ALBUM: The Smile’s ‘A Light For Attracting Attention’

“There was a point a year and a half ago when I wondered whether I would be doing this again,” admitted Thom Yorke on stage at the Albert Hall last October. “I’m a British musician, and I was told during the pandemic, like all British musicians, that I should consider retraining. And after we finally left [the EU] they told us we didn’t really need to tour around Europe anyway, did we? So perhaps I’m one of a dying breed… who knows?”

That classic Radiohead sense of embattled, paranoid defiance was only amplified by Mark Jenkin’s video for The Smile’s “Skrting On The Surface”, released in March, which cast Yorke as a miner, 200 feet beneath Cornwall, his face grimy with soot and sweat as he trundled his lonely cart down a rail track.

Is UK indie rock one more venerable heartland industry to be blithely cast onto the national slagheap? Could Thom [first-named basis?] and Jonny Greenwood’s next jobs be in cyber?

It’d take a heart of stone not to smirk – but there’s something heartening about Yorke and Greenwood’s vocational commitment to angular, knotty, intensely pissed-off art-rock.

Stream album via Spotify

While their ’90s contemporaries have wandered far and wide in search of fresh purpose in the 21st century, they have remained steadfast, even when venturing through abstract electronica or orchestral soundtracks, in mining the same rich seam of truculence and awe.

So much so that The Smile, ostensibly a lockdown project for Thom, Jonny and Sons Of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner, along with long-time producer Nigel Godrich, feels more like a refreshment, refinement or even fulfilment of Radiohead core principles, rather than an extracurricular dalliance.

An early version of “Skrting…” was in fact a feature of the parent band’s live shows at least as far back as The King Of Limbs, while the surging, splenetic debut single “You Will Never Work In Television Again” (“He’s fat fucking mist/Young bones spat out/Girls slitting their wrists…”) suggests the apprentice work of a neural network trained on the Yorke lyrical canon.

On the irresistible one-two of “Open The Floodgates” into “Free In The Knowledge”, he even ventures as close as he’s come to the acoustic balladry of The Bends in a couple of decades.

Funnily enough, though A Light… feels on first listen like Continuity Radiohead, you might find the source or mother lode in a backstage performance from 2008, just Yorke and Greenwood with a couple of acoustic guitars, fingerpicking through Portishead’s “The Rip” as though they had just come up with it in an idle jam session.

The album begins with the forlorn life-support bleep of a fritzing antique Moog, and it surfaces like a subterranean river throughout an album which seems to chart the same blasted, war-torn landscape as Portishead’s Third.

Sensationally so on “Speech Bubbles”, the beautifully mournful centrepiece of the record, set in the eerie calm after a terror attack (“Devastation has come, left in a station with a mortar bomb”).

The serpentine guitar figure might be a cousin of the one that unravelled through the verses of “Paranoid Android”, but what takes the track to a new dimension is Greenwood’s orchestration.

If Robert Kirby’s strings once roamed over the vales of Nick Drake songs like the cumulus clouds in a Constable landscape, then here Greenwood’s rippling piano, breaking through looming uneasy strings and woodwind, feels like a sunbeam in an otherwise foreboding Ravilious seascape.

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D.C. Punk Scene Documentary: ‘Punk the Capital’

Ian MacKaye

By Jim Wirth

As they bickered throughout the final days of Minor Threat, drummer Jeff Nelson told
singer Ian MacKaye that – as unwashed jocks from the ’burbs started to infiltrate their well-marshalled scene – he wasn’t really enjoying playing with the DC hardcore giants any more. Righteous fire forever burning in his eyes, MacKaye replied: “It’s not supposed to be fun.”

Packed with great footage and interviews, James June Schneider and Paul Bishow’s excellent doc on the evolution of Washington, DC’s mutant strain of punk shows how a teenage passion morphed into a full-on crusade. The comic-store nerds and Clash copyists who first thrashed out tunes at The Keg (“a heavy metal dump next to a strip bar”, so says the Slickee Boys’ Howard Wuelfing) in the late ’70s were crowded out by shaven-headed, middle-class hellions seeking a riot entirely of their own.

DC was a musical hinterland in the 1970s, with foundational punk acts such as Overkill and father-and-son shock-rockers White Boy (Google with care) pairing ripped T-shirts with flares and long hair as they sought new ways to tell the world that disco sucked. However, that tiny world began to expand when Bad Brains – black, jazz-fusion heads inspired by “positive mental attitude” self-help guru Napoleon Hill’s 1937 manual Think And Grow Rich – heard the Sex Pistols and the Dead Boys and decided that they could do it better.

