Bands #01 The White Stripes

Posted on April 30, 2012 by admin

I like an awful lot of music. I like everything from classical to Jazz, from blues to hip hop, from indie to electronica. I can casually graze through the related artists list on Spotify and find 10 news bands in a few minutes that I could quite happily enjoy listening to regularly. I am just a ravenous consumer of popular music, ready to devour anything new or interesting or strange, anything that can catch my attention is worth a listen.
And most bands are good bands! They can play well, sing in tune and gather enough about themselves to put out an album or two. Most of them are worth at least giving a try. But after a while most of them do just fade away into a state of pointless ambiguity. Uncared for and unloved, forgotten forever. The Von Bondies who? Sometimes though, the sands of time begin to shift, to spread apart, to make way for a new permanent fixture. Sometimes you hear a sound that you will never forget!

Ever since the first time I heard that almighty combination of Meg on thunder drums and Jack on lightening guitar surge through my TV speakers, I’ve been a changed man. Forever bound to give myself over, time and again, to the insatiable desire I now have, the craving, the longing, the lusting after the electrifying thrill of listening to the White Stripes.

As the late great John Peel said, they are as important a group as Jimi Hendrix and the Sex Pistols. The White Stripes are a band made of the same divine qualities as the great pioneers of Rock ‘N’ Roll. They are to be revered alongside such musical deities as Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Beatles, the Rolling Stone, the Doors, Nirvana, Elvis etc…

I lie on my bed, I have a cup of hot black coffee and my stereo is turned up. The milliseconds before the next track are an excruciating tension of desperation and delight. One song has ended and immediately I’m longing for more. It’s incredible how much suspense can build inside me in such a short period. But my CD still works, despite the amount of times I’ve played it. And suddenly, in an instant, my body is released from its anxious anticipation and my soul sinks once again in oblivion as the notes of the next song palpitate through my twin sub speakers gently vibrating every piece of furniture in my room.
Listening to the White Stripes is the most self indulgent thing I can do. In choosing to listen to them I choose to neglect everything that isn’t listening to them. Nothing else in the world matters.
Still lying down, eyes closed, mind relaxing and I continue to sink further into the deep satisfaction of my audio inebriation.

If you’ve read any of my previous posts you probably understand that I enjoy music. You yourself probably enjoy music too. But I lack the ability to articulate fully the depth of my affections for the White Stripes. It’s silly, I know. I don’t care. I can’t even explain why really. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why I should like them more than any other band. But I do. And how I do… I’m in love with a band…

Here are some WS songs you’ve never heard before! Enjoy!

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I like women

Posted on March 8, 2012 by admin

Today is International Women’s Day! I quite like women, and a lot of the music I listen to is made by women. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to share with you the wonders of one of my favourite bands at the minute, Tennis, fronted by the curly haired Alaina Moore, a woman.
In my opinion, the best modern bands out there are the ones who have copied the old styles. Who have boldy shamelessly tried to sound like their hero’s and manage to pull it off. Essentially, who have good taste! Take the White Stripes for instance, they loved Led Zep and ended up sounding quite a lot like Led Zep. The Black Keys early records sound a lot like Hendrix. And the Raveonettes sound like a combination of every 50′s Rock ‘N’ Roll band that ever there were. But thus is the nature of true creativity. Everyone needs to be influenced by something, and if your influences are good, the fuel for your inspiration is good, and your own creativity will flourish much more fully. And it does, all three of the aforementioned bands have produced some of the most interesting and individual sounding music I’ve ever heard.
Tennis are such a band. Harbouring the surf pop and garage rock sounds of the 60′s, and taking cues from the great soul legends, they are a group that have learned well. Tennis have great taste, and that comes through in the progression of their own unique creativity.

I love Tennis (I almost saw them live once)! I’m hooked on their jangly guitar noises, their bright chiming keyboard notes and happy upbeat drumming and Alaina’s soft, smooth and warming female vocal. Their songs are all so short, I don’t think any of them on either of their two albums have reached four minutes long yet, but that’s part of their brilliance. As a compliment to their lyrical content, they manage to draw you instantly. And for the two or three minutes of the song, you find yourself caught up in the midst of one of their sailing adventures. You are taken away into a special little place for a special little minute. A place that is bright and shiny, shimmering, and full of deep soulful echos. It’s a lovely and satisfying place to be.

Enjoy this, I do!

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#02 The Black Keys

Posted on February 21, 2012 by admin

I would say that I very much believe in love at first sight. Or maybe when it comes to music, first listen. When you fall in love this way, however, you don’t often realise what’s happening until after the fact. But it is the very best way to fall in love.
I can remember the first ever moment I heard the Black Keys. The year was, of course, 2003. It was a Saturday, and I was in a car driving back home (from somewhere :s). For some reason a Jonathan Woss show was streaming through the radio, which would be odd enough because, why would you listen to him on the radio? And even odder still, from his show, one of the grittiest, roughest, grooviest and most soulful sounds I had ever heard was quickly and confidently taking control of my senses. Deep satisfaction!

