Malajube - Labyrinthes

How would you like your prog pop sir? Served slightly overcooked with a side helping of French lyrics? Well, then this might be the album for you. On their aptly third album Labyrinthes, French Canadian four-piece Malajube unleash the proggy tendencies that were just about kept under control on their previous effort Trompe l’oeil. Like the Super Furry Animals at their most self-indulgent, the songs on Labyrinthes come slathered in all sorts of odd stuff. Opening tracks Ursuline and Porté disparu are good indicators of what follows. The first starts modestly with gentle music-box pianos before morphing steadily into a Muse shaped hulk of bombastic melody and power-pop guitars. It’s faintly ridiculous but it’s carried off with such cheery bravado that it’s hard to dislike. It is followed by the somewhat slight-sounding single Porté disparu,which, with its obvious barroom stomp, sounds like a strained concession to people looking for something as immediate as their previous hit Montréal -40’c. The rest of the album swings between poppy immediacy and over the top theatrics, tricked out with plenty of gaudy flourishes and ornate instrumental passages like the whooshing coda to Les collembas. After a while, it all gets a bit much, like the ELO playing an interval show at Cirque du Soleil. In other words, probably not everyone’s cup of tea.

At this point it’s probably worth considering the fact that Malajube sing entirely in their native Quebecoise French, making them one of the few bands to achieve a degree of popularity among an English-speaking fan base while singing in a different language. Their lush instrumentation and easy way with a melody probably go some way to account for this success. As with other groups who break the language barrier, such as Dungen and Sigur Ros, there is enough interesting noise going on beyond the words for the album to work. In fact, Malajube’s French lyrics are probably part of their appeal. As any fan of Sebastian Tellier knows, there can be something inherently fun about the French language when sung.

For the record, many of the song lyrics relate to the Catholic religion and its place in French Canadian culture. Apparently the boys aren’t too fond of le church. But to be honest, because of the band’s extravagant music styling, you can’t shake the feeling that it would be hard to take such lyrics seriously. A bright, over-inflated balloon of an album.

Dan Deacon - Bromst

Dan Deacon
Bromst
Carpark records

Last year, Baltimore experimentalist Dan Deacon made it clear in an interview with the American music press that he isn’t comfortable with the label ‘wacky’, and that perhaps those applying it to him were more bothered with his physical appearance than his music. Well Dan, you make it hard for us, so hard. If we discount the fact that the man wears gigantic neon pink spectacles, backward baseball caps and garish t-shirts a size or three too small for him, there is the small issue of his music so far; a heavy feed of mangled indie rave dressed up with chipmunk voices and the odd sample of woody woodpecker going wa-ka-ka-ka-ka! From where I’m standing, ‘wacky’ never seemed a million miles off the mark. Sure, I always thought it was brilliant too. But it is definitely an acquired taste (more often than not acquired after one of his revelatory live shows), and well yeah, ‘wacky’.

When at the same time Deacon announced that his next offering would be ‘darker’ than Spiderman of the Rings, one might have imagined him dreaming up a negative of that album, a gloomy 8-bit cathedral of dying screams, stuttering beats and dying woodpeckers. Instead, we get Bromst, an album that is both technically and melodically stunning but about as dark as Michael Jackson’s milky bum bum. Songs like ‘Woof Woof’ and ‘Red F’ utilize Deacon’s familiar funhouse structure of building sonic chaos around addictive samples, but up the warm fuzzy stakes by using more analogue equipment. There is certainly a greater variation in instrumentation at work and a tricksier command of melody and tempo than we’ve seen before from the man, especially during the gentler part of ‘snookered’ and ‘slow with horns/run for your life’. But don’t let any of that fool you. For every slow bit, there is a bit like the end of ‘Woof Woof’ where you can hear synths, kazoos and voices saying ‘quack’ all at once. This album is, at heart, the usual big flashing primary coloured barrel of reprogrammed nintendos having sex with each other we’ve come to expect from Deacon. And it is mostly great. There’s just one thing though. What is the fucking story with the old Irish folk sample on “Wet Wings’?

Bromst is due out on the 24th of March. Dan Deacon plays Andrews Lane Theatre on June 3rd.

Zomby: Where were you in 92?

Zomby
Where were you in 92?
Werk

Where were you in ’92? Erstwhile chip-tune loving Dubstep producer Zomby has just released a remarkable album based around this rhetorical question. Of course, the implication is that ‘you’ were mashed out of you brain at 4am in the middle of a field in England while a churning hardcore piano motif melded impossibly with the rising sun. There is no doubt that Zomby’s album is meant to play as a homage to such halcyon reminiscences. But, thankfully, the title is disengenous. There is a lot more at work here than mere revivalism.

For sure, Zomby has grabbed the glowstick of early ‘90s hardcore and run with it to a demented chorus of klaxons. Even if we disregard for a minute the explicitly druggy titles of songs such as ‘Pillz’ and ‘Euphoria’, the overall gleeful, sinister and deranged throb is so reminiscent of the work of Joey Beltram and 2 Bad Mice that listening to parts of the album is like getting stuck in an episode of Doctor Who where the Tardis lands somewhere off one of those fabled M50 raves in 1992.

