Month: October 2021

Get This!, Hard-to-find, Kraut-y

Weirder Bremen

Craig McAllister

My Bloody Valentine damn-near bankrupted Creation to make an album only a fraction as exciting, as intense, as self-indulgent as Faust‘s Krautrock, a track so good they named an entire genre after it. Julian Cope, in his worth-stealing Krautrocksampler book, called the track ‘a continuation of (Faust’s) whole trip‘. He’s right, of course. A dozen minutes of head music; expansive, noisy and pretty, pretty essential. Kosmische!

Faust – Krautrock

It lurches in on a slur of stretched 3″ studio tape…or perhaps a divebombing whammy bar…and layered fuzz guitars, overlapped and saturated to white noise levels of intensity, fall into a snaking groove pattern, panned from left speaker to right and back again, an instant head trip.

Der-der-derder-der-duuh…Der-der-derder-der-duhh. From underneath the blanket of restrained, compressed noise creeps a tambourine, its steady rattling jangle enhancing the drumless, beatless rhythm that’s unfolding in front of your ears.

Here comes the bass…woody and electric, looped and repetitive, recorded in an era long before Ed Sheeran and KT Tunstall and even loopers themselves were a thing. Disciplined, repetitive and worming its way into your consciousness, it’s now the lead instrument, a counter-rhythm to the relentless guitar noizzze that came before. Dum-deh-dehdeh-deh-dum…Dum-deh-dehdeh-de-dum.

But wait…is that a vocal? Is it? A sort-of chanted, Tibetan monk-influenced calling from some far-off metaphorical mountaintop? Remember when John Lennon had this idea – and he had it first, by a good eight years – for Tomorrow Never Knows? This is what I think he had in mind, if indeed a vocal is even here at all. I mean, I think there is. I’m sure of it. I think I am.

And now there’re drums. It’s Keith Moon tripping up and falling down the stairs, landing the right way up and falling straight into the beat; propulsive, steady, not in your face but driving the whole thing ever-forwards.

That guitar ambience that kicked it all off? You’d forgotten about that, hadn’t you? It’s still there, of course, aural background wallpaper, the splashes of colour in an otherwise steady and unshowy room. But as soon as you remember the guitars, there they are, suddenly at the fore again; fizzing static bursts of beamed-in-from-the-outer-edges art rock and long, howling notes bent out of shape by distorted wah-wah and studio trickery. Just as your mind alters to the staggered groove – are we at the end of a bar or midway through? – a keyboard floats in, keeping time with its Farfisa parp. Or is it actually a manic Velvet’s violin, noise-as-art aesthetic, screeching/keeping time like John Cage on Black Angel’s Death Song, trying painfully to be heard above the apocalyptic din? Maybe it’s both. Who knows? Who cares?

Shh! Listen! That quiet, respectful popping noise you hear near the end is the sound of Stereolab crying into their Rice Krispies, totally defeated. We’ll never be as good as this, they admit, though they’ll continue to give it a good try.

Get This!

Ezra Pounding

Craig McAllister

This time a dozen years ago I was a gape-mouthed, goggle-eyed, free-spending tourist in New York City. Look up, look down, look all around, as the song goes. There’s something happening all the time no matter where you rest your eyes, although you should never rest your eyes in the one place in New York for very long. “Get outta the road ya freakin’ jerk!” shouted a commuting cyclist as I stepped into the cycle lane on the Brooklyn Bridge in an attempt to snap the most perfectly symmetrical of shots. I needed two goes, on account of the fact the cyclist damn-near killed me during my first attempt. Wow. Even the locals make you feel like you were a bit-part player in some never-ending, ever-changing movie.

One afternoon we took a trip on the Staten Island Ferry. We’d missed our chance at an actual trip to the Statue Of Liberty, but this ferry ride, the Rough Guide book assured us, afforded close-ups of the iconic landmark as the ferry shuttled across the Hudson River on its short journey between New York’s most out of the way borough and Manhattan. In the event, those close-ups weren’t all that close, but we dutifully snapped and posed and what have you like the tourists we undeniably were, the statue a Lego-sized symbol of freedom in the hazy background.

The greatest thing about the ferry ride was happening outside the terminal back on the Manhattan side. A group, a posse if you will, of breakdancing b-boys, all baggy pants and backwards Mets and Giants and Rangers caps were blasting proper old-school electro hip-hop from the largest ghetto blaster you can possibly imagine and were taking it in turns to breakdance; a wee gang of headspinning, robot-walking, toprocking and freezing show-offs. They were terrifc and they knew it. A memory of it will sometimes flash into my mind and I will kick myself for not taking a video clip – or even a solitary snapshot – of the spectacle. The simpler days before camera phones, I suppose.

Anyway.

