theartsdesk on Vinyl 33: Pet Shop Boys, AK/DK, Ian Dury, Grateful Dead and more

THE ARTS DESK ON VINYL 33 Pet Shop Boys, AK/DK, Ian Dury, Grateful Dead and more

The widest-ranging record reviews available on this planet

The autumnal release deluge is upon us. Vinyl’s thriving and writhing. Raise a glass to it. Do it. However, records that, in another month, would have been reviewed here, music that would have been in the ALSO WORTHY OF MENTION section, has been unfairly passed over.

Peter Perrett, Concorde 2, Brighton review - magnificent songs scorchingly rendered

★★★★★ PETER PERRETT, CONCORDE 2 Magnificent songs scorchingly rendered

The one from The Only Ones returns with a vigorously engaging band set-up

These days Peter Perrett doesn’t rely on the songs of his late Seventies/early Eighties band, The Only Ones, to hold his audience’s attention. At 65, looking and sounding healthier than he has done in years, he’s on a vital late-career creative roll. At the start of his first encore he even plays a new, unreleased song, “War Plan Red”, giving vent to fiery infuriation with global politicking, his band shadowed in ominous scarlet lighting. He may be renowned, primarily, for songs of romance and dissolution, but with lyrics such as “The so-called free world stands for evil incarnate” he clearly feels that in 2017 there’s also much else to sing about.

Perrett fronts a five-piece band consisting of his sons Jamie (guitar) and Peter Jr (bass), alongside their girlfriends Jenny Maxwell and Lauren Munisamy on backing vocals, violin and keys, with drummer Jake Woodward holding steady at the back. This is a family affair and they’re musically tight to a fault, Jamie Perrett’s lively fret-wrangling showpieces the perfect foil to his father’s stationary stage persona. Peter Perrett himself is black clad in a white shirt and Ray-ban-style shades, his hair in a classic Seventies rocker cut. His words are perfectly enunciated, that distinctive nasal voice cutting through everything. He was ever about the words.

Its starkness emphasises what an undersung master-songwriter he really is

Most of the set is drawn from Perrett’s recent album, How The West Was Won, a comeback of sorts for a man who spent chaotic decades since The Only Ones mostly mired in a dark underworld of crack and heroin. It’s a fine album and even better live. The title track is introduced with a rare and dry aside, “This song is a eulogy to a country that’s become great again.” Full of lyrical pith, the band really work its “Sweet Jane”-ish riff, and also cut loose spectacularly on “Living in My Head” with a squawling, invigorating violin vs guitar jam. The set is peppered with Perrett’s raw, self-scathing odes to his wife of many decades, Xena, and an emotive highlight is the new album’s superb “Home”. Its existential longing is simply heart-rending.  

Perrett also dips into his solo back catalogue, from the better known such as “Woke Up Sticky”, which fires thought-provoking allegories off in all directions, to the more obscure “Baby, Don’t Talk” from 1994, with its cutting couplet “You ain’t learned nothing, from the cradle to the grave”. And, yes, The Only Ones are in there too, with fine versions of “The Big Sleep” and “Flaming Torch”. Surprisingly, given the song is something of a mixed blessing as it’s the only Perrett song most people know, tonight’s encore take on “Another Girl Another Planet” is a scorcher, Jamie Perrett nailing the famously tricky guitar solo with showy aplomb.

And at the evening’s very end, Perrett pushes towards the curfew on his second encore. He closes proceedings with a band-free take on The Only Ones’ “It’s The Truth”. Its very starkness emphasises what an undersung master-songwriter he really is. Given tonight’s performance it seems his return is only gathering pace.

Overleaf: Seven minute feature about Peter Perrett on Newsnight

CD: Golden Teacher - No Luscious Life

Glaswegian electronic cosmonauts drop a mini-album that presses all the right buttons

Possibly named after a variety of magic mushroom, left-field Glaswegian six-piece Golden Teacher have been turning out their very strange idea of party music since 2013. Initially they did so for local freak-fostering collective Optimo but have since appeared via various outlets, finally ending up on their own eponymous label. Their sound is electronic but also organic, with percussion that rolls and sometimes has a touch of the more polyrhythmic, advanced drum circle about it. Don’t let the words “drum circle” put you off for Golden Teacher are an invigorating proposition.

