Belgian indie ‘super’group. Some good, but just a little boring. There’s no need to try it for anyone living anywhere else, but it brings back some pleasant memories for me. That’s why I’m keeping it by the slimmest of margins.
194. Los planetas: Unidad de desplazamiento
Edit: Man, this record has grown on me a lot in the couple of months since I first heard it. It’s good stuff, guitar rock but just a little different in a way I can’t put my finger on – atmospheric, maybe it’s the rhythm of the Spanish singing. Anyway, something tells me I’m not done with this record yet, so it stays with me for now. I’m intrigued.
Will Oldham isn’t setting himself up for greatness here: the second outtakes and rarities collection for the years he recorded under various Palace aliases (1993-1998, Palace, Palace brothers, Palace music, Palace songs and so on). These were years in which he recorded and released music at a maniacal tempo anyway, several records/eps/collaborations/7”-singles a year. And yet, these were also the years in which his music and vision still felt fresh. I’ve long since lost track of his shenanigans now, but I know the inspiration soon wore off in the Bonnie Prince Billy years. And this collection’s predecessor, ‘97’s ‘Lost blues and other songs’, is my favourite Oldham-related record, precisely because it cherry picks the best and most diverse bunch of tracks from all those scattered projects by an artist for whom immediate expression always prevailed over quality control.
Sadly, this one is stuck with the passed over tracks from those same scattered projects, plus added live tracks from some very lo-fi sources. For the first forty minutes of this record you keep wondering what mess you’ve wandered into, and couldn’t they have cleaned it up a little before presenting it to you. But then, it may just be me, but exactly at the point I’m ready to toss it all in he throws in the a- and b-side of a 7” I treasured when I was an impressionable teen, ‘Patience b/w Take however long you want’, two solo acoustic performances, obviously recorded before the ink was dry, capturing the full poignancy of two great songs. Those are followed by a couple of really good unreleased tracks from an abandoned LP, also called ‘Guarapero’ (shades of what must be a great inspiration to the man, Neil Young). And so in the last 15 minutes, Oldham, under the umbrella of his most vibrant artistic identity, redeems himself for the last time.
192. Peter Case: Flying saucer blues
191. Myracle brah: Myracle brah
I’m bringing it up because I can’t hear anything Beatlesque about all that stuff, really. Maybe they loved it, but it’s not in the music. Rather, it’s an exaggeration of all the non-Beatlesque traits of Beatlesque ‘70s bands like Badfinger and even boogie bands like Boston or the Knack, maybe injected with some glasses-rock like Elvis Costello. So the tempos are way down, the melodies are never as immediate, the songs take so much longer to wind along their path, the mood is never as optimistic, never so full of the love of live, the promise that life is there waiting to be lived. Disappointment.
Now, that’s not a criticism (really, it’s not!), but it’s good to know where it’s coming from and what you’re going to get. A ‘60s song called ‘She’s gonna fly’ is going to be high on life, it may be a character study about a girl leaving home and reaping the world, it may be an invitation to get high… When Myracle Brah has a song called ‘She’s gonna fly’ you can be damn sure she’s gonna fly away from him, who never had any wings to begin with.
I can get along with this record, and in ‘I’d rather be’ they have a single that should have been heard (at least a little wider than it’s been). It’s maybe a little too comfortable, never quite getting in there to make a sound that sticks to your bones, but it’s not bad.
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