Today I’ve been listening to a really interesting album that was recommended by Scotti from Melbourne’s “Missing Link” record shop – a great place for finding things that no one else seems to want to stock. The Soundtrack of Our Lives is a Swedish rock band and, like so many things that come from Scandinavia’s music scene, they’re an interesting mix of tradition and innovation. Communion is their newest album. It’s a double CD set – just over 90 minutes, but 90 minutes of powerful, original, cleverly devised music that is, apart from anything else, just great to listen to.
The first thing that strikes you about this album, even before you listen to it, is the artwork, with all its photos of ever-so-slightly too happy faces – at home, at work, at play. But this is not an album about happy families but rather about the falsehood of all that. All throughout this album there seems to be a kind of indictment of the vanity-driven deception and hedonism of the modern middle class dream.
The album starts like an orchestra tuning up … then there’s a beat and a clap and things are off and running with “Babel on”. You are summonsed into its world and, before you've got a chance to ask any questions, you are moving and grooving to some great rock riffs, reborn from the 60s, but alive and kicking with real 21st century gusto, and a real 21st century message to tell.
The album goes through a lot of interesting paths, turning around a lot of interesting corners, at times hurling you along with energy you just can’t resist, at times asking you to stroll for a bit, while acoustic guitars take over, pluck away, and make you reflect. There are moments of introspection, moments of nostalgia, like the harpsichord and trumpet sounds of “The fan who wasn’t there”. There are songs that start off gently, lulling you into a sense of security, but then whip themselves, and you, up into a frenzy. Listen, for example, to "Second life replay", with its smooth, if unsettling and haunting, beginning ("I killed myself today"), transforming, bar by bar, to its feverish, impassioned end.
This really is music that could not have been written without the '60s, and at times I almost thought I was listening to Pink Floyd, but nor could it have been written before now, with interesting 21st century fusions of styles, and treatments and distortions of sound. It brings the two time zones and their different music worlds together in a way that makes you feel they belonged with each other all along.
It’s great music, but it’s by no means just about having a good time – although you certainly do that when you listen to this album. These songs seem to point the finger at all of us, confronting us with the façade behind which modern middle-class life seems so happy to hide. There are songs about how we destroy one another in our personal relationships, such as in “Universal Stalker”, or about how our society does it for us, as in “Mensa’s Marauders”. I'm not sure if I am reading too much into it, but it seems like this album almost means you to enjoy it in spite of yourself - you're dancing and rocking to songs that are telling you how false it all is, and how much damage it all does.
We are shown the absurdity of that façade, and its danger, like in the nuclear fallout of “RA 88”, with its hard rock aggression, its frightening, uncompromising beat: a song as much about our radioactive ideas, as about our weapons, I think.
But we are also shown our own search for meaning, our search for a sense of belonging, like in “Songs of the ocean”, with the words, “No we don’t belong anymore/to the umbilical shore” to music that really does sound like a voyage in a wide, endless sea - music that sways and drifts in some vast, vast space and ends with strings and electronic wails like the sound of some apocalyptic bird cry.
The album ends with “Passover”, where, to a grounded, steady, beat, and with lines like “Don’t pass it on/if you know it’s wrong” and “Somebody’s waiting for you” and “It’s only your life before you awake”, you can almost feel the band coming forward to the footlights, telling you that this is their message: you are part of something bigger, and people are relying on you to do the right thing.
If you don’t feel like plunging into the ideas behind this album, and their fairly confronting message of alienation and scorn (or at least that’s what they seem to say to me), you can still plunge into its music – because there can be little room for discomfort there: it’s just a great way to spend 90 minutes.
Thanks to Missing Link for a great recommendation!
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Matt Joe Gow & the Dead Leaves - Long Live the Leaves!
Last night's gig at the Nash in Geelong, with Matt Joe Gow and the Dead Leaves, was so good that I thought it warranted another post - a break with the one-post-a-day tradition of this blog, and with the record, so far, of not posting on one band more than once.
I talked a bit yesterday about their debut album The Messenger and most, but not all, of the songs from that album filled the bill last night. I had forgotten what it was like to feel the floor shake with the beat of really good music - music that's good not just because it sounds good (which it certainly does) but also because it manages to somehow tell you a story without first having to sit you down on the floor, cross legged, and tell you that it's telling you a story. It just tells it.
