Roky Erickson Emerges

Roky Erickson is set to tour Australia this coming March, 2012. As singer,songwriter and guitar player for the legendary Austin,TX band The 13th Floor Elevators,  they were one of the first rock n roll bands to describe their music as “psychedelic” and made an impact on the San Francisco scene,when they moved there in 1966.

The Elevators unique brand of heavy,hard-rocking electric blues spurned one hit ‘You’re Gonna Miss Me’,  yet their appeal was far-reaching,and influenced a long list of artists including REM, ZZTop, The Cramps, Radio Birdman and The Jesus and Marychain; all of whom have either recorded or played live versions of Roky’s songs. With a list of admirers that include Sonic Youth, Patti Smith, The Butthole Surfers, Pere Ubu and The White Stripes, his songs have appeared on countless soundtracks (Drugstore Cowboy, Boys Don’t Cry, Hamlet).

Unfortunately, Roky’s struggles with drug abuse and mental illness took a serious toll, including a three year stint in Rusk State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, for possession of a single marijuana cigarette (1969) where he was reportedly subjected to Thorazine,electroshock therapy and other experimental treatments.

Happily,today we find Roky in the process of being his own miracle and making an astounding recovery from nearly a two-decade long period. He has played his first shows in New York City, London and throughout Europe,as well as California’s Coachella Festival in 2007.

April 2010,saw the release of his first album of new material in 14 years; True Love Cast Out All Evil.

 

Tickets on sale Monday 31st October 2011

Tuesday,13th March 2011 – The Corner Hotel,MELBOURNE

Wednesday,14th March 2011, The Factory,  SYDNEY

Also playing Golden Plains Music Festival and Adelaide Festival 2012

 

R.E.M. – A Personal Reflection

When R.E.M. made the typically dignified announcement that they were disbanding after 31 years, my first reaction was almost a sense of relief that they had managed to complete their career without ever embarrassing themselves, and by extension, without embarrassing me and the other fans that had made the journey with them.

Even allowing for one album that maybe didn’t reach the highest of standards that they had set themselves (Around The Sun, although it still has a couple of golden moments), they never really went through any extended slumps or released a series of albums that had me questioning the validity of my support. That’s a remarkable achievement in three decades of any creative pursuit.

My second reaction was a kind of bemused comprehension that I had been a fan of this band for over 28 of those 31 years. That was kind of scary.

Even as a card-carrying, rock music, fan-boy tragic, and someone for whom the “music industry” (or some version of it) has arguably provided a career for around twenty of the last thirty years, it came as a jolting realization that almost thirty years had passed since I had first become enthralled by the mysterious murmurings of Michael Stipe’s vocals and the irresistible chiming of Peter Buck’s guitar on those formative early records, Chronic Town (EP), Murmur and Reckoning. And it’s even more remarkable that my fascination is no the worse for wear.

My introduction to R.E.M. came at Monash Records, the on-campus record shop at Monash University, Clayton, where I was studying Economics and Law. I spent way too much time in that record store and way too little time in the library, although the subsequent path my life took probably makes a lie of that statement. It was at Monash Records that I bought those first three releases (at the urging of the black haired dude, who wanted so much to look like Robert Smith) and by the time 1985 and Fables of the Reconstruction had ticked around I was taking my first tentative steps into music writing with the Monash student newspaper Lots Wife.

In response to Fables of the Reconstruction, this is what I breathlessly came up with: “It is an album of magic and enchantment. Michael Stipe’s lyrics are spawned from the tales and fables of the mystical deep south and follow a thread that winds through America’s proudest and most honest history leading through times of betrayal and off into the unknown. Fables is overwhelming: from the disturbing melancholia of the haunting Rickenbacker guitars, from the intrinsic acknowledgement of the power inherent in the lyrics mythological roots.”

I ‘ve got absolutely no idea what that last line means but it was clear that I had found what might have been the love of my musical life! In that year I named Fables as one of my five best albums of the year. To carbon date that time emphatically, you’ll be interested to know that Paul Kelly’s Post was another of that select group. I still find myself talking about Fables of the Reconstruction. I recently interviewed the albums producer Joe Boyd who is about to curate a couple of shows celebrating the music of Nick Drake in Australia, and I couldn’t help but devote part of that interview to his work on that album.

The fact that I discovered R.E.M. when I was at university mirrored the experience of thousands of college kids all around the world. In America R.E.M. was the quintessential college band and in fact have been credited with stimulating the rise in significance of college radio, and with it, the rise of independent labels and the whole indie rock scene. “But for R.E.M. …”, has been the opening line of many an obituary and tribute in the last couple of weeks.

Parallel to the emergence of the indie scene, both in America and here in Australia came whole cottage industries of street press, community radio and other self-starting mediums that realized that you didn’t have to wait for the permission of corporate giants in order to dare to exist. Sound familiar?

