After that preamble, it’s probably no surprise then to report that this was waiting for me when I got home today.  Well, no surprise to you, but one to me anyway.  Olivier Libaux may well be familiar to many as co-founder of Nouvelle Vague, a musical project covering songs from the Punk and New Wave era in a more relaxed, loungey style.  For his new project, Monsieur Libaux takes that same premise and applies it to the work of just one band.  Can you guess which one?

It’s probably not unfair to say that Queens Of The Stone Age’s position in the Rock Pantheon is somewhat unique in that they manage to counter the usual macho rock posturing with a healthy dose of femininity.  Olivier Libaux identifies this female element in each of the twelve songs featured here, extracts it carefully and then presents each tune almost 100% Yang-free.  This process leaves the essence of each track completely intact (fans will recognise most songs almost immediately), as well exposing the sultry beating heart at the centre of each composition.

This may all sound a bit twee and cosy, but thanks to the dual strokes of genius in an eclectic, sometimes unexpected and occasionally very brave set of song choices, and a cast of incredible vocalists tailored for each song makes for remarkable listening.  The “unexpected” side of things kicks off immediately with River In The Road, an aggressive original retold as an emotionally disconnected dirge reminiscent of Sharon Van Etten, thanks to Rosemary Standley’s beautifully wounded delivery.  A brightly jazzy Medication follows accompanied by Katherine Whelan, in turn followed by a slightly folky, slightly creepy rendition of Burn The Witch with messrs Homme, Lanegan and Gibbons’ respective grumpy parts sanded down and coloured in by Clare Manchon, the song being one of the loftiest highlights of Uncovered…

There’s a lovely bit in the middle where it all goes a bit John Barry in terms of cinematic grandeur and general sweeping loveliness.  In My Head sees Susan Dillane provide suitably breathy tones over a sultry, slow-burning backing, followed by the even-more-Bondlike 3′s and 7′s provided by Morcheeba’s Skye giving it the full Opening Credits beans, showing just how far you can push a song to the heights whilst keeping it familiar to the original.  Her “If ignorance is bliss, then I’m in Heaven now” line in this sends a chill down my spine.

There’s so much to pick out as potential favourites here, as it largely depends on what mood I’m in.  There’s the looney polka of Go With The Flow, the aforementioned Burn The Witch, the heart-tugging and torchy Running Joke…  I’d probably have to plump for the two contributions from Inara George though, as they are the two “bravest” choices of song in terms of potential fan-upsets, two of the trickiest to interpret, and the two most emotionally-accomplished songs here:  No One Knows is reproduced as a summery, swinging lounge number with a huge heart and a one-take vocal that is simply incredible; Hangin’ Tree has Inara transforming Mark Lanegan’s gruff yet calm delivery into shimmering ethereality.

Coming together largely via the internet (the vocalists are scattered throughout the world), it might irk the purists a bit (those same ones who will probably also moan that Track X or anything off the first two albums isn’t included) but that’s part of the fun.  The labour of love required to put this all together is evident from start to finish, and the end product is something that not only demands repeated and deeper listening but sits alongside each original track very well indeed.  It’s also made me pick up and re-appreciate Lullabies To Paralyze, an album that I never quite got into at first but hearing these versions (and I suspect that this is also Olivier’s favourite record of the three represented here) through someone else’s interpretation – particularly Alela Diane’s almost Lloyd-Webberesque I Never Came that closes the set – has made me realise that I like that record a hell of a lot more than I thought I did.  Out now, more can be seen and heard about this collection over at the QOTSAUncovered website.

They never did find out what all the Numbers Stations actually did, did they?  The Lincolnshire Poacher, Spanish Lady and Swedish Rhapsody continue to parp out their strange messages after over 30 years of operation, heralded by even stranger musical introductions.  And we still have no idea who was sending them, to whom, or indeed if these are an ongoing communication or relic of past tensions.

Boards Of Canada’s Tomorrow’s Harvest taps right into the spirit of these mysterious broadcasts, and began to do so even before the record was released;  a mysterious 12” bought in New York (followed by one other in London a couple of days later) mimicked these transmissions perfectly, a short chime followed by an inhuman voice reading out a group of six numbers…

Of course everyone goes on about this when this album is discussed, but it really does feel as though the campaign to announce the arrival of this record is an intrinsic part of the finished product, with the overall impression being of a disembodied message playing on a loop in the hope that it will one day be picked up.  There are numbers and speech dotted all about Tomorrow’s Harvest’s structure, all digitised, distorted and otherwise variously pitched so that they are almost completely incoherent, with only Telepath’s voice making occasional sense with occasional counts and instructions.  One can’t help but get the feeling that someone, somewhere with a one-time pad is listening to all of this, chuckling to themselves as they think “finally…”

As the anagrammatic Palace Posy suggests, this is a soundtrack to an apocalypse – but what and indeed when remain a mystery.  Such is the mastery behind Boards Of Canada’s gathering of the old and weaving it into the new, it feels like it could happen, or have happened, at any point thirty years either side of today.  Tracks such as Cold Earth and lead single Reach For The Dead exude a calm yet insistent feeling of an impending event with the damaged final part of Transmisiones Ferox sounding like someone’s final warning on a faded tape loop.

Much of the second half of the record has a strange feel to it after the ominous first act.  The aforementioned Palace Posy is the oddest track on here, as it’s the brightest-sounding piece, especially after the grim Collapse.  You then have some genuine uplifting beauty in Nothing Is Real, New Seeds (which contains the mystery 12”’s chiming herald during the fadeout) and Come To Dust before the leaden pall of the Russian-titled Semena Mertvyth descends to darken the mood once more.

