Took me a while, but now there’s a playlist. Four tracks missing – one I replaced with a live version (Hejira), the other three just not on Spotify Canada.
For each album, I’ve picked a track which either:
a) I rave about in the post
b) I think should be heard more often than the well-known ones, or
c) is my favourite, for one reason or another.
I should warn you – it leaps around somewhat in style, and isn’t what you’d call a seamless listening experience.
Which, I guess, is kind of the point.
What a long, strange trip it’s been.
The initial idea of a couple of paragraphs on each album, followed by a recommendation to check out some related stuff, didn’t last beyond the first two or three posts. It was never likely to – those first few were typed on my old laptop while on vacation last summer, and that whole structure went out the window as soon as I got back behind my desk, with all the time and space I needed to research things, listen to things and remember all the stuff I wanted to talk about.
In the end, some of these are too long, and some are too short. I may revisit them over the next few weeks and months, especially the ones where I’ve spotted unfortunate typos (never proof read your own material, kids).
Will I bulk out the first few posts? Probably not; one of the key things about this whole project has been its spontaneity – I wrote what was in my head and moved on. It only took a few weeks for me to realise that what I really wanted to do was review every track as it came along, which led to a way of working which will seem crazy to any actual writers who may come across this.
Every Saturday, upon finishing that week’s post (spoiler alert: I was mostly writing about five weeks ahead, so I could build in a buffer for the Life Events happening around me), I started to think about the next one. I’d spend the week in idle moments planning the structure – whether it was to be an autobiographical post, or just a reflective one; whether I wanted to talk about the context of the album in its time, or about its place in my life, but once I had the basic structure planned out, and the hook for the post, I just sat down every Saturday morning and wrote.
Once I was happy with the context piece, I put the album on, and reacted to it in real time. If you’re wondering why some of these posts read like first drafts, it’s because – by and large – they are.
Which is, I know, crazy. So I may give some of them a polish. Only some of them, mind – others seem to work well in their immediacy, and I probably have spent enough time on this, if truth be told. All in all, it’s exceeded my expectations, this thing. It’s kept me occupied and writing at a time when I thought I might not ever write anything substantial again; it’s allowed me to see other people’s reactions to things, and it’s helped me contextualise parts of my life which I probably wouldn’t otherwise have done. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it, but remind me not to do this again in another ten years.
When I first sat down to compile a list of albums for this exercise some time last summer, I had the vague notion that I should leave the last slot blank so that it might be filled by something new. Then I discovered that my first pass at the list was well into three figures, so I used the 60th slot as I couldn’t see a way to lose even one more from the list.
Perspectives change, though and (to let a little daylight in on the magic here) I discovered quite early on that there were a few albums on the list which I loved, but about which I had relatively little to say. Fortunately, as I weeded those few out, I discovered that I had also missed several titles off the list, so the revised total ended up at 59.
Which was no problem; I could easily go back to the original list and slot one in (surely I’d find room for a Deep Purple album… surely). Instead, I went back to Plan A – a space would be left at the end for whatever came out in the year and a bit it took to get this far, and I just had to hope that something would not only grab me, but relate in some way to what I’ve been banging on about all this time.
I reached the beginning of August, not panicking exactly (there was a new Big Big Train album, and – out of nowhere – a new Porcupine Tree one; I’d just have to do some shuffling of the order), but hoping that I’d be naturally led to something, rather than have to start digging and look for something I hope I’d like.
One of the things I haven’t really given enough attention to in these essays is the impact of YouTube to my musical experience. Not only can I dial up pretty much any album or track I want on Spotify (other streaming services, etc…), but I can often find things on YouTube I’d otherwise never have been aware of. A live performance by a half-forgotten band, or an interview with someone which illustrates nicely exactly what I’m trying to write about.
The other thing which YouTube brings me is the opinions and music of creators – people just putting their own stuff up online, or taking the time to share their expertise with the rest of us, and it’s through the channels of the likes of Paul Davids, Mary Spender, David Bennett, David Bruce; and the reaction channels of Doug Helvering, The Charismatic Voice, or Beth Roars, that I have found so many things which might have otherwise passed me by over the last few years.
Yes, that’s just a representative sample; there are hundreds out there – go find the ones you like…
It was one of the YouTube music channels which dropped this album in my listening space at the beginning of August. Rick Beato is a music producer and fan (I suspect he might put those two descriptions the other way round). He’s also almost exactly the same age as me, although his musical education took place on the other side of the Atlantic, so his memories are intriguingly different from mine in places. He also works in music, so has a much more in-depth knowledge of the music I missed while I was busy doing other things in the nineties and beyond.
I watch his videos partly to be entertained by the choices he makes in lists of the “ten best” this or the “twenty essential” that, but I also watch them because he’s a great teacher, and helps the amateur enthusiast like me understand why certain things work, and just what that drum pattern is doing. “Oh, it’s in 13/8”, he might say, and while I like to think I’d have got there, it’s great to have those signposts helping me understand what’s going on in that song I can’t quite drum my fingers along to.
At the beginning of August, with much going on in the rest of my life, I saw a Beato video called “The Musical Revolution We Need Right Now” (his caps). I was intrigued at the idea that there were any revolutions left to be had, and that we were in need of one now as opposed to any other time, and I watched. I don’t think that revolution is what the video gives us at all – it’s partly a review of the Seattle grunge scene of the 1990s – which I ought to feel more connected to, I think, given that I can see Washington state from my deck – and partly an introduction to what he calls a “new supergroup”, featuring members of Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden.
Which all sounded interesting enough, if not quite up my street. Just under three minutes in, however, he plays a clip of this new band, 3rd Secret, and I’m immediately hooked. Partly by the sound, and partly by the fact that there are two female singers given – as far as one can tell from a short clip – equal billing. Now that’s interesting. I dig around for more information, and find very little – there’s more out there now, about unusual guitar tunings and some influences, but not much – certainly not the kind of marketing you’d expect for a “new supergroup”. That’s also interesting.
There’s a whole album; it’s only available to stream (so far, anyway), and it’s the work of mere moments to crank it up and see what I think.
(Spoiler alert – it’s on this list on merit; easily one of my favourite albums of the last 20 years, and despite me having only lived with it for a couple of months, as familiar to me as any ten or 20 others on this list, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves)
Everything I’d heard in the video had been in some way grunge-related, so it’s fair to say the opening of Rhythm of the Ride took me by surprise; it’s folky in that Led Zeppelin III kind of way, with ringing open guitar strings and a voice which feels contralto to me; based in the lower registers, only occasionally soaring into the chorus. There’s nothing distorted or overdriven here; some minor chords for sure (or flattened sevenths, or whatever those music experts spot a million miles away), but the spacious beauty of the song is not at all what I’d been expecting. I’m immediately hooked, and on first listen, went back to hear it again before moving on, such was the power of its simplicity.
I Choose Me is much more anthemic; probably a lot more like what ‘grunge supergroup’ is supposed to sound like; it relies on a driving, distorted riff and some terrifically understated drumming for its energy, and a couple of distinctly different short guitar solos from the two distinctly different guitarists on display here. It’s mesmerising and powerful, and while there are dozens of influences I can hear in this, I’m trying not to go down that road.
Last Day of August is a dreamy drone of a song, with a chorus which mixes melody with a structure which seems designed to keep you on edge (and out of breath if you try to sing along) by going where the music takes it, rather than where the lyricist might want it to go. It was the first song from this set I found myself humming along to in an idle moment, taking a few seconds to recognise what it was my brain had decided to sing along to. It also has a delicious false ending, complete with the sounds of nature before the instruments decide they hadn’t quite finished what they had to say. It does feel like a song you’ve always known before you’ve even finished listening to it once; generally a sign of quality, I find.
There’s a paise for breath to let the final notes die before church bells usher us into Winter Solstice, and I’m immediately going to abandon my recently-established rule, because if this doesn’t knowingly pay homage to Sandy Denny while the carillon of bells rings the changes behind more of those gorgeously open guitar strings, I’ll eat my hat. And, yes, I do have a hat.
I haven’t heard this song in winter yet; I suspect it will be even more effective when there’s frost on the windows, and the howling of the dogs in the mix sound less like the singalong of Steve Marriott’s dog on Seamus by Pink Floyd, and more like a pack of wolves out in the fields, paying homage to the December moon.
As Rick Beato notes, if you’re looking for those trademarked grungy riffs, Lies Fade Away is the song for you. For me, this is the song where I can pay attention to the individual parts which make up this band – the vocal interplay; the causally brilliant drumming; the guitar solo which lifts this into another dimension, and the properly grungy bassline, courtesy of the man who played bass on Nevermind.
Not halfway into this album, the thing which is most clearly obvious to me is the variety. Every song has a distinct personality, while still being obviously by the same band, and being played on familiar instruments. Unlike so many albums which appear weighed and measured so that everyone has an equal amount of time in the spotlight, this one just serves the song. Live Without You is under three minutes long, bounces along cheerily despite its fatalistic lyric, and ends when it needs to because it’s said all it has to say. It is, needless to say, delightful.
Having said all that about familiar instruments, Right Stuff is an accordion-driven song. If you were wondering what I see in this album, here’s your answer – a wheezy ballad which lopes along putting smiles on the faces of everyone who hears it. Remember way back when I was complaining about Gerry Rafferty being bland, overlong and overproduced? This is the feel I was hoping for; it sits right beside that Mercury Rev album for authentic musicality; a bunch of people having fun making proper music.
More sumptuous acoustic guitar soundscapes introduce Dead Sea, a song which seems to me to have a delicious tension to it – the guitar wants to deliver an ordered structure, while the voices slide around, pulling it in directions it doesn’t quite want to go. There are some delicate keyboard sounds, the bass (it may be the bass strings on the guitar) slides in from time to time to try and keep order, but the harmonies are determined to do their own thing – I’m trying not to use the word ‘dreamy’ again, but I’m not sure any other word will do.
Again there’s a shift in mood, in style, and in instrumentation. Diamond in the Cold has the feel of an instrumental workout at first, which I’d have been on board for, but once again the voices cut through the curtain of guitar and open the song up; the 3-3-2 rhythm slides into something slightly different but equally off-kilter, and then the chorus drops in to lend some normality to proceedings before the riff asserts itself again and drags us back to the beginning, layering distorted riffs and threatening to disintegrate altogether before it rights the ship and brings us into harbour, disoriented but thrilled by the ride.
Somewhere in Time is a song which could have appeared at almost any point on the timeline of this exercise. If I’d heard it during the frenzy of 1978, I’d remember it as one of my favourite unheralded classics from that year which was bursting with them. I might allow that the production sounds somehow more modern than was possible back then, but I’m not sure there’s much you could actually point to which wouldn’t have been possible then; there’s a point where everything drops out to leave just bass and voice, and it’s as thrilling and vital as anything the Clash were doing back then. Sure, it’s just a rock song, but then so are the vast majority of the things I’ve talked about these past 59 weeks; what sets this – and a fair few of the others, to be fair, it that it has a timeless quality. Stack it up against the songs on Revolver, and all the basic elements are right there.
I used to think that was a bad thing; that maybe we hadn’t moved forward in nearly 60 years; now I celebrate it – age cannot wither it, nor custom stale its infinite variety, as someone once said…
We go out on something of an epic. The last few weeks have seen a definite return to my Prog roots in this list, so I think it’s fitting that The Yellow Dress, the last song I’ll review for this, is seven minutes long, begins with sound effects, and seems to be built in sections, including a thunderstorm which ushers in the kind of thundering heartbeat we encounter when woken in the night. Like all good nightmares, this eventually subsides back to the calmer rhythms we need to get us back to sleep, although now – in a pattern all too familiar to us, the brain is now chewing things over; there’s an instrumental break where the two guitars outdo each other in trying to sound like something otherworldly without ever breaking the sonic spell this song weaves around itself. Like the best songs, the parts where the band push and prod, looking to see just how far this structure will bend, it doesn’t break. It all makes sense, in the context of the song; in the context of this wonderful, captivating album, and in the context of 60 years of music.
When I sat down and clamped on the headphones for the first time back in the August of 2021, wondering if there was anything at all new I could say about Revolver, and I heard the opening strains of Taxman, I didn’t know where this journey was going to take me. I had no idea if I could even do this – make time to write a significant number of words every week, and try to keep it interesting and not too repetitive. Here at the end of the road, an album which didn’t exist when I started seems to me the perfect capstone to the whole thing. As I planned this week’s post, I initially thought I could tie it back, almost song by song, to all that has gone before (Sandy Denny and Led Zeppelin III survived from that idea, but a lot ended on the cutting-room floor which is my brain), but I think that would have done it a disservice – this is new music; building, like everything else in here, on what has gone before, and looking out to an uncertain but exciting future.
It’s been a blast. Thanks for sticking with it all these weeks, if you did, and thanks for dropping in if this is your first visit. Have a look around; there might be at least one other album in here you like….
Any other albums by this artist to consider?
Nope. First album, and all that.
Compilations to consider?
See above.
Live albums?
No, but there are a couple of live clips on YouTube…
Anything else?
Well, an enormous back catalogue. Just this once, however, while encouraging you to check out everything these musicians have done before, I’d also encourage you to pick something from the other 59 on here if you don’t already know it, and give it a whirl. You never know what you might find.
If the previous 58 posts have mainly been about looking back, and – perhaps – the last one might look forward at least a little, then I think this one should look around.
This album came out in 2016, like the last two, but I came to it a little later; it’s only been stuck in my head for a couple of years. In fact, now I think about it, it’s one of my pandemic albums. Stuck behind this desk for the majority of time while the whole world got sick, I did break up the endless hours of staring at screens by trying out some new music, as well as listening to a lot of old music, which is probably where the idea for this whole thing came from, to be honest.
