[record review] Neutral Milk Hotel "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea"

This is one of those famous records that lots of people like but which had somehow passed me by. I have had it vaguely on my radar as a record to pick up sometime, my interest piqued partly by the great All Tomorrow's Parties that Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel curated. The other thing that had me interested in this record was the range of people that talk about how much they like it, running from the likes of Charlotte Church to my friend K—.

I finally bought a copy in certain well known record shop, one of those famous independent record stores. The owner of the shop is an interesting presence on the internet, with insightful things to say about the plight of the little record shop today so I was curious to see how the shop was getting on.

Sadly, the shop was pretty much as it was last time I was there, several years ago. It feels like a shop about to close down at any moment, with hardly any new stock and a lot of unappealing locking old second hand vinyl albums and CDs in disorganised piles. And what new stock there was did not seem to have any obvious order to its organisation. I know from watching other records stores in decline that they run out of stock, as the record companies decline to supply them with anything for fear they will go bust and leave debts unpaid. Yet with this shop, it seems to have hung on in this strange half-life for years.

While I was browsing around, looking for something, anything I might buy in good conscience another punter came in and picked up the new Mogwai album and went to the counter to pay for it, striking up a conversation with the owner about the state of the record store business. Well, he may not so much have struck up a conversation as asked how things were going, which led to a long exposition on the nature of the business today. I am not sure if this was actually to the taste of the punter, though it was not uninteresting, if broadly similar to the kind of things the record store man says online. Basic summary: record stores are fucked. True enough I suppose, but it is a bit of a downer to have to listen through if you are just popping in to buy the latest kewl album and not something you have to go through when you are buying online.

Anyway, at this point I chanced upon the Neutral Milk Hotel and thought that, yes, I would make the plunge and buy this. So I did. Fortunately the owner's attention was still mainly focussed on the other punter so I was able to quickly hand over my money and scarper with my record and change.

So yeah, the record itself. Well I still have not listened to it too closely, but it is definitely likeable. One thing I did know about it was that one of the other band members went on to form the Gypsy-Balkan-etc. band A Hawk And A Hacksaw, but I was surprised by the extent to which this album nods in that direction. It is by no means a Gypsy-Balkan-etc. record but it has these undercurrents that make it unsurprising that the drummer went that way.

I may talk more about this album in due course, if it does indeed prove to be one of the greatest things ever or just something that is quite good or an album that would only appeal to people who were there at the time.

My beloved asserts that the album is too loud.

image source (Wikipedia)

Previously on Inuit Panda: A Hawk and a Hacksaw on record and live

Charlotte Church on In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

An inuit panda production; this post appeared in issue 138 of Frank's APA.

[live music] A trip to Cafe Oto

While in London recently I paid an exciting visit to that Cafe Oto venue place up in Dalston. This was exciting because I had never been there before and have long been marvelling at its fascinating line-ups in the pages of The Wire and elsewhere. This was for a night of music from some Glaswegian lot of music promoters called Cry Parrot, recommended by one of my Frank's APA pals. It proved to be a fun evening of eclectic music, helped by the good seats we had near the front thanks to our queuing outside in the bitter cold before they opened up and let us in.

First on the bill were Final Five, a kind of jazz trio, except I thought that maybe they were more improv than jazz. They boasted a guitarist, percussionist and a guy on double bass and they were on the forward thinking free jazz spectrum. They were entertaining enough but I found myself thinking that they lacked a certain sparkle.

Tut Vu Vu from Dave Allen on Vimeo

Act two was an outfit called Tut Vu Vu. Their thing was surfy guitars and warped loungey sounds, basically ending up making the kind of music that would be perfect for a David Lynch soundtrack. Indeed, they sounded not too different to a lot of the music I had heard at The Drowned Man on the previous night. We liked them.


The last act was Ela Orleans. She played on her own, doing funny synthetic stuff and that sampling her own voice to add texture to her vocals. That self-sampling thing can be very dull and formulaic but she was a real master at it. I notice that the Cafe Oto website blurb says that people often compare her to Broadcast, and listening again to a track there I can see where they get that, as there is a similar kind of dreamy retro-futurist quality to her music. We all thought she was great.

