Album Review: David Bowie – Low

As well as having one of the coolest album covers ever, David Bowie’s 1977 album Low is very much an album of sides. Before CDs, albums came on double sided vinyl/cassette and were often considered as such. I’ll focus on the music rather than the Berlin-inspired backdrop to the making of this album, of which much has already been written.

The first seven tracks are made up short zippy little songs, bookended by 2 instrumentals. Apart from the hit single Sound and Vision, none of the melodies are as strong as his ‘classic’ early seventies tracks yet they worm your way into your brain. Opening track Speed of Life has a strong melody, with soaring keyboards and pounding drums. Some of it can sound a little dated, the ‘video-game’ style noises back up What In The World can be a little annoying but in the main it still holds up.

At its best it sounds pioneering, in the case of Always Crashing In The Same Car, where he lays down the template for Gary Numan’s career and some of U2’s work on Zooropa. Be My Wife on the other hand is the most anthemic track here, with a fine vocal from Bowie as he croons “sometimes you get so lo-nely”.

The other side of this album is something else entirely. Bowie and Brian Eno linked up here to create a kind of ambient, Teutonic chilly classical electronic music, without any conventional singing from Bowie. The first of these, Warsawa, perfectly evokes a kind of wintry, Cold War-era Eastern European landscape with gloomy keyboards and some wordless chanting from Bowie in the middle. Art Decade fairs less well as the melody is somewhat meandering, sounding somewhat like the type of music that TV stations used to play many, many years ago over the test card.

Weeping Wall is less obviously melodic, and sounds like it could be used over a documentary charting the progress of recession-bitten immigrants, while Subterraneans sounds darker still, yet uplifting. Bowie chants some very strange sounding wordless vocals, yet it avoids the ambient music clichés and works. Even the saxophone manages not to ruin it. It’s very much night time music, best heard in darkness.

These instumentals gradually reveal themselves over time as hidden melodies come to the fore on repeated listens, and of course were hugely influential in terms of electronic music. Then again Bowie had been a pioneer for some time, right back to Space Oddity. Low is a timepiece frozen forever in a Berlin Wall era moment.

EP Review: And So I Watch For You From Afar – The Letters

2010 saw the release of this EP from my current obsession And So I Watch You From Afar, and this review is a little late but here goes:

S is for Salamander is a typically brutal ASIWYFA track, slaying all before them with heavy guitar riffs and impressive changes in tempo. There’s a neat line in machine-gun percussion in the midsection of the track.

D is for Django the Bastard is a real rabble-rouser. The pay-off comes early in this one as some melodic guitar leads into a sledgehammer mayhem-style riff. They go a little power metal in the midsection, with even a slight jazzy feel thrown in, till the powerful riff returns again, closing out the track with a wallop.

B is for B-Side is not quite as strong as the opening 2, rendering its title somewhat appropriate but K is for Killing Spree, which follows is another matter. Quite apart from being the archetypal ASIWYFA song title, the boys throw the kitchen sink at this one. It’s like a mixture of every one of their riffs inside 6 minutes, though it has the overall effect of sounding less post-rock, more metal, and thus less distinctive as a track from this band. It still rips along nicely, and the midsong collapse has me thinking of Sonic Youth.

Perhaps ASIWYFA actually work better on an EP as it’s hard to maintain the thrill levels over the course of a whole album, you have to reduce the intensity at some point. But no need to over 4 tracks.

Mick Karn RIP

Sad news today that Mick Karn has lost his battle with cancer at the age of 52. Best known for pioneering fretless bass playing as the 70s became the 80s, some might say he bears considerable influence... and responsibility for this, as he spawned many dubious imitators.

He came to prominence playing bass in Japan, and his talent flourished more on each of their albums, culminating on Tin Drum, where his atmospheric bass playing formed the framework for such tracks as Ghosts, Canton and Visions of China.

After a falling out with David Sylvian over his girlfriend Yuka Fuji, the band split. Karn worked with ex-Bauhaus singer Peter Murphy in their project Dalis Car, and other projects including solo work, before regrouping with his ex-Japan bandmates for Rain Tree Crow. In my mind, this was his finest work, taking the atmospheric leanings of Tin Drum to the logical next step on tracks like Every Colour You Are.

For the remainder of his life he worked with a variety of artists, but mainly solo before his untimely passing. As I write this I'm listening to Sons of Pioneers off Tin Drum, as fine an example as any of his bass playing, and one of the few Japan tracks he was given a co-writing credit for.

Live Review: And So I Watch You From Afar - Whelans, Dublin, December 31st 2010

Review for www.meg.ie

Best of 2010

As chosen for www.meg.ie

EP Review: Mark Lanegan Band – Here Comes That Weird Chill

This was a huge departure for Mark Lanegan in 2003, up till now he had released 5 solo albums of consistently moody dark folk-inflected blues, using mainly traditional instruments, as well as his considerable body of work with the Screaming Trees.

Here he threw out the formula, and rather than working with usual collaborator Mike Johnson he got Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri of Queens of the Stone Age involved, as well as Greg Dulli. Methamphetamine Blues is an arresting opening to the EP, featuring clanking percussion, loops and a driving rhythm for a great big heavy number. After the moody short interlude that is On The Steps Of The Cathedral, we get a blacker-than-black cover version of Captain Beefheart’s Clear Spot.

Message to Mine opens with Homme singing before kicking into a driving rock song with a Screaming Trees style singalong chorus, while Lexington Slow Down is a more traditional Lanegan piano song, featuring a great lead vocal. Then things get really messed up for Skeletal History: “An artery is not a vein” growls Lanegan on this QOTSA influenced track which lurches unpredictably from one riff to another.

Final track Sleep With Me is probably the most anthemic on this EP, featuring a powerful vocal from Lanegan. This was a very important album for Mark Lanegan as it’s where he tore up the ‘formula’ of his previous solo albums and used the influence of his collaborations to come up with this EP. The results are quite unlike anything he had done before.

EP Review: The Twilight Sad – Here It Never Snowed, Afterwards It Did

This was a stop-gap EP put out in 2008 featuring reworked versions of songs off The Twilight Sad’s debut album. What they have done here is given the rhythm section some time off and cranked up the My-Bloody-Valentine-at-their-most-spacey influence to produce much more atmospheric, droning versions, which really suit dark wintry evenings. So the guitars and drums are downplayed and replaced by organ, glockenspiel and a load of fuzz.

The production is really good on this one, with bells, violins and cymbals and gorgeous strings on And She Would Darken The Memory all giving added frostbite type effects. Singer James Graham should not be forgotten here either. On Cold Days From The Birdhouse he is in fine voice, rolling his ‘r’s deliciously, bellowing out lyrrrics like “and your rrred sky at night won’t follow me now”.

The title track was written with this format in mind, with some pathos-inducing organ keeping it in a similar mould to what has gone before, and lyrics like “are your hands cold, cos your fingers feel like snow”. It can be a bit same-y, Mapped By What Surrounded Them is almost pure MBV underwater-style backing track, with James Graham singing over the top which has the feel of two disparate parts being grafted on to each other. However none of the songs outstay their welcomes.

Walking for Two Hours even features sleigh bells and the Daniel Johnston cover Some Things Last A Long Time features accordion. It’s a bit of diversification from The Twilight Sad and shows they can turn their hand to something else, apart from the noisy stadium rockers of their main albums.