“We listened to the Ramones and The Damned and we said, ‘Well, they’re jumping so we’re gonna jump too, but we gotta be able to jump higher, quicker,’” remembers guitarist Darryl Jenifer. They raised the musical tempo as well. As Jenifer puts it: “If the Ramones think they’re playing fast, watch this.”

High-energy footage confirms Bad Brains’ reputation as a life-altering live band, but if their departure for New York – and back-flipping singer HR’s subsequent mental health issues – was a setback for DC, the baton was taken up by Woodrow Wilson High School classmates MacKaye and Nelson. Their first band, the Teen Idles, achieved moderate local success before splitting in 1980. With the final $600 in their band account, they made a record. The first release on their Dischord label, it was the start of a campaign to define and document an inward-looking Washington sound, unsullied by the need for critical approval they perceived in nearby New York. As Nelson puts it: “When you’re working in isolation, sometimes you come up with the best stuff.”

Nelson and MacKaye’s next act proved that – as important as Black Flag or Ramones in defining the evolution of the US underground, Minor Threat were lightning fast, with killer shout-along choruses. When future Black Flag singer and DC scenester Henry Rollins saw their first shows, he thought: “Finally we have our Beatles.”

Minor Threat also had a message. Annoyed at the Sid Vicious-style “self-destructive junkie culture” prevalent in punk circles, MacKaye evolved an aggressively wholesome no-alcohol, no-drugs, no-casual-sex ethos, which Minor Threat espoused in songs such as “Straight Edge” and “Out Of Step”. Footage of a topless MacKaye inviting audience participation at one gig shows how effectively he got that across.

Punk The Capital perhaps downplays how obnoxious and violent MacKaye and his crew were at this messianic peak, but it shows how increasingly intense male bonding at gigs fractured the once small, supportive, women-friendly DC scene. Headcases, misogynists and white supremacists entered the moshpit, while MacKaye’s ascetic values seeded more intolerant scenes in Boston, New York and beyond. Determined anti-careerists, Minor Threat got out while they were up, dissolving along with the other key Dischord bands – SOA, Faith et al – to regenerate into a next wave of less didactic DC acts: Rites Of Spring, Dag Nasty, and MacKaye’s Embrace and Fugazi.

The wealth of great video footage in Punk The Capital underlines what made DC hardcore unique; the main protagonists were not marginal dropouts, as they were in New York and California, but the well-heeled, eloquent children of admirals, diplomats and journalists, with the will and means to succeed without outside support. They were young hotheads with a genuine vision; abrasive but, in their determined rejection of lax values and espousal of DIY thrift, as American as the Mayflower. “It wasn’t a dress-up thing,” says the still saintly MacKaye. “We were going to live it.” Not fun: fundamentalism.

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Kings Of Convenience – Peace or Love

Kings Of Convenience

On the cover of Peace Or Love, the long-awaited fourth album by Eirik Glambek Bøe and Erlend Øye, the Norwegian duo are playing chess on a stylish piece of furniture. It’s not the first time the game has featured on their record sleeves – the art for 2004’s Riot On An Empty Street included a half-played board on the shaggy rug of a chic apartment, while 2009’s Declaration Of Dependence depicted the duo taking a break from a game on a Mexican beach.

Bøe and Øye do enjoy chess (the latter spent most of a recent quarantine playing it online), but their frequent references to it also capture something fundamental about the alliance that’s always powered Kings Of Convenience. Though their music is hushed, thoughtful, polite even, their relationship has always been fiery and competitive, the beauty and stillness of their songs fashioned from conflict.

The 12 years between Declaration Of Dependence and Peace Or Love weren’t the result of struggle and strife, however, but rather of a quest for perfection. Recording took place sporadically over five years and spanned five different cities, including Siracusa in Sicily, where Øye now lives, with the duo searching only for the right mood and feel, a kind of loose magic, rather than any technical prowess.

Their efforts seem to have paid off, for Peace Or Love is their most cohesive album yet. While it’s not a world away from their previous work, the mood is noticeably more stripped-down and melancholic – there’s nothing like Riot…’s I’d Rather Dance With You or Declaration…’s Boat Behind – perhaps informed by the last decade, which saw Øye lose his parents and Bøe suffer the breakup of his marriage to Ina Grung, the cover star of Riot… and their debut, 2000’s Quiet Is The New Loud.

In customary fashion, they begin with a slow, desolate song. Rumours, driven by three intertwining acoustic guitars, addresses someone facing “accusations we both know are wrong”; in close, breathy harmony, they offer support and advice, but it might be too late: “I want to tell you that I love you/But I know you can’t hear me now”.

Comb My Hair, with its fast, coiled fingerpicking, is darker still. Here, with the loss of a loved one, the protagonist is unable to get out of bed; even the stars and the warm evening air are “cold and senseless now”. Love Is A Lonely Thing, a tranquilised, echoing ballad with verses shared between Øye, Bøe and a returning Feist, and the minor-key Killers, both deal with the pain of love, of waiting interminably for someone or something to appear. Closer Washing Machine, one of the best tracks here, uses clashing guitar chords and plaintive viola to emphasise Øye’s romantic dejection and existential angst: “It’s true I’m more wise now than I was when I was 21/It’s true I’ve less time now than I had when I was 21…”

Not everything is quite as dark, though: Bøe’s Rocky Trail is a skipping, bossa nova cousin to Misread, but it twists and turns so deliciously that its chorus appears only once. Fever places electronic beats under Øye’s wry contrasting of lovesickness and actual sickness, but the effect is reassuringly subtle. Catholic Country, meanwhile, is swaying and vaguely South American, the chorus written with The Staves and beautifully delivered by Feist.

Ultimately, it’s the sparse, live interplay between the two guitars and voices that carries Peace Or Love. The arrangements were largely worked out on tour, while recording mostly took place in homes – hence the Sicilian crickets that accompany Bøe on Killers. There are mistakes here too, especially on Washing Machine, which only enhance the air of intimacy.

After a quarter of a century playing together, Kings Of Convenience seem to have discovered the purest essence of the music they create. It’s become increasingly tricky to tell who originated these songs, especially when, as on Catholic Country, Bøe is singing Øye’s lyrics over his own riff; what’s more, any frills they might have dabbled with in the past have been stripped out, leaving only the bones of the songs and whispers of the rawest feelings. Stylish moves, perfectly played.

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BLK JKS drop first album in 12 years, ‘Abantu/Before Humans’

BLK JKS

Bands like BLK JKS don’t come along often, especially in places like Johannesburg. There was no South African indie rock scene to speak of when the group emerged from the city’s Spruitview district in the mid-2000s, and their distinctive sound – a blend of kwaito, dub and township soul fired through a prism of dissonant alternative rock – made them a hot ticket. Diplo invited them out to New York to play their first American shows. Dave Grohl called their 2009 album After Robots his favourite album of the year. They kicked off the 2010 World Cup at Soweto’s Orlando Stadium with a live collaboration with Alicia Keys. Superstardom beckoned.

But things didn’t quite go to plan. Reluctant vocalist Lindani Buthelezi departed and then they split with their label Secretly Canadian. While the band remained an active concern – invited on tour with Foo Fighters and collaborating with artists such as Thandiswa Mazwai and Vieux Farka Touré – it was starting to look like that second record would never come.

But 12 years on from After Robots, Abantu/Before Humans is finally here. It comes complete with a lurid storyline. The master tapes for the original album, recorded over a few months in a makeshift studio at the Soweto Theatre orchestra pit, were stolen in a studio break-in. The group couldn’t let it go, so a year later they went back into the studio and re-recorded it in three days. While we can’t say for sure, it’s certainly possible that the version of Abantu we have here is the definitive one; it feels powered by a sense of urgency, a need to summon itself into existence.

On their debut, BLK JKS sounded excited by the prospect of exploring their influences, and that excitement was infectious. But time has brought focus and Abantu feels more comfortable in its skin as a result. Its sound is rooted in windswept desert rock, albeit one often punctuated with feats of carefully controlled rhythmic pyrotechnics and bursts of brass courtesy of new recruit Tebogo Seitei. The loss of a lead singer is a tough one to bounce back from but the group have reacted to Buthelezi’s departure by all stepping up to the mic, singing in chorus or contributing parts. It’s a potent combination too. Consider Running – Asibaleki/Sheroes Theme, which collides snaking dub basslines, fiery afrobeat horns and wild percussion breakdowns before closing on a group chorus that hangs heavy with pathos.

A lengthy subtitle on the album’s sleeve positions Abantu/Before Humans as “a complete fully translated and transcribed Obsidian Rock Audio Anthology chronicling the ancient spiritual technologies and exploits of prehistoric, post-revolutionary afro bionics and sacred texts from The Great Book on Arcanum”. It’s some ambitious framing. Luckily the songs largely meet that bar, powered by a philosophy that straddles the political and the spiritual. “Harare” is a wistful musing on migration, memory and mortality, delivered by one of the record’s few guests, famo singer Morena Leraba. A track titled Yoyo! – The Mandela Effect/Black Aurora Cusp Druids Ascending, meanwhile, is more or less as remarkable as its title. It starts with a bold chant: “They’ll never give you power/You have to take the power”. But the agitprop gradually softens into something more nuanced, a reflection on human nature and the importance of self-actualisation as a way to scale barriers.

