This Week I've Been Mostly Listening To...

Vashti Bunyan – Mother (2014)

In a Sunday lunchtime stupor – in no way brought on by the previous evening’s cocktail of gin, beer and red and white wine, you understand – I was catching up on Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone radio show.

My guard was down, and “Mother” – in the most balletic, subtle way imaginable – glided in and knocked me for six. A song delicate of beauty, sparse but poetic of language, it speaks of Vashti Bunyan as a young girl, standing at an ajar door, catching the beautiful unaware lady who had brought her into the world in a rare off-duty moment: on one occasion, her mother is dancing, spinning, “briefly unbound”; on another, she is playing piano and singing “songs long learned, so long untuned”. “My applause should have been rapturous”, Bunyan whispers, but, instead – heartbreakingly – she closed the door and “turned, turned away”.

In the subsequent conversation with Maconie, Bunyan said that she wanted to acknowledge the sacrifices that her mother’s generation made – that the opportunities she enjoyed when pursuing her musical dreams weren't available to them. Her new album Heartleap, self-produced at her home in Edinburgh and only her second release since 1970’s evergreen Just Another Diamond Day, contains many more treasured memories and secret treasures.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – Cellophane (2014)

Come for the name (just wrap your tongue around those delicious syllables), stay for the tunes. The marvellously-monikered King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have been incredibly prolific since forming in Melbourne in 2011, making a name (again, what a name!) for themselves in Australia’s vibrant psychedelic scene with several idiosyncratic LPs. They've recently been snapped up by Thee Oh Sees’ Castle Face label (a perfect fit) in the US and Heavenly Records in the UK, who’s nu-psych stable already includes Temples, TOY, The Voyeurs, and The Wytches. One listen through of “Cellophane”, and viewing of its accompanying 3D video, is enough to mark them out as a looser, loonier proposition than any of those bands.

Previous single “Hot Wax” suggested that King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard had befriended the “Drunk Girls” at LCD Soundsystem’s house party and led them out into the street for a spontaneous rendition of the “Monster Mash”. Their new album I'm In Your Mind Fuzz is to be let loose on Halloween on blood red and green splattered vinyl. Of course it is!

Viet Cong – Continental Shelf (2014)

Viet Cong - a four piece, featuring two former members of Calgary post-punkers Women - are another act likely to receive more attention now that they've signed to a prominent Indie (in their case the wonderful Jagjaguwar label). And rightly so - their Cassette EP, originally only available at their live shows and then pressed up as a 12", is one of the most promising things I've heard all year - a 7-track demonstration of how to do something fresh with your influences (garage pop, drone, post-punk), be adventurous, and fall with style.

“Check your anxiety, no need to suffer silently” dooms Matt Flegel, and Viet Cong certainly don’t suffer in silence here. "Continental Shelf”, set to feature on their self-titled LP out in January, is their most brooding, oppressively impressive creation yet, recalling Bauhaus (who's "Dark Entries" they covered on the Cassette EP) and The Scream-era Siouxsie & The Banshees. Their most angry too: the verses find Flegel tearing at his hair and not wanting to “face the world…it’s suffocating”; the chorus a resigned howl against the greedy and the selfish with their “fingertips in the fountain”, fondling “liquid gold” as the world falls apart around them.

Júníus Meyvant - Color Decay (2014)

There's something undoubtedly studied about Icelandic newcomer Júníus Meyrant's recreation of 60s baroque pop and 70s folk-soul. However, like Michael Kiwanuka's "Tell Me A Tale" or Ray Lamontagne's best work, "Color Decay" is so beautifully played and produced, its strings and horns so deftly orchestrated, that I can forgive him that. Plus, as I was listening to its autumnal sweep for the first time, Bob Lind's "Elusive Butterfly" came fluttering into my head. Which can only ever be a good thing.

Kevin Morby - Parade (2014)

"Slow Train", Kevin Morby's elegant collaboration with Cate Le Bon, was a real stand-out 2013 track for me, and the ex-Woods bassist clearly works faster than he plays guitar because he's back with another slice of unhurried, classic-sounding rock. On "Parade", the first track from his second solo album, his echoey vocal and diction and the universality of his melancholy lyrics (about coming to terms with the inevitability of death) are the right side of Dark Side Dave Gilmour; the "ba-ba-bahs", brass and "all my friends were there waiting on me" section straight out of a prime-Beatles McCartney piano number. Lovely stuff.

Live Report: The Horrors - ABC, Glasgow (26/09/14)

“Our colour isn't red, it isn't blue, it’s black”, wrote The Horrors’ Tom Cowan upon discovering that his band’s song “I See You” had been included in a pre-show playlist at last month’s Labour party conference. It was an effective and economical riposte. A funny one too, especially if you’re familiar with the Schlocky Horror Hipster Show image that the band had when they emerged from Southend-on-Sea in 2006 (leather jackets and drainpipe jeans; sun-starved skin; Back From The Grave garage-punk, complete with cover of “Jack The Ripper”). A suspicious media suggested that they were over-privileged chancers – playing dumb, feigning darkness. And after witnessing their performance as opening act on the following year’s NME Tour, I was of a similar opinion: a headache-inducing half-hour of confused clattering and illuminous goo-green strobes (this actually makes it sound a damn sight more exciting than it was); thick frenzies of hair and smoke where the tunes should have been.

