Some talk on the last couple of blogs (Wavves and Playlist 20) about the Ducktails record and Matthew Mondanile’s various other products, so today seems a good time to tackle his stuff properly – not least because I think he may be playing London over the weekend. The self-titled Ducktails album comes out on the Not Not Fun album, and seems very tied in to that label’s appealingly dazed, Californian take on psych; I’ve written before about a couple of their key acts, Pocahaunted and Sun Araw. But though Mondanile captures the wasted-on-a-beach vibe exquisitely – check song titles like “Beach Point Pleasant” and “Surf’s Up”, and the palm tree on the back cover – he actually seems to be from the East Coast. “Ducktails” was recorded on 4 and 8-track in Western Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Bushwick, New York. You could see it, then, as an exotic confection, fitting somewhere next to Sun Araw’s heavy tropical ambience (as Predator Vision, Mondanile made a great split 12” with Sun Araw a while back), or maybe see him as a beatific counterpart to Wavves. Actually, “Ducktails” is one of those albums that calmly provokes a whole bunch of comparisons, as Mondanile layers the liquid guitar meditations and corroded loops over dulled beats. The one name that keeps getting thrown at Ducktails is Ariel Pink, perhaps chiefly down to a sense that easy listening is being filtered through a hyper lo-fidelity production. It’s tempting to see Mondanile as a millennial bedroom Martin Denny in this way. But often – on, say, his sun-damaged miniatures like “Beach Point Pleasant” and the hi-life-tinged “Pizza Time” - he's not unlike a gentler El Guincho. The production is closer to the primitive workouts of Zomes, and sometimes you wonder how much of the charm inherent in this music depends on the hand-knitted treatment: would it sound even better spruced up a little? Certainly, when Mondanile sings and imposes a fractionally firmer structure to his meanders (“Dancing With The One You Love” and “The Mall”), it’s less effective: for a much better example of his aesthetic transposed to tighter songwriting, check out his excellent full band Real Estate, kindly recommended the other day by one of our best-informed posters, Bubba. Ducktails works best, though, instrumentally: on Amazon boat trip psych like “Horizon” and “Gem”, strong tribal kin to Sun Araw; on gorgeously dappled guitar workouts like “Backyard” and “Friends”, which remind me oddly of early Felt instrumentals, when Maurice Deebank was still playing guitar in the band. And on the 11-minute closer, “Surf’s Up”, where Mondanile stretches out into lush, saturated ambience that invokes Popol Vuh, Terry Riley and – maybe a better lo-fi analogue than Ariel Pink, this – the blurred landscape music of Flying Saucer Attack. Try him out on Myspace and, as ever, let me know what you think.

The last time I saw Simone Felice anywhere near a London stage, he was hanging above it, wild-eyed and shirtless, from a monitor in the ceiling of the 100 Club, from which precarious position he was leading a boisterous crowd through a rowdy version of a song called “Ruby Mae” from the recently-released new album by The Felice Brothers, who were at the time roaring towards the climax of a typically rambunctious show. Simone, as you may know, has subsequently vacated the drum stool with that band and is currently on extended sabbatical with his new outfit, The Duke & The King, a collaboration with Robert “Chicken” Burke, a long-time friend and, at some point in what sounds like a colourful career, a cohort of George Clinton, and kin in those circumstances, you’d have to imagine, to a certain amount of lunacy. I am expecting a rather more sedate performance tonight from Simone. The Duke & The King’s debut album, the exquisite Nothing Gold Can Stay, released next month and already one of my favourite albums of the year, is for instance by and large more quietly-wrought than his last outing with The Felice Brothers on the often spectacularly raw Yonder Stands The Clock. Bush Hall, with its chandeliers and gilt and air of fading, almost crumbling grandeur seems also an appropriate setting for the album’s often lush mix of dreamy Topanga ballads, country soul and gospel. I am anticipating, then, as I say, an evening of decorous music, all due decorum observed. This quite laughable notion lasts about five minutes or so – or at least until an initially nervously-delivered version of The Felice Brothers’ “Don’t Wake The Scarecrow” seems to die away only to rear up for an unexpectedly fearsome coda, and Simone is suddenly doing drop-kicks off the rim of the bass drum, for all the world like Joe Strummer making the same moves with The 101’ers, many years ago at the Nashville Rooms. Burke meanwhile is hammering the drums like he’s been taking lessons for years from Charlie Watts or Levon Helm, and the rest of the band –two guitarists, one on occasional keyboards, bassist and a percussionist who also weighs in with amazing gospel vocals – is making a hellish racket. Things calm down momentarily with a lovely version of “Water Spider” from Nothing Gold Can Stay (sample lyric: “Jesus walked on water, but so did Marvin Gaye”), which is prefaced by a declamatory introduction from Simone that finds an inspirational link between Ghandi, Martin Luther King and Keith Richards. Simone is on drums for the next number, also from Nothing Gold Can Stay, which turns out to be “Suzanne”, a funky jam that hints at Little Feat, sung with soulful gusto by Burke, who looks like the kind of tobacco-chewing hard-case who in a certain kind of movie would be found selling guns to Harry Dean Stanton from the trunk of a battered Chevvy Impala in the parking lot of a Motel 6 somewhere on the outside of a town with a name no one can remember. “TAKE IT!” Burke shouts suddenly at one of the guitarists, who does, sensationally, a torrent of noise forthcoming. “Sounds pretty, don’t he?” Burke grins, and he does. Simone is back in front of the microphone for a scary “The Devil Is Real”, coming on in its introduction like Paul Dano in There Will Be Blood, all hell-fire and damnation and righteous testifying, evoking angels and demons and ending with the wrathful holler: “Pharoah! Pharoah! My girlfriend is dead.” Two more numbers from Nothing Gold Can Stay quickly follow – “Union Street” and “Lose Myself”, Simone manfully trying to get the crowd to sing along on the latter to a song they haven’t heard and not giving up before they do. A barnstorming “T For Texas”, as covered on The Felice Brothers’ Tonight At The Arizona, prefaces a wonderful four-song run that includes versions of “The Morning I Got To Hell” from the new album, two outstanding Felice Brothers songs, “Your Belly In My Arms” and “Mercy”, which is tender until such time as it seems to explode, and ends with the achingly beautiful “”One More American Song”, from NGCS, which as much as The Low Anthem’s “To Ohio” is reminiscent of some Paul Simon classic. The night ends with a rousing “Radio Song”, another Felice Brothers gem, and an unexpected but entirely welcome version of The Beatles’ “Don’t Let Me Down”, Simone clearly relishing the spotlight to the extent that I was sure he’d only leave the stage at gun-point, and then reluctantly. This was only the second show The Duke & The King have played, and at times it showed, especially during a sometimes tentative first 15 minutes. Give them a couple of months on the road, touring hard, and these people are going to be frighteningly good.

