The Other Music newsletter

[imomus]

Once upon a time—in fact five years ago, when I lived in New York—I used to read through the Other Music newsletter with reverence, clicking all the links, listening to all the sound clips. I discovered some interesting records because of it: Max Tundra's first release, Sack and Blumm. Then, the way these things do, something changed. Was it something in me, or in the shop itself? OM's graphics got snazzier, but there were competition giveaways and promo stuff to wade through before you got to the reviews. The blurbs the staff wrote began to verge on the self-parodic; not only pretentious, but full of the overblown assumptions of the snobbiest kind of consumer journalism.

You know how Wallpaper magazine projects an "ideal reader" who knew Chef Miyasaki's fugu cuisine in Johannesburg, but can now conveniently sample it in Moscow too? (I mean, indulging in flattering fantasia beats admitting that you're just rewriting press releases, right?) Well, Other Music projects an ideal reader who's collected all of Obscure Psychedelic Artist X's rare late 60s vinyl releases from eBay, but is now relieved to find them on one reasonably-priced double CD set. Check out the video clips on the BBC's Posh Nosh page for a lovely parody of exactly this kind of journalism.

Anyway, I still get the OM newsletter, though I now take my buying tips from other sources. OM's music picks seem increasingly yuppyish (smooth jazz noodlings) or just downright conservative (fundamentalist Christian rockabilly, I kid you not). But today I decided to sit down and listen to everything in this week's edition and give you my impressions, prejudices and judgements on the music on offer. You can hear the music by clicking the links. I tend only to write about things I endorse in these pages, but this exercise forced me to confront things I had a wide range of feelings about: excitement, admiration, indifference, mistrust, loathing. Unlike the invariably breathless OM staff, I pull no punches. I'm not trying to sell records here, just work out how this music sounds and how I feel about it. So if I'm rude about your favourite artist, do forgive me. Here goes:

COLLEEN
The Golden Morning Breaks
(Leaf)

"The Happy Sea"
"Summer Water"

I did my bit to add to the cloud of media hype surrounding Cecilie Schott's first album on Leaf, writing about her for Vice and photographing her when she visited Berlin from Paris, where she works as a teacher. She's a friend of Anne Laplantine, and the sleeve of her debut album was drawn by my friend Flo Manlik, so she's very much family. I have to admit that "The Happy Sea" clip doesn't really do much for me, though. It's a slow brassy throb with some tinkling glockenspiels on top. The second track, "Summer Water", is nicer. It's not Coleen's fault, but my taste at the moment is for music with some textural space in it, more structure than this, and counterpoint. I'm in love with the Konki Duet album, for instance. Hey, Other Music, did you stock or review the Konki Duet album? No, you probably didn't. I wonder if you have any Active Suspension releases at all?

FOUR TET
Everything Ecstatic
(Domino)

"Smile Around the Face"
"Sun Drums and Soil"

I must admit to being rather annoyed with Four Tet. Kieran Hebden came along a year or so after I coined the term "folktronic", got seized on as a figurehead for a new movement called "folktronica", and is now, predictably enough, bored with the term and disowning it. Not only did he profit from (then abandon) my genre term, he even put a picture of my girlfriend on one of his single sleeves! (A drawing of Hisae appears on "My Angel Rocks Back And Forth".) Musically, I've been very disappointed with Four Tet in the past. Far from the electronic folk music I expected to hear, he seemed to be making rather vapid and tepid sequencer chaff, inoffensive instrumentals for slightly daring yuppie supper parties, a throwback to 90s stuff like Howie B. "Smile Around The Face" actually has a more interesting chuggy texture than anything I've heard, though. "Sun Drums And Soil" feels a bit like a rather more aggressive version of "Remain In Light"-era Talking Heads. I must say I wish the legions of people who'll no doubt buy this would go and get a Fan Club Orchestra record instead. Or the new Nathan Michel album "The Beast". Hey, Other Music, do you stock the Fan Club Orchestra?

SMOG
A River Ain't Too Much to Love
(Drag City)

"The Well"
"Rock Bottom Riser"

Smog's Bill Callaghan is someone I'm vaguely aware of, and vaguely wary of. He's a lone troubadour who sings depressive songs and is beloved by the sort of Frenchmen who go and see depressing anglo-saxon singer-songwriters perform on boats moored on the Seine, then proclaim them the second coming. That and Nick Cave fans. I guess I just dislike the sort of desurgent sincerity, the formal conservatism, of such figures. That's mostly prejudice, though, because I haven't really listened to Bill's oeuvre. I already really dislike the album title, "A River Ain't Too Much to Love". I should tell you at this point that I hate Neil Young and all who swear by him. But what do Bill's new songs sound like? Well, "The Well" is a sort of rollin' rockabilly number about "blues" and "ah felt so bad" and "wouldn't ya know". It's not as morbid as I was expecting, but it just feels deeply conservative to me. I resent the "assumed universals". Then again, if this were played on a synth it might not be far from Bruce Haack. No, what am I talking about, Bruce was funny and instructive! "Rock Bottom Riser" continues with talk of "pledgin' ma love to you" and "ma foolish heart". Like Nick Cave, he's clearly a literary fellow who reads Raymond Carver short stories, but I just don't respond to heartlands humanism like this. Go teach creative writing class in North Carolina or something, why dontcha?

