Just time for a cheap pun before I (new-man alert, new-man alert! (new is short for newtered, here, clearly)) make Mrs Impostume her dinner!

I'd far rather listen to "Miles Davies: a Tribute to Jack Johnson" than I would " Jack Johnson: a tribute to Miles Davies!"

ahhhh.

Yeah... sorry...must dash.. time to put those out-of-date Bernard Matthew's Fizzy-Lemon Flava Turkey Twanglepops in the microwave and open up another can of Graffititag Spageetiags (apparently sales of alphabeti spaghetti have fallen off with the decline in literacy). Never mind, we've got boil-in-the-bag black forest gateau for dessert.

I’ve just done something romantic.

To anyone who knows me, this observation will be roughly on par with, “George Bush discussed Proudhon sympathetically,” or "Madonna allowed the others to have their say.” This epically romantic gesture consisted in whisking Mrs Impostume off ( to “whisk off” has no sexual connotations as far as I’m aware. Or does it? “ He kept poking at me while I was doing the dishes and what with me gout and all that, I had to resort to one of the kitchen implements and quickly whisk him off into the sink, Trace.”) to Brighton, home of all things whole-foody and hipsterish to see one of her favourite bands (errr.. and mine) “La Chicana.” Much against expectations I managed to keep the location and the band secret until the moment they arrived on stage at the Komedia by using a series of diversionary/misdirection strategies of which Derren Brown would have been proud coupled with the kind of square-shouldered poster-blocking lunges to make a star quarterback weep with envy, stuffing my fist into the mouths of passing strangers if I suspected they were likely to utter the name, even taking my life in my hands by getting the rather feisty (ahh that Latin blood!) Mrs Impostume in a headlock and running her, convict style, past the venue itself and into a nearby café, when, due to my appalling sense of direction/timing we arrived at it an hour early.

As romantic gestures go it doesn’t seem like much but believe me, when your fate has been to leave your sun-drenched South American home and the open, warm and expressive vitality of its peoples to live with a man from Barrow-in- Furness in South London, you’re grateful for even the smallest of gestures. I am, after all, the man who, slightly disconcerted by the whole getting-married thing, made a hilarious gag at our enhitchment (“wedding” would be a term-too-far) by saying to the registrar immediately after the ceremony was completed, “Well, that was easy. I’m already looking forward to the next time!” BOOM-BOOM! only to be greeted by appalled faces and stony silence. However I console myself that it wasn’t quite as unromantic as the moment at my brother-in-law and sister’s wedding ( I was the witness, sitting at the back with the kids) when the registrar told him, “You may kiss the bride” and his rejoinder, looking at his partner of twelve or so years, was a tender, “Do I have to?” I laughed for a week! I would of course write more about the good Mrs Impostume, humbleberry gatherer/forcefeeder par excellence and expert glasses-wearer but for the fact that she’s rather more circumspect and modest than I am. I, for example have no problem revealing intimate details about myself to friends, family, acquaintances, workmates, fellow tube passengers, baffled tourists and so on. For example, the fact that I have a seventeen inch penis, an IQ of 263 and stand a magnificent six-foot four in my stockinged (yes that right, I wear stockings, gorraprollemwidatblud?) feet. (only one of the three prior assertions is true readers, can you guess which one? That’s right I DO have a seventeen-inch penis but am, in “reality” only four-foot six! (Note the Orwellian brilliance of my height-inversion strategy!) )

But I digress.