BLK JKS come from what Desmond Tutu called the “rainbow generation”, the first South Africans to grow up out of the shadow of apartheid. Few miss those days of discrimination and division but modern South Africa is no utopia and this music reflects that. Abantu’s best moments grapple with the pain of the past in an effort to transform it. Sometimes this results in something beautiful – see the rousing Maiga Mali Mansa Musa, which features guitar from Vieux Farka Touré. Other times, it feels more pointed. Mme Kelapile (“The Hunger”) is the closest the album gets to vengeful. Set to a beat based on a children’s playground song that mimics the rhythm of the train tracks that would ferry men to South Africa’s notoriously treacherous mines, you can hear a thirst for retribution rippling through its grooves.

The group have explained that Abantu should be thought of as a sort of prequel to their debut, which might be temporally confusing but, given the album’s recourse to mysticism and ancestral tradition, it makes some sense. Still, on their second album, BLK JKS are unquestionably facing forwards. Abantu/Before Humans is true 21st-century roots rock, drawing on new tools and new techniques to illuminate the way forwards.

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David John Morris – Monastic Love Songs

David John Morris

Take a map and find Gampo Abbey, a Buddhist monastery situated on a rugged finger of Nova Scotia, Canada, and you might notice that it sits at the end of a long track called Red River Road. David Morris, singer and songwriter in England’s Red River Dialect, wasn’t aware of the name when he applied for a nine-month stay at the monastery, but he couldn’t help draw meaning from it.

“Part of me likes the idea that everything’s coming together in some kind of cosmic fashion,” he tells Uncut, “like a David Lynch-like mystical thing going on, so I was quite happy to see that. If it’s at the end of Red River Road, though, does that mean it’s the end of my musical career?”

One would hope Monastic Love Songs instead marks the beginning of a fruitful solo journey – Morris himself is keen for it to flow alongside that of his band, who are still, in theory, a going concern. Following the recording of the group’s last album, 2019’s Abundance Welcoming Ghosts, the songwriter headed out to Gampo Abbey, one of the only establishments that allows its members to make temporary rather than lifetime vows. Musical instruments were not allowed (Morris believes a previous monk with a fondness for the ukulele put a stop to that), but in the final three months of his nine-month stay he was granted limited time with a nylon-string guitar and composed a series of songs.

When he left Gampo, he went straight to the Hotel2Tango studio in Montreal to track the record in one day with Swans’ Thor Harris on drums and percussion and Godspeed’s Thierry Amar on double bass. The result is sparse and subtle, the album’s 10 songs drifting at an unhurried and becalmed pace. Given due attention, these 36 minutes are seductive and deeply involving, hard-hitting in the manner of Nick Drake’s Pink Moon or Richard & Linda Thompson’s similarly spiritual Pour Down Like Silver.

The mood is established by the opening New Safe, at five-and-a-half minutes the longest track here. It’s a floating thing, hypnotic in its shifting chords and churning drones, while Morris sings of letting his “belly tension go” and of being at one with the world: “I feel the great expansive sky/Remember there’s no need to strive”. There’s a darker undercurrent here too, suggested by a discordant middle section and lines about a cracked safe leaking “a lake… thick like oil, scary stuff”.

The breezy Inner Smile began as a poem of thanks to his tai chi teacher, and it provides a positive, exultant end to the record, even as its lyrics dabble in aphorisms like the repeated, “it also tickles the paws of the jackals”. Skeleton Key evokes early Incredible String Band in its eastern-tinged verses, while its words catalogue Morris’s hopes as he entered the monastery: “Shaving my face and shaving my head/That person is dead… Please teach me how to always stay kind and open”.

“Rhododendron”, depicting Morris finding comfort in the shadow of a flower over a shrine, is another deeply spiritual song, yet it’s far from the hectoring associated with some religious music. Indeed, the enforced celibacy and hours of meditation at times led Morris to examine his own past relationships and the nature of love itself. Purple Gold,
for instance, looks back on first love, drawing a detailed picture of a 14-year-old Morris and friend listening to REM’s Up, “one headphone each”. The chord sequence is infused with tension, however, as if to show that this kind of “leaping the fence of memory” can’t be accomplished without some pain.

Circus Wagon is more of a parable, with the protagonist joining “a merry band” of acrobats, learning “how to catch a hand while falling through the sky, to dance beyond the you and I…” There’s also room for a charming miniature, Earth And Air, and a fine take on the traditional Rosemary Lane, its Jansch-inspired treatment lifted by invigorating, exploratory percussion and bass from Harris and Amar.

The latter’s louder final minute is as close as we get to Red River Dialect here, and it serves to demonstrate just how different this record is from Morris’ previous work: the songwriting may be similar, his voice just as idiosyncratic, if a little quieter, but the soul-searching intimacy and beautifully unembellished recording results in a completely different beast, fresher, stranger and painfully real. It exists in the moment, just like its creator has been trying to do.

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