364: Mask Dance, by Black String

Black String (South Korea)
Mask Dance (2017)
7 tracks, 55 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Korean music has been one of the biggest revelations across the music world of recent years. In the past decade or so, the South Korean government has put so much effort – and money – into promoting the country’s musical culture of all different forms. Most visibly, K-pop has taken the world by storm, a phenomenon unequalled in pop music since the boy- and girl-bands of the 1990s. The effect has been felt on the world music scene too. It feels as if every year, another two or three Korean artists working with Korean classical or traditional music make themselves known across Europe and the Americas. And it’s not for nothing – each of these groups do something different and each of them do it in an incredible way. Just this year, I have seen performances by Kim So Ra (solo janggu (hour-glass drum) player innovating the classical style), Ak Dan Gwang Chil (a band turning folk songs from a region now in North Korea into sophisticated jazzy pop) and NST & The Soul Sauce featuring Kim Yulhee (a roots reggae/dub band backing lead vocals from the ancient epic sung poetry of the pansori). What a wild mix, and each of them were fantastic. Today’s album comes from another such group, and probably the Korean artists that have made the most impact on European world and jazz scenes in the last five years.

The music of Black String is somewhat hard to describe, because there are so many different ways that it can be described. Depending on what ear you bring to it, it is sophisticated math rock; it is free jazz in the Ornette Coleman mould; it is an eclectic mixture of Korean classical, folk and religious styles that date back many centuries; it is contemporary improvised sound art. The music is meditative, acidic, mysterious, aggressive, confusing, calm, powerful. Of course it is all of these at once. The ensemble is led by Yoon Jeong Heo from the geomungo, the ancient Korean fretted zither. Other traditional Korean instruments are provided by Aram Lee on the daegeum and danso flutes and the yanggeum metal-stringed zither and Min Wang Hwang on the janggu and other percussion and voice; with a very different sound is Jean Oh, an electric guitarist with a jazz background who plays his instrument with as much distortion as possible and liberal use of the whammy bar, as well as contributing electronic sounds. As much as each musician is a master of their own instrument in their own tradition, each one of them is taken in a new direction. They play using unorthodox techniques, they use their instruments as much as noisemakers as musicmakers, they bring in bubbles of influence from unlikely places. From all of it comes forth music that is immediately recognisable as deeply and traditionally Korean, but as viewed from a different angle. Black String are pioneering this new wave of Korean improvised art music and, by doing so, creating a whole new tradition with those that came before.

It’s so exciting to see all of the impressive new talent coming out of Korea every single year, with each artist bringing something new and astonishing to the table, and playing every conceivable type of music, too. The pool of these artists seems inexhaustible. It’s indisputable that South Korea is now one of the musical powerhouse countries. And you know why? Because their government doesn't only value music in a way that means lip-service is paid to its importance as part of a wider culture while slashing music education, creating a hostile environment for music venues and generally making funding for musicians increasingly rare and hard to come by (thanks, nine years of Conservative leadership!), but instead literally value it by pumping actual money into music programmes, consistently, for years. By paying musicians to make music or empowering those who can, and by letting those musicians create new sounds that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. By funding those artists to travel abroad to play at festivals, make tours or present at professional events. By running those festivals and music professionals’ events in South Korea in turn, to bring the world to the music as well as vice versa. It’s really simple: if you make music a national priority, you get incredible, international-standard music out of it and a valuable national export to boot. Black String are just one particularly compelling example. It’s a methodology that could and should well be considered by many other governments around the world. Listen up!

336: Abraxas, by Santana

Santana (Mexico/USA)
Abraxas (1970)
9 tracks, 38 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I’ve talked before about the incredible fertility of rock music in the short period of the late-60s and early-70s, but I think Abraxas by Santana is a perfect example of this.

Abraxas is a classic rock album. It was huge at the time of release, and has been regarded as an important work ever since, frequently included in lists of best rock albums ever. But it’s so much more than ‘classic rock’ and all the images and associations that term conjures. That element is definitely there, yes, and seedlings of what would be ‘heavy rock’ can be heard occasionally throughout, but it’s far from the most noticeable aspect of the album. In fact, a defining feature of Abraxas is that it’s difficult to even fit it easily into the category of ‘rock’ at all.

It begins with ‘Singing Winds, Crying Beasts’, a moody and atmospheric instrumental piece with mysterious jazzy chords, a Latin rhythm and only a few glimpses of Carlos Santana’s wailing guitar among the waves of vibrating cymbals. That opening piece lasts for nearly five minutes and it’s a proper statement for what’s to come: whatever it will be, it’s not going to be what you’d expect. That piece segues into a cool version of Fleetwood Mac’s blues ‘Black Magic Woman’ and then into the Eastern European-influenced ‘Gypsy Queen’…and then it’s straight into a rocked-up but faithful version of Tito Puente’s cha-cha ‘Oye Como Va’. The next one, ‘Incident of Neshabur’ is a driving jazz-rock that sounds even Bitches Brew-like at times. And all that in just the first side! What a rollercoaster. The rest of the album also features the smooth jazz of ‘Samba Pa Ti’, the heavy metal premonition of ‘Hope You’re Feeling Better’ and ends up with the percussion-and-voice rumba of ‘El Nicoya’.

Holding it all together is, it almost goes without saying, a core of amazing musicians. The group themselves are so tight together that they can switch things up so often and know that everyone else on the band is going to be on the same page. Gregg Rolie’s keys are solid all the way through and his turns on the Hammond organ and electric piano really kick up the funk; the Latin percussion from José ‘Chepito’ Areas, Michael Carabello and Rico Reyes ground the whole album in a rhythmic basis that hadn’t – and still hasn’t, really – been explored in a rock realm but that fits it so well; and, of course, Carlos Santana’s lead guitar work that flits through the album’s many genres with ease, and really lets him stretch his muscles as an exciting and forward-thinking soloist.

You never know where you stand with Abraxas. Every track is different in its own way, but it all fits together in terms of the energy and atmosphere created and curated throughout the whole listening experience. That’s so rare; it’s an album that has the ability to surprise at every turn without making the whole endeavour feel like an exercise in wilful quirkiness. ‘Rock’ may be the wrong word and ‘Latin-blues-rock-prog-jazz’ is just stupid…but ‘classic’ is definitely the right word.

330: The Spotlight Kid, by Captain Beefheart

Captain Beefheart (USA)
The Spotlight Kid (1972)
10 tracks, 36 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

We’ve skipped ahead a bit since the last time we met Captain Beefheart. Then, we listened to Strictly Personal from 1968; although Spotlight Kid came out less than four years later, much had happened. Specifically, three more albums including the eternal masterpiece of Trout Mask Replica, an album that was so ahead of its time that we’re still trying to catch up to it*, and Lick My Decals Off, Baby, a more refined album but with a darker edge. So when The Spotlight Kid came around, I’m not surprised that it was met with confusion. Even those that performed on the album are quoted as being disgusted by its ‘boring’ and ‘simple’ content.

