Obscure Albums

When an artist tells you not to listen to one of their albums, it’s fairly difficult to disobey them.  I mean, fellow obscurophiles, there’s nothing we find more pleasing than feeling that the only two people who truly understand the album are ourselves and the artist.  With the artist gone, it’s a party of one.

Which leads to this fascinating album by Beefheart and his so-called “tragic” band, the absolute low point of his career according to many.  And yet, it’s difficult to understand why.  I mean, this is the second of his “mainstream” albums and the other, Unconditionally Guaranteed, is a turgid affair, spoilt by muddy playing and a lack of imagination (although This is the Day and Magic Be are still up there with his best).

It’s true that Bluejeans and Moonbeams is something of a slight album.  There are only nine tracks, and two of them are unpardonable filler – Captain’s Holiday is a wretched proto-disco stomp that seems to go on forever, and Rock ‘N’ Roll’s Evil Doll isn’t much better, trapped in a chorus that never threatens to do anything musically.

For those who are looking for a way into the album, I’ve got two words for you: Observatory Crest.  It’s pretty much perfect, with a shimmering guitar, and wonderfully complex bassline courtesy of Mr. Bob West that dispels any notion these was ham-fisted amateur players.

Pompadour Swamp has its haters, but it’s definitely a grower.   “Is he talking to me?” asks Beefheart before a sleepy, quirky bass riff and drunk piano kicks in.

There’s also the epic Further Than We’ve Gone, with a fantastically throaty performance from Our Captain, although it does seem to get a bit lost in the middle.  Much better is the JJ Cale cover Same Old Blues – given the scarcity of Van Vliet’s covers, you can be sure that when he does try his hand it’s going to be a beauty.

The album closer, Bluejeans and Moonbeams, is bizarre, and not in that conventional crazy Beefheart way either.  On the one hand, it tries its hardest to be a ballad,   “I’ve been workin’ I’ve been lovin’/Underneath the moonstone sky” he sings, “I know there’s many things I’ve never seen”.  And yet, the instrumentation is completely wrong, with the Moog’s screeching completely overpowering the gorgeous guitar noodling.  It’s still a hit, but you get the feeling it could have been much more.

I once heard that Kate Bush was a big fan of this album, which doesn’t really add anything to this review but is still kind of cool when you think about it.  I think that history’s been pretty kind to Bluejeans and Moonbeams, and maybe Beefheart’s rejection was an attempt to regain his “cool” in the face of a hostile critical reception.  I’d much rather have this album than, e.g. later albums with the “classic” style like Doc at the Radar Station – give me soppiness over fierce literacy any day of the week.

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It’s been almost a year since I’ve posted to Obscure Albums, but due to all the comments I’ve received since then I’ve decided to dust off the old keyboard and get to it.  I couldn’t possibly reply to all of you, but to Petr in Latvia, you simply must show me how you make $6000 a month working just a few hours every day at home and to Annie, dear old Annie, your website of vintage bags is an absolute must-visit and I’ll be sure to tell both of my friends about it.

You know when you got your first Casio keyboard, and you had no idea how to play it?  So you just mashed it with your childish palms in the hope of producing something that might loosely be called a rhythm?  Well so did Berntholer, and this produced a series of singles and LPs between 1981 and 1985 which were cobbled together into this delightful collection in 2004.

Berntholer are primarily known for their 1983 single My Suitor, which carries the curse of a John Peel recommendation and sounds like a This Mortal Coil song, with echoey female vocals and atmospheric strings.  ”He’s a flicker, he’s a glimmer” sings Albanian-born singer Drita Kotaji, with a heavily-accented discordancy that suits the general mood of the song pretty well.

Slightly strangely, the song continues for an extra four minutes, but it’s treated as an entirely separate song – Pardon Up Here.  In my three years as a well-respected music critic, I can’t think of a similar example.  Anyway, it doesn’t drag, whereas the other long songs on the record – The Curtain Long, A Distance – definitely do.  If you can sit through this record in one sitting, you’re a bigger man than I am.

