foetus on a leash (2013)

This one's a freAK! It might be Cave's most honest album, and at the same time it's his most self-deprecating. And that's honesty, that's life, etc. No southern preacher heroin poet character heralding the apocalypse this time around, Push the Sky Away's Cave knows what Hannah Montana is, he eats, shits, uses text speak, and wikipedias stuff when he's bored and alone. Push the Sky Away's character plays concurrently with the modern and trivial along with the mythical, lyrical, tragic. Articulate lapses into the inarticulate defy expectations of Cave's previous incarnations- the junkie genius, the faultless encyclopedic songwriter, the preacher, the vampire, the sex-crazed dirty-old-man- surely offering a reminder of their construction as, well, constructions. The narratives are still there, but diminished. What's left for fans is an emergent honesty, an identity aware of its age, obsessions, flaws, and desires, the same one which attempts to mislead us through the act of placing a song called Finishing Jubilee Street three tracks after one called Jubilee Street. The one that made the damn record, not the one in the song. And that's bold. Awkward, but bold.

Musically Mick Harvey's absence is noticed, but The Bad Seeds have mastered making simplicity and repetition hypnotic in his absence. I'm unsure where it'll go next, but for now everything feels right, bare and desolate as it all is.

A-

try / buy / spotify

Matt Johnson - Burning Blue Soul (1981)

Johnson's gift was making art and torment and inaccessibility accessible with The The. Before that gift was properly realized, however, he produced Burning Blue Soul in which nervous self-awareness, disorienting loops, and arty percussion were met with a punkish disregard for pop structures, and a half-assed psychedelic haze tied together disparate ideas and genres. It's a paranoid mess which for all its eccentricities manages to feel monochromatic, it's expressionistic but too planned and analytic to convey anything other than said self-awareness and paranoia, and it somehow manages to turn experimentation into tedium. Maybe if I hadn't started my day with twee pop I'd be more appreciative of his gloomy post-punk defiance, but I think it all just works better restricted to a pop framework- he writes a killer song when he wants to, and his pains and frustrations are more potent when they border on catchy

C-

stream / -

Avalon (1982)

I briefly thought about growing up and then I decided against it but my love for cornball sophistipop remained. I actually think it's easier to enjoy records like Avalon when you can't/don't want to relate to its make-out yuppie demographic. There's an unusual atmosphere hanging over Avalon and that's probably thanks to the cover- Wanderer above the Sea of Fog for white-collar Romantics divided in regard to what the mythical Avalon means to their white-collar Romantic contemporaries: the end of the colonial dream and the beginning of world music, the return of the colonial dream, or an allusion to Ferry's bedroom out of the spotlight. The best song's the opener which is even more obvious than the title track- Ferry throws every archetypal Romantic image he can at you BUT OH WAIT it's all in past-tense, and allegedly that's all there is- the beauty of times gone by. Pessimistic end-of-an-era vibes, optimistic end-of-an-era messages, or Ferry getting horny and reading 19th Century poetry? I can't tell, and that doesn't really bother me. His croons are some of the best in cornball sophistipop, his moods are darkly seductive (no homo), and the synths which permeate every sound are at the point of atmospheric which occurs just before tacky. Actually my favourite Roxy Music album

A

check

The Durutti Column - The Return of the Durutti Column (1980)

Along with Dylan Carlson, Vini Reilly does the best kind of instrumental rock music. The appeal's right there in the sound! Stripped down & fragmentary but evocative and essential, no thinking required, just listening. Sketch for Summer is just that, Sketch for Winter is too, fleeting impressionistic soundscapes neither wholly punk nor folk nor rock nor ambient

A

here

Matching Mole - Matching Mole (1972)

Matching Mole is one of the best album covers ever, a sweet opening track attempting to meld naivete and sophisticated self-awareness, a disarmingly modern sounding song called Instant Pussy (!), and artsy jams which may or may not begin to bore the shit out of the listener as they jam on. For those who lose their shit to boredom when hearing Wyatt's band jam away, the only way to really appreciate Matching Mole is on vinyl, gazing at the cover's best-album-cover-ever-ness and only playing the first side but who knows where to get that. I'd say it's directionless but maybe that's the point. I'm off to listen to Rock Bottom.

C

here

$World$

Not his best or anything but it's my kind of record- arrangements left to Mick Ronson and Tony Visconti, real artsy with cool heavy guitars and Bowie sorta on top of rather than inhabiting it all with stories about freaks and prophets. Killer concept rock rather than visionary singer-songwriter. Fucking genius

A+

ha

John Cale - Paris 1919 (1973)

Has more in common (atmosphere-wise) with folk than art or pop or the avant-garde or noise: more Something Else by The Kinks than anything else, which was also strangely folkish in its non-folkishness. It's the timelessness and pastoral-ness, I think. It might be a failure on Cale's part that his concept goes unnoticed even when the listener reads wartime atmospherics and then listens but still thinks of the record as a great companion-piece to The Kinks' masterpiece, or that for all his focus on literature it's only Thomas' childhood romanticism and Lear's nonsense which manage to stick, thus pushing his album way the fuck away from war or anything even remotely sinister... Too enigmatic for its own good, or too good for its own pretension? Sorry Mr Cale but your vibes are just too good

A+

spotify

Material - Memory Serves (1981)

Material's avant-garde dance record: as fun and weird as that sounds. Laswell plays oddball funk basslines which anchor the songs as the other musicians experiment like crazy over the top. Said musicians manage to go avant-garde while maintaining a punk rock spirit, keeping Memory Serves unpretentious. I can hear the Captain Beefheart influence and also where guys like Mike Patton and Les Claypool listened excitedly. That may or may not be a bad thing to you.. I think it's awesome

A-

spotify

David Bowie - Hunky Dory (1971)

'Cause why not. Bowie's best and one of the best albums ever. From chambery art pop with surrealist lyrics to punk rock with occult lyrics to Bowie's creepy masterpiece below

Whether it's insanely lyrical or just nonsensical, the inspiration for each bit of nonsense has lyrical and/or conceptual origins/intentions and so works on whatever level you want it to

A+

spotify

John Cale - Music for a New Society (1982)

1. Taking Your Life in Your Hands 4:46

2. Thoughtless Kind 2:41

3. Sanities 5:58

4. If You Were Still Around 3:29

5. (I Keep A) Close Watch 2:11

6. Broken Bird 4:44

7. Chinese Envoy 3:10

8. Changes Made 3:14

9. Damn Life 5:15

10. Risé, Sam and Rimsky-Korsakov 2:13

12. In the Library of Force 5:57

Whether it's comparisons to Scott Walker's Tilt or Lennon's Plastic Ono Band, nothing can really prepare the listener for Music for a New Society. It's a heavy listen, but contains some of Cale's sparsest arrangements- instruments drift in and out at different volumes and with different effects as his seemingly aimless voice half-sings poetic lyrics.

Disorienting skeletal songs delivered in the most disorienting way!

An incredible record

A-

v0