Jazzfinger - 'Mole & The Morning Dew' (Spirit of Orr)

Ecstatic drone! Thick, rushing roars of processed guitar. Echoes that ping back, jarring against other sonorities. Cheap keyboards and clanging guitars, sprawling out to explore a dark tunnel. Interplay both primitive and sophisticated. An autumnal atmosphere, like a Jesmond treeline in the dusk, the distant roar of suburban-bound traffic. Naturalistic renderings, both pastoral and contemporary.  The rush of electric energy, a current throughout, filling available space with its potentiality. Not exactly howls, but restrained cries, made with strings and wood being tapped, hammered and bowed. Treble kicked out of the window. Throw in everything and see what sticks, but refine it as it happens, control shaped through a long relationship of improvisation. It's not chaos, but a realm of glorious glowing energy. Arpeggios cycling towards a dark centre. Searing, bowed metal, pulsing through reverberating amplifiers. Gentle acoustic tones prodding against it all. Voices, bathed in static, in varispeed dictaphone glory, providing an off-centre to repeated guitar figures; the colour in the bowing takes it to different directions. Yet is always circles back.  A tape splice to end it all. 

Gleaming Spires - 'Songs of the Spires' (Posh Boy)

This is why I love the alphabetical approach - because we can go from Philip Glass to this, back-to-back. I bought this at a charity shop years ago solely because of the cover - it screamed out that this was a self-released experiment, possibly even a school project. But Posh Boy isn't a vanity label - they also released stuff by Red Cross and TSOL, and the Spires were actually the backing band of an early 80s Sparks lineup. You can hear that clearly on the record itself - these are clever pop songs in the mode of early 80s Sparks, with lots of synths and sequenced beats, and a very white male (and, I hope, ironic) viewpoint. Plus, both Maels wrote the liner notes on the back, silly screeds that don't indicate they actually listened to the record - the ol' backhanded compliment. The Gleaming Spires are remembered for their one hit song, 'Are You Ready For the Sex Girls?', track two here, which I must admit is a stomper. It's just on that border of novelty music, a wave I often enjoy surfing on. I'm sure it's being played right now in a strip club somewhere, as it will at strip clubs everywhere until the end of time - hopefully these guys had their publishing rights sorted out properly and they are still living comfortable on royalties. Whatever you may think of this song, 'they are women without any faults' is a line so brilliant it could have been penned by Ron and/or Russell themselves; the Spires clearly apprenticed well. The other cuts are hit and miss strong, and none too far from the Sparks formula. 'When Love Goes Under Glass' has a double tracked guitar line to lift the war imagery of the lyrics to a feel-good place; 'How To Get Girls Through Hypnotism' is amazingly predatory and it's hard to even sense the level of irony at play. Lines about 'make them do what you want' are stomach-churning, but then the verses suggest this is written from the perspective of a guy with serious fears and issues; regardless of its political correctness, it's just not a very good song, with the bridge, verse and chorus sounding like they came from three different places. The last two cuts are by far the best - the bouncing, peppery 'Talking in the Dark' and the maudlin, gorgeous 'Big Hotels'. A lush, romantic vision sung over synth string pads with a Euro-gazing perspective, it's my favourite song on the album and pretty much the reason I keep it.This electro-pop sound is back in style now and I can't help but wonder if a track like 'Blood Beat (Watch Your)' would be popular today. The darker tunes could almost be written by Tuxedomoon, if you squint, and that cover art is fucking amazing.

Gastr Del Sol ‎- 'Crookt, Crackt, Or Fly' (Drag City)

