Aglet Eaters

30 Songs That Blew My Mind (that you probably haven’t heard of) – Part 2

Five more tracks that stopped me in my… tracks.

6. Chromium – The Church: I didn’t meet The Church through ‘Under The Milky Way’ like most of the world. I met them when I was 17 and Pandora (which was in India at the time) played me a track called ‘Chromium’ which, I would later find out was not the original recording from After Everything Now This, but the acoustic version that appeared on El Momento Descuidado. I struggle to tell you what it was about this track that made me stop and listen and, once it was finished, rejig my radio station genres so it would play again. I could be as simple as the stripped down opening. It could also be the meaningfully meaningless lyrics (‘neo maniac in the cul-de-sac’ was my forum signature back in my Songfacts days). Maybe it was just the name of the song? Whatever it was, no other track by The Church – and I love every song they ever made – came close to doing for me what ‘Chromium’ still does.

7. Soul One/Mouthful of Cavities – Blind Melon: I still don’t know of a voice as emotive as Shannon Hoon’s. Blind Melon may be seen as one-hit wonders for ‘No Rain’, which is beautiful in its paradoxical pairing of uplifting melodies with lonely verses, but ‘Mouthful of Cavities’ and ‘Soul One’ (and St. Andrew’s Fall/Walk) are more than just the best of Blind Melon. They’re among the best things to have ever happened to us.

I’ve never seen Shannon Hoon’s face on a t-shirt but I wept for him, for Nico and for the songs I would never get to hear, when I heard ‘Soul One.’ I cried for his bitter little heart (Inside – pain in my heart often made her cry. Outside, I cursed the birds and the sugar skies‘) for his childlike joy (‘you know it felt like she was the only one’) and for his unresolved grief (‘but I never – no I never got a chance to say goodbye.‘).

Like ‘Soul One’, it’s the devastation in lines like ‘see I haven’t seen him smile in a little while,‘ on ‘Mouthful of Cavities’ that breaks my heart. Hoon says the line twice, first with desolation (it’s almost a question with the lilt at the end of the sentence), and then with frustration. And when he says, sadly but matter-of-factly, ‘One of these days this will die – so will me and so will you,‘ you know it turned out of to be true.

The more I listen to Blind Melon, the more I fall in love with them – for their words, their music and their raw emotion. But today, I live in a world without Shannon Hoon and there’s no one to warble ‘Life Ain’t So Shitty’ into a tape recorder kept by the window of a hotel room and make it sound like a masterpiece.

8. You Look Fine – Pia Fraus: Let everything I say about ‘You Look Fine’ be as beautifully simple as it is. If I had ever done music theory, I would have used this track as a study on the significance of composition, of silence and of chaos, and propounded a corollary on the irrelevance of complexity. Pia Fraus don’t tell me anything beyond ‘you look fine’, but I believe them. Their musicianship isn’t masterful, but it’s exactly what I need to hear. And they throw in a wall of chaotic noise – why? I don’t know, but it was meant to be there. Walk down a busy street with this song in your headphones and let Pia Fraus be the voice in your head, your armour against interaction, and your boost of self-confidence.

9. Do You Feel Loved – U2: One day I will write a 12 page paper on how Pop is U2‘s best and most underrated album. Maybe it’s the natural successor to their experiments with Zooropa and Achtung Baby, but Pop is more innovative than both – nothing like its name suggests. I still wish they could have taken the maturity they showed on that album further. Instead they followed up with the palatable All That You Can’t Leave Behind, and got more and more formulaic with every successive release.

It took me a decade of listening to Pop to realise that ‘Do You Feel Loved’ was the standout track on the album because I would keep coming back to it. For the first and only time in my life I wished more people knew about this obscurity because it was made to be danced to with wild hair and wild arms and not an inch of space between two bodies (‘stick together man and woman‘*). ‘Do You Feel Loved’ is orgasmic, but it remains one of the many dog whistles on Pop, an album that most know for its most mediocre track – ‘Discotheque.’ Make love to ‘Do You Feel Loved’ or just dance to it with someone, or by yourself, or in your mind. You’ll find yourself transported out of this world.

