Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago

Bon Iver - Flume

We've all had that feeling; when things get on top of you and you wish you could escape somewhere and shut the world away. After the break up of his long time band, DeYarmond Edison, Justin Vernon removed himself to a remote cabin in the woods of Northwestern Wisconsin for four months over winter. He spent his days splitting wood and generally working the land and in this isolation and contemplation recorded the bulk of this extraordinary album.

Bon Iver is a corruption of the French for 'good winter' and the recording of this album has clearly been a cathartic experience for Vernon. It is filled with love, loss and emotion and with its starting point of a man alone with his thoughts and a guitar the album actually builds into something far larger. I mean this literally with the addition of extra vocals and instruments on tracks like Flume and For Emma but elsewhere, with the layering of his own voice Vernon creates a surprisingly full sound and with necessity the mother of invention the album contains some musical surprises too, this isn't just an album of folky guitar strumming.

On most tracks Vernon employs a falsetto but his range is much wider on tracks like Skinny Love. The Wolves (Acts I and II) has a soulful and, dare I say it, funky feel to the vocals as he repeats 'What might have been lost'. Blindsided begins with a single note repeated but from this he weaves layer upon layer of voice to create something surprisingly complex. Lyrically the album can be a little obtuse but on some tracks there is total clarity. Closing track re:stacks is a beautiful finish in which, despite my talk of catharsis, he sings ' This is not the sound of a new man or crispy realization/It's the sound of the unlocking and the lift away/Your love will be/Safe with me'

So if you ever get that feeling I mentioned earlier and you can't get away to the country, take the phone off the hook, put this album on and enjoy, there isn't a weak track on it.

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suburban survivalist

Jernigan
by David Gates

American literature is populated by plenty of male narrators, charting the pressure placed on American values and ideals by the simple course of living a life. John Updike's Rabbit novels, Philip Roth's Zuckerman books and Richard Ford's recently completed trilogy featuring Frank Bascombe stand as shining examples of total character; men who feel as real, more real perhaps, than people we may actually know. David Gates first novel published in 1991 doesn't add another name to that list so much as start a new one; the American anti-hero, not an Everyman but rather the kind of man you're damn glad you aren't (and if you are, well, good luck).

Peter Jernigan is a drunk. The novel opens with him making his way to a friend's empty trailer in the dead of winter. He will be rescued by the state police after falling into a drunken stupor and lose his thumb and forefinger in the process but as he tells us '...the essential man was, and is, still intact. Which is the big thing, right, the essential man? Jernigan'.

Jernigan is a widower. A year ago his wife, an alcoholic herself, made a scene at a party, removed her bathing suit, got into the car and backed out of the drive into the path of an oncoming truck. Since then he has limped along in a state of limbo and it is his teenage son Danny who attempts to kick start him again socially when he invites him to join a party at his girlfriend's house. There, after a few too many glasses of moonshine, he ends up staying the night with her mother, and slowly finds himself there again and again until, almost without meaning to, he moves in to this ready-built nuclear family.

But this is a far from conventional setup, the moonshine is a hint towards the alternative outlook that Martha has towards life. Down in her basement she breeds rabbits for meat and her friend is the man behind a magazine , Suburban Survivalist, which is filled with articles showing how to enjoy the benfits of suburbia without any of the soul crushing conformity. Martha and her daughter have their own problems too but Jernigan's inability to deal with even the basics of his own life mean he's very far from the stable male influence Martha was hoping him to be.

Which all makes it sound rather serious and whilst it does have its moments this is primarily a dark comedy with the extraordinary Jernigan at the centre. A man with education and intelligence who finds it increasingly difficult to make those witty leaps into punning wordplay as the book progresses his frequent interruptions into the narrative are hilarious. 'Now what kind of thing was that to say.' he interjects after hurling yet another hurtful phrase. His contempt for those around him, especially when fuelled by alcohol, causes him to keep lashing out at those who want to help. Later, in a desperate attempt to feel something, he takes a gun and shoots himself in the hand. 'That's Jernigan all over: first you swallow a bunch of drugstore anodynes and then you want to feel something and then you bitch and moan because it hurts'. As the book progresses Gates shows the crumbling state of our hero as his sentences start to break down, thoughts remain unfinished, sentences sputter to an end, you can almost hear the brain cells dying with each gulp of alcohol.

Full bloodied and noisy, Jernigan's voice is compelling, a little like being held hostage by a talkative drunk in a bar. As much as you might wish that things had gone differently for him you can't help being gripped as he recounts the car crash that is his life.

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Foals - Antidotes

Foals - The French Open

Another day, another debut album groaning under the weight of hype and expectation. Foals have a slightly stronger pedigree than some of the other hot new bands for 2008 with a string of singles released last year. The decision not to include Hummer and Mathletics on their debut album shows some confidence in the new material, a confidence which isn't always backed up. So is it math rock, afro rock or even perhaps just pop?

The answer to the question above may well be all three. The album begins with The French Open's horns and staccato guitars which soon develop into a jumpy afro infused pop chorus. New single Cassius is a stomping floor filler, a trick they pull again on Two Steps, Twice to great effect, building the complex layers of rhythm and guitar like a piece of dance music. The problem is that Yannis Philippakis doesn't have the kind of voice you exactly fall in love with. Like Kele Okereke of Bloc Party with whom the band have been compared, his upper register shout is not to all tastes and the quieter attempts on this album expose its weaknesses. Some tracks like Heavy Water never quite gel leaving you with an album which feels a little less than the sum of its parts.

