I missed her live show in New York recently but I've been psyched to absorb Kelly Moran's new album, Don't Trust Mirrors. Incredibly talented and bursting with creativity, she's a musician constantly on the move. She is a classically trained piano player but her use of electronics is what usually draws me in, lush but not cliched. She works quite a bit with the Yamaha Disklavier, basically a real acoustic piano hooked up with all sorts of electronics (kind of the mirror image of a synthesizer trying to sound like an acoustic piano). In this recent interview, she explains her process and her debt to the late great Ryuichi Sakamoto, once part of the Yellow Magic Orchestra, but most well-known as the creator of the score for The Last Emperor for which he won an Academy Award.
And like only a handful of artists, she is on the right side of history on one of the most important issues of our day.
I don't know much about this band Caroline, except that they are from Great Britain. They seem to have a lot of people in the band, like 6 or 7 or 8 people of both sexes. They all sort of do stuff. To me, they seem to evoke the vibe of my beloved and long-gone band, the Books, a band about whom I have much to say but have not said a single word on this blog. Truly loved them. In any case, Caroline is sort of indie rockish, sort of glitchtronic, sort of fucked up, sort of shambolic (the drums literally never match up with the beat) but also about joy. Yeah, JOY. They are not a band of sad sacks. I love that. Anyway, this is one of my favorite tracks of the year, a broken, stilted, fucked up track of beauty. Oh, and if you want to read more about Caroline, see here and here.
I was a whipper-snapper graduate student in Pittsburgh when I first heard this, sometime in the year 2000. The album came out in May of that year (in the U.S.) and it soundtracked that summer for me. An abrasive turn from Primal Scream, XTRMNTR appealed to me first and foremost because the opening track was called "Kill All Hippies," the idea of which seemed cool to me at the time. Not sure if "kill all hippies" means anything remotely interesting in 2025 but it sure meant something in 2000. I also liked that Primal Scream abandoned (well, paused) their sex-and-drugs-and-party thing to pay attention to the real world for a bit:
"You got the money / I got the soul."
Also, special treat, Kevin Shields showed up out of the blue, reminding us exactly why he was the loudest guitar player in the world, even though we had not heard a peep out of him for years. Shields played guitar on "Shoot Speed / Kill Light" (and also produced it), surely the most thunderous metronome-beat song with a wall-of-electric guitars to pummel you into submission in the year 2000.
Also, did you know lead singer Bobby Gillespie played drums on Psychocandy?
My favorite Colourbox song (and probably most people's) is this, "Hot Doggie," the opening track on the compilation (remember those?) album Lonely Is An Eyesore, released by the 4AD label in 1987. An early adopter of using samples to construct songs (instead of using samples to just embellish songs), Colourbox alas, lasted for a very short period of time, from 1982 to 1987.
I guess most people would be familiar with Colourbox, not from one of their own tracks but as part of the collaboration known as M|A|R|R|S, a brief coming together between Colourbox and the great British duo, A. R. Kane, that produced "Pump Up The Volume" in 1987.
They had a whole bunch of (non-album) singles but only one proper album, self-titled, released in 1985.
Still, nothing beats "Hot Doggie": fantastic placement of samples, the build-up to release, the various call-backs during the song to stuff that happened previously, and relentless bass drum-and-snare four-on-the-floor synthetic beat.
Released in April 1960. Apparently written solely by Don Everly. Also, the drums, played by Buddy Harman, were apparently looped (!) and double-tracked, although the song was recorded completely live in one take. So not sure how that was possible. Harman played on a boat-load of Elvis tracks too. Also, Patsy Cline and Roy Orbison. But most incredibly, he played on Ween's 12 Golden Country Greats (1996), although it's not clear on which song.
I stumbled on to this guided by some lines of code on the internet -- it's quite mesmerizing. Of course, the piano playing by Nicky Hopkins is pretty, but really it's the chords sequence too -- shifting from plateau to plateau in the verses until the choruses drop you into the valley. Gorgeous stuff.
Lennon's original 1968 solo demo (when it was titled 'Child of Nature') here.
This is amazing footage of a rehearsal of the best song off of Hole's Live Through This. To see the band, especially the late great Kristen Pfaff, in such an intimate setting is wild. It's a bit ragged, but the jewel at the heart of this utterly fucking great song is right there, propelled by Kristen's tender but propulsive bass guitar.
