September has been dominated by the rerelease and remaster of two of my favourite albums. The second best album to be released from Wales and the best Irish album of all time. They’re both pretty lengthy write ups so I’ve left them for last, so you don’t have to subject yourself to the fanboy frothing unless you want to.
It’s been another fantastic month for music and there’s a few albums I’ve had to leave off for the sake of length, so here we go.
Public Service Broadcasting
Bright Magic
For album number Four, J. Willgoose, the main songwriter for PSB, left London and relocated to Berlin to help reinvent the band. He may not be the first Englishman to do this, but it certainty has worked for him. This album sounds very different from the band that brought us the Race for Space and an album on the history of coal mining in the 20th century.
The most obvious change is that PSB have stopped using the voice samples that they have built their career on. They’ve swapped them out for more guest vocalists with a with a Berlin connection. Which leads to the odd surprise, like Blixa Bargeld (Ex Bad Seed and Einstürzende Neubauten member ) turning up. The next surprise is the direction, People let’s Dance is a club floor filler and Blue Heaven is an indie banger. PSB have never been shy of an anthem but these, probably because of the vocals, feel more immediate, more human.
It’s definitely not all bangers though, things slow down towards the end of the album. The Lichtspiel section does feel a bit pretentious, but calling a track Lictspiel 1: Opus, is always going to raise an eyebrow around these parts. This is where Bowie’s Berlin years start to show their influence, rounding out a surprisingly different but very welcome new sound for the band.
A Talk in the Dark
Look to the Clouds
A few years ago I made the choice to stop listening to post rock. It felt like I’d heard about every conceivable variation that the genre could put together and I was tired of it all. But you can never truly escape a kind of music that you spent so much of your life listening to and sometimes a band will come along and pull you back in.
A Talk in the Dark are from County Meath in Ireland. (But we won’t hold that against them) Their version of post rock is a beautifully gentle one, mixing electronics with violin and a light guitar tone. It’s a soundtrack to a perfect, hazy summer evening. It’s widescreen without being melodramatic. They remind me in a way of fellow (and much missed by me) Irish band, Halves.
My only complaint would be that it’s a little cheeky using a track from their debut ep on such a short album. I’d like a few more songs, but that might just be me getting greedy.
AtitD won’t change your life but if you’re looking for some gorgeous music to soundtrack it, Look to the Clouds will be perfect.
Rivers of Nihil
The Work
Rivers came to world wide attention on their last album, the amazingly titled, Where Owls Know My Name. It was an incredible record that sounded like no one else, mixing a bunch of styles into an insanely heavy form of Prog, with some crazy free jazz saxophone that made people sit up and take notice. So how do you follow up something like that?
In this case you go bigger. Sometimes it feels like there isn’t enough ambition in music, that might be because RoN are using enough for about other 10 bands.
The album opens with The Tower which is rather surprisingly Goth metal. A deep, clean vocal introduces us to the album with the song getting progressively heavier as it goes along.
From here on in though, pretty much anything can and does happen. Death metal can transition to easy listening jazz, which will then have an Aerosmith style solo. The sax is deployed carefully, mainly used as texture until it finally steps out into the fore in The Void which no Sound Escapes, where it adds a fantastic dimension to the song.
The single, Focus, is the best place to start if you want to just dip your toe into the album. It’s still full on metal but shows the range of the band, while being more accessible than some of the more baroque tracks on here.
If I have a criticism of the album it’s that it is too long. 64 minutes of twisting and turning music is very hard to concentrate on. Having a 11 min sound ending the album, no matter how good it is, seems almost perverse.
That said, this is an incredible album that’s going to take months to digest properly.
65daysofstatic
Mimik
65 are working on a project to create a self generating music A.I. that will produce an infinite amount of music that sounds like 65days. Here’s the stream if that sounds interesting to you.
To fund this they have a Patreon where one of the perks is the release of an ep, roughly every month. They’ve mostly been pretty good but, for me, Mimik is the best thing they’ve put out in years. This is dark, 65days flavoured techno. These aren’t bangers like something off We were Exploding, it’s more the low key sound that they’ve been using on the last album. But it’s the sound I’ve been wanting 65 to play with since I first heard them on The Fall of Math. Dial back the post rock, embrace the machine and up the beats. This stuff is gold, lads, please keep the techno going.
