Mixing the unmixable - Regina Spektor's "Soviet Kitsch"

Given my love of all things Russian, of many things Soviet, and of quite a few things kitsch, I was naturally thrilled to discover, when Fiona recommended to me some time ago that I listen to some Regina Spektor, that she not only had Russian roots but that he first album was in fact called Soviet Kitsch. I bought it straight away, listened to it within the hour, but for some reason am only getting around to writing about it now, some months later.

'Kitsch' is perhaps a bit of a tongue-in-cheek word for an album like this, full of anti-folk songs that in different ways turn up their nose at the shallow world of the comfortable classes and instead show more raw portraits of rougher lives.

Songs like ‘Ode to divorce’ and ‘Carbon monoxide’ set the mood for the album pretty early – showing Spektor’s ability to move from the soft to the gutsy, the slow to the fast, the smooth to the rough, without hardly taking a breath, often against bare piano accompaniment and in songs that have rough and ready melody lines that are turned into music, more than any thing else, simply by the way she sings them in her beautiful, but no-nonsense, voice.

But nothing does what you expect it to. Like the ‘The Flowers’ – an anguished song about holding onto a past that has already gone, with an intensely wailing voice, with a stunning Schubertesque piano accompaniment that somehow changes, unexpectedly near the end, into a jaunty Russian dance.

The album is full of strange juxtapositions like this – between songs and within them. There’s the almost punk screaming and screeching of ‘Your Honor’, with its sudden little childlike interlude to the words, “Gargle with peroxide a steak for your eye/but I’m a vegetarian so it’s a frozen pizza pie”. Everywhere things seem to go off in weird directions, just when you think a song has settled into its own (already quirky) groove. The last person who I knew to mix the unmixable so well was Gustav Mahler.

There’s an almost stream-of-consciousness feel to these songs – their music as much as their lyrics – and that can always jar a bit when we have become so used to music capturing a mood, or an idea, and holding onto it. But here nothing stays in the one place for long, and nothing is comfortable.

It takes a bit of getting used to – but if you don’t approach Soviet Kitsch expecting it to sound easy and straightforward, but more like the music of a woman who was classically trained in Russia and then spent the rest of her life amongst America’s underground music scene, you’ll find an album that takes you deep into the mind of someone who knows that nothing is really here to stay and who looks at it all with more than just a hint of scorn.

But even when there’s a cello there as in ‘Ode to Divorce’, or a string quartet as in ‘Us’, or, for that matter, a stick banging on a bit of wood, as in ‘Poor little rich boy’, these songs all somehow have the feel of the cabaret about them – someone sitting at the piano, singing to you their most intimate observations of the world, while you sip your brandy (or, of course, your vodka).

And at times the utterly unaffected unfiltered frankness of these songs makes you think that maybe, when all is said and done, you’re the one who is just a little bit kitsch. I guess the Soviets had a knack of turning things around like that – and maybe sometimes that wasn’t an entirely bad thing to do.

Belated thanks to Fiona for introducing me to Regina Spektor.

Stomp and clap but sigh no more - Mumford & Sons

Sigh No More, the debut album of English folk-rock quartet, Mumford & Sons, is something that I actually discovered myself after having seen, and been pretty blown away by, one of its songs ‘Little Lion Man’ on ABC TV’s rage a couple of weeks ago. So today, totally unable to find any of the albums that my usual partners in crime had recommended to me, I bought this one instead. And I am encouraged by just how good my judgement has turned out to be.

Sigh No More sets its cards on the table in the very first track – the album’s title track – with a song that starts off almost bare, and with slow, soft harmonies against a minimalist guitar accompaniment. But then it detonates in an explosion country folk rock that is simply bubbling over with energy and life.

It’s how most of the songs on this album go, building big things out of little things. It’s a formula that works well and that certainly bears repeating and, before long, you find you are waiting for those explosions of music just to see how the little simple, hesitant, almost naïve tunes and rhythms will be transformed this time.

