Happy Mondays - Freaky Dancin' Live

Happy Mondays are truely the pinacle of the 'Madchester' scene which emerged in the late eighties/early nineties, combining the alternative/punk method with hippy psychedelic ideals all mixed in with the emergence of Exstacy in the UK's club scene, it caused a total media storm. With naive politicians and ultra-conservative media pundits blasting the genre for being some kind of drug cult (which it clearly wasn't), the bands stood through it all and emerged as many of the nineties best loved bands. Happy Mondays really advertised the hedonistic lifestyle and their psychedelic grooves just captured the listener's imagination. Today's review is a 12" debut single, Freaky Dancin' (Live).

Freaky Dancin' (Live) counts us into a nice trippy repetative groove, almost as if someone had spiked neu!'s drinks. This groove will flow throughout the whole track, and sounds really warm and funky. The singing comes on over the top kinda hazy and un-refined. It's clearly a live recording. However what's really important is the upper of the music, and that damn fine groove going on and on, makes you move your body in time. It's so chill. It carries on to the end, not a single down note, all positive.

The Egg is the B side, opening up with some psychedelic Syd barrett-lite guitar plonks over a laid back stalking beat, before getting into it's groove where it sounds very eighties, and very cool. the music just develops over time, before we get to some amatuerish singing, taking nothern soul and mixing it with a total druggy stoner feel. It's a neat mixture of psychedelic with eighties pop (yes, including those heavily reverbed snares) that really shows the Happy Mondays as a band still finding it's feet, escaping from the Joy Division sound by it's own accord. After grinding to a halt, we get the second track of the B side, Freaky Dancin', the studio version. A more refined and polished sound, which doesn't obscure the amazing groove and just upbeat sound, almost dreamlike and totally chilled out peaceful like. It's definately Bez singing here, that's for sure.

It's a shocker of a top quality single here, and I love it.

Judas Priest - Sin After Sin

Ahh, Heavy Metal...
Back when I was a teenager, I was obsessed with heavy metal, it kinda struck a chord with my geekyness and shyness, but looking back on it, I can barely listen to most of it as it just seems rather pointless and pathetic. Like an audio version of Dungeons & Dragons. It seems to get all the geekyness and wrap it in a cloak of manufactured malice, which ends up coming across all futile. However Judas Priest are one of the true exceptions. Formed in the industrial city of Birmingham, Priest started off as a kinda post-psychedelic heavy blues band, their first album, Rocka Rolla, a total delight. It's utterly bleak, without veering into the pseudo-gothic pretentions of which the genre is now associated. By their second album, Sad Wings Of Destiny, Priest had refined their sound into a chugging behemoth, not of the Hawkwind/Motorhead style, but more streamlined, more angry. By this, their third album, the blues element had faded, and what we're left with is kinda like metal's 'year zero', in it's new and fresh sound. But was Sin After Sin the first of the new fast metal, or the end of the post-psychedelic heavies?

The album opens up with Sinner, an epic fast paced monster of a track featuring searing vocals, a steady beat and chugging riffage. The signature Priest sound. Halford's voice still has those bluesy influences during the verses, but when it hits the chorus he's screeching in splendid falsetto form. The song features religious imagery presented in a sci-fi way, while musically it's total heavy metal featuring loads of different sections building up an epic feel, with tremendous playing featuring the kind of energy that left Zeppelin and Sabbath choking in their dust. The middle break features a delicious Hendrix take by the now sadly retired K. K. Downing. This however is not the summer of love, this is ghostly and alien, with Halford over the top with menacing imagery before returning to standard form and a more standard approach guitar solo. The track just then builds up to it's climactic... climax, where Rob Halford's voice just gets higher and punchier. Ouch. It's a killer track and one of heavy metal's defining statements. The next track, a cover of Joan Baez's Diamonds And Rust just kicks right off, with a KISS-like riff. It's a more poppier metal, but it's actually good! It doesn't carry the weight of Joan's original, and so feels rather synthetic, and if done by lesser bands, would come off cheap. Here though it just works and just feels right. It's absurd, but it works as a metal song. Also some of Tipton's lead breaks lay the groundwork for their next album, Stained Class. The third track, Starbreaker is kinda the album's let down. It's really average and just kinda plods along in comparison. It's not that it's a bad track, but it lacks any real energy, and the science fiction themes just float above the track in a sub-moorecock fashion. It kinda shows that this album is solid when a track that is merely 'good' is the let down. Side 1 finishes off with The Last Rose Of Summer. See, even these leather clad bastards have a sensitive side. Unlike say, Poison's 'Every Rose has It's Thorn', this track does not feel like plastic emotions sung in order to get into the girl's (or boy's) trousers. There's a distinct post-psychedelic feel to it, which harks back to my theory, that Priest were really the last of the sixties style bands. It's not a great track here, and lyrically it's kinda clunky, but it's a superb ending to the first side of the record, closing it nicely and not giving you any hint at the barbarism that lays ahead. If the first side of this record is the closing swansong of an ageing music, then the second side is the blueprint for metal.