Ezra Koenig is the vocalist and focal point of Vampire Weekend, one of a slew of weedy bands who grew from the cracks in the wake of the success of The Strokes in the early millenium. If you wore a guitar and size 28 inch jeans and lived within fringe-flopping distance of New York State, chances are you’d be offered a record contract by a label desperate to find the next guitar band to die for. I don’t mind Vampire Weekend in the slightest, but they inhabit that era in time for me when bands seemed to appear from nowhere and by the time they’d played the Barrowlands were onto their third or even fourth album. Where the fuckdiddilyuck did they come from? I’d often remark to no-one in particular. I’m too old, too lazy and too stuck in my ways to catch up. Oxford Comma though. Good tune with funny words. I like that. And Sunflower Bean. I like that too. I bet I’d be properly into them if I allowed myself.

SBTRKT is the shouty and vowel-shy nom de plume of Aaron Jerome, remixer to acts as diverse as Radiohead, MIA and Underworld. Sometimes glitch-itch-itchy and t-t-t-twitchy and sometimes turbo-charged, hi-gloss electronica, his music, much like those bands of the early noughties has pretty much passed me by too. This track has made its mark though.

SBTRKT featuring Ezra Koenig – New Dorp. New York.

IT’S BTY, WTH LYRC FROM ZR BTNW DRP, TWN N STTN SLND THT TKS T NM FRM TH DTCH PHRS FR NW TWN.

Damn! That’s impossible to keep doing.

Fading in on a whoosh of ambient New York traffic (though not on my version above, for some reason!), it’s the bass that hits you first, a proper subwoofing tectonic plate-mover. Almost immediately, the lyric threatens to fall into The Sweet’s …’and she thinks she’s the passionate one‘, but just as quickly falls into its own pattern. The vocals are flat and electronically treated, SBTRKT and an un-named female vocalist doing some sort of spoken word duet about New York and Manhattan and gargling gargoyles (tourist tip: always look up in old Gotham) and Ezra taking over with crisply annunciated words about cities to run and keys to the kingdom and the colour (or is that color?) yella.

‘My girl got a limousine, it’s a full-time job just to keep it clean,’ he says. ‘Got a speaker in the trunk y’know it weighs a ton…‘

Ezra, mate. Play this at any volume while you’re driving and you’re liable to stall and blow the windows in and blow the tires out, or at the very least be travel sick into your lap. I was once sick after a very loud band practice in my kitchen, the subfrequencies from the bass guitar bouncing off the tiles and zapping straight into my recently-eaten lunch, lying dormant in my stomach. Not for long…

I doubt Ezra ever practiced in a kitchen. An Ivy Leaguer from NYC, he’ll have got that record deal without too much bother. I’m glad he and SBTRKT found one another for that tune. Percussive, catchy and the creeping, claustrophobic cousin of David Essex’s Rock On, it’s the very definition of a banger; top of the Rock, top of the pops.

Get This!

Hello. I’m Harry.

Craig McAllister

I found myself drawn into Dirty Harry the other night. I channel-hopped my way into it during a hunt for some decent music telly just as it was starting and watched through eyes that hadn’t seen it for so long that watching it seemed like I was doing so for the first time.

It’s an accepted classic, of course, the loosely-based-on-a-true story of the Zodiac Killer – the pscychopathic Scorpio, a blackmailing maniac with a Van Morrison/Astral Weeks haircut – and you can’t get it out of your mind as you watch – who shoots women, hits school kids and extracts teeth from teenage girls, being hunted down by maverick cop Harry Callahan (no ‘g’). “Why do they call you ‘Dirty’?” his colleagues repeatedly ask, and Harry, played brilliantly by Clint Eastwood will stare them down into quiet, intimidated submission.

Harry lives by a set of police rules made for bending and frequently breaking, and has a list of against-the-book demeanours longer than the barrel of his Magnum. He’s forever being called into a supervisor’s office (or even to receive a fist-banging dressing down from the Mayor- wherever there’s a non-conformist ‘70s cop, there’s always a haranguing, popularity-infatuated mayor) where he’ll! be! shouted! at! with! incrEASING!! VOLUME!!! that culminates in a chewed “GETTHAHELLOUTTAHERECALLAHAN!!!!”, both Harry and his boss left under no doubt that Harry – Dirty Harry, remember, is off to bring justice to Scorpio by any means necessary.

Filmed in ‘70s San Francisco, the cinematography has a bleached-out, sun-kissed and almost-Instagramatic haze to it all; long, tracked shots of Lombard Street winding forever, the Golden Gate Bridge looming large, Alcatraz an unreferenced yet ominous permapresence out in the bay.

The night time scenes are so oily black as to be genuinely tense whenever the clock creeps around to the wee hours. Of course, homicidal maniacs as off-kilter as Scorpio only work under the grainy shadow of the moon, so whether Harry is running the gauntlet through a midnight wood full of propositioning perverts or he’s running breathlessly through a tunnel where you know – just know – that criminal elements lurk within or he’s running (again!) across neon-lit rooftops as bullets permanently alter the fascia of the building he’s conducting his stakeout from, Callahan spends a lot of his time in semi-darkness, semi out of breath and only ever a half-step away from life-threatening danger.