It makes sense. This isn’t the manic but tightly-reined chaos of Trout Mask Replica, and I’d even say it’s less starkly intelligent than Lick My Decals Off, Baby. But this is no bad album by any stretch: for me, this one is all about the feel. And that feel is boogie. Right from the beginning, too, with the track ‘I’m Gonna Booglarize You Baby’ – no mistaking the intent there, as a lexical or musical statement. It starts with choppy, funky and effected guitar riffs layered on top of each other before the deep, rumbling growl of the Captain comes gurgling from some primordial depths with his barely logical lyrics, only occasionally reaching up into the octave to offer a pained blues moan, while the evermoving boogie carries on underneath it all.

It carries on like that. It is much more simple than the previous few years’ material, it’s a little straighter on the rhythms here, a little more predictable in the melody there, but nothing about it can leave you in any doubt that this is the one and only Captain. It’s stamped in every sound and every word; it just shows that accessible Beefheart is still as innovative and still as…well, Beefheart.

Near the end of the album there is a basically perfect run of three tracks that keep the boogie rolling all the way through. It starts with the train song ‘Click Clack’, where the introduction doesn’t give you a clue as to where the beat is actually going to go when it finally comes in; then ‘Grow Fins’, another intensely blues-riddled tale, one of exploring the depths to get away from the banalities of solid ground, shored up by some fantastic slide guitar and blues harp interplay; and finishing up with – who’da thunk it? – a Captain Beefheart Christmas song, ‘There Ain’t No Santa Claus on the Evenin’ Stage’, replete with jingle bells and with a typically perverse spin on things, sung right at the bottom of Beefheart’s vocal register. Listen to those three and you’ll know you’ve been booglarized.

In some ways, ‘Grow Fins’ sums up Beefheart for me. Not that it is his most representative track or anything, but that the blues harp that he blows on that one is just so, so good. The Captain’s skills at the harmonica are such that if he wasn’t known for his thoroughly considered batshit compositions and poetry, if his career had taken the slightest kink along the way, I have no doubt that he would still have been known as one of the greatest blues harpists ever. And when you consider that even disregarding his music, he’s known as a legitimate fine artist and that, by all accounts, if he’d have gotten his way as a teenager, probably would have gone on to be a great sculptor instead, it becomes obvious that Captain Beefheart was an artist to the core, and would shine from the pack no matter what media he chose, be it paint or marble or words or blues harp. All that mattered was that it was him. And whatever you think about his work, you can’t deny that, if nothing else, it was him.


* To shamelessly steal words from How to Speak Hip, Captain Beefheart was such an out genius that the thing he was a genius at hadn’t been invented yet.

314: Abbey Road, by the Beatles

The Beatles (United Kingdom)
Abbey Road (1969)
17 tracks, 47 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

It took some time to decide which Beatles albums I was going to include on this blog. I gave myself a limit of three, and there were some obvious ones: Revolver was always going to be in there as one of my favourite albums of all time; Beatles For Sale is an abomination that should be disregarded from the group’s discography by any self-respecting fan. But what others to choose…?

When I considered Abbey Road, there were lots of things that jumped to mind. The top-of-the-head trivia about it being the last record the Beatles created (although it ended up being released before Let It Be), and the fact it contains both the shortest and the longest songs in their recorded repertoire. Then there are stylistic considerations of them aiming for a rawer sound, getting back to the rockier, bluesier sound in some way coming full circle to their days as mop-topped rock’n’rollers, while still incorporating the exciting new synthesiser technology of the Moog. Then there are individual songs that stand out: George Harrison’s stunning contributions of ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes the Sun’ and Lennon’s majestic-in-different-ways pair of ‘Come Together’ and ‘Because’…and on the other side of the scale, ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, a song that usually comes on-or-near the top (bottom?) of lists of the worst Beatles songs.

But the deciding reason I chose Abbey Road above the rest is the track ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’. Like Revolver, it took me a long time to really give this track a proper brain-listen as opposed to an ear-listen – when I was little, I somehow never paid that particular track much attention. It was a lot later that I listened to the album as a whole and was stopped in my tracks by it. ‘I Want You (She’s So Heavy)’ is that aforementioned longest Beatles piece at 7’46”, and for the first four-and-a-half-ish minutes of those it’s a fairly standard song, albeit an excellent one. Built on bluesy riffs and minor arpeggios with simple, repetitive lyrics (there are only 14 different words in the lyrics), a deliciously and uncharacteristically subtle guitar solo from John Lennon and lush organ fills by the incomparable Billy Preston, the song would have been impressive if it had just finished there, but it doesn’t. It just carries on with a never-ending loop of the piece’s opening arpeggio. It goes round and around in a perfect circle of tension and release and building tension again. There’s no lyrics in this section, just the hypnotic cycle that draws you in until you’re utterly mesmerised. All the way through is an ever-increasing tidal wave of white noise and wind that threatens to consume everything in its path; it starts silent, but by the end it’s almost deafening, the guitars struggling to be heard over its distorted roar. And then after three-or-so minutes – it stops. Out of nowhere, in the middle of the chord sequence, silence. And that’s your lot for Side A. It’s a genius way to end the song. There would be no satisfying way to finish such an immovable progression without sounding lame, so instead they make it as unsatisfying as possible. After having dragged you along for so long, letting the repetitions get up inside your head until it’s fully inside and you can think of nothing else, it disappears, and it’s like waking from a strange and intense dream into complete mundanity. It feels vaguely embarrassing yet exhilarating at the same time.

Abbey Road is a great album. It has some missteps, but when they get it right, it shows the Beatles at the top of their game – when you consider that it was made while the band were in the process of splitting up, it’s even more awe-inspiring. How blessed we are that these four musicians and their carefully selected collaborators got together to make music for ten years and – in the process – completely rewrote the history books several times. For them to go out making an album like Abbey Road just

302: Gris-Gris, by Dr John

Dr John (USA)
Gris-Gris (1968)
7 tracks, 33 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Right at the beginning of this blog, on the sixth entry, I talk about Dr John’s Gumbo and lamented the fact that I’d never managed to catch the Good Doctor live; that he was right at the top of my must-see list. I never did see him live. Since I wrote that entry, Dr John has passed – he died in June aged 77. He was in New Orleans when he went, and was honoured as a true son of the city in the way that New Orleans does best – the Dr John Second Line has already become a legendary occasion of celebration and mourning through the medium of spontaneous, leaderless music making. There are a lot of videos from that day, but the first I saw – this one, from Dust-to-Digital – impacted me hard. You can feel the love of the city for a man who loved it in return. It’s only fitting that we take another listen to one of Dr John’s most important albums.

