Shameless Promotion return, wordlessly. Event details here

Happy Christmas, y’all
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Duncan Barrett is a singer in esiotrot and drew the pictures on this site. He is available for illustration work through his site crayonlegs.com and offers no explanation as to the advanced age of the artists on this list.

2000 – Kid A (Radiohead)

it knocked my little socks off from the start, wrenched me out of nu-metal squalor and plunged me headfirst into a decade of exploring all the music i could get my grubby hands on

2001 – Gold Teeth Thief mix (DJ Rupture)

i’d like to pretend i was cool enough to listen to this when i was 17, but that would be bull. it goes from missy elliot to extreme noise terror via nettle, and it’s free here

2002 – Songs for the Deaf (QOTSA)

i moved out and they rocked out.

2003 – Champion Sound (Jaylib)

mind-bending madlib beats you can still bounce to.

2004 – Abattoir Blues (Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds)

i came to nick cave late and dived right in, the first cut is the deepest.

2005 – A River Ain’t Too Much To Love (Smog)

holy shit if only i’d known this was gonna be the last smog record when toured this. frighteningly good.

2006 – Orphans (Tom Waits)

Tom Waits – “Lie To Me” video from Anti Records on Vimeo.

3 discs, no filler, no-one comes close. can’t wait to get my hands on glitter & doom

2007 – Strawberry Jam (Animal Collective)

boneface.

2008 – London Zoo (The Bug)

The Bug Featuring Warrior Queen from Jermaine Grossett on Vimeo.

everything i always wanted from ragga. louder.

2009 – Silent City (Kaylan Kalhor and Brooklyn Rider)

the first full-length album to blow me away this year. dubbed-out ambience on live strings explodes into persian frenzy. worst cover, best playing. buy it!

And if I could only choose one..

Smog – A River Ain’t Too Much to Love. It does more with six strings, two sticks and one voice than Radiohead do with all their boxes of robots, it beats Animal Collective for whimsy, Tom Waits for yearning and Brooklyn Rider for understated virtuosity, I don’t know what I’d do without it.

In case you didn’t think we were pleased to be back, here’s another podcast for you. Watch out, it’s a live one.

Includes in no order:
Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers
Future of the Left
Boredoms
Ponytail
Sonik Youth
Johnny Clarke
Houdini

It includes an advert for this advert:

Remember to check the old ‘uns here

A seemingly disconnected sequence of music plucked as if from nowhere. Stop consuming and start listening. It’s, like, sooo random.

Episode 1 featuring in no order:

T++ remix of Applebim’s ‘Vansan’ from Skull Disco – Soundboy’s Gravestone Get’s Desecrated By Vandals
Charles Mingus’ ‘Fables of Faubus’ from Mingus Ah Um
Burial/Four Tet split 12″
Khedayar Bin Kessab’s Taqsim from Give Me Love: Songs of the Brokenhearted – Baghdad 1925-29
Martyn remix of Flying Lotus’ ‘Roberta Flack’ from LA. EP 2×3
Rhythm & Sound’s ‘Music Hit You’ with Jah Batta
Fantomas’ ‘She’s a Puker’ from Millenium Monsterwork
Dennis Brown’s ‘Westbound Train’ 7″

Millions of you will have read my review of their sophomore record, Midnight Organ Fight, which was pitched somewhere just south of gushing. But as I left the gig there was a certain sense of anti-climax, of opportunity missed. Make no mistake: this was a good gig by a good band. But you’d be hard pressed to be any more positive than that, and I’ve decided that the main culprit was the too-short forty minute slot they’d been given. It left the band with no real space to shape the set, and what we got was one-paced and dynamically limited. (Not quiet. Limited.) Which is something of a shame: we get all the big-song peaks – a thumping ‘The Modern Leper’ and a demented ‘Fast Blood’ being particular stand-outs – without any of the soft-touch valleys. No ‘Poke’. No ‘The Twist’. And a strangely pointless and shapeless ‘My Backwards Walk’.