Dirty Harry is brilliantly scored by Lalo Schifrin. Knife stabs of brass puncture the murky silence whenever Harry and Scorpio’s eyes meet. Fingers-down-blackboard strings scrape across the more violent scenes. And all that running is scored by breathless, alarming, pitter-pattering percussion; frantic hi-hat action and rattling toms that replicate exactly the sound made by two sets of Cuban heels in pursuit of either freedom or justice, depending on who the camera is focused on, as they batter at full pelt down a San Franciscan sidewalk.

When are these people – the goodies as well as the baddies – going to realise that sneakers are so-called for that very reason?! A clomp of Harry’s boot heel on bare floorboard is always Scorpio’s cue to make a run for it, the tinkling, ringing vibraphone that helps build the tension giving way to full-blown percussive bombast. But then again, no Cuban heels, no highly-tense soundtrack.

Dirty Harry Theme – Lalo Schifrin

‘I know what you’re thinking…” Harry says to Scorpio at the finale. ‘”Did he fire six shots or only five..?” Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement, I’ve kinda lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel lucky?’ Well, do you, punk?’” 

A film that looks great, sounds great and has instantly quotable lines in it…they don’t make ’em like that anymore, do they?

Cover Versions, Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

Won’t You Tell It To Me Doctor?

Craig McAllister

I’m particularly fond of this wee Teenage Fanclub curio. One half of a 2004 split single with International Airport (the side project of long-time Pastel Tom Crossley), each act has their version of the ‘Airport’s Association! on either side of the 7″.

Teenage Fanclub – Association!

Teenage Fanclub’s version is a lovely mid-paced chugger that grooves along at exactly the same pace and rhythm as Gerry Love tapping a battered desert boot while snapping a gub full of Juicy Fruit in time to the beat. It’s head nodding sunshine pop, all fruggable bassline and lazy, hazy double harmonies where Norman’s voice and Gerard’s seemingly mesh and melt into one another. The guitars, scrapy and scratchy at the start but clean and chiming fromm thereon in, rise and fall and ring and sparkle behind the vocals, acceding on occasion to the faintest of tinkling pitched percussion and the same thrumming atmospheric organ that fades in at the beginning.

It’s just about missing a handful of swinging fringes and some John Sebastian-conducted Lovin’ Spoonful on-the-beat handclaps, but feel free to add your own where you know they should go. You’ll probably want to pick it up a bit after the band drops out before coming back in alongside those ghosting backing vocals – “Won’t you tell it to me doctor?” Lovely stuff, it must be said.

Association! wouldn’t have sounded at all out of place on the following year’s Man Made album, but as you know, all the best bands  – The Beatles, XTC, New Order, The Smiths, (add your own selection  here: ________) – leave some of their greatest material off of the albums and keep them instead as stand alone tracks. Despite being a cover, Association! endures to this day as one of TFC’s best-kept secrets.

It’s somewhat difficult to make out lyrically, and not being well-known enough to appear on any of the internet’s lyric sites means much guesswork is required to work out what’s being sung. Repeated plays – and I’ve been playing it non-stop again for the past couple of days – throw up references to Castle Bay, boats, moving water, on the wreck of the Association – it’s about a boat! – and, I’ve got myself convinced, something about a Rubik’s Cube.

I mean, I dunno. The Fanclub could sing the obituaries page in last week’s Herald and make it sound like throw-away sun-kissed perfection, but on this track their melodic mumbling prevails. Phonetically though, it sounds wonderful.

“I’m part of the association, the circle of the free….

stereo music…yeah it’s a part of me.”

Or something like that.

The original throws up no further clues…

International Airport – Association! Channel Mash

Even tinklier than TFC’s version, and that’s a melodica in there too, isn’t it? – International Airport’s take has a home-made rough around the edges feel to it that I suspect most acts would have trouble capturing in their own way. There’s a lovely cyclical bassline to it, different to Gerry’s but no less wonderful, and some off-kilter harmonies that only add to the charm. Aggi Pastel wafts in and out at the tail end of some of the lines – “now you gotta wait and see” – and the drop-out on this version has some lovely rudimentary wheezy slide guitar accompanying the overlapping vocals.

What’s clear to hear is that International Airport had grand plans for their song – it’s lo-fi but with hi-fi ambitions – and that perhaps those plans could only be realised through Teenage Fanclub’s gift for a close-knit harmony and a closely-mic’d vintage guitar. Great songs are great songs are great songs though, no matter the bells and whistles you can hang on them. But I suspect you knew that already.

Now, does anybody have a full lyric for the song?