. Of course I recognise at least half the songs but there are surprises on here too. It represents a well trodden path of light AOR* (what an awful term that is) but is an excellent example of such.
Stevie Nicks with Mick Fleetwood
The Courage To Go It Alone
Keeping up the standard (and character) of this most enjoyable week we have another excellent album from a band I've not heard before. Fronted not by a female voice, but the very gentle tones of Tim Smith, Midlake are an americana/folk rock band from Texas.
The vibe on The Courage of Others is again on the pagan side starting with the hooded figures on the cover (as was also the case on the striking cover of their debut album The Trials of Van Occupanther).
The music gently rocks along and the sound is excellent. They so remind me of another band or artist generally and through particularly tracks. I just can't quite nail who I'm thinking of. I've considered Fairport Convention, The Flaming Lips, Fleet Foxes, Wilco, Iron and Wine, and Bear's Den. Bring Down sounds just like a track off of Radiohead's OK Computer and Fortune is very Simon and Garfunkel. Or perhaps overall they remind me of John Grant which wouldn't be too surprising as they played on Grant's debut solo album The Queen of Denmark.
It's those laid back breathy harmonised vocals most of all - the vocalist does seem to give a band most of it's character and on listening to some of their other music including a KEXP session I figured they weren't sounding quite as good as on The Courage of Others. Further investigation revealed that lead vocalist and songwriter Tim Smith had left and under slightly mysterious circumstances.
Apparently a follow up to The Courage of Others had been recorded over a couple of years and was almost ready for release but did not come up to Smith's painstaking standards (he was only happy with one song). Smith decided to leave to pursue his own path and the remaining band scrapped the complete recording and rewrote and reproduced a completely new album in only six months.
Musically we didn't see things the same way... you can hear from their new album our tastes and sensibilities are quite different and always have been.
The new album became Antiphon and with guitarist Eric Pulido taking on lead vocals Midlake had become yet another band (after Genesis and Can who I have discussed recently) choosing not to replace their main vocalist:
Antiphon is the most honest representation of the band as a whole, as opposed to one person's vision that we were trying to facilitate.
You can sense some frustration and resentment in Pulido's words.
Antiphon - Midlake's third
What of Tim Smith's new project? Well not much so far. It seems something is restricting his output and it isn't clear whether this is perfectionism, personal issues, or plain old writer's block. The website for his new project Harp leaves this message -
I'll give another update when there's something more to say, but if you don't hear from me for a long time that only means I'm still at it. Thanks for understanding. Peace and Love, Tim
For me this fuels the mystery further and I'll certainly be intrigued with whatever he comes out with. It's displaying all the hallmarks of being a masterpiece!
"I've never been one to rush the process of making music."The enigmatic Tim Smith in his home studio.
Now imagine my surprise when clicking the facebook link on the Harpband website I am taken to a post showing Tim Smith in a Brighton pub last April! He was over here recording some music with a local band Hollow Hand who I've not heard of but will certainly be checking out. The intrigue deepens.
Charity Corner
I do love discovering new music and to think this rich seam of sonic gold from Midlake was mined from a punt on a £1.49 charity bin album. By the way to continue my log of the most common charity bin albums it is only fair to add these two perennial repeat offenders:
Two more charity purchases this week. One was Charles and Eddie and the other was a book actually which I'll include here as it is on music.
The Charles and Eddie album is from 1992 and I remember having it when it first came out, on cassette I think as I either remember it from my car or from my "gap year" when I was travelling in Asia and bought a bunch of cassettes down the Khao San Road. I also remember they co-hosted some M-TV program.
Duophonic is a nice album which still sounds good today. Would I Lie To You is the famous track but there are lots of other familiar ones on here and the general standard of all the songs is high. Their keenly produced disco and soul music sounded something like Michael Jackson or the Bee Gees. Not bad for 49p. Sadly Charles is no longer with us having died as long ago as 2001. Eddie is still going as part of LA-based duo The Polyamorous Affair.
The Koln Concert from Keith Jarrett is a classic jazz piano album. It fascinates me how he has produced such beautiful music from what appears to be variations on just a couple of chords. I assume it is improvised. It certainly sounds like it. As such it sounds like music straight from the soul like it is being channeled from some higher source. Is that how all great musicians feel? You can hear him breathing and moaning over the music in places as if he is possessed.
Keith Jarrett tinkling the ivories of "The Unplayable Piano" in a most unusual way
I do wonder how much this is myth but according to this TEDtalk the genesis of this best selling jazz and solo piano album (of all time) was accidental. Apparently the piano presented to Jarrett at the concert hall was faulty - out of tune, poor of tone, and with sticky black keys! After some persuasion Jarrett decided to go ahead with the concert and by being forced to work around the limitations produced an unintended masterpiece. A clear case of less being more.
The book I picked up is The Train In The Night by Nick Coleman. This is right up my street as it is basically the musical recollections of a 50 something man (an idea I have had before for a book) who unfortunately is going deaf. Being 50 something I think means having lived through a certain development of music over the decades that I imagine will never be repeated again. You could say the same about life generally I guess although maybe every generation feels the same about that? Coleman's taste seems fairly similar to mine too. He writes that his first 7 records he bought were a rather impressive list as below:
Nazareth - Razamanaz
Lou Reed - Transformer
Genesis - Nursery Cryme
Yes - The Yes Album
Derek and the Dominoes - Layla
Gong - Camembert Electrique
The Rolling Stones - Goat's Head Soup
That certainly beats my first seven, admittedly from a few years later, which would have been mostly ELO followed by a bit of Rainbow and Black Sabbath.
