Simon Joyner ‎– 'The Cowardly Traveller Pays His Toll' (Sing, Eunuchs!)

My copy actually has a white sleeve, but it's so much easier to steal these images than to scan them. I hope that this brief excursion into early Simon Joyner records is as rewarding to read about as it is for me to listen to; this is an intensely beautiful body of work from a gifted songwriter whose talent only further expanded over the subsequent two decades, though for some reason I only have his early ones. The Cowardly Traveller Pays His Toll is a nice hybrid of the ragged approach found on his Iffy cassette and the somewhat most contemplative singer-songwriter vibe of the subsequent Room Temperature cassette. This is his first LP release and it's spread across different sounds and styles, with some band work and scarring electric guitar playing, perhaps by Joyner or perhaps with a band - no one else is credited but I'd guess Chris Deden is the drummer. Joyner is a natural with an acoustic guitar but over his career he has resisted attempts to pigeonhole him into the coffeeshop/open-mic genre. Here, electricity brings a darker cadence, especially on songs like '747', 'August (Die She Must)' and 'Fallen Man'. There's a lot of personal pronoun work here, and it's neither intensely soul-baring nor character work, which is maybe one of the reasons that Joyner's never found major commercial success. Instead, he writes songs that are rich in imagery, oblique enough to have an air of mystery, and relatable in fleeting passages. 'Appendix' is a long and somewhat surreal travelogue, which is quite compelling in it's manic strumming; it's the acoustic mirror of side one's 'I Went to the Lady of Perpetual Healing', which seems to describe a mystical experience but is maybe a bit tongue-in-cheek. These are great, ragged indie rock accompaniments, Omaha style, and they perfectly complement Joyner's unorthodox voice; the scratchy violin on 'Cole Porter' can act as a symbol of the whole scene he came from at this time, which stretched to the West Coast to include the Shrimper label and artists like Refrigerator and the Mountain Goats, who Joyner shares an obvious musical affinity with. It comes to a head with the final track, 'Joy Division' (where have we heard that name before?), which is an electric guitar and voice tune, sung to a father and with the same sense of mild desperation that rings through the whole album. It crescendos into a brief moment of cathartic rocking out, before ending with a tape splice. It's sudden, but suddenly moving as well, and there's still a glimmer of teen angst despite the more sophisticated approach to lyric writing. This style of arrangements is right up my alley but it set these artists aside from more commercially-minded songwriters; I clicked with it as an adolescent in the mid-90s because it felt intimate, homemade, and inviting. If the songwriting is pure then there should be no need for big studio production, and I think I still believe that today.

Guided by Voices - 'Vampire on Titus' (Scat)

Out of the frying pan and into the fire! I don't know a lot of other obsessive GbV-heads but I would guess that Vampire on Titus shares the same status in their minds as in mine: simultaneously their best and least essential of the golden period; an exercise in contradictions and paradox. This is where they took the 'lo-fi' thing as far as it could be taken while still resembling a rock band, by intentionally distorting & muddying most of the songs, needlessly so (some would say). And I'm not sure, still, how I feel about these choices in obfuscation. I can't imagine 'Perhaps Now the Vultures' or 'Sot' any other way, but it seems to hurt other songs - two of which appear in superior, and more clear forms on Fast Japanese Spin Cycle. In many ways this is my favourite GbV album because it's not only their most difficult but it also has some of their absolute best work. And it feels more like a complete work than a collection of songs, perhaps because some of the tracks are so obfuscated as to be almost impenetrable - so they blend into the overall blanket. 'Expecting Brainchild' could be an arena rock classic but because of the way it's recorded, it feels more like a Chrome outtake - and that's precisely what's brilliant about it (and enables the homophobic f-word to be overlooked and barely heard, just as in 'Hit' on Alien Lanes). Another thing which hurts Vampire was the subsequent release of the Fast Japanese 7", which will be addressed here if I ever actually resurrect the 7" blog, because as mentioned above it features versions of 'Marchers in Orange' and 'Dusted' that blow away the versions on this LP. The latter, made evident on the 7" as possibly one of Pollard's best-ever songs (and that's a tall claim!), is almost indistinguishable from the other midrangey rockers in its Vampire form. 'Marchers' on the LP is built around a clunky pump organ, and the title makes me think of the protestant Orange march that I frequently saw during my Glasgow years, so it's a dicey association though surely not what Pollard means at all. '"Wished I Was a Giant"' starts things off with that midrangey, murky basement rock 4-track sound but somehow transcends it, as it's become an iconic GbV song over the years; the mandatory quotation marks makes it all the more brilliant, and the context indicates that Pollard is referring it not as a direct quote but as a nickname for some power-tripping person. So, so many classics here - 'Jar of Cardinals' is pure beauty; 'Gleemer (The Deeds of Fertile Jim)' is one of Sprout's masterpieces, and 'Non-Absorbing', while simplistic in form, is more or less a statement of purpose: 'Do you see more than I do?'. These jams peppered live sets through the period I dub as 'golden' and I've listened to them hundreds of times, so they feel truly familiar to this near-obsessive fan. It is, I guess, the lesser-remembered songs which really characterise Vampire on Titus, and some of them should be more celebrated: 'World of Fun', 'Wondering Boy Poet' (which has the cleanest, folkiest part of the record with it's 'Sailing, just like the days....' refrain-outro) and 'Perhaps Now the Vultures' are all pretty great songs. Maybe the best testament to Vampire on Titus's lasting power is that I listened to it before writing this, then went away for a week before finishing it, and couldn't get '#2 In the Model Home Series' out of my head the whole time. That's a sketchy, fragmentary song that could be a forgotten track on Suitcase or a clip of 'Back to Saturn X Radio Report', but when it drilled deep into my brain its repeated refrain of  'And secretly she sees' somehow sounds like the key to unlock a world with a million hallways and meanings. And that's exactly why this period of GbV continues to fascinate me - because it's just a treasure map. Vampire on Titus may be one of the dustiest of these maps, but when you blow it off enough to see, the riches are extremely rewarding.

Don Dietrich/Ben Hall - 'Spitfire' (What The--?)

Three blistering tracks of free-skronk fury, allowing Dietrich to rip it up without the Borbetosoup around him (I've seen it live but think this is the only recording I've grokked). Ben Hall plays the drums real well, on the first track actually propelling things melodically and on the flipside being an absolute fury of the racktoms. It's a plundering of Sunny Murray's legacy, but I mean that in a good way - the beat is always falling through the centre, like a cylinder spinning so fast you don't know the bottom drops out (remember that amusement park ride?). Dietrich's tone is absolutely sick; on the second track it starts to mellow slightly, but the side-long second half of Spitfire is firmly in the upper scratch channels. Ayler's the obvious comparison because of the tone and construction, though this surprises me a bit - Dietrich always struck me as one step further away from the jazz tradition, though maybe this is Hall's influence. The tempo never drops, not even for a second, and while I often would cite that as a criticism, in this case I'm quite satisfied with the fury. The recording is just the perfect level of fidelity and I like to think of the three planes on the cover as representing three tracks.