There may not even have been InPress magazine if it weren’t for R.E.M. When I was writing for Lots Wife, I realized that I wanted to write about music on an on-going basis. I wasn’t going to let a pesky thing like such as a career as a lawyer stop me. My all-time favorite artist was Bruce Springsteen, but, by 1985, people like Dave Marsh and Griel Marcus and Robert Christgau had pretty much mined that territory, and really anything that came after them was simply piggy-backing on their words, and offering re-assessment. But R.E.M. came along and provided the perfect music for the nascent street press. They were the perfect soundtrack to the generational change that was sweeping across music and the media that rode that wave. This was music that was “mine” and I felt like it was my time to set the agenda and that my efforts as a tastemaker were grounded in a notion of how a new band stood up when compared to R.E.M. Starting InPress was my expression of my own little indie revolution and it’s no accident that the news pages of InPress eventually came to be titled “What’s The Frequency?”

R.E.M. also managed to soundtrack elements of my personal life as well. I vividly remember being on the wrong end of a painful (well, as a 20 something year old, it felt painful) relationship break-up and responding by changing my answering machine message to the chorus of The One I Love – to the extent that the song actually had a chorus. I felt like I was the only one in the world who realized that the first R.E.M. song to actually use the word “love” was in fact a bitter, anti-love song – and that they key line in the lyric was the brutally dismissive “another prop has occupied my time”. Of course I wasn’t the only one who realized that and all across the globe there were inner city romances disintegrating to the sound of Stipe anguished “Fire” refrain. I’m not sure whether the object of my angst ever realized that she had been smote with such a cruel sword. In all probability she never even called and even heard the message, let alone divined its hidden meaning! It wouldn’t have been near as effective by SMS!

But that ushered in a period where my romantic world was divided into two distinct camps – girls who liked R.E.M. and those who didn’t. For a period of time, only the former would have any hope of achieving a relationship of substance with this little black duck. I’ve seen other writers reflect on similar positions since the news of the bands break-up broke, and I have to wonder if the band themselves realised that they were responsible for drawing the emotional battlelines for a generation of young men trying to find a roadmap through the rocky paths of their indie-rock eighties relationships. It sounds like the kind of thing that Craig Finn, of The Hold Steady would write a song about – if he hasn’t already!

When R.E.M. signed that monstrous deal with Warner, that made them at least notionally the “biggest band in the world” there was a pervading sense of validation amongst the ‘street press’ generation – their heroes had come in from the cold, they had won and they had done it on their terms with their precious and hard-earned credibility intact. When R.E.M. won, we all had won. See, there was a way to beat the system by working within it. I don’t think its any accident that the bands last album Collapse Into Now was the final album of that deal. By choosing to disband after delivering that album, albeit to a much smaller buying public than that which had voraciously consumed Automatic For The People, Green or Out of Time, the band have again showed their sense of honor. They signed on, they delivered what they agreed to and they duly completed what was expected of them. I’m sure with the seismic shifts that have occurred within the industry in the last decade it would have been easy to try and remove themselves from a system that they could have declared to be broken and ‘go underground’ like Radiohead did, but it seems there was a morality about seeing that deal to its conclusion that informed their process.

R.E.M. have become synonymous with doing things correctly, tastefully and respectfully. In a business littered with glorious flame-outs they have become a beacon for longevity and respectability – not terribly rock n’ roll to be sure, but many young bands and their managers could still do worse than asking themselves “What would R.E.M. do?” when faced with difficult career decisions.

I met Peter Buck a couple of times. The first time was when the band toured Australia for the second time. In Melbourne they played at the Myer Music Bowl. I had interviewed Peter on the phone prior to the tour for InPress and in the course of that conversation he had expressed his love of Brisbane band the Go-Betweens and his interest in acquiring their early singles on vinyl. I had befriended Peter  Leak,the manager of R.E.M.’s touring support band Grant Lee Buffalo, and I’d given him my copies of the Go Between’s releases to pass onto Peter. Backstage with Peter after the show I was introduced to the R.E.M. guitarist, who politely thanked me for my gift and we chatted about music for a few minutes. Buck would always be comfortable chatting about music. Many years later I met him again as he leaned on the bar at the Central Club in Richmond waiting to play with Robyn Hitchcock, one of the many artists that he consistently plays with. He still had the Go-Betweens singles (amongst his collection of 10000). Nice bloke. Music Fan.

I’ve never met Michael Stipe or Mike Mills. Particularly in the case of the former I feel like I’ve known him for a long time from his songs….and not known him at the same time. Such was the intrigue of their music that there was always another nuance to be found, even on songs you’d listened to a hundred times. One frequently overlooked element was the humor of Stipe’s lyrics. Some of his asides and references were incredibly funny to me and the fact that he was able to come up with these gems and on the same album tear your heart out with a song of alienation or activate you with a statement of social or political discontent was a huge part of their appeal. Their evolution from the awkward but endearing guitar-pop shimmer of Murmur to a band capable of songs as subtle and majestic as Everybody Hurts, All The Way To Reno, Imitation of Life or Walk It Back is extraordinary.

