Matt Woebot makes a fleeting return to the blogOsphere here.

Brilliant first contribution from Alex over at the 90's blog, hopefully the first of many!

Another one of Wayne's "how the fuck does he come up with this stuff?" posts at the 70's blog.

Knight bigs up Level 42. yeah, you read that right....

There’s so much to contend with musically, so many scenes, artists and micro-genres that flare up sputter out and die, so much momentum both forward, backward and laterally that trying to be a reasonably conscientious listener circa the 00’s has been almost impossible. A full time job, which if it is your full-time job is just about manageable I imagine, but if you’re a mere punter, especially one for whom music is but one of your abiding obsessions, it’s almost impossible to absorb the sheer hyper-abundance of music new and old that’s regularly laid at your doorstep/ stumbled upon.

This much is widely known and is merely a preamble to what I really want to talk about, which is: love.

Is there any record of the last five years or so that I can honestly say I love, any record I have repeatedly returned to, any record that has moved me deeply, that gets into my bones, produces that fluttering in the pit of your stomach, that elevated, swooning sense of transport, of attachment and identification? One that produces an odd sense of faith in humanity, in its possibilities, the range of the imagination in all its surprising strangeness and richness? Any record that humbles you, that pains and delights you in equal measure, that feels beyond you in the way great work should?

Are you even allowed to make such claims for a record these days? A consequence of the glut not just of music but of critical voices is bet-hedging, there is a certain canon of giants we can all broadly agree on as we all equally agree we live in diminished times, cautiously approving this or that interesting development along the way: passionate enthusiasm for a record seem gauche, or at least a little reckless, ill judged. A certain dry sociology seems to predominate, a second guessing of trends and a formulating of genres, positioning oneself with regard to theory, history. None of this is per se wrong, but without being prepared to be wrong, without being prepared to embarrass yourself, things get creaky and stale.


Anyway, the record in question is the debut album by the Wild Beasts.










This is not a record that I find “interesting” in anyway, it’s a record I love. I love it for several reasons, firstly for the extravagant power and poetry of its lyrics, for its unashamed and unabashed desire to be poetic, secondly for its sheer insistent idiosyncrasy, its absolute determination to follow its instincts into wild and windswept territory. I also love its Englishness, its absurdism, its theatrics, its seaside postcard naughtiness its cherubic choirboy innocence, its horny-handed lusty paganism, it’s celebration and its sense of loss.

I also think its a very Northern record, there’s something in its defiant, non-hipsterish artiness, in its revelling in bloody-minded pretension that could in some ways only come from the North, from small towns, grey slate and looming hills, an imagination that could only be nurtured in quiet places, close to the countryside where time and history hang heavy: the dreams here are deeper, richer, more engulfing and necessary than they ever can be in the capitol. The Wild Beasts are great adepts not of England’s dreaming as much as of its Dreamtime, mining a rich seam of English reverie. The use of archaisms, elaborately florid language and sombre rustic imagery add to the sense that the songs and the singers inhabit an arcane, magical world. The albums title conjures it up perfectly, “Limbo, Panto”.










The vocal chores on the album are split between Hayden Thorpe (falsetto) and Tom Fleming. The falsetto vocal, post “Grace” is a wearying cliché, sensitive new-man modulations in Keane and Radiohead, but Thorpe’s falsetto is an all together different prospect, deployed for a pointedly a-typical set of affects, queenishly vamping or striking out at oddly surreal angles, more akin to the disturbing camp of The Tiger Lillies or the Associates. Imagine a wild combination of early U2, the Associates and The Blue Orchids. Sounds like a horribly unpalatable farrago, and in some sense it is, yet it's also, due to its singular conviction, uniquely, awkwardly powerful and beautiful.











All of this is carried forward in the music’s chiming, interlocking grooves, a kind of knockabout Music Hall thump-along, a spit and sawdust knees-up in some backwater pub. There’s a sense of something faintly antique in the music too, of dusty clockwork and rusted cogs, pendulums and gyroscopes, dark panelled wood, gleaming horse brass and dust motes scintillating in the sunlight. The vocals soar and swoop, tremble at crystalline heights and drop down to earthy, hotly embodied growls and grunts. The Wild Beasts understand the fullness of life, its range, the ways in which it’s both farcical and fearful, the delirious enormity of existence and are determined to have it, to have as much of themselves and as much of life as possible, beyond all considerations of decency or appropriacy. It’s an immoderate album, immature in the best sense of that word: it has yet to acknowledge any constraints: it overflows with reckless becoming.

*I really like the follow –up “Two Dancers” but can’t escape the feeling that somone from the record company buttonholed them and told them to tone it down a bit, to write a more restrained record. Maybe not, but I wish they would just let themselves go, offer up something heroically uncontrolled. I’m holding out hope for the next one, but given they’ve moved to Dalston, I’m not optimistic.