Yet, there is such a ridiculous abundance of other riches going on here. There is also enough quality drum’n’bass to qualify the album as more than just a doffed cap to A Guy Called Gerard circa ’95, and, on various later tracks, Zomby’s Dubstep day job comes to the fore, anchoring us to the present and cockily reminding us of his prodigious talents. Here is a rare thing, an intelligent producer exuberantly paying homage to dance music’s recent past whilst hinting at a potential way forward. Oh, and did I say? It is seriously fucking fun.

Estel, Steve Mackay and Mike Watt

Imagine for a minute that the Irish rock underground is a scary warren of tunnels. A bit like somewhere from the land of Mordor in Lord of the Rings except you can access it through a secret portal in the Lower Deck or the Boom Boom Room. It’s a cold, damp, labyrinthine place full of discordant, relentless, yet fascinating music. If bands like Adebisi Shank and Bats are the freshly-hatched spawn who guard the gates to this netherworld, chances are that Estel reside somewhere within it’s darkest vaults. They’d be a huge glowing maggot, or monstrous spider, an enigmatic creature that has resided beneath Dublin for ten years now, dreaming up dark, uncompromising instrumental music, oblivious to the fads and fashions of the world above.

The latest release to ooze forth (in keeping with the dodgy Lord of the Rings allegory) from camp Estel is an untitled album of tracks named after the four gospels, with a cover of The Stooges ‘Fun House’ thrown in for good measure. The album is a collaboration with Stooges saxophonist Steve Mackay and Mike Watt who played bass with practically every American hardcore band you can shake a stick at.

I know what some of you are thinking. “The four gospels? This stinks of self-important dreck.” I thought the same, until I saw the track-listing on my iTunes player. ‘Matthew’, ‘Mark’, ‘Luke’ and ‘John’ are punctuated, beautifully, hilariously and surely intentionally, by ‘Fun House’. This is apparently the gospel according to Estel. A reading where his great unholiness Iggy rubs shoulders with the four scribes.

The music itself was recorded in a short burst (perhaps because Watt and Mackay only had so much time on their hands), but as such, provides an engaging document of what happens when this sort of endeavour works. Rather than melting respectfully into the background, as others might do when working with their heroes, Estel are clearly the measure of the their collaborators. The first half of the album is more uneasy than the second. The band weave an urgent, undulating tapestry of sinister sonic matter on ‘Mark’ and maintain a remarkable piano refrain that not only supports Watt’s saxophone, but sounds like the product of months in the studio rather than an afternoon’s improvisation.

‘Luke’ and ‘John’, the two tracks that follow a respectful reading of ‘Fun House’, are lighter affairs. On ‘John’ in particular, the music seems to float endlessly upwards, and Mackay’s sax sounds like a balloon let loose from a net, drifting into rarefied spaces in the upper atmosphere. For an album recorded in such a short space of time, this is a remarkably expressive and coherent piece of work and testament to this band’s importance in the Irish underground.

Dent May

Illustration by Scalder.

Dent May is a bit like Truman Capote with a ukulele. Not only does the songwriter look like the American novelist (wispy blonde hair, oversized glasses and a penchant for formal evening wear), but he hails from America’s deep south and his droll lyrics reveal a sharp and literate mind. Dent’s first album ‘The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & his Magnificent Ukulele’ will be released on Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks label in February. Maybe the album title and my description of him already have you imagining what he sounds like? A slightly more exotic Jens Lekman perhaps? You’re not far off. Just mix in a strong dash of Stephen Merritt, a squirt of Morrisey (ooh matron) and shake the whole concoction to a Tropicalia beat before pouring into a chic glass. Nice.

As you may have guessed by now, the ukulele is central to Dent May’s sound (on this record at least; he also talks about an intriguing dance project called ‘Dent Sweat’). He explains why he chose this tiny toy-like instrument. “I chose the ukulele because it’s portable, and its tropical sound inspires lush, exotic soundscapes. It goes well with my other favorite instrument, the pedal steel guitar”.

Dent also has a connection with the instrument that goes back to his childhood. “I’ve known a few chords on ukulele since I was a little kid. My mother actually taught me ‘26 Miles’, which is on my album”. And of course there’s the practical side. He explains that he used to play guitar in a band but “got tired of lugging all the equipment around”.

I ask him if he ever worries about the ukulele thing being perceived gimmicky, that he might be pigeon holed as the ukulele guy? “I don’t mind if they see it as a gimmick”, he replies. “If the simple fact that I play the ukulele turns someone off, then I’m not really too concerned about it. I’ve heard a few people compare me to Tiny Tim as an insult, but I think Tiny Tim is amazing. For my next album, though, I’m burning my ukulele and going on tour with an iPod, some backup dancers, and a local community choir”. Having a limited grasp of American pop culture, I later look Tiny Tim up on the Internet to put Dent’s comment in context. I find him to be a frankly terrifying creature that appeared on US entertainment shows in the ‘60s and ‘70s, a sort of overgrown, ukulele-toting cross between Russell Brand, Lurch and Napoleon Dynamite.

