Sonic Youth - Smart Bar Chicago 1985

This Smart Bar Chicago 1985 cd takes you right to the heart of the beginning of Sonic Youth's reign as the premier American underground band. This is where the noise meets the rock and the rock is introduced to the pop. I dig Confusion Is Sex and Bad Moon Rising and even though most of the material for this live date comes from Bad Moon Rising, it's different. I always thought Sonic Youth progressed quite naturally but upon hearing this I started to think that perhaps Steve Shelley was the catalyst for a more accessible, fluid and rock Sonic Youth. He was not long in the band when this concert was recorded. He injects new life into these tracks (that were played on Bad Moon Rising by Bob Bert) and you can hear the future Sonic Youth starting to come together.  Songs take on a (Can-esque) flow motion that was previously non existent. This is where the No Wave noise and post hardcore sounds begin to be sculptured into something more beautiful and sensual. This is exemplified here on an early version of Expressway To Yr Skull.  1985 was the first time I read about Sonic Youth in Juke magazine. In that article they were discussing Bad Moon Rising, the 60s, Charlie Manson and John Fogerty's comeback. The band were photographed with a scarecrow. This article/image stuck in my brain but it would have been 2 years at least until I first heard their music with Schizophrenia on the airwaves of RRR whilst visiting the big smoke.

Maybe it was the disappointment of m b v that made me buy Smart Bar Chicago 1985 and go back to MBV's original influences. Just before I dug out Dinosaur Jr's You're Living All Over Me, I listened to Isn't Anything. This LP immediately transported me back to the late 80s. Glory days I suppose. My Bloody Valentine were once raw and incredibly melodic. Their other unsung triumph was their wicked rhythm section that was sometimes at the forefront of a tune. There was light, shade, claustrophobia, ecstasy and surrealism. What happened? More to the point do I really care now? The mourning was done some time ago. We've got the old records and they're brilliant as are those of their contemporaneous influences. The aforementioned Dinosaur LP has been cranked up real loud over this last week and its blistering blissful vistas have had me ecstatic. What can I say? Wow! Geez I would love to have been writing at that time. It was so exciting and fertile. The great thing is that, that excitement is contained within some of those records still.

The live Sonic Youth cd has of course had me listening back to their Evol and Sister LPs. Is their anything left to say about those records? Except they still sound fucking awesome in 2013. I don't know where First Born Is Dead by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds fits in to all this but I've been giving that a spin too. That was a fabulous and strange record! They were just a weird little four piece band then. Blixa, Barry, Mick (on drums) and Nick. It's such a sparse LP and so powerful!

All these groups were influences on the young My Bloody Valentine.

So if you ever wondered (I haven't until now) what Bad Moon Rising would have sounded like with Steve Shelley on the skins check out Smart Bar Chicago 1985.

Retromania moves in mysterious ways. I'm in the mid to late 80s now.

m b v - My Bloody Valentine

It just came out of the blue. If you can call waiting for 22 years for a follow up to one of the all time great albums out of the blue. What I mean is it was put out with little fanfare. Kevin Shields said the other day it might be coming out soon and then bang there it was on their website. Some people were paying attention though as the website crashed due to immense traffic. I heard one track on youtube Wonder 2 and got a little excited. The next day I'd bought the LP, cd and download for more than 40 dollars. So a nostalgic vibe took over. What was I really expecting though? Surely I wasn't expecting them to blow my mind at this late stage was I? Can they still make dizzy music to disconcert?

In 1996 I was still hopeful about the follow up to Loveless. There were reports of the tracks being jungle and metal influenced. This kept me interested for a few years. Eventually though I came to the realisation that it was never going to come out. Then I was of the opinion that perhaps this was a good thing. Retire at your peak. Nice. Have years of meltdowns, budget blowouts and scrapped half finished albums. This will all add to the mystique and they will become legendary well, more legendary.