There was always something completely genuine in the way the band and their support organization conducted themselves. From the mature way they dealt with the loss of original drummer Bill Berry, to their continued activism in their own local community and on selected global concerns, to Peter Buck’s frequent musical contributions to other favored artists (which showed he was still a record collector and a fan at heart) to Michael Stipe’s championing of independent filmmakers and his passion for the work of his multi-generational peers such as Patti Smith and Kurt Cobain, R.E.M. seemed to grow older with grace, aplomb and without a hint of desperation. They became adults in a youth oriented world but they did so without becoming parodies of themselves. Even when audience numbers dropped away, as was inevitable they would, there didn’t appear to be a need to panic. It was what is was and they would simply get on with it. The civilized way that they dealt with questions about Stipe’s sexuality was a example of their enlightened ways that should be a precedent for those who followed.

R.E.M. simply never let us down, and there’s not many band’s that can claim that over an extended period. And thankfully it didn’t take somebody dying to make us realize the significance of their body or work and the spirit in which it was made. That’s why their break up leaves me with only slightly mixed feelings. Their final album, Collapse Into Now was one of their best and it showed that they had plenty left in the tank; it wasn’t the album of a band staggering towards the finish line like a marathon runner with the jelly leg wobbles. The album left me wanting more, but isn’t that the most legitimate and best founded showbiz tradition? It was a clever album too- when I first heard it I thought it sounded like a self-tribute – there were songs on it that seemed to draw inspiration from just about every previous album in their catalogue. Whether this was intentional or not, it now works supremely well as a parting gesture. On All The Best, Stipe sings, “Let’s sing and rhyme/Let’s give it one more time/Let’s show the kids how to do it/ Fine, fine, fine/Fine. When the final song, Blue, draws to a close the guitar motif from the album’s opening track Discoverer returns closing the full circle on the album, in the way that the album perhaps closes the full circle on their career. A Perfect Circle indeed.

So now there is a full stop on this long, rambling, beautifully constructed and always meaningful sentence. They’ve chosen to stop at a time when stopping made perfect sense. There’s a Greatest Hits package due to arrive in November, and I’d imagine that for the record collector in Peter Buck there will be a temptation to mark the anniversary of certain albums with re-releases and the uncovering of lost recordings, demos and alternative versions.  There’s some wonderful live recordings available as audio and visual releases and I’m sure all three active members will remain active in other configurations. And if they don’t, that’s OK too.

I still want to name a racehorse Cuyuhoga, because I like the sound of the word and I still want It’s the End of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) played at my funeral, whenever that might be. Those friends that show up to hear it will look kinda silly bouncing around on their walking frames. But that’ll be their problem.

 

Joe Boyd Interview

Joe Boyd is an extraordinary music man. As a producer he’s worked with a startling range of important artists from Pink Floyd, to Richard Thompson to R.E.M. and the McGarrigles. He’s a musicologist with a remarkable array of involvements in various strands of world music. He’s an author of a remarkably interesting book called White Bicycles. But right now he’s coming to Australia to curate the  Way Too Blue – The Songs of Nick Drake concerts, which promise to be among the most unmissable shows of the year.

It was an honor to get some of his time.

HHMM: Thank you for your time. We are really looking forward to the Nick Drake shows down here. It’s a show that you have already curated in the UK. How has the reaction been?

JB: It’s been great. We did the first one in Birmingham two years ago and it was such a terrific show and people responded so well. We had the BBC offering to film it and we did another four dates in January of last year. We haven’t done it that often though. In total there’s been nine dates in the UK and two in Italy.  Each time there’s been slightly differing line-ups each time and with a core backing group and the arrangements for most of the songs pretty much stay the same.

HHMM: Do you almost have to pinch yourself when you see what a lasting impact those albums that you made with Nick have had?

JB: I hope this doesn’t sound ‘funny’, but in a way it is the opposite. For me it was more my incredulity that he failed to reach an audience with those records during his lifetime. When I first heard Nick I said, ‘this is it, this is the star, this is the guy’ and when Five Leaves Left finally came out and didn’t sell, and didn’t get ecstatic reviews and didn’t get everybody jumping up and down I was astonished and devastated. So for me the response of people discovering Nick over the years and saying, “oh he’s a genius”, then my response is “what took you so long?”

HHMM: It’s probably impossible to summarise it succinctly, but what do you feel was the magic in his music and those recordings?

