Essential albums #1: Love – Forever Changes

Forever changes is the ultimate beautiful, paranoid, dissonant, end-of-the-decade suicide note from the city of broken dreams. A gang of earthlings fronted by ethereal, handsome, tragic Arthur Lee, Love summed up the late sixties, somehow embodying the promise of that decade (the success of the civil rights movement, the stirring of subcultures, the politicisation of youth and the explosion of pop culture and music-as-art) and the flipside – the fin-de-siecle nightmare (LA gothic – Altamont, ‘nam, the demise of the Kennedys, acid burnout, excess and disillusionment).

Forever Changes feels like an open-roofed drive along the wide promenades of Los Angeles, with its haciendas, its carparks, its canyons, its diners, chain stores and gas stations, its festering underbelly, its grotesque wealth, its oppressive open space, its lost souls and its casualties. The city of the Mamas and the Papas on the one hand and Charles Manson on the other.

On this album it’s a city recalled by the melancholy flamenco trumpet solo of Alone Again Or, the deceptively upbeat opening track; the menacing conscript’s lament A House is Not a Motel; the psychedelic psychobabble of The Red Telephone and the shimmering existentialism of You Set the Scene. And through it all, the young Arthur Lee, at the height of his beauty and power, singing:

This is the time and life that I am living
And I’ll face each day with a smile
For the time that I’ve been given’s such a little while
And the things that I must do consist of more than style

This is the only thing that I am sure of
And that’s all that lives is gonna die
And there’ll always be some people here to wonder why
And for every happy hello, there will be good-bye
There’ll be time for you to put yourself on

Everything I’ve seen needs rearranging
And for anyone who thinks it’s strange
Then you should be the first to want to make this change
And for everyone who thinks that life is just a game
Do you like the part you’re playing

The story of Love is only more poignant 40 years later, because we all know how the dream ended.

PS: Forget The Doors. They weren’t in the race.

Jens Lekman @ The Corner Hotel 11/03/08

“This is a song about cutting all the bullshit and the lies, so we can get on with our lives,” deadpans the incongruously sweet-faced Swede Jens Lekman before launching a capella into the brutal, but undeniably catchy ‘I Am Leaving You Because I Don’t Love You’. The other members of his oddball-yet-gorgeous band then join him on stage for the rest of the song and it blooms with the familiar lush production of the joyous album from which it is plucked – Night Falls Over Kortedala – an album part Scott Walker, part Four Tops seasoned with a dash of wry Jarvis Cocker.

The show is perfectly pitched – intimate, yet celebratory, Jens’s songs lose nothing in the translation from studio to stage, thanks to some well placed samples from an onstage PC and the enthusiasm of his part-Swedish, part-Australian band, which includes a stunning girl in a bright yellow jumpsuit on drums, an angular alchemist on samples, a pixie-like bassist and a compact string section. That voice is enough to carry a two hour gig with very little assistance, but the ensemble feel turns his set into a party.

There are some jovial road tales, an extended spoken word introduction to ‘Postcard to Nina’ (about a lesbian friend of his who presents him as her ‘boyfriend’ to her conservative father) and some self-mockery when we hear a snippet of Kylie’s ‘Give me Just a Little More Time’ during ‘The Opposite of Hallelujah’. We’re even treated to some formation dancing antics, with everybody leaving their stage positions to ‘fly’ around the stage like aeroplanes during the bridge of ‘Sipping on the Sweet Nectar’. It sounds twee, but it works; it’s guileless and charming.

For all the fun and games, Jens runs a tight ship, and when sound problems (a speaker threatening to explode in close proximity to this reviewer’s eardrum) emerge during ‘Nina’ he makes his displeasure known in no uncertain terms, though he never loses his sense of humour in the process.

The shimmering ‘Arms Around me’ is a highlight. With its meandering beat and Johnny Marr-esque riff, it sounds like all the best bits of indie pop from the last twenty years. The same can be said of ‘Black Cab’. For the finale Jens gets brilliant support act Gary Olsen back on stage on trumpet for a stomping Motown-tinged number, and then enjoins us to whistle the riff to ‘Friday night at the drive in Bingo’, with surprising success. It’s comforting to hear that Jens might be bringing his Swedish pop sensibilities to Melbourne for good – he’s a delight.

Billy Bragg @ the Prince of Wales 31/01/08

The last time Billy Bragg played Melbourne he brought a full band which included legendary Small Faces keyboardist Ian McLagan. Many of his best-known anthems had been completely rearranged, for better or worse, and set to rockabilly and calypso rhythms. Billy even danced.

