Joy Division - 'Still' (Factory)

Still is always somewhat maligned by JD completists and I can understand why. It's patchy and thrown together from questionable live tapes; the version of 'Ceremony', one of the greatest songs ever to come from JD or New Order,  is actually pretty poor here. But there's a few reasons I like it anyway. One is getting to hear Ian Curtis sing the lyric 'sucking on your ding dong' during the cover of 'Sister Ray' - anything that de-mythologises a legend, even in a tiny way is welcome, and what value is Ian Curtis if we don't celebrate his humanity? Because half of this is live, it has a much more stripped down feel than Closer, coming almost full circle to Warsaw and making this a nice set of four releases to evaluate sequentially. There's a few songs from Warsaw present on the first half ('Ice Age', 'They Walked in Line'), which makes record one essentially a 'lost album' put together from errant studio sessions. Nothing here feels incomplete, and there's a brash, bold confidence among the best of them. 'Something Must Break' pulls the listener along as if on a leash, and 'Dead Souls' is a classic in its theatrical simplicity. The live cuts are rough, as they should be, and this ragged nature features some great insights, such as how fucking classic the guitar riff on 'Transmission' is. When synths are used in the live setting, like on 'Decades', it's lacking something, at least compared to the studio version - this take is so thin and compromised that I'm surprised it was included. Likewise the live version of 'Digital', a good choice to end the last official release of Joy Division, suffers compared to other versions I've heard, perhaps on that Heart and Soul box or some other compilations. I'm not sure why the raggedness hurts in this particular song as opposed to helping (such as on 'Disorder') but it leaves me wanting more. Perhaps this was always the intent with Still, or maybe it was just to stop bootlegging as Wikipedia claims. It's a curious release and this particular edition may be a bootleg itself, which is a nice absurd ending to the recorded Joy Division story. It took me awhile to get through these records since it's hard to find much to say about them, and I still failed to bring any new insights here in these four posts, yet I must admit I enjoyed revisiting them more than I thought. Whenever I think about culling records like this from the collection I usually listen again and find some sort of pleasure to justify keeping them. And it's times like this I can explain why there are 1600 LPs to the right of me. And now, it's onward to Simon Joyner!

Kevin Ayers - 'Odd Ditties' (Harvest)

These ditties aren't that odd, but they didn't make it to any previously released albums. Yeah, this is the singles and b-sides collection that you never wanted from Kevin Ayers, though the first side is good-to-great, being mostly singles and outtakes from the Joy of a Toy/Shooting at the Moon era. The French version of 'May I' is here, though I'm starting to get pretty sick of hearing that song. 'Gemini Child' and 'Butterfly Dance' are the highlights here, though the opening track 'Soon Soon Soon' (an abandoned single) makes a strong case with it's Nazz-like fuzz bass. Nowadays all these tracks would end up as CD bonus tracks so it's kind of weird hearing them together. Side two takes a dip in quality, beginning with a sappy faux-French duet with Bridget St. John and then presenting a slow, orchestrated version of 'Lady Rachel'. Then we dive into a shitty whirlwind of reggae-pop. There's a reason I don't own Bananamour; these songs, with Ayers singing in a fake Jamaican accent, are musical Kryptonite. The whimsical 'Don't Sing no more Sad Songs' picks things up slightly but then we get 'Take me to Tahiti' (which causes my response "and leave him there, please") and the closing single 'Caribbean Moon'. These things are always a bit hit-and-miss and here the hits are relatively clustered together, so I can just stick to side one if I ever actually listen to this again.