One unfortunate feature of the evening, however, was the amount of yappers in the audience. My friend D— had to politely ask some punters to be stop talking during the set of Ms Orleans. Afterwards he said that they appeared to be either people who had been onstage earlier or associates of the Cry Parrot people. This was a bit poor.

Image source (Cafe Oto's own guide to the artists on that night)

An inuit panda production; this post appeared in issue 138 of Frank's APA.

[Live Music] Rocket From The Crypt

I went to see this lot playing in a pretty packed Button Factory. They are this somewhat punkish US band who wear matching shirts and have a brass section. I came away from them thinking "Why don't all bands have brass sections?" But I also thought "Why have a band called 'Rocket from the X' if you are not going to play the likes of 'Ain't It Fun'?" by Rocket From The Tombs. I bet they love people saying this.

It is now a month or two since I saw this concert. While I certainly enjoyed the music, the thing I most remember about it is a story told by frontman Speedo (his real name) that began the last time they played in Dublin. After their show he was wandering around town taking in the sights when someone, deliberately or accidentally, pushed him out onto the road and into the path of traffic. A car (a taxi, I think he said) ploughed into him, leaving him with severe injuries. A random passerby brought him to hospital for treatment. Mr Speedo unfortunately did not have medical insurance and was poor in the way that rock and rollers generally are, but this random passerby picked up the tab for his treatment and put him up during his rather long convalescence, all out of the goodness of his heart. Stories like that make me think that theories of the fundamental badness of people are rather exaggerated.


'Ain't It Fun'

An inuit panda production; this post appeared in issue 138 of Frank's APA.

[record review] Eleni Karaindrou "Medea"

This is an adaptation and a setting to music by Eleni Karaindrou of the famous play by Euripides. It was apparently performed live in Epidauros and in the Odeon Herodes Atticus in Athens in 2011 and now it is available as an album on the ECM label. I bought it because I am all about the Ancient Greek stuff and because Medea is one of the few Ancient Greek plays I can quote any lines from in Greek (er, actually the only one), mainly thanks to the magic of having studied it in school. As you will recall, the play tells the story of the sorceress from Colchis who had helped Jason and the Argonauts fleece the Golden Fleece. Now, though, Jason is divorcing his weirdo foreign wife in order to marry into the royal family of Thebes, but Medea decides to enact a terrible revenge by murdering their children. The play is odd in how it manages our sympathies; obviously no right thinking person supports the idea of child murder as a way of getting at your ex, but in the play our sympathies lie always with the crazy foreign witch and never with smarmy Jason.

I have not listened to this record very closely (as is true of most records), but I am struck by how undramatic it is. One of the things I most remember from the play itself is smarmy Jason, but he does not seem to get much of a look in here. Euripides has some great scenes in which Jason tells Medea he is divorcing her and running her out of town, and then he expects her to be happy about this because he is doing such a sensible thing by marrying the local princess. But here we seem to just have music with occasional bits of singing rather than the kind of sung dialogue or speechifying you would imagine it this was a play set to music. I am not sure what is happening here. Maybe they have heavily adapted it to make it even more woman-focussed by cutting Jason's direct appearances, or maybe in performance the music here accompanied spoken dialogue not reproduced on the record.

The other odd thing about this is how restrained it all is. Medea is a play about madness and despair, about the chaotic and irrational triumphing over rational self-confidence. But there is none of that in the music. The music is pleasant to listen to, the kind of thing that I would happily put on while reading a book or resting, but there is nothing about it that suggests it accompanies the story of a woman who kills her children.

ECM's site for the record (and image source)

An inuit panda production; this post appeared in issue 138 of Frank's APA.

[record review] World of Twist "Quality Street"

So this is a CD reissue of the classic album by the World of Twist. Oh you know World of Twist, they came in at the end of all that Madchester stuff even though they were not really like that, making music that more sounded like a kind of pop version of Hawkwind (by which I mean they had at least some catchy tunes and wooshy synthesisers). They released just this one album, it did not do that well and they split up. The lead singer fell into heroin addiction and died some years later, as I think did at least one other key member of the band.

