Galaxie 500

“Until the futurist Filippo Marinetti began talking about speeding up rivers, ‘the Danube had never seemed so deliciously slow’. Peering back through history, we see scenes in a kind of slow motion that did not exist then. We have invented it.”
from Faster: The Acceleration Of Just About Everything, by James Gleick

Looking back at Galaxie 500 through the simulacrum of the double DVD set, Don’t Let Our Youth Go To Waste 1987-91, the Boston trio prove themselves as one of those few bands who could stop the clocks and make the world stand still. A band who, as we know on the Fourth Of July, looked at the Empire State Building and saw that it was no bigger than a nickel.

They recorded their albums quickly, keeping in all the mistakes, and in the dizzying, buzzing live performances captured here they imposed their own beguiling and bewildering order on the world.

They were simultaneously lugubrious and writhing joyfully in cavernous noise; an especially rare expression of the avant-garde that you want to embrace and be part of (see also: Roxy Music in 72 and the Velvet Underground whenever they took off their shades).

The two unreleased tracks don’t add much to the sum of knowledge, as one’s another Jonathan Richman cover (Back In Your Life) and the other, Buzz In My Head, is a little too close to JoJo’s Abdul and Cleopatra to properly have that ghostly atmosphere and epic paranoia that would truly mark it out as a Galaxie 500 classic.

I mention all of this because the DVD - 4 (four!) hours long -is being sold for the very reasonable price of £7.95.

Just don't you all snap them up before I buy one for my mate's birthday. Thanks.

DISC 1:MUSIC VIDEOS - 4 music videos directed by Sergio Huidor-Tugboat-When Will You Come Home-Blue Thunder-Fourth of July
TAPING FOR UK TELEVISION, LondonFebruary 9, 1990-Tell Me-Strange-Here She Comes Now-Interview with the band
LIVE ARCHIVE - 20 songs from 5 shows1) Middle East, Cambridge, Massachusetts March 19, 1988-Oblivious-I Can't Believe It's Me-Back in Your Life (unreleased)-Buzz in My Head (unreleased)
2) Commonwealth School, Boston, Massachusetts April 21, 1989-Tugboat-Temperature's Rising-When Will You Come Home
3) Kennel Club, San Francisco, California March 28, 1990-Flowers-Blue Thunder-Decomposing Trees
4) Club Lingerie, Hollywood, California March 30, 1990-Snowstorm-Plastic Bird-Victory Garden-Pictures-Ceremony
5) Kennel Club, San Francisco, California October 15, 1990-Summertime-Spook-Hearing Voices-Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste-Melt Away

DISC 2:
BOOTLEGS -
1) The Point, Atlanta, Georgia January 26, 1990-Decomposing Trees-Pictures-Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste-Blue Thunder-Plastic Bird-When Will You Come Home-Ceremony
2) ULU (University of London), London, England November 15, 1990-Fourth of July-Hearing Voices-Summertime-Don't Let Our Youth Go to Waste-Spook-When Will You Come Home-Sorry-Melt Away-Listen the Snow is Falling-Blue Thunder-Here She Comes Now

Projected Passion Revue

In 1981, Dexys’ frustration with EMI’s lack of support came to a head following the under-publicised Plan B single and they left the label. Without a major’s money behind them, however, most of the dates on the Projected Passion Revue had to be cancelled. A three-night residency at London’s Old Vic survived the cull and it’s one of those gigs that’s been released this week.

We should be glad. From the first bar, the first blast of horns and Kevin Rowland’s first passionate vocal this gig catches fire and burns brightly right to the close.

"Something happened and the sound of this group became spiritual, much more than the previous line-up,” Rowland writes in the introduction. It’s true that the deeper, purer soul elements that came to fruition on Too-Rye-Ay are evident, but there’s no escaping that the final words on Searching For The Young Soul Rebels prove an accurate prediction: “everything I do will be funky from now on.”

This gig is a passionate, scorching affair from the hard-hitting Tell Me When My Light Turns Green, to the blind passion and naked emotion of Burn It Down, and to the strutting, bile-laden There, There My Dear.

The only false move in the whole show is the cover of Respect, a song they never got right and one which the writer and performer of the original version, Otis Redding, was present at during its recording by Aretha Franklin: “I just lost my song,” Otis opined. A few songs can never be covered; Respect is that rare beast, a cover version that owns the original and is now the definitive reading.

