Half Man Half Biscuit – 90 Bisodol (Crimond)

In one of the most amazing about-turns in recent pop music history Birkenhead satirists Half Man Half Biscuit have abandoned their traditional parochial approach to cross the Atlantic in order to work with Kanye West & Armand Van Helden on a triple-disc prog-rock concept album examining the post-crash breakdown of law & order in the Western World from a dialectic perspective.

As if.

For many of us the arrival of a new Biscuit platter is a BIG THING. I still haven’t worked out whether I got up before my son last Sunday morning as both of us raced to download their latest effort 24 hours before its physical release. This is the band’s 12^th album in a 26 year (!!) career and if you’ve heard any of the previous 11 then you will have a pretty good idea of what it sounds like. HMHB are the epitome of an “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” band but with an acute sense of self-awareness, most memorably displayed on CSI:Ambleside’s Lord Hereford’s Knob - great title - when they sang “All of our songs sound the same” before following this up with lines from two of their earlier efforts. In assessing any new HMHB release the key question is, I think, “How witty/clever are the songs this time out?” and the answer here is “Very”.

There’s the usual assortment of seemingly random cultural reference points, including: Gok Wan, Swarfega, Ross Kemp, Dignitas, Dick Turpin, Betterware, Jim Beglin, Watership Down, Johnny Cash (“I shot a man in Tesco just to watch him die”), an oil painting by Mercy Rimell entitled “The Raging Ostler”, Kathleen Ferrier, Oranjeboom, the Duke of Westminster, Tories at Cornbury, a Ben Sayers 4-iron, Cadfael, Tommy Walsh’s Eco House, Iceland stores and, in the surreal Descent of the Stiperstones, “The actress  Lynette McMorrough who used to play Glenda in Crossroads”, who proceeds to explain how she is reliving her previous soap-star life by assembling a collection of dolls resembling her TV family.  A particular favourite is when Left Lyrics in the Practice Room drops in a very brief refrain of “Whoah Black Sabbath, bam-a-lam, whoah Black Sabbath, bam-a-lam”.

Main man Nigel Blackwell has always had a black side to his sense of humour but a lot of the content on 90 Bisodol (Crimond) is even darker than usual - the body-count on this record is remarkably high! Excavating Rita is about… well, try to work it out - it’s a companion piece to Jimmy Cross’s I Want my Baby Back - and has a melody (yes, really!) which is very mid-period Beatles. The Coroner’s Footnote is a delightful little ditty, borrowing most of the tune of Black Velvet Band, which concerns a lovelorn fool’s attempt to commit suicide by throwing himself under the train on which his former sweetheart is leaving; this culminates in as great a couplet as I’ve heard about the selfishness of such an act: “Well he thought of a love unrequited and he thought of a life full of pain, it's a pity he didn't spare a thought for the poor bastard driving the train.” Highlight RSVP, another in Nigel’s catalogue of lost-love songs, is built around a lilting waltz-time Irish air and details the pain of the narrator finding himself catering at the wedding of his ex. Just in case you haven’t worked out what’s going on the last third of the song drops in a brief snatch of Here Comes the Bride which cleverly merges into Chopin’s Funeral March to suggest exactly where this particular yarn is heading!

It’s not all death & despair though - there’s still plenty of room for Nigel’s pedantic attitude. Fun Day in the Park reels off a list of inviting propositions from a poster (“Punch and Judy, Shetland ponies, hot dogs, beat the goalie, soft play area with free bananas, Iguana Andy and his iguanas” etc.) – very much in the manner of, again, the (other) Fab Four’s Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite – culminating in “…and much much more. For further enquiries ring this number. I rang it and asked about the much much more. I was greeted with awkward silence. They had lied to me! They had lied to me on their posters!”

The centrepiece (masterpiece?) is probably Rock And Roll is Full of Bad Wools – a 5 minute Blackwell stream of consciousness rant in the manner of CSI’s National Shite Day – which regales us with the tale of a pop star’s appearance on (presumably) Sky’s Soccer AM alongside Heston Blumenthal. All is going so well – when asked about his favourite footy teams he replies “England, Chelsea, Accy Stanley and all the band love watching Barca” before Blackwell describes an unfolding nightmare:
“But then, disastrously, they ask him casually ’You come from Leigh-on-Sea, do you ever get to Roots Hall?’ Which to him means f*** all. Can only look askance and cast a sideways glance. Could use some help with this but Heston's gone for a piss. Needs something to deflect, enter Ruddock left. ‘More doughnuts!’ shout the crew, high art shall not ensue.”

Interest in this avenue exhausted, Nigel then takes the song off to the pub, where he “… went along to what I thought was ‘Curry Night’… it transpired that Curry Night were there to play Crowded House & David Gray” and delivers one of the subtlest put-downs on the album: “They take requests – ‘play one the drummer knows'’”.

90 Bisodol (Crimond) is not going to convert many (any?) non-believers but for HMHB acolytes this is bliss.

90 Bisodol (Crimond) is available now from Probe Plus.

St. Vincent - Strange Mercy; Tori Amos - Night of the Hunters.

