Big Joanie—Back Home

Last month saw the death of Mimi Parker, drummer and vocalist of the band Low. Parker was one of many women whose vital contribution to shoegaze is too often sidelined for conversations about the genius of pedal-headed men. Shoegaze was quintessentially 90s—a lush and indulgent do-over of the utilitarian post-punk that dominated alternative charts in the previous decade. The UK middle-class was emerging from the dark chrysalis of the Thatcher years into a stranger and more questioning world; a world where joy was suddenly palatable because you didn’t have to be a cabinet member to have it. Shoegaze fit neatly into this depoliticised world. It prioritised sensation over message, bending its massive arrangements over often inaudible vocals. But shoegaze wasn’t just quintessentially 90s—it was feminine, too. Most of the biggest bands in the genre featured women centre stage (something you can’t say about new wave or post-punk). And in public consciousness, shoegaze and the female voice are synonymous.

Now that sound inhabits Back Home, the new album from Big Joanie. This album represents an absolutely enormous shift in sound which greatly elevates the band’s material. As courageous as Big Joanie have been with this course shift, special attention must be lavished on producer Margo Broom, who makes everything heavy as bones but skyward-soaring and ebullient.

Back Home is hook-driven, but neither cheap nor cheesy. Individual songs are colourful and varied without sacrificing sonic or thematic consistency. ‘Insecure’ sounds like the 00s anthem accompanying the clean-up the morning after a Skins party. The track channels that millennial indie style; a sort of family-friendly reinterpretation of punk, all stabbing rhythms and repetition but without any nasty bits. ‘In My Arms’ bookends the other side of punk, its progenitors; it’s a riff-driven surf ballad that plays like a rediscovered Kip Tyler track.

Stephanie Phillips’ vocals are nasal, drawling, almost lackadaisical, which just adds to the grungey mood. They work particularly well with songs like ‘Confident Man’ whose lyrics are shot through with cynicism. Somehow these vocal deliveries have great resonance and clarity too. It’s clear that behind the apparent effortlessness is real craft.

A standout from Back Home is the closer, ‘Sainted’, which is something like a New Order take on krautrock. The track is lifted by a bass drone and a luminous chorus. It’s a fitting capstone for such a strangely celebratory album. Back Home is an emotional two-hander in the same vein as The Cure’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me; both bounce between pop and pallor, both demonstrate every trick in their respective bands’ books. Up until now Big Joanie had been a band with something really great in their future. With Back Home that future has arrived.

Andrew O’Keefe

Squid—Bright Green Field

It never went away—but some would have you believe the UK is in the throes of a(nother) post-punk revival. After glutting on glorified Joy Division impersonators Protomartyr, Preoccupations and Interpol, we’ve decided to show those Yankee doodle twats how it’s done by spending half a decade creating our own insipid tribute acts to The Fall.

It’s hard to resist post-punk buzz-band fatigue. Is the industry trying to frack primordial punk ooze from some deep and forgotten cultural fissure, every few months picking a name from their raffle to herald as the New Saviours of this tired and ancient genre? Maybe it just feels that way. I put off listening to Squid for a little while because I’d been overcome by the terrifying thought they’d be as shit as all their peers. Thankfully they’re actually alright.

Bright Green Field is lighter and more psychedelic than most modern post-punk. Rather than swaggering around holding its dick in both hands like a pump-action shotgun, this album revels in eccentricity, gentle humour, and not-too-out-there experimentation. Squid channel the likes of XTC and Talking Heads, with a joyful and associative approach to songwriting. In a musical landscape dominated by depressive diet-Deathconsciousnesses and posturing pricks, the easiness and confident simplicity of Bright Green Field is properly refreshing. It’s like finally being allowed a Sprite after being forced to drink nothing but Coke for months.

The best representation of this is in the album’s (very strong) vocals. There’s no affectation of an Estuary accent to bait the 6 Music crowd. It actually feels as though Squid are trying to make good music, instead of just engaging in some kind of elaborate prank that only people within a five-mile radius of central London would understand.

Squid are unpretentious and self-aware enough to limit their goals. They aren’t trying to invert the world’s power structures using big riffs and cool shirts— nor do they waste your time screaming Hackneyed (har har) platitudes—but they still have enough bite to justify the inclusion of lyrics in their music. Their music feels spontaneous and eccentric—but respects listeners too much to blow smoke up its own bum. Definitely worth a go.

Bright Green Field is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END!—Godspeed You! Black Emperor

The latest Godspeed LP feels significant for several reasons. With its release, the band’s post-revival albums now outnumber their original run of three, solidifying this second phase of their discography as un-ignorable. The album also marks Godspeed’s return to shortwave radio samples and field recordings—largely absent from their music since 2000’s Lift Your Skinny Fists…. Most importantly, it’s been heralded as a return to the impossibly high form of their early work.

That last point is both dubious and subjective—and I’d contest that the maligned “Luciferian Towers” and Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress are far from the duds naysayers would have you believe. Asunder… is especially overlooked, replicating the fury of Godspeed’s live sets in a way that no other studio effort has quite managed.

What G_d’s Pee does do is interrupt the one-upmanship (and one-notemanship) of their discography. Revival albums have been incrementally louder and more bombastic—at the expense of nuance, variety, and that tremulous half-hope that suffuses the old stuff. Many listeners like a band’s discography to feel in conversation with itself; elaborating, contradicting and offering something fresh with every release. It’s no wonder the fatigue had set in for those guys.