22 years on from Loveless and the innovations have become common place. The radical normalised. 22 years of artists pillaging this treasure chest have almost(?) made My Bloody Valentine redundant. So what could MBV have to offer us now? When Loveless came out there were even a few people who said "Is that it?' The shoegaze brigade (Slowdive, Curve, Lush, Pale Saints, Boo Radleys et al.) had already started using and abusing MBV's legacy which perhaps made Loveless less startling than it should have been. Then groups like Seefeel, Flying Saucer Attack, Third Eye Foundation etc. expanded upon MBV's frontiers and perhaps took their blueprint to several logical conclusions. MBV kept being a name checked influence throughout the 90, 00s and 10s. I personally have failed to keep up with the new shoegazers. The last things I heard were from 10 years ago when Pluramon and M83 began exhibiting a heavy MBV influence. The lineage continues to this day apparently with Deerhunter and the like carrying the torch.

The (non) marketing of m b v caught me a little off guard and I was swept up in nostalgic momentum. Wonder 2 is probably the best track on the LP, well at the moment it's only actually an mp3. The first half of m b v has the hazy sweet languidity part of the Loveless equation but lacks the other half ie. the noisy and chaotic undercurrent. These two yin and yang elements are what make My Bloody Valentine  so great. So it's nice but feels half finished. Where are the manic pop thrills?

Then along comes track six New You. I don't really know what to make of this track at all. It just feels wrong. Is this where I say nadir? Is it some kind of attempt at a MOR crossover? It just comes across like a bad Phoenix outtake. Next is In Another Way and thank god! It's a fucking MBV classic with all the elements that we know and love, but is it too little too late? Track 8 Nothing Is sounds like an attempt at a Meat Puppets instrumental?? Finally it's wonder 2. The album starts to really hit its stride with this dose of swirling and shape shifting psychedelia. Then the album's done. It's finished and you're left feeling a little bewildered.

m b v sounds like it could have come out in 1993 as a kind of follow up/companion piece to Loveless. What happened to the metal? Where's the jungle? Those recordings seem to have been scrapped and Kevin, Belinda, Colm and Debbie have gone for a Ramones/ACDC move ie. If it ain't broke don't fix it. They've settled on their bag of tricks and they've decided to sail in conservative waters.  Was there nowhere else to go? Did others get there first? Was there too much second guessing? Were the scrapped recordings shite? How did that winning streak from the You Made Me Realise EP to Loveless come to such a bizarre end? Are these the questions that have plagued Kevin Shields' mind for the last 22 years?

2013 has begun

I was about to write a post asking the question: Has 2013 started yet? A quick look on the internet made me go er.. maybe ....Ducktails have a new record...I should track that down. I was about to go to bed then I realised this

But I've left the computer cord at work and it's about to run out uuuurrrrrggggggg!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Boring Monday Night

it was either watching Master Chef or some other shite tonight. Luckily I went on the interweb and found this on Hardly Baked one of Simon Reynolds other blogs. This is a true time capsule and fuck me it made my week if not my month actually. Simon found it on the Our God Is Speed blog who in turn found it on the Exile On Moan St blog. So I thought I'd continue the tradition and pass it on. This is an incredible glimpse into Berlin in 1983. Even more so though, is the glimpse you get of the British idea of Berlin and Germany in 1983. It's got Die Haut, Malaria, Einsturzende Neubauten, etc.

This is as German as I got in 1983. This really swings!, quite unexpectedly. I thought Nena was the biggest spunk (er...that's Australian for good looking) I'd ever seen. That final part of The Tube In Berlin Special where a British guy is at the Russian War Memorial reminded me of this song which I haven't heard since about 1984. If I recall correctly she had a follow up single I really loved as well but I can't remember the title of that. Oh hang on here it is!

