list.co.uk/music GLASGOW COMPILATION VARIOUS ARTISTS Optimo: The Underground Sound of Glasgow (Glasgow Underground) ●●●●●
The mouth waters and the ears tingle at the thought of this, the first in a series of compilations showcasing the sound of a city by someone who knows it well. The producers have chosen well here, for they could have no more educated or able a debut tour guide than Optimo’s JD Twitch, who has a mercurial knack of finding songs that make you think, ‘what is that?’, every time a mix kicks in. The album starts in playful style, with an intro excerpt from John Steven’s Alan Lomax-recorded ‘The Big Kilmarnock Bonnet’, a chirpy a cappella folk reel which promises ‘ye’ll meet yer match in Glesca’. Then come the soft liquid beats of Twitch’s reimagined take on Bill Wells and Aidan Moffat’s ‘Glasgow Jubilee’, a chain letter of dirty assignations and rough talk around the offices and dives of the city. From there it turns definitively towards the dancefloor, cycling through an
array of styles: the electro grind of Debukas’ ‘I Am Machinery’; the warm afro- house of Cronk Family Enterprises’ ‘Tifit Hayed’; the delicate ambience of Lord of the Isles’ ‘I Remember’. Mash’s ‘Style is the Answer’ appears, partly down to Twitch’s ear for a great vocal sample, and there are cameos from the sublime Golden Teacher (‘Love Rocket!’) and Naum Gabo (Twitch’s Optimo partner Jonnie Wilkes, with ‘Ay & Oh’). It’s rarely a hard record, with Factory Floor’s ‘Real Love’ (the Mancunian group
making a cheat appearance here by way of an Optimo remix) about as downbeat as it gets. Rather, with tracks like Auntie Flo’s ‘La Samaria’ on board, it’s a selection which has been cannily designed to represent Glasgow as a young, diverse and impossible to pigeonhole melting pot of musical styles influenced by sounds from around the world. As Twitch points out himself, ‘I’m not sure if there is a “Glasgow sound” but there is definitely a Glasgow attitude.’ (David Pollock)
Records | MUSIC
FOLK/EXPERIMENTAL GLENN JONES My Garden State (Drag City) ●●●●●
For an artist whose compositions are entirely instrumental, Glenn Jones has a special talent for impressionistic storytelling. Like a musical translation of a haiku or imagist poem, his finest songs reflect on an image or idea, bringing them to life with expressively finger-picked acoustic guitar or banjo. ‘A Snapshot of Mon, Scotland 1957’, the gorgeously evocative highlight of his last album The Wanting, is one example, and My Garden State offers several more. Composed at the Jones family home while caring for his mother, an Alzheimer’s sufferer, several tracks meditate on the landscape of New Jersey.
The rolling banjo melody of ‘Across The Tappen Zee’, named after a bridge across the Hudson River, takes Jones and guest Laura Baird back to the Garden State, while ‘Alcouer Gardens’, dedicated to his mother’s care home, makes use of environmental sound, with the rumble of thunder and drenching hiss of rain providing a bed for Jones’ guitar. The spontaneously composed ‘Vernal Pool’ evokes spring light glancing off a murky woodland pond, with Jones’s fore-fingers parting the branches to let the sun shine through. ‘Going Back To East Montgomery’ shows Jones’s ability to develop melodic ideas over an extended form. Beginning as poignant minor-key Appalachia, the piece gathers momentum as Jones and guest guitarist Meg Baird’s treble notes bob and weave around an indelible bass pulse, the harmonic modulations creating an emotional push and pull that reflects the song’s bittersweet sentiment. This miniature New Jersey suite concludes with the utterly beautiful ‘Bergen County Farewell’, a warmly reflective and deeply touching folk ramble. Less focussed on raga and
drone than the late Jack Rose, Jones prefers to explore American folk forms, adding harmonic elements from the European classical tradition a la John Fahey. Graceful and poetic, My Garden State cements Jones’ reputation as the leading carrier of the American Primitive guitar tradition. (Stewart Smith)
POST PUNK THE FALL Re-Mit (Cherry Red) ●●●●● AMBIENT ECLECTICISM DIRTY BEACHES Drifters/Love is the Devil (Zoo Records) ●●●●●