Listening to it all again I would have to say that, yes, it is certainly rather appealing but I am not sure that if you played this to one of today's young people they would believe any claims that this was some kind of lost classic. I mean, the music is pretty good, but so is a lot of music. The one thing that this really has going for it is the big song: 'Sons of the Stage'. This is it, a combo of big monster riffs, aforementioned wooshy synths and vocalist Tony Ogden going for it like he is the pop star he dreamed of being. This song is such an instant classic that it is hard to believe it not to be a song you have heard before. Sadly it has been tarnished recently be being covered by Beady Eye (the band of that Liam Gallagher character), but as no one I know likes them you will not have heard their version. To hear the World of Twist version is to wonder how this band did not become all conquering.


Quietus review of reissue of this record (and image source)

The Beady Eye version of 'Sons of the Stage' (if you dare)

An inuit panda production; this post appeared in issue 138 of Frank's APA.

Owls to the rescue

The long and thin country of Chile is in the grip of a terrifying hantavirus plague. This contagious disease is carried by long-tailed pygmy rice rats, who are themselves immune to its terrible effects. These rodents traditionally live in forests and usually it is only people who go out foraging for bamboo who catch it from them. Recent forest fires, however, have pushed the hantavirus carrying rice rats into urban areas, where they have spread the disease into the human population to an unprecedented extent.

The Chilean forest service is responding to this crisis by trying to swiftly increase the numbers of owls. The flying predators like nothing better than to devour the long-tailed rats, so they could function as a "biological regulator".

There is only one problem to this plan. Many Chileans have a superstitious fear of owls, believing that their hooting near a house means that someone in it is about to die. The Chilean authorities hope to convince people that the owls are in fact a signifier of protection from the plague, but they have their work cut out for them.

More

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[record review] Tom Glazer "A Treasury of Civil War Songs"

I am well known for my interest in the American Civil War (also known as the War Between The States, The War Of Northern Aggression, The War Where Johnny Yank Took Away Our Property etc.), so I snapped this up when I saw it in Coda Records in Edinburgh. It is a collection of songs from that era given sensitive sing-a-long renditions on this Smithsonian Folkways record. Glazer accompanies himself on guitar and a small ensemble of others join in with other instruments and backing vocals. While well put together, it has a rough and ready quality that goes well with the songs, which would have been ones sung by soldiers or people in their homes rather than by choirs and orchestras. It even-handedly includes rousing political tunes of both North and South, as well as more apolitical songs about the suffering of soldiers.

The Tom Glazer version does not sound anything like this

My favourites here are probably 'The Battle Cry of Freedom' (obv.) and other rousing northern tunes like 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic', but there are other treasures here. I am reminded again what a great tune 'Dixie' is (one tune that I think suffers from not having a huge brass band accompanying the vocals). 'The Yellow Rose of Texas' is another corker, but the real star of the Southern sky here is 'Maryland, My Maryland'. Like many of the tunes on this record, it sets its words to a pre-existing tune, in this case 'Tannenbaum'. The song is an appeal to the good folk of Maryland to rally to the cause of the Confederacy and I recall reading that the marching bands of the Confederates played it when they launched their ill-fated invasion of that indecisive state.

Some of the Northern songs deal directly with slavery. They suffer a bit from being clearly written by white people who had very limited experience of interaction with African Americans. Their tendency to talk about "darkies" also strikes an odd note. But the song 'The Year of Jubilo' has a certain something, with its freed slaves laughing away as their shitehawk of a master has to peg it away at the approach of the Union army.

A performance of 'The Year of Jubilo' by one Mr Will Fly

The most famous song I had never heard before was probably 'Marching Through Georgia', a somewhat fanciful account of General Sherman's march from Atlanta to the sea with his destructive Union army (a march that either broke the back of the Confederacy or prolonged the war with its needless cruelty, depending on who you talk to). The song makes it all sound like a bit of a romp, the army greeted as they go by Georgians rejoicing as they are freed from the iron jackboot of the Confederacy. But anyone with the slightest knowledge of the war knows that Sherman's army laid waste the country it passed through; apart from runaway slaves, I cannot imagine anyone cheering its arrival. I am curious as to whether the composer and people who sang the song knew or cared about the truth of Sherman's march.

