The Universe Smiles Upon You

Nothing says Friday like a porcelain Victorian statue in a spa town pump house of a mermaid riding a dopey looking sea creature. Am I right?

Given the ongoing binfire of politics at home here it the UK and abroad it was cheering this week to see the result of the mayoral election in New York. The victory of Zohran Mamdani, a Ugandan born Muslim elected on a platform of rent freezes, universal childcare and free bus travel, is a lovely thing to see- and the fact he did it by sticking a pair of (metaphorical) middle fingers up to Trump even more so. It all put me in mind of this Dean Wareham song from 2021...

The Past Is Our Plaything

Meanwhile Khruangbin, ten years on from their debut album The Universe Smiles Upon You, have suddenly (yesterday) released a new version of that album, the ten tracks re- recorded and re- sequenced, new versions of old songs, the funky, mainly instrumental, gentle psychedelia of the three- piece out as The Universe Smiles Upon You ii. It's at Bandcamp. By coincidence I've recently gone back to last year's Khruangbin album A La Sala with this song especially standing out, May Ninth on November Seventh- and if that doesn't bring a little ray of summer sunshine into dark and gloomy November nothing will. 

May Ninth

That Khruangbin track may well be in my record bag tomorrow as I make my way up to Todmorden for another Flightpath Estate DJ outing at The Golden Lion. The line up is us, Steve Cobby and then A Love From Outer Space (Sean Johnston's autumnal ALFOS at The Golden Lion is legendary). Since we accepted the gig real life has intervened for some members of the Flightpath Estate DJ team so we are down to a bare bones, reduced squad tomorrow- mainly me flying solo with hopefully Dan turning up to bring some dub. If you fancy some afternoon/ early evening sounds with a pint, I'm on from 4- ish, playing the kind of stuff you hear here day in, day out. 

Last time we DJed there I threw Martin completely by leaving him to follow this Joe Strummer B-side, from the 1989 Island Hopping 12". Mango Street is a largely instrumental extended version of the song with spoons percussion, catgut guitar, whistling and Strummer at his most chilled out and playful. 

Mango Street

Heroes

This is another post brought via my box of magazine freebie CDs, this time a CD from Mojo in 2020- 'Mojo Heroes The Best Of 2020' (from the January 2021 edition but on sale December 2020- it came with a cover story about The White Stripes, a free calendar to go with the CD, and promised that inside you'd find the 75 best albums of the year- Bob Dylan's Rough And Rowdy Ways- along with articles about Neil Young's lost classics, Pharaoh Saunders, and AC/DC). 

2020 it's fair to say was not a year that turned out the way anyone thought it would. The news footage early on in the year from China and the Far East of deserted city streets and hundreds of thousands of people living in- new word alert- lockdown. It was followed by the news that Covid 19 had reached Europe and then the terrifying scenes from Italy. The government here was new, Boris Johnson having won an election in December 2019 by promising to 'get Brexit done' and to level up the places that lent him their votes in the general election based on the despair with Brexit and fear of Corbyn. Johnson would soon prove to be the worst person in charge at the worst time, literally the least suitable person to run a government during a crisis. Within weeks, March 2020, we were locking down here with workplaces and schools closing - and I remember the fear, the sense of being on the edge of chaos and loss of control in the week leading up to the announcement that schools were closing. Some people suggested it would only be a few weeks. In the middle of the year, May 2020, the killing of George Floyd by North Carolina police officers sparked the Black Lives Matter movement which soon became international. In the summer the Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced the Eat Out To Help Out scheme, where people received subsidised meals in restaurants and pubs in order to help the hospitality industry- a policy which many have linked with an autumn surge in re- infections. People were hospitalised and some died because the government offered half price pub food. By the end of the year we were in a muddle of Covid tiers, city lockdowns, a government that locked down too late, opened up too early, was determined (egged on by the tabloid press) 'to save Christmas' and then had to lockdown again in January 2021. 

We've forgotten a lot of this haven't we? Moved on. People talked of a restructuring of the way we do things but I'm not convinced that's really happened (although more people do work from home than did before). Over quarter of a million people in the UK died of Covid. Every one of them has a name and a family. One of them was my son Isaac, although he didn't die until 30th November 2021, long after the world had for most people returned to 'normal'. 

