Review: Foamy Lather by Ultralash

I wrote the words below whilst on the reviewing team at MOG. But it was recently brought to my attention that my review, as it appears on MOG following that site's redesign, is now practically unreadable.

So here's a neatened up version.

There's not enough written about the band in question – Ultralash – on the web. So I figured that what there is should be easily accessible. For this is a fine band.

So: the review.

Imagine a lo-fi, countrified, battery-operated Portishead.

Right? Easy. Now, add a dusting of insouciant Damon Albarn (bear with me), the alt-rock nursery-rhyme quality of Eels, and, finally, a seasoning of late 80s/early 90s synth-pop.

Got that?

Possibly not. But I've made one point, at least: Ultralash is quite an unusual-sounding outfit.

Lads' mag alt-folk?

It's an odd name, for starters. Ultralash! Here in the UK, at least (I know not how universal the slang phrase "on the lash" may be), it could pass for the title of a lads' mag, or an 'edgy' Channel 4 documentary focusing on underage drinking and club culture.

I have to say that the sound of this record is nothing like my idea of a band called Ultralash. Which is not – I might add – necessarily a bad thing.

This is an experimental album – not trendy, not a la mode. Its roots are in American folk – but this record is 'folk' in its broadest, least generic sense. The slightly ramshackle, rough-edged juxtapositions of electronic and acoustic elements – trundling samples against fingerpicked guitar – is suggestive of the alt-country genre. I hear echoes of Grandaddy's fascination with organicised technology (although Ultralash is sparser, far less lush and accessible) and, more distinctly, of Sparklehorse – particularly the use of distorted, choppy mechanical loops, and the practice of interspersing short, sample-based interlude tracks amongst the album's longer songs.

Avoiding the cliches

For a record with its heart in folk/country, Foamy Lather avoids just about every potential cliche of those genres. Often, vocals take a subordinate role in these songs: sketchy, distant in the mix, effects-laden and detached. At times, reminiscent of PJ Harvey's excellent White Chalk.

Unlike White Chalk, though, this is a beat-suffused album. The dirty, roomy kit sound of opener 'Like a Daisy' is meaty and confidently simple: alongside the distorted, off-key bass, it's the backbone of the track, rather than a nuanced accompaniment. Rhythms, samples and loops frequently and emphatically take centre-stage.

Indeed, it's not until the fourth track – the rather lovely 'Dayglow' – that we hear Karry Walker's vocals mixed clean and upfront. It's an affecting, versatile voice, and the performance eloquently captures the weary quality of the song. I'm glad she made us wait three tracks for it.

Noncommittal Modernism - slaloming from melancholia to noise

Foamy Lather's songs are often explorations of single ideas and motifs, rather than complex, crafted entities. Development tends to be in arrangement and performance rather than built into the songs' structures. The impression is of a fragmentary work – slaloming from acoustic melancholia to collages of mechanical noise.

There's something Modernist about it all - rather TS Eliot ("a heap of broken images") – and the listener is quite deliberately (it seems to me) left to make sense of the bizarre juxtapositions and extreme, sudden shifts in tone and colour.

All of which, of course, makes it a difficult record about which to make general observations. I might call it sparse in nature – but then I think of the burst of lushness (strings, vocal harmonies, dirty drums) towards the end of 'Girl On Girl'. Listening to the pitch-bent, woozy near-bitonality of 'Whiskey Sour', I might call it obscure and capricious ... Or apathetic, wry and remote, with the Blur-like, "can't be bothered" vocal inflections of 'Turn Me On'. And then I stumble upon a gem of heartfelt sincerity – the nostalgia-tinted, melancholic 'Bury Me' – that knocks my carefully-assembled adjectives into disarray.

It's enigmatic, then – and eclectic. And challenging. In the best way.

Provocative.

Sugary platitudes + chauvinism

Which brings me to the song I've chosen to feature. Download an mp3 of 'World Of Suck' by Ultralash.

Bearing in mind my words above, it may need not be said that there's no representative track on this album – no neat encapsulation of the Ultralash sound. But I think 'World Of Suck' illustrates what I (perhaps pretentiously) think of as the band's noncommittal modernism.

Again, carried by a weighty beat (heavily distorted – bit-crushed – kit), it's a poker-faced 'Nothing Compares 2 U' (Sinnead O'Connor's version) for the 00s – its lyrics juxtaposing sugary romantic platitudes with intense chauvinism:

You're cute

Nice rack

Not fat

What's that?

You're fine

I can really talk to you.

It's a brilliantly unsettling song: by turns comical and dark, impenetrably delivered. Again, I'm reminded of PJ Harvey – in spirit and fearlessness more than in sound. Investigate: visit the Ultralash website.

