This evening... vinyl only.

Once upon a time radio stations relied on pre-release vinyl. This is one such 7", from 1973, that presaged the release of the album 'Vagabond Of The Western World' (SKL 5170) that was not, as it turned out, destined to rock the world.

Given a couple more years things were to change dramatically in terms of the band; both its core dynamic and the public's appetite for such music. 
The two tracks on the other face of this are 'Gonna Creep Up On You' and 'Little Girl In Bloom'.
As things are going tonight is not going to get beyond 7" singles that I know/or had forgotten that I have. This is a song that, in all probability, you haven't heard for some time...
  

The original release of it  - VER 1 (1981) - sounds so very dated now, I think.

New Music 2012 - Part 18 - Audio Fiction - Worlds Apart

New York's Audio Fiction, which I have mentioned before in relation to their 2009 self-titled album, has just announced the completion of its successor 'Worlds Apart'. It will be released "sometime this summer".  I have no more specific date but here is the artwork for it:

This one was almost entirely funded using Kickstarter: Yet another nail in the coffin of the majors... and I don't think for a moment that the band will mind me saying that.
I'm currently listening to the album 'Audio Fiction' (2008) but I've heard some of the demos from 'Worlds Apart' and, well, I just can't wait to hear it all as it is finally intended to be.

No Direction Home 2012 - Slow Club

This post is a 'special' - it is for Addi, co-writer of the blog Listologies.
He mentioned his liking for UK-based Slow Club. Charles and Rebecca are originally from Rotherham. Here they are, just a dozen miles from there, live on the main stage at the first No Direction Home Festival a fortnight ago today.

It's not the first time I have seen them. They were awesome.
  

And the sun was shining too - they are that good!

No Direction Home 2012 - acoustic days

It is true that I have already mentioned a few of my, more or less, acoustic highlights of NDH 2012. The truth is that they were many and varied and so here a few more. Some hailed from very distant lands, others rather less so, but all of them were very good.
Now where am I to supposed start? Not least because it also includes both the stages that I have not even mentioned yet. Now where should I start with this, too?
Let's go with Urusen, who performed on the Boathouse Stage at 8:30pm on Saturday evening. We will come to the fourth stage later.
This is only two of the members of Urusen...

You know me - I complain when I'm too far away to take the picture that I want and now I'm too close! In fact I'm perched on the front corner of one of their bass speakers for a reason that just escapes me now because that is how festivals are.

This next one is two of the others but Urusen is a five-piece. There is also the drummer whom I never really saw at all...
It is a lovely stage but it has one problem. That is, and for entirely plausible reasons due to its approach access and lake-side location, it has a strictly limited capacity that has to be monitored and that was an issue at times. On the other hand it was certainly a popular stage!
  

That is not to say that the Electric Dustbowl Stage was short on acoustic action. Far from it in fact and here, on it Saturday lunch time, is 'Tiny Ruins' a two-piece from Auckland, New Zealand. She was accompanied by beautifully appropriate but very importantly never-overbearing double bass and backing vocals.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

It was magical... This is Hollie Fullbrook of 'Tiny Ruins'.

No Direction Home 2012 - electric nights

The slightly curiously named, but very likeable, Electric Dustbowl Stage was in late evening/past midnight the home to acts of an electric and/or electronic bent. Friday's two included a band very high on my 'to see-hear list' and another that was one of my highlights of EOTR 2011.
That first act is Veronica Falls and they certainly didn't disappoint:

They also played three new tracks that are not on the début album that was only released on Bella Union last year. That bodes well for their second LP I'd like to think.

The second, and the revelation to me at End of The Road last September, is Austra from Canada.

  

Electric Dustbowl head-liners on early Saturday (well actually just into Sunday morning at the start) were The Pyramids. Sharing two members with Archie Bronson Outfit you might care to label them a more raw, more rock version of the same. To be honest it is a little bit more complex than that.
It is pretty heavy and very much written and performed off the cuff, or at least that is the impression it seeks and for the great part succeeds in creating. For those, at least those with the inability of me, the lighting made photography challenging to say the least. This was the best I could manage.

It did, however, evoke the pyramid theme better than I was able to capture.

    

The following evening, although it started a little earlier it being the final evening, the music was quite possibly even more of a challenge. From California, and with a particular and uncompromising technicolor version of rock-punk, hails Mikal Cronin and his band.