So it’s good without being great; fun without being fantastic. They close with ‘Keep Yourself Warm’, and it’s genuinely wonderful to be part of a roomful of the slopey-fringed, arms in the air, all howling “It takes more than fucking someone you don’t know to keep yourself warm”; it would seem almost churlish to point out what they were planning to do with the end of their evening. And the drummer! In The Commitments, when they’re auditioning drummers, they ask for influences. The winning answer: “Yer man, Animal, from the muppets”. That’s what drummers should be: wild eyes, wilder hair, thumpthumpthump, and Grant Hutchinson doesn’t disappoint. He finishes the set on his feet, sticks clutched in his hands like axes, lurching towards the audience with his teeth bared; then he relaxes, the moment passes, and his growl fades into a smile. And everybody smiles back. Good barbarian. Nice barbarian.

This was the Thursday night of Concrete and Glass, a new Hoxton-centric multi-venue festival. Like Stag and Dagger and the Camden Crawl, it’s one of these “festivals” where the organisers take twenty or so venues within walking distance of one another, liberally scatter them with bands, and then ask the wristbanded hordes to make their own night out of it. In theory, excellent; tonight, a nightmare.

We leave Frightened Rabbit and walk a minute to see Bassclef, who’s on at 9. Except – as becomes clear after ten minutes confused trying of fire doors and puzzling of waitresses, and one conversation with a lost German couple – he’s not. He’s on tomorrow. Some programmes were amended; ours wasn’t. Right. A quick scan of the listings and we’re off to see Dirty Soundsystem, except when we get there we find four bored-looking hipsters and a hastily amended wall sign. Not on until 10.30. Right.

We pause in a pub, which at least has some people in it, and we have a row about the Rolling Stones before setting off to see Polly Scattergood. We find the place (eventually), but a hastily amended wall sign tells that Polly’s been delayed, and also moved, and so we mosey back on into the Hoxton night. We haven’t seen any music for about an hour and a half now, and it’s cold. But it’s okay! Skream is on just up the road! In half an hour! So we pootle along in expectation, only to find more delays. Skream’s meant to be on at 11.30, will probably be on later than that, but here’s Grosvenor. Let’s watch them.

As much as I love bitching about bad music in the pub, I’ve never really written about it before. I think that the John Peel attitude – if you don’t like it, ignore it – is best, at least in print. But sometimes it’s right there in your face: you’re cold, you’re annoyed, you’ve just bought a beer, and there they are. Grosvenor. Now, I’ve got some time for some of this Italo-disco-type stuff: it’s slick and it’s sexy and the Chromatics album’s quite good. But when it’s poor, it’s very poor, and when it’s got a self-indulgent sub-Clapton soft-rock sub-Kravitz soft-cock self-proclaimed guitar GOD masturbating furiously all over his own too-tight trousers at the same time, well … we left. Quickly. And we went home.

I didn’t go to the Friday, but I’m told it was a similar nightmare. The marquee draw, TV on the Radio, was moved at the last minute to the far-too-small Cargo. Due onstage at 11, the queues started at 8, and so the be-skinny-jeaned masses had a choice between forfeiting the whole of their evening or skipping the reason they bought the ticket. I think there’s potential in these festivals, but the ambulatory set-up means you need to make damn sure bands are on when they’re meant to be; not very rock-n-roll, but such is life. After all, trying to read your program by the light of a kebab shop while a night-bus drunk pirouettes in front of you will harsh the buzziest of buzzy buzzes. Sort it out, please.

MARLOW: What’s the loveliest word in the English language, officer? In the sound it makes in the mouth? In the shape it makes in the page? E-L-B-O-W.

– Dennis Potter, The Singing Detective

It all seemed so straightforward. I’d missed the Mercury award on Tuesday night, preferring to spend my time blinking in painful astonishment at exactly how bad John Coltrane’s Ascension is; while I don’t hate jazz as much as I pretend to, I don’t think I’ve ever heard any record so straightforwardly un-enjoyable. But it didn’t matter: Burial was going to win, because it had been guitar bands the last two years, and A N Insider had put an eye-watering amount of money on it, and dubstep’s just so hot right now. Or Radiohead would get it, by way of a Lifetime Achievement Award/sorry-we-didn’t-give-it-to-OK Computer gesture. No point watching.

Then I woke up Wednesday and remembered that Elbow had been on the list, and I was sad that they hadn’t won; squeezed out by their very nature: not quite cool enough, not quite big enough. So I listened to Asleep in the Back on the DLR and started drafting my own little love letter to one of the most precious bands in Britain. I thought it would be a good excuse to dredge up the Nick Cave line about an award ceremony as a “tumbrel, a bloody cart of severed heads and glittering prizes”. I’d go on about how Elbow were bigger and better and more important than any award. Awards. Who needs them? And then, of course, I got to work and found out that they’d won the thing. How embarrassing.

