Shabby Culture has already broken a few stories,
grabbed a few headlines. We had the Mercury nominations before anyone else, the
plan for Bob Dylan’s next few albums before he even knew what they were. And
now we bring you a certain world
exclusive. An album review of the 31st volume of Luke Haines’s Outsider Music.
(The kindly readers among you should excuse the confusion and pretension
present in this review. It is, after all, a confusing and pretentious project.)
In order to preserve the "sacred scarcity" of rock and or roll,
Haines has released 50 different takes of the same album. Each one an
individual half-hour performance featuring several songs pulled from a pool of
15. Each CD is live. There are no edits – one CD apparently contains him
answering the door to the postman. Crucially, each one was available for the
princely sum of £75. To put that into context, it’s about seven CDs by
Coldplay*.
So what’s it like, the 31st volume in the series? Unpeeling the plastic cover
and seeing the cheap, signed CDR inside is unsettling. There’s the feeling I
have been conned. Who could put it past arch-misanthrope Haines to lie? To just
claim this is an individual
performance? And there could easily be more than 50**. After all, if that’s
true, he’s pulled in just £3,750, almost certainly even less than he received
for his book Bad Vibes. But perhaps this suspicion is only included in the 31st
volume. Perhaps number 40 contains disappointment, number 5 pure rage and
number 17 post-masturbatory guilt. (Haines would never include contentment, we
all know this, the poor fools who have shelled out £75).
Haines is well aware of the relationship between a performer and his fans. He
knows that he’s creating a club of fools, willing to overspend on songs that
will inevitably see daylight in a more complete form. (One song, Enoch Powell, is
introduced with the words, "This is an embryonic version of a song called
Enoch Powell".) But it also contains one key part of every confidence
trick in the world: no one wants to look a mug.
After you’ve paid the exorbitant amount of cash, you’re sucked in, aren’t you?
You can’t call him a chiseller without being the chiselled. But what’s worse
now, here with this 31st volume of Luke Haines’s Outsider Music, is that even
if the premise is true, then I’m alone. I can only be objective. If we take
Sartre’s Being And Nothingness as our guide here (and why shouldn’t we? We made
our excuses above), there’s a gap spelt out between hearing the record and
describing it. There’s consciousness in the way of everything that you’re
reading. (See? I decided to write that. I did.) My ears are defining sounds
that yours will never hear. And that cost me £75. Of course this is always the
case – speakers are different, MP3 compression rates etc, I could upload this
performance to the internet and you would hear different sounds. But nowhere is
this spelt out as clearly as it is by this project. There’s no point in my
describing it, really. Who are you to judge what I’ve heard? All you can judge
is the purchase price. You have no clue. I have total existential liberty***.
This is not comforting.
And so the CD goes in. There’s a brief intro from a commendably tired-sounding
Haines. Tired from recording 50 albums, of course. He doesn’t sound tired from
booze or jet-plane flight. He kicks into The Art Supergroup. It’s class. Or is
it? Am I gifting it with more than it deserves because I’ve paid out all that
money that I could have spent on 75 downloads by Sum41? It’s just him in good
voice with a guitar. He segues straight into Thee (sic) Art Supergroup, a
strange underpowered ballad, over before I can really be bothered to make a
judgment. And straight away we’re off wheeling into the Angel Of The North – a
typically sneery, late-period Haines anthem eulogising the North/South divide.
It’s catchy, clever and his voice sounds better than ever. But hang on. Is it
just too mean-spirited, thoughtless? And anyway, surely we all know that it’s London v the rest, not
North v South. Does he really even believe in the North he builds up in his
head? Is Haines, like Morrissey, not quite clever enough to realise how dumb he
can be? "Just don’t fight it/We must never put our differences aside/It’s
a way of life/God bless the great North/South divide." Then his voice
cracks on the "fly" of "One of these days the angel of the North
will fly away" and it doesn’t matter. I’ve bought into his club again.
Damn his eyes.