*please ignore the heteronormativity this is 1999

10. Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in my Hand – Primitive Radio Gods: I’m almost willing to go as far as to say that this song is meant to be listened to with someone else though, personally, I would never do such a thing. ‘Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money in my Hand’ is a quiet companion – reassuring in nothing but its presence. It’s rare I meet a song that paints such vivid images with nothing more than a few words and fewer sounds. You can see how ‘Moonlight spills on comic books and superstars in magazines.’ You can hear the plane take off from Baltimore and touch down on Bourbon Street. I think I hear coins dropping in a phonebooth when the song opens, but is that just a jukebox scratching a BB King record? Friends or more-than-friends talk about god and conspiracy theories into the night. ‘Phone Booth’ is the soundtrack to our solitary evening reflections. It’s profound, cynical and possibly meaningless – like most of us.

30 Songs That Blew My Mind (that you probably haven’t heard of) – Part 1

Celebrating 30 (and a half) years on the planet with a six-part series on the 30 songs that changed my life and blew my mind. Here we go:

1. El Topo – HANDLINGNOISE

Two. That’s how many times I’ve listened to ‘El Topo’ in my lifetime.

I don’t recall how I found HANDLINGNOISE or where I was when I first heard this album, but I recall my heart coming to an abrupt halt at the clap that falls at the start of the track. I remember it staying that way for the next few seconds before picking up and racing ‘El Topo’ all the way to the end.

I listen to ‘El Topo’ sparingly. I wait for stars to align, darkness to fall, and for people to leave. Doors are locked and devices silenced. There is likely no other track that I am as selfish about. I’m an overzealous parent, forbidding it from reaching the ears of those unworthy of its magnificence.

Perhaps I should learn to share.

Is the rest of this album as good as the first track? I have no idea. I’ve usually ceased to be a sentient being by the time it ends.

2. Zoë Machete Control – [The] Slowest Runner [in all the world]

Another album opener that had me at first listen. I don’t remember my first [The] Slowest Runner [in all the world] experience either, but I do remember the smug satisfaction with which I killed a party when I played this track. Drinks paused, phones drooped, eyes glazed over. Someone tried to be cool and I heard them attempt to croak their approval but their voice was puny and insignificant, whipped into oblivion by the tornado in the room. If there’s another group that carries the label ‘neo-classical’ as gloriously and as genuinely as this one, I am yet to meet it.

3. Prodigal Summer – Snow in Mexico

‘Never gets old’ is the new ‘awesome’ – a phrase reduced to flippancy through overuse. But use and overuse it all you like when you’re talking about this track, and tell me – how is listening to ‘Prodigal Summer’ every time like listening to ‘Prodigal Summer’ for the first time? How does it compress every ASMR-trigger the world has ever known into just four and a half minutes? How is it so flawlessly composed of a thousand analogue childhoods when it was released in 2012? How is this song so new and, simultaneously, so, so old?

Here’s another overused word in shoegaze circles – ethereal. Again, use it all you want here. ‘Prodigal Summer’ doesn’t give you anything to grasp. There’s nothing by which you can pin it to your memory, no catchy hooks or sticky riffs. So you listen to it again, and again, and again, hoping that this time – maybe this time – it stays.

4. Fake Lights in the Sky – Last Leaf Down

I remember this vividly. It’s 10 am in the office. Under stark white lights I decide to listen to a track a friend of mine has assured me I will love. A minute and a half in and I can see the world around me slowing to a crawl. By 2.30, the earth has stopped spinning, time has stopped (naturally), and the outside world is frozen in place. Two minutes later, it’s all over. I’m looking at the post-its on my pinboard and I could swear I had only just blinked.

<a href="http://lastleafdown.bandcamp.com/track/fake-lights-in-the-sky">fake lights in the sky by Last Leaf Down</a>

Balms vs. Nothing

You have to wonder if in naming their track ‘Nothing In’, Balms aren’t giving a tip of the hat to the band of the same name (that’d be Nothing) whose track, ‘Fever Queen’ opens the best album of 2016.

