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

He is a rock. And he has a new album out.

I like Bill Callahan (he of Smog fame) very much indeed. Ever since seeing him play in Belfast, Heavy Soil has been a confirmed admirer of his low-key, modest sincerity.

His new album, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, was released yesterday, and is currently making its way down the tubes and ventilation shafts of the mighty www onto my iTunes. Rest assured, o soiler: it shall receive its review in due course.

Meanwhile, as an amuse bouche, if you will, I leave you with this video for 'Rock Bottom Riser', from his A River Is Not Too Much To Love album. If you remain unacquainted with the delights of Callahan, I urge you to give it a whirl.

Bask in the unhurried delivery, the mature and matter-of-fact way in which his voice navigates some lovely harmonic/melodic waters. Many an artist, had they come up with this chorus, would've milked dry the 'owe it all to you' passage, for instance. But Callahan has the restraint to let the melody sing itself.

... and what a delicious, warming change to major at 1.45. Enjoy.

Review: Metric's Fantasies -- compressed hubba bubba

Heavy Soil is very, very tired.

I'm just at the end of listening – start to end – (not, obviously, for the first time) to Metric's new record, Fantasies, which arrived in my inbox, neatly e-shrink-wrapped, at the end of last week. You can order a copy via Metric's website, should you so desire.

Now, as you might suppose of one who chooses to review releases on a music blog, I am not especially prone to music-induced fatigue. However, the fact remains that Metric's latest album has exhausted me.

Why? I give you one word:


Compression.

Others have written with greater authority, with more prolonged and impassioned delivery than I about the musical phenomenon that is the loudness/compression wars. So please take the following explanation as only the most cursory of summaries.

But, essentially, compression is about making the quiet bits of music louder, whilst the very loudest bits stay the same. Because of the way our ears work, the effect is an apparent boost to the loudness of the whole track. Compression is why, if you put on (god forbid) Oasis's What's the Story (Morning Glory), it'll sound way louder than, say, 'London's Calling'.

But there's a downside to compression. The more you raise the apparent volume of the track by boosting the quieter sounds, the more you iron out dynamic contrasts – the distinction between loud and soft. Excessive compression can squash the life out of a recording, removing the impact of a snare hit or a distorted guitar entry that would normally create a dramatic change in volume.

This video explains it, no doubt, rather more concisely than I have managed:



Heavily compressed tracks also become tiring to the ears. There's no relief. Do you ever find yourself, partway through listening to a record (especially on headphones), with an odd sense of claustrophobia or irritation? A mild sensation of unease or the sense that you're in some way hemmed in? A vague desire somehow to put a bit of distance between yourself and the music that's coming into your ears?

That's probably the effect of compression.


So ... back to Metric, then.

Fantasies is pretty heavily compressed. And I find that a bit annoying. Okay, so it is very well produced, and the band is clearly going for a slick, pop-informed approach. But it's a bit much for Heavy Soil. A bit full-on. What might seem 'pumping' for two songs seems wearying by track 8 – at which point Heavy Soil's ears are craving respite.


But enough about compression, eh? Let's try and talk about the songs.

It starts well. 'Help I'm Alive' is big – with massive bass and a hoofing kick. The chord progressions carry the song forward effectively, and there's a strong sense of momentum. Yes, it's compressed to hell – but on this song, in isolation, it works.

And the momentum is retained over the course of the next couple of songs. 'Sick Muse' (pretty good) kicks into its chorus with more than a dusting of Ash (think 'Burn Baby Burn' [youtube]). Indeed, there's an awful lot about this record that recalls the guitar-pop of yesteryear.

... 'Gold Guns Girls' – for instance – starts off with a riff that could've come straight from Franz Ferdinand's debut. It's pacey, with heaps of on-beat delay and smooth, piped-cream fuzz. Emily Haines's heavily treated vocals soar above the glassy blend of beats, guitars and synths – the familiar Metric formula – and the juxtaposition works as well as ever. But it's not really leading anywhere.

