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Scott Walker- The Drift

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It’s chastening to remember that Scott Walker’s first four solo records were recorded and released within three years. We’re now comfortable with the paradox that while fashion speeds up, culture slows down, but even by current standards, Walker is taking his own sweet time. If we include the four Scott songs on The Walker Brothers’ Nite Flights (and “The Electrician” is certainly the founding stone of this new era), then Scotts 5 through 8 span 28 years. It’s the pace of a novelist, or a poet, maybe; slow nights, massing to years, of editing and rewriting. It certainly seems to be how Walker now sees himself. “Every single sound in the track is related to the lyric in some way,” he said around the time of 1995’s Tilt. “I'm trying to go for something as carved down as possible.” That ambition has been abundantly achieved on The Drift, a record that’s pared down yet cosmically dense, as though compacted by geological pressures. Does that make it a diamond? Well, let’s say it’s the kind of rock record Samuel Beckett might have made: gnomic, terrifying, bleakly funny, often utterly unfathomable and advancing by its own strange logic. For all its industrial scree and jump-cut imagery, Tilt still bore the signature of Walker the existential balladeer, Jean-Paul Sinatra. “Farmer in the City” and “Patriot” were, in their way, as lush as “Montague Terrace”. The Drift offers no such consolation. Guitars scratch savagely, like Link Wray auditioning for Stockhausen. Rhythms are minimal, martial and produced, on occasion, by hammering a wooden box with a brick or thumping at a pig carcass. Strings lurch sickeningly with Bernard Herrmann psychosis, and Walker’s mournful baritone has been superseded by an urgent tenor, declaiming short phrases that merely hint at melody. “Cossacks Are” sets the tone. A two chord twang, a desperate rhythm, and a series of implored phrases that seem to evade narrative: “A moving aria for a vanishing style of mind”; “You could easily picture this in the current top ten”; “Medieval savagery, calculated cruelty.” This last, you might remember, was Chief Prosecutor Carla De Ponte’s summation of Slobodan Milosevic’s crimes in the former Yugoslavia, crimes that haunt the whole record. One aspect of this Drift is continental: Europe’s sleepwalk back to fascism. With a few hunches and a thorough afternoon on Google, you could trace other phrases back to book reviews, George Bush’s entreaties to Jacques Chirac, eulogies for Pope John Paul II. The collage effect, splicing the world historical with tabloid tittle tattle, is reminiscent of John Berger, years ago, flicking through the Sunday Times Magazine, from the spectacle of Bangladeshi refugees to aftershave ads, and declaring, “The culture that produced this incoherence… is insane”. Insane perhaps, but this style of blind quotation and vivid montage provides much of the method of The Drift. I could devote the rest of this issue simply to exegesis of these often baffling songs. The already infamous line from “Jolson And Jones” - “I’LL PUNCH A DONKEY IN THE STREETS OF GALWAY!” - refers to Allan Jones; not Uncut’s editor, but father of the younger Scott’s matinee idol Jack Jones. Jones père was a classically trained tenor who wound up in Hollywood and became best known for the novelty hit “Donkey Serenade”. Walker’s song has him commiserating with a drunk, paranoid Al Jolson in a ‘40s Vegas that doubles as the suburb of hell set aside for washed-up crooners. I’ll leave the other songs to your own suspicions, investigations and imaginations. What’s clear is the seriousness of Walker’s intent. This is a record of an ambition that’s rare anywhere in our culture, let alone pop music. This aspiration leaves The Drift wide open to accusations of absurd pretension. “Jesse” is a vexed meditation on 9/11 that quotes the guitar phrase from “Jailhouse Rock”, and makes a dream equation between the twin towers and Elvis and his stillborn twin Jesse Garon. “Buzzers” finds an obscure link between Balkan wars (the repeated refrain “kad tad” is Serbian for “one day”, the motto of patient vengeance-hunger) and the evolution of horses. “The Escape” is a paranoid vision that seems to conclude with a demonic Daffy Duck rasping, “What’s up doc?” Is it impossible to take with a straight face? Frequently. Will it disappoint those hoping for a return to elegant classicism? Profoundly. Does it strike you with a lurid, imagistic and nightmarish urgency? Always. Almost uniquely, this is a record that genuinely sounds like nothing you have heard before. If you can rise to its portentous challenge, if you can meet it even close to halfway, The Drift will prove to be a frightening, bewitching and rewarding experience. By Stephen Trousse

It’s chastening to remember that Scott Walker’s first four solo records were recorded and released within three years. We’re now comfortable with the paradox that while fashion speeds up, culture slows down, but even by current standards, Walker is taking his own sweet time. If we include the four Scott songs on The Walker Brothers’ Nite Flights (and “The Electrician” is certainly the founding stone of this new era), then Scotts 5 through 8 span 28 years.

It’s the pace of a novelist, or a poet, maybe; slow nights, massing to years, of editing and rewriting. It certainly seems to be how Walker now sees himself. “Every single sound in the track is related to the lyric in some way,” he said around the time of 1995’s Tilt. “I’m trying to go for something as carved down as possible.”

That ambition has been abundantly achieved on The Drift, a record that’s pared down yet cosmically dense, as though compacted by geological pressures. Does that make it a diamond? Well, let’s say it’s the kind of rock record Samuel Beckett might have made: gnomic, terrifying, bleakly funny, often utterly unfathomable and advancing by its own strange logic.

For all its industrial scree and jump-cut imagery, Tilt still bore the signature of Walker the existential balladeer, Jean-Paul Sinatra. “Farmer in the City” and “Patriot” were, in their way, as lush as “Montague Terrace”. The Drift offers no such consolation. Guitars scratch savagely, like Link Wray auditioning for Stockhausen. Rhythms are minimal, martial and produced, on occasion, by hammering a wooden box with a brick or thumping at a pig carcass. Strings lurch sickeningly with Bernard Herrmann psychosis, and Walker’s mournful baritone has been superseded by an urgent tenor, declaiming short phrases that merely hint at melody.

“Cossacks Are” sets the tone. A two chord twang, a desperate rhythm, and a series of implored phrases that seem to evade narrative: “A moving aria for a vanishing style of mind”; “You could easily picture this in the current top ten”; “Medieval savagery, calculated cruelty.” This last, you might remember, was Chief Prosecutor Carla De Ponte’s summation of Slobodan Milosevic’s crimes in the former Yugoslavia, crimes that haunt the whole record. One aspect of this Drift is continental: Europe’s sleepwalk back to fascism.

With a few hunches and a thorough afternoon on Google, you could trace other phrases back to book reviews, George Bush’s entreaties to Jacques Chirac, eulogies for Pope John Paul II. The collage effect, splicing the world historical with tabloid tittle tattle, is reminiscent of John Berger, years ago, flicking through the Sunday Times Magazine, from the spectacle of Bangladeshi refugees to aftershave ads, and declaring, “The culture that produced this incoherence… is insane”.

Insane perhaps, but this style of blind quotation and vivid montage provides much of the method of The Drift. I could devote the rest of this issue simply to exegesis of these often baffling songs. The already infamous line from “Jolson And Jones” – “I’LL PUNCH A DONKEY IN THE STREETS OF GALWAY!” – refers to Allan Jones; not Uncut’s editor, but father of the younger Scott’s matinee idol Jack Jones. Jones père was a classically trained tenor who wound up in Hollywood and became best known for the novelty hit “Donkey Serenade”. Walker’s song has him commiserating with a drunk, paranoid Al Jolson in a ‘40s Vegas that doubles as the suburb of hell set aside for washed-up crooners.

I’ll leave the other songs to your own suspicions, investigations and imaginations. What’s clear is the seriousness of Walker’s intent. This is a record of an ambition that’s rare anywhere in our culture, let alone pop music. This aspiration leaves The Drift wide open to accusations of absurd pretension. “Jesse” is a vexed meditation on 9/11 that quotes the guitar phrase from “Jailhouse Rock”, and makes a dream equation between the twin towers and Elvis and his stillborn twin Jesse Garon. “Buzzers” finds an obscure link between Balkan wars (the repeated refrain “kad tad” is Serbian for “one day”, the motto of patient vengeance-hunger) and the evolution of horses. “The Escape” is a paranoid vision that seems to conclude with a demonic Daffy Duck rasping, “What’s up doc?”

Is it impossible to take with a straight face? Frequently. Will it disappoint those hoping for a return to elegant classicism? Profoundly. Does it strike you with a lurid, imagistic and nightmarish urgency? Always. Almost uniquely, this is a record that genuinely sounds like nothing you have heard before. If you can rise to its portentous challenge, if you can meet it even close to halfway, The Drift will prove to be a frightening, bewitching and rewarding experience.

By Stephen Trousse

Bruce Springsteen- We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions

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Bruce Springsteen- We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions

On paper it sounds like a worthy chinstroker: Bruce trading in his Woody Guthrie affectations to pay tribute to Woody's onetime running mate, Pete Seeger. But as soon as a lusty clawhammer banjo introduces the opening "Old Dan Tucker", it’s obvious this is a world removed from The Boss in his familiar role as an earnest, sparsely accompanied. check shirt-clad troubadour. There's an irresistibly woozy horn section sashaying about, for starters, a constant presence through the 15 tracks that sounds born and bred deep in the bayou. Springsteen fronts an 11-piece band (first convened for two tracks on a 1998 Seeger tribute album) that swing as wildly and freely as The Pogues in their hell-for-leather glory. So wildly, in fact, that The E Street Gang suddenly sound tired and jaded. And then there's Bruce himself, lustfully rolling out the lyrics about "the dirty little coward" before biting down hard on "Jesse James", while the band play with abandon, mixing a Cajun two-step with a Mexican percussion fiesta. It all adds up to a great teeming flood of Americana: the streams of high mountain Appalachian bluegrass, running into Afro-Caribbean swells and bluesy stomps and hollers. The legacy of another flood, the one occasioned by Hurricane Katrina, emerges time and again. Not just in the abundant New Orleans musical references, but in the apprehension of "the mighty river" rolling in the prayerful "Shenandoah", the acknowledgment that there'll be "No more water/Fire next time," in the defiant gospel chorus of "Jacob's Ladder", and of course in the Civil Rights-bred resilience of the slow-burning title track. Seizing upon the joyful openness - rather than the pinched, puritanical elements - invoked by Seeger's excavation of the common songbook, Springsteen glories in a new life. Freed from the need to write songs to respond to events, a la The Rising, The Seeger Sessions is a powerful example of how songs reverberate through the years to accrue contemporary meaning. Certainly it would be hard for Bruce, or anyone else, to devise on demand an anti-war plaint as pointed as "Mrs McGrath", or a ballad of destitution and loss to equal "My Oklahoma Home". Or, indeed, an account of the mating rituals of little creatures as mischievous and surreal as - yes! - "Froggie Went A-Courtin'". There's really been nothing like this before in Springsteen's career. One minute you hear a violin and guitar duelling like it was The Hot Club Of Paris in the 1920s. The next ("Oh Mary Don't You Weep", f'rinstance) the Crescent City funeral march is in full effect. Recorded with a contagiously live feel at Springsteen's New Jersey studio ranch, We Shall Overcome does the honourable thing by praising Seeger's contribution while he's still around. But as Pete himself would acknowledge, it’s really a tribute to the spirit of joy and resistance that has powered music, and the communities that create it, for years. By Gavin Martin

On paper it sounds like a worthy chinstroker: Bruce trading in his Woody Guthrie affectations to pay tribute to Woody’s onetime running mate, Pete Seeger. But as soon as a lusty clawhammer banjo introduces the opening “Old Dan Tucker”, it’s obvious this is a world removed from The Boss in his familiar role as an earnest, sparsely accompanied. check shirt-clad troubadour.

There’s an irresistibly woozy horn section sashaying about, for starters, a constant presence through the 15 tracks that sounds born and bred deep in the bayou. Springsteen fronts an 11-piece band (first convened for two tracks on a 1998 Seeger tribute album) that swing as wildly and freely as The Pogues in their hell-for-leather glory. So wildly, in fact, that The E Street Gang suddenly sound tired and jaded. And then there’s Bruce himself, lustfully rolling out the lyrics about “the dirty little coward” before biting down hard on “Jesse James”, while the band play with abandon, mixing a Cajun two-step with a Mexican percussion fiesta. It all adds up to a great teeming flood of Americana: the streams of high mountain Appalachian bluegrass, running into Afro-Caribbean swells and bluesy stomps and hollers.

The legacy of another flood, the one occasioned by Hurricane Katrina, emerges time and again. Not just in the abundant New Orleans musical references, but in the apprehension of “the mighty river” rolling in the prayerful “Shenandoah”, the acknowledgment that there’ll be “No more water/Fire next time,” in the defiant gospel chorus of “Jacob’s Ladder”, and of course in the Civil Rights-bred resilience of the slow-burning title track.

Seizing upon the joyful openness – rather than the pinched, puritanical elements – invoked by Seeger’s excavation of the common songbook, Springsteen glories in a new life. Freed from the need to write songs to respond to events, a la The Rising, The Seeger Sessions is a powerful example of how songs reverberate through the years to accrue contemporary meaning.

Certainly it would be hard for Bruce, or anyone else, to devise on demand an anti-war plaint as pointed as “Mrs McGrath”, or a ballad of destitution and loss to equal “My Oklahoma Home”. Or, indeed, an account of the mating rituals of little creatures as mischievous and surreal as – yes! – “Froggie Went A-Courtin'”.

There’s really been nothing like this before in Springsteen’s career. One minute you hear a violin and guitar duelling like it was The Hot Club Of Paris in the 1920s. The next (“Oh Mary Don’t You Weep”, f’rinstance) the Crescent City funeral march is in full effect.

Recorded with a contagiously live feel at Springsteen’s New Jersey studio ranch, We Shall Overcome does the honourable thing by praising Seeger’s contribution while he’s still around. But as Pete himself would acknowledge, it’s really a tribute to the spirit of joy and resistance that has powered music, and the communities that create it, for years.

