Cardinal (Wonderland)

Of all the things that you never expected to see reissued in a deluxe edition with bonus tracks! When the Cardinal album reappeared in 2005 I was delighted - for one, because my original love of this album was only known through a cassette dub. Now vinyl would have been nicer (and we can keep dreaming) but at least they did that fancy Japanese-style cardboard sleeve that resembles a mini-gatefold LP. I'll tolerate a CD here because this is really clean, bright music, despite the warbly and murky voice of Eric Matthews and the reedy one of Richard Davies. I'll preface this by admitting that Richard Davies is, for me, one of the most singularly visionary songwriters in all of music, and I'm pretty much a fanboy. Matthews, well, he's not so bad either and I also thought this was a great collaboration because it truly felt 50/50. The liner notes indicate a far more Davies-leaning slant to the songwriting than I realised - Matthews is really the brain behind the arrangements. But when he pulls out the pen, it's cool - 'Dream Figure' being the only song on the proper album that he wrote solo. And it's a good one, with some grungy guitar action over lumbering rhythmic momentum. So really, he's like the understudy apprenticing with the master. And there are some incredible, brilliant songs on this record. 'If You Believe in Christmas Trees' is the opener and still the most iconic Cardinal song (and a good pick for my "best leadoff tracks of all-time" list). The orch-pop tendencies are shown here with a full horn section, but it never overcomes the trio at the core -- Cardinal is far closer to the garage than to Forever Changes. This is a record with many slowly unfolding, long, catchy hooks. 'You've Lost Me There' and 'Big Mink' are both amazing. 'Angel Darling' is a more contemplative duet-type ballad that bursts with horns only to repeatedly pull back into its shell. 'Tough Guy Tactics' is a group contribution and one where drummer Bob Fay's impact is most felt, with it's Sebadoh-like chorus. The sole cover on the album is 'Singing to the Sunshine' by an obscure 60's group called Mortimer. I've never heard the original, but Davies and Matthews harmonizing over a light guitar strum and confident bassline makes some magic. Particularly as the penultimate track - and then we get 'Silver Machines', another total masterpiece. Even though I never heard this song until college, it somehow stirs memories of my earliest teenage years, of wandering through parks and museums with cheap headphones on, and of waiting for my parents to pick me up. Overall, as albums go, Cardinal is not an all-out classic, but a personal classic that obviously attracted some followers over the past 18 years. The most obviously brilliant songs are at the start and finish, leaving a middle that I continue to explore with each listen. Now onto the bonus tracks. Well, a demo version of 'Xmas Trees' is a nice start - it's such a strong tune that even without the horns etc. it's still great. And there's some lyrical variation as well. 'You've Lost Me There', in demo form, allows Matthews' breathy croon to really fill the speakers and I might even prefer it to the studio recording. 'Tribute to a Crow' is brief and buried in reverb and riffage - a psych experiment that is a bit of a diversion for Cardinal's otherwise Apollonian mission. There's two cuts from the other Cardinal release, the Toy Bell EP, which both show a younger sound, and only 'Sweatshirt Gown' begins to hint at the transcendence of the full-length, but it ends before it gets going. And finally we get two versions of the great lost Cardinal track, 'Say the Words Impossible', the B-side to the 'Xmas Trees' single. It's a slow creeper, a bit less malevolent in it's demo form. But the studio version has vocals bathed in white noise, and a very austere guitar arpeggio; Davies' cryptic imagery feels like the credits are rolling, and it was a wise choice for the last track. 1994 was an interesting time for pop music like this; it feels so outside of the commercial 'alternative' scene that was happening in the charts, but at the same time, it's some reflection of that. Growing up myself during this time, it felt like these 60's-influenced indie pop bands (Zumpano also comes to mind) were really challenging the (as I perceived it) shallowness and immaturity of stuff like Smashing Pumpkins, Bush, Hole, etc. Now I have the hindsight to realise that these artists had little to do with each other. But it helped to form my own tastes and identity, which is why the Cardinal album is lockstep with my own development.

Jacques Berrocal - 'Catalogue' (Alga Marghen)

