Aprender Húngaro

I did write a really long post about struggling with pain and whatnot, a positive one for a change, as I've conquered a few demons that have been royally fucking with me all year, but I deleted it. Because when it comes down to it, I'm finally in a good fucking state of mind, most parts of my life seem to be going rather well thank you, and I'm not sure that huge blog posts analysing what's going on with my fucked-up nervous system and it's attendent effects on my inner life are actually that fucking helpful. So instead, here's a song which I think sums up my current mood quite fucking nicely...



Heh.

Mi Cariño, Te Echo De Menos Mucho (Du Ved Hvem Du Er, Og Det Er Din Tur Denne Gang, Or, If Britain Was Still Joined To The Continent Like It Was 15000 Years Ago Life Would Be So Much Fucking Simpler)

I'm a bit pissed, and in a somewhat mixed-up frame of mind for a number of unsurprising reasons. And when I'm this sort of mood only one thing'll do. Blues. Now, normally I'd post some obscure Maxwell St. live recording or something, but today, only one man's guitar will do. Yup, it's Peter Green time again. 'Cos when it comes down to it, no one nails heartsick like Greeny. There are very, very few musicians who can a. beat the Kings (BB, Albert and, king of the Kings, Freddie) at their own game, and b. reduce me to a tearful wreck with two or three notes. So without further ado, here's Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac*.





Yeah, I'm an incurable romantic (in the proper sense of the word), and a fucking sentimental ponce sometimes. What of it? But fuck it, ignore me, just revel in the absolutely pin-sharp beauty of Greeny's leads, and if it's not yr cup of tea, then may I suggest you seek entertainment elsewhere and leave the comments section alone 'cos I am not in the fucking mood for playing nice right now.

Normal service will be resumed in a day or two when I will be posting a huge essay on why 99% of everything is shit. So, no change there then**.

*Stevie Ray Vaughan fans take note. This is how y're supposed to do it.

**Humour. Or is it...?

Hola

The sun has finally come out again, which is nice, however, it feels like someone is very slowy sawing my foot in half with a rusty hacksaw, which is not. I am in a phenomenally fucking bad mood at the moment, and I am sick to fucking death of being in pain. It really fucking gets me down sometimes, and I've not been coping as well as I normally do with it lately, which is why I haven't posted, or emailed or whatever. Sorry, I'm just all up and positive one minute then plummetting downward the next and I really don't like feeling like this. So again, sorry for not emailing/phoning/whatevering you if I said I would, I'm really sorry, I'm just not exactly Mr Reliable at the moment and trying not to let this crap take over my life is taking up most of my energy and brainpower at the moment.* I'll be fine soon, I know, I just needed to vent some, as I'm storing up vast quantities of excess bile and it's going to have to come out somewhere, and that somewhere will be here.

*It's not just the pain that's getting on my nerves, there's other, far more personal stuff that eating away at me at the moment, but I just can't talk about that here, I'd just like to say, just for once, can that bit of my life please just go smoothly or in a vaguely normal manner? Fuck's sake.

El Tiovivo

I haven't posted for a few days for a variety of reasons, as the last week has been both shitkickingly brilliant and foot-gnawingly fucking awful in almost equal measure. So, consequently I haven't really been feeling that chatty, particularly as the main reason for the brilliance is also the main reason I feel like chewing my leg off and that's no recipe for clarity of thought, believe me. I'm ok, it's just taking up more of my brain than I'd like it to at the moment, and consequently, haven't been able to muster up any coherent writing. Next week therefore, will see a veritable flood of new rants, reviews and random shit as this emotional roundabout decelerates and I stop feeling quite so bloody dizzy.

In the meantime, I'd like to say this: Borbetomagus are still, 30-odd years down the line, the finest fucking noise merchants the US has ever fucking produced, a kaleidoscopic all-consuming wind tunnel roar of a band, who, using nothing more than a fuzzed out guitar and two enormously loud saxophones, produce a cascading life-affirming racket that makes me want to bounce up and down like a psychotic Zebedee, and live, as they proved beyond all doubt at the Luminaire last week*, they're a fucking force of nature, and so the first big piece coming next week will be about that, them and why they should be forced-listening for everyone who thinks they know how to make noise.

*Gig of the fucking year, by a country fucking mile.

