Robert Wyatt - Cuckooland/Comicopera

In my eyes the major issue of critics is the inability to grasp the present . For example look at the magazine Uncut, rating Arcade Fires debut with 4/5 and later on awarding it best of the year. This really points to how unappreciative they are of the great Robert Wyatt and more precis his last two albums Cuckooland and Comicopera. They aren't weird enough to be instantly recognisable as something properly new, unique and simply brilliant or formulaic enough to be properly recognisable. What they are however is something far more dangerous, subversive.

They key to understanding these two albums lie within one very basic principle, context. The context or more appropriately genre, in this case being 70's folk/psychadelic/jazz music with a disturbingly precise pop edge. What is important note here as well is that its all being filtered through the offbeat mind of Robert Wyatt himself into a single flowing vision.

The sonic landscape of these two albums are very similar and could quite easily be described as the sound of a well recorded jazz group with synthesizer pads and vocals. Interestingly enough, they are so well made that everything simply sounds acoustic, and by a

coustic i mean organic.

I guess a big part of how you in the end feel about the music is how you will hear Wyatts voice. It has been described by Brian Eno something along the lines of sounding like the worlds smallest man. In my ears it would be more accurately described as the antithesis to Louis Armstrong. Which is an interesting comparison for a couple of reasons, but mostly because of the fact that both Wyatt and Armstrong lean heavily on playing Trumpet and singing and because Wyatts music sound very much like a psychadelic version of What A Wonderful World (and yes, that is a very good thing).

You might ask yourself now if this could possibly be relevant in the 21st century? The short answer is yes. The long one that Wyatt has looked back upon the music from the last 40 years and channeled it by picking different bits and pieces from different genres across different decades and then putting them back together according his own aesthetic sensibilities.

What makes it even more resonating are the lyrics which often are at the very heart of Wyatts compositions. Often dealing in quite tough subject matters, Cuckooland definitel

y being a very dark affair with themes such as the holocaust and detonation of the atom bomb over japan. Though this could be easily missed if you didn't pay close attention.

To make a choice between the two albums is in my position impossible, but, if someone held a gun to my head i would go with Cuckooland for two reasons.

1) It contains a guitar solo by the great David Gilmour

2) The track Foreign Accents is staggering in its simplicity and genius

If I would describe Wyatt it would be that of Bilbo after returning to the Shire. After defying the world in a struggling journey he has returned to us to tell us all about it. We sit around the bonfire and listen to him speak of great magic and terrible monsters. However if we listen closely we can detect a hint that something is wrong. That he is here, but not really here at all. That when he came back he had left a part of himself out there.

Mew - No more stories are told today...

Yes it was liked by critics and the audience, yes it was universally hailed as a very good album and yes it is not an unknown ''gem'' BUT, it is far more clever, intelligent and miles better then people are actually giving it credit for.

Upon its release no more stories (as I will call it from now on) was seen as a very good album, more or less scoring strong 3/5 and 4/5. The album in itself is a beautiful masterpiece of musicianship and songwriting, for that is what it actually is, a masterpiece. It works in parts and more importantly it is more than the sum of them. Having listened to the album for quite some time now rather intensely i can confidently conclude that I am still not the least bored with it. It simply keeps giving.

Mew has previously been a case of hit and miss for me. Overboard the quality in their albums have been rather inconsistent with about one third being really good, one third ''just good'' and the final third mediocre, this however is not the case with No more stories. It raises the bar across the board and the weak tracks are ''just very good''.

What is interesting is that there is a very clearly defined point in history where the root for this album was sown, which was the Yes album 90125 and more specifically the track Changes with whom it seems to share DNA. For whatever you may say, No more stories is an album that is the child of the more pop oriented progressive music from the 80's and i say that in the best possible way. By 80's i mean very round and ''fluffy'' production (though wonderfully not synthetic) relying quite heavy on synthesizers while the guitar takes a more comping rhythmic approach rather then leading. What Mew did with no more stories (i don't know if it was intently or not) that i really want to applaud them for is that it rhythmically is created in the same way as the best minimal funk by James Brown. What i mean by that is that it is conceived very much like a jigsaw puzzle where all the parts make a whole rather than simply having bits that exists as pure embellishments.

And that is actually exactly how you could sum up the entire album. Yes it is dense and complex but it isn't for the sake of it. It is like a puzzle of 1000 pieces where all the pieces does create a whole and make sense if you can be bothered to put the effort into it.

For fans of music, this is simply put a treat.

Thomas Feiner - The Opiates Revised

I would like to start this by saying that i honestly believe more or less every single release on samadhisound is worth getting. It is without a doubt one of the most consistently interesting contemporary labels out there and one that is carving out a nice niche on its own at that (I also make it no secret that i believe David Sylvian to be a god amongst men, but that is another discussion). One of the things i can do here is that i can make my opinion of stuff public in a nicely arranged way. This is one of those times when that feels very good. What i want to share is the Opiates, an absolutely marvellous piece of work from the worlds most underrated swede, Thomas Feiner.

