Peter Hook, "Substance" (book)

Peter Hook's lengthy recollection of his twenty seven years in New Order is far from a traditional biography.  It's more of a "conversations with Peter Hook" serial than a thorough retelling of the New Order story.  The closest comparison in my library would be Chris Heath's "Feel".  It's the only other bio I can think of that contains so many bizarre road stories and random minutiae, and almost completely ignores the usual meat and potatoes explanations of the creative process and the how's and why's of the band's popularity growth.  In both cases, the book isn't really about the man, but about the man and his entourage of colourful characters.  Everyone and everything seems real and tangible, as if the laughter and debauchery is happening right in front of your face.  Often you're left wondering how this bunch of misfits ever got around to making such brilliant music.  

Hook wanders off script a lot, but in a good way.  He'll flash back to an older story to provide context, and offer a preview of events to come (sometimes years later).  Stories about time spent in the studio are punctuated by "geek alerts" with detailed yet accessible descriptions of the recording process and the then state of the art equipment New Order were using.  He'll provide an overview of a tour, mostly filled with tales of excess you're used to hearing from hair metal bands rather than the famously reclusive New Order.  After covering one calendar year of their goings on (or longer once you reach the 90's and the band's activities become less structured and more volatile), there's a timeline that includes nearly every setlist from every gig they played, and additional commentary from Hook for many entries, peeling back additional layers "behind the music".  

Eventually I'll likely buy his Hacienda and Joy Division books as well, but for now I need a break from the world of Peter Hook.  Did I mention how long this book is?  Then again, twenty seven years should cover a lot of ground, and you the fan probably want the journey to feel long.  Hook even says so in the book, and trashes Barney Sumner for ripping off his fans by devoting only 100 pages to New Order in his book (among the many, many, MANY shots taken at Sumner liberally from the start of the book until the end).  

Even though New Order were famously private in interviews, and almost always left their personal and professional lives shrouded in mystery, in a way there's nothing surprising in Hook's book.  Factory were hellaciously bad with money, most of it earned by New Order.  We knew that.  The band somehow stuck with the label until the bitter end for reasons that were never entirely clear.  And they're still not clear, even to Hook, today!  One theme of the book is how important issues were almost always swept under the rug. Critical decisions were postponed or avoided again and again.  Everyone involved only has themselves to blame.  Even at their peak, the band members kind of hated each other and formed three distinct camps -- Hook, Sumner, and The Other Two.  The best example of this is in the 1993 documentary "Neworderstory", which is sadly almost impossible to find on the usual streaming sites (I can't remember what I did with my old VHS copy).  It is kind of shocking how little is said about Steve Morris and Gillian Gilbert, particularly Gillian, who Hook hardly ever interacted with. 

Hook wears his heart on his sleeve, when the subject matter is inspiring, the writing is inspiring.  He doesn't go through with a track-by-track review of "Republic" (unlike every other New Order album) because the recording process was too frustrating and painful and he finds he just can't go through with it (i.e. the track by track review).  Toward the end of the book, the apathy and frustration comes across in his writing.  In the early 80's recording was a pleasure and Hook found his niche behind the soundboard, hence the frequent "geek alerts" and other cool little details.  By the end of the book, recording is a costly chore that alienated the band members from each other even more.  Hook's alcoholism didn't help (caused by the problems in the band or a symptom of them?) and it's clear that the creative spark is gone.  The fact that "Waiting For the Sirens Call" was so strong looks now like a minor miracle.          

First thoughts on Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk"

Like many casual fans of Fleetwood Mac, there was a time when I hadn't the slightest clue what the band had been doing between "Rumours" and "Mirage".   Then I bought the famous "Unknown Pleasures" edition of Melody Maker in 1995 (I still have the book, of course).  In his chapter on "Tusk", Simon Reynolds deviated from the style of the rest of the book and didn't really try to make a strong case for the album as a whole.  He mostly wrote about how blindingly great "Sara" is.  

Since that time, "Tusk" has gone on to become one of the most successfully critically rehabilitated albums of all time (has anyone put together a top ten list of those?).  But I'd never heard any of it, outside of "Sara" and the title track, until I bought the 2004 remastered and expanded edition at Scout Records in Vienna.  

