100 favourite songs: #36: "Noah's Dove" [demo] - 10,000 Maniacs

One of the most absorbingly mysterious songs I’ve ever heard — graceful, pretty and murmur-dreamy, it takes me somewhere beyond words.

100 favourite songs: #37: "Little Bombs" - Aimee Mann

“Little Bombs” is … completely the song to which I most sulked and burned over [last year]. Although in general 2005 was a pretty good year for me, I did spend parts of it feeling quite sad, and this was the perfect song for those times. - 16/1/06

Even though it was the year in which I fell head over heels into country music, if I had to pick one album as the soundtrack to my 2005, it would be The Forgotten Arm. Weirdly, nothing else made as much sense to me as it did (it had a lot to do with this).

… life just kind of empties out …

Musically and lyrically, the album’s pivotal moment comes about two-thirds of the way in, with the “Little Bombs”-”That’s How I Knew This Story Would Break My Heart” pair mapping out its characters’ emotional lowpoint and corresponding crystal-clear awareness of themselves and the mess they’re in. “That’s How I Knew…” is the more emotionally skyscraping of the two, the simplest, clearest, most vividly heartbroken moment on the album, but it’s “Little Bombs” that most speaks to me, the bruised despair that it wears on its sleeve all too convincing. Sighing, shuffling, wrapped up in helpless sadness, it’s the sheer prettiness with which it’s done that lends the whole affair the pathos and ache which really makes it.

The Crayon Fields @ Spanish Club, Friday 29 September

I saw these guys after Swee Leng sent me a link to their myspace page with a note that their music reminded her of some of the stuff I liked; in the event, I only listened to a couple of their songs (maybe only one) before the show, thinking that seeing them live was likely to be a more rewarding way of sussing out whether I'd actually like them. So it turns out that the Crayon Fields are, on the evidence of last night, pretty good and, yes, the kind of stuff that I do tend to like. Charming colourful guitar pop with an orchestral bent and a strong 60s and early 70s influence drawn from several threads of that decade - the Byrds/Big Star-esque chiming Rickenbacker-type guitars and harmonies, surf rock rhythms and Nancy & Lee touches being especially prominent, and some nice tunes and instrumentation to go with it (not forgetting the masked figures!)...keeping the songs short, too - a good move for this style of pop, I think.

There were a couple of supports - missed the first one, but the second, Minimum Chips, were quite fab. As far as analogies go, maybe think equal parts Architecture in Helsinki, New Buffalo and My Bloody Valentine which all up was, as you might expect, rather good.

(The crowd, by the way, was the most 'scene' that I've seen for ages.)

So, all up pretty impressive.

"Charles Blackman: Alice in Wonderland" @ NGV Australia

One of those exhibitions that was pretty much a 'must see' from the time I heard about it; finally got round to it last weekend with Kim and enjoyed it heaps. It struck me as an exhibition in which a few of the individual pieces were real keys to the whole - the 'upside-down Alice' was one, and the last one (as numbered by the curators), showing a world inside and expanding out from Alice's mind, and a couple of others which I can't remember now - and this might particularly have been the case given that Blackman's rendition of Alice is characterised by a strong focus on a few recurring motifs, the white rabbit and the tea party (and, more idiosyncratically, flowers and doors and passages) in particular. It's rare for one of the paintings to be composed in such a way that Alice herself is unequivocally the subject of the piece, and the series as a whole is suffused with a sense of disorder which emphasises the perspectival nature of its representation (ambiguity intended).

Didn't strike me as especially Australian, but it's far removed from the classic, utterly (almost fetishistically) English manner of depicting and imagining Alice and her adventures - and the surrealism of the style and concomitant highlighting of the workings of the unconscious goes hand in hand with that... (Is there such a thing as an 'Australian unconscious'? I don't know, but I imagine books have probably been written on the subject.) I did like the colours, which may've been the most recognisably 'Australia' aspect - ochres and sea blues and et cetera - and also the way that Alice's colours changed from painting to painting. Well, I liked it all, really.

100 favourite songs: #38: "Birthday" - The Sugarcubes

Charmingly whimsical and eminently melodic (not to mention its faintly gothic lyrical imagery and magnificent, breathy tail-off) … - 10/04

You know how some songs just push buttons that you didn’t even know you had to be pushed? Well, “Birthday” does that to me. It’s both ‘indie’ and ‘pop’ par excellence, and it has a magic which defies explanation — it glided down the sky, she touched it.

100 favourite songs: #39: "The State I Am In" - Belle and Sebastian

You really need to be in a very specific space to fully appreciate these wry, precious, oh-so-twee, librarian-chic clad indie-kids, but those of us who understand will always feel something akin to love for Belle & Sebastian — for their eloquent sneers at bourgeois society, for their quiet, wistful recognition that modern life was not made for such as them or I, and for their whimsical, faintly melancholy sense that for all of that, it’s the little moments and the gentle absurdities that make it all worthwhile. - 1/04

This song has only been a part of my life for a relatively short period of time, but it’s come to mean so much to me. It just perfectly captures where I’m at right now — wistful, melancholy, cynical, quietly despairing but somehow beyond the sturm und drang of adolescence and able to see the little brightnesses and amusing details of life, too. One goes on because that’s what one does. - 9/4/04

What can I say? This song means the world to me. - 18/4/04

It’s as much the idea of the song as the song itself, I think, and since when has that made any difference at all either way? I know that it’s special because it perfectly evokes the state that I’m in despite only having one line (“now I’m feeling dangerous, riding on city buses for a hobby is sad”) which could even remotely correspond to the externalities of my daily life, and for a thousand other reasons that I can't put into words. It just is.

100 favourite songs: #40: "Right In Time" - Lucinda Williams

This song gives me a rush — it’s as simple as that. All taut, yearning verses and then surging, lingering choruses, “Right In Time” could (and sometimes, when I think about these things, does) exemplify everything I like about this whole alt-country thing for which I fell so whole-heartedly over the course of last year. On this song — on the whole of the album from which it comes, Car Wheels On A Gravel Road, really — Williams completely blows any limiting conceptions of ‘country’ or ‘rock’ out of the water, making music which wears its antecedents proudly on its sleeve and takes the best elements of both streams in winding up somewhere else altogether, somewhere profoundly American and deeply universal, restless travellers on dusty highways under endless skies, the wind in one’s hair and sun in one’s eyes. Like I said, it gives me a rush.

100 favourite songs: #41: "Save Me" - Aimee Mann

Possibly the single most elegant and poignant sulk in a back catalogue that’s full of elegant, poignant sulks, “Save Me” hit its mark with me the first time I heard it and has continued doing so ever since. It’s all there in the very first line, the lilt and lift and immediate fading fall of “you require a perfect faith” and then, repeated, echoed, “a girl in need of a tourniquet” (need I mention that I love the rhyme?), a single-voiced call and response. One of the songs that I’m thinking of when I call Mann a songwriter in the classic vein, its aching, downbeat balance of resignation and the barest of quiet hopes around a simple, finely-wrought melody make it one of those genuinely perfect pop songs for me.

