My Friend The Chocolate Cake have been kicking around since David Bridie and Helen Mountfort of Not Drowning, Waving began it as a side project in 1989. With Fiasco, the group’s seventh studio record, Bridie’s take on acoustic, musically intricate pop sounds as warm and fortifying as ever – while the ingredients have been refined, the cake mix hasn’t changed much.
There are no surprises here. The record functions as a showcase of the MFTCC sound, with Bridie’s thoughtful, literate songwriting wrapped in a slightly folky, almost easy-listening veneer that has characterised the group’s sound from the beginning. This is no bad thing; songs like ‘Everything We Need’ or ‘Measured Best’ provide stirring nourishment, with Bridie’s musings on the nine-to-five treadmill and the absurdity of suburban living (staple themes, best aired in 2007’s Home Improvements) wrapped in comfortingly familiar arrangements.
As in past releases, Mountfort’s elegant instrumentals give the string players the opportunity to show their chops between the clusters of Bridie originals. Even the cover art, an involving collage by Warwick Jolly (who also decorated their debut and numerous other releases), suggests continuity rather than evolution. Which seems to be what the group’s voracious cult following wants. Still, one gets the impression that Bridie wouldn’t mind putting his ‘Cake days behind him to focus on his musical work in Papua New Guinea and his solo career, rather than serving up more helpings of the same meal.
Fiasco is a generous plateful of quintessential chocolate cake, and really, it’s a pretty good recipe. Provided you like cake.
First published in The Brag, Iss. 412, May 16th 2011
Monday, May 16, 2011
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Cass McCombs - Wit's End
It’s hard to think of an American songwriter working with a back catalogue of greater quality and a profile kept as deliberately low as Cass McCombs’. Exploring the underbelly of the US psyche as much as his own, over four inimitable albums McCombs has combined oblique lyrics with a musically minimalist aesthetic, gesturing as much towards the country fixtures of AM radio as the aloof poise of Leonard Cohen, in songs as finely wrought as they are unique.
With Wit’s End, McCombs has shifted away from the down-to-earth tenderness that marked 2009’s Catacombs, instead plumbing dark inner spaces and unconfronted fears, the kind that lurk beneath even the most convincing outer show of happiness. Opener ‘County Line’ sets the tone, a warmly nostalgic refrain that recalls the Twin Peaks theme, suggesting fallen expectations and romantic desolation, delivered in Cass’ shiver-inducing high register. Upbeat it ain’t, this cowed melancholy finding its natural extension in the claustrophobic intimacy of ‘Buried Alive’ or the despair of ‘Saturday Song’.
There’s a stillness at the heart of the songs here, a static sense of gradually emergent revelation. The harmonic simplicity of tracks such as ‘The Lonely Doll’ or album closer ‘A Knock Upon The Door’ (which features the same looped riff for nine minutes) is offset by the precision and variety of their arrangements, the instrumentation providing the base which McCombs’ meandering, elusive thoughts sweetly sail over – or return to, as with the bass clarinet-led soft-sell climax of album highlight ‘Memory’s Stain’, into which his seductive voice dissolves.
Wit’s End is alive with the still-questing spirit of a fella whose songs seem to say all that he feels needs be said.
First published in The Brag, Iss. 411, May 9th 2011
With Wit’s End, McCombs has shifted away from the down-to-earth tenderness that marked 2009’s Catacombs, instead plumbing dark inner spaces and unconfronted fears, the kind that lurk beneath even the most convincing outer show of happiness. Opener ‘County Line’ sets the tone, a warmly nostalgic refrain that recalls the Twin Peaks theme, suggesting fallen expectations and romantic desolation, delivered in Cass’ shiver-inducing high register. Upbeat it ain’t, this cowed melancholy finding its natural extension in the claustrophobic intimacy of ‘Buried Alive’ or the despair of ‘Saturday Song’.
There’s a stillness at the heart of the songs here, a static sense of gradually emergent revelation. The harmonic simplicity of tracks such as ‘The Lonely Doll’ or album closer ‘A Knock Upon The Door’ (which features the same looped riff for nine minutes) is offset by the precision and variety of their arrangements, the instrumentation providing the base which McCombs’ meandering, elusive thoughts sweetly sail over – or return to, as with the bass clarinet-led soft-sell climax of album highlight ‘Memory’s Stain’, into which his seductive voice dissolves.
Wit’s End is alive with the still-questing spirit of a fella whose songs seem to say all that he feels needs be said.