This time it was, as the title of his 1987 collection puts it, back to basics – nothing but the man, his electric guitar and a familiar vulpine reflection cast by the single spotlight on the far stage wall. A return to vintage Bragg – and the man needs no adornment.

Bragg’s starkly beautiful songs, stripped of all production and carried along on a wave of agit prop and amiable banter, are timelessly absorbing. Two hours and two encores later the sold-out crowd was still roaring for more.

Classics like Accident Waiting to Happen, Little Time Bomb, Greetings to the New Brunette and Levi Stubbs’ Tears need nothing but his plugged-in axe and flat-vowelled Essex accent to work their magic. The lyrics are still evocative of the cold, Thatcherite Britain that inspired them, yet they take me straight back to a suburban Australian teenage bedroom where I played them over and over.

Perhaps the pinnacle of his lyrical achievement is the ever-evolving Waiting for the Great Leap Forward, updated regularly to keep its political content fresh – so it’s the ‘Hugo Chavez highway’ in place of the original Che Guevara one, and ‘smart bombs in the hands of dumb people’. And he’s no stranger to what’s been going on over here – we get treated to a clever re-working featuring Howard and co as the villains.

A large measure of his time on stage is spent ‘in conversation’. He talks about being an old Clash fan, loving vinyl and preferring Melbourne to Sydney, a claim he backs up with The Yarra Song, which has a level of detail about Aussie rules football and Melbourne weather that makes his claim impossible to refute.

As always, his set is heavily peppered with the earnest political rants for which he has at times been lampooned. Back in 2003, in the midst of the Iraq invasion, the commentary was full of anger and disappointment. This time, drawing huge cheers from the crowd, he danced on the spectre of the erstwhile Howard government, and celebrated a potential new dawn in this country – though he warned against cynicism setting in. This monologue might have gone on perhaps a bit long for one or two cynics in the audience with tired 40-something feet, but for most it was a powerful moment of shared jubilation.

And the earnest discussion is punctuated by some moments of stand up comedy – Billy can be bloody hilarious, though there’s a heavy dose of ‘dad humour’ about his jocularity. But fair go – the man is a dad. During the coda of The Saturday Boy he throws in the riff of the White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army. Then, “for those who didn’t understand why the people under 30 were laughing”, he adds a quick blast of Smoke on the Water – “same shit different day”.  He makes the audience vote on whether he should play a Bob Dylan or Carpenters cover (out of curiosity, I voted to hear his spin on the Carpenters) and then plays a snippet of the Carpenters’ Superstar before launching into Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice it’s Alright. What a card.

But it’s not just about showmanship and clever lyrics. In 1997, when Billy channelled Woody Guthrie’s lost song sheets through his own poignant melodies, he created a masterpiece in Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key, a ‘euphemistically erotic’, lilting ballad that demonstrates in a nutshell why Bragg is far more than a pamphleteer. The sheer beauty of the song transfixes the audience.

The final rousing number of the night is A New England, the Bragg song made popular by the late, great Kirsty Maccoll. Leading the crowd into its last chorus Billy prompts emotionally,“for Kirsty!”, and our full-bodied response is deafening. It’s magic.

Susanna Nelson

Appeared in PBSfm online magazine.

The legend of Toto: serving up classic rock

With their swag of classics like Hold the Line, Rosanna and the ubiquitous Africa, Toto have become synonymous with slick, well-produced pop rock from a time when image and visual trickery was less important than how you sounded on FM radio.

As they approach their 30th anniversary tour, the band join the ranks of a select few – the Stones and U2 spring to mind – who have been together and touring for all that time.

“We’ve all being playing our instruments since we were single digits,” says founding member Steve Lukather over the phone from LA. “I first picked up a guitar when I was eight, listening to the Beatles.”

The band honed their craft as respected session players on a number of projects in the early 70s before forming Toto, the ultimate musos’ band, later that decade. Once described by Eddie Van Halen as “collectively the best musicians on the planet”, throughout their careers the guys have continued to ‘ghost’ on some of the most famous records in rock history, including Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and collaborated with contemporaries like Don Henley, Boz Scaggs, Steely Dan and George Harrison.

They’ve also hung out with some famous starlets, like Rosanna Arquette, after whom the Grammy-winning hit single is named, though the band has claimed in the past that the song itself is not about her. “She’s never really forgiven us for that,” says Steve.

There aren’t many people in the known universe who haven’t been exposed to the ridiculously radio-friendly hit single Africa, with its driving tribal beat and infectious falsetto chorus which can prove so disastrous when attempted at drunken karaoke nights. The song has been on high rotation on most classic hits stations around the world since it first topped the charts in 1983.