…if you could save me,/from the ranks of the freaks who suspect they can never love anyone…

Desert island books

Inspired by a survey question at the writers' festival, have been collecting the desert island books (3, at least in theory) nominations of various of my more readerly acquaintances.

(Mine, at least just now, would be To The Lighthouse, Invisible Cities, and Hard-Boiled Wonderland And The End Of The World.)

As to those of others so far (with more possibly to follow):

• Anna Karenina, The Mill on the Floss, and Blake's collected works
• The Bible, Yeats' collected works, and "some kind of coffee table book with pictures of places around the world"
• Moby Dick, Catch-22, and Pride and Prejudice
• The Great Gatsby, Oscar and Lucinda, and Possession or The Blind Assassin (and an attempt to add Brideshead Revisited "because, to be fair, Great Gatsby is hardly a book, more like a brochure")
• The Great Gatsby, Brideshead Revisited, and Le Grand Meaulnes (Alain-Fournier)
• Something by Yukio Mishima and something by early Plath
• Nabokov's collected stories or Lolita, What I Loved, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• War and Peace, Kafka on the Shore, and a complete set of Beatrix Potter
• Lolita, a book of love poems by Pablo Neruda, and The Master and Margarita

Australia's Britain (Meanjin volume 63, issue 3, 2004)

A back issue to which I was drawn in various measures owing to my: (a) general interest in the particular subject matter; (b) lifelong vague anglophilia; and (c) having been born in England myself. (Three things which, somewhat against the odds given their respective natures, are probably largely independent of each other.) So it's quite interesting - a few pieces revolving around the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies in London, which emerges as a kind of de facto cultural/diplomatic centre, others dealing with particular historical periods, movements or individuals. None that really grabbed me, either amongst the essays, etc or amidst the fiction (I haven't read most of the poems, being lazy about these things) but the themed reading and resultant partial immersion is always fun.

The Best Of Fabienne Delsol & The Bristols

When I heard this playing in Collector's Corner the other day, I couldn't work out whether it was actually from the 60s or rather the work of one of those latter-day revivalists who're so frequently to be found plying their trade today, and decided that it didn't matter - I wanted a copy of it regardless. The record store guy who was playing it didn't know (the cd cover didn't help any, either), but he did something with his computer and hazarded a guess - since proved right by google (allmusic.com having let me down) - that the band was contemporary...

One of the first hits on google suggests that the music made by Delsol (who has since gone solo) is something like a cross between that of Holly Golightly and April March, and I think that's a pretty good description of this, her old band's stuff, as far as contemporary referents go (there's a bit of Slumber Party there, too). The point, of course, is that the main referents for all of these artists' music are backwards-looking, and specifically of that decade whose music continues to gain a yet stronger hold on my imagination. There are strong elements of that primitive, strangely sinuous garage-rock sound (complete with organ-sounding keys, yay), shades of the Velvet Underground (one sees them wherever one looks, of course), and echoes (and occasionally outright reflections) of ye-ye and girl group sensibilities (Delsol's French, I think); generally topping out at around two to two and a half minutes in length and exactly the right length at it. Favourite song at present is the boppy "Questions I Can't Answer".

Alice Garner - The Student Chronicles / university / Melbourne

When I heard about this book, I knew I needed to read it - Love and Other Catastrophes was such a touchstone for me (I mean it - there's no single other film/book/etc that comes even close to it in terms of direct and dramatic effect on the way my university experience turned out), and here was one of its stars writing a memoir about her own Melbourne Uni days.

So I bought it (from Readings, naturally) yesterday and finished it in the evening in a couple of hours - it's a breezy read, constantly interesting (though possibly one needs to be a fellow Melb Uni-ite to feel that way - Baillieu library, Barry Taylor and the Philosophy department and syllabus generally, Peter McPhee, Carlton, Fitzroy, Royal Parade, MacRob (Garner's high school), all familiar and in some cases downright totemic figures from my own uni experience, and all prominent in these accounts). It's not really about anything in particular, but I suppose that that's the nature of memoirs, and I enjoyed reading it a lot. It will make me happy to know that the book is sitting somewhere on my shelves.

(In the back of my mind in re the enthusiasm to read The Student Chronicles is the fact that I've been writing one of the university chapters (there will be two, I think) of API lately, and given that Love and Other Catastrophes and its depiction of uni life (via, though I didn't know it at the time, Melbourne Uni itself) was so formative and influential on my time at university, it seemed an apt (tangential) revisitation.)

Anyway, partly inspired by the reading, when I found myself with a couple of hours free before needing to be in the city today, I thought I'd set up on South Lawn and try to get some writing done; the sun was out at that stage, and the day was showing every signs of at least intimating the summer feel that I'm seeking for the chapter. Sadly, however, no sooner had I arrived and ducked quickly into the Baillieu (partly for old times' sake, and partly to use the bathroom) than did the skies darken and the rain start, putting paid to that idea (to add to my sense of discombobulation, there seemed to be some kind of anime convention going on, as evidenced by the many anime-dressed people wandering around in cheerful if windswept - well, that latter's entirely apt - little groups). Well, summer will come when it does, and in the meantime the rain is to be welcomed, I guess.

So I was catching up with Kim over lunch, and we did that, then checked out the Blackman "Alice" exhibition (more on that later), and after that went back to her new place (in Bentleigh) for dinner with Bruno and another friend of theirs, Philip. And driving home afterwards (about an hour ago as I write this - 10.15pm, ie driving at 9ish), coming up the Nepean and then St Kilda Road, I was struck by the loveliness of the long, tree-lined, brightly yet hazily lit boulevard and felt glad anew that I've decided to make API a Melbourne novel. It will be a Melbourne novel, and it will glimmer, damnit!

Amy Millan - Honey From The Tombs

This was really all about "Skinny Boy". The rest of the album has its moments, and the of-the-moment somewhat spacey take on alt-country works; Millan's a charismatic vocalist and an effective arranger, but the songwriting is generally solid rather than inspiring, so that while it goes down nicely, the music doesn't really linger. Still, pretty darn tasty while it lasts..

Feist - Let It Die

This is what I wrote about Let It Die a couple of weeks ago:

David lent me this album, and I was thinking about why he seems to like it so much more than I do. So here's what I think: it's somehow related (not necessarily by a straight cause and effect) to the fact that the [at this point, I was going to insert something about the idealised pop star version of his girl friends collectively, based on my impressions of them, being far more likely to be something Feist-esque than that of mine].

Which is not to say that I don't like Let It Die - I do. But I'm much less charmed by it than a lot of people seem to be.

But, as time has gone on, the album has kept doing just enough for me to listen to it again, and again, and slowly those charms have properly revealed themselves. For someone who likes the kind of music that I do, I sure can be awfully suspicious of tweeness, but Let It Die has won me over, its delicate lounge-pop-soul (as to that last, "One Evening" and "Inside and Out" were important steps in falling a bit for the album, and are possibly my two favourites) stylings working the trick. Very consistent record, too - no troughs to speak of. Like it, at last.