When an album goes from being a curiosity for superfans and completists to minor classic in such a relatively short time (especially for a band as well known as FM), you need to be particularly careful in weighing out the hyperbole surrounding it.  Unfortunately, I haven't tried digging through interviews from the time to find out what Lindsey Buckingham was really striving for with his contributions to this album.  I can believe that he was influenced by punk and new wave, and was determined to challenge himself and not play it safe by writing a "Rumours II". I can't believe, as the liner notes imply, that he was struggling with his own sense of relevance and was worried about being swept aside by the new generation.  As Reynolds wrote in "Unknown Pleasures", "Rumours" was what happened in the US in place of punk.  It had minimal cultural and commercial relevance in 1979, when "Tusk" was released.  It strains the imagination to think that Buckingham was having a crisis of confidence while bathing in cocaine in his LA megamansion, thinking about whether the kids dying their hair pink in far away cities thought he was washed up or not.  

The Buckingham songs don't sound like "Rumours II".  The hallmarks of classic LB are still there -- gossamer guitars, intricate picking, cryptic and impassioned lyrics about dysfunctional relationships -- but have been warped through a Feelies-lite type of rhythmic lens.  But in Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie's, songs, I do hear fairly clear attempts to produce a "Rumours" sequel.  The songs are good, maybe even great, but they're not "Rumours"-level great, which isn't a fair comparison because nothing could be.  Even with LB's production polish, nobody in 1979 would have been even close to satisfied with them as the most expensive follow-up album to the then biggest selling album ever.  So in that sense, Mick Fleetwood's (paraphrased) comment about how "Tusk" saved them as a band may be true.  Without the Buckingham songs and oddities, "Tusk" is a "Waterworld"-sized waste of money and effort.  Maybe the fallout from that failure, piled onto the band breakups and mistrust, makes them go from kings and queens of music to oblivion in record time, like ABBA did. With them, it's at worst the hugely ambitious and slightly misunderstood epic double album.   

I also have to mention the oodles of weirdness to be found on the second disc, including the sprawling nine minute take on "Sara".  Much of this disc reminds me of the sloppy but enthralling takes on the second disc of the expanded Velvet Underground's "Loaded".  

Music in Austria(n vacation 2017)

1.  We alternated between Radio Salzburg and Hitradio O3 (broadcasting out of Vienna) during the multi-day scenic drive from the former to the latter.  O3 features mostly international (i.e. American) top 40 pop hits and German language songs done in the same style, whereas Radio Salzburg has more of a local, Austrian feel.

2.  At one point, David Hasselhoff appeared in a pre-taped segment to recommend a song, urging listeners to pay attention to it's powerful, emotional lyrics.  I am not making this up.  It's hard to believe this was an isolated incident either, i.e. we can conclude that an endorsement from David Hasselhoff is meaningful in the contemporary Austrian music scene. Speaking of stuff I couldn't possibly make up:

This was on display in a downtown Vienna subway station.

3.  It didn't take long for "Rock Me Amadeus" to come on the radio while I was in the car.  Falco is back in a big way, although in reality he probably left really left (much like Tupac Shakur in American culture, his post-death career has probably outshone the career he had while living, and he has the multiple greatest hits/live/rarities collections to prove it).  The latest is the Falco 60 compilation, released earlier this year to commemorate what would have been his 60th birthday.  There's also Falco: The Musical, with posters all over Vienna (even in the hipster neighborhoods) reminding you to buy tickets for 2018.

4.  Speaking of Amadeus, Salzburg is more or less a big Mozart shrine.  You have the Mozarteum (an academy of Mozart studies).  There's the Mozart museum housed in the former Mozart family residence (which we toured).  There's Mozart's birthplace (which we started at from outside).  You can attend Mozart concerts staged several times per week in churches, castles, and concert halls.  However, the displays in the Mozart museum reminded me of how miserable he was living in Salzburg, trying to eke out a living in the Salzburg court before finally bailing and heading to Vienna for considerably greater fame and fortune (the latter of which he squandered of course).  But technically Salzburg is his hometown and these days they're thrilled to claim him as such, even if he wasn't properly appreciated there while he was alive (a narrative that remains true of many young talents who flame out early even today).

5.  While music shopping in Vienna, I managed to keep my "Fennesz streak" alive (I think I've bought a Fennesz CD each time I've been in Vienna, which is all of three times, but I'll still call it a streak) by getting the Ozmotic/Fennesz collab from the always wonderful Substance store.  I also picked up La Dusseldorff's "Viva" at Scout Records, my second favourite music shop in the city.  They're so old school they don't even have a web page, just an unofficial Facebook fan page.  Is "Viva" better than any of the three NEU! albums?  I think it's close.