“Africa has been extremely good to us,” says Steve. “It has allowed me to live a comfortable life.” But can he still listen to it? “I couldn’t put the record on at home, but when we’re up on stage and we have the audience singing along, I certainly get into the spirit,” he says.

Toto finally got to the continent that provided them with the inspiration for their most famous song in 1997, playing to a delirious South African audience who went crazy when the song started. “It was awesome. We went on safari and saw some sights – we loved it,” says Steve. “We’ve toured a lot of places that other bands don’t go to. Seeing the world is one of the great perks of being in a successful band.” So it was the song itself that took them to Africa in the end.

A lot of time has elapsed since their well-produced hey-day, and the band has continued to make music which, while not as instantly accessible as their most famous hits, is satisfying to them. The most recent album has been described as a return to prog-rock, with some darker lyrical themes.

“We’re older now, with families, and there’s more to write about than fast cars and girls, you know? Turn on the TV and there’s not a whole lot of good news out there. It’s a world problem, not just an American one, but it’s about the word ‘freedom’ being distorted. I want to save the world, not destroy it.”

As one of the original members of a band that has always been known for its hands-on approach in the studio and a tight, technically faultless sound and production, Steve has little time for manufactured pop. “There are a lot of assumptions made about the 12-20 demographic, that they want to hear that stuff. And the same goes for the over 50s and what they want to hear. I mean, we’re over 50 and we still rock really hard. You get these pop superstars that can’t even sing Happy Birthday, you know? Go figure.”

So what does he think of American Idol and other reality TV shows? “Well, these kids are on a TV show and it makes them a star for five minutes and then, in most cases, it’s over. Sure, they can sing the material given to them, but that doesn’t make them artists. It’s like the tortoise and the hare, you know. We had to struggle to get to where we are, but we’ve been around a long time now.”

“Music is my passion, my life. Something keeps drawing me back,” says Steve.

Toto are touring Australia in March to celebrate 30 years together. Tix on sale now!

04 March Brisbane Tivoli
05 March Sydney The Enmore Theatre
07 March Melbourne The Palais Theatre
08 March Adelaide Thebarton Theatre
10 March Perth Metro City

Appeared in FasterLouder online magazine.

Liam Finn @ The Northcote Social Club

Diminutive Liam Finn, with his engaging, affable manner, fisherman’s beard and leprechaun-like appearance, is well suited to the low stage and informality of the Northcote Social Club on a Thursday night. There are lots of shout-outs to the audience, and good-natured banter and horsing about with fellow rock progeny Eliza Jane “EJ” Barnes.

Musically though, it’s straight down to business. Finn is a maestro who manages to be every member of the band rolled into one dynamic if slightly crazed operator, peering intensely over that beard and darting about to twiddle knobs and dodge the obstacle course of wires and microphones around him. And there is something endearing about those pristine white ‘dad’ trainers tapping furiously on the effects peddles.

Finn has a genial suck-it-and-see approach to the hapless instruments at his command, which he mercilessly thrashes, flogs, plucks and thrusts. His unconventional studio style – he prefers to record in analogue and is his own producer – translates well to the stage, though at times it’s easy to feel like an observer of some bizarre onstage experiment.

He moves from lead guitar – which he loops so that he can race off and thrash the shit out of the drum-kit – to theramin, which he wields like a possessed Brian Wilson, back to the drums, all the while holding sublime vocals together with partner-in-crime, EJ. The two have a personal chemistry which translates well to their musical interactions, and on songs like ‘Second Chance,’ their vocals meld beautifully above Finn’s manic instrumental adventures.

With the release of his debut album I’ll Be Lightning, Liam Finn emerges as a ridiculously talented individual who deserves to be measured and reviewed without reference to the Finn family twinkle in his eye – or at times in his voice – but that is a near impossible task for any reviewer. He takes the ‘play Six Months In A Leaky Boat’ heckles with good humour, and I suspect he won’t be judged by those standards for very long – he’s another kettle of fish entirely.

 Appeared in PBSfm online magazine.

The Brunettes @ The Northcote Social Club

Peddling their shiny new sub-pop release, Structure and Cosmetics, The Brunettes hit the Northcote Social Club with the distinct glow – and the barest traces of road-weariness – of a band starting to make an international impact.

Jonathan Bree and Heather Mansfield are the photogenic core of the band – the ‘structure’ and the ‘cosmetics’, if you’ll forgive the cheap shot. Live, the stylish duo are bolstered by six other musicians on a slightly crowded stage – including a guy who occasionally races over to cover the keyboards while Heather is busy on the harmonica, the xylophone or the oboe, as she often is. It’s chaotic, but it works. In contrast to their studio sound, the band tonight has a collective, bombastic presence similar to The Go! Team or Architecture in Helsinki.

