Danzig - Cantspeak

one of Tricky's favourite tracks of that year as it goes. Try to look past the hair, people!

It's an Impostume Danzig-fest..anything to put off finishing that post on Black Sabbath!

The Misfits - Attitude

For Nina!

Misfits - Where Eagles Dare

Last Caress

NOW WITH CORRECTED SPELLING!!!

A couple of weeks ago we had a small requiem for Klaus Dinger round my sister’s house. It was brief and quite poorly attended, consisting basically of me and my brother in law,* listening to a selection from Neu 75, Dusseldorf by La Dusseldorf and then err.. the entirety of “Radioctivity” by Kraftwerk while waxing drunkenly lyrical about the Krauts, shite at winning wars, being funny and losing on penalties, brilliant at self-righteous nitpicking and producing the greatest music and literature of all time etc. Interestingly, my Broinlaw’s (a new portmanteau rendering of the otherwise time consumingly hyphenated brother-in-law) top five included “Autobahn” (it was all-Kraut-die-ganze-Zeit, except for Led Zeppelin,**) whereas mine was basically all, well, err, ahem, literate rock, as it went. You know, the singer as storyteller, the song as surrogate literature, maturity, progression, a memorable chorus, attitude, authenticity. I almost had myself drummed out of the blogosphere in a lather of self-denunciation before the Nu-Rockist Big Other!) But it did strike me that a kind of decreasingly realist trinity could be formed form La Dusseldorf’s “Dusseldorf”, Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” and “Isi,” three different senses of momentum through three radically different landscapes. “Dusseldorf” is a decidedly terrestrial affair, with its crowd sounds, it’s anthemic Civic-pride synth riff, Metropolitan and concrete, “Autobahn” already shimmers and glistens out into a more abstracted, hyperreal vision of the delights of the car and the future, the more solid forms of “Dusseldorf” already beginning to take on an irradiated, impressionistic sheen, premonitory of a kind of (now considered) impossible “liquid modernism,” just over the horizon, a utopian resolution which heralds the intensely exhilarating race for the stars of “Isi.”

They’re all cinematic tracks, all travelogues, the first two using sound diegeticly to locate us within a particular world, “Dusseldorf” has an airplane arriving over the background crackle of an airport, “Autobahn” the sound of a car door slamming and an engine starting up, but with “Isi” there are no referents, it simply arrives (or is ushered in), hovers for a moment then hits warp drive, the constellations wheel around us, ribbons of nebula drift into view, scintillate and are left behind, it’s as though the Futurist dream has been achieved at last: endless, frictionless propulsion. There’s a decreasing grit, traction and infrastructure to the three, until “Isi” is plumbing deep space, if the others are vehicular, “ Isi” is movement itself, the pure form, there is no diegetic frame, we’re witnesses, not passengers. A part of this is down to the rhythmic undercarriage of each track, Dusseldorf’s is kept low down in the mix, stadium rock tubthumping, dry, “Autobahn’s” alternately sharp and dull pistoning drum pattern still has a hint of steam and sprocket, while oddly on “Isi” it’s Dinger who somehow manages to seem post-technological, a set of adamantine wheels spinning within wheels.

But all of this is merely a preface to what I really want to talk about, which is stoner rock in one way, but also partially the notion that songs are dramatic forms.

Which will be the next post.***

*although, actually, we should have invited my dad downstairs. On a trip to Paris last year I took the opportunity to Wyatt my own father (never let it be said that age, infirmity or, pah! emotional/familial ties are sufficient to deflect the Wyatter from his true aim: to annoy!) subjecting him via the in-car CD player to a random assortment of old nonsense grabbed at the last minute. Didn’t matter what it was, his grizzled response was the same, a grimace of disbelief and the question, “Did you pay money for this, son?” Or, on being asked if he liked it, a contemptuous chuckle and shrug of the shoulders. Didn’t matter what it was. Robert Palmer’s “Clues” (actually a bit of auto-Wyatting going on there) Sam Cooke’s “Night Music”, The Mahavishnu Orchestra’s “Apocalypse” even the extraordinarily life affirming beauty of “ Soweta is where it’s at” by Dollar Brand (another track which uses diegetic tricks to rather brilliant emotional-tone-establishing effect it occurs to me, with it’s opening of a baby crying. (isn’t there another Dollar Brand track that opens with a rumble of thunder?) basically coming on like the south African musical equivalent of “man with a movie camera”) a track whose epic, dazzling lyricism is capable of bringing tears to the eyes was considered “Bloody awful.” Yet strangely when we stuck on “Flammende Herzen,” by Michael Rother he started tapping his finger on the back of the seat and at the end of the first track managed: “ Not bad that, son. We’ll listen to this one again on the way home." Which we duly did, zooming along the empty, early morning autoroute in quite contentment.

