When you find a gothic electro-pop album featuring in several end-of-year extreme metal best-ofs for 2017, it comes as no surprise to discover that Ulver are responsible.
Having wrapped up their Norwegian black metal phase some twenty years ago, they may have followed their own map ever since into ambient soundtracks, trip-hop, psychedelia, prog and neo-classical experiments. But as they were there at the beginnings of a genuine musical phenomenon, and since chief creative spirit Kristoffer Rygg still looks like he could holler under a blood-lit moon with the best of them if the mood ever took him that way, Ulver get lifetime genre-membership privileges.
Even though no-one knows which version of the band are going to appear from record to record and it's almost certainly not going to be metal.
To these ears, the Ulver that have turned up for The Assassination Of Julius Caesar really like: Depeche Mode circa Violator; Trevor Horn’s 80’s production work; early 90’s techno; slightly over-earnest songs about the Roman Empire; The Beloved;
The good news is that this foregrounds Rygg’s voice – Ulver’s beautiful, pure-toned trump card – against sympathetic, mostly electronic instrumentation. Assassination is the closest they’ve come to pop since their 2012 psychedelic covers set Childhood’s End, although given that much of their output since then has been freeform jamming this isn’t necessarily saying much.
And granted, the music is still brooding, jagged and lyrically focussed on matters of faith and tragedy. But now Ulver - on, say, closing track Coming Home – are doing their thing over beats not a million miles away from Crockett’s Theme from Miami Vice, which is a big plus in my book. The fussiness I can sometimes resent in their proggier work (I’m looking at you, Wars Of The Roses) is almost completely absent here.
In yr blogger’s opinion, then, Assassination is Ulver’s best, most consistent work since the austere majesty of 2007's Shadows Of The Sun. That’s another synth-heavy album and if you like, Assassination is Shadows down the alternative disco, throwing out shapes at a stately 80’s bpm.
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.
It begins with 3 minutes of what sounds like end credit music for an 80's TV show - perhaps a provincial soap or minority interest sport. Its synthy brass and fussy disco drumming in no way prepares you for what happens next.
Track Two starts with thirty seconds of atmosphere, like the noise from a litter-strewn clearway late at night. Then a piano refrain to a marching beat. A guitar interjects with a sound like a stunned ox.
Finally, two minutes in - the voice starts. Somewhere mid-Atlantic between New York house diva and European cabaret turn, it's a tenor wail singing about ripping one's hair about by the roots and planting them in a garden to wait for Spring.
It's 1982. The voice is that of Billy Mackenzie, the album is Sulk, the band are The Associates, with Arrogance Gave Him Up's instrumental followed by No's tale of obsessive love forming probably one of the oddest opening one-two punches to a successful pop record ever.
But then it escalates further before it calms: Bap De La Bap is yodelled, shrieked electro-funk, barely in control of itself. Gloomy Sunday approrpriates a jazz standard and wallows in glorious pathos. Nude Spoons is goth with a jaw-harp rythym and a lyric about drugs/finding a Roman coin in the River Tay (McKenzie was from Dundee) delivered in a hysteric's falsetto.
Via the palette cleansers of Skipping and It's Better That Way, Associates finally deign to give us the singles, seven tracks in. Party Fears Two - AKA the one that still gets played on the radio - is a great New Romantic 80's pop song, while Club Country is a disco-fuelled outsider's dismissal of the same scene as sneering, selfish and cruel. Another light entertainment instrumental finishes the whole thing off.
Together with Billy's voice and the inventiveness of the backing tracks (kudos to main foil Alan Rankine) this pushme-pullyu attitude to pop is what makes Sulk so great. All the songs on the album are great pop songs, but on their own terms. They can't be reduced to the sound of a single scene; all sonic affiliations are subverted by that voice or by the next instrumental curveball. It's an intense little jewel of a record.
It's something of a triumph of chutzpah that the official version of Chim Chim Cheree in Mary Poppins works as well as it does. The less said about Dick Van Dyke's accent, the better, but he performs the heck out of the role. And certainly finds the mixture of bravado and sadness that this song requires.
I mean, check this lyric:
Let's face it, Chim Chim Cheree (by songwriters extraordinaire the Sherman Brothers) is a defiant workingman's urban folk number if ever I heard one, even if it started life in musical theatre (and indeed Wikipedia notes similarities to traditional Yiddish folk song Tumbalalaika).
There's this amazing tension (or ambiguity) in the entire song between acknowledging the hardship of the chimney sweep's life and the insistence of the 'lucky sweep' on reaching across social strata to those who might consider themselves his better.
If you can get past the Van Dyke factor, it's not only a great piece but it's also surprisingly amenable like many folk songs to a variety of different treatments. Here are some of my favourites - there are many more listed on the Wikipedia page for the song.
