Faust - 'So Far' (Recommended)

I've always envisioned Faust as a bit of a 'boy band', in the sense that they were put together by Uwe Nettelbeck to capitalise on the psychedelic craze. The best line from Wikipedia's entry on the first album is definitely "In 1971, Polydor entered a deal with Uwe Nettelbeck to assemble a musical ensemble that could compete with the likes of The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, and Small Faces." So they're basically the Backstreet Boys of their time! Again, it's hard to decide on the pinnacle of Faust's first four albums because they're all so fucking perfect, but So Far might be the most cohesive record of them as a 'band'. It's more diverse than the debut, opening with 'It's a Rainy Day Sunshine Girl' which is typically attributed as indebted to the Velvet Underground, but I hear more of the Godz in it, plus a hint of soul. Really! That's what my soul looks like. 'No Harm' is the one I like to play when I DJ, though I never remember the name of it ("Daddy, take a banana, Tomorrow is Sunday!", yeah that one) and when turned up LOUD, it sounds absolutely goddamned fucking incredible. This is Faust almost pissing out perfect, spazzy guitar-psych just because they can, and it's somehow a bit Dada and distinctly European and yet menacing and accessible simultaneously. They also manage to sound like Throbbing Gristle on 'Mamie is Blue', and spin some delicate folk moments with 'On the Way to Abamae'. It's occasionally goofy, like when the voices all line up on 'I've Got My Car and My TV', but more often it has a haunting, challenging darkness that spins a web of associations for me. There's actually less tape manipulations and studio fuckery here than I remember - it's really an album of songs, yet it's hard to grasp what these guys are actually about. I find something quite expressive among all these confusing branches, but then they had me at the first album. This is another reissue but one that has the beautiful prints inside, though the paper slipcase holding them is so tight that I rarely take them out. It was the last of the original four to get a CD re-release (or at least it was hella difficult to find in 1999) and thus the one I came to latest, so in many ways it still sounds the freshest, and it's a beautiful, inspiring package.

Faust (Recommended)

I got into Krautrock while a sophomore in college, circa 1998-99, and at the time I devoured all the big names (or at least what was available to me in the pre-Napster days, with a limited budget). You can read already my thoughts on Agitation Free, Cosmic Jokers, and Dzyan; but the "big names" as I saw it, probably thanks to Julian Cope's privileging of them in his book, were Can, Düül and Faust. (In my mind I always grouped Neu!, Harmonia, Ash Ra Tempel and Brainticket into a 'second tier' which is pretty stupid --Brainticket were Swiss, after all -- but, hey, we take easily presented narratives and stick with them, especially when 19). My point is that Faust seemed like one of the essentials of Krautrock and to me they were the best. The absolute best. My compass is always wavering on which of the first four Faust albums I like the best, but you can make a strong case for any of them. This one tends to get overlooked, maybe because it has the least "songy" bits, and also because it probably wasn't as big of a seller. Years later, after having dug through the NWW list and all the obscure surrealist treasures that have been unearthed through blogs and reissue labels, Faust "1" (as I like to call it) stands out as something special. The overall presentation is ace - clear cover and vinyl, mysterious lack of info, creepy/scary X-ray fist - and then three stunning tracks. I first found a CD reissue of this secondhand and played it to death, but this vinyl version (a reissue from the late 70s, I think) really makes the tones pop out. This is extremely left-field when compared to a lot of the other kozmiche music happening at the time, due to the collaged nature and odd pop/folk forms that are woven throughout - but I think it actually sounds quite distinct from a lot of the less jammy, more surreal freak music of the 70s, like Mahogany Brain or Jac Berrocal too. This is 1971, and that's notable as well, because it somehow feels like a blueprint for the 70s to come, clearly built from the psychedelic times of the 60s, but completely singular as well. There's only three cuts here, and the first side is pretty iconic, with its melting marching band and 'a wonderful wooden reason'.... but it's 'Miss Fortune' that I really love to listen to. It's a beautiful composition, even when it feels discordant, and it introduces the Faust tradition of ending the albums with genteel acoustic bits. Whenever other artists are compared to Faust, it's usually because they have a short attention span or collaged together a bunch of different styles a la Tapes. But who's out there capturing the mystery, the enigma, and the spectacle? Faust in the Internet age surely couldn't happen anyway...

Family Underground - 'Familiar Places' (Into The Lunar Night)

So many contradictions here! These Danes are about the sweetest, kindest people you'll ever meet, but their music often sounds like the devotional chants of a murderous cult. The title is 'familiar places' but the only familiar imagery this will conjure is an imagined nocturnal bender with distant, ever-ungraspable shrieks in the distance and a pulsating ur-drone throughout. That is to say, this is a pretty great album that somehow transcends the ecstatic drone scene it was birthed from and has lots of peers (Double Leopards, Birds of Delay, etc.) while still somehow retaining a distinct quality. The centrepiece, 'Valley of 1xxx Smokes', sounds a bit like the mid-fi horizontalism of Newcastle's Culver, though with extra members to sweeten the deal with melodicas, tinkering bells and other not-quite-identifiable sounds. It's not too obvious, but works up enough steam that having to break in the middle to flip the LP is actually a detriment. Family Underground seem to flirt between organic, pastoral drone and darker, industrial-tinged rattling; it's a delicate balance than shifts its weight even in the same track. And when 'Hellish Design' rolls around to close up, it feels sufficient, a band that hasn't outstayed their welcome and knows exactly what they are converging on.

Family Fodder ‎– 'ScHiZoPhReNiA pArTy!' (Fresh)

I rarely spin this 12" EP, mostly because it opens with 9 brutal minutes of 'Dinosaur Sex', a raveup that has energy and spirit but is just too utterly stupid for me to fully enjoy. There's the same creative pop production techniques at play here as on Monkey Banana Kitchen, though maybe a bit less vocal or structural experimentation. The dub/reggae influence is more subtle here, just being the undertow of 'Emergency' as opposed to an out-and-out rave. The flipside contains a few songs that predate fast, guitar-based indie rock, as well as the percussion blowout 'Silence', a memorable gem from the Savoir Faire greatest hits disc. There's a few songs that aren't that CD, and thus hearing gems like 'Tea with Dolly' (feeling like This Heat goes pop, with ascending and descending melodic steps keeping everything just off-kilter) and the closer 'Better Lies' (a tense hybrid between dream-pop and indie soul, with the line 'I am the sex pistol of dreams'). Schizophrenia may be appropriate, for that's the condition most associable with the tape-splice technique, though to be honest, there's less overt splicing and fuckery present here than on the full-length. It sounds great at 45rpm though!

Family Fodder - 'Monkey Banana Kitchen' (Fresh)

About half of this record appears on the Savoir Faire best-of CD (which we'll get to, soon) so I'm a bit disorientated by the sequencing of this, Family Fodder's first proper album, which I've listened to much less than I've listened to the CD. So the opening cut, 'Darling', while a great a-capella vocal experiment, is a bit of a what-the-fuck - as much of an anti-logical side1track1 as the forthcoming Fleetwood Mac Tusk (which starts with the naturally finishing 'Over and Over' as some sort of oddball paen to Finnegans Wake, I think, but enough of that for now). Family Fodder struck me as an utterly astounding calvary of post-punk art-school weirdness when I first heard them back in 2001 or so, but now with all the other magic that's been unearthed by blogs and reissue labels, they are less earthshattering. The tendencies between pop and experimental are held in check, mostly, and there's every imaginable influence that turn-of-the-80s British art punks were digesting. Monkey Banana Kitchen ranges from primitive indie-clatter (the sublime 'Cold Wars', aggro 'Wrong', and 'Savoir Faire', which predates Stereolab and adds a healthy dose of amphetamines) to dub ('Monkey' is the obvious one, but it's integrated into songwriting, Slits-like, in 'Symbols', a fantastic song left off the greatest hits album for some reason); straight-up reggae is attempted in 'Bass Adds Bass', which is the album's only real misstep besides the child rave-up 'Philosophy'. Romance is deconstructed in the duet 'Love Song', which looks for 'a new kind of love song'; 'Cold Wars' deals with similar territory, with the lyric 'We're just like America and Russia' reaching a new significance given recent world events. But romance is just one element - the grand brushstrokes are wilfully obscured by the strong sense of musical play throughout. Overdubs are used brilliantly - there's some bells, or a few seemingly random pianochords, or some discordant voices - and studio phasing/flange/fluter techniques are not shied away from. 'Organ Grinder' creates a eerie mood, with a cadence akin to Wire's 'French Film Blurred' and German chanting which balances 'Savoir Faire's frantic French on the flipside - it's a beautiful mix, ending in a dissipating sound bed of scraping string instruments and echoing xylophones. It's a song I've listened to a zillion times but I find something new to hear each time through.

