The Bathers – ‘Garlands’ from ‘Sirenesque’

For the past three decades or so I have always wanted to enjoy The Bathers’ albums more than I have done. The debut ‘Unusual Places To Die’ certainly ticked the boxes, as perhaps might have been expected for a record following on relatively shortly after the demise of Friends Again, the Bothwell band that really ought to have given singer-songwriter Chris Thomson chart topping fame. By the time of 1990’s ‘Sweet Deceit’ however, I had already started to feel distanced from Thomson’s apparent slide into ever more gravel throated deliveries, grown apart from what I suspected at the time might be overly ‘difficult’ orchestrated pretensions. And this despite a great opening line about following someone home from the Glasgow School Of Art and taking a night train to Paris, France. In many ways that line set up The Bathers trajectory, as each subsequent record seemed to immerse itself in European Bohemia, all unfiltered Gitanes smoke, Camus paperbacks and the glamour of the doomed romantic. With each subsequent album too I would think ‘this time it will be different. THIS time it will all click’ even whilst building the resigned awareness that it probably wouldn’t. I came, then, to ‘Sirenesque’ with this baggage and these doubts. Prepared to be disappointed. Underwhelmed, even. How gloriously wrong I was.

I nearly didn’t even bother. Only the irresistible pull of an opening track called ‘Culzean’ dragged me in. Like many raised on the Ayrshire coast of Scotland, Culzean is a place of childhood memory and wonderment; its grounds and Castle (a Robert Adam masterpiece) rightly considered the epitome of the Picturesque movement in Scotland. Anyone who attempted to brave the appalling adaptation of ‘The Buccaneers’ on Apple TV this year will have spotted it masquerading as the home of Lord Tintagel, but Unpopular readers are certainly more likely to know it as Lord Summerisle’s mansion in ‘The Wicker Man’. The short instrumental, punctuated with bird song, is a fitting opening to the record, for it both sets a mood and positions us within a sense of place. So whilst ’Sirenesque’ does also continue to inhabit those European Bohemian landscapes as witnessed in previous Bathers records, it also perhaps stresses historical connections and sympathies between Scotland and the Continent.

Thomson’s voice is still gravelly, but it now sounds a shade softer. More natural. Less affected, perhaps, or just that bit more mature. Indeed everything on ‘Sirenesque’ now sounds more intimate, luxuriously enfolded within the faded elegance of damask curtains exposed too long to sunlight. In many respects then Culzean feels like it not only sets the tone for the record, but also that its spirit inhabits its entirety. The songs are arranged like photographs arranged just so on a walnut Queen Anne side table, their gilt frames catching the blue from the Firth of Clyde. Squint and you can make out Ailsa Craig. Raise your eyes and you will see Arran. On the clearest day perhaps the Paps Of Jura or, looking south and west, the slimmest sliver of land that is Ireland. D.E. Stevenson was certainly familiar with the romantic possibilities of this coastline, and then, yes!, here we are at ‘The Camellia House’. Restored and reglazed in 1995, I mostly remember it in its semi-derelict state, a ghostly presence following us on night-time walks back from Maidens in the late 1980s. I wonder which state Thomson imagines it being in as his characters meet in a surreal theatrical sequence, whispers of a French woman’s voice fading in the background. “In many ways” Thomson suggests, this place “becomes their love song” and in many ways too this entire album is perhaps a love song to that aforementioned Euro/Scots romance. Or this might just be me and my imaginations. It’s entirely possible.

‘Sirenesque’ almost insists that it be listened to in its entirety, such is the manner in which each song flows from the others; each of those notional photographs picking up cues from the others to weave a dreamy narrative of romantic fiction. And whilst it may or may not be a ‘concept’ it is assuredly an album.

It is the gorgeous ‘Garlands’ to which I am most drawn, however. With the strings of the Scottish Strings Ensemble laying down a delectable bed of swooping Madras lace curtains that billow in the soft South Westerly’s, ‘Garlands’ rotates itself around a refrain where “we may laugh and we may sing”. I have visions of Joan Fontaine’s vulnerable beauty in ‘Rebecca’ here, for ‘Garlands’ is cinematic; is the understated glamour of the past filtered through a soft re-focusing of the present. Angelic voices shimmer like stars in the night and we shiver in delectable surrender.

Like the rest of the album in which it sits, it is romantic, timeless, seductive and utterly, effortlessly beguiling.

Withered Hand – ‘Serenity Prayer’ from ‘How To Love’

If Meursault and Neil Pennycook are/is adept at taking songs of gloomy introspection and sinking them in music that embraces and empathises their mood, then Withered Hand and Dan Wilson are/is expert in taking those moods and making songs that both sympathise and weirdly, wildly exaggerate them within a sound that can be astonishingly euphoric.

We’re talking degrees here of course. I mean, one suspects that children weaned on whatever the current frothy Pop Confection might happen to be the flavour du jour (my situation precludes me from familiarity with such) would find Withered Hand to be wholly lacking in joy and decidedly ‘old fashioned’. I do not make that statement pejoratively, incidentally, but nor is it an insult (though again, some might take it as such) to suggest that those of my own age who have a love of 1960s Bubblegum, 70s Powerpop and 80s/90s independent Pop and ‘rock’ might absolutely agree that there is unprecedented delight to be found in Wilson’s records.

It is nearly a decade since Withered Hand’s mighty ‘New Gods’ LP set topped the Unpopular advent and, a ten-year revision/celebration of 2009’s ‘Good News’ aside, it has been a long time to wait for a new record. ‘How To Love’ does not disappoint, and that infamous Delta 5 line about anticipation being so much better is in this instance proved wrong. 

Back in 2014 I wrote that “It seemed to me that in ’New Gods’ we glimpsed the ghosts of Gene Clark and Gram Parsons sharing a bourbon in an LA Airport lounge whilst daydreaming of peat fires and Sauchiehall Street” and in some respects that still holds true. The sound of Withered Hand does feel as though it may be both rooted in and pulled apart by a duality which takes in traditions of Scottish Folk and American Rock. These two aspects combine in a manner that at times recalls James Grant’s Love And Money, that band of former Friends Again folks who mined the Blue Eyed Soul sensation of late ‘80s Glasgow before maturing into the landscapes of Americana, turning more Jayhawks than Box Tops, perhaps.

Yet Withered Hand are better again. Somehow Dan Wilson retains an ability to conjure echoes of a soulful connection through the careful, understated placement of horns and harmonising backing vocals. When this is utilised, as on the glorious ‘Waking Up’, ‘Give Myself Away’ and ‘Misery and Company’’, it is a wonderful gasp of pleasure. Musically, these songs are dramatically exuberant, gleefully celebratory. Lyrically, however, it’s a different story. Words are downbeat, riddled with self-doubt. You sense that Dan Wilson finds all of this difficult. Making records. Being on stage. Doing the public artist thing. Life, generally, perhaps. It’s a duality that many might empathise with, and it is one that certainly seems to fire these songs onto a different plane.

If the contrast between lyrical and musical mood is marvellously exaggerated on those upbeat numbers, then the marriage of tone on the album’s two epic slow-dances is devastating. Both the album’s title track and ‘Serenity Prayer’ pass the six minute mark, the former edging closer to seven. Both too are solemn hymns to the problematic nature of existence, subtle grapplings with what we feel ourselves surrounded by, for better and for worse. Given the inevitable cultural baggage, I hesitate to reference Elliot Smith in relation to Withered Hand, but there is certainly something of Smith’s broken, blasted American Gothic Folk tradition in ‘Serenity Prayer’. Something of his whispered solitude. The song is one that acknowledges futility but one that also glimpses a light which might lead us on.

‘Thy will be done’ sings Wilson, the refrain oscillating between optimism and surrender, between belief and rejection. Moments of duality within a record to which that essence is the lifeblood.

