Howe Gelb, The Troubadour 28/10/08

A couple of weeks ago I read an interview with Howe Gelb. I'd heard of his band Giant Sand but that's all; it was just that I'd already read everything else in the magazine. The interview turned out to be amusing and thought-provoking and Gelb turned out to be witty and charming. A little bit of wit and charm goes a long way in the doltish world of rock, the vapid world of pop and especially the (mostly) unattractive, introspective world of alt-country.

Not long after that I opened up the street press and what did I see? My new friend Howe is coming to say howdy! A few downloads from the new Giant Sand album proVISIONS later I could confirm that Gelb's interview persona was not a false advertisement.

The wit is in the words - "Raggin'/they talk like a filibuster/Their words surround me/like I was Custer"; "Every girl is like a pearl/Heart strung along/then left stranded" - and the charm is in the tunes. Giant Sand's music is like its home-state Arizona, a little to the left of Tex-Mex and a little cooler. To mix metaphors but stay regional, it fizzes and soothes like a lime-necked Corona on a hot day: bitter, citric and sweet.

At the Troubadour last Tuesday we only got the frontman, his guitar and an electric piano. Gelb lived up to his rep as a laconic, Tucsonic gentleman but also revealed a penchant for moronic sonics. That is, right after hypnotising the audience with a whispered verse, in the part where Smog might do a li'l skip or Bonnie Billy might snap at his own ear, Howe would step on a guitar pedal and treat us (or himself) to the sort of wacky effects I used to giggle at when I was 13. The best one sounded like a high-pitched sitar with reverb. Obviously used to an acoustic piano, our man also became entranced by the "scat" effects on the keyboard and all up spent a good five minutes hunched over and smiling faintly at the doos and daas at his fingertips. I loved all of this and only wish some of the more po-faced troubadours of the world would take a leaf.

Blooming in the first few songs from an unassuming dude in a denim jacket and a trucker's cap to an assured showman, Gelb took the time for a chat between most songs. After removing his hat to say "thank you" (to the audible delight of a couple of the ladies in the room), he would either tell the next number's story or just open up to the floor.

Gelb: "Whaddy'all wanna hear, a song about love or a song about politics?"
Man with Queensland accent: "Love! Love! My girl left me!"
Gelb: "Who's Magill? Alright, this one's about love and politics. Well, it's kind of a love song that involves the ramifications of... well, you'll see".

Thus began a song about a returned, wounded soldier:

Looking in your eyes I surrender
Such surrender is rendered justified
You stand with boot upon my fender
Reflected in my glass eye.

Later we had a song about "the smallest possible... increment of love" (which turned out to be about chromosomes) and, for an encore, a return of the wacky guitar effects for a bizarre medley of "Ring of Fire/Hey Jude". Somehow even that was witty and charming.

Bruises on the fruit: weather changes moods

What do you feel like listening to right now? That's a relatively easy question, despite how often we find ourselves gazing endlessly at a shelf or wearing out our thumb trying to find something just right.

Take a step back and a more interesting question presents itself: why do you feel like listening to that right now?

Obviously there's a lot at play: what did your parents play for you as a child; what do your friends like (although I've made friends through music as much I have come to like music through friends); what sort of a day are you having; are you tired or buzzing? Even days of the week seem relevant. Friday for me is always the Stooges or somesuch; yesterday I heartily enjoyed Pussy Galore's Dial "M" For Motherfucker as I gulped down a morning coffee.

But what I've been thinking about lately is the weather. Whichever side you choose or are destined to take in the free will vs determinism debate, there's no denying two things: we're slaves to our bodies and our bodies are slaves to the world. All your thoughts, tastes, desires and moods ping electrically around your brain, which is carried around and kept alive by your person. And your person lives in the world where it sweats, gets sunburnt and shivers.

It's around this time of year that I always notice it most. It's as if we're brought closer to the world as our flesh warms up and our blood flows back to our extremities. At the very start of Spring, when it first becomes possible to enjoy a mandarin on the verandah in shorts, I put on Pavement. "So drunk in the August sun" indeed, although it's mostly earlier stuff of theirs that fits the bill. Lately I'm enjoying psychedelic music (both guitar-based and electronic) and I can't help wondering if the animated chaos of green grass, fluttering insects, swooping birds, rotting fruit and horny people all around me has something to do with it, as well as the equivalence of bathing oneself in sound with enjoying the first couple of months of heat before it becomes unbearable.
Most strongly, in Summer when I'm swimming through Brisbane's 80% humidity in 40 degree heat under black clouds with the smell of rain about to fall in fat drops, I understand the vast yet claustrophobic reverb of The Go-Betweens' Before Hollywood, the deep-voiced melodrama of The Triffids' In the Pines and the stickiness of Talking Heads' Remain In Light. On a sunny day I put on The Triffids' Born Sandy Devotional and think of blinding sand. From albums such as these and the sweaty, tanned arms in music videos an alien or eighteen-year-old might gather that the '80s must have been a hot and humid decade.