The Family Elan - 'Stare Of Dawn' (Locust Music)

The Family Elan is Chris Hladowski, Bradford-born multi-instrumentalist and member of various groups in Scotland in the last decade including Scatter and Nalle; this is a totally solo affair showcasing his immersion in Eastern acoustic instrumentation and it fits in well with a lot of the new wave of ethnic-flavoured underground folk forms that hit around this time (2007). The recording is close and bright, and on most of the six tracks Hladowski jams melodically on bouzouki or dulcimer or oud or something - it's not easy for this ear to discern the different tonalities, but there's percussion (maybe a drum or maybe just the side of the wooden instrument being tapped, plus bells and shakers) and a bit of singing and some flute and it's all just very very nice. But that's not to diminish it - when the repetitive, trance-like riffs break down, as they do at the end of 'Over The Hills and Fields I Wander', there's a bed of free sonority for all of these errant string plucks to dance around in. It's reminiscent of some of Vibracathedral Orchestra's (un)holy ruckus, though more rooted in a pastoral song structure. When Hladowski sings, as on the opening and closing cuts, his voice has a mellow, smoky tone that floats in between the strumming, plucking and bowing. The songs occasionally shift towards less stable territory, and violins scratch about an elusive centre; it's occasionally beautiful beyond belief, and while somehow feeling akin to a lot of other artists, nothing comes to mind so there's a unique vision as well. 

The Fall - 'The Wonderful and Frightening World...' (PVC/Beggars Banquet)

This is as far as I go, or maybe to This Nation's Saving Grace - I always forget which one came out later and I'm too lazy to look it up. So my only Fall on vinyl is the first and last, at least within the era that I know. And 5-6 years later, only a bit has changed. Karl Burns is the sole survivor from the Witch Trials band and he's moved to bass (I think; the credits are CONFUSING!). Craig Scanlon is on guitar and it's generally his acidic slashing that makes this era great (arriving for Dragnet and defining a style of post-punk shredding that is timeless, like so much great art, because it's simultaneously of it's era and also completely transcendent, like This Heat or Godard or, I dunno, Animal Collective or something...). You're thrown for a loop by the opening moments of 'Lay of the Land', which begins with some austere intonation about the apocalypse or something - hey, the Fall invented the Current 93 sound too! But it's just a ruse, cause the band comes crashing in and it's the Fall as we know it, with yet another great song. Catchy, but the hooks are all in the instrumentation, and the vocals are just fenceposts to build around. The production on this record is a bit weird, making the band sound distant and lo-fi but with a bright rhythm section. Smith's voice (both his and his wife's) has some reverb glow, and, hey, I like it! It gets quite muddy on 'Copped It', especially with the digital synth sheen and a snarling Beefheartian turn, building to one of the more vocally abstract (and I daresay adventurous) songs in the early Fall catalogue. 'Craigness' rises and falls through varying levels of plateaus but ultimately gets nowhere; it's the 'frightening' part of the album title, for sure. The 'wonderful' follows, actually at the end of both sides, in both 'Disney Dream Debased' and the strange 'C.R.E.E.P.', where the harmonic clouds around the band seem strangely benevolent, and oddly in-sync with 1980s pop. The keyboards here lift the songs, for once, instead of oppressing them, and Brix's feminine voice cuts the bile somewhat. It's still a strange trip, but one that sees a way out of the endless circles of concrete and muck. We're in the darkest period of Thatcher's assault on Britain here, yet somehow the Fall are able to make sense of it, true artists that they are.

