the return of WANKLE (another dream of a different Nineties)

I saw an early version of the James Lavelle doc at a festival a few years ago and what amazed me, first and foremost, was how many UNKLE albums there'd been.




the first was bad enough - so i guess i'd assumed that that would have been it

but no, no, they persisted after Psyence Fiction (yuk wot a title) -  there's something like FIVE subsequent UNKLE albums!

and what's worse is that they get increasingly rocky, involving such as Josh Homme from Queens of the Stone Age

like Lavelle started buying into this really naff idea of rock rebellion and intensity and authenticity

like a less tastefully executed version of the Death in Vegas approach - a studio assembled simulacrum of rock, without the actual rhythmic engine of band-energy powering it

i guess it shows the odd lingering prestige of rock - and especially the punk strand within rock - as the ultimate stand-in for rebellion and individuality, which continues to exert its thrall over people who've come up through hip hop or dance music, and whose creative procedures are radically different

for some reason deep in their hearts their burning desire seems to be to collaborate with Noel Gallagher (as with Goldie circa Saturnz Returnz) or Pete Doherty or somebody like that, despite being light-years ahead sonically of those guys





the other thing I gleaned from the doc - and Lavelle's embrace of rockism - was that he'd managed to convince himself that  being a curator really is the same as being a creator -  that's there's really nothing to writing songs, creating a distinctive band-sound, a band-voice.

all you need is some famous pals, and some connections - and taste, and attitude

simply convening the ingredients would somehow generate vibe in itself, hey presto, through the magic of chutzpah

wrong!

hubris 101: not knowing your limits, the nature of what you are actually good at (in his case, arguably at any rate,  branding, packaging, spotting talent in others i.e. Shadow, Krush, building a buzz)





yet despite this, UNKLE is still going - there's a new album out at the end of March -  The Road: Part II/Lost Highway -  a "filmic" affair whose cast includes the  Clash’s Mick Jones, Dhani Harrison, Editors’ frontman Tom Smith, The Duke Spirit’s Leila Moss, Mark Lanegan, Keaton Henson, Queens Of The Stone Age’s Jon Theodore and Troy Van Leeuwen, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds vocalist Ysée, Brian Eno collaborator Tessa Angus, producers Justin Stanley and Chris Goss,  BOC,  spoken-word contributions from legendary Scottish actor Brian Cox, and more

first single

press release:

“Once you have walked the road, everything becomes clear,” says Elliott Power on the Prologue to the sixth album from genre-bending pioneers UNKLE. ‘The Road: Part II / Lost Highway’ is the sound of an artist forever in transit on life’s journey of discovery.

“My work has always had an eclectic essence and soundtrack-influence in its structure,” says Lavelle. “If you go through the back catalogue, there’s a continuity between the motion and the ambition of the sound. Ideally, you’re constantly collaging and sampling elements of what’s relevant at the time to create something new.

“Now, there’s a lot more freedom. When I first started, the walls between genres in front of you were a lot greater to climb. We’re at a much more open-minded and eclectic place with music now.”

"I started doing a show on Soho Radio last year, which made me think about playing records in a different way,” says Lavelle of his life after ‘Part I’. “It wasn’t about trying to make people dance in a nightclub. It was a breath of fresh air, and about playing a more eclectic mix. ‘The Road Part 2’ was made in the same way – it’s a mixtape and a journey. You’re in your car, starting in the day and driving into the night. The language of it was for it to be the ultimate road trip.

He continues: “It’s the mid-part of a trilogy. The first record is like you’re leaving home; you’re naive and trying to discover. There are elements of my early days in there, as well as a bit of everything since. There’s an optimism and excitement to it, as there was with me having to direct this project alone for the first time.

“This record is the journey. You’re on the road, out there in the world. There are let downs, highs, lows, love, loss and experiences. The third record to come is basically about coming home; wherever that may be."

