The Impostume may not know much, heck half the time he doesn’t even know what he likes, but if there’s one thing of which he is certain it’s that Oxbow’s “The Narcotic Story” was a masterpiece and Eugene Robinson, king of fools that he is, is hereby crowned with that mightiest of accolades, the Impostume’s joint number one album of the year. (err, take your place beside Panda Bear, ahem.)

The Narcotic Story massively expanded on Oxbow’s piledriving Sabbath blooze adding orchestration and jazz-lounge piano, bringing in space, depth and colour, warping 50’s big band swing and croon. There was new-found restraint in the music, the lyrical and the lush, the strings and violin slowly spiralling into a melee of twisting riffs, powerhouse drums, strung out gibbering and wailing. Apparently Robinson recently got told off for his sexual politics in the Wire ( gahhhh!) but no-one has ever caught or , dammit, given substantial voice to the vertiginous instability of “maleness” better than Robinson. Where the lyrics are audible there’s a recurrent theme of loss and pain, uncertainty, as Eugene shrieks and mutters, mumbles, harmonises, ululates and sometimes just plain sings, giving voice to all the states of male abjection from demonic revelry to murderous hate, to mewling little-boy-lost fear, scrabbling after the shreds and scraps of a self that the cruel blows of life keep casting to the four winds. The narcotic story is magnificently seductive theatre of abjection, the ghosts of Frank Sinatra and Robert Johnson fighting in a Vegas back alley over the last wrap of smack, Edward Hopper re-imagined by Francis Bacon. An imperial, blood-red Burroughsian epic, but the neglected Burroughs of “Junky” rather than the over-quoted “Naked Lunch”.

Psyche Rock

These two go together quite nicely. Izzit

Johnny Guitar Watson SPACE GUITAR 1954

HOHOHO.

That’s Christmas done then! I naturally oppose the colonization of every quadrangle of our Psykik space from birth onwards by the fantasmatically pellucid and remorselessly tessellating tendrils of gelatino-Kapital but the fact that these days Christmas itself is increasingly seen as an unwelcome intrusion into the real business of mindless consumption is certainly one of the few plusses going. Everything back to normal on Boxing Day, you say? Pity the poor service industry folks who to have work on it of course, but otherwise.. hooray for unfettered materialism!

Naturally, like any sane, healthy person I really spent the entire year listening to Richard Thompson and Miles Davis, but obviously as an ageing hipster-in-denial I also felt obliged to try and stay saggingly abreast of all the stuff that the kids ( for whom I maintain a lordly late-thirties combination of envy, contempt and irritation) were into. Admittedly I didn’t do very well, only really managing to hear the Klaxons and Arcade Fire. I sort of approved of the Klaxons and loved their sleeve design, packaging, general shiny conceptualism and slightly antiquated Lit-referencing (the obligatory Burroughs, Pynchon and such ) but the music didn’t really draw me in. The same for the year’s really big success story, hype-intensive and hypertensive Canadians Arcade Fire. Listening to their strenuous, rather clubfooted attempt to hit that big moment you kind of willed them on, come on, yes, let’s have some poetic grandeur, some cinemascope, but somehow they just never got there. It was the musical equivalent of performance anxiety, just when you thought grandiosity, pretentiousness, the epic were about to break through they quickly reigned it back in startled at their own temerity. It takes an ego as monstrous, and frankly a lyricism as unabashed, as Bono’s to deliver the truly messianic. The Arcade Fire tucked their hands into their cardigan sleeves a bit too much, finally wanted to just be one of us a little too earnestly, too middlebrow, too middle-class, too decent. We’re here to change your life, if that’s alright with you…

Of course you shouldn’t think this means that what I actually did spend time listening to wasn’t also pretty trad …..

Part Four: A Trad Tryptich

Andrew Weatherall? Rhymes with Haunted Dancehall? Sabres of Paradise? Produced Screamadelica? Hundreds of other bits of legendary rave-related bizniss, izzit? Means not much to Mr Impostume I have to confess. While a certain percentage of my peers were going “radio rental” I was doing literally pints of lager at Amphetamine Reptile all-dayers in New Cross. However, it seems that our paths have crossed at last.

