Author: mickebjorn

I remember watching the TV series ‘Upstairs Downstairs’ with my parents as a kid back in the 70s. In the parallel nostalgiverse that Papernut Cambridge inhabits, we now get ‘Outstairs Instairs’ instead.

Inevitably, I am transported into a pre-teen room around the year 1974. There are posters of pop stars taken from glossy colour magazines on the walls; Marc Bolan, Elton John, David Essex, Abba, Alvin Stardust… Two of the room’s walls are painted orange, the other two brown. Opposite the bed, there is a desk with a plastic turntable, one of those portable things with the speaker in the lid. It is playing ‘Co-Co,’ an earlier single by the Sweet. A pair of wide-flared jeans hang over the back of a chair, and by the closed door there’s a pair of purple platform shoes.

Is it my room? Maybe, but these images are only half-remembered, and Ian Button’s Papernut Cambridge are not about pastiche. 

Although seemingly radio-friendly, most of ‘Outstairs Instairs’ might never bother the airwaves; the lyrics are too explicit, although not in a way that would get them banned. 

Instead, for example, the refrain on ‘Not Even Steven’ goes: “I remember something Steven said, sometimes the butter is too hard for the bread.” Not really hit material. These songs are too abstruse, and too full of complications. To put it in 70s terms: too much of 10CC’s ‘I’m not in love’ and too little of Ricky Wilde’s ‘I am an astronaut’.

In a sense, this is easy listening made hard.

But just to prove the rule, there are some standout exceptions. Toy-town pop opener ‘Buckminster Fullerene’ could easily have been on Top of the Pops. A band like Paper Lace would have killed for its instantly memorable bubblegum refrain and singing-drummer friendly beat.

The catchy wordplay of ‘Mr Shimshiner’ might not have the same instant hit potential, but is another lovely ditty that should have been on an A-side sometime in the early 70s.

But this is now and not then, and Papernut Cambridge continue to sound like nothing else around. The arrangements are generous and beautifully played, with nice details to discover, from piano embellishments to crying saxes. Although often being labelled ‘psych’ there is honestly nothing psychedelic here. Sometimes, their music is even called ‘power pop’, but there is thankfully no need for extra power to make these songs take flight.

Instead, what we get is soft and slightly introverted glam pop. Classy stuff that you absolutely must hear.

And this time, you just might want to get the analogue version. The LP has an outstairs and an instairs side in the sense that one side plays from the inside and then out whereas the other side plays normally. Nice! 

Despite – or maybe because of – the Gold Needles’ connection to Fruits De Mer Records, I put on their debut album ‘Pearls’ expecting a run-of-the-mill Teenage Fanclub soundalike, all commendable but nothing to write home about. And sure enough, it starts off all twelve-stringily jingle-jangly in Beatles/Byrds territorium.

But then a couple of tracks in, there’s ‘Dreamscape Time’ which begins with analogue synths in an extended, spacey intro, followed by another unexpectedly Pink Floyd sounding guitar intro. The song itself extends the feeling of drama from the dual intros, and I am starting to think this is pretty good.

OK, so all the expected ingredients are here, including snippets from Alice In Wonderland and Nixon talking to the Apollo 11 astronauts. But the Gold Needles manage to scramble the bits and pieces around enough to make it all sound rather fresh and exciting.

A few listens later, I am hooked. The anthemic power pop numbers are interspersed with guitar instrumentals, mostly acoustic West Coast stuff despite bandleader Simon Dowson and his Needles being from Hull. But suddenly there’s one that reminds me of the Spotnicks. 

On one track there’s also a drum machine, and on others the electronics are satisfyingly angular. Yet the overall feel remains very much Badfinger.

The production is slightly grainy in a rather nice way. Not particularly analogue sounding, yet certainly not digitally clean. Rather, it seems to suffer from too many overdubs, something like what a band like the Honeybus had to do given their limited circumstances back in the day. 