There’s much comparison to older BoC product on many pages at the moment.  And comparisons are fairly easy to make, as if there’s one thing that Boards Of Canada are so much better at than any of their contemporaries, it’s sounding like Boards Of Canada – there’s a comforting familiarity in their analogue tones.  Tomorrow’s Harvest though blurs some edges and sharpens others (the percussion here is a lot crisper throughout) and the strange cinematic narrative that flows through this makes it their most accomplished record to date.  Indeed, if I were now to introduce someone to Boards Of Canada who had never heard them before, I would use Tomorrow’s Harvest as a description of their archetypal sound, their easiest to get into, and also their best work.

As I am wont to do occasionally, I heed the advice of someone who knows this sort of thing better than I and listened to this band whose existence I had no inkling of previously. After about 2 minutes, I forked out forty Australian dollars (an amount of which I have no Earthly notion of how much that actually is) plus shipping on this double album on vinyl that looks as good as it sounds.  Thankfully it also came with a download so I’m not having to wait for it to appear from the other side of the planet.

A ten-track double album first released in 2009 and reissued in an incredibly small amount (300 copies) on vinyl last month, The Night Terrors are from Melbourne, Australia.  And that’s the extend of any fact-based prose I have.  Which is a good thing in a way as I now have loads more space to talk about what they do, and what they do is stunning.

It’s a strange introduction to be sure - Human Hair begins with eerie synth proddings introducing a theremin, the likes of which I’ve never heard before.  The theremin to me has always been a bit otherworldly and even slightly kooky in my listening experience; that experience largely limited to horror and sci-fi from the 1950s and 60s, all containing that same spooky “otherness” that created an atmosphere that many of the shows’ sets and actors couldn’t always match (a spot of research shows that at was all so similar because it was almost all the work of one Samuel Hoffman), or Jimmy Page onstage being a bit showy with one.  Here, the instrument is played as a humanlike voice, sympathetic to what’s going on around it and creating a level of confusing beauty as it skirts around the edges of the Uncanny Valley.  And when the band let loose on the following Dream Eater with its post-rock posturing and delightfully filthy bass, it’s the theremin that strangely gives the whole thing its heart.

It’s all very intriguing stuff.  The combination of the analogue (drums, bass), the electronic (lots of synths) and the theremin in between puts The Night Terrors in largely unchartered territory for this scribe, although it’s waters I’m more than happy to float in.  I guess the only thing I can compare all this to from my experience is the terrifying Italo-prog of Goblin (who, rather handily, these guys have supported) with a light, dramatic smattering of Sigur Ròs drizzled gently over the top as and when taste dictates.  I’m probably horribly wrong in this analogy, but hey ho.  The only other comparison I can draw is that the intro to Sesquipedalian sounds a lot like Michiru Yamane’s Strange Bloodline from her soundtrack to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night – I may well be one of very few people who make that comparison though…

Back To Zero is so chock-full of surprises and twists that it’s hard to pick on any element and say “yes – this is the thing that they most sound like”, as they’re far too busy heading off elsewhere to be bothered with little details like definition.  Whether they’re being bright and beautiful as in Epithet, knowingly hard-edged during Existential Revelation In The Circle Pit At Slayer, or just plain weird with the 20-minute titular closing track, it’s forever interesting and that’s what all the best records are.  It may well get utterly confusing in places, but that’s all part of the fun.  I can’t wait to receive the full 3-dimensional package in the mail, by which time I may well have a better idea of what I’m on about.  If you would also like to be as delightfully confused and enthralled as I currently am, head on over to their website for further instruction.

So, after the best part of a decade waiting and a couple of months after the treasure hunt started, there’s a new Boards Of Canada album just around the corner, and the livestream of Tomorrow’s Harvest is upon us, which you can have a gander at by popping over to BoardsOfCanada.com.  I have no idea how this is going to work this evening given that there’s only so much can be said for an album of presumably ambient instrumental overtones and there’s only so many adjectives, metaphors and similes that cover all that.  There’s a very real chance this could wind up looking akin to a very weird wine-tasting blog if I’m not careful.
So, erm, yes.  I am really looking forward to hearing what’s going to play over the course of the next however long the album is, I fully expect to not really take this very seriously, and ongoing comments would be welcome either at the bottom of this page, or via the Twitter feed at @6dft.  Spelling/factual/most other kinds of mistakes, repetition, digression and increasing madness will no doubt ensue.

Ooh – and for those not wanting to have the record spoiled in any way, I’ll probably only be commenting on a few tracks specifically rather than picking at each one (because there’s only so fast I can type!) so hope to get the ‘spirit’ of the first listen.  But if you’re determined to hang on another week until this record is in your well-manicured little hands, then good luck, and hope you pop back afterwards to have a peep below the line here and see if I’m wildly inaccurate in hindsight.

Oh how we laughed back on Record Store Day, when someone claimed to have purchased a 12″ single from a shop in New York containing a chime and six digits.  And then how we scrambled like lunatics when another one surfaced in London.  After that, we were subjected to the strangest pre-release campaign I can remember.  Things stared appearing in the strangest of places: another code on Radio 1; yet another on a well-hidden Youtube video; a spot on Cartoon Network; a projection on the wall across the road from Rough Trade and a video at a pedestrian crossing in Tokyo…  All very mysterious, and much in keeping with the Numbers Station cryptography that spawned the campaign.

So what to expect?  Dunno – the snippet of whatever it was in Detroit last week suggests more of the same (which is no bad thing if you ask me), but Reach For The Dead suggests the addition of something slightly more contemporary in terms of sounding a little bit more digital on top of their trademark warm analogue patina…

As an aside, there has been much of a kerfuffle about listening to a record that’s imminent but not yet released.  I’m with you on that one, as spending the thick end of twenty quid on a product then listening to the thing before it arrives can make the final 3-dimensional arrival feel a bit flat.  Maybe even especially in this case, as after so much mystery and the length of time since the last album, ending the wait in such a fashion might feel like a bit of a swizz.  But when it’s a one-off event such as this, the livelisten does feel a bit like a bit of an event that adds to the whole show, and it is making me all the more anxious to get hold of the record next week rather than feel a bit “is that it?” about it all.

