Read on for the bullshit:
Hey there!
Things are getting festive, lists are being published at a rate of knots, and I’m still here playing catchup. There used to be a time where I’d have already started counting things down, but I’m beginning to side with certain folks I know - if I’m gonna make a list, I’ll just save it for early next year. Not that that pertains too much to today’s newsletter anyway - it’s another grab bag, a stuffed stocking that you might hopefully pull something fun out of.
I went pretty long on the songs so I’m gonna wrap this up here. Fingers crossed I’ll have come up with a unifying theory of 2023 in time for the next one.
All I want for Christmas is a Mixcloud embed function for Substack.
Until then, as ever, if there’s something you want to hear/read further down the line, let me know. Otherwise, enjoy the radio.
Alex
The songs:
Theme from Radio Bullshit: Yo La Tengo – Esportes Casual (There’s a Riot Going On, 2018)I dunno, man, it’s just funny that I keep using a throwaway song from my favourite band as intro music. Really puts pressure on to make my first proper YLT pick count. Maybe next time…
Prefab Sprout - Don't Sing (Swoon, 1984)Shorn of the glossy lushness that defines the rest of their back catalogue, Swoon is by no means a representative Prefab Sprout record, but it might be the one I reach for the most. Frontman Paddy McAloon claims the title of his band’s debut album stands for “Songs written out of necessity”. I don’t buy it. The sealbark vocals careening across all peaks and valleys of his range, errant harmonica breaks, whatever the hell the bass is doing at any given time… Are these choices you make out of necessity, or am I just too stupid to imagine making them myself?
Sure, the band had barely any time or money to get their debut down on tape, which may explain why they held off on raiding the stockpile of songs that included “When Love Breaks Down” and “Goodbye Lucille #1”. But that makes their debut a curveball along the lines of the first Associates album, ensuring my undying respect for wilfully putting a less good foot forward first.
The Pharcyde - Runn in' (Labcabincalifornia, 1995)My lack of hip hop knowledge is vast, which means I tend to gravitate towards the sounds I know that I like. That also means I’m in a timewarp, since it’s hard to be a rap producer making beats like this in the present tense without being pegged as a revivalist at best, out of date at worst. Either way, “Runnin’” is one of those incredible meet-the-group type showcase tracks that makes it perfectly clear who Fatlip, Slimkid3 and Imani are as MCs. Oh, and that lopsided early Dilla beat, withholding the sweet release of bass until you’ve had a whole verse of just that circular guitar loop? Utter fucking perfection. I think I’ve just talked myself into calling this my favourite hip hop song of all time, which makes me feel about 8000 years old.
Elastica - Image Change (The Menace, 2000)No one really talks about Elastica anymore, so it’s not really that controversial of a take to call The Menace my favourite of their two albums. And some days, I don’t even think that’s true. But it’s an essential part of the story of the music industry in the nineties - what does a band sound like when they’ve seen a million faces and rocked them all, been worked to death and luxuriated in all the trappings of success to the point of tedium? Fucking tired. Tired of being in that band, tired of being in any band, and losing any urge to follow up the record that gave them that popularity. When a record has this much knotty psychology (and pharmacology) going into it, my ears are going to perk up, whether or not those thoughts and stimulants are audible. But between the dusky bleeping and the shredded power chords, you can hear that tension in this deadpan duet between Justine Frischmann and Donna Mathews.
Also, if Spectrum’s “How You Satisfy Me” can make it into the teaser trailer for Sofia Coppola’s new movie, surely we can’t be too far from late-era Elastica getting some love from an Anglophile A24 music supervisor?
David Nance - Shameless Kiss (Shameless Kiss, 2023)I’m not usually one for full-album covers projects. Even my beloved Daniel Romano’s high-concept take on Bob Dylan’s Infidels - now lost to the vagaries of Bandcamp - didn’t quite do it for me. So it stands to reason that I’m not entirely sold on Shameless Kiss, David Nance’s lo-fi, Southern fried one-man-band takes on The Cure’s daunting Disintegration (song names presumably changed to spare Nance from litigation street or, worse, angry goths).