And the transformation always seems to work miracles, turning the simple into the grand, the hesitant into the sure, the naïve into the wise, and you find you’re stomping your feet and clapping your hands, and everything is off and running to great eruptions of banjo, acoustic guitars, dobro, double bass, keyboards and drums.

There really is some fantastic playing here – full of earthy bass drum beats, plucking on banjo and guitar that bursts with vigour, keyboards clanging and dancing, and all of it integrating into music that sounds like the ground, the trees, the grass and the fresh country air have all been turned into a massive rustic choir.

And while it’s true that most of the songs on Sigh No More are kind of similar in their structure and sound, with the almost constant exchange between the quiet, simple bits and the big, noisy bits, it works – probably largely because it just sounds so irresistibly good.

But it also works because the subtle things that give each song its own character really are more significant than you might at first notice them to be – like the way ‘I Gave You All’ builds from its sad beginnings into a raging lament of almost cosmic proportions; or the way the guitars keep bubbling beneath the surface, aching to break through the song of gentle consolation with all their passion and fire in ‘Timshel’; or the way that wonderful quartet tangles and jangles downwards to “Rain down, rain down on me” in ‘Thistle and Weeds’; or the way everything just builds up into a wild, grim whirlwind of music in ‘Dust Bowl Dance’.

Sigh No More is a very spiritual album, with lines about grace and about connection to the maker and kneeling before the king – but its music stops it from being a narrow spirituality, turning it instead into something that feels more about that dimension in all of us that seeks solace and redemption in times of loss and despair.

The album closes with ‘After the Storm’ where, at the words “Night has always pushed up the day”, the music turns magically into dappled sunshine. And its parting words (“But there’ll come a time you’ll see/With no more tears/And love will not break your heart/But dismiss your fears/Get over the hill and see, what you find there/With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair”) are sung with such down-to-earth beauty that you can’t help believing in them.

And then you notice that the album has finished, and your foot has stopped stomping, your hands have stopped clapping and you are left with a warm feeling in your heart and perhaps just the slightest hint of a tear in your eye.

Take whenever necessary - Spiritualized, "Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space"

When you push the play button on Spiritualized’s 1997 album, Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space, you actually hear the album’s title coming to you over a PA system – and floating in space is exactly what you feel you’re doing, with a gentle, swaying, floating melody that promises to take your pain away.

It’s a fitting beginning for an album with liner notes that read like a pharmaceutical product information leaflet. And it certainly is druggy music – as much about spiritual drugs as chemical ones. There’s even the London Community Gospel Choir there. But if there’s anything of a revivalist gathering here, it’s one that you would only ever find yourself at after doing a few tabs of LSD.

Vocals, guitars, keyboards, organs, percussion and a whole orchestra, it seems, of electronica all mix and meld together, whether in swinging rock, like in ‘Come together’, or in slow, spaced-out shoegaze, like in ‘Stay with me’, becoming rich and thick and organic – noise with a tune.

There’s an intense unity of purpose in this music, no matter what it’s doing. Listen to the way that slow, solemn, calming passages alternate with loud, wild chaos in ‘All my thoughts’, while holding everything together like two sides of the one coin, sparking you up and calming you down like a day and night analgesic.

It’s the whole, much more than the parts, that you notice on this album. Even the fantastic guitar riffs on ‘Electricity’ are woven in as part of the fabric rather than stepping forward, making a spectacle of themselves, in the footlights. Simple lines that start to tell you a bare and unadorned story soon get drowned in floods of sound, like in ‘Home of the brave’, as if nothing is allowed to hog the limelight here. It’s the forest, not the trees, that matters.

This album takes you through so many paths as all rich, dense forests do - climbing up into the sunlight here, descending down into the shadows there. You'll love the vastness of 'No God ony religion', with more tunes and things going on than you can poke a stick at; but if you have ever been deeply sad you are surely going to feel the pain, and the pain relief, all over again when you listen to ‘Broken heart’ – music that seems to tell you that, in times of sadness, consolation is only a drink away.

Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space is an album of big music. Its music washes over you, sometimes sweeping you up, like in the gospel-infused ‘Cool waves’, sometimes throwing you back down, like in the bleak drugworld blues of 'Cop shoot cop ... ' a fantastic 16 minute track with an awesome anguished instrumental interlude and a grim love song at the end, where lines like “The desert is any place without you my friend/And I will love you even if I’m in it til the end” make you think that the lover is not a person, but the next shot of heroin.

Rightly or wrongly, this album helps you forget for an hour or so that there's a plain and mundane world out there. The liner notes’ suggested dose for Spiritualized is “once, twice daily or as recommended by your doctor or pharmacist”, but I’m inclined to suggest that you take it as often as needed. It might become a bit addictive but, as the leaflet says, it’s to treat your heart and soul – and you can never get too much of that.

Thanks again to Lucas for the introduction.

Not quite sibling rivalry - The White Stripes and "Elephant"

Today, several weeks after Scott recommended I buy it and Patrick recommended I listen to it, I have finally sat down and given a proper hearing to The White Stripes album Elephant.

Before getting into the music itself, I thought I’d just spend a few lines on the gossip. I constantly read stuff about The White Stripes as a sibling duo – Jack and Meg White – which does lend a kind of rebellious young person’s cuteness to their music. But I have in fact discovered through a little bit more research that they are actually not siblings at all, but ex-husband-and-wife. Jack White used to be John Gillis, but married Megan White and took her name. They divorced in 2000, but continued to work together, more than happy to be promoted as a sibling duo rather than as a divorced duo.

I guess it’s a bit of a whacky story – but who cares, when they come up with such great bluesy rock, always with a slightly irreverent, mischievous edge to it, laced with bits of acidic anger here, bits of juvenile humour there, and always doused in music that is gutsy, fun and clever all at once. It’s music that comes to you from the garage – but a well-equipped garage that only admits people who have got talent and who know how to have fun expressing it.

You get the first taste of what The White Stripes can do on the very first line of the very first song, ‘Seven Nation Army’, with its funky bluesy bass line (actually played on an semi-acoustic guitar, through an octave pedal), riffing away through the whole track, giving a base and a shape to everything else.

It’s a song that is fed up with everyone and everything – a song that tears itself away from people’s indulgence in themselves (“Don’t want to hear about it/Every single one’s got a story to tell/Everyone knows about it/From the Queen of England to the hounds of hell”).

That, in one way or another, is what most of this album is about – people losing touch with one another, forgetting the innocent splendour of love and then finding, in its place, resentment, things that niggle, and loneliness, like in the grumpy lines of ‘There’s no home for you here’: “Waking up for breakfast/burning matches/Talking quickly/Breaking baubles/Throwing garbage/Drinking soda/Looking happy/Taking pictures/So completely stupid/Just go away”.

But the bitterness is mixed in with reminders of what has been lost, too, like Meg White’s bluesy and seductive ‘In the cold, cold Night’; and with yearnings to find it, like Jack’s sadly cute plea to be accepted in ‘I want to be the boy to warm your mother’s heart’.

There’s a fantastic cover of Burt Bacharach’s ‘I just don’t know what to do with myself’, giving the song an intestinal fortitude it has always needed, full of the sort of bile that anyone would surely feel in the circumstances.

'Ball and biscuit' is probably the grungiest song on the album, a song about quick and hard sex, with awesome blues guitar riffs adding to the sleaze.

There’s the tongue-in-cheek cuteness of ‘Little Acorns’, where Jack’s sweet little squirrel Ow-ows are howled back at him by a blood and sweat drenched electric guitar. There’s the rough sarcasm of ‘Girl, you have no faith in medicine’, to rough blues guitar, Jack’s rough vocals and Meg’s rough drums.

It’d be a great finish, but Elephant in fact finishes with ‘Well it’s true that we love one another’ – a happy poke-fun-at-love duet with Jack White and Holly Golightly and with Meg throwing in a line of cynical commentary here and there, managing somehow to sum up the flavour of the whole album just as charmingly as the open track did aggressively.