G_d’s Pee touches on new territories and unexplored moods. It’s the first LP they’ve released that feels properly post-Bush (don’t ask me how—it just does). Considering Dubya stepped down in 2009, that’s a long sulk to come out of. The album responds to contemporary concerns, feeling right at home in a world where the response we must offer to global health emergencies is to sit around in our pants for a year. Committed to “waiting for the end”, as Godspeed put it, we can only look with bemused distance and seek a unifying light in the darkening hours of our species.  

The band still don’t arrange pieces with the intricacy they used to—but their grander and more direct recent style rouses without being hokey. You may have long dismissed Godspeed as ‘crescendo-core’—but that reductive take is informed by twenty years of shite imitators. This band remain among the best in their field and, twenty-five years down the line, are yet to significantly compromise.

G_d’s Pee is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

John Carpenter—Lost Themes III: Alive After Death

To the uninitiated, John Carpenter’s music must sound like another kitschy experiment; a nostalgic attempt to recapture the appeal of 70s-and-80s creature features. But Carpenter is the real deal—the trailblazer who brought us those very features; (among others) Halloween, The Thing, Escape from New York. His style was bold in its simplicity. Even the font used in his titles has become iconic and oft-imitated. Carpenter’s film and soundtrack work provided the still-indelible blueprint for any and all aspiring schlock doctors, and he remains as dark a shadow over Hollywood as ever.

Carpenter saw a late-career resurgence in the mid-2010s. Between playing video games he toured, produced new music and re-recorded old themes. Lost Themes III: Alive After Death is his latest collection of new music. It follows two moodier recent albums with a bright, explosive celebration of horror excess and cheese. Carpenter’s trademark synths bubble over into symphonic grandiosity, where once they burbled and beckoned like a tar pit. ‘Weeping Ghost’ is the most riotously silly track Carpenter has recorded since his theme for In the Mouth of Madness, and sounds like Black Sabbath trying to summon demons to the disco.

Lost Themes III is bold and loose in composition, too. Tracks are mad and balls-out in an energising way. ‘Dead Eyes’ lopes in hunchbacked baroque, ‘Carpathian Darkness’ bastardises, corrupts, inverts and deep-fries Angelo Badalamenti’s ‘Laura Palmer’s Theme’. Even when Alive After Death takes pause it does so in style. ‘Cemetery’ more resembles the ominous material of Lost Themes I and II. But it’s supercharged with crunchy electric guitar; less mood piece, more breakdown.

There are so many ideas bursting from this LP, so many perspectives of the macabre. When listening, it's impossible to ignore how enmeshed Carpenter is with the identity of screen horror as a whole. This feels like a victory lap in every sense. Carpenter has lived to see his own legacy and is relishing in it. From the outside, it feels like the director was bullied out of Hollywood for refusing to grovel for budgets, refusing to compromise creatively, refusing to temper his politics and his biting dark comedy. He produced masterpiece after masterpiece in a style nobody wanted to see. Now, desperate for cash, those same institutions recreate and imitate Carpenter’s work—which has become impossibly fashionable. The irony must make him chuckle. There is a wonderful sense of self-parody to Lost Themes III, and a signal from John Carpenter to the world: it’s been forty years, and you’re still playing catch-up.

Alive After Death is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Casper Clausen—Better Way

Better Way, which sees Efterklang alumnus Casper Clausen going solo for the first time, is an inoffensive collection of soft-edged indie jams which mimics its myriad influences with pride.

While it’s arguably redundant to say any post-2000 rock project has a Radiohead influence, similarities in this case are both too numerous and direct to ignore. Clausen’s soufflé-light voice is as versatile and lazily beautiful as Yorke’s—and sometimes finds itself subjected to identical delay effects. Instrumental elements regularly play parrot too. ‘Feel It Coming’ ascends into the same Warp-lite territory as the Radiohead of In Rainbows or The King of Limbs, patterned with irregular, krautrock-y percussion. Clausen’s style as a lyricist isn’t a million miles from Yorke, either. He favours imagistic or associative song subjects over a concrete narrative, and often repeats them like a chant, through which they accrue mystery and weight.

Clausen achieves moderate success with these techniques. He further elevates Better Way with some transformative production work, imaginatively incorporating some recognisable sounds. ‘Dark Heart’ features autotuned vocals which could be from a Poliça or a Travis Scott track, but places them so far in the background of its mix that they take on a fresh, whispery quality. These light touches—acousmatic drones under ‘8 Bit Human’, bubbling tape decay in ‘Little Words’—are the album’s best quality. In sheer lightness and musical understatement, Clausen has almost everybody in his genre beat. Better Way is as close as indie rock gets to ASMR.

Ultimately, the vocals are the kicker. Clausen’s voice has been compared to Bono—and by extension he sounds a little Chris Martin-y. The squeaky-clean male tenor isn’t as fashionable as it was fifteen years back, and may turn some listeners off completely. This is a shame, as Clausen is actually a very strong, tightly controlled vocalist. He brings the bashful Chris Martin of Parachutes Coldplay to mind; not the shouty-man of their new line of mum-pandering weepie anthems. Either way, he just ain’t Tom Waits.

This sounds facetious, but speaks to a larger problem. For something called Better Way, this album doesn’t strive to do much new. There is very little sense of danger. Not every album should reinvent the wheel, but most would benefit from bolder and more risky decisions. This is no exception; a little unsure of its own identity to get away with so fully incorporating others’ styles. Better Way is strongest at its most minimal—with standout tracks ‘Little Words’ and ‘Ocean Wave’ both built on quiet loops. This maybe reveals the album is at its best when it plagiarises least. Better Way is intricately crafted and compelling, but you may feel you’ve heard it a few times already.

Better Way is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe