This is beautiful. Aldous Harding’s second session for KEXP, recorded late last year towards the end of her US tour.
A highlight of this KEXP session is the closing performance of my personal favourite song from Designer, Damn, a gently affecting song with a beautiful musical coda that reminds me of Eric Satie. The interview by Cheryl Waters is also very gently and sympathetically handled and she adapts very adroitly to a painfully reticent interviewee.
Harding’s second album, Party, was an extraordinary achievement which I have returned to time and time and again and which signalled the emergence of one of the most striking creative figures to have emerged in recent years. Her third album, Designer, was previewed with the promotional video for The Barrel which expressed very powerful themes of personal freedom and emancipation via a very playful and childlike sense of mischief. This is a video simply brimming with invention and which demands to be viewed and re-viewed.
I loved the album, Designer, and bought a ticket for Harding’s show at Vicar Street not long after the European tour schedule was announced. Unfortunately, due to family commitments, I had to miss the show (I gave the ticket to a curious friend who has since become a committed fan of Harding’s) and, watching this KEXP session as well as bootlegs of shows from last year’s US and European tours, it appears that I missed an exceptional concert. But I know she’ll be back and I certainly won’t miss her next concert in Dublin.
Harding is a true original, reminiscent to my ears of the vocal stylings of Nico, Dagmar Krause and Bridget St. John. There is an otherworldly strangeness to her but it is not in any way artificial. She is an artist of genuine and profound genius, I feel, who will make a crucial contribution to the musical canon in the coming decades.
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Bill Callahan Performance on KEXP seattle
Vinyl -anything else is data storage.
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I loved Nadia Reid’s second album, Preservation. It was a genuine slow burner which required patience and close listening to unlock its rewards. But it was an effort worth making. Songs like Richard, The Arrow and the Aim, and especially, the title track, Preservation, have stayed with me and enriched my life and my understanding of their inner meanings has deepened over time.
Her new album was recently released. Although I have not yet bought it, I have been entranced by the tracks previewed online and none more so than the album’s closing track, Get The Devil Out. Like all of Reid’s songs, its lyrical content is elliptical and its meaning cannot be grasped easily. To my mind, it appears to be about the coming to terms with a sudden and traumatic bereavement and the importance of struggling through that crisis, and coming to some kind of epiphany about the importance of realising one’s personal identity and finding a place of security, permanence and constancy for ourselves in this life.
The first two verses are striking and immediately grab your attention.
“I gotta get the devil out of me
I’m searching for the permanence
So that I can breathe again
You took the razor to your skin
Not enough to die
Just enough so that you could breathe again”
Those lines speak to me of the emotional numbness that follows the bereavement of a loved one, where one is unable of relating to the outside world and other human beings and one may resort to alcohol, drugs or, in this case, self-harm as an attempt to feel something of the sensory world. Reid uses the word, “permanence”, to refer to a grasping after constancy and some semblance of normality from the midst of the emotional torpor which presently surrounds her.
The video for this song is simple but very effective, particularly the use of the mirror before which Reid is seated for the entirety of the song. For the first few lines, the shifting movement of her head appears to indicate an agitated dreamlike state. But her eyes open as she sings the line, “I am only one woman” and then the camera angle shifts to one side and she looks straight at the camera via the mirror and she sings “You are only one man”, as if to address directly the listener. This is not just a personal song about her grief but it has become a more universal song about the grief that we all must face in our lives and the painful journey of self-discovery that we must take in order to engage with our grief and re-emerge to the outside world. The forcefulness with which she sings the closing lines, “I am right as I am” underlines this newfound sense of hard-won personal identity.
The overall effect is deeply moving and extremely powerful. In summary, I think there is something being quietly expressed here about a reverence for one’s life and the responsibility we all bear for managing and preserving our mental and physical well-being throughout the course of our lives in the face of life’s adversities.
“So keep on movin’
Or stay by my side, either way
I’ll tell you a secret
I’ve never revealed
However we are is okay”
- from “Loping along through the cosmos” by Judee Sill
Her new album was recently released. Although I have not yet bought it, I have been entranced by the tracks previewed online and none more so than the album’s closing track, Get The Devil Out. Like all of Reid’s songs, its lyrical content is elliptical and its meaning cannot be grasped easily. To my mind, it appears to be about the coming to terms with a sudden and traumatic bereavement and the importance of struggling through that crisis, and coming to some kind of epiphany about the importance of realising one’s personal identity and finding a place of security, permanence and constancy for ourselves in this life.
The first two verses are striking and immediately grab your attention.
“I gotta get the devil out of me
I’m searching for the permanence
So that I can breathe again
You took the razor to your skin
Not enough to die
Just enough so that you could breathe again”
Those lines speak to me of the emotional numbness that follows the bereavement of a loved one, where one is unable of relating to the outside world and other human beings and one may resort to alcohol, drugs or, in this case, self-harm as an attempt to feel something of the sensory world. Reid uses the word, “permanence”, to refer to a grasping after constancy and some semblance of normality from the midst of the emotional torpor which presently surrounds her.
The video for this song is simple but very effective, particularly the use of the mirror before which Reid is seated for the entirety of the song. For the first few lines, the shifting movement of her head appears to indicate an agitated dreamlike state. But her eyes open as she sings the line, “I am only one woman” and then the camera angle shifts to one side and she looks straight at the camera via the mirror and she sings “You are only one man”, as if to address directly the listener. This is not just a personal song about her grief but it has become a more universal song about the grief that we all must face in our lives and the painful journey of self-discovery that we must take in order to engage with our grief and re-emerge to the outside world. The forcefulness with which she sings the closing lines, “I am right as I am” underlines this newfound sense of hard-won personal identity.
