Tale To Tell - of strings and things.

I'm no longer sure what should surprise me and what should not. I can however still be surprised - and Mummers did it for me.

It wasn't a case of thinking that I wouldn't like it but, equally, it wasn't in the least bit like what I had imagined it to be either. Here they are on the Uncut Arena on Friday. They are also appearing at 'The End Of The Road' in September. Another Brighton-based outfit, the album 'Tale To Tell' was released in 2009; and Londoner Raissa Kahn-Panni's music and lyric actually have much to do with an unhappy year spent as a waitress in Brixton.

I might dispute everything...

It goes without saying that constructive disagreement is the source of all virtue but what I believe to be so is, as likely as not, your poison. My delight was a relatively little known band from South Africa, 'Dear Reader', that however split listener opinion in half...

I'm on the loving side here, as must be quite apparent, but that is not to say that the detractors have no less reason for their opinion other than the fact that they are wrong.

If you don't like them then that's fine by me but here they are anyway.

The current album 'Replace Why With Funny' is just one of many on the list of those that my trip to Latitude has resulted in.

We have stage (and desolation)...

In four days spent with a crowd of thousands the concept of emptiness is perhaps not just improbable but almost unimaginable.
That such preconceptions are totally wrong is possibly one of the best things...

The 'Sunrise Arena', deep in the woods, was quite deserted on Saturday morning.

Back to the barricade: the sound tower on the Obelisk Stage on Friday morning.

A ghostly scene... 12:30 Sunday afternoon in the Uncut Arena.
There were four of us sat chatting, backs against the crowd barrier, looking out at the fifth and sixth persons in a tent that holds about 5750!

Past midnight Sunday @ Latitude 2007.

That which can only be imagined...

Latitude 2009 had a few flaws and one of them was the line-up on 'The Lake Stage', some of which was not available in the progamme and also thereafter. I hope that this will be sorted next year but that is not to say that it was derelict in 2009...
It was home, on Sunday, to a new artist to whom the epithet 'estrella' could hardly be more appropriate.

Marina and The Diamonds was simply awesome; the band members were very good indeed and Marina had both them and us, the audience, exactly where she wanted --- wrapped around her little finger --- and it didn't hurt one little bit.

Latitude Festival 2009

It is easy to say that it was amazing, because it served up what I wanted in terms of the less well known, but to deny that I was in thrall of some more main-stream acts would equally be a travesty.

Little Boots live on the 'Sunset Stage', Friday 17th July 2009.

One is just not enough.

I haven't even posted any real thoughts on Latitude 2009 yet but I will do so soon. Suffice it to say that, while it had the occasional and inevitable flaw, it was simply wonderful and so here a few photos to run with just for now.

Ladyhawke live on the Obelisk Stage on Friday afternoon.

Kap Bambino on the Sunset Stage on Friday...
Such good, if rather curious, behaviour would not last very long!

I don't think I can survive 2009 by going to only one festival... and now I don't have to because I'm going to 'The End of the Road' in North Dorset too. Even as the storm builds, a bit of acoustic never did any harm, and this was in the 'Film and Music Tent' last Thursday evening.

If You Want Mud, You've Got It...

I'm resigned to it and so I'm going to enjoy myself. The first band on the known agenda is tomorrow evening, assuming we are not all swimming, and is one I have mentioned before. As it happens their 'Frozen Heart EP' arrived with me today.

Not remotely like the recording the post-title parodies but one that I anticipate with much enthusiasm.

That's actually just made me think of something quite different:
Gossip are performing at Latitude 2009, so how about an AC/DC cover version?
'Whole Lotta Ditto'. The more you think about it the less you should but the lyric would need little alteration. She could surely do the original Bon Scott vocals proud and it would work alongside 'Standing In The Way Of Control' admirably.

Technical things:
The link to the Bellowhead tour dates and website, to the left of this post, now works as it should. I screwed it up yesterday evening.