Gris-Gris actually marked the invention of Dr John. The man’s real name was Mac Rebennack, a New Orleanian session player specialising in R’n’B piano. He was just about scraping by in Los Angeles, but needed a real creative outlet. And so was born Dr John, The Night Tripper. Originally a character, Dr John’s aim was to distil the essence of New Orleans and its music using the language of psychedelic rock that provided the soundtrack to California at that time.

This is a very different album to Dr John’s Gumbo. Where the later album was all about the very specific brand of NOLA piano jazz and boogie with all the exhilarating perkiness that entails, Gris-Gris presents the city’s more esoteric side, looking less at the picturesque colonial architecture of the French Quarter and more out into the surrounding swamps where the language is a mixed-up creole of French, English, Spanish and ancient African words.

Although there are stand-out tracks and hits in this set (‘Walk on Guilded Splinters’, ‘Jump Sturdy’ and ‘Mama Roux’ among them), the real impact isn’t about any particular piece of music; it’s the whole atmosphere that is the real triumph of the album. It is a dark work of funk, Afro-Latin rhythms and Voodoo references, all echoing together as if emanating from the belly of a deep cauldron. Jazz is present to a degree, but more important are the waves of rock, soul and gospel that sizzle and shimmer in among the rest of this ominous and vaguely threatening musical potion. Most heady of all is Dr John’s distinctive voice, high-pitched and pinched and with the strongest, most beautiful accent. His speech-song is littered with arcane imagery in all of the languages of New Orleans, and, word and sound together, he paints an extremely evocative image of place, time and atmosphere.

Gris-Gris was Dr John’s big arrival, a mysterious Voodoo priest of psychedelia, a man plucked out of time to change the directions of rock, jazz and R’n’B. Between this album and Dr John’s Gumbo, his prodigious musicality and his deep reverence for the ever-present New Orleans are starkly obvious. He was rightly hailed as a musical hero of the city and his loss leaves a big hole in the cultural landscape not only of New Orleans, but the world. He was celebrated in life and in death, and those celebrations will continue. His legacy lives on.

284: Pixvae, by Pixvae

Pixvae (France/Colombia)
Pixvae (2016)
8 tracks, 45 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

There so many fusions, combinations and admixtures all across the world of music. We’ve considered a fair few on this blog, and there will be many more to come. Some fusions are incredibly effective and frequently successful due to many inherent and obvious similarities in their constructions – think jazz hip-hop or West African blues. Some take such wildly disparate styles, smush them together and fall flat on their face to the surprise of hardly anyone. And then you have fusions between musical genres that should never work, from very different times, places, and culture, but that end up creating mad, previously unthought-of mid-point that sounds so natural and potent you feel a fool for ever having doubted it.

To that end, stick Pixvae in your ears. Their music is Afro-Colombian math rock with a death metal jazz edge. The band is actually a six-piece collision of two groups, with guitar, drums and baritone sax/synths from the group Kouma and three voice and percussion from Bambazú. Why does it work? I don’t know, but it does.

The Colombian element is currulao, a style from the Pacific coast of the country. It is based on percussion polyrhythms and interconnected vocal lines that duck and dive over each other as well as making sweet harmonies. Having developed among the Afro-Colombian population, the music still retains a strong African vibe. In the original style, it is all held together with the marimba xylophone, but instead, in Pixvae, that place is filled by noise.

Great noise, mind. The ‘math’ element of the rock means that even more complex polyrhythms are added to those of the currulao, meaning at some points there can be three or four different beats going on at the same time, all shifting in and out of phase with each other. The guitar, saxophone and synths are very loud and all have their own rawness to them – the reedy honking of the sax, the overdriven distortion of the guitar, the sawtooth waves of the synth – but they still manage to add to the sound in a subtle way, mostly focusing on short and interesting riffs that loop around and around. Again, these riffs are usually of differing lengths but played simultaneously so that the effect is ever-shifting and evolving.

When both of these come together, they fit together in a really pleasing way. They don’t always fit together easily – there are lots of crunchy dissonances created in all of the different overlapping vocal and instrumental patterns – but the shifting nature of the melodic and rhythmic cycles mean that each piece contains waves of tension and release. Even the sweetness of the vocals against the noise of the instruments provide a juxtaposition that doesn’t need a resolution, they’re just two very different flavours that nevertheless combine perfectly, like chocolate and salt.

Afro-Colombian folk music and heavy math rock jazz seem too far removed to birth a successful fusion, but Pixvae found the elements that link them and exploit them to the grooviest ends. Maybe no musical fusion is too ambitious to work, perhaps it just needs the right musicians to find those connections. Pixvae do it in the most exciting way possible.


N.B. In my research for this album I came across the review in Songlines Magazine…and they gave it a one-star review! Bollocks to that. What do music journalists know anyway?!

278: Nevermind, by Nirvana

Nirvana (USA)
Nevermind (1991)
13 tracks, 42 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

What can I say about Nirvana’s Nevermind that you don’t already know, and probably know better than me anyway? It is the apex of grunge, a undisputed classic that has influenced so many artists of so many styles, all around the world.

Yes, it is perhaps a little polished for a mainstream audience compared to other artists – and even Nirvana’s other music. But there is only so much that you can polish grit, and Nevermind contains more than enough not only to still anchor it firmly in grunge, but for it to still be markedly heavier than any other mainstream hit that year. By making their sound a little more slick, Nirvana helped to introduce the grunge scene to the whole world, and in doing so, changed the direction of rock – and, to some degree, pop – for a long time to come.

In Nirvana’s sound you can hear a direct descendancy from the punk of the 1970s – both the British styles of the Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Buzzcocks and those lot, and the American side of things with The Stooges and Dead Kennedys – as well as back to the music of the Doors and Jimi Hendrix. Unlike punk, which is very brash and sometimes shrill, there is a real meatier aspect to Nirvana’s sound, influenced by heavy metal. And at the same time, what gives this album (especially its most famous singles, ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, ‘Lithium’ and ‘Come As You Are’) such a wide appeal is that it has all the elements of a great pop record. Memorable lyrics, devilishly catchy tunes and riffs, a charismatic (and very cute) frontman – and it’s really fun to sing along to.

So with Nevermind, Nirvana created the album that turned grunge into pop. Probably the most impressive thing about it is that they did so without losing any of their own or their music’s integrity. No matter what music you’re into, you’ve probably heard of (and heard) Nevermind, and you’ve definitely heard music that it’s influenced – that is surely the dream of any artist in any niche musical scene.