Gold Coast Summers were different. I still put my longstanding devotion to Sonic Youth and anyone that sounds like them down to my adolescence swimming in a creek surrounded by dry bush and screaming insects, wondering what sort of music the trees would make if they could.

The music of a place must have something to do with its weather. Think of Ibiza and Seattle. At the opposite end of the humidity scale to Brisbane I find that when my skin's drying out and the insides of my nostrils are turning black in Sydney I get into the harsh scrapings of, say, Kiosk and Bird Blobs. Sometimes the weather seems to change music. When I rode a bus through fields of ice last year The Field's droning repetition was calming and crystalline. Listening to The Field now in a hot wooden house is more like surrendering to the lethargy and insanity of heatstroke.

I can't remember what the other half of the year sounds like, it seems so far away.

I'd be interested to hear anyone else's seasonal favourites.

The Long Blondes: Can't you see new idols?

The Long Blondes have had their career cut short and, not surprisingly, I am sad. Partly because I had such high hopes for them but mainly because I had that special feeling that, despite their faults, they were "my thing".

I first saw them in Tangents and a Plan B gig review and thought, "This sounds like my thing". I first heard them on an instore listening station a year later and thought, "This sounds like Arctic Monkeys". Then one hot afternoon I heard "Weekend Without Makeup" on the radio in my bedroom. Perhaps I'd dropped my unfair expectations by then but it sounded like exactly what I'd hoped for; I put the album on my Christmas list and never looked back. For something so brash it was a hell of a grower.

In a Plan B cover story, Everett True wrote that a friend of his whispered to him that the Long Blondes looked like they used to be in ska bands - and he didn't mean they played Desmond Dekker covers. True was kinder, saying that if he was honest (hmm) they reminded him of his old "Pastels crew". The Long Blondes did have a bit of the over-enthusiastic late convert about them - you know, like the annoying "I'm indie!" singer from Los Campesinos! or your friend who at age 15 suddenly gave up sport and got piercings, running around dividing everyone up into "us" and "them" and thinking they were the first person ever to namedrop various second-tier punk bands and French philosophers. That is, the Long Blondes were try-hards despite being old enough to know better. And I loved them for it. My Long Blondes badge is one of my most proudly displayed.

Like most bands these days they claimed, as one anonymous Wikipedia contributor put it eloquently, somewhat more eclectic influences than their sound suggests. They knew what buttons to push in 2003:

"Our shared influences include The Mael Brothers, The Marx Brothers and The Bewlay Brothers. We do not listen to The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors or Bob Dylan. We chose an instrument each and learnt to play it. Approximately three months after we formed, we played a victorious 25 minute
set at Leeds Hi-Fi club. We inherit the aesthetics of early Roxy Music.* We have a lot of influences, sometimes we sound a bit like them, sometimes we sound a lot like them. Sometimes we sound nothing like them at all."

They sounded like the mid-point between the Au Pairs and Blondie, but only to the extent that the Strokes sounded like Television and Interpol sounded like Joy Division. The guitars and drums were a bit like Arctic Monkeys.

Their studied glamour was chintzy. Some of the words (mainly, intriguingly, written by a man who was in a relationship with a woman in the band for another woman in the band to sing to men about women and sometimes to women about men) were squeezed awkwardly into lyric patterns and hung on chord progressions that resembled a modernist hat-rack you can't fit in your car to take home. But this was because, like any band worth watching, The LBs were in love with ideas. In any event, honesty always shines through and it did in rousing shout-along choruses and even more so in quiet moments like, "Never ever ever try to tell me it's a pleasure being alone/Because all I have around me are the records and the books that I own", and "That's what happens when you listen to Saint Scott Walker/On headphones/On the bus."

The "adventurous" second album was more brash if not plain grating in places (mainly due to harsh modern pop production), even more ideas-heavy and a bit slower to grow. If anything it only increased anticipation but in the meantime it added detail to their enticing world of boredom, affairs and belief in the redemptive power of glamour and had a couple of bangers to boot. "Guilt" has been playing in my head since I read the sad news.

I imagine an alternate reality in which The Long Blondes, having gone on to great fame, appear as talking heads on a documentary in 20 years' time. In my mind several of the band members are like Viv Albertine from the Slits: charmingly attractive and well-spoken but disappointingly ordinary, talking about a mere phase of their life. Guitarist and principal songwriter Dorian (who in this parallel universe never had the tragic stroke that the band blames for their break-up) is like the ever-wistful Glen Matlock, the man who had the brain and the dream but not the face or the voice; who "got it" more than anyone else but attracted suspicion more than adoration because he seemed a little too smart. He's much cooler than Glen though. Singer and looker Kate Jackson has her own interview and sits on the edge of the couch fiddling. She's an out-of-touch, chain-smoking, self-obsessed diva with destroyed hair and the corners of her lips curling down like Siouxsie Sioux - in other words, she's wonderful.