While there is probably something a bit affected about the White Stripes’ pretence of being siblings, there is nothing in the least bit affected about their music. Elephant takes everything that is good from blues, garage rock and punk, puts it into the blender and produces a fantastically original cocktail that will be sure to get you drunk – not just because its alcohol content is, I suspect, dangerously high, but because you just won’t be able to stop lapping it up.

... and getting gorgeous with The Crayon Fields' "Animal Bells"

After such a dark and dingy voyage into home-grown music yesterday, with Rowland S Howard, it just had to be a sign from god today that Marty W mentioned another local band for me to listen to – one which, as fate would have it, is filled with sunshine and light. And so what else could I possibly do but head out during my lunch break and buy The Crayon Fields’ 2006 album Animal Bells? I did buy some more drone noise, and the latest album of the Fuck Buttons, for a bit of balance, but that’s totally beside the point.

I had never heard of the Melbourne-based Crayon Fields before today, but a quick internet search showed me that pretty well everyone draws comparisons with The Zombies (who I had also never heard of) and with The Beach Boys (even I have heard of them).

Animal Bells is certainly very beachy, very boysy, and very Beach Boysy – but all in the best possible way. It is cruisy music, filled with soft, whispered harmonies, mellow, laid-back melodies, and rich but unobtrusive instrumentation that makes you just long for summer, a gin and tonic, and a deck chair by the beach.

The songs on Animal Bells are unashamedly dreamy, flagrantly happy. Toy bells add their bit of sparkle to each track, turning wine into champagne. Melodies and rhythms blend like ice-cream and chocolate topping.

The music is gorgeously unpretentious – but don’t think for a moment that that means it’s unskilled or simplistic. Everything here is so exposed – from the ravishing harmonies of the vocals to the clean and unadorned pluckings on the acoustic guitar and the glittering dance of the percussion. Every note has to be perfectly placed and perfectly played – and it is.

Each track has its own special use of colour, its own subtly unique way of shining the sun on you: the jaunty, jumping rhythms of the vocal line in ‘Living So Well’; the way ‘Back, Front, Side, Low, High’ slips so easily from major to minor and back, making darkness no more threatening than a walk in the shade on a hot day; the pulsating, whirring electronics of ‘Helicopters’; the way that ‘Lovely Time’ strolls merrily along one minute, skips along the next; the handclaps the push things along in ‘Impossible Things’; the jangling pentatonic percussion that gives ‘Do It First’ an almost oriental feel; the way that ‘Drains’ seems to wave farewell to you, with a smile on its face, a tear in its eye and, just when you think it’s gone, it turns around and waves to you again.

Animal Bells has a real childlike innocence to it – the sort of innocence that you never really totally outgrow: the sort that makes you realise that you can still smile, no matter how bad and mean people like Rowland S Howard tell you the world is.

Getting ugly with Rowland S Howard's "Pop Crimes"

One of the dangers for me in walking into Melbourne’s Polyester Records, is that, no matter what I have gone in there to buy, they always seem to be playing something else which I end up buying as well.

Yesterday, it was Rowland S Howard’s recent release, Pop Crimes. I was kind of conscious of the overall Nick Cave-esque feel to it all – the dark, gritty voice; the backings that seem to be coming from dingy back lanes at night – and so, when I learned that Rowland S Howard was originally from Birthday Party, I was kind of pleased with myself for noticing the Cave connection.

The music here takes you into a shadowy world, where things are kind of slow and hazy, and where love is sleazy, seedy, sexy and, for the most part, short-lived.

Pop Crimes opens with the perfect song to usher you right into the pit of this world, a shady duet that Howard sings with Jonnine Standish, ‘(I Know) A Girl Called Jonny’ with such great lines as “She’s my narcotic lollipop”.

Most of the songs on this album are pretty much filled with bitterness, like the self-loathing that slithers through ‘Shut You Down’, the tale of a man who seems to have somehow descended into life’s gutters, “Standing in a suit as ragged as my nerves”; and yet your heart breaks for him as he sings those lines “I miss you so much” which such raw, unadorned loneliness.