PJ Harvey & John Parish -- Live

A couple of days ago (on Thursday night, to be precise), Heavy Soil was fortunate enough to witness the musicmaking of Ms PJ Harvey and Mr J Parish (and band), in Oxford Brookes Student Union. Take a glance at the following video, courtesy of petemanning1975, for a wee taste:

I twittered my impressions as follows (if you want chronological sense, go from the bottom up):

• Good length gig. ie shorter than normal. Keeps it fresh. More gigs should be shorter, sez I.10:24 PM Apr 16th from TwitterForiPhone
  
  
• April is weighty as hell. Dark as molasses. #pjharvey10:20 PM Apr 16th from TwitterForiPhone
  
  
• Pig will not is better live10:06 PM Apr 16th from TwitterForiPhone
  
  
• Passionless pointless takes on for a moment the character of a blur slow stadium number. #pjharvey10:00 PM Apr 16th from TwitterForiPhone
  
  
• Masterful transition between two songs. Guitar and drums/keys play 16 bars or so in different time signatures from one another.9:53 PM Apr 16th from TwitterForiPhone
  
  
• Leaving california. Effortlessly falling into the high register again. Superbly retains the scooped out ethereality of the record9:46 PM Apr 16th from TwitterForiPhone
  
  
• 'chair'. Rock. This is very good. Not often a live mix gives real power to bass and kit yet retains vocal clarity9:42 PM Apr 16th from TwitterForiPhone
  
• 
  
• Thinning of texture for 'the soldier' works superbly. Great high register. Fragile.9:29 PM Apr 16th from TwitterForiPhone
  
  
• Her voice is superb, live. And - thank god - they've got the mix right.9:17 PM Apr 16th from TwitterForiPhone
  
  
• Pj Harvey live in Oxford. First song = black hearted love.9:03 PM Apr 16th from TwitterForiPhone
  

... So, yes, it was rather good. Though I couldn't help but think: if PJH is this good live when playing only collaborative numbers (the songs were taken from just the two albums released jointly by PJH + Parish, with no PJH solo material), she'd be friggin' excellent doing her own stuff.

I like the PJH/Parish music, but it generally (taken as a whole) lacks the variety and intensity of the solo albums.

Download an mp3 of 'Rope Bridge Crossing' by PJ Harvey and John Parish

Read Heavy Soil's review of A Woman, A Man, Walked By, the new album by PJ Harvey and John Parish

Review: A Woman A Man Walked By, by PJ Harvey and John Parish

So, you've seen the video for 'Black Hearted Love'? Good, innit?

But what about the album?

It's called A Woman, A Man, Walked By, and it was released on Monday. PJH's site altruistically offers a list of emporia in which you can snaffle it up.

Something New, Or More Of The Same?

PJH is all about reinvention. Few artists (and extraordinarily few with a comparably high profile) have explored so rich an array of voices and identities over the course of their career. How much of a change is A Woman, A Man, Walked By, relative to what's gone before?

Like White Chalk, there is a fascination with textures (meaning the combination of instruments and sounds at any one time) and timbres (meaning the tones and sonic characteristics of each individual instrument or sound). And also like White Chalk, there's a lot of percussion going on, but hardly ever courtesy of a drum kit. PJH and John Parish seem to favour not only acoustic, minimalist percussion (tambourines, hand drums and the like), but also percussive instrumentation and production.

So guitars are real rhythm instruments – woody and brittle or diced, metallic, rattlingly hacked ... And they're equalised in such a way as to accentuate the attack of each strum or pick – so that the songs drive without having their detail obscured by tub-thumping.

Guitars figure centrally, then. Nevertheless they're not perhaps as prominent or as open-throttled as the single 'Black Hearted Love' might've led us to expect. There's not as much uncomplicated rocking out as I'd expected having heard the single, with its expansive riffing and bluesy crunch – but there's lots of sonic inventiveness.

Not that I want y'all to think that this is a delicate, subtle record.

It's not. Fourth track 'Chair', for instance, is unsettlingly rootless, trip-hop-laced, oscillating between squally, punctuative rock onslaughts and eerily warbling pipe-organ-like sounds ... With its sudden, vertiginous transitions, the overall effect is something akin to Radiohead's 'Trans-Atlantic Drawl' [youtube] – a song (incidentally) that's criminally neglected thanks to its obscure B-side status, but actually one of the best – most interesting – things they've written.

(Radiohead's has way more key changes, though ...)

[Hey – why don't you just download PJ Harvey's 'Chair' as an mp3 and see what you make of it?]

Vocally – as ever – PJH is ventriloquistic. In 'April', she takes on the voice of a wheezy old soul singer – which, in combination with the rotary organ accompaniment, gives the song a tawdry, jaded, weary quality – until it soars to its impassioned, cracked climax, before subsiding again.