…a minute to go… And we’re off!

After just a few seconds, Gemini‘s intro reminds me of Blade Runner’s opening image of Hades, before eventually giving way to the now-familiar intro of Reach For The Dead.  Already established as a firm favourite in 6dft Towers, it has that knack of building up so slowly that the listener barely even notices that they’ve slowed their breathing in order to take it all in.

BTW, not sure there if there are supposed to be visuals accompanying this as I have a black screen.  A couple of people on Twitter are mentioning that their stream is cutting out, so I’m buggered if I’m going to press F5 to see what happens!

White Cyclosa now, and it’s all gone a bit John Carpenter, perhaps even a smidgen of Pye Corner Audio’s slightly paranoid otherworldliness.  And there’s nothing wrong with that.  I’m liking this a lot.

Is this what we’d describe as “typical/traditional” Boards Of Canada now?  Jacquard Causeway has those parpy synths and slightly distressed rhythms, but the drum sound is completely crisp and clear; the combination of the strangeness of the music and cleanliness of the snare is a very pleasing one.  I sound like a food critic now, and it’s only the 4th bloody track.

BTW, anyone wondering what the hell I’m going on about with regard to Numbers Stations, there’s a fascinating Radio 4 documentary on the very fellows (the doll at 10 mins post-Tufty might give you nightmares though):

And that link comes not a moment too soon, as Telepath is full of electronically-treated numbers.  No sixtyten though.  Bah.  Anyway, here’s Cold Earth which if memory serves, is the one that Detroit Squarepusher-goers were treated to briefly.  At this point of the album, I’m not sure if Tomorrow’s Harvest has well and truly sucked me into its world and I’m utterly comfy with the charms within, or this song is well in tune with their blueprint.  All very pleasingly Hi-Scoresy (same with Sick Times) and again with that crisp beat behind it.

Oops.  As I’m kind of doing what I said I wasn’t going to do by wittering on about every single track, I’m going to soak a couple of tracks up quietly while I try to fix my Twitter feed…

…Nope, Twitter is utterly borked.  Ah well.  Are we up to Collapse now?  I think we are.  Another slow builder like Reach For The Dead, and probably another one I will end up wishing was a few minutes longer.  It’s also another one with a 1980s zombie apocalypse flick feel to it.  Which makes Palace Posy‘s appearance all the more surprising, all bright grandeur with a bass sound that reminds me of that thing that the bald guy with the moustache played in King Crimson.  the name of both the man and the thing currently elude me.  Doesn’t half get weird towards the end.

Apropos of nothing but while I’m here, today also saw the postman rock up first thing this morning with an actual consignment of beer!  This sort of thing should happen more often if you ask me.  The boozy substance in question was actually four bottles of Ed Harcourt’s signature Dark Heart brew, which will form the subject of tomorrow night’s post and weirdly it’s not the first time I’ve reviewed the Demon Drink in the name of artistic endeavour either.  I might give Hanson’s recently-released Mmm-Hops a miss however, but wouldn’t turn it down if it magically appeared at all.  Which is won’t, so hey ho.

I must admit that it feels a bit odd doing this in your actual realtime, but it’s nice to think that there’s so many other people taking the time out of their day to sit and listen to this at the exact same time as everyone else is, and presumably being as equally enthralled as I am.  Hopefully one or two of you are reading this in between tracks, no doubt going “what the bloody hell’s he on about?”, and good on you for doing so, because I largely haven’t a clue.  Nice for BoC to put in the occasional interlude like the throb of Uritual so I can get up to speed.

I guess one of the things that’s grabbed me as I listen to the gentle, dreamlike surreality of Nothing Is Real, is that this is going to be one of the oddest records to hit the heights this summer thanks to the unique hype it created, and local radio DJs up and down the country will be wondering what on Earth is going on.  This is a wonderful thing indeed, and as strong an indication as any that in order to get people to listen to stuff that they might not necessarily look for, is to simply give them a reason to seek it out.  The publicity surrounding Tomorrow’s Harvest is completely generated by people who wanted to talk about it, and word of mouth is utterly invaluable now; so much better than getting a tune and incessantly banging the public over the head with it.  And, in New Seeds (playing now, as luck would have it), they even have a vaguely radio-friendly song to gently expand even further.  And is that the now-familiar chime of their code intro that plays in the fadeout?

Come To Dust is the strongest song of the set so far (Semena Mertvykh is going to have to be a stunner) as it sort of typifies the album as a whole – a track that patiently builds up and calmly fades out.  It has the same physical effect as A Winged Victory For The Sullen has on me, an almost symbiotic relationship with pulse and breath, slowing both down so that the listener gets as much of the music as possible.  And as Semena Mertvykh plays us out with the ominous tones that greeted those of us who excitedly put the 36-digit code into their website a month or so ago, I have to say that I’m stunned.  The hype that we all helped to build around Tomorrow’s Harvest was going to be so difficult to match, and it would appear that Boards Of Canada have exceeded expectation.  Rather than feel a bit of a cheat by not waiting for the vinyl to appear, I actually find myself slightly sad that I have to wait a week before listening to it again.

Anyway, that’s me done, and thank the stars for that.  Roll on next week.

