Apologies

Hi all,

Sorry, I’ve not been here for a while. I’ll get back to it soon. In the meantime, I’ve been writing for the Quietus website, and my first feature- a retrospective on Bowie’s Lodger LP- has just gone online: http://www.thequietus.com/articles/03161-30-years-on-david-bowie-s-lodger-comes-in-from-the-cold

Please have a look. You can also check out some album reviews I’ve been doing from there. Feel free to leave comments, etc.

Normal service at Hell is for Hipsters will be resumed as soon as possible. Sorry if I’ve said I’d review your CD and haven’t yet- I will get round to it. Rest assured I sleep uneasily, tormented by guilt. Oh, and thanks for stopping by.

 

 

Astra- The Weirding (Rise Above)

 

 

   It’s official- the New Wave of Psychedelic Prog (a term that seems to have won out over the equally applicable New Wave of Progressive Psych) is here to stay. The phrase was originally coined, in somewhat tongue in cheek manner, over on the Head Heritage Unsung forum to describe Astra’s Brighton-based Rise Above labelmates Diagonal, and their fellow travellers Wolf People, but San Diego’s Astra have firmly claimed the genre for their own.

In truth however, there’s little on The Weirding, the band’s debut album, that’s ‘new’ at all: this record wouldn’t have sounded out of place at any point between 1969 and 1975. And yet, you’d be hard-pressed to find any one album of that era that so magnificently covered all bases and magnified the cliches of the genre- right down to the Roger Dean-like, airbrushed fantasy art sleeve- to such epic and marvellous extent. Astra draw on the West Coast psych, hard rock, folk rock and metal end of the prog spectrum- there’s none of the real experimentalism of Van Der Graaff Generator or King Crimson here-  but within this limited range they’ve produced a record of such epic grandiosity and occasional sublime beauty that it’s hard not to be swept away by its obsessive dedication to its own metaphor. 

 It begins with ‘The Rising of the Black Sun,’ an appropriately anthemic instrumental overture of prancing, duelling guitars that sets the scene perfectly for the fifteen minute title track. A wistful flute introduces a vocal melody partway between Saucerful of Secrets era Floyd and Argus era Wishbone Ash, describing the environmental desecration of the planet (a loose concept- you knew there had to be one- for the record), before wah-wah guitars usher in a Black Sabbath-esque bridge and then a languid, space rock middle section. Then it does it all again on the way out. 

‘Silent Sleep’ once more recalls Wishbone Ash, with its Mellotron, double-tracked guitars and rather fey close-harmony vocals, although the endless descending arpeggios and chorus-effect guitars also bring to mind the 80s gothic rock of The Mission or The Cult, while making said bands seem almost restrained and under-achieving in their approach. Burbling analogue synths usher in the ballad-like ‘The River Under’, before the audacious seventeen-minute instrumental, ‘Ouroboros’ in which, like the titular snake that devours its own tail, Brian Ellis’s guitar winds in and out of organ and Mellotron dominated soundscapes, working itself up to a state of apopleptic fury before returning to its previously established melodic theme- and then dropping back in the final five minutes to let the moog synth take the high ground once more. It all builds to a spectacular, Kashmir-esque conclusion of hard rocking guitars and mellotron strings.

After that, ‘Broken Glass’ is a brief oasis of calm, an almost acoustic psychedelic ballad, fading directly into ‘The Dawning of Ophiuchus’ which itself is a five minute instrumental prelude to the closing track, ‘Beyond to Slight the Maze.’ This revisits to some extent the title track, giving The Weirding a somewhat circular feel. Its descending chords more than ever before suggest some early seventies Pink Floyd/Black Sabbath hybrid, as pastoral verses give way to doomily anthemic choruses and an extended, keyboard-dominated outro.

At nearly eighty minutes, this largely instrumental and unashamedly grandiose album can start to seem like a drag if you’re not in the right mood. There’s pomp and prettiness galore, but little to genuinely involve you- it’s all flash and mirrors, and for all the muso showmanship the songs are actually simple and repetitive affairs at bottom, following the same repeated descending chord structures throughout. But that said, its easy to succumb to its obvious, sentimental charms, particularly in the company of a bottle of good red wine or certain other combustible comestibles when one’s inner 70s rock man emerges cro-magnon like from his sub-conscious cave. Ridiculous, overblown and out of time as it may be, something about The Weirding is also quite wonderful.