But the title track is my favourite song on the Cure record, and so it is with “Shameless Kiss”, which boils the original down to its essence, shaves off half the runtime and practically all the fidelity. As the song starts, you can hear Nance almost audibly grapple with the enormity of what he’s up against, but it doesn’t take long for him to find his way in, keeping the original’s crests and swells in tact while embracing his 4-track’s limitations, and drawling the emotion out of the song in place of Robert Smith’s mewls. It’s not perfect, because these things rarely are, but I’d happily trawl through a dozen of these sorts of projects if there’s a gem like this to be found in there somewhere.
NB: those crickets and birds actually belong to the next song’s extremely long intro. Just pretend we’re zooming out of Nance while he’s pours his heart out in some remote Nebraskan shack, slowly revealing the dry rural dusk around him and panning a few states over, a few decades earlier, to the candy-coloured dreamshack that houses…
The Apples In Stereo - The Silvery Light of a Dream Pts 1&2 (Tone Soul Evolution, 1997)I can remember exactly where I was when I first heard this, though I had to cross-reference Google Maps to get the names right. There’s a cafe opposite the Parkinson Building - the iconic clocktower that fronts the University of Leeds campus - called Bakery 164, which is where a few recent grads I knew in my final year worked. At the very least, that always guaranteed a good soundtrack to go with my vanilla bullshit thing, which made for easy counter conversation in a pre-Shazam age. And so it was that I walked in one day to be greeted by Tone Soul Evolution, still my favourite Apples In Stereo album, and fully enraptured by this spiralling, inquisitive two-part centrepiece. When Blue from Diners started referencing this record in interviews as a major influence on her excellent album DOMINO (see issue 1), it felt like a final puzzle piece fitting into place, and it’s been a struggle to listen one record without the other following it ever since.
Jellyfish - The Ghost at Number One (Spilt Milk, 1993)Nothing is less cool than maximalism, especially if you’re taking a page from the Queen, Beach Boys and ELO playbooks. But there are few bands less cool than Jellyfish, which is what makes their two-album discography such a fascinating thing to consider. Their influence has a long tail - let’s not forget McFly took one of their songs to the top of the charts - but they’re more frequently discussed these days in hushed tones by power pop (and production) nerds. No shade to my people, but they deserve better than that fate.
And if that is their lot in life, then can we at least enjoy the sight of them performing this on Jools Holland while Brian Wilson looks on in what seems like knowing admiration? We can? OK cool.
Nick Lowe - Cruel to Be Kind (Labour of Lust, 1979)Harold Melvin & the Bluenotes - The Love I Lost (Tom Moulton Mix, 1973)I’m pairing these blurbs, and giving Nick Lowe slightly short shrift in the process, which is unfair. I’ll definitely have more to say about Basher in a future edition. But I swear my logic is sound - “Cruel to Be Kind” was my signpost to “The Love I Lost”, a track which Lowe has called the biggest influence on his biggest solo hit. If Lowe hadn’t shown his working, I’d have probably spent less time revelling in the work of Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes, and the sweet, joyous rush of Philly soul in general.
By building up and tearing down the original several times over, Tom Moulton’s exemplary 12” remix makes it easier to see which parts of the song caught Lowe’s ear. More importantly, it turns Teddy Pendergrass’s heartbreak into a seemingly endless party, which is all I want from a Tom Moulton mix. The best songs are the ones you want to live inside and explore every part of. The best remixes are the ones that stretch space and time to give you the grand tour.
Neko Case - John Saw That Number (Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, 2006)I’ve written about Neko a bunch of times. She’s one of the most original, compelling songwriters currently working, responsible for every detail that goes into her music.
And yet, for all the prose I’ve spent on her, it all comes back to one thought: Imagine being Neko Case, opening your mouth to sing for the first time, and that voice is what comes out.
Listening to Neko’s albums in order is like tagging along on a real-time journey where someone learns exactly what to do with the gift they’ve been given. This new arrangement of a gospel standard sits squarely in the middle of her discography as the central track on her breakout record. But it’s also a departure point of sorts - I don’t think she’s ever sounded as carefree on record since, which makes it something worth cherishing.
Zayaendo & Tenniscoats - By This River (live in Munich, YouTube, 2018)As with most folks, lockdown had a pretty profound impact on my listening habits - yes, they mostly skewed ambient, but when I needed some pep, I had the stunning trial of treats that Chicago jazz mainstays International Anthem were putting out. But I also found myself digging deep into Japanese music. I’d always been interested in acts like Cornelius and Tenniscoats, who I heard of via Two Sunsets, the brilliant album they made with The Pastels in 2009.