The point was: La Chicana. La Chicana come from Buenos Aires and are roughly part of the Tango Nuevo. While Bajofondo and the Gotan Project have spawned a million copyists and a kind of microindustry in pedestrian lounge electronica with bits of bandoneon and snatches of vocals on top ( I have a nasty feeling that Tango is one of those signifiers of mature cool, like Jazz, that gets drafted in to provide “intelligence” to middlebrow music, this despite the fact that it started in the slums of Buenos Aires and Montevideo and lyrically almost all of it deals with the lives/environments of the poor, including much overtly political work, especially by the magnificent Discepolo whose justifiably revered “Cambalache” must be one of the great comments on the twentieth century in any medium) there’s been another, quieter rebirth of Tango with bands like La Chicana ( as profiled in the documentary Tango: Un Giro Extrano) who’ve been revising the tradition, augmenting it and bringing in a wider range of influences from other traditional South American musical forms. La Chicana have several advantages as a band. One is that the singer Dolores Sola really has star quality, enormous stage presence. She’s been blessed Dolores, not only with great beauty but a magnificent voice, with just the right edge of rasp to carry the flavour of smokey milongas. The last great singer, Goyeneche, was a chronic alcoholic whose coke-shot, sozzled bark seems to have set the precedent for a long while, but there's something else in Dolore's delivery, a more knowing, impish quality that reflects the bands preference for early, rougher, more spirited and humourous Tangos. While there is of course an edge of pomo-knowingness in their original tunes ,written by the guitarist and partner of Dolores, Acho Estol, a conscious playing with the symbols of Tango, (“ Una rosa y un farol” “ a rose and a streetlamp” for example makes conscious, compressed use of two of Tango's great images) to enter into writing tangos Estol has realised, means taking on the forms and archetypes and reinvestigating their power and resonance within the wider culture, attempting to create new contexts in which their significance can be re-illumined.

There’s nothing “radical” about La Chicana in the modernist sense, but nor are they overtly po-mo. If one of the points about po-mo is that the artist is considered, by his revealing of the mechanics of the art, to stand above the artifact he produces, if the art always refers back to the artist, then La Chicana avoid this trap by their natural gifts for reverence and humilty, the tradition isn’t there to be plundered, it’s there to be contributed to. This isn’t to say they lack “character” what they lack is that brittle po-mo non-attribute “attitude”, that kind of aggressive self-assertion that is supposed to stand in for all other attributes. Dolores apologizes for her English, which she says is horrible ( I sympathize, still, it’s a bit better than my Spanish, though) but does her best to explain and introduce a context for each song. Estol, whose English is amazingly great, steps in to offer anecdotes and to help out, and he’s a fabulously witty and charming raconteur. The music ranges from a nineteen-fifteen Tango called “Fireworks” in which the violinist and percussionist reproduce the sounds of fireworks going off over the rooftops of Buenos Aires ( actually the violinist is great, reproducing a police siren, birds singing and numerous other touches throughout the gig) through to a track from the collaboration by Piazola and Borges, Cumbias, Chacareras, and a range of other forms I know almost nothing about. The common theme throughout all of them seem to be courage, invention and wit, three qualities that La Chicana have in spades. There’s a palpable sense of warmth and connection in the room and it’s one of the most enjoyable gigs on a number of levels I’ve seen for a while. Estol introduces a traditional Bolivian song about an exploited worker who tells his boss to go fuck himself even though he knows the gesture will ultimately be useless as exactly the kind of gesture that La Chicana love, and they themselves, by boldly refusing to get on the Tango circuit and make money touring Japan and by plunging into the tradition they love, trying to wrest something new from it and contribute on their own terms, embody exactly that beautiful spirit. This is the spirit of wit, play, invention and the deep engagement with culture that I admire, that in fact serves to reconcile me to humanity and by doing so reconcile me to myself. It’s one of the vital functions of art, one increasingly lost in a culture (ours) where intensities and supra-linguistic forms of "direct" experience ( frequencies, noise, colossal bass, blah, blah) all try to supervene the deep suspicion of humanist discourse and the pitfalls of language etc..but, fuck it… frankly if I have the choice between masochistically submitting myself to the like, psuedo-mystical immanence, yeah, of old-time bores like Boris and the grace, ease outwardness and inspiring tenacity of La Chicana, I’ll take La Chicana everytime, thanks.

