Origami Horses - Velvet Rock

 

I've always been a sucker for record sleeve designs that have a picture of a broken doll on the front.  Such images rarely disappoint and, given that the words on the front also include 'Origami Horses', the chances of this single failing to please instantly reduced still further.

I caught onto what was going on with this intriguing duo towards the end of last year, when their In Monochrome EP found its way into my ears and into my life.  I included them in my list of favourite new bands at the end of the year and we featured a track from them on our Unwashed Territories Into The Light compilation.  Now, their 'Velvet Rock' single is out, available from the Origami Horses bandcamp site and also via the Magnetic Eye label, who've had the solid good sense to pick up on the enticing vibes emanating from this quirky, engaging and surprisingly original outfit.

I say surprisingly because the raw materials that go into making Origami Horses are really quite traditional.  John sings and plays guitar and bass, while Matt drums.  What comes out of the other end is easily definable as a song and yet the collision of the elements therein come across like a mad boffin taking them into an illegal laboratory, dosing them with chemicals extracted from his collection of Velvet Underground, Seeds and Standells records, dusting them off against the hairs of his arse and throwing the results out of the window to reassemble themselves in any manner of semi-random and unexpected configurations.

'Velvet Rock' is no exception.   At heart it's an uncomplicated garage belter, but beneath the surface things happen that set the track well apart from other mutations of the species I've heard recently.  There's an enticingly manic quality to Matt's drumming, and as the tune proceeds John's guitar starts doing that thing where it appears to acquire a life of its own, careering off to copulate messily with the drums in some area of the stratosphere occupied only by them.

Or, if you prefer, this is an absolute stormer of a tune on which you can gorge mind and body in roughly equal degrees.  Amazingly, it comes in at under three minutes, leaving me to wonder, once again, at the strange dimensions of a rock and roll universe that can allow this timespan to cram so much into its relative brevity.  Not all bands can do this, of course, and most fail immediately or else disappear up their own arse trying to avoid their fate.  Origami Horses court neither possibility and can justifiably claim to have released the most remarkable single of its type so far this year.  Hear it in my March Dandelion Radio show this month and head over to bandcamp, or Magnetic Eye, or both, and grab a piece of it for yourself.

Laurence Made Me Cry - The Diary of Me

I've said it before and I'll say it again - it's all well and good being talented, but it isn't in itself something that will make a band or artist interesting.   In fact, the world is littered with artists who can play their instruments and hold a note, just as it's littered with people who buy their records, play them once and put them on the shelf.

To have such talent is a bit like having immense wealth - it's a great advantage but if all you is spend it on crap it doesn't really take you anywhere.

Cardiff-based Jo Whitby (no relation), the artist behind Laurence Made Me Cry, has talent.  She can sing and play instruments extremely well.  But she knows this isn't enough, and that's what makes her debut album The Diary of Me such an unmitigated delight, and something totally unlike anything else I'm listening to at the moment.   The album allows the unquestioned ability at the heart of Laurence Made Me Cry to take on an existential character, but that doesn't makethe album in any way a grim or intense experience.  Each of the songs here contains a narrative wherein repeated themes recur: waiting, distance, separation, solitude; but these are not vehicles for torch songs filled with angst and melancholy: in Whitby's hands the essential life and enigmatic joy behind them are plucked out via instrumentatation that so often trips lightly but decisively about surfaces that in other hands are so frequently left empty of any decisive or positive sentiment.

There is an assurance, both musically and vocally, about this artist that prevents the work becoming merely introspective, that skilfully brings the private and emotional into the realm of the universal and discovers a true and genuine joy at its heart.   In my Dandelion Radio show this month, I play 'All That Patience Brings' from the album, a song suffused with all of the themes mentioned above and yet, as its title hints, one that transforms the experience of waiting into one teeming with wonder and possibility and loaded with potential.  Last month I played 'Between Destinations', released as a single, a song that takes as its setting that tangible theatre of physical distance and separation the railway station and, whatever the mocking voice of station announcer has to say about South Wales rail locations, has the narrator behind the glass, looking into the eyes of a loved one who doesn't look back and discovering within her isolation only magic and wonder.

This is, for all its veneer of detached solitude, an album of spectacular and glorious beauty, filled with an artists' joy of discovery and the enchantment that lurk, waiting to be found, should we have eyes to see and a mind to explore, even in the world's most unlikely crevices.   For me, it's an unusual experience, and in a way an educational one: I've speculated when playing the album that probably about 90% or more of my usual listening diet concerns the intense, the angst-ridden or the angry, whether explicit or implied, and to find that something this good can contain an alternative perspective on the world is frankly good for me.

Get along to the Laurence Made Me Cry website or bandcamp site and get yourself a copy of The Diary Of Me, available as CD or download.  The vehicle it gives this remarkable artist with that rare combination of ability and something to say is worth the purchase in itself; that it may also, as it has for me, make you feel better about the world is an added bonus.