Kate was the star for better and for worse. For better because she deserved it. She was a fan first and foremost who painted portraits of '60s British movie stars, memorised Jarvis lyrics and carefully cultivated a darts-watching, vintage skirt and scarf-wearing persona. For better beacuse she relished her meagre fame and wore it well ("How does it feel to be a style icon?," the former vintage clothes store clerk said to Plan B. "Fantastic. Fan-bloody-tastic! Fan-bloody-bloody-tastic!"). For worse because it took something away. On stage at the Zoo in Brisbane, during the first song while the too-well-lit room was still cold and the small audience's feet were firmly planted, she danced and pouted towards a point 10 degrees above our heads with such professionalism I longed for her to trip on a cord and burst out laughing at the ridiculousness of it all like Karen O. Alas, that didn't happen but nor did we take our eyes off her.

The Long Blondes got somewhere by taking themselves too seriously: by authoring arch melodramas, acting like stars and dressing glam in Sheffield pubs. Perhaps what held them back - like most bands on their second album (or their first album if they've come to prominence through a series of feted, unexpected singles) - was that they took themselves too seriously. Your 15-year-old friend with the op-shop makeover was exciting at first, but after a while you wished she would let her guard down and have some fun without checking whether the NME approved. The Long Blondes obviously had to get some things out of their system, like "This is who I am" and "This is what I've read". I believed that the imminent release of "Singles", a compilation of their early, legendary you-know-whats (a great idea and long awaited by this foreign press reading ebayophobe) would bring that era full circle and give them the freedom to fulfil the potential I saw. I'm not sure what I hoped for, but maybe having seen that they had the influences and the ideas, and having heard them chance upon the odd beauty, I hoped they'd pull it all together and make something universal. Then again, it's hard to imagine anything better than "Weekend Without Makeup", "Giddy Stratospheres" etc.

*More bands should inherit the aesthetics of early Roxy Music.

TB Treats: In loving memory of Toy Balloon Mark I

Nimai, guitarist in Toy Balloon, looked at the blackboard outside Ric's. "Oh, he's called it that?," he said. "He's been wanting to use that one for a while. I wanted to call it Boybeard." It was early 2007.

So I gathered that the name that fits the band's aural and visual asesthetic so well was chosen with little fanfare by the only other member, Cooper, who plays the Groovebox. The Groovebox! Silver thing the size of a laptop made by Roland, incorporating a 303, a 606 and a 909, or maybe the one after. Drum machine, synth and sequencer. The Groovebox took the debate out of song titles, giving us such hits as "74", "14", "36" and everyone's favourite, "18" (not an Alice Cooper cover).

They played instrumental music. You're probably thinking "soundtracks". Well, in that case the reference points are Beverly Hills Cop II for the tom rolls and synth bass and... jeez... Made In USA for the thrashy, climactic guitar. But then, the electronic scapes are Warped enough that Morvern Callar is just as apposite and the guitar benefits from a little bit of Top Gun afterburn (even if it's just Nimai's lemon-suck face in the high parts). Speaking of soundtracks, it's pretty accurate to say that their warm, retrofuturistic pop-pulse presaged M83's vaunted nu-gaze reinterpretation of John Hughes powerballad teendom in some ways (a good year before Saturdays=Youth).

Instead of hopping the dance w/guitars bandwagon, these guys drew from a solid education in '90s Australian post-rock, classic shoegaze and the millennial IDM stuff everyone listened to for about two years when rock was "dead" and extrapolated from there.

Gradually the tracks got names and the band got fans to learn them. "Dance With Yr Girlfriend", but noone got the hint. They practiced and performed at the Hangar and formed allegiances with other new electronic-leaning bands - aheadphonehome, Re:enactment, Mr Maps. Still noone really danced but there was always plenty of nodding and shuffling. Still no cover of "Axel F".

A couple of weeks ago at the Tongue and Groove I saw Toy Balloon for the first time in a few months. They had pushed their sound further in each direction - Cooper to ever more synthetic spaces and Nimai towards chainsawing abrasion - and were all the more lovable for it. Good peeps and not shy of a bit of humble mic chat, they let it be known it was their last gig before a hiatus which would not end until they had a singer. Now, they had been saying that sort of thing for about a year but this time everyone seemed to sense it was for real and bayed for an encore and, tellingly, the band obliged. (I can't recall the name of the new song, which I think involved the sea, but it was very good and highly danceable, although noone really danced).

According to Toy Balloon's Myspace they've been recording an album with Phil of aheadphonehome/The Hangar. This is something to get excited about. Again there's mention of adding vocals, which is hard to imagine, but then My Bloody Valentine found room for them in their dense bliss-out.

Toy Balloon played what may actually have been their last gig in their current incarnation last weekend at Tabu, to a tiny audience, and people danced.

Band names

Fuck is the new Wolf.