‘And so as the dust settles about what (at least social mediumistically) appeared to be another successful Record Store Day, and the furore surrounding preposterously limited 7” releases subsides, are you ultimately left heavily laden with all that you were after? Did you waste many pounds, or make enough on eBay to polish your conscious? Has all faith been expeditiously restored in that most covetable of physical formats?
Well personally, I got to the back of a sidewinding Rough Trade East queue, only to turn back on myself after a half-hour stood roasting in the belatedly estival rays London came smothered in over the weekend. Feels as though I’ve now half a forehead, such is its frazzled, florid complexion this afternoon under the charcoal gloom which today returned to fester overhead, though this is the one song I’ve been so desperate to bathe in since the release list was first issued some weeks ago, and it comes from none other than Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. It’s entitled Animal X, and features the abattoir bluesman spinning an ever grandiloquent yarn atop atonal drones squealed from Warren Ellis’ weatherbeaten Strad; “a kinda humming” incongruous with everything, if not the lugubrious Water’s Edge from Push the Sky Away. It sounds a whimsical work – one composed “just for the joy of it” – which will doubtless therefore ensure it be in keeping with all those frivolous purchases made some days ago now, although it’s indeed “hard to tell” of its ineffable creaking musical, and so too visceral seething lyrical.’
Push the Sky Away is out now on Bad Seed Ltd.
Posts tagged Dirty Three.
‘Feeling nice and euphoric following on from that snippet of spangly, newfangled Daft Punk? Well, prepare to have that warm and fuzzy feeling of synthetically forged familiarity brutally savaged by the below. It’s the first I’ve heard of a genuinely terrifying young something named Kirin J Callinan – the one and only Australiana artist I’ve yet to investigate. He hails from Sydney, though Embracism – a thinly veiled Tom Waits-ism that’s as if one of Warren Ellis’ long and winding narratives set to a strangely cathartic, if heavily vitriolic grind – is spawned of an altogether more chthonian ambience, as Callinan tells of “two lads” scrapping each other to shreds out back. Lyrically, it plays into the deep-rooted homoeroticisms and primitivities of public school – the primordiality of Golding meeting with the profound patriotism of Welland – as this particular author continues to spit and seethe: “A man can meet another man/ In a bar/ On the sportsfield/ At his place of work/ Or in his own apartment/ Or on the internet right now.” His impassioned, highly aggravated words intensifying all the while, Embracism conversely opens up musically as it shudders on, gradually transmogrified into the sort of expansive synthpop Underworld extricated for their soundtracking of our Opening Ceremony though it’s Callinan’s discombobulating vocal, and the irritation it articulates which really instils a stirring sense of discomfort here. For rarely is machoism as proficiently confronted within a musical context as it is so explicitly and so too consistently throughout, and thus Embracism ultimately feels infinitely more emancipating than any number of condescending infomercials addressing male reticence with to regard to health matters mental, or indeed physical. This one of course errs incontrovertibly on the side of that latter, what with it being a meaty, corporeal recording if ever there were and if it doesn’t succeed in bashing some form of sense into you, well, perhaps nothing ever could…’
DOWNLOAD: Kirin J Callinan, Embracism.
‘I’ve been meaning to write something suitably effusive on grubby Ontario trio The Dirty Nil for quite some while now and even though they don’t quite make my top three for dirty somethings (that’ll be the ‘Projectors, the ‘Three, and the ‘Beaches in that very particular order) their latest, Zombie Eyed, is well worth a listen in on. Well, I say that, even though it’s one to keep a safe distance from at all times as all squalid distortions and rambunctious drums, it sounds akin to Pinkerton regurgitated – gristle ‘n’ all – by a nauseous Boss MD-2. A giddy thriller that’s as ruinous as it is revitalising, get down and dirty posthaste.’
‘As they strive to Push the Sky Away, they succeed only in reeling us in yet closer.’
Dots & Dashes review the fifteenth studio full-length from Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds.
