Art Brut – Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out! (Alcopop! Records album, 2018)

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“We’ve got a lead singer. Doesn’t really sing. Lives off his paintings. Got a flat in Berlin.”
– Art Brut, ‘Kultfigur’

Some seven years on from their last LP, much has changed for Art Brut. Two members from the original line-up, Jasper Future and Mike Breyer, have left, while enigmatic frontman Eddie Argos has various taken on the mantle of playwright, comic book writer, death’s door hospital patient, father and painter-for-hire.

Some seven years on from their last LP, much has stayed the same for Art Brut. Honestly, it’s like they never really went away. New drummer Charlie Layton, lately from The Wedding Present, and new guitarist Toby MacFarlaine have slotted so neatly into the Art Brut fold alongside original members Freddy Feedback (bass), Ian Catskilkin (guitar) and Argos that it’s like they always belonged here. The album was faithfully produced with Jim Moray, who also worked with Argos on his musical The Islanders, which was performed at Edinburgh’s Fringe in 2013.

Wham! Bang! Pop! Let’s Rock Out! is everything you want from an Art Brut record – the spiky, punk-informed, joyful guitar pop, the erudite non-sequitur-laden spoken observations of Eddie Argos, cheekily assimilated reference points (Lionel Richie, Phil Spector) and an ethos that’s simultaneously meticulously polished and chaotic by equal terms. In all of those many essential ways, the LP picks up precisely where Brilliant! Tragic! left off and that is a truly fantastic thing; sometimes you don’t realise you’ve missed something until it comes back, and that’s part of what this album charmingly represents, a continuation of something that should never have ever been allowed to fizzle out.

And yet, it also finds Art Brut somewhat changed. This is inevitable. We’re all seven years older, seven years wiser (whatever that is), seven years more experienced and probably seven years poorer. A lot can happen in seven years, and the turbulent upheaval of Argos’s personal life is unavoidably present in these songs. The album seems to pivot on the epic ‘Good Morning Berlin’. Here you find a Blur-ry swagger with antediluvian whistling and jangly ‘Country House’ guitar; it all sounds perfectly cheerful until there’s a slightly melancholy, wistful chord change on the bridge that coalesces into a concluding passage laden with regret, mournfulness and a sense of abject disbelief at the state that Argos finds himself in.

That sharp change in direction seems to reveal the catharsis at work on this album. The songs might sound as full of unbridled joy as they ever did, but here you find Argos working through everything from separation, coming to terms with sobriety, staring at hospital ceilings, watching someone you’ve spent intimate moments together shack up with someone else, and that heart-racing, sweaty-palmed excitement of falling in love all over again after years of comfortable coupledom. Yes, the delivery is unchanged, the wry humour is undiminished, but the content is infinitely more personal.

How you approach Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out! depends on whether you want to spend too long thinking through the sentiment of Argos’s words; if you don’t, tracks like ‘Hooray’ or ‘She Kissed Me (And It Felt Like A Hit)’ or ‘Hospital’ just sound like fantastically refreshing power-pop tracks, replete with overamped guitars, glam handclaps, occasional Theremin-like synths, horns and dizzying levels of unstoppable energy. Spend a bit of time in their company and what you find is a band that’s quietly, subtly matured, but still capable of rocking out as if time stood still.

“There’s a fire in my soul / I can’t put it out.” shouts Argos on the album’s irrepressible title track, and that says it all.

(c) 2018 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Berlin Blondes – The Complete Recordings (1980 – 81) (Strike Force Entertainment album, 2018)

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“Like most musical scenes, early synth-pop was littered with groups that didn’t quite make it; bands who should have been more successful than they were but who ultimately watched groups perceived as more deserving of acclaim have huge success and marketing energy bestowed upon them, while they were relegated to the role of mere footnotes – at best.

Such was the case with Glasgow’s Berlin Blondes, who wound up on the sidelines of the 80s synth dawn, already mostly broken up before their solitary album was in the can…”

I reviewed The Complete Recordings 1980 – 81 by overlooked Glasgow synth-pop group Berlin Blondes for the Cold War Night Life website. The album was released on Barney Ashton’s Strike Force Entertainment sub-label of Cherry Red.

Ashton is also the author of the Torsten plays which feature Erasure‘s Andy Bell as the troubled Torsten character. A third installment of the Torsten series is imminently expected.

You can read my review here.