I had forgotten, too, what it was like to see live music where the musicians really believe in what they're doing. That's something you certainly didn't get too often with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (the last gig I went to) who, even in music of the most intense, heartfelt passion, had an amazing capacity to look bored. Not Matt Joe Gow and the Dead Leaves. You knew this music was coming not just from their instruments and voices, but from something deep within them - sometimes their hearts, sometimes their guts.
Their terrific combination of acoustic and electric guitars, upright bass, and drums, all strumming and beating away at their wonderfully original mix of country and rock made for a phenomenal night before a smallish but very impressed crowd.
I've got a notoriously bad record at predicting outcomes of elections and footy matches, but I reckon I might just be backing a real winner this time when I say that I think this band has a big future.
I talked a bit yesterday about their debut album The Messenger and most, but not all, of the songs from that album filled the bill last night. I had forgotten what it was like to feel the floor shake with the beat of really good music - music that's good not just because it sounds good (which it certainly does) but also because it manages to somehow tell you a story without first having to sit you down on the floor, cross legged, and tell you that it's telling you a story. It just tells it.
I had forgotten, too, what it was like to see live music where the musicians really believe in what they're doing. That's something you certainly didn't get too often with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (the last gig I went to) who, even in music of the most intense, heartfelt passion, had an amazing capacity to look bored. Not Matt Joe Gow and the Dead Leaves. You knew this music was coming not just from their instruments and voices, but from something deep within them - sometimes their hearts, sometimes their guts.
Their terrific combination of acoustic and electric guitars, upright bass, and drums, all strumming and beating away at their wonderfully original mix of country and rock made for a phenomenal night before a smallish but very impressed crowd.
I've got a notoriously bad record at predicting outcomes of elections and footy matches, but I reckon I might just be backing a real winner this time when I say that I think this band has a big future.
Saturday, September 5, 2009
Believing in the leaves - Matt Joe Gow
I think it's pretty close to forever ago that I last went out to listen to a live band - unless, of course, you count the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra but, as my nephew Scott points out, they only do covers, so they don't really count. But tonight I'm breaking the drought with a band called Matt Joe Gow and the Dead Leaves and so, in preparation for my big outing, I've been spending some time today listening to their album The Messenger.
This music is, as I understand it, fairly securely grounded in alt-country territory, with a bit of folk and a bit of rock grafted on. The combination works wonderfully well and, within the first few bars your foot is tapping, your head is nodding, your body is rocking and you are swept up in the whirlwind of the opening track.
It's a song as full of hope and excitement as it is of warning - "It's best to make the most of this/Fate is know to twirl and twist even the face" - but the music makes you throw caution quite literally to the winds, and you are convinced that it is worth giving life and love a go. It's a fantastic way to open an album.
But winds wreak havoc, and much of the rest of The Messenger is telling you about the damage. They are songs about loss of love, moving on, looking back, saying goodbye and, ultimately, feeling at peace with it all and treasuring the memories for what they are.
All of this comes to us via the earthy, no-nonsense voice of Matt Joe Gow, backed by guitars, drums, sometimes piano, sometimes fiddle, sometimes an incredibly soulful harmonica as in the stunning interlude in "Come What May".
The singing, the playing, the music, the lyrics, all have an honesty to them that makes you believe, and believe in, it all.
The structural and, for me also emotional, centre of the album is "Land Is Burning", a song of cataclysmic grief, where the earth itself seems to be sharing in the loss. But it is surrounded by songs that are easier, gentler, breezier - and you are left feeling that the things that go wrong in life and love are really just part of the journey that we all take, and that we all share. You can't feel alone when you listen to music like this.
Everything comes to a wonderfully poignant rest in the last song, "Up On The Hill", where a man goes back to his childhood home and to his memories of parents breaking up and shattered childhood dreams, and manages to find resolution, forgiveness and peace. It's a gentle rocking, calming song - balancing the scales perfectly to the tornado of the opening track.
The nett result of an album with music as good as this, and structured as well as this, is that when you play the whole thing through, you feel a kind of completeness, like a good meal of the best home cooking you ever had.