By Gavin Martin

The Raconteurs- Broken Boy Soldiers

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The Raconteurs- Broken Boy Soldiers

The busman’s holiday has a long if mixed history in rock annals. From makeshift supergroups to one-off time-killers to impromptu jam sessions, sideline moonlightings are part of the very fabric of popular music. Normally, the point of the side project is to either have fun or to explore some esoteric preoccupation that an artist’s more mainstream “day job” won’t allow. Either way, it tends to involve musicians doing something less, rather than more, commercial. What makes The Raconteurs unusual is that they’re – in part, at least – a vehicle for Jack White to do something more conventional than the White Stripes. Where that two-hand Motor City phenom flouted every rule in the rock manual and became the coolest group in the world anyway, The Raconteurs are a) all-male, b) four-piece, c) guitar-driven and d) hard-rockin’ and ass-kickin’. You expect it of Ryan Adams, but not of Little Jack W. The good news is that while Les Raconteurs – raffish, rakish storytellers, perhaps? – operate within the coded confines of mannish-boy US guitar rock, much of Broken Boy Soldiers is fired by the same liberated, intuitive spirit that drives the Stripes. And yes, they sound like they’re having fun, if you define fun as being able to pretend you’re Ron Asheton for a night. The Raconteurs were born of the friendship – musical and actual – between gothic-blues-punk urchin-god White and bedsit powerpop craftsman Brendan Benson. And while a Venn diagram might not easily display the common ground ‘twixt White’s neo-Zep minimalist primitivism and Benson’s Fountains of Wayne-meets-Matthew Sweet’n’sour singer-songwriting, The Raconteurs enables them to meet halfway and produce music they’d never otherwise have attempted. Imagine two overgrown kids trying on each other’s clothes. For overgrown kids read Broken Boy Soldiers. The album’s (not quite) title track “Broken Boy Soldier” turns out to be a brilliant dissertation on immature indie musicians, set to a galloping garage-psych groove and boasting an inflamed White vocal that inevitably recalls the Steve Marriott of “Tin Soldier”. “I’m child of man, and child again,” White all but yelps. “The toy broken boy soldier…” A veiled dig at the incestuous, internecine Detroit scene? Or just the self-examination of a sometime demon-child superbrat who’s now the wrong side of 30? Either way, it’s one of the album’s 16-carat tracks. I shouldn’t need to tell you that “Steady, As She Goes” is another. The Raconteurs’ opening salvo sounds as snap-cracklingly great as it did when it was first unleashed as a 7” single in January. If Broken Boy Soldiers is, as Benson has suggested, Detroit’s Nevermind – it isn’t, but never mind – then “Steady” is The Raconteurs’ irresistible “Teen Spirit”. To hear inimitable White lines (“Your friends have shown a kink in the single life/You’ve had too much to think, now you need a wife”) riding on driving drums and churning guitars is a pleasure one should just surrender to. Pointing out that “Steady” isn’t as radical as “Seven Nation Army” or “Blue Orchid” – let alone “The Nurse” – would, frankly, be pedantic. Some tracks on Broken Boy Soldiers, (“Together”, “Call It a Day”) could have made it on to the next Brendan Benson album without much fuss, just as a stripped-down version of the superb “Store Bought Bones” might easily have migrated to the next Stripes opus. Other songs, however – “Intimate Secretary”, “Yellow Moon” – sound like pure fusions of White and Benson. On “Hands”, “Intimate Secretary” and “Call It a Day”, the two men come together perfectly via Beatlish harmonies that summon nothing so much as the ghosts of Revolver’s “She Said, She Said” and “And Your Bird Can Sing”. In any case, it would be rash to assume it’s Benson who brings the whiteboy-retro melodicism to the table, or that White inserts the more twisted, blackened moments into songs such as “Hands” or “Level”. En passant, let’s acknowledge, too, the power that The Greenhornes’ rhythm section (bassist Jack Lawrence, drummer Patrick Keeler) bring to The Raconteurs. Those who recall the thrilling “Portland, Oregon” on Loretta Lynn’s White-produced Van Lear Rose will be aware of the heat this Cincinnati duo generate. There are some flat moments on Broken Boy Soldiers, it must be said. As someone who’s been left lukewarm by his solo work, I find Benson’s spotlight moments here a tad anodyne. “Together” and “Call It A Day” serve their structural purpose as quasi-ballad lulls in the proceedings, but are both rather dreary. When the Beck-ish funk-rock grind of “Level” kicks in after “Together”, you’ll breathe a giant sigh of relief. The influence of Beck (with whom White collaborated on Guero’s “Go It Alone” last year) can also be detected on “Store Bought Bones”, with its jabbing Jon Lord organ and gnarly slide whinnying. The song’s electrifying “You can’t buy whatcha can’t find whatcha can’t buy…” middle eight could have come straight off Elephant. Interestingly, though, it transpires that it’s Benson, not White, doing the Duane Allman honours. It’s probably a good thing that Little Jack has the last word – or conte – on Broken Boy Soldiers. Prefaced by backwards Revolver guitars, “Blue Veins” sounds for all the world like the kind of thing the raw young Robert Plant was singing in his mid-‘60s blue-eyed-soul days with the forgotten Listen – ironic given a stray White remark that Sir Percy was what he least liked about Led Zeppelin. (Plant to me in 2003: “I think, ‘Well, that's fine, boy, but if you're going to play ‘In My Time Of Dying’, listen to the master’.”) A slice of “House Of The Rising Sun”-style melodrama in 6/8 time, replete with gospelly piano and shimmering vibrato guitar, “Blue Veins” unavoidably leads us back into Stripes-world. Which is probably what Broken Boy Soldiers will do anyway. Anyone who thinks Jack White will give up the avant-garde Americana – or the liberating constrictions – of his work with Meg clearly doesn’t understand this most maverick and ornery of contemporary rock gods. In the meantime, it’s a treat to hear the guy telling his tales, playing his songs, and having the fun he deserves. By Barney Hoskyns

The busman’s holiday has a long if mixed history in rock annals. From makeshift supergroups to one-off time-killers to impromptu jam sessions, sideline moonlightings are part of the very fabric of popular music. Normally, the point of the side project is to either have fun or to explore some esoteric preoccupation that an artist’s more mainstream “day job” won’t allow. Either way, it tends to involve musicians doing something less, rather than more, commercial.

What makes The Raconteurs unusual is that they’re – in part, at least – a vehicle for Jack White to do something more conventional than the White Stripes. Where that two-hand Motor City phenom flouted every rule in the rock manual and became the coolest group in the world anyway, The Raconteurs are a) all-male, b) four-piece, c) guitar-driven and d) hard-rockin’ and ass-kickin’. You expect it of Ryan Adams, but not of Little Jack W.

The good news is that while Les Raconteurs – raffish, rakish storytellers, perhaps? – operate within the coded confines of mannish-boy US guitar rock, much of Broken Boy Soldiers is fired by the same liberated, intuitive spirit that drives the Stripes. And yes, they sound like they’re having fun, if you define fun as being able to pretend you’re Ron Asheton for a night.

The Raconteurs were born of the friendship – musical and actual – between gothic-blues-punk urchin-god White and bedsit powerpop craftsman Brendan Benson. And while a Venn diagram might not easily display the common ground ‘twixt White’s neo-Zep minimalist primitivism and Benson’s Fountains of Wayne-meets-Matthew Sweet’n’sour singer-songwriting, The Raconteurs enables them to meet halfway and produce music they’d never otherwise have attempted. Imagine two overgrown kids trying on each other’s clothes.

For overgrown kids read Broken Boy Soldiers. The album’s (not quite) title track “Broken Boy Soldier” turns out to be a brilliant dissertation on immature indie musicians, set to a galloping garage-psych groove and boasting an inflamed White vocal that inevitably recalls the Steve Marriott of “Tin Soldier”. “I’m child of man, and child again,” White all but yelps. “The toy broken boy soldier…” A veiled dig at the incestuous, internecine Detroit scene? Or just the self-examination of a sometime demon-child superbrat who’s now the wrong side of 30? Either way, it’s one of the album’s 16-carat tracks.

I shouldn’t need to tell you that “Steady, As She Goes” is another. The Raconteurs’ opening salvo sounds as snap-cracklingly great as it did when it was first unleashed as a 7” single in January. If Broken Boy Soldiers is, as Benson has suggested, Detroit’s Nevermind – it isn’t, but never mind – then “Steady” is The Raconteurs’ irresistible “Teen Spirit”. To hear inimitable White lines (“Your friends have shown a kink in the single life/You’ve had too much to think, now you need a wife”) riding on driving drums and churning guitars is a pleasure one should just surrender to. Pointing out that “Steady” isn’t as radical as “Seven Nation Army” or “Blue Orchid” – let alone “The Nurse” – would, frankly, be pedantic.

Some tracks on Broken Boy Soldiers, (“Together”, “Call It a Day”) could have made it on to the next Brendan Benson album without much fuss, just as a stripped-down version of the superb “Store Bought Bones” might easily have migrated to the next Stripes opus. Other songs, however – “Intimate Secretary”, “Yellow Moon” – sound like pure fusions of White and Benson. On “Hands”, “Intimate Secretary” and “Call It a Day”, the two men come together perfectly via Beatlish harmonies that summon nothing so much as the ghosts of Revolver’s “She Said, She Said” and “And Your Bird Can Sing”. In any case, it would be rash to assume it’s Benson who brings the whiteboy-retro melodicism to the table, or that White inserts the more twisted, blackened moments into songs such as “Hands” or “Level”. En passant, let’s acknowledge, too, the power that The Greenhornes’ rhythm section (bassist Jack Lawrence, drummer Patrick Keeler) bring to The Raconteurs. Those who recall the thrilling “Portland, Oregon” on Loretta Lynn’s White-produced Van Lear Rose will be aware of the heat this Cincinnati duo generate.

There are some flat moments on Broken Boy Soldiers, it must be said. As someone who’s been left lukewarm by his solo work, I find Benson’s spotlight moments here a tad anodyne. “Together” and “Call It A Day” serve their structural purpose as quasi-ballad lulls in the proceedings, but are both rather dreary. When the Beck-ish funk-rock grind of “Level” kicks in after “Together”, you’ll breathe a giant sigh of relief.

The influence of Beck (with whom White collaborated on Guero’s “Go It Alone” last year) can also be detected on “Store Bought Bones”, with its jabbing Jon Lord organ and gnarly slide whinnying. The song’s electrifying “You can’t buy whatcha can’t find whatcha can’t buy…” middle eight could have come straight off Elephant. Interestingly, though, it transpires that it’s Benson, not White, doing the Duane Allman honours.

It’s probably a good thing that Little Jack has the last word – or conte – on Broken Boy Soldiers. Prefaced by backwards Revolver guitars, “Blue Veins” sounds for all the world like the kind of thing the raw young Robert Plant was singing in his mid-‘60s blue-eyed-soul days with the forgotten Listen – ironic given a stray White remark that Sir Percy was what he least liked about Led Zeppelin. (Plant to me in 2003: “I think, ‘Well, that’s fine, boy, but if you’re going to play ‘In My Time Of Dying’, listen to the master’.”) A slice of “House Of The Rising Sun”-style melodrama in 6/8 time, replete with gospelly piano and shimmering vibrato guitar, “Blue Veins” unavoidably leads us back into Stripes-world.

Which is probably what Broken Boy Soldiers will do anyway. Anyone who thinks Jack White will give up the avant-garde Americana – or the liberating constrictions – of his work with Meg clearly doesn’t understand this most maverick and ornery of contemporary rock gods. In the meantime, it’s a treat to hear the guy telling his tales, playing his songs, and having the fun he deserves.

By Barney Hoskyns

The Small Faces- Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake

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When The Small Faces had to think about their second album for Andrew Loog Oldham's Immediate label, they did what all self-respecting British pop bands of the era liked to do: retreat for a while to mull things over. But where the likes of Traffic holed up in their Berkshire cottage, The Small Faces opted for a quintessentially Cockney option, a nice boat trip up the Thames. Under the influence of various mindbending stimulants, their antics had the local floating bourgeoisie spitting feathers, as it became obvious that their vessel was, if not physically, then at least temperamentally rudderless. Somewhere along the way, they cooked up an idea for a concept album. Both The Pretty Things and The Who, their fellow-travellers on the road from R&B to psychedelia, were working on their own concept albums, the over-arching essential for the new popocracy. It was fine if you were an art-school pseudo-intellectual like Lennon or Townshend, but a bit of a tall order if you were a bunch of East End oiks who looked and acted as if you’d ligged your way into the Swinging ‘60s party through the bathroom window. Still, even barrow-boys have dreams, and behind the rough, playful exterior, The Small Faces had actually become quite thoughtful lads, lapping up the new-age mysticism of Carlos Castaneda, and musing upon spiritual concerns like many another rowdy beat group brought to introspection via LSD. Thus they came up with the idea of psychedelic explorer Happiness Stan and his need to find out where the moon went when it waned. OK, so it's not much of an idea, but it provided enough of a spine to carry one of the more engaging pop albums of the late '60s. It was a work which bore many of the hallmarks of the heavier "rock" music just starting to appear, but without sacrificing any of the virtues of pop - the bright harmonies, singalong melodies and colourful arrangements. Packaged in an infuriatingly fragile circular fold-out sleeve which pastiched an old Nut Brown tobacco tin, Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake exhibits a kinship not just with fellow hard-rocking music-hall storytellers like The Kinks and The Who, but with the Syd-era Pink Floyd too, occupying much the same territory of slightly sinister childhood whimsy. It would spend six weeks atop the UK album chart, though the success only served to increase the pressures that would see the band break up within a year of its release. This "Deluxe Edition" of the album is actually presented in a proper tin, though its three discs offer little beyond the original, comprising just a mono version, a stereo version, and the "Classic Albums" radio documentary about the album. The title track which opens the album is an instrumental overture with phased drums in "Itchycoo Park" style and a woozy wah-wah keyboard part on which Steve Marriott operated the effects box whilst Ian McLagan played the electric piano. It provides a pleasing link with the band's early career, being effectively a re-recorded version of "I've Got Mine", the 1965 flop single. Here, it looms portentously, before "Afterglow" serves up the first of the album's classic moments. It's a curiously muscular love song, but one whose charming melody punches effortlessly through the sonic barrage. "Another one of those written for one of your girlfriends, some watery tart or another," says Marriott dismissively in the documentary, but it's nonetheless one of the finest moments of their entire career. "Rene" is a tribute to another watery tart, in this case the Manor Park prostitute who gave Steve Marriott a hands-on introduction to the facts of life. It starts out as an exaggerated cock-er-nee music-hall knees-up that would bring a blush even to the cheeks of Great Escape-era Blur, but relaxes into a psychedelic blues jam for the extended instrumental coda. "Song Of A Baker" sounds a bit like The Who doing "Wild Thing", with a heavy guitar break over burring, Leslie'd organ and more of Kenny Jones' avalanche drums, although Ronnie Lane explains in the documentary how the idea - essentially, "how hard you'll work if you're hungry" - came from a Sufi book he had read. In contrast, the opening lines to the ensuing "Lazy Sunday" were written by Steve Marriott on the toilet of his messy Chiswick flat, where his late-night rowdiness aroused the ire of his neighbours. Now regarded as an all-time classic, this was another case where the band themselves were underwhelmed by their own magic. When Andrew Oldham released the track as a single whilst they were away touring Japan, they phoned home, furious, to protest. They didn't want to be condemned to playing this corny fluff every night; they'd rather be playing things like "Song Of A Baker", and "Rollin' Over" from the second side's "Happiness Stan" suite, heavier grooves which presaged both Marriott's future direction with Humble Pie, and the others' progress as The Faces. Linked by Stanley Unwin's semi-nonsensical narration, the suite is a brilliant summation of contemporary musical tropes, with tracks like "The Hungry Intruder", "Mad John" and "Happiness Stan" itself draped in Mellotron, woodwind, harpsichord and strings, with "Rollin' Over" and the MGs-style limber funk groove "The Journey" providing the more forceful moments. Naïvely charming, its fairytale whimsy is spiked with bathos in the concluding "Happy Days Toy Town", another music-hall cakewalk which finds them opining that "life is just a bowl of All-Bran". Like The Beatles satirising the Maharishi as "Sexy Sadie", The Small Faces may have been open to the influence of Eastern mysticism. But they were still, at heart, sharp-witted East End lads with a disinclination to take themselves, or life, too seriously. By andy Gill

