the crane marsh

I was initially intending to do a review of The Strokes’ ‘Is This It’, but I got a bit sidetracked by few things, not least among them Helsinki’s latest album ‘A Guide For The Perplexed’. Helsinki is the side (?) project of Drew McConnell, who is best known as the Babyshambles bassist (Babyshambles being best known as the side/main project of Libertines frontman Pete Doherty).

The phrase ‘side project of [insert band name here] bassist’ is not generally one that sends people rushing to the record store. There’s the reasonable fear and expectation that when someone goes off to start their own band they’ll drag up all the poetry they’ve been writing since 14 and set it to some music of questionable quality. Here’s the thing though - McConnell is actually a more than decent lyricist, and the music is very far from questionable. In my opinion, Helsinki makes a good case with AGFTP as a worthwhile musical endeavor and investment.

There is one moment in the opening track Rising Heights when I wondered if it would be a repeat of Nikolai Fraiture’s solo album, but luckily it only lasts for about a minute. It’s caused by the one flaw in the project, which is that McConnell is (as he’s said himself) not the strongest of singers. He’s a bassist by trade, and while he can carry a tune and sound good with effort, his voice slips into that vocal genre I can only describe as ‘alcoholic late 90s to mid 2000s emo/indie’ if he’s not paying attention. Luckily for us all, the vocal tracks clearly had effort put into them - they were the one part of the album not recorded over a period of two days. Rising Heights is an initial worrying wobble, but the album catches its balance almost immediately with the next song.

The second track, Cologne Hotel, has a guitar riff that’s catchy and vaguely reminiscent of some Jack White song, and a similarly catchy refrain: ‘when the government keeps you down/you can always find me hanging around.’ The line verges on being a cliche, but is relatable enough to get away with it; it will not surprise listeners that the songs are McConnell’s observations on the world as he sees it.

Track number three, Choices, - and I’m not planning on a track-by-track, I swear - is one of the best tracks by a mile on AGFTP, and that’s only partially due to a vocal appearance by Pete Doherty. It’s reggae, or close to it, with verse delivery that varies from nearly-rap to soft-and-slowly uttered French lyrics from a Manu Chao song. Even the middle eight, which I find impossible to actually play, mixes things up some more in a way that pulls it all together.

Other highlights of the album includes instrumental track ‘The Batteries Weren’t Dead’ (aided by Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr), Brideshead, Bitpart, and Ribtickling. Really, I’d say Rising Heights is the only song that I didn’t like at first listen (live it sounds quite lovely), and at least two of the songs are very good. Which, for a ten track album that’s less than forty minutes long and was recorded in only two days, is pretty fantastic. My one real gripe is that the sound can feel a little confining at times; there’s close to no space for the listener to breathe into (a few moments on Keys being the exception). All things considered, sometimes that’s not even a bad thing, and it’s certainly not a big enough problem to put me off the music. As I’m typing this I’m on my tenth or eleventh listen in the last month, and waiting for a copy that may never arrive, so. It’s a good ‘un that’ll make the album lists at the end of the year.

Believe me when I say that I could write an entire review just on Milk Teeth (and maybe one day I will), so it’s difficult to sum up that four minute song into a few words, and even harder to compare its complexity to the inherent intricacy of all his songs. Milk Teeth focuses on the frustration of someone leaving, and the pain that follows. The lines “One day you’ll drink from my bones / And scream as you rip out my throat / Don’t let me, don’t let me go,” are curious in their imagery, but perhaps summarize the entirety of this album: you will be used, and then you will be left behind.

In contrast, Kronos is anger and frustration, the lyrics nearly screamed at some parts, “This has been the best of me / I hope you end up missing me / And I’ll hold onto that.” The anger and liberal use of cymbals sets this song apart from others in the album. Henson is done with the quiet melancholy of his earlier songs; Henson can hold a grudge.

His music contains a kind of bleak hope, a sort of washed-out anger that I have never been able to get enough of. His website shows him to be a private, quiet person, something that certainly comes through in this album. Birthdays is also, in itself, a private thing; some of his songs are quiet and gentle enough that listening to them seems invasive, like peering through the keyhole at an intimate scene. Other songs are the kind of thing you would hear from the people in the apartment upstairs, shouted arguments with doors slamming and stomping feet shaking spiders out of the cobwebs above you. His music, and Birthdays especially, is both skillful and childlike; riotous and calm, an exercise in contrast.

Roman Candle is unabashedly lo-fi - approaching near tMG levels of ‘musician, mike, and guitar are all you need’. It’s a stark contrast to the sound of Smith’s last album in all but one respect - the lyrical content is the same material Smith worked with his whole life (depression, family issues, identity issues etc). It’s slightly less refined - ‘make him feel this pretty burn’ is the kind of line that wouldn’t have made the cut later on, and No Name #2 in particular is a very young sounding song. But you could just as easily put in Roman Candle as XO when needing music to deal with something. It’s all infused with Smith’s particular brand of vulnerability that fortifies and de-isolates better than anything I’ve heard yet.

It’s a very quick little album, just 30 minutes long from start to finish. In my experience, listening to it can be one of two things: very cathartic (Last Call and Roman Candle especially), or the musical equivalent of sitting in a boat heading down a creek at a fairly high speed. The pace never really stops, the melodies are largely sweet and sympathetic and very easy to get caught up in, and before you know it the opening chords of Kiwi Maddog 20/20 are playing. Almost every song flirts with getting too dark and caught up in itself, but somehow it never quite happens.

Roman Candle is brief; it hints at things to come and reassures you that you have survived the things that already came. It lingers on awkward moments, tense situations, and the times in between when everything is confusing and painful. It’s an Elliott Smith album, rawer and more innocent, but with all the good and bad that being Elliott Smith entailed.