While Dent is pretty far down the barmy spectrum that ends in Tiny Tim, he is definitely a bit of an oddity and cultivates the image. Not least in his music, which has elements of old show tunes, doo-wop, French pop and Tropicalia. On top of that, he came to the album after writing “a failed psychedelic country rock opera”.

What draws him to such diverse sounds? “Combining disparate elements to create a cohesive yet pleasant sound is definitely one of my goals as a musician”, he tells me. “I don’t want people to hear my records and be able to pinpoint when they came out or where I’m from. I do hope that the style of my songwriting helps tie things together, though”.

Animal Collective seemed to think so, signing him to their hip Paw Tracks label after running into him during the recording of ‘Merriweather Post Pavillion’. “I had just played a show in Oxford with my country western band Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City one night and there was a party at my house”, explains Dent. “I’m not really sure how they got there, but we became friends. A couple of weeks later I played my first show on ukulele with a band behind me, and they were able to check it out”. Hah, so maybe he is a bit like the Truman Capote of the American independent music scene, with the likes of Animal Collective turning up at his swanky parties.

I ask him if he really is the life and soul of the party, considering that one of his lyrics states ‘you can’t force a dance party/ but for you I’ll try’ and that his album is called ‘The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & his Magnificent Ukulele?’ “I think I’m super fun, but others might think I’m a grouch. There’s an aspect of my personality that throws lots of parties and also an aspect that wants to stay in my room forever”.

Unfortunately the part of Dent’s personality “that throws lots of parties” won’t be coming to Europe in the near future, but when he does he looks forward to singing his single “Oh Paris! in Paris for the first time”. He adds “I’ll probably fly over the crowd and cry like Garth Brooks”. Until that magical moment, anyone with a taste for sweet, sophisticated indie-pop could do a lot worse than check out Dent’s new album.

‘The Good Feeling Music of Dent May & his Magnificent Ukulele’ is out now.

Kompakt

Hear that sound? That is the sound of the global music business groaning, splintering, falling apart and sinking like the Titanic in slow motion. Ever since Thom Yorke smugly jumped ship and escaped on a little lifeboat called ‘In Rainbows’, the world’s eyes have been trained on this hulking industry as it slowly goes tits up in a freezing ocean of illegally downloaded MP3 files. Many see the current state of the industry as the death knell for record label. Some see this as a good thing. Yer Trents and yer Thoms will happily jig (or do a jittery Ian Curtis-esque jig movement in Thom’s case) on the graves of record labels, as Music Industry 2.0 welcomes us into a brave new world.

While many will not mourn the potential loss of the so called big four (Universal, Sony BMG, Warner, and EMI), surely some flowers (gladioli perhaps?) will be kept to mark the final resting places of the more revered smaller labels? Before we all throw in the towel, however, and start awarding posthumous accolades, Analogue would like to direct some attention to the more groundbreaking record labels of our time. Believe it or not, there was a time when record labels (not blogs) played the part of your musically aware older sibling. When I was 16, it didn’t matter a jot what sort of tune I heard but as long as it was on Creation, I was bound to love it. Creation shaped my teenage music years and I thank them for it. For people older than me, it was possibly Rough Trade. For my American counterparts, it was likely Sub Pop or Matador. In short, good smaller record labels have personality and passion.

‘Label Love’ will focus in depth on a different label every month. The structure might vary, but the general idea is to highlight an influential record label, try to explain what makes them special and consider some key releases. In a ruthless game of spin the bottle in Analogue towers, I ended up marked for this first feature. While I am sure many future featured labels will be guitar based, I am going to choose the music label I listen to most right now, a German based techno distributor called Kompakt. Hey, you at the back, stop rolling your eyes and give 4/4 techno a chance. Now, a little back story on Kompakt and a few releases that best represent the full range of its sound.

A Short History of Kompakt
Kompakt began with three German DJs (Michael Mayer, Jurgen Paape and Wolfgang Voigt), who worked together (and still do) in a big house in Cologne with a record shop attached. All three look alike and are vegetarians. Sounds like a scary techno cult right? Kompakt is often lazily described as a minimal techno label. While there is no shortage of acts representing that sub-genre on Kompakt, such pigeon holing does little justice to the more diverse releases and the full range of the label’s sound. In truth, Kompakt is home to a remarkably broad range of tastes, running from the strange swinging time signatures of the sound called ‘schaffel’, to the near beatless, ambient washes of the ‘Pop Ambient’ series. Also, the main seam of 4/4 techno the label mines, traverses a long continuum from the playful, campy pop sound of Justus Kohncke to the gothic dramatics of much of Superpitcher’s output. Indeed, the only real thread that ties such varied wonders together is the sheer consistency and quality of the label’s output; a demonstration of its owners’ imagination, impeccable tastes, and never-ending endeavours to push the boundaries of what is possible within techno music. While some will argue that the label’s glories are a thing of the past, recent releases such as Gui Boratto’s ‘Chromophobia’ and The Field’s ‘From here we go Sublime’ show that Kompakt’s heart still beats strong.