Best Laid Plans, and all that.  The current default setting here at the mo is “try to do something, then knock something else together as quickly as possible because Plan A has just gone a bit wonky”.  The pic to the left of this scribbling is the majestic, erm, majesty of the planet Saturn which looks stunning through the telescope but more than a little bit smudgy when I employ a camera.  Ah well, I know what it is and that’s the main thing.  Other plans that have gone awry (including the arrival of cloud-filled skies at night no matter how clear and lovely it is during the day) have been scuppered by time and work constraints, so I hope to start doing the thing I was hoping to do last week, next week – or maybe alternate that with this on Sundays.  I’m waffling.

And if things go vaguely (or at all) well tomorrow, I’m planning on liveblogging the Tomorrow’s Harvest Listening Party starting here at about 20:45 BST.  Would be fun if you popped by, so it’s not just me hitting “update” every 10 mins, typing ridiculously fast and looking for alternate words for “ethereal”.

From Ocean Beach

Red House Painters – Cabezon

Side 1 track 1 from possibly my favourite Red House Painters album (not least because the emotional attachment I have with Rollercoaster isn’t present here), Cabezon is a shockingly amiable track that both relaxes and disarms the listener before the catalogue of heartbreak and yearning that follows.

From Tight Knit

Vetiver – Rolling Sea

There’s a few songs that remind me of children’s TV show of yore (the chorus of Afterhours’ Bianca sounding like the theme to Rainbow, for example), but this one takes the biscuit by not only sounding like the themetune to “They’re all named after lighthouses” Wicker Man remake Portland Bill, but it also references said themetune’s “Oh come with me to the rolling sea” opening lyrical gambit with the title.  Coincidence I’m sure.  Or is it?  Probably, yes.

From Porcupine

Echo & The Bunnymen – Heads Will Roll

Sometimes I wonder if the shuffle function on my iphone is actually that shuffly, as this is getting played in my car a lot.  I hope this isn’t the start of my phone becoming sentient, as then it will probably leave me.  On the plus side, this most ‘typical’ sounding Echo and The Bunnymen song from my favourite album of theirs has all their trademark bits and bobs, presented here with aplomb and panache.  And not a little “we’re so much better than everyone else” posturing, but then it wouldn’t be Echo & The Bunnymen if it wasn’t, would it?

From It’s Not How Far You Fall, It’s The Way You Land

Soulsavers – Jesus Of Nothing

Much going on here, and possibly the scariest song Mark Lanegan’s put his voice to.  The use of koto standard Sakura Sakura played over, under and behind an oppressive drone and brutally slow backbeat is creepy enough, but it’s the tabla playing that tips it over the edge for me, an incessant and strange rhythm on a weird-sounding percussion instrument that sounds like the tune my old, not quite in tip-top condition jack-in-the-box used to play when I was a baby, and that brings back all manner of fearful memories of the bloody thing.

From Towers

Baltic Fleet – Toire De

Another slice of indie-tinged electronica, or is it electronically-tinged indie?  Anyway, it’s a lovely fuzz bass that propels this tune through its duration, with a general post-punk flavour and notes of neon and dry ice that suggests that should this ever be presented in video form, then Christopher Lambert should probably appear somewhere in it.

From Creep On Creepin’ On

Timber Timbre – Do I Have Power

Speaking of videos, the one to this is stunning – do check it out.  Reminding me of a time watching The Tube when The Very Things performed The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes (and do check that out also, it’s awesome and I guarantee you’ll never have seen anything quite like it before), it’s initially a bit 1950′s schlock before the listener starts to take notice of the lyrics and it all gets a bit threatening…

From Are You Normal

Ned’s Atomic Dustbin – Intact

Looking around the internet, these guys are somewhat unfairly described as “obscure” in several quarters.  Despite not commanding the attention and plaudits as geographical comrades PWEI and The Wonderstuff, their star shone brightly in the late 1980s and early ’90s, their T-Shirt sales alone would have been the envy of pretty much every other band in existence at the time who weren’t the Inspiral Carpets, and they (over)filled the International 2 like nobody else.  This is the closing track of their “grown up” album, in between the wonderful silliness of God Fodder and the overcooked Brainbloodvolume.  Summery pop aceness with a very human heart, and it still baffles me why the two-bass approach employed by the Neddies remains such a rarity.

From Bryter Layter

Nick Drake – At The Chime Of A City Clock

After much dwelling on Pink Moon of late, I’m now firmly back into this one.  Much is made of the new Queens Of The Stone Age album featuring a cohort of famous people, but of course this is no new endeavour as this album quietly features PP Arnold, Richard Thompson, John bloody Cale! and a couple of other exciting names, so it’s testament to his songwriting prowess that in the midst of all the “featuring”s, Nick Drake’s reclusive character is the thing that sells his songs.  Strange lyrics about trousers aside, this is a beautiful song about the cosmopolitan life he never got the hang of.

From Silver Age

Bob Mould – Fugue State

I’m never quite sure if I should feel sad when listening to an old punk still sounding angry and frustrated with life’s varied pitfalls, or revitalised by it.  Bob Mould, as with Jello Biafra, should have hung up their angry hats a long time ago, leaving this sort of thing to the young.  But I guess at a time when the youth don’t really seem to care enough to want to pick up their own guitars and complain, there’s nobody other than Bob who can make the personal wrongnesses apply to whole communities and countries, and long may he continue to do so.

From Blood Speaks

Smoke Fairies – Blood Speaks

This album‘s now out in North America, so if you’re sitting listening to this for the first time then shame on you.  A stone-cold favourite of mine, this title track is a nice follow-on to Devil In My Mind (from their previous album) where instead of London churning “like it wants me for dead”, Katherine & Jessica sing of going out into the city and embracing it by going where the heart guides them rather than the head (“I move where I want to, warmed by blood”).  A beautiful sentiment in a beautiful song, it’s a shame that the guy 2 songs up didn’t quite get it.