So, not the year anyone was expecting and in some ways it feels along time ago. A once in a century event, I hear occasionally as one minister or another tries to dismiss claims the Tory government has been incompetent (if you didn't want to have to deal with a crisis maybe you shouldn't have gone into government, I always feel like replying). A week today we get the chance to consign this government and the four Tory ones that preceded it to oblivion, the worst run of Prime Minsters and cabinets this country's had in modern times. I for one cannot wait. 

The CD is titled Heroes and the front cover, an African american woman in a beret with her fist raised in the air, reflects the Black Lives Matter side of 2020. Inside the cardboard slipcase we get Bob Dylan, Frazey Ford, Cornershop, Run The Jewels, Nick Cave (Galleon Ship from Carnage), Phoebe Bridges, Bill Callahan, Moses Sumney, Toots and The Maytals (Toots Hibbert died in August 2020 of Covid), Fleet Foxes, Tony Allen and Hugh Masekela (Tony also died in 2020, of an aneurysm), and Nubya Garcia. 

We also get this by Khruangbin, a lovely fluid and laid back piece of melodic pop with a very apt song title...

So We Won't Forget

Jarv Is... are present too, this from the album Beyond the Pale, Jarvis Cocker's album recorded in 2019 and then released in summer 2020. 

House Music All Night Long

The other band on the CD are Fontaines D.C. who have shown up in blogposts at No Badger Required and Dubhed over the last week. In 2020 Fontaines released their second album, A Hero's Death, the title track striking a deep chord with me- I've written about it previously. The song on the Mojo CD was this one....

I Was Not Born

How's that for electrifying? Pummeling drums and post- punk guitars and Grian's strident vocal declaring, 'I was not born/ Into this world/ To do another man's bidding'. It's a young man's song, the lyrics giving two fingers to the world of work and convention. 

Fontaines have released two new songs this year ahead of an album in August called Romance. The first single was Starburster. Starburster starts off like hip hop, rumbling in slowly. Last week they followed it with something very different, the childhood referencing and home video guitar pop of Favourite, a song that rattles along with guitars like mid- to- late 80s Johnny Marr and footage of the five Fontaines skateboarding and hanging down the pub. 

May Ninth

I posted this song back in February but it seemed so obvious to repost it today- today is 9th May and this is May Ninth from Khruangbin's latest album A La Sala. 

A very languid early summer groove, lighter than air vocals, the drums tap tapping away, the bass prodding gently while the guitar drops warm sunshine all over the song. 

The album came out a month ago. My pressing isn't brilliant, a little bit crackly and it doesn't seem loud enough to me but its an album that's growing each time I play it. The feel of the twelve songs is very much lounge, with a backdrop of psychedelia, some dub and the rhythms of early 70s soul and funk bands like The Meters, lush and widescreen. Many of the songs on A La Sala sound like they could play over the end credits of a film, as all the plotlines are resolved and everything's fixed. There are some found sounds in places, some ambient atmospherics and the album ends with a locked groove, a field recording circling endlessly. First song Fifteen Fifty Three opens with some crickets chirruping and the hum of the outside world, then the guitar and bass ease their way in and we're off into the Khruangbin world, eleven more tacks gliding by, no hurry or haste to get anywhere quickly and nothing outstaying its welcome either. 

This one, Pon Pon, is equal parts clipped, scratchy funk, whispered vocals and supper club. 

Pon Pon

A La Sala finishes with Les Petit Gris, a piano playing a couple of notes, lots of echo and a guitar line picking a way through the song, before it dissolves into the sound of cicadas. 

Ways Of Seeing

This is the wall at the back of our cupboard under the stairs, one of those cupboards that when you open it everything- the ironing board, the hoover, the stepladders, a pair of shoes- falls out on you. Or at least it was- it's been sorted now. Sorting it revealed the wall which looked to me like an abstract expressionist painting from the 1950s. It's gone now too, painted white. 

