The Verve - Bitter Sweet Symphony

"Bitter Sweet Symphony" is a song by the English rock band the Verve, released on 16 June 1997 by Hut Recordings and Virgin Records as the lead single from their third album, Urban Hymns. It was produced by Youth at Olympic Studios, London.
The Verve developed "Bitter Sweet Symphony" from a sample from a 1965 version of the Rolling Stones song "The Last Time" by the Andrew Oldham Orchestra, adding vocals, strings, guitar and percussion. After a lawsuit by the Rolling Stones' former manager, Allen Klein, the Verve relinquished all royalties and the Rolling Stones members Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were added to the songwriting credits. In 2019, ten years after Klein's death, Jagger, Richards, and Klein's son ceded the rights to the Verve songwriter, Richard Ashcroft.
The music video features Ashcroft walking down a busy pavement in Hoxton, London, bumping into passersby. It was played frequently on music channels and was nominated for Video of the Year, Best Group Video and Best Alternative Video at the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards. It has been parodied in television advertisements and other music videos.  From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Sweet_Symphony  

Rapunzel & Sedayne - The Railroad Boy (Died For Love)

Fleetwood, Lancashire-based Rachel McCarron and Sean Breadin are better known as Rapunzel and Sedayne. Following from their recent involvement in the well-regarded Oak, Ash and Thorn project, Songs from the Barley Temple is a new album mainly comprising traditional material with several new tracks from the duo. There is certainly plenty of material here with a total of 14 tracks featured.
Songs from the Barley Temple has an ethereal and haunting tone, medieval in spirit, yet sounding curiously contemporary at the same time. The songs feature skillful and powerful vocal harmonies with sparse instrumental accompaniments that create an occasionally disconcerting yet compelling landscape. Banjo, fiddle and cwrth (a medieval lyre) mesh well with the innovative use of a Korg Kaossilator synthesiser to provide interesting and distinctive drone effects.
Housecarpenter/ I Curse the Day showcases Rapunzel’s emotive vocals with background drones and instrumentals to create a truly eerie atmosphere. Riverdance weaves together strings and drones with harmonium to lend a timeless feel to a gloriously sung lament. In contrast, Outlaws is a far more modern piece, setting to music a 1930s poem by Bonnie Parker, of Bonnie and Clyde fame, whilst in Diver Boy Sedayne’s powerful vocals are given the opportunity to shine through. Never less than fully engaging, Songs from the Barley Temple is an album of rare quality.  From: https://brightyoungfolk.com/records/songs-from-the-barley-temple-rapunzel-and-sed

Pretenders - The Wait - Live 1980

After the complicated stomp of “Tattooed Love Boys,” side one of Pretenders went in a different direction, a slow instrumental with double entendre title of “Space Invader,” ostensibly named after a very popular arcade game of the time, highlighted by a big, rumbly Pete Farndon bass and out-of-nowhere guitar outbursts from James Honeyman-Scott that I absolutely loved. At the fade, they brought in some of the actual noises from the Space Invaders arcade game, which segued instantly to what might be my favorite song on Pretenders, the utterly incandescent “The Wait,” one of most exciting rock ‘n’ roll songs that anybody has ever performed.
I’ve often joked that Pretenders turned me from a boy into a man, and the moment Chrissie Hynde exclaimed “huuuuuuuhhhhh!” and the chittering, stuttering riff that dominates “The Wait” explodes out of the speakers is when I pretty sure it happened. (If it indeed, ever happened. Jury’s still out.) Coming after an initial outburst of guitars and drums that still hadn’t quite found a direction, it’s like Hynde is telling the song “follow me.” And boy does it ever. Weirdly enough, unlike most of the other songs on Pretenders (“The Phone Call” excepted, of course), the lyrics and singing on “The Wait” are more impressionistic and mixed lower, Hynde’s vocals becoming part of the song instead of dominating, everything being subsumed to the amazing riff (heretofore referred to as THE RIFF because I’ve been air-guitaring to it for nearly 40 years) at the heart of the song, spitting out the words to map the build up to THE RIFF’s explosion.

Said the wait child magic child work it on out now work it
The wait child pinball child pool hall child hurts
The wait child pacing child forth back now hurts
The wait child neon light late night lights hurt

And then, with Farndon picking up his bass and running away from the rest of the band as fast has he can, there’s a quick chorus while they all catch up to him and drag him back to THE RIFF.

Oh gonna hurt some child child
Gonna hurt some whoa my baby

After the second chorus, the guitars drop out and over a still on-fire Farndon and ever-sturdy Martin Chambers, Hynde sings actual words on the bridge.

I said child, child staring into the streetlight
Messed up child lonely boy tonight
Kick the wall turn the street and back again
Oh boy you’ve been forgotten

And with that, James Honeyman-Scott just totally and completely takes off: cramming about 5000 guitar solos into one, all skyrockets and pinwheels and air raid sirens and the end of the fucking world rolled into several bars of glorious noisy chaos that seems like it would be impossible to stop until it smashes headlong into THE RIFF and dissipates like a massive wave into a giant wall as Chrissie Hynde exclaims yet another dick-hardening “huuuuuuuuuhhhh!” before one last verse and chorus.
All in all, “The Wait” is an utterly tremendous and incredibly exciting piece of music, and the fact that it came after five other stunners, each one completely different from the others and yet all infused with everything I loved about rock and roll back then — and everything I still love about it — meant that it didn’t even matter that the rest of the album wasn’t quite as ovaries-to-the-wall powerful for it to totally and completely wipe me out.  From: https://medialoper.com/certain-songs-1630-pretenders-the-wait/

Talking Heads - Crosseyed And Painless

I was surprised to learn that Talking Heads made a video for “Crosseyed and Painless”. It was directed by Toni Basil, who also directed the “Once in a Lifetime” video, and briefly dated David Byrne. The band does not appear in the video; instead, it features an excellent breakdance crew, the Electric Boogaloos. (They are unrelated to the movie or the fascist movement.) It’s interesting that the video edit of the song doubles the length of the rap verse. It’s also interesting that at 3:33, Skeeter Rabbit does the moonwalk, two years before Michael Jackson did it at the Motown 25th anniversary show. The philosopher Timothy Morton, who coined the term “hyperobject,” wrote an entire book chapter about the song and its video. As you might expect from cultural criticism by a philosopher, it is very heavy and full of esoteric language, but I will do my best.

    The video stages the proximity of poor African Americans to the broken tools of modernity, far from valorizing their immiseration, offers a way to think black environmental consciousness as symptomatic of and central to the emerging ecological age, the age of global warming (p. 167).

As the William Gibson quote goes, “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

    This video and the song are part of the anthem of global anxiety, the overwhelming sensation that underlies ecological thinking like a note that no one wants to hear, a certain high-frequency hum like the sound of a malfunctioning electric pylon (p. 168).

This is definitely how I experience climate anxiety.

    “Crosseyed and Painless” is a superb example of funk, a broken blues without a story, without that four-chord trick, that twelve-bar narrative, just popping in and out, locking into that first section, like a needle stuck in the groove of a broken record. Funk evokes the repetition compulsion, returning again and again to the same part of the city, like Freud in his essay on the uncanny, over and over again to the same strange part of town, the part that is your home, made stranger by the constant popping dislocation of the groove. Funk burrows into that initial moment, the beginning of the blues sequence—the basic unhappiness that spawns the ironic enjoyment, the blue note. That chorus-like section that tries to fly from the sickening lurch of the verse, and seems for a few seconds to float above it, before descending back to uncanny home base, like a bird with a broken wing. No escape velocity can be achieved from the horrible gravity of the song, the centripetal torque emitted by the sharpened, shortened blues on heavy rotation (p. 170).

It’s not a musicologically well-supported idea that funk comes from the first four bars of the twelve-bar blues; it’s probably the other way around. However, what I think Morton is saying is that for Talking Heads in 1980, twelve-bar blues would have been the familiar template, and funk would have felt like looping the first four bars.

    Haunted by illusion, lies, anxiety, the black working class knows the secret life of things, the way they are in excess of their social role. Yet inner space does not provide a refuge from the outer world. There is no escape from this implicitly racist environmentality: The feeling returns / Whenever we close our eyes. Race, environment, nonhuman things are intertwined (p. 175).

Environmental racism is real. David Byrne gets into that with his bicycle activism, and in his book about biking around different world cities.

    Between the flattened seventh and the tonic note of the funk sequence, there is nothing, not even nothing—an oukontic nothing, like the forbidden gap between electron levels, which an electron jumps across when excited by a photon in the crystal lattice on a phosphor screen (p. 181).

“Oukontic” means absolute, as opposed to relative. Thinking of scale degrees as quantum modes of vibration is a rich and generative analogy. The flat seventh in blues probably arose from the seventh harmonic in the natural overtone series.

    The horrible familiarity and strangeness of anxiety, its uncanny creepiness that seems to lurk just off of the edge of our perception like a car in a driveway beside the street we’re walking on, or a car approaching in your wing mirror. U.S. car wing mirrors are object-oriented ontologists: they say, “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” The trouble with ecology is that it brings everything too close. Things become vivid, yet unreal, at the very same time and for the very same reasons (p. 185).

How much of any of this might have been in David Byrne’s mind, or any of the other Talking Heads, or Brian Eno or Toni Basil or the Electric Boogaloos? Maybe not consciously, for any of them, but unconsciously, it would make sense. The whole point of the Talking Heads aesthetic is to sneak intuition around the barrier of the conscious intentional mind.  

From: https://www.ethanhein.com/wp/2022/crosseyed-and-painless/

Cellar Darling - Dance

To get the obvious out of the way immediately, how are you all feeling as the release date of your debut is coming up?

Anna: Great! I’m exhausted, but in a positive way. We gave it our all, we poured a lot of energy and creativity into this album.

Merlin: We’ve worked on this album non-stop since the day we started the band, pretty much exactly one year ago. I would say it’s probably the most important release of our lives; at least it is for me. So there is certainly much anticipation!

How did you form your partnership with Nuclear Blast, and how is it going so far?

Merlin: As you might know, we’ve worked with Nuclear Blast with our previous band for nearly a decade already – we knew they have an outstanding team, and we knew they’d be among the first we would reach out to.

Anna: We sent them the two tracks we released last year (“Challenge” and “Fire, Wind & Earth”) and they immediately wanted to sign us. It’s going great, we’re very happy to work with them again.

Have you, at any point, considered adding more members to your band, or why have you decided to keep it as just the three of you? The obvious “missing link,” so to speak, would be a bassist.

Anna: No, Cellar Darling is the three of us and it works perfectly this way. Ivo is an amazing bassist, plays bass on the album and we’ll work with session musicians for live shows.

Merlin: I think a big part of the strength of this band is that we’ve been recording and touring together for years – we know what works, we know we work, and this established and proven symbiosis lies very much at the core of “This is the Sound,” too.

You played with Amorphis and Anneke van Giersbergen at the end of last year – what were some of the highlights? Were there any Spinal Tap moments worth sharing?

Anna: The first show with Amorphis was a bit shaky because of technical problems we had, but we still enjoyed the show and received positive feedback. The show supporting Anneke was much better and the entire trip was basically just one huge party. We traveled with a tour bus and brought all my friends along. Why? Because Amsterdam!

How does it feel to have so few people on stage, as compared to before?

Anna: Definitely very different, I think every person feels like they’re more “on display” than before. But that can also be a good thing, a lot of focus comes with it.

Ivo: It’s challenging too, but in a good way. Besides having more space on stage, it also opens up new possibilities for the live show.

Merlin: For me, there is more room for musicality; I can focus fully on what everyone else on stage is doing, and vice versa.

I’m not sure how the song-writing process went with Eluveitie, but I suppose it’s safe to assume that Chrigel was largely in charge? What differences, both positive and negative, did you notice now, working as a smaller collective?

Anna: Yes, Chrigel was the main songwriter in Eluveitie, with Ivo contributing a lot of riffs and songs and myself also being involved here and there. Cellar Darling songs are written collaboratively, based on ideas from Ivo or myself. It’s a group effort and you can hear that our songs are a symbiosis of us three and not one mastermind with a backing band. We experiment a lot in the rehearsal room and often also arrange whole songs together.

Merlin: From the very first Cellar Darling rehearsal, we played and explored ideas together in the same room—something which was entirely new for all of us, and something which I’ve enjoyed tremendously. We had been wanting to explore this way of working for some time, and it was quite surprising just how naturally it worked for us. The song we worked on during that first rehearsal actually made it on the album, albeit after many iterations!

How did it feel to work with so many fewer instruments now?

Anna: I don’t really perceive it as so much less to be honest. Besides the normal band line-up there’s the hurdy-gurdy, flute, strings, piano & even an Uilleann pipe on the album. But of course, our music focuses on what three people play and that is less, but I think it’s great.

Does your current music feel simplistic in any way to you by comparison? And if so, is that a nice change, or is it a bit strange?

Anna: Not at all actually, I think there’s much more variety in our arrangements. Fewer instruments does not equal simple.

Ivo: It’s not strange at all. Having fewer instruments also means that each instrument has more focus, which doesn’t make the songwriting process any easier or more simplistic. In fact, this approach feels more natural to me instead of having a checklist of instruments which have to be on every song.

Do you feel as though the lyrics carry more power with fewer instruments backing them?

Anna: That’s not really something I’ve thought about… we just write music, impulsively, and that results in something. Too much thinking would ruin that magical process.

I’ve noticed that your music is extremely catchy; for example, “Challenge” gets stuck in my head every time I think about it, let alone listen to it. Do you write that intent in mind, or is it just a pleasant side effect of the process?

Anna: That’s nice to hear! I never write music with any intent, it just happens naturally.

Ivo: The music I write mostly starts with a certain mood I am currently in; it’s not something I can control on my own. We don’t sit down and “plan” to make catchy melodies, they just evolve during the writing process.

Many bands travel the self-titled road for their debut – how did you come up with “This is the Sound” for the album title (which I assume is taken from the line in “Challenge”)?

Anna: We had a long list of album title candidates and like with most things, we went with the option that just felt right. “This is the Sound” is a statement to ourselves – we found our sound with this album and we’re thrilled about that.

