Dieser von der Mundhöhle in den Kopf ausstrahlende Maultrommelsound von Sonic Boom's Suicide. Erinnert mich sehr an den Kehlkopfgesang aus Tuva.

From her new album with the same title which is going to be released January, 24th. The song is downloadable from Matador's Cat Power section.

On the Covers Record she stripped down the originals to their bare bones. You could hardly identify the songs anymore. The new song goes into the other extreme. A lush slow-burning piano ballad full of strings, country guitar and background singing. And her slightly raspy melancholic voice in the centre. It's all a little overkill (in the vein of Neil Young's Harvest album) but what a beauty.

the live version of suicide which is introduced by sonic boom with his voice reverbing around the club as a tribute to guess who? is a fucking nice trip into a world i cannot describe by words. but it's much closer to divinity than mr. spiritualized's mostly lame efforts to make a stronger song on god's son than lou reed's jesus. lord can you hear me? has got its moments though.

and how i love the way in which revolution (see a couple of posts below) sweeps all that sweet-smelling rubbish away.

Revolution. By those drone kids from Rugby I mentioned in the last post. This one is by Peter Kember aka Sonic Boom. Like all the great obsessive tracks by Spacemen 3. Which were somewhere in between Jesus & Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine. Only straighter (not what you think) and more to the point. A later album was called Taking Drugs to Make Music to Take Drugs to. Those kind of stimulants don't do any harm in appreciating his music. That's for sure.

Ein kleines Gutenachtliedchen

I could listen to this for the rest of my life. There is a whole life buried in those piano chords. A life which cries for a repeat.

p.s. the file is glitched in a bad way. i suppose you have to buy the cd then. massive attacks's danny the dog. it's the last track.

The Hoboken trio Yo La Tengo put out May I Sing with Me in 1992. As most of their albums it is an eclectic high-quality work. Not really innovative but having this immediately recognisable band sound which I would call human and down-to-earth for the lack of better words in my limited vocabulary. A kind of indie folk rock with noisy elements which has been pioneered by the Velvet Underground in the late 60s.

This is the first song on it. It starts like an acoustic guitar instrumental. By the way my favourite tracks by them are instrumentals. An unhasty, lovely tune evolves. It feels like the foreplay before the intercourse. Tender and warm. When Georgia's drums kick in, the song accelerates and gets more physical. And when she starts humming the lyrics soon after, the extended plateau of the climax is finally reached. Her singing already bears the sadness of post coitum omne animal triste in it. In the background I hear Ira bumbling in sync. At the end when we are left with the slow drums and the guitar again the melancholy fades away and the song stops rather abruptly. All good things end too quickly.

Giant Sand, the desert rock trio from Tucson, Arizona released Center of the Universe in 1992, an album where Howe Gelb and mates cover the usual wide spectrum of indie rawk, American roots music, spacy ballads, paranoid noise and some bar jazz. Compared to many other albums by them, they are quite focussed and cohesive on this one. Going in zillions of directions but never getting lost.

The opener Seeded sets the atmosphere of the record. It's a guitar freakout track on the noisy side of things. John Convertino's drums kick off the song which is then dominated by a raw electric guitar which is backed up by Paula Brown's bass. After more than half of the song Howe starts delivering his surreal opaque lyrics in his deadpan voice and the Psycho Sisters provide the antithetic humming background choir. The fierce distorted guitar attack is perfectly balanced out by the harmonical singing of the girls. It's a song about yin and yang, about ferocity and sweetness. How can anyone not love the odd genius of Howe Gelb, I will never get it. He is like a Captain Beefheart of our times. Without the Captain's delta blues fixation but with songs with tunes I can appreciate. Maybe I haven't tried enough with Don van Vliet yet though.

1992 was also a peak year for shoegazing, an originally British movement of quite slow hypnotic music characterised by textures mainly based on layers of guitars. The name comes from the fact that the bands and/or the audiences were often looking down at their shoes and dancing slowly on the spot when listening to the music. It usually has a very full sound and marries distortion and pop hooks in a way which I always found very appealing. I would say that the grandparents of shoegazing were the melodic guitar noise band Jesus & Mary Chain and the atmospheric dream pop group Cocteau Twins. Both from Scotland which I think is no coincidence. The peak of shoegazing was probably My Bloody Valentine's Loveless (who were formed in Dublin) from 1991 but in 1992 there were still quite a lot of classic releases from bands like Lush, Ride, the Pale Saints and Catherine Wheel. My favourite tune of this genre has always been Flower to Hide from the last group's debut Ferment which was produced by Tim Friese-Greene of Talk Talk.

This song has got a transcendental quality of a kind to it which I generally love in music. It reaches towards something beyond the ordinary life, it has got the touch of magic which makes listening to it almost like a religious experience. This might sound inadequate and preposterous but it is how I experience this track. Like many shoegazer bands Catherine Wheel haven't got a singer with a dominant voice. Rob Dickinson's vocals are rather thin and subdued but that only adds to the power of the music. In comparison the rich guitar sound becomes even huger as a monument becomes more gigantic on a photo when you put a tiny human next to it. There is this typical swirling movement in the guitars which totally captivates me. Together with the heavenly wistful melody building up it makes this song so addictive and infectious to me. Asking for a replay when it finishes. The best drugs are the aural ones. You don't get a hangover. On the contrary the music resonates on in your mind for a long time after you have listened to it.