The past casts two very long shadows over The Defenestration of St Martin. The first is that of Martin Rossiter’s musical history with Gene, who he fronted back in the nineties. They were pigeonholed as britpop, but there was always something a bit more complex and cerebral about their lyrics and their music. Events conspired such that despite their differences, their career would follow a similar arc to britpop, and Gene split up in the early noughties. Music continue to flow through Rossiter’s veins though – teaching at Brighton’s ATM college, still writing for himself, and picking up the bass to play in Call Me Jolene. Now, more than eleven years after the last Gene album, Martin Rossiter has released a new record.
The other long shadow over the record is the pain that Rossiter has suffered over the years. If ten minute opener Three Points on a Compass – an incredibly personal, beautiful but damning song about his father – doesn’t have you crying into your headphones, then quite frankly, you’ve got no heart. Difficult lyrical matter continues throughout, as titles like I Want To Choose When I Sleep Alone, No One Left To Blame and My Heart’s designed for Pumping Blood attest, with little respite throughout. This isn’t an album to cheer yourself up to by listening to the words.
However, this doesn’t mean that the album isn’t a thing of magnificent beauty. Musically, simplicity rules throughout with Rossiter’s voice, stronger than ever, soaring over fantastic ballads with no instruments other than piano. Rossiter describes the tracks as secular hymns, and there is a very religious feel to everything here – slightly solemn, with very eloquent, articulate lyrics. The lightest moment on the record comes from the least religious moment with the most religious – I Must Be Jesus – sounding almost a show tune, with deliberately over the top lyrics, exaggerated for effect. Only in it’s closing moments does the album does the album allow itself to break free. In the last minute of Let The Waves Carry You drums beat and a guitar riff kicks off before the album fades out, a reminder of the music that Rossiter used to make, and hopefully a pointer to what we might expect in future, now that he’s back in the limelight.
It’s been nearly two years since the last Fujiya & Miyagi album Ventriloquizzing came out, so we’re about due another one. As it happens, we’ve got two. Or maybe none. Confused yet?
The next couple of weeks sees the release of Grave Goods by I Am Ampersand and the eponymously titled Omega Male. I Am Ampersand is the solo project by Matt Hainsby, Fujiya & Miyagi’s bass player and Ampersand. Omega Male is a collaboration between David Best and Project Jenny Project Jan’s Sammy Rubin.
Both albums start off sounding like they could be Fujiya & Miyagi’s own work. Omega Male, the opening track of the Omega Male album Omega Male (sorry, I couldn’t resist) reuses a technique David Best used on Ankle Injuries, repeatedly slipping in parts of the band name into the lyrics. The vocal style is unmistakeable and the track sounds like Fujiya and Miyagi with a heavy dose of electronics. I am Ampersand’s opener Lights and Radios also showcases Matt Hainsby’s contribution to Fujiya & Miyagi, with a bit rolling bassline and fizzing analogue electronics at the end. After the openers, the albums take on their own distinct personalities.
There are several options for you if you’re in a band but you want to pursue a side project – you could take what you do in the band and see how that works with other musicians, or you could use the opportunity of being free from the band’s style to do something rather different, and the two albums here show both those choices.
Fujiya & Miyagi and Project Jenny Project Jan have collaborated in the past, touring together and making the track Pins & Needles which appeared on Project Jenny Project Jan’s Colors EP back in 2009, so it’s no great surprise to see David Best working with Sammy Rubin again. David Best’s trademark vocals, emphasising each syllable (there’s a track about saying sorry called Uh-Pol-Uh-Jet-Ik), make the album sound very familiar to those who know Fujiya & Miyagi, and work well combined with Sammy Rubin’s electronica. It’s not a dance album though – You Bore Me To Tears revels in Serge Gainsbourg’s long shadow, and the album’s closing track. Buildings Like Symphonies, is probably the most beautiful song I’ve heard this year. An 8-bit electronic melody opens things sounding like digital birdsong. A simple string line starts at the same time as Best’s hopeful lament. Over a verse or two, the strings build, joined by subtle horns. Halfway through a loose drumbeat kicks off, the strings are soaring, and you truly believe Best when he sings that “Rumours were circulating / that we could build / Buildings Like Symphonies”. It’s the magical chemistry that makes tracks like Unfinished Sympathy by Massive Attack or Gorecki by Lamb the classics that they are. Breathtaking.
I Am Ampersand also has another of my favourite tracks of the year on it – 20 Seas 4 Oceans has received heavy rotation in these parts since it received an ultra limited release on 7″ earlier this year. I was enjoying it for the music, sounding a little bit like an acoustic country-folk take on Spirit In The Sky, not paying nearly enough attention to the lyrics which, now I’ve read the press blurb, I can hear are all about the song’s narrator being a Merman living in a city wanting to return to the sea. Obviously. The rest of Grave Goods is lovely pastoral psychedelic folk-pop, at times sounding like some of Gruff Rhys’ quieter moments, never losing it’s edge and lapsing into something “nice”. Fujiya & Miyagi loom large on Eko, an uptempo instrumental midway through the album, and then it’s back to the wonky pop on the first proper single Holding The Negative Up To The Light. The album closes with the title track Grave Goods – the archaelogical term for possessions buried with bodies. Three and a half minutes of country twang ruminating on life and death, and everything you accumulate inbeween. A fitting close.
Omega Male by Omega Male is released on Full Time Hobby on 12th November, and play at the Blind Tiger on Tuesday 20th November as part of Melting Vinyl’s Oui Love night.
Grave Goods by I Am Ampersand is released on Great Pop Supplement on 19th November.
Despite appearances, 1996 was a good year for Saint Etienne. Although it was two years since Tiger Bay came out and another two years before they would release Good Humor they weren’t resting on their laurels. I would regularly see them DJing at the Heavenly Jukebox at Turnmills, alongside the likes of The Chemical Brothers. It seems kind of crazy to think that you could go clubbing where the Chemical Brothers were residents, but remember that Dig Your Own Hole didn’t come until 1997. If it wasn’t the Chemical Brothers headlining the night, it would be David Holmes, or Richard Fearless from Death in Vegas, or Jon Carter from Monkey Mafia, or Andy Weatherall. Only in retrospect can I see just how stellar the line ups were.
Saint Etienne have had one foot in the charts and the other on the dancefloor ever since Pete Wiggs and Bob Stanley decided to cover a Neil Young song because they hadn’t yet written any songs of their own. The 7″ version of Only Love Can Break Your Heart is a Balearic classic, but Andrew Weatherall’s Mix of Two Halves (a nod to the fact that Saint Etienne are named after the football team rather than the French town) was the first of dozens and dozens of remixes which were as good, if not better than the original.
In 1995 the limited edition run of Saint Etienne’s first best of, Too Young To Die, came with a bonus disc of remixes which went down a storm. The following year this bonus disc got a full release with an extra cd. Casino Classics hit the shelves and featured remixes by The Chemical Brothers, Aphex Twin, Way Out West, Underworld, Monkey Mafia and Death in Vegas. Where the first disc was previously released mixes, the tracks on disc two were brand new unreleased remixes. Some were remixes of tracks that hadn’t even been released, and tucked at the end of the compilation was a remix by Broadcast, who at the time had only put out one EP and had yet to sign to Warp records.
