1982: Charanjit Singh - Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat
Charanjit Singh found himself in an interesting position back in the early 80s. Working as a session musician in the Bollywood films industry, he was exposed to a wide variety of electronic musical devices. Two of the instruments he used, which would not have been made so readily available otherwise, were the Roland TB-303 and TR-808 synthesizers — the very same synthesizers that later generated all of those drippy sounds you hear on your acid house records. During the time he spent away from his work, Singh sought to re-contextualize the ancient music of his nation — the Indian ragas — using the most technologically up-to-date methods. So no, Ten Ragas To a Disco Beat isn’t some abstractly titled avant-garde record (which is what I initially thought); it’s actually ten ragas played over a disco beat. And no, it’s not one of those corny gift-shop albums marketed to rich tourists — it’s 10 hissing artifacts that represent an aurally flexible ancient culture.
Now, ‘hissing’ isn’t usually the word one uses to describe what happens when folks attempt to re-record old cultural music. Usually you’d call it “world music,” and usually you wouldn’t listen to it. But don’t be averted. Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat was originally released in super-limited quantities in 1982, but it’s recently been re-released by the Bombay Connection label, and it couldn’t be better. The melodies mesmerize, the rhythms pulse relentlessly. And the synthesizer… Oh lord, Singh’s synth makes sound that modern electronic producers should envy. Ten Ragas doesn’t come off gimmicky like one would expect from reading over its history, rather, it’s minimal and potent beyond measure. So get your ass over to the Bombay Connection, they’ve got a gift waiting for you.
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1999: S - Sadstyle
Critics and commentators across musical lines all agree, and it’s certainly hard to dispute: the internet has made it easier to seek out obscure music. And yet there are still some artists whose music is difficult to uncover, precisely because their name defies easy Googling. Case in point: Jenn Ghetto. Best known for her membership in the beloved, soon-to-reunite Seattle band Carissa’s Wierd, Ghetto records under a solo project called S, making for a nice outsider touch, the 21st-century version of eighth-page ads in the back of MRR or HeartattaCk. While such an alias makes the music made by Ghetto harder to find on the internet, it’s certainly worth the extra steps.
Sadstyle was recorded from 1997 to 1999, during a time when Carissa’s Wierd was still an active band, and it has somewhat of a side-project feel. Listen for long enough and you’ll hear found-sound collages (as on “Iterlude”), tape manipulation (“Lemonade Sweetheart”), and unexpected covers (an abbreviated take on Metallica’s “Welcome Home (Sanitarium)”). This album is indeed a four-track project from the 90s, but it’s also a reminder of exactly why the home-recordings aesthetic works. These songs can feel messy at times, but that mirrors the messiness of the lives documented in them, something Ghetto’s lyrics and (especially) her vocal delivery makes clear.
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While S’s subsequent albums have adopted a fuller and more distinctive sound — see the incorporation of programmed beats on 2004’s Puking and Crying or the cleaner approach of 2010’s im not as good at it as you — parts of Sadstyle overlap stylistically with the emotionally raw sweep of Carissa’s Wierd. Both the rapid, rhythmic “Everyone Else” and the stream-of-consciousness delivery of “Up & Down” would seem equally effective played by a full band as they would in the stark, solitary versions heard here.
Elsewhere, the intimacy of home recordings feels essential. Ghetto’s voice can turn sharp, but here it’s mainly a whisper, imparting a sense of isolation as it sketches minute portraits of fractured relationships. What endures about Sadstyle is the way emotionally raw sentiments rise, bristle, and sting. On “Another X-Mas W/Out You,” Ghetto sings, “We can just be friends/ Guess it’s my turn now/ Let me buy you a drink/ I’m glad we figured this all out,” the last word elongated to show the stress. Another fragment that drifts into rapid focus comes in “I Love You Too…”: “Can’t even breathe in here/ Can’t even look at you/ Tell me how it feels when they all start to laugh at you.” It isn’t the lyrics, per se, but Ghetto’s delivery that’s hard to shake. The same could be said for this album; over the course of its hour-long running time, it establishes a mood that stays with the listener for much longer.
1991: Talk Talk - "Ascension Day"/"After the Flood"
Would you believe that I only recently heard Laughing Stock for the first time? I had, of course, unjustly written Talk Talk off as tawdry 80s electro-rockers, due largely to the greatest hits collection I had stumbled across in my lady’s iTunes library. Zero of the songs on that compilation were from Laughing Stock, and only two (“I Believe in You”, “Desire”) were taken from Spirit of Eden, generally considered to be the band’s other masterwork. You can see how I was misled.
“Ascension Day,” the second track from 1991’s Laughing Stock, is a stunningly tight six-minute song that manages to singlehandedly foreshadow much of the post-rock output of the next couple decades, including, yes, Radiohead’s later career phase (specifically In Rainbows). Lee Harris’ spacious drumming is the song’s backbone — the spirit guide for the band’s warm, textural noodling and frontman Mark Hollis’ charmingly disheveled Peter Gabriel-esque vocals. By the conclusion of “Ascension Day,” the song has split open and become a snarling beast, wide-lensed and feral.