Do I have any idea why this is the case?  Not especially, no.  I used to say that I could honestly either take or leave QotSA, but it’s something a bit stranger than that I think; more like “this is great, but I really need to be somewhere else, thanks”, going away for a bit, rinse and repeat.  On the plus side, it’s a system that works for me.

This new one is different.  On so many levels it’s different.  The main difference here being that I’m more than happy to, nay - demand to – listen ardently from start to finish.

As with one or two other things this year, the buildup to the release of …Like Clockwork has been sufficiently and happily different to everyone else’s that it will hopefully be used as a yardstick to less imaginative types when it comes to generating interest, of which I’ll illustrate with my own position of initial apathetic concern but that soon accelerated:

• They’re working on their new record?  Oh.
• They’ve got who working on it?  Oh?
• They’ve got who else piping up on it?  Oh?!
• Is that Matt Berry?  How strange!
• A song?  Ooh.
• A video appeared today?  Oh!
• Another one today?  Wow!  And another and another and another?  Wow!
• They all fit together?  Brilliant!
• A live preview show shown worldwide?  Yes please!
• It’s streaming on iTunes?  Er, no thanks.  I’ll hang on now I’ve preordered it.  But cheers anyway.

With the exception of that last bit, storming stuff.  Which made listening to the finished product that much more fun.  The 15-minute collection of violent, Akiraesque imagery courtesy of QotSA artist-in-residence Boneface (whose visual work throughout the lush album packaging gives …Like Clockwork so much of its character) gives the album a bit of a schizophrenic quality, with quickly-established songs such as I Appear Missing and My God Is The Sun from the released videos feeling as if they’ve always been there, sat next to first-plays such as Fairweather Friends and the title track.  Last week’s “here, listen to the whole thing” aside, the balance between giving people lots to talk about and leaving them with just as much again to look forward to is a great example of how to sell music to people nowadays.

Onto the record itself, and the first thing that struck me after sitting through the first playthrough is that although there has been much trumpeting about new and returning helper-outers on this record, Josh Homme takes centre stage as never before, moulding every element of his band around his vision like never before.  If there’s one thing from Rock’s pantheon that this record most feels like in terms of benign, dictatorial elegance, it’s Roger Waters grabbing the rest of Pink Floyd by their collective noses and dragging them from one end of The Wall to the other, although musically, this similarity only becomes manifest during Kalopsia (a gorgeous word so dear to Homme that the lyrics include its definition)’s quieter, yet subtly manic, moments and an utterance of “Goodbye Blue Sky” later on from Mark Lanegan.

It opens and closes in a curious fashion - Keep Your Eyes Peeled doesn’t so much introduce the new album as make the listener feel as though they’ve turned up late to something already in full swing; closer …Like Clockwork‘s dramatic downer brings the curtain down under clouds of self-doubt and sees us out of the door with “It’s all downhill from here” still ringing in our ears, wondering what’s going to happen next.

Elsewhere sees more natural progressions from QotSA’s sound: I Sat By The Ocean chugs along behind familiar vocal phrasing and harmonic directions, My God Is The Sun echoes their own Lullabies To Paralyze era with typical bombast and frantic guitar work, Smooth Sailing‘s sleazy groove could have turned up at any time during their career in one form or another and If I Had A Tail has a desert glam swagger replete with Gimme Shelter‘s guitar solo.  It’s where the mood changes however that add different colours to this particular set – the aforementioned Kalopsia starts off almost completely disconnected with thoughts disarmed and open before punctuating itself with a violent, chiding Bowie interlude or two.  There’s more Bowie-ings during bitter track Fairweather Friends where QotSA go all Spiders From Mars everywhere before exasperatingly giving up at its zenith.

Such is Homme’s benign grip on his material here that it ceases to matter who else is on or around any particular track.  Sir Elton John recorded some piano, buggered off to work with Englebert Humperdinck, and then came back again.  Jake Shears pops in.  The much parped-about returns of Mark Lanegan and – especially – Nick Oliveri can’t be heard unless you know where to look (Fairweather Friends, oohing and ahhing with Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner).  Trent Reznor’s knocking about in there somewhere.  Dave Grohl is all over the bloody thing!  But it’s one man’s record with his band (who pull together fantastically well) and collaborations feel more like friends passing by outside and going “do you mind if I just do a little thing on that?”, something akin to the work ethic of a friend (and co-worker here) of Homme’s, something also echoed in a set of lyrics that read that they are full of meaning; but what that meaning is, despite a few cracks in the wall (such as the existential I Appear Missing) is none of our business.

It’s a record that demands to be played in full from beginning to end, and it’s incredibly easy to do that as it feels like an impenetrable concept album with each song’s character feeling like part of a mysterious whole.  And while calamity may be at the heart of …Like Clockwork, the end result is one of order and an acceptance that, sometimes, bad things happen and Queens Of The Stone Age’s star sits somewhere far from their assorted and catalogued adversities.  All of which makes for an oddly uplifting and exciting experience – even operatic in places.  I just hope that Ben Elton doesn’t make a show of it in 25 years’ time.

Following from a set recorded live in Melbourne and his hugely enjoyable and eclectic Like Rats collection, Mark adjusts his oeuvre accordingly and heads off into pastures new, provided by the Album Leaf’s Jimmy Lavalle in an initially surprising fashion, but as it turns out it’s a fashion that suits both performers rather wonderfully.

Sun Kil Moon’s Among The Leaves from last year was an amiably, curmudgeonly and very wordy collection of reminiscence.  Perils From The Sea continues in that vein, although the mood is somewhat subdued compared to its predecessor.  That said, there’s never a glint in the eye very far away and even when the mood is at its darkest, there are moments and undercurrents of gratitude and even joy to ensure that the listener, as well as the orator, leaves this record better than when they entered it.