Whoa-whoa-whoa, etc! Don’t ever underestimate Mark E Smith, The Fall’s founder, writer, vocalist and sole surviving member since they formed 35 years ago. Some may dismiss him as a past-his-best drunken parody of many former glories, and while live shows can be inconsistent to the point of umbrage, the hardest working man in showbiz is an agent provocateur and master of social engineering. His singularly eccentric shtick falls somewhere between Bernard Manning, James Brown and Polish theatre director Tadeusz Kantor, who made onstage interventions an artform, just as Smith does. After years of hiring and firing a multitude of members, today’s Fall has
reached an autumnal stability of sorts, with guitarist Peter Greenway, drummer Keiron Melling and bassist David Spurr surviving in the ranks since 2006, while keyboardist and Smith spouse Elena Poulou probably deserves a medal on all counts for lasting a whole decade. While best witnessed in the live arena, there’s a vigorous urgency to The Fall’s 30th original studio album, named, apparently, after the need to put on gloves when going out. The opening instrumental shards of ‘No Respects’ is just the sucker punch for ‘Sir William Wray’, a relentless chug of imagined history which Smith gurgles his way through with a ferocity rarely heard since 1982’s Hex Enduction Hour. While sticking to a raw garage band template, the palette is broad, from the spoken word of ‘Noise’ and sonic collage of ‘Pre-MDMA Years’ to the slow-motion horror-flick psych of ‘Hittite
Alex Zhang Hungtai’s peripatetic lifestyle has taken him from Taiwan to Canada and then around the globe, and his lo-fi compositions as Dirty Beaches have a sense of dislocation that is both engaging and unnerving. There is no real sense of place in this latest opus, a double LP that varies in quality and is mesmerising in parts, but there is a real sense of self and of the artist.
Hungtai’s recordings – which channel everything from brittle krautrock and pared-down punk funk to scuzzy ambient and frayed contemporary classical – have a dilapidated grandeur and a lonely fragility. The essence of a modern nomadic one-man band, Hungtai distils myriad influences, introspections and emotions into a singular sonic vision. We all have our own foibles and eccentricities, Hungtai just happens to put them on record. To say this album has no sense of place may sound odd as it namechecks
many of the locations Hungtai was clearly inspired by during his life on the road for the past two years. But while there’s a leitmotif of travelogues (Lisbon, Berlin, the Danube and Belgrade are all referenced in song titles), the greater journey undertaken is Hungtai’s exploration of music’s outer realms. This is a disparate collection of recordings and the only constant is the no-fi aesthetic which gives the album that intimate, almost claustrophobic appeal, notably with the relatively swaggering bassline of ‘Night Walk’, over which Hungtai’s echo chamber croon loiters like Banquo’s ghost. There is something haunted about much of the
Man’ and beyond. Lyrically, Smith is back to creating the sort of parallel universe narratives that fuelled his equally dark Hogarthian mythologies on Hex and 1979’s Dragnet album. While there are no real surprises
here for long term Fall watchers, there’s a more considered artfulness to the musical backdrop. Poulou’s keyboards in particular burble with a fizzing insistence that suggests an inter- band chemistry that’s familiar without ever becoming flabby or complacent. (Neil Cooper)
album: the eerie kosmische of ‘Belgrade’, atrophied pop of ‘Elli’, and brooding new wave epic of ‘Mirage Hall’. The second half’s descent into solemn compositional experimentation has moments of beauty and retains the album’s crumbling artfulness, but there comes a point when you can only take so much foreboding. That said, what is beguiling about Dirty Beaches is the sense of closeness you get to the artist, and this collection brings you that, for better and for worse. (Mark Keane) 16 May–13 Jun 2013 THE LIST 85