TOSCA
J.A.C.
(G Stone / K7)

"Superrob"
"Naschkatze"

It's smooth, with a 70s blaxploitation vibe and reggae chops. Everything's just askew and off-kilter enough to avoid cliche, but it's a bit slick for my taste. This is the Richard Kruder who used to be in lounge outfit Kruder and Dorfmeister, right? So he's a Viennese who wants to sound American, right? The second track reminds me that I used to like Nightmares on Wax, for some reason. It's the sort of music you imagine people calling each other "Daddio" to: bland bobo music. Tommy Guerrero, anyone?

ED ASKEW
"Ed Askew"
(ESP-Disk)

"Red Woman - Letter to England"
"Fancy That"

God, this sounds exactly like a latter-day Stephin Merrit song! Until the high-pitched tenor comes in. It's a bit annoying, actually, that voice. Appalachian Irish narrative, with shades of Tim Buckley and Van Morrison. Did I tell you that I hate Van Morrison? No guru, no teacher, no method, that's me! Other Music's staff, meanwhile, do this record no favours by saying "to call it a work of genius would be no exaggeration". Come on! "Love to love the lovers who love to dance in the sky..." Plinky plonky picking and this annoying voice that sounds like the "genius" has just sucked a big lemon.

SANSO-XTRO
Sentimentalist
(Type)

"Misplaced Feather"
"Unsentimental"

This is a woman called Melissa Agate. It sounds like the kind of record F.S.Blumm might make with Anne Laplantine, therefore is A Good Thing. There are subtle undercurrents of processing and the right kind of counterpoint: not too much going on, attention to actual notes and how they affect each other. The second track, "Unsentimental", is great, I love out-of-tune guitars in chafing fields of static. Ah, now in comes a fat Moog! Oh, please don't bring in a drum loop! No, Melissa, no! It's getting too cluttered and slick now! You lost the clumsiness! Anne Laplantine would never lose the clumsiness. That's the best bit! Still, best record so far.

ANDY VOTEL
Songs in the Key of Death
(Fat City)

Clip One
Clip Two

Other Music writer at his most annoyingly wanky here: "I personally champion Votel as a kind of connoisseur-ace-charlatan... as someone who unbiasedly enjoys music and just simply gets it--with an edged, radically indulgent meditation on diverse sequencing and multivalent methodology in referential weaving in order to create a culture-genre-f**k of deliciously ill tunes." For fuck's sake, have you been taking writing classes with DJ Spooky or something? Andy Votel's music is just a gimmicky collation of samples as far as I can tell, what The Books would be like if they were a lot less original and had a much crappier collection of soundbites. But, hey, a lot more funky!

MED
Push Comes to Shove
(Stones Throw)

"Push"
"Get Back"

I guess this is "underground hip hop". It's a bit sharky and angular and awkward for me. I find the vaguely edgy hostility cliched and unconstructive. Again, it stays just far enough from convention to be the kind of thing Other Music feels okay about endorsing. They're not Tower, you know! But it's texturally unappealing. I don't like the digital sample sounds, the reverbs, the snares. I don't like the muscular way the accents are hammered home. I guess you could call it "indiscriminate assertiveness" or something. It's like a street where every car is a fire engine; after a while you just ignore the warning. Also, you know, sleeve shot of artist looking surly in front of brick wall. When you get bored of this, originality might be something to try, guys!

TERRESTRIAL TONES
Onboroed/Circus Lives
(Uunited Acoustic)

"Circus Lives"

It's my friend Rusty Santos with members of Black Dice and Animal Collective, the best new groups in America! You know, if I were ever to play a show in New York, say (just hypothetically) at 9pm on July 15th 2005 at Tonic, Rusty Santos would certainly be on the bill! This is a nice slice of sound which makes me think of Ralph Records and Pere Ubu, somehow. And of course it also sounds like the last Black Dice album: fascinatingly quirky in ways which are disturbing and reassuring at the same time. Endorsed! Yes yes! The good stuff! But why is this the only record OM only give us one clip of? And didn't some of these guys once work there?

MAXIMO PARK
A Certain Trigger
(Warp)

"Signal and Sign"
"Apply Some Pressure"

Why do British bands always erase all space in their records by putting in fuzzy chiming guitars? Why do they all still sound like they're in the 80s? Is avoidance of interesting arrangement ideas a defiance of bourgeois values? The singer in Maximo Park sounds a bit like a Geordie Mark E. Smith, like. The guitars just resemble a billion records from 80s Peel faves, but slightly slicker, you know, like Franz Ferdinand. More melodic chorus than The Fall would write, hey, crossover potential! This is music for people who voted no to the EU constitution because "things are changing too fast". It's music for the British weekly music press to do features on, with pictures of the band. It's music to play under a big banner that says "Carling Lager" on it.