First things first: it’s a cracking record. The Seldom-Seen Kid is named in honour of Bryan Glancy, ex-member of I Am Kloot and doyen of the Manchester music scene, who died two years ago. The album closes with a painfully direct farewell: “Never very good at goodbyes/ So – gentle shoulder charge – love you, mate”. But the album which grows from its melancholy roots into something beautifully enriching: yes, there is death, but before that there is life and love, there is me and you. There is Richard Hawley singing a cute/silly/odd song about fixing a horse race, there is Tom Waitsy stompage, there are trumpets and bells, sing-alongs, sob-alongs, everything you could really ask for.

Guy Garvey once described their music as “prog without the solos”, and while he was probably half-joking you can see what he means. They’ve made four albums of consistent quality and craft, and within those albums they’ve constructed songs of careful and restrained complexity. Listening to the interplay of piano and guitar that drives “Powder Blue”, or the soaring ‘cellos that lift “Red”, or the plaintive melody of “Fugitive Motel”, or the Glastonbury crowd closing out “Grace Under Pressure” is listening to a band of rare dedication and talent polish their songs until they gleam.

Allied to this is the all-too-rare pleasure of listening to a vocalist who clearly sweats over every word. “You are the only thing in any room you’re ever in”; “We kiss like we invented it”; “I’m proud to be the one you hold when the shakes begin”; “You’re a tragedy starting to happen”. Familiar without being clichéd, tight but not trite, they sit well on the page and simply fly in the songs. It helps that Guy Garvey’s voice is suffused with a smoky wistfulness, enabling him to avoid the cheap bombast or faux-snarl of so many of his contemporaries. Listening to him whisper “Darling, is this love?” packs more emotional heft than a million Chris Martins could ever hope to wail into an echoing stadium.

So why were they surprising victors? Why haven’t they been garlanded and feted and lauded to the heavens for many long years? Their career has progressed to a steady drip of critical praise and approval, and as the above will show you, Elbow fans love Elbow more than is probably sensible. Perhaps there’s never been that career-defining moment for them that bands need to go from good band to Good Band. It’s wonderful that they’ve never been the Next Big Thing; it’s enabled them to develop in their own time at their own pace. But there’s always been a vague feeling of injustice, too, that they’ve never quite got the love they deserve when so many inferior others have glimpsed so much more, however briefly. Revered without being relevant: that’s them. But then Burial made a great record and is at the forefront of an undercurrent; Radiohead made a great record and, well, they’re Radiohead. Elbow were never going to win.

But it’s utterly brilliant that they did. The Mercury is a weird award, described by Antony Hegarty as “a crazy contest between an orange and a spaceship and a potted plant and a spoon – which do you prefer?” Usually the winner gets brickbats from somewhere or other: Antony and the Johnsons for not being English enough; Roni Size for not being OK Computer; M People for being fucking awful. The underlying point behind this carping is that given the silliness of the comparisons, there can’t be a right answer; so any possible answer must be wrong. I would go with spoon, or maybe spaceship, and I’m sure the potted plant lobby would decry this as hype-minded short-sighted tokenism. (Ever tried eating a grapefruit with a hydrangea, hippies?) Such is the nature of the beast.

Which is why it’s glorious to see a record so unhyped, unheralded, unfancied and undervalued get its moment. There’s no special interest at work here, no crest-of-a-fashion-wave giddiness that will subside the morning after. There’s simply a very good record, made by a very good band, which will enhance the lives of those who listen to it. Record sales have been known to jump 500% after a Mercury win, so that’ll be nice: after 17 years and all manner of record label chicanery, if anyone deserves some big fat royalty cheques it’s Elbow. And from a wider perspective, while these decisions are never right (that’s opinion, folks!), it’s nice to get one that can’t be shouted down as wrong for the wrong reasons. When was the last time a debate about the Mercury centred only on the music? Last Tuesday night. So all together now: “We still believe in love, so fuck you!”

MARLOW: Into each life some rain must fall.

Dr. GIBBON: Metaphysics?

MARLOW: Music.

After the initial ‘wow’ at finding virtuosity in mundane surroundings you’ll soon find your attention wandering – perhaps you’ll even question whether they’re in the shop to do anything other than show off.

