Cardigans - 'Gran Turismo' (Mercury/Polygram)

In which my secret enjoyment of Swedish pop music is revealed! I forgot that this one was on the shelf, I guess because it's white minimalist spin is easy to not-notice. I'm not entirely sure how I ended up with this; something tells me "promo" or freebie but the barcode is not punctured. Anyway, it's been ages since the Cardigans cold mid-tone pop has graced my ears, so long that the glossy pages of the CD booklet have started to stick together. The songs are infectious enough that I still remember a few of 'em. It's not as pure saccharine as my memory told me, or as others from their homeland are certainly known for (yes, Abba, but I was actually thinking of the Concretes). 'Paralyzed' starts off with a very digital, yet not-overly synthesized hook and an edgy lead vocal. The big hit for me was 'Erase/Rewind', which follows a rather call and response pattern. The singer doesn't have an amazingly distinct voice but it's good for pop music, and both compressed and echo'd at the same time to make it feel even more cold. The title of this record is a Playstation game from the time (1998!) and I can't help but read images of motion and driving into these sons. 'Marvel Hill' and 'Starter' both get some crunchy rhythmic interplay into their back-end, though I wouldn't go as far as to call it 'heavy' -- the drums are too sequenced to allow the proper breathing space. But the details are there - guitars through probably hundreds of rack/studio effects are balanced among (rather restrained) organ/MIDI stuff, and it all gels together nicely. 'My Favourite Game' is maybe most calculated for chart success, with a rollicking brashness that holds up well after twelve years. Tempo shifts are always good and this chorus hangs in a nice slowdown; I can't help but think how this might actually be "timeless" pop (yes, I just wrote that) because it could pass in the current era pretty much unchanged. (Or maybe with a smidgeon of autotune applied?) I expected to toss this on the discard pile by the end, and I still might, but only because it's a CD. Records like this are really the last gasp of the CD era - not released on vinyl (as far as I know, it's a major label of course) and before the whole iTunes stuff hit. The Swedish cheaptones of the past are the landfills of tomorrow!

Can - 'Ege Bamyasi' (Spoon)

I don't remember where I first heard of Can - probably mentioned in some article or interview. I do remember the first time I decided to listen to them, when I was chatting with a coworker. I was sixteen and I had a job working in a library. There was an older music nerd who worked there and I remember asking him what his favourite bands were. He told me that it was probably Pere Ubu (who I had heard of surely, but not listened to) and Can. To which I replied 'The German band?'. Latter that night I went to a Silkworm gig. Anyway I'm digressing again, trying to babble on about my personal history with this music instead of talking about the actual sounds here. Ege Bamyasi is somewhat of a watershed; things weren't quite the same afterwards though I can't quite put my finger on why. This is a much more smooth, fluid record than Tago Mago. 'Pinch', the opener, is languid and bright, though frantic; it's Jaki Liebezeit stretching out and letting everyone else paint broad watercolour strokes over him. 'Sing Swan Song' is simultaneously ballad and minimalist heartpulse. Czukay's bass is brutal and pummeling despite the soft edges, and Suzuki takes us to a new a place with his emoting. 'One More Night' I can't disassociate these days from the loop that appears as the backing track to a few Joe Frank radio shows, during which you can really focus/obsess on it's disjointed rhythm. I'd like to say that this is a dub approach again, built upon a long jammy riff with most of the changes coming from elements coming in and out - 70's cop guitar, cymbals, Damo's voice, etc. It's three tracks in before you realise that this is a new poppy side of Can, no doubt motivated by the hit of 'Spoon', which is tacked on here as the final track. 'Vitamin C' takes us back to the kinetic repetitive funk of 'Hallelujah', though condensed into three minutes and even more open of a songform. There's enough room here for Damo to get quite lyrical, and while his experimentation on Tago Mago is unparalleled here, by this point it really feels like the man is finding a new voice. It's a Can jam for a mixtape, though it ends prematurely. I always swore it was a lot longer. Irmin brings in a somewhat liturgical organ solo near the end, but this is the church of psychological warfare. And there's a segue into 'Soup', the most 'out' track of Ege Bamyasi. This is a tick-tock Jeopardy game, with harshly squealing white noise and electric piano bumps, all somehow kept contained while constantly threatening to rip itself apart. It's a rocker until it breaks into a more freeform section, sounding almost EXACTLY like an Area record. Damo is even affecting some Italianness (Dago Suzumi? I couldn't resist, sorry), all gutturals, sputterings, and rolled consonants. Irmin is going far more synthy than the soft organs we heard on the earlier tracks, and once again (like the end of 'Aumgn') we have Jaki pushed to the forefront. But it doesn't outstay its welcome (not to imply that 'Aumgn' does!) and quickly takes us to the two pop tunes, 'I'm So Green' and 'Spoon'. The former is an edgy jazz-rocker built around a nice Liebezeit/Czukay shuffle and some arpeggiated jangle. It sets a mood quite similar to what the band did with Mooney, though again with a syncopation they could have only dreamed about in 1968. By the end of it's economical three minutes, we've reached something chaotically psychedelic that I'm still not sure how to read. And 'Spoon' was the tune for a cop show, or something like that. Fair enough, cause it's properly suspenseful, built around an ethereal pop hook, laden in reverb and with haunting background vocals. Hit songs are nothing to be ashamed of, and this maybe manages to capture Can at their peak in just three minutes. I know it lacks the long-form workouts, synth/vocal diversions or instrumental freakouts but there's still something to be said for it. The sense of spacyness - not like Hawkwind, but like Alvin Lucier - is there, despite being a fairly busy arrangement, and while no musician really gets to go for it, there's the sense of collective brainmeld that could only happen when a brilliant band reachers their peak.