When The Small Faces had to think about their second album for Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate label, they did what all self-respecting British pop bands of the era liked to do: retreat for a while to mull things over. But where the likes of Traffic holed up in their Berkshire cottage, The Small Faces opted for a quintessentially Cockney option, a nice boat trip up the Thames. Under the influence of various mindbending stimulants, their antics had the local floating bourgeoisie spitting feathers, as it became obvious that their vessel was, if not physically, then at least temperamentally rudderless.

Somewhere along the way, they cooked up an idea for a concept album. Both The Pretty Things and The Who, their fellow-travellers on the road from R&B to psychedelia, were working on their own concept albums, the over-arching essential for the new popocracy. It was fine if you were an art-school pseudo-intellectual like Lennon or Townshend, but a bit of a tall order if you were a bunch of East End oiks who looked and acted as if you’d ligged your way into the Swinging ‘60s party through the bathroom window.

Still, even barrow-boys have dreams, and behind the rough, playful exterior, The Small Faces had actually become quite thoughtful lads, lapping up the new-age mysticism of Carlos Castaneda, and musing upon spiritual concerns like many another rowdy beat group brought to introspection via LSD. Thus they came up with the idea of psychedelic explorer Happiness Stan and his need to find out where the moon went when it waned. OK, so it’s not much of an idea, but it provided enough of a spine to carry one of the more engaging pop albums of the late ’60s. It was a work which bore many of the hallmarks of the heavier “rock” music just starting to appear, but without sacrificing any of the virtues of pop – the bright harmonies, singalong melodies and colourful arrangements.

Packaged in an infuriatingly fragile circular fold-out sleeve which pastiched an old Nut Brown tobacco tin, Ogdens’ Nut Gone Flake exhibits a kinship not just with fellow hard-rocking music-hall storytellers like The Kinks and The Who, but with the Syd-era Pink Floyd too, occupying much the same territory of slightly sinister childhood whimsy. It would spend six weeks atop the UK album chart, though the success only served to increase the pressures that would see the band break up within a year of its release. This “Deluxe Edition” of the album is actually presented in a proper tin, though its three discs offer little beyond the original, comprising just a mono version, a stereo version, and the “Classic Albums” radio documentary about the album.

The title track which opens the album is an instrumental overture with phased drums in “Itchycoo Park” style and a woozy wah-wah keyboard part on which Steve Marriott operated the effects box whilst Ian McLagan played the electric piano. It provides a pleasing link with the band’s early career, being effectively a re-recorded version of “I’ve Got Mine”, the 1965 flop single. Here, it looms portentously, before “Afterglow” serves up the first of the album’s classic moments. It’s a curiously muscular love song, but one whose charming melody punches effortlessly through the sonic barrage. “Another one of those written for one of your girlfriends, some watery tart or another,” says Marriott dismissively in the documentary, but it’s nonetheless one of the finest moments of their entire career.

“Rene” is a tribute to another watery tart, in this case the Manor Park prostitute who gave Steve Marriott a hands-on introduction to the facts of life. It starts out as an exaggerated cock-er-nee music-hall knees-up that would bring a blush even to the cheeks of Great Escape-era Blur, but relaxes into a psychedelic blues jam for the extended instrumental coda.

“Song Of A Baker” sounds a bit like The Who doing “Wild Thing”, with a heavy guitar break over burring, Leslie’d organ and more of Kenny Jones’ avalanche drums, although Ronnie Lane explains in the documentary how the idea – essentially, “how hard you’ll work if you’re hungry” – came from a Sufi book he had read. In contrast, the opening lines to the ensuing “Lazy Sunday” were written by Steve Marriott on the toilet of his messy Chiswick flat, where his late-night rowdiness aroused the ire of his neighbours.

Now regarded as an all-time classic, this was another case where the band themselves were underwhelmed by their own magic. When Andrew Oldham released the track as a single whilst they were away touring Japan, they phoned home, furious, to protest. They didn’t want to be condemned to playing this corny fluff every night; they’d rather be playing things like “Song Of A Baker”, and “Rollin’ Over” from the second side’s “Happiness Stan” suite, heavier grooves which presaged both Marriott’s future direction with Humble Pie, and the others’ progress as The Faces.

Linked by Stanley Unwin’s semi-nonsensical narration, the suite is a brilliant summation of contemporary musical tropes, with tracks like “The Hungry Intruder”, “Mad John” and “Happiness Stan” itself draped in Mellotron, woodwind, harpsichord and strings, with “Rollin’ Over” and the MGs-style limber funk groove “The Journey” providing the more forceful moments. Naïvely charming, its fairytale whimsy is spiked with bathos in the concluding “Happy Days Toy Town”, another music-hall cakewalk which finds them opining that “life is just a bowl of All-Bran”.

Like The Beatles satirising the Maharishi as “Sexy Sadie”, The Small Faces may have been open to the influence of Eastern mysticism. But they were still, at heart, sharp-witted East End lads with a disinclination to take themselves, or life, too seriously.

By andy Gill

The Futureheads- News And Tributes

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Their cover of Kate Bush’s “Hounds Of Love” made The Futureheads bona fide pop stars. Running on accepted music biz logic, their second album, News And Tributes, should set out to consolidate such success with a suite of polished post-punk tracks, all Gang Of Four jerkiness and barber’s shop four-part harmonies. The opening “Yes/No”, however, tells a different story. “My advice goes as follows,” sings Barry Hyde, over salutes of metallic guitar, “Go home, brick yourself in/ Think about it properly/ Go back to the beginning.” Or, as one bright spark once put it: rip it up, and start again. Recorded in a six-week stint at a farmhouse outside Scarborough, News And Tributes replaces the hectic Technicolor rush of the debut – once described by the band as “a punch in the face” - with a more spacious, wistful feel comparable to late-period XTC or Wire, but defiantly of the Futureheads’ own creation. Thematically, however, an impulse towards the deconstructive spirit of post-punk remains. “Fallout” and “Burnt” subvert traditional love themes, the former a Romeo And Juliet for Cold War paranoiacs, the latter a curdled, minor-key prog construction that equates falling in love with receiving third-degree burns and concludes that, “Nothing lasts forever and nothing is free”. Generally, it’s the quiet numbers here like the title track, a misty-eyed homage to the victims of the Munich air disaster, that impress more than familiar, harmony-laden numbers like “Cope” or “Worry About It Later”. That, however, would be to ignore the crushing “Return Of The Berserker”, a track that’s hammered into the middle of News And Tributes like a stake through the heart. A one-chord clatter just a notch off the jackhammer pummel of Big Black, it’s seemingly thrown in to prove The Futureheads still can: that they don’t, it’s implied somewhat elegantly, is merely their choice. Like mid-‘80s Scritti Politti, News And Tributes is pop music made by DIY heads, accessible sounds made by young men loathe to sell their intelligence down the river. True, it might not awaken the same instant delight as its predecessor, but its cries should resonate as long, and as loud. By Louis Pattison

Their cover of Kate Bush’s “Hounds Of Love” made The Futureheads bona fide pop stars. Running on accepted music biz logic, their second album, News And Tributes, should set out to consolidate such success with a suite of polished post-punk tracks, all Gang Of Four jerkiness and barber’s shop four-part harmonies. The opening “Yes/No”, however, tells a different story. “My advice goes as follows,” sings Barry Hyde, over salutes of metallic guitar, “Go home, brick yourself in/ Think about it properly/ Go back to the beginning.” Or, as one bright spark once put it: rip it up, and start again.

Recorded in a six-week stint at a farmhouse outside Scarborough, News And Tributes replaces the hectic Technicolor rush of the debut – once described by the band as “a punch in the face” – with a more spacious, wistful feel comparable to late-period XTC or Wire, but defiantly of the Futureheads’ own creation. Thematically, however, an impulse towards the deconstructive spirit of post-punk remains. “Fallout” and “Burnt” subvert traditional love themes, the former a Romeo And Juliet for Cold War paranoiacs, the latter a curdled, minor-key prog construction that equates falling in love with receiving third-degree burns and concludes that, “Nothing lasts forever and nothing is free”.

Generally, it’s the quiet numbers here like the title track, a misty-eyed homage to the victims of the Munich air disaster, that impress more than familiar, harmony-laden numbers like “Cope” or “Worry About It Later”. That, however, would be to ignore the crushing “Return Of The Berserker”, a track that’s hammered into the middle of News And Tributes like a stake through the heart. A one-chord clatter just a notch off the jackhammer pummel of Big Black, it’s seemingly thrown in to prove The Futureheads still can: that they don’t, it’s implied somewhat elegantly, is merely their choice.

Like mid-‘80s Scritti Politti, News And Tributes is pop music made by DIY heads, accessible sounds made by young men loathe to sell their intelligence down the river. True, it might not awaken the same instant delight as its predecessor, but its cries should resonate as long, and as loud.

By Louis Pattison

Paul Simon-Surprise

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The last decade and a half have been lean years for Paul Simon. 1990's Rhythm Of The Saints was an even more satisfying realisation of his global beat flirtation than Graceland four years earlier. Yet when he eventually followed it, 1997's musical The Capeman and its attendant album found him struggling to adapt to the different structural and narrative demands a theatrical production place on a songwriter. ’s failure seemed to leave Simon artistically, emotionally and financially broken; 2000's You're The One sounded desperate as he attempted to recoup some of the seven million dollars he'd reportedly lost after his Broadway flop closed inside two months. In fact, he seemed unlikely to ever make a decent album again, particularly when in 2003 he retreated into the security of an artistically unchallenging but financially lucrative reunion tour with Art Garfunkel. Once Simon had secured his pension fund, however, producer Brian Eno arrived to help restore him to musical health. The parallel with how Eno’s one-time assistant Daniel Lanois rode to rescue Dylan at his lowest ebb in '89 is irresistible. It would be fascinating to know how Simon and Eno worked together, for you suspect the story must have been similar to the tale of cajoling, bullying, encouraging and kicking that Dylan related in Chronicles of the making of Oh Mercy. It takes a strong figure to tell a songwriter of Simon or Dylan's stature that they've got to do better; perhaps Van Morrison should try one sometime. Eno’s influence is obvious all over Surprise, in the swampy textures and echoing, ambient tones which give the 11 songs a soundwash not normally associated with Simon. Nowhere is this more evident than on the opener, "How Can You Live In The Northeast?", where supreme songcraft meets a palette of sounds that includes Bill Frisell's multi-layered guitars, backward tape loops and relentless percussion. But Eno's presence is surely evident in more subtle ways, too, forcing Simon to reject the mediocre and pushing his voice and songwriting to their best in years. Like Lanois with Dylan, perhaps his greatest contribution was simply to restore Simon's confidence in his own gifts. When he began the record, Simon has admitted he wondered, “What could I say that wouldn't feel unnecessary, irrelevant, stupid?" He found plenty. There are smart lines in abundance and most of them seem autobiographical. "If I ever get back to the 20th Century I guess I'll have to pay off some debts," he sings on "Everything About It Is A Love Song". "Outrageous” tells of a middle-aged man doing 900 sit-ups a day while "painting my hair the colour of mud." On "Sure Don't Feel Like Love", Simon remembers how "once in August 1993 I was wrong and I could be wrong again." The only track that doesn't quite fit the schema is "Father and Daughter" from the 2002 film The Wild Thornberrys, a captivating melody but one which draws from a quite different sonic orthodoxy and clearly pre-dates the Eno connection. A small glitch, though, on a comeback of unexpected maturity and power. by Nigel Williamson

The last decade and a half have been lean years for Paul Simon. 1990’s Rhythm Of The Saints was an even more satisfying realisation of his global beat flirtation than Graceland four years earlier. Yet when he eventually followed it, 1997’s musical The Capeman and its attendant album found him struggling to adapt to the different structural and narrative demands a theatrical production place on a songwriter.

’s failure seemed to leave Simon artistically, emotionally and financially broken; 2000’s You’re The One sounded desperate as he attempted to recoup some of the seven million dollars he’d reportedly lost after his Broadway flop closed inside two months. In fact, he seemed unlikely to ever make a decent album again, particularly when in 2003 he retreated into the security of an artistically unchallenging but financially lucrative reunion tour with Art Garfunkel.