JB: This is going to sound strange because my work as a producer is so associated with the Richard Thompsons and the Sandy Dennys and Nick and the McGarrigles and people like that who are very much people known as singer-songwriters – but the truth is that I never really liked Anglo-Saxon singer-songwriting very much as a genre, and particularly in the 60’s, I was quite hostile to it in a way. I started off as a blues and jazz buff and when I found myself around the folk world I was always much more interested in people who were playing blues or country music rather than people who were writing their own songs. Except of course, the great exception – Dylan – who was obviously genius. But my reaction to Fairport Convention when I first heard them was “oh god, it’s a folk rock group”. But then I heard Richard Thompson play the guitar and I thought ‘this guy is incredible’. It was the same with Nick in a way. I knew I was putting on a tape of an upper middle class boy who played the guitar, I had very low expectations for it because I knew it was the sort of thing that I didn’t really like. Because I had low expectations for the genre it took something unusual or out of the ordinary to get me interested in the form. There was something about Nick’s music from the very first time I heard it that was so unlike anything else that was around at that time. It was very mysterious where he got this from. Years later I discovered that his mother had been a huge influence on him and she from a very different set of influences. Nick had listened to Dylan and Bert Jansch and Donovan but he had his mother’s chord shapes and harmonic sense in the background. That gave him a very different starting point to people who had just grown up listening to Dylan and Rambling Jack Elliott.  But all of those things are an analytical explanation for something which is inexplicable, which is genius. And I think that Nick had something that transcended all of those influences and I think that’s what I heard on that first tape, something that was genuinely original that set him apart. And also his lyrics. He was a very well educated kid. He read all the romantic poets, he was aware of a lot of high culture and he had high standards about how to construct a song and how to construct a lyric. I get sent demo tapes from people who say they are huge Nick Drakes fans and you put on the tape and its arpeggio guitar and soft breathy vocals, but it has nothing of the intelligence and nothing of the sophistication of Nicks music and Nicks lyrics.

HHMM: By doing the shows and having these other really interesting artists interpreting these songs, have you found things in the songs that even you didn’t know where there?

JB: Certainly it reveals to me and to everybody else what a great songwriter Nick was and it doesn’t depend on hearing his performances for these songs to live. But I always believed that. Within a week of first hearing the demo I was already plotting to send a tape of Time Has Told Me to Roberta Flack, because she’s had a huge hit with First Time Ever I Saw Your Face and it thought it would be the perfect song for the follow-up and that it would Nick’s name as a songwriter. Of course she never recorded it. So now when I hear Krystal Warren singing it its like “yeah, I knew that could be a great soul ballad’. But there are other things that are totally surprising. Lisa Harrigan’s take on Black eyed Dog was totally astonishing. Deliberately  the voices are quite different, one from the other, and one thing I try to do is avoid artists who are obviously very influenced by Nick Drake. To me it’s more interesting to take somebody who sounds nothing like Nick Drake and have them sing the song. You reveal more about the song that way than by having someone who does a very good impression of Nick Drake.

HHMM: Do you think that we have reached a point in the maturity of our appreciation of contemporary music, that there are concerts and events that celebrate and re-interpret the music of people like Nick Drake?

JB: I think that this pool of music, which you can define however you want, but I guess that started with Dylan and the Beatles, has now a canon of works that can be considered the cream.  It’s like classical music where you’ve got so much to choose from, why not choose the best?  With perspective, people are looking at the canon of works from 1960 and looking at that body of work and saying, ‘these are the things that stand out and that interesting to look back at’.  You can also say, if you are an old curmudgeon like me, that one reason for that is that they aren’t writing such good songs anymore!

HHMM: I wonder if every generation says that though.

JB: There’s been more than one generation since the sixties, you know! If you still have a record store in your neighborhood and you walk in there and look at the box sets and retrospectives, there’s an awful lot more from the 60’s than there is from the 80’s. Any genre of art usually has moments of creation that provide the most interesting stuff, because the blank canvas is the most interesting. For artists today it is very difficult to find spaces to be original. People have been there and done that and the influences are so powerful that its very hard to sound original. People in the early 90’s where going crazy about Oasis and then you listen to it and think, why wouldn’t I just listen to The Beatles. But if you are young you look at them and they are sexy and young and like you, so you listen to them. But fifteen years later people are still boxing and re-issuing The Beatles and not Oasis. That’s true in a lot of areas. Nick and Leonard Cohen are two who were very original at the time. A lot of people have imitated them but once those peoples career arc has gone down, people are more likely to do a retrospective of Leonard Cohen or Nick Drake than of somebody from ten years ago who sounds a bit like them.

HHMM: Where do you think Nick’s music would have gone if he’d been able to make more music? Would he have evolved into an electric format or what?

JB: Who knows? It’s hard to predict, but whatever it would have been, it would have been interesting.  Even those terrible desperate last four songs that he recorded, those are desperately sad cries from a deep well. Some artists who get into a position of desperation and sorrow, well that’s all you can hear. But with Nick, even those songs are kind of genius. So I think whatever state he had been in, even if he had been living in a mansion with the royalties of selling a million records, he would have made really interesting music. I think Nick was incapable of doing something mediocre.

HHMM: I can’t let this opportunity pass without asking you about a record you produced which is close to my favorite album ever. And that is Fables of the Reconstruction by R.E.M.  How did five Americans, the band and yourself, in the midst of a London winter, manage to evoke the feeling and strange energy of the deep south so successfully?

