I’m tired, I’m confused, I’m dirty and I’m hungry, and five yards away my girlfriend is trying to sleep… Guess I better review these demos, then.
Latest Reviews
13-08-2010 Demos – Issue 27
13-08-2010 Tom DiCillo, When You’re Strange
What can be said about the Doors’ back story that hasn’t already been covered? The truth, for a start.
28-07-2010 Wavves – King of the Beach
There could hardly be a more apt sounding death knell for lo-fi indie garage than Nathan Williams’ infantile pop farts. Both the genre and Wavves itself have been due a backlash for some time now.
27-07-2010 M.I.A. – /\/\ /\ Y /\
In another universe, parallel to ours but not too distant, Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam is the pivotal character in Pulp’s ‘Common People’.
27-07-2010 Sleigh Bells – Treats
Everyone seems to hear something different in the kind of piercing racket that only the pairing of a former hardcore guitarist and an ex-girl group singer could produce
Reviews
The Triffids
Beautiful Waste and Other Songs, Treeless Plain, The Black Swan
Domino
Coming out of a shithole like Perth, Scotland in the early eighties might have depleted your chances of worldwide success. Coming from Perth, Australia surely rendered you stillborn. “We nearly made it,” as Nick Berry sang on the then ubiquitous and shocking ‘Every Loser Wins’ in 1986, and by god, David McComb was born of songwriting stock that would have made Berry retreat to the Dales and start shooting a gentle Sunday night cop drama with Billy Maynard. Sadly, the latter was true, but McComb died anonymously before even the new millennium, drunk, ill and too fucking young and too gifted to stop the world being reduced to the WalMart Coldplay Razorlight verb-mangling corporate mediocre purgatory we inhabit. But what do you do when nobody is really paying attention? Especially when everyone is buying their records off the telly?
Thankfully the clever people at Domino have realised where we’ve all been going wrong and rescued the Triffids collection for your posthumous predilection; for your penchant for the great things that were lost.
Born of a love of the Velvet Underground, The Triffids sound not much like them, though McComb’s overwhelming desire to emulate the late, great Lou Reed (Lou was spiritually dead by this point) comes through their early works, full of playful, playwright, play dead lyrics, with violins, double bass, acoustic guitars and slide. These were made in ’83 when the spirit of possibility still hadn’t been beaten out of the young colonial skamps. By ’85 the darkness hadn’t quite taken a grip, but tainting things with edgy guitar anyway, they no doubt influenced Luke Haines and invented Strangelove.
Treeless Plain sees them venture further into inspired, whimsical but varied indie pop with songs that outshine anything from the last two decades. And while Stephen Street takes over a little on The Black Swan, the dated production can’t disguise that everyone’s a winner, baby, and that’s the ultimate truth. Where Ian McCulloch wrote erratic, sometimes brilliant songs, he was too impressed with his own white beauty. McComb’s lost legacy is that every song is a beautiful adventure.
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