276: Hologram İmparatorluğu, by Gaye Su Akyol

Gaye Su Akyol (Turkey)
Hologram İmparatorluğu (2016)
12 tracks, 43 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

The past four or five years has seen an explosion in the retro-styled Turkish psychedelic scene. Sounds niche, right? But the number of artists in that niche – from Turkey and elsewhere – with booming international careers seems to keep rising: younger groups such as BaBa ZuLa, Altın Gün and Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek command hardy followings and undertake hardcore tour schedules, and stars from the original 1970s scene such as Selda Bağcan and Moğollar are getting used to a new-found worldwide audience due to a bunch of reissues and compilations. Even comedian Stewart Lee did a bit in his 2017 show Content Provider about the style, name-checking Moğollar, Selda, Erkin Koray and Toz Hasat along the way.

One of the most successful artists from this unexpected resurgence is Gaye Su Akyol. She’s often referred to as the sound of young Istanbul, but her sound owes a lot to those retro stars. Bağlama and oud and plucked alongside warped surf guitars, frame drum rhythms are bolstered by tight kit drumming, and Akyol’s throaty and thickly-vibratoed voice swoops over it, reminiscent of Turkish classical singers. There are also elements of film-score like string orchestras, Latin rhythms and dabs of electronica to mix things up too. While she uses many retro sounds in her music, there’s a powerful modernity to it.

Akyol’s style allows European and American listeners to approach Turkish music in the way that she herself approached rock. Her core influences are actually artists like Nirvana, Nick Cave and Jefferson Airplane, but in the way she first heard them – relating them in her mind to the older Turkish music she’d grown up with. It makes sense, too: Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ would fit alongside any Turkish psych compilation with ease. Now we get to hear those sounds parsed back through the same filter.

As her first international release, Hologram İmparatorluğu was a revelation and a powerful announcement of her arrival. The music was as striking as her on-stage presence and in the same manner – her fashion sense seems set at least 20 years in the future…or perhaps it’s a 1970s view of 2030s fashion. It’s all about looking back and looking far forward at the same time to make insightful – and not to mention insanely groovy – statements about the present.

What about the shared zeitgeist of the ultra-hip across Europe and Anatolia has led it to pick up on those intergalactic sounds of 1970s Turkey all the way over here in the 2010s? I won’t pretend I know any further explanation than ‘cos it sounds great’ and that’s good enough for me. And if it’s bringing around such cool artists as Gaye Su Akyol, we surely can’t have any complaints.

249: Violent Femmes, by Violent Femmes

Violent Femmes (USA)
Violent Femmes (1983)
12 tracks, 44 minutes (1987 CD version)
Spotify ∙ iTunes

If you prefer your punk to be high-brow, intelligent and insightful, the Violent Femmes’ is not the album for you.

The songs on Violent Femmes are immature dipping into childish. They whinge and whine about trivial stuff and get unreasonably angry about general facts of life. Listening to it as a not-17-year-old-boy, when I listen to these lyrics, I think ‘wow this guy sounds like a tedious, dangerous loser.’ I mean, the highlight of the set, ‘Add It Up’ could literally be the incel anthem, if incels had any notion of art or culture or beauty. But guess what? I was actually a 17-year-old boy once, for my sins. And although I didn’t agree with a lot of what frontman Gordon Gano is singing about, I definitely understood the emotional core of it, and I still do, really. The words are basically silly teenage edginess but performed in a really relatable way – there’s a real catharsis in listening to this album that makes that 17-year-old inside me feel spoken to at least a little bit. Everyone’s inner 17-year-old deserves a bit of understanding now and again.

But before I make myself sound like an unforgivable dickhead, let’s talk about the sonic element of the album as well as just the poetic. When it comes to cathartic music, punk has got to be one of the best styles for it, and so it is here. The music is played with much more emotion than perfection, the scruffiness of it all only adding to its charm. But where the majority of punk uses electronic noise to aid in the sonic chaos, the Violent Femmes take it in a different direction. Nowadays they call themselves ‘acoustic punk,’ and while that was less true of their first album (there are electric guitars and basses for one thing) it still undoubtedly has an acoustic feel to it. The jangly strumming of the acoustic guitar is central to their sound, and the earthy tones of the xylophone and violin make it hit home. It’s interesting because it allows for a different side of punk to be heard – it hints at a vulnerability behind the bluster, and the aggression just shows itself as the flip-side of fragility. Gano’s voice helps with this too – slightly androgynous and not-quite-post-pubescent, he certainly sounds like the immature lad he portrays through the lyrics, even though he was 20 years old when the album was recorded.

While there are echoes of all the expected punk influences at play – the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Dead Kennedies – I also hear connections from other artists from either side of this album, whether out of genuine musical connection or just some indefinable quality. I hear Doors, Kinks, White Stripes, There Might Be Giants, even Beefheart on occasion. This is why the album still has so much depth despite its immaturity. It speaks on so many levels, from inventive musical settings to angsty, emotional performances to, yes, teenage bluster. There is something to be gained by listening from each angle, and I reckon that’s why this unsubtle, flawed but incredibly ‘real’-sounding album is still regarded as a classic.

238: Strictly Personal, by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band

Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band (USA)
Strictly Personal (1968)
8 tracks, 39 minutes
Spotify

My dad is as mad about Captain Beefheart as the Captain was just mad. He always wanted me to get into the Captain’s music, but I just couldn’t. It was just weird, abstract and unpleasant noise, and no number of times being played Trout Mask Replica could persuade me otherwise. It’s rubbish! I was half-convinced he was doing it just to annoy me. You know, standard dad thing.

Then, one time – I remember it so clearly, it was when we were on our way back from Crewe station, having just picked someone up I think – the music came on, and it was a ‘What is this?!’ moment. Not only did I like it, it blew me away, I loved it straight away. I asked what it was, and I thought my dad was having me on when he said it was Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. But there it was – the album Strictly Personal. And I ‘got’ it in a way I never had before. It all made sense now, for whatever reason, and I got what all the fuss was about. The music had all of those esoteric, angular and out-there aspects of its clashing melodies, unkempt harmonies and rhythms that made no sense on any natural level, but it all worked in complementing the music rather than breaking it apart.

For me, this album worked as sort of like a ‘Rosetta Stone’ for Beefheart’s music. Because I discovered that it wasn’t just Strictly Personal that I understood, but his other albums too. I listened to his first, Safe as Milk, and the strangely controversial Lick My Decals Off, Baby, and loved them just as much. And then, after a while and with some trepidation, I tried Trout Mask Replica…and it worked! While I could still hear all of the same madness that had always put me off when I was younger, it somehow took on a different shape, like one’s tastebuds get used to complex, bitter flavours with age and perseverance, and you learn to appreciate it for exactly that complexity. It was as if Strictly Personal was the key that was necessary to understand the cipher that was Captain Beefheart.