100 favourite songs: #42: "Heaven Or Las Vegas" - Cocteau Twins

This is the moment when Liz Fraser first really allowed herself to sing, and the result was one of the most wondrously ascendant songs ever laid down by the Cocteaus. The fabrics and textures of Cocteau Twins songs always shimmer and sparkle, but here, with Fraser’s voice right up the front, the result is sheer bliss. - 1/04

100 favourite songs: #43: "Nude As The News" - Cat Power

It’s something special that the enigmatic Chan’s got going on with this one — call it a kind of skeletal percussive hauntedness, though it has a slink to it, too. “Nude As The News” is all about the vibes — the rustle, vibration and thud of guitar, drum and voice, shaking through to a rhythm that only Marshall can hear, and while it’s all totally inscrutable to me, I’m hooked anew every time as the song goes along and then won completely over when she gets to the final “he’s related to you, he’s related to you, he’s related to you…” part and the song winds unaccountably and brilliantly to its ending. I’ve not heard anything else quite like it.

Fear and Trembling

So at about 11.15 last night, I was sitting around, desultorily pushing words around on the screen of my laptop, when I received an sms from trang, giving me a heads' up after unexpectedly finding herself watching the film adaptation of Fear and Trembling on sbs. Happily, I'd only missed the first 15 minutes or so, and everything from the point at which I came in was sheer delight. The film really catches the sense and the air of Nothomb's book, and as such it's wry, whimsical, cutting, and faintly touched with poetry and the barest hint of sadness. In large measure, this is due to Sylvie Testud's charming turn as Amélie-san, striking the right balance between all of those elements characteristic of the film (and book) as a whole, along with a child-like obstinacy, cuteness and capacity for abandon which goes down a treat. (The actor who plays Mr Omochi is also, in his different way, exactly right - though Fubuki was less beautiful than the book suggests...which could even have been intentional given the borderline delusive aspects of Amélie-san's perspective on her superior.) It probably aided my enjoyment that I'd read the book, and that the film follows the book quite closely, but I suspect I'd have liked it heaps anyway.

Hilaire Belloc - Cautionary Tales for Children, rediscovered and illustrated by Edward Gorey

A few days ago, Serena (age 9) was reading the start of this; when I asked her if she thought the stories had a moral to them, she came up with "don't do naughty things or you'll get eaten by lions and stuff", and I don't think I could do much better. They're ostensibly cautionary tales for children, but really, with titles like "Jim, Who ran away from his Nurse, and was eaten by a Lion", "Matilda, Who told lies, and was Burned to Death" and, in more bathetic vein, "Franklin Hyde, Who caroused in the Dirt, and was corrected by his Uncle", it's clearly much more likely to appeal to, well, people like me.

You should have heard her Scream and Bawl,
And throw the window up and call
To People passing in the Street --
(The rapidly increasing Heat
Encouraged her to obtain
Their confidence) -- but all in vain!
For every time She shouted "Fire!"
They only answered "Little Liar!"

And therefore when her Aunt returned,
Matilda, and the House, were Burned.

Written by Hilaire Belloc and illustrated more recently by Edward Gorey (though in his usual drawing-room Victorian style), it's an insubstantial but definite treat.

100 favourite songs: #44: "The Ship Song" - Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds

Still the most perfect Cave love song … and one that I’ve spent far too many after-midnight hours listening to alone in my room, drenched in all sorts of angst and despair. - 2/04

I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: no one writes a simple, straight-up ballad like Nick Cave does. In my mind, his music, and this song in particular, has become entangled with an inordinate number of my most complex and significant relationships, particularly in the past — DWR once called Cave one of his ‘jinx’ artists, and I feel much the same way about his music. No surprise that “The Ship Song” in particular should stand out — it has just the right tinges of romance and sorrow and night, not to mention the prettiest vibraphone outro you could ever hope to hear.

100 favourite songs: #45: "In The Aeroplane Over The Sea" - Neutral Milk Hotel

… a somewhat idiosyncratic flourish of optimism — a song that almost always makes me smile. - 10/04

I've loved “In The Aeroplane Over The Sea” — the song — for ages, its giddy, melancholy, wide-eyed, amazed, arms-outstretched joyful everythingness always having done it for me…if there’s ever been a song which expressed how wonderful and strange it is to be anything at all, this is it. - 9/4/06

It was only this year that I finally listened to the album, but this song has been part of my life for much longer; I’ve always responded to its wild, unhinged celebration of life, shaded, needless to say, by an all too vivid awareness of always imminent mortality. The song really does reminds one of that strangeness — and at the same time, it’s a reminder of what indelible, undeniable cause for celebration this is.

100 favourite songs: #46: "Marquee Moon" - Television

To start from an unlikely starting point: playing ‘spot the influences’ with that band called Spoon is fun —the music they make lends itself to that particular game, and all sorts of possible predecessors get thrown up. I was just thinking, though, that in terms of the way their music makes me feel, the closest analogue is far and away Television — even though, by contrast to the punchiness of a typical Spoon number, “Marquee Moon”, say, clocks in at over 10 minutes in length. The similarity lies in the dynamic between a surface jitteriness and a rock-steady foundation beneath; anyway, however it works, it’s rock n roll!

“Marquee Moon” slips constantly from sense to nonsense and back again; endlessly quotable and endlessly gnomic (“listening to the rain, hearing something else…”), it teases with intimations of meaning while always deferring the moment at which understanding crystallises; and all the while Tom Verlaine sings/harangues in that fraught expressive voice of his and the guitars — and in many ways it’s all about the guitars — clatter and crash and stagger and chime in glorious noise, building structures into the distance from the most basic, immediately to hand materials…I suggested this before, and I’ll say it outright now: this is what rock music is all about.

100 favourite songs: #47: "Sea Of Love" - Cat Power

A voice with which to fall in love (or is it just me who’s always drawn to the sad ones?). Fragile, almost lilting, yet oh so strong, this is a cover, but none the less affecting for it. - 18/4/04

I’ve called “Good Woman” the archetypal Cat Power song, but “Sea Of Love” is the song that you’d get, I think, if you were to distil her music down to its barest, most essential elements, so that all you were left with was a voice, a guitar, a plaintive cry in the wilderness.

Nancy Sinatra - Boots

Leads off with "As Tears Go By" and also takes in "These Boots Are Made For Walkin' " - those are the highlights, but the whole of this record, swinging and swaying with the sound of '66, is gorge. I don't know what it is about the music of that decade that has exerted such a strong pull on me of late, but it's sure a wonderful place to visit.

16 Horsepower - 16 Horsepower

I don't know the 16 Horsepower history, but I'd guess that this ep is from early in the band's career - possibly even a debut given its eponymity. Doesn't have quite the bright-burning fire and righteousness of Secret South, but that Old Testament fervour is certainly apparent on this one even so, and it's pretty good.

Kate & Anna McGarrigle - Love Over and Over

More like Kate Bush and less like any folk singer or duo you might care to name than I'd expected. I bought this months ago out of curiosity (because of the Cave connection) and finally got round to listening to it properly today - it has a quirky stateliness which appeals but doesn't grab me. I can imagine myself listening to this in thirty years time - or, then again, maybe not. I really should learn to stop second-guessing my future self all the time.