What a loss. Not so well-known in the U.S., Steve Harley was a modest
sized rock star in the UK in the early to mid-1970s, principally
through a number 1 hit song, "Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)" which I
fondly remember from my childhood. A lovely acoustic ditty tinged with a
hint of his snarly cockney affectation,with bits of Dylanese sprinkled
in, it was everywhere in the 1975 and covered a million times by more
contemporary people, including Duran Duran and Erasure. The song was
billed under Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel.
But if you dug deeper, you might have stumbled upon a pair of his early '70s albums, billed under Cockney Rebel, The Human Menagerie (1973) and Psychomodo
(1974) which were the bastard child of Johnny Rotten (still to burst into the world of pop)
and David Bowie. I think Steve Harley had aspirations to make a grand
statement of an album like Sgt. Pepper but the ones he did
release still stand up as full-on attempts to produce a truly 1970s
album, one denuded of any hints that the '60s happened at all. There's
the obvious androgyny and glamness of it all, a hat tipoff to decadence
and self-gratification, the full-on unapologetic cadence of his working
class English accent, and of course, that sneer, half Dylan and half
Bowie and half still-to-be-created Johnny Rotten. Yes, three halves is
what makes Cockney Rebel slightly off-kilter, not really fitting into
anything, a bit off the rails, a true anomaly in the history of '70s
pop. Oh, one more thing, at least on his early albums, Harley sought to
disavow the guitar completely (too '60s), and so the sound becomes
something both baroque pop and almost proggy.
My favorite track off The Human Menagerie
is this, "Mirror Freak," a tour de force of sexy imagery and
decadent descent into debauchery, the drums cracking like broken elbow
bones. I guarantee there was nothing like this in 1973, no, not even
Bowie.
The sweet spot of my nostalgia is really the '90s, or more to the
point, something like 1988 to about 1999. In that period, I aged from 23
to 33, and that sounds about right in terms of how nostalgia fixes
itself onto one's twenties. My failing, if I can call it that, was that
even as I was experiencing it, I felt a sense of nostalgia about what I
was experiencing, something described once by Fredric Jameson as 'nostalgia for the present.' Ever since I was a young boy, I've had an acute sense
of the passing of time, that its inexorable,
unstoppable, and irreversible qualities gave it a particular bittersweet taste; a kind of big tragedy, perhaps even a farce in the grand
vista of life. I'm not sure I had the words to describe this feeling
at the time but I remember feeling aware of 'The Past' as an
object of lament and loss, even when I was about ten or eleven. I
have a memory of reading Neil Young's quote in Decade's liner notes (supposedly from
Bob Dylan): "Now that the past is gone," which seemed to distill all those tensions into a pithy quote.
I don't have any particular memory of
the Sundays' "Here's Where the Story Ends" but I do definitely remember
listening to it in 1990. The music gently evoked the Smiths but not in
any kind of gratuitous way but rather more as homage and affectation.
That year, especially, was a year of confusion for me. I wouldn't say
turmoil (which was 1991) but still not stable. My academic future was in
doubt, my girlfriend was interested in others, and I did a lot of
drugs. But I did have a very active social life with people whose names
I've mostly forgotten. And I absorbed a galaxy worth of new music from
every corner of the universe. But even then, the Sundays' track seemed
to perfectly soundtrack the feeling that something was ending (as it
was) and that "a terrible year" was either just gone, or happening, or
around the corner.
I'm sure the fact that the voice was a woman's
was an important factor - a waif-like English woman who seemed to inhabit a landscape produced by a Cure-damaged sensibility. In other words, someone, if she was real, I might have had a crush on, or at least been interested to talk to at a party.
Don't know why but am enjoying this. Distinctly remember walking somewhere in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2004 or so, listening to this blasting on my headphones. Sort of a motley combination of Led Zeppelin's version of "Travelin' Riverside Blues" and the Stooges "Down on the Street" or something.
Music like this seems particularly cringe these days. And honestly, I never listen to this kind of shit at all. But sometimes, just sometimes, you want to hear the knockoff, the pastiche, rather than the original. There must be a German word for when you prefer the imitation of the imitation to the original. Also, let no one say that Jack White cannot play guitar. One a good day, he's probably as good as Jack Black. He may not be as good as Meg White is a drummer but he can indeed hold his own.