(Err, it’s a top fifteen of the year or something, this.. leave me be.. I’m on a roll, fer fuck’s sake)

Compilation of the century was undoubtedly Weatherall’s insanely magnificent kickin-it-all-off contribution to Soma’s incipient Sc-Fi- Lo-FI series. What is it about that spacey combination of voodoo drums, sheets of reverb and treble-bright twang that’s so darn addictive? It’s the primitive-futurist thing, not yet risen to heights of self-consciousness! The spaceman in the jungle! While the compilation lacked the intergalactic bad-ass of Johnny “Guitar" Watson’s Space Guitar (see above) it more than compensated with the truly astonishing Jungle Fever from Charlie Feathers, a kind of senile, scattted suturing of doo-wop and hillbilly funk, the find of the year. From Link Wray Rockabilly through to The Shockheaded Peter’s Queer industrial R and B. Sci Fi Lo Fi was an absolute gem.

And Weatherall weirdly kept me hooked into his world with his own two projects last year, The Two lone Swordsmen’s “Wrong meeting” parts one and two, for which the stuff compiled on Sci-Fi-Lo-Fi had proved an inspiration. Genuinely against-the- grain concept albums-of-a-kind they were as in love with sixties garage, Goth and rockabilly as they could be ( a previous album, “ From the Double-Gone Chapel” saw them covering the Gun Club’s Sex Beat) the albums floated a backwoods', backroads' scenario of Tobe Hooper Americana inf(l)ected with buzzing, swooping synths. Perhaps not the most colourful vocalist in the world ( I assume it was Weatherall handling the vocals) and despite drafting in a couple of birds wot could actually sing the albums began to pall if taken together but in individual doses they had an oddness of intent and atmosphere, a cryptic, cavernous quality that kept me coming back for more.

Book of Knots #1

HOHOHOHO

Blogging on Christmas day, Mr Impostume, you sad bastard? No kids, eh? Family can’t stand you? Friends in short supply? No telly? Pissing it down outside, all the shops closed? No presents to unwrap? Just another dismal December Tuesday in your cramped, uncelebratory, congenitally deflationary heart?

Clearly the hour of Metal is uponeth us.

Part THREE

So essentially Profound Lore was label of the year beating off, err.. no other competitors at all as far as I knew, not being a very label-orientated guy. Most significantly for me the label had three of the most interesting Avant-metal acts around on ( notice how I keep the triptych thing going, it’s these bits of formal finesse that make the Impostume’s output the envy of the blogging world, izzit.) First of all they had Caina, which was a very good thing indeed..

..then they also had the Angelic Process, whose "Weighing Souls with Sand" I wrote about here, perhaps rather peremptorily suggesting it would be the best album of the year which it wasn’t, but it was still pretty-fucking-tremendous.

Then we had a whole slew of releases and re-releases from baroque drone behemoths, Nadja. Their more recent stuff, a spilt with Belgian noisemongers Fear Falls Burning and the ep "Gulited by the Sun” looked to have been heavily influenced by the Angelic Process’ military drums and weirdly viscid assaults, guitar like sudden vast surges of amber, a petrifying onrush that seemed to both distend and contract simulteanously, impossibly dense and suffocating yet oddly limpid, a tsunami of congealed light. Their masterpiece is still Bodycage, from 2005, re-released last year on Profound Lore. The textures here are all burnished mahogany, oak and darkly lusterous metal, a series of interleaved sliding panels inlaid with gold-leaf and mother of pearl. Bodycage has a stately, processional depth to which the likes of Sunn0)))'s weak and undernourished Oracle could only aspire.

I was also heavily into The Book of Knots an unusual kind of political art-metal collective out to document the ravages of post-industrial life in the US ( I wibble on about it here). Both the albums completed so far in the projected trilogy are superb, but 2007’s “Traineater” a cruise through America’s rustbelt was a righteous, pained and resourceful as its subject required (see above.)

HOHOHO!

Christ, is it 2008 yet ? Remember when the Millennium seemed to be inching slowly closer (what will the twenty-first Century be like!!!????......ahh, I see... ) time has sped up post 2000, innit. Actually, talking of regional variations (see previous post) heading down Trafalgar Road to buy a screwdriver yesterday my suspicion that “izzit” is now the default question tag/response to all questions was confirmed. The exchange went like this:

(geezer in skully) “ I thought you was still up in Woolwich.”
(young women (surprised)) “Izzit?”