And that's enough to blow any folk/country/acoustic cobwebs away.

No Direction Home 2012 - into the unknown

A festival should not be judged on headline acts. It would be a poor way to spend three days were it to involve enduring many hours of tedium in the hope and expectation of ninety minutes of heaven at the end of each. A good festival has strength in depth and, quite possibly, it is the so-called 'lower orders' that serve to define the truly good ones.
Well No Direction Home didn't fail on the former count by any means but, where it triumphed in spades is in the most important aspect of all. That it was a continuous source of angst to decide which act to see at all times everyday...
OK, so all three acts opening the Lake Stage were great.

Cowbois Rhos Botwnnog --- on the Lake Stage, in the pouring rain, Friday lunch-time.

  
I have already mentioned 'Cowbois Rhos Botwnnog', but neither Brighton-based (except when decamped to Lewes!) 'Laish' on Saturday and 'Trembling Bells' on Sunday suffered by comparison.
  
This next pair of pictures are of 'Laish', performing as opening act on the Lake Stage on Saturday. Well, given the second one, you can see exactly what time it is.

   

By Sunday you might have been coming rather concerned about the prospects for 'Trembling Bells'. Well, should that have been the case, you need not have worried one bit.

Even without Will 'Bonny Prince Billy' Oldham, Lavinia Blackwall and her cohort was more than effective in carrying off the tracks from that collaboration as well as all the other albums.

No Direction Home 2012 - introduction

This is the very first picture I took and in some ways it served well to set the scene...

Cowbois Rhos Botwnnog on the Lake Stage early on Friday afternoon.
    

You might have thought the weather awful; you might easily have underestimated 'No Direction Home'. Cowbois Rhos Botwnnog sung all but one song of their set in Welsh but to dismiss that as novelty, or worse, would have been an almost unimaginably huge mistake. No Direction Home is about surprises...

New and old songs - a mixed case of folk - Part 4

Two new releases; one by an artist already well known whom I saw live a few months ago at Frome Folk Festival and the other the début release by an artist of whom I only heard about for the first time a couple of days ago.
  
It is barely a year ago that Bella Hardy released her third album Songs Lost and Stolen and now she returns with another LP.

The Dark Peak and The White is a collection of songs, some traditional others her own original compositions. The arrangement is uniformly simple throughout, highlighting her singing and fiddle-playing on a record produced by the prolific and multi-talented Kris Drever who appeared as an artist on some of the tracks on Songs Lost and Stolen.  If you are new to Bella Hardy's music then this is no bad place to start, but be sure to also give the earlier albums a listen. In particularly the middle section, especially tracks 5 -10, on that album. No real wonder then that she won a 2011 BBC Radio 2 Folk Award for 'Best Original Song' and if 'The Herring Girl' is timeless, and it is, so is 'Jenny Wren' and neither are set in the Peak District for they are both about itinerants looking for opportunities in places previously unknown to them.
  
The second involves a trip some eighty-miles north as the raven flies along the Pennines, the spine of England, for Pip Mountjoy hails from near Richmond in the Yorkshire Dales.
On this release she is to be found cutting loose from her locale; the EP is Louisiana. The songs are all her own compositions but the acoustic theme, on guitar in this case, is rather striking while the songs in several cases evince a wish to explore new places but they are tempered by her concerns about things that might accompany that endeavour.

I'm not going to say much about this other than to suggest you give it a listen, then buy it. One to watch, definitely, she has only fairly recently turned eighteen. If you are going to Deer Shed Festival 3 in July (20 - 22) then she is performing there.
  
That in fact also, if accidentally (largely because it reminded me to check the updated artist list for DSF 2012 and found it was rather desirable), solved a conundrum that has been bothering me for months: if I were to add a third (logically July) festival between No Direction Home and End of the Road, then what should it be?  I have toyed with various ideas for July 2012: Latitude, the re-born Truck Festival and Priddy Folk Festival but none have really made me want to commit so far. It is hard to say why... they just didn't quite do enough to make me do so.
In the end it is none of these that did.  I've just bought my ticket so instead I'll be heading north once again in July, to Baldersby Park near Thirsk in North Yorkshire, for Deer Shed Festival 3.  I was, I must say, very tempted last year but it was the same weekend as Truck Festival and also the one immediately after Latitude (to which I was already going), so the distances involved in such a short time put me off and I went to Truck 2012 instead. Those particular considerations just don't apply this year and, to be honest, I can't wait. I like small festivals with awesome acts.