Can - 'Monster Movie' (Spoon)

It just so happens that 'Father cannot yell' was the first Can song I ever heard, because it's also track 1 on the Cannibalism compilation CD which my university library loaned me during my freshman year. When that rapid, oscillating keyboard started and then another rapid, oscillating drum and bass lick came in to support it, things were never quite the same for me. Monster Movie is a curious one to review now because while all four songs have their strengths, I actually very rarely bother listening to it anymore. There's a lot of ideas here, and most importantly a rudimentary/primitive edge that sort of disappears gradually over the next few albums (is this in any way identifiable as the same band of Future Days?). One can't deny the blues/garage edge, but then Michael Karoli's guitar lines usually sound like hot, pointy daggers. There's a missing rhythm guitarist here, not that Czukay et al lacks the rhythmic skills -- but with the chug-chug chunkiness taken away, they've already found some sort of inner space. Monster Movie has the feel of being recorded in one take, with less focus on studio techniques than we'd later associate with this band. 'Mary, Mary so contrary' is the ballad, or at least a place for Malcolm Mooney to try to inject his warped bleatings with some passion. It has a lumbering movement that sounds like it evolved from some of the middle tracks on Delay 1968, but a bit more precise. 'Outside my door' is the shortest track and one that I like to play when DJing. It has a rambling electric blues feel, and a driving harmonic/violin/keyboard riff (what exactly is it?), and it's probably one of the more 'punk' tracks in the Can oeuvre. But really, the monolithic beast of Monster Movie is 'Yoo Doo Right', which is a sideways inversion of rock arrangement, complete with random/modular vocals. It's such a cliché by this point and I realised after about 9 minutes in -- I haven't actually listened to this song in years. Usually when I put on Monster Movie (which is not that often, sadly) I don't invest myself in the full 20:14 needed to get through 'Yoo Doo Right'. Which is a shame, because I think it's a remarkable track, even if you feel that it's overplayed by the end of it. This is really the earliest use of spacey jazzmopherics in Can's discography, and you can see how it signals ahead to 'Mother Sky'. I guess that's why it has the distinction of being covered by both the Geraldine Fibbers AND Hieronymous Firebrain. Parts drop in and out, but it never stops pulsing, and at times it's hard to distinguish Holger's bass guitar from Jaki's bass drum and/or toms. There's a dark sibilence on everything, and, well, Malcolm Mooney sounds like he's about 79 years old here. He croaks and rasps and there's really no one else who could have carried this song, even though he's seen as the "lesser" Can vocalist. 'Yoo Doo Right' was also on Cannibalism, bookending the collection with 'Father Cannot Yell' beginning it, so I went straight to Monster Movie as my starting point. Its legacy may merely be the first album of a legendary band, but not a legendary album in its own, but it still explodes in its own way.

