Tears, Tech, Loneliness

Last month I wrote about two new songs from Halifax born/ Manchester based trio The Orielles, a single ahead of their forthcoming album Only You Left, an album that ties up all their loose ends and creativity at the end of a self proclaimed seven year cycle. You Are Eating A Part Of Yourself/ To Undo The World Itself were both really impressive, blurry, shape shifting guitars riffs and FX and poetic/ expressive lyrics uttered on top. It felt like something significant was being communicated, a point arrived at. 

This week's new song, Tears Are, is even better. Those guitars are back, played through some lovely amps, drums kicking away and singer Esme giving another cool vocal, free form and ambiguous. Esme said the lyrics were partly about 'imagery of wood versus metal' and how 'everything fell naturally into either category'. The song collapses into an acoustic guitar coda, circling notes and whispers. A mid- February treat and one that suggests the album, when it comes next month, will be one well worth paying attention to. 

Also out this week is a new song from Anna Calvi sharing vocals with Mr. Iggy Pop. Iggy sang with The Moonlandingz last year, a song that was one of my favourites of 2025. He's repeats the trick here with Iggy showing no signs of letting go and Anna's getting the best out of him and herself. Iggy, once 'the world's forgotten boy' is now God's Lonely Man... thumping drums, a thunderous rhythm that calls classic mid- 70s Iggy to mind, Anna more than a match vocally and some wailing guitar to punctuate the two minutes forty nine seconds the song sticks around for. 

Kim Gordon's solo career continues, a post- Sonic Youth adventure that is more experimental and more adventurous than many people half her age. On Dirty Tech she half sings/ half speaks over low fi electro and skittering drums. It's so electric and vibrant it could probably wipe tape clean at close quarters and scare wild animals. Kim Gordon is 72. 

Forty Minutes Of Dreams

While searching through my music folders and files recently I was struck by the number of songs I had that have the word 'dream' or 'dreams' in the title. A rich source of songwriting inspiration. They say hearing about other people's dreams is really boring but I don't think that's always they case. My own dreams have become really vivid and at times quite disturbing in the three years since Isaac died (and also since I started taking statins for high cholesterol a year and a half ago). Waking up having dreamed of Isaac, him being there and talking to me, is always a startling way to start the day (or the middle of the night). It takes a moment for me to realise it was a dream and that he's not there. Sometimes that half asleep- half awake state can be really pleasant and attempting to go back to sleep to go back into a nice dream is something that I'm sure lots of us do. 

Whatever the reason for dreaming, the brain/ consciousness sifting through stuff and pulling things from the dim and distant past into our sleeping state along with bizarre and random, surreal situations, is a rich vein of inspiration for songwriters- both musically and lyrically. Ambient music often seems like an attempt to make music that can soundtrack dreams. The blur and fuzz of shoegaze and psychedelia likewise. As all this percolated through my head on the road coming home from work one evening last week it seemed that a dreams mix was in order. 

Forty Minutes Of Dreams

• Kevin McCormick & David Horridge: Glass Dream
• Kim Gordon: Dream Dollar
• Spatial Awareness: Dream Food (SA Dub)
• Suicide: Dream Baby Dream (Single Version)
• Lunar Dunes: Pharaoh's Dream
• Ride: Dreams Burn Down
• Mark Peters: Red Sunset Dreams
• Sheer: Mezcal Dream
• Spirea X: Chlorine Dream
• Blade Runner Soundtrack: Deckard's Dream

Kevin McCormick is a Mancunian guitarist who released several albums of minimal instrumental music in the early 80s. He met bassist David Horridge in the late 70s and in 1982 they recorded Light Patterns, a minimal, gently psychedelic/ ambient album. Largely ignored, the album and others by Kevin were re- released in 2021. Last year Kevin released a new album- Passing Clouds- which is lovely and can be found at Bandcamp. 

Kim Gordon's solo album from last year, The Collective, passed me by a bit but it's a powerful piece of work, a jolt of electricity, hip hop drums, noise and Kim's NY blank cool. 

