1. Chelsea Girl - Nico [1967]

Consider.

The years spent modelling and vamping around Europe in the rubble of WWII, tail-gating auteurs, lead nowhere.

The cameo in Fellini's Dolce Vita fails to parlay into an acting career.

Strip Tease, an early recording with arch diddler et trésor national Serge Gainsbourg, is passed over for Juliette Greco. (Nico's voice is not to the old rogue's breathy and infantile taste.)

A spell in London with manipulator a la mod Andrew Loog Oldham fails to generate pop magic.

And so....

Nico washes up in New York to be taken up by Andy Warhol (as in "Hols") as his latest superstar and touted as such to the VU crew. She and Andy are briefly inseparable.

Chelsea Girl is the perfect album created for a model. Nine of the ten tracks are written by ex-lovers, including co-writes by Reed and Cale. Subsequent albums, Marble Index and Desertshore are superior because they reflect her vision, her songs presented on the instrument she makes her own, the baby harmonium.

For now, enjoy the debut Nico hated. It works close up magic. Conjures washed out regret, degradation and loss. Worlds of beauty and decay in miniature. 

Oddi wrth y brawd

Lolita Chick '68 - Jacqueline Taïeb [2001]

Unnecessarily prurient title says more about CD provenance (Japan release) than Madamoiselle Taïeb's toothsome  yé-yé , SSW, funkily grooved stylings.  

Oddi wrth y brawd

Initials BB: Raretés II - Serge Gainsbourg

Highwater 60s BB dalliance. Period cornerstones collected: Comic Strip (biff, bang, pow), Chatterton (fou a lier!), Bonnie and Clyde et caetera. Pour les neophytes un intro splendides, pour l'initiés il ya beaucoup de mix alternative et version anglaise. BB's string-driven Je T'aime...Moi Non Plus something of a tonic apres years of organ bump n grind.

Oddi wrth y brawd

bebe

The Outside Room - Weyes Blood and the Dark Juices [2011]

Jackie-O siren provenance and title suggest Weyes Blood / Bluhd is for busting some outsider freak zone moves. Well, all that and more as withal Ms. Weyes has gone and produced arguably the unprettiest feminine album since Nico's Desert Shore. Shades of Ms. Päffgen's beloved "Jeem" prowl from the get go on Storms That Breed's steamy Manzarek carnival organ swirls. Dunno who Dark Juices are perxackly but they make latterly Bad Seeds sound like sissy boys. Thereafter, it's all creaking ambient melody droning death folk lament. Mesmerizing and swooning like heavily narcotized Cocteaus / Galaxie 500. Classy, subtle and haunted.

Oddi wrth y brawd

dream songs

Spleen and Ideal - Dead Can Dance [1985]

Ancient religious evensong and Lisa Gerrard's glossolalic forays into antique incomprehension. Like some immense home cinema in a cathedral. The Goth stops here.

Oddi wrth y brawd
de profundis

Arabian Songs - Dalida [2009]

Dalida, pronounced D-I-V-A. Italian extraction, Egypt born, naturalised French. Powerful, colourful and tragic.


Departed on barbiturates in 1987. 

Oddi wrth y brawd

habibi

Bande Originale de la Comedie Musicale ANNA - Serge Gainsbourg [1967]

Des yeux gris
Des yeux verts
Demain je saurai leur couleur exacte...

Un jour comme un autre
Ou je reste seule avec moi
Pourquoi Anna...Anna...

Oddiwrth y brawd
voici le disque

Poupée de Son - France Gall

Joann Sfar's intelligent and thrillingly rendered Gainsbourg bio art pic Une Vie Heroique offers up scene after scene of class Gainsbourg/Gainsbarre moments. Few more so than Gainsbourg's first meeting with teenager France Gall belting out Baby Doll in the raw (steady, meaning sung unplugged...oh, desist).

