Mature Teams

 2021's Rock Action; minimal but magnificent.....

Musically 2021 seems to have got off to a slow start. Obviously that’s the case with live action, as we’re still under lockdown and there’s nothing on the horizon I can see until Arab Strap at the Boiler Shop on September 9^th. Please don’t tell Laura about that one as it’s on her birthday. Of course, there have been a few on-line performances, but other than an absolute killer of a set by Alex Rex from the Glad Café, they’ve all passed me by. Somewhat ironic that one, considering two of the three acts I’m about to talk about did live shows. When it comes to records, then it is very much a case of absurdly high quality product that deserves veneration. April will be bookended by long-awaited albums from Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Teenage Fanclub, which means I’ve got to keep taking the Beta Blockers if I want to be here when they come out such is my excitement, but before then a trio of tremendous releases by bands that have been round the block and back again have had me in raptures and them on rapid rotation.

First of all, Mogwai’s As the Love Continues debuted at the very top of the album charts. Now that was a sentence I’d never expected to type, but a superb social media campaign from their cottage industry Rock Action label, and the sheer brilliance of the product on offer, took them to number one.  And deservedly so; like all 3 of the bands I’m about to talk about, there is a degree of predictable comfort, if not formulaic ritual, about the content of the music. Lots of slow starts, quiet reverie, ear-bleeding thrashing drone that gets ever more intense and post-coital meandering are in evidence, but that’s no bad thing when Mogwai do it with such powerful panache. The album begins with a sort of post-rock Vangelis feel on To the Bin my Friend, Tonight We Vacate the Earth where an arresting synth riff drives the song on and is replicated in minimus by Dry Fantasy, before the eulogistic single Ritchie Sacramento is enhanced by a restrained vocal performance, the only one on the album, by Stuart Braithwaite. So far, we’re in introspective minor chord territory, but the big, bad noisy beasts are crowding round the door. Drive the Nail, Ceiling Granny and Pat Stains have beauty and brutality in equal measures, before the glorious, anthemic send off, in the shape of the tellingly titled It’s What I Want To Do, Mum, leads us euphorically spent, out the other side. Mogwai have 25 years’ worth of a high quality back catalogue behind them; As the Love Continues deserves a place on the top shelf of their trophy cabinet.

Also on Rock Action are the magnificently seedy Arab Strab. Following a decade long hiatus, Adrian Moffatt, whose career I’ve followed with intense scrutiny and Malcolm Middleton, whose work escaped my attention for the most part, are back together and making the sound of the sewers for those whose moral compass is permanently on the blink. As Days Get Dark perversely came out in early March, just as lighter nights and the promise of an end to lockdown are in sight, though the themes under Moffatt’s menacing microscope are almost uniquely set in the darkened realm of drunken, drugged-up, dystopian nights of flawed or frustrated passion. Nice to see it hit the charts at number 14. Their career has always had something of The Rake’s Progress about it, though what we’re presented with is more of a sordid, seething stumble through the undercover passages of a bad Bacchanalian netherworld as ever it is compelling, creepy and a triumph of all that is hideous and hateful, right from the opening bars and deliberate false start of taster single The Turning of Our Bones.

As ever, each song is a soiled narrative, steeped in booze, jizz and puke, with only the dysfunctional love song, Another Clockwork Day, that tells of a middle aged bloke secretly accessing an aged external hard drive so as he can pleasure himself to younger images of his wife, who snores upstairs, blissfully unaware of this bemusing gesture of enduring love. Everything’s Getting Older, as Moffatt said in his fabulous duet with Bill Wells, and that’s for certain here. From the knowingly retro Windows XP homage sleeve to the turn of the century sampled beats, we have the true experience of ageing, drunk blokes, too old for drugs but too young to accept that, trying to make sense of their social irrelevance by making some of the most poignantly bleak tracks you’ll come across all year, apart from the jarring prim Prebyterianism of the startling homage to sobriety, Here Comes Comus! At their very best, which is about 90% of the time on this album, Arab Strap are contemporary Hogarths; swimming with the tide in a shit storm of drunken aggression, failed sexual encounters and the sharp pains of bitter, hungover self-recrimination. Particularly noteworthy is the instances of extended metaphor to tell the narrative on Fable of the Urban Fox and Sleeper; a real step forward stylistically there.

If Arab Strap are likely to self-harm on a bouquet of barbiturates and wire, The Wedding Present have always been more likely to get duffed up by the school bully on the way to delivering a dozen red roses to their latest object of semi-requited love. For nearly 40 years David Gedge has sang plaintively of his personal pain from the privations of courtship. Unfortunately for too much of the last decade and more his way of dealing with this has been to make a romantic trip in a pony and trap more likely a trip to the slaughterhouse to see how much he can get from punting deceased nags. At last, following the uninspiring live versions and faithful retreads of George Best and the like, he’s gone out and made an almost new record. Don’t get me wrong; The Wedding Present’s 2016 album Going, Going is a work of delicate beauty, so the lad can still cut the mustard when he decides to. Without question, Locked Down and Stripped Back is an absolutely essential purchase for any serious fan of the Gedge oeuvre, for the absolutely definitive version of My Favourite Dress alone.

When Charles Hayward and Danielle Wadey quit the band to embark upon Planned Parenthood in late 2019, The Wedding Present were forced into another incarnation and, with 2020’s lockdown to deal with, they recorded this lo-fi almost semi acoustic take on a dozen different numbers. Frankly, it’s a triumph. The current line-up features Melanie Howard on bass, Christopher Hardwick on drums and Jon Stewart from Sleeper on guitar. It is the latter named who has helped contribute the two previously unreleased songs that stand out on this album. You’re Just a Habit that I’m Trying to Break is the first fruit of David Gedge's new songwriting partnership with Stewart, whilst We Should Be Together was originally written, but never released, by Sleeper themselves and this version has Louise Wener on vocals. There are 9 other tracks on the album, namely: A Million Miles, California, Starry Eyed, You Should Always Keep In Touch With Your Friends, Granadaland, Crawl, Sports Car, Deer Caught in the Headlights and Blonde. Of those my initial favourites are the incredibly sparse version of Blonde and Melanie Howard’s vocals on Sports Car. I’d like to think Gedge might decide to release a whole album of new stuff, but if he does, that won’t be for a while as they’re touring Seamonsters for the next year or so. Oh well, whatever pays the mortgage I guess….