The Present- The Way We Are (Loaf Recordings)

 

The press release: “Touchstones include the music of La Monte Young, Dimitri Shostakovich, Wolfgang Voigt, Cluster, Black Dice, Claude Debussy, Aphex Twin, Can, Arthur Russell, Boredoms and Brian Eno, and yet it sounds like none of these.”

 Well, there’s a thing. Reminiscent of the then-unknown BS Johnson punting his first book to publishers with the casual claim that he’s the sole heir to Joyce and Beckett; both hugely self-aggrandising and off-putting to anyone hoping to make commercial capital from your work.

The Present’s debut album, World I See came out last year and was an interesting, intermittently engaging and admirably experimental work, mainly noted due to its Animal Collective connections. The Present is the project of NYC based Rusty Santos, producer of Panda Bear’s rightly-acclaimed Person Pitch LP as well as AC’s Sung Tongs, working in this case alongside a couple of mysterious accomplices known only as Mina (who brings the Japanese pop and folk influences), and Jesse.

With The Way We Are, Rusty, Mina and Jesse have not only followed up with an almost indecent swiftness, they’ve leapt light years ahead. If The World I See sounded pretty way out last year, now it sounds like faltering baby steps compared to The Way We Are.

The album doesn’t play all its aces at once, though it’s clear from the off that this is gonna be a heavier trip than its predeccesor. Opening track, ‘Medman’ sounds like vintage Radiophonic Workshop stuff; incidental Dr Who music soundtracking some Silurian or Sea Devil-like monster emerging threateningly from the deep… it even reprises the clunky, ominous rhythm of the classic theme tune. ’Saltwater Trails’ is more atmospheric and subtle, but no less sinister once it catches ahold, like sirens luring you out into deadly quicksand… at first alluringly ethereal, then before you know it you’re up to your neck in musique concrete, and all kinds of degenerate spirits and marsh ghosts are being unleashed around you.  In fact, if the first track was Dr Who, this is Sapphire and Steel- voices of long-dead children echo in the distance, some spooky playground chant, the unknowingly departed mutter feebly to each other as all manner of psychic disturbances crack the ether. Do not play this with the lights out or under the influence of… well, actually, maybe do. It could be awesome. If you want your hair to turn white overnight, say.

Fading imperceptibly into ‘Space Meadow,’ we’re suddenly in smoother climes, three-and-a-half minutes of retro sci-fi ambience, inside the head of a valium and synthi-martini dosed 24th Century housewife awaiting her space pilot hubby’s re-entry to their satellite dream home, blissfully orbiting a cold dead planet. But ‘Shapeshifter’ marks the moment when she realises that someone’s spiked her drink: time speeds up and slows down in jerky bursts, her spatial perception starts strobing erratically, and all her digital labour-saving gadgets are malfunctioning and bursting into disobedient half-life at once. Is that the sound of an oxygen leak? Is that hubby knocking at the window, floating lifelessly asphxyated in space?

 ’Press Play’ finds us back where we started, in vintage Dr Who territory: some hallucinatory March Of The Cybermen, intense, claustrophobic and quasi-operatic. It’s another mini-masterpiece of wordless electronic dread, but all of this is merely an overture for the album’s epic, 32-minute title track: the main act, the thing itself.

Solid clusters of sound dominate the first two minutes, like pressurised steam hissing from between solid metal plates. But then a distant, almost tribal rhythm emerges from behind the lonely singing of satellites, the ancient ghost of earth mysteries and rituals bleeding through into the modern machine age of digital communication and virtual language. After about five minutes this phases into an almost random confluence of urban noise, like jumbled radio waves passing through space, industrial vibrations with still the hint of the natural underneath it all and, for all the confusion, a sense of order, of directedness, even of a serenity beneath the chaos, just waiting to be tuned into. Indeed, as we approach the ten minute mark the chatter falls away and only a profound drone remains, like a mighty ray of light or some universal omnichord. Delicate piano melodies dance around an ineffable alien core that is still somehow warmly familiar. The planet breathing? There is something of Gaia theory to all this, of an alternative Koyaanisquatsi for the more complex, digitally-rerouted 21st Century.    

At the fifteen minute mark, nothing and everything is happening: in the new age minimalist stakes we’re nearer to Steve Reich than Phillip Glass. Gradually, more thin sonic layers are slipped in, one on top of the other, building up the levels of sound almost imperceptibly until, another ten minutes on, you realise you’re dealing with a veritable cacophony: still Reichian, but Richard James and Boards of Canada have dropped in for tea, and Eye from Boredoms is banging at the door. And after half an hour has passed, you realise it’s not a tea party at all, but a seance: calling up all the brutal, unquiet spirits of our age. And then, with an unsettling suddenness, it’s over. And silence doesn’t sound the same as it used to anymore.

