Yuck - Yuck

Imagine receiving a gift, go on, picture it in your mind. You sit down in a comfy chair, hold it on your lap and then, slowly, begin to unwrap. Pulling off the fancy ribbon and then peeling back the paper, before opening up the box itself.

Then, inside, imagine discovering odds and ends from all the best alternative music from the past 25 years.

There's the arms and legs of Pavement, the heart of Dinosaur Jr, the brain of Sonic Youth, the lungs of Teenage Fanclub and the soul of The Lemonheads, all collected into a disjointed bundle just bursting to fly free. Bubbling with excitement and anticipation and just waiting to be put together. Waiting for a host to rescue them. Enter a four piece band from Shoreditch, London, called, rather inappropriately, Yuck.

Climbing from the ruins of the much talked about, but extremely short lived, Cajun Dance Party, who's fire extinguished after one album in 2008 under the weight of unreasonable expectations. 20-year-old's Daniel Blumberg and Max Bloom, after a three year hiatus licking their wounds and discovering the music of the 80's post hardcore scene, decided to have another stab at the one thing that they love.

Recruiting drummer Jonny Rogoff, after a chance meeting in, of all places, a kibbutz, and Hiroshima-born bassist Mariko Doi, they hit the road with their bright and shiny new band. Signed to Fat Possum records, the label of American heavyweights Band of Horses, Yuck have delivered an album that is so in debt to the scene unbeknown to them until a few years ago that you find yourself checking the CD that you are listening to to make sure you've the right one and not some 'Best of Alternate America' (if it exists) album.

I say this like its a bad thing, and for that I apologise, because its not! Its a wonderful thing. Its a wonderful thing to find young talent cutting their teeth making music that doesn't bow down to the gods that are the money men with their hellish throw-away music for a quick buck.

Sorry...rant over...back to the review.

From the opening track 'Get Away' with its Dinosaur Jr-esque squall to the dark feedback of 'Operation' evoking memories of Sonic Youths 'Teenage Riot' and the albums highlight, the beautiful Shook Down with its gorgeous harmonies sounding like a lost Teenage Fanclub track, these young upstarts have created a record that reaches the neglected parts of the brain like no other band do.

And it continues through all of the twelve tracks. Skewing from loud distorted guitars and and belting solos (The Wall and Holing Out) to the sparse and hypnotic (Stutter and Rose Gives a Lilly) to make an album that is, to this reviewer anyway, damn near perfect!

The band themselves claim their true influences to be Sparklehorse and Red House Painters, so we can hopefully expect a lot more emotionally oblique, cunning, layered angles to Yuck’s music. Just as long as they don’t get rid of their ability to hit so many of rock’s sweet spots, they’ll be just fine.

Chasing The Dead - Tim Weaver

As an avid, and some may say, obsessive, reader of crime fiction, I am always on the hunt for something new and exciting to wet my appetite. Amazon, Waterstones and, while they still desperately hang onto life, some of the few remaining local indie bookshops, have become my playground to source out the wheat from the chaff and find my next read.

But, and it pains me to say this, I had just recently started to tire of the genre that I so love. I had become bored of reading, seemingly, the same novel re-hashing the same old story of a triple D cop (disheveled, divorced and drunk) and his desperate attempts to hunt down a nasty killer. Even authors billed as 'the next big thing' were treading the same boards and it seemed as though all imagination had disappeared. So, imagine my delight when this little gem of a novel skipped into my hands.

I have to be honest to begin with, that until I came across his, rather excellent, author website, www.timweaverbooks.com, after a boring morning at work trawling the internet, I hadn’t heard of Tim Weaver. But, after a short while reading through it and then checking out the, mainly five star, reviews for this, his debut novel, I had to see what all the fuss was about.

The novel centres on journalist, turned missing persons investigator, David Raker. Reeling from the death of his wife, Derryn, from cancer, he is approached with a request to look into the disappearance of a young man named Alex Towne, who vanished without word five years before, eventually turning up dead a year ago, in a car crash.