Mal Momento

Bugger. I really fucking wish I'd been paid on time. Then I could have gone to see Palehorse this evening. Because I'd quite like to get drunk right now and bury my head in a wall of unbelievably loud bass-driven sludge, but because this month has been somewhat hard on the finances I'm fucking skint until Monday, and so you find me chainsmoking fags listening to Effi Briest at fucking stupid volume and writing bollocks on here in a doomed to failure attempt to not think too much about the phonecall I had earlier, which delivered some news which I knew was on the cards, and which, in the abstract and for the person concerned is fantastic, but for me less so, because it means that something brilliant will end in a few weeks time. So I'm simultaneously selfishly pissed off and happy for them at the same time. Oh well, life's been somewhat complicated, if enormous fun (in the main), lately, and I can't complain really, but it would be nice if certain areas of my life could proceed in a relatively normal manner for once. Then again, knowing me, I'd probably get worried if everything was too fucking simple, and it's often been pointed out to me that I almost never do anything the easy or normal way*.

On reflection, it's probably a good thing that I can't afford to get pissed tonight, but still. Arse.

*I was once told that if you cut me in half, I'd have the words "contrary bastard" written through me like in a stick of rock.

Escapar De La Suerte

No more being perturbed for the good Dr, finally some fucking resolution. Nice to have the smile back on my face*, even if the reason for it probably isn't the one y're thinking of, in fact, it's precisely the opposite. And no, I'm not going to elaborate other than to say translate the title. Right, what's next?

*Even if it has taken a somewhat more wry aspect than usual.

Soy El Hongo

At least that's how I feel at the moment. But fuck it, because tonight I shall be returning to the comfy confines of Cafe Oto, to see the rather fine TIME, the Morgen's other band, because as I say, they're excellent, and I keep missing their gigs, for a bewildering variety of reasons, so Michael Rother and cohorts are going to lose my custom tonight, and much as I adore Neu!, I suspect I know exactly what's going to happen at the Hallogallo gig, and much as I fucking love that motoriking loveliness, I'd rather see something new, and vital, and not an exercise in fucking 70s nostalgia. Plus Dean McPhee and Lichens are playing too, and Dean's stuff sounds quite, quite lovely, and I seriously fucking need some lovely this evening. Lichens I'm in two minds about, some of his collaborations have been excellent, but I've yet to be totally convinced by his solo stuff, I'm always open to persuasion tho, and a lot of people who's opinions I respect deeply seem to really enjoy his music, so we'll see...

Also, contrary to what it says on the Cafe Oto site, rumours of Morgen Und Nite's demise have been sorely exaggerated...

Helios Creed: La Última Risa

Now my devotion to Chrome's masterpieces Alien Soundtracks and Half Machine Lip Moves isn't exactly a secret. But it occurs to me that I've never written about Helios Creed's solo stuff on here before. Which is a little odd given that he's probably my favourite guitarist ever, I'll freely admit that sonically he's influenced me more deeply than any other musician and is certainly the one who opened my ears further than anyone before or since to the infinite possibilities of using a stupid amount of effects pedals*, and crucially, possibly even more so than Matt Bower et al, branded into the core of my musical being that going too fucking far is a damn good place to start.

There are three albums in particular (out of many) that will always be the killers as far as I'm concerned, the untouchable triumvirate of 1989's The Last Laugh, 1990's Boxing The Clown, and 1991's Lactating Purple (all on Amphetamine Reptile)*. A trio of albums that fused together every disparate strand of psychedelia and spacerock, filtered through a vicious hardcore/punk sensibility, occasionally refracted through an angular proggish prism, sometimes infused with a deeply unsettling almost mediaeval ambience in their (admittedly rare) quieter moments all wrapped round a noiserock core of unswerving viciousness and nailed to the fucking floor by whatever rhythm section the mad fucker had got on board for that particular album. Helios Creed used to go through rhythm sections like Spinal Tap go through drummers or the Melvins through bassists, and weirdly, his records were all the better for it then. He never seemed to attain the same heights of ultrapsych lunacy once his band actually coalesced into a stable unit.