Although the instruments are well-played, the sound is muddy in the midrange and a bit hissy in the top. In that sense the sound, if not directly the music, is a bit like that of contemporary American group the Once & Future Band; ambitiously arranged but with some rough edges.

Although balancing on a knife’s edge, the Gold Needles avoid being just derivative. Despite – or maybe because of – the album’s sprawling 18 tracks, ‘Pearls’ is quite an engaging listen. Great stuff, really!

The 10 best albums of Q1 2018 in alphabetical order

Field Music – Open Here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wQnqvvIhfU

The first Sternpost album was a pleasant surprise, and although it set the bar for the follow-up very high, I was not prepared for this: “Anti-clock” is a true marvel.

For those of you who do not know, Sternpost is a solo project by Petter Herbertsson from experimental pop band Testbild!.

Petter himself describes the music on “Anti-clock” as a sound collage, but it could really fit into a number of genres, such as ambient, experimental, electronic, musique concrète. Or progressive rock: Although Peter cites Lindsay Cooper and Chris Cutler as inspirations, I would rather describe this as National Health filtered through Karda Estra and imagined as the soundtrack to a film about a world where humans never regained language capacity after being punished for building the tower of Babel.

But arguing about genres is pointless. What is important is the fact that this music believes in its own capacity to explore. And that is incredibly exciting.
In this age of streaming, everyone can have encyclopaedic knowledge of music, and there are simultaneous parallel revivals of all genres as a consequence. Everything has a tendency to collapse into a post-modern game of spot-the-reference. Yet, “Anti-clock” has the power to make the listener believe there is still an unknown (and, in this particular case, unspeakable) musical landscape out there.

Although presented as a continuous piece of music – divided in two only because the LP format demands it – in reality this is more like a concept album consisting of short tracks tied together by field recordings, odd sounds, voices and snippets of dialogue between a man and a woman. Unfortunately their babble (brilliantly delivered by David Yates and his daughter Mabel) is unintelligible, although we can understand the emotional content of their chatter.

The tracks themselves are mainly instrumental and the few vocals that appear are again impossible to decipher, so if there is a story unfolding here, the listener has no way of finding out.

The music is often complex in a Canterbury prog way, but can without warning become quite simple or take on a dreamy, filmic quality. I suppose the atmosphere is quite dark at times, but there is too much musical playfulness for the darkness to linger very long. Melodies are frequently gorgeous, with chord progressions typical of Petter Herbertsson.

Taken as a whole, this album is of course very experimental, but the sweet tunefulness of much of it makes for a surprisingly easy listen. And most importantly, it never gets boring.

At the time of this writing, my iTunes play count is clocking in at 97 plays. And in this era of over-abundance of music, that is huge. That is probably ten times more than I listen to other albums however much I like them. As it happens, the only album that I have played more in recent years is “Il Misantropo Felice” by the Breznev Fun Club.
In other words, judging by my own listening data, I can’t refute the fact that “Anti-clock” must be one of my favourite albums of the decade.

Sternpost: Anti-clock

After Christmas, all Christmas pop songs are forgotten. For a reason – they normally stink.
So how would my pick for Christmas album of the year back in 2017 sound as Easter rears its eggy head?

I am listening to it right now, and it honestly remains every bit as good as it was back when there was a dead fir blinged out with plastic balls in my living room.

“Scarlet Fever” is the title of the Green Seagulls debut album and as far as I am concerned, it is one of this year’s key releases in the crowded neo-psychedelic genre.

Formed by Paul Nelson from New Electric Ride and Paul Milne of Hidden Masters and Magnetic Mind fame, the band rush-released two mesmerising singles last year. The single tracks are all included here together with ten new cuts that are equally good. (Just as the albums of those previous bands were by the way – albums that you must seek out if you don’t already have them!)

“Della stessa sostanza dei sogni” is one of the most anticipated releases for me this year, and now it is here! This is the third album by Sicilian art rockers Homunculus Res.