If I take March of 2020 as a pause in life, I might ask myself “where am I now?” If you’ve been following the autobiographical parts of this journey (and I don’t blame you if you’ve just been skipping to the bits where I talk about the music each week), then you’ll have noticed that I (and we, for a large part of the story) have been something of a wanderer. I started the story in Aberdeen, but that was already the third house I’d lived in, as I first heard (and heard of) the Beatles when we lived in Essex, in a place we all fondly called Upminster, but which was in fact Cranham.
From Aberdeen, I lived in Edinburgh, then various bits of Inverness, Perth, Tring, Watford, Edlesborough, Prince George, and now – am I saying finally? – Victoria.
I think we’re settled here. I’m pretty sure we’ll move house again at some point, but I doubt we’ll move far. The career I thought I’d abandoned in my early forties has returned, and while I keep trying out the word ‘retirement’, I don’t think it suits me just yet. As I nudge against 60, I find myself planning what the next few qualifications I’d like to get might be; I actually like being the old-timer in the room, but I also like being the old-timer who says things like “I don’t know, but I’m going to teach myself how”
Some things have come full circle: I’ve mentioned several times already that I buy and listen to vinyl albums (and the odd single) almost as much as I did during my fevered teenage years, when there was nothing else to distract me, and I spent whole days just watching the black plastic revolve around the spindle while I tried to figure out exactly what the words were.
Some things just passed: I couldn’t tell you the last time I listened to a cassette (musicassette: did I do that one?), and I haven’t borrowed music from a library in probably 25 years. I also haven’t bought a CD in over a decade, although they have not passed entirely out of my life: my father recently died, and I retrieved a selection of his CD collection and have spent many happy hours converting them to digital files while I consider what to do with the physical objects, which I don’t think I ever bonded with the way I did with albums or books.
There’s probably an essay there somewhere about how the CD was a triumph og function over form, and how the form is just no appealing enough, although maybe I’m just a generation too old to get nostalgic about jewel cases and tiny inserts you can’t quite read.
And, of course, a great many things have arrived, and show no sign of passing into history just yet. Had I started this exercise when, let’s say, Trilogy came out and first caused me to obsess over an album, I’d have had to borrow my mother’s elderly manual typewriter to put my thoughts down – I doubt I’d have handwritten it; one of the few drawbacks of being left-handed is that my childhood handwriting was generally smudged and hard to read, even for me.
I’ll pause to let you consider that all this time, I’ve been left-handed, and you didn’t notice…
Today, of course, I’m sitting at my well-appointed, if rather over-large, desk with all the electronic wizardry money can buy at my disposal. I could, if I wanted, break off from doing this on my PC and pick up again on my expensive Macbook in another room, or even another location entirely. If the urge took me, and I don’t know why it would, I could even do this on my phone.
When the time comes to listen to this week’s album of choice, I can do so in splendid isolation, listening through noise-cancelling headphones to a crystal-clear digital copy, a vinyl original or reissue as appropriate (well, not this week), or to a copy supplied by a streaming service. I don’t have to share my music with anyone if I don’t want to –
Let me rephrase that. I don’t have to share my music with anyone if they don’t want me to, and I can hear all the subtleties and nuances of a track exactly as the band, the producer or the recording engineer intended.
I can listen anywhere, react anywhere, and post these essays from anywhere, but I don’t, and this is what I mean by “where am I now?”
I am now in an incredibly fortunate place – all those things I mention up there are the product of a privileged and comfortable lifestyle, however much I like to moan about the bills. What I like to think I’ve learned from my sixty years of getting to this point is that while it’s possible to consume and produce on the go; to never take a pause to reflect and simply keep moving forward, I don’t think it’s healthy or even helpful.
I don’t mean that “everything was better when I was a kid; we made our own entertainment, and the only thing which might distract you from the album you were listening to was the text on the sleeve” – I delight in (almost) all the things technology has brought us; it’s just that, if this exercise has taught me anything, or reinforced anything for me, it’s that there is value in slowing down, stopping to listen; stopping to read, and stepping back from time to time from the ubiquitous black mirrors which we peer into all day, hoping to see ourselves reflected in some meaningful way.
Which is to say that where I am now is a place where I am able to put on an album – an old favourite or something brand new – close my eyes and listen. Perhaps not in the same way I used to; I’d suggest that the sound is better, the seat is more comfortable, and there’s less banging on the walls; but I’d say that the 11-year-old me who heard Trilogy all those years ago would recognise the way I listen to music now, and I like to think he’d approve of me returning to the act of actively seeking out new things.
I first heard of Thank You Scientist (I know; you were wondering which of the phrases up there was the band name) because I have accepted that the music I enjoy above all other forms of 20th century rock music is the much-maligned genre known as Progressive Rock. I have, perhaps, come to this realisation later in life than I should have, but I do take pride in the fact that it doesn’t in any way preclude me from liking all kinds of other things.
Because I’m interested in Prog, I seek out like-minded souls on the internet to see what I can learn from them, and a name which kept coming up in those discussions was Thank You Scientist. In deciding to see what the fuss was about, I felt in fairly safe hands; over the last few years, I’ve been steered towards a number of bands, some on this list, others – like The Mars Volta, Spock’s Beard, Transatlantic, Anathema, The Pineapple Thief, and Slowdive (OK, one of these bands is not like the others) – which might easily have been on this list but for the fact I had to make a cut somewhere.
Here’s how I dip a toe into new music these days, since I don’t have to go to my local record store (of which there are many) and buy something in the hope it will be good; I fire up Spotify (other streaming services are available), and I look at which tracks are the most popular.
Now, there’s a trick to this, which you might not know about, so here’s your fun fact for the day: in trying to find the most popular tracks for an artist on Spotify, ignore any which are the first track of an album or compilation. A significant proportion of those listens will be by people who started to listen, then realised they didn’t like it.
When looking for popular albums, however, you are generally on safer ground – the ones marked ‘popular albums’ generally will reflect listener taste, although this can also be skewed by re-releases and remixes – currently, the most popular Beatles album appears to be the recent soundtrack to the rooftop performances from the ‘Get Back’ project.
Anyway, Thank You Scientist – I sought a couple of tracks, liked what I heard, and bought myself a digital copy of the Stranger Heads Prevail album. I think the Trilogy-obsessed version of me would have enjoyed it; there are certainly some elements he’d be familiar with, but there’s also a lot going on which he wouldn’t yet recognise. Let’s see what the nearly-but-not-quite 60 year old version of that kid sees in it…
It begins, as all good Prog albums perhaps should with a prologue: A Faint Applause leans heavily on the vocal harmonies and instrumentation of mid-seventies Queen, with some ELO-style strings for good measure. I can see me at eleven thinking this is going to be exactly his kind of album
Only to be brought up short by The Somnambulist, all trumpet, treated vocals and seemingly random time signatures. The voice eventually breaks out into its normal register, and more traditionally ‘rock’ instruments take over, but the song itself continues to unsettle; at times it seems to be reacting to Metallica’s Enter Sandman, at others, it’s teasing us with snappy chorus-like segments with trumpets providing a fanfare. The middle section allows for some rhythm section exercises, but just as yo’re settling to enjoy the funky bass and jazz drums, it takes flight again, gleefully letting us know that ‘the world you know is gone’ before coming to a stop rather like a steam train reaching the end of the line
And if that wasn’t strange enough, Caverns erupts like a 21st century Frank Zappa extravaganza, hurtling through about six different musical styles before the vocal enters, sounding spookily like the Frost* album from last week – maybe this was the sound of 2016?
Oh, and if the general skittering about between styles wasn’t discombobulating enough, it turns out to be a disturbingly frank tale of a couple contemplating an abortion, although there’s a horror-movie element to it; I don’t think for a minute that any of this should be taken at face value. There’s a breakdown which sounds as if someone’s retuned a radio, then some almost djent-like metal guitars and some ferocious drumming before a more traditional guitar solo tries to anchor us back into the real world, although I’m not convinced it does anything more than point up the otherworldliness of everytihg going on. It’s a giant cacophony of a song; one which prompts me to both want to know more and o leave it entirely shrouded in mystery.
Thankfully, Mr. Invisible kicks off with some jazz-funk stylings which that 11 year old kid would have recognised. It sounds at once like a sweet love song with brass underscoring the general mood of jollity and fun; it swings along, although it also feels like a song which could also be performed in a much darker style, and as the refrain confirms the suspicion that all is not what it seems, the distorted guitars poke their heads out to say “we’ve been here all along; you didn’t think this was some sunny ‘moon in June’ thing, did you?”
However much the darker truth tries to assert itself, however, you can’t keep the bounce and swing out of this song; it floats through some distinctly 1980s arrangements, and there’s a swinging saxophone solo where a guitar might have been. Every now and then the ghost of Frank Zappa waves at us from behind the layers of instrumentation, while the vocal carries a soaring melody line over a collapse into heavy metal, which only allows the brass to wheeze at us, defeated, in the final bar.
A Wolf in Cheap Clothing is more sparse, and offers a bit of breather at first – there are some cunning drum patterns, and a vocal line which seems to be building to something, but is in no hurry to get there.
When we do reach the chorus, it’s tempting to invoke all kinds of other bands and musicians, but here’s the thing – the band they sound like is Thank You Scientist. There are a million influences in here, including, I assume, dozens I don’t recognise, but if by this point anything sounds familiar, it’s because this is the fifth track on the album, and the soundscape has really started to assert itself. There are sections which relate to each other in inscrutable ways; a familiar mechanism now, where the important vocal lines are backed by trumpet before the guitar elements underscore the fact that the song appears to be being played in two different time signatures at once.
I like pop music, but you can’t pick it apart like this for the most part, and that to me is where the real fun exists.
There’s a sense in Blue Automatic that the instrumentation is pulling on the leash; trying to break out into open chaos, and it’s barely held together by sheer force of will, or sheer force of songwriting. This is entirely deliberate, of course, as the lyric seems to be describing a panic attack from the inside looking out. It’s jittery, nervous and stutters around a melodic centre without ever quite settling on it; there are thrilling instrumental solos before – and I may be reading too much into this – the anti-anxiety meds take over for a brief period of calm.
It doesn’t last, however – there’s a genuine sense of paranoia in this song, and it doesn’t take long for the panic to come back before the song skids to an uncertain close.
Can I just point out here that all these songs end? It’s one of those tings I like most in a well-constructed song, that the composer has taken the time to figure out how to bring it to a natural close, as the way a song ends can say so much about what’s going on with it. I’m not a fan of fadeouts, and don’t get me started on the rare song which fades in…
Anyway, back on planet Scientist, here are some of the open reverberating basslines we last heard on Hejira, and – wait; I wasn’t going to do that, was I?
Ah, there’s no point pretending that all music isn’t connected in some way. Need More Input is a song which sounds 2010s, but owes that fact to the way it pulls sounds from throughout the history of popular music from the post-war period. This one is an ‘android comes to life’ song, although it’s hard to hear the mechanical in much of this; the music on this album (and the others I’ve listened to) is intensely human, even when trying to invoke the artificial. I think I can imagine what android music might sound like (I’m getting Gary Numan), but I can’t imagine the effortless shifting between styles, influences (it goes all middle-eastern for a moment in the bridge), and especially the way the song skips between tempos, time signatures and – I think; it’s hard to keep up – key signatures. It’s frenetic and head-spinning, this track.
This whole album, really.
A sign that I’m likely to enjoy a track is that very rare occasion when I laugh out loud at the title. Rube Goldberg Variations is the kind of joke aimed squarely at my sense of humour, and I don’t think it would have mattered what it sounded like, I’d have been predisposed to like it. It turns out to be a delightfully unhinged instrumental, initially anchored on a string section which pulls it back into line each time a ‘variation’ has had its turn, but which gradually cuts loose and just does its own thing. There’s no Bach piano line here, but there’s the full flow of a band exploring their abilities, and whether it’s a jazz trumpet over a bossa nova backline, or saxophone fronting some unexpected drum and bass, or a Stephane Grappelli-like solo violin, or fuzz guitar, or a deliberate invocation of the soundtrack to a mid-seventies cop show, there’s never a dull moment. It’s nearly nine minutes long, but had it gone on all afternoon, you’d have had no complaints from me, such is the wit and invention on show here.
There’s a whole genre of music called Psychopomp, or of there isn’t, there should be. Whether it exists or not, it probably doesn’t sound like this, because this sounds like Thank You Scientist, and I have no idea how you’d make a genre out of all the colliding parts of this. I can’t even decide what it’s about (Frankenstein’s monster? Charon? Given recent events, Paddington?) but, as with all of these songs, it doesn’t matter – the joy is in the experience, and – oh, look, I’m hearing Wishbone Ash in the twinned guitars now. I really love this music, but I’m glad I had all the experience of all the other music before I came to try to unpick this. Equally, I’m happy not to unpick, just to let it wash over me while I look on, mildly baffled.
And if I celebrated all the other endings on this album, I reserved an entire paragraph for this one, as the spoken word outro, played as if it was a spirit voice from the ancient past, delivered to us via an elderly vinyl recording, reverses all the theories I’ve been working on, and removes the ‘mildly’ from my previous paragraph. Brilliant.
Penultimate track The Amateur Arsonist’s Handbook prompts me to try to imagine it as a straight rock song; there are solid verses, interesting pre-choruses, and a gloriously melodic chorus, and I think you could just about build a four-minute single out of it – I can even just about imagine it in an acapella version.