Over the past three years, Saint Etienne have slowly been reissuing remasters of all of their old albums, and it’s now Casino Classic’s turn. Where each previous reissue has included an extra disc of material, the deluxe reissue of Casino Classics comes with two discs of additional material covering some of the best remixes since the original release all the way through to the release of London Conversations – the remastered Greatest Hits which kicked off the reissues. On the new version we’ve gained remixes of tracks by the likes of Paul Van Dyk, Faze Action, Tiesto, Aim, Add N to X and Hybrid, as well as US-only remixes of Only Love Can Break Your Heart and Nothing Can Stop Us by Masters at Work. There’s also some more remixes from the older days which weren’t included on the original Casino Classics including Pete Heller’s piano house take on Kiss and Make Up which only ever came out on 12″ over twenty years ago. Completing the circle, things finish with their Cola boy remix of The Method of Modern Love – the last single from the period covered. Cola Boy was another project that Pete and Bob were involved with in the early days of Saint Etienne, who only released two singles in 1991.
It’s hard to know where to start with recommending tracks from this compilation. I’ve already mentioned the Andrew Weatherall remix of Only Love Can Break Your Heart, and the Broadcast take on Angel. David Holmes remixed Like a Motorway before he got the funk, and is an amazing thirteen minute acid-techno wig out. The Monkey Mafia remix of Filthy is a big beat classic. The Faze Action mix of Sylvie is ten minutes of brilliant Latin house. Cool Kids of Death mixed by Underworld has been slimmed down by four minutes from the original to be able to fit more tracks in, but you still get more ten minutes of it. Their foray into drum’n’bass – when PFM remixed Down By The Sea is also reduced by half, but across the four cds (and the bonus downloads), you get a monster 54 tracks. It’s astonishing for any band to have that many remixes in the first place, let alone so many over so many years of such consistently high quality.
Casino Classics is out on Monday 12th November. On the same day, there’s also a deluxe reissue of Sarah Cracknell’s solo album Lipslide. Saint Etienne get a mention because Pete’s a Hove resident these days, but since Sarah isn’t a Brightonian I won’t be writing about what a great single Anymore was, or about how Summer Song (previously issued as a Saint Etienne song on the fan club only Boxette) is one of the absolute very best things to have come from the Saint Etienne camp, or about the mystery of multiple inclusions of some songs at the expense of the lilting acoustic bossa nova of b-side Oh Boy The Feeling When You Held My Hand (which you can buy as an mp3 from Amazon here). Oh wait, hang on…
Saint Etienne play the Concorde 2 on 13th December
Last Monday, Dark Horses released their debut album Black Music. We’d have written about it sooner, but we were waiting to tie it in with the launch party on halloween, and we’ve been shellshocked ever since.
Black Music, put simply, is the most powerful album to be released by any Brighton Band this year. It’s sleazy rock’n’roll. It’s filthy electro. It’s teutonic Krautrock. It’s the soundtrack to the film that Quentin Tarantino hasn’t made with David Lynch. It’s the smell of oil, leather, sweat and blood. It’s amazing. By about now, you should have stopped reading and opened up another browser window to order the album (try here).
Dark Horses got Death In Vegas main man Richard Fearless in to produce the album, and he’s the perfect choice. Black Music recalls some of the best bits from The Contino Sessions or Scorpio Rising. Around two thirds of the way through the album, the pace drops and things quieten with a few cover versions, the first being a song called Sanningen Om Dig by singer Lisa Elle’s Swedish compatriot Tomas Andersson, and the second a surprisingly delicate take on Talking Head’s Road To Nowhere, featuring harp and a doo-wop backing.
Dark Horses
Live, Dark Horses were as fearsome a prospect as the album, playing up to the myth with each band member dressed in black,, minimal lighting and dry ice filling the stage, and Lisa Elle adding to the mystique by talking in Swedish between the tracks. It was also daunting for me to take photos of the band – Dark Horses are one of the first acts I’ve come across who’ve given their photographer equal credit alongside each band member. They also manage to transcend the feeling that we were watching a local act – driven by their stage presence primarily, but also the following the band have, not coming to see them because they’re local, or because they’re friends with one of the members, but for what a great band they are.
