Just Played - On The Record #5
Picking up greasy fingerprints on the centre label since January 2023
How many bands make one of their best albums thirty-seven years after releasing their first? Things have been a little less frequent and rather more sedate in the world of Yo La Tengo in recent times, but if you’ve been asking yourself whether or not you really need another of their albums then the answer is very much yes. ‘This Stupid World’ is magnificent. It is both immediately, obviously excellent and also very clearly capable of growing on you, revealing so much more over time. Motorik rhythms, fuzzy textures and Georgia Hubley’s distinctive voice all fuse together to form a visceral, hypnotic and energising record.
It flies by, compels you to put it straight back on when it finishes and incites ever-increasing volumes. It’s Stereolab, the Velvets, Can, Radiohead, The Beta Band, Blueboy and, of course, Yo La Tengo. It’s your record collection chewed up, adored, nurtured and delivered with an urgency that seems to be about escaping recent times. Whether on a huge pair of speakers or clamped to the side of your head, this album delivers - trust me, I’ve tried both. The dynamics are there on the superlative Optimal pressing, but just be sure to listen to it wherever, whenever you can.
And as if that wasn’t enough, this week also marked the return of Maps. James Chapman has been trading under that name since the mid-Noughties, releasing out-and-out classic ‘We Can Create’ in 2007. Each of the albums since are well worth exploring and the latest is no different. Moving away from the vocal sound of old, ‘Counter Melodies’ is a sparkling, astral explosion, as glittering and stirring as anything he has ever done. It works best in its entirety, but here’s a taste if you’re wondering whether to dabble.
While I think of it…
This little venture is growing rather nicely but I’d appreciate your help this week. If you can think of a record collector, crate digger or vinyl lover in your life that might not already know about this, I’d greatly appreciate you literally or metaphorically popping it under their nose. All the buttons at the bottom as usual, but here’s an extra one in case you want to do it now. Thank you kindly.
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 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’, followed by Lone Wolf’s superb ‘Lodge’, Kylie’s ‘Infinite Disco’ and - last week - Steve Mason’s ‘Boys Outside’.
I remember the mixture of delight and mild anxiety when a reissue of the whole of The Cardigans’ catalogue was announced. These albums that so many of us had wanted on vinyl for so long were finally being done, but would they be mastered well and where would they be pressed? They wouldn’t be getting done again anytime soon, so we were at the mercy of the vinyl gods Universal’s manufacturing department. The good news came with the choice of Joe Nino-Hernes at Sterling Sound for the cuts. These have wide soundstages with excellent control of the all-important bottom end, especially on this particular album, ‘Gran Turismo’. GZ took, ahem, care of the production and a degree of roulette kicked in at this point. After a few exchanges, I arrived at a workable set with only minimal surface noise, but I won’t pretend I’m not still slightly gutted at not having a pristine copy of 2002’s undeniable masterpiece ‘Long Gone Before Daylight’.
Anyway, the music. And THAT voice. Good lord, Nina Persson belongs to that select group of artists whose sound is quite unmistakably them. She recently collaborated with James Yorkston on 'The Great White Sea Eagle’, an album I also heartily recommend, and the return of her singing to a new release was genuinely rather moving. The journey from the relatively lightweight early jangle of ‘Emmerdale’ to the apocalyptic atmospherics of ‘Gran Turismo’ took only four years. And, I have to say, I wasn’t totally convinced when this album originally came out. I didn’t really warm to ‘My Favourite Game’, but appreciated the glacial majesty of ‘Erase/Rewind’.
I became more fond once I returned to their catalogue as a whole, following the realisation that ‘Long Gone Before Daylight’ was going on my ‘favourite albums of all time’ list. However, the real breakthrough came with the vinyl reissue. The aforementioned enormo-sonics projected all of the nuances and delicate production decisions out into the room in the way a late-Nineties CD mastering on a less than superb system simply couldn’t. Listen to the vocal on ‘Explode’, let the scuzzy drum sound of ‘Hanging Around’ wash over you and sit perfectly in the middle of the stereo effects on ‘Marvel Hill’. It’s not their best record - I think it’s clear what I reckon that is by now - but it’s very, very good and really hasn’t dated, a quarter of a century on from when it first appeared.