Once Simon had secured his pension fund, however, producer Brian Eno arrived to help restore him to musical health. The parallel with how Eno’s one-time assistant Daniel Lanois rode to rescue Dylan at his lowest ebb in ’89 is irresistible. It would be fascinating to know how Simon and Eno worked together, for you suspect the story must have been similar to the tale of cajoling, bullying, encouraging and kicking that

Dylan related in Chronicles of the making of Oh Mercy. It takes a strong figure to tell a songwriter of Simon or Dylan’s stature that they’ve got to do better; perhaps Van Morrison should try one sometime.

Eno’s influence is obvious all over Surprise, in the swampy textures and echoing,

ambient tones which give the 11 songs a soundwash not normally associated with Simon. Nowhere is this more evident than on the opener, “How Can You Live In The Northeast?”, where supreme songcraft meets a palette of sounds that includes Bill Frisell’s multi-layered guitars, backward tape loops and relentless percussion.

But Eno’s presence is surely evident in more subtle ways, too, forcing Simon to reject the mediocre and pushing his voice and songwriting to their best in years. Like Lanois with Dylan, perhaps his greatest contribution was simply to restore Simon’s confidence in his own gifts.

When he began the record, Simon has admitted he wondered, “What could I say that wouldn’t feel unnecessary, irrelevant, stupid?” He found plenty. There are smart lines in abundance and most of them seem autobiographical. “If I ever get back to the 20th Century I guess I’ll have to pay off some debts,” he sings on “Everything About It Is A Love Song”. “Outrageous” tells of a middle-aged man doing 900 sit-ups a day while “painting my hair the colour of mud.” On “Sure Don’t Feel Like Love”, Simon remembers how “once in August 1993 I was wrong and I could be wrong again.”

The only track that doesn’t quite fit the schema is “Father and Daughter” from the 2002 film The Wild Thornberrys, a captivating melody but one which draws from a quite different sonic orthodoxy and clearly pre-dates the Eno connection. A small glitch, though, on a comeback of unexpected maturity and power.

by Nigel Williamson

Grandaddy-Just Like The Fambly Cat

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Grandaddy’s final album is deeply elegiac, but then, so were the previous four. Together, they comprise a disquieting chronicle of a sector of American civilization inhabited by lost souls living in cars that don’t run. On Just Like The Fambly Cat, songwriter Jason Lytle once again drapes a tattered astral gauze over the strip-mall banalities that surround him, presumably as an escape mechanism to despair, or the “color printer blues,” as he wryly puts it in “Disconnecty.” The band’s other distinguishing marks — the mock-heroic powerchords, the cut-rate arpeggios of analog synths, Lytle’s Neil Young-emulating vocals — are reprised as well. But everything now seems as worn out and used up as Lytle’s subjects, along with the imagery that brings them to life. The album as a whole resembles the garage sale described, with characteristically telling detail, in “Where I’m Anymore”; as if the band’s sounds and themes had lost whatever value their owners had once attributed to them, like “exercise equipment piled high” on “oil-stained driveways.” All of that makes the album’s self-referential centrepiece, “Rear View Mirror”, all the more poignant. Affirmation occurs only in the anthemic instrumental “Skateboarding Saves Me Twice,” which wordlessly conjures up vivid, slow-motion footage of laughing, airborne children, and by extension suggests that there is still something to live for. If Just Like The Fambly Cat overtly concerns itself with the world Lytle lived in until breaking up the band and moving from the smalltown of Modesto in Northern California to Montana, its underlying theme is Grandaddy itself, a group whose considerable artistic achievements went down as the members struggled to put food on the table. They also had to deal with the related reality that any discussion of the conjoined themes of technology and metaphysics in alternapop begins not with Grandaddy, but with the Flaming Lips, and it’s tough to keep the faith when your work is overlooked and undervalued. For all these reasons, Just Like the Fambly Cat stands as a modern landmark in an obscure subgenre that might be labelled the underdog saga, the template for which was set by Mott, the 1973 masterpiece from another band that never got the respect it deserved. By Bud Scoppa

Grandaddy’s final album is deeply elegiac, but then, so were the previous four. Together, they comprise a disquieting chronicle of a sector of American civilization inhabited by lost souls living in cars that don’t run. On Just Like The Fambly Cat, songwriter Jason Lytle once again drapes a tattered astral gauze over the strip-mall banalities that surround him, presumably as an escape mechanism to despair, or the “color printer blues,” as he wryly puts it in “Disconnecty.”

The band’s other distinguishing marks — the mock-heroic powerchords, the cut-rate arpeggios of analog synths, Lytle’s Neil Young-emulating vocals — are reprised as well. But everything now seems as worn out and used up as Lytle’s subjects, along with the imagery that brings them to life. The album as a whole resembles the garage sale described, with characteristically telling detail, in “Where I’m Anymore”; as if the band’s sounds and themes had lost whatever value their owners had once attributed to them, like “exercise equipment piled high” on “oil-stained driveways.” All of that makes the album’s self-referential centrepiece, “Rear View Mirror”, all the more poignant. Affirmation occurs only in the anthemic instrumental “Skateboarding Saves Me Twice,” which wordlessly conjures up vivid, slow-motion footage of laughing, airborne children, and by extension suggests that there is still something to live for.

If Just Like The Fambly Cat overtly concerns itself with the world Lytle lived in until breaking up the band and moving from the smalltown of Modesto in Northern California to Montana, its underlying theme is Grandaddy itself, a group whose considerable artistic achievements went down as the members struggled to put food on the table. They also had to deal with the related reality that any discussion of the conjoined themes of technology and metaphysics in alternapop begins not with Grandaddy, but with the Flaming Lips, and it’s tough to keep the faith when your work is overlooked and undervalued. For all these reasons, Just Like the Fambly Cat stands as a modern landmark in an obscure subgenre that might be labelled the underdog saga, the template for which was set by Mott, the 1973 masterpiece from another band that never got the respect it deserved.

By Bud Scoppa

The Waterboys- Fisherman’s Blues

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Though the excellent additional disc of out-takes accompanying this reissue is welcome, it is also, in a sense, redundant. Eighteen years ago, when Fisherman’s Blues was originally released, it was an album that communicated everything you were ever really going to need to know about it in the first 20 seconds, and this is still the case. There are few more purely thrilling openings to a record: the big pealing G chord that announces the title track, a whipcrack of Anthony Thistlethwaite’s mandolin, Steve Wickham’s fiddle sounding the charge, then the entire band arriving like cavalry behind Mike Scott’s delirious whinny. In 1985, Scott, grumpy and reluctant about the stadium-filling fame that beckoned his Waterboys beyond This Is The Sea, had gone to stay in Ireland for a week. Three years later, he was back to tell us what a hell of a time he’d had. When musicians go scrabbling in search of roots, it’s usually an indicator of dwindling ambition. For Scott, his exploration of folk, country and blues became a madcap treasure hunt. Fisherman’s Blues encompassed orthodox country drinking songs (“Has Anybody Here Seen Hank?”), raggle-taggle whimsy (“And A Bang On The Ear”, presented here in a slightly longer version) and brooding, gothic balladry (“Strange Boat”), all played with astonishing technical virtuosity and infused with Scott’s trademark grand passion. The extra disc included here is drawn from a similarly broad palette, including two Dylan covers (“Girl Of The North Country”, “Nobody ‘Cept You”; The Basement Tapes were an obvious inspiration) and alternate versions of “Fisherman’s Blues” and “Killing My Heart” (better known as “When Ye Go Away”). It’s just a shame that Scott’s blazing-eyed crusade to reawaken the soul of Celtic folk was answered by such a knock-kneed crop of recruits. The musical legacy of Fisherman’s Blues amounted to little more than a couple of mildly amusing Wonder Stuff singles, The Levellers, and a plague of woolly-hatted young men with acoustic guitars on Grafton Street, eventually provoking Scott to sing, on 1995’s “Dublin (City Full Of Ghosts)” that “Dublin is a city full of buskers/Playing old Waterboys hits”. All that really matters is all that’s here: a fabulous, joyous riot. By Andrew Mueller

Though the excellent additional disc of out-takes accompanying this reissue is welcome, it is also, in a sense, redundant. Eighteen years ago, when Fisherman’s Blues was originally released, it was an album that communicated everything you were ever really going to need to know about it in the first 20 seconds, and this is still the case. There are few more purely thrilling openings to a record: the big pealing G chord that announces the title track, a whipcrack of Anthony Thistlethwaite’s mandolin, Steve Wickham’s fiddle sounding the charge, then the entire band arriving like cavalry behind Mike Scott’s delirious whinny.

In 1985, Scott, grumpy and reluctant about the stadium-filling fame that beckoned his Waterboys beyond This Is The Sea, had gone to stay in Ireland for a week. Three years later, he was back to tell us what a hell of a time he’d had. When musicians go scrabbling in search of roots, it’s usually an indicator of dwindling ambition. For Scott, his exploration of folk, country and blues became a madcap treasure hunt. Fisherman’s Blues encompassed orthodox country drinking songs (“Has Anybody Here Seen Hank?”), raggle-taggle whimsy (“And A Bang On The Ear”, presented here in a slightly longer version) and brooding, gothic balladry (“Strange Boat”), all played with astonishing technical virtuosity and infused with Scott’s trademark grand passion.

The extra disc included here is drawn from a similarly broad palette, including two Dylan covers (“Girl Of The North Country”, “Nobody ‘Cept You”; The Basement Tapes were an obvious inspiration) and alternate versions of “Fisherman’s Blues” and “Killing My Heart” (better known as “When Ye Go Away”).

It’s just a shame that Scott’s blazing-eyed crusade to reawaken the soul of Celtic folk was answered by such a knock-kneed crop of recruits. The musical legacy of Fisherman’s Blues amounted to little more than a couple of mildly amusing Wonder Stuff singles, The Levellers, and a plague of woolly-hatted young men with acoustic guitars on Grafton Street, eventually provoking Scott to sing, on 1995’s “Dublin (City Full Of Ghosts)” that “Dublin is a city full of buskers/Playing old Waterboys hits”. All that really matters is all that’s here: a fabulous, joyous riot.

By Andrew Mueller

Red Hot Chili Peppers – Stadium Arcadium

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The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ sound was forged in conjunction with the brilliant producer Rick Rubin on 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Rubin recognised the band’s limitations: Anthony Kiedis’ wobbly, pedestrian voice; the skeletal bass-drum-guitar architecture; the predilection for jive-ass posturing. He compensated by going for audiophile-level sonics, spotlighting the spartan grooves in a white-boy update of the James Brown funk blueprint and miking Kiedis’ voice conversation-close and ultra-dry to bring out its humanity. The approach paid off immediately, while providing a rock-solid foundation for the thematic advances of 1999’s Californicationand the appropriation of classic Cali-pop melodies and harmonies on 2002’s By the Way. All of which makes Stadium Arcadium the supersized culmination of the Chili Peppers’ artistic journey. Fittingly, it was recorded at Rubin’s Laurel Canyon estate (“the Houdini mansion” to locals), the site of their first collaboration. The setting proved to be inspirational to the bandmembers: at 28 tracks, organised over two CDs bearing the subtitles Marsand Jupiter, the album is Sandinist-ically overwhelming. Strategically, its lynchpin elements are crammed into the opening track and first single, “Dani California”, as syncopated verses set up a widescreen chorus overdriven by power chords, before rolling into a heated outro during which guitarist John Frusciante’s fuzzed-out soloing takes over. What’s different about the track in terms of the Chili Peppers’ low-rider oeuvre is its arena-rock dynamic, with Kiedis’ tattered-denim tenor in the eye of the storm rather than filling the foreground, as in the past. The bravura performance provides the first indication that this will be Frusciante’s show. Two tracks later, on “Charlie”, the guitarist honours the funk with a perfectly struck JB’s-style metronomic rhythm, while the following “Stadium Arcadium” opens into contemplative atmospherics in the manner of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. “Especially In Michigan” finds Frusciante working in tandem with The Mars Volta’s Omar Rodriguez as the two players set off a flurry of contrasting tones, including Brian May-style harmony guitars. Thereafter he evokes Hendrix (“Wet Sand”), Clapton (“She Looks To Me”) and British blues (“Readymade”). Throughout the two-hour-plus epic, Frusciante sounds like he’s been waiting all his life to pull out his full arsenal of licks and effects, transforming what otherwise might have been an interminable monochrome exhibition into an extended, frequently thrilling fireworks display. There’s more to recommend Stadium Arcadium than the unleashing of Frusciante, jaw-dropping as it is. The songs with real staying power tend to be muted, nuanced pieces like “Wet Sand,” “Hey,” “She Looks to Me” and, most of all, “Hard to Concentrate,” wherein Kiedis puts aside the non-sequiturs and evinces unabashed tenderness amid intricate hand percussion, Flea’s mesmerising high-on-the-frets bass pattern and Frusciante’s E-bow washes. Not only is the track flat-out gorgeous, it bespeaks a new-found serenity, making Stadium Arcadium the Chili Peppers’ most life-affirming work, even as it explores the apocalyptic anxieties of the age we live in (“Desecration Smile,” “Animal Bar,” “Death Of A Martian”). The album may be massive, but it’s intimate as well, thanks in part to the wise decision not to pile on the overdubs. At base it’s the document of a band playing in a room— a deftly balanced amalgamation of more and less from a band that can now be legitimately described as unique. By Bud Scoppa

The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ sound was forged in conjunction with the brilliant producer Rick Rubin on 1991’s Blood Sugar Sex Magik. Rubin recognised the band’s limitations: Anthony Kiedis’ wobbly, pedestrian voice; the skeletal bass-drum-guitar architecture; the predilection for jive-ass posturing. He compensated by going for audiophile-level sonics, spotlighting the spartan grooves in a white-boy update of the James Brown funk blueprint and miking Kiedis’ voice conversation-close and ultra-dry to bring out its humanity. The approach paid off immediately, while providing a rock-solid foundation for the thematic advances of 1999’s Californicationand the appropriation of classic Cali-pop melodies and harmonies on 2002’s By the Way.

All of which makes Stadium Arcadium the supersized culmination of the Chili Peppers’ artistic journey. Fittingly, it was recorded at Rubin’s Laurel Canyon estate (“the Houdini mansion” to locals), the site of their first collaboration. The setting proved to be inspirational to the bandmembers: at 28 tracks, organised over two CDs bearing the subtitles Marsand Jupiter, the album is Sandinist-ically overwhelming.