**Can’t stand ‘em myself. Robert Plant! Turn down the abrasively shrill sex god theatrics on that voice will you mate. Ye (hammer of the) gods! The sonic equivalent of being forced to wear an unbearably florid paisley-shirt lined with sandpaper and reeking of week-old cum.

***Unless I type up that thing I wrote on the plane last week first. Or get horribly sidetracked.

I was going to attempt to dismiss Control with one of the summary one-line putdowns I so childishly enjoy coming up with but it’s not really amenable to that (my initial thought was. “Can’t wait for the sequel. “Control 2." "He’s lost control….AGAIN!!!!!”) It’s not that “Control” really justifies much time or serious thought, it’s more that it gets it wrong in so many different ways that its badness resists simple summary.

First off I should acknowledge that I’m Curtis-neutral. I think Joy Division are alright, I only own one record by them (though trust me I’ve heard them plenty) “Unknown Pleasures” and I can’t remember the last time I listened to it. No, actually I can, it was about ten years ago. I can only imagine that if you are a “fan”, and not simply one who is going to be blown away by the mere fact that this is a film about Joy Division!!!! "Control" is even more disappointing.

Basically “Control” feels like a slick, unrisky, bet-hedging contribution to the ever-expanding Joy Division industry, falling (like a clumsy, sample-laden proctologist!) between several stools. Its take isn’t on the band themselves, there’s nothing at all about the (excuse my French) “creative process”, gigging, the economics and mechanics of the Biz, studio time with legendary producer Martin Hannett etc. In fact “Twenty four hour party people” spent more time on the process of recording and playing than “Control” does, and despite having much more time to devote to the other band members than TFHPP they come off as ciphers, largely on the same terms, Peter Hook’s a vulgarian, boyish Bernard’s the “nice” one, Tony Wilson (here also almost exactly modelled off the abysmally limited Steve Coogan’s very Partridge-esque and un-Wilsonian non-impersonation in TFHPP) is a ludicrous fop.

The central drama then is the tortuous double bind of Curtis’ marriage and affair, of trying to be a young, rock star dad, but the film doesn’t really work as a love triangle either. Given that it’s really only interested in Curtis it's a kind of triangle with only one side. Deborah Curtis (on whose book it’s based) gets less screen time than Rob Gretton and in trying to be all even-handed about the misery of Curtis’ married life can’t really portray her in any way at all, except as stoically “loving” (like any proper, decent Northern lass.) Neither she nor their daughter are granted an independent existence in the film. There’s no parallelisms drawn between her struggles as a working class wife and mother with an absentee father and husband having an affair and leaving her alone for long periods of time, as this would start to impinge on the Curtis' myth a little too much. Tortured genius, torn in all directions certainly, a prodigy of conscience and consciousness no doubt, bit of a selfish, sexist wanker off shagging Belgians while his missus scrimps and saves looking after the kid and has to get a part time job, dear me, no! While he might question his inability to be a good dad, it’s simply used as another way of dwelling on his almighty angst, the film offers no critique, no substantial attempt at a balance, Curtis isn’t seen from anyone’s perspective but his own. The tragedy is being an impulsive man who married and had kids too young as opposed to the tragedy of being a woman who married and had kids too young with an impulsive, unstable man. Curtis is the towering romantic artist,who achieved something with his life, so the film must be constructed entirely from his perspective, helping the Cannonization of Saint Ian to reach critical mass (hasn’t Morley just brought a book out on Joy Division? (don’t get me wrong I’m eager to read it, “Nothing” being one of my favourite books of the past ten years.) Isn't some lengthy documentary on the horizon, etc.)

In one of its clumsier moments, and there are plenty, Curtis comes home and looks at his daughter in her crib. A reverse point-of-view shot cages Curtis in the crib's bars, the prison that is fatherhood and domesticity. It’s unintentionally comic, but lacking any more subtle or elaborated sense of just why the role of father and husband is so awful, any concrete sense of the daily attrition and compromises, the expectations and urges on both sides it has to resort to Big Signifiers.

There are two moments of equally monumental semi-comical clunk: both of them revolve around the use of classic Joy Division tunes. The first is the moment when Ian confesses to Debs that he might not love her anymore, the lines on the road striking a symbolic divide between them. As she walks away “ Love will tear us apart” strikes up. See! Love really was tearing them apart. It’s tremendously unsubtle, as is the even more clichéd discovery of Curtis’ body, a shot that holds on the outside of the house as Deborah enters. We wait for the inevitable scream of recognition. How long will it be…..maybe she’s nipped upstairs for a piss, or worse, it could be ten minutes before she gets to the kitchen. AAAAGGGHHH!!!!!!. Ah, there we go. In comes “Atmosphere” with a resounding clunk as Morton emerges distraught into the street. Let’s not even get on to the final shot of Curtis’ ashes dispersing themselves into the sky as he achieves a kind of invisible, over-arching artistic immortality becoming somehow part of the very “Atmosphere” we breathe. “We are all Ian Curtis!” Or something. And while it seems mean- spirited to say so, much additional clunk is also added by the use of Curtis’ own letters and notes, none of which sound anything other than utterly banal, we know he really meant it, man, but it’s still doggerel.