Meursault – ‘Rats In The Corn’ from ‘Meursault’

When you see an artist named after the main character in Camus’ existential classic ‘L’Etranger’ then you have a pretty good idea of what you are going to get. Since 2008’s ‘Pissing On Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues’ set, Neil Pennycook and his band have never failed to live up/down to the name, delivering a clutch of records that are each shot through with the marvellous bleakness that one would expect. This year’s eponymous set is no exception. It glowers with a face like thunder, stands swaying in the maelstrom, laughing wickedly at the downpour. Breaks in the cloud are rare, and when they come seem only to shed the palest light in which everything looks blasted and forlorn. Even the wry humour in a title like ‘Making The Most Of The Raw Materials Of Futility’ is tentative, like the curved lip of the damaged soul whose eye you really don’t want to catch. “You are just sick” intones Pennycook, and you are never quite certain if he means you, the world, or the face he sees in the mirror. Possibly all three.

The entire album is a half hour season in hell, each song an immersive experience in a theme park dedicated to fear, loss, sorrow, (self)loathing and the awkward raw love of the outsider. It’s bookended by two extremes, two characters that meet and discover they have the same preoccupations buried beneath their oppositional appearances. Album closer ‘Teacher, Was I Wrong To Burn’ is the heartbreaker of the year, no question. The one song that can make me break down and cry. In this it puts me in mind of Red House Painters’ gorgeous, brittle ‘Michael’, both Pennycook and Kozelek mourning figures from their youth and in so doing mourning the loss of not only that youth but the stretching of time that some souls have been denied. There is a sense that in acknowledging the possibility of absence, Pennycook concludes that the bleakness of existence might just be worth its weight of pain for the fleeting pleasures of the sparkling moment. But then again, maybe not.

As suggested, album opener ‘Rats In The Corn’ is from the other end of the spectrum. The song first appeared in recorded form back in 2020 on Pennycook’s solo ‘Vol 1’ EP. Accompanied by just acoustic guitar and harmonica (and a few overdubbed vocal harmony echoes), it is a raw folk song, a Dylan-esque lament from before he freaked out the beard-stroking worthies in Newport. As a ‘full band’ recording on ‘Meursault’, however, the song is full Dylan Goes Electric, transformed into a monstrous beast that prowls and rages. Underpinned by the hum of ungrounded electrics, it feels like we are in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a de-saturated landscape where withered hands grasp rusted wire and a hunter’s moon casts shadows of lead. It’s the sound of claustrophobia, the reek of rotten vegetation and, you suspect, something more sinister. This may be a kind of environmentalist lament, a hymn to the climate crisis, if you will, but it is, appropriately enough, an existential one. It feels like a howl of anger at the inhumanity inherit in humans, a sorrowful reflection on the impotence of individuality. We’re all fucked.

More than this though, it feels like humanity’s grief echoed back on itself, the immensity of love pulling itself to pieces from within. A breathless, deathless implosion.

Marlody – ‘Runaway’ from ‘I’m Not Sure At All’

If Kara Jackson pushes back against the notion of the role of the (female) singer-songwriter being at core a confessional one, then perhaps the glorious ‘I’m Not Sure At All’ set by Marlody takes that same notion and dashes off in the opposite direction. This isn’t to do a disservice to either, incidentally, and if anything both of these two albums might be said to take different approaches to make essentially the same point, which is that artists often use their work to, literally, work things out and through. ‘I’m Not Sure At All’ then does sound confessional and autobiographical in much the same way that Jackson’s songs at times suggest, but it perhaps inevitably treads a line that is more obviously rooted in Western European Folk and singer-songwriter traditions. It’s none the worse for that either, and if Marlody’s approach is at times like a Bunyan-esque whisper (over piano rather than guitar), it is also at times reminiscent of Virginia Astley and the lovely retro-electro Pop of Deerful. 

