Skip to main content

Robert Pollard and Richard Davies were COSMOS. At least in 2009. I like to keep up to date.

Image
(Steven J Wilson)
I’ve been such a good lad. Writing almost like a responsible journalist. That’s not a bad thing, but I promised myself (and you) that SPEW would be a place for more dashed off bits. 

Well, here’s one. 

Cosmos. Ever heard of them? Unless you’re a Robert Pollard completist, probably not. Their sole release, Jar of Jam Ton of Bricks was released in 2009 (one of Pollard’s 100+ issues, only about a 1/4 of which are Guided by Voices titles). Cosmos was a collaboration with Richard Davies, Australian pop oddball and auteur behind the cult faves the Moles. The two of them share a certain aesthetic, a vision that embraces early John Cale, the first two Brian Eno records, Pete Townshend’s Scoop demos, bits and pieces of the Beatles, and a dash of early Syd Barrett. 

Some of the songs on Jar of Jam are based on little more than acoustic guitar and percussion, especially woodblock, others are full band janglers. Because of the duo’s shared sensibility it all hangs together and segues not unlike the disparately united flow of the Beatles (white album, to you). Like that fabled collection Jar of Jam includes strange little fragments and fully developed songs. 
Pollard is front and center more often than not. On “For the Whiz KId” he treads toward Big Star, or maybe R.E.M. territory. “Sudden Storms are Normal” features a Lennonesque melodic twist or two. Some of the songs are not only collaborative but feature shared vocals, including “The Neighborhood Trapeze,’ with its Psyc Furs pallor and Robyn Hitchcock whimsy. and the spectral, piano-based trifle “Just By Pushing a Button.” Davies’s turns as primary vocalist are highlights. “Grapes of Wrath” (‘are mine, leave them to me’) is a full-bodied, chiming folk-rocker with a direct, seductive melody. The shambling feel of “Early Chill Early Crow” features Davies in extemporaneous, eclectic mode, shards of Eugene Chadbourne dissonant guitar framing musings about “early rock ’n’ roll.”

Jar of Jam Ton of Bricks isn’t a world beater. It’s a one-off by two like-minded eccentrics. It’s charms are substantial, though, if you are as easily seduced by chamber-rock and unforced melody as I am. 

Comments

Post a Comment

The people have spoken.

10. Alan Vega - It (Fader) ... SPEW'S Top 10 countdown.

(Steven J Wilson)
If you know who Alan Vega is we can move along.  Alan Vega with one of his installations. But maybe some of you don’t.  Alan Vega was part rockabilly hiccup, part electronic futurist. He was a poetic minimalist. Whether as musician, either with his partner Martin Rev in the band Suicide or solo, or as visual artist (his gallery shows were infrequent, but legendary), Vega was uncompromising and unwilling to play the game. He was interested in energy, in process, not in creating a portfolio. One romanticizes artists at one's peril, but Alan Vega didn't have time for bullshit, and his work shows it.  Alan Vega died in 2016; he was seventy-eight years old. Much of his life he’d been a bit cat and mouse about his age, not wanting to let his Seventies “punk” peers at Max's and CBGB's know he was fifteen years older than them. He needn’t have worried. Nothing dated Alan Vega.  His posthumous swan song It i(the back half of a New York 'exit...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Necks are from Australia. They are improvisors.

(Steven J Wilson)
The new release by the Necks was reviewed recently in Pitchfork. 755 bloody words and other than some vague references to genre, mention of label mates, there’s one reference of a musical nature - to the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.  Sorta. The rest of it is a lot of bubble and squeak about cascades or echoes or some such shit.   Pitchfork gives me gas. It’s a handy reference because they do review a lot of releases, but whatever critical paradigm they have is dominated and subverted by a lot of psycho-babble and allusion to extraneous nonsense.   So, down to brass tacks. Whatever else the Necks may be, they are a jazz ensemble, a trio. Drummer Tony Buck, bassist Lloyd Swanton and keyboardist Chris Abrahams are Aussies who’ve performed together since the Eighties. I don’t pretend to know their entire history, but their last two recordings have been compelling sets of group improvisation. Recordings I discovered in part thanks to the British online jo...
Post a Comment
Read more