Great Albums 46: The Marble Downs (Bonnie Prince Billy & The Trembling Bells, 2012)

A friend of mine is fond of saying that you can compile a sensible Worst Ten Hollywood films list without once stepping outside the back catalogue of Mr Arnold Schwarzenegger, and while I'm not so sure of that (any Top 10 with no Braveheart or The Incredibles is nonense, IMO), I am inclined to say that you can create a Ten Great Albums and never leave the ouevre of Mr Will Oldham, in his many and various guises.  Like Bowie, he's going to pop up in this Top 50 more than once...

This first entry though is his most recent release, in company with Scottish alt-fok band The Trembling Bells.  It starts like, well like nothing else you're likely to hear this year.  'I made a date (with an open vein)' sounds like it should be a miserable dirge but instead it starts off with over two minutes of repetitive yet pleasant instrumental layered with Lavinia Blackwell's equally repetitive but wordless vocal, then some drums kicks in and what may be the most unlikely opening lines to a love song ever.

"I made a date with an open vein/And with scarlet matter emblazened your name"

 The song continues in sinilar vein - brilliantly unexpected lyric, great melody, two excellent voices, clever instrumentation - and in doing so sets the template for the rest of the album.  Not every track reaches the heights of the opening song, but a couple - 'Riding' (as bleak as call/response tale of incest and death as Nick Cave ever managed - and, in passing, a far better version of the song than the solo version which appears on the Palace Brothers 'Lost Blues' album ) and 'Ferrari in a Demolition derby' (proving intense can also be funny) are on a par with anything I've heard this year or last, and even the 'weak' songs have lots to recommend them.

Like I said there'll be more Will Oldham (as Bonny 'Prince' Billy, himself or Palace Brothers) to come, but this is worth savouring for now...

Spotify Link to Album
I Made a Date video

Great Albums 47: Extricate (The Fall, 1990)

In 1990 Mark E. Smith, the driving force behind the mighty Fall, had just divorced his wife and one-time Fall guitarist Brix Smith. The band, for years a cult favourite championed almost exclusively by John Peel, were surfing an unprecedented wave of popularity after Brix pushed Smith into recording far more poppy and commercial tracks (both 'Victoria' and 'Ghost in My House' had charted in the top 40 in the preceding couple of years while the ballet soundtrack LP, 'I am Kurious, Oranj' had gained the band favourable reviews from other than the usual music press suspects).

Those of us who loved the Fall approached this new, first post-Brix album with more trepidation than usual (and, tbh, you approach every new Fall album with more trepidation than optimism - he's a cantankerous and unpredictable old bugger, MES). The presence of Martin Bramah, invited back into the Fall fold 11 years after leaving, was a reassurance though - even if Smith took the Fall all the way back to their late seventies punk roots, with Bramah it'd at least be competent (he'd played on the brilliant Live at the Witch Trials).

The first single off the album 'Telephone Thing' was a bit of a concern.  I saw Smith do it with dance floor types, Coldcut, and - with the exception of the reference to elderly Easteneders' actress Gretchen Franklin -  can't say I thought much of it.  Shades of bandwagon hopping (as Madchester dominated the music scene) are not accusations usually aimed at the Fall, but they could have been at that point.

But I needn't have worried.  The LP, when it came out, was a fabulous synthesis of MES' love of old rockabilly songs, memories of Brix poptastic hooks and a completely unexpected but excellent dip by the singer into crooning on the slow lovesong 'Bill is Dead' (which came top of Peel's Festive 50 that year).   I've seen it  mentioned that song began as a parody of the Smiths, which seems unlikely - it sounds nothing like the Smiths - but whatever it started off as it ended up being the highlight of an album which already contained the brilliantly scabrous 'Sing! Harpy' and 'Black Monk Theme', the pop genius of 'Popcorn Double Feature' and the simply fantastic 'Chicago Now'.  It's a shame that Smith only really uses his crooner voice once more (on the following year's 'Edinburgh Man') but maybe it would've got boring if he'd over-used it. 

What I wouldn't do for Fall album as good as this nowadays...

Spotify Link: The Fall – Extricate
"Bill is Dead" on SnubTV

Great Albums 48: Secrets of the Beehive (David Sylvian, 1987)

Stripped down to their bare essentials, with Sylvian's soft as Andrex voice whispering huskily in the middle of everything and Ryuichi Sakamoto's string arrangements draped over anything left over, these songs are as near to perfect a collection as any songwriter has ever managed. 

When I was a stuent, my flatmate, Alistair, had the album, not the cd, and for some reason when he put it on always started with side two. Which meant I always started with a track which is now mid-album, 'When Poets Dreamed of Angels'.  With fantastic spanish guitar and Sylvian's stylised, impersonal, velvet voice counterpointing a lyric about wife beating, violence and medieval poetic imagery, it felt like the place the album should start, rather than the actual first track, the brief, conversational 'September'.  Re-listening on cd though, 'September' is exactly right - sparse piano and a brief (just over a minute) sketch of a couple lying to one another in what I tend to assume is continental autumnal sunshine (the September sun - now 'so cold it blisters' is revisited in one of the last tracks, 'Let the Happiness In').  From there, the mood wanders up and down without ever settling on one, unless the faintest scent of nostalgic melancholy counts.  Which I think it does, not least because nostalgic melancholy is my favourite kind of melancholy.

