Tír Na HiFi

Not really the biggest Led Zep fan out there but I really did quite enjoy this. The sound quality of this remaster is really really good too. A shame that my other Led Zep 1 copy is warped so I'm gonna have to return it.

Teenage Fanclub -Grand Prix

Picked this up on discogs lately and can't believe how many songs I know in it as I have no memory of owning it. Must have had it on a long loan once, but again with no memory of it.

It's a great album though, really enjoying singing along to Verisimilitude and Neil Jung.


SJB

Sloop John B wrote:

Teenage Fanclub -Grand Prix

Picked this up on discogs lately and can't believe how many songs I know in it as I have no memory of owning it. Must have had it on a long loan once, but again with no memory of it.

It's a great album though, really enjoying singing along to Verisimilitude and Neil Jung.


SJB

Great album, great band

I've been listening a great deal recently to St. Vincent's latest, self-titled, album.  Rather like her last album, this takes a while to sink in.  The progress Annie Clarke has made over the last 7 years has been steady and substantial.  Her most recent two albums represent a change in soundscape from her first two albums.  These are much more electronic in approach but also more minimal and more compressed, both lyrically and musically.  The songs on these albums appear more straightforward than those on her first two albums but this simplicity is deceptive.  Also, the electronic textures initially appear to be a retrograde step from the more openly organic approach of her first two albums but this is misleading.  The experimentalism of her earlier work appears to be reined in but is still present.  There is a greater reliance on the power of repetitive structures, both within her music and her lyrics.  What remains constant is the channelling of her musical influences as a means of expressing something of the deepest emotional consequence, which intensifies with every passing listen.

Behind the surface veneer of the avant-pop production,  the anguished phrasing of her singing - which is outwardly detached but which contains inner anguish - tells a rather different story.  This is Clarke's "letter from the edge", to take a line from Birth in Reverse.  This is a work about emotional isolationism in the modern world, about feeling disconnected from oneself and from the world around us, our desire for others' validation and our vain attempts to feel some kind of connectivity.  It is about fear and loathing of oneself and of others.  It confronts the power of the self-created images that we confront the outside world with as well as the images of power that we are confronted by in our lives.   It chronicles the gradual dissolution of our individual selves which are steadily reformed into a more collectivised, more socially acceptable image.   Crucially, it is also about the inexorable passage of time.  How transitory are life's pleasures and how ultimately futile are our hopes that we strive towards.   "Who's the one animal all by yourself - all of us" she sings on Regret.  

Prince Johnny is a highlight, oozing compassion and regret and remorse for a lost lover.  It is a song about self-image and self-worth, about the pursuit of hedonism to individuate oneself in our world, and about the seeking of others' validation in a self-destructive way.  The central image of wishing to be a "son of someone" refers to a progressive loss of one's individual identity.  Is a peer-approved collectivised sense of identity more important to us than our own individual one?  The compassion that Clarke feels for Johnny as he falls deeper into his cocaine addiction is tangible and very affecting.  We only find out at the end that Clarke is speaking in retrospect, that Johnny is forever gone.  "I wanna mean more than I mean to you/I wanna mean more than I meant to him" finds Clarke speaking to a new lover.  These are ambiguous lines which possibly echo something similar that Johnny once said to her.  The sense of recognition of one's own descent into a similar fate to Johnny's is very moving, especially the sense that she is powerless to change.  ("But honey, don't mistake my affection for another spit-and-penny style redemption.")  And yet, when you hear these words, as Clarke sings them, you hear an aching desperation, a craving for love from which the song derives its mesmerising power.

Perhaps the emotional heart of the album is I Prefer Your Love, which recalls Mark Kozelek's beautiful I Can't Live Without My Mother's Love on the most recent Sun Kil Moon album, Benji.  Both songs are emotionally candid and relate the dependence that children continue to have on their parents even into their adult years, a dependence that is cruelly highlighted when a parent has a brush with death.  During a recent interview with the NME, Clarke spoke about her mother's recovery from a serious illness and the suddenly dawning realisation that she could lose her parents, and how that made her think about becoming an adult for the first time.  "I'm blinded to the faces in the fog" suggests a fear that she has become progressively disassociated from herself and the values that her mother instilled in her.  In the song she credits her mother as being responsible for all of her positive traits and that her flaws are hers alone.  She may rationalise that these flaws are created and sustained by a defence mechanism that enables her to succeed in her world but there is an element of guilt here and the unspoken fear that the last memory that her mother may have of her child may be a shameful one.  Clarke confesses that she prefers her mother's love to Jesus.  What she craves is forgiveness and redemption.  "Mother, won't you open your arms and forgive me of all these bad thoughts?"  Or, as Otis Redding puts it in the classic Dreams to Remember, "Listen to me, mama, I've got dreams to remember, bad dreams, rough dreams/Don't make me suffer rough dreams, bad dreams, dreams to remember."