Dexys did a fair few covers in their time, including the bristling soul stew of Cliff Nobles & Co’s The Horse, Chuck Wood’s quick and powerful Seven Days Too Long, and Johnny Johnson and the Bandwagon’s Northern classic, Breakin’ Down The Walls Of Heartache, with which they close the Projected Passion Revue.

Incidentally, it’s always struck me as a little odd that they never chose to cover anything by Chairman of the Board, whose singer, General Johnson, was the start and finishing point for Kevin Rowland’s fiery wail and bursting, rhotacistic style.

The reformed Dexys almost blew the roof off the Royal Festival Hall just over three years ago. The Projected Passion Revue has that same power, that same blistering intensity - it’s a reminder that, on a good night, Dexys’ vibrant mix of punk anger and soul vitriol is so strong and so seductive that every other band might as well pack up and go home.

Many new songs have been demo’ed, one of which is up at their myspace site.

I'm From Barcelona

Since last summer when I’m From Barcelona announced their arrival on the London stage at Jamm in Brixton in a fanfare of party tunes blasted triumphantly and a cornucopia of balloons and confetti strewn with the fist-pumpin’ celebrations of a major-title winning sports team, nothing much has changed.

Every gig is still “the last day of school” with IFB and every gig it’s still songs almost exclusively from the debut album. Now, I wouldn’t mind so much, but this does mean playing We’re From Barcelona twice – the second time is an oddly distorted techno version that sounds horribly like Rednex’ Cotton Eye Joe– and the frenzied, communal party atmosphere at times lends itself more to motivational speaking than pure pop explosion.

The Painter, with its insistent, singalong refrain, “Don’t give up on your dreams boy” now causes me to think that I’m From Barcelona is nothing more than – shudder – Christian Rock By The Back Door.

We didn’t stand for Sixpence None The Richer – after Kiss Me, there was a poorly received cover of There She Goes and we saw no more of them (the singer revealing, distastefully, to Melody Maker that she pissed on herself everyday in the shower mightn’t have helped) - and we shouldn’t stand for this.

Stuart Murdoch may have continued to work as a church janitor after Belle and Sebastian received some attention, but did he turn their songs into rallying cries for the Christian movement? No, he sang about sexual aids in The Boy With The Arab Strap, and so forth.

Equally worrying, IFB lead singer Emmanuel Lundgren looks increasingly like Paul Calf.

Nonetheless, I enjoyed the gig. But I would be happier with a public statement clarifying the band’s position on religion. I don’t like to think that the kids are being brainwashed, but there is something Christian Rock about this band that I find very unsettling.

Manhattan Love Suicides

Rejoice! Ring out the bells! The Manhattan Love Suicides album is out on vinyl, courtesy of those fine folk at Squirrel Records.

MLS probably have blood in their bathtub, slime running down their walls, use a severed foot as a doorstop and if they came to your house party they’d be the last to leave, the bins would be emptied and your dog impregnated, but in the howling gale of noise and the blistering fuzz guitar there’s the sweetest noise.

They say they like the Shop Assistants and you can hear Safety Net’s DNA stamped all over this album; similarly, they dig Galaxie 500 (like, who doesn’t?); The Fizzbombs – now tell me you can’t hear Sign On The Line’s rampant, boundless, fuzzed-up energy in these songs; and Beat Happening, whose naïve, straightforward simplicity they take a cue from, even covering that band's Indian Summer.

After all that, the closest touchstones are The Jesus and Mary Chain’s unholy blend of whiplash guitars playing Brill Building pop and the Velvet Underground’s feral, deadbeat, nocturnal noise.

In fact, they say they like “all the good stuff” and it certainly sounds like it, but we’ll have to bring them up on numbering “The Fat Tulips” in their list of good influences. They are not good and no amount of Chinese water torture or strapping electrodes to my bollocks and frying them at high voltage will get me to say otherwise.

The vinyl version of the album has two extra tracks – ain’t that sweet for all us vinyl lovers – the first of which, Wolves, starts the album by using – well, of course – the Be My Baby drumbeat. It then goes on to “borrow” “substantially” from Neil Young’s After The Goldrush. Along with Fugu ripping off Til The Morning Comes (oh yeah, St Etienne covered Only Love Can Break Your Heart 17 years ago, making them ahead of the pack) maybe now is the time that Young’s album gets the recognition as one of the very finest. Or there’s just a very long-comin’ tribute album in the works.

Episode Four - ebay madness

Confirmation, were it needed, that the world’s gone mad. Or, at the very least, someone’s gone completely crazy.



£400 for this 12"?!

