I Tried To Do Hand-stands For You...

It is time for some new 'thoughts', more lyrics and a whole lot of new music, but I tend to fail on the vaulting of my ambition.

The most evident utensil

Is nothing but a pencil

and, from different tracks on the same album...

Permanently black and blue

Permanently blue for you.

All the garbage that you have thrown away

Is waiting somewhere a million miles away.

Your condoms and your VCR

Zip-lok bags and your father's car

Dark and silent, wait for you, yea-hey

And so much garbage will never ever decay.

And just four hints for now:

Esben and The Witch

iLiKETRAiNS - album #2

The Joy Formidable - album #2

Blood Red Shoes - Fire Like This

...and a whole lot more to follow. Guess what? I am not a robot...

'White Holes of Mole Hills', anyone, Ruth Theodore (2010)?

Some thought it was facetious on my part and others saw it for what it was. It is real and another worthy of note in the nu-folk canon, artist and album both. It is released on February 15, 2010 by River Rat Records.

Was It Worth It - Jeremey Warmsley and Elizabeth Sankey (aka Summer Camp) seem to think so...

..and (for what it is worth) so do I, very definitely.

Progress:Reform (revisited)...

This is for whoever just asked about the lyrics for 'Progress:Reform'. I was thinking about this today, if only by proxy. Is Royal Mail about to self destruct in a similar way?
It is quite possible and I have mentioned my concern before - look at the effect the miners' strike of 1983-4 had. Yes, it was an industry facing major issues of falling demand, over-staffing and tragically adversarial industrial relations but that is relevant. Royal Mail, I fear, is now staring into the same abyss and the result could be as damaging as that which harks back to the Railway industry of 1963, which is where this track (as yet incomplete in lyric as I have to do them line-by-line) comes from...

The Beeching Report

Is this the price we pay for progress?
Taking one step forwards
For every six we take back.
Does your dirty oil-stained money
Make you happy?

Do you just want to be remembered?
To book your place in history?
[You will be!] {whispered choir}
Reform, reform!

You are taking apart what we made
With our hands and and our hearts
Our hands and our hearts
Are not just tools to ply your trade.

They are ours to live our lives
And you are taking them away.
Feel free to wrap you hands around our necks
And I'll feel free to do the same.

That's not all of it and probably due to its length they didn't play it at Latitude 2009, more is the pity, but at least this is a start on the lyric. It is a remarkable piece of writing from a remarkable band.

The Devil is in the detail

The devil is in the detail and that makes Latitude what it is. There are the headline acts and there are others including those that have been long known, to me at least, but that is only just a part of what matters. The currently less well known acts on all music stages are an equal part of the experience and I don't expect 2009 to be any different. Here are two more such - very different, one from the other - both with a ferocious attitude to live performance!

No 'Florence and The Machine' but that is no problem! 'Marina and the Diamonds' come from Wales and appearing on the Lake Stage at Latitude 2009, which is once again curated by Radio 1 DJ and champion of music from Wales, Huw Stephens.

He is also the power behind the ever growing Sŵn Festival (held in venues across Cardiff in 2007 and 2008 and to be repeated again from 24 - 26 October 2009) , which is showcasing Welsh bands, and any others that make waves, in both Wales and across the UK throughout the year - everywhere from Brighton's recent multi-venue indoor festival 'The Great Escape' to the surprising venue that is housed within the surplus shed of the still very much operational Wrexham Central station.

Is this the price we pay for progess?
Taking one step forward...
...for every six we take back.
Does your dirty, oil-stained money make you happy?
Do you just want to be remembered
...book your place in history?

Another band confirmed for Latitude 2009 is Leeds' iLiKETRAiNS, which can hardly be a bad thing in my world. Would I like to hear 'The Beeching Report' live? You bet I would!

Elegies To Lessons Learnt

I have mentioned this band before and this is one album that I have been looking forward to for a very long time. It is the first true album from iLiKETRAiNS and if you have heard the Progress:Reform EP then you would expect little else. While none of the tracks from that EP are repeated here the more recent single Spencer Percival does feature.
The album mainly addresses historical topics and this kind of music is quite surely not to everyone's taste but if you like it then you might well like this album a great deal. The label Beggars Banquet has also made it available on a suitably historical format too and the 12" LP edition is particularly worthwhile owning if just for the the artwork and the excellent quality of its packaging.