Some Key Releases on Kompakt:

The Mix CD

Immer: Michael Mayer

For any influential DJ, the most challenging demonstration of your musical dexterity is how you mix a set. For your average Berlin deck monkey, a DJ set will last between 4 and 6 hours, allowing all sorts of breathing space for strange and wonderful build-ups and detours. However, cramming that experience into a one hour mix CD is another thing altogether. Kompakt founder Michael Mayer managed this twice; spectacularly. The big fish that got away from the label was his exemplary, revered and upbeat Fabric 13 mix. But ‘Immer’, his first true mix for Kompakt is a monolithic example of the DJ mix as an artform. The whole of ‘Immer’ is greater than the parts. Mayer selects and precisely mixes a series of pieces that mesh together seamlessly, which, while married to the ubiquitous 4/4 beat, progress through a fully realised journey. In contrast to the circular, druggy abstraction of Ricardo Vilallobos, Mayer likes narrative. Many Kompakt mixes feel like mangled pop albums. They have a beginning, middle and end. ‘Immer’ is the ultimate example of this.

The Sampler

Total 3: Various Artists

Every Summer Kompakt announce the arrival of the latest sampler from their ‘Total’ series with a huge party in Cologne. While the quality of the Total series has been somewhat erratic in recent years, the early compilations from the label’s hey-day contain an embarrassment of riches. ‘Total 3’ stands out in particular, and with tracks like Superpitcher’s brooding ‘Tomorrow’, Michael Mayer’s playful ‘Hush Hush Baby’ and Reinhard Voigt’s thumping, spare ‘In aller Freundschaft’ it plays like a who’s who of techno’s most innovative producers at the mid-point of the decade.

The Box Set

Nah und Fern: Gas

‘Nah und Fern’ is the brainchild of Wolfgang Voigt and is a re-released compilation of four near mythical albums of ambient minimal techno, sampled mostly from German classical records, and inspired by the depths of the Black Forest. The vapourous music made by Gas is difficult to convey in prose. It’s techno in the barest sense, in that you will often hear 4/4 beats, sometimes close, and sometimes further away in the thick mix. They beat dully like signals through thick fog, either anchoring you or tricking you into following them ever deeper into Voigt’s strange, sometimes scary but always beautiful sonic terrain. Essential.

The Full-Length

From Here we go Sublime: The Field

Like many dance labels, Kompakt butters its bread from the vinyl singles it distributes from its Cologne HQ. Techno is often about that one, blinding shit-hot track a DJ drops at the right moment. Tunes exist in isolation, waiting to be threaded into someone else’s mix. In short, it is an environment where the concept of the album as an artistic statement carries a lot less clout than it does in traditional indie or chart rock. Last year, this trend was bucked spectacularly by Swede Alex Willner (AKA The Field), whose full-length from ‘here we go sublime’ is, well, sublime from start to finish. Glacial, expansive, and exquisite, the album garnered rave (geddit?) reviews on its release and is something of a modern electronic classic.

Built to Spill interview

Self-professed “fanboy” Darragh McCausland talks to Built To Spill main man Doug Martsch about their upcoming tour dates.

For their current series of European gigs, Built To Spill are playing all of their epic 1993 alt-rock classic Perfect From Now On in its entirety. The album is a true benchmark. Not only did it define their career, it married the questing, far out guitar sounds of Dinosaur Jr and Crazy Horse to a whimsical, melodic and lyrical sensibility redolent of contemporaries such as Pavement. It is a meandering, cosmic sprawl of an album that always chooses the scenic route; only one song clocks in below five minutes.

Ahead of their Irish date in Whelans, I get a rare opportunity to talk to their frontman and songwriter, the wonderfully bearded and angelically voiced Doug Martsch. Now is about the right place for my disclaimer. I am a drooling fanboy when it comes to Built To Spill. A sick, irrational, drooling fanboy idiot, like a ten-year-old McFly worshipper. Getting a chance to talk to someone like Doug is one of the reasons I started writing for Analogue in the first place. So when I pick up the phone to chat to him, I am experiencing a dose of dishwasher tummy, a mixture of raw nerves (what if he’s a grump?), excitement, and the obvious need to temper my sycophantic instincts. Thankfully, I manage to keep my inner teenage girl in check and ask Doug (who turns out to be very soft spoken and open) some sensible questions. Beginning with the current tour.

I ask him what it is like to return to the Perfect From Now On material in such an exhaustive way after what must presumably have been a long break from most of it? “Yeah”, he says a little wearily, “we started working on doing this a long while ago, and now I really don’t know what to make of it.” How come? “Well we’ve been doing that album for about two months now, and I don’t know. I mean it’s just a bunch of fucking music.” He sounds a little exasperated. Perhaps it is because with Built to Spill being a constantly evolving touring force, he now feels constrained by having to play this stuff in full every night. I ask him if there is anything he would change in those songs, now that he’s coming back to them, especially considering the bands reputation for tweaking things live? Or is the album like Ronseal and, like it says on its tin, perfect?

