Staccato Signals

They are Romantics, in love with a dead sound but intent on resurrection. The music was supposed to have died in 1959, but apparently no-one told the Raveonettes. Named after a mixture of the Buddy Holly song Rave On and the band the Ronettes, they look like film noir, they have a song called Attack Of The Ghost Riders and they sound like dashed hopes and broken dreams!
Their dark and seedy world of speed, women, cigarettes and rebellion, leather jackets and twisted love, is a glamourised ideology, steeped in Rock ‘N’ Roll mythology. And this is wonderfully preserved by their punk attitude, their Gretsch guitars and their good hair.
And the music more than lives up to the image. They turn brokenhearted songs of love into heart breaking songs of lust. With Everly Brothers style melodies and surf rock riffs glistening through a haze of Jesus And Mary Chain feedback, the sound is one that swells up around you and draws you in to deep dark places. And as your are surrounded by the echos, the darkness and the noise, almost left without hope, like stars scattered through the night sky, beautiful notes shimmer from glistening guitars and your broken heart is almost satisfied…
Rock ‘N’ Roll isn’t dead, and as long as bands like the Raveonettes are around it cannot be destroyed.

This, for me is one of those songs that just cuts deep into your soul and just… takes you away with it… or something, I don’t know… It’s just good!

So, I haven’t posted much in a while, I’ve been really busy. But the next post in the series will be good, I hope, and worth the wait. But for now, here is a little interim post. I have just watched this interview with the Black Keys about selling music for commercial use. Very interesting.

Watch the video and let one of my absolute favourite bands, the Grammy winning, world touring Black Keys explain…

“if you are going to be exposed to music randomly, I’d rather it be our music…”

It’s almost like an unwritten rule, that eventually bands just get worse with age, and far too many of them don’t call it quits soon enough. And you know the cliché, to say you prefer a bands early stuff. Well here’s the exception, Polly Jean Harvey!

She didn’t really start off badly, her personality, her songwriting and trashy guitar playing meant that she slotted quite well into the end of the grunge era. But Harvey’s character and creativity was always headed for a more beautiful destination, right from the start. She’s particularly noted for consistently producing records that sound nothing like the last. And having surpassed many a conventional understanding of rock music, her sound has gradually progressed from the raw blues power of Dry to the well finished indie pop electronica of Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, to the sweetly sung piano hymns of White Chalk. However, despite constantly changing her appearance and getting a bit bored of playing guitar, there is one thing that has remained the same, one constant that fuels her persistence in writing songs…

P J Harvey scares me just a little bit, but it’s her brutal honesty and emotion, as she pours it out almost sacrificially to herself, that draws me into her broken and beautiful world. And I think that’s why I love her music so much. She makes me uneasy sometimes and she can keep me on edge. But if you can sink through the harshness of her reality, as she presents it, you can easily immerse yourself in a thoughtful, considerate and intensely satisfying world of sound. And more than most other bands I listen to, P J Harvey can take me out of my self and consume me, with the power of her fragility. Every album I listen to has the same pulse, the same idea, the same feel, despite the constantly changing aesthetic. I listen to her as she mourns and laments and pulls through her experience of life and wraps it around instruments and words as she tries to find reason and meaning. This thrills me on a level where thrill and enjoyment seem to be an intrusion, but there is nothing like it.

I’m writing more specifically about one of her albums in a month or two. It’s an album that I think everyone needs to hear at some point. But for now, here is lovely a song from a joint album she did with a guy called John Parish. You probably wont like it…

If you don’t already know, I have quite a fascination with two man bands, 5 of my top ten favorite bands are duos! It’s like my fascination with the colour red. It happened upon me purely through coincidence, and has now become an intrinsic part of my personality. Any band that consists of less than three people but is more than one person will instantly attract my attention. I have come across only one that I dislike! But a band with one boy and one girl was never really going to work when the drummer is the boy and the guitarist is the girl, what were they thinking? And such a stupid name too…

Nevertheless, there are many two man bands out there that I have a lot of appreciation for, and most of them are boy/girl duos too. None of these bands will be part of this blog series, but if you find the time you should probably pay some attention to Joy Zipper, Fiery Furnaces, Crystal Castles, Royksopp and Air!