But why would you? What raises this and all the others above the ordinary are the extras – the crazed yet controlled drum fills; the electric violin solo; the hints of trumpet provoking the singer to break out of his safe range and reach for something altogether more epic; the return of the brass line at the end, and the acceleration to the crash ending.
Take a deep breath, because here comes the epilogue. Just as we began with close harmony and familiar sounds, we go out with … and the Clever Depart to give us time to calm down, return to normality so we can safely interact with the rest of the world. It, naturally echoes the Prologue, and even suggests an answer to the question posed at the beginning
If this album, or this band needs an epigram, it’s contained in this whimsical endnote:
“Too many notes for normal folk to understand.”
Their words, not mine.
My kind of band.
Any other albums by this artist to consider?
Considering how much I love this one, it may surprise you to know that I haven’t dug deeply into the others. Partly, I keep hoping to turn them up on vinyl somewhere (I do dislike not having a physical object to look at and hold); partly, I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of this album, and there’s only so much room in my brain. I’ll be going for Terraformer next, though.
Compilations to consider?
I know I keep saying this, but how could you compile this? No is the answer.
Live albums?
Not yet, but there are a couple of YouTube videos which suggest that a Thank You Scientist live show would be every bit as spectacular as you might imagine.
Anything else?
Not yet. Unless you want to try to unpick all those influences I can hear, and go back and try to find where all this came from. Frank Zappa would be a place to start if you wanted to do that…
It took us ten years or so to get itchy feet again after our move to Canada. The small boys who came to Prince George with us in 2006 were graduating High School and forging their own paths by 2016, and in the last year or so up north, I was beginning to wonder ‘what next?’
I had been doing a part-time IT job all those years; one which allowed me the flexibility to do all the parenting things I wanted, which mostly seemed to involve standing at the side of soccer fields yelling at teenagers while I tried to transplant my vision of the effortless game in my head to the feet of boys who weren’t all as confident as I was of their ability.
By the summer of 2015, I was more or less surplus to requirements as a coach, and was beginning to wonder if I could find my way back into a more career-shaped job, while I was just beginning to tire of the endless winter pastime of shovelling the driveway.
So when opportunity called for Zoë to expand her working horizons with the kind of job which seemed perfect for her, I was ready to dust off our ‘how to move house’ plans one more time.
The first time we visited BC’s capital, Victoria, perched at the southernmost tip of Vancouver Island, I think we both thought ‘not for us’. It seemed less Canadian than everywhere else we’d seen, almost as if a genteel English seaside town had been plonked down in the shadow of the Olympic mountains. Of course, first impressions can be misleading, and subsequent visits revealed all the hidden parts of Victoria we had missed first time round, and a trip in February of 2016 revealed that they have spring here, not just the sense of ‘only three more months of snow to go’ we had in PG.
So, with decisions made and job offer accepted, we set about the single hardest task known to 21st century humans – trying to buy a house in Victoria. This required several trips – together or separately – until we finally managed to persuade someone to take our money in return for an extraordinarily expensive piece of land – the house is something of an afterthought in these proceedings; it’s the location you’re buying.
The house wasn’t, and isn’t, perfect, which only means that we’ll likely be moving again before we lose our enthusiasm for packing and unpacking things. However, the process of buying it involved me driving around various previously unexplored areas of Greater Victoria one weekend in May, accompanied by the new album by my new favourite band.
I hadn’t realised, as we entered the 2010s and my age suddenly had a 5 at the beginning of it, that I was in the market for a New Favourite Band, but having been in the musical doldrums for long enough, I suddenly found myself surrounded by things I’d never heard before – the last three entries on this list fall into that category, but this one surpasses them all as there can’t have been a time in my life since I was in the grip of teenaged obsessions (qv) that I so rapidly and completely became immersed in the sounds of something completely new to me.
Big Big Train came into my life as a result of the first real Canadian friends we made on arrival – not that Andrew and Janet are any more Canadian than we are, in truth – which is to say, the people we bought our first Canadian house from.
We do things differently in Canada.
Not only did our predecessors in our enormous new house make the process as pain-free as possible, having been through the same process themselves only a few years before), but they stuck around, made us welcome, invited us to their ‘house cooling’ party so we could meet the neighbours and get to see the house in action, as it were, and generally behaved about as unlike anyone we’d ever bought a house from in the past as it’s possible to imagine.
After moving out, Andrew was a regular visitor, as he and I were both at something of a loose end – he waiting for his children to finish their last school year in PG, me trying to ensure mine got to school in something approximating upright, fed and dressed while our respective wives got on with the whole ‘earning a living’ part of things.
We lunched and watched World Cup games together; Andrew accompanied me to my driving test in case I failed and he had to drive me home; and gradually discovered a similar taste in music.
Which meant that when, a few years later, began raving about this English band he’d discovered, I paid attention. By now, of course, when someone recommended a piece of music to me, I could just click on a link and listen to it, and I too became immersed in the world of Big Big Train.
It is hard to describe the music of this band without referencing a great many things which make it sound like they’re somehow still living in 1973, and I’m going to try to avoid all that if I can, because there’s a lot more to them than a surface reading, or a description might reveal.
Big Big Train make music which is unabashedly English. And I do mean English rather than British; there are influences from all over the world, because of course there are, but the first few Big Big Train albums, including – and perhaps especially – this one, mine the seam of what it means to be English and to be surrounded by the depth of history in that ancient land.
None of it is tub-thumping or bombastic, rather it’s reflective and even pastoral in places; it celebrates the rural as much as it does the urban, and it’s interested in the corners of history perhaps overlooked by most. If Elgar had made rock music, I think it would have sounded like this.
And here I was, in the May of 2016, eager to properly listen to a new Big Big Train album, while driving around what is perhaps the most English of Canadian cities. This album will always be to me my ‘moving to Victoria’ album, even though its subject matter actually harks back to earlier periods in my life.
Oh, I also have to make a decision with this one which is becoming more common, which is to say: what is the correct tracklisting for it? The vinyl issue contains two extra tracks, and moves things around to perhaps make a more complete story in places, but after some thought, I’m sticking to the CD (and streaming) version, as that’s the one I heard first, and still think of when I consider this album. So, for once, I suggest that you listen along with Spotify, rather than skip bits…
Folklore begins with a sound which was familiar to Big Big Train fans, but which might cause the newcomers to raise an eyebrow – it’s essentially a fanfare of strings and brass, with not a rock instrument in sight. Even when the song proper starts, it’s essentially voice and drums for the first verse; appropriately setting the scene of the traditional folklorist, travelling from village to village, passing on the legends of the land. Of course, the full extent of the band gradually reveals itself, placing this modern music firmly into the tradition; allowing us to accept that what follows is a telling of some tales ancient and modern in this idiom.
Instead of a middle eight, there’s David Longdon’s breathy voice underscoring that while these are stories, they each contain a kernel of truth, a moral or a message. It’s deliberately set as a message from the past before it withdraws and allows this band of spectacular musicians to each put their stamp on the song before a gentle laugh reminds us that this is all an entertainment in the way it has been done for millennia.
London Plane is a contemplative stroll through the history of the River Thames, taking us not only around the bends in the river, but the history of a city and a nation. It does this, not by invoking the obvious, but by gently pushing us to make the connections between the Runnymede of the Magna Carta, the sunsets of JMW Turner, the briefest glimpse of Alice in her Wonderland, to the Festival of Britain, whereupon the music shifts gear to show us the modern city in all its hurry and wonder, still shot through, as the riverside is, with oases of calm and contemplation.
Incidentally, with the recent news of the passing of Hilary Mantel, I now see her Thomas Cromwell in those ‘kings and crowds and priests’ as the river passes through Putney, but maybe that’s just me.
As the Thames reaches out to the North Sea and ‘the fires grow cold in the east’, the music returns to a calm certainty as the voice soars and we drift out to sea, passing Canvey Island on one side, and then the Isle of Sheppey on the other.
I can tie the novels of David Mitchell and Neal Stephenson to all this, too, but I’d like to keep this to something around the same length as the others, so…
So we move out Along the Ridgeway, a landscape I know well, having lived alongside it for several years. To be fair, the part of the Ridgeway which this song references are much further south and west than the Dunstable Downs, but I can hear those familiar landscapes in this, alongside St. George, King Alfred and Wayland the Smith (which reminds me to recommend the novel The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth, another revocation of an ancient England which lives long in the memory after reading).
Along The Ridgeway paints its pictures in that sumptuous Big Big Train soundscape – rarely has the solo violin, so strongly associated with the Celtic nations, sounded so English, before doing a thing which you rarely hear, actually introducing the next song before it fades into it: ‘Here comes the Salisbury Giant’, we are told, and then…
Here, indeed, comes the Salisbury Giant. It’s a mainly instrumental piece, representing the 15th century processions of the giant and his hobby-horse which used to lead the midsummer processions in Salisbury, and which can still be seen (albeit in much restored form) in the Salisbury museum, where it can be seen in a context which stretches back to Stonehenge, and – I’d suggest – forward to this song and this album.
The Transit of Venus across the Sun is an extraordinary song which packs an enormous emotional punch even if you don’t know the story behind it. Inspired by the English astronomer Sir Patrick Moore, it uses the rare astronomical event of the transit of Venus to illustrate another aspect of his life; the death during the second world war of the only woman he claimed ever to have loved. The loss and regret bound up in this song with the almost mystical readings of features of the planet Venus as the narrator reaches the end of his long life is emotional enough, but then the representation of the transit itself takes it onto another level with what seems a simple trick.
There are three lines towards the end of the song which begin ‘So many words left unsaid’ which repeat three times, then the entire song takes a breath, gathers itself, and without missing a beat, moves into the sublime. On the face of it, it’s a modulation and the addition of an extra line, but it’s infused with such majestic power that it stops me in my tracks every time. It is, I think, intended to represent the pair of transits which happen every 247 years, in pairs eight years apart, assuming I’ve understood the maths correctly.
But it’s only possible to think about that once the song is over, because the force of that simple change is overpowering, and the subsequent return to the chorus with brass band accompaniment almost always passes by with me in something of a daze. Without the pair of transits, this would be a favourite song by a favourite band. With them, it’s something almost indescribable in its effect on me.
Fortunately, we get to have something of a party to clear our heads. Wassail celebrates the ancient English tradition, tied to Christmas, but probably predating it, where the last of the autumn’s cider was served warm to fend off the beginning of winter, celebrated in merry-making and song. Out of season, it’s a joyful celebration; in the depths of winter, it gives off a warming glow all its own.
Which brings us to the album’s first attempt to establish a modern folk tale. Winkie, despite its slightly unfortunate name, uses the structure of traditional storytelling to tell the tale of the first recipient of the Dickin Medal, awarded to animals who display what is described as ‘conspicuous gallantry’. Winkie was a pigeon, which allows for some appropriate sound effects and a jaunty tune which establishes what seems to be a slight tale of radio taking the place of pigeons for sending messages in wartime.
The jauntiness in turn, allows for the music to take a much darker turn when tragedy strikes, and then to illustrate the dauntless flight of Winkie herself. It’s a bit of a ‘schoolboys’ own’ tale of assumed heroism on the part of a bird doing what it had been trained to do, but the strength of this band is the way they can paint pictures with music, and sweep you up in the tension of the search (the Last Post is played at one point, seemingly dooming the story to a tragic ending) and the way the whole thing is played with straight faces and heartfelt honesty delivers a remarkably satisfying conclusion. It really shouldn’t work, but it really does.
Brooklands is not so much a story as a poem. Another twentieth century story, this spreads out and takes its time to establish the story of John Cobb, imagining his thoughts and memories as he prepares for his doomed water speed record attempt on Loch Ness in 1952. Cobb’s thoughts turn to Brooklands motor racing circuit, a place which future historians might seize upon to help explain the advances of the early 20th century. The lyric and the music treat this place of fairly recent memory with the same reverence as Runnymede and the Uffington White Horse earlier; one of the key themes Big Big Train work with is the place of advances in technology in the broader story of England.
At once elegiac and celebratory, Brooklands has time to breathe, time to reflect, before taking us into the cockpit of the Crusader as it reaches its top speed before breaking up. We don’t hear the disaster, we hear Cobb’s spirit ascend, still pleading for ‘one last run’.
I will admit that after the emotional punch of earlier tracks, this one doesn’t quite get to me in the same way, magnificent song though it is. I can’t quite put my finger on it, perhaps I just need to listen to it more.
The end is reached by way of Telling the Bees, another ancient English custom, here given a light touch and an arrangement distinct from the other, more serious songs on here. This is a perfect delight of a song, the very epitome of a fabulous album, in both senses of the word. ‘The joy is in the telling’, indeed.
I’ve avoided any reflection on the fact that some of the albums in this list were made by people who are no longer with us, but I cannot let the passing of David Longdon go without a mention. A charismatic frontman, powerful and expressive singer, lyricist and multi-instrumentalist, he was, by all accounts a lovely man, and his sudden early death last November was one of those which seemed to come as a physical blow. I’m delighted that the band has decided to carry on with a new vocalist, and am enormously looking forward to hearing what this iteration of Big Big Train will sound like.
Any other albums by this artist to consider?
Certainly. For all the impact this delightful album has on me, I’m not sure it’s even in my top three Big Big Train albums. The recent remixed and tweaked version of The Underfall Yard is spectacular, as is the combined English Electric: Full Power, which can keep me occupied for days once I get started. There are many others, including the tantalising glimpse that Welcome to the Planet gave us of what the future sound with Longdon might have been. I suspect it divides opinion, but I love its quirks and tangents.
Also, as with most of my favourites, try them all – there’s something for everyone here.