If you want to torture yourself, beautifully...

It's not that hard actually. Nor, I think, is it an especially dangerous ambition even if it is also a slightly wicked one. There is simply so much new music to be found and so much of it is legal, free and might possibly benefit the artists if some attention were paid to it. Buying it would of course be far better and, in many cases, it is very reasonable.
On the other hand you can never do it all yourself - there is quite simply far too much to listen to, let alone think and then write about. So we can all forget that right now. On the other hand writing something, about any of it, is all for the good. That is at least possibly achievable and if anyone is reading and likely some are, or better still commenting, then the oxygen of publicity will do no harm. I could believe that almost nobody does that but, on the other hand, I have many reasons to believe that this is not actually true.
If you want to torture yourself horribly then that is probably best done by denying what you actually like and, equally catastrophic, pretending to like what you really don't.  I'd say that it is certainly not the way to go. Not agreeing with others about more specific things, however, is a completely different matter and the boundaries may or may not always turn out to be quite as distinct as either party might have believed. Long may it remain so.

New Music 2012 - Part 17 - Joanne Shaw Taylor - Almost Always Never

It is almost unthinkable. 

Announced only today, tickets not yet on sale, is this tour around the UK from US-based, but originally from Wednesbury in the West Midlands, electric-blues phenomenon Joanne Shaw Taylor. What is more it is also in support of her third album 'Almost Always Never' released in the UK by Ruf Records on 17, September 2012 (almost certainly). This is the track listing:
  

ALMOST ALWAYS NEVER
• Soul Station
• Beautifully Broken
• You Should Stay, I Should Go
• Piece of the Sky
• Army of One
• Jealousy
• Almost Always Never
• Tied and Bound
• A Hand In Love
• Standing To Fall
• Maybe Tomorrow
• Lose Myself To Loving You
  
Note added May 22, 2012:
Tickets for the tour go on sale Friday May 25, 2012.  For an earlier comment on this topic see here.

Note added May 23, 2012:
Now think about this; how good this could be in a venue that has a capacity of 400 standing - about 60% of the capacity of the Cheese and Grain here in Frome?
That venue is Tavistock Wharf  and pre-sale tickets are available now.

New Music 2012 - Part 16

This first is something that I mentioned as up-coming a while back. It is 'Europe', the second album by Anglo-Australians Allo Darlin'.

It is released on Slumberland Records on May 7, 2012 - LP, CD & d/l

I saw Allo Darlin' live at EOTR 2011 and it was a wonderful set; that they could hold a candle to any other act there was certainly no mean feat. This album is a demonstration of that; there is no question about it in my mind.

Here is an image from that performance in the 'Big Top' at End Of The Road Festival 2011.

The second act is one I have been meaning to seek out for some while but only a chance reminder, Amazing Radio playing one of their songs, prompted me to do so at last. That band is a five-piece from Leeds, Ellen and The Escapades, which has only recently released its début LP 'All The Crooked Scenes' on Branch Out Records.

It is an album of beautifully poised contemporary summer folk. The album is available on LP, CD and d/l and Ellen & The Escapades is high on my list of bands to see live this summer.

Karine Polwart - Live @ Rook Lane Chapel, Frome

Following on from the success of the first Frome Folk Festival came the first visit to Frome of Scottish singer-songwriter Karine Polwart. Rook Lane Chapel is a wonderful venue and absolutely ideal for concerts such as this and there was nothing to disappoint a near sell-out audience. Support was provided by an up-coming artist from Bath, Beth Porter, who was playing solo (rather than with her varied-in-composition backing group 'The Availables') but that did not did not detract from the performance one bit.  Songs such as murder ballad 'Salty Water' are good in whatever format they are played. She announced that her début album is on course for release before the end of the year; there is an EP 'Red Floor #3' already released.
  
Karine and her two accomplices, her brother Steven and multi-instrumentalist Inge Thomson (originally from Fair Isle, no less), provided a lengthy and stellar set.

As well as the expected favourites it notably included at least five tracks that will be on her forthcoming fifth studio album: 'Traces' is due for release on August 13. Judging from what we heard yesterday evening it is going to be rather special and most certainly not apolitical. That is something artists only tend to do when they feel comfortable and the audience is already on-side, which it clearly was as demonstrated by two encores - the second of which was a audience sing-along cover of Abba's 'Waterloo'.
  