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That conclusion is a little confusin’: “Ascension Day” stops abruptly in the middle of a measure — the first time I heard it, I thought I’d gotten a bum copy of the track, but no. The teeth-gritting tension of that song leads abruptly into the beginning of the loping, spacious “After the Flood.” At almost 10 minutes, it is the undoubted centerpiece of Laughing Stock, a gem even amidst so many great tracks. Weird atmospherics abound as Harris rides an unswerving rhythm through snaking organ lines and calm guitar feedback. The melodic themes in “After the Flood” reveal themselves deliberately, laconically — all steady peaks and drugged valleys.
As a swan song, Laughing Stock is one hell of a lasting statement. Rumor has it Hollis turned the recording studio into a den of meditation, complete with incense and candles. And though it sounds kind of Enya-cheesy, you can almost sense the Nag Champa wafting through the headphones. It smells just about perfect as it sounds.
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2000, 2007: Shellac, Subtle - "Prayer to God"
For Doseone of Subtle, covering Shellac’s “Prayer to God” was an appropriate way of dealing with feelings about an ex-fiancée who had taken up with someone else while he was on tour. Ending the lives of the two parties involved, as the songs’ lyrics suggest, was not. Writing a new song must have seemed unnecessary when Shellac’s ode to jealous murder already existed.
Because songs about situations usually bear no more than a family resemblance to the intense emotion that gave birth to them, a soundtrack to difficult times seems more comfortable for artists than a fresh stab at greatness. If one were to respond completely insensitively to Doseone’s ‘situation,’ “Prayer to God” is the perfect wounded karaoke number because it isn’t something shiny and new; it’s old, borrowed, and blue. And as well as serving up the requisite jilted lover’s blues, it also turns the air blue with a sweary chorus of “fucking kill him.” Doseone really cranks up the demon/voodoo motor of the song, scrunching up his body and flattening his voice to its most nasal and nasty.
The story behind the performance can be verified in an interview he gave to Pitchfork, which — as they might have said in the olden days — was candid, an understatement in fact: As Doseone tells it, “Prayer to God” was prophetic — when an unusual soundcheck was played (the first time he heard the song), he knew something was up back home. I don’t know whether Steve Albini sold his soul to the devil by the roadside to make this song, or whether it was inspired by a real-life kitchen-sink drama, but whatever conspired to make it, ‘tharr be demons’ now somewhere in the mix. The song is eminently useful for angry people the world over — perhaps if put forward, it would steal the UK Christmas No. 1 from Simon Cowell a second time. Which would really piss Albini off.
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1988-92: Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds: Tender Prey, The Good Son, Henry's Dream
As part of their ongoing project to re-issue The Bad Seeds’ back catalogue, Mute Records has unveiled the next three albums in the series: Tender Prey, The Good Son, and Henry’s Dream. These records document a tremendous period of growth for Nick Cave as a songwriter, and as such they are some of the band’s most wildly and excitingly uneven. The first in the series, 1988’s Tender Prey, is a ragged and hungry beast, frothing at the mouth with the sort of murder and mayhem fans had come to expect of a Nick Cave outing, yet the violence is mitigated now and again by the gentle melancholy that the band had been refining since Kicking Against the Pricks. But no discussion of Tender Prey can truly begin without first addressing the album’s titanic opening track: “The Mercy Seat.”
In certain ways, it’s a perfect marriage of Cave’s noise-punk roots and his growing infatuation with melody. At seven minutes and eighteen seconds, “The Mercy Seat” is a dread monolith: a whirlwind of reverb spiraling around Thomas Wylder’s martial drum beat as a lonely Hammond keyboard tolls a single funeral note. Lyrically, it’s Cave’s masterpiece. Once again, the singer draws on two distinct sets of imagery to create an unsettling musical double-exposure. Cave inhabits the mind of a convicted murderer who, in his fits of mad religious fervor, extols the waiting electric chair as the very throne of judgment. In the process, he calls into question the value system that would send a man to his death in the name of justice and puts his own peculiar spin on the age-old quandary of theodicy and personal agency within a Christian worldview. I could go on dissecting the rhetorical effect of the cyclical rhythms, the hypnotic repetition of the central lyric, the way that the strings seem to swell towards climax without ever finding their limit as the song metastasizes towards its conclusion, but really you should just listen to it yourself.
It would be easy to lose sight of the rest of the album after that, but to The Seeds’ credit, there’s still plenty to love once you dig beneath Tender Prey’s surface. “Deanna” is a staple of the band’s live show, a hilarious send-up of fifties doo-wop about a spree-killing couple (or a mass-murdering young lady and the voice in her head, depending on who you talk to). “Watching Alice” is a somber piano ballad (about voyeurism) more assured in its loveliness than any prior Cave composition. The album’s most unexpected pleasure, however, comes at the very end with “New Morning.” It’s a stripped-down gospel hymn that, thanks to some truly beautiful lyrics and the ramshackle early-morning quality of the band’s backing vocals, stands out as a rare moment of unabashed joy in The Bad Seeds’ catalogue.