Strategically, its lynchpin elements are crammed into the opening track and first single, “Dani California”, as syncopated verses set up a widescreen chorus overdriven by power chords, before rolling into a heated outro during which guitarist John Frusciante’s fuzzed-out soloing takes over. What’s different about the track in terms of the Chili Peppers’ low-rider oeuvre is its arena-rock dynamic, with Kiedis’ tattered-denim tenor in the eye of the storm rather than filling the foreground, as in the past.

The bravura performance provides the first indication that this will be Frusciante’s show. Two tracks later, on “Charlie”, the guitarist honours the funk with a perfectly struck JB’s-style metronomic rhythm, while the following “Stadium Arcadium” opens into contemplative atmospherics in the manner of Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. “Especially In Michigan” finds Frusciante working in tandem with The Mars Volta’s Omar Rodriguez as the two players set off a flurry of contrasting tones, including Brian May-style harmony guitars. Thereafter he evokes Hendrix (“Wet Sand”), Clapton (“She Looks To Me”) and British blues (“Readymade”). Throughout the two-hour-plus epic, Frusciante sounds like he’s been waiting all his life to pull out his full arsenal of licks and effects, transforming what otherwise might have been an interminable monochrome exhibition into an extended, frequently thrilling fireworks display.

There’s more to recommend Stadium Arcadium than the unleashing of Frusciante, jaw-dropping as it is. The songs with real staying power tend to be muted, nuanced pieces like “Wet Sand,” “Hey,” “She Looks to Me” and, most of all, “Hard to Concentrate,” wherein Kiedis puts aside the non-sequiturs and evinces unabashed tenderness amid intricate hand percussion, Flea’s mesmerising high-on-the-frets bass pattern and Frusciante’s E-bow washes. Not only is the track flat-out gorgeous, it bespeaks a new-found serenity, making Stadium Arcadium the Chili Peppers’ most life-affirming work, even as it explores the apocalyptic anxieties of the age we live in (“Desecration Smile,” “Animal Bar,” “Death Of A Martian”).

The album may be massive, but it’s intimate as well, thanks in part to the wise decision not to pile on the overdubs. At base it’s the document of a band playing in a room— a deftly balanced amalgamation of more and less from a band that can now be legitimately described as unique.

By Bud Scoppa

Listen to the new Shack album

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Listen to the new Shack album

Having had a lengthy, eleven year-long hiatus since the timeless ‘Waterpistol’, Shack return this month with a new album, ‘The Corner Of Miles And Gil’. Released on May 15, the album is described in this month’s Uncut magazine as an album to match (‘Waterpistol’’s) eerie grace…a treasure trove for fans of Love and The La’s. Listen to it here in full before it hits the shops via the links below. Tie Me Down Windows Media - lo / hi Real Media - lo / hi Butterfly Windows Media - lo / hi Real Media - lo / hi Cup Of Tea Windows Media - lo / hi Real Media - lo / hi Shelley Brown Windows Media - lo / hi Real Media - lo / hi Black And White Windows Media - lo / hi Real Media - lo / hi New Day Windows Media - lo / hi Real Media - lo / hi Miles Away Windows Media - lo / hi Real Media - lo / hi Finn Sophie Bobby And Lance Windows Media - lo / hi Real Media - lo / hi Moonshine Windows Media - lo / hi Real Media - lo / hi Funny Things Windows Media - lo / hi Real Media - lo / hi Find A Place Windows Media - lo / hi Real Media - lo / hi Closer Windows Media - lo / hi Real Media - lo / hi

Having had a lengthy, eleven year-long hiatus since the timeless ‘Waterpistol’, Shack return this month with a new album, ‘The Corner Of Miles And Gil’.

Released on May 15, the album is described in this month’s Uncut magazine as an album to match (‘Waterpistol’’s) eerie grace…a treasure trove for fans of Love and The La’s.

Listen to it here in full before it hits the shops via the links below.

Tie Me Down

Windows Media – lo /

hi

Real Media – lo /

hi

Butterfly

Windows Media – lo /

hi

Real Media – lo /

hi

Cup Of Tea

Windows Media – lo /

hi

Real Media – lo /

hi

Shelley Brown

Windows Media – lo /

hi

Real Media – lo /

hi

Black And White

Windows Media – lo /

hi

Real Media – lo /

hi

New Day

Windows Media – lo /

hi

Real Media – lo /

hi

Miles Away

Windows Media – lo /

hi

Real Media – lo /

hi

Finn Sophie Bobby And Lance

Windows Media – lo /

hi

Real Media – lo /

hi

Moonshine

Windows Media – lo /

hi

Real Media – lo /

hi

Funny Things

Windows Media – lo /

hi

Real Media – lo /

hi

Find A Place

Windows Media – lo /

hi

Real Media – lo /

hi

Closer

Windows Media – lo /

hi

Real Media – lo /

hi

The Big Lebowski – Special Edition

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The Big Lebowski – Special Edition

By the time they came to make The Big Lebowski in 1998, the Coen brothers seemed unstoppable. Their previous film, the snow-bound noir Fargo, won them Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars, while Joel's wife and the film's star Frances McDormand walked away clutching a Best Actress statuette. The awards confirmed their place among America's most ambitious and exciting filmmakers. You might think it would be hard to top Fargo; but with Lebowski they made their masterpiece. The Big Lebowski finds the Coens firing sparks off their two most enduring influences - the narrative twists and bluffs of film noir and the screwball comedies of Hawks and Wilder. We meet LA resident Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), while the first Gulf War rages in the Middle East. A White Russian-swigging pacifist, he's a professional stoner for whom everything is "far out" or a "bummer". He passes his time at the bowling alley with his buddies, semi-deranged Viet Vet Walter (John Goodman, perfectly imitating the gung-ho machismo of the Coens friend, Apocalypse Now director John Milius) and the good-natured but simple Donny (Steve Buscemi). All is good in the Dude's world, until two German goons break into his house and piss on his carpet. It's at this point the Coens embark on a delirious joyride through the great sin city itself, executing some audacious hair-pin turns through the conventions of noir along the way. Seems The Dude shares his name with a wheelchair-bound millionaire (David Huddleston), whose trophy wife Bunny (Tara Reid) has been kidnapped. The Dude is roped in as bagman, but Walter, who just wants to help, only succeeds in making matters worse at the drop-point, swapping the ransom money for his dirty laundry. Soon a toe - apparently recently attached to the rest of Mrs Lebowski - arrives through the post. The film is rich in so many respects. The supporting characters - played by the A list of American independent cinema - are all magnificently drawn. There's Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lebowski's Smithers-like secretary Brandt; John Turturro as Jesus, The Dude's high-camp rival on the bowling lanes; Julianne Moore as Lebowski's daughter Maude, a feminist artist first glimpsed naked "flying" on some devilish wheel-and-pulley contraption across a canvas. Elsewhere, Peter Stormare heads up the group of German nihilists out to profit from Bunny's kidnapping, Ben Gazzara plays porn king Jackie Treehorn, and David Thewlis is particularly memorable as giggling "video artist" Knox Harrington. There's blink and you miss 'em cameos, too, from Chili Pepper Flea and Aimee Mann as a pair of nihilists (in one exquisite piece of minor detail, we learn the nihilists were once members of German electronic band Autobahn, the Coens even going so far as to mocking up a sleeve for one of their albums as a fabulous Kraftwerk pastiche). Of course, there's more: the soundtrack, compiled by T-Bone Burnett, features Dylan, Beefhart, Creedence and, iconically, Kenny Rogers And The First Edition, "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)". The famous dream sequence is a Dali-esque take on an MGM Musical, and worth a 12-page feature in its own right. And how many films are [ital] this [ital] good they can inspire an annual bowling convention, the Lebowskifest? The film's closest cinematic relative is Robert Altman's superior reworking of Chandler's The Long Goodbye (1973). Like The Dude, Altman's Marlowe (Elliot Gould) is another shaggy-dog of a man ambling through LA. But, by casting Bridges as this "man for his time and place", the Coens are also making sly reference to another of the actor's great characters: beach-bum Richard Bone in Ivan Passer's stunning film noir, Cutter's Way (1981). Bridges is sublime as The Dude - a slob, sure, but a man who'd do anything for his friends. "Sometimes, there's a man, well, he's the man for his time and place," says Sam Elliot's Stranger in the opening voiceover. He's a hero, of sorts, though a wonderfully unconventional one. So, how come the Coens have never since come close to matching The Big Lebowski? Soon after, they began work on an adaptation of William Dickey's novel To The White Sea, with Brad Pitt in the lead role as an airman shot down over Tokyo during World War II. The project repeatedly stalled due to Pitt's other commitments, and finally ran aground over budgetary disputes. They attempted to restart it, unsuccessfully, while working on the Preston Sturges-style romp O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000) and The Man Who Wasn't There (2001). But you wonder whether they ever fully recovered from the experience. 2002's Intolerable Cruelty featured a chemistry vacuum at its centre thanks to the miscasting of George Clooney and Catherine Zeta Jones in the lead roles. Most recently, we endured their pointless remake of Ealing classic The Ladykillers. You sense, too, that they've been leap-frogged by a new generation of filmmakers, particularly Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman. Anderson responds to the warmth the Coens have for their quirky characters, while Jonze and Kaufman take from the surreal aspect of their work. The Coens made it OK to be kooky; the next generation feel obliged to go further. The Coens next due later this year - an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's latest novel No Country For Old Men - at least promises a return to the lean, moody storytelling of their 1983 debut, Blood Simple. We must, at least, hold out some hope. It'd be a significant loss to movies if these two, great filmmakers never found their form again. But at least we have The Dude. And The Dude abides. By Michael Bonner

By the time they came to make The Big Lebowski in 1998, the Coen brothers seemed unstoppable. Their previous film, the snow-bound noir Fargo, won them Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars, while Joel’s wife and the film’s star Frances McDormand walked away clutching a Best Actress statuette. The awards confirmed their place among America’s most ambitious and exciting filmmakers. You might think it would be hard to top Fargo; but with Lebowski they made their masterpiece.

The Big Lebowski finds the Coens firing sparks off their two most enduring influences – the narrative twists and bluffs of film noir and the screwball comedies of Hawks and Wilder. We meet LA resident Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), while the first Gulf War rages in the Middle East. A White Russian-swigging pacifist, he’s a professional stoner for whom everything is “far out” or a “bummer”. He passes his time at the bowling alley with his buddies, semi-deranged Viet Vet Walter (John Goodman, perfectly imitating the gung-ho machismo of the Coens friend, Apocalypse Now director John Milius) and the good-natured but simple Donny (Steve Buscemi). All is good in the Dude’s world, until two German goons break into his house and piss on his carpet.

It’s at this point the Coens embark on a delirious joyride through the great sin city itself, executing some audacious hair-pin turns through the conventions of noir along the way. Seems The Dude shares his name with a wheelchair-bound millionaire (David Huddleston), whose trophy wife Bunny (Tara Reid) has been kidnapped. The Dude is roped in as bagman, but Walter, who just wants to help, only succeeds in making matters worse at the drop-point, swapping the ransom money for his dirty laundry. Soon a toe – apparently recently attached to the rest of Mrs Lebowski – arrives through the post.

The film is rich in so many respects. The supporting characters – played by the A list of American independent cinema – are all magnificently drawn. There’s Philip Seymour Hoffman as Lebowski’s Smithers-like secretary Brandt; John Turturro as Jesus, The Dude’s high-camp rival on the bowling lanes; Julianne Moore as Lebowski’s daughter Maude, a feminist artist first glimpsed naked “flying” on some devilish wheel-and-pulley contraption across a canvas. Elsewhere, Peter Stormare heads up the group of German nihilists out to profit from Bunny’s kidnapping, Ben Gazzara plays porn king Jackie Treehorn, and David Thewlis is particularly memorable as giggling “video artist” Knox Harrington. There’s blink and you miss ’em cameos, too, from Chili Pepper Flea and Aimee Mann as a pair of nihilists (in one exquisite piece of minor detail, we learn the nihilists were once members of German electronic band Autobahn, the Coens even going so far as to mocking up a sleeve for one of their albums as a fabulous Kraftwerk pastiche).

Of course, there’s more: the soundtrack, compiled by T-Bone Burnett, features Dylan, Beefhart, Creedence and, iconically, Kenny Rogers And The First Edition, “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)”. The famous dream sequence is a Dali-esque take on an MGM Musical, and worth a 12-page feature in its own right. And how many films are [ital] this [ital] good they can inspire an annual bowling convention, the Lebowskifest?

The film’s closest cinematic relative is Robert Altman’s superior reworking of Chandler’s The Long Goodbye (1973). Like The Dude, Altman’s Marlowe (Elliot Gould) is another shaggy-dog of a man ambling through LA. But, by casting Bridges as this “man for his time and place”, the Coens are also making sly reference to another of the actor’s great characters: beach-bum Richard Bone in Ivan Passer’s stunning film noir, Cutter’s Way (1981). Bridges is sublime as The Dude – a slob, sure, but a man who’d do anything for his friends. “Sometimes, there’s a man, well, he’s the man for his time and place,” says Sam Elliot’s Stranger in the opening voiceover. He’s a hero, of sorts, though a wonderfully unconventional one.

So, how come the Coens have never since come close to matching The Big Lebowski? Soon after, they began work on an adaptation of William Dickey’s novel To The White Sea, with Brad Pitt in the lead role as an airman shot down over Tokyo during World War II. The project repeatedly stalled due to Pitt’s other commitments, and finally ran aground over budgetary disputes. They attempted to restart it, unsuccessfully, while working on the Preston Sturges-style romp O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000) and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). But you wonder whether they ever fully recovered from the experience. 2002’s Intolerable Cruelty featured a chemistry vacuum at its centre thanks to the miscasting of George Clooney and Catherine Zeta Jones in the lead roles. Most recently, we endured their pointless remake of Ealing classic The Ladykillers. You sense, too, that they’ve been leap-frogged by a new generation of filmmakers, particularly Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman. Anderson responds to the warmth the Coens have for their quirky characters, while Jonze and Kaufman take from the surreal aspect of their work. The Coens made it OK to be kooky; the next generation feel obliged to go further.