Doug tells me “You know when we first came back to the album we tried to play everything as close as possible because we had been playing some of the songs and they had changed over the years. We never try to stick closely to our records that way. So we did try to do that. But now, we’re sort of fucking around with it a bit. To some people it might sound changed. To others it might not.” I’d warrant that for fans of Built To Spill, a bit of tinkering with the source material will be forgiven. After all, the band thrives on a live reputation that sees them playing lengthy sets with beefed up versions of songs, which often sound even better live than on record. For my money, the definitive version of “Stop The Show” is on their live album, Live.

For a band that tends to look forward, two months is a long time to be spending in bed with so many old songs. Considering that they are reportedly putting together songs for a forthcoming release, I wonder if working with the old stuff will have a creative impact on their new material? Doug tentatively admits it might. “Maybe so”, he says. “The new album was going to be a bit more stripped down and coming back to Perfect From Now On has me thinking more in terms of adding layers and stuff. I think we were starting to do that anyway, but I think with the Perfect From Now On stuff at the fore, I’m a bit more excited about getting back to do that.” But first there is the question of the road.
Built To Spill seem to be always on the road. Like Bob Dylan, the last few years saw them on a seemingly never-ending tour that has criss-crossed North America and Canada with the odd jaunt across to Europe. You would imagine that Doug would enjoy touring. I ask him if, like in the Lee Marvin song, he was born under a wandering star? Funnily enough, he doesn’t like being on the road.
“No I’m not the travelling type at all”, he says. “I do like playing live and doing all of that. But if I didn’t have a reason to be out in the world, I wouldn’t be at all.”

In saying this, he does acknowledge that after so many years playing in the States, they want to bring live shows further afield. Ireland is a case in point. Doug says that “the tour was all set up but we didn’t have any shows in Ireland but we made sure with the booking agent that we get to play there and Scotland.” This meant the band adding ten days onto their tour in order to play for two dates. I secretly and deludedly fancy that this is because of the begging messages I personally left on their MySpace page to play here.

Another MySpace page that sees its fair share of begging messages belongs to The Halo Benders, Doug’s on-off project with K Records main man Calvin Johnston. Fans are always anxious to hear new material from this group, whose brilliantly odd songs have to be heard to be believed (much of their material sounds like two completely different songs being sung at once and, curiously, works brilliantly). He tells me that this project is still alive, if a little delayed.

“We got together a couple of years ago and wrote some songs. But then Built To Spill became so overwhelming and it just fucked with the schedule of everyone. One of the guys went to school full-time. But we have a batch of songs that everyone is pretty excited about, so maybe when Built To Spill have a break we’ll get back around to it,” he tells me, providing a bone for material-hungry Halo Benders nuts to chew over. He also laughs when I request “Virginia Reel Around the Fountain” as an encore in Whelans. “Maybe if you or someone else shouts it out loud enough, sure,” he says. Well, Mr Martsch, that better be true because I can shout pretty loud.

Something casual Built To Spill watchers may not know about Doug is his interest in Reggae music. One of the more recently recorded Built To Spill tracks, “They Got Away” has a distinctly reggae sound. He tells me he only got into reggae in his 30s, when “someone gave me a really nice Lee Perry compilation. From listening to that stuff for a couple of years that song grew out of a sort of a jam that we did.”

The song marks an interesting departure for the band and although Doug tells me “it’s just a one off”, it will be fascinating to see if any of Perry’s vibes rub off on the next record’s sound.
The song structures on previous Built to Spill records can be crudely divided into two different types, the eight minute round-the-solar system epic (“Goin’ Against Your Mind”) and the punchier, hookier short track (“Centre Of The Universe”). Doug says that he doesn’t deliberately plot a course toward either one of these poles. “The songs sort of tell me what they are doing themselves”, he laughs, sounding a bit Zen. “The song is there and it looks after itself. There are lot of songs where we have done everything we could to shorten them but they just won’t let us.”

This is a lovely insight. It’s nice to think that Built To Spill songs exist somewhere “Out There” and that Doug just plucks them from the ether. It certainly befits a catalogue of music which, for all its catchiness and big hooks, has at its heart a sort of cosmic unknown; an awestruck wonder at the universe around us. Such wonder is beautifully expressed in the first song the band will play in Dublin next week, “Randy Describes Eternity”, where phased, squalling guitars carry a beautiful vocal line which contains the best metaphor I’ve ever heard to describe infinity. Amidst all of this, Doug decides he’s going to be “perfect starting now.” With a bit of luck, it will be the perfect start to a perfect show.

Credit crunch record shopping

A few years ago the Sunday supplements carried a few hastily written articles about a phenomenon called ‘fifty quid man’. Fifty quid man was a product of the mid-decade, a Mondeo driving accountant or city worker with a high disposable income who would march into HMV every Thursday and smugly splash out a crisp fifty on a few DVDs and the latest Snow Patrol release. Oh, he was a record company’s wet dream, was fifty quid man. He kept Keane and Coldplay straddled atop the charts like a pair of hookers on a Man United player, and the EMI execs smiling. Unfortunately (or fortunately?) fifty quid man’s days are over. As, sadly, are those of his sounder cousin, twenty quid man. Recent apocalyptic happenings in the global financial system have rendered these poorly drawn demographic stereotypes redundant, so now is as good a time as any for Analogue to introduce a new one, fifty cent man.