The Church - She Never Said

One last one for Australia Day. This is taken from Countdown in 1981. Countdown was Australia's version of TOTP sort of. Everyone watched it every Sunday night. Anyway this episode was shown recently on Rage and boy did The Church not fit. I guess they never fitted anywhere as was stated in their Hall Of Fame anouncement. On this edition of Countdown were a whole lot of very bad and thin sounding synth-pop performers. So when the Church go into this weird dark post punk psychedelia that was at once a throwback and futuristic they stuck out like a sore thumb. It was a surprise to see this performance I'd never seen before and in that context all the more interesting and powerful.

The Atlantics

More classics for Australia Day. The Atlantics Come On. I love the clip but it's obviously mimed. I'd like to have seen a live version from this era.

Here's a band I've mentioned before Kahvas Jute and their great progressive hard rock classic Parade Of Fools. This is a proto-stoner epic from 1971.

Sun Araw/The Congos/Sherlock Holmes/Girls

Sun Araw and The Congos create a new zone somewhere between Roots Reggae and Hynagogia.
Stoned? Us?

Not much to talk about musically really. I just looked over my top 20 of 2012 and noticed I left out the  Sun Araw, M Geddes Gengras Meet The Congos LP which is brilliant. And I only just, a week or 2 ago, got the 2nd Hacker Farm LP. I'm loving that and it's a huge leap from Poundland. I would describe it as Isolationist (in the best sense of the term) ambiance and dare I say the word, Industrial, anyway it's post all that, but post seems to be a bad word at the moment so I won't say that. The new Broadcast LP is the only other thing I've been listening to. A faux Giallo soundtrack that pays homage to Goblin and other Italian masters.

I've caught up on some tv though. Sherlock Holmes the BBC series featuring Benedict Cumberbatch & Martin Freeman is one I have watched. Thinking, well I didn't really like the Hollywood films of recent times but I'll give it a go, because Caitlin Moran rates it. I was immediately transfixed by the whole thing. The best BBC drama in a very long time. The plots are incredible and the acting, well fuck me!, where did this Benedict Cumberbatch come from? He's an incredibly charismatic actor with star written all over him. How does he do that unblinking thing? I've spent some of my life amongst people with Aspergers Syndrome and I could not come up with a more real version of the syndrome. At one point during the show Dr. Watson  claims Sherlock as Aspergers. This I find refreshing considering how many seasons has it been for Big Bang Theory? Where one of the main characters, Sheldon, quite obviously has Aspergers  and no one has muttered the word Autism or Aspergers as far as I know! But they are quite willing to make fun of his condition. Anyway what a surprise and I can't wait for the next season which is going to be at least a 12 month wait.

The next one was Girls. I was not expecting to relate whatsoever  to a show about 20 something girls in New York, but somehow it drew me in! I thought this may be an interesting show but did not expect to relate to it in any terms. I thought the era, ie now, would alienate me. Being married for the last 5 years etc. would exclude me but fuck this show just reminded me and the Mrs of our early 20s. Lena Dunham has captured in minute detail the confusion, bewilderment, narcissistic wrongness, the obsession with sex, and the whatever else is happening in your 20s perfectly. Timeless, brilliant and so close to the bone sometimes it makes you want to look away. Lena puts in all the bits, awkwardness, selfishness and embarrassment, that others would leave out. One of the most honest accounts of awful 20 something behaviour I've ever seen.

Port Douglas

Okay, I'm back from a sabbatical in Far North Queensland. Whilst on holiday in the tropics I was listening to some 60s Australian rock. The Mrs then says "Sometimes rock and roll is a bit incongruous." Who was I to disagree? Once while visiting Mildura at the height of a gruelling Australian summer I remember going for a walk in the 35+ degree heat. On my i-pod I had The Kink's Something Else while sweating in the semi arid conditions. The incongruity of that was precisely the point. I loved listening to tales of 60s British suburban life, it didn't fit at all. When I saw The Trip with Steve Coogan playing Joy Division in the picturesque English countryside I thought 'Ah a like mind, with a perverse sense of humour.'