New to me on this trip was Moses Records, which has a collection of used CD's that would have seemed quaint and esoteric even in the late 90's at the peak of the used (and new) CD industry.  I was repeatedly flabbergasted seeing CD's that I never knew existed or hadn't seen anywhere in years.  For example:

Did you know that you could buy the final (pre-comeback) studio album from Saskatchewan's The Northern Pikes for two euros in Vienna?  Did you know that Senser recorded an album with Arthur Baker in 1998?  (bonus points for even remembering who they are).  Moses records was a fascinating trip back in time.  It's mostly a store for rock and jazz vinyl, but there are plenty of deals to be had on CD as well.  Such as:

This was a Germany-only release.  I haven't  a clue what the connection is to Alf, but before you laugh, check out the tracklist.  I didn't buy this, but that's about as good of a commercial 1990 compilation as you'll find.

5. The best thing happening in Austria while we were there was the Heart of Noise Festival, which we didn't attend but oh man, if it wouldn't have required a complete redesign of our route and significant flight rescheduling, I would have loved to be there for even one day.  Gas. Fennesz. Monolake.  Psychic TV.  Samuel Kerridge.  William Basinski.  

Gas!

How disappointing ...  

Chris Cornell RIP

First of all, a hearty FU to "news" sites like CNN for sticking the "people we've lost in 2017" graphic at the top of every tragic story such as this.  Screw them for turning death into a meme.

I was never a Soundgarden fan, but there was no denying Cornell's talent and stage presence.  As opposed to the other star frontmen from the grunge era (who don't need to be named here), whose deaths were not entirely a surprise when they happened, Cornell seemed to have grown into the elder statesman role, and I assumed he'd have another two decades (at least) of steady touring and soundtrack work, not unlike Trent Reznor these days.

Unlike many rock stars who have to disappear before making their comebacks, Cornell stood apart from so many of this 90's contemporaries by staying relevant for the past two decades with Audioslave and his solo work.  Much like Dave Grohl, he stuck to making uncompromising rock music during the uncool days of rock when Nickelback and Creed were inexplicably kings.

And he hung himself on the same day (give or take a few hours) as Ian Curtis.  Damn.

Sigur Ros live from the Walt Disney Concert Hall with the LA Philharmonic Association; Carl Craig, "Versus"

I'm on Sigur Ros' mailing list and news of this concert certainly got my attention.  Even the band admitted to being a bit nervous.

The full concert features a one hour set with a huge LA orchestra, and a second one hour set with just the band. It was streamed live worldwide and can be viewed here.  But I almost always find that these band + orchestra in a classical music setting collaborations never live up to their promise.  Any band that aspires to this kind of performance already has a cinematic majesty to their music, and adding the orchestra then fails to amplify the magic that is present in the bulk of their recordings.  That's essentially the case with this performance.  Sigur Ros fans will certainly want to check it out, but there's hardly anything resembling a definitive version of these songs.

I enjoyed the second half of the show more, because it was my first time seriously checking out the stripped down, three piece version of Sigur Ros -- with no backing musicians, and no backing tapes (none that I could see).  When a band loses an multi-instrumentalist/keyboardist, the bass becomes more of a lead instrument to fill the space, but in this case it can't come close to filling it completely, nor does the band even try.  What's left over is raw, airy (well, more so than before) and sparse, like the home demo recordings version of Sigur Ros.  Nobody gets to hide behind a wall of feedback or a string loop, and for me it's a refreshing change to see this severely stripped down version of the band.

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And then there's Carl Craig's "Versus".  This isn't Jeff Mills banging out techno with real strings instead of synthesized ones.  It may be Carl Craig's best album.  It's undoubtedly his most challenging one.

"Versus" is uncategorizable, because nobody's pulled off a techno/classical hybrid quite like this before.  This is the furthest thing from a techno album with added strings to give it extra flair for the dramatic.  It's also not a classical music score that attempts to capture the rhythmic pulse of the clubs (which reads like a horrible idea anyway).  Carl Craig deconstructed his most famous tracks and remixes and has rebuilt them from scratch.  The pacing, instrumentation, and mood of each track has been completely re-envisioned.  The border between acoustic and electronic elements has been erased, thanks to nine years of painstaking effort in the studio to meld everything together just right.