The Fall - 'Live at the Witch Trials' (I.R.S.)

Whenever you evaluate the first release of an extremely prolific artist, it's a bit interesting to think about how there were no guarantees they would ever release any more records. What if this had been it? The Fall's first album is certainly not their best, but it's mostly great, and certainly sets the pace for what's to come. Yet the most interesting thing about it, maybe, is that it's the first of so many. All of the things are in place here by the end of the first song - the driving sound of indie future, Smith's sneering mockery with extemporaneous asides, something vaguely approaching pop form - and I can only think about what these young kids must have been like to spend time with. Certainly when bashing out 'Frightened' in some Mancunian garage, there was no certainty that 33 years later they'd be an institution, with countless albums, songs, and members. The Fall are an interesting band culturally, as I've meet lots of other casual Fall fans like myself, and we're all capable of being devoted to one particular era of the band without even dabbling in the others. I remember meeting a Fall fan whose expertise was in the Frenz Experiment era, and they had no idea what Perverted by Language sounded like -- just as I've never heard Extricate or I Am Kurious Oranj (though I'm sure they are fine records). To really sink into all 58 albums or whatever it is (72 according to discogs) requires a strength I just do not have. So I always stuck to the first handful, figuring they were the most influential and therefore the best (an arrogant assumption, for sure). Witch Trials has at least one all-time classic ('Rebellious Jukebox') and some underrated gems, such as the title track, a loose noodling sketch that serves more as an introduction to the perfect 'Futures and Pasts'. The presence of keyboards, even primitive ones, definitely separates them from Sham 96 or the Clash; they are haunting bells on 'Two Steps Back', a druggy moon hanging over the bleak 'Industrial Estate's of the North. Is this pure poetry, the birth of a new lyrical prophet? Or just another 'everything + the kitchen sink' art-school project? What I found so curious is that during my years living in Britain (2005-2008), all of the local bands still sounded like early Fall, though more like 'No Xmas for John Quays' than any of the messier bits. Whether this was direct inspiration or filtered through a few microgenerations, I'm not sure, but M.E. Smith is still royalty to a lot of people and there's not much sign that his geyser has slowed down since this.

Fairport Convention - 'The History Of' (Island)

I love those 'rock band family trees' and this gatefold LP uses it as the artwork, which is fun as you can really trace the lineups and changes of the sound as you listen through this compilation, which spans up through '71. Most of the first LP of this feels like a retread, especially as I just listened to What We Did on Our Holidays and Liege and Lief for this project; the Unhalfbricking songs are a nice inclusion (ah, it's such a pleasure to have 'A Sailor's Life' on vinyl!) though they included zero from the self-titled Judy Dyble-vocalised album. I can't say much more than I already did except I didn't mind listening to 'Matty Groves' again, and this first LP is a pretty solid collection that should be foundational for many people. 'Grazy Man Michael' and the medley replace 'Tam Lin' for some reason - I guess the medley is important to show their further descent into traditional material, especially to audiences in 1972 who might be purchasing Babbacombe Lee expecting Thompson's malignant picking to be there. The second LP I confess I rarely listen to, though it contains Thompson's mighty 'Sloth' and the single-only 'Now be Thankful'. 'Sloth' really is a masterpiece, alternating between world-weary resignation in the verses and the fire-storming churning of something more kinetic, only to sit back and look at the 'war' which has begun, just the roll of the drum, etc. etc. This is probably the best Fairport song. I'm so biased towards the official, rock-ist view of Fairport Convention, which is that after Richard Thompson left, I cash out (just like I care not a fuck for post-Wyatt Soft Machine, post-Barrett Floyd (mostly), etc.). I guess that's cause I've never taken the initiative to really give that stuff a chance, happy to take the collective doctrine as gospel.  The last side of the record is hard to sink into; 'John Lee' is all right, there's a real storytelling sense, and the performances are more than adequate, but I don't know; it's just not for me.