(c) 2018 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence for Cold War Night Life

Electronic Sound Issue 47

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Electronic Sound issue 47 is now available, featuring a very special in-depth look at Wendy Carlos’s work for Stanley Kubrick’s still-disturbing film of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange. This month’s musical accompaniment is a CD featuring exclusive ‘responses’ to Carlos’s soundtrack from a whole bunch of electronic music luminaries, including Chris Carter (who worked on the movie as sound assistant), Factory Floor‘s Gabe Gurnsey, Sink Ya Teeth and Jack Dangers. There’s also a nice chat with Barry Adamson, who Sink Ya Teeth recently supported for his October shows in Manchester and London.

This month I contributed an Introducing piece on violinist Jessica Moss, whose new electronically-augmented work Entanglement is both modishly minimalist and refreshingly maximalist. I also reviewed new albums by SAD MAN, whose ROM-COM is his eleventh release in the past year full of eclectic gestures; Demolition by Brooklynite Robert Toher under his Public Memory alias which has all the murkiness of classic Depeche Mode filtered through trip-hop nous; Defiance + Entropy by FORM, a collaboration between Rob Dust, Shelter‘s Mark Bebb and Depeche tribute act Speak & Spell‘s Keith Trigwell; and Where Moth And Rust Consume by Sone Institute on the consistently excellent Front & Follow.

My favourite album this month was the wonderful sax and synths of Frank Paul Schubert and Isambard Khroustaliov with their hypothetical muzak for “the restaurant at the end of the universe”, a hastily-recorded improvised record full of noise and compelling coarseness. Listen to the stellar ‘Maconte, The Cross-Eyed Agony Aunt’ from That Would Have Been Decent at Bandcamp below.

(c) 2018 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence for Electronic Sound

Irmin Schmidt – 5 Klavierstücke (Mute / Spoon album, 2018)

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5 Klavierstücke is Can co-founder Irmin Schmidt’s first album since 2015’s career-spanning Electro Violet, and finds the composer – ably assisted by Gareth Jones – playing not just one, but two pianos on five spontaneous compositions.

Well, I say spontaneous; one of Schmidt’s pianos, a Pleyel, was prepared following the teachings of his onetime mentor John Cage, whose various prepared piano compositions over a roughly 25 year period are perhaps the best exemplars of adding nuts, bolts and all sorts of contraptions to piano wires to disrupt their typical sound. It is a painstaking approach that few have the energy and artistic vision to undertake, since one needs to almost surrender one’s compositional ideas to the piano before striking a single note; unprepared, a composer may, in their head, create an expectation of what a song might sound like – when prepared, the composer cannot make those assumptions, for the piano will never behave precisely the same each time unless the precise preparations are followed each and every time. It is one manifestation of Cage’s lifelong obsession with chance interventions into the composition process.

Alongside the prepared piano, Schmidt also used a Steinway, his instrument not that much older than the octogenarian composer himself, and the five tracks alternate between both instruments, the Steinway or the prepared Pleyel. Aside from natural studio ambience, no further gimmicky or sonic trickery was employed, even though at times it’s hard to convince your ears that could possibly be the case.

Though I’m generally not a fan of the track-by-track album dissection approach these days, the five pieces here seem to justify individual analysis on this occasion. These are songs that contain a quiet drama, a composer’s natural instinct for melody and the white space in which the notes can float, uninterrupted, unadorned or adorned depending on which piano is being used. They may be formed from complex treatments, but the results are surprisingly sparse, bringing to mind Chopin’s observation that “simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes, and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”

I.

Delicate, filigree playing gives way to noisier, percussive sections from the prepared piano. At times, the repeated prepared bass note sounds like a very meditative jazz rhythm section that’s been asked to wait it out in the background, or notes that sound like the extended echoes of a gong.

II.

Rain-like sounds and insistent rumbling infiltrate the natural resonance of the sporadic unprepared piano notes. After a while, the piece opens out into a section that sounds like a clanking Hang pattern, one that is intensely melodic but unrecognisable from a piano.

III.

Percussive, low-register sketches are coupled with high-register sounds not unlike a cymbal. Loud shards of sound arrive without expectation, almost as if someone is driven to emphatically striking the side of the piano.

IV.

Beginning with churning, bass-heavy arpeggios reminiscent of some of Throbbing Gristle or Dome’s most regimented work, the addition of sprinkles of unaltered piano ends up making this sound like some sort of heavily-shrouded exotica or a spontaneous jazz cop theme. ‘IV’ accelerates toward the end into a thunderous, panic-inducing conclusion that leaves nothing but cavernous reverb in its wake.