The Coens next due later this year – an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s latest novel No Country For Old Men – at least promises a return to the lean, moody storytelling of their 1983 debut, Blood Simple.

We must, at least, hold out some hope. It’d be a significant loss to movies if these two, great filmmakers never found their form again.

But at least we have The Dude. And The Dude abides.

By Michael Bonner

The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada

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The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada

Released hot on the heels of Brokeback Mountain, Tommy Lee Jones' directorial debut offers further proof that the Western's alive and kicking its spurs. Despite its contemporary setting, it plays by genre rules more respectfully than Ang Lee's movie, its story of injustice, homicide, revenge and honour evocative of Peckinpah's death-drenched Mexican masterworks The Wild Bunch and Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia. If not for screenwriter Guillermo (Amores Perros) Arriaga's characteristic non-linear structure, the story might seem a straightforward chronicle of the determined quest of the victim's boss and friend, Pete Perkins (Jones, in a Cannes prize-winning turn) to see justice done by the killer. Instead, the movie flashes back from the discovery of a shallow grave in the West Texan desert to scenes showing how Mexican ranchhand Estrada's ended up dead and buried. But then the film is less concerned with plot than with place - the dusty townships down by the Rio Grande, home to desert rats, cattlemen and their bored wives, 'wetback' workers like Estrada, and border patrolmen - character and questions of morality. And in each regard it rings beautifully true. As such, it reflects upon the inequality, racism, suspicion and misunderstanding that marks US-Mexican relations; at the same time, however, it remains a stirring tale of friendship, obsession and unlikely redemption, played to perfection by all concerned (Barry Pepper and Melissa Leo lending Jones especially sturdy support) and shot by our very own Chris Menges as if he'd been raised on tequila from birth. As Perkins takes the law into his own hands and leads a man he deems guilty into the hellish desert, hauling a corpse along for the ride, you begin to wonder where his crazy quest will end. It's to Jones' and Arriaga's credit that they keep us guessing all the way, and provide a resolution as surprising as it's deeply satisfying. By Geoff Andrew

Released hot on the heels of Brokeback Mountain, Tommy Lee Jones’ directorial debut offers further proof that the Western’s alive and kicking its spurs. Despite its contemporary setting, it plays by genre rules more respectfully than Ang Lee’s movie, its story of injustice, homicide, revenge and honour evocative of Peckinpah’s death-drenched Mexican masterworks The Wild Bunch and Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia.

If not for screenwriter Guillermo (Amores Perros) Arriaga’s characteristic non-linear structure, the story might seem a straightforward chronicle of the determined quest of the victim’s boss and friend, Pete Perkins (Jones, in a Cannes prize-winning turn) to see justice done by the killer. Instead, the movie flashes back from the discovery of a shallow grave in the West Texan desert to scenes showing how Mexican ranchhand Estrada’s ended up dead and buried. But then the film is less concerned with plot than with place – the dusty townships down by the Rio Grande, home to desert rats, cattlemen and their bored wives, ‘wetback’ workers like Estrada, and border patrolmen – character and questions of morality. And in each regard it rings beautifully true.

As such, it reflects upon the inequality, racism, suspicion and misunderstanding that marks US-Mexican relations; at the same time, however, it remains a stirring tale of friendship, obsession and unlikely redemption, played to perfection by all concerned (Barry Pepper and Melissa Leo lending Jones especially sturdy support) and shot by our very own Chris Menges as if he’d been raised on tequila from birth. As Perkins takes the law into his own hands and leads a man he deems guilty into the hellish desert, hauling a corpse along for the ride, you begin to wonder where his crazy quest will end. It’s to Jones’ and Arriaga’s credit that they keep us guessing all the way, and provide a resolution as surprising as it’s deeply satisfying.

By Geoff Andrew

The Charlatans – Simpatico

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Death, embezzlement, nervous breakdowns - the first half of the Charlatans’ career alone packed in enough incident to send most bands fleeing for a desk in the Civil Service. If things have taken a more surreal turn recently, with drummer Jon Brooks’ unscheduled onstage appearance with Franz Ferdinand, and Tim Burgess’ role in light-hearted supergroup The Chavs (with Primal Scream’s Duffy, Carl Barat and Andy Burrows from Razorlight), think of it as therapy. Having resolved their internal squabbles with 2001’s career best Wonderland, The Charlatans have clearly decided that if they’re stuck with each other, they might as well enjoy themselves. Gone, then, is the feisty if predictable Charlies-rock of 2004’s Up At The Lake. Instead, their ninth studio album is a sprawling mix of dub, loose-limbed boogie and weirdo guitar-pop which will leave newer converts scratching their heads and fans of 1994’s bleak third album, Up To Our Hips, reaching for the Rizla’s. Opener “Blackened Blue Eyes” is a reminder that when they do funky, bar-room rock, there’s no-one to match them, and Tim Burgess’ voice is ever more an instrument of hope and resilience on lyrics like, “We all need a shoulder to cry on/Once in a while.” But after that, you can almost hear the rulebook flying from the studio window. A choir of rampaging Cossacks invade the chorus of The Specials-influenced “City Of The Dead”. “Sunset & Vine” is a synth-heavy Moroder-like soundscape, and mid-tempo skank “Muddy Ground” relocates The Stones’ “Waiting On A Friend” to a windswept Glastonbury Tor. The ever-present whiff of Camberwell Carrot, meanwhile, reaches a pungent peak on creditable dub-plate “The Architect” - a nod, presumably, to paranoiac’s favourite The Matrix. Talk of Simpatico as the band’s Sandinista, is, in truth, wide of the mark. It’s better seen as a footpath linking the claustrophobia of their early work with the Black Country funk of Wonderland, whilst hinting at a way forward for this most durable and eclectic of bands. As Burgess sings gleefully in the raunchy punk-funk of “NYC (No Need To Stop)”, “We’re not here to educate/Only here to stay up late!” The Walsall pact remains inviolable. By Paul Moody

Death, embezzlement, nervous breakdowns – the first half of the Charlatans’ career alone packed in enough incident to send most bands fleeing for a desk in the Civil Service. If things have taken a more surreal turn recently, with drummer Jon Brooks’ unscheduled onstage appearance with Franz Ferdinand, and Tim Burgess’ role in light-hearted supergroup The Chavs (with Primal Scream’s Duffy, Carl Barat and Andy Burrows from Razorlight), think of it as therapy.

Having resolved their internal squabbles with 2001’s career best Wonderland, The Charlatans have clearly decided that if they’re stuck with each other, they might as well enjoy themselves. Gone, then, is the feisty if predictable Charlies-rock of 2004’s Up At The Lake. Instead, their ninth studio album is a sprawling mix of dub, loose-limbed boogie and weirdo guitar-pop which will leave newer converts scratching their heads and fans of 1994’s bleak third album, Up To Our Hips, reaching for the Rizla’s.

Opener “Blackened Blue Eyes” is a reminder that when they do funky, bar-room rock, there’s no-one to match them, and Tim Burgess’ voice is ever more an instrument of hope and resilience on lyrics like, “We all need a shoulder to cry on/Once in a while.” But after that, you can almost hear the rulebook flying from the studio window. A choir of rampaging Cossacks invade the chorus of The Specials-influenced “City Of The Dead”. “Sunset & Vine” is a synth-heavy Moroder-like soundscape, and mid-tempo skank “Muddy Ground” relocates The Stones’ “Waiting On A Friend” to a windswept Glastonbury Tor. The ever-present whiff of Camberwell Carrot, meanwhile, reaches a pungent peak on creditable dub-plate “The Architect” – a nod, presumably, to paranoiac’s favourite The Matrix.

Talk of Simpatico as the band’s Sandinista, is, in truth, wide of the mark. It’s better seen as a footpath linking the claustrophobia of their early work with the Black Country funk of Wonderland, whilst hinting at a way forward for this most durable and eclectic of bands. As Burgess sings gleefully in the raunchy punk-funk of “NYC (No Need To Stop)”, “We’re not here to educate/Only here to stay up late!” The Walsall pact remains inviolable.

By Paul Moody

The Streets – The Hardest Way To Make A Living

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The Streets – The Hardest Way To Make A Living

Mike Skinner’s existence has been transformed by success and fortune. It’s a fortune accrued by observing, in startlingly prosaic detail, a life of Wetherspoons and scams, ashtrays and longing for haughty girls, of cab ranks and late night fumblings. The musical backbeat to Skinner’s tracks always seemed disconnected, however, remote from his own patter, as if emanating from down in the cellar of some nightclub from which he’s excluded, on the wrong side of the velvet rope. Skinner can’t pretend that that is his life nowadays, any more than he could ever pretend he was Nas or Jay-Z or any of his heroes. After the resounding success of 2002’s debut Original Pirate Material and its 2004 follow-up, A Grand Don’t Come For Free, Skinner is a winner. Yet fame hasn’t altered the warp and clunk of his lyrical stance. The setting may have changed, the soundtrack is boosted and richer, grimier yet cleaner, but Skinner’s predicaments remains the same. Take opener “Pranging Out”, in which beats come tumbling out as if from an airing cupboard, with Skinner regretting the consequences of a too-manic time on the road: boozed and cracked out; shivering with paranoia; and, worst of all, realising, “The iron has been on in my house for four fucking weeks.” Skinner’s response to fame is mixed. The title track limps along ruefully, as Skinner reflects on the money he’s squandered. “Hotel Expressionism”, conversely, has the cocksure gait of the Italian Job soundtrack, celebrating on-the-road excess as an art form,. On the rudely funked-up single, “When You Wasn’t Famous”, Skinner stops short of naming names but shows a keen eye for celeb squalor, wondering how the woman he saw getting wasted the night before can look so good on CD:UK the morning after. Closer “Fake Streets Hats” sees Skinner recall an onstage tantrum about supposed bootleg merchandise in Holland which turned out to be official - a wonderful and singularly Streets-ian gesture of self-deprecation. Amid all this are two balladic gestures of sober contrition; the Princean, anti-laddish “All Goes Out The Window” and “Never Been To Church”, which sails perilously close to McCartney’s ”Let It Be”, and on which Skinner fears that he is unworthy of redemption. Not true. The lad may get up to no good, but his entire oeuvre comprises acts of supreme redemption. This is Act Three. By David Stubbs

Mike Skinner’s existence has been transformed by success and fortune. It’s a fortune accrued by observing, in startlingly prosaic detail, a life of Wetherspoons and scams, ashtrays and longing for haughty girls, of cab ranks and late night fumblings. The musical backbeat to Skinner’s tracks always seemed disconnected, however, remote from his own patter, as if emanating from down in the cellar of some nightclub from which he’s excluded, on the wrong side of the velvet rope.

Skinner can’t pretend that that is his life nowadays, any more than he could ever pretend he was Nas or Jay-Z or any of his heroes. After the resounding success of 2002’s debut Original Pirate Material and its 2004 follow-up, A Grand Don’t Come For Free, Skinner is a winner. Yet fame hasn’t altered the warp and clunk of his lyrical stance. The setting may have changed, the soundtrack is boosted and richer, grimier yet cleaner, but Skinner’s predicaments remains the same. Take opener “Pranging Out”, in which beats come tumbling out as if from an airing cupboard, with Skinner regretting the consequences of a too-manic time on the road: boozed and cracked out; shivering with paranoia; and, worst of all, realising, “The iron has been on in my house for four fucking weeks.”

Skinner’s response to fame is mixed. The title track limps along ruefully, as Skinner reflects on the money he’s squandered. “Hotel Expressionism”, conversely, has the cocksure gait of the Italian Job soundtrack, celebrating on-the-road excess as an art form,. On the rudely funked-up single, “When You Wasn’t Famous”, Skinner stops short of naming names but shows a keen eye for celeb squalor, wondering how the woman he saw getting wasted the night before can look so good on CD:UK the morning after. Closer “Fake Streets Hats” sees Skinner recall an onstage tantrum about supposed bootleg merchandise in Holland which turned out to be official – a wonderful and singularly Streets-ian gesture of self-deprecation.

Amid all this are two balladic gestures of sober contrition; the Princean, anti-laddish “All Goes Out The Window” and “Never Been To Church”, which sails perilously close to McCartney’s ”Let It Be”, and on which Skinner fears that he is unworthy of redemption. Not true. The lad may get up to no good, but his entire oeuvre comprises acts of supreme redemption. This is Act Three.

By David Stubbs

The Zutons – Tired Of Hangin’ Around

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The Zutons – Tired Of Hangin’ Around

Who Killed The Zutons?, the Liverpool band’s 2004 debut, was a low-key, lingering success - selected for the Mercury prize, and quietly racking up 600,000 sales with barely a mainstream ripple. Like their mentors The Coral, The Zutons appeared to stand to one side of trends and hype, staying in a private world of surreal narratives and stewed 1960s sounds. Little has changed. As a straight rock band in the studio, they remain four-square and a little flat. The boundary-trampling spirit that makes their music stretch out almost infinitely live remains barely tapped. What keeps The Zutons special is singer David McCabe’s lyrics, which gush from him in a mixture of emotional frankness, Beat whimsy and street sharpness, matched at their best by arrangements of disciplined simplicity. As is the Liverpool way, there’s more than a touch of Love here, with Abi Harding’s sax giving jazzy depth to otherwise bright pop tunes. First single “Why Won’t You Give Me Your Love?” is a glam stomp that even recalls Mud’s “Tiger Feet”. But its lyric, in which the jilted protagonist “kept you in my cellar safe”, shows how McCabe spikes his sunny tunes with references to paranoia and other manic states. “You’ve Got A Friend In Me” repeats the stalker motif, as McCabe and Harding enact the most perverse pop duet since The Beautiful South’s “You Keep It All In”, till the stalker finally cracks and reveals his despair. Even the one straight love song, “Valerie”, involves trouble with the law. “Someone Watching Over Me”, that picks through a lonely man’s nightmares over descending piano chords, is trumped by “I Know I’ll Never Leave”, a private dystopia in which the singer’s trapped inside a ghetto flat with floors that slash his skin. Like most songs here, it’s a cautionary, crazed fable, built on inner turmoil. The Zutons seem capable of fabulous music to match. For now, they’re playing safer than they should. By Nick Hasted

Who Killed The Zutons?, the Liverpool band’s 2004 debut, was a low-key, lingering success – selected for the Mercury prize, and quietly racking up 600,000 sales with barely a mainstream ripple. Like their mentors The Coral, The Zutons appeared to stand to one side of trends and hype, staying in a private world of surreal narratives and stewed 1960s sounds.