Where the film’s good is in the band’s performances, the rawer, punkier kinetic kick of the live sound and at the other extreme, its depiction of depression as a slow implosion, a closing down of the idea of any possibility of movement or change, a draining away of the will. Cormac Mc Carthy’s apocalyptic “dimming away of the world” is really a description of depression's slow leeching of light and vital energy both from without and within, a trajectory you’ve found yourself on, pulling you out past the world of normal concerns and relations and into a paralysed no-man’s land. Curtis grows progressively more mute and sunken and in the final scenes of him watching TV and wandering round the house he’s already dead, inescapably entering a kind of negative velocity, a collapsing of linear time and forward momentum into a point of absolute density and stasis, the universe rushing back to a point of terminal contraction. His eyes half closed, words barely accessible to him, unreachably distant, he may as well be on the moon.

But, all in all it feels like a missed opportunity, one more hollow hagiography. Or maybe more of a marketing opportunity, my DVD came with a few adds for Cds and books before the film.

I ask you, is this what Sid died for? Or Ian for that matter?

The Twanglehumpingtons featuring Geenerica: “Spazztiddleupaguffagus” (B is for Boingafriend)

While a costive antichildlikishness may or may not be but finally is the preserve only of the venomously small of soul, the Twaglehumpingtons oeuvre (for oeuvre it is, be ye naysayer or gainsayer, for an oeuvre can not be made without a breaking of eggs) does, within the confines of its Lego-flavoured quadrangle, convey an infinitely schoolyard brightness caught in the looming shadow of arch New Cerebralarian (and who can not have had the infinitely remote corners of their late-seventies souls invigorated by their fiercely tremulous New Cerebralarian manifesto?) stalking-horse Pitt Humphrey’s, whose louche curlicues of trombone effluvium as part of the long-forgotten, forlornly suburban melancholics “Andy’s Knee-socks”, cut a dapperly Flapperesque Fitzgeraldian swathe through post-punk's oikishly prole-cult Piltdownmanisms.

Notunwithstanding the enmanglement of syntaxt here is to be found an infinitely admirable use of foot neither Goosey-Lucily enwebbed not reductively dactylic. In (On? Under? Between? Such is the prepositional befuddlement any encounter with the Twanglehumpingtons portends) tracks such as the infinitely and admirably ample “Oompa, oompa, (carpet-bombing Kuala Lumpur)” performed here in a veritable Glasnost of thawed Coldwarisms by Russian R and B Divotchka, the purringly wolfish Beeee-atchnik whose stirringly whimsical, Harrison-Birtwhistle-down-the-when-I’m-cleaning-Windows-isms tingle and roost like an itchy chicken in the fox-worried coop of the modern mind. Any notion of pastiche or parody or is soon frogmarched to the scaffold of judgement by the baying mob of refined sensibility as “Thwank, Thwank, Thwank” frugs frugally with a gamine’s insouciant obviousness, standing as a close but unmarried cousin to both The Hydrocephalous Foreheads “I’m in love with a girl who works down our chip shop and swears she’s Hitler“ and The Triple X Chromosomes architec-tronically plates-of-meat shifting “Cyborgasm”, a white-funk Fandango from the bitterly harvested anus horibilus of 1981, number one only in my grey Oxbridgian bedsit world of late night radio and suet-flavoured spangles sucked to keep the drabness at bay perhaps, even if in the world of those self-appointed arbiters of taste, the British public, it reached only number 332 in the hairycornflakian doldrums of that year’s Hit Parade.

A whipperwhilling stampede of sugar-frosted Melismatron heralds the entrance of finely-boned Negro songstress (and isn’t Negro, more than Negress so apposite, so Some-Earth-Mother’s-Do-‘Ave-‘Em right in this context. Are Frank and Herbert Spencer but two sides of the same prodigiously, infinitely orotund coin?) Kanbi with “Scouts On Her” a Baden-Powell-to-the-people jam-and-marmite-with-the-crusts-cut-off, Black Mother’s Pride sandwich of a track, as profound in it’s own way as the works of Plato. For as perspicacious readers of “The Purple Prose of Cairo” will recall my having sagaciously observated, all of western pop is but a footnote to “Itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow (and yet why “yellow”?? and yet further, why “itsy”) polka dot bikini.”

A further footnote, perhaps, yet a footnote noted for not only it’s feet, but also its handsomely shaped leg, the infinitely generous modesty of it’s hips (they yield yet also clamp, as with the gripping, velveteen, vaginissimus of preteen, polka-inflected number “ Well Hungarians (all the blonde girls love)” For had the Twanglehumpingtons not existed to whom would the infinitely ample perspicacity of soul have been granted in order that they should have been invented?

Ufommamut - Mars

new album truly awesome. this is off the last one. will write about it soon!