The Sorry Shop vs. My Bloody Valentine

While I agree that My Bloody Valentine and the Jesus and Mary Chain should be exempt from any and all soundalike competitions, the sheer audacity of The Sorry Shop’s ‘Anxiety’ as it rubs up against a (probably oblivious) ‘You Made me Realise’ makes this comparison worth a listen.

NB: Added lols for ‘Anxiety’ itself being a cover of the Ramones.

Life on Venus – Encounters

If you’ve been missing The Daysleepers since the cruel taunt that was ‘Dream Within A Dreamworld’ 3 years ago, word on the street is that they’re releasing an honest-to-goodness album this year. Take it from DKFM.

I am yet to see news of said album out in the wild, so forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.

2017 has been kind in other ways, however. Shoegaze superpower, Russia, has given us what is NOT a cheap imitation of the Daysleepers BUT RATHER a worthwhile adversary.

Encounters by Life on Venus is one of the most authentic shoegaze albums to have come out this year.

And how fortuitously do they just happen to hark back to the days of ‘Drowned in a Sea of Sound’ and ‘Hide Your Eyes’

Listen to ‘There Will Be Blood’ and tell me it’s not ‘Run’ and ‘Stars On Fire’ having a session in the sheets.

<a href="http://lifeonvenus.bandcamp.com/album/encounters">Encounters by Life on Venus</a>

Pick up Encounters here. It’s pay what you want, but it’s always nice if you pay a little for it.

The war is over, they won

Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lester Bangs was as eerily prophetic as his IRL counterpart when he said these words.

Let’s recap. The line crops up twice in the film. The first when Bangs is cautioning young William from becoming a rock writer, warning him that he’s made it just in time to witness the death of rock and roll (aka the commercialisation of subculture aka the creation of ‘the industry of cool’), just before commissioning him (William) to write him (Bangs) a thousand words on Black Sabbath. Given how the kid is so romantically oblivious to the possibility that there is anything else worth doing with one’s short life apart from writing about music, it’s easy for us to get sucked into our protagonist’s dream and to write off Bangs’ words as excessive and reactionary.

Which is why he needs to say them again later in the film for you to really hear him. William is on tour with Stillwater who are in the middle of a reluctant talk with a very convincing potential new band manager, while their existing manager looks on apathetically. This is in the wake of a series of tour-related mishaps all which could, according to New Manager, have been turned into a profit had they been better… managed. ‘We’re in it for the music!’ Russell’s attempt at staying authentic cannot stand up to the promise of profit and so, this time, when Bangs is on the phone with William and he says ‘The war is over, they won’ you feel him. In those five words you see sponsorship deals, record labels and ads in glossies. The Hit Machine materialises before your eyes and suddenly everyone’s recording in sleek wood-panelled studios instead of garages, basements, attics and bedrooms.

I think that the best records are made on garbage equipment and played on garbage equipment […] The Dolby’s, the studios and the whole surreality of the thing, it just takes all the mud and the guts out of it. I mean the music is supposed to be distorted in the first place, and the clearer you make it, the more you rob it.

That’s the REAL Lester Bangs predicting the demise of authenticity in music back in 1980. While we could still smell the sweat and taste the grit of rock and roll at least in the early 90s, we also saw ‘CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK’ on Kurt Cobain’s t-shirt when Nirvana appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone just two or so decades after Stillwater did, all while assembly lines stamped his eyelinered face on mass-produced black t-shirts. The war was over, they’d won.

Maybe the days of grit and dirty glamour are definitively behind us. You’ll still find dirt in the backs of dingy indie venues, where the beer is cheap and rent not so much. But perhaps the closest we’ll get to glamour is Zachary Cole Smith’s admission that DIIV’s last album is the story of his own struggle with heroin.