 

Well…. after a somewhat storming first six months of 2011, with at least half a dozen good new albums (including one bona fide classic in PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake), it’s been a very quiet last few weeks in Knob Towers. As the blissful summer sojourn draws to a close though – I think we did have a summer, allegedly – and the nights start drawing in, the last quarter of the year has a number of promising upcoming releases. First out of the traps comes this pair, both from American female singer-songwriters who share an interest in the more, shall we say, esoteric corners of pop music.

St. Vincent, aka Annie Clark, is a 28 year old Texan – 29 this month, according to Wikipedia - invariably described as “elfin” (got that out of the way early!). Strange Mercy is her third album, following 2007’s strong Marry Me and 2009’s even more impressive Actor. Annie has retained her eclectic array of song structures & musical palettes but this collection has a far heavier “electric” sound and is rather less baroque than its predecessors.

Opening track Chloe in the Afternoon kicks things off with phased synthesisers - somewhat reminiscent of Strawberry Fields Forever - quickly joined by loud crunching fuzz guitar - somewhat reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix - over which she informs us that “You're all legs, I'm all nerves”, leaving very little doubt about the song’s subject matter. The strange rhythms and phrasing which she has used so effectively in the past are in place (great chorus) and this is an impressive start to proceedings. Following this is Cruel - very 80s synth pop and very catchy.

Round and round we go, hopping through styles, much invention at every turn but never losing the sense that this is a cohesive set: Surgeon is a woozy little ditty which inhabits similar lyrical territory to Chloe… (“I spent the summer on my back “) and builds to an almost RnB/Jazz climax; Northern Lights is probably closest in tone to her earlier work (it wouldn’t feel out of place on Actor) and has a lovely rolling quality; Champagne Year is a beautiful second cousin twice-removed of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah.

Cheerleader is about as far away from what one would normally expect from such a title as I think it’s possible to be and would probably scare Britney Spears sh*itl*ss. Opening with strummed electric guitar and no percussion, it quickly becomes apparent that this is not going to be a paean to that most extolled of supposed aspirations for young American girls (“I've had good times with some bad guys; I've told whole lies with a half smile”) and bursts wide open for the pained, lumbering chorus (“But I-I-I-I-I don’t want to be your cheerleader no more”). A cracker.

Strange Mercy is, indeed, slightly strange - but quite compelling too.

Talking of strange, Tori Amos is also back with new album Night of the Hunters. For us those of us in the “like Tori” camp (to use a well-worn but appropriate cliché, she is the most Marmite of artists) a lot of her appeal is her singularity - you never really know what to expect. In 2005 my daughter and I went to see her on tour for album The Beekeeper, one of her more approachable and tuneful sets of late; she didn’t play a single track from it.

The fact that Night of the Hunters is being released on the classical Deutsche Grammophon label gives an indication of her current direction. Taking an almost contrary approach to St. Vincent it’s very baroque - wall-to-wall piano, strings and woodwind with not an electric instrument in sight. Tori has described it as “a 21st century song cycle inspired by classical music themes spanning over 400 years"; her stated brief was to “pay tribute” and “take inspiration” from original compositions by renowned composers (Bach, Chopin, Debussy, Schubert etc.) to create a new, independent work.

There is a linear linking concept here – involving an abandoned modern-day Irish woman confronted by mythical creatures, transported back through the centuries to a previous life and confronting all manner of forces on the “path to enlightenment” - but it takes a lot of work to try to figure out exactly what she’s singing about most of the time (this is not necessarily a bad thing). The tone of the whole set is reserved and quite melancholy – don’t come here looking for another Cornflake Girl or Professional Widow - although opener Shattering Sea is driven by pounding staccato piano to set the scene with a vivid description of the protagonist’s relationship breakdown (“That is not my blood on the bedroom floor; that is not the glass that I threw before”).

Highlights? Your Ghost is a far more typical Tori ballad than most of the other fare on display, along the lines of Winter, and tells of encountering a spirit dissimilar to the narrator (“He'll play a Beatles tune; me, more a Bach fugue. Is this such a great divide?”) but with whom she feels affinity - “Please leave me your ghost, I will keep him from harm”. Job’s Coffin has probably the most moving vocal performance here with a strong female perspective – “There exists a power of old who wanted Earth to be controlled, but she and she alone is her own” – and the woodwind accompaniment in particular really works. Nautical Twilight is a reasonable preview of the whole album - a tune that sounds vaguely familiar (Mendelssohn?) but with nice lyrical touches (“Greed and his twin, tyranny”).

Tori Amos - Nautical Twilight

Footnote to the above video: Am I the only one reminded of “Not the Nine O’Clock News” when watching it? Deliberate, surely?

This is undoubtedly a major talent at work and it makes for a relaxing, if not exactly “easy”, listen but, for me, Night of the Hunters is generally one to admire rather than love.

Strange Mercy is available now on 4AD. Night of the Hunters is released September 20^th on Deutsche Grammophon.