The Knife however are a band that I just have to mention. They are one of the weirdest musical partnerships I have ever come across and not least because they actually are brother and sister, unlike a certain other band who just lied about being siblings… They have produced some of the most incredible music I have ever heard! And there isn’t actually another band I can think of that I would consider to be better than the Knife. I guess I don’t really know a lot about them as a band, they are Swedish, they wear crazy masks and they have a song called lasagne. But that’s all boring stuff really, compared to the incredible sound they create; beautiful layered patterns of hypnotic repetition that create an exotic blend of abstract electronica that will sink to the depths of your audible capabilities. The Knife are master manipulators of synthetic sounds, creating the most carefully considered compositions I’ve ever heard. Their sound is meticulous, logical and almost mathematical, like you are listening to an equation being solved. It is not music that happened by chance. There isn’t a lot in life that satisfies so deeply, the Knife are one of the finest products of common grace and I would suggest that you should immerse and indulge yourselves in their sonic sound-scapes.

I’ve run out of words… Hope you enjoy the video!

I’ll be honest, despite my collection of skinny jeans, check shirts and over sized sunglasses, I’m not much of an Indie music fan. I’m not sure what you class as Indie, I’m not entirely sure I do either… It’s kind of just another one of those aesthetically pleasing yet rather ambiguous terms used describe specific current musical trends that ends up becoming its own pop genre… Like Punk! What was that all about?

I guess when I think of modern day Indie music, I’m thinking of stuff like the Strokes, the Libertines, Bloc Party, Editors perhaps, maybe even stuff like the Killers. Bands that are just alternative enough to be hip, but break through into the mainstream enough to be socially acceptable to the rest of the world.

Well, I have the first two Strokes albums and I really have no idea why… Anyone want two free albums?

Anyway, I think modern day Indie music is thoroughly letting down the ‘alternative’ scene! Kids these days still look pretty cool, but when bands start giving themselves names like Scouting for Girls, surely that’s a sign of bad times…

Maybe you don’t associate Indie music with the 60′s, but let me suggest that my third band in the series, the Yardbirds, are the best Indie band of any decade.

The Yardbirds were slick, stylish, well dressed, very capable and innovative. They put out some of the trashiest Rock ‘N’ Roll covers as well as their own brilliant brand of psyche pop and I absolutely love them!

So it turns out that I don’t really know a lot about the Yardbirds, they seem to be a little bit forgotten since their heyday and I think I’ve just used a lot of words to not really say very much… I think I can say however, that the Yardbirds are a band for people who like music, who like the look the sound and the feel of music. They played their songs with an appreciation of the past and a respect for the future. They didn’t really seem to have any agenda, no hidden motive for making music other than for the pure joy and the thrill of it. I don’t really think they ever properly pushed through into the mainstream of things, but they were compelling enough and significant enough to catch the attention of 60′s British hipsters! Also, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page all played a part in forming that distinct garage rock sound! I bet you never knew that! Thank the Yardbirds for Led Zep!

Week 2 of my top 10 series and number 9 on my list of favorite artists, Junior Kimbrough.

I like broken things. I like the look and sound and feel of broken things. I find myself constantly attracted to broken things. I especially like to take pictures of broken things. I find broken things disturbingly satisfying, probably a sign of my own brokenness. Nevertheless, I find brokenness beautiful.

Junior Kimbrough was a broken man. Few have heard of him, you can’t buy his music on the high street, but there are few artists I would rather listen to.