Spatial Awareness released Dream Food as an EP last year, an electronic trippy delight with this dub as a dreamy counterpoint. 

Suicide's Dream Baby Dream is one of those songs, an all timer. It came out as a single in 1979, a repetitive synth, drum machine and vocal blur of brilliance, a song lost in its own state of warm, blissful ignorance, the synth patterns circling endlessly. A track that could be loped for an hour and not outstay its welcome. 

Lunar Dunes' Galaxsea originally came out in 2011, post- jazz, post- punk, dubby global tracks 'for truth seekers and interplanetary vacationers'. The band included former members of Cornershop and Transglobal Underground and took the 1960s and 70s West German bands as their inspiration. Pharoah's Dream is at the centre of Galaxsea and rattles along in a cosmische and future jazz way.

Dreams Burn Down was on Ride's 1990 debut album Nowhere, a shoegaze classic, crunching FX guitars, slow motion drums and typically youthful lyrics about lost or unrequited love. Live Dreams Burn Down is massive, a wall of sound and sensation. 

Mark Peters is a guitarist from Wigan. His solo albums, 2017's Innerland and 2022's Red Sunset Dreams, are big Bagging Area favourites. The title track of the second is a rippling ambient instrumental, the wide open spaces of the American West crossed with north west England psychedelia. 

Sheer is Sheer Taft who in 1990 made one of the era's best wobbly Balearic dance records, the mighty Cascades. In 2022 Sheer Taft, now residing in Spain rather than Glasgow, made a follow up, an album called ...And Then There Were Four, a Spaghetti Western album with Andrew Innes and the late Martin Duffy from Primal Scream on board.

Jim Beattie was a founder member of Primal Scream, leaving to form Spirea X who released an album in 1991, Fireblade Skies. The debut release was a single the year before, Chlorine Dream, guitars from The Byrds, attitude from Glasgow, drums and vocals from 1990. 

An expanded, full length version of the Blade Runner soundtrack, The Esper Edition, was unofficially released and has done the rounds as a bootleg for years. The film deals with all sorts of themes dreams being one of them. Deckard's Dream is one minute and ten seconds of Vangelis/ ambient sound. In the film Deckard dreams of a unicorn, the meaning of which has been argued about since the film's release in 1982. 

Saturday Live

Sonic Youth are a band who I sometimes have mixed feelings about but there's little doubt that back in 1988 they were heading upwards with a furious punk rock/ art rock energy melding noise and tunes. In October 1988 they released Daydream Nation, a double album opus recorded in July and August of '88, a record that somehow caught the U.S. punk zeitgeist, building on the bands from a decade earlier who laid the foundations- Husker Du, Minutemen, The Replacements, Black Flag et al. Daydream Nation led Sonic Youth to Geffen and their 1990 album Goo and their experience and advice led Nirvana to the same major label. 

The 2007 re- issue of Daydream Nation came with a second CD, live versions of every song on the album recorded as they toured in 1988 and 1989. The songs on the album are a band on a songwriting hot streak, alternate tunings and tight playing fused with melodies and a careering confidence- driving drums, squealing guitars, feedback and distortion, drawled vocals, Sonic Youth giving it their NY punk/ art all while touring venues in the USA and Europe.

Hey Joni (Live at Paradiso, Amsterdam, 1989)

Silver Rocket (Live at Noise Now Festival, Dusseldorf, 1989)

Candle (Live at Cabaret Metro, Chicago, 1988)

Teenage Riot (Live at Paradiso, Amsterdam, 1989)

Total Trash (Live at Maxwell's, Hoboken, New Jersey, 1988)

In 1996 they pitched up at Rockpalast in Germany, the world by that point a different place in punk rock terms and Sonic Youth terms. Sometimes they could play gigs and be so obtuse that it seemed a little pointless. I remember reading a review of them flying to the UK for a single gig at All Tomorrow's Parties (or somewhere similar, one of those festivals) where a usually sympathetic reviewer described them tuning up for an hour and concluded that he couldn't work out why they'd bothered to cross the Atlantic to do this. But here, they do a good job, songs, noise, focus, the 'hits' (Teenage Riot, Bull In The Heather, Sugar Kane). 