Matt Joe Gow and the Dead Leaves' The Messenger is, for me, another great 3 PBS discovery - and while I am far, far too old to be going out to a gig that probably won't begin until close to midnight, this music has given me the energy to almost feel that might be able to manage it.
This music is, as I understand it, fairly securely grounded in alt-country territory, with a bit of folk and a bit of rock grafted on. The combination works wonderfully well and, within the first few bars your foot is tapping, your head is nodding, your body is rocking and you are swept up in the whirlwind of the opening track.
It's a song as full of hope and excitement as it is of warning - "It's best to make the most of this/Fate is know to twirl and twist even the face" - but the music makes you throw caution quite literally to the winds, and you are convinced that it is worth giving life and love a go. It's a fantastic way to open an album.
But winds wreak havoc, and much of the rest of The Messenger is telling you about the damage. They are songs about loss of love, moving on, looking back, saying goodbye and, ultimately, feeling at peace with it all and treasuring the memories for what they are.
All of this comes to us via the earthy, no-nonsense voice of Matt Joe Gow, backed by guitars, drums, sometimes piano, sometimes fiddle, sometimes an incredibly soulful harmonica as in the stunning interlude in "Come What May".
The singing, the playing, the music, the lyrics, all have an honesty to them that makes you believe, and believe in, it all.
The structural and, for me also emotional, centre of the album is "Land Is Burning", a song of cataclysmic grief, where the earth itself seems to be sharing in the loss. But it is surrounded by songs that are easier, gentler, breezier - and you are left feeling that the things that go wrong in life and love are really just part of the journey that we all take, and that we all share. You can't feel alone when you listen to music like this.
Everything comes to a wonderfully poignant rest in the last song, "Up On The Hill", where a man goes back to his childhood home and to his memories of parents breaking up and shattered childhood dreams, and manages to find resolution, forgiveness and peace. It's a gentle rocking, calming song - balancing the scales perfectly to the tornado of the opening track.
The nett result of an album with music as good as this, and structured as well as this, is that when you play the whole thing through, you feel a kind of completeness, like a good meal of the best home cooking you ever had.
Matt Joe Gow and the Dead Leaves' The Messenger is, for me, another great 3 PBS discovery - and while I am far, far too old to be going out to a gig that probably won't begin until close to midnight, this music has given me the energy to almost feel that might be able to manage it.
Friday, September 4, 2009
Shelter in the arms of David Sylvian
David’s Sylvian’s music is something that I discovered relatively early on in my venture into the non-classical world, when my friend Marty told me what a superb voice he has. He was right, and it’s music that I keep coming back to whenever I feel the need to just take a breath, reflect, and feel centred again.
David Sylvian’s voice is like a pair big warm arms that fold around you and hold you and, in that comfortable and comforting place, you stay, warm and at peace, while you listen to what he has to tell you.
And, on the album that I have been listening to today, Secrets of the Beehive, what he has to tell you is by no means always bright and happy. You’ll hear him tell you about loss, loneliness, violence, resentment, hopelessness, short-lived happiness.
But he tells you all of this in a voice that is almost a whisper – soft, smooth, seductive, sexy – and in music, mostly slow, sometimes almost funereal, but rich, warm, sustained, secure, even when it’s haunting, like in the eerie sounds and tolling bell of “Maria”.
There will be moments of incredible darkness – and yet a darkness which, even when it hints at being sinister, as it does in “When Poets Dreamed of Angels” and in “Mother and Child”, is never really bleak.
So much is said on this album through the power of the music – music of incredible beauty and strength, even at its most sad, where it seems to be saying “I’ve been there too, and I’m with you now to tell you that you’re going to be okay”.
This is, in fact, what “Orpheus” is all about – tellingly, the only song on the album for which the lyrics are printed in the booklet: “Tell me, I’ve still a lot to learn/Understand, these fires never stop/Believe me, when this joke is tired of laughing/I will hear the promise of my Orpheus sing.”
And the music makes us feel hope, because of its quiet, intimate strength – strings and guitars and piano – always giving you an assurance that the night won’t last forever, as when you hear time tick away on the piano, in “The Devil’s Own”, as the music, and we, wait for the dawn to come.
