Album of the Month: DRIFT CODE by Rustin Man

This album, while not very forthright initially, has been sucking me in for three weeks now. With its silky piano, with its classy yet nondescript vocals, with its smooth, ingratiating melodies only occasionally disturbed by a ragged guitar line, this album feels intensely autumnal. Which is interesting as this is a man, remember, who made that classic LP with Beth Gibbons titled - yes - Out Of Season.

The man is Paul Webb (this is his second album under the 'Rustin Man' moniker), formerly a bassist of Talk Talk. 

Drift Code is tasteful to a fault. You only need to look at the cover to realise that is one of those special records that get by on charm as much as they do on their musical substance. The same goes for Paul Webb's voice, too, which is late-period Bowie with just a touch of the Apartments' Peter Walsh.  

The album features no particular highlights. Everything's lowkey and extremely even - although you might want to pick out the tinkling piano bit in "The World's In Town" around the 2:30 mark, or else the chorus of "Martian Garden" (the catchiest thing here), or else the mysterious groove underlying "Judgement Train". Elsewhere, "Light The Light" is almost playful and "Brings Me Joy" is almost the prettiest thing you will hear all year. 

Mind you, the moment you let this record under your skin (which is the only true way of experiencing it), you will see it as a great mood-piece that could soundtrack any grim February of your life. However autumnal it may appear to be. And the way he intones 'summer' in that closing song - well, this will just sound devastating. 

P.S. Rest in peace, Mark Hollis.

Same as it ever was...

The Academy Awards cease to exist the moment the last winner is announced. After that - nobody cares, total void. You would be hard pressed to remember who got the coveted statuette two days ago. The only time the situation developed differently was, of course, in 1989, when the Oscars died the moment the ceremony started. 

But this year - it will be no different from the usual state of things. Today, by nightfall, the whole thing will fade away, and no one will care that the year's best film (Cold War) got nothing, that it still makes no sense to split the Best Director and Best Picture awards, and that Spike Lee said something or other. Oh and Green Book? Please. This is like saying Nashville Skyline is the best album by Bob Dylan. 

travelling notes (lxxxii)

The greatest miracle of my travelling summers took place in the small town of Consuegra, by the windmills of Miguel de Cervantes. The day was scorching hot, and the air felt like boiling water scratching every living inch of my skin. The ground was dried and potholed by humourless sunshine. There was one full hour before my bus to Toledo, I was hopelessly dehydrated, and the cash I had was only enough for one bottle of water from an automatic machine. I inserted the coin, and nothing happened. The coin got stuck. Out of sheer desperation, I hit the machine with my hands, and - lo and behold! - two bottles came out. It took me one gulp to drink all that water, but I think I was saved that day. 

Bismarck's Broken Neck. 'Stalin' by Stephen Kotkin

Some of the most evocative pages I've had the pleasure to read come from the final chapter of Stephen Kotkin's breathtaking biography of Joseph Stalin. The second part of the monumental trilogy (two thousand pages and counting), Waiting for Hitler, 1929-1941, ends with the tense few hours before the fateful morning of June 22. 

For a few moments, we are inside the head of one of the 20th century's bloodiest despots, pacing the room, distrusting everyone, fumbling with the pipe full of his favourite Herzegovina Flor cigarette tobacco. This is frankly astonishing stuff. Not least because you've already gone, and suffered, through hair-raising accounts of interrogations, arrests, executions. Because now it is he who is full of zoological dread. Because Hitler is at the door, Hitler whom he had recently toasted, and appeased, and supplied with grains and oil, and there is that sickening smell of madness mixed with German beer.

And then there is silence, only slightly diluted by the black ravens crowing at the window. The black ravens he had ordered to shoot by the thousands. So yes, now there is silence, only slightly altered by his shuffling shoes hiding those monstrous webbed toes which, as the legend has it, betrayed Satanism.

This could all seem too 'flowery' considering the fact that Stephen Kotkin, a professor in history of both Stanford and Princeton Universities, wrote a book so objective and so rich in sources (hundreds of pages you'd need a magnifying glass to read). Some time ago, in Kotkin's conversation with Slavoj Žižek at the New York Public Library, the world's favourite Slovenian Marxist spoke about how sick he was of all those historians who focus 'too fucking much' on personality and overlook the historical context. To which Kotkin replied, quite rightly, that sometimes the personality is just too omnipotent, and overpowering. 

And he tries, too, but what could you do about those mind-boggling 30s (even Hitler was dumbfounded), about a whole country ruled from one man's "Little Corner"?

Kotkin writes with great imagination, something you would not find in too many books on history, and the details he provides are of the kind that will stay with you long after you close the book. Those German women sewing Soviet flags to welcome Stalin in Berlin (German disinformation weeks before the attack). General Pavlov's subordinate listening to The Gypsy Baron by Johann Strauss II the night of the invasion. And, of course, the bust of Otto von Bismarck - whose neck got broken while being delivered to Hitler's office. With no one having the heart to tell the Führer. 

Even before the third book is released (in the works; tentative title is Miscalculations and the Mao Eclipse), Stephen Kotkin's work seems unparalleled. In its two volumes, both fascinating and unfathomable, it could well deliver the strongest judgement on the 20th century this side of the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam.

Robert Pollard in 2019

Robert Pollard may not need anybody, but he does need Tobin Sprout. Desperately:

It has become an annual ritual, listening to a new Guided by Voices album. By this time, I can almost predict my reaction, and the reaction is perfunctory. Come to think of it, I have not been consistently impressed with Guided by Voices music since Bears for Lunch. And that was, what, 2012. An eternity by the standards of Robert Pollard. 

For sure, the band has never released an all-out masterpiece, but then all-out masterpieces are not Pollard's concern. Pollard has always been about the scattered flashes of brilliance that have over the years provided such timeless pop 'hits' as "Hey Hey Spaceman", "Drag Days", "Feathering Clueless" and about a million others. The sound, the attitude, the hooks. 

These days, it seems, I can't dig deep enough. On surface, each song on 2019's Zeppelin Over China sounds like a potential Guided by Voices classic. The sound, the attitude, the hooks - it's all there, in spades. What is missing is that timeless melody that was last heard, albeit briefly, on "What Begins on New Year's Day" from August by Cake. 2017, no less. Otherwise, my ears are drowning in the sea of perfectly serviceable power pop and feedback-drenched balladry which, crucially, lacks that extra dimension. 

Quite simply, it lacks timelessness that Tobin Sprout can still produce on occasion. Highly unlikely, granted, but I assume a melody like the one on "When I Was a Boy" (from Sprout's overlooked The Universe and Me, 2017) could well remind Robert Pollard that he can still pen a melody which could fly:

Not that I will ignore those two other LPs to be released by Guided by Voices in 2019, of course. Like I say, it's a ritual. A hope. And maybe a curse, too.

travelling notes (lxxxi)

It is with great fondness that I recollect my first pub experience. Ages ago, in a pub outside Birmingham, I happened to make a fool of myself no less than two times. First, when I asked for green tea. Second, when I revealed my support for a football club from Manchester... Thankfully, everything gets written off when you travel.