With the album split into two acts each with a beginning, a middle and end, the trips from light to dark, from brute force to tenderness make for both the full arc of the adventure and suites to be enjoyed separately. It’s a bold, assured and confident collection – from the Americana of ‘Long Gone’, to the Kanye West ‘Black Skinhead’ - inspired ‘Nothing To Give’, the alt-orchestral rush of ‘Only You’ to the guitar-heavy mantra of ‘Crucifixion/A Prophet’ and the electronic child’s lullaby of ‘Sun (The)’ – via covers of ‘The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face’ made famous by Roberta Flack and the ‘guilty pleasure’ of the euphoric ‘Touch Me’ by Rui Da Silva. Helping to travel further down the myriad avenues of UNKLE’s sound are the full spectrum of collaborators and guests.

‘The Road: Part II/Lost Highway’ welcomes The Clash’s Mick Jones, Dhani Harrison, Editors’ frontman Tom Smith, The Duke Spirit’s Leila Moss, Mark Lanegan, Keaton Henson, Queens Of The Stone Age’s Jon Theodore and Troy Van Leeuwen, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds vocalist Ysée, Brian Eno collaborator Tessa Angus, producers Justin Stanley and Chris Goss,  BOC,  Philip Sheppard and artist John Isaac among others –  as well as spoken-word contributions from legendary Scottish actor Brian Cox (who used to be Lavelle’s landlord) and Stanley Kubrick’s widow Christiana, who leant her trust and voice to Lavelle following his acclaimed exhibition to the seminal director. The two names who crop up most throughout the record however are rising West London singer and producer Miink and experimental rapper Elliott Power.

“They’re just both so incredibly talented, and everything I love about London right now,” says Lavelle. “I’ve been playing a lot with going back to sampling and going back to certain aesthetics from when I was first buying records and DJing, then to mix that with something contemporary. They’ve helped me create this ‘Bladerunner meets London Soundsystem’ kind of vibe.”

But then, Lavelle has always been an artist as inspired by the past as he was racing towards the future.

“The way that things are now are what we were always doing with Mo’Wax,” says Lavelle. “The legacy was that we broke down barriers, took down everything culturally-lite and put it into something. Now street culture is the predominant visual culture of the world. It’s mad to think that Supreme is more popular and recognised than Louis Vuitton. Every major label and rapper is making sneakers and toys. At the time it was seen as vanity and gimmicky, but look at the way culture is now. That’s what we started.”

The striking artwork of the hooded knight that adorns the sleeve on 'Lost Highway' is by celebrated artist John Stark – renowned for drawing upon magical realism and using the more mystical elements of the past to reveal something profound about the present.

"It’s about the yin and yang, night and day, the rolling journey," says Lavelle of the artwork. "Here's a Ronin-like, lone warrior. It represents what it means for me to be going out into the world and finding myself."

the dream of the Nineties is alive in... Chelmsford?

well, a dream of a Nineties

from Jon Caramanica's New York Times profile of the Angloid emo-rapper Ratboy

"A couple of months ago, the 22-year-old musician who records as Rat Boy rented a huge empty warehouse a short walk to a lovely little stream and a slightly longer walk to a small black sign leaning against a decayed wall that reads FARM TOILET. Here, slowly, he, his father, and brother have been building out the raw space into a place — inspired by the Beastie Boys’ old G-Son Studios in Los Angeles — where he can work, and also play.

A few days before Christmas, it was mostly empty save for a roughly fashioned studio. On one wall was a Public Enemy “Fear of a Black Planet” poster. On a shelf was an autographed vinyl copy of the Beastie Boys’ “Hello Nasty.” On the center table, an old issue of the Beasties’ publication Grand Royal and some obscure graffiti magazines. Up against the wall, a small-scale screen printing rig and several of Cardy’s ghoulishly realistic illustrations. Sitting on a pallet under a blanket was an Amek Einstein console, the same kind that the Dust Brothers used to work on, that Cardy bought for about 6,000 pounds on the internet from Peru. It’s the most money he’s ever spent on anything, he said, but he still wasn’t sure it worked....