Keeping it OG
I’m grimly fascinated and occasionally entertained by the enclave of YouTube where middle-aged men unbox records and talk in sweeping generalisations about whole catalogues, production processes or even labels. Presumably, I’ve been recommended these because the trusty algorithm has landed in the right ballpark, and I find it especially amazing just how often one of these vaguely grown up iterations of show and tell is delivered in a funereal monotone. Are they filmed under duress? Is there some sort of content farm forcing the people who used to quietly, contentedly fart in the middle of the HMV sale to now feign excitement about multi-disc box sets that they’ll play once in front of an expensive auto-focusing camera? Each to their own, of course, but I started to see more after becoming interested in the reaction from the audiophile community to last year’s Mobile Fidelity revelations.
As I’ve tried to convey in my monthly Clash columns, trust your ears over everything else. Hype stickers can tell me the weight of the discs or find semantic loopholes to imply one source while actually using another but all I really care about is whether something sounds good enough that I’ll want to play it again. If you’ve spent a long time wanging on about the superiority of analogue sources, citing MoFi releases to support your unnecessary absolutism, then finding out many had a digital step may well have unleashed an almighty torrent of cognitive dissonance. As logic would suggest, some of their releases sounded better than others as there are always so many variables in play around the production of a recording. Some of their Elvis Costello titles were great but others lacked attack. Some felt the Miles Davis releases were too forensic. In short, trust your ears.
For some, this perceived betrayal has seen a pivot to the sanctity of the original pressing. Built, one imagines, on the belief that this will be the closest to the artist’s intentions, it seems a sweeping corrective to the occasional elitism around constructing a collection of highly priced reissues. As any record collector knows, getting a NM copy of something released forty or fifty years ago is harder than it might seem, not least because of the fevered cheese dreams that precede the listing of items by many Discogs sellers. Those with very deep pockets have taken the ‘hot-stamper’ route, while the more conventionally rich have gone for over-priced marketplace items in the quest for perfection. And, hey, whatever makes you happy that is within your means, but it does feel like this near binary logic is trying to do to vinyl what has already been done to much social discourse online.
A £300 original copy may very well sound better than a £25 reissue but, especially since writing the column, my feeling has always been that a really good £25 reissue will be a hell of a result for the vast majority of listeners who are simply never going to shell out for that costly first press. If you’re getting into Sandy Denny’s beautiful music, the Proper reissue of ‘Like An Old Fashioned Waltz’, with replica flimsy gatefold, labels and inner, is a much safer better than trying to find a gleaming and perfectly quiet original. Not only that but the digitally sourced vinyl master sounds pretty splendid to me. Then there’s the Blue Notes - both Classic and Tone Poet are all-analogue cuts - which vary in price but often come in way below the fee for sixty-year old pressings.
But it’s even less clear than that. Take the Blur reissue campaign from 2012 that’s currently being re-pressed ahead of their latest reunion. I thought ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’ and ‘The Great Escape’ particularly benefitted from the expansion to two discs and Frank Arkwright’s mastering. But ‘Blur’ couldn’t hold a candle to a 1997 2LP. It was warmer - I know, I know - and more open to me and I found myself surprised by how much it struck me as superior. And that’s within one band’s catalogue being done at the same time.
The sense that there’s always something better out there can hang over the construction of a record collection and it really needn’t. If you’re happy with what you have, then that’s job done. Your playback equipment will often make a bigger difference than whether something is a 1974 first press or a 1976 budget edition. Reissues are not automatically inferior and, not only that, they can sometimes offer more, particularly when we’re talking about music from the last thirty years or so. I truly hope that the Clash pieces feel like they’re on the side of the consumer, as I’m trying to boil it down to whether or not the titles I’m reviewing sound any good and if they are deserving of your cash. As I find each month, all I can do is trust my ears.