Much nicer is the cheesy jauntiness of Emotions and another single, You Grabbed Me By The Hand, which contains some nice male/female harmonies (think X) and some nice guitar.  If they put a few more of these guitar-oriented tunes in, and stopped trying to sound like a cross between Public Image Ltd. and Jean-Michel Jarre, this compilation would have benefited enormously.

If you do make it through the dirges (tracks 6-12 are all over 4 minutes) you are rewarded with three lovely pieces.   Simulation has some nice bass parts, and The Others’ early 80s synths are curiously satisfying.  On Japanese Garden, they create a wonderfully lazy Caribbean feel, although the cheesiness factor never quite goes away.  At least when Drita is whispering, you don’t tend to notice the horrible pronunciation – the butchering of the wonderful hook-filled chorus of Merry Lines in Skies springs to mind.

If you can get past these slight annoyances, there’s an interesting album to be discovered.  And if you have any issues with the keyboard player, you should know that he won a Palme d’Or in the 90s, which is one more than you’ve won.  Anyway, don’t be shy, leave me a comment to reassure me that there is life out there.  And yes, that includes you Petr.

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In his one and only recorded interview – done with John Trubie for Spin in 1985 – The Representative From Corwood Industries / Jandek / Sterling Smith said that he felt he had to release at least two albums every year in order to prevent his music from being forgotten. In the same interview he also said that he’d sold 9 copies. “Of the latest one?” “No, of all of them” he replies, meaning 9 copies in total of ten albums in a period of seven years (he talks of Nine-Thirty being the new one). Yet, amazingly, this tactic would eventually pay off. Throughout the 80’s Jandek released a huge amount of material, sending them to record stores, college radio stations, the independent press etc. The music – sometimes eerie and quite, other times discordant and loud (like the opposite states of manic depression) – coupled with his deliberately cultivated anti-image (no other interviews, no live performances, almost no personal information known, no guest presenting spots on MTV’s 120 Minutes) helped to create a mysterious aura that generated all kinds of rumours about the man behind it all. One story I like is that the first 19 albums were all recorded in a very short space of time – possibly as a form of therapy for a manic depressive – and that when they had all been released that would be the end (this was dispelled by album number 20, One Foot In the North, in 1991).

Eventually the mystery of Jandek became self perpetuating – and still exists to an extent despite his decision to start playing live in 2004. Jandek has gone from a marginalized artist that few cared about or understood to something well respected and revered – in certain circles at least. However, his vast discography can be problematic for anyone new to him. Many albums contain a few vital songs, surrounded by filler and throwaways. Chair Beside a Window, the 4th album, varies in quality, but contains some of Jandek’s greatest works along the way.

The album opens with the remarkable ‘Down In a Mirror’. The first verse sets up the song perfectly: “We can’t deny, there’s spirits in this house. You shut the door, the wind closes two more”. The faint percussion sounds like eerie footsteps in an abandoned house, as Sterling’s acoustic guitar somehow finds a midpoint between dissonant twang and forlorn jangle. Then there’s the voice. He sounds so completely alone, torn between a need for solitude and a desperate loneliness. For me, it may well be the man’s finest ever recording.

This delicately sombre atmosphere is then completely obliterated by the careening rock action of ‘European Jewel’. Picking up where the “incomplete” version from 1978’s Ready For the House left up, with pounding drums, Velvet Underground and Nico sounding guitar and even a bass solo. It’s thrillingly loose and another great moment.