But, as Raker soon realises, this isn’t going to be just any run of the mill missing person’s case, because the real issue isn’t the reason why he went missing or indeed where he went. It isn’t even about his death. The real issue is why his mother, Mary, thinks she has recently seen her dead son, alive and well, in the street.

Driven by his own personal loss and the desire to help those in need, Raker agrees to take on the case, only to find himself thrown headlong into a dark world of lies, deceit and brutality, that takes him from the southern coast of Cornwall to Scotland, and pushes him further than he thought possible into a shocking world of human cruelty.

Tim Weaver has written one heck of an impressive novel that plays on the primal fears of darkness and devilry and steps onto the same playing field that authors such as Simon Kernick and Greg Hurwitz occupy, delving into the ordinary man in an extraordinary situation template. When you consider that Chasing the Dead is his debut, it makes it all the more of a marvelous achievement.

He leads the protagonist through a series of brilliant, and, at times, peak through your fingers as they cover your eyes, scary, set pieces that are alive with equal measures of pace and shocks, and read like the work of a seasoned pro.

In Raker he has created a character with a heart, and one that you can almost feel beating in every sentence. He’s a character that doesn’t rely on special skills or powers to fight his fight. He is real, impassioned and vulnerable. And if the opening couple of pages don’t leave you with a lump in your throat, then, well, there’s no hope.

To sum up, Chasing the Dead is a cracking good read, by an accomplished writer who - and I grow weary of writing this - deserves a bigger audience. But, after this, and the recent release of his second novel The Dead Tracks, I’m more than certain that Tim Weaver is here for the duration…or at least, I hope so.

At Dawn - My Morning Jacket

I was scrabbling around this morning, late for work, a dry piece of toast clamped in my mouth, looking for some music to listen to in the car, when, to my delight, I came upon this.

I remembered buying it back in 2001, remembered reading the glowing reviews at the time with references of Neil Young meets the Flaming Lips, holding it in my hand and thinking that I would make time to savour it, but, you know what, ten years later and I dont ever remember really listening to it. So, sliding it into my CD player, I decided that today was going to be the day to change that.

Lets not mess about, its easy to see why this album has been hailed as a modern American classic. From the opening salvo of the title track which eases in with its dreamy, shoegazing refrain to the Lynyrd Skynyrd-esque country rock of 'Honest Man' and the Sabbath-like guitar riffs of "Strangulation" its easy to see that the band, or more so primary songwriter, guitarist and vocalist, Jim James, are heavily indebted to the past and are not in any way shy of wearing their/his heart, and influences, upon their/his plaid sleeves.

At Dawn is full of the same strumming acoustic guitar, hauntingly treated vocals, elements of country and blues, and everything else that made their previous album, The Tennessee Fire, a magnificent country, rock, and Americana stew and one of my favourite albums of the past few years. Only here, they take it up a notch, expanding their sound and throwing a host of different elements in the melting pot. The track 'Lowdown' floats along on chiming guitars and a poppy '60s-inspired vibe. There are hints reggae on 'Phone Went West' (the albums only low point in my view) and R&B on 'Just Because I Do' all of which, to me, only enhance the bands appeal. 

Then, there is the true highlight of this (and every other MMJ album before and after) and that is the truly magnificent voice of James. Sounding like an amalgamation of Neil Young and heartbroken balladeers such as Roy Orbison and Gene Pitney, his reverb drenched vocals soak through every track, his voice steeped in hurt and emotion but nevertheless keeping his songs just the right side of uplifting.

In summing up, this is a great record. Granted, its not wholy original and, as Ive mentioned, the influences are there for anyone to hear. But, I feel that that just adds to its charm. It brims with warmth and excitement, and to know that there are still true musicians out there, honing their craft to the gods of a by-gone era, instead of praying to the money grabbing one hit wonder machine of the music charts, makes it all the better.