The 1990s are the leading touchstone for Cardy, who has studied the era with loving devotion and built a specific, refined aesthetic from it: “It’s a bunch of people that are around my age making something for themselves. I love the way stuff looks — making their own magazines, the music, being motivated to put stuff out,” he said, slumped in a chair wearing a Supreme bottle cap T-shirt, his hair pink and scraggly. “They did everything right, but did they know they were doing it right?”

“I kind of see Jordan as the nexus of what was happening in the ’90s when punk and hip-hop were blowing up,” said Brett Gurewitz, the founder and chief executive of Epitaph Records, which is releasing “Internationally Unknown” via its Hellcat imprint. “Rat Boy is the embodiment of that time.”

... When he became curious about music, YouTube was his university. “I used to watch thousands of videos,” he said.

Cardy’s natural artistic curiosity was buttressed by a creeping sense of outsiderness. “When I was in school when I was a kid, I did feel like there were not, like, people that were into the same stuff,” he said. “Everyone was into what was happening around here, and I’m just liking [expletive] that happened 20 years ago.”

...  One of the first people in the music business he met was Drew McConnell, who plays bass in the British band Babyshambles (which is fronted by Pete Doherty) and was introduced to Cardy’s music by an intern at his publishing company. Before long, McConnell was setting up management and label meetings for Cardy, who was sleeping on his sofa.

“He had obviously listened to a lot of records,” McConnell said. “The way he would sing would remind me of Elvis Costello, or Robert Smith from the Cure. But at the same time he’s a huge hip-hop fan.”


Wait a minute, I'm confused here - he's 90s-redux and 90s-obsessed, but he sounds like New Wave?

And elsewhere in the piece as Caramanica does his breakdown of constituent parts, it sounds even more atemporal and mish-mashed:

"This month Cardy will release the second Rat Boy album, “Internationally Unknown,” a high-energy collision of punk convulsion and hip-hop storytelling full of raucously fun, sharp-tongued songs about slackerdom, resistance and disorderly joy. It’s shaped by late 1970s punk with flickers of dub, nods to 1990s hip-hop (and also the early 2000s English rapper the Streets), and embraces the musical exuberance of 2000s pop-punk.

Which is to say, it is an extremely of-the-moment amalgam, refusing to draw distinctions between genres. It’s also part of a long continuum of British punk that looks for kinship in black music and part of a wider re-engagement with the 1990s as source material."

Further confusing me

"In person, Cardy is gentle and soft-edged. But on both his first and second records, his attitude is consistent: a permanently extended middle finger to authority, and a robust sense of working class agitation."

What working class kid in his very early twenties can afford to drop 6000 quid on a vintage studio console? Because it was used by the Dust Bros?

He's certainly obsessed with the Dust Bros, whose claim to fame eludes me (Pauls Boutique? that Urge Overkill album?)

"Cardy went to Los Angeles and spent six weeks working with Armstrong at the Boat, once the studio of the Dust Brothers. (John King of the Dust Brothers also worked on the new album.)" 

This stuff about his dad Brett also puzzles me - 

"Cardy recalled how Brett never pushed him to pursue things he didn’t feel strongly about, like schoolwork: “It’s always been, like, do what you want to do.” They spoke about Cardy’s music and the unlikeliness of his performance intensity, joked about living in close quarters and celebrated hating authority. Recalling when Cardy was first learning to race cars, Brett explained his hands-off parenting philosophy, which felt like the foundation for all of Cardy’s subsequent life choices. “Just let him crash,” Brett said. “He ain’t going to do it twice."

Is it rebellion / slackerdom / DIY if you learn it from your dad? Or am I being old fashioned here, myself?