I’ve often wondered what about this album finally struck me in the correct way that Beefheart’s other work hadn’t. I’m still not really sure. The fact that I was at the height of my blues obsession when it hit me probably helped, I think. The first line of the whole album is ‘I got a letter this morning, what do you reckon it read?,’ which would make any bluesnut prick up their ears: it’s the same line that Son House’s ‘Death Letter’ and Skip James’ ‘Special Rider’ both revolve around. But after that one line, it dissolves into vintage Beefheart – lyrics that verge on nonsense (picked mostly for their aesthetic value than any particular underlying meaning), an electrifying blues harp boogie over the top of jaunty rhythms and confusing musical tinkerings. It eases you in. In the same vein later in the album is the track ‘Gimme Dat Harp, Boy’, which, despite its off-kilter angle, should be a blues rock staple. Maybe it was also the production of the album, a self-consciously psychedelic job that was hated by Beefheart and many of his fans, but undoubtedly made the soundworld a little more familiar to those already used to hippy freak-out music. Maybe it was just a maturing of my ears and this album just happened to strike them first. I don’t know.

The music of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band is still divisive after all this time. I definitely understand people who don’t understand it. But if you are genuinely interested in learning the joy held within, I beg you not to start on Trout Mask Replica. I know many do, and get scared off by it. That album is rightly held as a masterpiece but it is difficult, often unpleasant listening. You don’t start drinking by going straight to obscure scotch. Teach your ears to love Beefheart first, and the rest will come. Strictly Personal might just be the perfect place for you to start. It was for me.

233: Concert for Bangladesh, by George Harrison and friends

George Harrison and friends (United Kingdom/USA/India)
Concert for Bangladesh (1971)
20 tracks, 100 minutes (2005 remaster)
Full concert film on Vimeo ∙ Album on iTunes

The Concert for Bangladesh is usually recognised as the first benefit concert of any real scale, providing a template for such epics as Live Aid. It arose from a simple idea: Ravi Shankar told George Harrison about the famine, epidemics and other crises arising from Bangladesh’s struggle for independence from Pakistan, and asked if there was any way he could help. So, he helped. He got together a small amount of his friends and they held two gigs at Madison Square Gardens, and, together with proceeds from the album, managed to get around $12 million to Bangladesh through the efforts of UNICEF. In the years since, this has risen to about $50 million. Not bad. But of course it helps when you have friends like Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Leon Russell, Billy Preston, Badfinger and a whole bunch more. It seriously seems like one of the best concerts ever to have taken place, and the recording (both as a film and an album) are impeccable.

With this being such a long set with so many amazing musicians taking their turn playing amazing pieces of music together, instead of running through it all explaining how amazing it all is, I thought I’d just outline a few extra-special moments to look out for:

• For some reason, I usually forget that there was an ‘Indian music section’ that started the show. Which is madness, because it is a jugalbandi (equal duet) between Ravi Shankar on sitar, Ali Akbar Khan on sarod, accompanied by Alla Rakha on tabla. That’s three of their generation’s most defining performers on their respective instruments, all playing together. So of course the music they make together is sublime. Apparently they played for about 45 minutes at the concert itself, but only one piece, ‘Bangla Dhun’, was recorded and made it onto the film and album. But the 15-minute piece is too long to be an ‘extra-special moment,’ but the bit right at the beginning is just right. George comes on stage, introduces the musicians and explains what this portion of the show will be about, setting the crowd up for what will likely be, for most of them, their first ever contact with actual Indian music of any sort beyond the Beatles’ and others rather clumsy experiments. The musicians make sure all their instruments (including their many sympathetic strings) are all still in tune and make some small adjustments…which is greeted with a polite applause and some cheers. “Thank you,” says Ravi, “if you appreciate the tuning so much, I hope you will enjoy the playing more.” Lol. Love it.
  
  
• There’s one moment that always strikes me as profoundly beautiful in a way that I’m probably projecting in an unsubstantiated way. But still beautiful: about mid-way through the set with the full all-star band, the lights go down and the ensemble shrinks to just two: George and Pete Ham, both on acoustic guitars. Tiny bit of tuning up and making sure the mics and monitors were doing the right thing, and then the unmistakable first notes of ‘Here Comes the Sun’ ring out. When he first starts playing, George is frowning a bit, which is probably something of making sure the sound is still good, but I’m pretty sure there are nerves in his eyes and across his brow. This was the first time he (or any of the Beatles) had performed that song live, ever, and he was in the very stark place of being one of two acoustic guitars in front of a sea of 20,000 expectant fans. But then the crowd recognise those first notes and a huge cheers spills forth…George looks a little bewildered for a split second before a big grin erupts under his beard. It’s happening, it’s working and they love it! Oh it gives me goosebumps, that bit.
  
  
• And Thing III: Billy Preston’s floor spot, playing his song ‘That’s the Way God Planned It’. It’s one of the best performances of the whole thing, for starters: a funky gospel piece with Preston’s heart-touchingly soulful voice singing about a perfect world, little guitar flourishes from George and Eric Clapton here and there and an organ solo that makes me do a fist-bump every time. As it goes along, the heat ramps up and up, the piece getting faster and cymbal-crashier, the refrain repeating on and over itself, lapsing into groovy syncopations, and Preston, until now singing from behind his Hammond organ at the side of the stage, just gets taken over by the energy and boogies around the stage, filling in his vocal duties on whatever the nearest microphone happens to be. It looks so much like the ecstatic spiritual trances Sufis enter when the moment hits just right, and I’m pretty sure it is basically that. When he finally makes his way back behind the keys, he makes a signal to the band, does some crazy chord on the organ (seemingly without even looking at where his fingers are going) and there is such a look of pure joy and thrill on his face that there’s no way you can’t feel it radiate into your own soul too.
  
  

There. Just three tiny, even seconds-long, moments in about an hour and forty minutes of legendary concert. But you just know that it’s all good stuff. Just think about the stuff I’ve not even mentioned. Bob Dylan’s first performance in years, wracked with stage fright and with a stripped-back group playing some of his most famous hits in an acoustic way and bringing the house down with them; George and Eric’s duelling, weeping guitars on the Beatles’ song of that nature; George’s super-catchy but commercially rather unsuccessful single ‘Bangla Desh’; Leon Russell’s voice, man.

The Concert for Bangladesh birthed many, many imitations (for better or worse), and, in that way, has had an amazing impact on the world (mostly for the better). But from a musical perspective, surely none can really live up to this particular gala of huge stars playing brilliant music together as equals. I just can’t wait till they invent that time machine.

225: Led Zeppelin, by Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin (United Kingdom)
Led Zeppelin (1969)
9 tracks, 45 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I never cease to be amazed at the fruitfulness of the 1960s. To think there was a time when the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, the Doors, Captain Beefheart, Dr John, the Stooges, Pink Floyd, Janis Joplin, Can, and, and, and… were all creating scene-defining music in their own fields all at the same time is just mind blowing. And that’s just in the vague field of rock, without mentioning all the jazz cats, the blues revivalists, the folkies on both sides of the Atlantic. And all of those intersected at important junctions too, of course. I’d hope that someday we’d look back on any era with the same awe in hindsight, but you have to admit that the line-up the 1960s had going on is kinda hard to beat.