The press release: “A kaleidoscopic trip influenced by New York City, The Ocean, Mountains, The Sun and the Trees, Andy Warhol, Yukio Mishima, David Lynch, Friedrich Nietzche, Buddhist Mantra, Mass Transit, Cats, Birds and life. Life in all its myriad complexity and confusions, in all its transcendent beauty and its horrendous brutality.” Which normally I would dismiss as pretentious twaddle. But in this case, one feels they might actually be understating things.

The Way We Are is an ambitious, breathtaking, resolutely forward-looking record. Not for the faint-hearted, nor the jaded thrillseeker. But for those interested in the serious and thoughtful avant-garde of digital music, look no further.  

  The Present? Sounds like the future to me.

The Warlocks- The Mirror Explodes (Tee Pee Records)

   The Warlocks’ last album, Heavy Deavy Skull Lover, was a sprawling, self-indulgent freak of a record, pushing the sonic envelope in terms of way-out guitar sounds and atonal feedback dirges. The first impression of The Mirror Explodes (the band’s fifth), is that they’ve taken a step back and made a calmer, more conventional and reflective album. These things are relative, of course: the Stooges/Velvets/MBV influences are still obvious, but the drums are less pounding, the feedback more controlled, the evocation of some manic, chemically-assisted blitzkrieg on the end of the night replaced by a sense of hollow entropy, of momentum lost and ravens come home to roost. More than ever before, singer and songwriter Bobby Hecksher is at the heart of this record, which seems to map out a disturbing personal odyssey, the details of which are left mercifully undisclosed, while the overall tone is all-too-clear.    

   Opener, ‘Red Camera’ starts off like classic Warlocks- a slow monotonous Stooges riff, mogadon drumming, and glassy, echoey shards of space-rock digital FX. Bobby’s haunted, off-key vocals recall Lee Renaldo- the George Harrison of Sonic Youth- on his minor-key, one-per-album SY songs like ‘Mote’ from Goo. The lyrics, as throughout the album, are all-but inaudible, but random phrases drift out, ominous and sinister. “I’ve already been there- to the hospital.” The feeling is lost, lonely, cavernous and lysergically damaged- an epic bad trip.

   ‘The Midnight Sun’ pastiches Isn’t Anything era My Bloody Valentine, with monotonously strummed acoustic guitar, plangent waves of detuned feedback and droning, submerged vocals as everything is sucked backwards while still struggling forward, caught in the gravitational pull of some self-inflicted black hole. ‘Slowly Disappearing’ also recalls early nineties British ‘shoegazing’ bands (Lush, Chapterhouse, Slowdive, Pale Saints), but there’s none of the celebratory yearning or reaching for beauty of classic shoegaze. Once again, the mood is despairing and disoriented; anguished isolation. Bobby sounds like he is indeed slowly disappearing- down the plughole, perhaps.

   ‘There is a Formula to your Despair,’ despite its slightly embarrassing Sixth Form Emo title, turns against the tide slightly: here is hope, albeit of the most stoic kind. Bobby’s high, cracked vocals climb over a pulsing, echoing, minimal blues that recalls Spiritualised or Spacemen 3, but perhaps most of all Galaxie 500: “Everyone feels this way.” It’s a palette cleanser of sorts for the album’s centrepiece: ‘Standing between the Lovers of Hell’ is a slow-burning, stomping psychedelic monster, a churning, caterpillar-tread groove broken in two by an echoing Sisters of Mercy guitar solo. This will surely be the defining song of the live set when they tour this album over the summer.

   Unfortunately, after ascending to this peak there’s nowhere else to go but down. Which isn’t to say that ‘You Make Me Wait’ is inferior:  but despite Banshees-esque chorus bass and guitars moving like tectonic plates, it still seems closer to Bobby’s old allies/rivals the Brian Jonestown Massacre, which could also be said of the stripped-down, shoegaze blues of closer ‘Static Eyes.’ Between them, ‘Frequency Meltdown’ is a six minute instrumental jam that, while effective enough, sounds like a warm-up number or a studio outtake.