Marcel Paquet - René Magritte

It started with me and René some time last year - or maybe it was the year before - in the permanent collection of the NGV, my attention arrested by his "In Praise of Dialectics" (he may've done more than one). That's still the only of his works that I've actually seen, but meanwhile I've been making do with books, and this Taschen volume is a good 'un, attractively laid out, reproducing the famous ones, and narrated by way of a lucid and insightful commentary. If I were to pick one painter whose work best represents the way I experience the world, it'd be Magritte, I think.

      

      

      

Shirley Hazzard - The Great Fire

This was an unexpected treat. A fluent, delicate novel about love, war and loss, it reads like a dream - elegant, economically poetic sentences flowing one after another, shifts in perspective and setting and narrative direction handled seamlessly. Aldred Leith is a memorable protagonist, and Helen and Benedict, the literate, beautiful, not quite of this world sister and brother are simply lovely. And the host of other characters is handled deftly and with real feeling - Peter Exley, Audrey Fellowes, Tad, Talbot, Aurora, and the others all really come to life and it's often the more minor figures whose depictions most move one.

The Great Fire has a bit of a slow start, but once it caught hold of me, it never let go; I must admit that my heart sank when, not twenty pages from the end, Helen stepped out on a date with Sidney Fairfax. Hazzard writes old-fashionedly, with grace and subtlety; without ever seeming to try for too much, she wraps the reader up in a world from which I emerged only reluctantly, feeling as if I'd just read something real.

100 favourite songs: #48: "Little Stars" - Lisa Miller

Not Miller’s only perfect song, but her most perfect, and the one which hit me when I was most receptive — one of my favourite songs for dreaming, wide-eyed in the sunlight. Just gorgeous.

100 favourite songs: #49: "Heroes" - David Bowie

“Heroes” is one of those favourites to which I don’t actually listen all that often, and I don’t really know what it is about the song that so gets me — but get me it does, and right between the eyes. What it boils down to, I think, is that “Heroes” is a brooding, aspirational, literate love song wrapped up in still-fresh-thirty-years-later epic trimmings and an ineradicable melody, and knitted together by a startling unity of vision; then, too, I guess that the treatment it gets in Moulin Rouge doesn’t hurt, either — though obviously that was picking up on something that was already readily apparent in the song itself…

100 favourite songs: #50: "On The Beach" - Neil Young

I was tiredly walking back to the city from the St Kilda Festival one year, unable to bear the prospect of the crush of the end-of-day trams, summer everywhere in the air; I happened to be listening to On The Beach, and it was just exactly right for my state of mind — that was, I think, the first time that Young’s music had really spoken to me. Then came that strange, poignant time at the tail end of last year when everything was ending and Neil was the soundtrack to it all — On The Beach was a big part of that, too.

I need a crowd of people, but I can’t face them day to day …

Lots of great songs on it, but it’s the album’s crushingly sad centrepiece, “On The Beach” itself, which I’ve most taken to heart, Neil’s voice wavering as the instruments do the same, whether beneath the anomie-infused lyrics or (in the case of the guitar) coming to prominence with a ruminative, almost deathly stark solo, trailing off into the all-consuming plod of the bass and percussion. ‘Crushingly sad’, I said a minute ago, and it is that, but it’s also impeccably restrained with it — which, of course, adds to rather than detracting from the overall effect. There’s no simple emotional wallowing or messy splurging of angst here — but rather a bleak, almost peaceful holding-in of oneself as the world keeps on turning.

Though my problems are meaningless, that don’t make them go away …

100 favourite songs: #51: "Not Too Soon" - Throwing Muses

My favourite Throwing Muses song and, much as I love the endlessly engaging stop-start whirligig alt-rock ditties of lead Muse Kristin Hersh, it’s not really all that surprising that my fave should be a Donelly composition, for if there’s anyone out there who writes more irresistible alt-rock/indie-pop confections than her, I don’t know them; this is a big call, but I think that “Not Too Soon” is the catchiest song I’ve ever heard.

Really, the song defies categorisation, just as the band does; it’s one of those in which every bar seems to contain a hook, but the bit that really makes it for me (apart, of course, from the sheer joyous unhingedness of the chorus) is the unexpected extended secondary bridge about two-thirds of the way in, a rapid staccato chant hurtling in on the wave of the building instrumental and vocal swirl which follows the second verse/chorus/bridge, cresting with an implosive, emphatic shout, and investing the song with a whole new momentum as it races to its end…

As with many of the finest individual 4ad cuts, “Not Too Soon” is more than a bit inexplicable — I have a feeling that there are a lot of words in the song, but the only ones I know are isolated, evocative phrases which I’ve probably heard wrong anyway — and whatever’s actually going on with the song seems always to be just out of reach, but what I know is that it’s totally, totally brilliant.

Chinese Films in Focus edited by Chris Berry

Just by way of note, since actually I've only read the three essays on films which I've seen: Janice Tong reads Chungking Express in terms of its engagement with 'time' (I enjoyed this one - thought it quite insightful and it added something to my understanding of the film), Audrey Yue does In The Mood For Love (I remember Audrey fondly as the tutor of my first year cultural studies subject, and liked this piece - the insistence on the specificity and locality of the film brings some interesting things into prominence, while coexisting with some more general point-makin'), and Felicia Chan writes about the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon phenomenon (the least interesting of the three for me, focusing mostly as it did on the cultural reception/production aspects of the film rather than on 'the film itself').

100 favourite songs: #52: "Where Is My Mind?" - Pixies

A classic, of course. Strangely off-kilter and a bit perverse, but, underneath it all, essentially a brill pop song. - 10/04

I just instinctively ‘get’ “Where Is My Mind?”. Love its uneven falling-down stagger and the jagged, wiry, unhinged energy of it all, and neither can nor want to resist its combination of insane pop catchiness and refusal to conform to convention or expectation; the song is the very furthest thing from cerebral, but listening to it feels nonetheless like a mind-expanding experience. In a word, cool.

100 favourite songs: #53: "Only Love Can Break Your Heart" - Neil Young

The charm of this song really defies words. A woozy slowed-down waltz, plinking and kerplunking to an up and down rhythm which evokes the inevitable passing of the days, both musically and lyrically it’s an odd and wonderfully effective commingling of the allusive and the direct. There’s a sense of gentle sadness to it, but also an air of something like acceptance — a kind of compassionate wisdom or at least a sort of hard-won clear-sightedness. Simple, unaffected and universal, songs like this one are rare and precious.

I have a friend I’ve never seen,
He hides his head inside a dream,
Someone should call him and see if he can come out,
Try to lose the down that he’s found —

But only love can break your heart,
Try to be sure right from the start…

My Morning Jacket - Z

This album's excellent, and I suspect that it'll only get better as summer draws nearer. "Off The Record" is the first song from it that I heard, and it's the high point, guitars squawking and chirruping as frontman Jim James hollers charismatically along in a heck of an anthem, but there's plenty to like elsewhere; almost as good is raveup "Anytime", and likewise "What A Wonderful Man" (another song for which the concept of 'raveup' could practically have been invented) and "It Beats 4 U". It's a spacey southern rawk kinda thing that MMJ have got going on, and it's sustained and really good - benefits from being more concise than It Still Moves (which is totally fab for its first four songs or so, after which it always just sort of wears off), and as such doesn't let up at any point in its running time. Probably the best new rock album I've heard since Funeral last year.

