Firework Colours In Ghostly Hues
Autoleisureland, Buzzcocks, Casually Here, The Hanging Stars, Heron & Crane, Mammal Hands, Tokyo Bedroom Orchestra
The core of Pop In The Real World seaside rock
Circadia : Mammal Hands
Best for : Understanding the appeal of contemporary jazz
Six years ago I aspired to teach myself to understand the appeal of jazz. Up to that point it had seemed an alien, messy genre. I hope I've made some inroads to it. You're unlikely to find me swooping onto an Ella Fitgerald album in a record shop or raving about a classic John Coltrane saxophone solo. Venturing into the work of Miles Davies through Bitches Brew was a mistake I'm not inclined to make again. However, show me something by the Neil Cowley Trio, GoGo Penguin or Svaneborg Kardyb and I'm interested.
In that time Mammal Hands have become my favourite jazz discovery. They may break up, break down and break free but, as 'Window To Your World' illustrates they always revolve around and return to melody. They offer the giddy freedom of improvisation with the comfort blanket of great tunes. They give you what you need as you take your first forays into jazz.
'Circadia' is busy and even frenetic, but it returns to calm like a trawler re-entering port after a night of high winds at sea. 'Alia's Abandon' contains moments and passages of sunshine that cut through blustery rain and stormy weather. The key to enjoying the more lively passages is to lock on to one theme or instrument and cling to it until it can bring you back to earth. Focus on the piano in 'Paper Boats' for example and you will quickly discover the tune's groove.
Mammal Hands's music is full of great potential even if you can't immediately recognise it. It contains masses of energy without accompanying noise and volume. Their music engages the brain first and only then starts to nibble away at your feet, heart and soul. The quietly twittering bird song in 'Fallow Tide may go unnoticed at first but it transforms the piece when you finally hear it. In 'Helios' emotional passages surface like bubbles in a quickly simmering saucepan. 'Four Flowers' is the stand out track and highlights their strengths perfectly with its gorgeous melody and ominous textures,
The jazz of Mammal Hands is a mosaic made up of themes, fragments, beats and solos. You will find something there that you like.
Taster Track : Four Flowers
It Was As If : Casually Here
Best for : Bustling electronica with great hooks
Artist's comments about their own music aren't always helpful, but Nic Nell's (aka Casually Here) comments are key to understanding what's going on in his music. He talks about his album as showing "bifurcating possible futures at this precarious point in history". I didn't see his comments until midway through the album, and I had to look up the meaning of 'bifurcating', but that's when the album started to make sense.
'Bifurcating' means to divide, fork, or split into two separate parts, branches, or paths. His music is exactly that, full of split personalities. Take the opening track 'Home'. It's busy but warm and welcoming, throwing bird song, thunderclaps, giddy beats and multiple throbs and cascades together. Listening to it may feel like dipping into a box of tangled wool, trying to find the end of a strand you can cling to, but keep with it because when its textures and layers reveal themselves, it's a treat.
At first, Casually Here's music is a challenge. 'More' demonstrates that it's possible to lose the hooks in the surrounding clutter, but its nine note hook is a great one. Latching onto it is like finally spotting a friend you've been looking for at a packed Waterloo Station after all the trains have been cancelled.
You'll hear the different layers most clearly in 'Friendship' with its steady, almost stately, keyboard buried beneath a frenetic, jittery beat. Return to the bustling Indian market feel to 'Family' to move speedily between different worlds. It's fun. Like a boomerang, tunes soar and energise before fading into reflective calm and returning to repeat the circuit.
There are passages where quiet respite takes control. The end of 'Stumble brings a relief that flows into 'Tell Me A Story'. Quiet is located in beatless drones, whereas imagination drives the busier tunes. You can opt to join in or to keep yourself to yourself.
This is music that wraps itself around you, like bandages around a Mummy. In places it feels a little old school, back to the days of Fragile State or Four Tet's dancier elements.
The album closes with 'Plexuses' the name for the network of nerves and vessels that keep the body going. 'It Was As If' is, ultimately, an album about how it feels to be alive.
Taster Track : More
Attitude Adjustment : Buzzcocks
Best for : Remembering the original Buzzcocks and enjoying their updated sound.
Buzzcocks were always a band to put the rock into Punk Rock. Listen to tracks such as 'E.S.P.' and 'Nothing Left' on Love Bites. Fifty years after punk's explosion, Steve Diggle is following the rock route to keep the Buzzcocks flame alive and he's made a pretty good job of it.