The overall effect is deeply moving and extremely powerful. In summary, I think there is something being quietly expressed here about a reverence for one’s life and the responsibility we all bear for managing and preserving our mental and physical well-being throughout the course of our lives in the face of life’s adversities.
“So keep on movin’
Or stay by my side, either way
I’ll tell you a secret
I’ve never revealed
However we are is okay”
- from “Loping along through the cosmos” by Judee Sill
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Sure since your all in lockdown I might as well post a few more gems for Nigel to get his teeth into! :)
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This was a very pleasant surprise. Bob Dylan’s song, Murder Most Foul, was posted online yesterday and it is one of the best, most profoundly heartfelt songs that he’s released in many a moon. Ostensibly, it is about the assassination of JFK but that is simply the genesis of Dylan’s discontent. Richly elegiac in tone, this strikes me as a requiem for a society lost in moral disrepair. There is a great deal of bittersweet nostalgia here for what JFK represented to many Americans and what his murder robbed them of and references abound to the cynicism that progressively replaced an earlier generation’s idealism. A younger Dylan would have vented anger more freely but Dylan the elder seems to be looking here for some kind of consoling truth. This truth takes the form of the music which has sustained him throughout the course of his life and which holds more relevance for him now than ever before.
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Been playing this a lot over the last few days.
Never thought we'd see these guys playing together again
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Wow! He's still got it....mcq wrote: ↑Sat Mar 28, 2020 8:53 pm This was a very pleasant surprise. Bob Dylan’s song, Murder Most Foul, was posted online yesterday and it is one of the best, most profoundly heartfelt songs that he’s released in many a moon. Ostensibly, it is about the assassination of JFK but that is simply the genesis of Dylan’s discontent. Richly elegiac in tone, this strikes me as a requiem for a society lost in moral disrepair. There is a great deal of bittersweet nostalgia here for what JFK represented to many Americans and what his murder robbed them of and references abound to the cynicism that progressively replaced an earlier generation’s idealism. A younger Dylan would have vented anger more freely but Dylan the elder seems to be looking here for some kind of consoling truth. This truth takes the form of the music which has sustained him throughout the course of his life and which holds more relevance for him now than ever before.
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You'll never hear music like this again.......
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One of the strongest songs of recent years was Adore by Savages. A beautifully defiant song that celebrates life in its passionate immediacy and refuses to be unbowed by artificially proscribed moral strictures.
Savages were, I believe, the first band to perform in Paris in the wake of the Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan in November 2015 when 89 members of the audience were brutally murdered by members of ISIS. If those violent attacks and that ideological thought represented an absolute negation of life, then what the performance of Adore represented to the Parisian audience in December 2015 was an absolute affirmation of life. It became a profoundly moral statement to take to the stage to sing, “I adore life” and to ask the audience, “Do you adore life?”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c_nHpSJw_2M
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YME9f6kNg_4
Over the past few weeks, I have had the opportunity to spend extended time with my music and I have loved every moment. And yet, I have been hesitant to say to friends and family what is uppermost in my mind and that is simply, life is good. To say such a thing is selfish and disgracefully ignorant of the global suffering that is endured by so many across the world right now either directly or indirectly. And yet, I truly believe that life is precious and sacred and is not to be taken lightly. I remember reading The Plague by Albert Camus in my teenage years and the moral force of this book hit me very hard. It taught me that our daily pleasures are not to be taken lightly or for granted and that they can be wrenched away at any moment. Quite simply, it taught me to cherish life and to squeeze the best out of every day. Books and music turned my head in my teenage years and they have enriched my life ever since and I derive immense sustenance and nourishment from them now more than ever.
Life is good and it is precious.
“I understand the urgency of life
In the distance there is truth that cuts like a knife
Maybe I will die tomorrow so I need to say
I adore life”
- from “Adore” by Savages
Savages were, I believe, the first band to perform in Paris in the wake of the Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan in November 2015 when 89 members of the audience were brutally murdered by members of ISIS. If those violent attacks and that ideological thought represented an absolute negation of life, then what the performance of Adore represented to the Parisian audience in December 2015 was an absolute affirmation of life. It became a profoundly moral statement to take to the stage to sing, “I adore life” and to ask the audience, “Do you adore life?”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c_nHpSJw_2M
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YME9f6kNg_4
Over the past few weeks, I have had the opportunity to spend extended time with my music and I have loved every moment. And yet, I have been hesitant to say to friends and family what is uppermost in my mind and that is simply, life is good. To say such a thing is selfish and disgracefully ignorant of the global suffering that is endured by so many across the world right now either directly or indirectly. And yet, I truly believe that life is precious and sacred and is not to be taken lightly. I remember reading The Plague by Albert Camus in my teenage years and the moral force of this book hit me very hard. It taught me that our daily pleasures are not to be taken lightly or for granted and that they can be wrenched away at any moment. Quite simply, it taught me to cherish life and to squeeze the best out of every day. Books and music turned my head in my teenage years and they have enriched my life ever since and I derive immense sustenance and nourishment from them now more than ever.
Life is good and it is precious.
“I understand the urgency of life
In the distance there is truth that cuts like a knife
Maybe I will die tomorrow so I need to say
I adore life”
- from “Adore” by Savages
Gryphon Diablo 300, dCS Rossini (with matching clock), Kharma Exquisite Mini, Ansuz C2, Finite Elemente Master Reference.