The Ups and Downs of a Bactrian Camel

chrisweeks1020
Jun 2
11 min read

Updated: Jun 6

Starring

Black Country New Road, Carwyn Ellis and Rio 18, The Delines, Jeffrey Lewis, Lava LaRue, Les Cyclades, Peace Flag Ensemble

The Front Runners

Fontana Rosa : Carwyn Ellis and Rio 18

Carwyn Ellis’ passion project to mix Brazilian rhythms with Welsh pop delivers the goods again with a greater emphasis on hearts this time around.

Sometimes, all you need for a good time is the funky bass line, the scratchy melody line and rock steady Brazilian beats of ‘Hei Ti’. It’s good for the feet and it’s good for the soul. But life isn’t a 24/7 carnival and at other times you need something that touches you in the heart.

For every person who experiences a joyous moment of release in the midst of the carnival, there’s another person who’s trying to patch up a broken relationship and deal with an aching heart. That’s the path trodden here. It doesn’t concentrate on lightning bursts of guitar, or triumphant brass blasts. It follows a slower, quieter route without losing any of its power.

There’s an early emphasis on heavy bass lines in ‘Hai Ti’ and ‘Te Adoro’. The bass anchors the songs, brings seriousness to them and prevents them flying skittishly away. It’s the contrast between this and the lighter melodies in the vocal lines that makes the songs special.

This is the sound from inside the club in the empty hours, not from the colourful afternoon carnival streets. It’s more purist than party. It moves you emotionally more than physically. You may not sway as much but you’ll feel it in your heart more. The album is a heartfelt tribute to the Brazilian music of Bebel and Astrud Gilberto, more torch songs than torches held aloft.

It’s a change of direction and feel from before, a commitment to progress and to avoid making the same journey time and time again. They haven’t forsaken the groove altogether. It’s fundamental to ‘Hai Ti’ and ‘Te Adoro’. ‘No more Secrets’ works up a pace to tease your body. ‘Deffro’r Dydd’ brings everything together to prepare you for a return to sun soaked streets and festival sounds.

‘Fontana Rosa’ is an album that remembers the sadness that you need to know to enjoy the good times, and it does so with style and grace and a feel for great pop music.

Taster Track : No More Secrets

The EVEN MORE Freewheelin’ Jeffrey Lewis : Jeffrey Lewis

Prepare for the kind of ranting musical onslaught that only comes along once in a long while. Ready yourself too for unexpected moments of laugh out loud humour and occasional shafts of devastating sadness.

Jeffrey Lewis describes himself as anti-folk, but it could be that he’s anti folk in the sense of being anti people. Take ‘Do What Comes Naturally’, a breathless rant at people who give well meaning but useless advice. The lyrics immediately grab your attention as he gives a scathing dissection of what that would mean if he ever put it into practice. It’s both an attack and a plea for help. It’s direct, honest, in your face and, above all, funny.

He has a singing voice that, perhaps, only a mother could love but that never held back Bob Dylan or Tom Waits. He has a performing voice though that deserves a huge following. On ‘Tylenol PM’ he tells of the overwhelming pressure of coping with the stresses of being alive in the modern world when you’ve reached the end of your tether. ‘Relaxation’ is anything but. It’s the product of a life lived with too much noise, exhausting and stressful.

Musically he’s a mix of bar room troubadour with, whisper it quietly, folk leanings and stylings. Lyrically, say on ‘Sometimes Life Hits You’, he sounds as if he could improvise on any topic, although his songs are as finely tuned and perfected as a headline stand up routine. Given that he’s a one off you will, nevertheless, hear echoes of Randy Newman at his most satirical, Jonathan Richman in his keep it simple and repetitive music, and a comedian like Rich Hall and his musical alter ego Otis Crenshaw. If you remember Mad magazine from its 70s heyday, Lewis would be their house musician.

It’s the energy and frustrated passion that is the first and lasting impression. There are respites from this though. ‘The Endless Unknown’ is the quiet after the storm, the moment to take a deep breath and start again. ‘Movie Date’ is quiet and domesticated, funny and recognisable. In the context of the album ‘Inger’ is a revelation. It sounds sweet but delivers an unforgettable hammer blow of sadness.

Jeffrey Lewis - taking on the world so you don’t have to and making your day in the process.

Taster Track : Inger

Starface : Lava LaRue

An ambitious, slightly flawed concept album is lifted by some wonderful pop moments that hold immense promise for Lava LaRue’s future work.