   Undeniably flawed then, but still creepily fascinating, The Mirror Explodes may turn out to be The Warlocks’ most memorable statement. Bobby sounds bewildered, burnt out and betrayed, and whether his demon is drugs, depression or just life turning to shit in the everyday manner matters little. The specifics may be obscure, but it’s the generalities that we can all identify with at some point or another. The title is apt: The Mirror Explodes is a record to keep you company in the wee small hours, when you look at your reflection and it all comes apart and the shards cut you bloody, your only companion through a dark night of the soul. Like Skip Spence’s Oar, Syd’s Barrett, or more recently, the Television Personalities My Dark Places, it’s uncomfortable, unsettling, but profoundly real. The Mirror Explodes is a damaged classic.

Black Moth Super Rainbow- Eating Us (Memphis Industries)

This is my first encounter with the excitingly named Black Moth Super Rainbow- a Pennsylvania collective made up of the even more excitingly named Father Hummingbird, Power Pill Fist and best of all a gentleman who rejoices in the given moniker of The Seven Fields of Aphelion (what were his parents thinking?) alongside the rather less excitingly named D. Kyler and a frontman simply known as Tobacco.

I wonder whether Tobacco has actually smoked so much of the stuff that he’s had to have a full tracheoctomy, and has had his voicebox replaced by a vocoder device? This would explain much, as the vocals throughout Eating Us are uniformly compressed and robotic. Instrumentally, there are loud, tumbling drums, distorted organ, burbling bass and sweeps of synthesised strings. In a nutshell, Eating Us sounds very much like Moon Safari by Air. Which is not neccesarily such a bad thing, it’s just that it’s all a bit… 1997.

So ‘Dark Bubbles’ cuts from gently picked acoustic guitars to an avalanche of crashing drums, while ‘Twin of Myself,’ is all sparkly post-disco and “chilled electronic beats” (or should that be beatz?) as I believe the young people say. Indeed, this will probably be the hit of the summer amongst the kind of folk who go to festivals like Beachdown and The Big Chill, and will doubtless soundtrack many a beery Sunday roast in trendy pubs with low distressed wood coffee tables and big soft sofas.

Titles like ‘Tooth Decay,’ ‘The Sticky’ and ‘Bubblegum Animals’ nail the problem: it’s all a bit too sickly sweet, too much like pink candy floss. Only ‘Iron Lemonade’ brings a sinister edge to proceedings, conjuring up an image of brightly painted wooden soldiers advancing down the Yellow Brick Road, bayonets at the ready, while B52 bombers swoop low over the emerald city.

At best, you could see this as a 21st Century update of 60s soft psych and sunshine pop, but for that you’re better off with somebody like Caribou; to me this already sounds both dated and soporific. Pleasant enough, as a stoned soundtrack to a baking summer afternoon, but it’s a comfortable regression, not a bold step forward. Groovy names notwithstanding, this is hippy womb music; kicks, visions and epiphanies not included.

Medicine and Duty- Don’t Use ‘a’ (Foolproof Projects)

 

Nothing is certain. This is the latest album from  Brighton’s premiere live experimentalists, Medicine and Duty, but even that should be qualified: it’s not ‘new’ anymore, as it came out at the end of last year, and to be honest I don’t know if it’s still their latest. Technically, too, it should probably be called a mini-album, being just seven songs long and less than half an hour in duration. Nothing is certain. And I’m not even certain of that.

The first thing that strikes the listener is that this is a far more mechanically-generated record than their previous releases, or indeed the band’s usual live shows. Matt Colegate and Jack Cooper have left their guitars at home and are credited instead with ‘electronics,’ but they are electronics of a particularly dense and fearsome nature. You could dance to this, but it’s not a ‘Dance’ record.  Andy Pyne’s drumming heads boldly out on open-ended expeditions into overgrown and rarely-trod rhythmic territory, where robotic birds fall keening from dark skies and ancient humming force fields wait to trap the unwary. Holy Fuck are another band who started out along a similar path recently, but after the primitive rave-inflected wave oscillations of the album’s opening track Medicine and Duty leave them far behind,  exchanging nods with Sunburned Hand of the Man instead as they pass each other further into the wilderness.     

The album’s title seems like an injunction never to take the obvious, easy option; Eno’s oblique strategies reduced down to one basic principle. The individual track titles give little away, but point to a general aesthetic: ‘Jury Rigged,’ ‘Maths on Fire,’ ‘The Blind Toolmakers,’ ‘Horizontal Tracking,’ etc. Although all three band members are credited with vocals, the tracks are essentially instrumentals, with any lyrics rendered either inaudible or incomprehensible, chanting, wailing and speaking in tongues: the ghosts in the machine, making their presence felt. Meanwhile, the music moves from claustrophobic industrial noise to oddly beautiful echoes of crystalline jungles, from surreal semi-oriental landscapes to the abstract language of mechanised desire, much like a slim volume of short stories by the late JG Ballard.