Diggle is the only original member of the band left. This album bears the same relation to the Buzzcocks as Graham Coxon's solo work bears to Blur. That's by no means a bad thing. The original sound, and Diggle's updated version are two essential halves of the same band.
What's different? Well, the swearing is milder for a start if the isolated example on 'Games' is anything to go by. The sound is more R.E.M. than Sex Pistols. It's less three chord, 12 bar blues played at pace and more a wall of sound, lacking the simplicity and the anger of punk. There's as much energy in the songs, but it's the energy of breathless momentum not of fuel. In place of anger, there's a surprising level of poetic reflection. Diggle's older and grainier voice fits these new songs well, but Pete Shelley's voice was one of the defining aspects of their original sound and it can't be replaced.
What can't be stressed enough is that, whilst this may sound different, it doesn't reflect a drop in standards from 1978. 'Queen of the Scene' may be full of nostalgia, occasionally verging on cliche, but it buzzes and fizzes as of old. The gift of melody remains strong, running through all the songs as it did through 'Promises', Harmony In My Head' and all their best songs back. Diggle embraces a kind of peace ethic on 'All Gone To War' but with the air of a hippy toting a machine gun. 'Just A Dream' is the closest to the original Buzzcocks sound. 'Break The Ball And Chain' has the bass to pummel the walls of Jericho and the brass to bring them tumbling down. It's as if they've borrowed an approach from Teardrop Explodes and it works brilliantly. And on several of the songs, including 'Feeling Uptight' and 'The Greatest of Them All' they just don't want to let go.
That's the abiding memory. They still love what they do, and they still hit the bullseye nine times out of ten. 'Attitude Adjustment' is both a great addition to the Buzzcocks legacy and a strong album in its own right.
Taster Track : Break The Ball and Chain
Tsuioku : Tokyo Bedroom Orchestra
Best for : Gorgeous ambience without rules
Ambient music is a whole different musical universe. You'll never hum along to it. You'll find it hard to explain its impact to others. You'll find in it a different world with a population of one because, more than any other genre, it's about how and what you feel when you hear it. And I want to feel the way I feel when I listen to Tokyo Bedroom Orchestra more often.
It's a soft edged sound, a world removed from loudness, industrial noise and a jostling commute. 'Shayou' captures that feeling of being allowed to drift unobserved through the world. The indecipherable voices that surround you from time to time prove that even in this ambient world of your own responses, you are not alone.
These effects are realised in curious ways. 'Shikijitsu' is as musical as an orchestra tuning up. 'Minamo' might be the music you hear if you're lucky enough to be waiting at the gates of Heaven. Both are utterly beautiful pieces of sound. 'Yungi' is gentle, sensory and comforting. The sounds of flowing water, whether in the great outdoors or down the window pane as you watch the world go by, are calm and soothing. Beats are not needed, soft, static waves take on their role. Even the gentle distortion of 'Hisan' is the aural equivalent of seeing yourself reflected in a bendy mirror.
Almost by definition, it's difficult to find a point of reference to entice you in. It's possible that the strangely emotional feel to 'Tsuioku' has its origins in the warped sounds of a Sigur Ros melody taken further than even their boundaries.
If there is an issue with this album, it's that you can't sit above its surface, detached from its power. You have to clear your mind of distractions and immerse yourself fully in it. You need to make the effort to fit it into the demands and rhythms of your life. Can we find 37 minutes to experience it? We should try.
In the end, stop trying to analyse it and simply experience it for yourself.
Taster Track : Tsuioku
Migrations : Heron & Crane
Best for : Undemanding instrumentals
Sometimes bands give you an unexpected problem. There's nothing unlikeable about them, but there's nothing to keep in your head, heart or soul either. That's the problem here. It leaves you without much to say.
Heron & Crane have delivered their fourth album, but the first that consists entirely of instrumentals. It sounds great but empty. I could tell you that it sounds like the soundtrack for a documentary about the Great American Plains. Something's missing, and that's the pictures the music could and should paint for you.
It's music that sounds great. Heron & Crane have a polished production style. It doesn't have the hallmarks of a masterpiece though, but of incidental music. It's just so much test card music, the kind you hear on hold to a company that feels your call is important to them while telling you that you are 19th in the queue. It feels too easily achieved, that the passion and energy that drives great work, couldn't get out of bed that day.