If you thought that the thrill of rifling through a shelf of records and being on social welfare didn’t go hand in hand, think again. There is a veritable Aladdin’s cave of musical treats lying in wait in our country’s charity shops. Dublin’s North inner city, from Dorset Street to Capel Street, and around the Rathmines area on the Southside, are particularly rich hunting grounds for the dedicated record collector. All you need is a bit of patience. It’s a bit like shopping in TK Maxx, where you have to hoof your way through twenty pairs of luminous yellow, size 26 men’s jeans in order to find a pair that are blue and reach your shoes. Only in Oxfam, you have to flick through twenty copies of a CD called Finglas by a Dublin rapper called Spiral who once appeared on Big Brother (I kid you not, it’s everywhere) in order to strike gold and romp home with a two euro copy of The Who’s Live at Leeds. With all this in mind, I decide to set myself a challenge to venture forth and see what’s out there on a given day. I give myself a budget of twenty quid, (the rounded up average price of a CD album) and I set out into town with the cash in my pocket, an afternoon to spare, and an open mind. The plan is to see how many CDs, cassettes and records I can buy without breaking the budget, take them home for a good goin’ over, and write about the whole thing.

My first port of call is Gorta on Liffey Street. Gorta is not as upmarket as some of the other shops I visit, it’s Aldi to Oxfam’s Marks and Spencer. The shop smells and looks like it’s made out of mothballs, missing jig-saw pieces and amputated plastic doll’s limbs. Like most of the other shops I visit, the music section is located in a few big crates near the cash register. Stickers tell me that all CDs are either one euro or fifty cents and all cassettes and LPs are one or two euros. Welcome to bargainville. I dive into the crates like a pig in search of truffles. There is a lot of dross in the boxes. Aside from the CD cases that are simply empty, there are buckets of promotional CDs for dreary has-been dance outfits, and obscene amounts of Sunday newspaper promo CDs being sold back for 50 cent a pop. But hey, it’s all for charity, and if you plough through it, the gems start appearing. Ten minutes later I’m heading toward the next shop with three cassettes, two CDs and a vinyl. The price? A princely €6.50. After rooting around the next couple of shops on Capel street I make an observation. It would appear that one man’s treasure chest is another’s coffin. These cardboard crates of doom prove to be musty monuments to a plethora of failed British and Irish indie also-rans. Shed Seven, The Four of Us, Menswear, Babybird, Gene, they are all here, looking grim with cracked plastic casings falling from their hinges. Worryingly, The Flaws’ last album Achieving Vagueness is in Barnados for €2.90. I don’t buy it.

One fun thing about buying music on the cheap is the sheer recklessness that soon develops. Everything is so inexpensive that a goofy impulsiveness sets in. A novelty single by sinisterly shaped ITV children’s TV presenter Timmy Mallett for 50 cent? Why not? Vampire Weekend fan? Go straight to the source and grab a copy of King Sunny Adé and His African Beats on cassette for the price of a cornetto. Surely others are sucked into this world of foraging and reward?

What sort of person typically buys music in charity shops? I bravely attempt to quiz the only other dedicated shopper I meet today. A youngish Spanish dude is eagerly rifling through a box of musical detritus in Mrs Quinn’s charity shop. He starts to act defensively as I approach. He looks at me with a glaring intensity that seems to ask what the hell would I want with these shitty tapes, even though he’s all over them like a rash. I wait for him to finish so I can ask him if he, ahem, comes to this sort of place to look for music often? His name is Flavio and he tells me that no, he doesn’t. What sort of music does he like?
“R & B and rap, I like most. But there is very little here. This one is okay” he says, picking up a D12 rap album, “but it’s expensive”.
I look at the price. It’s €2.90. I agree that it’s probably about €2.90 too expensive for a D12 album. Seeing a quick opening to big up the Irish, I whip Spiral’s ubiquitous Finglas single out of a nearby CD box and tell Flavio it’s Irish rap and worth checking out. He eyes it suspiciously and shakes his head. By now he is looking at me as if I have three heads, so I slink out of the shop and homeward.

Arriving home I spread my haul across the floor to photograph it for Analogue. It looks pretty impressive, provided it all plays well (I remember getting ape-shit excited after buying a second hand cassette of The Beatles Revolver at the age of fourteen, only to be traumitised by John and Paul’s voices briefly warbling like Donald Duck every two seconds). There are fourteen items in total, meaning that I paid an average of €1.40 per item. Sweet. At prices like this, it’s no wonder I went a bit crazy, splashing out on MC Mallett. It’s time to pour a glass of red wine, haul out three different types of music player and get listening.

