Student Selection (3 of ??) - P-Model

The return of Student Selection -  a series that never really got started (just one post I think - actually two) but was intended to showcase cool music that my students have turned me onto. 

Quite a few classes are based around a prompt - send me a clip of your favorite tune in such-and-such a genre, or sometimes a specific artist (Bowie or Joni). For a recent class on New Wave / Postpunk, a student who is very knowledgeable about the genre nominated this from a Japanese group that shamefully (what with being a postpunk historian and all) I'd never heard of.   

Listening it struck me initially as "none-more-New-Wave" - like how could anything be more New Wave than this? The angularity, the synth bit, the strained vocals....

But then, listening more, I discerned an odd resemblance to Led Zeppelin - the beat reminded me of "When the Levee Breaks" (or Billy Squier's Zep-clone "The Stroke"). The vocals get quite soaring and Plant-y. And when the noisy guitarburst comes in, it's excitingly noisy but it's definitely a solo - not so far from something Jimmy Page might let loose. 

And what d'ya know? As the knowledgeable student revealed, P-Model is a classic example of the Old Wave / New Wave switcheroo. Before, they had been an unsuccessful prog band and like so many Western counterparts (Police, Cars, etc) they wholesale embraced the New Aesthetic  - sonically, sartorially, in terms of record design. 

Geometrics heightened by the obi-strip

None-new-wavest of all time, possibly, this back cover:

And not least a significant element of the total make-over is the band name P-Model, which is  "we are product" / "we are machines" in its oblique sleekness. 

But you can tell these dudes can really really play - they got the chops and in classic crypto-Oldwaver fashion are shoving all that snazz into the strictures of the New Thing. 

Listen to the demented clockwork virtuosity of this one

Thoughts on a Grey Day / winter seasons of the soul

Long loved this album title and record cover (the shot was taken by John McVie) , but never listened to the music until now.

The image has a powerful English-nostalgia effect, memories of walking to school through fog or mist

But the Bare Trees cover photo could easily have been taken in California

The fog in the Bay Area is something else. I once approached San Francisco in a taxi from the airport, which is further inland. As we drove along, getting steadily nearer to the coast, I could see tentacular plumes of low-lying mist  creeping up the creek beds - the fog was able to extend further inland on lower ground than the main mass of its miasma could reach. An eerie sight - the fog tendrils seemed to be the sinister vanguards of a larger occupying army, stealthy prehensile auguries of an all-subsuming formlessness.

All along the California coast, right down to San Diego way, you can get fog at certain times of day or year. I remember staying once in a hotel in Torrey Pines and the Englishy flashback thrill of seeing the adjacent golf  course completely shrouded in grey, visibility drastically reduced, the normal sunbright clarity of rolling green vistas muffled and bleached…

It's also been misty morned here in LA recently. Which I've noticed because I seem to be waking up at 5.30 AM or 6 AM no matter when I go to bed. This happens in old age, right?

The record? Well, it's post-Peter Green and pre-Buckingham/Nicks, the inbetweeny years, the hitless years (Green-era FMac actually had way bigger UK hit singles than the later, poppier phase). So it's got this kind of amiable, washed-out, bluesy quality, not unlike Climax Blues Band. 

Actually what it reminds me of is Wishbone Ash - pleasant but inessential. 

Perhaps the thematic of misty greyness in the title and image was suggested by the music's indistinction.

I say "hitless" - but until the Buckingham/Nicks era this was the only Fleetwood Mac record to sell a million in America. I guess it's very Frampton-like blandness helped on FM radio.

However there is the remarkable track at the very end.  

from Fleetwood Mac wiki: 

Aileen Scarrott, credited as Mrs Scarrott, was a resident of Headley in Hampshire where Fleetwood Mac lived between 1971 and 1974. She was featured reciting her poem Thoughts On a Grey Day on the band's 1972 album Bare Trees.

She was born Aileen Katie Mary Huggett in 1904 at Eastbourne in Sussex. At the time of the recording she was married to Harry Scarrott, the third marriage for both of them. Harry had lived in Headley for at least forty years beforehand. Her previous marriages were to Alfred F. Cager at Brighton in 1935 and Charles E. Smith at Willesden, London in 1947.

She died in 1984 at Cannock Chase in Staffordshire.

The recording of Ms. Scarrot's poem "Thoughts On A Grey Day" that was used for the Bare Trees album was actually read by Mick Fleetwood who was trying to sound like a sweet old lady.

I wonder if that last bit of contradicting info is really true? If so, it's a bloody good impersonation of a dear frail old lady. 

Some other versions of the cover have a faint mauve tinge to them

Ah, there's a back cover with a similar sort of wintry image

Pix taken recently by local photographer Martin Rance in the area of West Herts I grew up and still have ties. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness….