We start off with an instrumental break, Let Us Prey, pseudo-church guitar harmonies which bleed into Call For The Priest,  a balls-to-the-wall proto speed metal headbanging moshpitting slobberknocker of a track. It's fast, it's heavy, it's aggressive, it's got that steady fast beat. It's just a total fun track, played by superb musicians who must've surely known that they were treading new ground. The Let us Prey harmony returns with Halford now inventing power metal with his warrior-like chants before we get into a lovely duelling guitar section leading into another harmonised part just totally down and to the point. The track races to it's climax, leading to the bluesy depression-soaked rock of Raw Deal, describing Halford's experience in a famous gay bar,. The bass pounds through, the music taking various turns throughout, always coming across as bitterness personified as music. It's not bitterness against homosexuals, as Halford himself is gay, but bitterness at how it had to be kept in the dark, hidden. After describing the act of sex, the track then leads into it's climax, with Rob's screams coming through and then slamming into a post coital disregard for what has happened, in total spite. After the frank openness of Raw Deal, we're taken into Here Come The Tears Taking that psychedelic feeling of The Last Rose Of Summer, but taking it to an emotional nadir. There's no optimism here, no pretence, just unrelenting misery and Halford at his most emotive, whilst it builds up into one of the most soul crushing guitar breaks in the whole genre. Soaked in the damp fluids of the blues without sounding fake like Clapton, this just carries the track through dragging us into a resolution. Through the murky waters of despair into an explosion of emotion, which ends it all... until the next track starts to trickle in, Vague watery dots of music which give no hint at the pure anger and hatred present in Dissident Aggressor, the track that has yet to be supassed interms of metal's barbaric intent. The aggressive outlet of all the emotion that has gone on before it. Halford does not sing so much as shoot the words at you, while the rhythm chuggs along propelling us further forward, the solo not much of a solo as a mess of deliciously sharp noise which penetrates the ears before building up struggling and fighting to survive, building up to a sudden end.

This album is perhaps the only metal album you'll find that I'll mark as a 'MUST HAVE'. Because quite simply, if you've heard this album, then you've heard everything the genre has to offer. Like literally, the genre hasn't really progressed since Sin After Sin's release in 1977. Whilst Iron Maiden may have streamlined the music to it's purest form, they never take it further, and likewise the more 'extreme' areas of metal, such as black and death, are essentially Deep Purple with extra shouting.
This LP is also an example of how clever track positions make an album. the whole of the second side is set up to just bring you to an emotional peak, with anger, bitterness and sadness leading into sheer brutality. Whilst metal is seen as something of an embarassment in the music world, I have no problem admitting that I just really enjoy this record.

Boney M - Belfast

Boney M are a popular multi-national (Jamaica, Germany and more!)disco group, achieving success in the late seventies with their peculiar brand of offbeat pop which combines reggae, soul, disco, funk and a particularly German style of deadpan humour. This single, Belfast, was their fifth single and topped the charts in Germany and the UK.

Belfast jumps right in with a funky disco beat, a dense sound with some nice distorted guitar work, the machine like intro takes us into a nice groove. The intro/chorus is almost militaristic and reminds me of German drinking songs. Marcia Barrett's got a nice kinda subtle voice which really works well with the groove. It's a very bizarre song, dancing grooves, disco stylings and political lyrics, but it kinda works in this disjointed way. The song kinda just loops itself around until fading out. It feels like it's missing some main parts, an unfinished song.

Plantation Boy is our B side, starting off in a disco/reggae style, just bouncing along in an optimistic fashion. The vocals come across as like it's an old island song, but with definite pop hooks. Lyrics searching for a positive future, to rise up from being a slave labourer, which work well with the lighthearted music to create a nice upbeat track. Musically again it just kinda loops itself away without any real bridges and breaks, but works better with it's bouncing groove. Again it fades to silence.