Anna has said in other interviews that she never directly addresses things in her lyrics (like the story of eating too much ice cream)—are there any stories behind songs on the album that are similarly metaphorical? And what might the original stories/inspirations be, if you don’t mind sharing?

Anna: I think pretty much all songs on this album are metaphorical. I noticed at the end of our songwriting sessions that a lot of songs deal with “the end” in some way or another, whether that is in the form of death or the apocalypse… I guess I wrote about those topics because I was still processing the Eluveitie split without fully realizing it. It’s so interesting how our mind can tell us things and give creative hints like that. Another track that is very personal is “Redemption.” It’s about the people we love, yet manage to hurt, and the regret that comes with it. I turned it into a story about a magical moor that can take you in and give birth to you again as a new person. But with a price.

Are there any overarching themes or concepts on the album, or is each song an individual element? Is there any message you were trying to get across with the music or lyrics? What is the album “about,” if anything?

Anna: There is no lyrical concept; each song tells it’s own story. The only concept being the way the lyrics are written, as stories. I want the listener to drift off into another world, see pictures and colors. Like I do when I’m composing them, or when I’m listening to music that I like. My message is to use your imagination; it’s the most valuable and powerful thing you have.

The length of your songs is surprisingly varied—“Water” is a mere 1:54 minutes, while “Hedonia” is 7:29—how did some songs end up so short, while others were so long?

Anna: Song lengths are never intentional, they just happen naturally. Here once again we just do what feels right to us.

Finally, the phrase “cellar door” has, for many, many years (a century even), been considered to be one of the most beautiful phrases in the English language. Do you agree, and do you think that “Cellar Darling” has a similar beauty, as it is phonetically similar?

Anna: I do actually! I’ve always loved the combination of words, there’s something about them. Cellar is dark and Darling is light, like our music.

From: https://www.bearwiseman.com/off-the-record-interviews/off-the-record-with-cellar-darling

Strawbs - Grave New World Promo Film 1972

Grave New World - the movie. Strawbs' epic album Grave New World was one of the first full-length rock videos, made in 1972, long before the ground-breaking "Bohemian Rhapsody" and latterly MTV made it essential for single releases to have videos to accompany them. The film was directed by Steve Turner and was recorded at Television International's studios in London in 1972. The video made intensive use of the then new technique of colour separation overlay, or chroma-keying as it is now known. The images generated at the Whitfield Street studio were recorded at Tvi's editing facility in Windmill Street. The film was edited by Barry Stevens who later edited the promo for Bohemian Rhapsody. The edited master was then transferred via an optical printed to 35mm film stock for projection at cinemas, a hugely expensive operation even today.
I saw it as a double bill some time after its initial release, coupled with either Emerson Lake & Palmer's Pictures At An Exhibition, or Pink Floyd Live In Pompeii. The Cousins/Hooper/Ford/Hudson/Weaver line-up perform most of the tracks from GNW, against a variety of settings - gogo dancers, swirling psychedelia, and most notably - in the case of the stunning "New World" - some powerful and frankly disturbing images of riots, wars and famine, which underline the song's relevance not just to the troubles in Northern Ireland which inspired it, but to all forms of human suffering.  From: https://www.strawbsweb.co.uk/video/tokyo/tokyo.asp

The Electric Crayon Set - Calling on the Cards

They wish it could 1967 again! But don’t we all? They even refer to XTC and Martin Newell as to their future, and therefore at the moment (of the imaginary 1967) non-existing influences, and as for their own “contemporary” ones, for an observer that’s in the know, the name of the band inspired by the fifth (dimension?) one of the Rubble series, featuring The (pre-Creation) Mark Four, The Poets, The Game, The Attack, Fire and the like, makes it all clear enough.
Both of the tracks from last year’s promo CD single Don’t Make Me Squeeze Yar Balls, Man … (reviewed elsewhere on these pages) are present, with the Blossom Toes kind of a Britsike quirk of Good Girl, now at least equalled if not bettered with the album’s opening title tune, put through an additional XTC filer, the same one that the popsike pair of Spacedust and Black Prince are being put through.
Likewise, the cockney-ish Britpop of the Small Faces-through-Modernlife-era-Blur kind, of the other single track These Nights Are Supernatural is being accompanied with Kitty Ruxpin, while there’s also some equally slightlydelic Drake-meets-Donovan-like folky stuff to be heard in Morning Of Magicians, as well as some upbeat blue-eyed soul in Key To The Sacred Pattern, with some “singing-bird-like” 12-string fills thrown in, just for the jangle of it... and also, I’d like to think that they seem to have been paying attention to my previous review, and therefore giving a much more serious thought to the artwork, here displaying their West Ham United admiration in spite of the several seas between them.  From: https://popdiggers.com/the-electric-crayon-set-what-a-rotter-of-a-day/