Tanya Donelly - Whiskey Tango Ghosts

"Sweet Ride" is one of my favourite Belly songs; and, as much as I like the original recording (a b-side), Tanya Donelly's solo unplugged version on one of the KCRW 'Morning Becomes Eclectic' cds is even better, even more plaintive and wavering and bittersweet. Now, there's something of that latter to Whiskey Tango Ghosts which, unlike the electrified rush of Donelly's previous solo albums, extremely stripped-back (sometimes even approaching the spareness of fellow ex-Muse Kristin Hersh's individual work) and slowed down.

It makes for interesting listening - the glorious hooks are still there, and not so dissimilar from previous Donelly/Belly, but because her characteristic instrumental sound is no longer present, it all comes across quite differently. And, the initial surprise at the direction the album evinces having passed, I'm liking it plenty.

100 favourite songs: #54: "Ride The Wind To Me" - Julie Miller

[A] lovely, melodic song … which, instead of fading away after the initial infatuation, continues to work its way deeper and deeper into my heart. – 16/1/06

As the above suggests, I keep expecting this song to wear off — there are a lot of these pretty, tuneful, melancholy-edged songs sung by women with girlish voices (often with a strong country tinge), and many of them are really good, but only a handful endure after the first rush — but so far it’s shown no signs at all of doing so. I’ve heard Miller’s voice described as a ‘keen’, and that’s spot on — even when her subject matter is upbeat, she sounds as if a part of her is lamenting, and here that singing comes together with a windswept, yearning-hopeful melody and some lovely guitar work, and the result is exquisite.

100 favourite songs: #55: "Musette And Drums" - Cocteau Twins

From right down the goth end of the band’s spectrum, stormy, lurching and ominous, shearing MBV-esque guitars cutting swathes across the drawn-out sepulchral tones going on and on and on, shuddering, end-of-the-world drums everywhere and faintly glimmering lighter guitar fabrics which emerge only briefly before being submerged by the general cacophony, Fraser howling like a banshee in the swirling, resounding thick.

100 favourite songs: #56: "Wish You Were Here" - Pink Floyd

I think that I first heard this song properly on a tape of the album which bears its name, around year 11 or so, and I thought then that the song sounded so familiar that I must have heard it before, years ago, and, even more than that, that I had loved the song when I had known it in the past, so that this new falling-for was more a renewal than something entirely unprecedented. Now, looking back, I suspect that not only had I probably actually heard it, or parts of it, many times before in the background on the radio, etc, but that there’s also something intrinsic to the song itself which lends it that kind of feel — a sort of nostalgia which probably owes a lot to its subject matter, which is expressed as much in the music itself as in the lyrics.

“Wish You Were Here” is an extremely simple song, and it’s that simplicity which allows it to be so effective and so affecting. In many ways, Pink Floyd are, in all their pomp and excess, the last band that I’d expect to write a really timeless song, but that’s just what “Wish You Were Here” is, blessed with an melody that feels as if it’s always been there and an arrangement and execution which allows the melody to breathe and resonate; I’ve loved it a lot more immediately in the past than I do right now, but the feeling remains as deep as ever.

100 favourite songs: #57: "Torn" - Natalie Imbruglia

I can't even begin to imagine why it gave me such a rush — these things are always a bit ineffable — except by surmising that it was (and remains) just one of those perfect pop songs, delivered (and produced) just right, breezy and sweet and sad. - 7/10/05

Given the types of other songs on this list, a casual onlooker could probably be forgiven for imagining that the appearance of “Torn” must be attributable to some kind of strong and unshakeable association of the usual kind between it and some significant event from my past — a first breakup, perhaps, if the lyrics are any guide, or maybe even just a first affaire de coeur more generally. But that’s really not the thing at all — there’s no such association, either specific or general, except in the most abstract way possible (in the sense that I’m sure it made me feel wistful at the time, but without any kind of localised or even more universal object). There’s just something about the song itself; I still don’t know what it is, and it’s still there.

100 favourite songs: #58: "Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)" - The Arcade Fire

“Wake Up” is more extravagant and immediately striking, “In The Backseat” more spine-tingling, and “Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)” more edgy and danceable, but “Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)” is my favourite song on Funeral, and I think that it succeeds so well because it’s the song on which the Fire’s grandiose and epic leanings are best synthesised with the band’s capacity for understatement and careful detail and craft; the result is a towering piece of orchestral pop in a constant state of tension, seeming in every bar about to burst forth and yet always held in check at the same instant, so that the climax, when it comes, doesn’t need to be overblown or LOUD (which it’s not) to be completely and utterly cathartic (which it is). Magnifique.

Ali Smith - The Accidental

When it comes to writing, you can talk about style, voice, form, theme, and much more in that vein, but in the end they all present themselves most immediately in the overall effect of the writing, and while there's a lot to be said about The Accidental, the strongest sensation with which I was left after finishing it was of that effect - which could perhaps be described as one of cryptic unresolvedness.

I was thinking about effect because I was trying to make sense of my response to the novel - and, in particular, why it reminded me so especially of Nicola Barker's work. Now, I've read two or three of Barker's books, a couple of years or so ago, I think, and I thought they were pretty good, but they didn't leave any particular impression on me and I don't recall finding them very satisfying (though obviously there was enough going on there for me to recur to her once or twice). Anyway, my point is that, whatever her merits as a writer, Barker's an unlikely reference point for me - but there it is, because it was of her that I thought immediately upon beginning to digest The Accidental. I don't know why.

There's a lot that I don't get about The Accidental, really. The two most striking things about the novel are its voice(s) and its structure/form, and, after a bit of thought, I've decided - at least for the time being - that both function, to overschematise a bit, in a tri-layered fashion:
1. Initially, the effect is disorienting - because the reader is deprived of a stable narrator, linear narrative, etc.
2. The disorientation doesn't last long; indeed, for anyone who reads a reasonable amount of contemporary lit fic, said disorientation is probably more theoretical than real, in part because we're so accustomed to the deployment of these kinds of textual strategies, and in part because Smith has the knack of using them in a way which seems quite transparent and doesn't cause the reader to bog down.
3. But this appearance of transparency-amidst-obscurity itself conceals a further obscurity which has little to do with the unconventional voice/structure, etc (at least in any direct sense). And it's that 'further obscurity' which lies at the heart of Smith's novel and which gives it that sense of unresolvedness and ungraspability (and not in any particular way the text's playing with form, narrative and all that).

I'm not sure if I liked it. No, I definitely liked it. I'm not sure what it's about. But it's definitely about western society today and its failures, absences and discontents. It's readable, provocative, subtle and human - four characteristics which aren't to be found in a single novel all that often. It doesn't seem to provide any easy 'outs' or neat resolutions, but I couldn't help wondering whether that 'seeming' didn't conceal - or allow, or authorise, or legitimise, or something - some implicit moves with which I wasn't entirely comfortable (in particular, Michael seems to get off too easily, and maybe Magnus too - but am I just being old-fashioned in: (a) my judgements of those characters; and (b) my desire to see them receive their moral 'just deserts' based on those judgements?). The Amber/Alhambra 'character' and general figure/subject, especially at start and end, feels underdeveloped - but again, I wonder if I'm just applying the 'wrong' kind of frame to my reading of it.

