Album Review: Neil Young – On the Beach

Amazingly this Neil Young album, originally released in 1974 was not released on CD until 2003! It’s a more sombre album than his other early 70s albums. As the natural follow-up to best-selling Harvest, it must have been confusing for fans weaned on those pretty country-style songs which made up the majority of that album, as this gloriously bleak album sees a man who is jaundiced, sick of the rock star culture of the 70s and the acclaim that goes with it. And yet, it’s not a bore to listen to as Neil Young made an album which has definitely stood the test of time.

For this album he assembled a motley crew of musicians, with the likes of David Crosby, Graham Nash (of CSN and sometimes Y fame), along with Ralph Molina (Crazy Horse), Rusty Kershaw, Ben Keith etc.

Walk On is a somewhat unremarkable opener, a standard issue Neil Young lope-along track, but second track See the Sky About to Rain is a wholly different kettle of fish. Notable for the heavy use of keyboards in it, it’s a slow-burner of a song, with Young singing “played a silver fiddle, played it loud and then the man broke it down the middle. See the sky about to rain.” It’s kind of foreboding, but nothing like us foreboding as Revolution Blues. This song reportedly freaked out Crosby, Stills and Nash, with its insistent guitar pattern and ‘call-to-arms’ style lyrics, lacerating the big stars of the period (“I see bloody fountains, And ten million dune buggies comin' down the mountains. Well, I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars, But I hate them worse than lepers and I'll kill them in their cars”).

After this, the rootsier For the Turnstiles comes across as a relief, though again it’s an uneasy listen, with Young’s high-pitched, almost cracking vocals over banjo and dobro.

We settle into the second half of the album with Vampire Blues, another ‘lop-along’ like Walk On, with a basic blues progression, and a sparse, one note guitar passage in the middle section. Young sings about how “good times are coming, but they sure are coming slow.” The title track follows which is a much bleaker piece, featuring slow hand drums from Ben Keith, and great hesitant guitar from Young himself. He sounds totally bereft on this track, singing “though my problems are meaningless, that don’t make them go away.” The playing on this track is wonderful, it’s perfectly paced with a wonderful sparse guitar solo in the middle.

Motion Pictures features Neil Young singing in a much lower register than usual, and it suits him quite well, over a simple descending guitar riff, accompanied by some nice harmonica. He carries this singing style through to the last track, the nearly 9 minute Ambulance Blues, which is a kind of low key epic, featuring a simple folky guitar part , joined by harmonica and Rusty Kershaw’s rusty fiddle (don’t know if it actually was, but I imagine it to be). There are some lovely touches here, like when the lyrics wonderfully reflect the music. He sings “burn-outs stub their toes on garbage pails” as he deliberately plays a deep note loudly on guitar that could be a bum note, except that it’s in tune.

It’s criminal that these songs are not better known, or indeed this album, as it’s one of Neil Young’s finest.

Album Review: Sun Kil Moon – Admiral Fell Promises

Mark Kozelek is a treasure. He has been ploughing an individual furrow for 20 years, through Red House Painters, solo albums and now Sun Kil Moon, with little deviation from the original template set out by 1992’s Down Colorful Hill. Indeed I would call this admirable dedication to the cause. He is also one of the most talented guitarists around.

This album consists of virtually nothing but Kozelek’s voice and nylon acoustic guitar, played classically. Opening track Alesund starts out like Duk Koo Kim but becomes folkier and more austere, with a beautiful melody. There are subtle keyboard touches which don’t detract from this masterclass in guitar picking, as his playing on this and all the other tracks has reached new levels of excellence. After 5 and a half minutes or so we get an instrumental coda, a format that many of the other tracks follow. The song is jawdroppingly good, and a breathtaking way to start the album.

Maintaining a sombre mood is the following track, Half Moon Bay, with an equally pretty fingerpicked guitar pattern and Kozelek’s reverbed vocals, singing about “wandering in a dream”. Some of the ‘guitar runs’ on this track are particularly impressive, though borderline show-off territory! Sam Wong Hotel is similarly brooding.

Third and Seneca is a little more cheerful sounding, with a seriously impressive middle section, before the guitar picking becomes even more intricate. The mood lightens further with the relatively straightforward You Are My Sun, as close as this album comes to a simple love song, with a chorus that simply sees him dragging out the name ‘Leona’ (“Leeeooonaaa”). It works pretty well!