Further Listening:

Everything All The Time - Band of Horses

Alligator - The National

Veckatimest - Grizzly Bear

Yonder the Clock - The Felice Brothers

The Trials of Van Occupanter - Midlake

Clockwork Masterpiece

A Clockwork Orange is one of those books which everyone has heard of but which few people have actually read, seemingly prefering the 1971 big screen adaptation by Stanley Kubrick, which, I have to say, pales into insignificance compared to Anthony Burgess' dystopian novel of nine years previous.

In short, the story centres around Alex, a fifteen year old boy. But, he's not any old fifteen year old boy. He is a twisted, sadistic, violent fifteen year old boy. He is the self proclaimed leader of his gang, his Droogs, and between them they set out on a hideous rampage of rape, torture and murder. Then Alex is imprisoned for his crimes and the state, via mind control, tries to reform him

The story is, famously, preceded by a reputation of shocking violence, and, I’m not going to deny that it shy's away from it in any shape or form, featuring lengthy accounts of heinous crimes, and they’re vivid, excitement filled, descriptions (of which Burgess later wrote in his autobiography: ‘I was sickened by my own excitement at setting it down.’) Yet it does not glorify violence, nor is it a book about violence per se. Rather it’s an exploration of the morality of free will. Of whether it is better to choose to be bad than to be conditioned to be good. It is a storey of alienation and how to deal with the excesses to which such alienation may lead. And ultimately, of one man’s decision to say goodbye to all that. (At least in the UK version. The American version, on which Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation was based, ends on a less optimistic note.) In short, it’s a novel of ideas which just happens to contain a fair bit of violence.
It is also nothing short of a marvellous artistic and linguistic achievement. Those who have seen the film will know that Alex (the anti-hero) and his droogs speak a made-up language full of Russian loanwords, Shakespearean and Biblical influences and Cockney rhyming slang. Initially this nadsat language was nearly incomprehensible to me and caused my avoiding it for a long time. I found myself cursing Burgess for his pretention at writing such a novel. Then, one day I picked it up finally made a stand to give it one last go, and it was only then that I realised that I had found one the best books ever written.

However, despite all these issues regarding the language, Burgess takes great care to introduce his new words in an understandable way, so, after a few pages you get the hang of the nadsat lingo, and, after a few pages more you’ll begin to admire it, because for one thing, Burgess is awfully consistent about it, and for another, it just sounds so damned good. I mean, if you’re going to come up with a new word for ‘crazy’, you might as well choose bezoomny, right? Because it actually sounds mad. Doesn’t it? Anyhow, there’s more to A Clockwork Orange than just philosophical ideas and linguistic pyrotechnics. The writing itself is unexpectedly lyrical, and not just when it deals with violence. Some of the most beautiful passages in the book deal with music. More specifically, classical music, because, for all his wicked ways, Alex has a passion for classical music, and a particular adoration for Beethoven. He is cultured, and while his culturedness obviously does not equal civilisation and goodness (a point he himself is quick to make), it does put him a notch above the average hooligan. It’s the apparent dichotomy between Alex’ tastes in art and his taste for violence which makes him such an interesting protagonist and which keeps you following his exploits to their not entirely believable (but good) conclusion.
In short, to say that Burgess' most famous creation is anything other than a masterpiece is utter nonsence. It stands, in my opinion, alongside Orwells 1984 and Salingers Catcher in the Rye, as one of the greatest works of 20th century literature.

Unpublished work by crime master set to be unveiled.

A cache of unpublished works by famed writer Dashiell Hammett, often looked upon as the father of hardboiled detective fiction, has been found and is set to be unveiled in America.
Hammett, whose best-known work, The Maltese Falcon, was made into a film starring Humphrey Bogart, died in 1961. But now, 15 unpublished short stories are set to hit the bookshelves after being discovered by magazine editor, Andrew Gulli, among the literary archives of the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas in Austin.