Many contemporary artists see the orchestra an opportunity to lend sophistication to their comparatively simple compositions. Carl Craig and Francesco Tristano looked at each other's respective domains and see a vast space into which they can expand their palate of sounds.  If it was as simple as it sounds, everyone would already be doing it.  But Craig and Tristano have basically claimed an entire genre for themselves.  If the genre lives and dies with them because they're the only ones capable of pulling it off, more power to them.

The Caretaker, "Everywhere at the End of Time - Stage 2"

In one of last year's best interview pieces, Leland James Kirby laid out his plans for the Caretaker persona's six part slip into dementia.

"The interesting thing is the switch between the first and second album. The second one is a massive difference between the moods. The second one is the point where you realise that something is wrong. You’re seeing doctors. You’re still coherent enough to say, “Right, I’ve got dementia…” You know this thing is coming. There’s a bit of disbelief."

There are way too many great quotes from that interview to list here, but it's rare to see an artist's vision translate so vividly into the finished product.  "Stage 2" is exactly what Kirby promised and more.  If anything it's even more nerve-wrackingly beautiful than I ever could have imagined.

The first album didn't stray very far from much of his prior work as The Caretaker.  His gently distorted ballroom ballads conveyed a type of nostalgia that could either be sad (crushing realizations that the old days are gone and never coming back) or wistful and peaceful (happy remembrances of how simple and fun those old days were).

True to his words, the transition to the second album is brutal.  Parts of the old memories are still there.  The crackling static is more pervasive, and yet the mind perseveres and sometimes can retain its focus throughout one of the old standards.  But at other times it increasingly becomes clear that important parts are missing.  The tone of the instruments becomes so distorted that there's some doubt about who or what is playing (is that a saxophone?  clarinet?  bassoon?)   The solos are still there, floating through the haze, perceptibly stretched in time, and are no longer anchored to anything in particular (where is the bass line?  where are the verses?  are these parts even from the same song?)

There's a functioning human being in there who can still hum the choruses to plenty of long forgotten tunes, but 20-30% of the time he's humming on autopilot, recalling without thinking, feeling empty and confused as to why things don't make sense like they used to.  It's a horrifying feeling, really, to fully understand what's happening to you, powerless to do anything except grip your memories tightly before they disappear forever.

At the time of the interview, Kirby had just started working on the third album.  He acknowledged that his patient was degrading fast and that he was unsure what the last three albums would entail.  "How do you make complete confusion a good listen?", he wondered aloud.  Can it really get more depressing than this album is?  

Diary of Musical Thoughts Podcast Episode 36

So important was this mix that this mode of consciousness became an instinct - 54 minutes

It's been so long since my last mix that Mixcloud sent me an email about this week.  I've been sitting on this mix for nearly three months.  Inspired by Dan Selzer's New York Endless Mix (which I wrote about here), I had been thinking to myself, "why can't my mixes be as fun as this?"  Nothing too challenging, no downer experimental interludes, don't be afraid to make abrupt transitions as long as the sequencing works, always think about how it would sound on the dancefloor, and don't wear out anyone's patience.  Get in and out in about an hour.  

All that, and I managed to span twenty years of techno too.

Pitchfork's 50 Best Britpop Albums

I fell for the clickbait again and read through yet another Pitchfork top 50 list of a poorly defined genre from a poorly defined era of time with a completely predictable top ten that reiterates the great things we already know about the albums that we already knew were great.  In this instance, they're barely even pretending there's an actual genre to tie the list together.  It's a list of mid-90's British indie rock (hence it's the 50 Best but not the 50 Best "of all time" ... which would be redundant because we're essentially talking about a four year window in the 90's save for the rare exceptions for the likes of the La's).

It's kind of embarrassing when so many of the bands were never lumped in with the Britpop I knew at the time (SFA, Denim, Mansun, Placebo, the list goes on and on) or were outwardly hostile to Britpop (Manic Street Preachers, Auteurs) and would be appalled to see themselves on a list like this.  Inasmuch as an actual genre of Britpop can be defined, it was one of the most top heavy scenes ever, with a small number of excellent bands at the top, a handful of mediocre curiosities with a couple of passable hits, and very little else.  When you narrow the eligibility criteria to such a degree (UK indie rock bands who released their debut album after "Parklife" and placed at least one album in the top 30 of NME's year end list in either 1994, 1995 or 1996!) even Echobelly and Sleeper can wind up on a "best of" genre list.
 