JB: They were, at the time, and still are a remarkable group, and a very interesting one.  It’s a tricky subject for me because I think at the time we all felt frustrated with the record. I felt frustrated with the mixes. There are two studios at Livingston and the one I felt more comfortable in was being refurbished and so we had to mix the record in the other studio. I always felt like I couldn’t hear what I was doing and Michael and Peter Buck both kept telling me to turn their parts down. I always felt like I hadn’t done the job properly and I was immensely relieved when the record sold well. But to a certain degree I felt that their career was progressing at such a rate that any record they made could have sold well. They were also disappointed in the record at the time and its been really gratifying to have people many years later come up and say that they didn’t like the record at first, but that they really like it now.  The band have done that themselves and they’ve told me that they have come around and really like it now. Have you heard the re-mastered version? When that was coming back I actually approached the group and asked if they would mind if I tried re-mixing a couple of tracks.  Generally I am very much against doing that because I feel like the mixing was part of that moment and it would be violating of the whole process to go back and fix it.  But I found myself on the phone to Athens, Georgia, saying “can I re-mix it”! I went in and did a couple of tracks and I thought they sounded better with just a little bit more voice and a little bit more clarity on Michaels voice and everybody liked it. We were just about ready to go and do the rest of the songs, and then one of the group decided it was a violation of the spirit of the moment and so they vetoed the idea. They were saying exactly the kind of things I would say! I understood the point and decided to be philosophical about it. Then they put out the 25^th Anniversary edition of the album and it had been re-mastered. I don’t know who re-mastered it but they did in the re-mastering a lot of what I did in the mixing and were able to achieve what I wanted to achieve. I think it sounds great now and a lot more the way I had imagined it ought to sound.

 

AUSTRALIAN DATES NOVEMBER 2011

 

SYDNEY OPERA HOUSE Friday 11 November 2011

MELBOURNE RECITAL CENTRE Monday 14 & Tuesday 15 November 2011

 

The King Is Dead – The Decemberists (Capital)

The latest offering from The Decemberists is less conceptual, but no less satisfying, than previous releases. It’s a collection of songs that individually stand the test of independence and yet still constitute an album of integrity. The reference points are obvious and not even slightly disguised – early REM, Wilco, Neil Young (circa say After the Goldrush) and 10000 Maniacs.

What’s not to like?

It’s an album that rewards a variety of uses. It fits nicely into a comfortable armchair, with the lyric sheet being perused, but is just as useful in the car stereo on a trip down the coast.  I guess that implies that the lyrics, often regarded as somewhat scholarly, still reward close inspection, but if that isn’t your inclination you can use this music as a more instinctive type of companion.

Three songs feature Peter Buck and they are not hard to pick out – Calamity Song sounds like a close descendent of 7 Chinese Brothers while Down By The River borrows liberally from The One I Love.  He also appears on the albums opener Don’t Carry It All and while that doesn’t have such an obvious derivation, it’s just a strong way to open the album. It also features Gillian Welsh and Dave Rawlings, who both appear regularly throughout the album. On All Arise! The pairing of Decemberists’ Colin Meloy and Gillian Welsh almost enters into sublime Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood territory.

In some ways this is a ‘safe’ album in the sense that its doesn’t have a concept that has potential to alienate part of the audience, but that also could be interpreted as simply being an undeniably likeable set of songs. Again, I ask, what could possibly be wrong with that?

There’s a few songs here that are going to create yet more highlights in The Decemberists fantastic live set ( is going to be a live tour de force) and while the success of this album has projected The Decemberists into a higher commercial stratosphere it has done so with their integrity intact.  How many Billboard No. 1 albums can claim that?

It just shows what can be achieved when a band is given a series of albums to actually evolve. The King Is Dead is a satisfying step in that evolution and one that sees The Decemberists confirm their place as a band that matters enough for us to continue to care.

R.E.M.- New Album Preview

I found myself at the right place at the right time the other day, and heard a sneak preview of the new R.E.M. album Collapse Into Now.  And let me tell you, I think this is the album that long time fans of the band have been hoping for for several years.

While I was a big fan of their last album Accelerate, it was undoubtedly a very deliberate attempt to rediscover the punk/garage band roots – it was abrasive and urgent and while I thought it succeeded in its aims, it may have been a little too one-dimensional for fans who had adhered to the band at different stages of their evolution. But it was probably the album they had to make to bring them to the point of being able to construct Collapse Into Now.

The remarkable thing about this album is that it draws on just about every part of the bands history – its almost like a ‘tribute to themselves’, except all the songs are new. And very good.

The previously downloadable Discoverer sounds like a song  that could have come from Green. Uberlin ‘feels’ like an Automatic For The People track, while Oh My Heart recalls Up (at least for me). It Happened Today and the delightfully named Me, Marlon Brando, Marlon Brando and I both suggest Fables of The Reconstruction to these ears, although somebody else suggested the former was more a descendent of Out Of Time – and they may well be right!