Music I Want in 2009 - Part 9 - New European

I'm pondering strategies for a wet weekend at Latitude 2009 but the issues involved are not devolved; the weather is no less my responsibility than it is that of the event organisers and neither of us can blame the other for it. They have contingency plans too and so, even if not ideal, I think it will probably work out OK... Rather than say which acts I'm hoping to see, though I have mentioned a few already, I thought I'd tell you of a few that I won't be seeing because, in so far as I know, they are not playing. It is not criticism, rather curiosity, that got the better of me...

Ray Rumours is the semi-solo project of Ros Murray (Electrelane) and it sounds nothing like their electronic output and this is the second album released under this moniker.
Recorded in St. Martin l'Ardèche, in the autumn and winter of 2007-2008, it is entirely acoustic. It is released on CD by StitchStitch (March 2009) and it available either direct from either of these links or from some independent record stores.

More Scandinavian surprise, this time in the form of ambient folk-electronica from Sweden, comes in the form of the début album 'Aurora'.

The Deer Tracks (2009) - Aurora

And here is another recent release...

Lau are battling with Bellowhead, in press reviews and more, for the crown of best folk-inspired band of 2009 and it is quite obviously a discussion to be had over a couple of pints in the pub(s) of your choice (The Bourne Valley and The Griffin would be mine) but beyond that it means little except to say that we are currently spoiled by such talent and long may it remain so.

Love Tattoo - live

It is hard to say what the most incredible live gig I have ever seen is but this is certainly amongst the top ten or so...

The remarkable band not only played almost all of the 2008 album 'Love Tattoo' but also several impressive new songs that are to appear on the second album which, they also said, is due in January 2010. Come the end everyone was asking random strangers "did I really hear that?" and it is the mark of a gig that, although they were doubtless already high, exceeded everyone's expectations of it.

If I see two sets as good or better than this at Latitude 2009 then I shall regard myself as very fortunate. If I don't I shall not feel hard done-by and doubt that I will come away disappointed.

Life live?

Two venues and five bands in six hours is a good deal however you view it. That it all took place within a fifteen minute walk from home is just a dream scenario. The supposedly showery weather did not materialise for the International Food Event - I had Kenyan fried chicken with spicy accompaniments and, while rather beyond my usual menu choices, it was totally delicious.

The weather was near perfect and the turn-out was quite amazing. The first band was Praying For The Rain and even that couldn't make it happen... The next band, Phantom Limb, could probably invoke a hurricane without warning if they so wished with their unashamed tales of death and despair... and that couldn't do it either.

... but gathered a young following regardless.
This was the final song 'Withering Bones'.

Time to head over to the Cheese & Grain for Acoustic Plus not least because there is not another until September. I got there just in time to hear the last four tracks of the first set:

Ruby Brown live at Acoustic Plus, Frome , Cheese & Grain - 4 July 2009.

Next up, The Rusticles playing energetic cross-genre tunes of their own devising...

and to wind the evening up some funk rock from their début album.

I'll Be On The Common - Port Erin

www.myspace.com/porterin

Yeah So?

It is almost as far as is imaginable from the boisterous indie of Arctic Monkeys but no less genuine for it - Slow Club is the other shimmering face of Sheffield indie music. They are appearing at Latitude 2009 for a third successive year, which may be a record, and this time it is just after the release of their first album, Yeah So, (Moshi Moshi, release date 6 July 2009)!

and then they are off to tour it in the US and Canada.

More links, including the lyric for the 2008 EP Let's Fall Back In Love:

http://rpgreenhalgh.blogspot.com/2008/09/lets-fall-back-in-love.html

http://rpgreenhalgh.blogspot.com/2008/09/to-whoever-just-asked-about-slow-club.html

London, band, Kelly White, Glastonbury...

For those looking for information try here:

The Equations are the band - Kelly White is a member of it - and Amy Turnnidge is Theoretical Girl. Watch out for the début album in August... they are now signed to Memphis Industries.