Listen: the machines are singing.   

Go to: www.foolproofprojects.co.uk

Giant Paw- The Stars are Ours (Feral Electronics)

 

Okay. I’m gonna start trying to catch up with some of the CDs I’ve been sent over the past few months for review. Feeling guilty? You betcha. This baby, for instance, was officially released at the beginning of March, so I’ve probably had my promo hanging around since the start of the year. Sorry, Tony- but here goes…

Giant Paw are a North London collective; I would say band, but this sounds very studio-based, although apparently they’re fast becoming known for some spectacularly chaotic live shows. This is their debut album, but all four I suspect have been around long enough to know better, and Andy P, for one, has a past as frontman for notorious thrash-goths Creaming Jesus. Giant Paw, I should quickly add though, is something very different, trading in electronic psychedelia of a largely ambient nature, although a tongue-in-cheek sense of humour and a willingness to get very messy on occasion are elements the two combos have in common.

The record starts with ‘Flood,’ and a very English voice reading what sounds like a diary entry concerning heavy rain and increasingly apocalyptic flooding, over a mellow bongo and bass-driven groove, topped with echoing guitars. On the chorus, a high-pitched voice recites ‘Now you’re in the water, you’re gonna drown,’ reminiscent of Spike Milligan’s Eccles character in ‘The Goon Show.’ Indeed, despite the events being narrated, the song never loses its quirky pastoral quality, and it reminds me overall of Lemon Jelly, an outfit whose twee, knowingly druggy and cloyingly smug ambient soundscapes I’ve never particularly enjoyed (I’m not a fan of Gong or Terry Pratchett either, for similar reasons).

‘Mosquito’ has something of Syd Barrett about it, albeit over a clumping Happy Mondays rhythm, but there’s still something a bit too self-consciously whacky going on for me to really enjoy it. The Cardiacs also spring to mind, as on ‘Tea on the Lawn,’ where the birdsong of an imagined English country garden introduces ambient electronic pulses, cool jazz trumpet and a soulful female voice cooing sweet nothings as a ‘Jackanory’ sample once again raises the dread spectre of Lemon Jelly. Yet the sinister, Syd-like vocals save the day.

After ‘Ooh It’s Sunny,’ a blurry, bouncy number concerning space travel, ‘Alarm Clock’ veers into electro-industrial territory, while retaining that same earthbound, clodhopping beat, before the album’s brooding centrepiece, ‘Push The Light.’ Along with the first three tracks this was mixed by the legendary Kramer, and there is certainly something of the Shimmy Disc sound of yore about this near-sixteen minute epic. Like The Butthole Surfers covering ‘Screamadelica,’ it tries to groove but ends up writhing around interminably in its own excrement. This is not neccesarily a bad thing. I enjoyed this song a lot, actually; the dying computer Hal from 2001 burbles away throughout, and after about ten minutes the whole thing spaces out completely into an empty cosmos of Tangerine Dream informed dub electronica, as though the drugs- or the shit meditation- have finally kicked in. Nice one.

And so we find ourselves on the dark side of the mong, and all the better for it; the twee ambience of the first few songs kicked aside for an altogether edgier set of propositions.  ‘Skin of Your Teeth’ is lo-fi electro rock n’ roll with an unhinged maniac groove, like the work of hedonistic and dangerous cyber-hillbillies. ‘Feral’ is minimalist techno motorik with a lyric that seems to recall a child’s dreaming in the back seat of a long car journey. And ‘Curse of the Giant Paw’ is distorted 21st Century squat punk, like Public Image Limited on Ketamine; ghosts in the machine, and an oily exorcist getting his hands dirty.

‘The Stars Are Ours’ is something of a Jekyll and Hyde record then, and personally I much prefer it when they loosen up and let rip. Some might enjoy the lulling ambience of the first half but find the eruption of noisy beats and guitar filth towards the end just like, harshes the vibe, man, but fuck those types- what did the hippies ever do for us? Lose the crumpets on the lawn tweeness and keep it dirty, boys, and the stars really could be yours for the taking.