That said there are some effective moments like the much darker Electric Bloom which conjures some haunting images ' An empty morgue with gurning hearts and hollowed crowns/And all I see is marching bands/... It's just another hospital'. And Foals clearly know how to get a live crowd on their feet and dancing away. Perhaps their second album will see Foals grow into a band who can fulfill their promise.

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a midsummer night's dream

The Feast Of Love
by Charles Baxter

Strong recommendations are hard to ignore. They don't always pan out, often the books which others feel most strongly about will disappoint when you read them but I always try. And a good thing too. The ever enthusiastic Scott Pack recommended I try this novel before the film version arrives on our shores and I have to say that having now seen the trailer (below) I'm glad that I did.

A writer called Charlie Baxter wakes one midsummer's night from a bad dream and goes for a stroll through his neighbourhood in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He walks to the University football stadium and from his seat in the stands sees a young couple making love on the fifty-yard line (a not uncommon experience apparently). Later he sees a friend, Bradley Smith, sitting on a bench. Smith tells him what his next book should be about and proceeds to tell him some tales of love. The rest of the novel hears tales from those others in his life, his philosophy teaching neighbour, two young lovebirds who work in his coffee shop and two soon-to-be-ex-wives along the way. There is a lot of humour to be found in such a universal subject, especially in the often sad figure of Smith. As described by Chloe, his employee, he is '...a gentleman, and sweet, and he's so smart you can tell thinking bothers him and takes up a great deal of his time'. In one hilarious episode he is forced to steal his own dog back from his sister after she refuses to return it after a period of care. The dog, also named Bradley, is his only source of love after the split from his first wife who embarks on a lesbian relationship. It is her who, after telling Baxter her side of the story, points out that:

You think that what I've just told you is an anecdote. But really it isn't. It's my whole life. It's the only story I have.

Baxter doesn't settle for just a humorous rendition of love. His neighbour, Harry Ginsberg, and his wife have a fractious relationship with their youngest son Aaron. Frequently he calls to shout abuse and accusation down the phone and then to demand money which Harry dutifully sends. He does after all love his son regardless. But his attempt to break this cycle of destructive behaviour ends in eventual silence from his prodigal son.

America, as everyone knows, is large enough to lose a child in...As the tongue goes to the missing tooth, so do we poke and pry at his absence. He is our null.

Perhaps the best example of the success with which Baxter mixes the tone of his writing, making it bittersweet, is in Bradley's recounting of his second honeymoon. In two pages Baxter surpasses the whole of On Chesil Beach. Through the seemingly simple language of a husband and wife discussing what love means to them whilst in post-coital slumber, you know that this marriage is doomed from the start.

I had my hand cupped around her breast, and she had her hand on my cheek, and we were having an argument, though still making it sound like love talk. "Bradley, what are we going to do here?"...You can have good sex on your honeymoon and still suspect there's something fishy going on.

The book also conceals its most powerful emotional hit in its young lovers, they have the most to learn of course, but the extent to which fate intervenes is unexpected even when it has been made painfully clear earlier on and Baxter skillfully brings his characters together near the novels close.

It is a surprisingly beautiful read and one I would recommend over the film which as you'll see below may not have the variety of tone and depth with which Baxter paints his picture of everyday lives.

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Portishead - Third

Portishead - The Rip

It is amazing to think that it was over a decade ago that Portishead's Dummy landed almost from another planet and transformed my student listening. It is easy to forget that before it became middle-class dinner party music their debut was a confident, fully formed and exciting new sound. The band have always been honest about the difficulties in maintaining that impact with subsequent work but by any measure it has been a long time to wait for a follow up to the eponymous Portishead album. There have been hints about a more aggressive sound and there is certainly something harder, harsher and menacing about this album. Beth Gibbons work away from the band has shown the wide range her voice is capable of and so I am gald to her some of that in evidence on this new album.

Opener Silence has skittering drums and menacing guitars which slowly build and it is over two minutes before Gibbons' unmistakeable voice comes in. This is definitely a darker sound. Hunter lulls us in with that familiar Barry-esque film score sound and then subverts it with dark guitar chords. Nylon Smile has a more familiar ring to it, albeit with faster drums and Gibbons' plaintive cry 'I don't know what I've done to deserve you/ I don't know what I'd do without you'. It is a much softer voice which begins The Rip with acoustic guitar and that melatron but then halfway through an amazingingly held note brings in synths and drums to take it somewhere else. Plastic is a track which sounds like it is being hunted by a helicopter overhead, very unsettling. And that menace continues onto Carry On with a sound like an alarm and an almost tribal drum beat under the dissonant melody. As the track builds, in drops a bass guitar riff that Peter Hook would be proud of. That is followed by Deep Water, a short ditty on ukelele with a bluesey vocal sample which seems to have evaded Moby's clutches. Then we're straight back into staccato beats with Machine Gun a track which shows the continuing influence of 80's synths on today's music. Small is nearly a ballad until 70's organ stabs come in and guitars. Magic Doors has an almost eastern like flavour to it and the album finishes with the superb Threads, its beautiful melody surrounded by those menacing guitars again. 'I'm always so unsure' sings Gibbons before it turns into a holler which is replaced by a synth's repeated note like that vast bass note used to communicate with aliens in 'Close Encounters Of The Third Kind'.

I'd love to see the middle classes try to use this as dinner party backing music. It isn't easy listening, which isn't to say it's hard, far from it. But it's good to hear Portishead back and sounding confident once again. It was always going to be a must have for Portishead fans but this album might just interest a new generation in their individual sound. I look forward to an appearance on Later...with Jools Holland especially because that will bring me right back to that moment I first heard them all those years ago.

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