The Fall - 'Grotesque (After the Gramme)' (Cog Sinister)

This is a weird CD release because it pre-pends some early singles ('How I Wrote Elastic Man', 'Totally Wired' plus b-sides 'City Hobgoblins' and 'Putta Block'), but without anything in the liner notes indicating that. So 'Pay Your Rates' actually kicks in as track 5, and then Grotesque proper begins. Not a problem here - the singles complement the album perfectly - it's just that I only know what the song titles are thanks to my familiarity with the tracks (and the Gracenote CDDB database, of course). Repetition, cited often as an early Fall motif, is maybe most prominent here of any of these early releases - 'Pay Your Rates', 'New Face in Hell' and 'C n CS Mithering' (not to mention 'The NWRA'!) are insanely monotonous, drilling into one's brain with their back-and-forth soul-sucking. It's like a Michael Snow film, except with Smith's sneering lyrics providing a wild unraveling. 'English Scheme' has always been one of my favourite Fall songs, maybe due to the way that the carnivalesque keyboards blast over everything and the geographic evocations within the lyrics tweak my own fascination with British maps By this point, The Fall have evolved out of the punk thing entirely and arecreating something intangible but about their lives in Manchester. It's more confident, perhaps, less prone to hiding between Smith's bile. The keyboard and guitar interplay on 'New Face in Hell' is practically jazz. 

John Fahey - 'America' (Takoma/Fantasy)

At the deepest point of my Fahey interest (1999-2001, roughly) I was convinced beyond any doubt that America was his masterpiece - though I must say that I hadn't heard them all, and still haven't. This was due largely to a friend uncovering a vinyl copy; he dubbed it to a tape, and during a long afternoon drive across central Pennsylvania we listened to it while trying to stay awake and the synergy was magic - the long sweeping guitarscapes were a perfect complement to the dim light of I-80, with rolling hills in the distance that seemed to write their own elegies. I immediately ordered this CD, which strangely expanded and contracted the LP at the same time. A lot of additional material was added - the first nine tracks, in fact - but one of the LP tracks was shortened to fit the fascistic 75 minute runtime of a compact disc. But it's great in both formats; I can't, at this point, imagine America without the beautiful 11-minute 'Dalhart, Texas, 1967' or the incredible version of 'Amazing Grace' (the best these ears have ever heard, with piercing shards of guitar cutting through the nonbelievers like machine gun fire). And neither were on the original LP. When we finally get around to it, I'm taken back to that drive and the transformative power of music (or whatever cliché you prefer) is in full effect. America is built around two 15- minute tracks, 'Mark 1:15' and 'The Voice of the Turtle', and the longer formats are where Fahey shines the most (although the former, I believe, is the truncated one). These pieces take their time to build, and especially in the case of 'Voice of the Turtle', represent probably the fullest evidence of his guitar genius. The shorter tracks are also great though - 'Dvorak' is celebratory and when looking at the strange, primitive artwork ('The destruction of Takoma Park, Maryland') while listening to it, it feels spooky. This is no longer necessarily my favourite album of his - I would probably take the wistful longing of Days Have Gone By, or just decline to pick one - but it's a formidable entry into American music. The title seems to acknowledge this, and while it's easy to inject a whole lot of context into your work by titling it 'America' (I'm looking at you, Baudrillard), it's fitting for the self-made man he was. I'm always drawn to the way mid-century American artists dealt with space, to me one of the fundamental issues of American culture - and the long format improvicompositions here breathe in and exhale, like a William Carlos Williams poem. The title track itself (left off the original issue!) is perhaps the most impressionistic part of the album, with a resonant high-register introduction before the resounding, aggressive strides of the main theme kick in. It's easy to think of this as the whole 200-year history compressed into a 7 minute instrumental guitar piece and I'll succumb to that analysis. Though it's lacking any musique concrete experimentation or weirder elements, this is Fahey's magnum opus for sure, and it's been recently reissued in full on vinyl so I'll probably make the conversion soon - which is the first time it's ever all been together, even if only two minutes are missing here.

Extra Glenns - 'Martial Arts Weekend' (Absolutely Kosher)

Guess what? I'm a massive Mountain Goats fan, but since it's gonna be 2021 before I ever reach the M's I'll just tell you now: from The Hound Chronicles on, I'm enraptured, up to and through Full Force Galesburg which is the apotheosis of some unobtainable magic that is uniquely tied to my own adolescence and development of an understanding of art, language, and expression. I should also tell you that Galesburg came out when I was 17, and his post-Galesburg records I still enjoy, occasionally love, but something has been missing for me. It's me that's changed, not him; nothing but love and respect for the big D himself here from Cinderblock HQ and I'll save my gushing for, well, 2021. Anyway, amongst that era of perfection lies the Infidelity 7", a rare example of a supergroup that truly is, or whatever clichés come to mind. This full-length didn't appear til almost a decade later and I scooped it up fervently, even though by 2001 my obsessive Mountain Goats collecting phase had, I guess, waned. I never thought we'd hear anything from the Extra Glenns after that 7" so this was quite a surprise - but if a new Extra Glenns release comes out next month, I won't be shocked. The once-per-decade release rate is a good way to be. Martial Arts Weekend occupies a really strange, almost forgotten corner of my Darnielle pantheon. It's a completely solid album; I can't pick it apart for any reason except my general criticism of later Mountain Goats (or what now is probably mid-period to current Mountain Goats), which I already stated above: I changed. These songs just came at a time when they didn't resonate with me as much as the first few hundred Darnielle songs I consumed. As on the 7" Franklin Bruno takes a backseat but not too much of one; his contributions are enough to distinguish this from the Mountain Goats recordings of that era, even though the songwriting is almost all Darnielle. But for some reason, I always forget that this record exists. There's wonderful tracks - 'Ultra Violet', 'Sombody Else's Parking Lot in Sebastopol' - but they never attain the personal highs of, say, any song on Zopilote Machine. We get a rather straight, piano driven cover of 'Memories', from my favourite Leonard Cohen record, which somehow replaces the leering swagger of Cohen with that earnest bi-fi sound. 'Malevolent Seascape Y' follows the X of 1993 and is just as malevolent; 'The River Song' is pastoral, genteel, and resigned at the same time. Bruno is an artist whose work I always liked but never got WAY into; Nothing Painted Blue were just a bit too far away from anything I could latch onto, though maybe I just didn't try hard enough. I think this might be the last recorded occurence of 'Going to...' songs but I'm too lazy to pull out other CDs and check dates. I'm glad for this project because it reminded me of the existence of this album, which over a decade later reveals some forgotten pleasures.