First Look
Demon Music Group are soon to release a 4CD bookset that covers the first three albums by Mull Historical Society, the memorable stage name used by Colin MacIntyre. It adds in b-sides, bonus bits and rarities for the completist. Alongside this, that core trio of releases is getting a fresh vinyl outing. While ‘Loss’ and ‘Us’ had been on the format previously, ‘This Is Hope’ is making its 12 inch debut after nineteen years. Wisely, the original artwork has been dispatched and you can explore the interior and exterior of the package below. All titles are available from Friday 24th February.
One Little Independent have a rather charming folk project on the way in early March. More on that in due course but, for now, here’s a tantalising early look at Hack-Poets Guild’s record ‘Blackletter Garland’. It’s the debut release for a collaboration from Marry Waterson, Lisa Knapp and Nathaniel Mann.
Something for the ‘read all the way to the end’ folk
Dungen successfully passed me by for some time, so I figured they were a good choice for this particular section. I completely missed the album that many consider to be their masterwork, 2004’s ‘Ta Det Lugnt’, and it was more than a decade later when I finally paid attention to a new release email from the lovely people at Drift in Totnes. 2015’s ‘Allas Sak’ is a very difficult album to describe. It’s sort of jazz-prog-fuzz-garage-psych-electro. And they’re Swedish. If you haven’t heard it previously, you want to now, right?
‘Franks Kaktus’ builds up and drops down several times, bongos and flute rampaging around flurries of acoustic guitar like some sort of early Seventies obscurity you might catch Gilles Peterson raving wildly about one wet Saturday afternoon on 6 Music. It is flat out brilliant and if you need a way in to this record, that should be it.
‘En Gång Om Året’ offers a different path, kicking off with reverb-drenched backing vocals as Gustav Estes’s lead seems to fracture into ascending pieces. The drumming across all of ‘Allas Sak’ is noteworthy and there are some belting drum fills on this particular track. It brings to mind the glorious Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve remix of Midlake’s ‘Roscoe’. ‘Sister Festen‘, meanwhile, is immediately jubilant despite my having literally no idea what Estes is saying at any point on it. Even the percussion seems jolly.
It often feels like you’re in the studio with them, the immersive rhythms and rather magnificent soundstage consuming the space in the room. It’s an uplifting, riotous record that suits all moods, having endured since its initial allure. The guitar work on ‘En Dag På Sjön’ soars as the rhythm section seems to scatter around excitedly beneath it. The sense of eavesdropping on some sort of all-consuming frenetic jam is hypnotic, the exuberance of the musicians passing through the speakers.
Having opened with its title track, which sounds like two excellent songs playing at once, the eight and a half minutes of ‘Sova’ ensure that the multiple personalities present on ‘Allas Sak’ combine at its close. A gradually escalating indie-psych track collapses into a sprawling, noodling drone piece. It’s a suitably odd way to end a bizarrely brilliant album.
A trip to Brighton in the autumn included a visit to Resident, where I happened upon 2022 release ‘En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog’. I’d somehow dropped the ball again, but I was very glad to be reacquainted. Hopefully you’ll enjoy their company too.
Hey Gareth ... I'm really onboard with your "trust your ears" mantra but sadly I feel this is leading me down the path of falling out of love with vinyl. Buying both used and new vinyl seeming sets me up for endless disappointment with the quality of pressings. I'm not a first press junkie on the used releases. I do like to have something "early" but as is well known, a clean looking platter can be a crackly mess when you get it on the turntable. Similarly new material seems to also be a lottery. Yes, I know I can return everything but the hassle just eats into time I should be using to enjoy the actual music. I'm finding myself drifting back into digital with tracking down early un-remixed, un-remastered content still having a fun element. My small vinyl collection currently almost fills two of the 4x4 Kallax but I don't see me really adding to it much more moving forward. Don't worry ... I'm still going to read your posts !
Great as ever, but forgive me for struggling to understand the Blur section; are you saying that the 2012 remaster of Blur is better or not as good as the 1997 original? I think the latter, but you refer to the '97 version as a 2LP when I think it was just a single record? Am I just misreading?