It took just eight minutes to change many minds. Coming across “Sea Within A Sea” on the radio was one of those wonderful “who is this?” moments: a motorik pulse (a good few years before every alternative band was adopting that Neu! beat and claiming to be influenced by Can), howls of reverb and stabs of wiry guitar which built into a dizzying electric storm; a spooked voice encouraging you to follow him “far beyond the shallows, far beyond the reaches of the shadows” towards “the scraping sky…my destination”. When it came to an end and the DJ revealed it as being the new Horrors track, “who is this?” turned into “that was them?”

Tom Cowan’s comment also recalls a description by 1960s freakbeaters The Creation – one of the finest English art-rock bands of their time – of their own sound: “our music is red – with purple flashes”. It refers to the concept of chromesthesia, in which heard sounds automatically and involuntarily evoke an experience of colour. Red seems apt for The Creation’s particularly incendiary brand of biff bang pow; the purple flashes perhaps the metallic screeds that guitarist Eddie Phillips used to elicit from his electric guitar using a bow. It’s safe to assume that a group of avid crate-diggers and psych-heads like The Horrors are familiar with The Creation, the quote and the concept. 

Primary Colours, the band’s second album and home of “Sea Within A Sea”, was an extraordinary progression from the damp, dingy debut, Strange House. Geoff Barrow from Portishead was brought in on production duties and although he’s downplayed his role, saying that The Horrors knew actually what they wanted to achieve, his ear for fine detail and love of experimental rock is easy to detect in the record’s sound: thick coats of red, blue and yellow layered, swirled and smudged together to create a claustrophobic, breathlessly exhilarating mix of shoegaze, post-punk and psychedelia.
With Skying, the band moved from Primary Colours into Technicolor, their artful take on stadium rock drawing comparisons to The Chameleons, New Gold Dream-era Simple Minds and Psychedelic Furs. Frontman Faris Badwan claimed to have never heard any of those bands and that any similarity in sound was completely coincidental; either way, broadsheet critics, eighties rock fans and Shoreditch art students were all into it like a train.

In a recent interview, the band revealed that the intention for the latest album was to continue their “slow ascension into music that elevates”, adding a glistening electronic sheen, inspired by Giorgio Moroder and house-music labels Trax Records and Metroplex, to their already-airborne alt-rock. When the record was finished, and they were looking for a title that “expressed the sounds that live(d) within the sleeve”, one word felt right: Luminous.

Tonight’s packed show at the ABC kicks off confidently with two cuts from the new LP. The slow building, bongo-assisted intro and subsequent pay-off of “Chasing Shadows” makes it a tailor-made opener and “In And Out Of Sight”, while often overlooked in the reviews of Luminous that I've read, may be – along with “I See You” – my favourite on the album: the prominent yet fluid use of synthesizers on these tracks marking another progression for this forward-thinking band. A handful of tracks on Luminous (“Mine And Yours”, “First Day Of Spring”), while perfectly serviceable, feel like lesser versions of previous highs and, tellingly, don’t make tonight’s set-list.

We are rewarded for our appreciation and patience with two Horrors classics: “Who Can Say” – with its Ronettes-via-Ramones spoken word section – and a moody, magnificent “Sea Within A Sea”. Similarly, later on, mid-set newbies “Jealous Sun” and “Sleepwalk” are immediately followed by a catapulting “Endless Blue” and "Mirror's Image". Crisp, clean strobe tramlines complement the “Chase”-indebted “I See You”, while the terrific “Falling Star” is arguably The Horrors’ poppiest track yet - I can imagine someone like Grimes or Chvrches taking that gorgeous synth riff and running with it into the upper reaches of the Top 40.

In contrast to that fateful NME show, where he was throwing himself around, presumably in an attempt to mask the absence of tunes, Faris Badwan now lets the songs do the talking. His poise and cool is disrupted only by a smoke machine which is positioned directly behind him – at seemingly random intervals, unnecessarily powerful streams of smoke are fired out, engulfing the singer and threatening to force his slight, gangly frame off stage. As the smoke dies away, you half expect to find poor Faris hunched-over, wheezing and coughing.

Badwan's lyrics for The Horrors are rarely as personal or emotionally honest as his work with Cat’s Eyes (the closest he gets to vulnerable tonight is during the crooned verses of “Change Your Mind”): he’s too busy observing the skies and in awe of the vastness of the ocean to be pouring his heart out into a diary entry. But these songs clearly do connect with people. The fact that “I See You” was judged suitable for the Labour conference – alongside tracks by such black-hearts as Embrace, Gorgon City and Laura Mvula – shows just how much light and shade has seeped into The Horrors’ music over the years; it’s hard to imagine any of their early material being considered, let alone chosen, for such an event (though a “Sheena Is A Parasite”-backed speech on targeting benefit cheats would be genius). They produce a Big sound without resorting to the lazy “woah woah-woahs” and “yeah yeah yeahs” of many stadium acts. “Still Life” – while, yes, sounding a bit like Simple Minds – is expansive yet elegant, anthemic without being contrived.

Any other band would have saved “Sea Within A Sea” for last, but The Horrors also have “Moving Further Away”, another fantastic, propulsive eight-minute epic. Strobes shoot like caps of silver and the crowd wheels in formation.
The ABC felt like the perfect-sized venue for The Horrors tonight (large enough for the songs to swirl around and breathe; small enough for the experience to be an immersive one), but it would be no surprise to find them filling stadiums and headlining festivals in the near future. Their star is still on the rise.