There already might be an indie-ey theme developing around this blog, and I hope to redress that with the other two albums I bought in Cambridge on Saturday, so hang on. I can't believe I had to go all the way there to physically shop for music, though admittedly I could have gone to Ipswich, which is less than half the distance in the opposite direction, but I don't know it. I really, really miss Fopp. Easily the best thing to arrive in Bury in, say, 20 years, it had the unfortunate effect of putting the town's inferior but still decent music retailing incumbent out of business before it folded six months later, so off to Cambridge I went. Luckily Jolly (James Oliver-Smith, plus he's the sort of person who might say jolly!, though he never does) wanted to come too and had a car to drive us. By the way, if you're planning to see Run Fatboy, Run, it is incredibly average.
This was a reissue, with seven extra tracks tacked on to the original 1984 release. Oddly, it's the extra tracks that toy with normality and established genre music: vocal harmonies on a cover of What To Do by the Stones, funk on I'm Not Here and punk rock in the first half of Teenager. As the sleeve notes, two live reviews by contemporary journalists and a piece comissioned for the reissue by indie music writer Michael Azzerad, make clear, it's the stuff that made the cut that's out of the ordinary. While Curt Kirkwood, the album's sole songwriter, is credited with bringing in diffuse older influences, namely country, bluegrass, Tex-Mex and the Grateful Dead (Azzerad's words not mine - I was under the impression that Tex-Mex is a kind of food), his songs are so much more than an amalgamation of tastefully unfashionable influences. His guitar work is brilliant. It's exploratory but not really experimental, because having to be experimental would be too much like following the rules for this guy. It goes all over, always searching, sometimes in familiar places and sometimes not; it feels like the guitar is everywhere around you at once and that it's somehow evocative of things that you've never experienced. There's psychedelic car chase music in Magic Toy Missing and in We're Here there's a song that sounds like people waltzing under a beautiful night sky. If stars talked to the stargazer rather than just gazing back, the result would be Aurora Borealis. If a man plodding through the desert to his death with vultures circling overhead was plucked at the last moment to safety by a friendly bird of prey, he would remember the experience through the haze of heatstroke as Plateau. Listening to this album might give you cause to think I'm talking rubbish about it, but I am sure that by then it would have imbued in you visions that were different but just as special as mine.
But here's the thing. Although Curt Kirkwood's unpolished voice, with its '"free-associative tone control"', fits well on the quiet tracks, on the louder Lake Of Fire it sticks out like a sore thumb, especially along with the pseudo-Biblical lyrics, which would be done sooo much better by Black Francis in a few years time. So there's a fly in the ointment there. Chris Kirkwood is a decent bassist, but the real problem is that Derrick Bostrom really lets the side down with his drumming. His constant and unchanging beat might seem like a solid foundation, but songs like this are houses built on sand - they only last so long before you get fed up with them and they crumble. There's a theory I have about why people get bored of the music they at first love. When we listen to a song and like it, our minds pick out the best bits; be they be a riff, the way the singer's voice sounds or the propulsiveness of the rhythm section; and bring them to the surface of the music, neglecting everything else. After repeated listens, though, every element of the song is heard, and that's when the annoying niggles come to the surface, a monotonous drum beat, say, and cause the listener to cast the CD into a dusty corner and renounce all love or knowledge of it. Songwriters: it doesn't matter how good that special touch is, if there's a chink in your song's armour it is living on borrowed time. I've had Meat Puppets II for four days; in four months I might hate it. But 'tis better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.
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