As Fools We Are

I wrote a Halloween/All Hallows' Eve themed post last year and this year I decided to have another go with the theme being the connection between Halloween, which has become increasingly "celebrated" or at least commercialised in the UK in recent years; the event known "Bonfire Night", held to celebrate the failure of Guy Fawkes and his co-conspiritors to blow up Parliament in 1665 and, this year only, the dénouement of the most fascinating US Presidential contest in my lifetime!
This wonderful cocktail of superstition, religion and politics needs a soundtrack and a dark one at that - of shock, fear, change, possibility and perhaps ultimately redemption. Here is my condensed selection of music for the next week:

To start with is the album 'Rock It To The Moon' by Electrelane. The fairground ride has the word 'pleasure' on it, the lights are lit, but the whole scene is deserted.
The music is similarly almost devoid of voices: On the first track a dog barks in a distorted electronically-warped sound-scape. When voices do fleetingly appear on tracks they are often indecipherable souls - the snatch distinguishable is "some fallen angels". This is what I imagine happens when the 'Piper At The Gates of Dawn' reaches the end of the road and is negotiating with Charon. Much of the later output by Electrelane is similarly obscure and, while less obviously so, instrumental, and seemingly concerned with some journey - the 2007 album No Shouts, No Calls would be suitable too.

In the last couple of years the UK has seen a huge explosion in music perhaps best termed nu-folk which, although not at all a unique phenomenon, has produced some remarkable artists and when dark, disturbing songs are required few can hold a candle to Laura Marling. Last Monday 'Night Terror' was finally released as a single but it originally appeared in 2007 on the 7" EP 'My Manic and I' and the title track is no less disturbing.

Not everything is so scary and, sticking with the nu-folk acoustic genre, here is a band that have been around for a couple of years now but are finally getting some well-deserved recognition. They are called Fireworks Night and take a slightly more mellow approach and, to support the Halloween theme, their female co-vocalist is Rhiannon; for those with long memories the very same as the benevolent mythical Welsh witch who was made famous, at least in music, by Stevie Nicks.

Their first release was a 7" single in 2006 rather prophetically titled
'The Day We Fell Through The Ice'.

It was followed in 2007 by the album 'As Fools We Are' and, while not exactly cheerful, it is quietly optimistic about the way things will turn out and I like it for that.

They have not been idle since and their new EP 'A Mirror, A Ghost' will be available on Organ Grinder Records very soon.

Like music, like life.

Down Memory Lane... my 'want to listen to' list - part 3

My 'wants' list gets no shorter but I have got used to that now. Here is one more:

Fireworks Night - 'As Fools We Are'
(Kartel Records/Organ Grinder, 2007.)

Usually, and like the example above that falls in the acoustic/lo-fi category I guess, it is new or at least recent items that get added but last week there was an exception or actually two.
On Friday a work colleague and I became involved in a conversation that, one way or another, ended up turning to the influence that late 1970s German electronic music had on Ultravox in the Midge Ure era. I'm sure this is exactly the kind of thing that everyone discusses at work on a Friday afternoon but it was diverting anyway :-)

At the time Midge Ure was recruited to Ultravox he was touring with Thin Lizzy as a stand-in guitarist on their tour of the album 'Roisín Dubh - Black Rose - A Rock Legend', so something of a change of style there!

We both agreed that this was the period 1980-4, and that the 1986 album 'U-Vox' was utter cr*p. I even had the misfortune to pay good money to see Ultravox tour this album live at Wembley Arena and it remains as probably the worst concert I have ever endured. That left us with four albums, of which we could both remember the names of the first two (but own usable copies of neither) and also most of the tracks on them. These are:

• Vienna (1980)
  
• Rage In Eden (1981)

As for the second pair, although I knew I had owned both on vinyl for at least twenty years, I couldn't for the life of me remember their titles! We did however, during the course of the afternoon, correctly remember several of the singles that were taken from them! These albums are:

• Quartet (1982)
• Lament (1984)

Clearly it was time to dig these out and listen once again, which I did that evening. The problem with the first pair is that I only ever owned them on cassette tape and it was a unreliable Chrysalis "Two on One" edition at that. I decided to buy both again - on CD this time as these releases include some bonus tracks (including several of the tracks sung in German) - but in the end I didn't. While investigating the possibilities I made a very interesting discovery and thus, to keep my long-standing vinyl albums company, I have ordered them as the original vinyl releases instead. It cost little more than the cost of the CDs in any case.

Note added: 10th May 2007.
The above artwork for 'Rage In Eden' is not that of the original UK LP release by the way - thanks to the people that e-mailed me about this. The two LPs were waiting for me when I got home from work this evening so next week maybe I'll try and review all four albums together.