Not Turning Off: Volume 30

An omnivorous accumulation of aural fodder from Ellis Island Sound, Freakons, Listening Center, K of ARC, Suicide, The Lemonheads and more

With 2022 firmly adding itself to the recent long list of hard years on the planet, a lot has happened in the month or so since the previous instalment of this column, to add collective doomscrolling. Nevertheless, musical life has rolled relentlessly on, so much so that the review mountain almost feels insurmountable for someone with diverse tastes. Hence, the necessity to scale an elevation of the short-form, the long-form, the new and the revisited, before it all becomes a multi-format landslip.

Starting things off small – but not without significance – is a super-limited lathe-cut 7” (with download) return from Ellis Island Sound (AKA the long-running on/off/on duo of Pete Astor of The Attendant, The Wisdom of Harry, The Weather Prophets, The Loft et al. and David Sheppard of Snow Palms, State River Widening, ad infinitum) via Faux Lux.

Last heard together on 2014’s divine Divisions mini-album, which tapped predominantly into Sheppard’s Steve Reich-infused percussion palette, these two new pieces lean nearer to the lo-to-mid-fi art-pop of Astor’s still-fresh alias outings as The Attendant and his earliest works from The Wisdom of Harry.

Yet, the pair still operate in a hive-minded fashion across these fresh constructions. Therefore, A-side “Tape Deck” is a lateral tribute to once freedom-creating analogue technology, through Dictaphone manipulations, reversed vibraphones, a pulsing bass line and hushed murmured spoken voicings from Astor, whilst AA-side “Streets in the Sky” is a wonderfully balmy Byrds-meets-Brian Eno blend of more prominent vocals, chiming guitars, drum machines, synths and samples with a wistful pastoral look up at brutalist London tower blocks.

Both playful and pensive, this is a fine addition to the long-running Ellis Island Sound breadcrumb trail.

Also imbued with a sense of place whilst saturated with bucolic and electro-organic fusions, is Look to Imber, a compilation from the ever-consistent Modern Aviation. Conceptually based around label owner Will Salmon’s fascination with the real Wiltshire locale of Imber which – like the ‘lost’ Dorset village immortalised across the eponymous Tyneham House LP co-released on Clay Pipe and Second Language in 2012 – was requisitioned and subsequently left abandoned by the British government for military usage as part of Second World War efforts, this multi-artist assortment is both majestically mysterious and inventively inviting.

Thus, over the eleven tracks, Stellarays open things sublimely with the richly-arranged retro-futuristic elaborations of “Votre Passport”; The Leaf Library drop into soothing Yo La Tengo-meets-Broadcast blissfulness with “A Stone in Water”; The All Golden and Lose a Leg make connections between Jim O’Rourke’s Bad Timing and prime-time Pentangle; Floodlights join forces with Rupert Lally for the utterly radiant “The Last Voice You’ll Hear”; Burd Ellen deliver a stark version of the traditional “Bushes and Briars”; Ben Winter and The Home Current bring in some mid-80s Factory Records-flavoured beats-based interludes; and Oliver Cherer conjures up the celestial post-classical “Saint Giles at Imber” to conclude proceedings.

Arguably, Look to Imber is the first must-buy compilation of 2022. Don’t delay in picking it up.

Following a slightly more conventional approach to compilation curation is Covers of Covers, released by American Laundromat Records in tandem with Under the Radar magazine, to celebrate the latter’s twentieth birthday. Featuring twenty artists reinterpreting the works of others who have appeared on the front cover of the publication, the collection contains some charmingly likeable juxtapositions.

Amongst the highlights you will find some reconversions from seasoned pros and newer-arrivals alike of various stylistic stripes. This includes Grandaddy remaking Metric’s “Blindness” very much in their own warm fuzzy image; the Miki Berenyi-led supergroup of Piroshka in turn giving Grandaddy’s “Crystal Lake” an affectionate shoe-gaze rendering; Peter Bjorn and John radically remoulding The Divine Comedy’s “Songs of Love” with mystic space-rock voodoo vibes; James Yorkston spookily stripping-back Phoebe Bridgers’ “Smoke Signals” to a campfire strum; C Duncan dreamily reconstructing Angel Olsen’s “Acrobat”; and Nation of Language repositioning Broken Social Scene’s “Stars and Sons” as a steely old-school synth-pop nugget; Alex Lahey’s swooning New Order-suffused chug through St. Vincent’s “New York”; and EMA’s Molly Nillson-laced take on Modest Mouse’s “Trailer Trash”.

Whilst there might be a handful of less strong contributions in-between times, the overall open-heartedness of Covers of Covers – from which American Laundromat will be donating some proceeds to the Sweet Relief Musician Fund – is worth embracing.