Gulli, who will now publish one of the stories in his crime magazine, The Strand, later this month, said, "There are some very, very good pieces of fiction here. Some of them are classic Hammett and fit in with the style we know and others are very different and go off to places that were a different direction for him,"
The Hammett discovery is just the latest in a series of coups by Gulli's magazine. In recent years The Strand has also printed previously unseen works by Graham Greene, Mark Twain and Agatha Christie.
The Hammett story that will feature in The Strand, Called So I Shot Him, is a piece of straight talking detective fiction in the rat-a-tat style familiar to Hammett's legion of fans that tells the tale of an afternoon by a lake that goes horribly wrong.
The dialogue is said to be crisp and deadpan and the characters memorable, which, to anyone familiar with Hammetts work, will come as no surprise.
The news of the undiscovered works has some crime fiction experts delighted at the prospect of studying fresh material from a man many consider to be a popular genius. Besides The Maltese Falcon, whose hero was the crafty hard-bitten gumshoe Sam Spade, Hammett also wrote The Thin Man and Red Harvest – the latter was once named on a list of Time's 100 best novels in the English language.
"We can never have enough Hammett."said Tom Nolan, an expert on detective fiction and a literary critic for the Wall Street Journal. "The prospect of being able to research and understand stories that have never been published before is truly exciting. Hammett is as relevant as any of the better known American writers of the day like Ernest Hemingway or John O'Hara."
Hammett, along with other writers of the 1920s, 30s and 40s such as Raymond Chandler, defined a new fictional world with their gritty portrayals of urban America. They shunned straightforward heroes and villains for chancers and grifters who worked on both sides of the law. The low-life characters and anti-heroes were a ground-breaking development for most mass fiction and still influence crime novels today.
Hammett lived as colourful a life as any other writer or indeed any of his characters. His inspiration for the worlds he created came from his time spent as a detective for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency from 1915 to 1922.
However, he was also a political activist and a fervent supporter of leftwing causes and the labour movement. By 1934 he stopped writing full novels and devoted most of his time to political causes, including joining the American Communist party. He was eventually blacklisted in the 1950s by Congress's notorious house un-American activities committee. A fondness for hard drink also took its toll and he died a virtual recluse in a New York city hospital.
Now the discovery of new work adds an unexpected final chapter to Hammett's literary life. Gulli said he had no idea how or why the works were in the Texas archive or when they were written as none are dated. "They could have been written anytime in the 1920s or 1930s or 1940s," he said.
But, in a typical Hammett plot device, they now provide an unexpected twist at the end of a narrative. As many of the works, including So I Shot Him, deviate from the traditional settings of his previous detective fiction, they show that Hammett was a talented writer beyond the literary niche he was best known for. Hammett, Gulli says, should now be seen in a very different light. "He was drifting into something else. We have discovered that he was a far more versatile writer than he ever gets credit for," Gulli said.

Hmmm, beard?

Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Abraham Lincoln. The thoughts conjured up are of great, influential men of their time. Men immortalised by their leadership, literature and forward thinking. But what else? Well, they were all beardies.
Moustaches and beards have been around, seemingly, forever, and for many it is more than just a fashion statement. Beards hold more significance as they are seen as an extension or even enhancement of the man's personality and characteristics. Michael Buchino, writer for internet forum Beard Revue says, 'the growing of a beard is the outward expression of man’s inner soul and the transformation is an opportunity for unfettered contemplation'
In days gone by, it was normal to have a beard, it was perceived that a beard wearer was of higher intellect and superior wisdom. 'He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man' said French author and filmmaker John Cocteau. It was thought that with a good beard came masculinity and a sign of power. But these beards were often rough and un-groomed. In today's fashion conscious world, beard styles have evolved from unkempt layers of hair to stylish and suave enhancers.
There are so many beard styles doing the rounds today, that it is impossible to not notice them, from the classy, neatly trimmed goatee to the groomed George Michael-esque designer stubble, to the full unkempt grizzled mountaineer beard, all these styles appealing to men of all ages across the world. A lot of women also like to see men with beards as they feel it enhances their masculinity, and makes them look more rugged. American comedienne Minnie Pearl said 'kissing a man with a beard is a lot like going to a picnic. You don't mind going through a little bush to get there'
For far too long the bearded men of this nation hid themselves away, becoming synonymous with the geeky and the studious. But, with the advent of celebrity culture, gone are the days when beards were associated with the tweed jacketed geography teacher, the techie boffin or the unkempt political protestor, they have now become a trendy fashion statement, worn by everyone from sharp suited businessmen, male fashion models and the Hollywood a-list.
Beards have been in and out of fashion for as long as there has been fashion. Over the course of history, men with facial hair have been labelled with various attributes, ranging from, wisdom and knowledge, sexual virility or high social status to filthiness or of being of an eccentric disposition, such as in the case of a bum, hobo or hippie.
Its history dates back to biblical times, with Sikhism, Judaism and Islam all considering the beard to be an integral part of the male body. Countless images of God's and deiti's throughout the world are portrayed with beards as part of their nobility and dignity. 'it's time I joined the ranks of great men with beards, just look at Jesus' said Family Guy's Peter Griffin.
The Ancient Egyptians grew hair on their chins which was often dyed and plaited with gold thread. In Asia, beards were admired and grown long as a symbol of wisdom. Then there were the Persians who greased and curled them. The Greeks were lovers of their beards too and thought that it was not only a sign of virility but also made the wearer look smart and Philosophical. The early Romans, however, considered it as a mark of slovenliness and squalor and not until the latter days of the empire was it seen otherwise.
Centuries then passed where the beard fell off the radar, before Henry VIII reinstated is as a fashion statement. William Shakespeare then wrote, at the height of his powers, in the play, Much Ado About Nothing 'He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man' And Ivan IV of Russia, or Ivan The Terrible as he was more famously known was said to be so fond of his, and the beard in general as a statement, that he is quoted as saying 'To shave the beard is a sin that the blood of all martyrs cannot cleanse. It is to deface the image of man created by God'
Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries the beard became relatively unknown among most parts of Western Europe and America, especially among the upper classes. Things stayed this way until the Victorians, lead by statesmen and cultural figures like Charles Dickens and Benjamin Disraeli, brought it back with a bang and grew theirs bigger and better as a sign of pride in the British Empire.
But it was in the 1960s and throughout the 1970s with the advent of television and popular music spreading across the world that the beard really came into its own. With the hippie movement springing out of the United States and musicians like The Beatles and The Beach Boys and acting stars such as Clint Eastwood and Sean Connery all adorning impressive facial hair, the beard saw itself presented to a global audience and its influence explode. And today, everywhere you look you see beards.
One only needs to look at popular culture and the trend of beards amongst celebrities to know the alluring effect that they have, they are part of society more than ever before. Stars such as George Clooney, Joaquin Phoenix and Jim Carrey have given over there rugged clean shaving appearances in favour of a beard. Brad Pitt was even quoted as saying, 'My beard is staying because it covers my bum shaped chin!'
Footballer David Beckham has swapped his boyish model looks for a face of hair. TV chefs The Hairy Bikers are forging a career out of their facial hair. Scores of fuzzy-faced men from across the globe descend on various locations throughout the world for annual Beard and Moustache Championships. Phil Olsen, the founder and self-appointed captain of Beard Team USA, states that it is 'his mission to make the United States a power in international beard and moustache competitions and to bring back the beauty of the beard'
In summary the beard has a bushy, thick and richly fascinating history, one that has spanned many centuries and many great men. Perhaps, though, if Francis Drake hadn’t singed the beard of the king of Spain, it may have been a different story.