I never thought I’d be grateful to Jonathan Woss for anything…

…As soon as I got home the very first thing I did was to check out the Black Keys website. Endless delight!

Listening to the Black Keys is a bit like touching a van de graaf generator. It’s electricity that pulses through your whole body and makes your hair stand on end! It’s like being caught in the midst of a low voltage, high frequency electrical storm. And especially live. A low deep rumble, it seems quite distant at first, starting gently, but with increasing vigor the tension rises and rises. The guitar gets tighter and tighter, the drums get looser and looser, and the sound almost sticks to you, it gets so thick you think you can feel it!
But don’t think of the ‘Keys music as some kind of wild, erratic, confused mess. As even in their improvisation there is order and harmony and complete control. Think of them as Impressionist painters. Because more than anything, they are trying to evoke feeling and emotion. The band’s sound has progressed and adapted and changed quite dramatically through the seven studio albums they have recorded. Particularly the seventh, with a most intentional and decisive change in direction. But there is one record they have produced that I think captures the essence of what they are about perfectly. Chulahoma is a collection of songs written by Junior Kimbrough (see several posts ago…) and covered blissfully by the ‘Keys. What they do on this record is dig deep down into the heart of Junior’s soul music and pull it right out for everyone to see. Everything I have said so far is more true on the arrangements of the six covers on Chulahoma than anything else they have ever done. There is a beautifully tender and affectionate resonance, musically and emotionally, on the record. You can’t listen to the music with your ears any more than you must listen to it with your heart and mind. If Monet were a musician, his songs would at least feel the same as this record does.
There are lots and lots and lots of ‘artists’ out there who know how to make music. They can think it through and write it down and mathematically work out the equivalent of a musical equation. 2+2 = your basic factory produced, radio friendly chart song. But the Black Keys, more than most, have the ability to let uniqueness of their personalities flow through into even the aesthetic of the music they so wonderfully continue to produce.

Here are two songs, one a Junior Kimbrough cover from Chulahoma, one of my particular favourites, Meet Me In The City. Try and make the effort to listen to this through good speakers and at a decent volume. Set You Free is my favourite ‘Keys original. From their second record, 2003′s most aptly titled Thickfreakness. Enjoy!

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#03 The Kills

Posted on January 4, 2012 by admin

The second band that makes up the foundation of my musical propensities is the Kills.
The Kills are a band I almost decided not to like. They made music with nothing more than an old guitar and cold hard vocals, but also, to my slight dismay, a drum machine. I thought a drum machine was a bit of a cop out and that they weren’t really a proper band. But in the end the Kills’ stark minimalism and the abrasive rawness of their geometrically sequential sound proved to much of an intensely satisfying combination for me to leave alone. I turned from misguided ‘principals’ and ventured into the world of electronica.
The Kills, when they first appeared on that most ambiguous of scenes, the Indie music scene, were carelessly compared other boy girl duos making waves at the time. Apart from a vaguely similar setup and ethos, the Kills don’t share as much as you might think with the White Stripes. There is a sense in which the minimalism; the lo-fi construction and the down beat feel of their sound expresses the essence of a blues appreciation similar to that of Jack and Meg. But generally, to think of the Kills as another one of the bands trying to resurrect Rock ‘N’ Roll from 50′s and 60′s isn’t quite right.
One comparison to the White Stripes, however, can be made. The ‘Stripes second record, one of my absolute favourite records of all time is entitled ‘De Stijl’. De Stijl, or, The Style is an art movement originating in the Netherlands in the early 1900′s and was co founded by a man I love named Piet Mondrian. Mondrian takes the world around him and reduces it to it’s simplest most basic form and produces beautiful minimalist abstractions. I think that this is what the Kills set out to do with their sound. They looked at what they had and took away as much as possible until all that was left was something simple and beautiful. They reduced their world view, their inspirations, down to their core components and set about arranging the few pieces they had left into simple elegant compositions. This is electronica. Electronica is quite an aesthetically unnatural and synthetic sound. But it’s this process of breaking down, reducing, sorting and sifting, then building back up slowly but surely, an abstract, but nevertheless accurate reinterpretation of ideas into delightful patterns of layered sound that makes it so appealing and so satisfying. The Kills started out as black and white as you can get, but as they have progressed through four records, they have furthered the process each time. Each album is denser than the last, filled with more noises, more ideas, more patterns and a bigger sound. But I guess that’s just what happens over time. And it’s good!

When I first heard this song I thought it might take over the (Indie) world. It didn’t, the Kills still remain a fairly obscure fashion. But I got hooked on this particular performance of it instantly. It encapsulates everything I love about this band. Enjoy!