First published in The Brag, Iss. 411, May 9th 2011
Monday, May 9, 2011
Wild Beasts - Beautiful Brutes
While originality in pop music is a rare and precious thing, the shock of the new has a tendency to repulse as many as it attracts. Back in 2008, Wild Beasts managed to blindside a UK scene grown comfortable with the likes of Kaiser Chiefs and Muse, and stretch the four-blokes-with-guitars-drums-‘n-bass formula to an outer limit of theatrical faux-camp outrageousness. Their first record, Limbo Panto, split critics and audiences alike, thanks in no small part to Hayden Thorpe’s inimitable vocals, his soaring countertenor liable to swing from wanton caterwaul to velvet croon while never being anything less than hypnotic.
Chatting from his East London flat ahead of the release of the group’s third album, Smother, Thorpe looks back on their initial splash with pride, attributing its more bizarre aspects to youthful naivety and a long, cloistered gestation in their isolated, North England town of Kendal. “There’s a sort of purity to it, in that it was completely unknowingly Dada and avant-garde. We thought we were making pop music,” he muses. “For a long time we were more embarrassed by [the weirder elements], but then we began to realise that those were the things that set us apart.”
Peopled by blokes who are into their booze and footy, Limbo careered between the abject and the divine, its hapless characters slaves to raging libidos and desires that exceed the bounds of what society may deem acceptable or even want to know about – take ‘The Old Dog’ as case in point, a simmeringly lush ballad about casual sex amongst the over-65s. For their follow-up Two Dancers (2009, made “in the aftermath of our dreams with the first record collapsing”), the group reigned in Thorpe’s wilder vocal excesses, giving greater weight to the gruff, moderating baritone of bass player Tom Fleming, while incorporating more electronic textures to produce a sleeker, more sophisticated sound.
This direction has found its logical extension on Smother, the aching carnality of ‘Plaything’ or glowing surface of ‘Albatross’ being reached through a need to “create something of beauty”, as the band challenged themselves with unfamiliar equipment and software to achieve the shimmering textures of the finished songs. “When I pick up a guitar, I know what it’s going to do,” says Thorpe. “I think there’s something rather boring about that. [But] use a sampler or software, and there’s an element of not knowing that I think is crucial for creating the atmosphere that we want to create … You have to be excited about what you’re doing, and one of the ways of doing that is to sort of go into the dark and see what you pull out.
“One of our big realisations was that beauty demands imperfection and demands a crudeness and a brutality sometimes, twinned with a lushness, y’know? It’s like the Photoshop syndrome, where the face has a few blemishes on it, a few pockmarks, but [when] you clear that face up, it’s no longer human … it’s just this generic face. There was a real sense of wanting to maintain those things that make it seem more vulnerable, show ourselves a bit more.”
Although the group was boosted by being signed to Domino early in their career, Thorpe is dubious about success within “the dirty machinery and filthy cogs that work behind the beautiful facade that is the music industry”. “I think we cannot be needy about what we do – it’s not a snatch and grab scenario,” he says. “We’re not the product of hype or sensationalism. Maybe that’s why it’s a slowly growing success; we’re aiming to make a long-range point, rather than make our point and disappear.”
As to what that point might be, try passing the steely-eyed social realism of, say, Mike Leigh, through an aesthetic sensibility more in keeping with Oscar Wilde or Rimbaud. There are few groups brave enough to have delved as deeply into the (sometimes intensely ugly) rents and fissures of male sexuality with such single-minded focus, nor with such exquisite musicality. Take Fleming’s ‘All The King’s Men’ from Two Dancers for example, where any comforting old-world charm is undercut by savagely ironic lines like “you’re birthing machines / and let me show my darling what that means”.
“I think that the way society is set up, we can’t really fully explore real desire,” says Thorpe. “Society is set up to regulate and compartmentalise instinct. That probably sounds really highbrow, but it’s not meant to. I just think that songs can reveal things that can’t be revealed in the everyday. I think that there’s a real thrill in revealing those things, those forces; exploring the line between what’s safe and what’s unsafe, what’s right to sing and what’s wrong to sing.” Although less overtly salacious than its predecessor, a sense of risk unavoidably percolates beneath the glisteningly seamless surface of Smother, the lyrics veering between uncomfortably intimate and outright lascivious. “These songs are love songs,” says Thorpe, “but that love is not the pumping, glamorous all-or-nothing thing that a lot of love songs try and make it seem. We try to be human about it: you can love and hate someone at the same time. It’s about the push and pull of power.
