Griff says: Trivial Pursuits

Keen monitors of the 'Griff says' articles will hopefully remember my previous post about one-woman-band and all round creative marvel Julia Kotowski who operates under the name of entertainment for the braindead. As I made clear at the time, observing the continuous and varied expression of her artistic vision has been an enduring joy for me over the last three years. You can presumably imagine the frisson of excitement I felt yesterday then when I saw her myspace bulletin announcing a new release. It's called Trivialities and as ever it's available as a free download, though on this occasion just at bandcamp.

Perhaps not too surprisingly I think it's wonderful and I'd really like to describe it to you. However, rather than do that I'm going to reprint Julia's own description as I love the honesty and feeling of the following passage and I don't think I can top it:
"Now this is nothing for the Greatest Hits Collection. No excellent piece of craftsmanship, no mentionable artistic value. Just stuff that happened, songs that happened while I was planning on something else, like a comma in the short story that is my life. That's how it rolls, you're designing your career, planning out your steps, willing to create something big and meaningful, and in the meantime there are all those little things going on... friends become strangers, strangers turn into friends, maybe one of them reminds you that life's not so bad or meanwhile you've found comfort in nihilism, and then there's this little ukulele that you've owned for years but rarely ever played... yet suddenly it's overflowing with music.

No experiments this time. No exploration of unknown terrain. No concepts, nothing big.
Sometimes I feel so sick of sounding lovely all the time, of always sounding the same, but then again I can't help it. So, fuck creativity! Fuck belief in progress! Maybe I should be elsewhere already. We always feel urged to move forward, do better shit than yesterday, more accomplished, more brilliant, more fancy, and maybe it's almost considered stagnation in personal development if someone just wants to lean back and play some boring ukulele folk songs to comfort himself. Sure I want to be more brilliant and fancy and better than ever, too, but for now maybe there is no need to reinvent the wheel as long as I'm happy playing my rediscovered ukulele for a while. All the flamboyant shit can wait until tomorrow.
So once more I'm not taking a creative leap forward but rather just sitting down on the very spot I happen to stand right now. But maybe someone wants to sit besides me and listen? "

Phew! Quite a statement of intent and a position perhaps best summed up by another rather more famous German; "Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht Anders tun. Gott hilfe mir. Amen." (Just joking, Julia. You're nothing like him, I don't even think he played the ukulele!)



Personally, I love Trivialities. I think it's a mature return to the magical sounds of Hypersomnia and Hydrophobia. I also love it that, in the passage above, Julia displays such naked passion in defending an art-form (bedroom folk) that's often portrayed as safe and wimpy. The attention-grabbing, toddler tantrum antics of some musical genres has unfortunately meant that music that is gentle and thoughtful is sometimes mistakenly labelled as bland and insipid. Nothing could be further from the truth, this is music with genuine feeling and sentiment. It exists because of the artistic urge. What more are you looking for?



For musos amongst you, Julia has rather helpfully provided an inventory of the instruments used on this recording:
"A soprano ukulele, a bowed guitar, a bluegrass banjo, a mandolin banjo, glockenspiel, one concertina, another concertina, a wooden flute, borrowed drums and a cardboard box, casio mini-keyboard, shaker & tambourine."



I hope that clears that up. Enjoy!

Griff
xx

~Kitten Wine~#16: Swans Way

By rights we should have hated it!

It was all the NME's fault....and The Face....and Robert Elms! This New Pop infused with light Jazz should really have made us bellicose...but we loved this one particular song that emerged from it. I mean, we REALLY loved it! How come? Let's find out. Jump in the Streetlamp Time Machine and we'll go back to early 1984.

It was a time when the NME was still printed on that thick coarse paper and the ink made your hands black as you pored over every word. Back in those days, Griff and I lived by the NME, and to a lesser extent TV shows The Tube and The Old Grey Whistle Test. There was no Internet then and even MTV Europe was till a couple of years away, so for impassioned little music monkeys like us, the NME was IT!

In those days the NME still adopted a very intellectual pose, it was full of Post Punk and Postcard Records, Jean Cocteau and The Cocteau Twins, articles on French Cinema and Those French Girls, more Jean-Paul Sartre than John Paul George and Ringo.....and we loved it! It was a transitional time for us....we had done the bratty Punk thing in our early teens and now, in our mid teens we found our tastes becoming a little more sophisticated.