Man walking across a field with an Andy's Records carrier bag
On the Genesis album he writes: "Nursery Cryme was a fallback position. Deploying my new stevedore's swagger, I'd bravely gone to buy Genesis's latest album, Foxtrot, at the stall on the market in town only to find that they'd sold out. Miller's were out of it, too. Not one of the three other, lesser, record shops had it either. Consternation. [Friend] Andy had been quoting passages of Foxtrot's side-long epic Supper's Ready at me for days and I had a hunch that its surreal yet baroque outlandishness would fit me like a glove. Given that Andy's [good-looking] sister Linda was also known to be a Genesis fan - [her boyfriend's local prog rock group] Hamilton Gray owed quite a lot to the fine-boned Charterhouse boys - it might have given Linda and me something to talk about at the bus stop, should such a frightening yet wholly desired event ever transpire. In the circumstances, therefore, it just had to be Genesis. And so, in the absence of Foxtrot, the group's previous record would have to do. It was cheap too: £1.69.
"I still have the thing and still love it, even though I can now only hear it properly in my head, and even then not very clearly. I hope that my own children will love it in due course, too. History says that Peter Gabriel-era Genesis were a slightly unnecessary folie amusante arising from rock's need in the late Sixties to expand its formal horizons in a way that matched its artistic ambitions and enlarged social scope. History also sneers at Genesis for being posh; for not being even slightly Mod. Well history can do what it likes. The middle-class boy writing these words was wholly transfixed at the age of thirteen by the defiant remnants of the shut-down old man who voices The Musical Box and, now that he is partially shut down himself, the boy sees no reason to pretend that pastoral English prog rock didn't have its moments of outlandish emotional clarity."
Reading this section was timely. I've been revisiting quite a lot of Genesis myself recently - in fact not so much revisiting as visiting for the first time. I do love discovering new bands! I've consequently softened my views on post Gabriel Genesis. Sampling the "in-between albums" (in between Gabriel's last 1974 album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway and the fully realised 1980 pop album Duke) I've been impressed, even with Phil Collins' singing which I'd previously described as "constipated". Impressed to such an extent that I currently have ebay bids running on what I call the Genesis Mark One and a Half albums as below:
.. And Then There Were Three (the in-betweeny albums)
I pick up a lot of CDs from Charity Shops - often for a £1 or less! For example this week I came across Robert Plant and Alison Krauss's Raising Sand album which I'd heard a lot about but had never listened to (it's a cracker).
Of course there's always a lot of junk in the charity bins too - the same old rubbish gets recycled before eventually ending up in landfill presumably. It is rare to find a good album - logically the good stuff is usually kept so rarely recycled. Think about it - you don't see much Neil Young or Bob Dylan do you?
On the other hand there are a lot of artists that repeatedly show up in charity shops. It occurred to me that the most common album I see in charity shops is this one from Texas. I've never heard it but it must be a complete duffer. I imagine an anaemic middle of the road pop/rock band with a crap name fronted by an attractive singer. Ubiquitous in the CD collections of middle England. "Tick standard" as Keith Lemon would say. I could be wrong. I really should hear at least one track before my condemnation. I'll try one. Hang on... I tried Say What You Want. Don't know if this is representative but it's the first one that came up on Youtube. Predictably the video just centres on the singer who is all breathy and sultry with the occasional breaking croaky (sexy) voice in an X-factor style. The music was less expected. More disco and easy listening than I imagined.
Maybe it deserves an award? What other consistent showers in charity bins would give this one a run for it's money?
Perhaps as more and more people go digital old collectors like me may have further chances to pick up gems amongst the rubbish as people give away their whole collections.
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1. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss - Raising Sand
2. Neil Young - Hitchhiker
3. Beck - Colors
4. Genesis - Turn it on Again, The Hits
5. Can - Ege Bamyasi
6. Can - Sacrilege CD1
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The 2009 Grammy Award winning Raising Sand album was a very pleasant surprise. There are moments with these sorts of records where it's a case of "you go", "no your turn", "no after you" with the key players taking it in turns to lead. So we get some Alison Krauss songs and some Robert Plant songs and not all that many that feel like genuine duets. There's also some country and some rock, but mostly it's old time rock with production by T-Bone Burnett giving the sound a nice live band feel. Actually the songs are nearly all old covers mostly from the 60s written by the likes of Gene Clark, The Everly Brothers and Allen Touissant. There's also a song by Tom Waits and Waits' long time guitar collaborator Marc Ribot features in the band. Plant's voice has matured well beyond his 70s screaming heyday and now exudes a much more laid back and effortless confidence.
Lots of good songs including current favourite Please Read The Letter featured below:
I think I'll be checking out Plant's latest album Carry Fire soon too having heard some impressive samples somewhere recently - probably on Jools Holland.
A quick word on the Can albums this week (there will be more in a Can retrospective review currently in production). Ege Bamyasi is just about the perfect Can record covering all their best bases in barely 40 minutes, which is quite remarkable when some of their extended jams usually take up half of this time alone. The Sacrilege album is a set of remixes circa 1997 (when drum 'n' bass was the flavour of the month) by artists like Brian Eno, The Orb, Sonic Youth and U.N.K.L.E. The results are mixed and most successful where the remix artists have moved the furthest from the original. Where the originals are already very drum and bass heavy it is not sufficient to just augment the drum and bass which seems to me to often be the case with remixes.