This pair of songs are both new, came out recently and although they don't sound much like each other have become linked for me- I've been playing them back to back and they evoke similar feelings in me. Firstly the latest song from Khruangbin, May Ninth, a promise of springtime coming. Someone said recently it's beginning to feel if not like spring then at least like the end of winter. May Ninth makes me feel exactly that. It is just over three minutes long, the sonic equivalent of sunshine, the delicate guitar playing, the notes ringing and rippling like a happy Vini Reilly, the drums just so on it as to be perfect and the bass padding away as the words waft by, 'Waiting for May to come... Just another day'. Something very close to pure feeling in a song, an emotional hit and a few minutes of optimism for the end of February.

I've been pairing it with the latest single from the forthcoming Ride album, an Andy Bell song called Last Frontier, four minutes of soaring, chiming indie rock with an early 90s New Order feel (if this song had been on Republic it would stand alongside Regret as the album's best moment). Over streamlined bass and drums and twin guitars Andy songs of 'Ways of leaving/ ways to say goodbye/ Ways of seeing/ Seeing eye to eye/ Without losing our way'. Like Khruangbin's May Ninth, it's emotive and inspiring, music that makes you feel something.  

A Love International

The start of 2024 seems to have been a goldmine for new music already and we're less than four weeks into the year. In the middle of last week Houston, Texas three piece Khruangbin released a new song, A Love International, a blissed out five minute glide by, an instrumental sitting in some sun drenched sweet spot between a modernist, psychedelic Balearica and exotic, wiggy global soul. The guitar line and tone, always circling around, climbing and falling as the bass pumps away underneath, is a joy. 

A Love International is from their fourth album, A La Sala, out in April. I haven't gone very deep with Khruangbin, their three previous albums passing me by- the name was always floating around my periphery and I came across them on the Ron Trent What Do The Stars Say? album in 2022 and a Don Letts' Late Night Tales compilation from the same year. Don Letts offered up this marvellous dub of Khruangbin's Dern Kala. 

Dern Kala (Khruangbin Dub Mix)

Now I have four Khruangbin albums, three remix albums and a bunch of EPs to explore. Which is a good thing and yet, also costly. Sigh. 

What Do The Stars Say To You

The new album by Chicago house and techno legend Ron Trent, What Do The Stars Say To You, is causing a bit of a stir and rightly so- it's a repeat play, engaging, innovative and enchanting record, one that already feels timeless. Across the album's ten tracks (fifteen on CD) Ron Trent uses the studio, electronics and a range of live instruments with a slew of guests and collaborators. Every track is stunning- the production is sumptuous, the synths, instruments and drums perfectly mixed. Taken together, it's a fluid, grown up, richly musical album that has space to breathe and a general sense of wellbeing, that when it's playing, things are ok. 

On an album where every track could be a favourite here's a handful of highlights. Admira, recorded with ambient/ Balearic artist Gigi Masin, starts out slow with drums and cymbals and is suddenly interrupted by discordant synths and a noodly leadline. Gradually it builds, layers of sounds gliding in silkily, hand drums pattering away, toplines picking out melodies from somewhere. By the five minute mark it's weightless, floating off and away. 

On Sphere, created with French violinist Jean- Luc Ponty, the sheer warmth of the production and the dazzling melody lines (violin and synth) hark back to the 80s but also make something that feels very now. It's got jazz and house in its grooves but also something of a smoothed out version of early 80s New York avant noise. 

It's followed by WARM, a sultry, softly padding piece of music with keyboards and guitars going off at different points and an undulating bassline. Nothing stays the same for long and it's all so fresh and lively, endlessly finding new ways to repeat itself. 

The album is full of contributions from others. As well as Ponty and Gigi Masin, there are tracks with Venecia, Brazilian duo Azymuth, Lars Bartkuhn and recent Glastonbury smash hits Khruangbin, and a host of 70s and 80s influences- Tangerine Dream, Herb Alpert, Jan Hammer, Grace Jones, Vangelis, Prince, early Kraftwerk and Dinosaur L all get mentioned by Trent. On Flos Potentia (Sugar, Cotton, Tobacco) Trent and Khruangbin kick up an Afrobeat storm, propulsive grooves and euphoric chords. 

Back in 1990 Ron released Altered States, a definitive piece of US techno, thirteen and a half minutes of kick drums, synth strings, basslines, hi hats and raw but gliding, futuristic techno. He has recorded and released hundreds of records since, a back catalogue deep and wide, but Altered States remains untouchable. 

Altered States