A couple of months ago I bumped into the editor of one of the local magazines while I was out and about, and as I always do when I see them, asked who they had lined up for their next cover. His eyes lit up – “It’s Tall Ships” he gushed. “They’re fantastic – have you heard them?”. I said that I’d seen them earlier in the year at Sea Monsters, but added that I’d probably seen a hundred bands since. He told me that the night they headlined at One Inch Badge’s festival at the Prince Albert back in February sold out faster than any of the others, and then went on to tell me how great the album was, saving special praise for the album’s eight minute closer Murmurations.
He wasn’t wrong. Current single Gallop has been all over the radio, and to whet your appetite their record label Big Scary Monsters have put up an album stream over at The Line of Best Fit so you haven’t got any excuse not to listen to it. And if that’s not enough, you can catch them live at the Haunt this Friday.
Severed begins slowly and quietly. Opening track Capsule uses the same trick that Boards of Canada use – woozy out of phase ambience, familiar yet disorientating. Sounds echo from left to right almost lazily, lulling you into a false sense of security for what’s to come.
Things step up with recent single Precautionary Measures – wonky arpeggios, clattering drums, yelping vocals. Hyss starts off with more crazy stereo effects and builds into something that sounds like it could be a prog epic from the seventies with layered vocals and deliberately primitive keyboards. Pigments lays off the stereo but brings back the out of phase wooziness against krautrock beats with a crazy breakdown midway through.
Lux and Lost Ones bring some of the menace that comes with the wall of sound created at Speak Galactic’s live shows, thick slabs of electronic noise which fall away and blend seamlessly into the album’s masterpiece, Solar Sail.
Clocking in at a mere seventeen minutes, Solar Sail is a piece of ambient beauty. Twinkling analogue electronics start things off before swiftly moving into a seventies sci fi soundtrack that never was. Around seven minutes in you think it might be all over – there’s nothing except something which sounds a bit like tinnitus and some ambient noise. Xylophones threaten something more and background noises start to rumble. And then the sound of running water, and some simple chords which take you away to a beautiful place. Without you realising some distorted noise creeps in underneath, but it doesn’t matter because you’re still in the higher plane you’ve been taken to. The white noise increases, but there’s a beautiful majesty to it, and then out of the noise steps the final slow motion melody, towering like a giant over the rest of the record leaving you feeling exalted. It’s fantastic. It’s like Stereolab and Spiritualized at their most experimental jamming with each other. That good.
Severed is an ambitious, uncompromising, experimental record which isn’t for the faint hearted. It laughs in the face of genres and convention, but rewards you for taking up the challenge it offers.
Speak Galactic had a launch party for the album at Fitzherberts last saturday night. Support came ambient out of towners Plurals and Brighton Music Blog favourites Us Baby Bear Bones. Last time we saw them live was at The Great Escape, and since then they’ve been off in the studio recording material for an upcoming EP. They’ve obviously learned a trick or two while they’ve been away because their sound now is even bigger than before. The magic is still there and the songs sound better than ever. I can’t wait to hear them on record.
Us Baby Bear Bones
Speak Galactic live are a much noisier prospect than on record, and one that’s even more impressive, mainly because all of the sound (save for some live drums) is created by Owen Thomas. Everything is created onstage with a microphone, a guitar, a keyboard and a handful of effects pedals. There’s so much energy, and you can see the ideas and the talent fighting to get out, channelling itself through his fingers and voice. Visuals have been a recent addition to the live sets, and these complement the performance well – another assault on the sense with repeated patterns morphing with the music.
Music needs pioneers, people who are willing to push the boundaries to see what happens, and in Speak Galactic, Brighton’s got one they can be proud of.
Speak Galactic
Speak Galactic is released on on clear vinyl on September 24th by Cupboard Music.
It’s difficult to know where to start writing about Restlesslist, because there’s no one quite like them. At the same time, there are both no points of reference but also dozens of points. There’s psychedelia, surf rock, post rock, prog rock, ska, calypso, easy listening, exotica, italo-house and spoken word, quite often all in the same song. I first came across the band at Sea Monsters earlier this year, and loved the fact that they had so many people onstage, including a narrator wearing an eye-patch. Last night they launched their new album Coral Island Girl at a gig at The Haunt.