Blue has the same discordant snarl that we found on Monster (with some textures that could have been found on New Adventures in HiFi) and Alligator Aviator Autopilot Antimatter sounds like a song accidently left off Accelerate. Finally, All The Best sounds like a Document song, crossed referenced with something from the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack, which was a Stipe-influenced piece of work. Which strangely means there isn’t a song that specifically reminds me of Lifes Rich Pageant – and yet overall that’s the album this most relates to. That’s probably because it seems to gather and synthesise all the elements that make up “classic” R.E.M.

Now the concept of doing a ‘self tribute’ – and I’ve no idea whether it was even intentional or not – would be kinda weird, even sad, if it weren’t for the fact that these songs are really, really good; just as good, in fact, as many of the songs on the albums they seem to reference. It isn’t the sound of a band going over old ground, but rather embracing all the glorious steps of their sonic journey (with the possible exception of their earliest, most tentative steps), and celebrating them, rather than re-inventing just because they feel like they should.

The first song being pushed to radio (who probably wont play it anyway) is ironically a song that doesn’t remind me of any previous era of REM, but rather sounds to me like an Alex Chilton tribute, a gorgeous power-pop tune that embracing both the southern pop of Big Star and New York new wave. It’s called Mine Smell Like Honey and indeed it is a sweet tasting song.

On one listen it’s hard to decipher everything that Stipe is singing about but it seems like there is some aching melancholia, some biting observations and some outrageously funny wordplay present in these songs. Patti Smith and Eddie Vedder are present, although only the former is noticeable on first hearing. The other very cool, notable element is the way the final song Blue, segues back into the first song Discoverer – giving the album an obvious circular quality and reminding us that albums can be a complete body of work and not just a bunch of individual songs capable of being individually downloaded.

Collapse Into Now may quite possibly be the album that kickstarts a whole wave of REM revisionism.  It deserves to be ranked with their best efforts if only for its acceptance of the bands own rich musical lineage.

I’m looking forward to giving it much more time and attention.

The album is not out until March 4, but I’d suggest you start counting sleeps.

Wire Tour Australia

Wire have been described as the only real subversives of the punk rock revolt. It’s been suggested by Pop Matters that while much of that revolution quickly became mired in clumsy politics and caricature, Wire retained their importance and integrity through “reconceptualizations of song structure and content and their expansion of the possibilities of performance.” They pushed rock in directions that many of their contemporaries in the class of ’76 would have been hard-pressed even to imagine.

Since their formation in London in 1976, Wire have delighted and disturbed in equal measure, troubleshooting the circuitry of perfect pop, or patrolling the limits of focused experimentalism.

Wire came to prominence through the cultural revolution of punk in the UK, the effects of which were felt throughout the latter half of the 1970s. More than any other group from that period, Wire embraced the purpose of punk as a minting of otherness and newness—as a response to the notion of modernity itself reaching critical mass.

Wire are often cited as one of the more important rock groups of the 1970s and 1980s. Critic Stewart Mason writes, “Over their brilliant first three albums, Wire expanded the sonic boundaries of not just punk, but rock music in general.”

Wire are one of those bands whose influence has outshone their record sales. In the 1980s and 1990s, The Urinals, Manic Street Preachers, The Minutemen, R.E.M., and The Cure all expressed an influence from Wire. R.E.M. covered “Strange” on their Document album, and “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth?” has been compared to Wire’s song “Feeling Called Love”.

As removed from self-conscious intellectualism as they are from the inherent conservatism of much rock music, Wire employ their unique, endlessly restless and risk-taking creativity to question every aspect of song-writing. In terms of performance, Wire exchange the traditional heroics of live rock for the rhetoric of incitement, while remaining irresistibly entertaining.

Wire Albums:

Pink Flag (December 1977)

Chairs Missing (August 1978)

154 (September 1979)

The Ideal Copy (April 1987)

A Bell Is a Cup… Until It Is Struck (May 1988)

It’s Beginning To And Back Again (May 1989)

Manscape (May 1990)

The Drill (April 1991)

The First Letter (October 1991)

Send (May 2003)

Object 47 (July 2008)

Red Barked Tree (January 2011)

DATES

January 19 – The Corner MELBOURNE

January 20 – Beck’s Festival Bar Sydney Festival SYDNEY

January 21 – MONA 2011 HOBART
,

January 23 – MONA 2011 HOBART

January 25 – The Bakery PERTH

R.E.M. Album Details Revealed

Despite the fact that the last R.E.M.  album Accelerate was a great, urgent, punk rock influenced album,  it didn’t sell particularly well. However that hasn’t stopped them powering on to another new record. Yay! 

Bass player Mike Mills has recently spoken to a couple of  on-line publications this week and has revealed that Eddie Vedder, Patti Smith and Peaches are among the guests on the album. Vedder sings on It Happened Today, Patti Smith sings on Blue and Peaches joins the band for a song that doesn’t have a title as yet.

The band recorded their new album Collapse Into Now in Berlin with producer Jacknife Lee, who also worked on Accelerate.

Mills was quoted by Rolling Stone saying,  “On the last one we tried to make everything focused, short, fast and sharp. We took most of the rules off this time, picking the best songs regardless of whether they were fast, slow or mid-tempo.”

The disc, which is due out in March, reminds Mills of the band’s 1992 classic Automatic For The People. “The songs go from one type into another really easily and it all seems to fit as a piece. It makes sense as a whole the same way that Automatic For The People did.”

Darker My Love

If ever a band qualified for the “new bands that sound like old bands” section of this website its Darker My Love.

After a few listens to their third album Alive As You Are here’s a partial list of bands that they sound like – The Beatles, The Byrds, Dream Syndicate , The Church, The Hollies, The Fleshtones, Flamin Groovies, R.E.M., Tom Petty, Lets Active, Game Theory, Guadacanal Diary, Big Star and The Stems.

Now that’s not to say that they are necessarily as good as any of those bands but if you like anyone of that list then you would be well advised to give these guys a listen.

The following extracts from the bands bio for Alive As You Are gives some indication of what they are about:

“When you get right down to it,” Darker My Love’s Tim Presley says, “this record is about loss and hard work.”

Informed by profound personal tragedy, Alive As You Are is the Los Angeles-based band’s most musically focused and emotionally direct collection to date. Songs like June Bloom and Dear Author see DML traveling away from their trademark psychedelic power drones to a more evocative approach reliant on bold, straightforward songcraft and earthy, intricate arrangements. The band’s third Dangerbird Records album, Alive As You Are marks an extraordinary reinvention for Darker My Love – a rambling, powerfully realized work of great nuance and even greater heart.

“I think it was just prime time to try something new,” Presley says. “It just felt right. It wasn’t this pre-conceived thing, like, ‘Okay, we have to be different.’ I think this is secretly the music we always wanted to make. We wanted to make an album that you could listen to and not just rock out to. Something you can throw on on Sunday morning.”

Which is exactly what I did to good effect.

Presley formed the band with drummer Andy Granelli, after both had been members of hardcore punk band, The Nerve Agents. They were joined by Boston-based singer/bassist Rob Barbato and guitarist Jared Everett. The band made its recorded debut shortly thereafter with a self-titled Tarantulas Records EP, followed two years later by their eponymous Dangerbird Records debut album.

In quite a twist that same year also saw Presley and Barbato join the long list of musicians who have served time accompanying Mark E. Smith in The Fall, playing on the post-punk band’s 26th studio album, 2007’s Reformation Post TLC.

The addition of keyboardist Will Canzoneri on organ and clavinet brought richer textures to 2008’s 2, which received across-the-map critical acclaim for its mind-bending neo-psychedelic grooves and hazily anthemic hooks. “(An) album so deep in aural and emotional layers you don’t quite know what to call it,” enthused the Los Angeles Times, while the Village Voice simply declared 2 “one of the most indelible indie-pop records of ’08.”

Alas, Granelli decided to leave Darker My Love to concentrate on his family in the midst of the long touring cycle that followed 2. The band found themselves in “drummer purgatory,” playing with a number of fill-ins until finally hooking up with The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Dan Allaire.

A deeper, more significant transformation came with the August 2008 death of Presley’s father. The experience knocked Presley for a loop, but eventually led him to a complete rethink of how he went about his art.

“It’s pretty crazy,” he says, “it really was life-changing. I know that’s a cliché, but it’s true. It changed everything for me. I realized that if it doesn’t mean anything, then it’s not worth doing. The lyrics have to mean something, they just have to.”

When the time arrived to make a new album, the band considered some name producers, but ultimately opted to work with their friend Nick Huntington, known as co-founder of Attacknine Records and member of duos both electronica (Freescha) and acoustica (The Surf, The Sundried).

“We wanted to try the buddy system,” Presley says. “Instead of having someone you don’t really know tell you about your songs, have a friend there, almost a collaborator of sorts. More like a peer group than a recording team. We’ve known Nick for years, so he fit the bill for that.”

As DML explored new kinds of hooks and melodies and songcraft, it was handy to have an expert on the subject in Huntington, who, in addition to his various glitch/folk/dance projects, has also penned songs for some seriously A List pop stars.

“Nick has a really good folk sense,” Presley says, “but then he writes songs for Britney Spears. But because this record was very much about songwriting, he was a good person to have around.”

In January 2010, DML headed north to record the album at San Francisco’s legendary Hyde Street Studios, located smack in the seedy heart of the Tenderloin.

“We wanted to use a real studio,” Presley says. “but we didn’t want to pay Los Angeles prices. We just couldn’t afford it. But then we had this epiphany moment – ‘Hyde Street would be perfect!’ We really really loved the whole vibe of it. It’s dirty, it’s gross, it’s old. It was just the perfect middle ground between a real studio and home recording.”

It also didn’t hurt that in its original guise as Wally Heider Recording, the studio was the source of some of the greatest records of the 60’s and 70’s, beginning with Jefferson Airplane’s Volunteers and continuing through classics from Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the Grateful Dead.