Arnold Dreyblatt - 'The Sound of One String' (Table of the Elements)

It's not every day that a composer releases an Incesticide, to refer to that Nirvana collection yet again. The Sound of One String serves two purposes - it can function as an introduction to Dreyblatt's work, presented chronologically - while also collecting rarities for the fans. There's some familiar pieces here - 'Nodal Excitation' appears twice, in different forms, including an early solo performance from 1979. And there's a live version of 'Propellers in Love' which is a bit brighter than the studio version. Live recordings of Dreyblatt are great because you can really get a sense of the room, depending on the recording - on the more spare moments, like the aforementioned solo 'Nodal Excitation', you get a bit of room noise and while it's maybe not the most accurate way to reproduce the very specific frequencies, it's a wonderful document of 'being there' that only brilliant sound recordings can convey. By the time this version of 'Propellers' ends, the whole disc has been an ecstatic bit of buzzing beauty. And 'Damping Influence', a more subdued piece, works well to bring down the energy, with it's toy piano cutting through like a bizarre gamelan. And things start to pick themselves up again here, building up towards the steady electric-guitar drone of 'End Correction' and then 'Music for Small String Orchestra', a stunning experiment with traditional instrumentation. It's still just-intonated, of course, and changes slowly from overtone to overtone, and feels like an epic drone composition - like a more austere Lou Harrison, perhaps. The whole disc (and it's a packed 79 minutes) ends with 'Dirge Relations', which looks ahead to the sound and lineup of Animal Magnetism. This does that slow 'walking' thing that is all over Animal Magnetism, suggestion a modular music that is nonetheless cohesive. I admit I haven't kept up with what Dreyblatt has been doing for the past 20 years or so, which is a shame because I love his music this much. Such an reinvention of acoustic instruments doesn't feel dated at all, even though some of these tracks are 34 years old; for this listener, at least, it's a direction for further exploration.

Bingo Trappers - 'Juanita Ave.' (Animal World)

A few years after their masterful Sierra Nevada, the Bingo Trappers returned on a new label with this CD, which (if I remember correctly) was marketed fairly strongly: magazine ads, college radio play, and a big US tour. All in vain, methinks -- they sank without a trace and now this remains an obscurity, though less than a decade old (2000). Given the preponderance of bedroom-lofi thumb-twiddlers making their rounds now (I'm looking at you, Woodsist label!) you'd think it would be time for a comeback. I expected as much when Woods put out a record on Shrimper - that seemed to link the two 'movements', if there is any such thing to link. But the Bingo Trappers, if they still exist, are probably just hiding out in some Amsterdam suburb now. Juanita Ave. is a strong set of songs, and generously so - 15 of them in 50 minutes - and the tone shifts a lot to prevent it from ever sounding samey. There might not be anything as earth-shatteringly classic as 'King in Exile' here, but there's a similar bummer/ramshackle feel throughout. 'Is That a Fact' reminds me a bit of Suicide or Lou Reed - there's definitely more 'tude here than these Nederlanders ever showed before. The first half of the album is strongly guitar-jangle heavy - not aggressive or distorted, but frantic and lyrical. Deeper investigation would probably reward a r willing to lose themselves in 'God's Biographer', 'White Bikini' or 'The Last Resort/Seinpost 1976'. I can hear sentimentality, self-criticism, and resignation, even on the goofier sounding stuff like 'The Real Mr. Tambourine'. Energy is great, especially when brushed over 4-track recorded rock drums, but I love this band when they're at their most pastoral. 'Twilight Kids' recalls 'Walkin' Through the Clouds' from Sierra Nevada, and is a step above the rest of the songs in terms of fidelity. It's followed by 'My Virtual Things', which takes a page from the Bats songbook and hits that mellow NZ sunshine vibe. I should say here that this record is lo-fi, but honestly so. There are no deliberately disfigured tunes, apart from maybe 'Sneakers' ghetto-industrial rhythm/theremin loop. These last three songs actually are a great coda to the album - my favorite part - and make me think of the 'Nighttime'/'Blue Moon'/'Take Care' trilogy that ends Big Star's Third (which, coincidentally, is the last CD reviewed here). I suspect there's hundreds of these discs somewhere in a box in Tallahassee, which is a shame for the band, the label, and the public.