Can - 'Delay 1968' (Spoon)

An essential part of the four-year college experience, for me at least, was sitting around with my friends listening to Can records and dreaming of changing the universe through sound. Actually when going through this project I'm starting to realise how much of what I'm listening to takes me back to those four years, or the time period immediately after them. It's true that I barely even hear these Can records for being records anymore, since I've heard them so much they're become 'classic rock' to me. But listening now, with the explicit goal of typing something right here for you to read, I tend to come across things I forgot (example: the kazoo playing at the end of 'Man Named Joe' while Jaki Liebezeit is kicking a high school talent show drum solo). I got rid of all of my Beatles records about 8 years ago when I realised that there was no point to owning them, since I could just turn on the radio if I wanted to hear the Beatles. I almost feel that way about Can, though of course no radio station will play Can with the ubiquity that they deserve - -but I suppose I could look on YouTube quite readily to hear (and see!) all the Can I could want in a single dosage. The reason I feel like it would be okay to get rid of my Can records is not that I don't love them, but because they are such an iconic entry in the canon of music that I almost feel like my time could be spent listening to something else. And I realise I'm not explaining that very well, which is well enough since I'm definitely not going to get rid of these records. I'm not sure where to file Delay 1968, since it came out in 1981 but clearly pre-dates Monster Movie. This is such a fun record to listen to, cause it's Can as basement-punk pounders, with no real trace of the textural genius they would get into later. Instead we get distorted guitar riffs, Doors-on-more-acid organ layers, and lots and lots of Malcolm Mooney. 1968 was a hell of a year - romanticised endlessly in the history of rock music, and certainly one responsible for some barnstormers, but this feels like it's coming from another planet. The rhythm section is already established here, filling the disc with that 'Can' sound. Liebezeit's jazz background is held in check in favour of minimal monotonous pounding, with subtle polyrhthymic inflections between the beats -- but nothing to steal the spotlight or take away from the unity of the group! I believe that 'Uphill' and 'Little Star of Bethlehem' definitely rank with the greatest Can songs ever, as perfect samplers of the pre-Damo sound. 'Uphill' is exploratory and horizontal, with band members coming in and out with different layers, solos and stabs. It resembles the opening cut, 'Butterfly', in these aspects, but turbocharged with more oomph (and with that weird ending I guess is a studio accident/error)? 'Little Star' is certainly Mooney's show, with his exemplary lyrical gift being displayed in the most extemporaneous of fashions. But this is also a masterpiece of Michael Karoli's guitar work. It's subtle, and well-crafted, but also thrilling and cutthroat while somehow being the same song. There's not a bad track on this record though. 'Pnoom' is the head-scratcher, but not for long at 26 seconds, and it looks forward to Tago Mago. 'Thief' is a ballad of sort, with Mooney's denial/plea sounding nearly convincing and properly desperate. The story goes that Delay 1968 was shelved so they could make something more commercial, but they made Monster Movie instead, which sounds equally weird to me. Delay 1968 is about as 'classic' as a posthumously released album can be, but since it's actually beginning, we can hear the sounds of genesis. Which can be just as wonderful as the sounds of apocalypse.

Camper Van Beethoven - 'Camper Van Beethoven Is Dead. Long Live Camper Van Beethoven' (Pitch-A-Tent)

It was a shock to hear about this CD, in 2002, when I didn't expect to ever hear another peep from Camper Van Beethoven. But since then, they've become a semi-active band again, although one that has only released fairly experimental new work and mostly plays the classics in concert (I've seen 'em twice and they were awesome both times). Camper Van Beethoven Is Dead, Long Live Camper Van Beethoven is a second odds-and-ends compilation, but not a "normal" one like Vantiquities - it's built upon old material from concert recordings and demos, overdubbed with state-of-the-art 2002 recording techniques. This approach is pretty obvious, particularly as they tried a bit too hard to make things flow. So, the very raw live recording of 'L'Aguardiente' (a nice Balkan stomper) blends into the very studio-based 'Tom Flower's 1500 Valves' with some audience noise to mask the transition, but it's blatant smoke and mirrors. So yeah, this feels pretty incomplete (by definition), with a few old fan-faves like 'SP37957' and 'Balalaika Gap' thrown as bones. The musique concrete experimentation, like the opening track whose name is too long to bother retyping, isn't half-bad -- the opener in particular could be a Morton Subotnick outtake, but it's worthwhile as a bit of outsider electronic experimentation (which I'm sure no one treated it as). If you want to hear new unearthed Camper Van Beethoven vocal-based songs, well, there's a few, though the only really great one is 'Klondike' -- 'Tom Flower's' is a bit lackluster and 'We're All Wasted and We're Wasting All Your Time' is merely 'Shut Us Down' crossed with 'No More Bullshit' crossed with 'The Ambiguity Song' crossed with 'Life is Grand' (and you can guess where it's sequenced). The orchestral 'All Her Favorite Fruit' is expectedly grandiose, but maybe a tad out of place here (but where else would they put it, right?) -- and I prefer the original anyway, because you don't need an orchestra to carry the gravitas. Also notable is another cover of 'Who Are the Brain Police?' (the first one being by CVB offshoot Monks of Doom, though this one has a lot more pizazz). The long composited medley of different live versions of 'SP37957' (I'm assuming from the Key Lime Pie tour, but maybe we're hearing Fichter and Segel together thanks to digital editing) actually has some visionary (in inauthentic) improvisational sections, and it might be my pick of this disc. So what I'm holding is maybe the least essential CD ever, but if it enabled this band to get back together, I'm all for it.

Camberwell Now - 'All's Well' (ReR)

Camberwell Now, what a band, what a moment in music, but what little splash they made! This CD, long sought-after by yours truly before it was finally reissued, compiles everything they recorded during their brief (1984-1986) existence. Now, here's a bias to lay up-front: I'm a massive This Heat fan, and I look to Charles Hayward as a magical musical force that did a lot for my own artistic and critical development. This Heat/Camberwell Now brought together a lot of concerns for me at just the right time in my life (my early 20's!). In the musical arena, they brought together ruthless sound experimentation with mindblowing musical chops - the balance is always perfect, as for every dazzling Hayward drum run comes some incredible use of musique concrete techniques. And lyrically, Hayward showed me that you can bridge fiery, political expression with poetry and the personal - I'd say that I now follow the "everything is political" philosophy, which is a great deal inspired by This Heat. So Camberwell Now was the somewhat more obscure followup band, whose lone LP The Ghost Trade I luckily scored from eBay about ten years ago, but whose other records remained unobtainable. The Meridian EP, which comprises the first 4 tracks of All's Well, is an open, tuneful Camberwell Now, and maybe the furthest removed from This Heat's post-punk caterwauls. The nautical theme is overabundant and years before all those midwestern indie rock bands started writing songs about boats, it's funny to hear Charles Hayward's approach. The trio format of This Heat, with Stephen Rickard on the tapes, is retained; what's different is that there's a more central rhythm, yet less rock structure here. It seems to emanate more directly from the intelligent 70s prog scene that Hayward came out of, but I think more of Rock Bottom than the Quiet Sun LP. Coming in the midst of Thatcherism, these songs about decaying empire and the exploitation of natural resources seem prescient, if not overtly obvious. A bit of digging under the surface is good, and the way these rhythms emerge it feels like waves, gently rocking. The instrumental 'Resplash' is where we get Camberwell Now starting to really amp things up. It gets a bit 'S.P.Q.R' at points, but puts on the brakes at just the right moments, building up massive caches of tension. It's the first really astounding track in a disc that's full of them, and it's like rock music has taken a major step forward. A bonus track, 'Daddy Needs a Throne', is inserted after Meridian, before Ghost Trade and clearly coming from the same sessions. This is when we start to really feel the manic, bass-driven rock of Camberwell Now's middle period. The song, in only 3 and a half minutes, somehow manages to address the difficulty of maintaining a working class family structure, while exploding in a cacophony of furious voices and electricity. But it's almost a teaser for 'Working Nights,' the leadoff cut from The Ghost Trade, which I'm glad to have on CD because my vinyl copy is practically worn through. This is the definitive Camberwell Now song, which is crazy because the first time I heard it I thought it reminded me of New Order! There is something lively and dancey here that This Heat never had, but it's so fucking intense and fast and magical and the bassline is like a choker necklace on your brain. I don't even know what else to stay here, but I know the LP will get listened to soon on Vinyl Underbite, so I'll save it for there. 'Sitcom' follows , assessing the state of progress in mid 80's Britain, and then the beautiful, understated 'Wheat Futures' closes out side 1. Except this is a CD, so we don't have to flip anything! 'Wheat Futures' is one of those songs where Hayward is singing/droning/intoning deeply and passionately, accompanied at first by an electric erhu and some keyboards, and it slowly builds to a slow series of musical thoughts, with a repetitive autoharp line to centre it. This is still somehow punk rock to me, but it's also folk and experimental and anything and everything. Hayward probably never plays drums as minimally as at the end of 'Wheat Futures', yet it's still folding in on itself in rhythmic complexity. 'Speculative Fiction', with it's cut-up vocalisings and electro-beat, at first sounds like the great sellout, but is actually an upright stride towards Valhalla. While still frantic, it's slow enough to breathe, with lots of studio/Rickard tricks, such as layers of bells and whistles, echoing drum fills, and nooks and crannies jumping out at all points. By the end it's a swirling maelstrom of the original electroclash hook and Haywards layered Ya-ya-yas. And then 'Ghost Lantern', whose lyrics aren't printed in the booklet for some reason yet this track continues The Ghost Trade's reliance on Trefor Goronwy's manic basslines and frantic guitar chops, with Hayward's crisp yet explosive drumming. And then 'The Ghost Trade', the 12 minute behemoth that ends the album of the same name. The first four minutes are a midtempo song, an indictment of global capitalism, post-Fordism and conspicous consumption. And then a slow xylophone line emerges from the keyboard smog and a plodding, instrumental coda takes us to the end. It's as beautiful as everything else here, which is to say it's also tense and strange and unusual. And then, the Greenfingers 12" to close out the disc! The title track is an explosive meditation on rural malaise, with punchy saxophones and a rock-solid beat that makes me violently tap my foot off the bottom of my desk when I listen to it. It feels a bit more fruity than what came before, perhaps a feeling carried on in 'Mystery of the Fence'. At this point, the band has expanded to a four-piece, with Maria Lamburn adding the sax, piccolo and viola. The textures are slightly more plastic, but it's 1986 after all - it's got that digital sheen on things, despite Lamburn's organic grounding. Goronwy's own tune, "Know How" comes next, which is a real 180 turn. His earnest, bright voice sounds like he should be in Tears for Fears, and the simple, minimal lyrics are much more commercially rooted than Hayward's use of language. There's a nice pulse behind everything, and I've come to really like this song over time. It's a weird sort of ending for the Camberwell Now, though I guess that would actually be the 35 second 'Element Unknown' which actually ends the disc. I realise this has been one of the longer and more passionate entries in the Constructor Bags to date, but I guess that's why I love music - because it gets me excited, inspired and totally fuckin' pumped! The booklet includes lyrics and a rather technical description of the tape switchboard, written by Rickard. I know that this is all that there is, but I still can't help myself from pining for some more deluxe edition (vinyl!) in the future.