Maybe it’s because, as the music video fades, and as bandcamp finds itself saturated with audio, we’re listening more and watching less.And maybe bombastic egoism and self-destructiveness are meaningless in the absence of an audience. What good are sexual escapades if there aren’t any hushed voices whispering stories of the depths of your debauchery? Why drop a tab if you haven’t an awed spectator to narrate your trip to after the comedown? We throw the words glamour, grit and guts at our stars, but we don’t have the time to label anything beyond the music we listen anymore. Maybe it’s not as romantic, but perhaps it’s the best we’ll ever have. Maybe this is the purest music has ever been.

Find Your Way Home: Looking back at K with Crispian Mills

This year, Kula Shaker release K 2.0 – a companion to their seminal debut, K, released in September 1996. At the time of this interview, I’m huddled in a quiet corner of a restaurant in New Delhi and I’m asking the Kula Shaker frontman to walk me through the story of K with 7000 kilometres between us.

I start by asking him to tell me about what it was like to release K twenty years ago. He makes an unconventional Blake reference, referring to Songs Of Innocence And Experience – a book he describes as “one of the great classics of literature.” In it, Blake walks the reader through the joys and perils of youthful naïveté.

“What does that have to do with K?” I ask.

“Innocence. We thought we were smarter than we were. We were speaking to these veterans of the music business and getting ripped off. You tell yourself: ‘It won’t happen to me.’ You’re young. But we were walking right into the lion’s den. A nest of snakes. That was the innocence of our youth ploughing into the adult world.”

He continues, his memory of the spirit of the album as vivid as if it was released yesterday. “And it’s an innocent album. It’s an album that’s asking questions, struggling with identity. It’s an album that’s looking for answers.”

K was – and still is – a landmark album. It reached me through Indian cable television the year it was released, but it wasn’t until many years after that I learned that its reception in its home country was… mixed. I ask Mills what he feels the reason behind its criticism was.

“The musical styles on K are mainstream now. People didn’t know how to understand it or where to place it when it was released, so all that was left to do was deride it. Before K, ‘Indian music’ was the music that played in the background when you were in an Indian restaurant. Before K, Krishna was an image on kitschy poster. It really changed us. More than acid, it was hearing about Krishna and going to India that changed us. Krishna is the unavoidable, inevitable karmic destiny. The crooked, unpredictable, divine lover. It’s very personal. And K is based on very personal beliefs.”

Indian influences aside, K was born in the belly of Britpop and, while that could have worked against it, the album managed to turn the era to its advantage.

“Britpop was very much about being British. Bands really embraced and got off on that ‘We’re British!’ sensibility. We weren’t saying we were Indian or that we were British; there’s a more universal identity on K. Theresa May said something like ‘A citizen of the world is a citizen of nowhere’. People are sceptical that there’s a world out there without flags. We said that and people wanted to kill us. People are afraid of the concept of no flags.”

“When I was in private schools, they called me ‘common’, and when I was in state schools they called me ‘posh’. It’s made me very cynical about all these labels. Kula Shaker was born cynical, idealistic, and true. It’s born in ancient traditions, the universality of sanatana dharma, jivan dharma, the identity of the soul. We have a lot of people against us who don’t understand what we’re about. I call it an ‘Accident of Chronology’; it was a moment that suited us. Its 60s obsessed, golden age of pop and rock aesthetic fitted quite well with our own.”

Regardless of how neatly it fitted the Britpop mould, K was something else. A band of four Brits turning Hindu mantras into 60s infused pop melodies was bound to stand out.

“We didn’t make an effort to be different. We were different. We were learning music – I was learning sarod – and we were working with Himagsu Goswami, who was living in London, and his niece, Gouri, who sang on all the albums. A lot of our sound developed from playing unconventional gigs; we played squats, we played festivals – it wasn’t just pubs and clubs. We weren’t listening to the radio and saying: ‘Let’s sound like them.’ We felt this was our destiny.”

The innocence and positivity on K lies in stark contrast to its cynical successor Peasants, Pigs And Astronauts – an album whose dystopian lyrics are just as applicable today as they were in 1999. I can’t resist pointing out the dichotomy.

“Peasants, Pigs And Astronauts is the apocalypse and the aftermath. It’s us having fun with the idea of the millennium,” he tells me. “There was angst in K. But it bore fruit in Peasants, Pigs And Astronauts.”