V.

This is vaguely reminiscent of Jacques Louissier’s interpretations of Satie’s Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes or a Sunday afternoon Bill Evans session, all gentle, delicate melody and harmonics. That’s the case until the very end, when a clangorous discordancy comes to the fore to bring this outstanding, understated album to a conclusion.

(c) 2018 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Jon Spencer – Spencer Sings The Hits! (In The Red album, 2018)

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Jon Spencer‘s fantastic debut solo album is perhaps exactly what you’d expect from this purveyor of raucous goodtime rock ‘n’ roll, even if you’ve only taken the most cursory of listens to the Blues Explosion, Boss Hog or Pussy Galore.

I reviewed Spencer Sings The Hits! for Clash – click here to read my comments. Bellbottoms are optional.

(c) 2018 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence for Clash

Iv/An – Transmute (0.5 EP, 2018)

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To celebrate Mute‘s 40th anti-versary, electronic musician, 0.5 label owner and Small Doses publisher Iv/An has issued a unique tribute to the formative years of Daniel Miller‘s label.

Iv/An has previously released a carefully-hidden cover of The Normal‘s ‘Warm Leatherette’ – spliced with Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’ – on a CDr that came with an issue of Small Doses that coincided with the 35th anniversary of Miller’s debut single. For its 40th, he has issued a highly limited handmade object in a private edition of just twenty copies, containing a CDr with a new version of ‘Warm Leatherette’ interspersed with sections recognisable from Depeche Mode‘s ‘I Sometimes Wish I Was Dead’ and Nitzer Ebb‘s ‘Join In The Chant’.

The CD also includes a new track ‘FG/FT’ based on Fad Gadget‘s ‘Ricky’s Hand’, ‘New Jerusalem’ by Frank Tovey and another early Ebb track, ‘Violent Playground’; taking the concept of documentary evidence to an obsessive level that I could only ever dream of, the lyrics on ‘FG/FT’ are derived from Biba Kopf’s liner notes to The Fad Gadget Singles, a snippet of Fad’s own ‘Insecticide’ and an old Mute LibTech article about Fad / Frank. The final track on the EP is a cover of Yazoo‘s ‘Bad Connection’ containing sections of ‘Back To Nature’, ‘Salt Lake City Sunday’ and ‘Lady Shave’ by Fad Gadget, and Yazoo’s own ‘Goodbye 70s’. The effect is like listening to an Eric Radcliffe and John Fryer DJ set at a Blackwing Mute staff party, with exclusive invites to just a handful of twenty fortunate souls.

The cardboard sleeve quotes J.G. Ballard’s seminal and controversial 1973 novel Crash, one of the primary influences on Miller’s lyrics for ‘Warm Leatherette’, along with still life photocopied images of Ballard and two of the novel’s narrator’s main muses, both of whom died in car accidents – James Dean and Grace Kelly.

The new version of ‘Warm Leatherette’ is available at 0.5’s Bandcamp page as a free download and can be streamed below. Iv/An has also created a video for the track, which you can also find below.

Link: 0.5 on Bandcamp

 

With thanks to Iv/An for making me one of the fortunate twenty.

(c) 2018 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

In Conversation: Barry Adamson (Rough Trade East, 7 November 2018)

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Upon the release of his career-surveying Memento Mori compilation, I will have the enormous pleasure of talking to Barry Adamson at a very special Rough Trade East event on 7th November from 7pm.

Barry Adamson talks to Mat Smith about his 40 years in music, taking in his formative beginnings with Magazine, his time as a member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, film soundtracks and his solo career, as a musician and composer.

This will be followed by a short set of songs from his new 40 year anthology ‘Memento Mori’.

After the performance there will be a signing where Barry will be available to sign his new album and items from throughout his career.

Tickets can be obtained through Rough Trade’s website here.

(c) 2018 Mute / Rough Trade

Marianne Faithfull – Negative Capability (BMG album, 2018)

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The new Marianne Faithfull album, Negative Capability, was co-produced by The Bad Seeds’ Warren Ellis and features stunning new compositions by Nick Cave and Mark Lanegan.

I reviewed the album for Clash while travelling back from Paris, which, coincidentally, was where Negative Capability was written and recorded. You can read my review here.