Live: Folks, Proud Gallery, Camden

 

  Named after both one of the oldest words in the English language AND George Bush Jr.’s favourite innappropriate colloquialism (as in “we’re gonna get the folks that did this,” after 9/11), Folks are a Manchester band steeped in the soundtrack to the American Century, whether that be Spector, Dylan, The Beach Boys and The Byrds or, less obviously, Marvin Gaye, John Coltrane, Beck and Dr Dre. Throw in The Beatles and The Stones too, who whatever their origins were always American in essence. But in reconfiguring these sources for the present moment, Folks, unlike many of their so-called peers, don’t just wear their musical influences as a borrowed suit of clothes, but rather take on the attitude of these long-gone greats too- the indefinable spirit that made, say, Buffalo Springfield write ‘For What It’s Worth,’ Lou Reed lay down ‘Heroin,’ or, for that matter, NWA to knock out ‘Fuck tha Police.’

  Y’see, while superficially, from surface impressions, you could be tempted to file Folks next to the dinner party soft psych/MOR of Fleet Foxes and their pleasant if rather inspid ilk, that’s only if you register the close harmonies and melliflous melodies but ignore the message behind them. Cos Folks are a protest band, albeit one in the mellow tradition of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young rather than the more commonly abrasive likes of The Clash or Rage Against The Machine. But that doesn’t mean they’re any the weaker for it; just a tad less inclined to state the obvious and bash you over the head with a sonic sledgehammer when, lets face it, that kinda noise is only gonna be preaching to the converted anyway.

   Nope, Folks are kicking against the pricks and protesting our rights in the true, um, folk tradition. That’s down from Dylan and Ochs to CSNY to solo Lennon and on, the pre-punk era of sticking it to the man, if you will. And when it works it’s damn powerful, cos it gets in under your skin and subverts ya from within.

   The Proud Gallery is a converted Victorian horse hospital, of all things, at the top end of the thieves’ bazaar known as Camden Market, and I guess the ketamine is the only constant between the two. It’s a painfully trendy bar-cum-mausoleum for frozen rock n’ roll images of the past, the kinda rebellious iconography that sells cars and insurance and keeps the careers of late-middle-aged millionaires afloat, with picture-memories of themselves as drug-damaged children pouting palely in black leather jackets, self-consciously cheap trash now framed and designated as art with an appropriately expensive price tag. Cultural gentrification- dontcha just love it? And in the middle of it all are Folks, playing a free showcase set on a Saturday afternoon to a passing, transient crowd of disinterested bodies that they’ve gotta try to hold onto somehow if they want to be invited back. It’s a tough gig, but you’ve gotta take the breaks where you find them. And actually, Folks do pretty well, holding onto a sizeable fixed audience, and such is the nature of Camden on a Saturday afternoon, or perhaps Folks’ particular pulling power, that I find myself watching them from an artfully arranged minimalist leather sofa between a cartoon Polish bag lady on my left and an up-and-coming Radio One DJ on my right, although perhaps that just reflects my own status in life right now.

  “We’re all dead, there’s no protest and the map’s gone,” Scott Anderson sings on ‘We’re All Dead,’ a hypnotic acoustic drone topped by dream-like harmonies, inspired by the late JG Ballard’s short story, ‘The Life and Death of God.’ Scott has the casually charismatic presence and the neat beard of a young Barry Gibb, and his slurred yet strident vocals shine powerfully on ‘Nest,’ which also features a stunning slide guitar solo from Andrew McKerlie. Rhythm guitarist and songwriter Michael Beasley provides the gentle, chugging groove of ‘Fireflies,’ which descends artfully to a dark, minor key climax, while ‘Providence’ is a white soul ballad with a Big Star feel, an ominous chorus- “Drown the sailors, burn the rowboats” -and an impressive choral coda. Throughout, Terry Kirkbride’s driving drums keep things moving and tight when they could otherwise easily drift apart at the seams, and Colin Ogdon’s confident keyboard runs add a depth and texture missing from many contemporary guitar groups. It all comes together on the amazing ‘In A Moment,’ which combines swooning George Harrison slide guitar with tight, modal jazz picking, soulful organ and hammering drums, and a soaring chorus straight from ‘The White Album.’ 

   Such is Folks’ successful absorbtion of the less-travelled tropes of classic songwriting of the past that many of their tunes contain passages that seem naggingly familiar, even if you can never quite place where they come from. Me, I don’t believe they are stolen; they just trigger the same synapses and associations of some half-forgotten favourite from childhood radio.