The music for this new venture is provided by Jimmy Lavalle, and it’s immediately interesting to take in when we’re all so used to Kozelek singing over the top of his guitar when What Happened To My Brother‘s entrance is heralded by minimal, almost primitive electronic backing.  The surprise is short-lived however when it becomes utterly obvious that this music and Mark’s words and voice are perfectly matched, to the point when a guitar is finally (and sparingly) heard towards the album’s end that it is that instrument that makes the listener sit up with a “where’s that come from?” expression.  The music that forms the background to Perils From The Sea is subdued and sympathetic throughout, providing a comfortable bedrock for this collection of long, monologic ruminations.

Recollections, as before, are varied and warm.  There’s Gustavo, a curiously wistful tale of a Mexican illegal immigrant who was fixing up Mark’s house and who was deported before he finished, the song carrying a slight tinge of guilt about the final phone conversation between the two men.  The first verse of By The Time That I Awoke concerns the flight attendants (and the memory of one in particular) of Korean Air.  Here Comes More Perils From The Sea seems to concern the onset of growing older, almost thankful to have some distance between the scenario played out and his own existence.

And then there are things that cut deep, sandwiched between seemingly innocuous imagery.  Ceiling Gazing recalls missed family, backed by a gently reassuring church organ.  He Always Felt Like Dancing is almost unbearably sad and elegantly beautiful in its romantic tragedy.  And the ten-minute closer Somehow The Wonder Of Life Prevails is absolutely heartbreaking and brilliantly uplifting in equal measure – the burden of the death of a friend is somewhat lightened by receiving a photo every Christmas of her growing daughter, a staggeringly moving image and one that hits home for me tonight, as halfway through writing this post I learned that a dear family friend passed away today and I’m left sad, calmed and cheered by the happiest memories of her.  But I digress.

Like Matthew Ryan’s electronic dabblings and most intimate sharings, Perils From The Sea is something that can’t be taken lightly, but it’s easy to come out of the other side with light in abundance thanks to a backing that imitates, quickens and romanticises the heartbeat it seemingly controls so easily.  The music is beautiful, the words are soft and powerful and the end result is stunning, moving and affirming in perfect, equal measure.  Even before it made bad news sufferable this evening, I’d already fallen for its meandering and occasionally begrudgingly sullen charms.  Perils From The Sea is simply a beautiful album.

Going to try to Do A Thing this week that may or may not end up being a regular going-on – there seem to be a lot more singles and EPs floating about that usual of late, so I’m hoping to have a brief rummage through these on Wednesdays.  Other than that, it’s more general deck-clearing as there’s a couple of unlooked-for gems sat here to get out of the way before some more of 2013′s Big Guns start to show up and I find further distractions away from here.

Pre-release single from Tomorrow’s Harvest

Boards Of Canada – Reach For the Dead

I am very excited about Tomorrow’s Harvest, as indeed everyone should be.  Not just for the manner of its sudden appearance after an interminable period of silence, but also for the challenge I face in writing about something with little in the way of peers – there are many who sound like Boards Of Canada, but few who Boards Of Canada sound like.  I can’t wait.  And on the same day that I read the first review in this month’s Mojo, this track appears largely unannounced on Soundcloud, followed by the video arriving shortly after on Youtube, and then the song itself appearing in my Bleep account thanks to a cheeky preorder when the code was cracked.  The song itself promises much – it still sounds like BoC, but there is something newer afoot; something a bit more digital sat on top of all the timeworn analogue beauty.  It would appear that the game is about to change all over again.

From “Gone For Good”

My Jerusalem – Valley Of Casualties

A bit of a revisit for me with this, as I’d not given Gone For Good much of a listen recently.  But as with all things of this nature, popping up at random in the car is the best way to rediscover old favourites, and listened to in isolation rather than as part of a whole does change things as well.  It’s a nice, gentle way to float into what is quite a cheerfully mad album, as well as being a great way to float into the world of My Jerusalem as a whole – and it’s a world you may not wish to leave.

Pre-release single from …Like Clockwork

Queens Of The Stone Age – My God Is The Sun

I must admit to liking Queens Of The Stone Age, but never quite as much as I feel that I should do.  No idea why this should be the case either.  But I’m happy to report that the dripfeeding of bizarre videos last week (culminating in a delightful, looping whole story) has seduced me into being rather excited for this one.  My God Is The Sun sees the band in typically tight form, and it’s bloody exciting to boot.  And sometimes “exciting” is the only reason one needs to listen to anything.

From the Mass Of The Fermenting Dregs EP

Mass Of The Fermenting Dregs – Highlight

Strangely-titled Japanese ladypunk ahoy!  One of those “no idea how I found this but so glad I did”, the curiously-monickered Mass Of The Fermenting Dregs come up with the most beautiful pop songs powered by some immensely strong instrumentation, not least a bass sound to die for.  I suspect that this may well be one of those tracks that won’t appear on the playlist below, so if it doesn’t and nothing else catches your eye this week, track this lot down – they’re amazing.

From The Villager

Matt Deighton – Jesus Loves The Rain

I’d been racking my brain (note use of singular there – “brains” implies something of size) to try to work out where I’d heard similar to the folkier parts of Bibio’s Silver Wilkinson record before, and it turns out it was this.  Recommended on a Facebook post by similarly blissed-out electronic indie types Stratus (who have a new EP out imminently – check it out here), it’s generally spoken of in hushed tones as something that kind of slipped between the cracks in the mid-90s when Britpop had the country in its awful grasp, although then again, it does sound as though it had appeared through a similar crack from 1975.  One of those little delightful songs that makes you glad you’ve just heard it.

From The Courage Of Others

Midlake – Children Of The Grounds

Another one that popped up in the car randomly, and included here for that very reason.  I’d had a really bad day at work and was really fed up driving home late.  Then this came on, and I took an hour-long detour around the country lanes after selecting the whole album.  It’s nice when music does that.