(c) 2018 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence for Clash

Simon Fisher Turner / Espen J. Jörgensen – Soundescapes (Mute Artists album, 2011)

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‘I think we’re both rebels,’ is how Simon Fisher Turner summarised Soundescapes, his distance collaboration with documentary film-maker Espen J. Jörgensen which was released by Mute Artists in November 2011. The product of a chance encounter following Jörgensen browsing MySpace in response to having heard Turner’s soundtrack to the David Lynch movie Nadja, Soundescapescontains thirteen tracks of adventurous sonic exploration, marking this out as the freshly-independent Mute’s most experimental release so far, and reuniting Turner with the enduring faith of Daniel Miller, whose original Mute imprint was Turner’s primary output for a large chunk of his career.

On the gatefold cardboard sleeve (which hides a fold-out poster), Turner is credited with ‘structure, rearrangements, composing, editor, voice, life recordings’ while Jörgensen is responsible for ‘sampling, circuit bent & analogue instruments, beats, oscillators, rain app, voice, composing’. From how the pair have described their collaboration, this demarcation of roles and responsibilities was crucial to Soundescapes‘ genesis – Jörgensen would effectively ‘feed’ Turner a diverse array of almost random recorded sounds, the sources of which were often not evident or known to the recipient, while over the course of two to three years Turner would process those sounds into the tracks via harsh edits into the thirteen songs included on the album. Just as Turner would be blind to the sources of the sounds, Jörgensen would often find it yet harder to identify his own sounds in the resulting tracks. Jörgensen’s sound sources included circuit bent instruments, snatches of conversations and pounded wood among others, none of which are remotely identifiable on the album. It’s also worth bearing in mind that this collaboration occurred without either side ever meeting one another, nor even speaking over the phone.

One condition of the collaboration would be that each side was unable to challenge the other, meaning that Jörgensen would not comment extensively on the final tracks Turner was sending him, while Turner would be the one to ask for more sounds or indeed decide when Jörgensen should stop the pipeline of noises. Jörgensen only commented on two tracks, one of which, ‘Tristfull’, includes one of the more identifiable sound sources in the form of a French rain shower recorded by Turner, soaking the backdrop with organic sound while layers of what could be tinkly music box sounds (but easily could be from something entirely different) dominate the foreground. Similarly ‘Drippex’, which starts with a snatch of wobbly, Marc Bolan-esque vocals (one of Turner’s own contributions) wanders off on nice gentle synth arpeggios, while closer ‘Twomen’ features snatches of what Jörgensen calls ‘bedtalk in Japanese’ and simple, layered baby xylophone loops. These are three of the prettier tracks here, a direct contrast with the busy ‘Noise Activity’ which Jörgensen originally described to me as the duo’s ‘ADHD track’ when describing its short abrasive punch to the eardrums.

Jörgensen sent me a photo of one of his favourite sound sources, a circuit bent Speak & Learn children’s education tool that I vaguely remember from my own childhood. That trademark electronic voice tone is evident (I think) on ‘Worry’, but instead of the friendly computer I remember, that voice is manic, distorted and uncomfortable to listen to, while all the while a regimented grid of pulsing not-quite-beats and synth squalls keep time. Elsewhere tracks blend together calm and serene tones with mechanistic cyborg confrontationalism, a case in point being the (almost) title track ‘Soundescape’ (early versions of which Jörgensen sent me as a ‘legal bootleg’), wherein vast blankets of Eno-esque drift clash with the abrupt intrusion of broken electronic machinery whirring to life.

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‘Selfcentred’ starts with drones and noxious clouds of threatening noise, concluding with brief snatches of what could be tiny orchestral loops if you listen really closely punctuated by patches of strained silence. Most tracks on Soundescapes are perfunctory affairs, generally lasting no more than four minutes or so, until you reach the hypnotic ‘Start At The End’ which stretches out its template of loops and grinding Throbbing Gristle-style industrial sound closer to the nine minute mark. Some Aphex-style detuned and distorted beats emerge toward the end of this album highlight, closing out the track with thunderous and gorgeous noise.

When I tried to import this CD into iTunes, the genre that came up was ‘pop’. Surely this should be ‘subversive pop’, given the often punishing sonic assault that the listener is presented with, and it is amusing to imagine a parallel dimension in which this is what pop music might sound like. For me, this noisy and adventurous release is a welcome, uncompromising, addition to New Mute’s diverse 2011 release schedule, a direct relative of its more sonically challenging material from yesteryear and a not-so-gentle reminder that Mute’s genesis lies squarely in electronic music’s wilder hinterlands. Sometimes you just need something a bit more edgy to clear your head, and Soundescapes does that many times over the course of its 40-odd minutes.

Originally posted 2011; edited 2018.