Gary Rock And Roll will be released as a glam-rock stomper. Uh huh huh. It’ll
probably become the best song on his next album. I can already hear the
swaggering rock menace, the loud guitars, the driving drums. All that I’m
adding in my head, and it’s really good. I’m now convinced that I could do a
better job arranging this than Luke Haines.
The foetus of Enoch Powell is introduced and it’s genuinely good. This one, for
certain, for definite, is a good song. There’s no denying it. It’s a
wonderfully crafted pen-picture of middle-England bitterness. This is a song
that I feel I can confidently stand by. In Nausea, Sartre’s main character felt
nauseous at the thought of trying to describe all the colours, the shades and
subtleties of a tree to someone else. How could they ever understand what he
saw if it could take him his whole life just to describe a fraction of a single
tree? Here, I must stand up and say "Jean-Paul. The important thing is
that there is a tree. Ignore that and you’ll get hurt skiing." Enoch
Powell is that tree.
Objectively, the performance of Enoch Powell on the 31st volume of Luke
Haines’s Outsider Music is a fine, fine song. In a search for truth, relativism
allows you to fire hundreds of bullets against a barn wall, then draw a target
around one and say you hit it. Epistemologically speaking, this is a safe
bridge of a song. It can hold weight.
A song about meeting the "lead singer of a band called Suicide", Alan
Vega Says, follows. Vega tells him the song is going to be a hit but Haines
ripostes, "I’m too lazy to write my own melody/So here’s one I stole from
the TV". It feels great, but it only adds to the confusion. Jesus Is Right
On can’t begin any better, kicking off with the brilliant couplet, "I
discovered Jesus on a train bound for Seven Sisters/I want to go holy and be
home in time for EastEnders."
If the album had begun with Modern Life Is Easy, the 31st copy of Luke Haines’s
Outsider Music would be a different record. It’d be clear you’d been cheated.
It feels like there is no gusto or guts to it.But perhaps the performance is fading. Perhaps the listener’s
relationship with the record has switched again? No. Hearing it again, it’s
just weedy.
Me And The Birds is the strangest moment of a strange experience. On the 31st
copy of Luke Haines’s Outsider Music, Haines introduces it then pauses and adds,"I warn you that it contains a bird
whistle." It does. It appears to be a song about the silent fury of a
serial killer having cocktails at the "Premier Travel Tavern". "Me
and the birds are going out tonight/Their legs are bare, mine are wrapped up
tight/They’re going to do some damage to the Blue Lagoon/I’m going to do some
damage to a half empty room."
"Grand finale," says Haines and begins The Art Superheroes. God, it’s
good. It wants to reassure me because Haines knows about the relationship
between me and this record. He knows. He wants to prove that he’s not all bad.
He wants me to know I’m right. He wants me to believe. He wants to believe.
He’s a superhero. He’s not getting away with it. We’re both getting away with it. I can enjoy the record. I know I’m
right. Are you with me? Who’s with me?
"The art superheroes are hanging around. And art superheroes will never let you down."
*Unless they’re on sale, in which case it could be up to 15. It’s more
difficult than X+Y. **Email us if you have a copy. We can draw up a full list and CHECK. ***Except, of course, for all those friends who wish to come round in order to
listen to my copy of the new Luke Haines art project. Yeah. Exactly.
What with all the
great music and art and culture around nowadays, it seems a bit redundant to
use the old 'this is better than that because that is bad and this is good'
template for a review. It's not necessary. It's childish.
But rappers live for the who's better, who's best, don't they? It's not a
continuum, it's a competition. Who are they to call me childish? Nerr so there.
Let's take, for comparison, Eminem. When Big Boi's alma mater OutKast were making
their best work together, Eminem was making witty, unpredictable records.
Eminem has made a new record. It's Number 1 in the LP charts. The new single
has got the ubiquitous Lil Wayne, rap's biggest new star of the last few years
on it. It samples Haddaway's What Is Love. Haddaway's
What Is Love. Samples it clumsily and badly, for that matter. And is a pile
of steaming, straining, whining effluent with all the bounce and brilliance of
a burst brown beachball. Like the rest of the record.