One morning I found myself rifling through my CD collection, trying to get my aging boombox to play an Elliott Smith CD. I got all the way to New Moon before it started working, and hearing ‘Angel in the Snow’ start to play was a relief on several levels. When I’m truly exhausted, too tired to sleep and too tired to truly function, I can always count on music to usher me out of consciousness.

This late night/early morning sleeplessness calls for a particular type of music. When I was young, Brian Eno was a regular feature in the ‘sleepytime’ playlist that my dad made on the family iPod. Now, I turn to slow pop.

I’ve heard a couple names for it, chamber pop being the most common. That slow, ambient noise with quiet vocals: the auditory equivalent of ripples in a pond. Perfume Genius, Foxes in Fiction, even some of Owen Pallett’s songs are the perfect soundtrack to the kind of hour that is too late to consider being very alive in.

If you’ve heard Foxes in Fiction then you’ll probably know that Warren Hildebrand, the mastermind behind it, started the record label Orchid Tapes in order to make physical copies of his last album. Now, Orchid Tapes hosts about 30 musicians, many with the same kind of sound. In 2014, fourteen of these artists contributed to a sampler of sorts: “Boring Ecstasy: the Bedroom Pop of Orchid Tapes.”

It’s a fairly slow-paced, too-sleepy-to-be-sensuous kind of album. There are exceptions: some tracks feature rhythms almost jarringly upbeat in comparison to the more bedroom-y of the other songs - The Sweater I Gave You’s song ‘Nobody’s Baby’ is an early example. There’s a slight but noticeable genre clash at times, as well - Infinity Crush’s ‘Spoiled’ feels more grunge than pop (depending on where you draw the lines for pop, I suppose). If you go in expecting another Foxes in Fiction album, you will almost certainly be disappointed. However, if you’re looking for an album to turn down low and strain to hear the words until you fall asleep, then you’re in luck.

Official recommendation: listen to during a sleepless cycle, if you want to be lulled into something, or write all the song titles down and pick one randomly to be the soundtrack for the scene in your new movie where character A drives through the night as character B falls asleep against the window. A very gentle album.

Often in Carrie & Lowell, the music brings you to his mindset: lost, confused, depressed; a fever dream, a hallucination. In an interview with Pitchfork, Stevens says, “[The album] feels artless, which is a good thing. This is not my art project; this is my life.” At times, his songs fixate on his self-destructive behavior; in No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross, “Like a champion / Get drunk to get laid,” and later, “There’s blood on that blade / Fuck me, I’m falling apart.”

The eponymous track is a reenactment of his childhood, describing his mother’s absence, his own drunken teenage experiences, and the burden of what might be depression. He references Greek mythology rather than his own Christian faith in the line “Erebus on my back” (an allusion to the phrase albatross on my back, though Erebus was the god of darkness and shadows) and a few verses later, “Ephemera on my back / She breaks my arm.” As with most of the album, he is referencing his mother: Ephemera, while not a goddess, signified small, impermanent things. The succeeding line could have several meanings, perhaps it is his mother that breaks his arm, perhaps it’s symbolic of how her death affected him.

There’s a crushing sadness to Stevens’ music, a tangible inevitability - though what’s eminent is often unclear - that leaves the listener in a whirl of their own thoughts, upbringing, and emotions. In general, it’s a highly emotional album, if detached and somewhat unfocused.

Now, in 2015, with Doherty clean for the first time in over a decade, coming off a string of successful gigs with the Libertines (reunited and it feels so good), and up to welcome antics with Carl Barat, we can look at this album without forcing it into the fairytale timeline that had been eagerly awaited. It was not the turning over of a new leaf for Doherty himself, but Grace/Wastelands gave him an opportunity to venture into ‘acoustic stylings’ that previously had only appeared during live performances. (This is all a long-winded way of saying he sticks largely to acoustic guitar, and shies away from the free-falling smash!bang sounds of Babyshambles and the Libertines).

Lyrically, Doherty is largely as solid as he’s ever been, and sometimes even better. His influences and references to English pastoral poetry, military and biblical imagery, and so forth, remain less than subtle. Whether that’s a good or bad thing is rather subjective - personally, I enjoy his ventures back into Arcadia (with “seraphic pipes along the way”). Doherty’s other mainstay and forte is, of course, that of love. He attacks and serenades the topic in turn, with recitation of Jean Genet’s poetry over “The Last of the English Roses”, the laying out of a disturbing abusive relationship in “A Little Death Around the Eyes”, and the obligatory ode to Carlos in “Sweet By and By” (and arguably another one in “New Love Grows on Trees”, a previously officially unreleased Libs song).

Musically, it’s a far quieter album than Doherty’s attempted thus far. “Don’t Look Back”, the bonus track, is the closest we get to the shambolic sounds of the past. Instead, there are keyboards, strings, and even light woodwinds on “Salome”. The effect is sometimes overly dramatic - almost comically so when the music swells on “A Little Death Around the Eyes” as Doherty sings the less than elegant lines ‘Your boyfriend’s name was Dave/I was bold and brave’. For the most part, however, it’s a stripped down, eminently listenable sound. “I Am the Rain” is just Doherty and his guitar for most of the song, and it’s a song that reminds you of just how good he can be, lyrically and melodically.

Grace/Wastelands is not an ambitious album, and this works in its favor. There’s very little overreaching; what you are promised at the beginning is simply music, and that is what you get: largely good, pleasant sounding music with an occasional foray into strange barbershop piano (“Sweet By and By”) and 70s dramatics (“A LIttle Death Around the Eyes”). It’s not Doherty’s redemption album, but the stretching and flexing of underused muscles with promising results.

Official recommendation: Good music to listen to while reading, writing, or filling time before September 3rd.