I think I may be one of the last bloggers in the world to get round to writing about Wavves, who became something of a ubiquitous presence a few months ago when “Wavvves” first surfaced. Since then, there’s been some complicated label and release shenanigans (My original promo came from De Stijl, though I don’t think they ever actually released it), culminating in a UK arrival on Bella Union next week. In time for summer, would be the charitable way of looking at this, though you do wonder if some of Wavves’ hipster momentum has been derailed as a result of all the stop-start Transatlantic scheduling. Not that this is particularly important, of course, but it does mean that I’ve had the time to appreciate better this prickly and entertaining record. “Wavvves” is one of those albums that’s clearly bright and immediate, but which curiously takes a while to make a proper impression on me – hence Wild Mercury Sound being way behind the curve on music like this. Wavves, also, is a bit snarkier, a bit more brattish, a bit self-consciously cooler than most things I write about. Out of 14 tracks on this debut, five feature the word ‘goth’ in the title (“Goth Girls”, “California Goths”, “Summer Goth”, “Beach Goth”, “Surf Goths”), while other favourites in Nathan Williams’ wryly limited vocabularly include ‘Beach’ and ‘Demon’ (ie “Beach Demon”, “Beach Goth”, “Killr Punx, Scary Demons”, “Weed Demon”). Throw in “Gun In The Sun”, “So Bored” and “No Hope Kids”, and you may be getting the picture. As it is, that picture turns out to be compellingly simple. Williams is – or at least affects to be – a moody slacker 22-year-old from San Diego who combines moody slacker lo-fi with the sort of heathazed dude-ishness you’d expect – in a clichéd way, of course – from Southern California. Which means, essentially, that he specialises in a kind of bolshy, homebrewed fuzzpop where the cranky noise co-exists with some very sweet-toothed pop tunes and high, more or less in tune, harmonies. “So Bored” is the prime example of this, along with “Beach Demon” and “Sun Opens My Eyes”, which provokes the perhaps inevitable Beach Boys comparisons (“Don’t Worry Baby” meets “Psychocandy”, briefly). Other obvious reference points involve No Age and shitgaze bands like Times New Viking. But beyond the arch schtick and dreamy evocations of alternately skateboarding in the sun and sulking in your bedroom, Williams has the gifted audacity to be both more directly poppy and obnoxiously noisy than most of his contemporaries. So while, say, “Gun In The Sun” can resemble an immensely catchy, if severely damaged, “Little Honda”, the likes of “Goth Girls” is an unsteady mix of noise skree and overloaded sequencers set to relentless migraine frequencies. Part of this feels like a pretty juvenile desire to irritate, but it’s saved by Williams’ noise pieces having a vibrant and fairly original aesthetic shape, and by them fitting so well into the overall album, at once racey and dazed. Not quite as cute and subversive as it thinks it is, but every bit as clever.

I’m not sure who compiled “Archive From 1959 – The Billy Childish Story”, reducing something like 100 albums’-worth of material down to 51 tracks, but I suspect it may not have been Childish himself. When I interviewed him a few years back (you can read the full Childish interview here), Childish was so committed to creating new art that he was painting over his old pictures, having run out of money for new canvases. The act of poring over his archives and boiling those thousand-odd songs down to 51 seems completely uncharacteristic. Why obsess over your past (like this bloke, say) when you can surge on with something new? New, of course, is something of a relative concept for Childish. If “Archive From 1959” shows us anything, it’s the breathtaking consistency of the man. Over, what, three decades, with The Buff Medways, The MBEs, The Milkshakes, Thee Headcoats, The Pop Rivets, Thee Mighty Caesars, The Chatham Singers and so on (Jack Ketch & The Crowmen, anyone?), Childish has proved to be diligent and unrelenting in his commitment to a fixed set of aesthetics. High fidelity, musical progress, an extended remit all remain doggedly off-limits. Only the moustache, more or less, evolves. “Archive From 1959” isn’t arranged chronologically, but it wouldn’t sound much different if it were. As a snapshot of one man’s herculean obsession, it works pretty well. As a primer in Britain’s foremost exponent of garage rock, it works even better. There’s an argument that Childish’s music works best in seven-inch bursts, but massed together, it starts to make a kind of sense as an art project, too; one where quantity and an artisanal commitment to homogeny are paramount. I can’t pretend to be a total expert, but most of my personal favourites do seem to have made the cut here: The Buff Medways’ “Troubled Mind”; Thee Headcoats’ “Punk Rock Ist Nicht Tot”, “What’s Wrong With Me” and “We Hate The Fuckin’ NME”, a rare example of Childish’s bile being specifically directed towards pop culture (and a big favourite with many of us NME writers back in the day, of course). Who knew he’d even heard of Mega City Four? Like many, perhaps, I have Billy Childish phases, and it’s always comforting to know that you can dip back in to find that more or less nothing has changed. My strongest period of engagement coincided with the early Buff Medways records, and so it’s these songs that resonate most here – “Strood Lights”, “Sally Sensation”, the aforementioned “Troubled Mind” and so on – from familiarity. That said, things like Thee Mighty Caesars’ “Cowboys Are Square” sound superb, too, and the Chatham Singers stuff is strong, too. Anyone seen him play recently? I wonder what the setlist looks like these days?