I guess that’s a bit of a non-sequitur (can something start with a non-sequitur? Who knows), but considering the shape of popular music at the beginning of the decade, to end it with Led Zeppelin – the eponymous group’s debut album – it really shows what a transformative period this was. In this album are the inklings of what was soon to be heavy metal. In fact, when I listen to this album, I cannot help but hear it as the birth of the whole wide-ranging musical movement that metal became. Although every song has a heavy imprint of blues or British or American folk overlaid with all the trappings of 60s psychedelia, there’s something else in there. Whereas psychedelia usually revels in mellowness or trippiness, Led Zeppelin took it to a different place: in their hands, it was harder, heavier and more aggressive – and more exciting.

Even as a blues band, Led Zeppelin excel on this record. Their versions of ‘You Shook Me’ and ‘How Many More Times’ (the former made famous by Muddy Waters, the latter a development of Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘How Many More Years’) show a group that were capable of doing the blues rock thing without abandoning their own sound of burgeoning heavy metal to do it, making them stand out as more interesting and innovative than the other British blooze boom bands such as John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Fleetwood Mac and even the Rolling Stones.

Throughout this blog, you’ve probably noticed that I have a thing for in-between points in music, whether that’s music that highlights geographical-cultural-historical connections between different traditions or that marks the mid-stage of a musical evolution. Led Zeppelin is definitely one of those in-between stages, with psychedelic rock, blues and British folk as its ancestors, and all sorts of metal as its descendants. The 1960s had so many of those albums or musical moments that spun whole genres on their head, or conjured them from some genius realm, and nothing could be the same since. I wonder when the next such upheaval will happen, and what will come of it…

221: Split, by Groundhogs

Groundhogs (United Kingdom)
Split (1971)
8 tracks, 40 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

For me, this album is like a distillation of British hippy rock of the late 60s-early 70s. All the way through there are elements alike with artists such as Jethro Tull, Blodwyn Pig, Jimi Hendrix, Captain Beefheart and a million psychedelic bands of the time, all refined into one sound. There’s an extravagant looseness to the music that skews it to a slightly odd angle and adds to its trippy atmosphere, but it’s saved from sounding sloppy by the tightness of the compositions – the eight songs on this album all have a direction that they are headed towards, and even if they take some detours here and there, there’s no rambling. It’s like if garage-band jamming had a very clear purpose in mind. That at-once looseness and tightness of atmosphere is also helped by the tightness of the group itself, with Tony McPhee on guitars and vocals (and very much the leading man of the band), Peter Cruikshank on bass and Ken Pustelnik on drums, there’s no extraneous sonic elements that need to be built into textures that simply work perfectly as a trio.

The fuzz of the guitars, the crunchiness of the vocals, the chugging rhythms and the clashing cymbals show Groundhogs’ place in the evolution of heavy metal, but the structure of the compositions and their slightly mystical and conceptual airs also foreshadow the prog rock of the latter part of the decade. But me being me, the track that always stands out as a highlight is the last one, ‘Groundhog’, the song from which the group took their name. Interestingly, it’s a song written by the artist featured yesterday, John Lee Hooker. It’s clearly his too: his trademark style is left intact, and the cover is a very faithful one, stripped back as it is from the rest of the album. It’s an almost-solo by McPhee (with just Pustelnik’s kick drum keeping beat), shredding up the electric slide guitar alongside his relaxed but weighty vocals. One of the things I like most about this track is its placement as the album closer. There are blues bits all the way through the album, but ‘Groundhog’ coming at the end is like a proper full stop, as if to say ‘that’s what we are and what we can be, but where we came from is just as important.’ After some strange directions in the rest of the album, the simple, raw Hooker groove brings it all back down to earth with as much grit as any other track.

Split is a great album to get your fix of psychedelic rock with a bluesy tinge without having to stray into acid trips and badly-played sitar territory – Groundhogs keep their feet on the ground even when their brains and voices and fingers maybe travelling a little outside our usual astral plane.

217: Tender Prey, by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (Australia)
Tender Prey (1988)
11 tracks, 54 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

I don’t know why, but this album always makes me think of the Oliver Stone film Natural Born Killers. I reckoned it was because it may have been used as part of the soundtrack, but I looked it up and nope, no Nick Cave there at all. I think it must be because they both share a similar vibe, or maybe aesthetic. The most memorable and exciting moments of each are made up of an unsettlingly entertaining combination of ultra-violence and bleakness with a twinkle-eyed but pitch-black humour and a haunting beauty. Tender Prey’s songs are catchy like pop songs, but you won’t want to catch yourself idly singing these lyrics in public.

I really like the subversion of styles that Cave uses here, and things are never usually as they sound. ‘Deanna’ is an up-tempo gospel song that tells a gruesome story with a bug-eyed and manic delivery from all musicians involved; ‘Up Jumped the Devil’ is a work song suitable for mining brimstone in hell. The album is also relentless. There is a darkness to every single track in some way, whether it be subject matter, musically or just in the slightly weird and disturbing production. It’s also in the tracks themselves: both ‘The Mercy Seat’ and ‘Up Jumped the Devil’ end up in just a rolling and roiling jumble of sounds, repeated and overlapping phrases that get more and more demented the longer they tumble along together. As an exercise in atmosphere curation, Tender Prey is a masterwork.

And for all that, Cave doesn’t enjoy it at all. He’s been quoted as saying he doesn’t particularly like the songs, or the performances, or the production. His later disappointment (even revulsion?) in the result is a little understandable from a personal level – the album was made at a dark point in his life, at the height of his heroin abuse, living in a foreign country with a band wracked with disagreements and divisions. I reckon it’s natural to resent anything that comes from those origins. But those pressures somehow resulted in – from a neutral standpoint – an amazing album that reflects the darkness of its birth without seemingly any effect on its quality as a piece of art. This is not an album I could listen to every day. In fact, I’ve not listened to it for years. But when I do break it out, I revel in it all over again in disconcerted joy. Back into the CD rack for another few years, then.

206: Fun House, by the Stooges

The Stooges (USA)
Fun House (1970)
7 tracks, 37 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

After the idyllic soundscapes of yesterday chilled us all right out, let’s get angry today.

Fun House is the second of only three albums by original incarnation of The Stooges, and the last one before Iggy Pop took a starring role in the band’s name. They remind me quite a lot of their contemporaries The Doors, actually. They were both taking the psychedelic rock of the 1960s into fresh new places, but where Jim Morisson’s crew seem to lean more into the prog rock side of things, Iggy’s were definitely what we can now call proto-punk.