Junior was a blues singer and the blues are sad. The sound of his music is sad, and his words are sad. And I’m helplessly captivated by his lyrics as they paint pictures of a stark reality. In his song ‘Sad days, lonely nights’ he sings;

My momma told me
I was a child
She said, “Son,
You’re gonna have hard days”
My daddy told me too
He said, “Son,
You’re gonna have sad days
Lonely nights
Setting alone
Head hung down
Tears runnin’ down”

A negative sentiment if ever there were, yet he says these things very matter of fact, like with a sigh of acceptance. And when you can’t hear his words through his lazy drawl, you can understand the sense of his putting up with and getting on with life through the music. Through the way he plays his guitar, and through the way his band sluggishly churn out these repetitive, hypnotic grooves. It’s not a happy sound but I think it’s somehow uplifting. His words are an interpretation of and the music is a response to his life. It’s a way to utilise the brokenness and turn it into something of value, in and of itself. Even when the musicians make what might be considered mistakes, wrong notes, or a slight misjudgement of timing are part of what makes this music beautiful.

Now that I’ve depressed you all, I will share with you a glimpse of hope. A song that suggests Junior was a man who did actually long for more than what he settled for.

Junior Kimbrough, a man who understood his life, but a man who thought that life was all that it was, a man who knew how to tell it how it is…

So, I’m going to post about my top 10 favorite bands, albums and songs. Hopefully one a week for the next 30 weeks. Starting with bands, I’ll post roughly in an ascending order, from 10th – 1st in each category, according to a fairly tenuous preference. Unless it’s White Stripes, then you may safely assume that I prefer it over anything else! I have 3 complete lists so far, but they may change a bit by the time I actually get round to posting. They were hard lists to compile, but I think they give the best overview of my particular musical preferences, of which the whole world should be aware!

10. The Doors

I was wondering around an MVC once and had no idea what kind of brilliant music was being pumped through the store’s stereo system. I thought it sounded like the Animals, only a bit heavier and edgier. That’s always a good thing in my books! Turns out it was L.A. Woman by the Doors. L.A. Woman is the last album the Doors made, but the first I heard and bought. It’s a fantastic album written on the back of so much experience by a band who knew exactly what they were doing. It’s an album that is fully engaged with the popular music trends of the time and has a very modern sounding set of songs that don’t neglect the blues rooted sentiment that brought about so many big bands like the Doors themselves, the Rolling Stones, Cream, Led Zep and even Pink Floyd.

And I think that’s what I love most about the Doors, that they constantly pull through an appreciation of their influences, musical or otherwise. Twisted through the black magic of Jim Morrison’s brain and sympathetically arranged with great insight and imagination by as fine a set of Rock ‘N’ Roll musicians as ever there were, there isn’t much in my opinion that can compete with what the Doors produced over their short period.

One of my favorite Doors songs is a cover of a Howlin’ Wolf tune (I think). It’s a song as dark and dirty and suggestive as Jim Himself and in typical Doors style it carries you off almost in a trance with its hypnotic blues rhythms! Ladies and gentlemen, Back Door Man!!!

(this version also seems to include a bit of Crawlin’ King Snake, for good measure

It’s the end of the summer now and for about 5 months straight I can’t say that I’ve listened to much that isn’t Miles Davis, John Coltrane or the song Take Five by Dave Brubeck and his quartet.

I find this a bit odd and was wondering why, because at least on the surface I just don’t get Jazz as a genre. To be honest, if you don’t listen to much of it, it really does all sound the same. It all seems to lack structure and direction and often sounds, as Homer Simpson would say, like they are just making it up as they go along! Nevertheless, I just can’t get enough. It’s just like magic in my ears. Or maybe crack, I don’t imagine magic is very addictive… My latest purchase is Bahia by Coltrane, my main man at the moment. The title track is this crazy little riff led by piano and bass that bounce up and down in the background with Coltrane going a bit nuts on his tenor. And there is this great bit about 1 minute 20 seconds in when he makes these weird quite distorted noises on his sax that just sound awesome. It’s kind of like a Jack White solo, like on Black Math or Ball and Biscuit where he’s not really playing much, melody or tune, but just brilliant improvised noise is happening! Man, what a good song, you just gotta hear it -