There were a couple of solo numbers and this one is Inge singing a traditional Shetland song accompanying herself on piano accordion.

New Music 2012 - Part 15 - Dear Prudence

One of the best things about new music is when it just appears in my consciousness quite unexpectedly. So it is with this five piece, fronted and founded by Madi Ponica and based in Brighton, that has also taken a rather dangerous name as its own.  It could, owing a debt in kind to Siouxie and The Banshees and maybe even The Beatles via The Cure, have been a complete disaster from the outset. It isn't. The first single is 'Valentine' and this is the artwork for it.

It is early days, certainly, but I'm listening carefully and think 'Dear Prudence' has potential in 2012. They are too young to remember and also too wise and ingenious to merely parody...
Were I booking acts for summer 2012 this one would, without doubt, be high on my list. If they can pull off an album as good as these songs, that matches their obvious talent and ambition and they are wisely being secretive about their plans for realizing this, then I wouldn't bet against them for a moment. In fact it is already a much better bet than you-can-guess-who (for prudence does not become him) --- and that is why I am at home and writing this just now: His loss and their gain!
  
Link added April 24, 2012:
http://mtmbroadcasting.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/dear-prudence-gig-review-green-door.html

New Music 2012 - Part 14 - Metric 'Synthetica'

Metric will release its fifth studio album on June 11 in the UK and June 12 in North America (that is simply a chart-counting related issue).  This is the album art now that I have reduced it from 3690 x 3690 pixels to a more manageable, unless that is you want to project it on to a large flat wall, 800 x 800 pixels!

The usual problem with pre-release album art is that it is small and grainy; so even making it workable at 320 x 320 pixels for use in the side-bar of the blog can be a challenge. That is not a problem in this case but on the other hand I have never seen Metric live, which is something I might just have to put right this year and, because I can certainly do so, this is the track list:

  

SYNTHETICA
1.     Artificial Nocturne
2.     Youth Without Youth
3.     Speed The Collapse
4.     Breathing Underwater
5.     Drums So Real
6.     Lost Kitten
7.     The Void
8.     Synthetica
9.     Clone
10.   The Wanderlust
11.    Nothing But Time
  
Their second studio album 'Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?' (2005) was one of the first I ever posted a comment on and as such it pre-dates this blog. Rather more importantly I still love it to bits!  

Record stores, vinyl, live music and poster art.

Saturday next, April 21, is Record Store Day...  certainly the biggest and sure to be the best yet.  All kinds of traditional High Street shops have been struggling of late, and record shops for longer than most - a couple of decades at the very least - but now the green blade rises.

I believe that, while it may sound contrary to say it, the legion of ways that the rise of the internet has heralded in recent years actually has something to do with this. In particular it has provided new means for artists and fans to speak once again, other than chance meetings at live performances. It has cut out much of the stultifying meddle-middle-muddle that did nothing for communication and, very often, little more for the acts in terms of meaningful promotion either.  If they didn't turn into an instant 'hit' for the major label they were cut-adrift from the contract and, more often than not, simply vanished.

North America kept live music going, more or less, and in time that slowly spread back to the UK and Europe. I am not there, sadly, but I can watch many of the highlights of Coachella 2012, and pretty much live, if I chose to do so. It made very diverting breakfast-time watching (owing to the time difference) this last weekend, I must say.

Returning to Record Store Day 2012 the wealth of special, limited edition, releases is quite simply staggering...

It has also stimulated an outbreak of poster art from the stores taking part - also part of a resurgent theme as it has become a feature of live events once again.  Here are half-a-dozen that have caught my attention over the last fortnight or so and in no order other than that in which I noticed them...

  

  

  

  

OK, it is a baker's half dozen because I couldn't resist the last one.

Neon Music has decided that Hungary needs a Record Store Weekend and, who knows, maybe that is the way to go.

It is just one of those things...

To be fair it is not often that one needs 'one of those things' and especially when a new release is concerned. The 'thing' in question pre-supposes that you are already equipped to play vinyl. They were widespread way back when - not least because most foreign (that is in this respect non-UK) and also almost all juke-box vinyl 45s used this format.
This one does too, and it is about as new as you can get.

Heavy Chevvy, Pocket Change and Mama are not tracks on the album 'Boys & Girls'.