Joe Pernice (Scud Mountain Boys, Pernice Brothers etc.) is perhaps the best demonstration of Chim Chim Cheree as imagined folk, as he strips the song back to a simple strum.
Folk fact: the song is also seemingly quite popular with accordion players as well if You Tube is anything to go by.
One of the things I hadn't appreciated either until Wikipedia pointed me in the direction of covers by Louis Armstrong and John Coltrane was the crossover between the golden age of musicals and jazz standards. Both covers couldn't be more different - the one vocal/order/groove and the other instrumental/chaos/fragmentation, but they're both amazing in their own way.
I mean, I never thought I'd have Dick Van Dyke to thank for introducing me to John Coltrane. But here we are.
And from another tradition entirely, how about Chim Chim Cheree as a beautiful Japanese psychedelic rock ballad by Plastic Tree, from an entire compilation of J-Rock Disney covers?
Sadly, no metal version that I'm aware of as yet, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.
In the space of nine months, we've lost perhaps rock music's greatest rythym section in Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit, the engine of late 60's/70's German experimenters Can.
The best attempt to explain Can I've ever read (annoyingly I can't remember the writer responsible) basically says this: on paper you'd expect them to be a band only a critic could love, but they're so annoyingly good they're wasted on music nerds.
And as someone at least half-way to music nerdery, I'd agree with that wholeheartedly.
Yes, Can sometimes noodled on for 15 minutes or more in the way that prog rockers often do. Yes, their members included students of avant-garde composer Stockhausen, hardcore jazz musicians and non-singers taking a turn on the mike. Yes, they liked a bit of music concrète.
But from all these influences and their collective talents they jammed out, and then tightly edited, a bunch of short tracks, which if you squint at them a bit funny, are some of the best experimental pop songs of the 70's: Spoon; Vitamin C; I'm So Green; Moonshake and I Want More, their solitary UK hit in 1976. Don't believe me? You Tube is currently streaming latest their singles compilation, so see for yourself.
The longer, more experimental tracks can be great too, but that's an argument for another time.
The other thing that helped Can break down barriers is that they were very, very funky indeed: Jaki Liebezeit stripping down jazz technique down into a series of endlessly unfolding drum loops; Czukay's bass - never two notes where one would do - holding down the groove and creating space for the other players.
This love of funk and jazz meant they were also unlikely early adopters of disco rythyms on I Want More (listen here).
Eminently danceable, for three and a half minutes it comes on like the best sort of mutant glam disco. These ears find echoes of War's Me And Baby Brother (a belated UK hit earlier that year), which might just be me, but perhaps also indicates the ballpark Can were aiming for here. By this stage in their career, they didn't have a steady lead vocalist, so I Want More also features all the band chanting the lyrics in unison to slightly sinister effect like a German Funkadelic.
And if you think there's a lot of repetition of the title in the chorus, I direct you to the B-side ...And More, which extends the workout to a full seven minutes, bongos and all. Bliss.
Postscript: I
discovered Can when I was out as a foreign language student in Germany,
thanks to a fellow student who offered to make me a compilation
cassette, which I subsequently wore out exploring the streets of my
university town with my Walkman. I'd heard nothing like them before, and to some extent still haven't. So if by some miracle you're reading this, thank you Ralf for this game-changing gift. :)
Like a bad sign hanging over me, it seems I can't carry on writing about the charts of 1976 unless I deal with Cliff Richard's Spring top ten hit Devil Woman. So let's attend to the witchy elephant in the room.
Even by the 'anything goes' standards of 1976, Devil Woman is a deeply odd song to have been placed into the hands of noted Christian bachelor Cliff Richard. Now, if you're expecting any cheap shots at the expense of either category, look elsewhere. That's the least interesting thing I could write about here.
But it is true that the preposterous lyric about a young man being seduced against his will by a practioner of the dark arts doesn't, on the face of it, fit with Cliff''s public persona at all. Which in turn makes the song such an object of curiosity.
The fact that it's Cliff - wholesome rollerskates, mistletoe and summer holidaying Cliff - being led astray by sorcery gives Devil Woman a presumably unintentional transgressive energy, making it unlike anything else in his back catalogue. The conflation of evil and female sexuality expressed is bizarrely, wrong-headedly compelling in a way not often seen outside Dracula.
Of
course it helps that the song itself is a stonking piece of occult rock
boogie, with the funky keys and bass in the intro being worth the price of purchase in their own right.
In short, there's a whole lot of cognitive whiplash goin' on here, wrapped around a proper tune. It's very strange in the way that only really straight stuff can be. And it speaks volumes for the power of the results that the only contemporary I can think probably better suited to sing Devil Woman would be that great doom shaman Ozzy Osbourne.