In late 1983, early 84, somebody(Robert Elms we suppose) decided that Jazz was (ahem) 'the new thing' and that Pop should be it's outlet. In that immediate pre-Yuppie early 80s, The Face was the Bible of choice for the fashionistas founded by ex-NME journalists and took it upon itself to promote this 'new' music. Suddenly Jazz-Pop was everywhere, from the sublime(Weekend, Fine Young Cannibals) to the ridiculous(Simply Red) with all the lukewarm water inbetween(Sade).

In late 83 as we prepared to leave school and totter out into the big world our music tastes changed considerably, but also we became more passionate about music....a passion that still burns through these Blogs today. And it was moments like seeing 'Soul Train' by Swans Way that lit the blue touchpaper...

God, it was seismic! Like so many other moments from that time, I can remember exactly where I was and how I felt as it played out on The Tube....scratchy cello strings, a mellifluous voice intoning 'It's midnight....Sooooooul Train....Hah!' and we were off into 3 and a half minutes of beautiful, vibrant Pop.

The music moves with a slinky, louche swagger all cellos and brass, but it's the vocals that are SO strong on this track. Robert Shaw is the singer of note here and it's the impassioned longing of those "I try...I try...I try....oohoooohooo" lines that win this listener over. Add to that the call and response style of the verses and the "I'm not strong enough" finale and you have near as damn it a perfect Pop song. Sadly, the public didn't agree and the song only scraped a paltry Number 20 position on the charts. This somehow suggests that there were 19 songs better than it in the charts that week! I would argue that there aren't 19 songs better than it in the history of music!!

In that transitional period of early 1984 as we began to leave the well trodden streets of our youth and move into the bars and clubs of our *cough* Golden Years, we clung to music like a safety jacket....it was everything, and every record, every song was digested, dissected and discussed in minute detail. Some songs became mere 'songs', but some, like 'Soul Train' became the very lifeblood.

We really should have hated it....but we loved it...and still do!

~Gordon~

As an addendum we present Swans Way's follow up single 'Illuminations' which strangely I never heard at the time it was released. Now, hearing it here, I wish I taken this band a bit more seriously. Oh well.....

~Kitten Wine~#15: Jacques Brel, And The Poetry Of Desolation

It was always inevitable that I would run into the words and music of Jacques Brel one day. He had already been a major influence on some of the artists I admired; David Bowie, Marc Almond, Dusty Springfield, to those I couldn't live without; Momus and Scott Walker. Momus, Walker and Almond had all recorded entire collections of Brel's work, so it was obvious we would collide one day. I just didn't expect it to be such a long strange path to his door....

It all began in the late October of 1989.....SHE had gone, and this time for good, the sting of anguish still hung on me like a fresh tattoo. It was a Tuesday night, the first Tuesday since early April that we hadn't been together. I had a bit of a flu coming on so decided just to stay in with a bottle of Jack Daniels and the four Scott Walker albums I had recently acquired. They had been a bit of a bargain...through Record Collector magazine I had managed to pick up Scott Walker's first four solo albums for £40. This was quite something as I had seen both 'Scott 3' and 'Scott 4' for sale in RC for over £60 EACH.
The rest of my family had gone away on holiday that afternoon so I was alone in the house. I know what you're thinking....empty house, broken heart, melancholic music, Jack Daniels, flu remedy capsules....an accident waiting to happen, right? Wrong....somehow I felt both uplifted and soothed as I listened to the four albums in chronological order. There were certain songs that I felt did the job better than others, and as I perused the sleeve notes found that the songs I connected most with were those written by a certain J Brel(as the label had it). The three song Brel finale of 'Scott 3' especially; 'Funeral Tango', 'Sons Of...' and 'If You Go Away' in particular was simply miraculous. Scott's interpretation of 'If You Go Away' in particular sounded, at that moment, like the greatest piece of words and music combined in all musical history. I played it over and over again. Better than any Beecham's Powders.

I thanked Scott and Jacques for their combined efforts in getting me through the longest night of the soul and made a point to find out more about Brel and check out his own work.