Last Thursday is a long time in Music

Last Thursday I wrote something, about the passing of Jim Marshall and his influence on electric guitar music. That included the comment that, at least in the UK, it is somewhat out of fashion.
That would be quite inconsequential were it not for this...  much hailed as just more 'southern fried rock', something long forgotten and also forever indie, so Alabama Shakes was derided by much of the music industry. It is a cliché that, I'm pleased to say, I don't think they could ever stoop so low as to reach; it was, however, tentatively predicted to gradually conquer at least the more receptive parts of the UK audience through live performance.
  
Be that as it may, the latest UK album chart mid-week predictions suggest otherwise - the début album 'Boys and Girls' is really on to something... it was only released - vinyl, CD and d/l on Monday, 9 April in the UK by indie label Rough Trade Recordings.  There's serious trouble afoot and it is just possible that it will top the UK album chart on its week of release. WTF is that about?
The album is extremely good, and not just for a début, but more than that the band's live reputation is already firmly established. The band is awesome live but, unusual in such a genre, so too is the contribution by vocalist Brittany Howard.
  
The album artwork has a quite unsurprising geometry:

Alabama Shakes is confirmed for End Of The Road 2012 (EOTR 2012). I, for one, can't wait.

Thoughts of forthcoming UK 2012 Festivals.

I haven't forgotten how to write, and I certainly haven't forgotten how to read or listen either. To follow in the coming weeks are some of my thoughts summarized by the post title and also by this lyric...
  
But who cares what the night watchmen say
The stage has been set for the play.
  
Townes Van Zandt is sadly unable to be there in person, although perhaps still present in spirit. On the other hand and in a similar, but mortal, vein Richard Buckner will be appearing at End Of The Road 2012. If that is something the same event also features a legend of Americana before the term was coined, or at the very least widely understood - Van Dyke Parks. From writing lyrics for The Beach Boys album Smile (he lived to see it released, if not as it was originally intended), as amazingly so did Brian Wilson (although not functional as originally intended), much more recently he conceived much of the arrangement and the production of Joanna Newsom's Ys (2006). In-between times, and amongst many other projects, he recorded and released six albums of his own material.

Jim Marshall - a man beyond music

It is so iconic, of amplified music, that it is indelible. Today Jim Marshall passed away... you know those ubiquitous amps, of course you do, but likely never thought about how they came to document and then define electric guitar music in particular for almost half a century.
http://marshallamps.com/
Now you do.  The next time you see one, and I'd wager that will be soon,  just remember Les Paul and Leo Fender too: the electric guitar ain't dead yet... far from it. Here's to the next half-century.

Murderous, Modern and Urban?

Much has been written, and much more doubtless will be, about the corrasion (rather than mere corrosion) of some modern 'urban' music and in particular that it dwells heavily on themes of injustice, death, violence, and murder.

That is true but equally it is nothing new - the folk canon is replete with such themes in all forms --- from the night songs (of lovers lost) to the murder ballads in which the boot is on the other foot.  The stories are often old, the telling of them not always so much so:
  
Charlotte Dymond
In early April
1844
I heard you talking
By the barn door
You agreed to go with him
To a church upon the moor
You planned to leave me
You'd be mine no more
  
Two years I loved you
Two years you were mine
I swore I'd love you
Until the end of time
But now you've found a new love
You crossed the line
Oh what have I done
I'll hang for my crime
  
You went walking up on Bodmin
An early start that day
Never said where you were going
But I could walk with you some of the way
Well you never reached that chapel
You never got away
For by the stream I killed you
And there I hoped you'd stay
  
On my return I told the others
New work you had found
They did not believe me
And with your absence I was bound
Oh, curse you Charlotte Dymond
Where you lay on the ground
For along with my boot prints
Your body was found
  
I tried to hide it
Tried to save my own skin
But the Mistress turned against me
With all her kith and kin
I know that I must suffer
For this dreadful sin
Now the gallows await me
Hell's gate says welcome in.
  
Lyric: Charlotte Carrivick (2011), based on traditional sources including the twenty-three four-line verses of Charles Causley's 'The Ballad of Charlotte Dymond'.  Fiddle and backing vocals: Laura Carrivick.
Matthew Weekes was convicted of the murder of Charlotte Dymond and was sentenced to death by hanging. This took place in Plymouth.