Don't believe me? Check out this performance, featuring some great intrepretative dance and the politest 'ugh' in rock and roll, which by Mr Richard's standards is practically gonzo.
So, what does all of this say about 1976? Well, for starters and most importantly, it tells us that its tolerance for misogyny was much higher than we would accept these days. Even more so than Sailor's A Glass Of Champagne, Devil Woman's gender politics consign it to being a period piece rather than a tune for the ages. No-one today would get away with it, and quite rightly so.
Culturally, it also reminds us that a lot of 1970's rock was powered by the co-option of the blues (or at least motifs from the blues) - the ethics of which is a whole other conversation - but if Cliff was doing it you can safely assume that by the middle of the decade it had become very mainstream indeed.
It's also a another answer to the recurring question in these posts of whether pop was in crisis in 1976. Pop, fuelled by funk and disco, was doing surprisingly well, thank you very much. But when Cliff freakin' Richard was riffing harder than pretty much anything else in the charts short of Thin Lizzy, it's clear that rock - not pop - needed to take a long hard look at itself.
In lieu of a proper post today, a growing playlist of the cream of the charts of '76 (at least in this blogger's opinion). No reissue, no Christmas singles, alright?
Abba - Dancing Queen
Abba - Money Money Money
Joan Armatrading - Love
Average White Band - Queen Of My Soul
Biddu Orchestra - Rainforest
David Bowie - Golden Years
Johnny Cash - One Piece At A Time
Tina Charles - I Love To Love
Brass Construction - Movin'
Can - I Want More
Chicago - If You Leave Me Now
Paul Davidson - Midnight Rider
Detroit Spinners - Rubberband Man
The Fatback Band - Night Fever (no, not that one)
Bryan Ferry - Let's Stick Together
Fox - S-s-s-Single Bed
Emmylou Harris - Here, There And Everywhere
Isaac Hayes - Disco Connection
Juggy Jones - Inside America
Elton John - Pinball Wizard
Elton John and Kiki Dee - Don't Go Breaking My Heart
Gladys Knight And The Pips - Make Yours A Happy Home
C W McCall - Convoy
George McCrae - Honey I
Steve Miller Band - Rock N Me
The Miracles - Love Machine
Mistura featuring Lloyd Michaels - The Flasher
Mud - Shake It Down
Walter Murphy - A Fifth Of Beethoven
Osibisa - Sunshine Day
Dolly Parton - Jolene
Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody
Cliff Richard - Devil Woman
Diana Ross - Love Hangover
Sailor - Glass Of Champagne
Boz Scaggs - Lowdown
Lalo Schiffrin - Jaws
Sensational Alex Harvey Band - Boston Tea Party
Silver Convention - Get Up And Boogie
Candi Staton - Young Hearts Run Free
R And J Stone - We Do It
Donna Summer - Love To Love You Baby
Johnnie Taylor - Disco Lady
10cc - Art For Art's Sake
Thin Lizzy - Jailbreak
Thin Lizzy - The Boys Are Back In Town
Johnny Wakelin - In Zaire
War - Low Rider
Wild Cherry - Play That Funky Music
My previous post offered a qualified defence of 1976 as actually not being such a terrible year for pop music as might have been thought. While the foundation of my argument rests on the view that soul, funk and the new kid on the block, disco, were not only in the rudest of health but also formed a fair proportion of the Top 40, I thought I'd see what else I might call to the defence of '76.
Here are some thoughts to get me started which I will work up into longer posts as I go forward.
Any preferences? Anything else you think I should be tackling?
1. Stevie Wonder releases Songs In The Key of Life
Although I Wish was a top 5 hit towards the end of year, SITKOL is worth a citation in its own right as there's so much goodness on this double album it's unbelievable: As, Love's In Need Of Love Today, Have A Talk With A God and Sir Duke (which charted big the following year).
I mean, Have A Talk With God sounds like Stevie and a chorus of malfunctioning R2-units praising the Creator and it's still an amazing piece of pop music. Sui generis.
2. Reminder: the golden age of classic rock continued
Blue Oyster Cult's Don't Fear The Reaper, Boston's More Than A Feeling, Thin Lizzy's The Boys Are Back In Town, Kiss' Detroit Rock City, The Eagles' Hotel California. All released on albums in '76, all singles, all great pop regardless of what else they and their bands might be.
Queen and Bohemian Rhapsody, of course, we've already covered.