Kula Shaker never really revisited their sound on K. Their style changed across each successive album, seemingly moving away from the band’s original aesthetic. I ask if there’s any chance we can expect a return to their roots in the future. The closest we’ll get, I learned, is the release of their first live album.

“It’s something we’ve struggled with in the past. We’ve struggled to bottle the magic and excitement of a live show in a recording. So we booked a studio in East London and played a show to a few hundred people. This was in May this year. The sound and the atmosphere were great. The album’s going to be called Live In The East (End).”

I ask, and he lets me in on a secret around K’s recording. “We weren’t crazy about how the album was sounding, originally. We originally recorded it with John Leckie. We were huge fans of his work, but we weren’t huge fans of the outcome when we first heard K; we were disappointed. Our manager told us to stop being such perfectionists. We’d recorded a version of ‘Shower Your Love’ that they wanted to release. No one’s heard it yet.”

“We had to record the B-sides in a small studio. ‘Drop In The Sea’, ‘Dance In Your Shadow’ – that’s where we recorded them. Stephen Harris was at the recording session and we ended up taking a lot of the Leckie tracks off the record.”

A lot has changed in twenty years, and if the music industry was a lions’ den/snake pit then, would K have survived today?

“The music business, and the way it works, used to be much more focused. Not only was it signing bands but it was also simpler to navigate in terms of the ways you could promote a band. But now you have this ocean of content – the Internet – that everyone is drowning in. It’s difficult for music to get through. And whatever does get through has a vanilla taste to it. So I think K would struggle, but you never know. K didn’t fit with Britpop either.”

“As for downloading music – it works, it’s easy. But just because something is easy doesn’t mean it’s right. It’s just as difficult for a band today to make it and there’s so much less support from record companies. Musicians have to be part-time, and there’s a huge sacrifice to be made if you have to live that life. Not many people can tour like that. You have to be a bit mad and very clever to make it.”

I’ve caught Mills just ahead of Kula Shaker’s tour of Japan and the UK. “K is an album that was designed to be heard in one go,” he tells me. “When we’re on tour in Japan and the UK, we’re going to be playing it in its entirety.” He doesn’t see me nod and plan my trip to London. I ask him how the shows are doing, and to tell me about the people who come see them play.

“Our fans are pretty devoted, and I’m always amazed. We did a concert in LA – we hadn’t played there in 15 years, so we didn’t know if anyone would remember us. But they were such exciting shows – we’re so grateful to have those fans. We’re very grateful for the people who’ve stuck with us – the kids, now maybe their kids. The band certainly means something to the fans.”

At 9 years old, when I first heard K, I thought it was beautiful. At 29, it’s still beautiful. I’m not yet tired of the chaotically spiralling guitars on ‘Tattva’, and ‘Govinda’ still manages to soothe me at my most savage. The strings that open ‘Hollow Man (Part 2)’ are exquisite enough to have generously ‘inspired’ Radiohead (cough ‘Faust Arp’ cough), while ‘Start All Over’ is as sweetly romantic today as it was then. And then there’s ‘303’, whose whirlwind cityscapes and unrestrained recklessness can still melt my cold, dead heart.

Originally published on Drowned in Sound.

The Radio Dept. – Running Out Of Love

You can’t listen to The Radio Dept., least of all Running Out Of Love, in the absence of political context. To the more removed among us, Sweden is the portrait of bliss – idyllic surrounds, progressive laws, good-looking humans. It’s a role model for the rest of our feuding, collapsing nations. This is a country that has its shit together, passing laws against hate speech on the internet, while the rest of us struggle to revive our economies, feed our starving masses, and keep death tolls down to an acceptable minimum.

But all seems to be not so well in Sweden. In Sweden, if you want something done, get ‘Swedish Guns’. This recent release from the album is a biting commentary on the country’s weapons industry. The Radio Dept. have never been an aggressive band. You’re not likely to hear a chest-thumping call to arms on their tracks, but you will almost always hear the echoes of faded hope and regret. ‘Just take me by the hand/We’ll make them understand…’ they promise before falling back into the same jaded chorus ‘if you want something done/get Swedish Guns.’