“A lot of amazing records have been made there,” Presley agrees. “Whenever you go into a recording studio, you always go, like, ‘Oh wow, this person recorded here!’ I guess you kinda want that to rub off onto your record.”

Tired Pony – The Place We Ran From (Fiction/Shock)

This album is the first from a collaboration instigated by the lead singer of Irish band Snow Patrol, a guy named Gary Lightbody. Apparently Snow Patrol are rather big, primarily as a result of a huge hit called Chasing Cars which achieved recognition via being on a television shows named Grey’s Anatomy.

All of this information is stuff that I was vaguely aware of but I have to admit that the music of Snow Patrol is not something that I’ve had much exposure to. I actually became interested in this album due to the identity of some of Lightbody’s collaborators, most notably Peter Buck (of R.E.M.) and fellow R.E.M. alumni, musician Scott McCaughey and recent producer Jacknife Lee. They are also joined by Richard Colburn of lauded Scottish band Belle & Sebastian.

While Buck has a tendency of popping up just about anywhere there is a studio light on he rarely appears on anything less than interesting and so his involvement here certainly made it worth investigating. It seems as though Lee is a common thread being the producer of both R.E.M.’s vastly under-rated Accelerate album and Snow Patrol’s last few releases.

I’ve read a couple of reviews that suggest that this album was intended to be Lightbody’s nod of country but it ended up sounding not that far removed from Snow Patrol, (presumably without the big hit single)

So…that’s the contextual prologue dealt with!

The musical reference points that seem to leap out at me include The Waterboys, The Decemberists and Coldplay, three bands that at first appearance have in common a sweeping approach to their songwriting tempered by an intelligent use of interesting organic instrumentation and impressionistic lyric writing.

Tired Pony cleverly avoid taking most of these songs into the epic realm and keep the grand gestures to a minimum even though a couple of the songs are almost begging for them. Held In The Arms Of Your Words is one example of this. In the less restrained hands this song could have built into a crescendo but instead it burns slowly to better effect.

Dead American Writers is almost a single with it’s buoyant up-tempo swing while the album’s opener NorthWestern Skies manages to capture the spirit of it’s lyrical content superbly – feeling claustrophobic and a threatened. It’s also one of several songs where Buck’s mandolin is a subtle but effective contributor. Iain Archer (a longtime collaborator of Lightbody’s ) takes lead vocals on I Am A Landslide which becomes the album’s ‘folkiest’ tune but one that inherited some Southern Americana flavour from another subtle Buck contribution, this time on banjo.

The Deepest the Ocean Is is a brooding and very gentle song that it one of the best on the album, and is also notable for having instrumental credits for the respective players of “feedback”, “noise”, “rubber duck” and “typewriter”. I can actually imagine this song on an R.E.M. album circa Reveal or Up.

The album closes with Pieces. This song does take the liberty of building to a more panoramic, sweeping climax and it’s final couple of minutes are more cacophonous with a mass of electric guitars creating a harsher and more abrasive sound. But it does this well and as the album’s closer it is well excused the less restrained approach.

This is an album that gets better each time you play it. There is a lot to take in both lyrically and instrumentally and it certainly manages to avoid the feeling of being an indulgent side-project. I’m not sure what the intentions are for the future of Tired Pony, but if it does transpire to be a once-off project it will have been a completely worthwhile one.

R.E.M. Latest

In R.E.M. news the band has just completed recording their next record in Berlin and according to manager Bertis Downs, “To my ears it all sounds like quite a wonderful set of songs.”

R.E.M. spent most of June at Hansa Studio in Berlin with Jacknife Lee putting the finishing touches on songs that evolved over the course of two previous recording sessions, the first in Portland in 2009 and the second in New Orleans earlier this year.

The next step will be to mix the record this American Fall. Although we don’t have a specific date for the record to be released just yet, all signs are pointing towards American Spring 2011.

In other R.E.M. related news The Place We Ran From, the debut album by Tired Pony– the group featuring Snow Patrol’s Gary Lightbody, Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey, Garret Lee, Iain Archer, Richard Colburn, and Troy Stewart–has been released this week in Australia by Shock.

Finally R.E.M.’s original Hib-Tone version of Radio Free Europe (1981) has been selected as one of the 25 songs included in the 2009 National Recording Registry which is housed at the Library of Congress.

The Registry entry for Radio Free Europe reads: “The original Hib-Tone single of this song set the pattern for later indie rock releases by breaking through on college radio. Although a more elaborately produced version of the song appeared on the band’s first album Murmur, the original maintains a raw immediacy which undoubtedly contributed to its overwhelmingly favorable critical reception. Singer Michael Stipe’s elliptical lyrics and guitarist Peter Buck’s arpeggiated open chords
would not only become signatures of the band’s future output, but added greatly to the song’s enigmatic appeal.”

The National Recording Preservation Act of 2000 established “the National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress to maintain and preserve sound recordings and collections of sound recordings that are culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant, and for other purposes”.

Next Page >