Now if only I had a subscription to the Wire so I could cancel it for putting bloody Grinderman on the cover instead of La Chicana. And the article's done by heroic, David Thomas' suffering, ace guitarist and all round nice guy Keith Levine*!

*update. I'm a fool...i mean Moline!

Here we GO!

Got No Soul

Late for work again today
Somebody's lying down on the job again
Will you people please stop jumping under my train
Ladies and gentlemen, there will be a slight delay
While we hose the blood away
(And the clock keeps ticking...)

So I spent my evening wishing I was never born
Drinking toasts to that hood with the hooves and the horns
Because the roaches won't do the laundry no more
And the rats refuse to fix the holes in the floor
Water comes through the ceiling...

I asked a pig if he wanted to dance
He says is that a 45 in your pants
Or are you just happy to see me? (rim shot)

I said, All I need is a distraction
Or maybe a sense of satisfaction
Perhaps a pair of pliers to rip off these blinders
Because my peripheral vision is dying
It ain't as if I ain't trying
I'm a rat in a maze of my own devising
And is that a call to arms... Is that a call to arms I hear rising?
Is that a call to arms I hear rising out of that concrete hole?

Yer war on drugs got no soul, yer hired thugs got no soul.
You hippy trash got no soul. Yer yuppie cash got no soul.
Yer video clips, yer beauty tips, remote control.
It's a big black hole. Got no soul. Got no soul.

And the clock's clicking off like the timer on some big neutron switch
Except that there's just one hitch: you gotta strike it rich
Before the shit comes down
So they're out there panhandling for gold
Prospecting in the street, sifting garbage in the gutter
Digging in the tenements, looking for a vein
Trying to find that big score: the mother lode
And everything's a wannabe -- the wicked and the weak,
The victors and the victimized, the economists and the economized
My T.V. mind-set is shattered (sh'dooby)
No guts, no glory, no balls -- whatever you wanna call it --
There ain't nothing real there at all (and I don't feel whole)

Yeah, yer mobile phone got no soul. Yer rolling stone got no soul.
Yer music scene got no soul. Yer answering machine got no soul.
Yer microwave, yer toilet slave. You corporate swine.
Yer bullshit line. Hey you on the payroll! Hey you on the J Train!
Hey you on the T.V. News! Hey you in the 3-piece suit!
You got no soul. I got no soul. Got no soul

UPDATE! download contains " Suck City EP" which contains "we shall be changed" featuring a sample from one of the impostume's favourite movies ....that's right.. the Exorcist 3!

It’s the second week in February, Mark’s slate (slags! slates!) down the Cloth-Capped Intellectual took a Yuletide hammering, so it must be time for a new release from Salford’s most famous son-AH!

That new Fall album tracklisting in full!

Grumble, Pensioner!

Journeyman Plod!

Amphetamine Bus-pass Gargoyle-ah!

Bar-tab hackwork!

Bremen! Barman! Betrunken!

French Bint in Studio!

New-wife non-contribution scam!

Garage cover No 632

(Paying) My New Mortgage.

Lundun Twats!

Old rope=money

Sub-Kraut Kredibilty Dirge.

(We desperately need Grant) Showbiz.

Worst since “Missing Winner”

A Past Disgraced!

Surprising!

One of the first gigs I ever saved up enough money to get out of Barrow-in-Furness to see was Band of Susans, Dinosaur Jr and Rapeman at Leeds Polytechnic back in about....oh, 1923 or something. The girl I was with cried during Dinosaur Jr at, like, the ragged beauty of it all. I really liked “You’re living all over me”, was less keen on “Bug”, heard “Freak scene” perhaps just two or three hundred times too many over the next several years worth of Indy discos and never really thought about Dinosaur Jr again, never followed their output, know nothing of any post Bug stuff, stuff with “the Fog” etc. They had in fact completely dropped off the Impostume’s musical radar, until today gentle reader.

