Just Played - On The Record #2
The difficult second email - just don't use the word sophomore
I briefly mentioned the Dave Rowntree album last week, but it needs your full attention. I don’t really know what I was expecting from it but it has taken me by surprise. There are hints of Damon and Graham’s solo work on there and opener ‘Devil’s Island’ has more than a hint of Gorillaz to it. At times, Rowntree’s vocal sounds quite like Coxon, as here on ‘Downtown’.
What’s also worth pointing out is how quickly it establishes a connection. The first play suggested it had its moments, but it is growing on me fast. The Diamond Black pressing isn’t as quiet as I’d like, but the cut is decent. The curious decision to close with an orchestral instrumental - with nods to Max Richter - is something of a twist. Honestly, whatever your preconceptions, just give it a listen.
It’s a strange quirk of the current vinyl landscape that metaphorical flares go up whenever popular back catalogue titles come back in stock. The lovely folk at Spillers Records in Cardiff tend to tweet whenever vintage titles return to the racks and there was much fuss from many on social media last week about a repress for Blur’s ‘13’ and ‘Think Tank’. At £40, they’re double the outlay when originally remastered in 2012. It looks like the rest of their discography is on the way back too, no doubt influenced by the extra interest following the announcement of the summer dates. Warner pricing aside, it’s good news that people can once again acquire these excellent cuts of significant albums. It does make you wonder a little, though, about how catalogues are handled these days, even allowing for production delays.
The magic of the megastores of yesteryear was largely conjured by the comprehensive nature of the artist alphabetical sections, allowing you to flick through CDs that covered the majority of a career in one go. Rummage in an HMV these days and, once you’ve fought your way past thousands of Funko Pops and racks of sweets, you’ll struggle to find many bands whose releases are all sitting there ready for you to excitedly carry to the till. Naturally, this is partly down to supply and demand right now, but it still strikes me as odd that the period of resurgence for the format wasn’t used as a way to ensure people were buying up all of their favourite albums on the most inconvenient and expensive medium available.
Sure, vinyl parts can only be used so many times and fresh cuts cost money, but it is surely ridiculous that the capacity to acquire certain albums can be so utterly arbitrary when standard reissues of them could keep everything ticking over. Don’t believe me? Then why do shops make such a fuss every time one of those desirable classics gets delivered to them? Sure, a zoetrope edition or splatter pressing might keep first week sales high on new releases but, when you look at the raft of online sales that keep popping up, how many classics are in there? Perhaps the RSD pressing capacity could be better used providing those exact same shops with boxes and boxes of £25 copies of otherwise scarce catalogue corkers.
A thought without a title
Seamless, involuntary earworm transitions are fun, aren’t they? I keep running the “Will you ever return me, just like Frankie Fontaine?” bit of the Super Furry Animals’ ‘Hometown Unicorn’ into the Sugababes’ ‘About You Now’ at the “I know everything changes, all the cities and faces” part. Can’t shake it from my head. It does make you realise just how many thousands of melodies are running around in there, occasionally bubbling to the surface. How songwriters sift through that and find the new ones is quite the trick, but almost as fascinating is how the tiniest moment of a song can fire up the mental jukebox and cue up eight bars of something or other you haven’t listened to in years. I haven’t arrived at some great philosophical observation here, it’s just playing on my mind - as it were. Given how good both songs are, it seemed a good excuse to include them here.
Misc-Cogs
Did you know that the Discogs app has a neat feature for the indecisive mind? When on the collection tab, give your phone a shake and it’ll select something at random from your library. Each week, I’ll flex my wrist and see which disc comes up. No censoring - if it’s Eternal’s ‘Always and Forever’, I’ll give you my thoughts on it. The first one was John Martyn’s ‘Solid Air’, which you can read here.
Ah, Lone Wolf, the temporary stage name of Paul Marshall. His debut under the moniker he came to hate, ‘The Devil and I’, was released by Bella Union at a time when I used to receive almost every one of their releases in an aesthetically pleasing series of promo CDs. It immediately stood out as something special but Marshall found the ‘folk’ tag that came with it rather unhelpful. It certainly fitted into a musical landscape full of luscious records by Midlake and John Grant and was a favourite of mine that year, capped by a very strong set at 2010’s Green Man several months after it had hit the shops.
By the time 2012’s ‘The Lovers’ came around, he’d left the label and self-released via PledgeMusic, back in the days when that meant the artist got the money and the customers got the goods. It’s a fascinating record and, as I wrote at the time, ‘Butterfly‘ possesses a chorus which sounds like a witching hour play of the Sugababes’ ‘Hole In The Head‘ at the wrong speed. And then there’s ‘Two Good Lives’, a beautifully sad tale of the head and heart parting ways. It perfectly highlights Marshall’s superb vocals and also the synth-flecked style he was pursuing.
It was that approach which he finessed for the final record of this chapter of his career, ‘Lodge’, in 2015. Prompted to make one more set as Lone Wolf by the news that his favoured studio was soon to close, he poured everything into eleven tracks on which he played all the instruments. Veering nearer to the latter years of Talk Talk than ever before, with further nods to Jason Molina’s brilliance, it seemed to occupy its own little world in that musical landscape. There’s every chance you’ve never heard this record but I suspect, on these bleak wintery days especially, it has the capacity to make some fresh connections. I hadn’t listened to this in ages and it was a pleasant surprise when it came up at random for this feature. It also sent me back to an interview I did with him around release for Clash. The full version is appended to this piece from my site. I’d love to know what you think of this, should you give it a chance, as I’ve greatly enjoyed being reminded how striking it is.
First Look
Fancy a quick glance at the new Steven Wilson curated box set from Demon, ‘Intrigue’, pressed at Pallas? Ah, go on then.
Oh, The Pale Fountains titles coming from Proper this Friday too? Why not? For (some) comparison, ‘…From Across The Kitchen Table’ is pictured next to my NM copy of the 1985 reissue which quickly dispensed with the fold-back sleeve. This new edition is modelled on the original, including the inner labels. I don’t have an early edition of ‘Pacific Street’, but you can have a look at the new one here. Note the tell-tale signs of a GZ sleeve on the outer-edge, where the remains of perforation can be spotted.
Something for the ‘read all the way to the end’ folk:
Anyone that has read my words for some time will already be well aware of Georgia Ruth but those who have arrived more recently deserve to be invited into this particular club too. Firstly, Bubblewrap Records are soon to release a 2LP edition of her bewitching debut, ‘Week Of Pines’. It was my album of 2013 and you can read my thoughts on it over here. More recently, they also released her superb ‘Kingfisher EP’ and the vinyl pressing has landed this week. Her sound never stands still and the journey from the 2011 EP ‘In Luna’ (try ‘Bones’ - it’s stunning) to this latest extended player is substantial. The electronic tinges and soundstage of several of these songs mark an evolution that suggests the next full album will one to make a fuss about. (Like the previous ones, to be fair).
Anyway, have a listen to this and then head here to buy it.