The cover artwork 'Tree of Eyam' was also created by the band. It is like the subject matter of many of the songs and is rather on the dark side. Reviewing the album is not as easy as I thought it would be and I think it is a "Marmite experience". Music-as-a-history-lesson is almost certainly either passion or poison!
I fall in the former category, and there is no doubt about that, but I'll try and provide some more objective commentary on individual tracks from the album no later than this coming weekend. In the mean time I'll end with one of my own images because, while the sun doesn't always shine, I like trains too.

This is Minehead shed, Somerset, at work on a misty morning in March 2006.

Think about this while listening to the to The Beeching Report, which is the final track on the Progress:Reform EP. While this route just survived the mass cull in the 1960s, and has eventually become a major tourist attraction, the great majority didn't.

I'm catching up; and so hopefully is Royal Mail...

It's taken me a long time to catch up after my unplanned absence and now there is so much new stuff that I want to get hold of to listen to, of which more below. To do that however I rely heavily on the services of Royal Mail, the UK Postal Service, to bring packages to my door and just recently this long standing organisation has been involved in protracted industrial action over the subject of changes demanded by the modern competitive environment. It is possible that, for all parties involved and not merely out of my self-interest, over the recent weekend a deal has been reached that will put all interested parties back on course.

Quite possibly the future of Royal Mail is at stake here and this kind of consideration somehow reminded me of the past, an increasing music collection, and then a 2003 album Give Up - The Postal Service.
I no longer even attempt to keep my CD and vinyl collections in any logical order and although this probably started as a matter of lassitude it has now become a quite deliberate policy.
By profession I'm a chemist, which seen in simple terms (that are almost always good) involves toxic cookery and, when things don't go quite so well, nu-alchemy! As an undergraduate therefore I had to go to lectures on quantum physics that left me cold and also seemed incredibly pointless and theoretical. The 'Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle' has few such simple and useful applications larger and thus more useful than the subatomic. Put very simplistically it states that it is fundamentally impossible to know "what some thing is and where it is simultaneously just so long as it is far too small to be useful in any sensible way" - but my life-enhancing discovery is that it also describes my music collection perfectly. By ensuring that remembered and sought for items regularly, but of course totally unpredictably, become mislaid a natural quid pro quo means that those which have genuinely become either forgotten or lost will inevitably come to light again!
Thus, while I was hunting for the CD Give Up, I preternaturally came across my CD of the (eponymous) 2000 album Saint Low. I had forgotten about it for several years and so I listened to that again too! In fact I found both and they are too good to be forgotten and so I'm planning to review both albums on here in the next week.

I've also got a whole list of things I want to find an excuse to order - enough to keep me out of mischief at least until Christmas - and the first few arrived on Saturday and this morning. Coming soon are my thoughts on:
iLiKETRAiNS - Elegies to Lessons Learnt
Maxïmo Park - Our Earthly Pleasures

Already on order are (yet) another two albums from the hot-bed that continues to be Montreal and they are...
Patrick Watson - Close To Paradise
Letters Letters - Letters Letters

... and that is not to mention the latest album from Stars - In Our Bedroom After The War, which I have already mentioned!
Last for now, but not least is Awyren - Cerys Matthews' first EP entirely in Welsh, which was released today on CD by Cardiff-based KungFu Records. Sorry about the poor representation of the cover art - I'll add better as soon as I can. (24 October - at least one job got done!)

Amazon.co.uk does not seem to know about this one, and I can't tell you quite what it sounds like yet either, but I have just ordered it regardless! It is available, worldwide, from sebon.co.uk; always a good place to search for all music Welsh! The price is GBP 5.50 (for guidance only - US$ 11.00, € 8.25) and this includes post and packing in the UK. For delivery abroad add GBP 1.00 (about US$ 2.00 or € 1.50).

The Strange Death of Liberal England.

I've been hearing whispers about this Portsmouth-based band for some time now and most of them have been as intriguing as they have been favourable. This could however cut both ways; I was thus glad to have the opportunity to check them out live on the Uncut stage at Latitude where they were playing the opening gig at lunch time on Sunday.

It was timely as their first eight-track mini-album Forward March! had been released the previous Monday on Fantastic Plastic Records, which ensured a sizable and enthusiastic turn out.

It was quite clear, even before the set started, that they have a loyal following and it was soon very clear to me why that is. In a set that could only last 40 minutes, why waste time talking? They didn't say a word, other than the sung lyrics, introducing themselves and the songs using hand-written and hand-held placards.

It was very effective and reminded me rather of the occasional frames, conveying plot details, that appeared flickeringly in the days of silent movies. What is more, if you look carefully at the these pictures, you will notice that this is a band very flexible when it comes to who plays which instrument on any particular song.

It all suits their ambitions and circumstances well, I have to say.