From Yes And Also Yes

Mike Doughty – Weird Summer

Well, yes.  But I’m not going to moan about the weather again (it’s rather nice today), instead I’ll go on about how this is one of those songs that just fits everything about its chosen time of year, in the way that good Christmas songs also do.  It’s also got one of my favourite “sing loud in the car” choruses.  Yes, I spend a lot of time in my car.

From The Place Beyond The Pines Soundtrack

Mike Patton – Beyond The Pines

More film soundtrackery on the pages of 6dft again, and I’m all for that kind of thing.  Faith No More vocalist and general musical omnipresence Mike Patton comes up with a corking score to a film I’ve not see yet, but whose musical cues are malevolent and unsettling – it would appear that Mr Patton has spent a bit of time in the company of the first Resident Evil (game, not film. Eww) soundtrack, and it’s sounding great here.

From The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste

Ministry – Dream Song

From the only Ministry album I’ve ever really got to grips with (although Last Temptation Of Reid they did with Jello Biafra as Lard is incredible), this track always stood out as being completely and utterly bizarre.  Lacking any of the abrasion of the whole of the rest of The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste, it’s hypnotic and rather scary in its beauty, and it’s not lost any of its power in the intervening years.

From Never Give In: A Tribute To Bad Brains

Moby: Sailin’ On

Here’s a weird thing.  I bought this record as a Bad Brains fan and as a fan of tribute albums in general, and gazing through the tracklisting this opener from Moby stands out like a sore thumb.  As it turns out, it is the track that stands out on this record, as he’s the only one who seems to have put any thought into his version, unlike the remainder of the nu-metal identikit homogeneity that makes up the rest of the album.  And given that Bad Brains were always out on their own, a record of a load of songs nearly all sounding the same is a bit of a shame.  Moby’s version sounds like you’d expect Moby covering Bad Brains would sound like, and this is the charm of it – the sound is completely different, but that attitude (ahem) is completely intact.  Bravo.

What some of us are also good at is creating our own sunshine out of whatever happens to be around.  Silver Wilkinson, the latest album from Wolverhampton-based Bibio, follows in that fine tradition of parting the clouds and repainting the skies for the benefit of the rain-dampened masses.

The album’s artwork should have given it away really, although it wasn’t until I did a bit of a search around the internet for info on this new-to-me artist that I realised that both the album’s title and Bibio’s own nom de plume are types of fishing lure.  This works incredibly well as an indication of what to expect here as there are bright, seductive, hook-laden things throughout Silver Wilkinson.

It’s a gently strange record for the most part.  Opening with the carefully-aged parping synths of The First Daffodils, the first impressions are of certain Canadian Boards, but it’s all rather in spirit and the warm patina of the sound rather than in execution as the guitar inclusion is much more integral to these songs than BoC, although any and all comparisons to them are completely favourable and well-deserved.  And when the guitar takes a more central stage such as with Mirroring All or the wonderful Dye The Water Green, comparisons are cast further towards the acid folk of respective Matts Deighton and Berry, the calm soundscaping that buoys these songs along providing a perfect disguise to these currently grey days.

It’s with À Teut À L’heure that really puts the sunshine up there.  Unashamedly cheerful and reminding me of my brother’s Gordon Giltrap albums, the 12-string acoustic matches the upbeat rhythms and forthright bass make this an unabashedly lovely, quirky pop track that should be all over the place by now and probably would have been if it wasn’t for a pair of cheeky French robots and their massive hype machine ensuring that no records other than theirs appears anywhere in public media.  One of the most beautifully happy songs I’ve heard in a long time.

It’s not without it’s weirder moments too - You sees Bibio coarsely grating the Commodore’s Just To Be Close To You and serving it us as some very confusing disco indeed is an odd highpoint, whereas Look At Orion! has someone with a spider on their face as an opening gambit before mixing plenty of spare parts together to make a very danceable yet slight;y bewildering collage, the succession of quickly appearing-then-disappearing layered elements coming across as a funked-up Focus Group.  Later on, Business Park lives up to its rather 1980s-esque title by being slightly post-punk in approach with a slight shift in worldly focus.

Silver Wilkinson is a dreamy delight from start to finish, and by crikey we need stuff like this in this miserable climate, meteorological or otherwise.  It’s something to be taken outside and enjoyed whilst lying on your back, looking at the sky no matter what time of day, night or year you happen to listen to it.

This blog is tiny, and I guess I got lucky at the start of the life of whatever this is when one or two posts started to get passed around and retweeted… I even managed to garner a few comments on posts (albeit about 50% negative), and traffic was uniformly high, certainly higher than anything I could have expected from miserably scribbling away.  And then this happened on the site where most networking occurred.

Facebook is a business (even more so now it’s gone Public) and businesses need money, but in its voracious desire to hoover up every cent from everyone and by treating piddly little sites like this with the same approach as they do General Motors, Coca-Cola etc, they’ve strangled all sense of community.  Because every view is now so precious to everyone, bands and artists are now so focused on pleading with their fans to comment, like share and retweet every snippet of info, they’re not noticing so much when people do say something about them.  Especially when things can’t be soundbitten down into a meaningless arbitrary score (“This record was the soundtrack to my losing my love and my subsequent descent into drinking and drugs, so I rate this 8/10!” – and this record exists but I’m buggered if I’m going to tell you which one it is), it does sometimes feel now that everything’s getting a bit insular and territorial now, and that does nobody any good.  Word Of Mouth is just as important for blogs such as this as it is for the people that blogs such as this write happily and freely in favour of – it means that there is an outlet of positivity that they haven’t had to pay or beg their fans for, and this symbiosis also requires participation, otherwise that $10 per day to get one’s musings out there starts to look worryingly inevitable…