Or is that just musician envy? Whatever, people who are passionate about music are under no obligation to love musicians, and it’s easy to suspect that the ones who practise most are missing the point, wasting their time training like an athlete when they could be conjuring up something altogether more valuable and proportionately less quantifiable.

Singer-songwriter-stomper-guitarist Paul Curreri proves this is a fallacy. For sure, his advanced folk/blues/country chops are as impressive as they come but the real thrill of hearing him play live isn’t in simple velocity – it’s in the energy with which he attacks the instrument. His playing proves that musical finesse doesn’t have to come at the expense raw physical excitement – he makes an spectacular sound with one 6-string acoustic, and between his right thumb and thumping foot there is enough rhythmic drive to leave many bands for dead.

Curreri’s playing has an elasticity that transfixes an audience, slowing the tempo and accelerating, developing catchy riffs into elaborate arpeggios. It frames and lifts his vocals, which although capable of cooing sweetness and blues roars, tend to remain warmly understated.

And playing live is his natural arena – Curreri may be a good (and occasionally excellent) lyricist, and his songs have good tunes in any setting. But his album recordings have not yet captured the impact of his live act. Or the spontaneity. He is a master of between-song patter, while his talking blues staple Long Gone John from Tennessee contains an apparently improvised fast talking hipster digression on John’s shoes: “…they’re from London, that’s five hours ahead – these shoes are from the future…”. Elsewhere he uses older songs Letting Us Be and On Hopeless Love (i think) the way a band like Led Zeppelin would use a song like Dazed and Confused. On a bad night (and I’ve never seen Curreri on bad night even when he was trying to quit smoking – which was also the subject of another rambling tall tale) these might be mere showcases. The rest of the time, they are extravagant, even grand explorations. Not only does the playing quicken your pulse, it pulls you into his world, and makes the songs (which transcribing here won’t do justice to) truly three dimensional.

His wife and co-star, Devon Sproule is an entirely different talent.

Working in what might sound like the same genre, she’s more than a competent guitarist, but an extraordinary singer. Her songs have more melodic hooks than her husband’s but her voice, while ideally suited to them, is hard to appreciate in print. What is distinctive, and what lifts her above equally able vocalists, is the delivery. From the rural intonation to the utterly natural way she rides a melody, she inhabits every word she chooses to sing. Sproule’s commitment and low-key sass also make her compelling to watch, wrinkling her nose during the more telling lines of her most intimate songs, and popping her shoulder and thrusting her head during up-tempo numbers. At the Roundhouse, she was backed by a sympathetic, almost transparent four-piece band including jobbing pedal steel ace BJ Cole. The ensemble would probably have diluted Curreri’s playing, but they made Sproule’s songs glow.

During the instrumental breaks she frequently continues to sing off-mic, as though these tunes just pour out of her constantly, and all she has to do is stand in front of a PA system at the right time. Sproule’s voice even has a melodic ring when she’s offhandedly dedicating songs to her friends. Or was I just hypnotised by this point?

She is never showy, but she shares her husband’s easy humour, both between songs and during. Many songs have a domestic setting and dwell on picturesque detail, but others inevitably encourage speculation about her relationship with Curreri. Don’t Hurry for Heaven contains this pay-off: “Well I’ve heard the curse of a guitar like the curse of a woman/ and you can tell a true player by his want to get better, they say/ So if you love me even half as much as you love your old Martin, well you should be practising on me just about every…”

… And then instead of the final word, she executes a cheeky blues guitar run, that says just as much and helps turn what could have been a rather acidic broadside into a well-meant joke.

After the triumphs of their solo sets, the third, featuring the pair dueting, felt more like an extended encore. The mood was consistently upbeat. Although Curreri made the best jokes, he made sure his wife was the real star as he backed off on the guitar, and used voice as a harmonic accompaniment to hers. By the penultimate song, the old, rolling-as-the-hills traditional Weeping Willow, their musicianship was meshing perfectly – but most importantly, the warmth they generated radiated from the stage and bounced right back to them from the audience. Virtuosity is one thing, but charm quite another – and to have your brain, ears and funny bone all tickled in the same show is a rare treat indeed.

Little Dave Clapping

LINKS

www.paulcurreri.com

www.devonsproule.com

www.myspace.com/paulcurreri

www.myspace.com/devonsproule

(Four albums’ worth of duets for free download) http://www.paulcurreri.com/music/valentine_main/index.htm