Reviews

It’s spring, but it feels like summer. It was winter when Richard Macfarlane hit me with this meme. The months have raced.

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your Spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they’re listening to.

Wildly emotional music always gets me, but I’m increasingly loving music that’s more three dimensional: knees up, head down. And at least the first few in this list of seven songs driving me wild right now are those kind of songs.

Nina Simone – ‘Strange Fruit’
Ms N. Simone’s voice is rough, sweet, tortured and beautiful in pretty much equal measure, like the woman. She’s so special we named our little girl after her. I’ve been listening to her albums over and over recently. And although a friend just gave me her wonderful 1959 live recording at New York’s Town Hall, an album so thick with mood it wraps around your ears like caramel, it’s her intense ‘Strange Fruit’ that never leaves me.

She’s ferocious and raw and honest and, more than anything, alive.

(Well said Big Stereo)

Tricky – ‘Council Estate’ (South Rakkas Crew remix)
A little while after my daughter began to kick down her walls, her mother’s stomach, Tricky released this record. “In my mother’s belly and I’m starting to kick.” It’s a Tricky life story… paranoia, superstar aspirations, pop hooks. In other words, vintage Tricky Kid, which might not be such a big deal if you’d only heard his first couple of albums (Maxinquaye, Pre-Millenial Tension), but is pretty amazing in the light of disappointing recent records (including Blowback with Ed Kowalczyk from Live). Desperate for a fading fame? Whatever inspired his return, the original is good, but the South Rakkas Crew’s soca-fied and time-stretched dancehall version is pure symbiosis.

Justin Townes Earle – ‘The Good Life’
I was in New York City a few months ago and saw in Time Out that a guy with Steve Earle and Townes Van Zandt’s names was playing a show. I’d never heard of him before, but he’s named after Townes, and son of Steve, and I figured that was enough. Not sure what I was expecting, but he was much better. We’re talking rockabilly, country, the blues, or as Justin calls it, “mostly love songs and train songs.” I might save my other comments for a review, as I just discovered he’s touring Australia in November. If he’s half as good as the gig we saw in the National Public Theatre’s tiny side room (capacity around 20-30), you’ll be hearing a lot more.

Eilen Jewell – ‘Rich Man’s World’
This rollicking bluegrass and country pop record found its way to me a month or two ago. Along with Alela Diane’s The Pirate’s Gospel, it’s my kind of easy listening. Friends over, barbeque listening; Sunday afternoon listening (or morning if you’ve been tuned into my radio show).

The Rectifiers – ‘Climbing Giant Numbers’
I was obsessed by ’60s pop and admittedly very twee indie pop when I was at uni. I worked up the street at a record shop in Newtown, and devoured records every day in a circuit of record shops that would generally involve large piles of vinyl and pretty significant amounts of time listening. Around then, I got a spectacular compilation of new French music makers called Source Lab 2 – featuring, among others, Daft Punk, Dimitri From Paris, Alex Gopher, Doctor L – but the most astounding thing on the record was a sedate piece that spun in ’50s exotica and warm proto trip hop, Air’s ‘Casanova 70′. ‘Sexy Boy’ followed soon after, soundtracking far too many hairdressers and cafes, but their thing was pretty amazing. In the past couple of months, I’ve been listening to the third record from Melbourne’s Rectifiers. And it has a similar vibe. Air with a bit of another Australian group, Sun. Hard to choose a favourite track as the whole album is so easy on the ears, flowing by in a softly optimistic, blissed out blur.

Charge Group – ‘Lunar Module’
I could understand someone writing this off as bloated and slow. It’s definitely a ponderous thing and I’ve probably written off many great bands like that. Fortunately, I saw Charge Group play a lot of these songs at Sydney gallery and warehouse gigs over the past year or two, and was well and truly primed for their album. The band is basically old Sydney outfit Purplene: Matt Blackman, Matt Rossetti and Adam Jesson; plus Bree Van Reyk and Jason Tampake. This is really tugging the heart strings stuff, bleak, blanched and captivating. But while it touches on moods you might find elsewhere, Matt’s voice is so Australian and so earthy it’s almost jarring.

Micah P. Hinson – ‘Tell Me It Ain’t So’
Every now and again a song sends tingles all across my skin. There are probably a quantifiable group of variables responsible, some combination of words and sounds, but I don’t care, I love those songs, and this is one. I heard it on the radio for a while before I got a copy, and every single time I hear it, my skin goes crazy. The forlorn “constantly, craving what isn’t mine” could be a riposte to the K.D. Lang song, or it might not be. It’s Americana with a crossover of folk, blues and country, but like so much great music, it’s also just Micah P. Hinson.