Some fans and critics regard Tender Prey as the end of a discreet phase of Nick Cave’s career, the last gasp of the junkie prophet crying out in the wilderness before the singer turned to more tuneful endeavors with The Good Son. When viewed in the context of his entire body of work, however, the album’s Gospel-infused balladry seems like a natural outgrowth of the gothic Americana that had informed The Seed’s prior work. And while “The Ship Song” and “Lucy” may reflect a heart-bearing tenderness almost unheard of up to that point, we can’t forget that The Bad Seeds’ albums had been skewing more and more melodic for the last three releases. And it’s not like The Good Son is a record full of lullabies; even under a breezy acoustic love song like “Foi Na Cruz” there’s something sinister brewing. Cave complicates the soothing beauty with a sense of unease through some very subtle piano work and his own nuanced delivery. The darkness and melodrama of his previous work are fully evident in songs like the title track or “The Weeping Song.” The overall result is an album more cohesive than its predecessor, although lacking Tender Prey’s manic highs.
Of the three albums in this batch, Henry’s Dream feels the most like a new start for Nick Cave. It was the first time The Bad Seeds had recorded apart from Flood, who had engineered all five of their previous efforts. It was their first album with former Triffids bass player Martyn P. Casey (replacing the great Kid Congo Powers) and pianist Conway Savage. But the factor that made Henry’s Dream stand out most starkly from its predecessors was probably the involvement of producer David Briggs. Impressed by his work with Neil Young, The Bad Seeds sought him out to bring the ragged, atonal acoustic album forming in their imaginations to life. In Briggs’s hands, however, their stark acoustic vision became the brashest and most rock-oriented record of the band’s early career, a fact that the band still laments. Putting aside any speculation as to what The Bad Seeds’ idealized vision of Henry’s Dream might sound like in Lucien’s audio library of never-recorded works, the album does seem like the runt of the litter. Cave’s flare for crafting sharp, blood-drenched narrative is keen as ever, as evidenced by songs like “John Finn’s Wife” and the outstanding “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry.” But, except for a few really stand-out tracks (mostly loaded at the front of the album), the music just isn’t as captivating this time around. Whatever its flaws, Henry’s Dream still paved the way for the bolder rock sound that would characterize their follow up, Let Love In, which ranks easily among the finest recordings of Cave’s entire career.
Mute set the bar high with the last batch of reissues, and they’ve remained true to that gold standard. The music is crisper and deeper than ever, and each re-issue comes packaged with a DVD containing a 5.1 surround-sound mix of the album, the b-sides and rarities associated with the particular release, and a segment of Do You Love Me Like I Love You?, a serialized documentary featuring interviews with band members, music experts, and fans relating their memories of The Bad Seeds. My reservations about the documentary remain largely unchanged; it’s a lot of talking heads engaging in, at times, blatant hagiography. See below and judge for yourself:
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Henry’s Dream is worth singling out, however. In addition to the b-sides “Blue Bird” and an acoustic rendition of “Jack the Ripper” (which are already available on the band’s triple-disk B-Sides and Rarities collection), the disk includes five truly excellent live recordings that, to the best of my knowledge, are not widely available anywhere else. Even its installment of Do You Love Me… is eye-opening for the light that the band members shine on the battle of wills that raged during the album’s recording. It’s indicative of the loving craftsmanship that goes into each of these releases, and that obvious respect and affection for the source material keeps me eagerly awaiting every new installment.
1967-74: V/A - Psych Bites: Australian Acid Freakrock [Vol.1]
It’s difficult to properly define the term ‘psychedelic.’ Drug use and the social environment that it constructs are fine opening topics themselves, but things become much more complicated when ‘psychedelic’ refers to a genre of music rather than a cultural tradition. The tricky thing about attempting to describe psychedelic music is that, objectively speaking, the genre lacks base standards for inclusion altogether. One can’t explain the music by listing a set of genre-specific instruments, structures, lyrical themes, or production methodologies; rather, the potency of psychedelic music is reliant upon its listener’s familiarity with the form, so any accurate depiction of psychedelia must tether itself to the genre’s inherent and unending fluidity.
That said, this sort of dynamic becomes more problematic than interesting when the time comes to revisit old psychedelic records. Psych-rock, for example, is structurally rooted in rock ‘n’ roll, and it’s horrifyingly familiar to those of us who grew up listening to classic rock radio. You’ve heard it all your life — the stuff’s more outdated than psychedelic nowadays. As a result, now might not have been the most advantageous time for Past & Present Records to release a compilation such as Psych Bites: Australian Acid Freakrock.
Although Psych Bites would certainly impress someone who hadn’t heard anything apart from tracks featured on the Blues Brothers OST, this compilation was marketed towards a group of individuals who are, for the most part, quite acquainted with the genre’s American and European counterparts. Many present-day listeners have even immersed themselves in psychedelic music that has grown from and expanded upon the very material listed on the back cover of this compilation. Consequently, this Australian Acid Freakrock isn’t so freaky — just retrospective and uninspiring. Perhaps these sounds were affecting in their own time and context, but what’s clear now is that our parents’ old acid jams just aren’t tripping us anymore.