Fairport Convention - 'Liege & Lief' (Island)

Most would consider this their best album, and it's hard to argue with the "Don't fuck with me" stomp of 'Matty Groves' or 'Tam Lin'. My personal favourite is Unhalfbricking, not just for its awesome title but also for it's brilliant Dylan covers and the epic 'A Sailor's Life'. Alas, I've never found an affordable vinyl copy so we have to skip on to this fourth album, which as I already said, is pretty hard to fuck with. While Unhalfbricking might have better songs, this has the strongest performances. According to the Internet, this was released in December 1969, making three full albums in one calendar year, and I'd say their three finest, certainly of the Thompson era (which is really all I know). This is truly Fairport showing their growth as a "band"; the grungy stomp of 'Matty Groves' is evidence of a solid rock ensemble that has developed over a few albums, the kind that Carducci would write about as a tight technical unit. There's nothing fey or wimpy about the folk influence; instead it shows a remarkable dedication to the presence of each musician, the rhythmic motion pulling each piece in a definite direction and letting Denny's voice soar. The repetitive palm-muting on 'The Deserter' achieves a similar transcendence. Fast-forward to this blog years in the future, when we get to solo Thompson albums and I'm sure I'll still be raving about how 'Calvary Cross' is as heavy as the best Black Sabbath material then. The years may pass, but my diatribes never change. Anyway, the traditional, Swarbrick-driven material like side two's medley maintains the same hard-rock edge, and if there was any singer here besides Denny, she'd probably be left in the dust. This is six people playing rock music, not five plus a singer, and the way she coasts over the crests of 'Tam Lin''s waves is masterful, allowing the in-between verse sections to meander with guitar explorations but holding everything central. This could make a believer out of anyone who thinks they don't like folk-influenced stuff, and over the years this continues to sound fresh and alive, not like a clichéd dinosaur.

Fairport Convention (A&M)

If you came here expecting a review of the first Fairport Convention album, their lone release with Judy Dyble as vocalist, you're going to be disappointed. This is actually the second Fairport record, correctly known as What We Did on Our Holidays but released in the US as a self-titled record, just like They used to do so often to be intentionally confusing (or, I'm sure there was a better reason, but, eh). This is another record that is, at this point, "iconic" but we'll try to actually hear it this time through. 'Fotheringay' is the opening cut, along with 'Meet on the Ledge' the two eternal classics from this album (which will appear on any Fairport/Thompson greatest hits comp that has the rights to them). The traditionals are the high points - remember, unlike most of their ilk, Fairport actually started more "rock" and migrated towards "folk". 'She Moves Through the Fair' is one of those things that would truly define the movement, and the then-contemporary covers (Joni Mitchell's 'Eastern Rain' and Dylan's 'I'll Keep It With Mine') situate it in a wrapping that is strangely paisley with a British tweed mix (which would probably look godawful were it a real fabric and not a badly-designed music-writing metaphor). 'Book Song' is an original that feels akin to 'Percy's Song', with an inspired Thompson blues-influenced solo that has just a wonderful, earthy tone. The blues progression of 'Mr. Lacey' is a bit tired, and Simon Nicol's 'End of a Holiday' ends things with a melancholy I find less than convincing. But I'm just nitpicking; the way the dark moods of '"The Lord Is In This Place... How Dreadful Is This Place"' explodes into the pure pop of Thompson's 'No Man's Land' is more or less magic, even if the "folk" and "rock" are split across two tracks. It's so easy to look back at this as an experiment in synthesis and lose sight of the emotion and feeling of what it meant for young British rockers to be rediscovering this material. It's the feeling that made this a cornerstone of a movement, or rather an empire.