Cadaver in Drag - 'People Mean to Die' (Husk)

I'm not the best one to describe records of this genre, which I believe is called 'grindcore' but someone more attuned to such cultural nuances can certainly correct me. Cadaver in Drag are a four-piece gang of kids from Kentucky who thrash through 9 songs in 16 minutes on this self-released CDr, though most are around a minute long, and 'Baptized in Embaling Fluid' is a long, slow one with (i think) keyboards and a really miserable, downer vibe. The Hair Police guys helped out with the recording of this, and Robert Beatty is credited with electronics and editing, and I'd guess 'Hermaphroditehandjob' is entirely his work, cause it's a cut up work of speedy fuckery. The other tracks are more in the grindy style - insanely fast, blast beats, thick fast guitars, breakdowns, screamed/screeched vocals that are unintelligible, and song titles like 'Sorority Whore', 'Beaten to Death With a Prosthetic Leg' , and my personal favourite, 'Cut into Eighths'. It's an aesthetic, a movement, a lifestyle, and when I've dabbled in it's exhibitions, I've enjoyed what I've seen. Energy, obsession, and definite chops but committed to burying them under white noise and distortion. When these tracks really hit, it's when all of the dissonance builds into these clouds of sharp, rusty overtones and some sort of metallic sheen takes over. I know this is a million miles away from black metal, but the one time I tried to get into Burzum I found that it also worked well if you kept the volume super low, in a bit of a Rafael Toral manner. This works too with Cadaver in Drag, but then you can't hear the majesty of 'Cut into Eighths' as it was meant to be heard. I dig it either way