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#04 The Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Posted on January 3, 2012 by admin

In 2003 four bands released four albums. They are some of the first records to enter my collection and are the 4 greatest influences on my musical preferences and appreciations. These four bands and their respective albums all share equal amounts of similarities and differences, all are equally contrasting and complimentary. They all retain the qualities that I crave whatever I listen to, but they all express these in very different ways. My hugely eclectic taste in music can be narrowed down and defined between these four albums alone, they form the basis for everything I appreciate about the rest of the music I listen to.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs then, are the first of the four bands, Fever To Tell the record they released.
I love this record in particular, because, to myself at least, the music sounds like how the cover art looks. It is a pop art/pop music masterpiece, being both controlled chaos and distorted harmony. This contrast I think, is wonderfully summed up between the first few tracks. Rich, the opener eases you in with its sugary sweet, mega catchy riffs that get stuck in your head and rest there so easily, so pleasantly. Then all of a sudden your are hit with the slightly awkward, grinding distortion of Date With The Night. It shouts and screams and breaks through your concentration, grabs hold of your attention and keeps tight hold until it’s done with you.
And so the record goes on, beautiful hooking riffs on fuzzy squealing guitars, machine gun drumming and screeching banshee vocals.
This is one of the best pop records I own, when I first got it I couldn’t listen to anything else for weeks. Every track in some way sounds the same, but different. As you listen to it, it constantly moves you about. Full of chops and changes there is not a dull moment, not a single chance to get bored.
The second record, Show Your Bones (apparently written about a cat…) and the third, It’s Blitz! are stylistically quite different to how they started out. With acoustic guitars, keyboards, softer singing, slicker production and even bass being added to the mix. But the YYYs songs are all written the same way and all do the same thing. Listening to this band is a bit like eating cake. It’s so easy to do and so instantly satisfying and moreish. That’s What good pop music is.
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs effortlessly continue to produce some of my favourite pop melodies and their songs carry on sinking their hooks into my brain. And their approach to music has greatly influenced my own.

Here is a song I love!

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#05 The Raveonettes

Posted on December 11, 2011 by admin

They are Romantics, in love with a dead sound but intent on resurrection. The music was supposed to have died in 1959, but apparently no-one told the Raveonettes. Named after a mixture of the Buddy Holly song Rave On and the band the Ronettes, they look like film noir, they have a song called Attack Of The Ghost Riders and they sound like dashed hopes and broken dreams!
Their dark and seedy world of speed, women, cigarettes and rebellion, leather jackets and twisted love, is a glamourised ideology, steeped in Rock ‘N’ Roll mythology. And this is wonderfully preserved by their punk attitude, their Gretsch guitars and their good hair.
And the music more than lives up to the image. They turn brokenhearted songs of love into heart breaking songs of lust. With Everly Brothers style melodies and surf rock riffs glistening through a haze of Jesus And Mary Chain feedback, the sound is one that swells up around you and draws you in to deep dark places. And as your are surrounded by the echos, the darkness and the noise, almost left without hope, like stars scattered through the night sky, beautiful notes shimmer from glistening guitars and your broken heart is almost satisfied…
Rock ‘N’ Roll isn’t dead, and as long as bands like the Raveonettes are around it cannot be destroyed.

This, for me is one of those songs that just cuts deep into your soul and just… takes you away with it… or something, I don’t know… It’s just good!

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Total sellout!

Posted on December 2, 2011 by admin

So, I haven’t posted much in a while, I’ve been really busy. But the next post in the series will be good, I hope, and worth the wait. But for now, here is a little interim post. I have just watched this interview with the Black Keys about selling music for commercial use. Very interesting.

Watch the video and let one of my absolute favourite bands, the Grammy winning, world touring Black Keys explain…

“if you are going to be exposed to music randomly, I’d rather it be our music…”

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#06 P J Harvey

Posted on November 3, 2011 by admin

It’s almost like an unwritten rule, that eventually bands just get worse with age, and far too many of them don’t call it quits soon enough. And you know the cliché, to say you prefer a bands early stuff. Well here’s the exception, Polly Jean Harvey!