Little has changed. As a straight rock band in the studio, they remain four-square and a little flat. The boundary-trampling spirit that makes their music stretch out almost infinitely live remains barely tapped. What keeps The Zutons special is singer David McCabe’s lyrics, which gush from him in a mixture of emotional frankness, Beat whimsy and street sharpness, matched at their best by arrangements of disciplined simplicity.

As is the Liverpool way, there’s more than a touch of Love here, with Abi Harding’s sax giving jazzy depth to otherwise bright pop tunes. First single “Why Won’t You Give Me Your Love?” is a glam stomp that even recalls Mud’s “Tiger Feet”. But its lyric, in which the jilted protagonist “kept you in my cellar safe”, shows how McCabe spikes his sunny tunes with references to paranoia and other manic states. “You’ve Got A Friend In Me” repeats the stalker motif, as McCabe and Harding enact the most perverse pop duet since The Beautiful South’s “You Keep It All In”, till the stalker finally cracks and reveals his despair. Even the one straight love song, “Valerie”, involves trouble with the law.

“Someone Watching Over Me”, that picks through a lonely man’s nightmares over descending piano chords, is trumped by “I Know I’ll Never Leave”, a private dystopia in which the singer’s trapped inside a ghetto flat with floors that slash his skin. Like most songs here, it’s a cautionary, crazed fable, built on inner turmoil. The Zutons seem capable of fabulous music to match. For now, they’re playing safer than they should.

By Nick Hasted

Calexico – Garden Ruin

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Calexico – Garden Ruin

While their spiritual kinsmen Wilco and Radiohead have continued to hurtle toward the outer limits, Tucson’s Calexico have been cruising in the other direction, increasingly mixing traditional songcraft with the avant-garde pieces that put them on the indie-rock map. Core members Joey Burns and John Convertino managed to put these disparate impulses into perfect balance on the milestone 2003 album Feast Of Wire, juxtaposing free-form instrumentals like “The Root And The Canal” with verse/chorus constructions like the sublime “Quattro”. And now, on the proper follow-up to Feast…, Calexico have completed their formal journey. Garden Ruin is an album likely to polarise their fans, inasmuch as it contains nothing but discreet songs. On the 11 tracks, Burns reveals himself to be a student of the California classics as he echoes Gram Parsons, Neil Young and Lindsey Buckingham, among other quirky songsmiths. The album opens with “Cruel,” a sociopolitical lament (“Future’s left to wallow in fortune’s waste”) that adheres to standard song structures but nonetheless manages to pack into its four minutes virtually every element in Calexico’s inclusive style — the sinewy rhythmic base, the instrumental filigree, the Latin brass, Burns’ impressionistic lyrics and troubadour-next-door vocals. That sets the template for the album, as the players accent each song with the signature strokes and hues of their evocative sound-paintings. On “Panic Open String”, for example, ambient glockenspiel plinks and forlorn Casio organ tones glimmer like fireflies around desolate images of “propeller power fields” and a “solar panel side.” What Garden Ruin is short of is Convertino’s burly but wonderfully articulated stick work, which up to now has been as crucial to Calexico’s character as Burns’ tremulous tenor. It’s a real kick in the pants when the drummer rolls up his sleeves and thunders away on the band’s first flat-out rockers, the garage-y “Letter to Bowie Knife” and the Rumours-style “Deep Down”—indicating this is one classic move they may want to explore further. There’s nothing here as stunning as “Quattro”. Still, Burns and Convertino prove they can play it relatively straight, without sacrificing Calexico’s hard-earned status as a band that matters. By Bud Scoppa

While their spiritual kinsmen Wilco and Radiohead have continued to hurtle toward the outer limits, Tucson’s Calexico have been cruising in the other direction, increasingly mixing traditional songcraft with the avant-garde pieces that put them on the indie-rock map. Core members Joey Burns and John Convertino managed to put these disparate impulses into perfect balance on the milestone 2003 album Feast Of Wire, juxtaposing free-form instrumentals like “The Root And The Canal” with verse/chorus constructions like the sublime “Quattro”.

And now, on the proper follow-up to Feast…, Calexico have completed their formal journey. Garden Ruin is an album likely to polarise their fans, inasmuch as it contains nothing but discreet songs. On the 11 tracks, Burns reveals himself to be a student of the California classics as he echoes Gram Parsons, Neil Young and Lindsey Buckingham, among other quirky songsmiths.

The album opens with “Cruel,” a sociopolitical lament (“Future’s left to wallow in fortune’s waste”) that adheres to standard song structures but nonetheless manages to pack into its four minutes virtually every element in Calexico’s inclusive style — the sinewy rhythmic base, the instrumental filigree, the Latin brass, Burns’ impressionistic lyrics and troubadour-next-door vocals. That sets the template for the album, as the players accent each song with the signature strokes and hues of their evocative sound-paintings. On “Panic Open String”, for example, ambient glockenspiel plinks and forlorn Casio organ tones glimmer like fireflies around desolate images of “propeller power fields” and a “solar panel side.”

What Garden Ruin is short of is Convertino’s burly but wonderfully articulated stick work, which up to now has been as crucial to Calexico’s character as Burns’ tremulous tenor. It’s a real kick in the pants when the drummer rolls up his sleeves and thunders away on the band’s first flat-out rockers, the garage-y “Letter to Bowie Knife” and the Rumours-style “Deep Down”—indicating this is one classic move they may want to explore further. There’s nothing here as stunning as “Quattro”. Still, Burns and Convertino prove they can play it relatively straight, without sacrificing Calexico’s hard-earned status as a band that matters.

By Bud Scoppa

Interview: The Futureheads

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Interview: The Futureheads
Uncut: Where are you right now? We’re doing a few gigs – one in Hamburg, on in Cologne, and one in Berlin. Just doing some small gigs, we haven’t really done that many shows in central Europe, so we’re catching up I suppose. It’s so varied, from place to place in Europe – it’s weird ...

Uncut: Where are you right now?

We’re doing a few gigs – one in Hamburg, on in Cologne, and one in Berlin. Just doing some small gigs, we haven’t really done that many shows in central Europe, so we’re catching up I suppose. It’s so varied, from place to place in Europe – it’s weird when the next country is only ten minutes away.

Uncut: Is it tempting to debut new songs outside the public eye?

Definitely. The first proper gig, where we debuted all the new songs, was in Bangkok (laughs). We want to get them all up to a standard before the album’s out – we don’t want to shy away from playing new material because it’s not 100% up there. How was Bangkok? We had one day where there was nowt to do, so we did some fairly touristy things to be honest – went on a boat, went up to see some temples, hung around some of the food markets. We didn’t do anything sleazy! To be honest with you, that whole side of Bangkok is hideous. Some people just assume that you’re a sex tourist, they’ll catch them looking at you like you’re the most disgraceful human being. Or you’ll see these older British men who are there by themselves – you look at them and they’re so ashamed of what they’re doing. It’s like, why are you here by yourself, where are your friends? Ah, I know why. You’re a naughty boy. It’s the exploitation that goes on because of the pound, if we were a poor country, no-one would be going away to have sex with young boys. It’s a luxury we shouldn’t be able to afford.

Uncut: You recorded News And Tributes on a farm in Scarborough…

Yeah, just outside of Scarborough in the North Yorkshire dales. It took about six weeks all together. The first album was quite arduous – we recorded it twice, one with [Gang Of Four’s] Andy Gill, then scrapped two-thirds of the stuff we did with him because we weren’t happy with it. It became a real mess to be honest. So this time, it was like right, we’re going to go somewhere in the middle of nowhere, be really confident with whoever we decide to work with, and just get everything out of it that we should have got from our first album. We weren’t really prepared to make our first album when we came to Andy, we didn’t have our heads together enough. There was lots of touring around the recording. But now we’ve found our feet in the studio, and the whole experience of recording News And Tributes – we came away from it a different band, we felt fresh again.

Uncut: Although the first album was recorded all over, it felt quite uniform, while this one goes to some quite weird places…

I think it’s common that a band’s first album isn’t a particularly well thought out album as a whole. I think when we were writing a lot of the stuff for the first album, we didn’t even know if we were going to get a record deal – we were going into the garage thinking ‘Let’s write another song for our album!’ But when you’ve got a deal, you can think a little more. What is it that interests me about an album? It’s always variety – a great Led Zeppelin album goes right across the board, and I think we wanted to demonstrate that we could do that, that we’re not just a band that plays really spiky punk music. That’s not where we end, and it never was.

Uncut: How would you describe the mood of the record?

There’s more space to breathe – particularly from a performance aspect! What we did on our first album was something we were proud of, but it had to be that way, and we’re glad we’ve learnt from any mistakes that we’ve made. When I say mistakes, I think I just mean that we weren’t being completely forthright with our ideas. That’s the only mistake you can make really, that ‘You can fix it in the mix’. I suppose it was the ordeal of recording it twice – if we recorded the album that you heard first time, we’d have been over the moon. I suppose the new album is less of a juvenile record. We were all teenage boys when we got that album together.

Uncut: One of the first lines on the record suggests you “Brick yourself in”, while “Fallout” sees to be inspired by Cold War imagery – are you attracted by the idea of isolation?

“Fallout” is about a ‘80s propaganda film called Threads. It’s a hypothetical thing about what would happen if they dropped a nuclear bomb on Sheffield. I went with a group of friends and I came out and we all sat in silence, thinking about the possibility of Armageddon. If it ever happened, how would you make your final moments the best possible? You’d want to be with the right people, the people you absolutely love – but they’d be dead, I suppose, and so would you. It’s a pretty fucked up song, I suppose, but I’d rather do that than write, like, ‘This is a song about nuclear war – bombs, bombs, bombs…’ Also, though, it can be read as

a song about falling out with someone – splitting up with a girl, for instance, but not losing one another in the process.

Uncut: Do you know if Kate Bush heard ‘Hounds Of Love’?

Yeah, we got a message off her when we were on the farm, actually. I think we were busy up in the barn, or something, but she left a message on the answering machine. It went ‘Hello, Kate Bush here – just phoning to say I absolutely love your version of “Hounds Of Love”, we haven’t had a chance to meet yet but I hope we will, and hope you have a nice Christmas.’ Did we phone her back? (Laughs) No, we were terrified! We found out she was going to ring us, so every time the phone rang, we were like ‘You get it, you get it’. No-one wanted to speak to her, because… well, she’s a legend, isn’t she? What do you say to Kate Bush? I don’t know.

Uncut: Did you think about recording a cover for this record?

No. Some people might think “Hounds Of Love” was something we did later on, to beef the album up or score some daytime radio play. But we’ve been doing Hounds Of Love for four and a half years, before we ever had a record deal. We treat it like one of our own, and for it not be on the first album would be to deny what that album was about. I think cover versions can be excellent for bands – it’s way better than writing a mediocre song.

Uncut: Do you feel any kinship with ‘80s bands like Scritti Polliti, or the New Pop movement – bands from a DIY background, who aren’t afraid to make pop music?

Yeah. Pop isn’t a dirty word. Only when it’s industry-controlled pop music. I think we do consider ourselves to be a pop band, but just from a weird angle – we’re not all just post-punk boys who swear by Sniffing Glue, and shit. We love pop.

Uncut: How do you plot your vocal harmonies?

For this album, a lot of them were done around a piano. Pianos are really helpful because you’ve got the full range of notes in front of you, it’s a much more visual thing than playing the guitar. But there aren’t as many harmonies on this album. We started doing mad harmonies because we were show-offs, but we’re learning how to pull back a bit – this album is all about us making a song out of five ideas, not 55. Because that can make a bigger sound, more spacious, and it helps what is on the record to get more recognition.

Uncut: One of the biggest departures on the record is “Burnt”…

It’s dark. That song, for me, is the song on the album that typifies how different this record is. If you play that next to, say, “Knows” – this insane, mathy punk song – you wouldn’t recognise the two bands. It’s basically about relationships again – how we constantly prove that we have no control over love or passion, and we never, ever learn from our mistakes. We’ll gladly plummet straight back into a relationship, or make promises to people we can’t keep. It’s constant, and constantly repeated – the thrill of the chase, the possibility that this person might be the one. I wouldn’t say it was cynical. It’s probably representative of my relationships in general!

Uncut: Then there’s “Return Of The Berserker”, which is only a couple of notches off Big Black…

Damn right, Big Black, yeah. That song was totally spontaneous. We played it once, didn’t structure it, and overdubbed a couple of guitars afterwards just to make it sound insane. When the album was coming together, we realised there was more space to breathe, to listen – so we wanted to prove to ourselves that we could still kick the shit out of it if we wanted to. We recorded it in the cattleshed, and at the end of the take, we could hear Ben [Hillier, producer] on the intercom, just laughing his head off. And when we listened back, to be honest, I’ve never had a thrill like that from music at all.

Watch the trailer to ‘The Devil & Daniel Johnston’

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Watch the trailer to ‘The Devil & Daniel Johnston’

The story of cult musician Daniel Johnston is brought to the big screen this week with the release of the Jeff Feuerzeig directed ‘The Devil & Daniel Johnston’. The documentary melds current footage, vintage performances, home movies, and dozens of recorded audiotapes from Johnston's life to capture the singer/songwriter/artist through bouts of manic depression, dangerous delusions and…a stint in the circus. Daniel Johnston has inspired the likes of Wayne Coyne, Beck and Tom Waits and this documentary offers a unique glimpse into the man, and his devils. View the trailer to the film here. Real Media - lo / hi Windows Media - lo / hi Plus - enter NME.COM's competition to win a Daniel Johnston style Epiphone acoustic guitar

The story of cult musician Daniel Johnston is brought to the big screen this week with the release of the Jeff Feuerzeig directed ‘The Devil & Daniel Johnston’.

The documentary melds current footage, vintage performances, home movies, and dozens of recorded audiotapes from Johnston’s life to capture the singer/songwriter/artist through bouts of manic depression, dangerous delusions and…a stint in the circus.

Daniel Johnston has inspired the likes of Wayne Coyne, Beck and Tom Waits and this documentary offers a unique glimpse into the man, and his devils.