The album is a series of gorgeous musical passages. The Leaning Tree features a lovely middle section, echoing April’s Blue Orchids where Kozelek sings “you came to me in a dream…. I long for one more day with you in my life.” Later in the album, Australian Winter returns us to austerity with a suitably chilling Spanish guitar pattern. Amazingly, the album doesn’t peter out as Church of the Pines has another fantastic melody. It sounds devastatingly sad, which really is Kozelek’s speciality, before ending on a somewhat hopeful note with Bay of Skulls.

A criticism I have of this album is that most of the tracks are pretty similar, with no electric workout to balance the album. Also many of the songs are quite long, and some are a little drawn-out with lengthy instrumental guitar passages. Luckily I love acoustic guitar played like this. And this album is unremittingly lovely.

Album Review: The Horrors – Primary Colours

Reviewing 2009’s Primary Colours is a bit like playing “spot-the-influence”. There are a whole lot of influences thrown in here, but I suppose the base material is Interpol twisted through a My Bloody Valentine sieve. Also the fact is that these guys are clearly posh boys. It shouldn’t really make a difference, I am one myself, but it’s harder to empathise with anguished, over-privileged doom-mongers.

The first track Mirror’s Image starts off with some esoteric keyboards and funnily enough is reminiscent of the beginning of U2’s Zooropa album. This is dispelled by the entrance of a confident bass line, a wonderful progression of notes that sounds effortless and this is joined by the guitar doing the Kevin Shields / My Bloody Valentine “waaiirr”. “Is it the way,” he sings, “is it the way she looks at you” and it isn’t, it’s the bassline, the guitar and the synths. It’s a thrilling and exciting way to start the album.

However, it’s a hard trick to repeat over a whole album, as it soon becomes clear that the MBV effect is going to repeated over and over throughout the album, as next track Three Decades illustrates. Who Can Say races along on a bed of Jesus and Mary Chain style guitars and fairground-style keyboards, and is ‘distinguished’ by a cringe-worthy spoken word bit in the middle (“and when I told her I didn’t love her any more… she cried”).

The singer is capable of a whole range of vocal stylings. Brett Anderson is his inspiration on Do You Remember, which doesn’t sound a million miles away from Suede. New Ice Age starts off ominously, with foreboding bassline and synths, building up into a crescendo, bursting into a Chameleons-style number. It’s somewhat ruined by the brattish, strangled vocals though (exhibit A: his howl “the AGONY!”).

Scarlet Fields sounds a lot like a coupling between Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart and Pretty In Pink by the Psychedelic Furs. The bass line is a dead ringer for the morose Mancunian’s track while the singer does a fantastic impression of Psychedelic Furs’ Richard Butler. It works really well. Next track, I Only Think Of You (they’d been scanning Loveless for song titles as well as guitar effects!) sounds like NYC by Interpol but stretched out and ran through the MBV sieve to seven minutes in length.

After the insistent, Spiritualized knock-off I Can’t Control Myself, we are back on steady ground with title track Primary Colours, which has a nice pace and tempo to it, a bit like The Cure with Andrew Eldritch on vocals. Sea Within A Sea is the final and longest track, and is possible the most interesting. It starts quite simply with a simple, repeating bass note which shifts up slightly in line with the vocal melody, then halfway through adds a muted Morricone-style guitar part, before evolving into a Depeche Mode synth track. It actually works pretty well and is a good way to finish the album.

But will I be listening to it in 18 months?

Ideal circumstances to listen: A dingy basement rock venue, full of sweaty bodies and ne’er-do-well’s, while drinking Snakebite. While pretending to be a 20 year old.

Album Review: Mark Eitzel – The Ugly American

This is a deeply strange album. In 2002 Mark Eitzel went and collaborated with a bunch of Greek musicians to reinterpret some of his back catalogue. The Greek instrumentation appears to be pretty traditional in the main, with bouzouki, mandolin and zourna joining the usual guitar, bass and drums.

Most of these revisitations are a good deal busier than the sparser originals, and to be honest, most of them fall short of the originals. Western Sky is one of the more successful interpretations, though the Greek instruments completely dominate the mood, changing it entirely from the original. Nightwatchman is probably one of the best ones here. While I still maintain it pales in comparison to the original, it still sounds mightily impressive, with a soaring melody.

One of two tracks don’t really work. Here They Roll Down sounds quite strange, with instruments wheezing in the background while Eitzel booms away in the foreground. The more it goes on, the more manic and odd it becomes, sounding almost nightmarish by the end. I also figure that Anything, one of the better songs on Invisible Man is totally miscast here. On Invisible Man it was a tale of longing, on a bed of brooding electronica. Here the instrumentation is way too busy, and the whole mood and feel of the song is transformed into something more joyous.