Heavily stewed in the outer fringes of dub where the likes of On-U Sound Records have resided for decades, Golden Teacher are also unafraid to add layers of further psychedelic echo. In the case of “Diop” and the eight minute title track, tribal percussion designed to untether the mind takes over. A good reference point might be the best moments of Micky Hart’s Rolling Thunder album, if it had been made for Nineties clubbers rather than hippies (he’s the bloke out of The Grateful Dead who liked going cosmic on his bongos). No Luscious Life also has a post-punk sensibility, an edge that recalls New York skronk-dance outfits such as !!! and Outhud.

There are a couple of attempts – sort of – at vocal pop, or at least alt-pop, since it sounds nothing like the tween meme phone-piffle that mostly haunts the current Top 10. “The Kazimier” is Grace Jones by way of The Tom Tom Club and the synth-poppy “Spiritron”, a keys-fuelled ode to the singer’s “cosmitron”, is akin to Fujiya & Miyagi attempting to make P-funk.

There’s a lot of music about that doesn’t attempt anything new. Life is blighted by the stuff. Not Golden Teacher. In an era when it’s hard to do so, they use their imagination to push the boat out. This is head-fry music for freaky dancing. If they weren’t named after that psilocybic fungi, they should have been.

Overleaf: Listen to a four minute edit of Golden Teacher "Sauchiehall Withdrawal"

Reissue CDs Weekly: Paul Major’s Feel the Music

Astonishing collection of “blow-dried hair psychedelia” and musical moments of “bleak clarity”

Dave Porter has a question. He wants to know where clouds go. “After they pass by, are they just like people, that go on and then die?” The figurative bit between his teeth, he wonders if small clouds “are lonely, like you and I? Do they just go to rain, or is that a tear from their eye? Sometimes I feel like a small cloud passing by, never knowing where I’m going and never knowing why.”

CD: Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Luciferian Towers

CD: GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR - LUCIFERIAN TOWERS A fine album of defiantly uncommercial psychedelia from the Canadian oddballs

A fine album of defiantly uncommercial psychedelia from the Canadian oddballs

Luciferian Towers, the third album since Canadian oddballs Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s 2011 reunion, is an instrumental psychedelic masterpiece that reflects our times without resorting to political bluster. Indeed, with two of its four tracks almost touching a quarter of an hour long, it’s also an album to sink into and absorb rather than a likely source of any radio hits.

Goat/Moonlandingz, Brixton O2 Academy review - a feast of modern psychedelic rock

★★★★★ GOAT/MOONLANDINGZ, BRIXTON O2 ACADEMY Top nu-psych package concert shakes the venue and the audience

Top nu-psych package concert shakes the venue and the audience

Representing the best of the current psych revival’s many faces, the scuzziness of The Moonlandingz and overwhelming groove of Goat all seem initially out of place amongst the mock-Greek décor of the O2 Academy Brixton. With an audience that doesn’t stop bopping through both the bands and stellar DJ sets in between, however, the night feels far more transcendental than awkward.

There is a third act on the bill that also deserves mention. The futuristic pop of British alt-folk perennial Jane Weaver is nothing short of immense. The unearthly soundscapes of her most recent album, Modern Kosmology, are replaced by a more driving, insistent sound live, and never is this more evident than on the single “Slow Motion”, which is arresting in its snaking synths and steady drums. “The Architect” is another musical thunderstorm, with Weaver balanced on top of the locked-in, grooving rhythm section perfectly. Reminiscent of the poppier sides of the hauntological Ghost Box Records catalogue, her formidable vocals hang between siren and banshee throughout the set, and are particularly melancholic on “I Wish”. Weaver saves what may be her least tumultuous song, “I Need a Connection”, until last. It blossoms slowly but, eventually, the whole audience stands enthralled by her emotionally charged crying out of the title phrase.