So there you go. This record might not be for everyone but anyone with my strange interest in the civil war of a faraway country will find it fascinating. And even if you are not a big fan of the American Civil War, hearing 'Dixie' and 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic' on the one record cannot but put you in mind of Elvis classic 'An American Trilogy'.


Image source (Smithsonian Folkways)

Coda

An inuit panda production; this post appeared in issue 138 of Frank's APA.

[science] Dogs and their understanding of human voices

Scientists in Hungary have been investigating how the brains of dogs and humans react to different noises. This has involved training dogs to lie still while undergoing MRI scans. The trainers used positive reinforcement strategies ("lots of praise", says Dr Attila Andics of the Hungarian Academy of Science's Eotvos Lorand University).

The scientists then played a variety of noises to their human and dog subjects. These included dog vocalisations, human sounds and various environmental noises. They discovered that when dogs and humans heard the human noises, in both cases there was activation in the same part of the brain (the most anterior part of the temporal lobe). Furthermore, the activity in human and dog brains was remarkably similar when exposed to emotionally charged human sounds (such as the sounds of laughter and crying).

For other sounds, human and dog brains reacted differently. The human brain responded far less strongly to recordings of dog vocalisations. And dog brains seemed far more engaged by environmental sounds, which is not particularly surprising to anyone who has ever seen a dog excited by a barely perceptible sound off in the distance.

These differences in human and dog responses to other noises make the similarities in response to human noises all the more fascinating. Dogs have of course been selectively bred for closeness to people for a long time now, so it is not too surprising that they would have some sensitivity to human voices. But the apparent emotional engagement with human vocal sounds is rather interesting and suggests perhaps that our canine friends really are able to tell when we are happy or sad.

More (BBC article by Rebecca Morelle, from which come the images)

Even more (Article in Current Biology, so you won't be able to read it unless you have a subscription)

An inuit panda production

[film] "Epic of Everest"

Epic of Everest is a reissue of a silent documentary film by Captain John Noel from the 1920s, with a new score by Simon Fisher Turner. It tells the story of the il-fated Mallory Everest expedition. It starts off as an anthropological jaunt through Tibet (inter-titles informing us that this is a country whose people never wash from the day they are born to the day of their death, apart from having butter rubbed into their skin when they are babies) and then becomes more serious when the climbers reach the mountain. At that point the bulky cameras of the time are less able to travel upwards and eventually have to halt their ascent and merely film the climbers from far below.

It is the mountainside sequences where the film really comes into its own. The musical soundtrack is of the unnerving variety, featuring both electronic and acoustic instruments. Its eeriness is added to by the inclusion of the uncanny sound of the whistling Himalayan wind. The inter-titles talk of legendary snow monsters and as storms descend it does seems like a malevolent presence is demanding that the climbers vacate the mountain. At one point some of the climbers were cut off in a higher camp by a sudden storm; on being rescued they reported hearing the terrifying sounds of monsters out in the snow storm. Yet George Mallory, the team leader, takes advantage of a break in the bad weather to set off for the summit with Andrew Irvine, his climbing partner. The film sees them in the far distance through a telescopic lens, a speck on the face of the mountain. And then it sees them no more. It is like the mountain came alive and took them. Mallory's body remained undiscovered until 1999; Irvine's has never been found and to this day no one knows whether they succeeded in reaching the summit of Mount Everest.

The film is a brilliant evocation of the heroic age of mountain climbing, when Everest was not overrun with tour parties and amateur climbers queuing up for their turn on the summit.


image source (BFI: with information on the film, its restoration and the new soundtrack)

An inuit panda production; this post appeared in issue 138 of Frank's APA.

