OOIOO - Feather Float

OOIOO are a side project by Boredoms (best band ever?) femme fatale Yoshimi P-We. Their 2004 record 'Feather Float' is, well, one of the most colourful albums you're likely to hear. Cover art is fairly suggestive of this.

Just about as much fun you can have within the popular music sphere without losing your mind. Or whatever, lose your mind, who cares. Contains bits of Vision Creation Newsun, Neu! like trance pulses, rock experimentation that may make their peers embarassed, and repetition. and repetition. and repetition. and repetition. and repetition. and repetition.

be sure to loop

The Renderers - A Dream of the Sea

The Renderers are a kickass psychedelic/dark country act from New Zealand, and are associated with the legendary Flying Nun scene, sharing members with The Terminals (quite possibly the greatest rock band of all time) and have been putting out fantastic records since the early 90's. This is their best work in my opinion, 1998's A Dream of the Sea. 

Fucking brilliant. Songs about the human relationship with sea and our failure to understand it, and our attempts to connect with it via leviathans, storms, shipwrecks and even the surrender of oneself to the water - ultimately signalling that there is something exceptionally serene and enigmatic about the darker depths; how we long for catharsis from things that are larger than our lives. Painted with the velvet brush of The Terminals' legacy of noise, every track tells a tale while the guitars lick their wounds and occasionally lash back and forth; and husband-wife duo Brian and Maryrose Crook are your northern stars, your only guides in these treacherous waters. 

I have been looking for the way back
I have been lost on dry land
my body walks away from me
since the river beneath 
the river broke its banks

Have I spoken about the songwriting yet? It's flawless.


low to the ground

Can - Tago Mago

Can are pretty much my favourite band of their era. The mother-band of sorts; at their peak everything they touched turned to gold. 1971 saw the coming of one of music's best experiments of all time; a double LP by the name of Tago Mago. Some great reading here from Stylus:

What can you say about Can? About The Can? Because, make no mistake, they are the definite article. Their name is an acronym of Communism, Anarchism, Nihilism. Or it’s the German word for “love”. Or an African word for “life”. Or something you keep beer in. On the cover of Ege Bamyasi it’s a tin of okra. Who knows? Can. The Can. Can formed because of an argument between a music teacher and his student. The student said The Beatles were more radical than Stockhausen, the teacher laughed, they formed a band. They recruited the greatest drummer in the world (Jazz-trained—instilled with the motto “never repeat, never repeat” from the day he picked up sticks. And when given the freedom to play how he wanted? Decided to repeat forever.) and a giant black American singer, a sculptor evading the draft by travelling Europe. They recorded in a castle, strange nursery-rhyme inverting songs about getting high with Mary, about your father being unborn, weird, European psychedelic junctions. 20-minute jams about nothing in particular but keyed in to the rhythm of the universe. Oh yes. The singer couldn’t take the stress, or something, and left. The rest of Can spotted a Japanese man shouting at people in the street, and asked him to join their band. He did, and proceeded to sing in a made-up language for the next five years. (Later he would find religion, and become a Jehovah’s Witness, which is the mentalist inversion of Americans or Europeans “getting” Buddhism or Taoism.) 

Everyone has stolen from Can. Talk Talk (the looped piano riff from “Life’s What You Make It”, everything they did from Spirit Of Eden on), Happy Mondays (“Hallelujah” is “Halleluwah” from Tago Mago performed by a load of Mancunian drug addicts with no sense of musical history), Primal Scream (everything,everything), The Fall (“I Am Damo Suzuki” to name but one of hundreds), The Stone Roses (“Fools Gold” is Ege Bamyasi’s “I’m So Green” run through acid house and The Byrds), Stereolab (everything, everything), My Bloody Valentine (texture over form), The Verve (10-minute spacerock grooves), any band that ever started playing around with electronics or weird jams, anyone who ever played at spacerock or being experimental (hello, Radiohead), anyone who ever went for texture and rhythm and sound over song, anyone who ever got a singer to sing in a made-up language (hello, Sigur Ros). Before every album Blur have released, Damon Albarn has either claimed that it was influenced by Pavement or by Can. The only two occasions when he wasn’t lying were Blur(Pavement!) and 13 (Can!). The Mooney Suzuki stole their name from Can’s two singers (Malcolm Mooney and Damo Suzuki). LCD Soundsystem’s most important namedrop in “Losing My Edge” isn’t about being the first person to play Daft Punk “to the rock kids”; it’s about having been at the first Can shows in 1968, “in Cologne”. Which is, of course, a lie, because James Murphy was a baby if he was even born. Eno, Mogwai, Cabaret Voltaire, Tortoise, AR Kane… You could keep naming bands forever.                  

A contender for one of the greatest albums of all time. A trip unlike any other, 40 years since it's release now and there still isn't anything that fucks with your head as beautifully as this album does. That album cover is pretty spot on, I'd say. Musical nirvana, if there ever was one. Give it a few spins, you'll see what I'm on about.

halleluhwah!

Sly & The Family Stone - There's a Riot Goin' On

Sly and the Family Stone were an American funk and soul band from San Fransico, California. Active from 1966 to 1983, the band was pivotal in the development of soul, funk, and psychedelia. Headed by singer, songwriter, record producer, and multi instrumentalist Sly Stone, and containing several of his family members and friends; as well as one of the first important groups to have a racially integrated, multi-gender lineup, something quite unheard of in the music scene in the late 60's. They released a whole bunch of albums; 2 of which were masterpieces that still hold up today. This is their best album in my opinion,  the 1971 behemoth 'There's a Riot Goin' On' 

Urban legends are cool. One says that where Marvin Gaye searched and pondered what exactly had come to be in his time with the aptly titled "What's Goin' On?", a slightly less known musician (but equally, if not more talented) called Sly Stone responded with this album. With the death of the 60's, came also the death of a lot of the expectations and ideals the 60's had envisioned. Political strife, police brutality, assassinations, the fall of the social rights movement and general social disillusionment brought forth by events of the era were the zeitgest of the day, and Sly Stone had been off the map  for nearly 2 years following the hugely optimistic and colourful 'Stand', the band's previous release. Prior to recording this album, Sly Stone more or less locked himself up in a studio, and fuelled by the aforementioned air of negativity, chooses to create a haunting conceptual album whilst spiralling under the heavy weight of substance abuse and worsening relationships between him and his band. The result is jaw dropping; a man left with his thoughts, employing a minimalistic, murky approach to his funk, lays down some of the bleakest soul music ever seen. Features some of the earliest and creative use of overdubs and rerecording, drum machines (on the lead single "Family Affair"), the drug induced euphoria of the opening "Luv n Haight", the satirical take on country on "Space Cowboy", the album is produced just as well as the material it contains - Sly's voice feels like a distant, disorienting lament of a man on the edge as opposed to a stagefront croon that he had trademarked on his previous albums. The album closer "Thank you for talkin' to me Africa" is essentially a slowed down version of a previous single of theirs "Thank you for lettin' me be mice elf again", is absolutely devastating in it's simplicity; a bluesy number on hedonism and self resignation that goes on for a good 7 minutes, but still feels exceedingly short. All in all, a fitting epitapth for the end of the last great decade of social optimism and upheavel - the darkest psychedelic funk/soul album put to record is also one of the most resonant and endlessly fascinating albums of all time; both in songwriting and scope. In my opinion, There's A Riot Goin' On sits comfortably as one of the ten best albums of the 1970's, and has stood the test of time as an all time great.


Thank you for lettin' me be myself again