What you have to remember is that back in 1989/90 there were no huge CD reissue campaigns on the go, in fact there weren't really an awful lot of CDs of old music at all, it was all new stuff that was being put out on the spiffy new format. And there was certainly no Internet!
Every time I went to Glasgow I tried to find Brel albums or CDs but to no avail. Then one day, in the late Summer of 1990, in Tower Records Import section....there were THREE Jacques Brel 12" vinyl albums....a kind of 'hits' compilation, a Live In Paris 1961 album, and a double album set of songs he recorded in the mid-sixties. Needless to say I snaffled all three immediately. On the train back to Stirling I studied the sleeves longingly....I couldn't wait to hear them. This was SO exciting!!
Finally I was in my room, the Dansette fired up and I put the first album(the 'hits' one) on.....
The music was like a mix of music hall, cabaret and the soundtrack to Monsieur Hulot's Holiday, then came a big shock....he started singing...IN FRENCH!!!! Huh? Now, get the stupid looks off your faces!! I was genuinely surprised! Somehow I just imagined he'd be singing in English....I mean, how had all my idols understood his lyrics?
But as the album played on, one thing became obvious....it didn't matter that I couldn't understand the lyrics, it was the delivery, the emotion, the timbre....THE TIMBRE!!!! that kept me hooked. As an interpreter of song, Brel is almost without equal....

On 'Les Bourgeois', his attack on the lazy middle classes you can virtually hear him stamping up and down as he vents his spleen on the idle rich...


On the extraordinary 'La Valse à Mille Temps', he seems to fit more words into a song than is humanly possible....


The song 'Amsterdam' has been covered quite superbly by Bowie, Almond and Walker, but check out Brel's own interpretation below as proof that nobody delivers vocal drama like Brel. Look out especially for that moment right at the end where he vanishes from the spotlight....it takes the breath right out of your lungs....


On 'Quand On N'a Que L'Amour' he fills a gentle acoustic ballad with so much emotion, pathos and depth that wonder about all these flouncy singer/songwriter types that faff around these days and the pencil-kneck geekery of it all...


And then there's 'Ne Me Quitte Pas'...the original of 'If You Go Away'. I thought it would be difficult to better Scott's interpretation, but again it's all in the drama....the sobs in the vocal, the moments when the voice all but disappears or where it suddenly bursts into anguished longing. Painful....but, just like a broken heart, that 'good' pain.


Jacques Brel tought me that it doesn't matter if you can't understand the lyrics, a good interpretor of song should move you regardless, and had it not been for Jacques then I probably wouldn't have sought out the music of Juliette Greco, Sylvie Vartan, Meiko Kaji, Amalia Rodrigues, Reiko Ike or even Edith Piaf.

Discovering music when you are at your lowest ebb can often lead to a longtime love affair with certain songs or artists and 20 years on Jacques Brel can still move me to tears without me having a clue why.

Salut!

~Gordon~

Griff says; I'm feeling swooky, s'okee though.

mkf is the pop psuedonym of San Francisco resident, and one-woman creative powerhouse, Maria Kristie Fabila (pictured). mkf released her album 's'okee' on bandcamp in 2008 and it's squarely grounded in familiar 'Griff says' territory. You know the drill by now; quirky, lo-fi pop with a broken-hearted, soft-voiced girl accompanying herself on ukulele. Think Wisdom Tooth, Shelby Sifers, Madeline Ava and a host of other Griff favourites to get the picture. And there's certainly nothing wrong with that picture, let's face it, it's a winning combination. However, in April of this year mkf released a further album on bandcamp entitled 'sunday morning phase'. This short (5 track) recording seemed to promise more of the same, albeit with more polish, until track 4 'Lead Me On' kicks off. All of a sudden we've moved from cute twee-folk and are straying into 60's girl-pop territory with amazingly effective results.

And if you think that's delightful and unexpected, the final track; 'I Wanna Do Stuff' has mkf breaking cover and storming into full-on Shangri-Las or Ronettes mode. I promise you, it's exhilirating stuff. I leapt from my computer chair and jived uncontrollably around the stately Scottish mansion from which Streetlamp broadcasts to the world and, believe me, I rarely do that.
Given the above, I'm delighted to see that this week mkf has released yet another freely downloadable track 'swooky' on bandcamp. This is apparently the first track of an EP to be made fully public in October of this year and it continues wonderfully from where 'sunday morning phase' left off. How would I desribe it? Let's just say that if you've been longing for an outbreak of super-cute, lo-fi, doo-wop, electro-pop to shake up the world of indie then 'swooky' is the answer to your prayers. But don't take my word for it, have a listen:

When she's not shaking up the world of indie, Maria is a freelance graphic designer (available for creative freelance work in the Los Angeles area if you're interested). I mention this as I want to finish off with the brilliantly creative video for her song 'we belong in ____, baby' from 's'okee'.



Hope you enjoyed that as much as I did. Now visit bandcamp and support this artist.

Griff
xx