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

also on the topic of different kinds of Nineties, a Nineties you might have barely intersected with, and "is this even the Nineties we're talking about here"? -  just got this press release through the mail, for a Hip Hop Brunch thrown by an organisation called www.The90sBrunch.co.uk  -


Whether you’re the ultimate ’90s fan or you just really like gettin’ jiggy wit it, this affair isn’t to be missed. The 90s Brunch’s entertainment this weekend has been seasoned with the spiciest nostalgic flavourings in the cupboard. We're talking glitter, transfer tattoos, lip-sync battles, dance-offs, and a full soundtrack that pays homage to the best decade ever. Now how’s that for 90’s nostalgia?

And you can’t forget the best part – a lip smackin’ three-course meal and an hour (yes, an hour) of bottomless cocktails – that should really get you in the mood to dance (or roller skate) like it's 1990.

Held on Saturday, Jan 19th from 12-5pm at a secret London venue, this brunch is guaranteed to be the best day-party out there.

the Ice age

“I call it the lost generation, because from 2000 to 2017, nothing really defines that whole generation in pop culture. Like, how would you look back at 2000 to 2017 and remember anything? How would you see somebody wearing some gear and say, ‘Hey, that’s gotta be from 2014?’ There’s no music there, there’s no pop culture, there’s no fashion that defines the generation. I look at the Nineties like it’s the last truly great decade." -  Vanilla Ice

That's like a vernacular version of the Gospel according to K-Punk and Simonretromania being ventriloquized through Vanilla Ice's mouth there!

Ice is quoted in this piece by Rob Sheffield for Rolling Stone about Nineties revivalism, the Nineties nostalgia circuit that Ice and others are doing very nice business on, and decade-consciousness.

Mark McGrath of Sugar Ray also quoted on the Nineties:

“It was the last heyday of the music business. When you were a kid in your garage, you could pick up a guitar and dream of being part of that. I compare it to these young kids playing basketball, wanting to be in the NBA – then all of a sudden the NBA disappears, and the NFL disappears. Now people are still playing basketball, but it’s the local rec league; people are still playing football, but you gotta go find some guys and get some games together. The infrastructure of stardom is gone. So you look back on that – not just as a business, but romantically. ‘Boy, that was fun, going to Tower Records to see what’s new, watching MTV for a world premiere.'”

Sheffield lays on McGrath this idea of Nineties as the last proper Decade with a sense of itself c.f. first two decades of the 21st Century being Zeigeist-ly amorphous:

 “Right – what would you call it, the Noughties? The 2000s? No one knows what to call it. No one knows when it started or ended. It took a while for the stink of the Nineties to go away, because nothing replaced it. The industry imploded, so there weren’t new bands coming up. Name the last rock star. The top ten touring bands in Pollstar – it was still the Chili Peppers, it was still Soundgarden – God rest his soul, Chris Cornell – it was still the Dave Matthews Band. Nothing replaced the Nineties, even though the decade was over.”

This doesn't seem true to me, seems a bit of a self-serving fiction - there are plenty of definitively 21st Century pop stars, some of whom have taken on and taken over the old functions of rockstardom (excess, outrage, political statements, being taken seriously / taking themselves very seriously) ....  indeed Rockism is alive and well in pop itself, ironically (and boringly)... rock anthems of the 21st Century is a shrinking category, true... guitars are rarely heard in the Top 40, for sure....

As for the no-feel-to-2000s/2010s ... I guess we'll have to wait a bit longer to see if early-Noughties nostalgia kicks in. Won't be long now, if the 'stalgia is already settling in on the late Nineties, eve of Y2K moment.