Hunh (to be read as: "slightly disgruntled exhalation").

Madeleine Peyroux - Dreamland

A cloudy, smoke-wrapped set of mostly old songs, curled jazz intonations and arrangements giving it the feel of a record set down 50 years ago rather than only 10. I prefer Careless Love, but I think they're actually quite different records, even if clearly coming from the same Peyrouxian place, and Dreamland is very nice, too. Best of all is her "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter", langorous, heartfelt, and somehow wry.

"2005"

David's[*] cd documenting his last year (musically) - two songs each from My Morning Jacket, Wilco and the Arcade Fire, and a lot of other 'David' artists (White Stripes, Beck, Talking Heads...). I'd heard most of the songs before - some through David himself - but mix cds are always fun, not least for the way they recontextualise songs that one already knows, so it's still neat to listen to this cd all the way through. Favourite new song by a long way and one of my favourites on the cd full stop is My Morning Jacket's "Off The Record", which is ace and has prompted a certain amount of Z listening, of which more later.

* * *

[*] Incidentally, doing his own top 100 songs here.

The Cure - The Head on the Door

Another that it's taken me a while to work back to. For some reason, The Head on the Door is the one 'old school' (which I define very loosely here to mean everything up to and including Wish, the last album on which the band could plausibly be argued to have been relevant to anything at all except for itself and its own back catalogue) Cure album that I never got round to buying (apart from a brief ownership of a secondhand vinyl copy, which turned out to skip or get stuck or something and was duly returned, a few years back) - I didn't particularly avoid it, but somehow it just always slipped through the cracks, even though I always liked the offcentre pop joys of its three singles, "In Between Days", "A Night Like This" and, of course, "Close To Me".

So anyhow, it turns out to be quite good (and probably a lot easier for me to get into, so long after the time of my proper Cure infatuation, than if I'd left, say, Faith or Pornography out instead and then had to rediscover one of them out of that Cure-lovin' context in which they made so much sense). It is basically a quirky pop album, and it's good with it - the singles are pretty ace, and there are a couple of other nice moments (the Church-esque "Push" comes to mind).

Belle and Sebastian - Storytelling

It's taken me a while to work my way back to this one because of the inauspiciousness of its back story - B&S record a bunch of music specifically to soundtrack Solondz film, Solondz decides it's not right and ends up using hardly any of it, music gets bundled up and released as an unofficial B&S album. So, a lot of the tracks are instrumental, and kind of incidental in that film soundtracky way, though pleasant enough - and the vocal numbers, which are, unusually for a soundtrack (though Storytelling is evidently more of a 'soundtrack') backloaded on the tracklist, are similar in being pleasant and touched with something of the B&S magic, but ultimately fairly minor (although, having vocals, they tend to stand out more than their purely instrumental counterparts).

Bic Runga - Birds (special edition)

An interesting experience to be listening to this, now. This special edition adds two songs to the original version and rearranges the entire tracklist to give the album a far more hushed, nocturnal feel, apparent especially in this version's opening ("Captured", "Birds", and "No Crying No More", before launching into the three best songs on the album - and the three that most made me liken it to classic singer-songwriter fare of the 60s the first time round - in "Winning Arrow", "If I Had You" and "Say After Me"). (The new songs, "Somewhere In The Night" and "Something's Gotten Hold Of My Heart", are both nice enough but nothing special.)

The other new aspect of this 'special edition' is a dvd with five of the album's tracks done live (in which Bic is earnest and pretty good), as recorded at the Civic Theatre in Auckland in '05, and music videos for "Winning Arrow" and "Say After Me".

100 favourite songs: #59: "The Killing Moon" - Echo & The Bunnymen

One of the raft of 80s British post-punk classics for which I fell completely and unreservedly during that heady transitional time around the tail end of high school and early uni (the other really key artists being the Cure, the Smiths and Joy Division), the song’s dramatic, occluded, unselfconsciously romantic swirl continues to stand up amazingly well as the years roll on. For all of its pretensions, there’s also always been a mystery and an urgency to “The Killing Moon”, and those aspects remain undimmed all these years on. In a word, grand…or maybe ‘grandiose’ — it doesn’t matter, for the magic remains the same.

100 favourite songs: #60: "Consequence" - The Notwist

I heard “Consequence” through a mix cd that Nenad was distributing years ago and his accompanying notes hit upon the perfect way of describing the song: put simply, it’s sublime. The mix of understated electronic pulses and organic-sounding percussion with the weary, lovelorn vocals is immaculate, and it’s another of those songs in which form and content — whatever they may mean — are in complete harmony.

… you’re the colour, you’re the movement and the spin …

… (never) could it stay with me the whole day long …

… fail with consequence, lose with eloquence, and smile …

… I’m not in this movie, I’m not in this song …

… leave me paralysed, leave me hypnotised, love …

100 favourite songs: #61: "Daisy Glaze" - Big Star

Classic Big Star with all the elements that made them great. - 2/06

… tentative, tender, descending lines make up the opening half or so of the song, muted but crisp and bright-edged, yearning and slowly, plangently spiralling; and then, the glory moment, when the guitars find voice and ring out and Alex Chilton really goes for it, and the song catches fire and everything just keeps on going forward, upwards and upwards again; pulls back, then comes again more vividly than before, crashing and jangling, and even though you’ve no idea what he’s talking about when he cries, over and over, “you're going to die”,[*] it still all makes sense.

* * *

[*] Which, incidentally, I'd always heard as “you know the type” before looking it up just now.

100 favourite songs: #62: "Be Mine" - R.E.M.

Another from New Adventures in Hi-Fi, and in a lot of respects the obvious number to pull out from that record’s tracklisting (along with bizarre and great-in-a-different-way single “E-Bow the Letter”) and tone-perfect closer “Electrolite”) — possibly the sweetest thing they ever recorded, its downbeat indie-rockisms and straight-up melody make it a close cousin to MBV’s “Sometimes”, but wearing its heart and its plaintiveness far more on its sleeve. One of the best builds-ups and eventual cuttings-loose in modern rock music, and an ending which goes on and on and on and is exactly right.

100 favourite songs: #63: "Street Spirit (Fade Out)" - Radiohead

Opening with an unhurried, almost stately guitar line which anchors the rest of the song, “Street Spirit” is a sweepingly grand, understatedly moving piece of pop music perfection … - 18/6/02

Over the years, I’ve had a lot of ‘favourite’ songs from The Bends — “Fake Plastic Trees”, “Black Star”, “The Bends” itself — but it’s elegiac closer “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” that’s always seemed most likely to endure, and so it’s proved, at least to the present. It speaks to and for a part of me now as much as it ever did, increasingly buried though I fear that part may be.

100 favourite songs: #64: "One" - U2

A song which has been there for as long as I can remember. What can I possibly say about it that hasn’t been said a thousand times before? Rarely are beauty, majesty and subtlety so perfectly commingled.

