Some Things for the Weekend
Some Things for the Weekend
An album, a song, a video, a radio show, a Substack, a playlist, a book, and a fanzine. What more do you need to get by?
This is a Midweek Update (for the weekend) of the type I frequently posted during my first year on Substack, because sometimes, culture just grabs me and I have to share it back out. These posts are usually shorter, or at least delivered in bite sizes compared to my weekend essays. Enjoy. And if you do, please subscribe. And if you have already, thank you. Please feel free to pass comment.
ALBUM
Tom Hingley was the distinctive vocalist for Inspiral Carpets. Don’t worry, he is still very much alive and well, judging by his new solo album The Grand Mal, one of many he has released since quitting the reunion line-up when the others demonstrated resistance to recording new material. It is also, however, his first new album in seven years. I know Tom personally, so I can vouch for his relentless work ethic, as well as his entertaining ability to start any conversation on an unexpected political tangent before one has even said hello. Disarming though such conversations can be, Tom has genuinely helped school me on several life issues, in particular turning me away from using discriminatory terms like “chav” or “white trash.” So I always listen to what he has to say - and sing. And I can certainly understand why he writes on his site that “I’ve never been prouder of an album.”
Written during the 2020 lockdown, The Grand Mal is musically varied and meticulously produced, with not one but two harps appearing on “Easy,” Kelly Wood’s piano playing adorning the vocal tour de force “Bird on a Wire,” and the unexpected return of the Inspirals’ other trademark sound, that distinctive Farfisa, on “Take It Like A Woman,” which inevitably recalls a period where all was ecstatic on the Manchester scene.
But the highlight for me is the opening song “Actors.” Just Tom and acoustic guitar, it’s a beautiful “I was there…” semi-ballad with intriguing lyrics, and a perfectly melodic verse and chorus linked by an off-kilter semi-spoken bridge. In the old days we might have said “Tune!” It’s a great sign of maturity, I hope, that I can instead shout, “Song!”
PLAYLIST
I have another friend - though I haven’t seen him in years - called Manuel. We buddied over wine. Manuel’s reviews of wine were like miniature essays that enraged some in our offline group, entertained others, and enlightened a few along the way. I probably fell into all three camps, which is why I liked the guy so much. Nowadays, Manuel is to be found, in part, compiling Spotify playlists by consciously seeking out records with less than 1000 plays. He calls them The Joy Of Low Numbers. He is, by nature, a contrarian.
Some of the playlists are thematic – like his recent Latin music one above, which is an absolute treat – and other seem more random, wondering up and down the musical aisles and back and forth over the years. But all of them come introduced by essays that indicate that Manuel’s writing has not lost one bit of its bite. Here is the opening paragraph – merely the opening paragraph, mind – for The Joy of Low Numbers 39.
Some of the voices in my head have been carrying out a loud argument about the Dead Internet Theory and the disappearance of “Third Places” in our cities. The internet is dead because it’s been taken over by algorithms and has gone from facilitating human contact to just bots selling you shit. “Third Places” were the parks, malls, street corners and various joints of our, beyond school, church and home, we were free to be kids, unsupervised and unspending.
But here, there is a point to be made of my own. By getting off Spotify and going over to Qobuz, I eliminated myself from the numbers game entirely. Nowadays, the music I listen to is the music I listen to. And that includes the songs on Manuel’s playlists. For him, they may be The Joy of Low Numbers; for me, they are merely The Joy of Good Music. And OMG - sorry, had to do that - has he found so much of it.
NB: You can transfer playlists from one music app to another using Soundiiz. I maintained my free Spotify account for situations just like this one where I could save them there and listen to them on my a platform that - hey Manuel, just saying - does not equate “plays” with quality.
BOOK
It’s not everyday that a 600-page hardback lands on my doorstep, gratis, and my immediate reaction is not, “I’ll never have time to read this” but “how can I clear the slate so that I can read this?” Such is the case with Pressure Drop: Reggae In The Seventies by John Masouri, newly published by Omnibus Press. Of course, not having yet dug in means I should not be recommending it but, as someone who did a seriously deep dive into reggae last year for an essay entitled “The Studio as Instrument in Jamaican Dub Reggae,” which included reading several other books and papers, who also put together a playlist of the original quartet of dub albums and then threw in a bunch more so that it runs 11 hours, who jumped on the opportunity to write about the Bob Marley biopic here on Substack and who, and I’ve said this many times, considers there to be almost no ill that can’t be righted by reggae – when I was recovering from my brain hemorrhage it was all I could and did listen to for a good couple of weeks – I can tell pretty quickly that a book of this length, devoted to the decade when reggae ruled, published by a company I know and respect, is seriously unlikely to be a dud. Wish me luck, I’m going in!
RADIO SHOW
Since starting up the Dear Boys, I’ve started becoming properly acquainted with Louder Than War radio, a spin-off from the Louder Than War magazine-turned-web site, all of which originally spun from the hyperactive mind and body of (The Membranes’/author) John Robb. Among the many cool shows on LTW that I’ve only just discovered is Wallace Dobbin’s Rock & Roll Radio. While lovingly named after the Ramones song of that name, the title is something of a misnomer, as Dobbin favours imperfectly askew but suitably intriguing indie rock over your standard meat-and-potatoes rockist fare, as exemplified by the Oct 19 one-hour Saturday afternoon (UK time) feast-fest which fed me an almost endless array of acts whose music I probably ought to know, but which flies under my radar (and likely yours too) because there’s so damn much of it!