Sylvian's voice is so high in the mix (in a good way) that at times he's almost all you can hear, which is no bad thing with a voice like his, but there's still space for Sakamoto's lush (damn, I promised myself I wouldn't use the word 'lush' in this post) strings and some lovely bursts of trumpet and what sounds like double bass  and jazzy piano(on 'Mother and Child'). He never did anything even approaching this good again, but most people never do so even once.

Spotify Album Link
Sylvian singing 'September' live, 1995

Great Albums 49: It's So Hard to tell who's Going to Love you the Best (Karen Dalton, 1969)

 Such an unexpected album, this.

Following a snippet in some music review or other, which described Karen Dalton as a white Billie Holliday, I found a copy of her debut album, put it on and ended up playing it half a dozen times in a row.  I don't really understand the Billie comparisons, or the suggestion that some might find her voice difficult to listen to.  Like a quieter Janis Joplin who *really* liked a ciggie, or a half-cut bar singer slurring wonderfully into her drink, every track is a mix of blues and folk, with a bit of country thrown in for good measure.  It feels to me like an entire hippy commune turned into a series of songs, something reinforced by my later discovery that every song on the album is a cover version (of tracks written by the likes of Jelly Roll Morton, Leadbelly and Fred Neil).

I say later discovery because I had no suspicions that they weren't all originals, so completely do they feel like the singer's songs.  On the best tracks - 'A Little Bit Rain', 'Ribbon Bow', 'Sweet Substitute' - the weary, druggy voice is better suited to mood and lyrics than pretty much any other singer I can imagine.  The best track of all though is the one which feels slightly out of place, the 'proper' blues 'Blues on the Celing' - though it's horribly ironic that the refrain 'I'll never get out of thse blues alive' proved to be true.

Sadly, though Karen Dalton lived until 1993, she only recorded one more (more popular, but inferior) album and succumbed to AIDS after to a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse.  This album though is a better epitath than any numbe rof more prolific singers have ever managed.

Spotify Link
Dalton singing 'Hurts me Too' live

Great Albums 50 - The RIse and Fall of Madness (Madness, 1982)

So 50 great albums, eh?  Not - obviously - the 50 greatest, since that's a value judgment of massive proportions, possibly requiring a metric which is beyond me.  Not even My 50 Favourite Albums, since there'll be a band I've never hear dof along any minute now with an album which requires me to listen to it fifteen times a day for the next two months and which would spend those entire 80 weeks in my Top Ten.  Just 50 albums which, on the day in question, I happen to think are great, for one reason or other (I might mention the reason, I might not - depends if it has anything to do with Doing It, I suspect - it could go all 50 Shades of Grey in here quick as fuck, you know.  Or not.  Annnyyyyway....)

The Rise and Fall - Madness (1982)

This was the first album I ever actually asked someone to buy me.  It was December 1982 - and wait,  stop there.  That's actually quite odd, since I've always thought that the first albums I ever owned were Now That's What I call Music and Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture, but I got them from my dad at Christmas 1983, and this predates that by a year (I definitely got it for the Xmas it came out because Scott got it too,  and we wouldn't both have got an old record for a present.)  There you go - JNT was right, memory cheats.

Madness were Scott and my favourite band by the length of Princes Street, even though we could only really hear them on the radio (and also possibly via the Greatest Hits' LP, Complete Madness - which came out even earlier, and which I listened to compulsively, thus confusing my personal Timeline of Music Ownership even further!) and this album had already been called Madness' best by the Edinburgh Evening News!

It didn't disappoint, for all that it was a long way from the pop ska of their singles.  Though I didn't realise it at the time, Madness presents The Rise and Fall to give it its full title, started off life as a concept album, revolving round memories of childhood.  The concept quickly got dropped though you can still catch glimpses of it in songs like 'Our House' and 'Rise and Fall' itself.  Instead, the LP is a fantastic fusion of all sorts of unexpected bits and bobs - Indian influences, olde-time music hall, foot-stomping ska, political commentary - even a bit of jazz.  It's been described as the 80s version of the Kinks' excellent 'The Village Green Preservation Society', and they're both albums about Englishness (much like Blur's 'Parklife' in the 90s and PJ Harvey's 'Let England Shake' in the last decade) but I think it's better than the Kinks' release, because there's a huge amount of energy and positivity amongst the pop nostalgia and underlying strands of melancholy.

