MUSIC | Records
ALBUM OF THE ISSUE
ART ROCK THE PHANTOM BAND Fears Trending (Chemikal Underground) ●●●●● Like the audio equivalent of that ‘all the buses coming at once’ cliché, (admittedly heavily paraphrased here), the Phantom Band have simultaneously rewarded the patience of faithful followers and curious new fans alike with the release of two brand new
records this year after a significant absence. The second of which, Fears Trending, is cut from pretty much the same cloth as the earlier Strange Friend; coming from essentially the same sessions and both sharing themes in their artwork.
Opener ‘Tender Castle’ teases with its cosmic, pulsing synths, before it unfurls like a flower; but the kind of flower that would make you trip balls if you ate it. ‘Denise Hopper’ on the other hand is about as close to the dancefloor as the Phantoms get here, with the twin squalls of riff and synth cascading over each other generously.
These seven tracks are crafted to flow together with great ease; seamlessly rippling between a variety of different tempo changes, moods and atmospheres, yet feeling unified almost as one piece.
‘Black Tape’, along with ‘The Kingfisher’ and closer, ‘Olden Golden’, represent the more measured and comparatively more languid side of the record - and the band itself.
While, with songs like ‘Spectrelegs’ they also show off their ability to crank out pieces of a much more immediate nature, the charm ultimately lies heaviest in their ability to hypnotise and one’s inability to resist getting lost in it all. The only flaw would be the times where it sounds much more ‘real’ and gritty, like a live show, when you want it to dwell in its cosmic tendencies rather than come back down to earth. But it’s a solid experience nonetheless. (Ryan Drever)
FOLK BALLADS ALASDAIR ROBERTS Alasdair Roberts (Drag City) ●●●●●
That this is Ali Roberts’ eighth album on Drag City tells you a lot about the rich seam of traditional folk balladry he has mined throughout his career. That he has, in all that time, remained resolutely untouched by crossover success is another signifier that the Stirling singer is, and will remain, an acquired taste. Folk gets more diluted as years go by but not by Roberts – he sings wizened ballads about knavery, weavers, shitty Lents, water diviners, and ‘the dry black bread and sugarless tea and penance’ as poet Patrick Kavanagh put it. Much in the same way that Dick Gaughan will stir your spirits with some rabblerousing paean to the proletariat, Roberts will turn your ear pining about a less than satisfactory harvest and the implications for winter.
So he is a man out of time making honest, earnest music steeped in authenticity. On this eighth album, his reedy voice has become even more pronounced and distinctive; a thin, plaintive and at times straining brogue, at other times a needy lament. Again this merely adds to Roberts’ allure as the unalloyed troubadour – it’s not all about the voice, y’see, it’s about the storytelling, the musicianship, the heritage, the purity, and the credibility. Roberts’ songs have some wonderful musical flourishes – and touch love, loss and death with robustness – but there is an essence of austerity at the heart of the music, of the traditional, puritanical, and respectful. At the beginning you wonder are these songs meant to be enjoyed, or instead, like church sermons, meant to be
observed, digested, and quietly contemplated. The colour and vitality of the
album reveals itself with repeated listens. With breezy opener ‘The Way Unfavoured’, the solemn strings and tin whistle of ‘Hurricane Brown’ and the straight-up loveliness of ‘This Uneven Thing’, Roberts deftly highlights his singular talents. This is not the record to lure those still immune to Roberts’ meticulous, unfashionable craft but his solid following will find plenty to be beguiled by. (Mark Keane)
ELECTRO SWEARING DAVID SHRIGLEY & MALCOLM MIDDLETON Music and Words (Melodic) ●●●●● PSYCHEDELIC POP BC CAMPLIGHT How To Die In The North (Bella Union) ●●●●●
When the first track of this collaboration between former Arab Strapper Malcolm Middleton and Glasgow School of Art alumnus David Shrigley was released, there was plenty to get excited about. ‘Story Time’ told the tale of a delightful wildlife scene gone horribly, blood-lettingly wrong, narrated by actress Bridget McCann in full strait-laced mode. All perfectly fine in its own cursing way. Except Music and Words is comprised of 12 bits of lyrics and sounds pretty much all doing the same thing; many of them start off innocently enough before descending into a morbid hell, others cut straight to the nasty chase. Featuring tracks told by the likes of Still Game’s Gavin Mitchell as well as Shrigley himself, opener ‘A Toast’ delivers a bitter, profanity-fuelled speech, ‘Houseguest’ features the desperate victim of a home invasion (with lots of swearing), ‘Help’ revolves around someone in various states of distress which require immediate assistance and ‘A Computer’ is about a maltreated PC. If you heard one track of this stuff per year, it might seem mildly subversive; consumed in single gulps by the dozen, it just offers an upset stomach. And surely, Sean Connery impersonations are now the preserve of the worst kind of pub bore? There’s something arguably more interesting going on, both musically and lyrically, in ‘Caveman’, which on the surface seems to be about a Stone Age knucklehead going about his everyday murdering business or could equally be concerned with a modern-day serial killer pondering his awful existence. But there’s little time to reflect on such layered possibilities as soon we’re careering back down a pointlessly depraved avenue with ‘Sunday Morning’ which artlessly, tediously, rhymes ‘dong’, ‘long’, ‘bong’ and ‘gong’ over and over to depressingly little effect.
Malcolm Middleton and David Shrigley are capable of creating something much more subtle and powerful which can still happily incorporate scatological elements, but teaming up seems to have brought out the worst in them both. (Brian Donaldson)
94 THE LIST 11 Dec 2014–5 Feb 2015
In what sounds like a moment of toe-curling self-abasement that has all present staring awkwardly at their feet, Brian Christinzio aka BC Camplight has been known to describe himself as ‘the guy who blew it’. While things have gone swimmingly of late for his former jam-buddies Sharon Van Etten and The War on Drugs, this New Jersey-born, formerly Philadelphia-based singer-songwriter and virtuoso pianist has practically gone into self-imposed exile after seeing his One Little Indian-released first two albums largely sink without trace. ‘You should have gone to school, you fool,’ goes the chorus to the opening track of the same name, as Christinzio perhaps fantasises about an alternative career path.
For reasons unclear, Christinzio has relocated to Manchester to dream it all up again, hooking up with a UK label in Bella Union for his third offering How To Die In The North. Its name evokes Boys From the Blackstuff slate-grey social realism. But the music is frequently too damn chipper to fool anyone into thinking Christinzio might be native to the northwest: Brian Wilson-esque West Coast pop harmonies and rays of sunshiney, if psychically fraught psychedelia abound.
Intentionally or otherwise, there’s a little of an awful lot of other artists suggested by BC Camplight’s music. ‘Grim Cinema’ echoes early Super Furry Animals’ speedy, eccentric fuzz-pop; the strange and pretty ‘Just Because I Love You’ is a kind of shiny, dreamy brass-burnished ballad with shades of ELO, while Christinzio’s vocals on the downbeat ‘Good Morning Headache’ sound to the very detail of diction like British Sea Power’s Yan Scott Wilkinson.
That feeling of ‘heard it done before, and better’ just keeps recurring throughout this unfocused album, which leaves you with precious little sense of exactly who Christinzio is and what he’s all about. You could imagine him presenting a valued asset as a sideman and foil to a writer of truer inspiration. But ‘the guy who blew it’? It’s debatable exactly what he had to blow. (Malcolm Jack)