“It’s a complex thing to be a man. There’s that unresolved element of what is expected of a man, that blend of being a gentleman as well as being a brute, caring as well as protective – I think there’s a strange dynamic going on there.”
First published in The Brag, Iss. 411, May 9th 2011
Chatting from his East London flat ahead of the release of the group’s third album, Smother, Thorpe looks back on their initial splash with pride, attributing its more bizarre aspects to youthful naivety and a long, cloistered gestation in their isolated, North England town of Kendal. “There’s a sort of purity to it, in that it was completely unknowingly Dada and avant-garde. We thought we were making pop music,” he muses. “For a long time we were more embarrassed by [the weirder elements], but then we began to realise that those were the things that set us apart.”
Peopled by blokes who are into their booze and footy, Limbo careered between the abject and the divine, its hapless characters slaves to raging libidos and desires that exceed the bounds of what society may deem acceptable or even want to know about – take ‘The Old Dog’ as case in point, a simmeringly lush ballad about casual sex amongst the over-65s. For their follow-up Two Dancers (2009, made “in the aftermath of our dreams with the first record collapsing”), the group reigned in Thorpe’s wilder vocal excesses, giving greater weight to the gruff, moderating baritone of bass player Tom Fleming, while incorporating more electronic textures to produce a sleeker, more sophisticated sound.
This direction has found its logical extension on Smother, the aching carnality of ‘Plaything’ or glowing surface of ‘Albatross’ being reached through a need to “create something of beauty”, as the band challenged themselves with unfamiliar equipment and software to achieve the shimmering textures of the finished songs. “When I pick up a guitar, I know what it’s going to do,” says Thorpe. “I think there’s something rather boring about that. [But] use a sampler or software, and there’s an element of not knowing that I think is crucial for creating the atmosphere that we want to create … You have to be excited about what you’re doing, and one of the ways of doing that is to sort of go into the dark and see what you pull out.
“One of our big realisations was that beauty demands imperfection and demands a crudeness and a brutality sometimes, twinned with a lushness, y’know? It’s like the Photoshop syndrome, where the face has a few blemishes on it, a few pockmarks, but [when] you clear that face up, it’s no longer human … it’s just this generic face. There was a real sense of wanting to maintain those things that make it seem more vulnerable, show ourselves a bit more.”
Although the group was boosted by being signed to Domino early in their career, Thorpe is dubious about success within “the dirty machinery and filthy cogs that work behind the beautiful facade that is the music industry”. “I think we cannot be needy about what we do – it’s not a snatch and grab scenario,” he says. “We’re not the product of hype or sensationalism. Maybe that’s why it’s a slowly growing success; we’re aiming to make a long-range point, rather than make our point and disappear.”
As to what that point might be, try passing the steely-eyed social realism of, say, Mike Leigh, through an aesthetic sensibility more in keeping with Oscar Wilde or Rimbaud. There are few groups brave enough to have delved as deeply into the (sometimes intensely ugly) rents and fissures of male sexuality with such single-minded focus, nor with such exquisite musicality. Take Fleming’s ‘All The King’s Men’ from Two Dancers for example, where any comforting old-world charm is undercut by savagely ironic lines like “you’re birthing machines / and let me show my darling what that means”.
“I think that the way society is set up, we can’t really fully explore real desire,” says Thorpe. “Society is set up to regulate and compartmentalise instinct. That probably sounds really highbrow, but it’s not meant to. I just think that songs can reveal things that can’t be revealed in the everyday. I think that there’s a real thrill in revealing those things, those forces; exploring the line between what’s safe and what’s unsafe, what’s right to sing and what’s wrong to sing.” Although less overtly salacious than its predecessor, a sense of risk unavoidably percolates beneath the glisteningly seamless surface of Smother, the lyrics veering between uncomfortably intimate and outright lascivious. “These songs are love songs,” says Thorpe, “but that love is not the pumping, glamorous all-or-nothing thing that a lot of love songs try and make it seem. We try to be human about it: you can love and hate someone at the same time. It’s about the push and pull of power.
“It’s a complex thing to be a man. There’s that unresolved element of what is expected of a man, that blend of being a gentleman as well as being a brute, caring as well as protective – I think there’s a strange dynamic going on there.”
First published in The Brag, Iss. 411, May 9th 2011
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