Ten songs slip past in a little over half an hour, each a small treasure of observation and reflection. The entire album feels delicately draped in loss, disappointment, frustration and the desire to make something tangibly positive from darkness. The songs feel, for the most part, eloquently mature. They acknowledge the dispiriting hollows of depression yet never quite give way to the pressures of sorrow (not even on the brief ‘Malevolence’ in which Marlody admits to really wanting to “smash that face”, before deflecting the personal into the global as escape from the electropanic). 

This determination to not only use music as the means by which to navigate the waterways of the soul, but to simultaneously embrace and deny the seduction of the solitary is perhaps best captured on the exquisite ‘Runaway’. “I was nowhere to be found” she begins, over a plaintive keyboard sequence, repetition making its point. Now if Marlody were an angst-filled teen in thrall to the delicious theatre of desolation we might expect such an opening to lead into time-honoured r’n’r tropes of abandonment. A wallowing in the ennui of youth, perhaps. But no. Marlody instead immediately rejects these impulses. She insists instead that: “I was not lost and I didn’t really want to be a runaway soul.” Such refusal of (Pop/r’n’r/singer-songwriter) tradition and expectation, whilst at the same time musically enfolding itself within the fabric of just such a tradition is, I think, at the root of what makes the song, and the album in its totality, so appealing. 

‘I’m Not Sure At All’ may have come from a place of uncertainty and self-doubt, but there is no doubt at all that it is one of the finest quiet records of this or any year.  I for one am eager to hear more.

Kara Jackson – ‘why does the earth give us people to love?’ from ‘Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?’

I wonder sometimes if there ought to be a yearly award for the least unpopular entry in the Unpopular advent. In recent years it would have been won by mainstream artists like The Chicks and Kacey Musgraves, and whilst I make no apology for ranking both of those as favourites of their respective years, neither of them needed any additional coverage from an all but invisible blog to generate more interest.

In 2023, however, as previously noted, the mainstream has passed me by even more easily than usual. I did make another attempt to fathom the interest shown in global phenomenon Taylor Swift but once again came away bewildered. That hypothetical Unpopular award, then, is one thing that will elude Swift in 2023, though I suspect the billions of dollars earned/generated will soften the blow of bitter disappointment somewhat.

Instead, the award that doesn’t, in truth, exist is probably going to Kara Jackson, whose ‘Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?’ lit up the early summer with a blaze of articulate fury and sorrow. A record of sublime natural poetry, as one might expect from a former U.S. National Youth Poet Laureate, much of it recalls the kind of take on ‘folk’ music heard in the records of Hurray For The Riff Raff. To be crassly obvious, this is perhaps due to neither Jackson nor Alynda Segarra coming from an, ah, ‘traditional’ Eurocentric white Folk narrative, and it is their natural warping of those traditions that gives their records much of their appeal. Refreshing too is the way in which Jackson pushes back against that notion of the (female) singer-songwriter being at core a confessional one. It’s a great point that picks up on the way in which an audience might not always see the work that has gone into making something sound the way it does, particularly if that something is pared back and apparently raw, as much of ‘Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?’ is. “I don’t just draw something in my journal and sing it. I construct verses.” she points out. Indeed.

Yet as fine an album as ‘Why Does The Earth Give Us People To Love?’ is, it is the 6 plus minute title track that sits at its core and commands the most attention. Riven through with reflections on grief and loss, the song is effectively one of two parts, the first of which is a generalised lament to human impermanence within the immensity of nature’s ongoing narrative. It’s the shift in the second part of the song to the immensely personal that makes it all so effective, however. Reflecting on the loss of her best friend to cancer in 2016, Jackson writes and performs with candid, carefully crafted observations. When Jackson sings “the sight of you was vanishing” it is both brutally literal and beautifully metaphorical, whilst her recollection that “we were going to start a band, hijack my folks minivan” and  “actualise our silly plans” is heartbreaking in its simplicity and purity. Finally, Jackson concluding that she will “sing the low notes in the end” is a moment of poetic magic complimented by an arrangement of strings that on one level we know is manipulating the heightened emotion, but that on all others we submit to willingly. This is the art of the great singer-songwriter, after all. They draw us into their worlds and make us feel like we have always belonged. They make us want to empathise and they help us to feel known and heard. And they make it seem easy.