The heady, impossibly upbeat Archies aesthetic – promoted by the statuesque Heather in her very Vegas-entertainer-circa-1968 trumpet-sleeved white shift, in league with that very handy horn section – is balanced by Jonathan’s angular guitar shapes, moody presence and nasal Television inspired vocals.

The Brunettes’ sound is, loosely speaking, 1960s pop meets 1980s production values. When I described the Brunettes to a friend thus he said “Oh, like the B52s?”… Well, yes… and no. While there are a couple of self-consciously twee moments, like when the entire band is introduced with the help of a Sesame Street rhyming chant, not to mention some verge-of-daggy YMCA-style arm movements during the ironically-titled Brunettes Against Bubblegum Youth; there is enough depth to rescue them from going the way of the B52s and launching into novelty orbit.

There are some truly lovely girl- group harmonies and arrangements, and songs like the current album’s title track have a depth and majesty to them that belie the bubblegum front. Who knew there was optimistic pop of this calibre still left to be made? Well, perhaps last year’s tour-mates and sub-pop alumni The Shins. There’s certainly a shared musical exuberance there.

Appeared in PBSfm online magazine.

The Roys – Holus Bolus (In-Fidelity Records)

The Roys are a self-confessed, good old fashioned Aussie pub rock band. In pretentious indie circles there was a time when an admission like this would have made them pariahs. Several years of dirty rock n’ roll later and balls-out rock, with irony surgically (and painfully) removed, it’s not only acceptable, but actively feted by coolsie types – not that the Roys would care about what they think.

Debut long player Holus Bolus announces its unashamedly country roots with opener ‘Body Double’, replete with rock vocals hollered and yodelled over 12 bar blues and a wailing guitar. Elsewhere on the album, brothers Simon and Felix Juliff venture into boisterous, commercial-radio-friendly ZZ Top terrain. ‘Sexy Man’ is music to pick a bar-room brawl to, or advertise a car stereo – the lads do a good line in what you can only hope is ironic sleaze-swagger, complete with a group of howlin’ mamas on backing vocals. Then there are the boot-scootin’, hootenanny misfires such as ‘Clover’ and the catchy, but tragic ‘Miles.’

Thankfully, occasionally the mood shifts to an entirely more satisfying alt-country sound, which traces its lineage from Young and Parsons through to Jeff Tweedy. It’s a much better look than the knee-slapping, Republican Convention, rodeo soundtrack of the faster numbers, and proves there’s some serious song-writing talent hidden beneath the bluster and busy fretwork.

Be this as it may, The Roys do retain the taint of the vaguely daggy pub (or worse, party) band for hire – you know, the sort who will cheerfully knock out good-natured, suspiciously well-rehearsed covers of ‘My Angel is a Covergirl’ and ‘The Joker’ before the punters can say “a VB stubbie, mate” over at the bar. Make of that what you will – but there’s no shame in enthusiastic, heartfelt rock n roll, with a heavy country twang, if that’s what you’re after. And there’s plenty of that on display here.

Appeared in PBSfm online magazine.

The Drones @ The Corner Hotel Saturday

The Drones – the group dubbed ‘Australia’s most important band’ – took to the stage at the Corner on Saturday night to a capacity crowd, in one of their final performances before they head to the States to showcase their considerable talents. Velvet Underground-esque support act Snowman set the agenda with a set of haunting, richly layered noise using sax, violin, wide-eyed chanting and at times almost operatic vocals to build a wall of defiant, experimental sound.

The Drones peddle a brand of simple, yet sophisticated dark rock, pioneered by the likes of The Birthday Party and The Dirty Three and energetic front man Gareth Liddiard channels the ghosts of every disgruntled, black-clad loner who ever sat down with his guitar and a chewed pencil.

On CD, some Drones songs can sound under-produced and murky – but live, Liddiard completely inhabits them, spitting out the pithy syllables like stray bits of tobacco from his rollie. He’s met by a similarly angry and unfeasibly tall audience who sing back every word to big numbers like the captivating, anthemic, ‘Shark Fin Blues’, with the additional spectator cry of “Go you Drones!” hollered for good measure.

At times a number of burly blokes at the front attempt to revive the near-extinct practice of crowd-surfing, which is alarming considering the size of some of them. Eventually a smaller guy is lifted good-naturedly above the throng. Nobody else tries to mount the audience, but there is a definite rowdiness to some audience members, who I suspect miss a lot of the subtlety and depth in songs like ‘Locust’.

