When I said a couple of weeks ago that The Fall were still going strong – http://terrapinlistens2.blogspot.com/2008/11/fall-50000-fall-fans-cant-be-wrong-part.html – I have to admit I had my fingers crossed behind my back. I listened to this with some trepidation, but not only is it true, I was astonished, gobsmacked, whatever at how good this is. With the possible exception of 1993’s “The Infotainment Scan”, it’s the most consistently good Fall album I’ve heard (though I have to admit that I’ve lost touch with them over the last decade or so) since “This Nation’s Saving Grace”, some 23 years ago.
It kicks off relatively quietly, with the subtly surreal “Alton Towers”, so the howl and guitar riff that introduce “Wolf Kidult Man” come as a shock. The benchmark for Fall classics in recent years is “Theme From Sparta FC”. This definitely passes the test. My heart sank at the thought of the next track, which is over 11 minutes long (must be the longest they have ever recorded). I assumed that it was going to be boring, unfocused and rambling, and would have been happy to bank my winnings. Totally wrong. “50 Year Old Man”, which is a celebration of Mark E Smith’s half century, is wonderful, taking off at tangents several times, including a slow bit with banjos. (Have there ever been banjos on a Fall record before? There have now...) MES shouts “Fade out! Fade out!” over the fade-out, but fading out seems to be the last thing on his mind.
The rest is brilliant. You wait for the duff stuff, but it doesn’t arrive. Even tracks like “I’ve Been Duped” (with Eleni Poulou/Smith singing – can you imagine the scene in the Smith household – “Darling, I’ve written a song especially for you to sing”?), and synth near-instrumental “Taurig” (sic), which shouldn’t work, do. Especially good is the ominous “Tommy Shooter”, whose lyrics – “See, the clouds are darkening with wings of chickens, they’re coming home to roost” manage to be simultaneously sinister and hilarious.
Skewed and life-enhancing. A great and totally unexpected piece of work.
Tuesday, 25 November 2008
Wednesday, 19 November 2008
Johnny Cash – Ring Of Fire: The Legend
I’ve never been into country music. I haven’t heard enough of it to form an active dislike: I’ve just never really gone near it, mainly because to an outsider – ie an English city dweller - a lot of it seems sentimental and conservative. But a couple of weeks ago I was in a record shop and I heard Johnny Cash’s “San Quentin”, recorded live at the prison, and I had to hear more.
This collection, released a few years ago around the time of the biopic “I Walk the Line”, crams the whole of Cash’s recording career, from the mid-Fifties to his death in 2003, into a single CD. It’s a heroic endeavour (at least four times as heroic as trying to fit 25 years of The Fall onto two disks) and as a basic introduction to Johnny Cash it succeeds enormously.
The hardest thing about listening to Cash’s music, at least the earlier material, is that it is deceptively easy. That is, it doesn’t seem difficult (which is why country music is – fairly or unfairly – bracketed with “easy listening” in the UK. So it’s easy to underestimate the depth of songs like “I Walk The Line”, which isn’t (as it first seems) just a about a bloke saying he is going to behave himself, but about the redemptive power of love.
The zenith of this collection is the amazing “San Quentin”. It has to be listened to rather than described, so I’m not going to try.
Some of the stuff that follows is a bit disappointing: the mawkish “Man In Black” verges on self-parody, and “The Highwayman” (with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson – Cash draws the short straw and gets the daft verse about the spaceman) is a mistake. After that I wasn’t expecting the dark late songs to be very good, but they were, especially the covers of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” and Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”.
If any country fans out there have got any suggestions for further listening I’ll be glad to consider them. Meanwhile, I’ll be buying or borrowing copies of the San Quentin and Folsom concert albums. Or stealing them...
This collection, released a few years ago around the time of the biopic “I Walk the Line”, crams the whole of Cash’s recording career, from the mid-Fifties to his death in 2003, into a single CD. It’s a heroic endeavour (at least four times as heroic as trying to fit 25 years of The Fall onto two disks) and as a basic introduction to Johnny Cash it succeeds enormously.
The hardest thing about listening to Cash’s music, at least the earlier material, is that it is deceptively easy. That is, it doesn’t seem difficult (which is why country music is – fairly or unfairly – bracketed with “easy listening” in the UK. So it’s easy to underestimate the depth of songs like “I Walk The Line”, which isn’t (as it first seems) just a about a bloke saying he is going to behave himself, but about the redemptive power of love.
The zenith of this collection is the amazing “San Quentin”. It has to be listened to rather than described, so I’m not going to try.
Some of the stuff that follows is a bit disappointing: the mawkish “Man In Black” verges on self-parody, and “The Highwayman” (with Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson – Cash draws the short straw and gets the daft verse about the spaceman) is a mistake. After that I wasn’t expecting the dark late songs to be very good, but they were, especially the covers of Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” and Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”.
If any country fans out there have got any suggestions for further listening I’ll be glad to consider them. Meanwhile, I’ll be buying or borrowing copies of the San Quentin and Folsom concert albums. Or stealing them...
Thursday, 13 November 2008
Sibelius – Symphony No 3
First, apologies for the longwindedness of the posts on the Fall compilation. Now, Sibelius.
I’ve never really got on with the Third. It’s not that I actively disliked it – if I had, I might have made an effort to understand it – but more that I didn’t take it seriously. So I don’t think I’ve listened to it more than two or three times before. In fact I don’t think I had heard this version – part of the set I bought about 15 years ago – ever before.
Something odd happened this time because halfway through I caught myself not taking it seriously again, so I decided to listen to it a second time. Now I understand this piece much better and rate it a bit (though not much) more highly.
The busyness of the first movement makes a strong impression, especially if you are experiencing it as a dose of bright C major sunlight on a dark grey November morning in gloomy London. But whereas my impression of the opening movement of the Second is of economy and efficiency - see http://terrapinlistens2.blogspot.com/2008/09/sibelius-symphony-no-2.html – here, it is the opposite. There is a wealth of material in the exposition, but I’m a bit disappointed that Sibelius doesn’t do much more with it. Again, I thought on first listening that I had been wrong to bracket the second movement with other Sibelius slow movements which just seem to be there to be pretty. But the second time round I wasn’t so sure.
I love the third (and final) movement now, however, especially the way the chorale theme comes out of nowhere like a ship out of a mist, and sweeps on and on, delaying its resolution until the very end.
I like this work more than I did. But equally important, I respect it now
I’ve never really got on with the Third. It’s not that I actively disliked it – if I had, I might have made an effort to understand it – but more that I didn’t take it seriously. So I don’t think I’ve listened to it more than two or three times before. In fact I don’t think I had heard this version – part of the set I bought about 15 years ago – ever before.
Something odd happened this time because halfway through I caught myself not taking it seriously again, so I decided to listen to it a second time. Now I understand this piece much better and rate it a bit (though not much) more highly.
The busyness of the first movement makes a strong impression, especially if you are experiencing it as a dose of bright C major sunlight on a dark grey November morning in gloomy London. But whereas my impression of the opening movement of the Second is of economy and efficiency - see http://terrapinlistens2.blogspot.com/2008/09/sibelius-symphony-no-2.html – here, it is the opposite. There is a wealth of material in the exposition, but I’m a bit disappointed that Sibelius doesn’t do much more with it. Again, I thought on first listening that I had been wrong to bracket the second movement with other Sibelius slow movements which just seem to be there to be pretty. But the second time round I wasn’t so sure.
I love the third (and final) movement now, however, especially the way the chorale theme comes out of nowhere like a ship out of a mist, and sweeps on and on, delaying its resolution until the very end.
I like this work more than I did. But equally important, I respect it now
Monday, 10 November 2008
The Fall – 50,000 Fall Fans Can’t Be Wrong – Part 3 (the last - I promise!)
Disk 2 kicks off with two tracks from 1986’s “Bend Sinister”. Some people think that this was The Fall’s best album. I don’t (I think its predecessor, “This Nation’s Saving Grace”, was better), but “US 80s 90s” and the single “Mr Pharmacist” are classics.
After that, it goes off the boil. “Living Too Late” is dull dull dull, and I don’t think “Hey! Luciani” was that good either. I didn’t notice at the time because I was just glad that they were getting more attention (though that was double-edged: I remember the Luciani play/opera/thing being trashed by the critics). Even I couldn’t be fooled by the dreadful cover of “There’s A Ghost In My House” (1987), which by some quirk of fate became The Fall’s one and only top 30 hit (so far, anyway).
Oddly, things look up after “Ghost” with the follow up singles, the epic, clubby “Hit The North” and the razor-sharp cover of the Kinks’ “Victoria”, although neither of them had the same chart success.
We then leap two years into the post-Brix era, with “Telephone Thing” (the only song by The Fall I’ve ever heard on a pub jukebox), which is OK, but gets a bit monotonous. “High Tension Line” (1991) is a great song, however, and so is the apocalyptic “Free Range” (from “Code: Selfish”, 1992 – does it remind anyone of the theme from “Miami Vice”?).
Even better is the astonishing cover of Joe Gibbs’ reggae classic “Why Are People Grudgeful?” (1993) – see Gibbs’ obituary http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3598060.ece for the story behind this song.
On to “Middle Class Revolt” (1994), which I’ve never really liked, compared to the records before and after. Two tracks from this: the single “Behind The Counter”, which is far better than I remember it, and the best track “M5#1”. Perhaps this album is worth a revisit. Ditto “Cerebral Caustic” represented here by “Feeling Numb”: pretty good but not the best track.
Next up is “The Chisellers”, a bit strange even for The Fall, but good. “Powder Keg” is much more direct, one of the best tracks on this disk. Another album I want to have another listen to is “Levitate”, which I don’t remember as very good, but I liked “Masquerade”, included here.
I’d like to write a lot more about “Touch Sensitive”, now my favourite Fall song but (as usual) there isn’t time. Smith’s lyrics home in on the really important issues – “And you’re dying for a pee / So you go behind a tree”.
After the clarity and sharpness of “Touch Sensitive” the last three tracks are more fuzzy and distorted. I hated “Crop-Dust” when I heard it for the first time, but I now recognise its brutal genius. “Susan Vs Youth Club” is bouncy. “Green Eyed Loco Man” is OK but a bit weary sounding.
And that’s the end. Or not the end because MES is still going (fairly) strong.
A few words (or rather a lot of them actually) about the selection of tracks for the collection. There aren’t any session tracks, so we don’t get the Peel session versions of “New Puritan” or “Eat Y’self Fitter”, which is a shame because they would belong in any Best Of collection, but understandable. (We do get the effete version of the latter from “Perverted By Language”, which is probably worse than nothing.) The backbone of the collection is single A-sides, and in order to keep to 2 disks, they aren’t all included. Both of which, again, are understandable, and some of the omissions are understandable (who misses or even remembers “Look Know”?) but others are more unfortunate, eg “It’s The New Thing” (disliked by some, but only their second single), “Rollin’ Danny” and “Cab It Up”.
The absence of B-sides rules out classics like “Wings” and “City Hobgoblins”. And there are some essential album tracks which it would have been nice to have, like “The NWRA”, “Lay Of The Land” and “Bill Is Dead” (the latter The Fall’s only Festive Fifty Number One) and the chaotic live version of "No Xmas For John Quays".
But I’m not going to carp. This is brilliant.
After that, it goes off the boil. “Living Too Late” is dull dull dull, and I don’t think “Hey! Luciani” was that good either. I didn’t notice at the time because I was just glad that they were getting more attention (though that was double-edged: I remember the Luciani play/opera/thing being trashed by the critics). Even I couldn’t be fooled by the dreadful cover of “There’s A Ghost In My House” (1987), which by some quirk of fate became The Fall’s one and only top 30 hit (so far, anyway).
Oddly, things look up after “Ghost” with the follow up singles, the epic, clubby “Hit The North” and the razor-sharp cover of the Kinks’ “Victoria”, although neither of them had the same chart success.
We then leap two years into the post-Brix era, with “Telephone Thing” (the only song by The Fall I’ve ever heard on a pub jukebox), which is OK, but gets a bit monotonous. “High Tension Line” (1991) is a great song, however, and so is the apocalyptic “Free Range” (from “Code: Selfish”, 1992 – does it remind anyone of the theme from “Miami Vice”?).
Even better is the astonishing cover of Joe Gibbs’ reggae classic “Why Are People Grudgeful?” (1993) – see Gibbs’ obituary http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article3598060.ece for the story behind this song.
On to “Middle Class Revolt” (1994), which I’ve never really liked, compared to the records before and after. Two tracks from this: the single “Behind The Counter”, which is far better than I remember it, and the best track “M5#1”. Perhaps this album is worth a revisit. Ditto “Cerebral Caustic” represented here by “Feeling Numb”: pretty good but not the best track.
Next up is “The Chisellers”, a bit strange even for The Fall, but good. “Powder Keg” is much more direct, one of the best tracks on this disk. Another album I want to have another listen to is “Levitate”, which I don’t remember as very good, but I liked “Masquerade”, included here.
I’d like to write a lot more about “Touch Sensitive”, now my favourite Fall song but (as usual) there isn’t time. Smith’s lyrics home in on the really important issues – “And you’re dying for a pee / So you go behind a tree”.
After the clarity and sharpness of “Touch Sensitive” the last three tracks are more fuzzy and distorted. I hated “Crop-Dust” when I heard it for the first time, but I now recognise its brutal genius. “Susan Vs Youth Club” is bouncy. “Green Eyed Loco Man” is OK but a bit weary sounding.
And that’s the end. Or not the end because MES is still going (fairly) strong.
A few words (or rather a lot of them actually) about the selection of tracks for the collection. There aren’t any session tracks, so we don’t get the Peel session versions of “New Puritan” or “Eat Y’self Fitter”, which is a shame because they would belong in any Best Of collection, but understandable. (We do get the effete version of the latter from “Perverted By Language”, which is probably worse than nothing.) The backbone of the collection is single A-sides, and in order to keep to 2 disks, they aren’t all included. Both of which, again, are understandable, and some of the omissions are understandable (who misses or even remembers “Look Know”?) but others are more unfortunate, eg “It’s The New Thing” (disliked by some, but only their second single), “Rollin’ Danny” and “Cab It Up”.
The absence of B-sides rules out classics like “Wings” and “City Hobgoblins”. And there are some essential album tracks which it would have been nice to have, like “The NWRA”, “Lay Of The Land” and “Bill Is Dead” (the latter The Fall’s only Festive Fifty Number One) and the chaotic live version of "No Xmas For John Quays".
But I’m not going to carp. This is brilliant.
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