Present comp musters poppermost ye-ye apres ye-ye classic. Galloping opener Poupée de cire, poupée de son won Eurovision Song Contest 1965, representing Luxembourg. Being Gainsbourg, words unfold double / triple meaning wordplay. Translating as doll of wax, doll of bran/sound, the title sets up floppy singing doll Gall as Gainsbourg's plaything. Sylvie Simmons in her fine biog Fistful of Gitanes writes the song is about "the ironies and incongruities inherent in baby pop", that "the songs young people turn to for help in their first attempts at discovering what life and love are about are sung by people too young and inexperienced themselves to be of much assistance, and condemned by their celebrity to be unlikely to soon find out." (And if the galumphing rhythm and melody weren't later ripped off for theme tune of 70s UK children TV staple "The Flashing Blade" then je suis l'oncle d'un singe.)

Les Sucettes, Lollypops, ups le risqué factor with anis flavoured oral sex shenaniganisms.

Annie aime les sucettes
Les sucettes à l'anis
Les sucettes à l'anis
D'Annie
Donn'nt à ses baisers
Un goût ani-
Sé lorsque le sucre d'orge
Parfumé à l'anis
Coule dans la gorge d'Annie
Elle est au paradis

Annie loves lollypops
Anis lollypops
Anis lollypops
Annie's
Give her kisses
A taste like ani-
S while the barley sugar
Perfumed with anis
Sinks in Annie's throat
She's in paradise

Gall maintains she performed the song wholly unaware of Serge's sleazy intent.

All this plus anti-LSD flop single Teenie Weenie Boppie.

Oddi wrth y brawd

salut poupee



Meritie - Islaja [2004]

Snork Maiden Islaja (or Merja Kokkonen) trades in intimate, experimental world psych folk of exceptional proportions. Drawing on an array of esoteric instruments and electronic textures to create harmonic space transcendental and magical.  Doyenne of phenomenal Fonal label and known to knock about with Kemialliset Ystävät.

Don't say acid folk Björk, female Syd Barrett, or Nico. Maybe one woman Incredible String Band.


Buy and more

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sea road

Me Oh My - Cate Le Bon [2009]

Following 2008's Welsh language EP -  Edrych yn Llygaid Ceffyl Benthyg - and assistance on Gruff Rhys's Neon Neon project, Cate Le Bon applied her dark magic to debut album proper, Me Oh My. Dark indeed, though tongue is surely in cheek when she announces by way of explanation "Early experiences with a string of pet deaths had a profound lasting effect on me," and inform an "abnormal fixation with death." Or maybe not - check video.

Me Oh My is a rewardingly strange listen. Acoustic folk in feel but bringing in bursts of electronica, 60s psych and VU melancholy. Weirdness seeps through cracks in the folksy pop structures. Understated and spare. Fully merits the glowing reviews garnered on release. Where next for Ms. Le Bon?  

Oddi wrth y brawd
headed for the black

Arkhaiomelisidonophunikheratos - Satanicpornocultshop

As deranged, diverse and compelling as cover and title would suggest. Band hail from Osaka, though this is incidental to their defining achievement: a multiplicity of sound layers pierced by one single breakcore beat making for a destabilisng futuristic hip hop attack, alternating with fried folkery in the female Fursaxa vein.

Accordingly, opener Next Year's Snow lovingly mimics Vashti Bunyan to the point of pastiche. Only gentle glitches give warning of cut-up madness to come. Next up, (R.I.P.) Tide, a psychedelicised mash up of Pentangle's Light Flight, in which we are invited to get our  collective freak on, repeatedly. Saddam Fed Bird While Jailed ups the ante on beats and samples and ushers in Stanley knife mayhem of next two tracks, slashing, ripping and pasting multifarious field recordings, riffs and songs and shaping them into howling beast beat  monsters. A light and dark pattern emerges as the acid-fried harmonium chill returns with the respite of Glaneurs and Diamond Day hip hop of Pinky (the latter with further exhortations to get our freak on - a given by this point). Thence the breakcore-tastic Custom Drum Destroyer delivers on its title: wholesale lo-fi sample of No Fun mid-way through is nothing short of sublime. Left-handed Darling is twisted J-Pop. 9 Headed Monster begins by asking: "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" - a leitmotif for all this light and dark dialectic bethinks y brawd. So thick and furious are the subsequent breaks that the answer has to be "dazed and confused witch, thank you very much". Things then tail off into pleasing mellowness: a stab at 80s pop with Paradise; more Vashti / Fursaxa shenanigans on Kanariya; Margo Guryan over easy on Nido; a reprise of Next Year's Snow; to finish, a mad big beat electro-debris cover of Francoise Hardy's unassailable Comment Te Dire Adieu.