(c) 2018 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence

Mute 4.0: Fad Gadget – Fireside Favourites (Mute album, 1980)

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As part of Mute‘s fortieth ‘anti-versary’, the label is making available very special limited edition vinyl versions of selected releases from their four decades of releasing and curating incredible music. Full details on the releases can be found here.

Released in 1980, Fireside Favourites was the third album to be released by the nascent Mute imprint and the first LP by the sorely-missed, still woefully-overlooked Frank Tovey. Tovey’s early work as Fad Gadget played an enormously significant role in the development of Mute’s creative aesthetic, beginning with the Daniel Miller-produced ‘Back To Nature’ single and continuing with this album.

The creative team behind Fireside Favourites was common to a number of early Mute releases – the album was recorded by Eric Radcliffe at his esteemed Blackwing studio, accompanied by his young protégé John Fryer; Miller added extra synth nous to a number of the track and the sleeve was designed by Simone Grant. ‘Back To Nature’ isn’t among the tracks on the album (not an uncommon thing for early Mute albums), but a radically reworked version of its B-side ‘The Box’ appears toward the end.

As an album, Fireside Favourites is a collection of contrasts. The are moments of near-pop that brim with vibrant synth-driven energy, such as the frantic opener ‘Pedestrian’, which has one foot in the evolving post-punk movement and another in the developing electronic pop scene. But even in something like ‘Pedestrian’ there’s a noisy, clattering interlude and conclusion; the brief, mewling sound of a baby in the background, along with Tovey’s distinctive half-spoken / half-sung vocal, keeps this and other more accessible tracks like ‘Salt Lake City Sunday’ from feeling too accessible.

Elsewhere there are moments of ugly, abrasive noise that aligned our Fad with the works of contemporaries like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, the processed vocal on single ‘Insecticide’ and the theme of ‘Newsreel’ being cases in point. The vivid lyrics on those songs nodded to Tovey’s physical stage performances and also carried a nihilistic, Ballardian impulse that Daniel Miller had also employed for his own ‘Warm Leatherette’ single.

What also emerges here, perhaps surprisingly, is a dark and occasionally threatening funk angle. ‘State Of The Nation’ has some solid drumming from Nick Cash and a treacly bassline from Eric Radcliffe over which are layered all sorts of sonic events, from squalling, saw-edged synth blasts to wonky melodies, to probably anything that was lying around in Blackwing at the time that could be made to make a sound. The seminal ‘Coitus Interruptus’ does the same, but its funky disposition is subsumed under unswerving, focussed synths that give this frustrated sexual paean a robotic quality, a bit like how Kraftwerk might approach Soft Cell’s ‘Sex Dwarf’; there’s an increasingly breathless, desperate, snarling quality to Tovey’s vocal here, the perfect human foil to the menacing, repetitive electronics that surround him on this weirdly anthemic track.

Tovey had a reputation for being something of a confrontational performer, but he was also a purveyor of dark humour. There’s no better example of this than the title track, bestowed with a wandering, irrepressibly joyous Radcliffe bassline and jazzy, (qu)easy listening brassy synths. It’s a lot of fun, but if you listen to the lyrics –sung with a gentle, music hall breeziness – they are unendingly grim, loaded with vivid post-apocalyptic imagery and a bit of that Crash-style perversity: “Hey now honey, open your eyes / There’s a mushroom cloud up in the sky / Your hair is falling out and your teeth are gone / Your legs are still together but it won’t be long.”

The rendition of ‘The Box’ is perhaps the most surprising of the tracks here. In the place of the original version’s insistent, over-amped synth bounce, the version here is much more subdued, with the distinctive synths being replaced by what could be a pump organ. The whole track only emerges out of its subdued, detached mood at the very end, making this almost the inverse of itself and acting as something of an oblique clue to Tovey’s later work under his own name with The Pyros.

Why this LP doesn’t seem to carry the same sort of influential weight as the synth albums that arrived en masse the following year – such as the similarly dark Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret by Tovey’s fellow Leeds Poly students Soft Cell – remains a bit of mystery to me. Perhaps Fad Gadget was too much of an outsider figure, too linked with that grubby, confrontational DIY industrial movement to appeal more broadly. The orange vinyl re-release of Fireside Favourites for the Mute 4.0 ‘anti-versary’ provides an ideal and timely opportunity to give this album the critical appreciation it always deserved.

For Mute 4.0, Fireside Favourites is being reissued as an orange LP edition.

(c) 2018 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence