This is a Recording

Songs like ' Suddenly ', from her 2013 album One Breath had piqued my interest about Anna Calvi. When I heard the title track from her covers EP 'Strange Weather' the following year, the desire to acquire kicked in, and I ordered a vinyl copy of it (I can't recall why I didn't save myself a few pounds and get it on CD). In any event, I did not regret my purchase: it's an intriguing selection of songs confidently interpreted. I wasn't familiar with FKA Twigs' 'Papi Pacify' before hearing Calvi's version. The original's electronic instrumentation is replaced here by piano, guitar, bass, drums & strings (the last arranged by Nico Muhly), building in an unsettling crescendo from a spare & soft beginning. Another then-recent song follows, in the shape of Connan Mockasin's vaguely creepy 'I'm the Man that will Find You'. A couple of older compositions start and end side B: Suicide's 'Ghost Rider' and Dav...

"Warmduscher" is, I gather, a mild German insult meaning "hot-showerer": that is, a person unwilling to undergo the bracing rigours of a cold shower, or otherwise rough it; a bit of a wimp. In this case it refers to a London-based band fronted by U.S. ex-pat Craig Louis Higgins Jr., aka Clams Baker. Their second album Whale City was one of my favourite records in 2018. I have it on CD. Whale City - as a locale - is a re-imagining of the decrepit and dangerous NYC of the '70s. The album has a loose concept, outlined in a few spoken-word interludes, of following one man's unscrupulous rise through the ranks of that city's underworld. The musical action begins with the second track ' Standing on the Corner ', whose unsavoury urban storylines play out over an invitingly insistent bassline.  The short & sharp 'Big Wilma' has more of a post-punk aura, while '1000 Whispers' feels like it's being transmitted from some '60s ba...

I can't pinpoint my initial encounter with Neko Case's voice with any precision. It would have been between '02 and '05. Perhaps I'd heard her on The New Pornographers' song 'Mass Romantic'. Or maybe one of the tracks from Blacklisted ('02) was included on a promotional CD affixed to a music magazine. In any event, Blacklisted was certainly the first of her albums I bought. And it's turned out to be the only record of hers I've held on to. I eagerly ordered Fox Confessor Brings the Flood ('06) when it was first released, but never did warm to it. Much more recently I purchased Hell-on ('18) which hit me only just a little wide of the mark. Even this record, much as I love the tone & timbre of Case's voice, is one I revisit quite seldom - annually or so - but each new listen has been a fresh pleasure, so its place on the shelf is secure. The tunes are lovely. Case's lyrics are often interestingly oblique. Her singing is...

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea has attracted a great deal of fervent praise and no small measure of derision in its time. As is to be expected, given that I own a copy, I count myself among its admirers. It was already five years old before I'd even heard of it. Come 2003, intrigued by laudatory reviews I'd found on-line like this one , I downloaded an mp3 copy via LimeWire. A first cursory listen to a few snippets failed to impress me, but my on-line peers kept going on about it, and in due course ('04) I ordered a CD copy from Amazon. On sitting down to properly listen under headphones for the first time I became a convert within its first five minutes. By the end I was deeply impressed and moved. I revisited it very often in the years that followed, and tried to spread the word among my off-line friends and acquaintances (absolutely none of whom were interested). Not only did I find it a fascinating work of art in its own right, it also served as a gateway to further won...

Thanks to my newfound enthusiasm for Pixies' Surfer Rosa in 1988, I soon afterwards became aware of  Throwing Muses, the two labelmates often being mentioned together in the music press. The next year I bought the latter band's third album Hunkpapa , only to find it easier to admire than enjoy. It wasn't until '91, and The Real Ramona (album #4), that I properly became a fan. The opening track 'Counting Backwards' was my favourite of its songs. Decades later & with those cassettes long gone, I was intrigued, ca. 2018, to find a vinyl copy of The Real Ramona in a Chepstow charity shop. I couldn't see a price on it, so queried the cashier who shrugged and suggested £2, which seemed like a bargain. On getting it home I found there was a price sticker, but inexplicably affixed to the inner sleeve where neither of us had seen it: £12. Having been briefly pleased at landing a good deal I then felt bad at having snatched a tenner from the hands of the needy...

The Supersuckers took a sharp turn off the rock'n'roll highway in 1997 with their fourth album Must've Been High , which saw them travel for the first time "down that old dirt road to the country". I'd previously heard 'Born With a Tail' (from The Sacrilicious Sounds Of The Supersuckers : album #3) so had an inkling of where they'd driven from to get there, but this was my first proper introduction to their music. It's far from a perfect record, but twenty-five years on I still get a kick out of playing it. Mine is a German-made CD copy. The sleeve-notes promise "Simple [...] three-chord songs, sung from experience", and that's what we get. The subject matter encompasses the pleasures of recreational drug-use ('Non-Addictive Marijuana'); the end of a long night's revelry ('One Cigarette Away)'; the morning after the night before ('Hungover Together'); the hazards of being on stage ('Barricade') ...

This LP comes with a fold-out poster on which there are instructions on how to "Build Your Own Pop-Up Construction to Hold your Music Tapes Recording" (namely the CD you're encouraged to make of the downloadable versions of the songs), with part of the poster itself intended to be cut out and used in said Construction. The list of additional supplies the would-be hobbyist will need is: "one small acorn; a warm iron; scissors; a piece of stiff paper; glue". Among the instuctions is: "Draw a tiny musical note on your acorn". It's so very twee, as, to some extent, is the music, but it's also decidedly weird. Tweird , perhaps. My belated discovery of the "Elephant 6" artists' work about fifteen years ago did not extend to The Music Tapes. Only last year did I happen to stray into their eccentric world. Music Tapes For Clouds And Tornadoes is unusual with respect to both its instrumentation and recording. The musical saw and the banjo...

Stanley Brinks, formerly known as André Herman Düne, is a half Swedish, half Moroccan, Paris-born, Berlin-resident singer-songwriter. The Wave Pictures are a three-piece band from Leicestershire fronted by singer/guitarist David Tattersall. Both they and Brinks have recorded prolifically. Jointly they have released at least three albums and as many singles, with 'Orange Juice', issued in 2014, being the first of the latter. It was released as a bright orange 7" on the Fika Recordings label. A week ago I wrote "very often I need to hear an unfamiliar song several times before its charms or its annoyances become fully apparent": 'Orange Juice' is a counter-example, a case where it was love at first hearing. In a nasal tenor, Brinks laments the state of the weather, his own decrepitude, the music he hears on the radio, the dirty streets, and, lastly, the apparent futility of existence. Against all that, a more optimistic chorus rejoins "but I'll get...

It would have been in 2015, between the release of her debut album and her first visit to the UK, that I first heard of Aldous Harding. I was intrigued from the outset, but not quite enough to make any purchases. Nor did what I heard of her second album Party persuade me to reach for my wallet. It was only when I saw the video for 'The Barrel', the first one made to promote her third album Designer in 2019, that things clicked into place, and I ordered it on CD. I'd already heard 'The Barrel' on the radio a couple of times, but I had failed to appreciate it before seeing it visualised . It's a soft and slow record that gets even quieter and slower toward the end. Recorded not so far from here up at Rockfield Studios near Monmouth, Harding was joined by some Welsh musicians like H. Hawkline, Gwion Llewelyn and Stephen "Sweet Baboo" Black. Producer John Parish also contributed a variety of instrumental parts and backing vocals. The closing two tracks, ...

The buzz about Yeah Yeah Yeahs reached my ears in 2002, whereupon I bought their debut EP, which I loved. When their keenly-anticipated debut album followed in '03, I ordered that too (on CD), but found myself a little disappointed by it. Of course it has some great songs: 'Maps' especially has become a firm favourite for many, but as an album I didn't love it then, and I still don't. I'm also very fond of 'Date With the Night' and 'Y Control' (my personal favourite on the disc) and quite enjoy 'Rich', 'Pin', and 'Cold Light', but the rest of it leaves me more or less cold. It's an outstanding EP with some lacklustre padding. I never was taken by the artwork either, which is credited to one Cody Critcheloe, who, I just learned, has since become a recording artist, going by the name of SSION. It's a CD I've considered parting with a few times, but then I put it on and recall how much I enjoy the same few songs, ...