Compilations to consider?
Well, I kind of gave English Electric: Full Power non-compilation status up there, but technically it’s a compilation, so…
Live albums?
It took a long time for Big Big Train to establish themselves as a band who play live shows – a combination of a desire for something close to perfection and the complexity of the arrangements meant that any show would be expensive to produce, but with the support of their remarkable fans, collectively (and inevitably) known as the Passengers, they ventured into the light in 2015. Those concerts are captured on A Stone’s Throw From the Line, the following set of shows on Merchants of Light. Both are highly recommended, and I’m off to listen properly to Empire, so you can probably take it as read that it’s also worth your time.
Anything else?
Big Big Train has had a revolving cast of members over the years, many of whom have much other work to recommend, from Dave Gregory’s time with XTC to Nick D’Virgilio’s extraordinary drumming with Spock’s Beard. Having been in Big Big Train is not an absolute guarantee of a musician’s quality, of course, but it’s pretty damn close. However, I’m going to end by pointing you to the book – Between the Lines covers the entire band history, of which there is a lot more than you might expect, and one more footnote:
The album Between a Breath and a Breath by Dyble Longdon was a collaboration between the legendary Judy Dyble and David Longdon. It now, sadly, stands as a tribute to them both, and is also highly recommended. It also, by its mere existence allows me to tie this band all the way back to King Crimson, Fairport Convention (they surely stand musically somewhere between those two), and tangentially to Joni Mitchell and (again) the novels of David Mitchell – Judy Dyble surely having been one of the inspirations behind the staggeringly good Utopia Avenue.
You think this post is long? You should have seen the first draft…
I’m reaching the point in this process where I’m starting to get a little philosophical about it all. While I won’t miss my self-imposed weekly deadline, I will miss just rifling through my memories for things to say about albums I love, albums I remember fondly, or albums I’d pretty much forgotten.
Having got this far, and surprised myself by still having something new (well, new-ish) to say each week, I do however find my thoughts wandering as I figure out how to introduce the last four on the list, which by definition haven’t had nearly as much time for me to think about and respond to them.
This album and the next are something of a pair; they appeared in my life during one of those life-changing years which seem to keep cropping up in this story, but I’m going to leave the telling of that tale for another week. This album, therefore, left me scratching my head a little, until I realised that what I wanted to talk about with this album is that – in common with many albums released in the last few years – it’s really hard to pin down what exactly is meant by ‘album’; indeed, what is Falling Satellites? Is it the CD version, the digital version, the limited edition vinyl release, some of which have more tracks than others; some of which have tracks billed as ‘extras’ which appear to be part of the main body of work on other releases.
Look, if you’ve read this far, you know about the semicolon thing…
Back at the beginning of this story, I pinned the blame for the concept of ‘album’ as I knew it on the Beatles and Revolver, which isn’t entirely fair or accurate – after all, my contemporaries who grew up in Canada know a slightly different album called Revolver, and it wasn’t until Sgt. Pepper came along with its immutable track list that even the Beatles could claim full control over what was released in their name.
But Revolver, I think , along with a few others of the same era, crystallised what was meant by the long-playing record album; around 40 minutes of music, split over two sides of vinyl, carefully curated so there was some sort of natural flow to the thing and (according to my theory of albums, at least) with the strongest song as the first track on side 2.
We called them albums in the 1970s, and never thought to question that. We certainly didn’t call them “LPs”, as that was the kind of thing our parents called their jazz albums from the 1950s. You would ask your friends if they had heard the latest Groundhogs album, and they might respond that they had it on cassette or tape, but you couldn’t put an LP on a tape; that made no sense.
It was only relatively recently that I discovered the derivation of the word ‘album’ as it related to the 12-inch slabs of black plastic we all carried around. It’s a fascinating story, to do with how the early 78 rpm disks were bound together in books, so that you could hear more than three minutes at a time of your favourite artist, and – despite what Wikipedia claims – also referred to the way some defunct post-war formats were packaged, with collections of records bound together as a ‘record album’.
We knew nothing of this in 1975, of course – all we knew was that we were album fans rather than the kind of people who went to Woolworths and bought singles.
The album seemed to be a fixed and permanent point of reference – if a band had more music than would fit on one album, they released a double album. Simple. Or, if you’ve been with me all the way back to that mad Jim Steinman album, threw in a separate single as there wasn’t quite enough material to fill four sides.
I even own a Joe Jackson album which has music on three sides of vinyl…
It was, however, the advent of the CD which started to change all that we knew to be true. I blame Dire Straits.
When Brothers in Arms came out, everyone (well, not me – I didn’t have that kind of disposable income) rushed out and bought themselves a CD player and a copy of the album with the resonator guitar on the front. The CD was, inevitably, seen as the definitive version, and the album; the LP version, was the abridged one. For the first time I’m aware of, there was a distinct difference between the two formats, and the CD was the ‘correct’ one. This wasn’t achieved by having extra tracks on the CD, it was simply an exercise in editing some of the more egregiously twiddly instrumental bits in half the songs so they would fit on one LP. For the first time, there were two versions of an ‘album’, and things only got worse from there.
I have a child who loves one of the early albums on this list – Close to the Edge. The version he loves, however, isn’t the one I reviewed way back at the beginning of this process; it’s the ‘Special Edition’ with extra tracks and early versions of the finished songs. He still finds it weird to listen to only the first 40 minutes of it….
Throughout this exercise, I’ve found myself annotating the Spotify extracts I’ve been putting at the top of each post, as they more often than not have all kinds of ‘special’ treats attached, while all I’m interested in is the album as I knew it back in the old days where you got whatever would fit on two sides of vinyl, and that’s it.
Of course, the artists will see it differently, but my response to that is that Pink Floyd’s last proper album, The Division Bell is twice as long as Dark Side of the Moon, but I doubt many would argue that it’s twice as good. It also feels a little cynical to me, even with artists I love. To bring up Porcupine Tree for the third time in four weeks, their new album contains seven tracks and is perfectly realised to these ears.
Unless you stream it, of course, where you’ll find another three tracks tacked on. All three are excellent, and had they been included in the album, would have fitted (you’d want to change the order a bit, though). I’m probably showing my age, but in my mind an album is an album is an album, and having bonus bits attached make it something else – for example, the remixed and re-released version of OK Computer which came out with all the extras was called OK NOT OK, which at least is honest about it being something else.
Anyway, to Frost* and the album I discovered by the old-fashioned method of reading a magazine and seeing an interview with them. These days, of course, I can just fire up my friendly local streaming service and listen to the whole thing, and – after a couple of listens – decide I love it and would like to own a copy. Since I now have something approximating a disposable income, I can go and buy myself a digital copy and listen to it whenever I want.
Except – what is it, exactly, that I’m listening to? There’s a clean symmetry to this album as (I think) it was originally intended; it starts with a track called First Day and ends with one called Last Day.
Then there are two or three more tracks, which on some versions are labelled as ‘Bonus Tracks’, but which are just included as far as I can see on every released version. The ‘two or three’ refers to the fact that there’s an untitled instrumental tacked on at the end of at least one version.
So, what do I review here? From the first time I heard this, I assumed that it was an album of 13 tracks; to later find that two of them were actually ‘bonus tracks’ leaves me scratching my head. I’ll review all 13, as I didn’t make a distinction at the time, but all this uncertainty makes me feel old.
Close to the Edge doesn’t need any bonus material; I doubt many albums do, but it’s hard to tell these days where the ‘album’ ends, and the ‘extra stuff’ starts. Let’s see what this sounds like, armed with that knowledge.
It starts, with First Day, almost as if in the middle of something – a ‘ping’ introducing a wash of keyboards with an indistinct lyric about remembering how I ended at the start – all of which reinforces the idea for me that this album’s going to have a natural ending; a companion bookmark to this contemplative start.
There’s no break, as the album bursts into life with Numbers. In keeping with the pedigree of some of these musicians, there’s a hint of frenetic 1980s synthesiser work here, but the layered vocals and the slightly off-kilter rhythms place this in a different idiom altogether. Having said that, it is at heart, a quirky pop song of the kind which Thomas Dolby used to regularly bother the singles charts.
OK, we think, we know what we’re dealing with here. However, if this whole album was just 80s influenced synth-pop I doubt it would be on this list, so buckle in.
Numbers ends with a sound effect of breaking glass, which leads into the extraordinary soundscape of Towerblock. I’m sure there’s a specific genre which is being referenced here; it sounds to me a mix of several different sonic experiments – there’s a flowing melody sung with a slightly treated vocal, several hints at what’s to come, and then the song – and I don’t know how better to describe this – collapses like a towerblock being demolished.
Rarely, if at all in this list or elsewhere, have I heard a song which so viscerally describes what’s happening, not in words, but just in music. Everything breaks down; there’s a scattering of rhythms, a mix of distorted and tortured instruments before the song gradually pulls itself from the rubble and gathers strength gradually; the lyric is looking for a way to express the emotions involved in seeing your childhood home demolished, and while the words convey the mix of emotions, the music seems to underlay it all with a kind of barely-suppressed anger which eventually devolves into static and tension
Signs begins with just voice and drum; a bass drifts in to underline the quiet philosophical lyric before the chorus explodes into full flower. When it subsides back into verse, the bass is now much more active and playful, building a platform for other sounds to rest on, so that the second chorus is a little less surprising. It’s a fascinating lyric, this one – I can imagine the teenaged me finding it incredibly deep and worthy of intense scrutiny.
I can also imagine the teenaged me rocking out to the guitar break in the middle, which effortlessly shifts genre again, sounding not a million miles from the nineties metal which made that genre so much more acceptable in polite company that the stuff I used to listen to ever was.
It’s a great song, this, with the broken rhythms just skipping along as if all this lyricism on one hand and overdriven riffing on the other just weren’t happening. Even the modulation at the end is entirely earned – I have a whole essay about the ‘truck driver’s gearchange’ kind of modulation; this one is almost subtle, and causes me to smile rather than wince.
Lights Out is set up as a little light relief from the big, muscular songs. Three minutes of pop song fit the bill nicely here, and the mix of male and female voices drive the song along delightfully. And then you listen carefully, and realise it’s a song about dying. The reason this album’s on this list is that it does things like this all the time – reel you in with one view of the world, only to subvert your expectations.
Heartstrings barrels in like a Muse song; all synthesiser riffs with the inevitability of a steam train; in the way of Frost*, however, it changes mood and direction with the entry of the – I’m going to call it a chorus; it’s more of a refrain. Either way, it’s another of those gorgeous melodies, given space to breathe by a sudden gap in the driving force. They repeat the trick a couple more times; the third time round, the voices are subdued and treated, almost enticing you to lean in before bursting back into life. It’s another thought-provoking and intriguing lyric; much of this album appears to be about being taken before your time, and this one seems to throw in a wartime metaphor before drifting down to the synthesised beat which introduces Closer to the Sun.
This song is one of those which just fills me with joy and an almost irresistible (and inadvisable) urge to get up and dance. It plays tricks on us, lulling us into a sense of being a chilled-out dance anthem before slowly subsiding into its own groove and almost grinding to a halt. Whereupon something happens which is only inevitable after you’ve heard it once. Out of the primordial soup comes a buildup which goes nowhere; a gentle arpeggio which hints at something, and then a guitar solo by guest star Joe Satriani during which the power of rational thought entirely escapes me. There are few songs which do that to me; this one joined that list on first hearing, and is in no danger of ever dropping out of it.
One of the joys of music is that you can’t really explain it (yes, I know); it just is, and sometimes – in those perfect moments like the solo in the middle of this song, the isness of it just overwhelms, and you perhaps get a glimpse of what the composer heard before they tried to capture it by writing it down.
I love Closer to the Sun. I may even love it more than Closer to the Heart, which, for those who know me, is saying something…
And then it seamlessly burst into the greatest title on this and virtually any other album, The Raging Against the Dying of the Light Blues in 7/8. Which pretty much sums itself up in its description. If you can imagine what a song called that would sound like, you’ve probably got it. If you can’t; have a listen – it’s got something for everyone, including the title, designed to appeal to the Dylan Thomas fan.
The Dylan Thomas fan who generally prefers their music in 7/8. Works for me.
Oh, it’s also the second track to reference the album title, using the same melodic line. And you were wondering what I saw in this album.
The ending sounds to me cinematic, which prompts me to reflect that a falling satellite is one of the many motifs in Wim Wenders’ Until the end of the World; which I’m pretty sure I referenced way back during the Achtung Baby post. Everything is connected. Well, most things in my brain are, anyway.
Nice Day For it… for example immediately makes me think of that early scene in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when Arthur and Ford are in the pub. The song itself is a neat recapitulation of three others we’ve already heard, kind of tying it all together before heading for the exit by way of a nod to a previous album.
The three quotations are subtle, and could easily be missed if you were intent on just enjoying the instrumental, but there are enough musical motifs from earlier songs to make you (well, me) lean in and pick out that the voices are saying, and why they sound familiar.
How all that ties into the Vogon fleet demolishing Earth to make way for a hyperspace bypass isn’t entirely clear to me, but then I remember Towerblock.
Concept albums; there’s nothing like them.
Hypoventilate clearly points back to an earlier song, Hyperventilate, the first track on their debut album, Milliontown. Coming to it, as I did, not having heard the earlier album, all I heard was an instrumental which appeared to be playing backwards…
So we come to the end; Last Day. It does indeed close the circle of the album; not directly related to the opener, it does lay oput some of the key themes in a sparse piano-and-voice arrangement which – deliberately, I assume – sounds like the end of something.