Then, in closing 'Cracks In The Canvas', she's doing the poetry-set-to-music thing that's so cringeworthy in the hands of those like George Pringle [last.fm]. It's not cringeworthy here – though she's still not quite as good at it as Jarvis Cocker (compare Pulp's superb 'David's Last Summer' [Last.fm link]).

'Passionless, Pointless' is all delay-soaked melancholy and hypnotic tremolo – but perhaps a little directionless (a nice unexpected key-change would've made it for me. But Heavy Soil is a shameless courtesan in the harem of the unexpected key-change, as you'll know by now).

Some of the unflinchingly aggressive, testosteroney delivery – which can veer into unpleasant territory, I presume deliberately – recalls Uh Huh Her (to my mind, her least successful album). I'm thinking of 'Pig Will Not' (which actually contains distorted vocal frequencies harsh enough to make me wince) and the brawling, sneering vocal assault of the album's title track. I have little doubt that it's intelligent as opposed to mindless shape-shifting and histrionics – and (boy) it certainly has an effect – but it's not necessarily easy or pleasant to listen to.

(... But is that what we come to PJH for? Methinks not.)

There is certainly a Kid A quality to this record in its combined austerity and pugnacious defiance. I'd link it, too, to Portishead's brilliant Third (indeed, songs such as 'The Soldier' tap into very similar sonic territories – washed-out, desaturated operating-room-folk). While White Chalk was veiled, subtle, shimmering, sunbleached, dignified, A Woman, A Man, Walked By is neurotically restless, by turns demandingly hysterical and obscurely reticent.

Put it all together then, Heavy Soil. It's what we pay you for.

(Eh? You pay me?)

Well, we're swinging from the excesses of Uh Huh Her to the otherwordliness of White Chalk, all imbued with something of the spirit of To Bring You My Love. There's a kind of rabidness –a glassy-eyed, bolshy unpredictability to the whole thing – and the album certainly feels (at times) as close to the edge as did Rid Of Me.

Musically, though, it meanders a little at times. Part of its nature (the artistic conception behind it, I'd hazard) is to be far less consistent, less encapsulated-in-amber, than White Chalk. It sets out to do something quite different – something far more intrusive; active, not passive. And the music successfully sets my head spinning. As might a bloke who clocks me round the bonce with a baseball bat, before tenderly kneeling at my side and reciting Gerard Manley Hopkins.

But if I'm judging the album as a deliberately provocative piece of art, I think it falls slightly short of excellence. At times, it's treading water. Not often, perhaps. But enough occasionally to let up on the bewilderment and to allow me to relax into a degree of familiarity.

In a way that albums such as the aforementioned Third (and, for that matter, Kid A) do not.

I suppose what I'm saying is, if PJH and John Parish are going to go for the unpredictably neurotic, they have to make sure it doesn't slip. And occasionally, it does. And, whatever they say, there are times on this record at which I feel I could be listening to an outtake from earlier album recording sessions. 'The Soldier' – to pick one song – could be a track on White Chalk.

... And, curiously, it's songs like the superb, soaring, matt-laminated 'Black Hearted Love' (certainly one of the album's most enjoyable) that jar in the context of the more aggressive, uncompromising stuff.

It's a good album, definitely. But (funnily enough, given the raw immediacy of some of the material) I don't think it's been pushed quite hard enough in places to be entirely what it wants to be.

As ever, the mp3 is provided in order that you may appraise. If said appraisal is positive, Heavy Soil urges you to position your money in a similar position to your mouth and buy the album.

Black hearts and bouncy castles

Below is the video for 'Black Hearted Love' by PJ Harvey and John Parish – whose album, A Woman A Man Walked By, is out today.

Heavy Soil, indeed, has just bought its own copy. On compact disc, no less. Old skool.

It's a damn fine video. Simple, but mesmerising. Great use of slow motion and timing. Colour palette contrasts. Texture.

We'll be reviewing the album soon. Meanwhile, though, content thyself with the video. And look out for the point at which PJH looks – for a second – bizarrely like Michael Jackson.

Enjoy.

PJ Harvey's got her leather boots on

So ... Following on from Rebecca's masterful encapsulation of PJ Harvey, last week (hey, Rebecca's all about masterful encapsulations, don'tcha know?), Ms Harvey today takes her turn on song of the day.

Hell, Heavy Soil could fill a month of posts with PJH songs of the day.

This time, we encounter cello as part of an ensemble: a sextet. Which is, I promise you, every bit as spicy as it sounds.

Download Mansize Sextet mp3 via YouSendIt

Crack this one on at high volume and let the neighbours know that CHAMBER MUSIC ROCKS.

It's Waltonesque, percussive, textured, atmospheric ... It ain't melodic, I'll admit. But who want melody, these days?

Rebecca on PJ Harvey

"She's just fucking there.

She grew up in Devon."