Taking an earthier backwards seam digging approach, is the long pre-announced eponymous full-length outing from Freakons on Fluff & Gravy. The product of a Transatlantic Americana-folk-country supergroup gathering, featuring members of the Louisville/Chicago-reared Freakwater (Janet Bean, Catherine Irwin, Jim Elkington, Anna Krippenstapel) and onetime Leeds exports The Mekons (Jon Langford and Sally Timms) bolstered by various accomplices, the album translates the on-paper-restrictions of coal-mining-themed originals and covers into engaging wide-open reveries and up-close rustic reflections.

Arranged and produced with the same warmth and richness as Freakwater’s still sublime Scheherazade from 2016 and blended with the less-plugged-in modes from The Mekons’ latter-day works, this is a collection that has real artisanship baked into its anthracite-coated tales of fearless union organising, scorned-upon picket-line-crossings, fatal disasters, bereaved loved ones and economic/environmental wreckage.

Freakwater fans have the most to gain from the endeavour, with the balance tipped into the communal singalongs of “Chestnut Blight”, “The Mannington Mine Disaster” and “Phoebe Snow”, the soaring Bean-led “Judy Belle Thompson” and the lonesome Irwin-steered “Dreadful Memories”.

That’s not to say that Langford and Timms don’t get their fair share at the fulcrum. The former’s gutsy lustre powers the core of “Darks Lords of the Mine”, the twangy hoe-down of “Abernant 84/85” and the aching finale of “Blue Scars of a Miner”. Elsewhere, Timms marshals the combined troops on the gritty “Blackleg Miner” and the haunting harmony-boosted “Coorie Doon”.

Yet on the whole, while the distinctive protagonists are identifiable, the two conjoined camps happily cohabit enough to the point that the record’s cohesion is demonstrable. A rousing and tender triumph in short.

Far away from the gang-mixing methodologies of Freakons – but no less creatively valid – there have of course been another clutch of home studio works from the one-man-and-his-electronics side of our world, waiting in the listening queue. Here next are three such notable box-fresh examples.

Shifting over to the colourfully-presented cassette-encased environs of Waxing Crescent after two well-received releases on Woodford Halse, is Kevin Downey’s Giants of Discovery enterprise, with The Language of Vibration.

Aside from track titles inspired by Fugitive Pieces – a novel by Anne Michaels – this time around there is deliberately no overarching concept. This allows Downey to adroitly immerse us in aquatic burbling (“Mirrors and Tides”), ambient drifting (“Time is a Blind Guide”), deep-lurking dronescapes (the title track) and modular-minded meditations with rhythmical ripples (“Through the Rivers, Through the Air”), that collectively create calming and contemplative room for cluttered headspaces, without breaking into an undignified sweat.

Existing fans of both Giants of Discovery and Waxing Crescent will feel contentedly at home here.

Contrastingly, K of ARC’s Show Them Your Throat on Cruel Nature Records – the first full-length solo set from Kev Craig of Last Harbour and A.R.C. Soundtracks – is a rather more imposing and bleaker conception. Filmic in its feel and at times burrowing into deeply-buried-barely-there-yet-enveloping sounds, this is intentionally not an easy listen. Informed, as it is in various combinations, by Philip K. Dick, growing up in an industrial new town, envisioned extra-terrestrial encounters, ghost stories and cosmic terror, this is not a restful affair.

With its post-apocalyptic prowling (“Visions from The Clockwork Hill”), Cosmic Ground-saluting Berlin school kosmische (“Contact”), industrial juddering (“Outrunners”), expansive whirrs and hums (“Constant Return”) and deserted after-midnight city streets atmospherics (the title track), this probably isn’t the soundtrack for listeners seeking to escape our growing shared existential dread. However, for those that just can’t get enough of the dimmest-lit synth-sculpting this should prove to be a subtly mesmeric meeting of shadowy noises and dark imaginations.

On a far lighter tack, David Mason returns to us again with an almost indecent haste – due to pressing plant schedule discombobulations rather than pushy ubiquity– with the Listening Center’s Cybernetic Window (Polytechnic Youth). Rewinding a tad to the warm vibes of the operation’s earlier utopistic Cycles/Other Phenomena LP from 2014 whilst adding a spring-scented buoyant freshness, the album is one of Mason’s most gloom-cutting collections so far.

Stuffed with lashings of snappy micro-beats and antique electro-pop tunefulness but still with moments of reflection, Mason steers us through ping-pong percussiveness-meets-Radiophonic Workshop wobbliness (“Memoiré”), the romantic futurism of mid-70s Kraftwerk (“Chemsuit”), nods to Oxygène-phase Jean Michel Jarre (“Discontinued Module” and “Elka Sixty Forty”), the most contemplative compact side of Cluster (“A Safe Non-Place”) and the fizzing orchestrations of Michael Bundt (“Well of Mirrors”).

Though this isn’t the most sonically radical of Listening Center albums, its sailplaning uplift is generously transporting is these trying times.

Not only but also…

If the above still isn’t quite enough to blow your Bandcamp (and elsewhere) budget for the month here are some other things to explore…

Taking yet more brave steps away being pigeon-holed as a straightforward electronic scene documenter, for the month of March Woodford Halse ventures into more previously uncharted territory, with two complementary set of recordings.