View the trailer to the film here.

Real Media – lo /

hi

Windows Media – lo /

hi

Plus – enter NME.COM’s competition to win a Daniel Johnston style Epiphone acoustic guitar

The Flaming Lips – At War With The Mystics

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There was something so ultimate about The Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin, emphasised by its release in the last year of the 20th Century, you expected it to close with this paraphrase of Jean-Luc Godard: “End - End of Music.” Although its predecessor, 1997’s quadrophrenic experiment Zaireeka, proposed new directions, TSB was the culmination; a compression of pop’s best ideas into 12 mini-epics of nuance and bombast. The acclaim it won in the critics’ polls and for their live forays in 2000 gave further credence to the idea that this was as far as the Lips, if not rock per se, could go. After this, one suspected, being embraced by a large audience following 15 years on the margins as a cult horrorshow with just the Butthole Surfers for company would cause a loss of nerve. And yet, miraculously, they did it again in 2002 with Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, another record magnificently poised between gorgeous melody and garish electro-noise, between their old life on the fringes and their new status as the mainstream’s weirdo cause celebre. It was their second consecutive brilliant state of the universe address on mortality and dread, transience and transcendence, but surely now, with a million sales and celebrity fans from Jack White to Juliette Lewis, overexposure and their new media friendliness would rob them of their edge. Besides, when you’ve created two records so monumental in terms of production and lyrical content, what do you do for an encore? Advance word on At War With The Mystics sent alarm bells ringing. There was talk from frontman Wayne Coyne of a return to raw power and doing-it-live, of a retreat from studio artifice towards a more organic and conventional rock attack that could be recreated on the world’s stages. Seduced by success, The Flaming Lips would, it seemed, spend their dotage pandering to young crowds as rock’s token mad uncles. Then there was the heroin effect. That scene in the Fearless Freaks DVD in which multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd prepared to shoot up showed what a dead end he, and the band, could find themselves down. Narcotic oblivion had destroyed his sense of purpose. Worse, some implied, was that Drozd’s genius was fuelled by smack, and if he did clean up, he’d lose his touch. Either way, a third classic album was looking unlikely. Then again, from a group who more convincingly than any other convey wonder and joy – and with a Disneyish flourish, no less – a happy ending was inevitable. At War With The Mystics is another extraordinary collection from this late-peaking band. Recorded throughout 2005 with Dave Fridmann at the controls, the swooning/shocking duality of the Lips’ concerts, the pink bunnies and gore-fetishism, is once more reflected in the music, which veers from shattering FX to celestial sonics just as the lyrics jerk between metaphysical despair and juvenile glee. “Yeah Yeah Yeah Song”, the opener, is acid bubblegum that subverts as it affirms. The first single, it’s going to be a pan-generational smash, in spite or because of the dumb know-thyself lyric and call-and-response chorus. The music is dense with detail: there’s an air of abundance here as Fridmann and Co fill every space with sci-fi sounds and micro-melodies, speaker-panning whooshes and digital splutters. “Free Radicals”, a dig at fundamentalists and Donald Trump, pivots around a daft Coyne falsetto and Michael Ivins’ cosmic slop of a bassline: this is funk as envisioned by Frank Zappa and Hanna Barbera. After the last two albums’ titular obsession with conflict, on this loose concept the Lips assault Bush and his bombing cronies. “The W.A.N.D.” (a recent internet-only single), including the cry, “We got the power now, motherfuckers!”, is hi-tech grunge, like Sabbath produced by Pharrell. On “Haven’t Got A Clue” (“Every time you state your case/The more I want to punch your face”) the subject of Coyne’s surreal vitriol is probably Dubya, although saying At War With The Mystics is about Iraq is like describing Sgt Pepper’s as anti-Vietnam. Well, it was and it wasn’t. More than any polemic, The Flaming Lips encourage resistance through rapture. Their not inconsiderable presence stems from the beauty of their, yes, Cosmic American Music. “The Sound Of Failure/It’s Dark… Is It Always Dark??” followed by “My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion” and “Vein Of Stars” forms a symphonic soul sequence as madly exquisite as psychedelic Philly, from the Bacharach-ish chord changes to the acoustic-deliquescing-into-electric guitars that sound like Ernie Isley on Mars. Only the Lips could hymn, as they do on “Cosmic Autumn Rebellion”, the twitter of birds on a late-summer’s day. Why? Because they’ve been there, done that, got the blood-soaked T-shirt. On “The Sound Of Failure”, Coyne, happy to be sad, sings, “Don’t tell Britney, don’t tell Gwen”, and, even though it’s a critique of the girl teenpop aesthetic, it’s thrilling to hear these former pyromaniacs and rank outsiders referencing an MTV world that’s as much theirs as it is The Strokes’ or la Spears’. Suddenly, like some rampantly eclectic Playlist, At War… goes prog, Hari-Kiri for some bands, but not these brainiacs with the common touch. “The Wizard Turns On…” brings to mind a manic mid-’70s Herbie Hancock space-jazz Moog instrumental. When “It Overtakes Me/The Stars Are So Big, I Am So Small… Do I Stand A Chance?” switches from handclaps and robot clatter to heavenly sighs, it’s like discovering an alien life-form that communicates via ecstatic harmonies. “Mr Ambulance Driver” is sublime AOR, its appearance on the soundtrack to The Wedding Crashers in the same year they provided the theme tune to Spongebob & Squarepants proving the Lips can do silly and solemn with aplomb. Saving the best till (second) last, “Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung”, recalling Pink Floyd’s “One Of These Days”, features Drozd’s first lead vocal and waves of crashing synths – even non-fans are blown away by this one. Finally, “Goin’ On”, the quiet after the storm, is Rhodes-embellished, Rundgrenesque white gospel. Maybe we doubted them because Coyne is no mock-recluse feigning intensity of vision. The Lips debunk notions of authenticity – it’s never clear who does what in that studio of theirs in Fredonia, New York State, although Coyne appears to be the Bowie figure, busy conjuring while Ivins, Drozd and Fridmann, his Fripp, Eno and Visconti, realise his grand schemes. But make no mistake, the Lips have done it: three astonishing albums in a row. This marks the first occasion since the ‘Berlin trilogy’ that an artist has climaxed with albums 10, 11 and 12 of their career. It’s official! The Flaming Lips have outstripped Lodger. Now all they’ve got to do is make the next one better than Scary Monsters… By Paul Lester

There was something so ultimate about The Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin, emphasised by its release in the last year of the 20th Century, you expected it to close with this paraphrase of Jean-Luc Godard: “End – End of Music.” Although its predecessor, 1997’s quadrophrenic experiment Zaireeka, proposed new directions, TSB was the culmination; a compression of pop’s best ideas into 12 mini-epics of nuance and bombast. The acclaim it won in the critics’ polls and for their live forays in 2000 gave further credence to the idea that this was as far as the Lips, if not rock per se, could go. After this, one suspected, being embraced by a large audience following 15 years on the margins as a cult horrorshow with just the Butthole Surfers for company would cause a loss of nerve.

And yet, miraculously, they did it again in 2002 with Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, another record magnificently poised between gorgeous melody and garish electro-noise, between their old life on the fringes and their new status as the mainstream’s weirdo cause celebre. It was their second consecutive brilliant state of the universe address on mortality and dread, transience and transcendence, but surely now, with a million sales and celebrity fans from Jack White to Juliette Lewis, overexposure and their new media friendliness would rob them of their edge. Besides, when you’ve created two records so monumental in terms of production and lyrical content, what do you do for an encore?

Advance word on At War With The Mystics sent alarm bells ringing. There was talk from frontman Wayne Coyne of a return to raw power and doing-it-live, of a retreat from studio artifice towards a more organic and conventional rock attack that could be recreated on the world’s stages. Seduced by success, The Flaming Lips would, it seemed, spend their dotage pandering to young crowds as rock’s token mad uncles.

Then there was the heroin effect. That scene in the Fearless Freaks DVD in which multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd prepared to shoot up showed what a dead end he, and the band, could find themselves down. Narcotic oblivion had destroyed his sense of purpose. Worse, some implied, was that Drozd’s genius was fuelled by smack, and if he did clean up, he’d lose his touch. Either way, a third classic album was looking unlikely.

Then again, from a group who more convincingly than any other convey wonder and joy – and with a Disneyish flourish, no less – a happy ending was inevitable. At War With The Mystics is another extraordinary collection from this late-peaking band. Recorded throughout 2005 with Dave Fridmann at the controls, the swooning/shocking duality of the Lips’ concerts, the pink bunnies and gore-fetishism, is once more reflected in the music, which veers from shattering FX to celestial sonics just as the lyrics jerk between metaphysical despair and juvenile glee.

“Yeah Yeah Yeah Song”, the opener, is acid bubblegum that subverts as it affirms. The first single, it’s going to be a pan-generational smash, in spite or because of the dumb know-thyself lyric and call-and-response chorus. The music is dense with detail: there’s an air of abundance here as Fridmann and Co fill every space with sci-fi sounds and micro-melodies, speaker-panning whooshes and digital splutters. “Free Radicals”, a dig at fundamentalists and Donald Trump, pivots around a daft Coyne falsetto and Michael Ivins’ cosmic slop of a bassline: this is funk as envisioned by Frank Zappa and Hanna Barbera.

After the last two albums’ titular obsession with conflict, on this loose concept the Lips assault Bush and his bombing cronies. “The W.A.N.D.” (a recent internet-only single), including the cry, “We got the power now, motherfuckers!”, is hi-tech grunge, like Sabbath produced by Pharrell. On “Haven’t Got A Clue” (“Every time you state your case/The more I want to punch your face”) the subject of Coyne’s surreal vitriol is probably Dubya, although saying At War With The Mystics is about Iraq is like describing Sgt Pepper’s as anti-Vietnam. Well, it was and it wasn’t.

More than any polemic, The Flaming Lips encourage resistance through rapture. Their not inconsiderable presence stems from the beauty of their, yes, Cosmic American Music. “The Sound Of Failure/It’s Dark… Is It Always Dark??” followed by “My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion” and “Vein Of Stars” forms a symphonic soul sequence as madly exquisite as psychedelic Philly, from the Bacharach-ish chord changes to the acoustic-deliquescing-into-electric guitars that sound like Ernie Isley on Mars. Only the Lips could hymn, as they do on “Cosmic Autumn Rebellion”, the twitter of birds on a late-summer’s day. Why? Because they’ve been there, done that, got the blood-soaked T-shirt. On “The Sound Of Failure”, Coyne, happy to be sad, sings, “Don’t tell Britney, don’t tell Gwen”, and, even though it’s a critique of the girl teenpop aesthetic, it’s thrilling to hear these former pyromaniacs and rank outsiders referencing an MTV world that’s as much theirs as it is The Strokes’ or la Spears’.

Suddenly, like some rampantly eclectic Playlist, At War… goes prog, Hari-Kiri for some bands, but not these brainiacs with the common touch. “The Wizard Turns On…” brings to mind a manic mid-’70s Herbie Hancock space-jazz Moog instrumental. When “It Overtakes Me/The Stars Are So Big, I Am So Small… Do I Stand A Chance?” switches from handclaps and robot clatter to heavenly sighs, it’s like discovering an alien life-form that communicates via ecstatic harmonies. “Mr Ambulance Driver” is sublime AOR, its appearance on the soundtrack to The Wedding Crashers in the same year they provided the theme tune to Spongebob & Squarepants proving the Lips can do silly and solemn with aplomb. Saving the best till (second) last, “Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung”, recalling Pink Floyd’s “One Of These Days”, features Drozd’s first lead vocal and waves of crashing synths – even non-fans are blown away by this one. Finally, “Goin’ On”, the quiet after the storm, is Rhodes-embellished, Rundgrenesque white gospel.

Maybe we doubted them because Coyne is no mock-recluse feigning intensity of vision. The Lips debunk notions of authenticity – it’s never clear who does what in that studio of theirs in Fredonia, New York State, although Coyne appears to be the Bowie figure, busy conjuring while Ivins, Drozd and Fridmann, his Fripp, Eno and Visconti, realise his grand schemes. But make no mistake, the Lips have done it: three astonishing albums in a row. This marks the first occasion since the ‘Berlin trilogy’ that an artist has climaxed with albums 10, 11 and 12 of their career. It’s official! The Flaming Lips have outstripped Lodger. Now all they’ve got to do is make the next one better than Scary Monsters…

By Paul Lester

Watch Springsteen studio footage

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Watch Springsteen studio footage

Columbia Records will release Bruce Springsteen's twenty-first album, 'We Shall Overcome, The Seeger Sessions,' on April 24. The album features Bruce's personal interpretations of thirteen traditional songs, all of them associated with the legendary guiding light of American folk music, Pete Seeger, for whom the album is named. Tracks featured include ‘Jessie James’, ‘Shenandoah’, ‘Jacob's Ladder’, ‘My Oklahoma Home’, ‘Froggie Went A-Courtin'’ and ‘Old Dan Tucker’ amongst others. 'We Shall Overcome, The Seeger Sessions' will also include a DVD, which contains extensive behind the scenes footage of the recording of the album. You can watch highlights from the exclusive behind the scenes studio footage of the recording of ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ and ‘Shenandoah’, here, first via the links below. 'Shenandoah' Windows Media - lo / hi Real Media - lo / hi 'Jacobs Ladder' Windows Media - lo / hi Real Media - lo / hi

Columbia Records will release Bruce Springsteen’s twenty-first album, ‘We Shall Overcome, The Seeger Sessions,’ on April 24. The album features Bruce’s personal interpretations of thirteen traditional songs, all of them associated with the legendary guiding light of American folk music, Pete Seeger, for whom the album is named.

Tracks featured include ‘Jessie James’, ‘Shenandoah’, ‘Jacob’s Ladder’, ‘My Oklahoma Home’, ‘Froggie Went A-Courtin’’ and ‘Old Dan Tucker’ amongst others.

‘We Shall Overcome, The Seeger Sessions’ will also include a DVD, which contains extensive behind the scenes footage of the recording of the album. You can watch highlights from the exclusive behind the scenes studio footage of the recording of ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ and ‘Shenandoah’, here, first via the links below.

‘Shenandoah’

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‘Jacobs Ladder’

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