So what has 10 years done for Big Boi? A split solo album that everyone
remembers for Hey Ya and The Love Below, with Speakerboxxx (Big Boi's half of
the double set) not getting quite the same attention despite being riddled with
belters. Launching a record label for the tremendous but unsuccessful Sleepy
Brown and Bubba Sparxxx. Dreaming up some more fantastic monikers for himself
(we now have General Patton to add to Daddy Fatsacks and Lucious Left Foot).
Denying that Outkast have split, having not played or recorded together for
seven years (Jive Records being pricks, apparently). And now he's actually made
a record. A record with a cover that looks like a cheap, thrown-together mixtape,
but plays like a pulse-pounding funk-pop CLASSIC.
You probably already know Shutterbugg, instant and funky as all get-out.
And everything else on here follows that template. It's dirty too. In the first
funny rap skit in, oooh, 20 years, we find out about the 'David Blaine'
position. Try it. But don't think the presence of a skit means a meandering
load of twaddle. These songs are all four minutes or less, get in, get down and
get out. The OutKast/Dungeon Family house producers Organized Noize (who wrote
TLC's Waterfalls) come with four songs, and all the guest beatmakers (Scott
Storch, Andre 3000, Salaam Remi) have all brought the snap and slide you want
to hear under BB's easy-jittering flow. There are no phoned-in lines. No phoned-in
guest spots. Just baking hot Atlanna class
throughout.
Go and listen to it on Spotify, it's on there F.O.C. And when you realise
you're on your sixth listen in two days, go out and spend your hard earned on
it. How else are we going to encourage rappers to keep away from mawkish
moaning and clumsy Europop sampling?Reward the Dungeon Family boys for still being the best and most
creative around.
After a couple of
EPs that were big on quirkiness if not originality, super-hyped Brooklyn quartet The Drums finally deliver their debut
album.
Despite their Hoxton haircuts and fashion magazine photo shoots, The Drums are
very definitely not trendy; they bang on about The Wake, dance like robots and
come off as fiercely uncool. They’re channelling Sarah Records rather than The
Strokes, which is admirably different – when it works.
Opening track Best Friend encapsulates The Drums at their best. With tight
guitar riffs, yearning lyrics and an insistent repetitive vocal hook, it
features brilliantly gauche lines like, "You were my best friend/But then
you died". But they repeat this formula to diminishing effect across the
album. Every song kicks in with the same tinny drum beat, whiny guitar and Joy
Division bass line, and lead singer Jonathan Pierce’s monotone vocals quickly
pall. The eccentricities poking through on earlier songs like I Felt Stupid are
flattened out, leaving only disappointing blandness.
Lyrical simplicity ("I thought my life would get easier/Instead it’s
getting harder without you") quickly stops sounding refreshing and comes
across as the best they can do. Me And The Moon’s "You still sleep with
your back to me" is like a first draft "Why is the bedroom so cold/You’ve
turned away on your side", lacking the original’s painful intimacy. And
that’s the problem: there’s an emptiness at the heart of this album. The Drums
are C86 without a manifesto. For all their name-dropping of British indie pop,
they come across as false, a band lacking in politics or sincerity, and so
desperate to be loved that it becomes a turn-off.
When they stop trying to sound like The Field Mice, they deliver something
breezy and harmonious that sounds like it’s produced by a goth Phil Spector.
Let’s Go Surfing has a playful melody undercut by an eerie sense of menace;
it’s The Beach Boys mixed with The Cure, and somehow it works. We Tried,
proclaims the title of one song, and if they wore that effort a bit more lightly,
they could make something joyous and special. Maybe they’ll deliver when the
pressure’s off, but for now, this is too try-hard to love.
Allo Darlin’, named
after the catcalls of Soho builders, consist of Australian Elizabeth Morris and
her indiepop accomplices, all of whom moonlight in other bands – Elizabeth is
in Tender Trap, bassist Bill plays with Darren Hayman and the Secondary Modern,
and guitarist Paul and drummer Michael are in Hexicon.