After falling for the female voices featured on Broken Social Scene's You Forgot it in People ca. 2003, I was on the lookout for works by Leslie Feist and Emily Haines, ordering the former's album Let It Die in '04 and the debut by Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton: Knives Don't Have Your Back in '06. Come 2017 though, the release of Choir of the Mind passed me by completely: I'd heard nothing of it on the radio and hadn't so much as read a word about it anywhere either, until there came a time that I actively googled Haines' name. I found she'd done a good deal more with Metric (though their stuff hadn't quite appealed to me in the way her solo songs had) - and then there was Choir of the Mind . I liked what I heard of it on-line, but it took me a long while before I finally obtained a copy - only last year - on CD. But - all's well that ends well: I love it and have played it often. It's not without some flaws: its reliance on s...

Here's another relic of the period, in the middle of the last decade, when I sometimes bought singles inspired by things I'd heard on the radio. This one came out on the Ra-Ra Rok label in 2016: 'Human Baby' by Phobophobes. It's a clear vinyl 7". This is a band that emerged from the same South London milieu that spat out the likes of Goat Girl and Fat White Family. It's slightly unusual in having two tracks on the A-side: 'Human Baby' itself, a satisfyingly shambling number with some clever lyrics & a strong chorus; and 'The Ground is Friend to All', a poem by deceased former band member George Bedford Russell (who had succumbed to a heroin overdose). The latter is read, unaccompanied, by the novelist Will Self, its contents amply illustrating what a tragic loss Russell's death had been. On the B-Side, 'Free the Naked Rambler' is a topical song about Steven Gough, then much in the news, whose determined insistence on public n...

I think I must have first heard of Low about twenty years ago, but whichever of their songs I encountered at that time didn't make much impact. By a decade ago I knew them as the performers of  'Just Like Christmas', already on the way to becoming something of an alternative end-of-year fixture: a song I admired, if not enough to explore their other work. The release of Double Negative in 2018 garnered them a great deal of praise, and after hearing some of the songs from it on the radio, and more on YouTube, I was intrigued enough to buy it on CD a few months later. As many commentators have noted, it's uncommon for an artist or band to break fertile new creative ground decades into their careers, but Low, together with producer BJ Burton, succeeded admirably in doing so with their twelfth studio album. My favourite tracks include 'Always Trying to Work it Out' and 'Poor Sucker'. It's a disc I played relatively often, until I acquired their thirte...

Was it on the kind of mix CD that one might find affixed to the cover of a music magazine where I first heard 'Jellybones' by The Unicorns? Or was on a hand-made CD-R mix that someone kindly sent me from the other side of the internet? I can't remember, but I fell for the song and ordered the album, specifically the UK CD version, on the strength of it. It's a whimsical, odd, inventive record, although, for me, nothing else on it quite matches the charm of 'Jellybones'. It's not a CD I've played a great deal. When I do, I'm impressed afresh by it, without my admiration amounting to love. It's not the first time the act of writing about a record has been the stimulus that leads to my letting it go: I'll be releasing this one back into the wild in the near future. The sleeve design is exactly right. My second-favourite tracks on the disc are probably the spectral segue of 'Ghost Mountain' & 'Sea Ghost', and also 'Let...

The Moonlandingz began as a figment in the imaginations of the Sheffield duo The Eccentronic Research Council, whose idea for a concept album about a fictional band by that name and an obsessive fan of theirs ended up with the no-longer-altogether-imaginary group recording some real songs. It helped matters no end that they were able to recruit Lias Saoudi and Saul Adamczewski of London-based reprobates The Fat While Family to take part. The first song to surface from the project, ' Sweet Saturn Mine ', knocked my socks off when I first heard it in 2015. In time there was a full Moonlandingz album ( Interplanetary Class Classics ), but before that there were a few EPs, including this one, Blak Hanz , a 10" record with four tracks issued in a limited edition of 500 copies in 2016. I'd missed out on the first couple of releases owing to lack of funds, but eagerly snapped this one up.  As well as the queasy psych-pop of the title track, there's ' Drop It Fauntlero...

