MUSIC | Records
ALBUM OF THE ISSUE
CULT BUSKER THE SPACE LADY The Space Lady’s Greatest Hits (Night School) ●●●●● ‘My musician parents lived in Roswell, New Mexico, around the time of the famous flying saucer crash in 1947, and I was born the following January.’ So begins the fascinating, otherworldly biog of Susan Dietrich, a 70s / 80s outsider- pop diviner who, armed with a
squeezebox, then with a battery-operated Casio keyboard, performed astral cover versions on the streets and subways of Boston and San Francisco. Clad in a winged helmet with a flashing red bulb, she came to be known as The Space Lady.
Those opening words are also the first lines in the sleeve-notes of her Greatest Hits, an entrancing, ethereal retrospective of Dietrich’s electronic pop, including a celestial, disorientating take on Peter Schilling’s ‘Major Tom’, a woozy, lo-fi variation on The Sweet’s ‘Ballroom Blitz’ and haunting, robo-cowboy reworking of rodeo classic ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’. Released via Night School Records (Julia Holter, Golden Grrrls,
DIVORCE), the LP also features original songs – gorgeous tech-pop aria ‘Humdinger’; orbital ballad ‘Synthesize Me’ – written by The Space Lady’s collaborator and then-partner Joel Dunsany (aka Mount Helium Pegasus). The anthology is a long-overdue salute to The Space Lady’s mercurial underground talent, which has found zealous champions in Erol Alkan and John Maus, and seen her aligned with Daniel Johnston, Captain Beefheart, Joe Meek and Jandek on Irwin Chusid’s 2000 outsider collection, Songs in the Key of Z. The sleevenotes go on to tell of raising a family, and struggling to make ends meet from art – a colourful tale of love, pop and sleeping rough; of draft-dodging and DIY cassettes and cosmic intervention (‘we saw a UFO at close range, just above the treetops . . . from then on we were convinced we were being protected by aliens’). The Space Lady’s music is just as curious, rare and full of wonder. (Nicola Meighan)
POP / SPOKEN WORD PAUL HAIG Kube (Rhythm of Life) ●●●●●
Of all the paeans to the late Lou Reed in the last couple of weeks, one of the most touching was a poem by Paul Haig, whose old band, the Reed/Velvet Underground/Chic-inspired Josef K, have proven so influential on the likes of Franz Ferdinand and others since their brief existence in the very early 1980s. To see such a private artist acknowledge a musical debt like this was surprising too. Like Reed, beyond some mid-80s major-label hiccups, Haig has done things
on his own terms. Where it would have been easy to go down the revivalist route and reform Josef K, apart from a handful of live shows a couple of years ago, Haig has kept studiously out of view, ploughing his own wilfully individualistic and largely electronic furrow. There won’t be many aware that this collection of skewed, beat-based electro-melodrama is Haig’s 12th solo album. No matter, because this first release since 2009 is a forward-looking tome on a multitude of levels, and it’s clear that Haig has been absorbing up-to-the-minute cutting-edge sounds alongside his classic influences.
This makes for a slightly schizoid mix of Bowiesque vocal heroism and
cinematically styled instrumentals that moves between jaunty opener ‘UW2B’ straight on to spoken-word-sampling dancefloor collage ‘Intro K’, the menacing fizz and burble of ‘All of the Time’ and the acid house noir of ‘Cool Pig’. ‘Daemon’ is an aspirational single in waiting, ‘It’s In’ a machine-groove mantra and ‘Red Rocks’ a sax-punctuated cyber-age march. There are cut-up experiments and staccato guitar on ‘Dialog’, ‘Midnattssol’ seems to reference Four Tet by way of John Barry, and ‘Pack’ is a techno-headed monster full of foreboding. The piano-led whispered vocal of ‘Torn’ implies some dimly lit conspiracy, while the closing ‘Shifter’ lays down a funky guitar riff over assorted beats and skitters. Vocally and musically, then, Kube is a subtly textured mood-music suite that retains a warmth throughout, even as it flits between light and shade. (Neil Cooper)
72 THE LIST 14 Nov–11 Dec 2013
FOLK-POP BLOOD RELATIVES Deerheart (Comets and Cartwheels) ●●●●●
They may have ditched their zoological moniker, but the Glasgow folk-pop gaggle formerly known as Kitty the Lion are still preoccupied with animal – and animalistic – matter, if their debut album Deerheart is anything to go by. Now trading as Blood Relatives, the band is fronted by striking vocalist Anna Meldrum, and also counts members of electro-pop monarchs Prides (formerly Midnight Lion) among its number. Deerheart sees Blood Relatives hone their knack for barbed chamber-indie,
rousing folk and melodic twee(t) pop – they may have discarded the leonine designate, but there are still creatures all over the shop, especially of the avian variety – including opening harmonic aria, ‘Fowl Mouth’, piano-rousing singalong ‘Duck!’, the brooding alt-pop of ‘A Murder Of Crows’, and acoustic ditty ‘Bird Flu’. As suggested by the latter two titles, there is latent menace at the heart of Blood Relatives and the album is riddled with bones, joints and dismembered hands and hearts (‘Bone Idol’, ‘Dead Hip’). Musical comparisons with the anthemic folk-pop likes of Admiral Fallow and Olympic Swimmers are inevitable, but Blood Relatives are equally redolent of classic 80s / 90s Scottish pop acts like the Pearlfishers, Thrum, or the Wild River Apples.
While its avian tendencies work well, its highlights are rooted in land and sea. The Regina Spektor-esque ‘Cold Fish’ is a fine slow-burner, the title track is a galloping melodic- rock delight, and recent single ‘Dead Hip’ is the best example of Blood Relatives’ charming and persuasive way with a middle eight: it sees Meldrum’s vocals dive and soar, and hints at greater things to come. (Nicola Meighan)
LABEL RETROSPECTIVE VARIOUS ARTISTS VIRGIN 40th Anniversary Compilations (Virgin) ●●●●●
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s record companies were monolithic and faceless, vast industrial combines that also manufactured your fridges and television sets, and were answerable slavishly to shareholders. Then in 1973 came Richard Branson and Virgin Records, and the paradigm changed forever.
Pop became territorial, partisan, an ensign, a flag to rally under. And Virgin was instrumental, nay central, in this – in turning pop into this patchwork of passions and world views, outlooks, factions, genres and cults. This is the kaleidoscopic model we still know, 40 years after Branson used the music press to sell dippy concept albums by mail order. There was never an aesthetic to the label, or a guiding musical philosophy. Rather, Virgin was a bazaar, a splurging, promiscuous A&R free-for-all. This renders CDs 1–3, Losing Our Virginity, covering the years 1973–1976, difficult to digest, with their off-key saxes, challenging 7/8 time signatures and all-pervasive eau de student bedsit: only professors at the Open University could find warmth in their hearts for Kevin Coyne and Steve Hillage, Gong or Henry Cow. Indeed, the great benefit of this hulking, 5x3-disc 40th anniversary compilation
lies in reminding us how necessary the great vowel shift of punk was. Virgin, of course, signed The Sex Pistols, not to mention The Skids and XTC and Magazine, and did sterling work in popularising roots reggae. It was with post- punk, however, that the label harnessed quality to eccentricity most effectively,
as covered here in the New Gold Dreams 1979–1983 set, before the dancier imperatives of the Methods of Dance 1973–1986 and Fascinating Rhythms 1987–2013 sets kick in. There are hits here: The Human League, Culture Club, even Public Image Ltd. There are horrors too: Gong again, I’m afraid. At times it’s like wading through a horribly extended edition of Top of the Pops 1975. At others it’s as though the vast, tattered flag of modern British popular culture is unfurling before you. (Allan Brown)