Churn Milk Joan - 8 Black Postcards

It's been a good year for improvised music.   I'm currently enjoying wallowing in the elongated jams of Keller (something from them in my April show) and the Mystical Weapons album was probably the first really outstanding release of the year.   Now the latest collection from Churn Milk Joan is upon us, a five-track monster that's the result of impromptu recording sessions in Hebden Bridge, and it's another stunner.

On the evidence of this, improvisation suits Churn Milk Joan.  For this release Colin Robinson and Richard Knutson are joined by Marian Sutton and Pete Scullion, guitarist with Colin in Block 454.   As I'm a fan anyway, and so never really want their records to end, the prospect of luxuriating in the products of lengthy krautrock-influenced sound experiments immediately tickled my fancy.

But that doesn't really describe what I found, which is actually much much better.  These are not the twenty-minutes plus epics favoured by Keller, but instead the improvised jams have provided an opportunity for the band to unleash their brilliance in a looser framework rather than merely indulge themselves, and the results are even more wonderful than anticipated.

The five pieces on 8 Black Postcards all warrant attention in their own right, but it's the second track 'The Letter (episode 1)' that for me represents the best work of Churn Milk Joan to date.   Characteristic of the album as a whole, its eight minutes do not become a stretched palette onto which the band paste meandering sound collages, but instead yield a taut percussive backdrop against which sparse guitar patterns interweave, Tago Mago-esque musical interludes rise and fall and something not unrelated to a funk vibe drags you into a sonic blender into which sounds are tossed before coming out of the other end entirely transformed, as indeed is the listener.

As usual, you can get the release as name your own price from the Churn Milk Joan bandcamp site and you won't be surprised to hear that I've seized the opportunity to feature 'The Letter' in all its lengthy majesty in my Dandelion Radio show this month.   You'll hear a band who've ceased to be simply an interesting afterthought to enjoy in the gap left by Block 454 and have now confirmed themselves as a fascinating musical proposition in their own right.

Nac/Hut Report - Angel-like Contraction Reverse

I hope the day never comes when I get tired of the feeling I get when an unsolicited release pops up in my inbox and I realise, within seconds, that it contains music that will keep me company for the rest of my life.

The feeling occurred recently when the Polish underground label Double Hallucinative sent me a copy of the new album by Polish-Italian duo Nac/Hut Report.  Entitled Angel-like Contraction Reverse, even on first listen it quickly joined the pack of albums vying for the title of my favourite release of the moment.

There's a lot to be said for noise and the mere act of simply hearing an unholy racket is often enough to send me running to the toilet in excitement, but what we have here far exceeds mere bladder-loosening.  Beneath the caustic cacophony that provides the album's surface noise bleeds an emotional heart where one half of the duo - Brigitte Roussel, a visual artist by trade - fights back with gorgeous, intensely evocative vocals that bounce off the brick wall of sound laid over them.

The duo's other half is outsider musician Li/ese/Li and, between them, they take inspiration from early eighties industrial bands - the influence of SPK is particularly noticeable here - along with avant-garde artists and the more left-field elements of post-punk experimentation.

A song like 'Violent Lips' - and there is a song clearly detectable within all nine pieces that make up the album - sees Brigitte's vocals bleeding through a distorted electronic pulse, while 'One Last Time' finds her melodies leaking through a fascinatingly raucous din.  It's a formula - if such meticulously brilliant sound layers can be reduced to such a simple term - that serves the album well throughout, as some fantastic sonic duel is played out before your ears.

The best thing on here?  I find myself alternating between the multi-tracked sound paranoia of '...Hears Nothing Untill He Returns' and album opener 'Junkstarrr', which has also been released as a free download single, available here.  Incidentally, the single also includes a track called 'Bright Future' - not on the album - which is easily as majestic as anything here and certainly equally worthy of your attention.  Something here will be making an appearance in my April Dandelion Radio show, but you don't have to wait that long.  Go to the Double Hallucinative site and get it for yourself.

Apparently the album took almost three years to pull together.  Its loops and dense layers of sound are certainly the result of painstaking work but no less enjoyable for all that.  As you can probably guess, this is not easy listening. Nor is it something you can stick on in the background while you do whatever you do. It demands your total attention, and if you give it that it will pay you back repeatedly.

Dissolved - Surge of the Lucid

Just when you think the Daddy Tank label can't astonish you anymore - this drops through the letterbox.

I've enjoyed Dissolved's releases before, of course, and his Snowy Psychoplasmics album in 2011 was a masterpiece in its own right. I suspected he wouldn't top it, but he has, comfortably.  Surge of the Lucid is the best album I've heard so far this year and it's laid down a mark for 2013 which even the venerable Daddy Tank themselves will struggle to surpass.

You always get a kaleidoscopic collage of mind-bending sounds on any Dissolved release; but here the kaleidoscope consists of colours that are off the spectrum and sounds that collide to form shapes that seem impossible in any conventional universe.  That I don't much want to live in a conventional universe may be the reason I find that so appealing.

'Your Age In Shark Years' juxtaposes sublime harmonies and interjected speech with jagged, spiky beats;  'Seimantrasm' floats along on a miasma of disturbed melody; the astonishing 15-minute album closer 'On Board The Deuterium Arc' rides a panoply of troubled beats towards landscapes that may or may not exist: something like half-way through, you realise it doesn't matter and the only thought that persists outside this sonic mind-storm is how the track somehow supersedes even what went before it.  Then you put it on again and think that probably it never did.