MADNESS/WHITE DENIM/EVAN DANDO - Various venues, Shoreditch, 21/5/09 “Thanks for coming to see a washed-up Eighties pop band,” deadpans Suggs as MADNESS take the stage. We’re in The Light Bar, a 300 capacity venue on Norton Folgate, a thin stretch of street that separates Shoreditch from the City. The band are here to celebrate their new album, The Liberty Of Norton Folgate, which is currently sitting at No 5 in the midweek album charts. Not bad, certainly, for a washed-up Eighties pop band. There’s something a little strange about seeing Madness play inside, in a venue this small. You might expect them to be leading massed knees-ups in the afternoon slot at a festival, perhaps; or anywhere, really, where they can have room to roam. It seems awfully cruel to confine them in such a small space. And a tightly-packed one, too. Predictably, perhaps, the audience seems largely comprised of men in their 40s, who presumably have been following Madness since their earliest days, and a smattering of EastEnders cast members. More interestingly, there’s also a large contingent of teenagers who, I’m later told, are the band’s offspring – one member of Madness has, apparently, fathered no less than 11 children. We’re all crushed in here as Madness whip through most of the Norton Folgate album (including “On The Town” with Bodysnatchers’ Roda Dakar) plus a goodly number of classics – “Our House”, “It Must Be Love”, “The Prince” finishing with a rousing “Nightboat To Cairo”. Then, it’s out into Shoreditch to catch some bands taking part in Stag & Dagger. This is, I suppose, rather like Camden Crawl, where one ticket will gain you access to 22 of Shoreditch’s many pubs, bars and clubs. I expect the streets to be crammed with Hoxton’s finest dashing from venue to venue across Great Eastern Street or down Brick Lane. In fact, it’s eerily quiet round here. It’s only when I get to a particular venue – the Hoxton Bar & Grill, on Hoxton Square – that I realise the reason the streets are so quiet is because everyone is standing in a queue to get in somewhere. They are, literally, queueing round the square to see WHITE DENIM. The last time I was at this venue was almost a year ago to see Fleet Foxes. While certainly there’s not much parity between the beguiling harmonies of the Foxes and White Denim’s muscular jams, the audience response is broadly identical. A lot of people – or at least, the ones who can get in – are just transfixed by White Denim’s thunderous garage psych-out. I’m frankly amazed at the impressive velocity they sustain through their 13 song set, including “All Your Really Have To Do”, “Shake Shake Shake” and “Darksided Computer Mouth”. And so it’s in a slightly disorientated state I head to Cargo for EVAN DANDO. Cargo is a bar-come-restaurant (I recommend the chorizo sandwich – only £5.95) in converted railway arches off Shoreditch High Street. It’s, by nature, quite a dark, enclosed venue, but it’s certainly given a great deal of colour and light tonight by Evan. Arriving on stage pretty promptly at 12.15, he plays for about an hour, running song into song into song, barely speaking in between. An hour, incidentally, would be the length of time it would take to play It’s A Shame About Ray in its entirety twice, with room for a short encore. And while indeed we do get pretty much all the album – including a hushed “Frank Mills”, a singalonga “Confetti” and a cheery “Alison’s Starting To Happen” – there’s plenty of room for “Into Your Arms”, which gets the tightly-packed crowd whooping, “It’s About Time” and, I reckon, about 15 more songs. Looking round the crowd – mostly, a slightly older crowd in their mid-late 30s, a lot of couples –everyone’s pretty much smiling throughout. I’m hard pressed to think of another gig I’ve seen recently where the audience has quite literally glowed so much with happiness. It’s testament, I suppose, to Evan’s easy-going nature and near-faultless collection of songs. He leaves the stage with much cheering and little fuss, only to pop back a second later. Sadly, there’s no encore; whether he planned to do one, or whether the venue’s curfew has hit isn’t clear. All the same, top marks; lovely stuff. MICHAEL BONNER