   A few days later, I join Folks on the G20 protests in central London. Or rather, I don’t: the police’s now-notorious kettling techniques, the cordons and general chaos (orchestrated by the authorities rather than the people), conspire to keep us apart, and we don’t manage to rendezvous until late afternoon at the relatively sedate and old-school anti-war demo in Trafalgar Square, which in contrast to the heavy-handed scenes around the banking district is practically unpoliced (and entirely peaceful as a result). Folks- or to be precise, a stripped-down trio of Scott, Michael and Andy- had been spending the day playing their song ‘Dirty Words’ to the people, busking and adding their voices to the combined shout out against the financial robber barons, war mongers and those who would ravage and plunder and stick knives in the earth, in the words of Brother Jimbo. Encouraging as many people as possible to join in with the song’s simple, affirmative chorus- “Wasn’t born to kill nobody” -they’d just, when I ran into them, got no less than Arthur Scargill on board the bandwagon. Not bad, considering the song has already been adopted as an anti-war anthem by protesters in America, with one Jesse Dyen arrested for singing it on the lawn of the White House. Now, I joined them for a lusty performance on the steps of the square, accompanied too by impromptu bongo-playing hippy chicks, which immediately attracted a crowd of curious, smiling faces and cameras clicking away.

   Folks are inclusive, not aggressive; they don’t wanna alienate ya, they wanna welcome you all in, their message is unfailingly positive, even as they acknowledge the confusion, hate and negativity in the world today. Music, ultimately, is for bringing people together. Or in the words of Johnny Keats, “Truth is Beauty, and Beauty, Truth.” And that really is all you need to know.

   For more info, check www.myspace.com/folks

Folks play ‘An Evening with Folks’ at the Inn on the Green in Ladbroke Grove on May 13th, with LA /New York based singer-songwriter Luther Russell, plus Colorama and Ain and very special surprise guests- I know everyone says that, but this is for real, I know who it is but I can’t say. It’s free and well worth going down.

Live: Spectrum, the Freebutt, Brighton

 This was the set.

Mary (for the late Mary Hansen, of Stereolab). Transparent Radiation. How You Satisfy Me. Set Me Free. When Tomorrow Hits. Revolution.

Fucking Revolution.

I rest my case.

Oh. You want more? Okay. 

Spacemen 3 were one of the most important bands of the past 30 years. I don’t think that’s a particularly contentious statement. I think history will prove me right on this one. In fact, I’d kind of assumed that the status quo was already in agreement with me here; after all, most of the other major indie-rock bands of my ‘youth’ have already had posthumous respectability, if not quite sainthood, conferred on them by the Nick Hornbys, Alex Paphides and Mark Lawsons’ of this world. Everyone from Pixies to My Bloody Valentine, to The Jesus and Mary Chain and Dinosaur Jr; every last man jack of ‘ems been subjected to acres of po-faced nostalgia masquerading as serious critical re-assessment in the broadsheet culture tomes, the glossy grown-up music mags and weighty volumes clogging the bookshelves of Borders. They’ve all been discussed at length on Radio 4 and have reformed to perform, grey-haired and portly, to gushing adulation on Later with Jools. And all this by people who, one suspects, were far too busy getting firsts in English at Oxbridge and clambering up the greasy pole of media success in the early nineties to have ever wasted their youth stagediving onto the snakebite-drenched floors of blackened firetrap venues and sleeping in bus shelters afterwards in order to actually properly experience this stuff, and throw away their life for it, at the time.

 And the thing is, yes, yer Valentines and yer Dinosaurs and yer Pixies were all very well, and we all loved them dearly, but for those of us pissing the last days of student grants up against the wall in, roughly, 87-92 or thereabouts, the band who were really spoken about in hushed tones of reverence at the time were Spacemen 3. The reasons are legion, and obvious even now from any one of their albums. They were effortlessly cool and enigmatic. They had the attitude and approach of the most experimental psychedelic voyagers of the long-lost ancient 1960s (which were, after all, twenty years gone by), but merged all their impeccable influences into a sound that, once fully developed, belonged exclusively to the present moment: a wall of noise, pure, uncompromising, unconcerned and elemental. Layers of violent guitars conspiring to create something of transcendent beauty, while never losing their threatening punk discordancy. It was both a sonic refusal of everything the Thatcher era expected us to aspire to, and a foreshadowing of the joys of hypnotic, repetitive minimalism that, through techno and acid house, would spread across boundaries and generations like a virus.