First up, we find Tallahassee trio Medusa Phase joining the extended family fold with the cassette/download Negative Space, an alluringly inscrutable album that joins the dots between Weekend’s La Varieté, Fontana-era Cocteau Twins and Connan Mockasin’s Caramel, with plenty of woozy gauziness and half-melted melodicism.

Close behind is the sub-editor troubling allyoueverwanted, which anthologises – on one CD – three previously-released 2008-2013 EPs (and a little bit more) from the New York-based MAYa (AKA British expat and multi-disciplinary creator Maya Hardinge); covering a broad but seamless spectrum of work that melds neo-classical cinematics, strains of PJ Harvey circa White Chalk, Anna Calvi’s more hushed moments, shades of Anita Lane’s Dirty Pearl and Björk’s most gamelan-tinged avant-pop experiments.

Both releases may not leap out of the speakers and do require some unhurried headphone-listening but there are a lot of enthralling places to be surveyed across the pair.

On the fully retrospective front some reliable outlets also continue to re-excavate the goods…

Although there have been plenty of archival side-outings for Suicide in the past on top of core LP catalogue reissues – in the form of tape-store raiding singles/EPs for Record Store Day, a live recording boxset and the Blast First Petite split-10” series – there surprisingly hasn’t been a go-to sampler-meets-best-of collection. Surrender (Mute/BMG) aims to fill that void.

Pulling together key pieces from the first two essential full-lengths from 1977 and 1980, a sprinkling of tracks from the later long players spread between 1988 and 2002 and unreleased early alternative cuts (one on the CD, two on the vinyl edition), this semi-portable anthology is sequenced with a chronological disorder that makes it frustrating to properly plot the evolution of the twosome’s pioneering and highly influential canon. However, taking the material on its own merits despite the shuffled-up contextualisation, there is much here that reminds us why the legacy of Suicide remains so potent.

Whether its Rev’s dual knack for placing punk grit into pulsing synth-repetitions (“Rocket USA”, “Ghost Rider”, “Mr Ray”, “Diamonds, Fur Coat, Champagne”) and summoning-up raw yet elegiac beauty (“Dream Baby Dream” and “Cheree”) that has heavily-intoxicated everyone from Gallon Drunk to Wooden Shjips over the years or the late Vega’s maniacal but focused persona and visceral lyricism that bridged the gaps between Elvis, Iggy Pop and Nick Cave (across everything from the terrifying “Frankie Teardrop” to the soothing aforementioned “Dream Baby Dream”), it’s clear that this was a pairing with borderline-unique creative powers.

Additionally, this round-up sparks two other observations. One, it prompts the need to explore post-1980 Suicide studio wares a little more closely; thanks to the likes of the rubbery funked-up “Dominic Christ” and the oddly serene gospel-edged “Surrender”, though less so from The Fall-vaporized-by-too-many-effects messiness of “Dachau, Disney, Disco” and “Why Be Blue?”.

Two, it reminds us that sonic framing, performances and personalities aside, Rev and Vega were an extraordinary songwriting team, which in part explains why such a diffuse range of artists – that incorporates Angel Corpus Christi, Anna Calvi, Luna, R.E.M., Bruce Springsteen and Primal Scream – have successfully transported their songs into intriguing and at times transcendental new directions over the last few decades.

A somewhat flawed but important and illuminating compendium all told.

Finally, Fire Records continue to prove themselves – alongside the oft-undervalued Cherry Red Records – as careful custodians of guitar-slinging veterans of certain vintage.

Hence, after many years reupholstering the earlier ‘pre-success’ catalogue of The Lemonheads, the label finally unveils – after some no doubt hard major label negotiations – the definitive enhanced reissue of 1992’s It’s a Shame About Ray.

The fat-free pinnacle of Evan Dando’s contrarian CV to date, the album needs little introduction nowadays other than to say that its cross-fusions of Grant Hart, Gram Parsons, The Ramones and The Blake Babies, filtered through seemingly effortless but tightly-forged songcraft, remains refreshing and comforting.

Coupled with a second disc that features a near-complete round-up of contemporaneous rarities (after Rhino’s less comprehensive 2008 deluxe edition), existing fans and any latecomers are well-served alike. A long-overdue reboot of 1993’s more sprawling but still fondly-remembered Come on Feel The Lemonheads should be along next if we’re lucky.

And for those looking for something gnarlier from the same era then Come’s previously discussed on these pages Peel Sessions compendium (also on Fire) doesn’t disappoint either. Packing in place fierce but finessed BBC-commissioned readings of songs from 1992’s Eleven: Eleven, 1994’s recently-reissued Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and a couple of B-sides, along with a separate earlier bonus live recording of the never-before-released “Clockface”, this is a public service product compiled with consummate skill and attention, even if it drops half a mark for there being no CD edition to sit next to the handsome vinyl-with-digital-only presentation.