Listen, too, to the lonely, forlorn trumpet in “Let the Happiness In”, summonsing the slow, subtle change of hue in the music from a cold grey night to a gentle warm sunrise, with the trumpet soaring, singing above it all in a heartaching, and ultimately hopeful, beauty.
There are certainly many sides to this music – there is always a degree of ambiguity in its emotions, and its styles seem to roam somewhere between the slightly avant-garde and the slightly jazz – and it is the sort of album that really cries out to be listened to many times and absorbed a little more each time.
Secrets of the Beehive takes you to a very special place – not a place full of lightness and sunshine, but a place where you feel comforted and safe, and where you know that your tears will be understood, should you choose to shed them.
David Sylvian’s voice is like a pair big warm arms that fold around you and hold you and, in that comfortable and comforting place, you stay, warm and at peace, while you listen to what he has to tell you.
And, on the album that I have been listening to today, Secrets of the Beehive, what he has to tell you is by no means always bright and happy. You’ll hear him tell you about loss, loneliness, violence, resentment, hopelessness, short-lived happiness.
But he tells you all of this in a voice that is almost a whisper – soft, smooth, seductive, sexy – and in music, mostly slow, sometimes almost funereal, but rich, warm, sustained, secure, even when it’s haunting, like in the eerie sounds and tolling bell of “Maria”.
There will be moments of incredible darkness – and yet a darkness which, even when it hints at being sinister, as it does in “When Poets Dreamed of Angels” and in “Mother and Child”, is never really bleak.
So much is said on this album through the power of the music – music of incredible beauty and strength, even at its most sad, where it seems to be saying “I’ve been there too, and I’m with you now to tell you that you’re going to be okay”.
This is, in fact, what “Orpheus” is all about – tellingly, the only song on the album for which the lyrics are printed in the booklet: “Tell me, I’ve still a lot to learn/Understand, these fires never stop/Believe me, when this joke is tired of laughing/I will hear the promise of my Orpheus sing.”
And the music makes us feel hope, because of its quiet, intimate strength – strings and guitars and piano – always giving you an assurance that the night won’t last forever, as when you hear time tick away on the piano, in “The Devil’s Own”, as the music, and we, wait for the dawn to come.
Listen, too, to the lonely, forlorn trumpet in “Let the Happiness In”, summonsing the slow, subtle change of hue in the music from a cold grey night to a gentle warm sunrise, with the trumpet soaring, singing above it all in a heartaching, and ultimately hopeful, beauty.
There are certainly many sides to this music – there is always a degree of ambiguity in its emotions, and its styles seem to roam somewhere between the slightly avant-garde and the slightly jazz – and it is the sort of album that really cries out to be listened to many times and absorbed a little more each time.
Secrets of the Beehive takes you to a very special place – not a place full of lightness and sunshine, but a place where you feel comforted and safe, and where you know that your tears will be understood, should you choose to shed them.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Letting in the sunlight with the Cave Singers, "Welcome Joy"
It seemed to somehow be worth holding onto the upbeat mood of yesterday, at least for a little bit longer, and so today I decided to listen to the Cave Singers' latest release, Welcome Joy - which I guess is a sort of alt-folk type of sound, with maybe a few tinges of country and rock thrown in throughout. But whatever its genre - and, believe me, it's taking me a lot, lot longer to learn my genres that it took me to learn the alphabet in primary school - this music is just terrific.
There's a line in the opening song - “Dance in the doldrums of each new day” – that seems to typify what this album is all about: a refusal to be brought down, and a determination to see everything as an excuse to dance.
The music seems to always be built on a solid, dependable beat, and uses simple, unpretentious bricks of acoustic and sometimes electric guitars, and earthy, you-could-be-my-best-friend type voices, to build a home that invites you in, keeps you warm and makes you feel safe.
The album just overflows with wonderful devices to make the music weave its charm - like the way you want to cry for joy at the entrance of the harmonica in "Leap", or the sense of intimacy you get from the sounds of hands on drums in "Shrine"; or the way the guitar riffs all through the album keep returning to their root, making you feel centred; or the smooth, magical vocal backings, soothing the rough but grounded voice of Peter Quirk; or the jaunty, funky guitar tunes of "VV", that makes you want to play – with life, every bit as much as with the guitar; or the warm, orange-hued chords that punctuate “Beach House”, really taking you to the beach and the sun. It all just works so well, and everything, every little shade of colour, seems to blend together to make this album into something organic and full of life.