FERN JONES
The Glory Road
(Numero)

"I Do Believe"
"I Was There When It Happened"

I already don't like this record when I see it's called "The Glory Road" and has a track called "I Do Believe" on it. Oh God, it's devotional music from the 50s! Someone send a tsunami to the southern US states so they stop believing instead of endlessly declaring they do. Of course, that would only strengthen their belief. They'd keep stubbornly believing even if God came in person to tell them he didn't exist. And it would be terribly touching to behold. And we'd all buy records about it. Track 2 is about being saved. Jesus. The sound is quite nice, though: limpid and lame, the way I like it. And you can snap your fingers to it, Lord, yes you can! Christian kitsch, just what I don't need. Thanks, Other Music!

BILL FAY
Bill Fay
(Eclectic)

"Narrow Way"

BILL FAY
Time of the Last Persecution
(Eclectic)

"I Hear You Calling"

This is some rediscovered 60s British folk singer. The arrangements are a bit Joe Boydish. His voice lacks magic—in fact, I'd say it's a bit out of tune—but there's something nice about this. The arrangements are "baroque folk", they plod, but in a good way. It's nowhere near as good as Robert Wyatt, but there's something poignant and unvarnished about it which reminds me of him. Then again, Bill Fay sounds like a loser, and Nietzsche wrote somewhere that you should never buy records by losers. Or Christians. Read some Nietzsche, Other Music! Tower does.

ETHIOPIQUES 19
Mahmoud Ahmed: Alemye
(Buda Musiqe)

"Ney Denun Tesesh"
"Wegenie"

I fucking adore the Ethopiques series. North African and Arabic pop is one of the things that really excites me at the moment. The singing is so expressive, the arrangements and time signatures complex yet compelling. Eno once said that he felt, listening to these vocalisations, like a little child, a total beginner. Also, just about any music from 1969 to 1975 has that nice compressed, rounded analogue recording sound that I like so much more than sharp digital sound, and has probably been recorded in one take rather than overdubbed. The clips here are pretty great. To anyone who thinks I'm an enemy of passion because I don't like people like Van Morrison and Nick Cave, listen, this is passion and I love it!

A CERTAIN RATIO
I'd Like to See You Again
(LTM)

"Touch"
"Show Case"

I also fucking adore James Nice. One of LTM's first releases was a tape of the demos I made with my first band, The Happy Family, and without the positive reception it got I might not have continued in music. James has stayed in the early 80s, re-releasing the Crepuscule Factory school of electronic pop, and now he's putting out ACR's 1982 album again. I loved early ACR, but this album was the first one I didn't buy. I suppose they'd got too slick for me, too tight, too clean. Gone is the sloppy cold wild funk of their earlier stuff, the chaos and contradiction; the sound on this record is just boring, somehow. No "feel" at all. The drums have a Linn plod, even though they're being played by Donald Johnston. The slap bass just sounds like Level 42. You guys probably don't even know who that is, do you? You're lucky.

GILES, GILES & FRIPP
The Cheerful Insanity of...
(Eclectic)

"North Meadow"
"She Is Loaded"

There are way too many rereleases in this newsletter, has pop music died or something? Oh right, it's the best of both worlds: you know Robert Fripp, right? Well, I know a Robert Fripp record that you don't know... Brand recognition plus snob appeal. This is hardly an essential Fripp record, though. It sounds like Free Design songs being sung by waiters at a garden fete. You know, it's quirky and not very good, it only sold 600 copies in 1969 and it should only sell 600 copies now.

THRONES
Day Late, Dollar Short
(Southern Lord)

"The Suckling"
"Senex"

God, it's some sort of warped death-grunge with Neu! sound effects on top. Again, it's the lack of space in this sort of fuzz guitar music (with its 70s drum fills) that makes it feel so airless, so claustrophobic. Of course, you're meant to feel like you can't breathe... I blame Christianity for this devilry. Waiter, some bossa nova, please!

THE MELVINS
Mangled Demos from 1983
(Ipecac)

"Snake Appeal"
"Set Me Straight"

I really have no interest in this sort of garage rock. "Three chords and three cases of brew", says Other Music. What about "three poisoned chalices"? Rock music is some kind of nasty toxic religion. If my neighbours were into this, I'd move out.

WILD PAARTY / ON U SOUND
Volume 1 / Various Artists
(Cherry Red)

"Quit the Body" The Chicken Granny
"Woodpecker Sound" Jah Woosh

You know, Cherry Red are the coolest fucking indie label ever. Iain McNay invented the indie charts, and now he seems to be the only original indie left; everyone else signed with Sony or EMI and died the death. I adore my label because they never seem to get bigger or smaller, they just survive. And here's how: they acquire old catalogues and rerelease the gems therein. Here they are putting out Adrian Sherwood's great On-U Sound stuff, which I listened to a lot in the early 80s (especially the New Age Steppers). The Chicken Granny is what ACR could have sounded like if they hadn't got boring. It's scat-scratch-jazz in the style of Rip Rig and Panic, it's Johnny Rotten joining Pigbag. Jah Whoosh is a Jamaican Cabaret Voltaire sort of thing. I'm sure Black Dice are listening to this stuff, making mental notes.