The instrumentation throughout Pop Crimes is mostly just bare guitar, bass and drums but is garnished here and there with violin or organ or odd percussion, giving it shady, shadowy colours, like the clanging, lumbering beat in ‘Life’s What You Make It’, the track, incidentally, that convinced me I just had to buy this album.

The title track is the sort of song that would sing to you in a cheap late night bar, over a glass of whisky, where people reminisce about love gone wrong, and about how bad and mean and mighty unclean the world is, but to a wonderful funky beat and electric guitar riffs.

There’s the swaggering beat of ‘Nothin’’; the rough and bluesy guts of ‘Wayward Man’, with lines like “I do all my best thinking unconscious on the floor” and “I’m the fly in the ointment, Your constant disappointment”; the tender sadness of ‘Ave Maria’, and the black hymn, rocking along to everything that’s ugly and dirty, in ‘The Golden Age of Bloodshed’.

It’s music that is always rough and raw, music that lets itself wallow and that feels like it might actually be proud to be bitter and twisted.

I gather Rowland S Howard doesn’t do a lot of recording in his own right, but Pop Crimes certainly mounts a pretty irrefutable case that he should do more. Listen to it alone, late at night, with a bottle of whisky at your side, and take comfort in the fact that sometimes it’s good to get ugly.

Forever young - Sonic Youth's "The Eternal"

After so much of the weird and the whacky over the past few days, I thought something marginally more mainstream was called for today and, having been inspired by Lee Ranaldo's work on yesterday's album by The Melvins, decided today to go out and buy Sonic Youth's latest album.

The Eternal brings us some good solid rock, but dressed in the unique and interesting garb of sounds that Sonic Youth are famous for creating – keeping the music world of underground rock very much young and alive. Listen, for example, the feeling of tolling bells that ushers in the opening track, ‘Sacred Trickster’, or to the symphony of sounds, the thick electronic soundwaves and the metallic clangs, that punctuate ‘Antenna’ – none of it is exactly new sounds, but it’s all sounds being used in new ways, giving this hard, even heavy, music a feeling of light and life, as if it is waking up in the morning younger than when it went to sleep the night before.

There’s so much on this album that gives you a new take on the old and trusted elements of rock, like the terrific steady pounding beats on ‘Anti-Orgasm’, driven down semitone by semitone, creating a wonderful sense of seediness before eventually giving way to something more gentle and chilled-out. The whole effect leaves you feeling that you’ve just walked down a dark and dingy stairwell into some incredibly cool, and slightly spaced-out, nightclub.

‘What We Know’ is fast and fuming – hard rock with a dash of the tribe mixed in, its pulse so powerful that I think even my two little dogs were nodding their heads along with the beat.

‘Malibu Gas Station’ starts with some lonely, sad almost sentimental pickings on electric guitar, which is unexpectedly swept aside by a solid rock beat, but then is later transformed into its own rock lament, mounting in rage and energy, while you are dragged down by the force of the beat’s undertow.

These are incredibly cleverly structured songs. Even when the music is at its most wild, like in the frenzied bits of ‘Thunderclap For Bobby Pyn’ everything seems balanced and planned and yet it never loses its spontaneity. Listen to the way that song suddenly stops, with one abrupt, perfectly placed, bash that sounds like they all only thought of it all together, all at once.

There’s the swinging groove of ‘Walkin Blue’, relaxed in its own way, and with so many layers of sound that I wouldn’t even begin to try to count them, but then turning your swagger into a brisk walk and then into a furious run, before you even know it has happened. It’s a great way to get fit.

The Eternal finishes with ‘Massage The Storm’, almost ten minutes long, but creating a sense of the epic even more by the vastness of its sounds than by its running time. It does feel strangely like a storm being massaged – something wild and untamed getting lulled, if not exactly to rest, at least into a sense of its own kind of peace. It’s still a storm, and it still has all the force and power of nature rumbling within it. But you feel it’s not going to just blow itself out anymore – it’ll be there, for a long, long time, ready to put on its awesome show for you whenever you need to feel exhilarated. In some ways it’s an apt metaphor for what Sonic Youth seems to have achieved for rock music on this album. It has massaged rock and, in doing that, has kept it eternal.