Which makes the two bonus tracks something of an imposition. I know ‘ve already moaned about this too much, but the first 11 tracks on this album form a whole; the extra bits just feel stuck on.
But I said I would, so here they are:
Lantern is something of a sketch at first; even when the second vocal line enters, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that – given the full instrumentation of the album – there’s some fleshing out to do here. It’s a pleasant song and hardly a half-finished song, but I’d have been happy to wait until the next album to hear what became of it.
British Wintertime is closer in feel to the album which came before it; pensive and meditative in the beginning. I’m resisting the temptation to write this off as not complete, like the last track, because I think the repeated line does build appropriate tension, and the fact that we only hear what happens next instrumentally is of a piece with the rest of Falling Satellites, especially the way the music speeds up into the thunderstorm, leaving us with a genuine sense of having experienced something, not just listened to it.
All of Falling Satellites is like that, and so this song does fit. Just not here, as a bonus track.
If you’d stopped after 11 tracks, you’d have missed something, but you wouldn’t have felt something was missing, I don’t think. Make of that what you will.
Any other albums by this artist to consider?
Several, and in the way of such things, I haven’t got round to them all yet. Milliontown is a good place to start, though, and I have recently been enjoying last year’s Day and Age, although I don’t think it’s as good as this.
Compilations to consider?
In the modern way, there are various bits and pieces available to stream. No compilation as such, although there is a multi-CD retrospective called 13 Winters which includes pretty much everything and therefore doesn’t strike me as a compilation as such.
Live albums?
I can’t tell how official or otherwise the many live ‘albums’ on Spotify are, but The Philadelphia Experiment seems to be an actual artifact rather than something cobbled together by a streaming service. The recording is from 2009, though, so if you were hoping to hear how they did Towerblock in a live environment, you’ll be disappointed.
Anything else?
The various members of Frost* have been in many other bands over the years. Indeed, they at one point shared a drummer with the next band on the list. However, I feel it only fair to point out that if you’ve heard of main man Jem Godfrey, it’s as composer of hit singles for the likes of Atomic Kitten and Blue. Great melodies will out, whatever context you put them in.
Back at the beginning of this exercise, I promised one album per artist, but I always knew that there would be both a Porcupine Tree and a Steven Wilson album in this, and while I could have picked one of the later solo albums which are much less Porcupine-like, I wanted to explore this album because I think it says something about how listening to albums has both changed out of all recognition since those early days in Aberdeen, and is yet surprisingly similar now.
I’m coming to the end of this journey, and I’m feeling that some of the conclusions I thought I was coming to may not be as clear-cut as I imagined. For example, here is an album which I have regularly listened to in exactly the same way I used to listen to those ELP and Wings albums back in the early seventies.
Which is to say, alone, in my room, watching the album rotate on the turntable while I pore over the cover and do nothing else that just listen. I think that from the point when I was first able to listen to my music in a car (in the van, in my case), I slowly lost the ability to just stop and listen; there always seemed to be something else to be getting on with, but there’s a song on this album which I credit with bringing me back to the original way of doing things; a song which only emerged into the light when I stopped doing anything else and just listened.
There’s also a song on here which only truly reveals itself when you see the video accompanying it, so that’s another area to explore.
Following the demise of Porcupine Tree, which happened more or less at the point when I started to become a proper fan, I naturally developed an interest in the works of Steven Wilson; a lifetime of music-making which I think would take a lifetime to explore and appreciate, given all the projects and remixes he’s been involved in. Around that time, I first got myself a smartphone, and discovered that there was a Steven Wilson app.
At which point, I think it’s worth pausing to consider just how all this music was now reaching me.
It’s not a direct analogy, but bear with me – in 1975, Genesis, a band I was just discovering, broke up. For some definition of ‘broke up’, of course – this is what I mean by it not being a direct analogy.
The lead singer, Peter Gabriel, started releasing solo albums, but the only way to hear one of them was to go out and buy it (it didn’t appear in the library, and the only other option I had was to borrow it from one of my more Genesis-obsessed friends, which – I think – is what I eventually did.)
By 2010, armed with my early smartphone, I could hear all or any of the tracks on Steven Wilson’s first couple of solo albums any time I liked, as I had access to iTunes, and shortly thereafter, to streaming services like Spotify. The teenaged me would have passed out, I think, at the idea of just being able to pull this music from the ether using a device which fit in my pocket.
I mean, the teenaged me was also heavily into science fiction, so might have coped better than most, I don’t know….
There was, however, a downside to being able to hear all this music whenever I wanted. Firstly, it took me a long time to get round to the Steven Wilson solo albums, because I was busy streaming endless albums I had discarded over the years, copies of things I still had, but which were in poor condition (something weird happened to my CD of Hejira, for example, so it skipped like an old-fashioned, poorly treated LP), or went looking for back catalogues I knew I should have heard, but had never quite got round to.
Eventually, however, I started to work my way through the solo Wilson albums, and liked what I heard. It wasn’t until much later, however, that it occurred to me that ‘heard’ was the operative word – I wasn’t so much listening to these albums as hearing them, and perhaps I just accepted that this was the way things worked now – who had time to properly listen to things any more?
Well, that was, of course, nonsense.
Back in the early 2000s, I would often listen carefully to music through headphones, not only as I travelled, but as I walked around the village in a vain attempt to hold back the effect of time and a sedentary lifestyle on my waistline. All that had happened in the meantime was that my life became busier, with much less time available for listening – I think you can see that in the spread of albums in the list as a whole.
Suddenly, with children old enough to fend for themselves (and being invested in their own musical tastes), I found myself wondering if I had missed a thing or two, and resolved to do better, starting – I think – with this album, which was the first Steven Wilson solo album I actually bought, as opposed to just streaming it.
Back in 2011, I heard a review of a documentary film called Dreams of a Life, a film I – strangely – have never seen. The review made a strong impression on me, however, because of the subject matter – the idea that a person seemingly involved in a normal, socially involved, life could die and lie undiscovered for three years was – and is – profoundly shocking. The idea that Joyce Vincent could be overlooked and not particularly missed is extraordinary, but possibly not as uncommon as you might think.
Hearing, therefore, that this album was partly inspired by those events, and by an artist I had come to admire, meant that I was going to actually own a copy of it, rather than just tune in to it whenever I felt like it. For what felt like the first time in years, I listened to a new album almost the way I used to absorb the ones I borrowed from the library all those years ago.
But the modern world has its distractions, and it wasn’t until I actually went into a record shop and bought a vinyl copy that I really listened to it, and it was only then that I discovered just how much was going on; only then that I listened to it the way I used to listen to music back when there were no smartphones, no internet, not much television, and nothing on the radio which reflected my musical tastes.
Hand. Cannot. Erase. is a concept album, then, but it’s one of loosely connected themes, not a linear story. It does eventually touch on Joyce Vincent’s story, but only after a journey around several other female voices, articulating feelings of isolation and loneliness.
Opening track First Regret is a gentle instrumental, setting out part of the musical palette – ringing, open acoustic guitar chords compete with a fluid and flexible bass to keep at bay the power chords which threaten to break in from time to time. The track blends seamlessly into 3 Years Older via the first of a series of jaw-dropping Guthrie Govan guitar solos. The first lyric of the album demonstrates Wilson’s increasingly confident voice – it’s up close and personal here in its fragility; the Steven Wilson of In Absentia treated his voice as one element in the mix; here, it’s leading the song and while the instrumental break gets quite excitable in places, there’s a calmness which comes from the vocal and which asserts itself in a tale of single motherhood and ostracism before breaking out into a full-on 1970s Prog Rock wig-out, but shot through with modern percussion sounds which keep it from sounding like a pastiche or parody before coming to an emormously satisfying ending with one extra beat in the final line to round everything off.
The title track is all sparse guitars and treated drums at first, and there’s a lyric which refers to emails where its predecessors would have talked of letters. As it expands into the fullness of its central arrangement, I’m struck by how – after more than half a century of this kind of popular music – it’s still possible for the truly great songwriters to come up with instantly memorable, catchy melodies. I know something of the mathematics behind the fact that we’ll likely never run out of new melodic structures, but this album is full of tunes you feel sure someone must surely have thought of before. Parts of this rock like a Porcupine Tree song might, but much of it sounds new and different, and will have you singing along like the best pop songs do.
Flipping over my vinyl copy, we come to the most interesting of the songs in the collection. Perfect Life is a meditation from the perspective of a 13-year old girl, narrated by Katherine Begley over the kind of beat which Nitin Sawnhey was turning my head with a few weeks back. It’s completely unlike anything else on here, except it isn’t really – it’s all of a piece; this is just another aspect of where Wilson’s music was at this point. When it breaks into song at the end, it is – of course – another sumptuous melody which perfectly balances the loss and longing of the spoken first half.
Incidentally, this is one of those rare songs which has had a few key lines stripped from it after the lyric sheet went to print – the elision makes the song much more enigmatic and strange than the printed version, but both versions live in my head.
It’s impossible, I think, to explain what exactly Routine does to my emotions. Its jagged and tense opening hints at things unspoken and puts you on edge, a tension which feels like it will never resolve as the song grows subtly and pushes in on you from all directions.
I’m going to recommend listening to this while watching the astonishing hand-animated video, as it not only explains more of the background to the grief-laden story, but provides a visualisation of the shattering catharsis performed by Ninet Tayeb as she finally allows her character to give voice – an inchoate scream, to be sure, but voice none the less – to pretty much every human emotion. It’s one of the very few moments in music which can cause me to spontaneously burst into tears; it’s that powerful.
But it doesn’t end there – after the storm has passed, there’s a daybreak of hope and regret, perfectly expressed in a repeated unresolvable couplet in which we, the grieving, have our conflict eloquently expressed.
For a long time, I thought Routine was the best track on this album. It isn’t, but it’s close.
Another side, another shift in mood. From melancholy and grief, we are treated to the appropriately scary sounds of Home Invasion. Not a song to be listened to alone in the dark, it isn’t satisfied with throwing as many distorted instruments as it can find at you in an insistent, so fast it’s slightly out of control, rhythm; it also eventually breaks out a menacing distorted vocal which points the way forward to Wilson’s later album The Future Bites. This vocal section is much more melodic, and even manages to be soothing in parts before dumping you back into the madness of the modern world with no apology.
Before it goes, Home Invasion elides into Regret #9 which teases you with what sound like voices from a Cold War numbers station and a keyboard solo played in the manner of a guitar solo, which eventually merges into a guitar solo played much more like a keyboard solo. It’s properly discombobulating, this song, especially as it fades out to the sound of a few sparse notes picked out on a banjo.
Transience is much closer in tone and theme to Porcupine Tree. It features a train – a favourite Wilson motif – and deliciously layered voices; all as far as I can tell Wilson himself. Unlike the other tracks on here, this one is short and simple. Like most of them, however, it’s melodic and compelling.
The final side begins with what I eventually understood to be the best track on here, and possibly Wilson’s solo masterpiece, Ancestral. A great, intricate edifice of a song, it begins in the sparse reverberating architecture of a song finding its way, accompanied by a delicate but confident flute line. It gradually adds layers of drumbeat and meaning to the lyric, which is about the lonely in the big city, and how the network of ancestry can so easily be left behind without necessarily meaning to. As it reaches this conclusion, the full breadth of the arrangement is heard, then we are swept up into another Guthrie Govan guitar solo.
I’ve tried not to be carried away in my descriptions of individual instrumental parts in any of these albums, but, honestly, if you have any sense of the power of a great guitar solo, you really need to hear this one – it’s expressive, dynamic and somehow develops the themes of the lyric in one take. It was only when I sat down and seriously listened to the guitar solo on Ancestral that I began to understand what a great song it is.
Then, just as you think you’ve heard it all, there’s a section of what I can only describe as broken time, as the song threatens to run away with itself, then all sorts of rhythms and time signatures compete for our attention, gradually evening out into a full-throated rock riff, albeit in a time signature I still can’t quite pin down, another break down into a two-chord pattern, before just letting loose with all guns blazing and then dissolving into a spaced-out burst of psychedelia with flutes and hi-hats.
All of which is just setting up the return of the main (is it though?) riff, this time pulling in all the prior themes, carrying the flute line with it to what sounds like one of those conclusions compsers of great symphonies used to indulge in when they wanted to be sure that every theme and passing motif was properly tied up and concluded.
It must have taken a great deal of self-control not to end the album there, as it’s one of the most conclusive pieces of music I’ve ever heard.
But, of course, we have to return to the main theme of the album. If Joyce Vincent is anywhere in all of this, it’s in the words of Happy Returns, which – without making anything specific – reflect on that bafflingly sad story while effortlessly rolling out yet another memorable melody and lyric.
We hear Joyce’s imagined voice for a couple of verses, sparsely accompanied as if to highlight her solitude, before the essential humanity of this album kicks in and without changing the story in any way, makes it seem more hopeful. I don’t think it’s trying to let the world off the hook for its neglect and indifference, but is perhaps suggesting that we’re not all like that.
And then, as if we were watching her spirit leaving her body, a choir sings Joyce Carol Vincent to her rest in Ascendent Here On… and a pretty much perfect album comes to a pretty much perfect end.
It’s easy to dismiss a lot of the music I listen to as ephemeral or uninvolving (beyond the visceral thrill of a well-executed riff or a moment of perfection in a solo), but that isn’t a label you can pin on this album. It’s involving, emotional, thrilling, sad, comforting and joyful, often all at the same time. Some time in the late 1990s I wondered if this kind of music had run its course.
No, it hadn’t. Not even close.
Any other albums by this artist to consider?