Let North meet South in your very own discourse Mr Impostume:

“Yous two have been to the bingo, izzit?”

Part TWO

Yep the triptych thing's stuck… so here’s three more, I’m ashamed to say, pretty predictable choices for best albums of the year, lumped together on the basis of colour-scheme really. If the albums below all glowered to varying degrees then these three largely glowed.

It’s tempting to say that “ Comfy in Nautica” the Impostume’s Joint Number 1 album of the year, was simply the most life-affirming record ever made. Its devotional, fourth world, endlessly efflorescent pop was like some weird Arcadian Microverse saturated in impossibly rich colours and peopled by a more intrinsically joyful species than our own (izzit?). Waves lap at the shore, the vegetation teems, the air takes on rich hues, children sing and cry, thunder rumbles overhead, it’s tumultuous and tumid, fecund, overflowing and brought to mind the opening sequence of Malik’s fantastically great “ The Thin Red Line” and much of the slightly less great “The New World.” While Caina, Wyatt, Albarn gazed around the long, darkening day, the leaves rusting, long fingers of mist creeping in, Panda Bear was enjoying an Endless Summer of the Soul. Few records have ever sounded so generous, so bountifully full-to-the-brim with the sheer beauty of the world. Panda Bear was a kind of Anti-Hamlet ( WTF!? Now you’re going too far) somehow, he had of late, found all his mirth, re-animated his own quintessence of dust and set it all dancing ( that’s enough Shakesbear and Panda Spear comparisons, already!) The album which has most closely approximated the experience of being young and in love, running downhill toward the sea on a glorious mid Summer day. If I ever met Panda Bear ( careful now, don’t go doing a Woebot on him) I would probably feel the need to somehow personally thank him.

Obviously I only heard Black Moth Super Rainbow as Blissblog was banging on about them, and of course, he was bang on. There was as much colour and light in Dandelion Gum as you could need. A huge, glistening, multihued glacier of a record, it should be prescribed on the N.H.S as a cure for Seasonal Affective Disorder. Like finding the sweetshop of your childhood dreams hidden inside a dilapidated hillbilly shack. Great tartrazine-colured washes of sounds, exquisitely toothsome peaks of pink-icing inflected Moog, long, fizzy strips of sugar-rich Vocodered-up vocals. Chemical without being at all toxic, this was the kind of palette that only Chemistry can bring you, hyper-vibrant, a peek inside the mind of a supersmart kid hyped-up on Haribo.

What was I doing enjoying a Radiohead record? No-one was more surprised then I was, (actually, no-one else cared…. aha, you like the new Radiohead album, right. So???!!!) never having had much invested in them, generally finding them a bit too exactly-what-an intelligent-modern band-should-be and that Thom Yorke solo album downright dull. It might be the fact that I can’t even remember what “Kid A” or “Hail to the thief” sound like but “In Rainbows” seemed to sideline Yorke’s emoting and grimly adolescent “lyrics”and get on with some sinuous, glitchy, flowing and free floating, wonkily propulsive post-pop that put me as much in mind of Pram circa “Imaginary animals” as anything. Plus “Bodysnatchers” had that Killer-riff/ pealing echoplex guitar thing going on that, dammit all, it’s just hard to resist and " House of cards" was the best song U2 never got round to.

HOHOHO and a merry Christmas to one and all.

I’ve been a bit busy of late, visiting malingering, err... sorry, ill father up North, rediscovering the beauties of the Cumbrian demotic ( that plural version of you, for example “Yous” as in “ are yous going to the bingo?”) and entering a short story competition by writing a completely new short story instead of just dusting off some old stuff. How noble of me! There’s a five grand first prize and having just received the first half of my winter gas bill I can only pray to god I win it. Come on Zadie, sort it out and I promise to spend the money on the seven-hundred remaindered copies of “Utterly Monkey” in Meridian Books.

But that’s more than enough biographic tittle-tattle, Mr Impostume, you boring cunt. Give us some of your searing insights into the Netherworld of unpopular culture. To wit: What are your albums of the year?

Should I just do a list, or.. oh, alright let's have some waffle, if you insist......


Part ONE

Three albums that, for me at least, formed yea! a veritable triptych were Wyatt’s "Comicopera,” Albarn’s “The good, the bad and the Queen” and Caina’s “ Mourner.” They might even have been three generations of the same family. There was something, sprawling, damp and autumnal about all of them, they were all kinds of (Theoretical Antihumanists look away now!) literate, strongly persona-driven concept albums and all three seemed, however obliquely, to address the state-of-the-nation.