100 favourite songs: #65: "Breakfast In Bed" - Dusty Springfield

… nigh on perfect, shivering with feeling and drama … - 24/2/06

It’s in the details, but it’s in the way they come together, too. The tentative, crystalline chimes of the guitar, punctuated by the barest of clanging percussion, is perfect. So too is Dusty’s throaty entrance, “You’ve been crying, your face is a mess,/ come in baby, you can dry the tears on my dress – “ and then the spine-tingling shiver of “She’s hurt you again, I can tell”, and here’s where the strings and the piano come in, subtly but unmistakeably. And then everything surges, and continues to surge, and the brassy horns blare and redouble their call, and it’s as if she’s singing for her life, and the refrain arrives, and it sounds like a celebration and, I guess, by now it is.

100 favourite songs: #66: "Rebellion (Lies)" - The Arcade Fire

Tucked away near the end of Funeral, this song didn’t immediately strike me as one of the record’s standout tracks — it always caused my ears to prick up and the rhythms would catch me, but to the extent that I thought of the song at all, it was as a fairly minor number nestled amidst the more immediately towering songs around it (coming immediately before show-stopping closer “In The Backseat” is a hella thankless position for it).

But repeated listening has really brought out the especial brilliance of “Rebellion (Lies)”. I’ve heard Funeral described in terms of its dirge-momentum or something very similar (I don’t know, I might have written those words myself), and that’s just exactly right for this song in particular. It’d be possible to unpick the threads, to trace backwards how the different instrumental and vocal lines layer and interweave into a stadium-bestriding whole, but really what would be the point? More than anything else, “Rebellion (Lies)” strikes me as the soundtrack to a revolution not yet staged, its vaguely martial cadences, ever-forwards drive and lyrical subversiveness going only part of the way to explaining that impression, the rest, I think, being attributable to something more difficult to identify — perhaps, it’s the scent of endings and originality, of something new and astonishing being wrought before our eyes.

100 favourite songs: #67: "Midnight Singer" - Laura Veirs

Troubled By The Fire … as a whole is so gently, rollingly contemplative that it’s almost a surprise when the frequent moments of real beauty hit you; “Midnight Singer”, the closing number, is one of those, and there’s a ruminative, sad-eyed quality to it that gives me the shivers every time… - 18/4/04

It’s strange how often my defining memories of song-hearings are rediscoveries of the song, some time after the first flush of enthusiasm. In the case of “Midnight Singer”, it came one afternoon, trudging home from the bus stop after a day at uni; in my memory, it was late spring or maybe even summer, coming towards the end of a hot, sun-swept day with shadows falling heedlessly on the bitumen road and melancholy hanging heavy in the air. Then this song came on, and it was high and heartbreaking and perfect. Its music-box melody and Veirs’ gentle, floating vocals impart a delicate magic to “Midnight Singer”, and it’s one that always seems to be everywhere in the air once the warmer months arrive, the days grow longer, and their ends more protracted and poignant.

100 favourite songs: #68: "Electrolite" - R.E.M.

For a while now, I’ve thought that R.E.M. are probably the finest exponents of the classic pop song — in all of its guises — of our time; they’re a genuinely great band that just happens to have also achieved huge mainstream success. … there’s a grace and a fluidity to “Electrolite” that’s every bit the match of the band’s earlier days of jangle-pop glory… - 1/04

The last song on their best album, in fact “Electrolite” has a jangle of its own, mostly of the piano variety, in keeping with the direction that the band had taken by that stage in its career. R.E.M. have always been able to write songs that are unaccountably catchy and (relatedly) irrationally great, and “Electrolite” stands high among them.

100 favourite songs: #69: "Colors And The Kids" - Cat Power

Piano and vocal only, “Colors And The Kids” sounds like glass, shivering — narrow, upright slivers, catching the light and reflecting all the colours of the spectrum. (If that seems an unlikely image, well, that’d be because you can’t see how the world looks and sounds to me.) Should I ever manage to see her live, it’s for this song that I’ll most be hanging out.

100 favourite songs: #70: "Without You I'm Nothing" - Placebo

Churningly cathartic. - 1/04

I was never really a Placebo boy. In some ways, I was probably cut out to be one (at least at the relevant times), but despite having been aware of them from the time that “Pure Morning” came knelling onto the airwaves (and worked my way back to buying their debut fairly soon after), and followed them through their radio hits more or less since then, I’ve never really bought into them (by which I mean their music, natch).

“Without You I’m Nothing”, though, I think is touched by genuine greatness. Its fuzzed-out, repetitively jangling chords and the reverb of Molko’s ever-disaffected vocals, the waver of it all as he reaches the “tick, tock” section and then the crashing waves which surface and crest in those trailing desperate screeching lines before themselves being taken over by an even denser layer as the words giving the song (and album) its title are intoned over and over and you realise that the whole song has been building to this crescendo right from the beginning, and it’s all just totally everything that 90s post-grunge modern mopey alt-rock aspired to be and so rarely was.

100 favourite songs: #71: "Revelator" - Gillian Welch

To me, this song sounds like a long, gently undulating river — or how it feels to travel down that river, summer all around and slow birds calling overhead. I don’t know how she does it, but here, as on all her other records, Welch creates a version of americana which is, without the slightest hint of affectedness or striving, warm and timeless and true.

100 favourite songs: #72: "There Is An End" - The Greenhornes (featuring Holly Golightly)

It’s a great song in its own right, but I think that my response to “There Is An End” owes a lot to the setting in which I first heard it. I’m thinking that there are, in a sense, two aspects to that response, and the way they interrelate is probably quite reflective of their general relationship as far as their appearance/application in my own life goes. First, there was the emotional and quite instinctive response: “There Is An End” is the song that plays over the opening and closing credits of Broken Flowers, and it wound its way from the cinema speakers out to me at a Nova late show late last year, a sense of endings all around as the year, honours, and university all drew to a close (and, naturally, I was there alone). And the song, in its 60s-invoking garage rock n roll shimmy and sway, was, y’know, exactly right for my mood at the time — contemplative, dreamy, langorous, poetic and touched by a wistfulness and hinted-at sense of loss — and got me all set for the film to come.

Then, over the days and weeks which followed, a slightly more intellectual (but no less deeply-felt) response kicked in, as both song and film settled more and began to make more and more sense. The cryptic lyrics about words disappearing, thoughts rearranging, and all familiar now strange, take on a further resonance in light of the imaginative soul journey undertaken by Bill Murray’s character in the film, not to mention the opening sequence following the progress of the letter; all of this mixing up with and making sense of then-current Lacan (and, especially, “Purloined Poe”) reading and pre-existing thoughts about consciousness, language, and ‘world’ (and, of course, vice versa).