But I positively have to say I’m currently experiencing much love for up-and-coming “Beyond.” The fact that Lou Barlow has recently rejoined his erstwhile band mates means diddly-squat to me….What, that bloke who was in Sebadoh.. err.. ok! And quite where “Beyond” stands in relation to recent Mascis output I have no idea.... I am then, as usual, supremely unqualified to make any kind of rigorous or thoroughgoing examination of the Dinosaur Jnr oeuvre. I shouldn’t go on, I’ll go on….

Obviously despite the nigh-on twenty year gap, it’s largely more of the same, if you can stand Mascis’s ragged drawl and cackhanded way with a tune (my tolerance is pretty high) and basically stick around for the guitar, (which is the whole point of the DJ’s right?) then you won’t be disappointed. In fact, to suggest that Mascis has more tone, texture and sheer colour to his guitar palate than anyone else out there is insurmountably obvious. Nobody manages to make the guitar sound as alive as Mascis does, like some dormant beast that suddenly springs to life in his hands and goes ripping through the rest of the song. Few guitarists manage to sound like they're playing “Iron man” and “Maggot brain" simultaneously. It’s not that the sounds are impossible to source, it all sounds like a guitar at the end of the day, but it’s a Dali guitar, multicoloured and melting. Mountains crumble, geysers spurt day-glo spumes, volcanoes erupt in waves of incandescent magma, the universe pinwheels and scintillates, oceans boil dry, and that’s just the first track. The truly gorgeous stand-out track, “ Pick me up” starts with Sabbath boogie, achieves a kind of super-string cats-cradle of cosmic slop for the nominal chorus whinge of “Hold on” that unravels into a long acid drenched solo and ends in a brittle, bright clockwork counterpoint. The final track is a flanged- to-infinity Kosmic dirge with the guitar phasing back and forth in the mix over what seems like several light year’s worth of studio space. It’s a huge, rollicking, rambunctious ride, Mascis is clearly some kind of idiot savant notoriously inarticulate in person his guitar seems to wring out all the vibrancy, drive and emotion you could want. It’s up there with ( Hyperbole Alert) “Up on the Sun.” Pretty amazing, man.

Faint praise.

I make no great claims for Soft Circle’s latest, except it partially helps to fulfil my claim about the eastern element coming through in 2007. Some geezer who used to be the drummer in Black Dice (wow! Eh?) decides to fuse Sitar drones and tabla with a bit of electronica and folktronic strummyness. Certain to strike many, not only those who spent thirty years from the age of two learning at the feet of Prandit Pran Nath, as an abominable exercise in insultingly tokenistic hipster Yank hubris (it has titles like “Stones and trees” and “Shimmer” (ahem)) and while not entirely successful, the bloke’s a bit too flat and nasal to really lift the soul into the cosmos, like, ( most of the time he sounds like he’s shouting down from his sickbed for another mug of Lemsip) then again, it has also got a certain something too. I don’t imagine John Hassell or Terry Riley are exactly bowled over by it’s grasp of the tradition, but the final track sounds a bit like Hassel’s “Cities” gone House to me. Worth lending an ear to at least.

Shocking.

You know I hate Scritti Poliiti, yeah?

No I don’t, I don’t, I don’t……………. “Cupid and Psyche” is fucking amazing.

“Absolute” is one of the most gorgeous things I’ve ever heard, especially that weird , breathy-synthetic vocal riff that surges in toward the end and oh.. the twinkling synths over that kind of bubbly drum pattern…..y’know.. all THAT stuff…

I would like to take this opportunity to publicly prostrate myself before Green who I know regularly scours this blog hoping to glean a few morsels of intellectual sustenance in an otherwise bereft universe….and say … you have made some VERY GOOD records!

The Impostume in conjunction with Kino-FFisting Euro Partners The CPC, thrusts a well-lubed Prole forearm elbow-deep into the Po-Mo prolapsed, Bourgeoise back passage of Kontemporary Kinoma!

Kumming Atractions! Summer 2007’s Big Movies.

