Bachata Roja/Vijana Jazz Band

By the end of the year, Joey's long-supported "For Charles Bronson", a wiser and more all-encompassing empowerment-anthem-f​​rom-the-brink-of-co​l​lapse, had gained traction and become the one I preferred on a record I still wasn't sure about. I got in a ****ing car accident listening to that one

[cont’d]

There was actually a somewhat pastoral period shortly before that accident (November) when we were winterizing systems, which is a lot less stressful and allowed for a lot more album-listening time. In the spirit of the Live Wire files Cam had gifted, I did some research on the periods of the band I hadn’t investigated – namely, post-1979. I didn’t even know Document & Eyewitness was mostly originals. Everything after that bad art EP that used to be 154’s CD penalty was a mystery to me, so having found Wire too arty-rocky to treasure (as opposed to songy, and not rocky enough after that first blast), I was pleasantly startled to find a Stephen Hague dream-amalgam of Beauty Stab and early Tennant/Lowe; a scintillating little robotic counterpart to Cloudland; pop! In certain theoretical models I’m sure Wire’s punk pedigree helps less-inclined listeners justify its product, but really it needs neither justification or intellectualizing – it’s just weird, wild future-age radio, as faux-deep as Big Audio Dynamite but at least as compelling, and a monumental redemption of the McCartney II school of English electrodabblers.

Graham Lewis always drew the lion’s share of my fascination with Wire, a group I’ve by now done some serious delving-into, and mostly because it was so often associated with a kind of revulsion. 70s Graham Lewis – a stout little gargoyle of a guy who spent the first Wire rehearsal being made fun of, who opens the band’s bit on Roxy London WC2 by stuffily huffing “pay attention”, whose nerdy little Pink Flag lyrics are full of little pseudo-academic riddles and are sodden with sexual resentment and are nevertheless drenched out by astonishing music – has always struck me as one of rock’s less savory personalities. “I Should Have Known Better”, christ; that’s the high school fringe kid you knew even you could probably beat up but who still somehow seriously unsettled you. (I swear on my life that I was not that kid.) But even though his little fear/contempt of the opposite sex remains creepy (“Ambitious”) or just generally embarrassing (“Feed Me”), Lewis’ over-the-top vocals are one of the more enjoyable sonic components of The A List, particularly those bourgeois little interjections (“buzz, buzz”), giving the sense of a former freak having evolved into a stately social misfit who still somehow resists sexiness. “Torch It!” is as cute a pleasure as “Kidney Bingoes”, wherein Lewis’ vocal ascensions toward the coda make want to cry my eyes out. Nowadays, of course, he’s the one who ended up aging the best, and writing the best songs.

Time to go take more amphetamines!

 Wouldn't it be crazy if we really were faking it and had stolen the identity of four people who happened to be friends??

22. Amy LaVere, “Stranger Me”

21. Withered Hand, Good News

Broken is beautiful, be it pro or be it ragamuffin. On the title track of the slick third entry in a career not dissimilar to St. Vincent’s, LaVere quiets down from the anthemic heroics of the standard-ready “Damn Love Song”, which is so titanic it swallows her voice, and bathes her guarded plea in sonics you wouldn’t notice on a U2 record, the sort of city-lights synthetic throb that typically compels critics to use the word “sonics”. It befits a brilliant no-breakup-please plaint whose closest recent spiritual cousin is “Mountain of Tires” – the music’s cautiously seductive invitation mirrors the level-headed humanity and hugely affecting honesty of the lyric, a sort of how are ya with a subtext of deep, dignified yearning the music never once fails to completely inhabit. It’s a climax worthy of the finest Eno (or at least Daniel Lanois) when it all coalesces and then lifts upward, hurling every lovely little subtle hook imaginable at you along with a repeat of that most stirring lyric – “laugh at the traffic”. She's singing to someone who could compel her to the point of peak expressive satisfaction in that most claustrophobic and deadening of situations, a rare and significant quality even if she's lying to herself about it. She ought to have called this one “Real Love”.

Broken is beautiful, be it ragamuffin or be it pro. Dann Wilson isn’t actually too thrilled about hangin’ on the boulevard with the idiot savants, so he reckons it his divine right to cut a pop confessional. He knows an emphasis on the less attractive details of his pained existence don ‘t exactly qualify him for a higher-order crowd, but he’s compelled to set it all to the prettiest music he can conjure up with his amigos simply because he has in him a joy and that joys needs to be beaten out. Riding an much-needed poster-boy train re: the psychological destruction in which religion usually results, Wilson can’t shake the idea that love is a disease and chooses to focus most of his literary autobiography on that definitive handicap, which badly needs the exorcising. It’s a niche he inhabits with the deftness of an expert, but keep him away from Trevor Horn or he’ll be staging uncomfortable, pretentious musicals about that ****.

Really, though, I’m satisfied with my characteristically overwrought assessment on 5 Records: "The irrefutable intrinsic value of a basic universal morality notwithstanding, religion remains one of humanity’s worst enemies, whether poisoning our political discourses or stagnating fine psychologies as those they belong to try to make sense of life’s unavoidable chaos. On this miracle of an album, amiably unassuming Edinburgh everybloke Dan Willson spends ten perfect songs gently keeping this demon at bay, while struggling to make sense of the damage it’s done to him for no good reason at all. He’s tried to make a real and earthbound love his ticket to ride, incurring further wounds from merely wishing his dick were inside her; the emotional toll that sleeveworn heart has endured bedecks every rivetingly plainspoken sentence. It’s that pure and hardly unpoetic directness that makes these lyrics the best you’ve heard and will hear in a while, shambling from contradictory thought to random-**** image with a clarity and conviction nobody this ****ed up should be so capable of. And he’s set them to the first absolution that’s ever really worked in a life devoted to the pursuit of one, a splendorous folk that combines the fragile backroom beauty of pre-pro Belle & Sebastian with an oddball prowess forged in his own image. As casual baroque touches sweeten the empty spaces, he sermonizes in a voice that’s either perennially threatening to crack or perpetually stuck in the middle of one, every careful word intoned with the misery of age and the ebullience of its accompanying wisdom."

  I like Wild Flag (#48! Shouldn't this be higher?)