YeahI wouldn't be surprised if a certain look (to clothes, hair) and feel 'n' finish to entertainment products will start to become apparent as we move into the future - something we couldn't put our finger on at the time, what with the welter of revivalism and pastiche

the clunkiness of an era becomes its charm

(although films and TV of the late Eighties and early Nineties often look really shit)

90s nostalgia i can get behind

"The grungy 90s drama  Reality Bites looks set for a revival on the small screen after the  original director, Ben Stiller, approved plans for a new TV series based on the hit film. Starring Winona Ryder
as an aspiring videographer working on a documentary about the disenfranchised existences of her friends and roommates, Reality Bites was often described at the time as a "Generation X" movie, despite efforts by studio Universal and Stiller himself to pitch it as a comedy with a broader appeal. The actor's directing debut, it performed only adequately at the box office in 1994, despite reasonable reviews. Nearly 20 years on, and the movie's achilles heel looks likely to prove its most appealing asset, with 90s nostalgia all the rage."- The Guardian

Now Winona Ryder nostalgia, that is something I can get behind.


 In fact we were watching Heathers only the other night - with slightly bemused 13 year old son. This on the eve of him starting high school (so perhaps not the best thing to watch, maybe).

How long long ago the clothes and overall look of the film seem!  Especially as it's not a very slickly made film. Whereas e.g. The Hunger (also seen recently) which is from 1983 (a half-decade earlier than 1988's Heathers), because it's so much higher budget/deluxe/filmic in its cinematography/ editing/lighting/sets,  doesn't look nearly as dated, as distant from present standards. At least not until Susan Sarandon' s hairstyle crops up on the screen.  

There is a syndrome where the recent past still seems recent enough to feel like nearly-the-present. And then it crosses the line. I noticed this most acutely with Seinfeld re-runs, which have been on continuously since the show ended (probably even before that, with the earliest series re-running while the show chugging through its mid-to-late seasons). Basically it's never been off the air. And at first in the late 90s/early 2000s Seinfeld, if you found yourself idly catching half or whole of an episode you'd watched at the time of its original airing, the show would look more or less like the present -- the clothes, hair, the production quality (studio lighting, film-video texture etc etc). But then all of sudden, what you were rewatching achieved the distinctness of a period. It was suddenly dated. An early-mid Nineties time capsule.  

"you can lose yourself in the sound like it's yesterday"/ back-to-the-Nineties, slight return

Early-nineties-retro  from Annie and Richard X

DJ Jesu, Utrecht Amiga Squad's "Punishment Dance", very droll....

back-to-the-Nineties

"Music fandom often follows a slow boomerang trajectory: listen to top-40 radio through your tween and early teen years, reject those impulses in favor of more cerebral, left-of-center music as you’re growing up, lean back toward pop as you settle into adulthood. The last couple of years have found a crop of young independent artists boldly attempting to reconcile those stages of their own listening life cycles, walking a tightrope of poptimism and experimentalism to create confectionary, homespun electronic music that’s sometimes described as future-pop. Grimes gushes about Mariah Carey and Aphex Twin in the same breath; Canadian duo Purity Ring have listed “Justin Timberlake, Clams Casino, and Holy Other” as inspirational forces behind their prismatic fairy tales; Glaswegian electro trio Chvrches have spoken about loving Fugazi and the Cure in interviews before divulging plans to cover Whitney Houston’s “It’s Not Right, But It’s Okay” in live shows" -Pitchfork's Carrie Battan on AlunaGeorge, who cite Timbaland and Neptunes as big influences.

Except it's not really "future-pop", is it, if the reference points are Nineties and early 2000s (Mariah, Whitney, Timbaland, Timberlake etc).  If it was to even be present-pop, let alone future-pop, it would have to be made in immediate response to, ooh, DJ Mustard and Will.i.am and Dr. Luke....

What it really is, is the Style Council move...  today's equivalent of making Curtis Mayfield records in 1983.