I play it safe first, sticking with what I know. I cycle through the tracks on The Mamas and The Papas live album, Glenn Campbell’s Greatest Hits CD, then through Steve Winwood’s Roll with it and Paul Simon’s Graceland on cassette. All is in order on the CDs. ‘Wichita Lineman’ makes a little countrified corner of my heart swoon as usual and ‘Creque Alley’ makes a little psychedelic corner of my mind yearn to be out of my bin on acid in ‘60s San Francisco. The cassettes are in fine fettle too. The Steve Winwood Roll With It album appears almost untouched. After one listen, I think I know why. Steve Winwood is pants. It’s music for jacket and jeans CEO types to drive down the California coastline in open-top cars while pondering if their recent divorce has unshackled their inner ‘soul’. There was a recent hair-brained attempt to rehabilitate Winwood’s music in a particularly far-fetched essay in The Wire magazine. Pure tosh. This is soulless music that is best plundered in order to provide two second samples for Italo-trance tracks. However, it was worth buying to validate the above rant. Paul Simon sounds fabulous. Maybe this man was built for cassette? Graceland’s natural home seems to be on magnetically charged audio tape. In the same way, Chevy Chase, Paul’s comedic partner in the video to ‘You can call me Al’ is most at home on VHS. Listening to my cheapskate copy of Graceland reminds me that the cassette is not an entirely useless medium. If your natural proclivities tend toward laziness, you are more or less forced to hear each side from start to finish. The familiar stuff out of the way, I delve into the rest of my charity haul. The oddities. The impulse buys. Stuff I wouldn’t normally think twice about.

Timmy Mallett’s single, unsurprisingly, is cobblers of the highest order, albeit with a strange B Side called ‘Mr Mallett, Mr Mallett’ that is a surprisingly explicit and cynical pastiche of pilled up early nineties ‘ardkore techno. It’s a bit druggy and not what I expected of the paragon of kiddies TV. Shame on you Mallett. A vinyl of John Williams space movie themes played live by the Boston Pops is a snip at two euro, as is a seminal ‘60s record by the New York psychedelic jazz outfit Blood Sweat and Tears. It’s called The Child is Father to the Man and its insane cover is a tableau of all the band members with tiny versions of themselves sitting on their laps like children. In today’s age of photoshop this record cover is still disturbing, and even if the music wasn’t good (which it is), it’s worth it for the cover alone. I also listen to a Shed Seven single, an album by a failed indie band called Cosmic Rough Riders, a superb compendium of Soviet folk music and a cassette of house remixes of early Pet Shop Boys tracks. All this for twenty quid.

So, if you are stuck for cash and still craving the root and reward dynamics of a good day shopping for records, you could do a lot worse than the charity shops. Drop your prejudices at the door, and who knows you could discover a whole new genre of music. It’s better than the internet. Why? Because, I know that a million monkeys with a million broadband connections would never, ever, come up with a copy of ‘The Bump’ by Timmy Mallett, but somehow I did.

New Animal Collective Album in 2009

One of our writers Dan Grey likes to joke that if you type ‘Animal Collective’ into the Analogue search bar you get about eight articles written by me. What can I say? I am a pathetic and drooling fanboy.

The super-prolific objects of my adoration will be releasing their ninth full length album next January 12th 2009. It has the rather wonderful name of “Merriweather Post Pavillion”, and contains the awesome ‘Brothersport’ which they aired on their current tour, and which for my money could be the greatest single track these guys have done. Bring it!

Here’s the Tracklist

1. In The Flowers
2. My Girls
3. Also Frightened
4. Summertime Clothes
5. Daily Routine
6. Bluish
7. Guys Eyes
8. Taste
9. Lion In A Coma
10. No More Runnin
11. Brothersport

Mental illness and Rock

Art by Scalder

“I’m full of dust and guitars”. Syd Barrett uttered these words to a Rolling Stone journalist in an interview in 1971. This haunted statement provides one of the most harrowing insights into the mind of a mentally unwell rock musician. The words betray a consciousness that is both empty and ruined, yet which still holds a place for music. At the time, Barrett was well known as a former songwriter and guitarist in Pink Floyd and as a solo artist in his own right. In the neon raddled excess of the late sixties psychedelic period, fans were fascinated by his playful outsider’s take on the daily world. He had a childlike ability to turn the ordinary inside out, conjuring odd psychedelic fantasies from the grey mundanity of contemporary English life. The elaborate alternative England that is palpable in his best work with Pink Floyd is an archaic, imaginative place, teeming with scarecrows, cross-dressers, gnomes and bicycles. However, as the late sixties snaked darkly into the early seventies, it became obvious to his former bandmates, his fans, and most likely to Barrett himself, that he was experiencing serious mental illness (most likely LSD abetted schizophrenia).

Barrett was not alone in undergoing a form of mental breakdown during the late sixties. He was only one member of an ‘exclusive’ club of talented musicians around which a pervasive and enduring rock’n’roll ‘type’ developed, namely the ‘drug casualty’; where the flame of youthful brilliance is snuffed out by a spectacular and rapid mental deterioration normally attributed to overindulgence in psychedelic drugs. This stuff utterly fascinates music fans. Any half-hearted flick through the pages of Mojo and Uncut magazines will reveal how entranced we are by the myth of the ‘drug casualty’. Indeed, in Barrett’s case this interest intruded into his personal life. Up until his death, he was sporadically bothered by people who arrived at his house in Cambridge on some sort of deluded pilgrimage, hassling a man who had more interest in painting and pottering around his garden, than he did in attention and his own past.