There's something of wide open spaces in the music, but also something that suggests they're not bothered by the need for an audience. It's pretty, but also deliberate and occasionally to the point of clunky. 'Kudzu Moon' is quirky in its feel of a music box driven by guitars but it's also a step too close to noodly for comfort. 'Tropical Lustron' sounds like a musical exercise, containing nothing but a drifting, impressionless impressionism. 'Soft Cycle', perhaps the most memorable piece here, feels like a throwback to prog or turn of the Millennium chill. It's striving to be meaningful, but with too strong a suspicion of Emperor's New Clothes.
It demands little. It can drift by like the work of William Tyler, Bibio's pastoral pieces or Air at their dinner party peak.
'Migration' is pleasant. It's Ok. It's music to garner faint praise and that's all.
Taster Track : Soft Cycle
Just A Day : The Hanging Stars
Best for : Sunday morning melodies and harmonies around 1976
Aided by Teenage Fanclub's Gerard Love on production, The Hanging Stars make pitch perfect jangle folk rock. They look the part. They play and sound the part. They probably live the part too. Their biggest challenge is nothing to do with their music. It's that, quite simply, their time isn't now. (Neither is mine.)
If every band that had ever played were grouped together according to how close they were to pop's DNA, The Hanging Stars would be comfortably central. Their songs are a blend of AOR jangle melodies and harmonies, a mix of FM Big Star power pop and Laurel Canyon folk rock. In that pop creators circle, they're too far from the boundaries to push them. They're sat between The Hollies and The Eagles if they had already invited Tom Petty to sit in with them. They stand out, not because of their talent although they have that in abundance, but because they're unfashionable.
'Just A Day' is full of songs like 'All Your Yesterdays', 'Big Red Car' and 'Time Is Nothing' that are easy to like, well written and tidily performed. It's the kind of music you'd have on in the car as three generations of your family drove twenty miles for Sunday lunch at your aunt's. Their songs are competent rather than compelling, enjoyable rather than enchanting. That's OK. You certainly wouldn't run from the room if someone put them on.
Gerard Love has served the band well in production. If the songs lack the magic, emotional melodies of Teenage Fanclub, the album has been balanced perfectly to showcase the band's strengths. Their harmonies are some of the best I've heard for some time.
The sad thing is that, good as they are, they are unlikely to ever be Premiership players. If streaming had existed in 1976 they might have expected over 400,000 followers. Today, it's closer to 4000. That's not fair, but it's a brutal fact of life.
The Hanging Stars make music that is reminiscent of sixties and seventies music as it really was, not just as it's remembered for its highlights.
Taster Track : All Your Yesterdays
New Road Movie : Autoleisureland
Best for : The innocence of 80s pop rediscovered for a new generation.
Autoleisureland are two thirds of The Kane Gang who you may remember for their 1984 hit 'Closest Thing To Heaven'. 1984 was about the time that synth pop was at its most sophisticated before shifting gear towards the Stock Aitken Waterman sound. Autoleisureland preserve and distil the essence of that period into something immensely enjoyable.
'New Road Movie' will trigger emotions that you've clung to but didn't know you could still feel. These are songs that will take you to the brink of bitter sweet tears that sting your eyes and scratch your throat even as you smile. It's nostalgic for the 80s but it's also the soundtrack for your first true love and your first cruel heartbreak. They capture the feel of the album beautifully in these lines from 'Anything Can Happen'.
"Anything anything can happen
But it never does
So you can wake me when it's over
Then I can go back to dream I really won't be heartbroken"
Gulp!
'Northern Morning' is a lovely way to say "hello". For a moment it sounds as if Prefab Sprout have walked back into your life, a feeling only questioned by a late 80s dancefloor chorus. Its happy, sad melody fully deserves its six and quarter minute running time. 'All The World Over' is that song for the closing credits of a coming of age film that changed your life. It's celebratory, with the scary excitement of standing on the threshold of something new and unknown.
These are unashamed love songs that are as quietly but memorably infectious as they can be. 'Comsat Angels' demonstrates their gift for creating verses that sound all grown up and choruses that dissolve you into a warm marshmallow happiness. 'Come Whatever' scores 10/10 for hummability. 'Pool To Pool' is sweet, soft and luxurious. 'Chemical Beach' will have crowds gently swaying, lost in the music of their first holiday romance.
Autoleisureland are smoother than the Kane Gang. They have the melodic strengths of say Eurythmics and draw on the soulful pop of Simply Red and Go West. If you're aged between 14 and 21, or in your mid sixties remembering an age of innocence, this is for you.
I loved it and I defy you not to as well.
Taster Track : Anything Can Happen