Severed Crossed Fingers might be the best lyric she's ever written,  dwelling on the hope that pulls us through our lives through disappointment after disappointment, and finding in the end that this hope, whilst crucial to our sense of self- preservation, is ultimately delusional.  "Humiliated by age, terrified by youth, I got hope but my hope isn't helping you".  The image of finding your severed crossed fingers in the rubble of your crushed dreams is a deeply troubling one that expresses the utter nihillism that lies at the heart of the delusionery nature of the hope which appears to preserve yet which ultimately betrays us.  "We'll be heroes on every bar stool when seeing double beats not seeing one of you" encapsulates the sense of devastation  when a loved one is taken from us.  The impermance of our deepest joys (which seem so very permanent and lasting yet can be swept away suddenly and without warning) and the transitory nature of life means that we are trapped in a cyclical wave of delusion and illusion.  "Spitting our guts from their gears, draining our spleen over years, find our severed crossed fingers in the rubble over there."  It's a chilling end to a wonderful, thought-provoking album that grows more urgently rewarding every time you return to it.

Perhaps the strangest thing about Severed Crossed Fingers is the fact that her guitar appears to be completely absent from the sound mix.  I think that what Clarke is trying to achieve here is to succeed absolutely in her songwriting.  The sound of her guitar is certainly audible in the mix elsewhere on the album but it is by no means as visibly "present" as it is in a live context.  On the one hand, this is lamentable as it potentially dilutes the emotional impact of the work, but, on the other, it forces us to consider Clarke as a genuine songwriter.  Perhaps she believes that foregrounding her guitar work would obscure the lyrical details and musical structure of her songs.  What is uppermost in my mind when I listen to this music is just how sheerly emotional it sounds to my ears.  The reason for this is the quality of Clarke's singing throughout.  It appears to me that many articles written about Clarke refer to her guitar-playing or dwell unnecessarily on her image and appearance.  Her singing is an undervalued asset, in my view.  She appears as a guest vocalist on Swans' new album, To Be Kind, and that band's frontman, Michael Gira, commented in a recent interview that Clarke's command of perfect pitch was unmatched in his experience.  Musical flow is controlled by the insertion of opposing textures, themes and colurs into the mix to create a dynamically fluid soundscape.  This is mirrored by a singer's vocal phrasing, her command of the many various nuances of vocal production and technique at her disposal - specifically, the way in which a vocal gesture is produced with a breath, and progressively shaded and coloured through her body as a means of communicating the emotionalism embedded in the song lyric.  In Clarke's case, the way in which she sings the words may be directly opposed to their literal meaning and may be more directly inspired by the music.  The word meanings may initially appear vague but the way in which her vocal phrasings suggest - alternately - elation, boredom, rage, terror, yearning and sorrow enable the listener to intuit the song's meaning.  Listen to Clarke sing "We all want to be sons of someone" in Prince Johnny and you sense and are struck by an overwhelming sense of loss and the aching sense of loneliness that lies at the heart of the song.  

great write up.

have spotified St Vincent once or twice but never really clicked for me.

must take another shot at it.

SJB

mcq looks deeper into it then I do but have the 4 albums and seen her live earlier this year and also with David Byrne last year. Find live versions of her tracks are often more engaging than the album versions.
I don't think her latest album will win many new fans. Don't get me wrong I play it constantly but it is a step too far
experimentally for most. David Byrne is quoted as saying that after being on the road with her over a year he still didn't really get to know her.

Thanks for that, John and Tony.  It's interesting what Byrne said about Clarke and that is part of the reason why I find her work so interesting.  So far, we have only seen individual facets of her musical tastes which  indicate where she is in her life at a particular time.  The changes she has made from her first two albums to her last two albums may indicate that she is working in cycles and that her next album may indicate another change of direction.  She has hinted at working with Dave Grohl and Steve Albini.  But I think it is crucial for her to carry on pleasing herself rather than trying to pander to anybody else's tastes and expectations.  In past interviews, she has always indicated a long-term approach to her career.  I think we will see more collaborations from her in a similar vein to the David Byrne album.  I believe she learned a great deal from working with Byrne, and I would love to see her collaborate with Robert Fripp, who was a great influence on her guitar playing as well as her disciplined approach to her music.

Could nearly find it's way into the blues section......

I came to the Stones late, but their albums at the turn of the 60's to early 70's certainly have an effortless swagger that's hard to resist.


SJB

Not an uber fan of Frank, but this does get played occasionally.


SJB

Lizzy, I am an uber fan of, but this would be far from my favourite -

What sort of mood am I in tonight at all?