But you know and accept all of this. You also know that Spacemen 3 split in drug-fuelled acrimony in 1990, and that one of them, Jason Pierce, went on to form Spiritualised, an arguably watered-down and more traditionalist incarnation of his previous band’s vision, destined to do the business effectively at successive Glastonbury Festivals throughout the nineties and so eventually earn themselves a regular seat in each series of Later and widespread critical acceptance, even as their often enjoyable albums grew progressively less adventurous.  The other half of the partnership, Sonic Boom- the cooler one with the more aggressive songs, the harsher, stronger voice and, sadly, the more destructive drug habit- formed Spectrum.

And so here we are, in 2009, and Sonic Boom is onstage playing Spacemen 3 songs. Nostalgia it may be, but on the other hand if Syd Barrett walked out on stage and played Arnold Layne, See Emily Play and Lucifer Sam for an hour, you wouldn’t complain and demand new material, would you? And that’s kind of how this felt. Surely, if historical hindsight were at all even-handed, this would be, y’know, a big deal. With Mojo mag frothing at the corners and thousands of greying Mondeo men eager to conterfeit memories of a youth that passed them by at the time. But no. Spectrum play to a crowd of under 200 souls, many of whom are actually I suspect hearing these songs for the first time. Actually, that’s quite good, isn’t it?

 For one thing, Sonic himself seemed sober, healthy and happy onstage. He looked damn well for any man in his mid-forties actually, tall and skinny in a black polo shirt and an unassuming, boyish haircut, not even hiding behind shades but looking for all the world like an enthusiastic music fan just emerged from his Rugby bedroom. Beyond Sonic himself, Spectrum never really had a fixed line-up, so it was no surprise to see him backed by a bunch of younger lads on guitar, bass and drums, and very capable they were too. The analogy is closer to Warhol than Hendrix; Spacemen 3 / Spectrum were about the vision rather than incredible individual musicianship, and so in a sense it doesn’t matter who is playing so long as you have the original visionary at the helm. A point amusingly proved by the encore, which amounted to the band playing a lengthy generic Spacemen 3 instrumental piece while Sonic wandered around adjusting their amps and effects units to establish authenticity, than wandered offstage to leave them to it. And a point made even more clearly when all the players left the stage to their instruments feeding back exquisitely, a subtly modulating wail that continued for a good five or ten minutes, some of us still dancing, aware that this was as much a part of the performance as what had preceded it. You gotta repect the feedback.

The opening number was the only piece I wasn’t already familiar with; a keyboard-led instrumental that was equal parts Neu! and Delia Derbyshire, appropriately for a tribute to the deceased Stereolab guitarist. The rest of the set maybe lacked some of the aggression and volume of yore, but not by much. Sonic complained of a non-functioning monitor, and his microphone was distorted and cut out occasionally, but for me that just added to the raw energy of the event. Between songs he bantered good-naturedly with the audience. And, yes, ‘Revolution’ tore the roof off. More relevant than ever, and better than we had any right to hope for.

 ’A most enjoyable visitation,’ as Robert Plant said after last year’s Led Zeppelin reunion. This was a trip back to the essential molten core, the primal om. And actually, I’m glad I was stood in a sweaty pub and not sat in the Royal Festival Hall with a load of Guardian readers. The revolution will not be televised. Still.

Ron Asheton RIP

I don’t have much time for guitar heroes. I’ve never particularly enjoyed hearing technical virtuosity for its own sake, unless it’s in the service of something excitingly original or beautiful. Ron Asheton, by far best known as the guitarist with The Stooges, wasn’t neccesarily the most technically brilliant guitar player in the world. But he was the living proof that you don’t have to be a virtuoso to make music that can move the hearts, the souls, the bodies and the sexual chakras of millions.

Ron Asheton’s guitar playing cut right to the essence of punk rock. It was dirty and loud, sleazy but somehow pure. It was psychedelic without being in the least part whimsical or pretentious. It was anger, energy, sex, frustration. It was Detroit. It was working class, industrial, but reaching for the cosmic beyond in an uneducated, and therefore real and genuine manner.

Ron didn’t play fast. He played deep. He played like he meant it, because he did. Listen to the guitar sound on ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ or ‘Funhouse’ or ‘1969′. Anyone could do it, but nobody could make it sound quite the way Ron did it. Leastways, not before he’d done it first. It was a noise that inspired generations to get it on; to challenge, to change, to question, to break free, to shake it up, whatever.

This is all off the top of my head, an immediate reaction to the news of Ron’s tragic and untimely death at the age of 60. A thought: in the week I started my current job, after years on the dole, Joey Ramone died. In the week I end it, Ron Asheton follows.