Easy then to understand criticism from some quarters aimed at the lack of full on breakcore onslaught with this release. However, to these ears the leavening of beats and samples with female oriented chilled out pop and free folkery work their magic. Proving perhaps that nothing is ever entirely black and white.

Oddi wrth y brawd
for twitchy witchy folk everywhere

23時の女 - ラブ・イン [23 Hour Woman - Love In] - 伊東きよ子 [Kiyoko Itoh]

Soft, whimsical and subtly erotic. Not the full on orgasmic moaning of Ike Reiko [know your conjuror] but something far more appealing and aurally addictive. Against the occasional back-drop of city-life field recordings Kiyoko hushes into being an impeccable set of melancholic love ballads. From what Y Brawd can work out, lyrics mostly concerned with the lonely lot of a metropolitan female singleton.

Nihon-no-philes will find this worth seeking out if only for the contributions of big-hitters J.A. Seazer [see earlier WB post here] and Kun Kawachi [keyboardist in Happenings Four and mastermind behind Kirikyogen / Kun Kawachi & Friends].

Whatever, this quiet wonder of an album stands on its own two feet…or rather, sits in some bleak Tokyo apartment…or early morning bar in Shinjuku…waiting for love that’s never going to arrive.

[Track titles in comments]



Oddi wrth y brawd
check, mate

Gainsbourg Versions Femmes - Various

Like many misogynists, Serge loved the ladies. And the ladies, by and large, they loved Serge. For one, he wrote songs the ladies love to sing. For two, his songs set beauty in miniature and flatter the plainest voiced songstress naif. His music brings out the innate beauty in the base and imperfect. Is it sexist to suggest that few women find this resistible? Probably. Now go listen.

Oddi wrth y brawd
lulu

Chelsea Girl - Nico

Try and point to a significant man to man dialogue in the work of Jane Austen. You’ll be hard pressed. Austen wrote what she knew and having little idea what blokes talked about in private, she left well alone. She’s a woman’s woman. her analogue, Nico is a man’s woman. Bear with me.

9 out of the 10 tracks on Chelsea Girl are written by Nico's ex-lovers. Even the co-writes by Reed and Cale. She is receptive, passive and her dependency, like her relationship with the needle, is essentially penetrative.

Consider. Years of modelling and vamping around Europe with talented auteurs has led nowhere. A cameo in Fellini's Dolce Vita is not parlayed into an acting career. Strip Tease, her early recording with arch French diddler Serge Gainsbourg is passed over for a version by Juliette Greco (her voice isn’t sufficiently breathy and infantile); a spell with mod manipulator Andrew Loog Oldham fails to launch her in the charts; she washes up in New York and is taken up by Andy as his next superstar. They are briefly inseparable.

I'll be your mirror / reflect what you are / in case you don't know....

Chelsea Girl is the perfect album by made by a model. In many respects, the later Marble Index is superior precisely because her voice - like her new instrument the harmonium -  is her own. On Chelsea Girl the narcotic monotone is not yet austere, narcoleptic drone. What her first album has instead are wide-eyed melodies tarted up with baroque strings that lull you into a washed out mood of regret, degradation, and loss.

She works a magic within the limits set. A world of beauty and decay in miniature. Jane would have approved.

Oddi wrth y brawd
Gwiriwch