[theatre] "Assassins"

I saw this Stephen Sondheim musical a bit before Christmas. It was being performed in a relatively low budget production by the well known Irish theatre company Rough Magic. This lot are no strangers to the musical, having treated us previously to Improbable Frequency, a musical play featuring John Betjeman, Erwin Schrödinger, Flann O'Brien and various fictional characters hanging out together in neutral Ireland during the Second World War. Rough Magic is a company whose name I see as a reliable mark of quality; or did until that Canadian unpleasantness of some years ago, of which I will speak no further.

Assassins is about assassins. In particular it is about people who have assassinated US presidents, or had a crack at one of those leaders of the free world. Partly it presents all of the assassins (successful or not) in a strange surreal otherworld, and then separately we have vignettes of each of their lives, either showing them as they get ready for their crack at Mr President or else some other formative experience. Perhaps in an attempt to shoehorn some kind of overall plot, things climax in with all the assassins joining Lee Harvey Oswald in the Book Depository, urging him to shoot Kennedy rather than kill himself.

There is quite a range of thematic mood in what is on offer here. Some of the stories are rather poignant (that of Leon Czolgosz, say, the lone wolf anarchist who murdered President McKinley). Others are dealt with more humorously (e.g. the tale of Samuel Byck, who tried to assassinate Nixon by hijacking a plane and flying it into the White House).

Assassins presents its subjects mostly as dysfunctional individuals who tried to kill the President as a way of validating their pathetic existences or for other similarly inconsequential reasons. That works for some of them more than others. My sense is that Czolgosz was not the loser motivated by a sad infatuation with Emma Goldman, as shown here, but someone genuinely motivated by a desire to effect social change by striking at the top man of capitalist society, as was a common enough idea in anarchism of the time. Likewise with John Wilkes Booth, murderer of Abraham Lincoln, presented here as another saddo. I am in no way sympathetic with his pro-slavery and white supremacist views, but it seems to me that Booth was a committed ideological assassin and not the delusional fantasist he is presented here as.

On the other hand, John Hinckley Jr. (the guy who shot Reagan because he was obsessed with Jodie Foster) and Samuel Byck are probably presented accurately as fucked up saddos. Because saddos are funny, Assassins gets a lot of mileage out of these two, with some of the stuff with Byck being quite hilarious on a number of levels. Byck seems to have been one of those crazies (as they like to be called) who recorded tapes outlining his view of the world to send to famous people. One of the people he recorded tapes for was Leonard Bernstein, the conductor and composer, Sondheim's previous collaborator on West Side Story. I have no idea how well or badly Sondheim and Bernstein got on together, but there is something funny about a Sondheim musical in which a character rants and raves at Bernstein. Jack Olohan's performance as Byck was an impressive one.

Byck's actual attempt to kill Nixon resulted in his own death and that of an airport policeman and pilot; he shot another pilot but that man survived. The plane he tried to hijack never left the ground.

Possibly because it gets to have dialogue between two assassins (who in real life I think never met each other), the scenes with Sara Jane Moore and Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme are perhaps the best in the play. Fromme and Moore separately tried to kill Gerald Ford a few weeks apart in 1975. Moore was an eccentric far leftist while Fromme was a member of the Manson Family who had until then somehow escaped conviction for serious crime. Assassins presents them both as oddballs, but Fromme comes across as the more driven and less delusional one of the two, with Moore presented as more of a flake, someone who had slipped into the whole assassination business almost by accident and certainly without thinking things through properly. The performances of Clare Barrett as Moore and Erica Murray as Fromme are probably the most striking in Assassins, though that might be because they have the most meaty roles.

I will stop there lest I bore you with an outline of everyone who ever tried to kill a president and how Assassins deals with them (but you should definitely investigate the strange career of Charles Guiteau). One thing I will draw to your attention as I finish writing about the show is the music. Careful readers will by now notice that I have said nothing about it. And in truth, that is because it has not lingered in my memory. I did enjoy it while I heard it but I would not know be able to hum a single tune sung in the show. This may be why Assassins has proved so much less successful than such other Sondheim musicals as Sweeney Todd or A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum.

image source (Flickr set of shots of the play)

An inuit panda production; this post appeared in issue 138 of Frank's APA.