But back to Monster Movie: packaged in a smart red card sleeve embossed with a gold foil eastern orthodox icon, Transistor is sublimely and beautifully melancholic; it’s like music to break your heart to. There are numerous highlights, not least of which are the perfectly disembodied vocals provided by guest Rachel Staggs of Texan spacepoppers Experimental Aircraft. Peak of the pack for me though is the aching ‘Left’. An acoustic guitar drifts in on a bed of radio fuzz whilst the melody floats on the midnight moonbeams like the 14 Iced Bears sublime ‘Hayfever’ from their eponymous lost masterpiece. In fact, ‘Left’ reminds me of playing that album alongside a tape of early Field Mice demos in a darkened hotel room overlooking Lochs and mountains in the Scottish Highlands, snow whipping across the water and the TV tuned to white noise in the corner. And for that, as much as the provision of such a lovely record, I am impossibly grateful.
I’m also grateful to Louis Phillipe for letting me hear his rather fine new album The Wonder Of It All. I’m sure you don’t need telling about Louis exploits, so I’ll précis by saying: él records, Stuart Moxham (with whom Louis performed a great set at the Chickfactor ball in December 2004), Pizzicato 5, PJ Proby, Sean O’Hagan, Cathal Coughlan… and I’m barely scratching the surface. Louis makes an exquisitely choreographed and bittersweetly literate chamber Pop. Immaculately dressed and perfectly poised, it’s intelligent and clever without being unwieldy and overbearingly dull. Listing to Louis Phillipe you find yourself tracing lines in steamed bus windows that connect Robert Doisneau’s post-war Parisian scenes to Momus’ seedy bedsit haute couture to Brian Wilson’s vignettes of sleepy psychedelia to a daydreaming chamber orchestra playing the hits of Stephin Merritt. This is music that casts an eye back at those times when Vic Godard’s ambition was to be played on Radio 2; music that, like Lawrence and his Denim aims to both embrace and undermine the notion of the middle of road.
To paraphrase some popular television advertisements, you can’t currently buy the album in the shops, but you can instead head over to Louis’ own website and get it there, along with a whole range of his previous recordings.
The Great Destroyer though grabs me and pretty much keeps my attention for its 50 minute plus entirety. In these days of iTunes playlists and the skipping of songs being a mere keystroke away, that’s no mean feat. Maybe it’s because there’s more obvious melody here, more traditional song structure. I mean, single ‘California’ could even pass as a classic country-folk-rock song, albeit one dragged through the dust and with its fringed jacket clipped. Or maybe its just that at times The Great Destroyer seems so much louder than I remember Low sounding in the past. In places it’s a little like hearing Neil Young fronting Sonic Youth, at others it’s like rediscovering The Pixies circa Surfer Rosa, and you know that’s no bad thing. At others points, however, it’s mournful and beautifully downbeat; a ravishingly dark and seductive record of deserted lonely hearts on fire.
On a different tack are New York City’s Baskervilles, whose Midnight release on Secret Crush has been delighting me this week too. There are two covers on the seven song set: The Bartlebees’ ‘Pictures Of You’, and The Television Personalities classic ‘La Grande Illusion’ are both given peachy treatments, and are perfect pointers to where the group are coming from. And that is from a landscape of bohemian love and squalor painted with tinkly (and twinkly) keyboards and guitars. Of their own sparkling compositions, there’s the ace ‘I Danced With Kate Moss’ and my own favourite, ‘Another Free Show In Battery Park’, which recalls the refrain from the aforementioned TVP’s ‘A Picture of Dorian Gray’. At twenty minutes, Midnight is a neat treat of sparkling off-beat Pop. Definitely worth investigating.
© 2005 Alistair Fitchett