Elsewhere in the hipsterscape, the 1980s are still getting a look-in.... "boogie" (i.e. postdisco black club records) are a big influence, And then there's Ikonika's new album. .People frowned when I said that her debut Love Contact Want Whatever had the whiff of hyperstasis about it, but for the sequel Aerotropolis she's gone outright retro:

"The whole album is a fantasy of me being a lot older in the '80s, and choosing music rather than videogames at that time. It's funny to me that I didn't really grow up at the right age at the right time. And if I had produced this album back in the late '80s, would it sound the same or would it be different? I made an effort to use older equipment – like, I used a 707, I used Bok Bok's Juno-106 a lot. It's nice, as a producer who's come from a computer-based background, to work with machines and see how the early producers did it."

Q: Were you going back to the music of the 80s for inspiration?

"Yeah, a lot of freestyle house. I'm really attracted to that genre because it was very melodic with these brass sounds, and at the same time had really nice dancey, housey, disco and sometimes hip hop beats from the drum machines. I just love the patterns. I was thinking, this music must have been amazing at the time."

This review of Aerotropolis at Tiny Mix Tapes is so IDM-nerd-looks-down-on-collective-dancefloor-experience-as-brainless-and-de-individuating  it's not true, but otherwise seems on the money re. the "the shiny, retrogressive hedonism and 4/4 decadence", which aligns itself with the back-to-house vybe dominating the UK.

Maura Johnston asks "Why Can't We Leave the '90s"?  (at Seattle Weekly)

"Last month Microsoft, in the hope of burnishing the reputation of Internet Explorer, launched an ad that essentially asked, "Remember the '90s?" Called "Child of the '90s," the ad opened with a decade-appropriate bit of self-deprecation ("You might not remember us . . . ") before launching into a listicle of artifacts that existed between 1990 and 1999... They're hardly alone. ABC Family is readying the third season of Melissa & Joey, a sitcom based more on the premise of having Melissa Joan Hart (Clarissa Explains It All; Sabrina, the Teenage Witch) and Joey Lawrence (Blossom) share a small screen than on anything resembling a plot. The Twitter account @SeinfeldToday fast-forwarded that NBC sitcom's '90s-rooted characters and racked up 410,000 followers and a couple of parody accounts. And this year's Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, set for two April weekends in the California desert, will feature three headliners—the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Stone Roses, and Blur—better associated with the (touring) Lollapalooza era than the music-blog age."

Strangely in the whole quite long piece, Maura doesn't mention the My Bloody Valentine record and the huge nostalgia-driven swell of attention, discussion, etc about what is effectively a time capsule from the mid-Nineties.

(My initial reaction to the news of the album was to feel vaguely inconvenienced, as if by the sudden arrival on your doorstep, without any advance warning, of an old dear friend you haven't seen in 20 years -- you know you should be overjoyed, but life's moved on a lot, your head is in a completely different place, the timing feels off)

(My initial reaction to hearing the record, having finally succumbed to curiosity and proddings from the wife, was "Can I have my 42 dollars back please?".  Hopefully that'll fade on repeat plays. Hopefully the vinyl, whenever the fuck it turns up, will be glorious sounding. But in MP3 form, even when burned to CD-R and played on a good stereo, m b v mostly sounds dead to me, in an eerie but not particularly pleasing or compelling way. There's something rhythmically suppressed, aurally suffocated about the bulk of it - like my slight misgivings about Loveless were premonitions. If only the last track were the first track and it took off from there).

Back to Maura... 

"But the relentless march back to the '90s—whether through reunion tours by the likes of the Afghan Whigs and Pulp or 95-page photo galleries of the decade's toy crazes—seems to be more intense than the nostalgia of previous generations. (Yes, even more the Boomers', whose self-glorification sure seemed oppressive.) Reunion tours; full-album concerts; galleries of fashion from the decade; listicles that stroke readers' lizard brains until they're endlessly looping the question "Remember when?": These all reflect a culture that seems much more interested in looking back instead of moving forward."

Another recent piece on the 90s revival -- Smells Like 90s spirit  - and I make a brief appearance in that one

“Life moved a little slower.... the future was bright” -  Child of the 90s / Internet Explorer commercial