“Comicopera” was like wandering round a vast, dilapidated stately home, Wyatt’s oddly beautiful, saintly face hovering around every dank corner and leading you on, the wallpaper coming off the walls in great fronds, the woodwork warping, the family silver long since sold, traces of be-bop and vocal-harmony palely shining among the mildew and the mist creeping in from the fields. The Wire's album of the year, you say? Not quite mine but still, ludicrously, luminously rich and affecting.

Every fucker else's album of the year, you say? Then certainly enough has been said about TGTBATQ’s charcoal and woodcut Clashkinksian afrodubpop. Except! that it is charcoal and woodcut Clashkinksian afrodubpop and that it managed to beguile for the best part of an entire year where other more immediatley arresting treats ( see: Von Sudenfed) quite rapidly evaporated.

No-one's number one, not even mine, Caina will have to be content with number two this time though I'm confident that his next release will nail it.

I can’t emphasise enough how fantastic I thought “Mourner” was, or the injustice of its being almost totally overlooked. A brilliantly organic synthesis of extreme noise, death metal, post rock and dubbed out folk it felt like the natural heir to and a considerable extension on something like Bark Psychosis’s “Hex”, an alternately raging and drifting, meditative missive from the shadowlands of the national psyche. Shot through with a diffuse lyricism and palpable yearning for something more than this, it was an epic act of reclamation. Where so many attempts at these kinds of surprising hybridisations feel contrived (“ it’s kind of Napalm Death mixed with Rai, but done on a laptop”) “Mourner” felt utterly, uniquely right, the expression of a new sensibility in which a series of disparate elements have finally alchemically acceded to a higher form, all Neo-pagan hokeyness avoided.

I wonder if Caina isn’t a kind of Burial for metal heads. Personally I keep thinking (bear with me) of the Smiths, and not simply because of the confluence of Caina's plaintive " break yourself on rocks" with Morrissey's " and the rocks below say hurl your skinny body down son." Perhaps because, like Morrissey, Caina's muses are all ultra-white. But at least he's doing something interesting with them though, eh?

(Arab Strap react to the news with customary excitement during a liquid power-breakfast with their manager)

Arab Strap's latest single “Pished” culled from their 132 copy-selling latest LP “One more night moaning down the boozer (and still not learning how to sing)” is being touted at odds of 732-1 as a surprise Christmas number one!!! Their record label, Tartan Expectoration, has responded with delight saying, “We always knew that they had the potential to be bigger than the Beatles. That's why we passed up on the Arctic Monkeys to sign them.” The song, a typically gritty, low-key number played on a stringless acoustic guitar and recorded on a dictaphone in a skip behind the band's local has become a surprise smash with bored office-workers everywhere after it was used to soundtrack a hilariously zany NSFW Youtube video of two tramps beating each other to death over a bottle of Meths!!!!

Those lyrics in full!!!!!

Pished (oot ma fucking heed wi a hoor)

Dredgen tha Pobs tha Chresmas fucken Eeve

Ah wiz pished oot a ma wee fucken heed

Ah sin the way ye wiz standin theyr

Chewin on ya derrty, dyed black heyr

Ah had ma derrty, bloodshot eyes fixed on yer derrty bloodshot vadge

Ya smooth-talked mi, hen, wi yer: “ Get tae fuck, ya wee fuckin radge”

Doon tha backstrreet ah set tae choowin on yer grizzled auld bits

Rubbed ma wee, red-cheeked Santy-Clause betwin yer pleated auld tits

Ba 12:30 we wa snug in yer wee cooncil flaaat

Ah wiz so fucking randy, A’d a done yer wee fucking caaat.


Chorus:

Chew ma lumpy nutsack, run yer false nails doon ma fleecy back,

Another wee fucken tune, ba Arab fucken Strap,

Endlessly recycling, tha same old anti-romantic crap.

(repeat until band members lapse into diabetic coma....)

Right, I need to sort some links out for Industry Scum or the Impostume is just going to end up being a refferal service.

Thank you for your attention.

Industry scum!

Are there any (shudder) Lit Blogs out there that aren't horrible? PLEEEZZE pass some on to me!