Cigarettes After Sex: comfort listening

Not every album has to blow minds, to change the world.

Sometimes a set of songs can be the sonic equivalent of a much loved T-shirt, perfect for a Sunday morning sofa session. They can be comfortable and familiar and have so many good memories associated with them that you forgive them the fact that they have nothing new to say.

If this sounds like I'm trying to convince myself that this is enough, then it says a lot about how I feel about Cigarettes After Sex's self-titled debut album (listen on Bandcamp here).

It's an undeniably good record, especially if you've ever felt some kind of love for the quieter end of The Velvet Underground or their many, many indie and alt-country descendents.

Musicaly, it's all beautifully spindly guitar ballads as far as the ear can hear, with a dub-like tendency for all but the bass and drums to drop out behind the vocal, giving the songs a quiet-quiet-quiet dynamic. 

And boy, those songs are good! CAS have been going since 2008, and it feels like songwriter-in-chief Greg Gonzalez has waited until he'd accumulated a really good crop before dropping this debut. 

Lyrically we're in bohemian romance territory, of course, with the occasional startling shift like the Fitzcarraldo references of Opera House or the doomsday mutterings of Apocalypse to leaven the sweetness. 

The songs are almost good enough to save Cigarettes After Sex from its main weakness - that of being in thrall to a particular well-trodden post-Velvets style. As it happens, that's a style I love: many of my favourites down the years (Madder Rose, Orange Juice, Low) have built on it.

But this is comfort listening. And much though there's nothing wrong with that, and although this album's on heavy rotation round my way, I keep coming back to the idea that imitation - the reduction of music to an exercise in style is the end of any meaningful artistic progression. 

It doesn't matter if it's a style I like - which in the case of Cigarettes After Sex I very much do - the point still stands, pretentious though it may be. An lovable vintage T-shirt of a record it might be, but we need more than this if we're going to make it through.

Gorky's Zygotic Mynci live at The Room, 1997

In my wasted youth at University of Hull, I penned the odd review for Hullfire, the student newspaper. For the sake of completeness and comedy value, I'm adding them to this blog. Here's a strangely beard-fixated Gorky's gig review from 1997 from which my main recollection these days is terrible indigestion.

The beard has gone! Whether by accident or design, Richard James, guitarist in the worst-named band in rock... EVER, has finally done us a favour and picked up a razor. Thankfully, the rest of their appeal remains unchanged; their elegant newly-shorn pyschedelic pop is still hurled in unpredictable glam, lo-fi and punk directions, with added folk flavour courtesy of violinist Megan Childs.

Similarly, Gorky's bilingual (Welsh and English) lyrics retain a healthy preoccupation with the surreal, populating their corner of Wales with sleeping giants, jealous violin teachers, fiery patios and seaside voyeurs. While their set consequently teeters on the edge of 'Still we are young / We like elves / Have Lord Of The Rings / On our shelves' cliche, they are far too good to simply recycle Uncle Syd Barrett ad nauseum.

If pop logic ran in straight lines, then Kula Shaker, who plunder the same period and emerge sounding like The Charlatans, would be the best band on the planet. Thank goodness for a band who, facial hair or no facial hair, think in curves.

The Stone Roses - Britain's last punk band?

The Stone Roses: War and Peace by Simon Spence is a good rock history (as opposed to criticism) meticulously researched, fair minded, narrative-driven. And even someone like me - not the biggest admirer of the Roses bar Fools Gold  and Waterfall - can see that he's got compelling subject matter.

Spence's book did make realize just how much punk was a formative experience for the Roses. They idolized the Sex Pistols, followed The Clash on tour, roadied for The Angelic Upstarts. They formed their own musical imitations. And reading War and Peace, it's all-too possible to imagine an alternate history where the Roses were a footnote in third-wave early 80's punk rather than the slow-burning spearhead of the Second Summer of Love.

Viewing the Roses as essentially late-blossoming Jubilee flowers rather than a return to classic rock, the perceived 'flaws' in what they became - Ian Brown's vocals, the overly self-mythologizing lyrics, the occasionally jarring melange of beats and guitars - all start to make a lot more sense. A punk reading doesn't just flatter the band - it places them in the right context.

This punk heritage was not just musical - but ideological too. The Roses' populism and finely tuned sense of spectacle, their anti-monarchism, their deliberate, contemptuous naivete towards the music industry, their readiness for confrontation - all hark back to '77. And John Squire's flag-adapting cover art stands as much in the tradition of Sex Pistols' collager-in-chief Jamie Reid as it does Jackson Pollock.

The Roses even had their own Malcolm McClaren in the shape of Gareth Evans, arguably both the best and the worst thing to happen to their career. Like McClaren and the Pistols, their partnership too dissolved in an acrimonious court case and disputes about money. Spence is particularly good on this tragic, scarcely believable relationship.

But what about the 60's influences? The chiming guitars?  Well, yes. But punk inherited more from the unrealized radical impulses of the previous decade that it cared to admit when it was busy hating on Pink Floyd. And the lemons on the cover of The Stone Roses harked back to the hippies' most punk rock moment, serving as home-made protection from tear-gas in the demonstrations of Paris 1968.

We're used to looking at the Roses as 'Madchester' incarnate or as John the Baptists for the Gallagher brothers. Maybe we should be thinking of them as Britain's last punk band instead?