The album ends with the relative peace and calm of "Bramble", recalling the centred riffs of "Leap", but bringing everything to a kind of rest, as if you just need to lie down for a while, with a smile on your face, after all that fresh air and sunshine.
The Cave Singers’ Welcome Joy is exactly that - a welcome joy. If there was a musical version of a dog wagging its tail, this would be it.
Thanks heaps, Scott, for introducing me to the Cave Singers!
There's a line in the opening song - “Dance in the doldrums of each new day” – that seems to typify what this album is all about: a refusal to be brought down, and a determination to see everything as an excuse to dance.
The music seems to always be built on a solid, dependable beat, and uses simple, unpretentious bricks of acoustic and sometimes electric guitars, and earthy, you-could-be-my-best-friend type voices, to build a home that invites you in, keeps you warm and makes you feel safe.
The album just overflows with wonderful devices to make the music weave its charm - like the way you want to cry for joy at the entrance of the harmonica in "Leap", or the sense of intimacy you get from the sounds of hands on drums in "Shrine"; or the way the guitar riffs all through the album keep returning to their root, making you feel centred; or the smooth, magical vocal backings, soothing the rough but grounded voice of Peter Quirk; or the jaunty, funky guitar tunes of "VV", that makes you want to play – with life, every bit as much as with the guitar; or the warm, orange-hued chords that punctuate “Beach House”, really taking you to the beach and the sun. It all just works so well, and everything, every little shade of colour, seems to blend together to make this album into something organic and full of life.
The album ends with the relative peace and calm of "Bramble", recalling the centred riffs of "Leap", but bringing everything to a kind of rest, as if you just need to lie down for a while, with a smile on your face, after all that fresh air and sunshine.
The Cave Singers’ Welcome Joy is exactly that - a welcome joy. If there was a musical version of a dog wagging its tail, this would be it.
Thanks heaps, Scott, for introducing me to the Cave Singers!
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
A great way to get your carbohydrates - Booker T.'s Potato Hole
After so many days of music dominated by the black, the bleak and the blue, a Greg-inspired change of pace today seemed like a breath of fresh air. Not that Booker T.'s latest album Potato Hole is exactly light and breezy, but it certainly is fun and funky.
I was reading a few reviews of this album today and not many of them were very complimentary - some complaining that it's not like the earlier Booker T. stuff, some saying that the percussion doesn't capture the subtleties of soul, some saying that the covers of Tom Waits ("Get Behind the Mule") and OutKast ("Hey Ya!") just don't measure up to the originals. Of course, knowing hardly anything about soul, and only a little of Tom Waits and absolutely nothing of OutKast or early Booker T., none of that mattered in the least to me, so I just listened to this album as itself.
And, for me, it just sounded great. At the end of a tiring day it boosted my energy levels like a shot of intravenous Red Bull, had me turning up the volume just a notch and then just another notch and then another, and then dancing and grooving away throughout the house (uncoordinated and out of sync, but that's not Booker T.'s fault), and suddenly everything was good with the world.
I loved the way Booker T.'s Hammond B3 and Neil Young's electric guitar (yes, Neil Young, no less) play with each other, in the sort of slightly grungy conversation that a couple of rough old blokes might have with each other on a Sunday afternoon in a beer garden. I loved the way the beat, pounding and strong though it is, backs rather than dominates the music - keeping it going but never leading it. I loved the way the opening track ("Pound It Out") sets the hairs on your arm on end with its opening bass line, and the way the closing track ("Space City") at first makes you almost think you might be in church but then, before you realise you're doing it, you're dancing and gyrating in the most unholy way imagineable.
And, for the record, I thought "Get Behind the Mule" sounded absolutely fantastic - dirty and edgy - and I am looking forward to seeing if Tom Waits does it as good.