The gig was fantastic. Once again, the stage was packed (how on earth did they fit everyone onto the stage at the Prince Albert?), and rather than being a studied affair it looked like everyone onstage was having a great time. The audience were having a great time too. Well, most of them were – there were some very puzzled faces at the back. The gig that Restlesslist chose to launch their album at was a support slot for American band Howlin’ Wolf, and it seems that some of their fans were… Well, let’s just say that maybe their musical horizons aren’t wide as Restlesslist’s. If any of their fans end up reading these words, my advice to them is to look beyond check shirts and long shorts – there’s a wonderful world out there waiting to be discovered. Visuals were provided by Innerstrings Lightshow, who splashed the stage with 70s style projections in bright colours, adding to the already trippy experience of the gig. The band played their album from start to finish, without breaks between the tracks – that’s where the narration is – or any encores. Well, support bands rarely do encores, do they?
Restlesslist / Coral Island Girl
Coral Island Girl is a concept album. It recounts a tall tale told from the perspective of the album’s narrator of events following a shipwreck. Between each short spoken word segment, the story continues in instrumental form, conjuring up imagery of wonder or excitement, with the musical and non-musical elements complementing each other perfectly. As the story develops, the drama is heightened, and the tension mounts until it reaches it’s explosive conclusion. As I mentioned earlier, the album is jam packed with different styles but familiar motifs crop up throughout which give the record a bit of consistency. It’s an exhilarating listen – as imaginative as it is expansive – and deserves to be digested in one sitting. In a world where mp3 culture has reduced musical attention span to three minutes, it’s a joy to hear an record like Coral Island Girl. Definitely one of the albums of the year for us.
A few weeks ago we posted up the video for King Porter Stomp’s new single Shuffle, and last monday the album of the same name hit the shops.
Reading the PR blurb the I got sent with the album I was expecting a ska / reggae record, but Shuffle is much more than that. If anything, it’s more a hip hop record, with a predominantly reggae backing. Or maybe it’s a funk album. Who knows. Screw genres. Let’s just say that it’s a great party album.
A great album leaves you wanting when it ends, and you know what I want? To go to one of King Porter Stomp’s parties.
The Bird School of Being Human is the new album from Woodpecker Williams, out on 10th September on Robot Elephant Records.
The album is both challenging and comforting, bonkers and beautiful. It all starts off innocuous enough, with Gemma Williams (you didn’t think Woodpecker Wooliams was her real name did you?) proving that Brighton can match Joanna Newsome for quirky harpists. The first sign of discontent is at the end of opener Red Kite, where things break down a bit, but Gull brings back the strumming.
But then we have the new single Sparrow, and everything’s changed. The harps have gone. There’s wonky chopped up keyboards, and lots of reverb all across the vocals. Magpie has acoustic guitars and a queasy drone, and by the time we get to Crow (which got picked for the cover cd of this month’s Uncut), things get really messy and distorted. I’m sure I’ve had nightmares which have sounded like this. Which is kind of a compliment – in that to actually capture the creeping fear and paranoia is quite a feat.
Then our palates are cleansed with Dove, as Gemma reminds us that there is beauty in the world. The harps swirl again, but this time recalling some of Bjork’s quieter moments from Vespertine. Finally the record closes with Hummingbird, the album’s triumphant moment. It builds slowly from a choir-like intro, then halfway through things pick up, vocals get looped, latin drums kick off, and the vocals are joined by trumpets and party blowers.
Less than half an hour after we started, the album’s done. You’ll want to listen to on repeat to go through all those emotions again and again, and I can guarantee you won’t hear anything quite like it this year. Sparrow is out as a single next Monday with remixes from Marcus Hamblett, Becky Becky and 182 Productions, and the album launch is at Saint Andrew’s Church on Saturday 8th September. You can pre-order the album from the Robot Elephant Website.
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