From The Outside Looking In - Glastonbury 2009

There has been some fuss in the press today. It is said that the BBC spent as much at £5 million on their coverage of Glastonbury across TV, radio and on-line. How many millions do they spend annually on soaps and sport, none of which I watch? I don't watch much TV as a rule, but I certainly still pay the same licence fee. This weekend I watched enough to almost make it worth it alone. I'm not saying that everyone should feel the same way but I'd like to thank the BBC - this is precisely the never-ending dilemma faced by a public-service broadcaster. Please stick to your guns...

This must be also true of choosing acts for a festival but from all accounts it was quite some festival, even by it's own standards. There was rain, and the concomitant mud, but only in reasonable proportions and would it be the same without it?

Starting as it didn't go on... Friday dawns over one of the many camp sites.

The festival atmosphere should electrify but someone left the charger on too long. By lunch time on Friday the sun had appeared and so it remained for all three days! Thanks to all the aforementioned BBC coverage I soon came to one conclusion - I should have tried to get a ticket!

I thought all three headline acts were excellent and enjoyed every moment of each. What however impressed more was just how much the newer acts were gathering coverage and large crowds. The Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs - though not very new as they recently released their third LP, It's Blitz, were show-stopping. Three genuinely new artists in 2009 were:

La Roux, whose début album would have been a run-away at the top of the UK charts on Sunday were it not for the demise of Michael Jackson. As it was it made #2, which was an incredible result for the duo of Elly Jackson and Ben Langmaid and single 'In For The Kill' has already become one of the signature sounds of 2009.

Little Boots was another obvious winner and also deservedly so I think.

The third artist that I put in this category will be no surprise either, even though that first album, 'Lungs', is not physically released until this coming Monday (in the UK). Florence and The Machine were simply on another planet.

It would be hard to persuade anyone who had come across them for the first time, that fifteen months ago they were almost unknown outside South London. As well as the main set, which was on TV, they also recorded an acoustic BBC6 Music Hub Session on Friday:

BBC6 Music DJ was Cerys Matthews and she joined them for a duet with Florence Welch.

The Green Fields of Canada...

I still wonder how they do it...

The track that is the title of this post is actually a traditional song - I have two recorded versions of it and neither are by Canadians. They are from the following albums both of which I can recommend, particularly for their original content.

• Cold Blow And The Rainy Night - Planxty (1974) (12" vinyl LP - Polydor Super 2383 301)
  
• A Lily For The Spectre - Stephanie Dosen (2007) (CD - bellacd137x)

The former is now readily available on CD and mp3 but, surprisingly, also as a 1990 vinyl re-issue that is available at about £15 / € 18 / $25. The latter I saw live at Latitude 2007 and if you think she sounds good recorded let me tell you that live she really is something else.

That is something that the three new releases, which follow this reflection, also promise in abundance.

I digress however, for what I have to mention are new releases by three Canadian acts that are in a broadly similar vein. This is in part More New Music I Want but, while all three albums are by Canadian artists, I already have one of them.

Po' Girl - Deer In The Night

I have listened to a great deal of roots/modern folk in the last eighteen months and it is not the nature of the genre to be groundbreaking, in part by definition, but this blew me away the first time I listened to it and on repeated listening it has got even better. I haven't come to any conclusions about favourite tracks yet...

[well kinda - all of them really]

A trio now (R - L), Allison Russell and Awna Teixeira write most of the songs while Benny Sidelinger not only plays guitars and such (as do the aforementioned) but also builds the ones that they play!

I have mentioned this artist before and in fact none of these are début albums so there is an albeit short back catalogue to consider too! I'll continue with this as her début solo album, Honey From The Tombs, was the subject of a very early post on this site and I still play it often so it was a clearly a good choice. This is the second solo album from (Stars and Broken Social Scene regular) Amy Millan. It is due to be released by Arts & Crafts on vinyl, CD and download on September 8.

Amy Millan - Masters of the Burial

Note added 13 July 2009:
A Canadian tour to go with it was announced today. I wish that we could be so lucky.

And, when there could surely be no more from Canada, back to the artists at the top of this post...

Everyone Is Someone is the third LP from Canadian acoustic-pop duet Dala. Not the easiest item to find in the UK at the moment but amazon.ca have it in stock and will ship to the UK without any problem.