Oh, yes. There are a great many Steven Wilson and Wilson-adjacent things to try, but sticking strictly to his solo work, the run of albums from The Raven That Refused To Sing to To The Bone showcase an artist developing his voice and crafting everything from thoughtful ballads to perfect pop songs along the way. The most recent solo album, The Future Bites isn’t at all like anything we’ve just been listening to, and because of that seems to have a poor reputation. Don’t listen to the naysayers – it’s a terrific thing.
Compilations to consider?
If you’re completely new to Wilson, once you’ve listened to this album, try Transience. It gives a fair idea of what he’s about.
Live albums?
In keeping with the whole ‘biggest artist you’ve never heard of’ vibe around SW, the Home Invasion concert, which is available as a DVD as well as an album is a breathtaking overview of his three Royal Albert Hall performances in 2018, and is as good a live album as this century has produced.
Anything else?
So much. Porcupine Tree, obviously, but also No-Man and Blackfield. Oh, and Storm Corrosion, which many people will tell you (not me, but it’s close) is his best work. The man’s an insane workaholic, and pretty much everything he touches has a guarantee of quality. If you get through all the stuff he’s performed on, try seeking out some of his remixes, especially the Yes, ELP, Jethro Tull, Gentle Giant and King Crimson ones. Or the Tears For Fears or Simple Minds ones – there’s something for everyone. Oh, and he’s written a book, because of course he has. Haven’t read it yet, but I have a birthday coming up…
I don’t know what the last album I bought on vinyl was (I mean the last album before the revival of vinyl buying; I know exactly which album I bought three days ago); I don’t remember what the last cassette album I bought was, but I do know that this album was one of two ‘last albums’ I bought on CD – I can even tell you where I was and the date. And will, in case you were wondering.
This came out during my wilderness years for new music – I think that the switch from CD to streaming, the advent of reliable mp3 players (I loved my chunky Creative Zen player, but eventually surrendered to the ease of use and ubiquity of the iPod), and the shift in my listening habits in the car contributed, but the truth is that moving halfway round the world, changing my roles and responsibilities, and writing a book did amount to a complete change in how I – how all of us – did things.
We had exchanged life on the outskirts of one of the world’s great cities for rural northern BC; I had exchanged a desk job for one which had me driving all round my mew home town, and one of the things which changed radically for me was that I stopped listening to music.
There’s a significant period of adjustment involved in living somewhere new and so radically different from where you were before. For me, the change was reflected in the way I reached out for small things which reminded me of ‘home’ – I no longer had access to the print media I used to devour, so no-one was telling me about new releases or who I should be listening to. The online discussions I still had access to were increasingly about bands I hadn’t heard of, and who didn’t pitch up on local radio.
Indeed, I didn’t really get on with local radio either – I missed the reliable things I used to hear on the BBC, and quickly turned to the new-fangled idea of podcasts to keep me in touch.
Even in those early days, listening to BBC podcasts felt like a comforting link back to my old life – here were the programmes I used to hear in the car, playing for me in the car, often at roughly the same time of day as I used to hear the originals. I don’t think I consciously stopped listening to music on the road, it just happened. None of my daily journeys were more than about 20 minutes (Prince George is not a big town, nor does it have much traffic), so I was rarely completing my full week’s worth of downloads before the next week came along; music faded out of the space I probably used to listen to it in the most.
So when an album like Takk… came out, I probably didn’t hear about it at all – I didn’t have an office full of people discussing music, I didn’t hear things like it on the radio, and I wasn’t really reading about new music either.
How, then, did I even become aware of it?
Honestly, I don’t know. Here’s what I suspect, though: TV adverts.
Only once I had come to know and love it did it dawn on me that I had heard about half these tracks before on TV, so it must have seeped into my consciousness that way. Certainly, when I did buy myself a copy, I knew what to expect, and there must have been some discussion somewhere which prompted me to download it, then turn it into a physical copy.
I do know that it happened during 2009 (I know, we’re jumping forward a lot at the moment), and the reason I know that is because I was dealing with the fact that my mother was dying while I lived 8000 km away. I traveled over to Scotland three times that year, and my solid, reliable old mp3 player was loaded up with podcasts and music for the trips. On the second of those trips, I had acquired a copy of this album, so somewhere during that summer, I must have gone on iTunes and bought a copy.
I’m not claiming to never have downloaded music for free, but my policy was generally that if it was music I hadn’t already owned in some format, I was going to pay for it, so I’m confident that my digital copy of Takk… had been paid for.
Buying it in iTunes, then converting it to something I could play on my Zen was something of a struggle, though, combined with the fact that I tried to also burn it to CD, and – as seems to have been the story for much of my life – I can’t be sure that the quality was all that great, and this is an album of subtlety and nuance, so I’m not sure I properly got it.
What I do know is that it helped get me through those traumatic few months; a constant, calming presence in my ears as I flew back and forth across the Atlantic. On the day before I flew back home after the memorial service, I flew down to London and spent a few precious hours walking my favourite walk along the South Bank, poking around at the second-hand books under Waterloo Bridge and going in to the record shop at the Festival Hall.
I was looking for – and found – a copy of Finlandia, but also spotted a copy of Takk… and, reasoning that it was the day before my birthday, which I would be spending in Economy on an Air Canada 777, I should treat myself.
Owning a copy of this did change things – I started listening to it in the car, and added more CDs, some of them burned from my digital copies. I changed up to a smartphone as they became available, and started looking around me again; looking for new things to surprise me. I managed to find a balance with the podcasts, and gradually made myself playlists of old favourites to go along with the new things I was discovering.
All of this happened because of this album (and the one before it in the list) as I gradually found my way back in to listening to new things, and reached some sort of equilibrium in my new life.
I often said that adjusting to life in a new country wasn’t enormously difficult, and on the grand scale of things, it wasn’t, but the fact that I have a ten year gap in this list where no new music appears tells a more truthful version, I realise now. I had retreated into the safe and well-known for several years while I processed everything that was going on.
Now, with new methods of acquiring music open to me, and a seemingly settled life, I started to look outward again, and I think a lot of that is down to this strange and delightful album.
It opens – quietly – with the title track, immediately laying out the soundscape – layers of keyboard sounds with voices fading in and almost indistinguishable from the overall wash of sound. There’s a very low note, which might be a bass, but otherwise it’s a wide open sound, welcoming you in and setting the scene.
Glósóli is the first of the tracks I’m sure I heard on a TV show or an advert. It immediately returns me to the soaring vocals of Cocteau Twins, although the language here seems more deliberate, and there’s a marching beat underpinning it, which gives it more forward momentum that many Cocteau Twins songs had. I tried hard to focus on the language, wrongly assuming that the title was related to words in some way, but my Icelandic is not up to much, and in any case, just as I’m focusing hardest on the sounds, the track explodes into life like a Godspeed You! Black Emperor track, which has me grinning and paying no attention to any words while I digest the musical box ending.
Hoppipolla is almost certainly the best known track on here; its anthemic sweep is utterly irresistible, and while I’ve been careful not to refer to video versions of any songs, the one for this is so supremely joyful and silly that I can’t resist recommending you watch it. It is a beautifully constructed piece, designed to provoke emotion, although the circumstances of me first getting to know it tend to produce a different emotion than the intended one, I suspect. Everything about it, even – or perhaps especially – the collapsing ending – appeals to me at a level way beyond simple appreciation.
This is also true of Með blóðnasir which pulls one of the musical threads of Hoppipolla and plays it out over a blurry drum track to give the previous song a kind of unfocused and warm encore; as if the band couldn’t quite let go of the magic they had produced.
Sé lest emerges from static into a world of glockenspiels and pianos, then gradually uses the vocals – the human voice is as much an instrument on this album as any of the others – to build a world of its own. The lyrics are in the band’s own, made-up language, and defy any interpretation, leaving us to enjoy them on their own merits as sounds and texture. The glockenspiel sounds return, calming things down in the place where a middle eight or guitar solo would go if this was a rock song, then the voices push it all back into life along with some brass instruments, which quickly threaten to evolve into an oompah band, but which are drawn back into the mist by the voices. I hear this song as a series of glimpses through a veil – any of the constituent parts could burst into life at any time, but the overall feel of the track keeps them all in check until the clockwork comes along to put everything back in its box. Or something.
Sæglópur features more of the clockwork – a kind of looped sample of a clock being wound provides the rhythmic underpinning to this ethereal, sad song which – I only discovered this much later – is about someone lost at sea, something always in the back of the mind of a small island community. It, again, opens up after the mournful first section, into something perilously close to an actual rock song, although the language and otherworldly fell keep it from just letting loose and turning the guitars all the way up. In any case, it fades back into its original pattern (into the sea, perhaps?) although the third movement is fuller than the first, informed by that muscular middle section.
Any time an album contains a track which is over ten minutes long, it’s going to attract my attention, and take me back to those early seventies album I loved so much. The other things Mílanó has going for it are the way it introduces and then develops a memorable theme, and the fact that it’s named for an Italian city – even after all this time, I am irresistibly drawn to all things Italian, although it occurs to me that my days of commuting to Italy for work haven’t exactly had the attention they perhaps deserve in this whole story.
Ah well, you’ll have to wait another ten years for that…
As I mentioned earlier, some of SIgur Rós’ music does something similar to the Godspeed album I was raving about a couple of posts back; if I have to break it down, I think I would have to conclude that my absolute favourite music of all generally fits a pattern of developing themes over at least ten minutes, while introducing variations and secondary themes, all the while aiming for a destination which may or may not involve an increase in tempo and volume, while also telling a story in words I either have to imagine, or can’t quite make out.
I’m not sure I’ve ever found that section in any record store I’ve ever been in, though.
I don’t know (probably because I have never really though about it before today) if the title of Gong relates in any way to Daevid Allen’s experimental hippy commune of pot-head pixies. I don’t really hear a musical connection beyond the general refusal to stick to three-minute pop songs, but it’s intriguing.
Throughout this review, I have been carefully steering clear of pinning down exactly who is doing what on the album. Even though I owned a CD copy of this, and therefore have sleeve notes I could refer to, I’ve always shied away from knowing too much about the band; who sings what, or even which language it’s being sung in. Unusually for me, I’m not sure I want to know – I prefer to think of this album as having been beamed in from another dimension and part of the appeal of it to me is that it is impenetrable and mysterious. It speaks to the power of the music that I can be uplifted and moved by a song like Gong without having the first idea what’s going on.
And then comes the one track I really do want to know more about. Andvari is a wonder of musical construction, and I find myself, even having listened to it dozens of times, trying to figure out exactly what’s going on with the metre. To describe a piece of music as being in an ever-rotating and seemingly random set of time signatures would be to run the risk of putting people off entirely, but Andvari is clear and lyrical, with a delightful melody. It’s just that the beat seems to wander about at will under the melody, despite there being a steady pulse under that. I’d love to see the sheet music for this, because I’ve no idea how you would notate everything that’s going on.
And then I listen to it again, and just float along without worrying about any of the technicalities, because it’s also that kind of track.
On the odd occasion when I am listening to these on Spotify rather than my own copy, I find myself drawn to the tracks which have the lowest number of plays, and Svo Hljótt is that song on this album. To be clear, it still has over two million plays; it’s not exactly lurking in the dark corners, the neglected child of the album. But it is puzzling to me for two reasons. One is that it is to my ears, just as delightful a track as the others on here. Sure, there’s a hint of accordion at the start, but there’s also yet another gorgeous melody and another enigmatic lyric which seems hopeful and uplifting. Perhaps people don’t generally like songs which are over seven minutes long, although a song generally takes as long as it needs to in my experience, and this definitely doesn’t outstay its welcome.
The other thing which puzzles me, however, is more of a ‘me’ thing. It genuinely astounds me, looking at the counters for each of the albums I’ve visited, that – aside from the big singles, which I’d expect to have more visits than the others – there’s such a variation among individual tracks on the same album. Does no-one actually listen to albums any more? I concede that there are a couple of tracks on here I might add to a playlist and hear in isolation, but I can’t imagine listening to a track like this without hearing it in the context of the whole album.
In a way, that’s what this whole project has been about for me – a chance to revisit entire albums. I know that there are albums here which have not detained me, but which might have yielded a track or to I’d like to go back to. But ingrained in me is the idea that the only way to hear things was to put the whole album on the record player, and it seems I’d still rather do that than hear things in smaller chunks. Indeed, I can get quite twitchy if I’ve had to leave off listening halfway through an album, and will go back and complete the exercise as soon as possible after the interruption.
All of which is distracting me from the final track, Heysátan, which fulfils a vital purpose for any great album, in bringing it to an appropriate close. If I’ve been engrossed in a sound world, like I have with this, the icing on the cake is the band essentially asking my permission to take their leave, which is exactly what Heysátan does, calling back to the sounds which have gone before, but slowing them down and pausing for breath before quietly going out but leaving the door open for future visits.
I hadn’t listened to Takk… for a while – maybe years – but diving back into it just now was soothing and reinvigorating in exactly the way I had imagined it would be, and has reminded me of how the doors to more new music were opened for me, even if I was now buying invisible digital copies of everything.
Any other albums by this artist to consider?
Ágætis byrjun and () are the usual suspects, although I don’t know them nearly as well as I know this one. There’s much to discover in the world of Sigur Rós.
Compilations to consider?
Not as such; there’s one called Hvarf/Heim which is a mix of new songs and acoustic renditions of older ones, but to invoke one of my recurring themes – go buy a whole album…
Live albums?
Inni is a multimedia extravaganza from 2011, and part of it is a live CD which is worth hearing. The band seem not to be terribly active these days, so this may be as good as it gets for live material
Anything else?