Predictably, only Tom Ewing brings any interesting ideas to the table as he stops to consider the Britpop that never really was in his short takes on Saint Etienne.  What would have been if Britpop had been more like the introverted, cosmopolitan urban dance pop model of Saint Etienne instead of the extroverted, beer and football loving anthemic chorus model of Oasis?  More than anything, the best bands of the time exuded confidence (or arrogance, depending on one's viewpoint) that made them far more exciting than Saint Etienne could ever hope to be (and I love Saint Etienne).  Pulp, Blur, and Suede each had their visions of music (completely different from each other) that were rooted in uniquely British traditions and each was 100% convinced that their music was the most worthy distraction against the then-dominant stodgy American grunge rock.  However, the fact that Blur had their biggest hit with a grunge song a few years later was an irony only the most British of British bands could pull off though.

A Spice Girls Puff Piece

As a breezy, easy to read summary of a group and a time and a place, this short Spice Girls history isn't bad.  The context isn't really there, nor would I expect it to be in a fluff piece like this (the photos and video clips provide most of the context the piece requires).  It's true that boy bands ruled the charts in the UK for most of the 90's, but girl groups like En Vogue and TLC were big in US at the time, and worldwide it was a near golden age for female solo artists (Celine, Alanis, the Lilith Fair artists, and countless others).  So the Spice Girls' world takeover was hardly unprecedented, but they were still revolutionary in that no other contemporary group had been marketed in that way (five divergent looks, five unique personalities) and they were marketed specifically to girls, i.e. they competed with the boy bands for the same fan demographics and won.  

In reading histories like these, I'm always struck by how short-lived their fame was, compared to how all-encompassingly long it felt at the time.  Spice Girls were at the highest strata of pop dominance.  They were everywhere -- on the radio, in movies, in the tabloids -- with market penetration and omnipresence that only the likes of Michael Jackson, Adele, the Beatles, and a handful of other pop stars can lay claim to.  And it all lasted little more than two and a half years -- from "Wannabe" in the summer of '96 to Geri leaving the band and their final Xmas number one, "Goodbye", in the winter of '98.  It was still enough to make them the biggest selling girl group ever. 

RIP John Lever

Tributes have been slowly pouring for the Chameleons' drummer who passed away a few days ago. When you're a "cult" band (a unfortunate term, as Ned Raggett refers to it in his piece for The Quietus, but it is what it is) the proper recognition can take time to gather steam in death just as it did in life.

Chameleons belong in a select group of influential 80's bands that nobody has ever quite been able to duplicate (I'd put both The Smiths and Cocteau Twins in this category).  The combination of Mark Burgess' throaty vocals, Reg Smithies and Dave Fieldings' interlocking guitar lines, and John Levers intricate yet propulsive drumming somehow added up to more than the sum of their parts, as many have noted.  When I was first absorbing alternative music in the late 80's, "Swamp Thing" was the Chameleons staple heard most often on the radio.  But as the years went by, "Soul In Isolation" became their signature song for me, in no small part due to Lever's blowaway drum performance.

While recording the album "Strange Times", the band was pushed to record live as much as possible with no overdubs.  So rest assured that Lever played the complex opening riff for "Soul In Isolation" with two hands and only two hands.  In an alternate universe, its opening drum riff is as iconic as "Be My Baby".  It would be copied more often if more drummers were capable of playing it.

Few rock drummers could switch so effortlessly between the busy opening riff and the expansive, energetic drumming in the bridge and chorus.  Of course you can always stick together two ideas in a song to form an odd, schizophrenic pairing.  But the two drum riffs in "Soul In Isolation" don't come off sounding like that.  They're a logical progression in a cohesive whole.  And then the pattern repeats itself in the second half of the song!, i.e. yet another switch to the busy would-be iconic riff, and back again to the propulsive final stretch.

Jammed into the middle as the fourth song on a sixteen song CD (ten for the album proper plus six bonus tracks), "Soul In Isolation" arguably loses part of its impact in the post vinyl era,  On vinyl, it was the epic Side 1 closer, fading away in volume while the band surged on without the least bit of let up, with Lever's outstanding drumming leading the way. It reminds me of something once said about Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir".  It's a song without a clear beginning or end, it's practically all middle.  It passes by like a slow moving float in a parade, and while it's in earshot you get you hear a few (well, technically eight) scant minutes but you can't be sure how long they were playing before, or how much longer they'll keep playing after the float passes by.