They’ve assembled a debut album featuring a great deal of ukelele, a heavy dose
of wide-eyed childlike wonder at the world, and songs about popcorn, Woody
Allen films and funfairs - any of which could push this album into twee
overload. But somehow the emotionally honest lyrics teeter just the right side
of sentimentality, telling Jens Lekman-esque bittersweet tales about lost loves
and new lusts. Elizabeth’s perspective of an
outsider looking in on London – a city that "has a way of taking every little thing" – gives an air
of curiosity about the capital, and a way to embrace themes of loneliness and
outsiderdom.
Opener Dreaming, a duet with Pipettes svengali Monster Bobby, echoes the
innocent breathy female/ominous baritone male pairing of Isobel Campbell and
Mark Lanegan. A couple share their differing perceptions on a night out,
reminiscing about night buses, discos and stars that turn out, more
prosaically, to be satellites. The Polaroid Song continues the nostalgia theme,
with polaroid film acting as a metaphor for a new relationship: "Will we
still look happy when we’re not so over-exposed?’ Elizabeth worries, over a backdrop of flutes
and jangly guitar.
A spirit of playful lyrical borrowing (look, you can’t call it theft when the
band are this adorable; the lyrics are just resting in their account, OK?) runs
through the album – ballad Heartbeat Chilli takes its chorus from a line from I
Walk The Line, What Will Be Will Be is based on Que Sera Sera, and the bouncy
Kiss Your Lips breaks out into a full-on Weezer singalong. Standout track Let’s
Go Swimming, about a life-affirming moment sitting by a lake in Sweden, is
entirely the band’s own creation. Swoonsome slide guitar and gorgeous vocals
usher us into the joy of something "simple and true" that "all
of the hipsters in Shoreditch could never style... all the bankers in Moorgate
could never buy."
This is a beautiful, happy, skippy gem of an album; the sound of a band that
can’t quite believe they’re getting away with it. And there’s something about
that ukelele, an instrument everyone feels they could pick up and play, that
makes this album relentlessly accessible and cheerful. This summer, we’re all
included on the Allo Darlin’ guestlist.
The pervading synth revival tends to take 1983
as a jump-off point; the moment Yazoo split
and Depeche Mode discovered a guitar, and Tears For Fears ghosted in and made
pop massive. The synth became a tool for stadium acoustics, conjuring the huge,
before Detroit whiz kids hooked it back into the future.
Aussie/US duo The Golden Filter remember how these glassy sounds splintered in
the 90s, where Saint Etienne made beautifully thin pop, icily modern in style, 70s
AOR in melody. TGF don’t share SE’s facility for killer tunes, but singer
Penelope Trappes is a vocal ringer for Sarah Cracknell and programmer Stephen
Hindman knows his way around featherweight, airy disco.
The Golden Filter’s debut album is bright, insubstantial, pretty and vague. In
their careful hands however, the absentmindedness is a plus, filing Voluspa
alongside The Beloved’s best work as ambient dance pop that’s pleasant to have
around. It sounds like faint praise, but Voluspa is rather faint. At its least
consequential, it sleepwalks through Lamb-by-rote numbers like Moonlight
Fantasy and Stardust, weaving sunset symphonies that won’t disturb your
reveries. But on top form - the Theme For Great Cities synth-play of Frejya’s
Ghost, the chunky beats and ABBA chorus of Look Me In The Eye, the mournful
warmth of The Underdogs – it’s mainstream techno at its most delightful.
In the end you take the rough with the smooth, and where The Golden Filter are
concerned, even their rough is a touch on the silky side. Sophisticated,
glacial and accessible, Voluspa would look rather nice on your coffee table.
Allo Darlin’, named
after the catcalls of Soho builders, consist of Australian Elizabeth Morris and
her indiepop accomplices, all of whom moonlight in other bands – Elizabeth is
in Tender Trap, bassist Bill plays with Darren Hayman and the Secondary Modern,
and guitarist Paul and drummer Michael are in Hexicon.