Better living through chemistry

Here are the runners and riders for the next @lpgrp vote. The theme is 1960s Psychedelia.

The listening session will be 9pm, Sunday 2rd February. 

You can vote for five albums by sending the numbers (not names!) of your choices to the @lpgrp Twitter account (via a direct message or an ordinary tweet mentioning @lpgrp). 

You are allowed to vote for the albums you nominated. 

The deadline for voting is 8pm, Friday 17th January.

1. 13th Floor Elevators - Bull of the Woods.

2. 13th Floor Elevators - Easter Everywhere

3. 13th Floor Elevators - Psychedelic Sounds of 13th Floor Elevators

4. The Action - Rolled Gold

5. Kevin Ayers - Joy of a Toy

6. Syd Barrett - The Madcap Laughs

7. The Beatles – Revolver

8. The Beatles – Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band

9. The Beatles – The Beatles (The ‘White Album’)

10. Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band – Gorilla

11. The Byrds - Fifth Dimension

12. The Byrds - The Notorious Byrd Brothers

13. C.A.Quintet - Trip Thru Hell

14. Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band - Trout Mask Replica

15. Caravan – Caravan

16. Cream - Disraeli Gears

17. Deep Purple - Shades of Deep Purple

18. The Doors  - The Doors

19. Dragonfly - Dragonfly

20. Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera - Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera

21. Funkadelic - Maggot Brain

22. Golden Dawn - Power Plant

23. Grateful Dead - Live/Dead

24. Holy Modal Rounders - Indian War Whoop

25. The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Are You Experienced

26. The Jimi Hendrix Experience  - Axis: Bold As Love

27. The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Electric Ladyland

28. Kak – Kak

29. Love - Forever Changes

30. The Monkees - Head

31. Nazz - Nazz Nazz

32. Family - Music in a Doll’s House

33. Os Mutantes - Os Mutantes

34. Pink Floyd - Piper at the Gates of Dawn

35. Pretty Things - SF Sorrow

36. The Small Faces - Ogden's Nut Gone Flake

37. The Soft Machine - The Soft Machine

38. Tomorrow - Tomorrow

39. Tyrannosaurus Rex - My People were Fair and had Sky in their Hair... But now they're Content to Wear Stars on their Brows

40. The United States of America - The United States of America

41. Various Artists - Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era

42. Caetano Veloso - Caetano Veloso (1968)

43. West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band - Volume 3: A Child's Guide to Good and Evil

44. The Zombies - Odessey and Oracle

Turn on, tune in, drop out, nominate an album or two...

The theme for @lpgrp’s February session is ‘1960s Psychedelia’.

The listening session will be 9pm, Sunday 2^th February. 

First, we need to create a shortlist. Please send me the name of two 1960s Psychedelic albums you’d like to nominate. Use a direct message or a tweet mentioning 'lpgrp' to contact me. Your deadline is 6pm, Sunday 12th January. Once the shortlist is ready, I’ll publish details about how to vote. 

Thank you.

-----------------------------------------------

Here are some lists to help jog your memory:

Rate Your Music - a personal list from a punter.

Scaruffi - Decent list but not just 1960s.

The Active Listener

Best of 2013 - Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds' - Push the Sky Away

Thank you, @oneillpaudie for singing the praises of Nick Cave's 2013 offering. 

--------------------

Following 2008's raucous 'Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!', itself sandwiched between the chaos of Grinderman 1 and 2, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds returned this year with the understated, slow-burning and quite frankly brilliant 'Push The Sky Away'. Their first record since Mick Harvey's departure, it's more atmospheric and darker than its immediate predecessors, deep bass lines, synths and Warren Ellis's eerie strings recalling the mood of early Bad Seeds, even Birthday Party albums. The menacing opener 'We No Who U R' sets the record's tone nicely, and 'Waters Edge' or 'We Real Cool' could fit easily on 1985's 'The First Born Is Dead'. 'Jubilee Street' builds up perfectly,  its swirling crescendo never reaching 'Mercy Seat' proportions, but hits just the right heights to create a bit of a clatter, Bad Seed-fashion. Sir Nick gets quite animated during the tumultuous 'Higgs Boson Blues' before the album closes with the powerful and stunning title track. 'Push The Sky Away' may not create the loudest racket of Nick Cave's incredible discography, and it may not be his heaviest release either, but it's a subtle, affecting and beautiful LP that holds its own against any of them, and for that it is certainly one of my albums of 2013.

Best of 2013 - Prefab Sprout's Crimson/Red

Many thanks, @iancpeacock for penning these words about the Sprouts' 2013 offering. 

--------------------

I must have first heard Prefab Sprout around 1984. I remember spending one weekend listening repeatedly to their debut single, Lions In My Own Garden (Exit Someone). Even today it still sounds like a breath of fresh air.

Their debut album, Swoon, with its sophisticated music and clever lyrics, became and remains a firm favourite. The follow up, Steve McQueen, was almost as good. A string of other albums followed up to 1997 when their (to my mind second best) album Andromeda Heights was released.

After that releases became more sporadic – 2001's disappointing The Gunmen and Other Stories, 2003's stunning Paddy McAloon solo album, I Trawl The Megahertz, and 2009's Let's Change The World With Music, which was previously unreleased but had been recorded in 1992 (and wore its Prince influences on its sleeve).

In June last year rumours appeared on Twitter of a new Prefab Sprout album. A link produced an album's worth of new songs which blew me away. They were finally released in October as Crimson/Red. Interviews with Paddy said that the songs were recently recorded and that the album was all his own work – sadly health problems prevented him recording with others.

The album suggested that Paddy had lost none of his gift for strong melodies and intriguing lyrics. The single The Best Jewel Thief In The World could be treated as a straightforward song about a jewel thief or could be about the “borrowing” which sometimes forms a part of great songwriting. At least two songs pay tribute to other songwriters - The Songs Of Danny Galway is about Jimmy Webb and Mysterious is about Dylan who “roared out of nowheresville” and was “cryptic, elusive, smart, mysterious from the start”.

The Old Magician reflects on the parallel decline of an act's popularity and the marriage between the magician and his assistant - “the tired act that no one loves” when “there was a time we produced doves”. Best of all for me is The Devil Came-A-Calling. Paddy is approached by the Devil - “no brimstone, fire or rain, in fact I found him charming, articulate, urbane” - who offers him 50 years of success for his immortal soul. He is held to the bargain although while “my memory is hazy, I'm sure that I declined”.

A great return to form and let's hope's there more music to come from Prefab Sprou

Best of 2013 - Hookworks' Pearl Mystic

One of our Leeds correspondents, @stevenswift, on his home town favourites, Hookworms. 

--------------------

Pearl Mystic  - Hookworms

My album of the year by some distance . Even in an exceptional 12 months that’s left  me daunted by the sheer quantity and quality of LPs to get through and process Pearl Mystic  has stood out as the collection that most bravely challenged and invented.

A disclaimer first. I’m from Leeds and Hookworms are a Leeds band. They are also the fulcrum of a thriving local music scene that has finally put this historically under achieving city on the music map. They have members in other ascending bands (Cowtown, Menace Beach) and have broken out of their back yard with live shows that have wagged tongues from Liverpool to New York to Brighton.

None of this could have happened without Pearl Mystic. Comprising six epic soundscapes and stitched together by three sonic interludes it’s an album that defies the dreaded shuffle. Listened to at random it loses the carefully crafted subtlety that bleeds between the tracks. There is a structure to the LP which squares the circle – an opaque journey that  touches on the themes of frustration, personal responsibility and  loss – big issues dressed in sprawling, hypnotic arrangements.

The album opener Away/Towards is typical – echo-drenched vocals, detonating drums, pulsing bass and a near nine-minute frag that ends in a Hawkwind daze. The spatial desolation of  In Our Time reminds me of second album Suicide  - whilst the album’s centrepiece – Since We Had Changed – refuses to emerge from its pulsing cocoon serving only to amplify the disorientation of Preservation’s incoming drums. 

The production is joyously drum-heavy against a transcendental wash of keyboard effects and guitars, the voice frequently emerging from the mix to take the songs to that next level.  Form And Function starts with a church organ, call and response vocals and ends -  like their live shows – in a dissonant cacophony and  fuzz.

This debut  is, it seems, set to be followed quite soon by a successor. The competing dynamics of Hookworms mean that this is unlikely to be a consolidation. Pearl Mystic is a precisely configured yet passionate statement from a band with frightening potential. No other LP has touched so many bases. Album of the year from a Leeds band? Well I never. 