Thinking about Thoughts on Music

Before thinking about today's big news, and the start of Glastonbury 2009, I'd already been thinking about the wider aspects of performance music thanks to two items that very recently came my way.
The first may seem almost inconsequential as it was just a flyer in an album I received...

You can probably see why this appealed to me - and what a great way of making buying physical music more appealing - though I had just bought this, Iamsound IAM024, and imported it from the US anyway unaware of this bonus. The album is Dance Mother - Telepathe on 12" vinyl and the best thing, apart from the fact it is available on vinyl at all, is that doing so is not prohibitively expensive.

I am also reading a book that is proving much more fascinating than I expected it would be. It is a question that lies behind all music, recorded music and live performance, although it is predominantly concerned with the former.
What do we mean when we say "That sounds really good." and why?

If anything that is only an easy question: Is it possible to find answers, or even gauge trends, in a topic so obviously fraught with individual tastes and tolerances?

How do I know if the CD I am listening to now even sounds the same to you as it does to me, regardless of whether it is to your liking or not? It could have been a book of untold ennui but, as I got a free copy to review, I decided to take the risk.
I have only read about half of it so far - at nearly four hundred pages it is no light-weight matter - and the further I get the harder it is to put down. It is factual and sometimes analytical but only because the topic requires it to be thus at times; at others it is reminiscent of a detective novel in search of those responsible for the way in which the story unfolded and what the influences and motives were, or in some cases, might have been.
I am finding it enlightening and simply fascinating. It is certainly not necessary to read it to enjoy recorded music but will it increase my enjoyment of recorded music?
My answer is that it is probably too early to tell really but it is unlikely to do any harm. It is already making me think about the whole process in a different light.

You can find many blogs that discuss the merit of Dave Sitek's production duties on various albums of late, and one of those is that by Telepathe that I mention above (and helpfully I've recently seen them play live, for comparison). Reading the book and listening to this and (other) albums might inspire some to write a PhD thesis. Count me out, I'm too old for that kind of thing now, but tell me about it and I'll gladly read yours.

Do you recall the day the music died?

Today has been one in which news has been dominated by an event directly related to music. When I heard the news of the sudden death of Michael Jackson this morning two things suddenly sprung in to my mind:
The first was the (pre-digital age) response to the assassination of John Lennon but the soundtrack to it wasn't Lennon at all - it was Don Mclean's 'American Pie'. I have no doubt that in the digital world of downloads this week's charts will be full of Jackson's songs and indeed, if that were not true it would be surprising.
While Don Mclean has been careful never to unequivocally confirm or deny that the song was, at least in part, inspired by hearing of the death of Buddy Holly (in the year after Jackson's birth) and the complex and largely unfathomable lyric seems fitting to Jackson, who as much as he was a pioneer of new musical format as spectacularly demonstrated by the video to 'Billie Jean' amongst others, has remained a staple of gossip and speculation concerning his lifestyle and behaviour. Not without reason did the UK tabloid press coin the phrase "Wacko Jacko" at least two decades ago.

In addition there are some hundreds of thousands of ticket-holders for a massive series of come-back gigs at the O2 arena in London and for them in particular this couplet might sum up the current situation pretty accurately:

I knew that I was out of luck
The day the music died.

Now The Green Blade Rises - a lyric hymnal

Note added 25 June 2009:

10:30pm on THURSDAY 16 July, according to the Smoke Fairies' latest e-mail update. Live music on the Thursday evening hasn't been a feature of Latitude as I remember but is certainly a welcome development.

Note added 19 June 2009:

Smoke Fairies has just been added to the bill at Latitude 2009 on the "Film and Music Arena" - see here for current programme - but the day and time are not currently specified. While not a headline act this is certainly something I don't want to miss...

Note added 18 June 2009:

I've just listened to the recorded lyric (several times) while now able to compare it with the (supposéd original) one below. There are some minor differences and I'll post what I think are the actual song lyrics tomorrow.

Richard

I'm sorry about the delay in posting lyric for The Smoke Fairies download single but here it is, or at least that for 'Now The Green Blade Rises' as it appears in the Ox­ford Book of Car­ols, 1928.