What it proves in many ways is what a fundamentally powerful thing music can really be.

The style of the album is very much low key, downtempo soft orchestral pop music. The beauty of the strings constantly weighed against the roughness and melancholy of Feiner's own voice simply excels in providing an (what I dare say) important contrast to a lot of todays music. This is a collection of properly written tunes with a lot of heart behind them and even a few standout tracks.

In my eyes you have got two choices if you are going to make a masterpiece. Either you do something new, or you do it better then everyone else. This is the later. The whole thing has got a great sense of that you feel like you have heard it before quality. Take for example one of the standout tracks, Dinah and the beautiful blue. Drowned in nostalgia it feels like you have listened to this somewhere before and that it is all almost so familiar that you can hum it (trust me, the chorus is stupendously gorgeus). This is mainly due to extremely organic songwriting and composing, which is really just a fine way of saying that it all flows damn nicely. It is very much a lost classic.

The closest comparison i could possible give it is the movie Shawshank redemption. They very much share the same qualities and those great big life affirming qualities and both very clearly point out difference between synthetic sentimentality and genuine human emotion.

It is an incredibly easy album to fall in love with it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jORyPnUdQ48&feature=related - dinah and the beautiful...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQa6GSIjht4&feature=related - the siren song

Scott Walker - Climate Of Hunter

Scott Walker of Walker brothers fame released this greatly overlooked album in 1984 and it saw him shedding his skin in favour of a more pop oriented style. For many people the 80's is seen as the dark ages of music in terms of quality and artistic integrity. For me this is complete nonsense since my thesis is that a lot of the acts who where good in the 70's got a lot better in the 80's. Personally i believe it to be the big untapped decade of great records since no one is looking for them there. Proof: Scott Walker Climate of hunter.

What he did with Climate of hunter was an anti-pop album of sorts. This is done by using the surface of a mellow pop album and tricking you to go deeper and deeper with him into the rabbit hole. And oh how deep the rabbit hole goes, straight into the heart and mind of Scott Walker. Going with the album, you won't notice how increasingly weird and wonderful it gets, and that is a sign of a true master who has ''perfected'' his craft. What I am trying to say is that you really shouldn't be fooled by the ''dated'' drum sound or eerie pads for this is not some commercial super production, but instead a highly personal expression.

The marvel Walker produces exists, or more importantly coexists within the given framework of pop. The deconstruction of pop is in itself is absolutely essential because it shows us how fragile a genre can be and what happens when you're more interested in art than commodity. By seemingly combining drone notes, 80's pink floyd guitar solos and symphonic arrangements it all melts into a very unique and loveable voice.

Choosing specific tracks or even commenting on parts of the album is hard since i don't really know what is what. You are probably scratching your wondering how I can sit here and recommend it as a forgotten masterpiece without knowing it inside out. It is easy you see, the album is 31min long which is really not that long, and When an album is of this let us call it thoughtful length, there can in no way be any excuse not to sit it through from start until finish. Especially since it is about as complete an experience as you will ever get. That is what happened to me anyway. I can't remember just listening to one song of it.

All the truly good albums can very much be likened to a journey (in many ways much reminiscent of cinema). What makes this particular album unique is how easy it actually is. As long as you just take the time to sit down with it, it will do the job for you. Sure it is experimental, sure it has weird tendencies but it eases you into it so well that if you're not paying a good amount of attention you won't even notice the transition.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZCx5HRwDkY

Scott Walker – Climate Of Hunter

Forgotten Masterpieces Prologue

During some upcoming weeks and days i want to spend some time on stuff that's actually really worth it. i will write about 10 albums that i consider to be among the greatest ever done and that i feel have been truly neglected throughout the years. It will mostly be music that is in some way defined as pop music since that is what i consider to be the superior format for proper albums. What you can expect is music from the last 40 years which hopefully helps to show how powerful and genuinely awesome music can be at its absolute finest.

I apologise beforehand for the heavy focus on white men 40+ with slight narcissistic tendencies, it just happens to be that way. Still, i hope that the staggering amount of sheer quality of what i will present will refute any accusation in the vein of feminism and chauvinism.

This was simply the best i could come up with and whatever you take away from these albums, i hope you get the sensation of something musical in the same way all the best movies are cinematic.