Some of Eitzel’s more sensitive songs feature here (Jenny, Will You Find Me and Last Harbour). It’s not quite butchery, but this album might have worked better without Eitzel involved, as it is these songs are too readily comparable with the originals, and suffer by comparison. It’s a fairly inessential, yet interesting diversion. Mark's Achilles' heel?!

Ideal circumstances to listen: On a boat cruising around the Greek islands on a warm August day, drinking Ouzo.

Album Review: (smog) – Rain On Lens

This is one of the more frustrating Smog/Bill Callahan albums. Released in 2001, with the addition of parentheses () it finds them/him moving away from the country sound of the Puke EP. The title track is a short intro which creates a pleasing foreboding atmosphere, but what follows is a series of ‘plod-along’ tracks which are fine in themselves but a whole album of them gets very repetitive. Each track kind of melds into the next one, and most of them go on far too long at 4 or 5 minutes, with little variation and no choruses.

As I said, there’s nothing wrong with any of these mechanised, grinding tracks, but a whole album of them gets a little dull. Dirty Pants is one of the stronger tracks, kicking off with what sounds like a metal hammer knocking in some nails and then some low-slung growling guitar, but this one actually evolves with a nice violin part in the middle. Lazy Rain isn’t bad either, a Velvet Underground style tale of walking home in the early hours to be greeted by a waiting (waking) female.

Probably one of the best things about this album is some of the titles. Live As If Someone Is Always Watching You isn’t quite as good a song as it is a title, it’s a little more at ease, more stripped down than some of the others, and final track Revanchism I can only surmise is something to do with ‘revanche’ which I gather is French for revenge. This track is almost jaunty, with some horns, and a couple of stops and starts which makes it at least more attention grabbing than the rest of the album.

If this was the first Smog album I had heard I probably wouldn’t have pursued any others.

Ideal circumstances to listen: On a, yes, rainy day walking down a dark stifling tunnel.

Album Review: REM – Fables of the Reconstruction

REM’s third album, originally released in 1985 never received great reviews, and as far as I know is not a fan favourite. It’s not the most alluring of albums, they changed the sound which had worked so well on Murmur and Reckoning and moved to England to record it with Joe Boyd. Replacing the bright sound of its predecessors with a strange kind of lethargic murk, for those familiar with later REM this is a curious beast. The album doesn’t really care whether you like it or not, not like the likes of The One I Love, or even the Out of Time album, specifically Losing My Religion which reaches out and gives you a great big vice-like hug.

Anyway, opener Feeling Gravity’s Pull certainly doesn’t want to hug you, starting with a dischordant guitar which leads into some strings, giving the song a foreboding air. The Peter Buck jangly charm is still here, just overlaid by other things going on. Michael Stipe’s lyrics are as impenetrable as ever, making this a ‘grower’ of an album rather than an instant one. Even hearing it now, it’s quite a jarring first track. Maps and Legends is fairly direct, with a relatively simple chord progression and a great vocal performance.

Driver 8 is faster, with an almost country influence on Stipe’s vocals in the upbeat chorus. It’s one of the faster REM songs in a mostly midtempo catalogue, and certainly one of the most propulsive things her on a mostly blissfully downbeat album. Tracks like Old Man Kensey, Green Grow the Rushes and Good Advices are very pretty, in a looking down at your feet kind of way (as advised by Good Advices: “when you meet a stranger look at his shoes”).

There are faint influences of the Durutti Column on this album (Life and How to Live It) and some rather unfortunate brass-funk (Can’t Get There From Here), but on the whole it’s an enjoyable album.

Ideal circumstances to listen: Walking through a dense forested area on a dry, humid Thursday in September.

Are there any really consistent bands?

In an age of intangible music formats, X-factor here-today-gone-tomorrow clowns, more so-called indie bands than you can shake a stick at, not to mention every second older band reforming, today’s music scene is arguably more transient than ever before.

In the supposed ‘golden age’ of rock, there were consistent acts like the Rolling Stones, Neil Young and David Bowie to name just 3 who had a superb string of albums (especially the last 2) and seemed untouchable. Until the crap one came along.