Thurston Moore's autobiography is due soon and being well talked about already. It will have to be good to equal Kim Gordon's Girl In A Band which is a superb account of her life and times. The end of their relationship, following Thurston's affair with another woman, led to the end of the band and Kim is pretty open about it in her book. The live version of Bull In the Heather at Rockpalast in '96, Kim at the mic, shows how vital a part of the band she was. No Badger Required has dedicated August to female artists and yesterday featured Kim with a few words from me. You can read it here. 

Slow Boy

There's a whole load of shouting and squally guitars and a blistering guitar solo in this recent collaboration between J Mascis and Kim Gordon (pictured above with Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein), done with or for Converse and free to download. It starts noisy and gets progressively noisier, sounding not unlike both their previous band's late 80s peaks. But who is the slow boy?

Girl In A Band

I read Kim Gordon's memoir Girl In A Band last week and very good it was too. The book divides into three main parts: her upbringing in California and her entry onto the world of art in the late 60s and early 70s; her move to New York and the best part of three decades spent in Sonic Youth and married to Thurston Moore; the bringing up a young family of her own while being part of an experimental guitar band and the effects of Thurston Moore's affair and the break up of her marriage. The entire book is cut through with a sense of loss and questioning, as the ramifications of Thurston's actions lead her to re-assess most of what went before. The breakdown of the marriage clearly brings the band to an end- more loss. Her childhood also contained the loss of a brother to mental illness and she constantly questions her relationships- with men, with art, with life. The chapters are often brief but full of insight, a series of postcards from her life. By the 90s the book also brings in a wide supporting cast, including Kurt Cobain (more loss), the New York art and fashion worlds, the gentrification of the city (loss again), Beck, and The Beastie Boys. It's sad in parts, angry and furious in places too, moving but uplifting too as a new Kim emerges at the end. It's a thoroughly affecting read and another first rate female rock autobiography from the last couple of years to hold up alongside Viv Albertine's and Tracey Thorn's books.

Sonic Youth moved from indie to major in the 1990s, having seen the pitfalls of The Replacements and Husker Du doing the same in the 80s and wanted to avoid making the same mistakes. Their output didn't really suffer- Goo (on Geffen) stands up strongly, close to Daydream Nation and their 80s indie-punk classics. Dirty Boots, Kool Thing and Bull In The Heather are all just as good as Teenage Riot (well, almost as good as Teenage Riot), Expressway To Yr Skull and Death Valley '69. They were just recorded in bigger, more expensive studios.

Death Valley '69

Ciccone

In 1988 Sonic Youth put out The Whitey Album, not very well disguised as Ciccone Youth and in tribute to Madonna Louise Ciccone. Most of the attention was on the record's cover versions. These had been put out as a single on New Alliance in 1986 and were expanded out for the album. Coming at a time when Sonic Youth were being praised to the heavens for Daydream Nation this was possibly an effective way of defusing some of the hype- some noise, contributions from Mike Watt, jokey covers plus a hip reference to krautrock with the song Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening To Neu! The cover of the album was a photocopied close up of Madonna's face. Madonna apparently gave her blessing to it, remembering the band from her clubbing and Danceteria days. Ciccone Youth did their Madonna thing on Into The Groove(y) and Burnin' Up. Someone on Youtube has done the decent thing and set the music to clips of Desperately Seeking Susan (the only Madonna film that is actually watchable).



Better still though was their version of Robert Palmer's Addicted To Love. The video and vocal were recorded in a karaoke booth for $25- D.I.Y. punk rock in attitude, style and cost. It was also a very effective way of sending up Palmer's video with Kim Gordon singing the song deadpan and dancing with images from the Vietnam War flashing over the top.



This is the standard setter and last word in ironic cover versions. And still sounds great.