The first of the three, The Last Laugh, featuring the rhythm section of Jason Finn (drums) and Daniel House (bass) starts with a three part blast that recalls the disjointed structures of Alien Soundtracks and Half Machine Lip Moves, kicking off with the straight-for-the-jugular Some Way Out, a careering piece of psychedelic hardcore, powered along by that fucking guitar sound, that stuck wah'ed chainsaw that just cuts through yr brain like a monofilament garrotte with the heavily distorted and filtered vocals of Mr Creed insanely gargling through the maelstrom and then suddenly, with no warning, cuts straight into the unsettling ambience of The Dream, all heavily reverbed backward and acoustic guitars, massively detuned chant and and atmosphere of real hypnagogic dread before slamming back into The Diplomat, a mid paced spacepunk cut with some fucking astonishing guitar that sounds like a writhing psychedelic hydra during the solo. Track 3 (I'm not going to go into all the tracks here, I just want to whet yr appetite if you've never heard this shit), Nirbasion Annasion, is one of his greatest moments, like spacerock turned inside out, beginning with a wonderful persian sounding guitar line, it's rolls into full power on an insidious, sinuous bass line and minimalist drums as the man himself unleashes a torrent of just fucking amazing acid guitar lines forwards and backwards (and as ever with Helios, it's sometimes hard to tell which is going which way, or if it's one, two or four guitars), intertwining with each other and the bass to create a philosophers knot of a track, with his relatively buried, and as usual, heavily processed vocals adding to the glorious confusion. It's just brilliant, and deeply weird. It's everything spacerock promises to be, but almost never quite becomes, except when this man pulls his acid soaked finger out of his arse and gets it right like he does here.

Side 2 is just as fucking good, leading off with Late Bloomer, a track drenched in the same paranoid Ballard/Dick atmosphere that was soaked right through Chrome's Third From The Sun, before kicking into the deeply unsettling Where The Children Are. One of the most traditionally structred songs on the album, yet one of the most disturbing, (along with Road Out Of Hell which ends side 1), it's a seemingly innocuous slowish rock song, well, at least until the guitars really get going. The phasing bandsaw is back with a vengeance, allied with a howling, crying solo line that splinters and recombines as Helios deadpan intones the lines "As you wish upon a star, wondering where yr children are" and other lovely sentiments, it's not a song you necessarily want to examine too deeply, there's an undercurrent of reined-in violent perversity to it that's never explicit, just felt as a deep unease in the back of yr throat. The tension built up by that piece of masterful freak horror is perfectly defused by the next song, the most playful track on the LP, The Rant, which is sort of what would happen if you took a fast 60s r'n'b or soul number, preferably one that tells you exactly how to do the monkey, or the watusi, or the boogaloo, and rerecorded it with a Venusian harcdore band. Fantastic madness, and it contains some of the best fucking guitar you can imagine. There's not a duff track on the album, and it would be a stone cold motherfucking classic if it wasn't for the LP that followed it, Boxing The Clown, a record which I can safely say, that if The Last Laugh blew my mind, then Boxing The Clown gave it the single best musical fuck it had up until that moment, and which will be the subject of the next post in this series.

So yeah, part two will be coming when I have the time as I suspect this week could be a bit chaotic, and I can't be arsed to write any more this evening because those lovely blue valium tablets someone very kindly gave me last week have just kicked in and I'm starting to giggle at everything, so yeah part two very soon. And yes, I'm much less discombobulated now, and that's not because of the valium, but because I now know what I really needed to know before. Cryptic? Yeah, but you know me.

I wouldn't normally post anything from youtube without any visuals, but I don't have Nirbasion Annasion on any digital format, but the man himself has posted the bugger up there so I'll make an exception as it is such a fucking amazing piece of psych. Enjoy. Or run away...



*A live engineer once sneeringly asked me do you think all those pedals are really necessary? To which he received one of my two customary answers to the fucking stupid things some live engineers come out with, that is to say a look of withering contempt coupled with a skull fracturing blast of phased to fuck feedback, followed by the one word answer "yeah". The other answer is just "oh fuck off", it depends how much of a cock the engineer is, and what sort of mood I'm in at the time.

** The preceding LP, Superior Catholic Finger (Subterranean) is fucking excellent too, as were the two  LPs that followed these three on AmRep, Kiss To The Brain and Planet X, but that's for another day and another article.

Una Sonrisa* De Oreja A Oreja, O, Muchos Gracias Señor Marrón**

Goddamn motherfucking holy shit YES. Usted consigue a veces el extremo correcto del palo, if you get my drift. You know that wall I've talked about before? Rubble.

*My favourite word in my slightly shaky second language, it means smile/grin.

**And no, I don't mean heroin. You fuckers.

Usted Consigue A Veces El Extremo Incorrecto Del Palo

And sometimes, someone else gets the wrong end of the stick. Sometimes you both do, and instead of awkward and weird, it's actually funny and doesn't matter. Sometimes you don't get what you want but end up somewhere really good anyway, and why has it taken me 37 fucking years to realise this?

Ah, fuck it, who cares, all I know is I've knocked a permanent crack in a wall that's been standing for two damn long, and one good crack is all it takes to make it start to crumble and fall, and that makes me so damn happy, and calm in a way I haven't felt for a very long time.