This may well be quite deliberate because as the band's name suggests (it is taken from a book of the same title and I'll let you find it and what it was about) they quite wilfully hark back to earlier days in their lyrical content but without any discernible influence from traditional music. The real issue is that they do it incredibly well and had they gone on for two hours longer I'd have happily missed whatever other acts I had planned to go and see!

In some ways, while less obviously obsessed with historical narrative, they reminded me of iLiKETRAiNS and that is another band I very much want to see live.

I Am Murdered.... Music and Politics

Music and politics have an extremely long and very close association.
When print medium of even the most basic sort was solely the preserve of the rich, and almost all of the populace would have been unable to read it even if it were available to them, songs and the travelling singers that sung them were both a way of spreading political information and also of fomenting dissent. Music was also an ideal medium for disguising, often by allegory, messages that might have been treasonable if spoken in public and many examples survive in the canon of folk music.
In general three circumstances, which often occur together, seem to lead to a rich legacy of songs of a socio-political nature: repression, resentment and hardship. This is why there is such an extensive collection of songs, particularly from Ireland and Wales, dealing with these themes and also a large collection of songs documenting workplace hardship and catastrophe. Not all songs however: Lilli Bulero is probably a good case in point as it seems to have started life as exactly the opposite!

Not that much has changed: forty years ago the Vietnam War spawned a resurgence in the genre - though obviously particularly in the US - and they generally became known as 'Protest Songs' but if George W. Bush (a self-confessed fan of Country music - a penchant to which he is of course quite entitled) leaves a musical legacy of his Presidency then it is the huge upsurge in the depth and breadth of political song writing worldwide.
I'm sure that, for the truly cutting edge music sociologists, there are plenty of folk collections to be made in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. ...
It is almost enough to make the original London 'punk scene' look quite feeble by comparison but all things need foundations and quoting Sir Isaac Newton, when explaining the basis of his achievements in a letter to Robert Hooke on 5th. February 1676, and not the rather later Oasis lyric:

"... it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Modern (UK) folk and traditional music often get slated, rather unfairly I think, for their tendency to focus on bucolic themes to accompany the largely traditional sounds. I happen to like much of this too, but I don't see why the particular sounds and the lyrics should be so closely tied together.

Very occasionally they are not.

Spencer Perceval (1762-1812) is the only British Prime Minister to have been murdered. His assassin was John Bellingham whose grievance was the UK trade policy instigated by the above (Bellingham had lost his fortune in trade with Russia) that he believed was ruining him and which, eventually, drove him to the deed. He did the job himself; on 11th May 1812 in the lobby of the House of Commons, when Perceval was on his way to attend an inquiry into Luddite Riots.
Bellingham was apprehended at the scene, confessed and was hanged within a week. No contemporary account of the incident seems to have survived in song but it is however a very unusual theme for a 2007 single!

Spencer Perceval c/w I Am Murdered is a single at that bears little resemblance to anything ever normally found on the format. The 'A' side is an account of the lead up to and execution of the murder itself from the perspective of the murderer, while the 'B' side is the response of the murdered to the crime. Only one band I can think of at the moment would even attempt it and that, of course, is iLiKETRAiNS.
It is not a topic to take lightly, and certainly not one to try and cram into a four-minute 7" single, so they simply didn't bother with convention and of course one advantage of the CD single format is that this is no problem. So no vinyl then?

Fear not - there is a full-length 10", 45 rpm, heavy-weight vinyl version that could be a murder weapon in its own right. The quality is great, from the music and the pressing right down to the packaging, but as it is all dark a picture would hardly do it justice. The two tracks together run for over fifteen minutes and echo each other - the first being 'angry' the second 'reflective'.
It is brooding and dark but there is nothing folk about it whatsoever. In fact the "accusation" - "reply" format of the two songs even has faint echoes of the hip-hop duelling of a few years ago!

The murdered Perceval reflects on his lot which, even before he was murdered, was not a politically happy one. At the time of his assassination he was, as well as holding the post of Prime Minister:

• First Lord of the Treasury
• Leader of the House of Commons
• Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
• Chancellor of the Exchequer (he asked six colleagues and they all turned the post down!)

As the song lyric [I Am Murdered] goes:

If truth be told I've had a lot to contend with.
I've kept the French at bay
In Portugal and Spain
As our King went insane.

Not the run of the mill (don't even mention the Luddites) but quite typical of iLiKETRAiNS

Perceval himself was a master of the sound bite and during a debate on electoral corruption he came up with the following memorable rejoinder when asked for his comment on the forgoing speaker:

"I have nothing to say to the nothing that has been said."