There are quieter, more restrained songs, too. But often these fail to leave much impression. They may (as in the case of 'Front Row') mess around with a few interesting dominant seventh chords and a pretty melody or two – but they tend to congeal rather than attractively mutate.

At this point, please be my guest and download an mp3 of closing track 'Stadium Love' by Metric. It's probably the most interesting thing on the album. An 80s-tinged buzzing blend of distorted guitars and hard-edged synths hammer out an insistent, two-note bass riff that – in its simplicity – is more powerful than any number of mathsy guitar figures and hyper-layered 8-bar chord progressions. This is real momentum, a la Sonic Youth et al. And it's a pity – and something of a disappointment – that we've had to wait until the album's last track to get it.


Overall, then, the record is surprisingly two-dimensional.

I've always thought of Metric as intellipop – music that's interesting and slightly subversive in its tendency to seem simpler and more obvious than it actually proves to be. Whether through unexpectedly outre production tricks, wrongfooting chord progressions or Emily Haines's twisty, deadpan lyrics.

But on Fantasies, there's far less depth. Whereas I'd previously have condemned comparisons with bands like No Doubt as lazy, on the strength of this offering, I'd not be so sure.

You see, I smell a disconcerting whiff of Hubba Bubba.

There are too many familiar production techniques, too much delay. It's unavoidably a little bland: too artificial, mass-market-sounding. I come to Metric wanting the odd surprise, the shot of dark unpredictability that suddenly clouds its crystalline pop surroundings with inky blooms. And that doesn't happen often enough, here. Too much sheep's clothing; too little wolf.


As ever, if you like the free mp3 – which is provided in order that you, the reader, may appraise – please buy the music.

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.

Review: Beware by Bonnie 'Prince' Billy

The Obligatory, Obliquely Self-Revelatory Anecdote Part

When I was a nipper, I used to have singing lessons.

And I was a fortunate nipper – to have been taught, successively, by two very pleasant singing teachers.

The latter of these – the magnificent Nicholas Perfect (magnificent, hear ye, not merely in name) – once posed an insightful rhetorical question that has stayed with me: 'But don't you think it's so much easier to write an interesting sad song than an interesting happy one?'

Remember that nugget of Perfect wisdom. It'll come up again later.

The Long-Have-Been-My-Struggles, Difficult-And-Painful-Is-My-Task Part

It's not particularly easy to review an artist such as Bonnie 'Prince' Billy (hereafter, 'BPB'). The last time I did so, I grappled with Ask Forgiveness – itself a tricksy wee album – and now I grapple with the newly-released Beware.

Perhaps you've read a review or two already. Who knows? You might be into that kind of thing. If so, you'll perhaps have observed that early reactions have been subdued. Drowned in Sound's Alexander Tudor isn't keen, for instance, damning the album with a slightly-worse-than-mediocre 4/10.

Straight off, I'm going to ask you to forget that (slightly smugly iconoclastic?) rating. No way is this album worth a paltry 4/10.

Indeed – [Here, Heavy Soil pauses for its own interlude of smug self-reflexion] – this is why Heavy Soil avoids any kind of rating system. Because it's all too easy for a reviewer's score to be warped beyond recognition by the forces of his or her expectation. A rating system works, perhaps, for new or unknown artists, simply as a filter. But applied to a superb, versatile and seasoned musician such as Will Oldham (the human behind Bonnie 'Prince' Billy), a rating is something of a joke. We need to be nuanced, here.

Beware is not I see a Darkness; not The Letting Go. It is considerably less dark (at least on the surface) than much of Oldham's work; more whimsical. It is also more lavish and expansive in its production. In these two respects, it moves away from what might be considered BPB heartlands – from the territory in which many of his fans may have cemented their raptness.

So let's beware [a ha!] of measuring Beware against a scale extrapolated from BPB's earlier work. For the moment, at least. Let's consider it on its own merits.

The Actually Talking About The Songs Part

Opener 'Beware your only friend' strikes out with an exuberance that characterises many of these songs – and (again, typically) the sense of ensemble and musicianship is strong. The whole record is peppered with jubilant instrumentals (provided, of course, by BPB's intimidatingly distinguished and extensive array of collaborators) – and these are carefully, neatly, sensitively combined, thanks to fine, transparent production (the kind that's good enough seldom to be noticeable).

So on 'You Don't Love Me', raucous fiddles swoop and peck, saw and squall; mandolins shimmer and accordians flutter on 'I Don't Belong To Anyone'. Meanwhile, 'Heart's Arms' opens with a wash of vibratoless fiddles and deep, buzzing, woodily resonant bass – but masterfully swells to a resounding series of fuller-textured climaxes, before ebbing away back to its original sparseness.

A good many of these songs, I might add, have rather splendid middle-8s/C-sections. 'You Can't Hurt Me Now', for instance, suddenly breaks from its leisurely, countrified swing into an affectingly direct injunction to 'Do it now and not let someday / Get in the way'. In my characteristic, achingly pretentious manner, I couldn't help but be reminded of Lambert Strether in Henry James' brilliant (but long) novel The Ambassadors:

'Live all you can – it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?'

Like Strether's impassioned outburst in the novel, its directness is striking in the light of what has gone before it – in James' novel, the mannered, restrained conversation of high society; in Oldham's song, the settled, predictable, conventional country swing.

Indeed, I suppose this is actually a symptom of one of the record's most pronounced qualities: its organicism. Whether its in terms of their structure (BPB commonly eschews or adapts familiar verse-chorus-verse-chorus sequences), or the fluctuation of their instrumentation, these songs feel natural. They feel like a conversation between friends – led not by the conventions of polite discourse, but by the desire to communicate.

This means that they develop in unpredictable yet uncontrived ways.

Often, you'll be swept away by a flurry of unexpected key-shifts, or drawn in by a sudden dynamic change. Thus, whilst the form of many of these songs is more accessible than BPB's bleaker and more experimental earlier work, it does not follow that they are simpler.

Want to hear what I'm blathering about?

Download an mp3 of Bonnie 'Prince' Billy's 'I Won't Ask Again'.

Dig, first of all, that woozy, fluking fiddle line, and the way it subsides into the vocal entry. Then feel how the change begins at 0.57 with the unexpected, colourful move to minor (accompanied by the addition of the organ) ... is temporarily relaxed by the resolution at 1.10 ... before kicking into a beautiful change of key at 1.23, full of sunbathed backing vocals and flutes.

This is songwriting with the harmonic deftness and nuance of the Beatles at their best. Notice how superbly judged are the swells of dynamic and instrumentation – how the music gathers pace, density and urgency to keep pace with the motion of the chords – so just as the song is moving into new grounds of harmony and key, so the instrumentation and tempo are subtly augmented to further the impression of movement.

The Part Where He Seamlessly And Not Even Remotely Predictably Brings It All Back To The Anecdote From The Opening Part

So this is where Mr Perfect's words re-echo in our ears. Crack on some reverb, so he sounds like Obi Wan Kanobi talking to Luke Skywalker, if you like:

'Don't you think it's so much easier to write an interesting sad song than an interesting happy one?'

I think you're right, Mr Perfect. And I think – for all its apparent breeziness and countrified charm – this is a pretty damn intelligent album; a pretty damn sensitive album; a pretty damn worthwhile album. And it would be a grievous mistake to follow the likes of Drowned in Sound in equating light with lite.

(Heck, these days, it'd probably just be a mistake to follow Drowned in Sound, full stop. But I'll never learn.)

All that said, however, I will – as promised – return to the subject of Beware in the context of BPB's earlier work. And I will say this: personally, I do not find it quite as engaging as 'I See A Darkness' &c. Personally.

Somehow, these songs do not address me quite so directly, emblazon themselves quite so starkly upon my mind as I listen. There is that small degree of distance. A slight sensation of mutedness.

Less powerful, perhaps.

But I'd be very, very wary of saying less good.

The mp3 provided is there in order that you may gain a flavour of BPB's loveliness. If you like, do please buy a copy of the whole album. Here's an Amazon link, free of charge.