Now The Green Blade Rises

Now the green blade rises from the buried grain,
Wheat that in the dark earth many years has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.
In the grave they laid Him, Love Whom we had slain,
Thinking that He’d never wake to life again,
Laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.
Up He sprang at Easter, like the risen grain,
He that for three days in the grave had lain;
Up from the dead my risen Lord is seen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.
When our hearts are saddened, grieving or in pain,
By Your touch You call us back to life again;
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.

I didn't imagine when I started this blog, and even though I subsequently realised that lyrics were not simply a curiosity of mine, that I would ever be asked about ones such as these or, for that matter, still be enjoying the challenge even more almost 350 posts later. I now wish I could add more sooner...
For the original post about this song:

http://rpgreenhalgh.blogspot.com/2009/06/now-green-blade-rises.html

Alright Dynamite - Music I Want in 2009, Part 8

Ooh, just listen!
The Canadian multi-tasking, collective-inspired, ethic is still alive and well I am delighted to report.

A member of Canadian band 'The Paperboys' and also part of the collective 'Outlaw Social' - she plays with both - this is Kendel Carson's second solo album and, as well as being a redoubtable fiddle and violin player, she is a fine vocalist too.

I mentioned Amy Millan's alt-country début solo album 'Honey From The Tombs' (2006) a long time ago and so I now can't wait to hear this too. Nor can I deny my curiosity about Millan's second solo album, currently being recorded I believe. Both of Carson's were largely written and produced by Chip Taylor, with input by Carrie Rodriguez, and that is hardly likely to be a bad thing. The first was this album and I want it too.

Rearview Mirror Tears (2007)

Spoiled for choice... a new dilemma.

Whatever things might be wrong in my world finding, or simply being notified of, new music isn't usually one of them. In one sense it is almost becoming a problem of its own - what to do about it all - but then that is a positive as music is, at least in part, an escape from reality so to be confronted with a different problem is a change if not a rest.

To illustrate that point here are two items. Firstly UK act Blackbud, local to this part of England as it happens, about which I was asked today (by someone in the US) and the second that I was told about today (a US act as it happens) that I had never heard of before and quite fortunately they are not directly comparable.

Released in 2006 this really should be better known. To say that it is traditional rock is something of an injustice and not least because every track on it is an original composition. That would not matter if it were no good but in fact some songs are so surprising that it merely begs the question "why were they not written before?" It is rock, laid back rock, yes, but certainly not asleep. The illustration is actually that of the 12" LP release (ISOM62LP - Independiente Records, 2006).

On the other hand I learned about this today and it is released in the US tomorrow!

The Low Anthem - Oh My God, Charlie Darwin

The multi-instrumentalist threesome (Ben Knox Miller, Jeff Prystowsky and Jocie Adams) are from Providence, RI and went as far from civilisation as is possible in Rhode Island to record this acoustic album in winter. I gather that, and the data is plentiful, it is a masterwork of modern acoustica. It is available from the US on vinyl and so, as an indulgence, it is my birthday present to myself.

It won't be the end of the problems though...

...it is hard enough to keep in touch with UK new releases and this is one that isn't.
Little known over here it is, however, amazingly good.

Innovate never imitate - Music I Want in 2009, Part 7

In a year that electro-pop is back in favour in a big way here is a timely reminder of one of the most consistent and hard-working bands that has been tirelessly trying to raise the status of such music for six years now. They DJ in the UK and abroad, they run club nights, even their own club, and if that were not enough Command is their fourth album as a band and I have already mentioned their third album, Heartland, when it was released in 2007.

The defining streaks are command and control: almost military anonymity [band members are still officially Clients A, B & E] and the musical integrity remains untouched. If the agents at Station X had run riot, in the spare time that they didn't have, and used the machines to make music it would probably have sounded like this far earlier than it did.
I've got to get this - hence the post - as Heartland was in My Charts of 2007 and I can't understand why they are not better known already. It is of course released on the label Out of Line, which is their own, and also this...

Maybe they could run the country too.