3. Yankee punk countercurrents: Ramones and The Modern Lovers release their first albums
Okay, so neither band were troubling the charts of 1976 on either side of the Atlantic. But since Blitzkrieg Bop, Roadrunner and the rest helped inspire a new-old style of pop music in the years that followed, at the very least we can point to the creative health of the punk margins at this time as a sign of what was to come.
And whisper it, but Anarchy In The UK was released in November 1976.
4. ELO enter their imperial period
We're still two years away from Mr Blue Sky, but A New World Record was out and Livin' Thing snuck it's way into the Top 10. ELO were on heavy rotation in my house when i was very young, so this would inevitably be something of a sentimental journey.
As so far I've cherry picked what I actually write about from 1976, I thought it might be interesting to consider what a typical Top 40 for the year looked like. Which genres predominated? How much of it was actually any good?
This was partly inspired by coming across a 2011 article by Alexis Petridis in The Guardian damning the music of 1976 as 'pop's worst year' based on watching the Top Of The Pops archives.
"it's difficult to express how awful [...] pop music seems to have been in 1976. Every week, something comes on that causes you to be gripped by the absolute certainty that an unequivocal nadir has been reached and that things can only get better."
Is this fair? Was pop in crisis in '76?
To begin to test this, let's take 11-17 April 1976, when the top 10 was as follows:
1. Brotherhood Of Man - Save Your Kisses For Me
2. Abba - Fernando
3. John Miles - Music
4. Barry White - The Trouble With Me
5. Hank Mizell - Jungle Rock
6. 10cc - I'm Mandy Fly Me
7. Diana Ross - Theme From Mahogany (Do You Know Where You're Going To)
8. The Bay City Rollers - Love Me Like I Love You
9. Sailor - Girls Girls Girls
10. Elton John - Pinball Wizard
So, according to my own idiosyncratic understanding of genre, that's:
- MOR/pure pop - 4
- Prog-pop - 2
- Funk/soul - 1
- Novelty rockabilly - 1
- Rock opera showtune - 1
- Vaudeville atrocity (you know who you are)- 1
And in descending order of quality:
- Pinball Wizards - 1
- Barry Whites - 1
- Music from the future and from the past? Why, Mr Miles! - 1
- [tipping point for quality starts here]
- Good bands having a bad day - 2
- Hurry up and work with Chic already - 1
- MOR purgatory - 2
- What-is-this-I-can't-even? - 2
A Top Ten in which the best thing in it by a country mile is a song from 1969 redone for a Ken Russell's film does tend to support the Petridis Theory, it's true. And any week in which the chart is topped by Save Your Kisses For Me is in itself is a self-contained argument for punk.
But let's see how this plays out over the Top 40 as a whole:
- MOR/pure pop -13
- Funk/soul/disco - 11
- Beatles reissues - 6
- Prog-pop - 3
- Country/country rock - 2
- Glam rock - 1
- Keith Emerson playing ragtime piano, because hey, why not! - 1
- Novelty rockabilly - 1
- Other 60's reissues - 1
- Rock opera showtune - 1
- Vaudeville atrocity - 1
While this week is something of a high watermark for nostalgia in 1976, EMI having just reissued all 22 Beatles singles, pretty much any given week that year sees golden oldies charting. And it's hardly a ringing endorsement of the health of the charts when the past is more essential than the present.
However, the big shift when looking at the Top 40, and this is pretty much consistent in my journey through the year so far, is the increase in soul, funk and disco tracks.
And if I look at what's good (for reasonably broad but subjective values of 'good') in the entire chart, I find an interesting correlation.
- Disco Connection - Isaac Hayes
- S-S-S-Single Bed - Fox
- Love Really Hurts Without You - Billy Ocean
- Movin' - Brass Construction
- Silver Connection - Get Up And Boogie
- All By Myself - Eric Carmen (yes, that All By Myself)
- I Love To Love - Tina Charles
- That's Where The Happy People Go - The Trammps
Heck, even Convoy, if I'm feeling generous.
The key point here is that the overwhelming majority of the good stuff in this particular chart is either contemporary American funk and disco music or local iterations of the same (the mighty Billy Ocean and Tina Charles) or otherwise heavily endebted to it (Fox). While I haven't gone back for rigorous checks, I'll maintain that this holds broadly true across all the 1976 Top 40's I've looked at so far. And to be fair to Petridis, this is also a point he near-as-darn-it makes in his article too.
Viewed in this light, talk of pop crisis in '76 needs to be more nuanced. Yes, there's a fair amount of middling to terrible light entertainment and MOR to work through, which not even Abba can balance that out. And it's true that decent rock '45's not from the 1960's are thin on the ground; punk and new wave can't come soon enough to change that.
So it's a crisis of place (the UK) and a crisis of sub-genre, perhaps, but not one of pop itself.