On ‘Nancy Sings’, the album’s other high-water mark, Sterling slowly and methodically plucks an acoustic guitar while Nancy beautifully sings about nature in a voice as sharp and clear as glass. (side note: I’ve only ever heard the remastered CD version and I’ve always wondered why there are a couple of noticeable sounding edits in this song. Apparently you could hear a motorbike outside on the original vinyl release. Sterling alludes to this in the John Trubee interview, but says he doesn’t want to mention which song this is on. I think he was probably testing Trubee seeing as he’d already told Sterling earlier in the interview how much he liked ‘Nancy Sings’. The remaster also omits the line “smoking cigarettes” from ‘Blue Blister’ for some strange reason, leaving the song with just a single line of lyrics.)

Elsewhere Nancy randomly tells Janky he’s “nuts” and “a jerk” on ‘No Break’, which doesn’t stop him from getting uncharacteristically soppy on ‘Love, Love’ and the spirit of Nick Drake is seemingly channelled on ‘Poor Boy’. If you’re looking for somewhere to start your Jandek adventure, this is as good a place as anywhere.

A footnote: in April 2012 me and a friend went to see Jandek play at a small church in Manchester. Afterwards my friend casually chatted to him about the gig and previously live performances. Turns out he’s just a man who happens to make interesting music. Who would’ve thought it?

Simon Waldram

Who’s that cocaine addict on the front cover, and what has he done with Bryan Ferry?  Do I need 3D glasses to see it?  With In Your Mind, our favourite Geordie Londoner largely turns his back on the sense of mystery and atmosphere that Roxy did so well, even though the usual suspects (Manzanera, Wetton) are all over it.

Whenever he had done anything on his own, it was the R’n'B stuff, the saxophones and the singalongs, that came most naturally to him, and there’s certainly plenty of that here.  One Kiss is a prime example, an air of sadness pervading its boozy, brassy excesses, Ferry slurring his way through proceedings.

All Night Operator is the cover that never was, which is perhaps a testament to Ferry’s songwriting craft.  “Am I just a number to you?  A handful of empty sighs?” asks Ferry, which would probably constitute sexual harassment these days.  Nevertheless, it’s got a lovely horn (much like its singer) and it’s rather  nice to listen to.  It’s when he tries to push the boat about, like in the overly busy This Is Tomorrow, that the instruments crash together in a not altogether pleasing way.  I don’t know why people suddenly developed an obsession with overly screechy female backing singers in the late 70s, but I thank God I wasn’t alive to witness it first-hand.

Sometimes, ladies and gentlemen, there is a song on a record that is so gosh darn good it kind of puts all the other songs to shame.  On In Your Mind, it is undoubtedly Love Me Madly Again, seven and a half minutes of pure orchestral perfection.  Oh alright, it also sounds like a Roxy Music song, but I’m no fan-boy – I must have listened to his covers album These Foolish Things far more often than “masterpieces” like Country Life.  Anyway, it has pretty much everything: a growling Ferry spitting out lyrics like “Do ya make savage love when you meet”, a melt-in-the-mouth slide guitar, and a lovely breakdown bit in the middle which is apparently provided to us by Ann Odell (from her website:” the finest jazz music in Surrey”).  He even does the quivery voice thing in a few places.

It’s a shame that it’s a novelty, Tokyo Joe, that was the single, given that it sounds nothing like the rest of the album.  If you can get past the oh-so-stereotypical lyrics and orchestration, which is pretty much the whole song, there’s a decent melody to be found, but unless you’re a Carl Douglas fan it’s probably best to give it a miss.  Then comes some filler, Party Doll, which is pretty inexcusable given that it’s only an 8-track LP.

Rock of Ages lurches dangerously towards gospel but saved by some nice soulful singing and crunching saxes.     The title track closes off the album with a bit of a chug, going for that epic last song feel, but never getting anything close to the climax of say, Just Another High.  Overall, In Your Mind is an incredibly curious album, lost to the sands of time, wedged in between Roxy’s first break-up and triumphant return.  It seems to be content to go over old musical ground, and yet throws in a couple of curveballs to placate Roxy fans baying for blood – a mix that made Ferry’s solo career kick off with a whimper rather than the bang he deserved (oo-er).

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