Spotify Link: The Rise and Fall
Our House video

Manleigh Books - Open for Business

Cody Quijano-Schell and I are delighted to announce a new ongoing ebook series! Available right now, The Periodic Adventures of Senor 105 will appear monthly and feature the exploits of scientist, explorer and semi-retired masked Mexican wrestler: Senor 105. Senor 105 has been with Obverse Books from its very first release three years ago, but this is something very different and has prompted the creation of a new sister e-book imprint, Manleigh Books. The series is designed to appeal to people who like getting a monthly jolt of storytelling in the form of low-priced, short novellas. The first book is available for download now. “The Gulf”, written by the character’s creator Cody Quijano-Schell, is a good starting place for anyone new to the character. A lot of details get nailed down for the first time in this book, including the origin of the villainous Terrible Kings and their leader, a shadowy figure from Mexico’s future. There is an exploration into the contents of the Chicxulub Crater that has always been in the background of 105’s stories. And a new recurring character is introduced in the form of Lori, the Royal Canadian Mounted Policewoman. "The Gulf" also contains hints about the origin of the crater and strange goings-ons in the solar system, on the Moon and Earth’s lost twin. This will lead into future stories such as Blair Bidmead’s novella, which takes place on Venus and features the Venusians as originally seen in Paul Leonard’s “Venusian Lullaby”, a Doctor Who Missing Adventures novel. Some authors who have never written for 105 have been brought aboard; including Richard Wright whose “The God of Many Masks” will be released in September. Later novellas will follow from Lawrence Burton and Blair Bidmead (both former 105 and Faction Paradox authors) followed with Stuart Douglas taking us into a special Christmas story and a first 105 story from Selina Lock. So it’s an exciting first 6 months! There will be ongoing arcs resolved over time, but the novellas are designed to be self-contained. The long-term reader will be rewarded, but newcomers won’t be punished with heaps of continuity. But if you have been curious about 105’s jukebox, Sheila’s family, the history of 105’s “Golden Age” mentors, Tierra, Viento y Fuego, then you’ll be pleased to know they’ll all be explored in time. There will be times when open submissions are accepted, watch for announcements on the website and on this forum.

The Tale of Hill Top Farm - Susan Wittig Albert

I've been away on holiday you know.  In company of my learned colleague and all round good egg (rolled on a barber shop floor) Scott.   Cruising round the Mediterranean, he taking photos of things, me typing furiously away at the Great Novel on Notes on an iPad (that teaches you to have nerves of steel - push the wrong button and 'whoosh!' - due to the lack of an Undo facility everything you wrote disappears beyond hope of rescue - like writing using pee in snow and hoping it doesn't turn cold any time soon*).

Anyway, obviously I did a bit of reading too, in the gaps between tramping round Cadiz's narrow streets with Julie and Cam and taking the wee train to the beach in Corsicaand whizzing down Lisbon's steep hills on a tra which cost a pound as opposed to Edinburgh's 3/4 of a billion.

Spcifically, I read Susan Wittig Albert's 'The Tale of Hill Top Farm' and finished it with a great desire to read not only the rest of the books in the author's series of Beatrix Potter stories but also the various biographies of Potter listed in the acknowledgements and even the likes of The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.

For one thing, it's a great idea.  Unlike the often dull trend for having A N Historical Figure solving crimes for no apparent reason other than implausible authorial caprice - the Jane Austen Investigates school of fiction - this is a sweetly heart-felt fictional biography of a certain period in Potter's life, complete with small village crimes and misdemeanours, mischief not murder, misuderstanding not mayhem.  Two pounds is misplaced, a church registry goes missing and - most criminally of all - a small painting disappears.  That's the extent of the nefarious activity in this book.  Instead of criminal masterminds, the author gives the reader an array of lovingly sketched village characters (think of Mrs Gaskell's Cranford, and you wouldn't be far wrong) and, brilliantly, the thoughts of both Beatrix's pets and the village animals.  I particularly liked the way that the human characters react to the speech of the cats and dogs - hearing only squeaking and mewing as the animals discuss the events around them.

Had the animals remained as just that - animals who can speak amongst themselves - then I'd have been delighted, but Ms Albert inserts an extra layer of non-human characters which jarred for me (though I know it worked for other readers).  An owl professor with a telescope in his tree suffers from obvious comparisons with the very similar friend of Pooh Bear, but he, Fritz the Ferret and the various rats, all of whom wear cutdown human clothing, feel out of place - creatures from an entirely different sort of story.  Obviously that entirely different sort of story is one of Miss Potter's own, which feels like something of a mis-step to me.  On a similar note, it seems reasonable that a cat might learn to read by listening to her mistress reading out loud, but silly that the same cat would think to write a note for the humans to read.

Still, after reading this first installment, I immediately bought the rest of the series for my Kindle - and you can't say fairer than that, considering I had the on-ship delights of Berni Flint in Concert and Paul Daniels' laddie doing magic tricks as an alternative source of amusement.

* Actually, that's a rubbish comparison, but I just got cleaning chemicals in my eye and it hurts a lot, so I can possibly be forgiven.