Asking £400 for Episode Four’s Strike Up Matches ep is a bit, uh, rich, wouldn’t you say? A copy did sell for £225 a couple of years ago, but going to almost double that is madness. I hope no one buys it at that price.

Ebay has opened up new worlds to the pop watcher: a new catch-all category, “C86”, which relates to melodic indie, and some very wealthy people with pots of cash to spend on rare indie pop (£300 for Falling and Laughing, sir? One such was sold last year; the year before that, too).

As far as I’m aware, only one song from the ep has been issued on CD and this is probably driving up the price. If you want a copy of your own to download, just say and I’ll ysi the ep over the weekend.

It might dampen the fever around this record; it’s a decent enough record but it’s not nearly as good as those peerless East Village releases.

The Library Trust

Seven years ago, right after Disco 2000 had been retired from back-to-back radio broadcast, the kids or the music press (not both; it never works that way), decided that Britpop was dead (conveniently forgetting that it died one weekend in August 1997 when 659,761 people took their copies of Be Here Now home, played it, thought ‘what is this crap?’ and vowed never again to buy blustering, soulless rock sulked until they bought The Verve’s Urban Hymns in October) and that Starsailor were the saviours of rock’n’roll.

Thus, the New Acoustic Movement was born. Tragically, this deformed creature wallowed in the shallow end of the gene pool and smote us with the lumpen offerings of Coldplay and Travis with a side order of Turin Brakes (for God’s sake, does no one think of the children?); any band who’d failed to buy into the nonsense of Oasis as the second coming of The Beatles, or a cool minority who knew Let’s Make This Precious by Dexys (“No not those guitars they’re too noisy and crude…There’s no need to turn it up, If it’s pure I’ll feel it from here”), were all part of a mythical new movement.

A year later, Kings of Convenience claimed “Quiet Is The New Loud” too late in the day and Badly Drawn Boy won the Mercury Music Prize as a swan song, and the music press remembered that bluster and rock and sweat was their business, so The Strokes were the second coming and if you didn’t dye your hair black and buy a Black Rebel Motorcyle Club record (it didn’t matter which one, they really all were the same) then you should buy a leather jacket and a Libertines record (gramme of heroin optional).

The quiet bands continue to come, of course, and in Shady Bard we have something special; just as strong, perhaps even better, is the criminally neglected The Library Trust. The sound of life in a northern town, the Bonnie Prince Billy of I See A Darkness vintage with a nod towards The Field Mice’s more tender moments like So Said Kay, the band is one Robert Edwards, now residing in Manchester.




It would be stretching things a little, I think, to put The Library Trust in with Manchester’s survivors of that new acoustic movement, Badly Drawn Boy and I Am Kloot (let’s face it, the only survivors from a nuclear war would be IAK’s Johnny Bramwell and some cockroaches).

The Library Trust’s understated pop, all brittle and fragile like it might snap from the cold but for its shy, poetic warmth, was brilliantly showcased on the Build Your Own Snow Globe ep and The A to Z of Mathematics album. Hopefully, there’ll be more soon.

This year, so far, quiet is the volume of choice. A new Alasdair Roberts album next week – fingers crossed it matches Farewell Sorrow, to my mind 2003’s best album – suggests things are going to be quiet in a good way for a while.

Shady Bard

The year’s first classic gig happened last weekend in the breathtaking surroundings (it sure beat the likes of the Betsy Trotwood and the Garage) of St Giles-in-the-Fields church in the centre of London.

Shady Bard, whose Penguins single late last year was an inviting rather than inspiring debut, showed they had a lot more to offer. Displaying the same resonant soulfulness of latter-stage Tindersticks, the spacious tear-in-a-beer alt-country of Sparklehorse and the out-there woozy melodies of Gorky’s, Shady Bard have shaped up to be one of 2007’s contenders.

An album on Static Caravan at the end of April showcasing the Shady Bard orchestra of violin, cello, French horn and piano could see them – if they translate their fuller, muscular sound to the studio – deliver a classic debut album. It often pays to get to gigs early to see the band at the bottom of the bill (although they were the band I most wanted to see, they were much better than I expected).

The Clientele’s new songs sounded good, apart from two of them, which were, bizarrely, both Daydream Believer by The Monkees. It makes a change, I suppose, from one of Lou Reed's VU ballads.



Sodastream were good as ever and they came equipped with some tall tales from recent travels. My favourite was the one about the man who claimed to have killed a dog with a single punch. I’ll probably go to see them next Saturday as Airport Girl and Monkey Swallows The Universe are also playing.