And then, too, there’s the sense that “There Is An End” is really a once-off, never to be repeated, with neither the individual work of the Greenhornes nor of Holly Golightly seeming really to approach the perfection of their collaboration here…

words disappear, words once so clear,
Only echoes passing through the night,
The lines on my face,
Your fingers once traced,
Fading reflection of what was …

Thoughts rearrange, familiar now strange,
All my skin drifting on the wind,
Spring brings the rain,
With winter comes pain,
Every season has an end …

I’ll try to see through the disguise,
But the clouds were there, blocking out the sun …

Thoughts rearrange, familiar now strange,
All my skin drifting on the wind,
Spring brings the rain,
With winter comes pain,
Every season has an end …

There’s an end …

100 favourite songs: #73: "Feed The Tree" - Belly

Gorgeous swooning onrushing golden pop. - 29/1/05

If there’s one single best thing about all the best Belly songs, it’s the way Tanya Donelly’s voice can just take off at the right moment and drag you along by the scruff of the neck, swooping upwards on the crest of the instant at which her voice seems about to crack and soars into a whoop. On “Feed The Tree”, it happens on the last word of the second occurrence of the line “I know all this and more”, and the transition into, and whole of, the chorus which follows (“take your hat off boy when you’re talking to me,/and be there when I feed the tree”) — but they’re set up by everything else around them, from the immediately urgent chords and the layers which swiftly drop in at the start through the building, surging initial stanzas. In many ways, it’s a very compact song — far from anemic, but absolutely nothing is wasted and it’s always in motion. They only put out two lps and a handful of other recordings, but Belly were a genuinely great band.

100 favourite songs: #74: "Maps" - Yeah Yeah Yeahs

… there’s a clarity and a grace to this song…oh, I don’t know — it’s just wonderful. - 9/04

I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs when they first started making waves — I’d heard a couple of the songs from the early eps and I liked them well enough while also being quite ‘yeah, whatever’ about the whole thing. But then I heard “Maps”, which is a different beast altogether. It has a simplicity and an unexpected subtlety to it, and a desperation, a fire and a purity to it which is perfectly suited to its subject, and all in all I reckon it’s a modern love song in the grand tradition.

100 favourite songs: #75: "Utopia" - Goldfrapp

Goldfrapp came along pretty early for me, and while I don’t think I’ve ever thought of them as one of my really favourite bands, the duo’s always had a place in my heart which it doesn’t share with anyone else. I could never decide which I liked best of Felt Mountain and Black Cherry, and when Supernature came along it made three Goldfrapp records which I couldn’t split in quality, but “Utopia” is definitely where it all started, and there’s something about it still, something in its cinematic, dramatic quality, in the whispers and mews of Alison Goldfrapp and the sheer electro-lushness of it all…and also for having provided me with one of those expressions of a concept which has gone straight into my working vocabulary (spoken and thought) — the idea of being wired to the world.

100 favourite songs: #76: "Wuthering Heights" - Kate Bush

Words that describe, or evoke, this song:
• wild
• overwrought
• demented
• unhinged
• preposterous
• brilliant

Very close to the feel of the novel — no mean feat in itself — yet stands alone, too, as one of those pure distillations of a one-off vision finding thrilling, undeniable expression in music.

A note on the posting of these top 100 songs

Viz: I've been writing about these at intervals, not necessarily in order - and sometimes I get stuck on one, not feeling inspired to write about it, resulting in a backlog above it and the tendency of the entries to be posted in large blocks all at once. (Also, I tend to write more than one at once.)

C'est tout. :)

"Speaking out, shutting up" @ Merlyn Theatre, Malthouse Theatre, Melbourne Writers' Festival

The festival guide blurb read:

Moves to stifle debate and limit free speech seem to be increasingly popular with democratic governments playing the 'terrorist threat' card. PEN presents a forum about public discourse and freedom of expression from an international panel: Emha Ainun Nadjib, Tom Keneally and George Szirtes.

As it turned out, Keneally pulled out (ill?) so it was just the other two, speaking separately and then fielding questions at the end, chaired by Arnold Zable. Szirtes went first, giving a potted history of government and censorship in Hungary and grounding his reading of four Hungarian poems in that context, briefly commenting on the modes of commentary and resistance that each piece embodied and represented. And after him was Nadjib, speaking (through a translator) about his experiences as a writer and activist in Indonesia, including as the organiser of a group of Indonesian intellectuals and artists who had presented a letter to Soeharto and persuaded him to sign it in order to set in train his stepping aside in the name of democratic elections.

It wasn't quite what I'd expected, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one feeling that way - Zable alluded to something similar in his closing comments, saying that it had been 'a subtle panel' - but it was good. Szirtes was either very self-effacing or very private, or both, not reading any of his own original work (I think one or two of the poems of others' that he read were in his translation) - quite the Eastern European intellectual (though he's spent the last 15 [?] years of his life in England, though one or two of the questions drew him out. (Because of the background and the themes, I was thinking about The Unbearable Lightness of Being throughout.) Didn't inspire me - as it did Swee Leng - to go out and read Hungarian poetry but very much did remind me of how much is out there, and something about Szirtes inspired the feeling that he had the right to speak of the 'moral authority' of the writer and of the experience of state tyranny and censorship. And Nadjib was great to listen to - a very charismatic man, telling stories, he and his interpreter sometimes slightly talking over each other (that in itself was enjoyable and interesting to watch) - with a strong theme regarding the insidiousness of the censorship he faces in Indonesia and provided probably the highlight of the session with his response to a question in which he spoke about his faith (as a Muslim) in today's international context.

(I'd had hopes of seeing most of the Lisa Miller set before - memories of the last time still quite strong - but, as these things go, everything ran late and we were only able to stay for a couple of songs before ducking across to "Speaking out, shutting up".)

* * *

[*] Vegjie was our organiser - also there were a friend of hers[**] (one Sarah M), and I rang in Swee Leng (who turned out to be second cousins with Sarah...these things long ago ceased to be surprising, but it's nice to feel that the right people still all seem to be in the process of meeting each other) and David; Kelly (+ friend - Damien?) also around for other events.

[**] A word which I now know not to be apostrophised thanks to Fowler's, hurray.

Kasey Chambers - Carnival

Thanks to a zealous co-attendee (Kevin), I already have tix to one of the Kasey gigs in November, so I thought it behooved me to give her newie a listen asap. A while on, it hasn't left much of an impression. The reviewers seem really hung up on Carnival being a move away from the 'country' direction towards more of a pop-rock sound, but I'm not convinced - insofar as there's a shift evident, it's not a large one and very much a natural continuation from where Chambers has been before. For me, what's missing from this album is any properly memorable songs, which none of her previous records have lacked for - the songs are still unmistakably Kasey, both in the writing and in the performance, but it's all mid-level Kasey and, at least as yet, doesn't sparkle like her earlier work.

Tom Waits - Rain Dogs

Generally I like Tom Waits well enough on a song-by-song level without ever having lost my head over his music in the way that a lot of people I know and meet seem to - I've never had the patience to penetrate past the gravelly voice and general clatter and mess and so have never really 'got' him. Rain Dogs, though, has proved to be something of an exception. I picked it up a few weeks ago after hearing "Downtown Train" playing in a record store and being very taken with its gruff, chugging rockisms (not realising that it was Waits till I went to the counter and saw the cd case on display) - this probably reflects the skewedness of my listening patterns, but the closest cognate for the song that I can come up with is Springsteen's Born in the USA - and I'd heard "Time" before (Waits ballads have a way of sticking in the mind), but it turns out to be very listenable from start to finish, and on repeat play, too. Nice!