So yeah, two decent songs here. Whilst not on the same level as Earth, Wind & Fire, or Chic, Boney M can really work some good stuff together. It's also worth pointing out that while often looked back as like some embarrassing joke band due to their offbeat music, Boney M had a different groove and were still able to carry on the Afro-futurist stylings that were at the heart of disco. Good single.

David Bowie - Where Are We Now?

So, yes, after ten years, Bowie releases a new single. Becomming centre stage in the music media once again by just releasing a sudden new song without any fanfare or social media wankery. Also there is the news of a new album(!!!!) due out in March, which I am so looking forward to. With so many rumours buzzing around Bowie's health and other issues, it's kinda hard not to follow through on the media bandwagon a bit, and suddenly proclaiming to be an oracle of David bowie knowledge (though I will point y'all to a post last year about his classic album, Low) Anyways this new song unfortunately, is not on 7", so you're treated to a review of it on youtube...

The song has been said stylistically to be going back to his Berlin Trilogy, however while there is a distinct element of that sound (in particular, Lodger), the thing is that, that's just the Bowie sound, and every album he's done post Tin Machine, has been accused of returning to the Berlin feel, though in this case, it may be to connect the soft and fragile music with it's likewise fragile lyrical content. Some have compared this track to Robert Wyatt, and yeah, it's noticable, but in the way that Bowie has always had a similar sound to the likes of Wyatt and Ayers. That kinda artistic pop that still sounds timeless.

It takes us in with a slow rhythm, kinda airy and dreamlike before Bowie start singing in a melancholic fashion, about being amongst everyday people walking through Berlin. The chorus doesn't really pick up pace but just ups the emotion a bit. It really works with the surreality of the music. The drums later pick up tempo, keeping this nice groove going on with an almost frippatronic guitar sound via excessive delays (Fripp of course also retired, but Tony Visconti surely picked up a trick or two), and the song fades to silence. The references to places around Berlin strike a chord with me, having visited there during a rough point in life (and stayed in a hostel not too far from where Bowie lived whilst there) so it also brings back a kinda sentimentality to me as well.

Despite being educated in the visual arts, I won't discuss the video much here as it seems that people are focusing more on that than they are the song itself. Which is a total shame, as it's a great song and shows that he's still got it.

NOTE: Would have done a post about this on Tuesday but been at work past two days, grr.

Paul Robeson - I Still Suits Me

 My first review in around two months or something, apologies!


Ahh, Paul Robeson, a man whose voice is as timeless as it is powerful. As much as a political activist as he was a singer, Robeson (natually) helped the civil rights movement, protesting against imperialism and injustice and proudly supporting the USSR after numerous visits, declaring that they didn't have the institutionalised racism which was (and seemingly still is) prevailant in the US. His political activities though would damage his commercial career, leading to an almost complete erasure from twentieth century history until his death in the late seventies, where he once again began to be appreciated and aknowledged as a truely great man. One who would not bend to the whim of the elite, and would not sacrifice his principles at the risk of his career. Paul Robeson's a man I often mention as a personal hero, because of his inability to back down in the face of injustice, and because he was a man confident enough to speak his mind. but anyways, what we're here to do is talk about this music! My earliest recording on vinyl, 1936's 'I Still Suits me'.

I Still Suits Me comes from the musical production, Showboat, which really launched Robeson's career into the american mainstream, especially his soul breaking rendition of 'Old man River'. A beautiful relaxed string takes us into it, while Paul sings over in a faux hawaian style. Infact the track itself is very faux-island. Elizabeth Welch jumps in making this track a duet. They trade lines after the first verse, the light hearted airyness of the music contrasting the domestic arguement at the heart of the lyrics. Showing that despite the disagreements, the love is still there. A typical Hammerstein move, and we like it.

Side B features 'Just A Wearyin For You', written at the turn of the century and this rendition recorded in 1938. A soft romantic opening introduces us to Robeson's deep deep baritone voice crooning for his love. It's a very sentimental track, as typical of the time, but the man's powerful voice makes it truely timeless and gives it's gentle romanticism an almost biblical sense of feeling, this isn't just one man awaiting the return of his love, but Paul Robeson becomes everyman whose awaiting the return of their love.

It's a great little piece of history to have, two good songs sung by one of the greatest men in human history.