They are generally seen as being the second coming of the Italian Canterbury sound, roughly taking over where Picchio dal Pozzo left off in 1980. But while it is true that they belong to this tradition, they have transcended their influences and are clearly making music for the future rather than the past.

My experience of Lawrence has always been one about exaggerations.

Back in 1980, as I was making a fanzine together with a good friend, we decided that we wanted to publish an interview with Lawrence about the Felt debut album “Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty.” Alas, there was no Skype back then and we had already spent whatever money we had traveling to London to make interviews with other acts.

Instead, we managed to get an acquaintance of the band to make the interview and write the article for us. I remember being very unhappy when translating it into Swedish because it was just too full of superlatives. Felt were depicted as the most important thing to happen to music ever, more or less. Lawrence and guitarist Maurice Deebank were beings from another dimension.

Despite my feelings that we were losing credibility by publishing it, we went ahead in the end.

Listening to “Crumbling the Antiseptic Beauty” now, I find it very much easier to live with the exaggerated superlatives. This album has aged extremely well. Not only does Lawrence’s quite British take at lazy vocals and Maurice’s lyrical and ringing guitars work as very creative conduits for their Television influences, but the cymbal-less sound seems totally contemporary also today.

The exciting tension between Maurice’s classically influenced guitar playing and Lawrence’s pretentious yet shambolic outlook remains on subsequent releases; the predominantly instrumental “The Splendour of Fear” the masterly “The Strange Idols Pattern & Other Short Stories,” and Maurice’s final album – the uneven but partly jaw-droppingly brilliant “Ignite The Seven Cannons.”

If you don’t have this stuff already, now is the time to pick the albums up as they are being reissued by Cherry Red as a box set called “A Decade In Music.”

The box also contains a renamed version of Felt’s first attempt at music without Maurice, the instrumental, and misguidedly cheesy “Let The Snakes Crinkle Their Heads To Death”. Although a low point in Felt’s catalogue, interestingly, it serves as a bridge to Lawrence’s latest release with his current band the Go-Kart Mozarts, also now out on Cherry Red.

True to form, the press release accompanying “Mozart’s Mini-Mart” holds none of the hyperbole back. This time, we are told that: “This really is the most commercial set of songs Lawrence has ever released and it is definitely, absolutely the top most pop album of the year. It can’t be topped and it won’t be stopped!”

Ironically, given the fact that the band sound like they are using instruments bought in the titular mini mart, the overall sound sounds as dated now as that first Felt release without Maurice sounded then. The cheap electronic voice treatments certainly do nothing to change that impression…

But that is not necessarily to diminish the music, because what we have here is another wry and disillusioned look at modern life from the underside. The first song is called “Anagram of We Sold Apes”. What could that anagram be, you wonder? Opal Swedes? Your guess is as good as mine.

Here are songs about depression, alcoholism, trying to not further into poverty, not having sex, more poverty… Lawrence portrays his characters as ultimate losers but it doesn’t make his observations less relevant or less biting.

Not really top most pop. But when Lawrence sings about stuff that is too awkward to sing about, you can’t help but thinking that all this fake stuff is very much what reality is made of.

So, who knows? Today I don’t agree, but maybe I will look back at the exaggerations in the press release a couple of decades from now and nod my head. Could it be that Lawrence is really ahead of his time again?

http://thefeltdecade.com

The greatest album 2017

Tom O. C Wilson – Tell A Friend
https://soundcloud.com/tomocwilson/sets/tell-a-friend-1

David Wells is certainly a key record collector hero of mine. I buy everything he reissues and curates. Among other things, that entails complete collections of his Tenth Planet LPs and Wooden Hill CDs, and more recently a string of excellent CDs on Grapefruit. Even though the lost classic quotient is reasonably high, there is always a back story that makes all of the stuff he rescues from obscurity worthwhile.

What got him started on that path was the album “A Game For All Who Know” by totally unknown early seventies act Ithaca. He was the first collector to own that album and by inadvertently causing it to become one of the more sought-after private press LPs, it changed his life.