Highly entertaining post on 70's left wing comic strip by the High Lord of Concrete here. Nice Scans!

Special Guest Culla giving it some 90's and 00's Sonic Truth here.

new post on 80's blog here.

geto boys unedited version damn it feels good to be a gangsta

Da Lench Mob - Freedom Got An A.K.

The Fall ~ Fantastic Life

You are a door - Mordant Music

Yep I’m pissed again…..

… and you should, I’m sure, never blog under the influence…

But someone just emailed me to ask if I’m having a go at K-punk in the below post…

And with all due respect and all that, but it’s pitiful, innit, the degree to which some people would like to see a spat occur…

OF COURSE I’m not having a go at Mark bleeding K-Punk.

Here’s who I’m manifestly not having a go at: anyone in that links bar over there, err…anyone they know….

I will also happily support the endeavours of both Laurie Penny AND the SWP if that’s alright…
yeah I have reservations, but thenm fewer reservations than I do about myself….

Plus… and here I’m branching off a tad, but…isn’t some kind of public spat between former ”compatriots” just the most hollow and Oedipal thing to do.. like if I had a serious objection to, say, Owen’s position on something I’d certainly have more dignity and decorum than to act out in some semi- public arena, like a great hysterical flouncy tart trying to make a name for himself by killing Daddy in the all seeing arena of the blogosphere. I’d like, email him and have a meaningful dialogue. Credit me with a modicum not just of decorum, but with a bit of loyalty…

Actually I have to say loyalty seems a fundamentally important category to me… my loyalty isn’t easily won but I know human decency and commitment when I meet it. I love these people you fools! They are the best of England!

I’ll doubtless regret posting this tomorrow, but it will be the right kind of regret.

Onward!!!

I haven’t been in the UK for about 2 months now and left more or less just as the student protests were kicking off. What I’m suspecting is that a whole swathe of people who even three or four months ago were broadly dismissive of leftist-y rhetoric and positions, cleaving to well-worn Late Capitalist orthodoxies of dismissing class-based grievances and struggles as relics of the past and congratulating themselves that they were smarter and more modern, cooler, than all that earnest, shouty and angry political stuff are now, sensing that maybe the fashionable, the “cutting edge” thing to be in 2011, is committed and anti-apolitical are, with varying degrees of success no doubt, now trying to reposition themselves as “he/she who knows” and doubtless with the same ego-salving, loftily dismissive air: “yes of course I was always of the Left, but at the time we all quite reasonably believed..” will be one strategy, another will be to broadly approve, with several “mature” objections so that you don’t seem to be too desperately reversing your position just because like, it now seems kind of unhip to be saying that stuff…

These people will scrabble after the authoritative discourse and try to cloak their essential emptiness in a little of its glory every single time there is some kind of shift, cultural, political, economic, whether to the left or the right, depending on where they feel they need to be situated in regard to power or the thrill of the underground. Prior to the financial crisis they dismissed predictions as scaremongering and racked up debt: straight after it they were telling you of course it couldn’t go on that way and were into bargain hunting, boasting how they had an i-phone app that let them compare the price of onions on any British high street, austerity being breifly the clever-person's choice. There is a left inclined version too who will have gone from “progressive Left-liberal”, dismissing any critical talk of Neo Liberalism or redistribution or revolution as Old-thinking, to being excited by its shiny new, Twittered-up rebirth, quietly trying to bury that old self they used to take such pride in and desperately reading up on all the right names and notions to drop in blogposts, tweets and pub chat. Political principle is this year’s lifestyle choice! Irony is starting to look so Last Decade...

So maybe it's time to scrap that novel you were writing, designed to demonstrate the range of your classical erudition yet heavy with pop culture references, wacky incidents, multiple narratives, kooky characters and smartarsed riffing on the minutiae of Late Capitalist life (but with a kind of diffuse melancholy thrown in so that it has some like, gravitas, yeah?) and go for something angry about the New Disaffected. They look like what’s happening right now. Maybe something about a gang of mixed race Urban youths who get involved in a protest, all set over one day, that exposes the divisions in our society and the vested interests and state power, kind of Kidulthood meets Saturday, or a British La Haine. Of course that way you can also show off your ghetto-smarts with the street-speak and the Grime and dubstep refernces, but it'll be an act of sympathy and solidarity with the underclass! Yeah, maybe that’s how you’ll get to be the voice of your generation.

Hey! Maybe this post will get re-tweeted by exactly the kind of people it attacks as a way of helping them kid themselves/others that it's talking about someone else!

Trust me, I'm the last man on earth who wants to actually agree with the Spleen about anything but I saw the reformed Pop Group last year too, and they were absolutely great.

Swans however, were dull as dishwater. So good not to have agree too much.