Long live the oddballs

What they don't want you to know

The state of music today is simply put chaos. Economically and artistically it is all going down the drain. I don't know if that is the reason for it, or if there is something else going on but the decline of musical quality have been severely lacking for some time. Personally i believe it has to do with a fixation with image and a dull crowd. The problem that rises from all of this is a concerning loss of identity. Naturally i am not speaking about the really commercial stuff because that is simply put without any sort of merit orquality per definition. What i am talking about are the little smaller acts that play at festivals etc... I am talking about all the fleet foxes, Arcade Fires of the world. All those acts that have been praised about their smarts, social conscious and just general ''cleverness''. Problem is, it is not proper art, or rather it is not music as an art form. There is too much from the brain and too little from the heart and soul. Maybe they're just afraid?

If you have listened (not heard) to a bit of music, what you start feeling is the decline of real honesty in the craft and art. Just because you have a nice melody line to go with those chords doesn't mean you should. Music is a language and what you feel today is that you have already heard all the arguments, or rather, no one is actually willing t

o have an argument. People are only interested in having nice discussions about the general beauty of nature or something along those lines. Listening to the wonderful Michael Gira, what i feel is that personal expression is dead. No one is willing to take a risk and do something different. It is a bit like movies, all the best ones are about humans and ideas. Without those, you would just get an empty shell.

I think most good artists hear a lot of stuff they love, and all the good ones pick from a lot of varied places and spaces. Take all your influences and ask yourself what do I want to do? How can i make noise that sounds distinctly me? And most importantly, w

hat do i want to say?

If you listen to a lot of music you should naturally feel pretty much at home in a number of different genres. Take all those and ask yourself how you can combine the different parts you like into something interesting. What is it that you enjoy about metal and what is that you enjoy about dubstep? Distill those down to their essence and you will be able build something.

What I am looking for when i hear an album. Three easy points:

1. What are you trying to tell me about?

2. How are you telling/showing it to me?

3. Why are you trying to tell/show me?

These three points show clearly how a popular group like The Police had moments where they could genuinely transcend into something far greater than just pop music. It combined genres and was actually about something. Sting once upon a time actually wr

ote tunes with really interesting content and mood and all the members of Police brought it their personal touch. It was genuinely about music as a means of communication.

The explanation to why almost all of the good music is a bit odd is quite simple. We are all human beings and therefore we are all different. We all have a unique identity and personality and if you are truthful in the music you make, that will be reflected. Hence to a start, people will see it as sort of weird because it is you. The beauty of other people lie in their personality and you can't truly love another human being until you've spent a considerable amount of time with them.

See what I am getting at?

People

The spotify playlist above have bands that are connected and sound sort of similar, but the more you listen to it the more you feel that they are all truly individuals. It may sound weird at first, but that is because you are listening to the stuff of people, not accountants.

then again, guys like Richard D. James can get a bit overkill...

More human than human

Splice Review

Vincenzo Natali is definitely one of the most interesting directors working in ''mainstream'' cinema today. With pictures such as Cube, Cypher and Nothing he has proved himself to be a proper original who's at the end of the day simply put is extremely interesting. This is for me an important point to make with splice for whatever you may call it, it is just not dull.
Splice is basically about two young and sort of perfect hollywood scientists who go a wee bit too far by splicing animal and human dna they manage to create an entire new species. Of course the creature isn't just going to stay put and be nice, or is it? The two protagonists are played by Sarah Polley and Adrian Brody, who also just happen to be a couple. Adrian Brody in my opinion is a wonderful actor and Predators was in some ways the last piece of a puzzle that really did show that he can pull off any sort of role effortlessly. Point being: name me three actors that believably would be able to do both Szpilman from the wonderful Polanski movie the Pianist and Royce from Predators. Sarah Polley is someone i really haven't seen before and i felt she didn't really manage this piece. It is probably because there are some quite striking problems with the script concerning the characters and partly because of the fact that she didn't made me buy into everything her character felt, and that is very much the main flaw the movie. Some parts didn't feel properly written and i thought the motivation and explanation for what the characters feels etc... weren't really shown. at all. Secondly, and it's very simple, they should have went with the strength of their convictions and gone all the way with the story because unfortunately, the final 10-15min of the film are just klisché horror movie stuff, and it had until then been too interesting and too gripping to justify bailing out.
What really worked with the movie though was the mood and story. Simply put it is actually quite good and more of a psychological and twisted drama/thriller than a dull slasher or horror film. What the movie has at it's best is a sort of twisted Polanski and Cronenberg vibe going on, you know, bits of psychosexual and bits organic horror.
In any creature sci-fi/fantasy type of film an important part are the creatures. Looking at both the design and the technical elements Splice definitely excels. The cgi is very good (and not overdone), the props look very ''nice'' but where the actual magic happens is in the design department. The main creature (which they name dreN) which is something they created by splicing both human and animal dna. It is a wonderfully weird affair, never knowing which animals they used you are constantly a bit nervous about which properties and abilities it has.

I want to conclude by saying this: Splice is not a a flawless affair, but it has a properly interesting mood and the ideas within are very interesting and gripping. It is something different and that is always worth celebrating.