In the case of the Rolling Stones, this arrived in 1980 with Emotional Rescue, which took some of the disco beat experiments and Jagger falsettoisms from their previous album, the not-too-bad-at-all Some Girls, and fleshed them into a basis for an album. The impact of this was to render them unable to subsequently release any more than 2 more tracks of musical merit, the following years’ Start Me Up and the excellent Waiting On A Friend. And they still haven’t gone away you know.

Neil Young’s case is less straightforward. After a string of almost flawless albums from 1970’s After the Goldrush to 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps, 1981 saw the release of the pretty uninspiring Re-ac-tor (featuring the 9 minute repetitive yawn-fest T-Bone). Since then his solo career has not been totally merit-free (Freedom, Harvest Moon and Silver and Gold all had their moments), though it never scaled the heights of the 1970s.

Similarly with the aforementioned David Bowie. He bestrode the 70s like a colossus, with some brilliant albums (Hunky Dory, Aladdin Sane, Low), some very good ones (Ziggy Stardust) and some critically acclaimed (though overrated) ones (Diamond Dogs, Station to Station, Heroes). He inspired punk, post-punk and even the new Romantics, and invented Berlin as a cool destination for making music. So he could have defined 80s mainstream music. Unfortunately he let it define him. Let’s Dance was the start of it. Commercial as hell, aside from the title track it featured a terribly sanitised version of China Girl, which he wrote for Iggy Pop in 1977, which set the benchmark for the remainder of the decade. He released cheesy albums like Tonight and Never Let Me Down, before forming the noisy and tedious Tin Machine. Since then, he has been less relevant, releasing a series of albums in divergent musical styles, none of which has been awful but few with any really high quality tracks.

I can’t claim ownership of any of the above as I was too young for them in their prime. So what of the next generations of bands. Are there any who have managed a string of consistent albums, without any let downs?

Definitely out of the reckoning: Morrissey (Kill Uncle, Maladjusted, Years of Refusal), Mark Eitzel (despite the quality of the American Music Club albums, his solo albums are generally pretty patchy), The Cure (should never have been allowed release anything after 1989), Jesus and Mary Chain (ditto except fast forward to 1994). Also out would be Sonic Youth - too many dodgy noise experiments, key piece of evidence being their collaboration with Mats Gustafsson, Hidros 3, which consists of little more than noise and some particularly nasty groaning from Kim Gordon.

The Lemonheads released a pretty awful covers album last year (Varshons), and Primal Shame are really just a bunch of chancers. And Lurid (Lou Reed) had the same problem in the 1980s as Bowie and Neil Young. As for the grunge scene, Pearl Jam didn’t keep their initial momentum going, in fact they deliberately pulled back, while Soundgarden were all well and good but I don’t know if Chris Cornell’s credibility will ever recover from last year’s Timbaland-produced Scream.

Arab Strap were a candidate, though I was reminded that they were off the boil sometimes, and had too many albums that sounded the same. And the problem with Ryan Adams, apart from the awful Rock N Roll, was the media attention he received turned him into a pain in the neck really, which manifested itself in some of his music, of which he released too much to even approach consistency.

REM is an interesting one. 1994’s Monster is probably the most bought REM album. What I mean is that, with their critical stock at an all-time high after Automatic for the People, everybody wanted Monster. What an aptly named album though, within months you could pick this up easily in any second-hand music shop (of which there used to be plenty in the mid-90s). They haven’t released anything of note since. But imagine Michael Stipe had died after Automatic for the People, he would be deemed way more important than Kurt Cobain. There were rumours about his health at this time. Thankfully he is alive and well, though if a hypothetical premature death had occurred I’d say he’d have been revered, almost deified.

As for the possibles, the first band that occurred to me was the National. Although the first album wasn’t really anything special, subsequent albums have been way better. Though perhaps it’s them remaking the same album, just better each time? Radiohead would probably be the most obvious candidate, though it’s hard to make a case for Hail to the Thief as a truly enjoyable album. Nick Cave probably counts as one but he’s just so goddamn unloveable really, I can never get truly moved by him. He seems incapable of getting bad reviews though.

Mark Kozelek is probably an example of this, ever since his Red House Painting days, and perhaps Mark Lanegan would count too, no serious mis-steps (in my opinion). Tindersticks would also be one, though it’s probably just for my ears really. Richmond Fontaine are discounted as they don’t really make much impact, and I actually prefer Willy Vlautin’s books, I’d argue that’s where his true talent lies.

The problem is that many bands just make the same album over and over (often with diminishing returns), does that make them consistent? All feedback welcome!