Back at you Macfarlane – you’re ages away in the UK blogging for tinymixtapes so you must be hearing some very fresh sounds – also, Rozie, Lee Tran, Andy Ramadge, Chris, Matt, Bec Paton and Everything At Once.

Watching Jamie Lidell on stage it’s all too easy to see his thing as one gigantic piss-take.

The crazy outfits, the big soul numbers. He was dressed in Joseph’s Technicolour Dreamcoat the first time I saw him, in early 2004 at the Sydney Festival bar. He’s got a band now, and at the Bowery on NY’s Lower East Side last weekend, they opened with an explosive version of ‘Another Day’ from new record Jim. Read the record reviews and you’ll see names like Marvin and Otis and Sly and Prince – it often feels he’s tilting an ironic brow to those guys, but it wasn’t always that way. Lidell was an IDM demigod, a hero among Wire critics – Super Collider, ‘media suits’ made from videos, CDs and 16mm film – so his 2006 blue-eyed soul record, Multiply, was something of a surprise.

A couple of years earlier I saw the beginnings of that record at the show in Sydney. I could not stop talking about it. I was blown away to the point that it left an embarrassingly black mark on my name. Lidell took risks. Along the way, his music alienated much of the audience, a crowd attracted by the promoter’s brand of smooth deep house rather than its headliner. Lidell’s live loops and heavily layered performance have since been co-opted by the likes of Final Fantasy and Dan Deacon, though their approach differs from Lidell’s uninhibited blast of the thrill of being there, playing live.

Back to that black mark. A Sydney DJ came to play at a party I organised in Canberra later in ‘06. I picked the DJ up from the airport, and he proudly shoved a demo CD in the player. It was works-in-progress from Multiply. I kept listening when he got out of the car at the hotel, and – to my eternal shame – ripped the disc. I was that excited. Thrilled, even, to hear this guy again. The recorded set was good, too, packed with messy, unmastered jams and Lidell’s playful voice.

A while later, Multiply appeared. Hints of those early performances remained, there were some decent songs too, but musically it was flattened. The spikes and mistakes replaced by grooves and polish. Like a turntablist, his thing struggled on disc. Jim, his latest, appeared this year. But I’d lost interest and only went along to the Bowery show because friends wanted to go.

Flaunting a spray-on beard, dark glasses, embroidered jacket and stripy pants, Lidell stepped out with a full band, including a bearded sax blower in a smoking jacket (and not much else). It was a skronking, funked up jam, taking in 12 songs and both records. The band took a break halfway, leaving Lidell space for a 20 minute knob-twiddling, tumbling beats jam that culminated in an extended version of ‘When I Come Back Around’.

Lidell’s voice is not of the calibre of the artists he emulates – it’s rawer, not quite as versatile – and his songs don’t hit the same heights either. But the thing you need to understand with the guy, the thing I’m beginning to understand, is that all that stuff isn’t the point. The point is the performance. And his band – part Muppets, part Zapp – has a by-the-seat-of-the-pants joie de vivre that’s exhilarating, contagious, and seeing Lidell just makes me want to see him again.

I fell in love with Macy Gray’s debut, On How Life Is, about eight or nine years ago.

This wasn’t just some fling, well it didn’t seem like one – after getting the CD on promo about a half a year before the proper release, I listened to it repeatedly, told everyone about it, played it constantly. Like Badu and Mary J., Gray took hip-hop and classic soul and twisted it into a simmering groove. Unlike those singers, Gray was up close and intimate, snug and comfortable, the kind of singer whose music insinuates its way into you.

With a proper release, she found her way onto the soundtrack for every party, cafe, clothes shop and bar, seemingly right around the world. And, like so many distinctive singers, her voice quickly became a prison. Her once dear voice turned cloying.

Alela Diane’s kinda new record, The Pirate’s Gospel, reminds me of Gray. Not musically – far from it. The similarity’s in the proximity you feel to her voice, the up-close intensity of listening to her sing. I say ‘kinda’ because the album came out on a self-release several years ago, and has just been rereleased, courtesy Holocene/Inertia. I think it’s essential, but you may have to hold tight for the final verdict.

A song from Alela’s album: The Rifle (courtesy of Holocene Music).

My review of The Pirate’s Gospel for Cyclic Defrost.