Stephen Pastel, founder of The Pastels, Geographic Records and the brilliant Monorail record store in Glasgow, has been a vocal proponent of the Japanese indie underground for some time. His interviews would reference bands like Maher Shalal Hash Baz or Hallelujahs, who had with zero English-language footprint, outside of records his own label reissued.
And somehow, through that, I found this collaboration between Tenniscoats and their chaotic brass band offshoot Zayaendo, filmed during a seemingly ad hoc performance at Munich’s Goldmarie cafe. The angle never changes. Our eyes are hovering over a table in decent enough view of seven or so musicians - a strange drum set, a tuba, a clarinet or oboe maybe, definitely a melodica and I’m pretty sure a banjo? Either way, a rum assortment of instruments to be tackling one of Brian Eno’s most delicate songs. The video starts in media res of their shakily hypnotic rendition, and I wouldn’t have been surprised that they’d been going for ten more minutes before someone thought to hit record. I could have taken them carrying on for another twenty.
If you’re interested in hearing another hour of “By This River”s, cue up this incredible mix of versions (curated by Aquarium Drunkard’s Tyler Wilcox) after this set finishes.
The Bevis Frond - Johnny Kwango (The Leaving of London, 2011)Nick Saloman’s long-running project has been on my radar for ages, having worked with or been covered by the likes of Mary Lou Lord and Teenage Fanclub. But this was the year I started putting the hours in to parse their vast, shaggy discography - next year’s Focus on Nature will be their 26th or so - and you should absolutely investigate the likes of Son of Walter, Any Gas Faster and We’re Your Friends, Man for more nuggets. This led off the band’s first album in seven years, but you know what you’re getting with the Frond, and I can’t imagine it sounding like they ever went away.
Harvey Danger - Little Round Mirrors (Little by Little, 2005)Sean Nelson is one of the most underrated lyricists of the last thirty years, despite only really having four albums to his name - three with his former band Harvey Danger. So at the very least, you probably already know one song he’s written…
But his style evolved into something more classic, more nuanced and literary - you know, all the words that critics throw at musicians when they’re definitely not going to get any more famous. This devastating “A Long December” style ballad with a capital B dissects isolated fandom more accurately than most, which makes me think that Nelson’s only protesting too much because he can relate. How else could you explain his ability to use CDs - the mid-00s’ shiny landfill-in-waiting - as such a cutting metaphor for never seeing a way out of the obsession that may well be your downfall? And then throw a fuckin’ French horn on top? Ugh. The man knows what he’s doing.
Charlotte Dada - Don't Let Me Down (Money Be No Sand [1960's Afro-Lypso/Pidgin Highlife/Afro-Rock/Afro-Soul], 1971)This popped up on one of Cairo Records’ excellent series of arcane soul compilations, which also helped get me through lockdown. Information on Charlotte Dada seems scant, but I can comfortably say she has a wonderful voice, and equally wonderful taste in Beatles songs.
Mo Troper - Your Brand (Exposure and Response, 2017)There are few musicians working today who I’m more excited to hear new stuff by than Mo, the figurehead of what you could grudgingly call a modern power pop revival. In the run-up to his sixth album proper, he’s just put out an album of Jon Brion covers - further proof that he and I speak the same language - but this is from his more orchestrated second album, with arrangements courtesy of Roger Manning Jr from...Jellyfish! And has also done a full-album cover of Revolver. See, it all connects!
The Charlatans - Blackened Blue Eyes (Simpatico, 2006)This year was the closest I’ve yet come to “getting into” The Charlatans, British indie’s longest-running wallpaper merchants, thanks to a charity shop copy of Up to Our Hips. It’s arguably their vibiest, snakiest-hipped album (and therefore the easiest to just throw on), and one I file alongside De La Soul’s Buhloone Mindstate in “albums that soundtracked moving house this year”.
But there’s something about how each of their records exists as a way of celebrating whatever Tim Burgess was most excited about that year that intrigues me - the Britpop trendchasing of their mid-nineties run, Us and Us Only as a meditation on grief via the Bob Dylan back catalogue, Wonderland’s plastic funk etc.