Lord Of The Isles & Ellen Renton – ‘Don’t You Ache’ (feat. Ellen Renton) from ‘My Noise is Nothing’

‘My Noise Is Nothing’ would likely have passed me by were it not for a friend on The Social Media noting its relationship to the Future Sound of London’s ‘Lifeforms’ and the moments in the KLF’s ‘Chill Out’ when a little bit of percussion drifts over the landscape. Those references are well judged of course, but although this record is naturally touched by those stones from the past, it is also one that inhabits a sublimely impermanent position in space and time.

Perhaps it is all at its best on the stunning ‘Don’t You Ache’. Renton is to the fore here; McDonald’s contribution a beautifully measured restraint of piano. Lyrically it is a delicious cascada of poignant imagery that scratches at wounds: “Sky hum in a sulk”; “Words gone tasteless like overdone gum”; “Every censored cut of morning” (or is it “cut of mourning”?); “The ease of war”; “That confident walk that cruelty has, like it knows it’ll never get caught”; “The devil’s advocate keeps pulling up a chair”… and… “Don’t you ache? Don’t you ache?” A cough on the corner. Feeling sorry for ourselves in our ultimate uselessness. Existential mirth of mourning. Or is it morning? Something like this. Or nothing. Reality is slippery.

There is something intriguing here about the way in which voice might change, or at least warp received meaning. So when Renton says the word ‘ache’ it sounds, in her delivery, more like a sharp poke in the ribs than a soft sob of sorrow. The pokes feel sharper the deeper we get into the piece, so that by its conclusion the phrase “don’t you ache?” is much more a poisoned dart of accusation than a gentle invitation for shared solace.

‘Don’t You Ache’ then might be a sublime highlight of ‘My Noise Is Nothing’, the loose tooth to which one cannot help but return, yet it is also true to say that its treasure is amplified by the brilliance it is surrounded by. There is nowhere on ‘My Noise Is Nothing’ where the level of engagement drifts. We are continually drawn into a space where meaning and feeling reverberate against one another, where glimpses of the tangible give way to shivers of extraordinary elegance. ‘My Noise Is Nothing’ is a record of magnificent quietude and one of the most essential releases of this, or any year.

My full review is published on Unpopular here: https://unpopular-culture.com/2023/10/16/reality-is-slippery/

Junkboy – ‘Chase the Knucker’ from ‘Littoral States’

On their album ‘Littoral States’, brothers Mike and Rich Hanscomb navigate coastal threads from the Bognor Regis of their father’s birth, through Worthing, Brighton, Newhaven and Seaford. Field recordings provide subtle textural backdrops to songs that inhabit a place where ancient superstitious myth and modern progressive thought meander around each other, trading occasional fleeting embraces of mutual attraction. Long term Junkboy collaborators Will Calderbank, Becca Wright, Marcus Hamblett and Owen Gillham provide cello, violins, trumpets, banjo and EBow to colour in the songs, whilst vocalist Hannah Lewis provides an occasional Sandy Denny ingredient to proceedings. The allusion to Fairport Convention is not unintentional of course, for ‘Littoral States’ is certainly a record that places itself on the arc where Folk music is given a smooch of something altogether peculiar and reveals itself to be magically Other. On ‘Sea Captain’ Lewis’ voice follows a fairly traditional folk narrative, but on the terrific ‘Chase The Knucker’ (a legendary Sussex water dragon, I’m told) and ‘Witch Of The Watery Depths’ she dissolves mostly to a kind of abstract, restrained jazz improvisation with a Liz Fraser trembulation. It would have been easy to utilise this Siren song at more points throughout the album, and it is to the Hanscomb’s credit that they recognise the value of scarcity. Less is More.

My full review is published on Caught By The River: https://www.caughtbytheriver.net/2023/10/junkboy-littoral-states-review/