This music is simply incandescent. It has so much from music that preceded it, from Hendrix’s psych-blues and The Who’s hard rock, obviously a lot from the psychedelic era and even cues from free jazz with Steve Mackay’s saxophone, but there is something in there that sets it so apart from all of these others. It’s aggressive, anarchic and chaotic; it’s angry but it also sounds like it was a whole lot of fun to make – and it is to listen to, too. Although this record pre-dates punk by a good few years, that aesthetic is clearly starting to take shape on Fun House, and it ends up being an electrifying ‘best of both worlds.’

This is one of those ‘cult’ albums that never really achieved the success it deserved in its first run, but blew up later. It’s a sign of a band truly ahead of their time – the world mustn’t have been ready for the Stooges’ sound at that point. Once people’s ears had gotten more used to the looser, unpredictable and flailing attitude that would come to embody punk, Fun House began to make sense again. It’s strange that such an amazing album – now rightly regarded as one of the most influential in rock – wasn’t rated at the time, but at least we know now.

The version I have is actually a two-disc affair with a bunch of demos, outtakes and other miscellanea on the second disc, but that’s really only for completists. Stick to the original seven tracks if you want a tightly-packed 37 minutes of intense but perfectly balanced noise that sounds as much a part of what came before it as what came after.

204: Blue Wild Angel: Live at the Isle of Wight, by Jimi Hendrix

Jimi Hendrix (USA/United Kingdom)
Blue Wild Angel: Live at the Isle of Wight (2002)
18 tracks, 119 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

“A bit more volume on this one Charlie, it’s gonna need it! Let’s have a welcome for Billy Cox on bass, Mitch Mitchell on drums…and the man with the guitar…Jimi Hendrix.” The words that opened Jimi Hendrix’s performance at the Isle of Wight Festival in the early hours of 31 August 1970, as well as this recording of it and several other live compilations, have been burnt into my memory since childhood. Simple yet effective. A few seconds of tuning up…and then straight in with the trio’s anarchic version of ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. Not a bad way to start a set.

It’s Jimi #3! I’ve already covered Axis: Bold as Love and People, Hell and Angels before, and Blue Wild Angel is going to be the last Jimi on this blog, and the only live album of his. I obviously chose this one because I enjoy it (it is a Good Album, after all), but so many reviews and discussions of this set talk about how Jimi sounds dispirited, his music lacking in passion and the overall performance falling flat. That seems so strange to me, it’s as if I’m listening to a different record than the rest of them. I won’t claim that the performance is perfect, but there are so many sparkling moments all the way throughout that by far make up for any jetlag-fuelled moments of less-than-peak energy.

There’s even bits where some of the performance’s rougher edges are turned into moments of genius. The epic 22-minute version of ‘Machine Gun’ sees Jimi’s solo interrupted by walkie-talkie chatter from the festival’s security personnel interfering with the sound equipment. So what happens? He just builds it into his solo. Without warning and completely on the fly, he turns something that would derail other musicians into something that makes this one a truly unique performance. It goes almost without saying that Jimi’s guitar playing is immense all the way through here, because I don’t think he was capable of any less. His band – half Experience and half Band of Gypsies – have an easy confidence to them and, as always, I’m in awe at the drumming of Mitch Mitchell, who seamlessly turns jazz technique into the perfect accompaniment for Jimi’s heavy blues rock.

Despite what you think of this album as a whole, it’s still mad to think that, just 18 days after it was recorded, Jimi was dead at the age of just 27. What madness to achieve such a height at such a young age. His death was obviously not natural, so it obviously had no bearing on his performance at the Isle of Wight, but it nevertheless gives the whole thing a slightly surreal aspect to it. You can’t help but marvel that the fleetingness of life and the suddenness of death, even when music like this makes you feel so alive.

187: American Idiot, by Green Day

Green Day (USA)
American Idiot (2004)
13 tracks, 57 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Much like yesterday's album, this is one that I came to as a teenager that didn't make me as cool as I thought it did. Unlike yesterday's, I can't really remember where I came across this one. Maybe I saw them on telly, Later…with Jools Holland or something, or maybe one of my friends put me on to them, I'm not sure. Whichever way, this wasn't music I usually listened to. I'd had some exposure to 70s British punk as part of standard cultural consciousness, but Green Day were the first band of the American punk lineage that I really got to grips with.

I think American Idiot is a real teenage album, and considering it came out when I was 13, it got me at exactly the right time. This music felt so raw, energetic and exciting, and even quite subversive. Maybe this was my chance to be a rebel properly for once! Or at least it was until I mentioned it to my parents and my dad said 'oh yeah, Green Day, they're good them, your brother used to play them a lot about 10 years ago.' GOD, dad you’re so lame.

Anyway, I still loved it. A lot of the songs, especially the most famous in 'American Idiot' and 'Holiday', are angry-political in an uncomplicated and non-nuanced way that is very appealing for kids who are just about becoming politically aware: they seem to have a deeper purpose than the impotent anger of classic punk ('Anarchy in the UK', 'Boredom', 'Pretty Vacant' etc) but without the need to be anything more than vaguely aware of world politics as it was happening. And then there are a bunch of tracks that are basically Teen Angst: The Soundtrack and I am completely okay with that – teen angst is a very important seam to mine.

What is really excellent is that – to my ears at least – this album hasn't aged a jot, musically. Yes, lyrically it's a bit childish, but the album is just as listenable from an entertainment standpoint as it ever was. There are tracks that are straight-up loud, fast and chaotic punk; there are slower, more weighty tunes; there are long medleys that ride a range of emotions and musical styles united by a common theme; there's even a piece based on a sample of tabla and tambura that is nowhere near as cringy as that sounds.

Much like I came into hip-hop just as my peers decided it wasn't cool any more, the same thing happened with Green Day: here's a band that has been part of the zeitgeist in their particular field for a long time, they release an album that I really connect with musically and emotionally and…well, fans of the band tend to agree that American Idiot was the turning point of Green Day, the album where they sold out for a more mainstream audience. Ho hum. That's up to them. As for me, I'll keep letting my inner teenager rock out to 'Holiday' more frequently than is perhaps dignified, but for a long time to come.

179: Come Find Yourself, by Fun Lovin' Criminals

Fun Lovin’ Criminals (USA)
Come Find Yourself (1996)
15 tracks, 57 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Other than the vaguest definitions of cool being a sort of unflappability, it's so hard to describe what makes something cool without getting into circular logic, that cool is... well, cool. Or, y’know, hip. The easiest way to explain it is to offer examples, and every so often there comes some piece of culture that helps us to calibrate our (individual) sense of ‘cool.’ The first time I heard Come Find Yourself, I had to rejig my conception of cool.