The tales woven into each song evoke something that can only be described as Australian Gothic – and this refers more to the mystical storytelling tradition of a wild colonial past, of the sort brought to technicolour life by Sidney Nolan (and, more recently, Nick Cave’s film, The Proposition), than any 80s eyelinered subculture. Indeed, Cave is probably the link between the sub-cultural and historical ‘gothic’ territories mined by The Drones.

This heritage is thrown into sharp relief by an acoustic encore performance of ‘Sixteen Straws’, a ballad in the literary sense – 30 verses of rum, sodomy and the lash (as The Pogues might say) at the hands of the dreaded British in Port Macquarie, in a century long ago and far from the consciousness of much of the crowd.

With Liddiard at the helm, The Drones are nothing short of masterful in a live context and their rich storytelling deserves to be heard on the world stage.

Appeared in PBSfm online magazine. Photos copyright Susanna Nelson 2007.

Lo-Fi-Fnk – Boylife (Speak and Spell)

 

Lo Fi by name, but certainly not by nature, Swedes Lo-Fi-Fnk are all flashing lights, day-glo rave flavours and seriously annoying stop-start keyboard blips and sequencers. Buddies Leo Drougge and August Hellsing formed the band at school in 2001, “trying their hand at what could only be described as instrumental soft house disguised as Bruce Springsteen,” according to their publicity. I wonder what the Boss would have to say about that – Boylife, their debut LP, is about as far from Thunder Road as Fatboy Slim is from Neil Young. And I don’t know about you, but to these ears, that’s pretty far.

The lads are bursting with energy and a swag of revived sound samples last heard somewhere in a Docklands warehouse in the 90s. They were obviously giving Armand Van Helden’s back catalogue a good workout and imbibing far too much red cordial when they came up with this garish debut – it plays like a continuous aural strobe light. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot more to it.

To be fair, some moments of Prince-like funk and nasal Pet Shop Boys vocal stylings (albeit with a thick Swedish inflection) occasionally emerge before they are crash tackled by the army of busy, programmed beats. In the less noisy moments it is even possible to trace a lineage from Boylife back to the infectious early days of ‘Madchester’ in the early 90s when pop first met hard dance in the shape of bands like the Beloved and the Shamen. But perhaps a little less of the frustratingly random beats and blips and more of the melody of those bands would have made this CD bearable.

The band have been likened to a ‘happy Cut Copy’, but Cut Copy’s innovative, layered electronic music makes Lo-Fi-Fnk seem like overexcited toddlers. The big floor-packing single ‘Change Channel’ will definitely appeal to young and crazy shape-pullers who can accommodate an assault of multiple, competing, asymmetrical beats, synth blasts and schoolground chant vocals, but for the most part I felt like a rabbit trapped in front of one of those enormous semi-trailers festooned with marker lights. There are far better things coming out of Sweden right now.

Appeared in PBSfm online magazine.

Shy Child – Noise Won’t Stop (Wall of Sound / Liberator)

 

True to their word, Brooklyn duo, Shy Child, keep a frenetic pace throughout Noise Won’t Stop. The album is a showcase of so-called ‘new rave’, but with a bouncy, shrieky edge that will keep enthusiasts (and all the neighbours in the block) up late into the night. It should probably come with an advisory sticker for anyone who is allergic to the interminable synth of happy hardcore, which some of us thought was safely locked away in the 90s vault for now. Wrong.

These guys have probably kept purveyors of fine keytars and other synth relics in business long after they would otherwise have turned away the last big-haired punter back in 1989, just as computers were taking over the dance music scene. Unfortunately, the Shy Child guys use these otherwise pleasing instruments in a way that would probably make big muscly blokes down the local nightclub rhythmically punch the air and ‘build shelves’ in a not entirely pleasing way.

This album harks back to the dance paradigm where a low fidelity sound built to a crescendo of high definition wizardry, and that build up was the high point of an otherwise fairly predictable trajectory. It’s a formula that worked for many years before the punters tired of it, and its appearance on an album at this point in time seems either hopelessly out of date or the start of a brand new revival. Obviously the fans of this 21st century take on 90s techno will be yelling above the din that this is the new future of dance music.

Noise Won’t Stop is too testosterone-fuelled for this listener, and while it will please the fans – angry dance-oriented boys, mostly – it jabs too hard and with too little variation to do anything for me. Like it or loathe it, with bands like Shy Child and Lo Fi Fnk, the 90s dance revival has finally arrived.

Appeared in PBSfm online magazine.