Anyway I thought about Emma's comment and thought okay let's see if I can match this scene of humidity, palm trees, insects, lagoons, jellyfish, The Great Barrier Reef and The Pacific Ocean. A quick check of the I-pod showed I currently had 3 Dolphins Into The Future releases synced. I put one on and immediately there was synchronisation between the world in which we were in and the sounds we were hearing. The funny thing is from our room with lagoon views in which you could see palm trees, gum trees, brightly coloured tropical birds, the Pacific Ocean etc. you couldn't open the window for fear of giant mosquitoes entering your space and destroying your pleasure. With that window being closed all you could hear was a low hum of the air conditioner. Putting on the Dolphins put the sound back into our room. It fit like a glove. In some way though this was just as fake, like a sound designer putting the environmental sounds retrospectively onto a film. It made me think that in some ways this is as incongruous as the rock. Anyway for the next week it was all Three Dolphins records as the soundtrack to our balmy holiday. The perfect soundtrack.

The only other album I put on the i-pod dock was Paul Shutze's New Maps of Hell III. This fit as well. I remember a critic once describing it as music from the pacific rim. This however was a slightly darker take on similar themes. I checked the title of one track, it was called The Rapture of Drowning. The next day while on a boat for a Barrier Reef snorkeling tour I couldn't get that kind of horror vibe out of my head. I thought if Radha Mitchell turns up and starts talking to us we're definitely doomed.

Post Nostalgia

When I wrote that post yesterday I didn't think I'd read the the term post-nostalgia before. I did however think that perhaps I'd acquired it by osmosis. A quick google throws up some stuff. The best and closest to my article here. When I read that I thought that's what we meant. Beautifully written.

Nostalgia for nostalgia...

The Mrs comes out of the bathroom and says what's missing is the yearning for nostalgia. Nostalgia for nostalgia. She then says that being nostalgic is lost due to the availability of everything. This availability renders everything timeless. Everything is now. Then I add you mean the fleeting, ephemeral and the yearning for what's lost can't be experienced because it is not lost. It has probably been found by someone else so you don't even get to enjoy the experience of finding it yourself.

Emma then adds a case in point would be a show she vaguely recalls from school called the Dark Towers. This was some kind of spooky television for schools show (Emma attended primary school in North Wales). Emma knows the theme tune sort of. She is also aware that she can go onto the Internet and probably find it. A few years previously these events would usually unfold: The phone calls to her sister where she would sing the theme tune and her sister would go 'yeah I think I recall that.' Then talking to other people she went to school with or her father to piece together this vague memory. Then what if someone had an old VHS of the Dark Towers programme? It would be exchanged watched and discussed. Or if nobody had it it would remain a little mystery. Now all that would be lost.

This parallels the death of the pub conversation. In the pre-Internet on your mobile phone days you could argue for hours about anything and it might not get resolved for a long time. A case in point was a conversation that took place perhaps 8 years ago. I was saying that isn't it weird that George Harrison wrote Taxman but didn't play the lead guitar part? In fact Paul McCartney plays the lead part! The mate I was with was saying no way it was either George or John playing that guitar break. I said I know for a fact that it was Paul! He would say nah that's bullshit! The conversation probably ensued like this for some time. It was a week or two later that I found a book on The Beatles at work (er...I worked for a book distributor at the time) with a page on the recording of Taxman. I was right. I photocopied the said page and either faxed it to him or showed him next time he was around at my place.

Now days someone will just pull out the mobile phone and solve any argument in an instant. This in turn halts the natural flow of conversation, you know, the fun part of drinking and talking crap at the pub. People younger than me are (ie. Generation Y and younger) perhaps more prone to this. I have noticed people looking up every second thing I've stated in a conversation at the pub.

What we are getting at is that perhaps a part of our social and emotional interaction in the world is being eroded by technology in ways that we've barely even noticed. Ending with these questions: What is the future of nostalgia? If everything is presently found and preserved how can we yearn for it? What is the purpose of nostalgia? Is nostalgia now redundant? If so what are the implications?

Are we now Post-Nostalgia*?