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Bunch of suggestions in the comments, and via email, as to other blurry, muzzy covers

Seventeen Seconds is the one where I'm kicking myself: 

About the audio contents of The Cure's album, I recently mused the following:

The aspects that Nick Kent (original NME reviewer of the album) finds frustrating - the vagueness, the tentativeness, the foggy pensiveness,  a sense of things being withheld, emotional indeterminacy - are exactly the  qualities of the album I find intriguing and attractive.

I feel like it's a record that could only come out of English suburbia...   (Crawley is almost exactly the same distance from London as my hometown Berkhamsted is, just on the other side of the metropolis).

Yet having said that, the atmosphere sometimes puts me in mind of Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet

Because of my life experience it inevitably conjures Home Counties memories of  listlessness-as-bliss... mystical mundanity...

A Thursday afternoon in an unseasonably damp, overcast August. Poor visibility, light drizzle muffling the sense of distance. 

A much more recent group - Lo Five, from the Wirral -  taps into similar states of suspended-from-Time mystic listlessness. The greyscale sound of releases like The Geography of the Abyss always makes me think of  rivulets of rain streaking the windows of a coach... drizzle so faint it almost hangs in the air rather than fall to the ground and that creates a reduced-visibility effect, foreshortening the landscape  and making it seem like it's disappearing into formlessness 

"Bare trees" reminded me of some self-help books I spied recently in a UK book store, based on the concept of wintering - how to get through fallow seasons of the heart and mind. 

The top one by Katherine May was the best-seller that started the trend, seemingly. They all have the same generic style of artwork

The follow-up from May shifts to a spring-like vibe while still acknowledging the exhaustion idea

This one seems to be more literal - winter in the weather / climate sense rather than winter of the soul

I wonder what pearls it contains

 Wrap up warm? Drink soup? You can't beat a hot water bottle.  Roast chestnuts. Crumpets are nice.... 

Canonic Albums by Artists Who You Love and Revere But For Some Reason This One Bypasses You Almost Completely

Albums you grudgingly respect / dutifully acknowledge the objective eminence, but when push comes to shove you never actually want to play / could happily never hear again.

Velvet Underground - White Light, White Heat

The Beatles - The Beatles aka White Album

The Band - Music From Big Pink

David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars

David Bowie - Station to Station

David Bowie - "Heroes"

Can - Ege Bamyasi

Rolling Stones - Exile on Main Street

The Aphex Twin ...I Care Because You Do

"Bypasses You Almost Completely" - the "almost" here refers to the one or two tracks on the album you unreservedly love. Usually these are The Obvious Singles e.g. "'Heroes'", "The Weight" - even when it isn't literally a single (was "Vitamin C" a single? Perhaps it was in Germany). Sometimes there's like one other track you really like e.g. "The Secret Life of Arabia".

With Ziggy, it's just "Ziggy Stardust" and "Suffragette City".

With Station, it's just "Golden Years", which is one of my absolute favorites by Bowie. The title track's eminence in people's hearts continues to perplex.

White Album, the actively liked songs would be "Blackbird" and "Something", "Back in the U.S.S.R"...  A few others are nice enough ("Guitar Weeps", "Mother Nature's", "Dear Prudence", “Warm Guitar”) Its grade is lowered by the excrescent presence of some of the very worst things they ever made: "Glass Onion", "Ob-La-Di", "Bungalow Bill", "Do It In the Road". Most anything perpetrated by McCartney. Mainly, it's just very very long. 

Exile is just a samey slog really. "Happy" and "Let It Loose" would be my picks here.

Apart from the sublime "Alberto Balsam" nothing from .... I Care Because You Do has ever managed to lodge itself in the memory or the heart, despite periodic attempts at "giving it another go"

^^^^

Albums that don’t qualify for this category -

- universally accepted as duff /disappointing records by Canonic artists (eg Television’s Adventure) 

- albums by Canonic artists where there is no consensus about whether it’s great or shite (Strangeways Here We Come). 

(I am not sure what Smiths fans feel about Meat Is Murder - to me is it is a mystifyingly slight and sterile sounding album redeemed by two luminously wondrous songs, “Well I Wonder” and “the Headmaster Ritual” and if I am feeling generous “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” which is lushly appointed (it is lowered in my estimation by being a bizarrely misguided choice as a single - continuing a long stretch in which the Smiths could do (almost) no right when it came to the Single (from Shakespeare’s Shitstir to well the end really - save perhaps Thorn, Shoplifters, Sheila). Meat also contains some of their slightest tunes - "Rusholme", "Want The One I Can't Have", "Nowhere Fast", "Barbarism Begins" - and a couple of real graters ("What She Said", "Meat Is Murder" itself). I suppose on balance, added up, it totals out as simply not very good, even before you factor in the clinical  production.  But I'm sure many would disagree).