Because I'm not sure there is a better way to describe this album. It is a distillation of cool. Musically, the Fun Lovin Criminals' debut album is based on rock, rap and funk with lyrics heavily referencing New York City and crime, but also deeper and more ponderous topics. But the coolness comes, as it often does, in its personality. There are small elements of jazz in the album's music, but I hear a lot more jazz in the attitude – lead singer Huey Morgan's performance mannerisms can't help but put me in mind of hipsters and beats from the 1950s, with a Latino edge, even when he's rapping.

The album is full of great tracks, from the most famous singles of ‘Scooby Snacks’ and ‘The Fun Lovin Criminal’ to lesser-known album tracks such as ‘Smoke ’Em’ and ‘Bombing the L’, but to me, the track that really stands out comes at the end of the album as a bonus track: an alternate, 'Schmoove' version of the piece 'I Can't Get With That'. In some ways, I feel like it's the epitome of the album; although musically quite different from the rest – the rock is stripped back and replaced by a groovy, soulful jazz; the rap slowed down and its rhythm relaxed into more of a speech-song – it takes the coolness cultivated throughout to the next level. It really takes its time. Nothing about the track is rushed, nothing is overstated, but it has everything it needs, no more or less. I'm not usually one for alternative takes or versions of tracks (apart from remixes and dubs), but for me, this track has become my go-to of the album, and the one I think of whenever Fun Lovin Criminals come to mind.

Real coolness may be indefinable, but it's easy to point at something that defines cool through its very existence. And if you're under any misconceptions: Come Find Yourself is COOL.

175: Vampire Weekend, by Vampire Weekend

Vampire Weekend (USA)
Vampire Weekend (2008)
11 tracks, 34 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

I once heard Vampire Weekend referred to as ‘the whitest band in America.’ Aside from the fact that, in the iteration on this album, not all of the band are even white themselves – making such a statement kinda weird to be honest – I sort of get where that commentator was coming from. The band’s image is nerdy and ultra-preppy, their lyrics and imagery are full of references to the Ivy League, and their vocals are sung in ambiguous mid-Atlantic accents. But what really drew me to their music when I first heard it was how much it didn’t just sound like your average white-boy indie rock band.

The first song that I heard by Vampire Weekend – and I’d guess it would be the same for most people in the UK – was their single ‘A-Punk’, their first to achieve wide success over on this side of the ocean. I found it curious – it was very polite, and had none of the angry energy of punk that its title led me to expect, but there was an energy to it, bouncy and poppy without being pop music. Then there was a clear but indefinable African edge to the sound. The influences are a bit murky on this track, the high-pitched guitars echoing the sounds of Ghanaian highlife, Congolese soukous or Zimbabwean jit without obviously being any of these; the drum pattern was similarly vague. Nevertheless, the sound was there. I wanted to delve deeper, so I got their album – and there those influences flourished out.

They’re all the way through, and almost every track seems to take inspiration from a different African style. The highlife, soukous and jit are there in clearer tones, and so are Soweto jive and isicathamiya, and the Congolese sound of the electro-likembe (replicated on electric guitars) and the rhythmic patterns of Angolan kuduro and Burundian karyenda drumming. Perhaps the most obvious place that this influence shows is in the song ‘Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa’ – not only is it in the music, it’s right there in the name: kwassa kwassa is a music and dance style adapted from soukous and made famous by Congolese star Kanda Bongo Man.

For all these African influences, they enrich the sound of the indie rock rather than take it over. They give Vampire Weekend a unique sound without making it just sound like an American band attempting to copy African musical styles – after all, a lot of their sound also comes from a whole range of other directions such as rock’n’roll, synthpop, folk-pop and even aesthetics of baroque chamber music. There’s lots of talk connecting Vampire Weekend’s music to Paul Simon’s Graceland but, if anything, I reckon the younger band do a better job of bringing the African styles in as part of their own sound, rather than just sticking them together as Simon did, albeit to good effect.

With all of these styles at play, from across the US, Europe and seemingly most of sub-Saharan Africa, I have difficulty understanding the critical mind that can listen to this album and define that sound as being made by ‘the whitest band in America.’ However, there is no disputing that what Vampire Weekend do is cultural plundering and appropriation with very little acknowledgement of their music sources – which I guess you can think of as the whitest things a band can do.

139: Grace, by Jeff Buckley

Jeff Buckley (USA)
Grace (1994)
11 tracks, 57 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

Grace, Jeff Buckley’s only studio album released before his death, is a different prospect than the album we’ve already covered, his café sessions record Live at Sin-é, which was recorded just a few months earlier. There, he was on his own, just his guitar and his voice; here, the arrangements are full of atmospheric production and huge instrumentation, from many guitar overdubs with all manner of different effects to string arrangements and interesting timbres from harmoniums to dulcimers. However, what is the same is his own immense talent: his intelligent guitarwork, his agonised but strong compositions and above all, his soaring and swooping voice, a remarkable instrument full of fragility and emotion.

There’s so much variety on this album, it shows just how much he had to offer, musically. The three covers he includes illustrate this well – there’s ‘Lilac Wine’, a gently jazzy musical theatre song made famous by Nina Simone; then possibly the album’s most famous track ‘Hallelujah’, a tragic but passionate rendition of Leonard Cohen’s ballad; and then again ‘Corpus Christi Carol’, a hymn from the Middle Ages that fully utilises Jeff’s tenor range. Even these disparate covers contrast with the original material on the album too: ‘Corpus Christi Carol’ is immediately followed by ‘Eternal Life’, probably the heaviest song on the album that even owes parts of its sound to grunge and punk.

On Live at Sin-é, Jeff makes his famous statement about the legendary Pakistani qawwal Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, calling him “my Elvis,” and going on to sing a version of the qawwali ‘Yeh Jo Halka Halka Saroor Hai’. There are no Nusrat covers on Grace which, considering the target audience, is probably not too surprising, although hearing a full in-studio arrangement of the piece would have been really cool. But if you listen closely, Nusrat, qawwali and South Asian music in general are all over this album. They’re there in obvious places such as the introduction of ‘Dream Brother’, which is all drones, sliding guitars and tabla, but it’s also there in small elements such as the patterns he traces as he drifts away at the end of a phrase, or even in the way he sometimes constructs his guitar parts and chord progressions. All of it comes together on the title track, where his guitar and voice together sound so much influenced by the South Asian sound that I’m sure there would be room for an interesting cover highlighting those aspects.

Jeff’s death at just 30 years old is an unspeakable tragedy not only for his age and the circumstances surrounding it, but at the sheer amount of creative potential the man held. Everything he made was so beautiful, and his planned work was, by all accounts, just as captivating as that which he left us. It’s a story that seems to be repeated so often in music, and it gets no less saddening. But he did leave us with beautiful music, at least, and that shall ever be attached to the memory of this singular musician.