I was reading a few reviews of this album today and not many of them were very complimentary - some complaining that it's not like the earlier Booker T. stuff, some saying that the percussion doesn't capture the subtleties of soul, some saying that the covers of Tom Waits ("Get Behind the Mule") and OutKast ("Hey Ya!") just don't measure up to the originals. Of course, knowing hardly anything about soul, and only a little of Tom Waits and absolutely nothing of OutKast or early Booker T., none of that mattered in the least to me, so I just listened to this album as itself.
And, for me, it just sounded great. At the end of a tiring day it boosted my energy levels like a shot of intravenous Red Bull, had me turning up the volume just a notch and then just another notch and then another, and then dancing and grooving away throughout the house (uncoordinated and out of sync, but that's not Booker T.'s fault), and suddenly everything was good with the world.
I loved the way Booker T.'s Hammond B3 and Neil Young's electric guitar (yes, Neil Young, no less) play with each other, in the sort of slightly grungy conversation that a couple of rough old blokes might have with each other on a Sunday afternoon in a beer garden. I loved the way the beat, pounding and strong though it is, backs rather than dominates the music - keeping it going but never leading it. I loved the way the opening track ("Pound It Out") sets the hairs on your arm on end with its opening bass line, and the way the closing track ("Space City") at first makes you almost think you might be in church but then, before you realise you're doing it, you're dancing and gyrating in the most unholy way imagineable.
And, for the record, I thought "Get Behind the Mule" sounded absolutely fantastic - dirty and edgy - and I am looking forward to seeing if Tom Waits does it as good.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
The many shades of blue
In a world where we like everything to fit into neat categories it can sometimes be hard for us to deal with things with blurred boundaries. But blue, unlike black and white, is a colour with many shades - and a whole lot of them appear on Joni Mitchell's classic album Blue - an album that, to me at least, seems to defy any attempt to put it in a box. The songs on this album, usually with little more than a guitar or a piano to accompany Joni Mitchell's amazing voice, wandering all over the place from high sporano to throaty folk, seem to belong to their own world.
It's a world full of sadness, but always, in every song, mixed with something special and unique - like the hope that walks, hand in hand, with the hurt of "All I want"; or the blend of sad, sad loss with the gentle beauty of new life in "Little Green", where a young mother gives her newborn baby girl up for adoption; or the sense of sad resignation in the title track; or the poignant hints of "Jingle Bells" in "River", a song about sadness at Christmas.
It's all shades of blue, and they are all conveyed with the simplest means - just a sparse accompaniment, and that incredibly pure voice, turning speech into music, with its free rhythms and its melodies that just refuse to be tied down. These songs make you feel that music was always how things were meant to be said.
I guess we have learned to think of blue as a sad colour and, certainly, all of the songs on this album are sad. But it's a sadness which, like the music itself, is fluid, beyond definition or containment. It's a sadness which you feel like embracing, not escaping - and all because of the music, the way it just sounds so incredibly, unaffectedly human. On this album blue is a warm colour.
I think for me it was, ultimately, the intimacy and the honesty of these songs that captured me so totally. It's like sitting down and listening to someone tell you their story, just to you and no one else.
Thank you, Neal, for sharing the Blue with me.
It's a world full of sadness, but always, in every song, mixed with something special and unique - like the hope that walks, hand in hand, with the hurt of "All I want"; or the blend of sad, sad loss with the gentle beauty of new life in "Little Green", where a young mother gives her newborn baby girl up for adoption; or the sense of sad resignation in the title track; or the poignant hints of "Jingle Bells" in "River", a song about sadness at Christmas.
It's all shades of blue, and they are all conveyed with the simplest means - just a sparse accompaniment, and that incredibly pure voice, turning speech into music, with its free rhythms and its melodies that just refuse to be tied down. These songs make you feel that music was always how things were meant to be said.
I guess we have learned to think of blue as a sad colour and, certainly, all of the songs on this album are sad. But it's a sadness which, like the music itself, is fluid, beyond definition or containment. It's a sadness which you feel like embracing, not escaping - and all because of the music, the way it just sounds so incredibly, unaffectedly human. On this album blue is a warm colour.
I think for me it was, ultimately, the intimacy and the honesty of these songs that captured me so totally. It's like sitting down and listening to someone tell you their story, just to you and no one else.
Thank you, Neal, for sharing the Blue with me.
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