As far as I know this is the only album in my collection named after a 17th-Century treatise on speculative astronomy: specifically John Wilkins' The Discovery of a World in the Moone: or, A Discourse Tending to Prove that 'tis probable there may be another habitable World in that Planet (London, 1638). It's not at all obvious to me why the band chose that title: some of the songs' lyrics hint at otherworldly shenanigans, but I don't recall the moon being mentioned anywhere in them.  My belated exploration of the œuvre of the Elephant 6 artists had led me to The Apples in stereo ca. 2004. I bought Tone Soul Evolution (1997) which I enjoyed, and then Her Wallpaper Reverie (1999) and Velocity of Sound (2002 - thereby skipping over The Discovery... ) neither of which held as much appeal for me, so my exploration of their catalogue stalled at that point. Only a few years ago did I return to their music, discovering that I very much enjoyed The Discovery... , and ou...

I remember 'Lucky Number' from its time as a UK #3 hit single in 1979 (outsold at its peak only by Elvis Costello's 'Oliver's Army' and 'I Will Survive' by Gloria Gaynor). I was only ten, but just beginning to take more of an interest in the chart's upper reaches. I suspect its success then had a lot to do with the quirkiness of the performance: with Lovich looking like something out of '20s German expressionist cinema and sounding like no-one else. It is, meanwhile, a strong song that still holds up well. The 7", on Stiff Records, was part of a lucky discovery at my local charity shop last year. The B-Side, 'Home', has also withstood the test of time, and sounds great. A few months after buying 'Lucky Number', I picked up a copy of the disco classic 'Supernature' by Cerrone, also on 7", and was surprised to learn when I looked it up that Lovich had, without being credited on the record, written its lyrics.

I didn't get into Deerhoof until after the release of their acclaimed 2005 album The Runners Four , but, for reasons lost to the mists of time, the first record of theirs I bought was Apple O´ from 2003: perhaps it was more readily-available via Amazon UK at that point, or just slightly cheaper. In any case, it made a favourable impression, and I obtained The Runners Four soon afterwards, along with the Green Cosmos EP. Allmusic reviewer Heather Phares wrote "As the title implies, Apple O' (my eye) revolves around the band's musings on love, sex, and creation". But is the last character in the title really an apostrophe, when, on the cover, it has the look of an acute accent? My theory is that the O´ in the title is an emoji-esque representation of a cartoon bomb ( Apple 💣), which happens to match up  with the title of track 6: 'Apple Bomb' - which, to my ears, is the best song on the disc. It's a number that builds from delicate beginnings to an...

When I found a vinyl copy of Infected by The The in the wild last summer, I was in two minds as to whether I should bring it home or not. It's an album I liked and admired when it was new, enough that I bought it on cassette at the time. But it was never a record I unreservedly loved. I did bring it home and had the peculiar pleasure of hearing it all for the first time in what must have been at least twenty five years, if not thirty. Why then had I hesitated to pick it up? I doubted I'd revisit it - and, sure enough, since then I've yet to play the LP a second time. I had misgivings about the state-of-the-art mid-'80s production when it was still the mid-'80s. The songs still stand up pretty well, but I didn't always enjoy how they were dressed up, and nor do I now. The political concerns it addressed, sharply here; clumsily there; are largely still relevant, yet it's such a serious record, to the extent of being po-faced. My favourite tracks on it are ...

I only deigned to take notice of the The White Stripes hype in late 2001, several months after the release of White Blood Cells . Perhaps I'd read enough laudatory reviews of it; perhaps I'd seen the video for 'Hotel Yorba' on MTV2. I was enthused and delighted by the album: it's front loaded, with the opening four tracks charging out of the gate. 'Hotel Yorba' and 'Fell in Love With a Girl' were immediate favourites. Further along the running order, the sweetly sentimental 'We're Going To Be Friends' was another I loved. I bought Elephant as soon as it was released, and loved that too, but, by 2005, and Get Behind Me Satan my affection for them had began to cool. It's been a good few years since I played this one: I'll have to take it out for a drive and re-listen, then decide if I still need to keep a place for it on my shelves.  Updated later to add: having greatly enjoyed making its re-acquaintance, the CD stays!