Jad Fair & Kramer - 'Roll Out the Barrel' (Shimmy-Disc)

Recently, Jad Fair released a 99-song CD set called Beautiful Songs, a career retrospective. That's a pretty apt title, as both words seem to describe the man's output: beauty is a strange one, his not a traditional notion of it by any means, but nonetheless evident in his naive, gentle subject matter and constructed idiot-savant delivery. And "songs" indeed, for even in Half Japanese's most frantic and anti-melodic early work, a dedication to songcraft can still be heard. This collaboration with Kramer hails from 1988 and it's an often overlooked record, at least by me - its been on my shelf since I was in high school but I rarely give it a spin. It's a strong collection, though, as Kramer uses Fair's songs as a framework on which to hang various production and arrangement techniques. These are sometimes spooky and ethereal; he mostly avoids Galaxie 500 reverb on Fair's voice, but Don Fleming's guitar playing is atmospheric and searing on cuts like 'Bird of Prey', 'Best Left Unsaid', and 'When Is She Coming'. Other tracks are a surreal cornucopia of sound techniques, often deconstructing cover versions in that Shockabilly manner. This is around the time Bongwater was releasing Too Much Sleep and that same style of kitchen-sink addition is evident in how these are put together; and honestly, listening to Kramer's most recent release The Brill Building, as tough as I found it to get through, his approach hasn't really changed. Roll Out the Barrel, while diverse and curious, is never slick; even more clean electronic-tinged songs, such as 'Better Safe than Sorry', support rather than overpower Fair's tenor wails. The covers are possibly meat to be ironic - 'Help!', 'On the Sunny Side of the Street' - and the Penn Jilette-assisted 'Twist and Shout' and 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' are all pretty great. I fear that Jad Fair's presence might push this into 'novelty music' territory for many, who would then overlook what's a great collection of late 80's art-rock. Despite being NYC-based for so long, the Shimmy-Disc scene sounds so different now from other avant-leaning artists from that place and time, though they were all part of the same gang. Now that we've gone through a few iterations of the hip ebb and flow around song-based work from NYC (with Thurston Moore somehow remaining central to so much of it, present here too) this feels strangely contemporary in the post-everything era, or whatever a more educated cultural commentator would view the 2013 soundworld. My point: blow the dust off this and enjoy it as much as I just did.

Eyeless in Gaza - 'Drumming the Beating Heart' (Cherry Red)

My other experience with Eyeless in Gaza comes a year after Photographs as Memories, finding a bolder production, maybe slightly toned-down singing, and some long-form instrumental explorations in 'Dreaming at Rain'. (Great choice of a preposition there, guys!) Maybe the 80's changed everyone because I hear a more 4AD sound here - not that Photographs didn't had a liberal use of synth textures and reverb-laden vocals, but it has the more polished, more churchy vibe here which makes me think of Dead Can Dance or Dif Juz. 'Veil Like Calm' sounds practically epic, compared to the first albums relative raggedness; there's not only more confidence here, but a more unified vision perhaps. At this point, Eyeless in Gaza sound like Eyeless in Gaza and no one else. It's still unmistakably capturing a mood and time that is long past, yet elements surface in the popular sounds of today. I keep going back to the aforementioned 'Dreaming at Rain' - it's clearly the dark horse on the album, yet feels a product of writing the rest of the songs -- the end of an organic process, perhaps. I don't mean to harp on Bates' voice, which is wonderful and expressive - but here, especially on side two, he stretches it into something flowing and responsive rather than just over-the-top dramatic. There's more instrumentation that guitars here (as there was on the first, but even moreso) and the plinky-plonks and bells and whistles occasionally create a tapestry of pure tortured beauty. Despite these new romantic tendencies (and the album title) this never strays into too maudlin territory. An underrated gem.