'In the museum / they set up the drums all wrong / reversed hi-hat and snare' is a lyric that, when you read it here, doesn't sound so odd. But once David Grubbs delivers it with his famous diction, and perhaps in the context of the overall song ('Parenthetically', which is clearly a hissy, caught-on-dictaphone improvisation) and the overall album (the sublime, strange and still singular Crookt, Crackt or Fly), it feels fucking alien. There's a forgotten generation of people like me, mostly male I'm guessing, and white, and quite a few who wear spectacles, who felt the power of the guitar but didn't want to sound like Yngvie or Satriani in our teenage aspirations. Gastr del Sol, and in particular this LP, was like manna from heaven. I never really listened to the first Gastr album, because it didn't have Jim O'Rourke on it. But here on the sophomore record, the two are equals, dazzling in their guitar interplay but not afraid of incorporating some piano or electronics when necessary. The thirteen minutes of 'Work from Smoke' make up the Gastr piece de resistance, the masterpiece that takes you through everything they do in a short period of time: Grubbs's idiot-savant lyrics, edgy acoustic guitar slashes, and a new dawn of droning electronics that sounds like George Crumb having a go at remixing the Spirit of Eden master tapes after drinking a few sixpacks of malt liquor. If this was the only track they ever cut they'd still live in eternal greatness for me, but there's actually the rest of the album to enjoy (and a few other records, too).  Side two's monster is 'The Wrong Soundings', a combination of processed ambient/field recordings (sounding mostly like somebody fucking around in a cave or other resonant space) with some circular insanity-guitar; the first half doesn't grab you by the throat and throttle like the best parts of 'Work from Smoke' or 'Every Five Miles', but it's a key transition to Upgrade & Afterlife's more O'Rourke-dominanted moments - and then the RAWK comes crashing in, and we remember the roots of this band (or at least 2/3 of them). It's not the most cohesive track, feeling a bit like a collage of several different parts, but the sum isn't shabby. I think part of the reason this record feels so perfect is that is sticks to a fairly limited palette, being mostly acoustic, though John McEntire shows up to rock out on side 2 for a bit. Crookt, Crackt or Fly breathes a heavy gust of the avant-garde into an indie rock carcass (remember, Grubbs was the dude from Bastro!) and if there needs to be a photograph of something in the dictionary entry for 'post-rock', this is a pretty strong candidate. You can laugh at Grubbs's vocal delivery (and I often do - it's great to open your junk mail and sing it in his style), and maybe the strangeness feels affected to some, but I'm never one to mock ambition and this is bathed in it, and I think confidently achieves its goals. Maybe it's mostly forgotten by now, but the legions of crookt crackt guitar players in contemporary bands (Dirty Projectors come to mind) surely owe some debt to this. It's absolutely wonderful, and despite the very distinct tone here, I'm almost always in the mood for it.

The Feelies - 'No One Knows' (Coyote)

There's not much to this 12" - it's an extended single, marked on the label as 45rpm but actually 33rpm, so you don't even get better sound quality on the two Good Earth tracks, 'the High Road' and 'Slipping (Into Something)'. Well, I guess you do, as a shorter run time means it can be mastered louder, but I couldn't tell. They are great songs, and the two b-sides are both covers - the Beatles, again, with 'She Said, She Said', not quite as luxuriously reinvented as 'Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey' but with a nice psychedelic vibe - a thicker middle than most of the other songs from this period. 'Slipping (Into Something)' is a pretty great song, with very minimal vocals and a thick, accelerating ending that builds to an inevitable But then the kicker - a cover of Neil's 'Sedan Delivery', done in the same tossed off way as the Beatles cover. This is faithful, and the high pitched voice is even accurate, though out of character. The singing on both of these covers has an exuberance that hasn't been heard since Crazy Rhythms and that's very, very welcome - the saving grace of an otherwise unnecessary EP.

The Feelies - 'Crazy Rhythms' (Stiff)

I listen to this record quite often. It somehow cuts through the familiarity that saturates so many other albums from this time; the songs have seeped deep into my cortex, with every note and tom-tom tap memorised to the point of instinct, yet it doesn't feel like I'm on a mental autopilot when listening to it. This early Feelies lineup is so different than their subsequent albums, probably due to the presence of Anton ("Andy") Fier, who left after this record. The opening cut is pretty much the roadmap - 'The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness', which explicitly lays out the nervous energy that made this early lineup so great. It's a song where only Bill Million plays any guitars, a studio assemblage for sure, and the rest of the band is on various percussion. Larks Tongues in Aspic this is not; I wish I could say layered guitars were influenced by Glenn Branca, but I doubt it; it's jittery, tight and coherent, but succinct and still a pop song. The more catchy songs, like 'Crazy Rhythms' and 'Moscow Nights', could be punk thrashers with different production and a different singer. In the voices of Million and Glenn Mercer, it's comes off as some hybrid of R.E.M. and Mission of Burma (both of whom the Feelies pre-date). It's all good, though. Nothing stays beyond its welcome, even the seven minute 'Forces at Work'; when the contrapuntal ascending and descending guitar lines break out at the end of 'Loveless Love', it fades out before it starts to be show-offy. This is a total guitar album; 'Forces at Work' is epic in the way it crescendos, yet it's never jerkoff Yngvie-style stylings - the players aren't necessarily virtuosos on the fretboards, but they have a masterful way of assembling things. The vibe of Crazy Rhythms is fun and hyper without being overly aggressive, and the fashion of the members from the cover and liner photos is so proto-indie chic it would be a cliché if this wasn't 1980. The Beatles cover is just in line with the rest of it, and it doesn't feel silly or gimmicky. This is a great band and this is a great debut, and it's nice that they change gears so abruptly on their next album (which took six years to come out!).  I don't have a bad thing to say here, nor anything insightful either; I feel like I've just been describing this record by pointing out how balanced it is and what it is not, more than what it is. I'll tell you this - I throw on 'Moscow Nights' or 'Crazy Rhythms' some time just when I want to jump around and play a weird sort of air guitar, and I'm glad no one sees me doing so.