Let’s start with the concept. From a single listen, it’s based around warnings from a character called Starface that we are not looking after the Earth and every living thing on it. There’s an uneasy balance between being given the warning, but also reassurance in songs like ‘Better’ that everything can turn out OK. If it were a book it would benefit from a judicious editor. It’s cleverly executed - a first class honours piece from a performing arts degree course.

The album feels like a trip on many levels. The relaxed wooziness of ‘Poison Cookie’ hints at a drug inspired dream. There’s the trip through space of the concept. And then there’s the trip through time to combine retro and future sounding musical elements. It’s those elements that lift this album into something special.

‘Push N Shuv’ has an addictive but simple chorus that should be topping charts around the world. It’s a spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. The sound of ‘Second Hand Sadness’ is rich and lavish, qualities that emerge across the album. ‘Aerial Head’ has an immediacy that’s sometimes missing from street music. Those songs are here - ‘Manifestation Manifesto’ is one of them and they’re earthy and sassy but not off putting to those who come to this for good tunes. ‘Shell Of You’ even brings back a suggestion of Lily Allen! ‘Better’ and ‘Humanity’ have the more kindly feel of a life mentor, with superlative melodies and tunes. They make the album more inclusive.

Throughout the album there’s a warm, summery feel. It’s a cleverer and more attractive proposition than it may seem at the outset and it’s lifted by some of the best pop music I’ve heard for some time.

Taster Track : Aerial Head

Everything Is Possible : Peace Flag Ensemble

This is smooth jazz that’s intelligent, lounge music that works in every part of your house. Peace Flag Ensemble are the jazz quintet to help you recharge and revive.

There are some commonplace things and feelings that are hard to describe but deserve their own word or phrase. One is the feeling you have at the end of a stressful week, when you’ve poured your first drink of the evening and the realisation hits that the week is done and you can stand down. I’m going to call that ‘ ‘Peace Flag’ moment.

Slow and meandering, ‘Paint Drying’ pulls you towards it, promising the comfort of soft pillows and a warm bed. This is unwinding jazz, perfect for cloud watching or for moving through zero gravity. Not that I’ve ever moved through zero gravity but it would make an ideal soundtrack to a space walk.

Your head says this is background music. For the most part it floats by, melodies emerging like the movement of a red kite making new patterns as it drifts on thermal currents. ‘Le Souvenir’ is typically background, but it’s so pleasant that you really don’t mind. With one exception, there are no spikes in this music. (The exception is ‘Lovers’ Spat’ where the harsh interruption simply spoils the mood.)

Your body hears a track such as ‘Anne Hodges Asleep On The Sofa ' and says “Aah! Lovely”. And it will say it just as you become aware of a nine note bass melody that gently scurries beneath the top layers of the song before disappearing down a rabbit hole. This is music that displays patience . ‘Hot Mic’ senses that it will find a way through to you in the end, and it’s not wrong.

Your heart will simply want to befriend these songs, whether it’s the loveliness of ‘Flamingo Heart’ or the quietly celebratory conclusion that comes with ‘I Am Not The Gauguin I Used To Be’.

Those of you with an inability to settle or with a driving work ethic that won’t allow you to switch off may find a tune such as ‘General Strike’hard to take. As a number of acts have sung , I pity the fool. I’ve seen this album described elsewhere as a set of Talk Talk instrumentals. I hear that and nod an acknowledgement, while qualifying that it is gentler, sweeter and warmer than that suggests.

Give yourself a respite from the daily grind. Pour your second drink. Listen to this album.

Taster Track : I Am Not The Gauguin I Used To Be

The Chasing Pack

Forever Howlong : Black Country New Road

I’ll cut straight to the chase. This is undeniably impressive on many counts, but I found it hard to like. So let’s work out why.

First, as Black Country New Road have always been, it’s wildly ambitious. I accept that’s a good thing.Their heady energy, the skill demonstrated in the playing, the bewitching purity of the vocals all stand it in good stead, as does the imagination evident in the songs and its full on commitment to their vision for music.

It’s all resting though on a noisy brainstorm of ideas that make for busy listening. Tracks are frequently polyrhythmic, often multi-parted. Rather than creating excitement it quickly became irritating. There’s an alternative view of this that hails its inventiveness, and if you can latch on to that…great!

They’re less a band that picks magpie like from different genres than one that takes a barrelful of what’s available and hurls it into the musical cauldron they’re using to make their songs. It’s easy to detect the jazz in these epic concertos of psychedelic pop or the flamboyance of an opera that's trying to dumb down to become a crazed musical. It’s not long before you begin to feel the presence of a manic folk music taken from a much earlier era than pop usually visits.