Searing Mash. Grand Opuses. Orchestral? The Rest.

The occasional borderline-tweeness of Belle & Sebastian.

The crooning-through-an-anguished-yet-twistedly-sardonic-grin tones of Guillemots' Fyfe 'Dangerfield'.

The grandiose sweep of Arcade Fire (and accompanying tendency to sweep grandiosely back and forth over the same (by now very well-swept) harmonic territory).

The softer-edged, crowd-friendly aspects of Wolf Parade/Sunset Rubdown.

The reverb-saturated woo-oooo-oooooing of Sigur Ros ...

... The Rest.

This is a band who have spent 'a laborious, fulfilling year and a half' writing and recording Everyone All At Once, an album due for release 'this April', according to the rather nice bulk email that plopped sonorously into Heavy Soil's inbox, some weeks ago.

I thought I'd write about this one, because it distinguished itself by virtue of not being chronically let down by a shoddy vocalist. By virtue of being an album to the whole of which I actually found myself able to listen to without losing patience by track 2.

For this fact – along with their apparent general competence and their pleasant mode of mass-correspondence – I commend The Rest. This is clearly a band composed of musicians with some talent, the ability to play and sing in tune (so much rarer than it should be, this one), and the inclination to construct arrangements that are dynamic, organic and expansive.

Heavy Soil writes these words. But Heavy Soil's withered heart is not in them. Because for all that there is to commend (yes, to commend – that most rock'n'roll of verbs) about Everyone All At Once, Heavy Soil cannot find anything to love. Nothing by which to be excited. Nothing that makes aforesaid withered heart beat faster.

Sure, there are some grand opuses. Some rather nice string samples. Some stirring crescendos. There's dynamic contrast, musical confidence and competence, a solid ensemble feel.

But there's so much slow-progressing harmony, one-chord-to-a-bar ... So much mid-tempo extemporation ... So much overdubbing ... So much wall-of-sound reverb.

Commonly, people refer to these big, Arcade-Firey arrangements as 'orchestral'. This is one of the things that pisses the shit (yes, pisses the shit. Got that image?) out of Heavy Soil.

Because 'orchestral' is Beethoven; 'orchestral' is Stravinsky; 'orchestral' is Verdi. 'Orchestral' implies a complex, intricately-interwoven web of instrumental lines, masterful contrasts of texture. 'Orchestral' conjures elaborate fugues, in which themes are played off against one another, sudden changes of pace, whereby a single root chord might be suspended for 32 bars, before a breathtaking flurry of harmonic movement, key-changes and counterpoint, all crammed into the following 8. It's about a hell of a lot more than just playing the same chord/melody in unison on as many instruments/gutar sounds as possible.

In writing this, I feel churlish. I review virtually none of the submissions I receive from bands. A hell of a lot of bands do 'orchestral' much worse than this. Indeed, this album from The Rest is about the best thing I've received unsolicited, whilst writing this blog. But I want it to be better. Chaps, you're up against Arcade Fire. They got there first. Now, I'm no Arcade Fire devotee. But when they were first doing this stuff, it was (by mainstream indie standards) reasonably fresh. Now, it's old. You have to do something damn good and damn interesting within this subgenre if you want to stand out.

And, at the moment, you aren't. I'd love it if you were. Really, I would. But you aren't.

I wish this band well. But I wish they would sometimes change chord several times in one bar. I wish they would occasionally change key as dramatically as they build to a searing mash (y'know ... mash can be pretty fucking searing. The trick is to use near-boiling milk and make sure you don't leave the potatoes to drain too long ... Oh, Christ, never mind) of guitar overdubs. I wish the not inconsiderable talents of their vocalist were more often matched by musical ideas that we haven't heard many times before.

(And I wish they'd stop singing 'whoa-a-oh-oh', too. Because that shit annoys me.)

Anyhow. Have a listen. See what you think. I reckon a lot of people might like this. But, boy, I've sold it to you well, haven't I?

• 'Modern Time Travel (Necessities)' mp3
• 'Apples & Allergies' mp3