Best of 2013 - Bill Callahan's Dream River

@Sweeny99 (who has a music blog here) writes about @lpgrp's Album of the Year, Bill Callahan's Dream River. 

--------------------

One of the bottomless joys of Christmas time is the privilege of having time to just piss away, heedless of all other normal considerations. And, really, what better way to do this than with some warmed-up Christmas pudding and another leisurely listen to Bill Callahan’s Dream River.

To my surprise, Dream River has won the prestigious @lpgrp album of the year award to be ruminated and cogitated over on Jan 5^th. And perhaps even more surprising, given my previously poor record in these matters, is that I actually voted it my favourite of the year.

I’m not going to try to do a serious review of what is at times a pretty formless and hard-to-pin-down record - it’s beyond my ken, to be honest, and would largely spoil the point of the actual evening, even if I could. There are a couple of pretty good reviews at the Pitchfork and Quietus sites, though, which will get you started. Instead I thought I’d mention a couple of pointers and suggest some ways in for folk who are just getting to know this lovely record.

When I am out walking my eyes are still forming the door I walk through

·         The word “unhurried” doesn’t really do justice to Callahan’s deep, laconic delivery or quite prepare you for his gentle, sometimes puzzling images or slowly unfolding songs. Many of the pictures and metaphors he uses develop in your mind, taking substance as they recede and the song moves on. His songs are for stopping and listening to with a slow drink and perhaps a free afternoon, rather than playing on the car stereo or while you’re doing some job or other. Callahan’s style doesn’t force itself upon you, he just doesn’t compete well with the other “stuff” of your life

First thing that I will do, I will wake you too

·         I really like Bill Callahan’s careful, deliberate delivery. He’s hardly a brash, over confident character – he’s bound to be a quiet chap, surely - but he sings with measured confidence. There’s no self-conscious masking of his voice behind multiple layers of sound – for all the sense that life baffles and confuses at time, he’s clear about having something to say and wanting to be heard.

I really am a lucky man

·         I think I read that Callahan is 47 years old now, and there’s something very refreshing about hearing a man of “advancing years” reaching something approaching contentment. This is particularly true when you apply it to such a famously sombre individual as Callahan has been. To be fair, there’s still time spent “looking out of a window that isn’t there”, but there’s a little more light mixed in with the shade these days…

The only words I’ve said today are “beer” and “thank you”

·         Actually, as with many of his best records, there’s also a fair amount of gentle humour in this record: a couple of lines of “beer… … … thank you” here, a Donald Sutherland reference there - enough to make you smile to yourself as you saunter through each song. As with many things, though, the pleasure is all in Callahan’s trademark wry delivery, one which regular fans will recognise. Other familiar features of the old Smog persona also appear: the occasional nod towards an unimagined sensuality; the haunted characters whose life stories take odd twists; the restlessness and bewildering variety of travel metaphors that go hand in hand with it. All of them are reasons in themselves to know and love Bill Callahan, but bundled together in one mature, gorgeous record they make a worthy, worthy winner of this month’s vote.

Dream River is Bill Callahan’s fourth solo record in his own name, but there are a mouth-watering 13 other albums released under the name of Smog, for you to work through, which are effectively Bill Callahan records too. My own favourites are Supper and Knock, Knock, but you can’t really go wrong wherever you start. Dig in (slowly)! 

Best of 2013 - John Grant's Pale Green Ghosts

Thanks, @reev0 for penning this piece about John Grant's follow-up to Queen of Denmark.


--------------------

John Grant followed up his much-admired debut album with a left turn in terms of production - half of Pale Green Ghosts boasts a heavy electronic sheen. What hasn't changed is the heart he wears on his sleeve and his use of surprising, left-field lyrical turns that undercut any risk of a depressing listen and elevate this to something very special. Surprisingly, both Grant's albums understate the powerful voice that he uses to full effect in his wonderful live shows (his show in Cambridge was my favourite gig of 2013), but it's still a potent weapon. And even a heart of ice would be moved by Glacier, the album closer that tells how he has overcome pain and criticism. This isn't quite my favourite album of the year, only because a couple of the most heavily electronic tracks still haven't won me over; but Grant is far and away my favourite artist.