It's loud, it's infectious, it's everything Goat do best

The Moonlandingz are like a pair of festival wellies – filthy, battered and given to trampling all in their wake. They’re instantly enjoyable; teetering between rockabilly, synth-pop and glam rock, they’ve got the stomp of Chumbawumba, the grit of early Pixies, and a charm that is unmistakeably their own. Set opener “Vessels” is a beast of a track, echoing round the room as singer Lias Saoudi writhes across the stage. “Sweet Saturn Mine” is the song equivalent of an earthquake, or possibly a military march played by a circus, while “The Rabies are Back” is almost “Proud-Mary”-ish in its lilting groove, sending the front half of the audience into frenzied flailing. In perhaps the most unexpected and touching moment of their set, “Lufthansa Man” culminates in a synth solo which comes on like Magazine covering the Sherlock theme tune. There’s not a dry armpit in the room by the end of their riotous time on stage.

Up to this point, it’s been a near flawless gig, and Goat don’t break the run in quality. Dipping in and out of funk, ambient, classic rock, and endless strains of global roots influence, their hypnotic set keeps the audience swaying then headbanging, by turn, all night. Songs like the cute, flute-led “Union of Mind and Soul” are endearing in their own plodding, simple way, but their set really takes off with hip-shakers such as “Goatfuzz” and “Gathering of Ancient Tribes”. Above walls of distortion, Djembe drums and sitar-like guitar noodling, the ululating vocalists shine in their shamanic garb, shaking, twisting, shrieking, and leading the audience in crazed chants. The jewel in Goat’s crown is the rollicking “Run to Your Mama”, taken from their acclaimed debut album World Music. It’s loud, it’s infectious, it’s everything Goat do best; and live, it’s impossible not to be caught up in the ecstasy of the band and their fans.

Exhausted but content, there’s no way the audience can leave unhappy.

Overleaf: Watch Goat's brain-frazzling, almost hour-long set live at Glastonbury 2015

CD: Melvins - A Walk With Love and Death

Doom, anger and grot from the still-abiding Seattle grindmasters

For over 30 years, Melvins have been flagbearers for a kind of foundational American underground rock. Monstrously psychedelic, heavy as lead, mischievous and angry, they are part of a lineage that connects to squarepeg counterculture forefathers like Beefheart and The Fugs, share swathes of DNA with heavy metal and particularly Black Sabbath, and are particularly impervious to outside cultural shifts. Though they were fleetingly affiliated by the media with grunge, thanks to founder Buzz Osborne's musical and personal relationship to Kurt Cobain, they were something else.

CD: Ride - Weather Diaries

CD: RIDE – WEATHER DIARIES Shoegazing trail-blazers return for another spin on the rock’n’roll merry-go-round

Shoegazing trail-blazers return for another spin on the rock’n’roll merry-go-round

In 1990, Ride were in the first wave of the Shoegazing scene to get out of the blocks and into the studio to record their iconic debut EP. Four albums and a sack load of EPs and singles later, however, they called it a day and the four lads from Oxford slouched off to join Oasis, the Jesus and Mary Chain, put out solo records and, in bassist Steve Queralt’s case, to take up a career in retail at Habitat. And that seemingly was that. However, in 2015 fate intervened and the Coachella Festival came calling with the offer to get back together in front of a crowd of 70,000.

Reissue CDs Weekly: The Doors

Jim Morrison and Co’s confusing visual legacy suffers from lack of upgrades

Fat cigar at hand, Jim Morrison is pondering the future of music. “Maybe it might rely heavily on electronics, tapes,” he says. “I can envision maybe one person with a lot of machines, tapes and electronic set ups, singing or speaking and using machines.” When that prediction was first broadcast in late June 1969, what he described may have seemed outlandish but it came to pass. He can’t be held responsible for Howard Jones, but whole genres of music evolved which revolved around solo artists utilising, indeed, machines, tapes and electronic set ups.

Reissue CDs Weekly: Hoyt Axton

REISSUE CDS WEEKLY: HOYT AXTON The baroque country masterpiece ‘My Griffin is Gone’ resurfaces

The baroque country masterpiece ‘My Griffin is Gone’ resurfaces

Hoyt Axton’s songs were heard most widely when recorded by others. Steppenwolf recorded his “The Pusher” in 1967. It featured on their early 1968 debut album but was most pervasive in summer 1969 after it was included on the soundtrack of Easy Rider. Axton himself didn’t release a version until 1971, when “The Pusher” appeared on his Joy to the World album. The title track, another of his best-known compositions, had charted earlier that year for Three Dog Night. Back in early 1963 "Greenback Dollar", which Axton had co-written, was a US hit for The Kingston Trio.