While Syd was perhaps the best known example of this myth, there are plenty of others from his generation who share elements of his unstable back story. For example, Rocky Erickson from The 13th Floor Elevators, former Beach Boy Brian Wilson, and Peter Green from Fleetwood Mac. Again, there is a ferocious appetite for printed material relating to stories pertaining to their mental breakdowns. It sells magazines. Stick a big psychedelically coloured picture of Barett’s stoned young head on the cover of Mojo over the words ‘Meltdown’ ‘Burnout’ or ‘Frazzled’ and you have a formula for success as tried and tested as putting Ben Stiller and Will Ferrell in a wacky movie about sporting underdogs. People want to know all the grisly details about these musicians’ eccentric stunts. At times, the musicians themselves seem to become gruesomely detached from the music they made, surrogate Kerry Katonas for 40-year-old rock fans who relish the finer points of how Brian Wilson filled a recording studio with sand, how Syd Barrett shaved off his eyebrows, or how Rocky Erickson underwent electroconvulsive therapy. These stories are played out in exhaustive detail and from multiple perspectives on a monthly basis in our favourite music magazines. And they are just the so-called acid related breakdowns.

Of course, it can reasonably be argued that because the artists mentioned above belong to a different era, stories about their mental collapse have now entered rock lore, and fan’s preoccupations with them are as harmless as recounting Marianne Faithful’s alleged brief encounter with Mick Jagger and a Mars bar. However, when this fascination is transposed into the setting of a modern audience and its relationship with a troubled performer, things become more unsettling and problematic. The vampiric relationship between the media, fans and Amy Winehouse flap uglily around the mainstream media for all to see. It might be worth turning our attention, therefore, to a performer in the alternative bracket, Daniel Johnston.

For those not familiar with him, Daniel Johnston’s story is marked out by a long struggle with both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Much of this is documented in Jeff Feuerzeig’s 2005 documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Feuerzeig’s film chronicles Johnston’s career trajectory from the beguilingly fragile cassette recordings he recorded as a hyper prolific youngster in the 1980s, through the mental illness that saw his life see-sawing from one damaging event to the next (attacking his manager, believing that various people and places were under the control of Satan, and wrestling the key from the ignition of a small plane that was subsequently successfully crash-landed by his father). Throughout this catalogue of illness-related hurt and chaos, Johnston maintained an adoring fanbase within the indie rock ‘hood. Bands like Sonic Youth, Half Japanese, Nirvana and Teenage Fanclub queued up to sing his praises. He played to hordes of worshipful fans, and all the while was (and still is from time to time) deeply, troublingly ill.

Just what is at the heart of Johnston’s relationship with his fans? There are some questions that are hinted at, but which remain largely unanswered in Feurzeig’s documentary. For example, at what point does adulation become exploitation? Do people go to his shows because they want to be infected by the giddy, innocent, Beatles on Hersheys rush of his best material, or because they want to see the crazy man-child that Sonic Youth once toured with? Recently, he played the Whelans venue in Dublin as part of a tour with some noted and venerable luminaries from the alternative music world, including Jad Phair, members of ‘Teenage Fanclub’ and ‘Yo La Tengo’. The gig was something of a success but afterwards, something about it still did not seem right to this journalist. What was it? Was it that a few whoops from the room felt a bit too extreme, a bit too patronising? Or was it a case of a hyper sensitive journalist over-thinking the occasion?

Certainly, according to some accounts, the time he played before, a year or so previously in the Vicar Street venue, an element in the audience were there to see him off the back of the documentary, and received his show in a strange and patronising manner. Anyway, this time around the tone was less one of condescension and more one of adulation. Yet, on the surface there is not much in Daniel’s current live performance (apart from an anxious tremor perhaps) that should distinguish him in any way from fleets of ‘sincere’ indie bands that played the same venue to more muted responses during the year. However, he was revered where others were overlooked. This could be one of the key points in the enduring love-affair with artists who are mentally unwell. What other bands often affect could be what Daniel Johnston actually does. At the core of much music is a very conscious leap from a self-aware way of thinking to a mock innocence. People who could quite coolly sing about fucking their girlfriend’s sister will instead construct a ditty about falling in love with a duffle-coated girl on a park swing in Glasgow. While not always, sometimes much of this is coolly calculated, affected, and as much a carefully spun shell of artifice as the one which surrounds the gurning tosser who chooses his best lucky shirt to wear to Krystle.

So maybe we are drawn to the mentally ill rock artist not just because of sensationalism, but because something special about their songwriting cannot be faked. If, for example, Chris Martin decided to pull all his toenails out with a pliers and run naked through Notting Hill batting cars with an umbrella, would Coldplay suddenly become more artistically credible? It’s doubtful. It’s nice to think that if Syd Barrett’s and Daniel Johnston’s songs were buried in a time capsule and dug up in hundreds of years, that they would be judged on their own merits; As things of precious wonder that stand apart from the details of the mental turmoil from which they were created.

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