vendredi 10 mars 2006

Where the words won't do (Dot Allison) Oh yes, Dot Allison. The missing notebook mildly bothered me because listening to more musicians than you can hope to mention swiftly at busy times, your memory can play tricks on you. Dot, a Scot, has got me wondering what she's doing musically today. She was full of love's unknowns -- and its inevitable polar opposites in 'Message Personnel', which is lyrically stronger sung than in the sketchy refrain you'll find written down anywhere -- on 'Afterglow', but that was in 1999. Hers is among entrancing voices of the years when there could be almost no music in my life and thus a real pleasure to discover by trusting to the odd ways of the iPod finger, which is equally unerring at finding just the right woman on some shelf. It wasn't the CD cover, just a name, a title and a blonde with a downcast gaze and long straight hair who might have been one of many women sampled on the Net but lacking the something special that stops me. What reminded me of stopping and much enjoying a taste was a fleeting reference to birds; "Oh yes, Dot Allison" (at a Chemical Sister home) and friends once raving about the "acid house" band she was in, One Dove, and with that she was back, a songwriter for busy days full of dreams. The emphasis for now is on the feelings Dot expresses in songs like 'Did I Imagine You?', her little touches like "I, I wanna hear the sound I only dream of And I, I wanna feel the chill of summer love" ('I Wanna Feel the Chill') and recurrent contradictions throughout the album's words that could easily pass for coldness and distance if Allison had failed in conveying the 'Afterglow' taken for the title for this set of songs but given none of them. Musically, she mixes so much chorally, electronically and instrumentally that listening to this again was a natural follow-up to some other Scots, the Cocteau Twins, with Dot's lyrics easier to grasp, more shoegazing and a head and voice above the clouds. Being unfamiliar what she achieved between then and 2003, I'll omit biographical details easy to find elsewhere. This is an uncredited photo of the Dot Allison of more recent days, attractively older than the pretty lass on 'Afterglow'. But just what afterglow? The album captures it far better than I can in ending a week much as it began, attentive to music from women who approach something maybe impossible to say in words alone. Love (that Big L beyond any powers of definition I've got when it acts through us and shapes what we do with others), particularly if we're "in" it or steeped in memories of being in it, can have strange effects I don't like to cogitate since doing so gets us nowhere. Allison's seven-year-old CD includes a kind of "break-up, make-up" song ('Tomorrow Never Comes') and a gorgeous opener, 'Colour Me,' the way a lover can, which is music for where what you've got with a partner is very real, colouring everything, yet "... it's intriguing (this is heaven now) So young yet too old to learn That summer is the thirst The river always runs dry first". She goes on to sing about the times when you know you're in the afterglow and it's sure and very uncertain both at once, but quoting lyrics isn't much good without the music. If what I'm trying to say means anything to you, however, then it'll be clearer if you remember: "Oh yes, Dot Allison." 'Clever clogs' and the blog rolls I've done it again. I don't mind if you don't, but more and more often there are times I tell myself, "No log tonight; you've got nothing to say and you fancy a break." But some musician's come along with an album that homes right in on what I've been slowly meditating, usually still am, and out they carefully come: the words for a bit of it. I do fancy a break, without bothering to go into changes you may have noticed, just a smile for a person who remarked that the Blogrolling service a lot of us use offers up to 10 blogrolls, "but Nick, you've only got nine on your site and that's not like you." That was smart and very true. For now, there are nine. I'm going meditate some more on a theme that has got me kind of pregnant. I've found the notebook again and now have to decipher it. It was buried under Garbage: 'Beautiful' (2003)! I kid you not ... but synchronicity only bothers me any more when it's absent. I wrote about later Garbage last May, suggesting "'Bleed Like Me' is a good dose of mental hygiene about messes between the rest of us." So it is, but having taken up meditation again, a practice some people regard as a kind of "mental hygiene", I don't believe it's just the "thought that counts". Dot Allison caught how it's what lies beyond the thought that makes for music. 11:52:49 PM  link   your views? [] Hurts to Purr? Only imagining things You may add "ambient" to the painful genre list. Some twit did on hearing what's coming. Was he driven out of his senses as well? It's mad, it's March and I'd be misbehaving minus a couple of decades to make sure she knows I'm listening ... if age matters since she says she's 102. Ms Pappademas looks every peachy day of it and has the wits to tell us what we wanted to know of the music. It "sounds like: "The far away details and patterns and other things you see from planes including skateboard shaped clouds and swimming pools. Hitting an air pocket and losing level flight. End of your life guilt. Loneliness paired with a weird love for everyone around you and all your past loves. The cold sweat recovery. Landing at home." Liz, the whole world knows I adore flying, am rid of life guilt and know about loneliness paired with a weird love for (almost) everyone around me and all my past loves. I've had more cold sweat recoveries every day than you've even begun to digest that multitude of influences. I'm not put off by this brawny pair of heavies ... or gentle giants. And what on earth could you want with 605 -- and still counting -- "friends"? I mean you like Gershwin and it'll be springtime in Paris, even for Californians like Liz of Hurts to Purr (My Space), someday in the next seven months? So would you...? - Good evening, all. It 'Hurts to Purr' at home on your own when you're too decent to keep a find like this trio to yourself, have been good-natured since a woman said "you're weird. Truly weird, but that's okay," and at last discover a band knows right from its sparkling first album where to shove the odious "sounds like" stuff. Since Melanie Haupt is a local writer and says nice things with justified pride in home fare, I suppose she's off the hook for declaring: "Hurts to Purr is the brainchild of singer Liz Pappademas, Austin's answer to Fiona Apple without the drama-queen histrionics" (Austin Chronicle). My taste includes the self-dramatising New Yorker's albums and I've shown surprise ar Apple's attitude to boyfriends; if there's no smoke without fire we only hear Fiona's side of the story. Hurts to Purr can conjure with the confessional too. Let's never confuse ambient with easy listening. Hurts to Purr are a delight on the ear, Pappademas' fine voice is one of the reasons, her lyrics and the surprises the band has up its sleeve are compelling and smart. I snapped this up on the strength of sound-bites at the iTMS (you won't find their self-titled album at Amazon), spurred by an instinct for great attitude. One bite was bright jazz, another 30 seconds of crystalline Pappademas piano and lovesick song with words all the "sillier" for being so true, and a third had an irresistibly catchy bass line (Tom Benton) -- all different. Kevin Ryan's the third purrer, producer and performer who knows a thing or two about Fiona Apple. This sufficed to sway a guy in a mood to find life quirky, surreal and often magical on hearing the detail in the seemingly mundane. Since I want to give you as much new stuff as possible, despite my views on the elasticity of time and a tight budget that's proving a good thing, the synching feeling here was irresistible. If I got it right Liz originally comes from San Francisco, one of the few places in the United States on my fantasy destination list. They're rebuilding New Orleans and what I hear from musicians has allayed some of my fears more soulless people will turn it into a Disneyland parody of itself. San Francisco's on a fault line, so ... fingers crossed. Hurts to Purr, however, is a pretty flawless first. Don't ask me for more when you know my mood? Pappademas and the guys have a perfectly nice way of introducing themselves (CD Baby, for instance). As for the future, ask Liz. And remind me to write up musicians and the My Space phenomenon -- I even had to get one of my own. Now that's all about ambience, what you put in it. Hers really is a gem. 12:01:47 AM  link   your views? []

nick b. 2007 do share, don't steal, please credit under artistic licence terms; contributing friends (pix, other work) retain their rights.