Simpatico is not an especially well-regarded Charlatans album, and even Burgess sees it as something of a nadir for both his band and his personal life. “Blackened Blue Eyes”, its lead single, cribs from all sorts of sources - a bit of “Billie Jean” in the vocal melody, the obligatory Stones worship in the piano intro (by way of their own “One to Another”) and the wailing gospel of the outro.
It also sounds to me like all of the drugs that Tim Burgess was doing in Los Angeles in the mid-00s, like a man trying to go full vampire mode. You can hear the leather jacket and the sunglasses that are glued to his face, and the song begs you not to ask for them to be taken off. Even wrapped up in that period’s production gloss, the sunshine sickness is never far from the ear. It’s as close to real darkness as the chirpy Charlies ever got.
Guided By Voices - Puncher's Parade (Nowhere to Go But Up, 2023)I wish I could find the actual quote, but I swear to you that Robert Pollard once said every song he writes has one note droning through it somewhere, so the listener never feels like home is too far away. It seems like almost every instrument on this song, a highlight from their third album of the year, gets some kind of gorgeous moment of stillness like that, the same notes ringing out over and over - there’s a spot here where you’d expect a solo, and all that happens is that the song gets more room to open out and breathe.
Shop talk - it’s a trick I’ve copped for heaps of Fightmilk songs. There’s something super gratifying about playing (and hearing) a riff or a chord sequence where you’re leaving most of your hand in the same place on the fretboard. Not like cheating or anything, but just taking advantage of the accidents - the unexpected dissonances or overtones that emerge as any instrument opts to diverge from the path.
Emmylou Harris - Where Will I Be (Wrecking Ball, 1995)See what I wrote about Neko earlier, to be honest. Wrecking Ball was a real talisman record for me during the worst of lockdown, a constant companion during those darker-seeming nights. And maybe it’s because sometimes I couldn’t face the whole thing, but as its opener, this ended up being a song I listened to more than most during that time.
The country establishment weren’t kind to Wrecking Ball at the time, and a lot of die-hard Emmylou fans still have an inherent distrust of it. I don’t know if that view has changed all that much among those in the know, but it’s the record that made me trust that Daniel Lanois could make any veteran artist sound like a ghost in the rock and roll machine. Which is to say he can make them sound like some spectral form of U2, but it’s OK because Bono’s not out front.
Jonathan Rado - Farther Away (For Who the Bell Tolls For, 2023)I literally junked an early version of this mix to add this track in. Rado’s been behind the boards for a bunch of the most interesting sounding records of the last few years (don’t sleep on that most recent Killers album, I swear). For Who the Bell Tolls For - great title - is his first solo effort in a decade, and nods to all manner of strange touchpoints that I am a sucker for, from Eno’s seventies idiot rock era to the jaunty piano rags of his late mentor Richard Swift.
It’s also totally process-driven, drawing on the Oblique Strategies cards that Eno and Peter Schmidt devised in the seventies for inspiration. In this case, the driving rule was “blindfold drums” - Rado asked his drummer to play any song and recorded him doing so for six minutes, then wrote the song around the resulting unpredictable, wonky tattoo. To come up with anything off the back of this beat, let alone something this sonically dense, is nothing short of a miracle in my book.
Michael Rother - Flammende Herzen (Flammende Herzen, 1977)There’s a specific strain of krautrock that I tend to reach for, and it’s when the genre is at its most driving, and its most floaty. This, the title track from the former Neu! guitarist’s first solo record, does that to perfection. I got hipped to this from an interview with Gruff Rhys, who described it as “utopian sports montage music,” and I honestly don’t think I can find a combination of words that can sell it better.
Teenage Fanclub - Alcoholiday (monitor mix, Demos & Outtakes, 1991)You know what I said about 12” mixes giving you the room to roam around a song? This feels like another version of that - the full version of my favourite Teenage Fanclub song, whose intro will be one of the first things I strum on picking up a guitar, as my long-suffering bandmates can attest to from countless soundchecks.
This extended version bypasses the album version’s fade-out entirely so you can the band continue to ride out that fuzzy-jumper chord progression into the sunset, until someone in the control room starts frantically waving their arms to let the band know they’re almost out of tape. There aren’t all that many nooks and crannies to find in “Alcoholiday” once Norman Blake stops singing, but I love hearing whoever is soloing their way through its back half, trying to seek those hidden corners out.