"Anna Id: a Naiad In Indiana."

The long awaited collaboration between simply the smartest guys ever to like also be really just regular guys who also enjoy, y’know, hanging out and stuff and just whatever, Charlie Kaufman and David O Russell. You nodded along in approving recognition at the endlessly arch, try-hard tropery of "I Heart Huckabees’" mutli-plot satirical celeb-smarmfest (" Corporations suck, but hey whaddayagonnado! Howabout goofy irony, will that help?!"). You wept at like just how todally true under all the hyperreal multi level plot trickery "Eternal Sunshine" was… now join the smart but kinda regular twosome, together for the first time, in their new movie, "Anna Id". The story of a play within a play within a play within a city that’s inside the head of a character in a play that’s… within another play that’s also not a play! "Brechtian alienation techniques were just so alienating at the end of the day, we wanted to be kinda alienating, to go with that energy but in a positive way, " Kaufman explains " kind of inclusively alienating, so we call it familiarating, it’s like that moment when you realise so wow, maybe we’re all just kinda weird and messed up inside and so like maybe that’s ok!!!! y’know, I’m made strange, you’re made strange. Here we are in Strangeville." Truly a tonic for those early third millennium blues. Worried that the world might be fucked? Hey, think you’ve got it bad? You could be a kooky suburban Nymph (played by thirteen different actresses! Including the big screen debut of spacehopper-headed Indie shriekstress Joanna Newsome!) who finds it hard to disentangle Fantasy from Reality and drifts whimsically along for years on her parent’s money before deciding hey! it’s not like there are any answers anyway, you know, and hey! maybe that is the answer in a way!

"So smart I had yet another crisis of intellectual confidence and went back to writing hysterical realism!" Zadie Smith

The Dourness.

"Lo and a grey blight of peevishness and general sulky apathy shall descend upon them."

London 2011 and the Chthonic mist leaking from the recently unearthed Stones of Mandrugaban which have been brought to the British Museum spreads an air of general despondency and all round shoulder shrugging. The Neo-Fascist Government introduces Martial Law to try and force the population into displays of enthusiasm for the upcoming Olympics. Can one man, armed with the memory of what life was like before The Dourness settled upon the land and with only a Tickling Stick passed onto him by the mighty warrior Kenneth of Dodd, a revolving bow tie and a plastic lapel flower that squirts water save the soul of the nation and rescue it’s people both from the ancient curse and the iron grip of government? With Oscar worthy turns from Nicole Kidman as Margaret Thatcher and Reese Witherspoon as Ken Dodd.

"Kidman gets her spunk-sponges out at 32:15 and again at 87:20. Well worth a twazzle!" Baz Lilliput. The Daily Sport.

The Death of Mr Longeuresku.

An octogenarian crawls along a Romanian hospital corridor for three and half hours before finally expiring just at the entrance to the doctor's office. Filmed in a single 210 minute static camera take as Mr Longeuresku inches slowly closer to the door, occasionally lapsing into unconsciousness for up to thirty minutes at a time, this film is really unlike a Hollywood movie. Not since the fifty three minute panning shot of the desolate Balshvenko mud flats in Bela Tarrpit’s very un- Hollywood-like "MagyarWaltz" have we been quite so aware of the inexorable passing of time and more painfully conscious of how we might be wasting it. A darkly human, comic, un-Hollywood-like masterpiece, a boldy humanistic vision of the human capacity to both humanly suffer and endure in its humanity, a defiantly un-Hollywood-like, visionary work.

"Totally un-Hollywood-like. Not even remotely so-called-entertaining or even slightly "engaging" on any level. Few filmmakers even care enough to dare to bore us to this degree. The kind of arse-numbing yawnathon that only the Europeans still have the artistic integrity to produce" Filip Phrench.

"Totally validates my desire to be perceived as someone who watches meaningful non-Hollywood movies and has a pronounced attention span. I didn’t stifle even one yawn, ok?!!" I.C.A Punter.