So why continue, if it makes me so angry and despondent at times?  Because sometimes it’s as good an outlet for my pettier, nastier side as it is for my enthusiasm and joy.  And as I don’t spend time here writing about what I think are bad records (because I don’t buy bad records as a rule, it’s kind of a waste of money to do so), I need a slightly different target to vent my spleen .  And when I hear that someone has bought something, or even just taken the time to have a bit of a listen, based on something that’s been written here, I can’t explain just how good that feels.  On the rare occasion that a conversation is begun that sends its participants off to a record store on the basis of something that someone said, it’s brilliant.  When artists take the time to pass something on or even get in touch, it’s a fantastic feeling and I am so utterly grateful for every single time that I see something of mine appearing on Facebook or Twitter or on other people’s sites and messageboards.  Hopefully I can keep bungling away here until the pendulum swings back towards a relationship that’s much closer to “us” than “them”.

From “Dynamite Steps”

The Twilight Singers – The Blackbird and The Fox

Dynamite Steps has proved to be the most challenging Twilight Singers album for me to get into longterm, but it’s also proved to be the most rewarding.  This was the first song I heard from this record and it remains my favourite, feeling as quintesentially “Twilight Singeresque” as it’s possible to determine by their output so far.  Hopefully it won’t be too much longer before Greg Dulli picks up where he left off with this project after he’s finished with the current (and continuing, if Tweets from guitarist Dave Rosser the other day are anything to go by) Afghan Whigs reunion.

From “Full Tension Beaters”

Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra – Guts For Saxophone

I have no idea what agitator Tastsuyuki Hiyamuta opens this track with (“All the ladies”?), but no matter – this is one of the coolest tracks on a record with one of the coolest front covers.  And to describe it with such high regard when it sits on the same album as a scorching cover of Lalo Schifrin’s theme to Enter The Dragon is saying something.  Starts gently swinging, soon gets into “themetune from Ren & Stimpy” territory, goes wonderfully mad.  If only digging further back into this band’s history wasn’t so expensive…

From “Zen Arcade”

Hüsker Dü – Never Talking To You Again

I bought Hüsker Dü’s early 2×7″ Amusement/Statues thingy for Record Store Day this year (not in the initial haul, but the online plundering the week after – and I now have the Lanegan/Moby 7″ too, so I’m a happy bunny at last), and it was with some slight chuckling that much on those early single/demo tracks sounded better-produced than their major-label stuff, but I digress.  Zen Arcade might be a tad self-indulgent at time, but it’s a classic nonetheless, and it’s so well-regarded because of songs like this – poisonous, honest and beautiful.

From “Set Phazer To Stun”

The Time And Space Machine – More Cowbell

Indeed.

From “Songs Of Molly Drake”

Willis – Love Isn’t A Right

Shortly after the album of Molly Drake’s songs appeared, this 4-song EP of covers of choice cuts from that record surfaced.  Probably my favourite song of Molly’s, it’s interpreted here as a slightly torchy, Jazzy, Parisian affair that accentuates Mrs Drake’s dissatisfied middle-class housewife cautionary tale.  It’s well worth checking out both original and this version.

From “Tower Of Love”

Jim Noir – Eany Meanie

Included because the football season’s just finished and I find myself with no millionaires to get angry/euphoric about for a few months.  Sounding like Cream here, Jim Noir’s childlike sunshine-psychedelia is another of those songs that lull the listener into thinking that Summer’s finally arrived, even when it quite patently hasn’t here.  Jim has a new album out, and it’s probably time that I looked into it.

From “Milkwhite Sheets”

Isobel Campbell – Willow’s Song

I made the mistake of watching the remake of The Wicker Man again this week.  Dreadful, misogynistic film that should have been buried under the M5 instead of the wonderful original.  Cage deserved every single bee.  Anyhoo, from the soundtrack to the Proper version comes this saucy song (to be fair, they were all saucy), covered beautifully and even more Scottishly than Magnet’s rendition by Ms Campbell, demonstrating a far greater understanding of the film than anyone involved with the “step away from the bicycle” remake ever did.  Perfect for calming the ire caused by even thinking about that, and for stoking another one.  Ahem.

From “Hater”

Hater – Mona Bone Jakon

This is a record that I have yet to wax lyrical upon, and it probably won’t be long before I finally get around to it.  Another gem from a fertile Seattle scene not averse to supergrouping, this is perhaps my favourite Sub Pop album.  This opening track is a cover of the 1970 Cat Stevens song about his Gentleman, performed with no small amount of psychedelic threat here.

From “The Duckworth Lewis Method”

The Duckworth Lewis Method – Sweet Spot

The Ashes are almost upon us again, and what better way to prepare than by digging this album out again?  There is a new DLW record out shortly (with cover artwork that will be instantly familiar to anyone growing up in the 1970s as I did), until then here’s the guys being slightly saucy (this is all unintentional, I promise!) ditty which has that sort of sleazy high-registered fuzz as a goofy Queens Of The Stone Age having a bit of a laugh.  Or perhaps that’s just me.

From “Pale Green Ghosts”

John Grant – I Hate This Town

This week, John had his computer nicked off the stage at a gig in Brighton by a twat.  Hopefully it’ll turn up and happy endings will abound all over the place, but until then here’s my current favourite off his Pale Green Ghosts album that I tried to review a while back but failed miserably in my attempts to do so.  I love this song because it’s sad and funny and unfortunately it’s something that resonates so terribly with me.  One day I’ll be outta here, until then I now have this slice of beautiful empathy.

BTW, Spotify no longer shades out tracks that can’t be shared so I can’t tell if all/any of these will appear below until I publish.  Hope you enjoy and further seek out the ones you can hear here (erm), hope you decide to track down the ones you can’t.