Well, I feel I should point you to other music from Iceland, like the Sugarcubes, and former member Björk, (and you should check them out), but I’d like to also point you to the much-missed Jóhann Jóhannsson,whose Fordlandia album was unjustly ejected from this list (it remained first reserve for a long time, but I never could quite fit it all in). You’ve probably heard some of his film music, but he was an extraordinary composer of music in general, and while he didn’t have any formal link with Sigur Rós, there’s definitely a kinship there.
Looking at the list of albums still to come, I notice there’s about to be a ten year gap in release dates, which does in a way reflect what was going on in my life, although – thanks to my insistence on sticking to release dates – the gap in me listening to new music actually covers a different ten year span, so that this one and, to a degree, the next one, are out of place in my personal chronology.
Still, there was a ten year gap in my listening habits, and I should probably explore that a bit.
Otherwise, I’ll just suddenly say something like “so, after several years living in Canada…”
The gap comes, pretty much, in the first decade of the 21st century. Not, as I later discovered, that it was a quiet decade for new music, but it was a chaotic and turbulent time in my life – in all our lives – and if I bought new music, it was by artists I already knew and loved (and are therefore already on this list), or classical recordings.
Or downloads, which became a thing in those ten years. I’ll be coming to streaming and downloads, I think.
So, in the last six years of my time at Ferrero, I not only became a properly qualified IT person, but became responsible for a number of significant projects, the details of which need not detain us. Over those six years, my working life evolved from the occasional trip around the UK, to the occasional trip around Europe (mainly to Luxembourg or Italy), to – in the last 18 months – regular and somewhat draining trips to Italy (or Germany, or Poland, but mainly Italy) as I worked on the UK part of a genuinely global and transformative IT project.
It’s a curious part of my life, that 18 months. From a work perspective, I wouldn’t change a minute of it; I learned so much which has served me well in later years, and was exposed to a vast amount of experiences (and food) which I’ll never forget, but it was tough on a fledgling parent, to be away as much as I was. Even on the weeks when all I did was drive in to work in the morning and home again at night, I was often out of the house for 12 hours at a time. The boys were young, and I felt I only saw them at weekends.
Eventually, with the UK part of the project complete, and focus turning to the Canadian rollout (and the Russian one, and the Mexican one), the prospect of my travel becoming more global or my responsibilities in the UK becoming more onerous, we upped sticks and moved to Canada.
That is, of course, a long and complicated story, and one I’ve told on here before. We moved to northern BC in April 2006, roughly in the middle of my decade of not hearing new music, and my life changed utterly – from full-time and then some IT and Project Manager, to primary parent and part-time (when I could fit it in) IT technician.
Our parenting roles reversed, and I became the one doing the school run, making the meals, filling the endless days of Spring Break or summer holiday, and – I may have mentioned this a bit – coaching soccer. It’s tempting to be a little blasé about the whole thing now, but it was a big upheaval, and looking back, I was taking refuge in familiar music, and not seeking out the new.
So, I missed this (and a great many other things) when it first came out, and I might never have encountered Porcupine Tree, or Steven Wilson, or all the associated side-projects, were it not for my love of Prog, and Glasgow Airport.
Over the first years in Canada, we went back to the UK (to Scotland, mainly) several times. Sometimes we all went, flying from Vancouver to Glasgow and back, and sometimes Zoe or I would go alone, for various reasons. On one of our trips back (I covered some of the detail of this in the last set of memories, ten years ago; I’m not going to elaborate here for now), I was perusing WH Smith in Glasgow Airport and spotted an early copy of what would eventually become Prog magazine.
I think it’s fair to say that the magazine market was in an uncertain phase, one it may well still be in, and it seemed that one of the ways the industry was addressing this was by spinning niche interest publications off more established titles – I think this was a spinoff of the more widely-read Classic Rock magazine – but it intrigued me.
It intrigued me because in all of the revisiting and ‘comfort listening’ I had been doing, I has been gradually reintroducing myself to some of my mid-seventies favourites. I went through a significant ‘rediscovering Rush’ period around this time, and plundered iTunes for digital copies of, firstly, all the albums I’d owned and loved back then, and then all the other ones I’d not paid enough attention to, hearing many of them in clear digital sound, often as if for the first time.
I also had come to realise that my thinking about music had changed – I think that while the British music scene (if such a thing even exists) is keen to label and classify things, while there didn’t seem to be any of that going on in Canada. Aside from the clear (and mandatory) bias towards Canadian music, all kinds of music sat cheek by jowl with things which to my ear sounded incongruous. The landscape was different, and the conversations I’d have with people were also different. Being a fan of Rush was a given – I think you get a Rush fan club membership with your Canadian passport – but owning up to those early ELP albums would prompt earnest discussion rather than sniggering.
The reason I bought that copy of Prog magazine was that it promised a countdown of the top 50 (or top 100; I really should have figured this out by now) Prog albums ‘of all time’. As I’ve said before, nine of the top ten were familiar to me, although I disagreed with the order, naturally.
I read the thing cover to cover on the flight back; I made notes in the margin of things I’d like to explore a little more, and – mainly, I think, because I didn’t know anything about it – I went and downloaded myself a copy of In Absentia, which was the one exception in that top ten.
I think it and the next album in this list were what brought me firmly back to ‘new music’ as a concept; everything which follows from here is music I heard for the first time more or less as it came out – in my fifties, I rediscovered the joy of new sounds which had faded out of my life when all the other supposedly more important things crowded in.
It’s not a coincidence that this later flourishing of new things coincides with the rise of streaming services and downloads, and more recently, and to my endless joy, with the revival of the record store (record shop, the teenaged me would have insisted). I can overlook the way the current generation seem to mangle the terminology (what on earth is a ‘vinyl’?) because the sheer joy of being able to go into a shop and flick through the new releases, and be transported back to The Other Record Shop as I decide whether or not I can afford this new album I’ve only vaguely heard about, but which looks like it would be right up my street.
I first heard In Absentia after flying back form Glasgow that day in 2009, but I first properly heard it when I bought my own vinyl copy. Even though it wasn’t recorded with the intention of being played on vinyl, that’s how it sounds best. To me, at least.
But is it Prog? Let’s find out.
I had no idea what to expect on first listen, so the spacey guitar line with sound effects shifting between speakers in no way prepared me for the kind of aural assault I hadn‘t heard since the days of listening to Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath albums. Blackest Eyes, of course, quickly settles into a more gentle, almost acoustic melody with a ridiculously catchy chorus about…
Well, it seems to be about a stalker or serial killer, or something. The lyric certainly reflects the duality of the musical approach; at once melodic and soothing before exploding with the sort of riff in weird time signatures which suddenly made me realise what I’d been missing all these years. Honestly, one track in, I was on board.
Which is, of course, appropriate, as the second track is Trains, which pulls off the same trick of being calm and melodic before opening out into a much wider and expansive soundscape, with some of the same riffs going, but there’s so much more to hear in this – there’s a plangent guitar solo, which seems to somehow migrate from electric to acoustic as it goes, and then some dense but gorgeous vocal harmonies and a second instrumental section with syncopated handclaps and what definitely sounds like a banjo before the chorus comes back in, heralding the return of the full band and the maddeningly catchy riff. Again, it’s not entirely clear what it’s about – it’s vaguely disturbing, but not something you can out your finger on, then the handclaps are buried under a fair approximation of a peal of church bells, and…
And we’re off into Lips of Ashes, which had a spaced-out guitar sound and a doubled vocal surrounded by reverberating effects which make the whole thing eerie and hard to pin down. It’s not the pop-inflected sound of the opening two tracks; it’s more of a soundscape with disturbing imagery than a verse-chorus-verse kind of song, but it also boasts a terrific guitar solo, and – look, let’s just get this out of the way, shall we – it’s most definitely Prog, although not in the way I remember it, which was much more about showing off and cramming as many instruments as possible in there.
Side two (sides are shorter these days, as everything is spread over two discs but only lasts about an hour) starts with The Sound of Muzak, which has a remarkable lopsided rhythm going on under a lush melody and a vocal about the cheapening and corporatizing of music. Right about here is when I thought “yup, they’re playing my tune”.
The song is deceptively straightforward in its blunt message, but in absolutely nothing else – Gavin Harrison’s drum track is impossible to air-drum along with, in the way that the best of Neil Peart’s were, and every time you think you’ve got a handle on this song, it shifts gear subtly, and dares you to follow along. If you want to know what’s wrong with the pre-packaged and soulless music of today at the same time as hearing what could be done about it, this is the song for you.
Gravity Eyelids is produced to sound lie it’s playing in a nearby room with the door shut, although the vocal is right there with you, almost sitting on your shoulder. Steven Wilson (of whom more later) has developed as a vocalist over the twenty years or so since this was recorded, but there’s something to be said for the way his voice here is pushing against the limits, almost falsetto in places – it lends a tension to the song which is entirely in keeping with its – again – unsettling lyrics. The scratchy aesthetic of the sound lasts until the instrumental break, when the guitars emerge into the same space as the voice and tear through the kind of break where the riff (and the laser gun sound effects) are more important than the actual solo, which seems to be happening quietly in the background.
Once out the other side, all the instruments start pulling together, and it’s now the voice which appears to be treated and less distinct. It’s a superb transition, and lends the song that most Prog of traits, an actual progression. It, of course, all fades back into the underground from whence it came, giving the impression that the band had been plugging away in that locked room this whole time.
Wedding Nails is the kind of instrumental wig-out which is hard to pull off unless you’re as talented as these four. Again, I find myself thinking of the later-period Rush instrumentals, which mined much the same seam, just for the joy of playing together and making as much noise as possible in shifting time signatures.
Since I don’t have lyrics to worry about, I’ll just take the opportunity of observing that I’m reviewing this only a couple of weeks after OK computer, and the inner sleeve design, with the reversed typewritten words, complete with crossing out are, well – unlike everything else on this album – a little derivative.
Or maybe it’s an homage.
Flipping over again, it’s another of those catchy melodies. This time, Prodigal hooks you with a narrative verse pulled along with two separate guitar lines – one which works as a kind of drone, and the other breaking in from time to time with a gentle riff illustrating as much as it is accompanying. There’s a chorus of sorts with more of those lush harmonies, an instrumental sort-of-middle-eight which threatens to break into a bridge section then unfurls a distorted solo before dropping us back into a verse section which has a single line designed to make you re-eveluate everything you’ve heard so far, and cast the narrator in a totally different light, befgore bursting out into the actual solo which had only been threatened before.
Sometimes in Porcupine Tree music, you get the feeling there are two songs going on at once. The end of Prodigal is one of those times for me.
Immediately we’re into .3 which is all about Colin Edwin’s sinuous and muscular bass line. It introduces us to the broken rhythm of the song and then refuses to settle back down into being part of the accompaniment; it stays there throughout, insistent and purposeful. It’s almost an instrumental, this, with sweeping strings (arranged by Dave Gregory, who we’ll be meeting again soon) and assorted noises off before it drops into a very distinctive Porcupine Tree acoustic guitar riff under the kind of lyric last heard in the early eighties nuclear paranoia. Never fear, though, here comes that bass again to return us to the feeling of being…
Well, of being unsettled and off-balance, to be honest. .3 is not a cheery singalong kind of track, to be honest, but that’s nothing compared to the industrial barrage of The Creator Has a Mastertape which bleeps and yowls over a treated, half-spoken kind of lyric which makes you think of strange, half-remembered experimental European movies you used to watch at one in the morning when you were a student.
Well, it does that to me, anyway. It’s absolutely riveting, but not for the faint of heart. It’s Prog, but it’s not exactly the way I remember it being. I can also report that it is the kind of song which makes you take corners too fast, and is not recommended for when you’re driving down narrow country lanes.
Heartattack in a Layby is a song about – well, have a guess. Appropriately reflective and mournful, it’s an existential crisis of a song, which is quite an achievement for something which namechecks Baldock.
Is there another song anywhere which mentions Baldock? It’s the kind of place which only Steven Wilson would think to set to music, I think, but if he’s referring to a specific lay-by (rest area for those non-Brits among you), then I’ve probably driven past it several times. It eventually turns into a kind of round, with the lyrics interweaving in a way designed to invoke a kind of out-of-body experience. It might also provoke one, under the right circumstances. Not to be listened ot in a lay-by east of Baldock, I’d suggest.
More muscular bass introduces Strip the Soul, which – look, if this is an album about anything, it’s about the sociopath and the serial killer, and while that’s not exactly the first thing you think of when dreaming up a concept, it gives the whole album a kind of ominous sense, which perhaps reaches its apogee in this song. Not for the first time, the protagonist hints at his ‘faulty wiring’, and there’s definitely a through line to a number of these songs which the music illustrates, being appropriately dark and menacing when needed, which in Strip the Soul is pretty much the whole time. It’s dense and dark, and thank goodness it’s not the last track on the album.
We do need to have something more hopeful to end on, and while I’m not convinced that Collapse the Light into Earth provides it lyrically, it certainly does the job musically. Starting from a simple piano line, it gradually fills in the spaces around the voice as it pleads for a little understanding and human company. I don’t think you can stretch the concept of this album to the point here each song is delivered by the same protagonist, and in fact, I’d go so far as to hope not, as the previous narrators have confessed to some things which can’t just be forgiven by a sumptuous melody and a full-figured string accompaniment.
But it’s a magnificent way to go out – this most remarkable album ending on an emotional and musical hope for redemption and acceptance which becomes almost spiritual in the end, as everyone seems to ascend out of sight, borne aloft on strings and harmonies, leaving only the dogged pianist behind to provide an anchor.