This is the third piece of the puzzle, reissued in a digipak by Alga Marghen with some bonus material. I'll spare my usual rant about digipaks and instead thank the Marghens for bringing this gem to the surface again. Where Musiq Musik is exploratory improvised deconstruction and Paralleles introduces more surrealist trope, Catalogue goes full-on collage style and presents 17 different sides of Berrocal in 17 tracks. Nothing is safe here. Electronics and tapes, for sure, put this alongside the weirdest fringes of LAFMS or other outsider camps -- yet there's also simplistic instrumental interplay that harkens back to Musiq's joy di vivré. 'friedrich trass' and 'tango' both use toy instruments to construct surrealist miniatures, and we get vocal manipulations galore. A big band sound appears too, creaking along on 'JONCTION' and 'Rideau. 'SOLO' splits the record with a strangely operatic Gregorian chant and there's some rock excursions too ('nO mORE dirTY bLa blApS' and 'signe particulier', which make me think of something Zorn would do, but not Naked City). Catalogue is a great title because this really is a compendium of maverick approaches to sound. I think the diversity of this release always made it the Berrocal record I found it hardest to interact with, but on this listen I'm totally stoked. It's almost like a desert island disc of ideas; the only frustrating factor is that the ideas are rarely given enough space to develop. If you like making weird music yourself, this is cool, because you can take these tracks inspiration and crosspollinate these ideas with your own, unless you're hellbent on being 100% original. I don't think I'd mind hearing someone else riffing on 'néon' or 'terminal'. I'd definitely put this in a special box alongside stuff like the first Anal Magic disc, because they came from some fucked up place, disappeared and 30 years later provide a treasure map of exploration for all of us young believers. The (mostly live) bonus tracks are nothing to scoff at either; they only pad the record out to 47 minutes instead of stuffing the disc, an act of restraint that I quite like.

Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band - 'The Mirror Man Sessions' (Buddha)

Here's a rare case when the CD reissue trumps the vinyl - Mirror Man was a record of leftover long jams from the pre-Strictly Personal sessions, a surprisingly uncommercial yet revelatory glimpse from '67 or so, though it came out in '71, if I have my timeline right. This CD sticks those tracks (maybe extending some of the first few tracks, though I'm not sure) and other, generally superior versions of songs that were re-recorded for Strictly, and in the process becomes one of the most essential Beefheart items, I think. 'Tarotplane' blends into '25th Century Quaker' which blends into 'Mirror Man' and it's hard to even notice where the seams are. These are exercises in horizontality, really the only time I can remember the Magic Band merging with the James Brown band, at least spiritually. Soul is actually present but it's as inside-out as you'd expect it to be. Somehow despite hearing these jams a million times I think they manage to surprise me, at least a little bit, every time. Whatever had infected Can and Neu! was clearly in the same smoke but the difference is all in the culture - Beefheart's band is all guts, worms and breath while the Germans have little funny tables next to their sofas. But furthermore, these long tracks are about motion - they move, slowly, like crisscrossing waves that rise and fall and gradually take you across to another island. The shorter songs are for the most part superior to the versions that ended up on Strictly Personal - for one reason, because they're so much more clear, though they are Krasnow as well. There's some great true distortion present on a few tracks - meaning the guitars actually break up because the amplifier/speaker can't handle the signal. The phasing stuff isn't here but it manages to sound weirder anyway. Because weird is not just prepackaged effects that everyone uses - it's in the songwriting, the performance, the expression. This disc is packed at 71 minutes and pretty satisfying, but it's also still a band in transition, on the verge of masterpiece.

Arbete och Fritid (MNW)

This is self-titled so I think it's the first Arbete and Fritid record, but I can't read the lengthy booklet, which is in Swedish. This is what you get if you mix traditional Scandinavian folk music with a good deal of acid - a group of guys sawing away at the classics, sometimes approximating traditional tangents and other times picking up the ball left off by their fellow countrymen The Parson Sound. Things start off sensibly enough, with a few folky tunes performed with an amped up string section. It has that feudal quality I love in the Third Ear Band, but there's a somewhat more jazzy feel and a bit of whatever Kurt Weill is, too. But enough of referencing other artists - let's talk about Arbete and Fritid. When 'Petrokemi Det Kan Man Inte Bada I' kicks in, its a heavy groove that stays locked into itself, but still lets the sax solos out to play. And from this point on, things start to get weird. The strings, so happy to stick to to classics on the first half, begin to bubble and fester as if possessed. Yeah, I feel a bit of malevolence, but maybe it's just an evil smile spread across five Swedish faces. They don't vocalise on every song but when they do you might get growling, earthy bravado or shriking giggling gasping experimentation. Even the delicate sections feel somewhat uncompromising. You've probably never heard a recorder played with such gusto before, and it's recorded pretty well - so much that when the audience applauds at the end of 'Pols Efter steffe Henningsgård, Brekken' it's a bit of a shock. As a bonus track (I think), you get a 20 minute jam entitled 'Ostpusten - Västpusten' which I'm going to guess means something about east and west. It's weird when a bonus track is 1/3 of the disc running time, but I guess this blog is about the CD format to some extent. This begins with a weighty string piece that breathes in and out, hanging in the ear like a giant distended stomach even during passages that are thick with movement. Percussion creeps in, and soon it's an all-out jam that rolls like an ocean wave. There's something hedonistic about this track; there's a bunch of melodies pulling at each other, but it keeps flowing with a perverse passion. By the end it's shifted a few more times and there's some more applause to close out the disc.