It’s not on youtube so here’s a bandcamp link.
https://65daysofstatic.bandcamp.com/album/mimik
Super Furry Animals
Rings Around the World
I’ll never forget the first time I heard this album. I was curled up in the back seat of a friend’s car, driving back from Cork. I was hungover enough to want to die. I hated every second of it and was too ill to tell my friend to turn it off.
Luckily I’ve had time to reassess things since then and RAtW is easily one of my favourite albums of all time. (And the second best album to come out of Wales)
At this point in the Furries are at the top of their game. They had the talent and the confidence to pull off pretty much anything they turn their hand to. Luckily for us they also had the kind of ambition that you very rarely see. This is the sound of a band throwing everything against the wall, and amazingly, it’s not just sticking, it’s a masterpiece.
The key to SFA’s success is their ear for melody. The fact that the band can still deliver the multi part harmonies live is testament to their skill and it’s sparing deployment lifts every song it’s used on.
There’s a perverse, yet joyful sense of fun on the album, from Rings around the World with it’s Japanese film in jokes to the sheer cheek and muso nerdiness of getting Paul McCartney in to chew celery on Receptacle for the Respectable. Happily, the album is knowing but never smug.
The mashing up of genres here shouldn’t work, something like No Sympathy on paper is a mess, a gentle ballad, all country guitar and vocal harmonies shouldn’t morph into an Aphex Twin style IDM techno assault. But it does, and it’s great.
There’s 2 discs of extras on here, but for me the only thing I’m really interested in is the seven B sides that I now have easy access to. They shows just how hot the band’s writing streak was at this point. 6 of these songs could easily fit on the album. Happiness is a Worn Pun could have been a single. I mean, just listen to how much fun this is.
Pure magic and Yeti roars.
20 years on and this album still sounds like nothing else which makes it even more precious. SFA shot for the stars with this and they got there. This album is magic. I mean this video even has a cute-ish Cthulhu in it.
Whipping Boy
Heartworm
I’ll open with a bold statement here. This is the best album to have been released out of Ireland.
Now that might sound outlandish? Is it not by U2 or maybe by that Anti Vax twat from the North?
Nope.
Whipping Boy had been kicking around Dublin since ‘88, making a noisy form of shoegaze. Their first album, Submarine, was a lot cleaner and was more indebted to bands like Sonic Youth. It has some great songs but is pretty uneven, so there was nothing there to suggest that by their second album, Heartworm, they would almost completely transform. The jagged musical edges and the speed fueled anger calmed down to form something that felt personal, and with Fergal’s lyrics almost poetical.
WB’s music still has an edge though, there are walls of guitar but there’s just so much room for the songs to breathe. Some are wrapped in strings, large stretches of the album are beautiful but there’s still a white knuckle rage here, and that’s what really makes this album stand out.
Fergal’s lyrics are the crown on this already great album, from the lighthearted When We Were Young’s talking about youthful messing around, to the loss of The Honeymoon is over, he shows a lightness of touch that puts him up with the best in the world.
But it’s the album highlight, We Don’t Need Nobody Else that stands out. There’s a verse about the first time he hit his partner (A lyric that has gotten Fergal accused of misogyny over the years). His delivery of the line “Yea, and you thought you knew me” is still chilling after decades of hearing it. It may be disturbing but the Heartworm goes to dark places without it ever feeling sensationalist. It just feels real, whether we like it or not.
Disc 2 is filled with different versions of the album tracks and live versions, which while nice, isn’t essential. What is essential though, is Whipping Boy’s cover of Caroline Says II by Lou Reed. It’s a masterclass of a cover, taking an incredibly dark song and making it their own. They streamline it and wrap it in strings but this never overpowers the track. The final refrain is still devastating.
The hidden track from the CD of Heartworm, A Natural closes the disc out and should never have been taken off the main album. Quoting lyrics rarely works in a review but it’s hard not to quote Fergal, and this painfully confessional song has so many amazing lines but the line “I myself am heaven and hell” has always stuck.
The band broke up after making a third album that only got released posthumously, but it could never have lived up to this. It’s a pity they’re not doing reunion shows but we’ll always have the record and that’s all we’ll ever need,
The ways of exile 