But that’s why we have curators. I was especially intrigued to discover Micko & The Mellotronics, whose improbably catchy upcoming single “Guilty” takes on the topic of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be put to death in Britain, and then to find an intriguing two albums’ worth of back catalogue from the band lingering on Qobuz just waiting to be heard. It was an equally similar story with the euphorically goth Black Doldrums, the vibrant power-punk-pop female trio BERRIES, and to a lesser extent, the Warhol-inspired Drella. Best of all, Wallace introduces or back-announces all songs with enough info that you might just find yourself saying “Oh, yes, I always did wonder what happened to two former members of northern English punk band the Proles, and whether they might have put together another band decades later and called it The Men From Planet X.”
Listen via: https://www.mixcloud.com/louderthanwar/rock-roll-radio-with-wallace-dobbin-19-october-2024/
VIDEO
Manchester punks Hungry are yet another band that came my way from Rock & Roll Radio, and it was only because I went seeking out their new single “Sick of It” for my Qobuz playlist that, coming up short, I found myself watching the video instead. It is described by one person in the comments as “the most British music video I've ever seen.” And they may not be wrong. The song, by the way, is not quite so angry as the title would suggest, and the video, rest assured, has humor. But then you have to these days, don’t you, or you’d top yourself.
SUBSTACK
One of the benefits of going off course and posting a long essay like last weekend’s “the Art of Noise” is that it ultimately finds its way to new readers, though I only know as much if they bother to “like” the post. (Please, if you are new and you like this, “like” it so at least I get to know you.) When the “Deaf Anthropologist” did just that, I was immediately intrigued in turn and quickly went over to his home page, Deafn(((o)))tes where he reveals himself as Gaetano from Hamburg, “profoundly deaf in both ears since childhood,” and “passionate for sound design”. His debut Substack article was subtitled “why I appreciate drone music” (anyone suffering any form of tinnitus either gravitates to it or runs a mile from it, depending how it interacts with their own inner drone); his most recent Substack article, posted just two months later, “celebrates the release of my first project, “SPACES & GRAVITY.”
There is much in Gaetano’s writings… Actually, that sentence holds its own: there is a lot here, some of it quite deep. But persevere. For there is much in Gaetano’s writings and research, his music-making and the collaborations with his dancer wife, that we can learn from: if self-proclaimed multiculturalists say we want to hear from all voices, we especially need to hear from those who struggle to hear us say as much. Thanks for popping in Gaetano, congratulations on the milestone in your creative journey of studying interdisciplinary anthropology, and kudos on your typography and design as well as your thorough and fascinating writings. I didn’t realize that Substack could look quite so… post-modern?
SONG
Ten-minute poetic epics do not deserve a shout-out by mere virtue of existence, otherwise we’d all be living back in 1975. But just as I made a special point of writing about Andrew Franks’ “Cºuntrycide” several months back, so I feel compelled to shout out Two Dark Birds’ newly released opus “The Song to End it All.” Verse upon verse upon verse – nine of them I believe – of poetry that starts “with a hungover caveman in prehistoric France” and concludes “inside a Bob Seger fever-dream of the apocalypse,” “The Song To End It All” nonetheless feels like something of an autobiographical confession by its composer, New Yorker Steve Koester. One verse finds the singer trapped inside a bathroom at Newark Airport, ashamed seemingly of not acting publicly upon his liberal convictions; the next has him on a merry-go-round at the Bayshore Mall wondering “is this the song sung by The Fixx?” The following verse find him down at Brighton Beach – the British one based on the fact that he “just came down from London town” – acting out everyone’s inner Quadrophenia:
I spent the night out on the pier
Blinking arcades and a head full blind with beer
When dawn broke on that gray beach
I cursed into the breach
I screamed my lungs into those squalls
I sang the song to end it all
Accompanied by lap steel, and keyboards, rather than a full-tilt Springsteen band or the simple acoustic backing of a Dylan, ‘The Song To End It All” falls a little short on production; the listener has to lean in to really make out vocals that ought to be dominant given the lyrical substance. But hey, maybe that’s why Steve made some short explanatory videos to go with it. A man has to promote a song however he can these days, even – especially - if he does want it to be “the last song that humankind will require.” Tongue is presumably in cheek: there’s a new Two Dark Birds album to follow.
FANZINE
Check The Record is not, strictly speaking, a music fanzine. But what is these days? Certainly, in the States, the “perzine” ethos – whereby the editor writes about themselves and their own life, check my Fanzine Podcast here for one of the more enjoyable episodes with two of the genre’s more vibrant and committed editors – is the dominant theme, and Check the Record even self-describes as a perzine. But when you are a radio DJ, as per Check The Record’s Jen Matson, and you are also a record obsessive (ditto), and you own 8000 records that you are worried might come through the ceiling of your 100-year old house (ditto), and you’re the kind of record collector who even takes care of their flexidiscs… well, your perzine is going to come pretty damn close to a music fanzine.
So, even if Issue 2 of CTR does not review new music, there are still articles on “Structural Engineering for Record Collectors,” and on flexidisc care, a look back at when Record Collector magazine introduced Jen to the Television Personalities, and a hilarious article on “Right Name, Wrong Band,” like the time she bought a record by The Bats thinking it was by The Bats, among other examples that will have you confused until you read for yourself. And if you go ordering a copy, make sure to get her reversible zine “How to Discover New Music”/”Figuring Out What The Heck To Play,” in which she also lists her Top 5 albums of all time. The Chills are on the list so, you know you’re in safe hands.
I hope you enjoy some of these recommendations, and please feel free to share your own.
"Pressure Drop" is coming to my local library's catalogue- I was probably the first to put a hold on it...