I’ve already alluded to the visual similarity between this and OK Computer; I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to suggest that the two albums had a similar effect on me – in both cases, I was fully immersed in the world of the band’s imagination, and in both cases, challenged to think again about music I thought I knew and understood. I may not have heard it until it was several years old, and established as perhaps the pinnacle (perhaps; see below), but it shook me out of my musical complacency, and everything which follows in this list is here because I took a punt on In Absentia.
I’m going to miss music magazines if they eventually go.
Any other albums by this artist to consider?
Several. I think, other than this, Deadwing is my favourite, but you should definitely also listen ot Fear of a Blank Planet. Delightfully, and somewhat surprisingly, there’s actually a new Porcupine Tree album, Closure / Continuation, which I recommend wholeheartedly. A hiatus of more than ten years doesn’t seemed to have done them any harm at all, and it’s a spectacular return to form.
Compilations to consider?
Now this is tricky. Porcupine Tree compilations emerge from time to time, but they are almost exclusively offcuts, b-sides and rarities. There isn’t any such thing as a full PT retrospective. As with most Prog bands, it’s probably best to dive in to the albums anyway.
Live albums?
All sorts of DVDs, and strange limited edition things exist. See below for the DVD recommendation, but there’s a live download-only album called Atlanta which behaves the way traditional live albums used to, and an actual album called Octane Twisted which is basically a live version of the The Incident album, but some versions of which include other tracks. I have a suspicion that there will be a live album following the Closure/Continuation tour later this year, though…
Anything else?
Well, if you wait a couple of weeks, I’ll have all sorts of Steven Wilson stuff to recommend, but in the meantime, I do recommend the Anesthetize live DVD, which is broadly a live rendition of the Fear of a Blank Planet album. There will be more in a couple of weeks, though – watch this space…
I ruled classical music out at the beginning of this process – and, to be clear, this isn’t classical music – but I also need to talk about the BBC Proms, and this album, which I haven’t listened to many times in the intervening years – allows me to do that.
I feel I had always been aware of the Proms; we certainly watched the Last Night every year when I was growing up, and it always seemed to me to mark the end of summer and the proper return to the drudgery of the school year. I knew other concerts were available – my dad would listen to them from time to time, especially if there was nothing on TV, but it wasn’t until I lived within commuting distance of London that I properly started to appreciate the scale and accessibility of the whole thing.
The idea that you could (and Covid seems to have changed this) simply walk up to the Albert Hall of an evening, queue for an hour or two depending on the popularity of that day’s offering, and for a pretty much negligible price, see some of the best orchestras and musicians from around the world was startling, and I started to avail myself of the opportunity some time in the mid-1990s.
I suspect it was after we moved to Watford – Tring was a fair trek in to London from a station some miles from the town (they thought it would be better to build the station near the railway line), but once we lived in a place where you could (with a change of train here and there, or a drive up to Watford Junction) be in central London in 30 minutes or so, it became a thing we – usually just me, in truth – were able to do several times a summer.
I saw some spectacular things in those years, and the experience forever changed the kind of music I listened to, and also the way I thought about concert-going. The barely-organised chaos I remembered from my younger days watching overloud bands in converted cinemas had gradually evolved into a kind of slick, vastly overpriced, corporate ‘event’ where you might or might not be able to see the band from the only seats you could afford and the front rows seemed to be populated by people who had no particular involvement with the music, but whose suppliers or clients wanted to entertain.
And then I was exposed to concerts by household names (well, in my household, anyway) featuring some of the greatest music ever written in an iconic venue for less than I used to pay to stand in a freezing cowshed out by Edinburgh airport to see the biggest bands of 20 years before. It was civilised (although not completely comfortable – it was usually too hot, and you do have to stand up all evening, sometimes packed into a huge crowd), and it was all audible, you could see the sweat dripping off the brow of the percussionists, and appreciate every nuance of the wildly famous conductor.
I loved my Prom-going, and it remains one of the things I miss most about the British summer.
However, not every Prom was an orchestra playing a symphony. Scattered around the fringes of the festival were other things – 20th century musicals, for example, or film scores; a children’s Prom each season, and the occasional and eclectic Late Night Prom, which – like the one I’m about to describe – were often jazz-related.
These weren’t terribly Late Night in truth, they would start around 9:30 as I recall, and be scheduled for about an hour. Having said that, I just dug out the programme for the one from Friday, August 3 2001, and it started at 10pm.
I don’t recall the whole story of that Friday night, but I know, because I have both programmes here, that I attended both Proms. The way that worked was that you queued up dutifully for the first Prom, eating your M&S sandwich on the pavement in Prince Consort Street, and were accosted by the queue wranglers who dished out raffle tickets to anyone who said they wanted to attend both concerts. On exiting the Hall after the first one, you took your place allotted by the raffle ticket in the second queue, and went through the process again, each time paying the astonishing price of £3 for the privilege.
The first concert was a mix of Joshua Bell playing Bernstein and Ravel’s Bolero; the second was jazz-flavoured, and was billed as the ‘Later…’ Prom, featuring Jools Holland, who has been presenting the ‘Later…’ programme since the early 1990s (I just checked; it’s still going strong.)
Jools Holland and his Orchestra was the main attraction for me that night; the other artists were Julian Joseph playing some jazz standards with an acoustic trio, and Nitin Sawhney doing I knew not what.
Julian Joseph I knew – I was at the time a Radio 3 listener, and he had a jazz programme on there I would occasionally catch snippets of; Nitin Sawhney I didn’t know at all.
If you can remember back that far, I already confessed to buying a great many albums by artists I was going to see live, regardless of quality – I just wanted to be at least passingly familiar with the music before hearing it live, and the same thing applied here. Two of the three acts would be performing songs I knew, or was at least passingly familiar with; the third was an unknown quantity, and rather than discover it all as it was played to me, I decided to revisit my youth and hear some of it beforehand.
I went out and bought the CD of Prophesy a couple of weeks before, and played it until I was familiar with the songs. It was – and is – quite unlike anything else I was listening to, and came from a place I was unfamiliar with, but I put it straight on this list as I was drawing it up, and I have no doubts it deserves to be here, even if I haven’t heard it in many years now – I no longer have the CD, which puts me at a slight disadvantage, as I don’t know who any of the musicians and singers are, beyond Sawhney himself, and I will be guessing at some of this, I’m afraid. It’s a good exercise in pushing my boundaries, though, and I’m looking forward to rediscovering it.
That Late Night Prom over-ran that evening; I remember slipping out at around the time of the encores to race back to South Kensington station, so I wouldn’t miss my last train back to Watford, but I do remember it fondly; Late Night Proms were special, and had a relaxed atmosphere all their own. I wonder if they still do?
The album isn’t on Spotify, so I’m recreating it thanks to a YouTube playlist, giving me visuals as well as audio. I’ll try not to be distracted by them, and just listen.
The album starts in a space I recognised from the likes of Massive Attack or Soul II Soul, radio staples of the previous ten years. It’s a chilled dance beat with a delightful female voice, who I can’t identify, and all purrs along in a fairly predictable way until the appearance of a rapped section in a language which some digging suggests is Bengali – it’s entrancing and engaging, and I’m immediately reminded why I liked this album so much.
Nothing has a lo-fi feel over it’s tricky beat, with a soothing vocal probably by the song’s writer, Tina Grace. It does sound of its time, reminding me of the spaced-out songs I’d sometimes hear on the radio in the evenings, but it doesn’t grab me the way the previous track did; it’s soothing deapite its somewhat nihilistic lyric, but no more than that.
I do remember Acquired Dreams, however. It’s much harder to pin down, featuring electronic beats and traditional Indian instruments in a mainly instrumental soundscape which dances from speaker to speaker, bringing in lush string sections here, and a repeated vocal line which may or may not mean something; it certainly sounds at once modern and rooted in an ancient tradition. It’s really hard to pick apart the influences and traditions these sounds are coming from, which I suspect is part of the point; it’s intentionally a mashup of whatever sounds good together, without particular emphasis being given to any one part of it – there are clear jazz elements, but just as many rooted in traditions I have no experience with at all. Comfortably my favourite of the first three tracks, it’s uplifting and inspiring.
It fades out with flute sounds drifting into a reprise / early draft of Nothing, called Nothing More, which revisits the earlier track with just voice and sparse acoustic guitar over a background of waves crashing on a beach. It acts as a coda and – perhaps – a bit of a recontextualization of the earlier version, sounding more hopeful and relaxed.
Moonrise is sung in a mixture of Portuguese (I assume Brazilian Portuguese) and Rai, the Algerian folk music sung in Arabic. The mix is startlingly effective, and the musical underpinnings – save for the spectacular classical guitar – are simple, designed to direct attention to the words. It makes absolutely no difference that I don’t understand any of them; it’s a powerful statement of fusion and unity; actual World Music in a time when that was a label used to shift more units.
The next track, Street Guru (Part 1), starts with a field recording (echoes of the last post here) of what I’m led to believe is a Chicago taxi driver, of which the key line is ‘technology has made us slaves of the time’. The same technology which makes music like this possible is also enslaving us. This is more than 20 years ago; I’m still waiting for the promised ‘backlash against technology’.
The Preacher appears to be the heart of the album; it talks about ‘the Seal of Prophecy’, and features a vocal from Terry Callier, full of blues and the heartfelt soulful folk music he made his own. Again, the arrangement is sparse, eventually fading out altogether to let Callier’s words sink in. It’s a simple song of joy and hope.
The introduction to Breathing Light is a war report from the frontline of the Bosnian conflict in Sarajevo, followed by a glorious piano line, a stuttering drumbeat, more flute, and the words of Nelson Mandela, proclaiming us ‘free to be free’. The juxtaposition of the two spoken word parts is – as so often on this beguiling album – startling and provocative. It is, of course, very much of its time; the reference points are from the tumultuous and – I think – hopeful post nineties point of view; this album was released before the September of 2001 changed so much about the world, it retains an optimism and general sense of hope which I don’t think we see too often in the following few years.
It fades directly into Developed, which runs the risk of me getting into a lengthy political rant. It’s a spoken word piece from an Australian aboriginal, and let me just say this – from the perspective of a white person who has come to live on traditional lands of people who were here for tens of thousands of years before I showed up – he’s dead right.
It moves directly into an acapella children’s choir singing in one of the South African languages – my research suggests it is Zulu, but I’m prepared to be corrected on that. It’s a magnificent transition, away from the beats and synthesised sounds of the rest of the album, to the simple power and beauty of the human voice. It’s called Footsteps, and it ties us in to the next track, Walkaway, which develops the theme of the footsteps in what begins in the Western idiom, but which reaches out to all the sounds of the world as it takes us on its journey – none of them are more than hints and illustrations, but they underline the point of this album, folding Martin Luther King and Malcolm X into the mix under some Indian strings. It’s quite the journey, this album, and while I don’t feel remotely qualified to deconstruct it, I certainly know how to react to it.
Street Guru (Part 2) picks up the conversation from the first part, initially with a snippet of song which could be coming from the taxi’s radio, which finds its previous beat again, until the question ‘What’s going on; we can’t use our brains?’ shuts it down instantly.
I’ve looked up and discovered that the playlist doesn’t include a track called Cold and Intimate – all I have are the lyrics. Once I’m through the rest of this, I’ll go digging for it; it’ll appear out of sequence, if it appears at all.
That short interruption is probably what I needed to prepare me for Ripping Out Tears, which is an angry, guitar-driven rap. It references Columbine, but is otherwise ripped from today’s headlines. Has nothing changed in the 21 years since this was recorded? It’s a long way from Mandela’s hopeful words, and the clear, joyous sound of the Zulu choir. I don’t know who the rapper is, but she’s rightfully angry. I’m not a hip-hop kind of person (you probably noticed), but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate and understand exactly what’s going on here.
Seriously, 21 years?
We move from the rapped Prophecy to the final statement of – well, what exactly? We’ve heard from all kinds of people all around the world and their views on what the future holds; this is the closing statement of Nitin Sawhney, and it is stepped in all the traditions we’ve been visiting along this spectacular journey – there are traditional Indian instruments, Western-sounding vocal harmonies, and Arabic-sounding melodies, all set over a beat which accelerates constantly until we’re all hanging on for dear life as it swoops and soars to a spectacular end where everything drops out, leaving us with only the voices, seemingly still seeking answers, only fitting for this most eclectic and thought-provoking album.
I don’t know why it fell out of favour in my collection to the point where I don’t own a physical copy any more. I’m also more than a little disappointed that it’s not available anywhere to stream, but I shall go and seek out a new copy, because I need to spend a lot more time with this music.
Like I said, I’m not exactly equipped to comment on it on more than a basic level of noting its impact on me, but I can report that it’s quite the impact – it’s a tremendous album, and I wish I’d spent more time with it, and exploring Sawhney’s work all these years. There’s still time, though.
Postscript – I did track down a video for Cold and Intimate,it’s back in that ‘Massive Attack’ soundscape from the beginning of the album. Again, I don’t know who the singer is, but it fits right in here, providing a bridge which makes the transition toRipping Out Tears seem a little less jarring.
Any other albums by this artist to consider?
A great many, I should think. I’ll let you know when I dig some out.
Compilations to consider?
I don’t see any, but perhaps this might be the appropriate place to try out one of those Spotify ‘This Is..’ playlists. That’s what I’ll be doing.
Live albums?
There’s an album called Live at Ronnie Scott’s, which I’ll be checking out, too.
Anything else?
Film soundtracks. I’ve seen the ‘live action’ Mowgli, and therefore I have heard his soundtrack for that. Again, I’ll be revisiting that – after all, I’ll have some space in my schedule in a few weeks.