Thematically, ‘Swedish Guns’ plays off the next track, ‘We’ve Got Game’ – a nightmarish depiction of racism and targeted oppression which flashes images of laser beams, SWAT teams and gunshots against the band’s trademark vintage Eighties synth backdrop. If there’s anything the Radio Dept. does well, it’s getting you to dance wildly to social commentary.

‘Committed to the Cause’ embodies this perfectly. It is the diamond in a sea of rubies. Driven by an uncharacteristically dense bassline and punctuated midway by a beautiful, swirling hook, its sheer hypnotism belies the nihilism beneath. “when our pain’s over, It’s someone else’s turn/No point in staying sober, if we’re gonna burn.” Musically it’s 4 am in the Hacienda. Emotionally, it’s dawn on the last day of your life.

Release ‘Teach Me to Forget’ as a pure pop single and it’ll climb to the top of the dance charts immediately with its popularly acceptable overtones of a tragic relationship (though it’s second nature to read a dystopian political narrative into the lyrics by this point) and synths pulled from every nightclub playlist in 2014.

Perhaps the secret to the Radio Dept.’s inimitable ambience is their science of memory. There’s not yet a band that can evoke the intangible nostalgia that the Radio Dept. do, but at least with this release we can be assured we don’t need there to be.

Originally published on Drowned in Sound

2016: The gift that keeps on giving

Not since the golden era of 2009-2011 have so many magnificent shoegaze albums been released in such rapid succession.

2016, I can’t keep up.

So far this year, we’ve been blessed with new releases by the following bands:

LSD and the Search for God
Nothing
bloody knives
Yuck
Pinkshinyultrablast
Hammock
Autolux
Mogwai
Deftones
Explosions in the Sky
M83
Ask For Joy
SULK
65daysofstatic
The Verve (reissues)
Night School

Edited to add:

Pity Sex
DIIV
STFU

While releases by Autolux and M83 were unconventional enough to register no more than a blip on this radar, we’re still eagerly awaiting:

Airiel
Alcest
The Radio Department
A Shoreline Dream
Seasurfer (just announced).

Edited to add:

Tears Run Rings
Blueneck
The Emerald Down
The Stargazer Lilies

I can’t keep up.

Tell me what I’ve missed.

The Ride Today: The Last of the Microdance

It’s difficult to imagine that this might be the last article I write on The Microdance, contender for AE’s Most Written-About Group (and, with this post, the likely winner).

Not long ago, I woke up to the rude news that the Microdance was disbanding

Surely not!

The Microdance were seemingly at their peak. They released their first full-length album last year, and it was only days before Alex’s status update that they’d celebrated the launch of their latest single – ‘The Ride Today’ – with a launch party in East London.

<a href="http://themicrodance.bandcamp.com/album/the-ride-today-come-back-to-me-my-lover-in-the-sky-double-a-side">The Ride Today/Come Back to Me My Lover in the Sky – Double A-Side by The Microdance</a>Goodbye adieu farewell

In the days that followed the cold, harsh truth of the breakup came to light. Nothing as glamorous as inter-bandmate animosity, or stories of uncontrollable drug abuse and sordid affairs. No, it’s just that being in a band in the 21st century is not very profitable for those involved. Having to pay for and lug your own equipment to studios and venues isn’t quite the rock and roll lifestyle we grew up dreaming of.

While ‘The Ride Today’ was never expressly composed to serve as a swan song for The Microdance, there could be no more fitting closure to a group that is part shoegaze, part metal, and part 80s power chords (check that guitar at the end). Then again, with an open admission that they create an average of one new song a day, it’s hard to imagine that Alex, Gavin and co. will go on for very long without a couple more releases – perhaps under a different moniker? Together with its A-Side ‘Come Back To Me My Lover In The Sky’ who we first met last year on New Waves of Hope, ‘The Ride Today’ is hopefully, probably, less of a goodbye and more of a BRB.