Bent Leg Fatima (File 13)

To all those of you who own this record, I ask, 'When was the last time you listened to it?' Cause I was about to lament this as a great forgotten psych-pop record, but then I started thinking about how much I overuse the idea of the 'forgotten' here on the Underbite ... forgotten exactly by whom? I often make the mistake of assuming some sort of hive mind of music listeners, inadvertently projecting my own biases and beliefs onto the rest of you. It's been years since I've given this a spin, and once the first proper song began ('Cup and Saucer') I started thinking about how this should get more play. There's a lot of creaking and bending despite it being a fairly driven Krauty-jam, and the singing/vocalisations are bright and melodic while still maintaining an aura of the mystic. When Bent Leg Fatima step on the more acoustic/folky gears, it reminds me more of something like Bügsküll. There's something unmistakably 90s indie pop about it, but it's melting under weird artefacts: Alice Coltrane records covered in butter, canyon cinemas projected backwards, and frogs leaping to wrong time signatures. They know when to accentuate things with studio fuckery, but they don't overdo it. Things sounded a bit simpler then; later these dudes morphed into party-Kraut-Hee Haw revival band Need New Body, but I think they were still ascending at this point. Both bands share a proclivity for horizontal (or go-nowhere, if you prefer) instrumentals, based among a deep rhythm, though Bent Leg's are much more chilled out. There's guitars but they don't dominate - the organs and electric pianos shoot out jumpy and high strung, plucky staccato arrows occasionally turning into lightning. The balance is split quite nicely between 'pop' and instrumental; you can pick your favorites but they're interspersed perfectly. Just when I start to get bored with the synths and wispy atmospherics, someone starts to croon about a mouse or a cat again. Though judging from the titles, these guys were also writing about Hemingway and Yachts. Psychedelphia's take on "Yacht Rock"? I don't hear much of a Christopher Cross influence, but maybe I'm just not trying hard enough. Did I mention how great the production is? The drums sound like drums, and this sounds like a real band playing on top but it's somehow modern and retro at the same time.

Kevin Ayers - 'The Joy of a Toy' (Harvest)

Jesus H. Christ, but how did I end up owning seven Kevin Ayers records?? Sure, we'll have a blast with these first three, a trilogy to rank among the progpop greats -- but then somehow I have both Odd Ditties (his Incesticide) and some cheapo greatest hits collection that has the French version of 'May I?' (yes, 'Puis-je?'), neither of which I look forward to hearing again. So another gauntlet here; fair enough, let's take it easy cause that's surely Kevin's M.O. I've always loved the lackadaiscal summer melodies on this record, laid down effortlessly with the most charming, smirking approach. There's a real goofball feel to the instrumentation, with slide whistles, oboes and soft winds, but it doesn't feel over-orchestrated. Instead it's a nice day out in the park with a slightly mischievous, maybe not entirely-reliable longhair as your guide. And the darker tunes aren't exactly dark - maybe it's just a bit overcast, but I still feel like I'm strolling through an open-air market, squeezing various fruits to test for ripeness. We get lyrics for only two songs in the moldy gatefold - the hypnotic, creepy 'Lady Rachel' and the Beatles-quotin' 'Song for Insane Times'. But there's nothing really insane here beyond the variable tapespeed fuckery at the beginning of 'Stop This Train'. Maybe this is Kevin's big philosophical statement about life- just relax, smoke a doob, grope a boob. I've always associated Kevin Ayers' music with rampant oversexed free love, and this album artwork is creepy enough to suggest something far more perverted. And exactly which kind of toy are you talking about, buddy? Soft Machine alumni back him up and things really get cooking on 'Eleanor's Cake' with some head-bashing solos. Though this LP looks pretty clean, it crackles a bit - and I wouldn't be surprised if this copy spent a few hours soaked in beer on an ugly carpet in a smoky room at some point in the 1970s. I used to rock this one quite a bit, so maybe some of the surface wear is my own fault; each spin would reveal a nice new detail, such as the kazoo's interaction with Hawaiian guitar in 'Lady Rachel'. Nothing is hidden here; it all sits really well in the mix. I wonder what Ayers was going for here - total pop success? It certainly feels like an attempt. Take the first Soft Machine album's songwriting formula, simplify the cadences a bit, and strip out the long instrumental vamps. Even the 'weird instrumental', 'Oleh Oleh Bandu Bandong' is pretty palatable, and it segues into 'All This Crazy Gift of Time', the straightest, folkiest statement of purpose that Ayers ever laid down. "All my blond and twilight dreams / All those strangled future schemes" -- fuck yeah! What strikes me about this record is how it appears to be such a straight arrow on first listen but slowly reveals itself to be a gradual curveball. Just like you can't see the Earth's curvature unless you're standing on a glacier or something. I don't think he ever found the commercial success due to his own hedonistic digressions and musically oddball urges, but this was a hell of an audacious start. Which makes our next listen even more interesting ....

Axemen - 'Big Cheap Motel' (Siltbreeze)

Just about every Kiwi noisenik has been in and out of this band at some point, but their available material has been scarce, at least outside of the NZ cassette scene from the early 80s. This vinyl reissue of one such tape, from '84, is quite welcome; it's done with minimal remastering and the properly lo-fi quality is saturated. I mean, this is when lo-fi meant lo-fi; cheap and warbly, but the guitars still know how to slice through things and the low end is surprisingly present as well. The live portions of this come from a concert where they wrote a set the night before to protest the milk company sponsoring the event for their sexist ads. The songs are as ramshackle as it gets, with drum set falling apart, bass farting in and out of time, sax glue and these little prickly guitar lines that skirt all over the place like a stone skipped on a frozen pond. The sloppy black and white graphics, plus the lyrics, suggest some crust-punk, Crass records kinda thing - and I think that spirit is here, cause it's certainly "punk" in some way. The band is all-male but just about every song attacks male attitudes head-on; there's not much subtlety in a song like 'The Pornographic Milk Drink' or 'Can't stand up for 40-inch busts' but I don't think I bought this record looking for subtlety. I can go back to the Au Pairs record from the other day for that -- but funny how the name Axemen suggests a big cleaving phallus? The avant-leaning tendencies of the Axemen come more from ineptitude than staying up all night studying MEV records; but there's also a freedom present, meaning that I don't think these guys had really tightly defined rules about what could and couldn't be done. And these days, that factor is more thrilling to me than whatever subcultural boundaries a certain record might skirt. The purpose of listening to this in 2009? I'm not sure that I can venture a proper guess; I guess great rabblerousing is timeless and this certainly tickles the alveoli. There are a few soaring, anthemic songs that get fairly melodic and recall the Clean's earliest and best work; Wikipedia says that Peter Gutteridge was a member once so maybe there was some cross-pollination at work, and it's a small island anyway.