What’s lacking is any sense of pop melody. Without that, this is too much for the new or casual listener. I’m not suggesting that they sell out and become a ‘mere’ pop band, just that they make some small concessions to accessibility. Gentler songs such as ‘Two Horses’ or ‘Mary’ go a little way towards providing it but not far enough.

Experiencing Black Country New Road is like facing a tsunami. It may only last for 12 minutes or so, but it’s overwhelming as it happens. There are moments here when it feels as if you are trying to catch the debris of an explosion all around you. And all the while, you can’t shake the thought that they are a community of fools, in the sense of the Fool in King Lear - outwardly incomprehensible, but capable of profound and important insights if you can reach them.

Black Country New Road are a strong and acquired taste that might be capable of possessing those that fall for it. To learn if that’s you be brave, not timid. Crash through their noisy surf, don’t dither on the edge of their music.

Good luck and fare well.

Taster Track : Two Horses

Mr Luck and Ms Doom : The Delines

The Delines serve up their best set of noir fiction set to a kind of lounge, Stax, country blues backing yet.

They may, credibly, be the only act you might not be surprised to see win a literary or a musical prize. They specialise in tales with hopelessness and sadness at their core, tales of people and couples who are in doomed, gritty relationships and who feel they’re damned. They can never catch a break because they lack the awareness to recognise it for what it is. They make mistakes and they double down on them, despite all experience pointing them in the opposite direction. In ‘There’s Nothing Down The Highway’ they make it clear that all you’ll find there is “darkness in the road”. If they’re sitting on the curb, they’re less likely to be passing the time of day and more likely to be watching their home burn down. (‘Sitting On The Curb’)

Amy Boone is the perfect singer for these songs. She captures their tired, romanticised sadnesses with the weary tones of someone who has travelled the same path, made the same mistakes. She’s a pitying, sympathetic observer who summons up ghosts and memories but she’s also a survivor. That fact is one of the few glimmers of a future in the songs. Another comes in the slightly bouncier ‘Maureen’s Gone Missing’. It’s a song that has to be pieced together from clues. Because we only have a part of the story there’s a chance that , whatever Maureen’s done, she might get away with it. There’s a slither of hope that hasn’t been extinguished.

The band are the background but they’re as vital to the whole as an engine is beneath the bonnet of the car. Willie Vlautin’s imagination is finely tuned. If the combination makes for flawless songs, it also makes something unremittingly intense. But, hey, you don’t head for John Grisham novels searching for a drawing room comedy.

There are two linked tracks. ‘Don’t Miss Your Bus Lorraine’ and the closing track ‘Don’t Go Into That House Lorraine’. Together they’re a brilliant summation of the album, and even the Delines’ career. Amy Boone’s aching, helpless vocals on the latter mean that you don’t need to see or hear what happens. You’ll know with every fibre you have that it ends badly. It represents a full stop for Lorraine, and an immensely satisfying conclusion to the album.

On this form, Bob Dylan is not the only musician who deserves the highest literary honours for his songs.

Taster Track : Maureen’s Gone Missing.

Glika : Les Cyclades

These are electronic adventures in sound - stereophonic sound - that are composed for devotees of electronic music rather than casual listeners.

It’s a jumble of sounds and styles that are effective for the most part. Like the best deep electronica it shifts shape, rhythm and beats over the course of an extended running time without you registering how you’ve moved from one part to another. But like less successful examples of the genre it is, for the most part, a cold musical space that is bereft of friendly melodies.

‘Yser Mystere’ is full of brooding ambience, with jazz saxophone inflections. It’s an overture of sorts, setting the dark tone for much of what follows. It also shows that some of the found ambient moments are the most memorable, and you have the same feeling about ‘Parc Fou’.

They call their sound ‘proto-balearic’. Perhaps its fully formed stage was quietly chilled because it learned to move on from the urgent, climbing pulses of ‘Alocasia’. It’s constantly intriguing though. Some of the effects are impressive and fall into the “let me hear that again” category - the last few notes of ‘Alocasia’ and the twisted child sounds of ‘Glossa’.

This is cleanly produced. It’s experimental too but, if I’m honest, I’m not entirely sure of the starting hypothesis for it. Ultimately, a piece such as ‘DRAM’ leaves me distant and disengaged. It’s more like listening to machinery than music.

There’s a welcome surprise towards the end. The wind instruments make a further appearance and that adds warmth to the album, a single electric bar to turn to as you leave the fridge. ‘PAME’ is the moment when the album turns almost perky and moves closer to the expectations built by the term proto-Balearic.

There is much to admire and appreciate here, but little to warm to and love.

Taster Track : PAME