OK, but it's hard not to disappear up your own arse when trying to assemble into words something so great it defies any form of rational judgement.  If I occasionally manage to step back and appraise the album's brilliance from something like an objective viewpoint, I realise my favourite track is the just-under-ten minute 'Forgotten Processes'.  I'm playing it as the opener in my March show on Dandelion Radio, which means you get to hear it without any burbling from me prior to it, I presume, grabbing you in the monster-like grip with which it now holds me.

Apparently this is Dissolved's fiftieth release, which is quite something in itself.  I can't imagine there are any other artists who could commemorate this considerable milestone with anything anywhere near this good.   Get it from the Daddy Tank site - your senses will love you forever: all of them.

The Healthy Boy & The Badass Motherfuckers - Carne Farce Camisole

I'll be honest - I nearly made the mistake of judging this by what it said on the tin.   On receiving a copy of the release from the Kythibong label, I thoroughly expected this to be some full-on rap album and my only hope was that it would be among the very small proportion of such releases that turned out to be any good.

I suppose I ought to have noticed the tell-tale clue: 'motherfuckers' spelt correctly rather than idiomatically.   Not only does the album turn out to be a million miles stylistically from rap, it also - thankfully - turns out to be something very much of its own.

I've learned since that The Healthy Boy is in fact Benjamin Nerot, from France, and he's been doing this kind of thing for a while.   Once I've finished with this mesmerising, understated masterpiece, I'll check the rest of it out, but that might not be for some time.

The growling guitar-based ballads could go the whole way and imitate some of Nick Cave's more intense moments, but they don't.  Instead, it comes out more like Tindersticks stripped down and bare, with everything else that goes into making them Tindersticks lobotomised and infused with menace until what you're left with are gorgeous, spare guitar lines overlaid with vocals that take something from Tom Waits but give much more back.

As you can tell, I'm struggling with the comparisons.  And that's the best thing about this release.  Whatever influences you might detect rumbling below the surface, they stay beneath the surface and what you get is something that resists easy categorisation, which is exactly as it should be.

I find the album's best played late at night, in the dark, straight whiskey in the hand; in such a setting I can absord myself in its sparse, brooding brilliance and start to get a sense of what's going on in those lyrics. so elusively enunciated it's like grasping at whispers in dreams that frequently subside and change into something else before you've had a chance to grasp them fully: on 'Boneman', you're transported to some troubled, insane scientist's lair, your brain ripped out and replaced for some foul experimental purposes; 'Triumphs and Victories' lays a glorious, expansive sound across its initially bare landscape; the album's longest song 'Portrait' comes off like Charles Aznavour singing while caught grimly by the bollocks in some dim cell.

It's the album's opener 'Our Story's Grave' I've chosen to broadcast in my March Dandelion Radio show (streaming, as usual, on most days and at various times during the month) because something about it encapsulates the appeal of the album as a whole, the lilting, evocative strings at the beginning leading into the growling vocals that tell of loss and life and insanity, the music building, subsiding and lifting again like the backdrop to some unspeakable human act, crying out unheard in some wilderness, perhaps never to be touched by another human soul.

As you can tell, I love it.  Get it here.   Whiskey and dark room optional but highly recommended.

Tingle In The Netherlands - Why Can't You Write Something Nice for a Change?

I'm assuming the title of this album was inspired by a question Tingle In The Netherlands get asked a lot.  Thankfully, for the rest of us, their debut album provides not only evidence that they plan to ignore it but also that they're defying it to propel their lyrical content into, if anything, still greater heights of naughtiness.  They're already responsible for the greatest rhyming couplet this century (the incomparable 'Made in China/Bought with vagina' from 'Prostitute's Handbag') and thankfully, while there's plentiful evidence of a broadening artistic palette here, they've not sacrificed the penchant for utter filth that remains at the core of their considerable appeal.

Satisfyingly, that single makes a welcome reappearance here, along with the ode to the pursuit of milkmen-shagging that is 'The Housewife's Lament' and the self-explanatory 'Forest of Cocks'.  Meanwhile, 'I Lost My Heart To A Starship Cleaner' goes into places that neither Sarah Brightman, nor the supposed purveyors of 'naughty bits' Hot Gossip, would have dared to venture.

I'm playing 'Mammals' in my March show on Dandelion Radio, a brilliantly irreverent trawl through facts and non-facts that includes such assertions as 'The prime minister produces one pint of saliva a day', 'the aristocrat wil frequently eat its own young' and my personal favourite 'The pilot produces the largest volume of ejaculate among primates'.

The album's a joy from start to finish, all delivered via Owen's brilliantly understated and yet somehow subversive synthesiser parts and overlaid with Helen's enticing enunciation of subject matter that moves from the provocative to the beautifully disgusting with appealing ease.

Available as usual from their own Nerve Echo label, you can also grab a copy at the duo's bandcamp site.   It's an early contender for one of the releases of the year - don't miss it.