She didn’t really start off badly, her personality, her songwriting and trashy guitar playing meant that she slotted quite well into the end of the grunge era. But Harvey’s character and creativity was always headed for a more beautiful destination, right from the start. She’s particularly noted for consistently producing records that sound nothing like the last. And having surpassed many a conventional understanding of rock music, her sound has gradually progressed from the raw blues power of Dry to the well finished indie pop electronica of Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea, to the sweetly sung piano hymns of White Chalk. However, despite constantly changing her appearance and getting a bit bored of playing guitar, there is one thing that has remained the same, one constant that fuels her persistence in writing songs…

P J Harvey scares me just a little bit, but it’s her brutal honesty and emotion, as she pours it out almost sacrificially to herself, that draws me into her broken and beautiful world. And I think that’s why I love her music so much. She makes me uneasy sometimes and she can keep me on edge. But if you can sink through the harshness of her reality, as she presents it, you can easily immerse yourself in a thoughtful, considerate and intensely satisfying world of sound. And more than most other bands I listen to, P J Harvey can take me out of my self and consume me, with the power of her fragility. Every album I listen to has the same pulse, the same idea, the same feel, despite the constantly changing aesthetic. I listen to her as she mourns and laments and pulls through her experience of life and wraps it around instruments and words as she tries to find reason and meaning. This thrills me on a level where thrill and enjoyment seem to be an intrusion, but there is nothing like it.

I’m writing more specifically about one of her albums in a month or two. It’s an album that I think everyone needs to hear at some point. But for now, here is lovely a song from a joint album she did with a guy called John Parish. You probably wont like it…

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#07 The Knife

Posted on October 20, 2011 by admin

If you don’t already know, I have quite a fascination with two man bands, 5 of my top ten favorite bands are duos! It’s like my fascination with the colour red. It happened upon me purely through coincidence, and has now become an intrinsic part of my personality. Any band that consists of less than three people but is more than one person will instantly attract my attention. I have come across only one that I dislike! But a band with one boy and one girl was never really going to work when the drummer is the boy and the guitarist is the girl, what were they thinking? And such a stupid name too…

Nevertheless, there are many two man bands out there that I have a lot of appreciation for, and most of them are boy/girl duos too. None of these bands will be part of this blog series, but if you find the time you should probably pay some attention to Joy Zipper, Fiery Furnaces, Crystal Castles, Royksopp and Air!

The Knife however are a band that I just have to mention. They are one of the weirdest musical partnerships I have ever come across and not least because they actually are brother and sister, unlike a certain other band who just lied about being siblings… They have produced some of the most incredible music I have ever heard! And there isn’t actually another band I can think of that I would consider to be better than the Knife. I guess I don’t really know a lot about them as a band, they are Swedish, they wear crazy masks and they have a song called lasagne. But that’s all boring stuff really, compared to the incredible sound they create; beautiful layered patterns of hypnotic repetition that create an exotic blend of abstract electronica that will sink to the depths of your audible capabilities. The Knife are master manipulators of synthetic sounds, creating the most carefully considered compositions I’ve ever heard. Their sound is meticulous, logical and almost mathematical, like you are listening to an equation being solved. It is not music that happened by chance. There isn’t a lot in life that satisfies so deeply, the Knife are one of the finest products of common grace and I would suggest that you should immerse and indulge yourselves in their sonic sound-scapes.

I’ve run out of words… Hope you enjoy the video!

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#08 The Yardbirds

Posted on October 13, 2011 by admin

I’ll be honest, despite my collection of skinny jeans, check shirts and over sized sunglasses, I’m not much of an Indie music fan. I’m not sure what you class as Indie, I’m not entirely sure I do either… It’s kind of just another one of those aesthetically pleasing yet rather ambiguous terms used describe specific current musical trends that ends up becoming its own pop genre… Like Punk! What was that all about?

I guess when I think of modern day Indie music, I’m thinking of stuff like the Strokes, the Libertines, Bloc Party, Editors perhaps, maybe even stuff like the Killers. Bands that are just alternative enough to be hip, but break through into the mainstream enough to be socially acceptable to the rest of the world.

Well, I have the first two Strokes albums and I really have no idea why… Anyone want two free albums?

Anyway, I think modern day Indie music is thoroughly letting down the ‘alternative’ scene! Kids these days still look pretty cool, but when bands start giving themselves names like Scouting for Girls, surely that’s a sign of bad times…

Maybe you don’t associate Indie music with the 60′s, but let me suggest that my third band in the series, the Yardbirds, are the best Indie band of any decade.

The Yardbirds were slick, stylish, well dressed, very capable and innovative. They put out some of the trashiest Rock ‘N’ Roll covers as well as their own brilliant brand of psyche pop and I absolutely love them!

So it turns out that I don’t really know a lot about the Yardbirds, they seem to be a little bit forgotten since their heyday and I think I’ve just used a lot of words to not really say very much… I think I can say however, that the Yardbirds are a band for people who like music, who like the look the sound and the feel of music. They played their songs with an appreciation of the past and a respect for the future. They didn’t really seem to have any agenda, no hidden motive for making music other than for the pure joy and the thrill of it. I don’t really think they ever properly pushed through into the mainstream of things, but they were compelling enough and significant enough to catch the attention of 60′s British hipsters! Also, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page all played a part in forming that distinct garage rock sound! I bet you never knew that! Thank the Yardbirds for Led Zep!

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