Nine Feet Underground

This has certainly worked well. Not. So much for posting more frequent shorter musings, though to be fair there have been ‘extenuating circumstances’.   There’s been a veritable cornucopia of topics I have written, but sadly these have only been written in my head.   I really do need to find a way to transfer what I’m thinking into digital text without the need for laborious typing. Any ideas? I guess if I could type as fast as I think I might be in with a chance, but that’s never going to happen. There is a backlog of posts to be written on topics including: The 40 th Anniversary release of Caravan’s album ‘In the Land of Grey and Pink’ Why the Top 40 today is like the Top 40 in the 1970s Ash Ra Tempel album remasters The album review project Guardian/Observer ‘My Favourite Album’ music blog The last articles on the list are likely to be the first ones I’ll actually write as I’ve been listening to a fair few albums over the summer and have amassed a few thoughts on the

A recent email from the Caravan Information Service alerted me to the imminent (30th May) release of a 40th Anniversary deluxe edition of 'In the Land of Grey and Pink'. Given all the extra tracks that were added to the remastered versions of the albums Caravan recorded for the DERAM (Decca) label, not to mention the extras surfaced on the 4CD Decca anthology ('The World is Yours') released last year, I did wonder what they could find to fill the 3 disc release. Well, there's not a huge amount of new material, however probably enough nuggets for the fan of the band or album.  Disc one contains a new remastering of the original album, plus an unreleased mix and two unreleased versions of tracks from the album.  Disc two includes some more unreleased versions and mixes, of which the version of 'Nigel Blows A Tune' is potentially the most interesting. The rest of this disc includes tracks recorded live for the BBC, which I believe are available elsewhe

Clearly I'm going to have to admit defeat - at least on one front: the format of this blog must change, at least for the foreseeable future.     So let's finish off the February album of the month and then on to a new, crisper approach to the blog. Feb's fab five did get a full work out and here's what I made of them... I had high hopes for Rumer's debut, 'Seasons of my Soul', even though for some time I'd consciously ignored the album mainly due to solo female singer overload: too many too similar. Then out of the blue I heard 'Slow' and was bewitched. Sadly the rest of the album is a disappointment: don't get me wrong, her voice is beautiful and given the right material this could have been a great album, but the songs drift by like lift music, barely registering. The songs and her voice rarely combine to convey emotion - not a problem if glacial cool / ice queen is the aim (Sarah Nixey where are you now?), not so good if soul is the g

Music always comes third in the list of priorities when it comes to my time, so it comes to pass that February’s short list post appears in March.  It’s not a big deal – I’ve had the February five since early in the month and owing to working in London these days, there’s plenty of time to listen whilst on planes, trains and automobiles. The not-so famous five for Feb are and these are 'Seasons of my Soul' - Rumer, 'Ventriloquizzing' - Fujiya and Miyagi, 'Spooky Two' - Spooky Tooth, W hite Noise Sound's self-titled album, a nd lastly  'Rolling Thunder' - The Go! Team  (left to right, top to bottom). I’ve not a lot of time to say why these five – Rumer was an out of the blue choice after hearing a couple of tracks and being smitten by “Slow” in particular. Spooky Tooth – the token oldie – are a band whose name I’ve long been fascinated by but whose music I barely know.  I remember their name from Saturday afternoon Alan “Fluff” Freeman shows

Welcome back my friends (“...to the show that never ends”)… January’s long list pretty much chose itself – I already had five albums in mind before I started the blog.  There’s always a ton of oldies I want to listen to (off the top of my head…a couple of early Robert Wyatt “solo” albums, a compilation of the Tangerine Dream Virgin albums, recent reissues / compilations from dub reggae masters Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Scientist, the early Mothers of Invention albums, the first album by Deuter and a bunch of “krautrock” albums from Popol Vuh, Cluster (them again!) and Amon Duul II blah blah blah!) so that’s never a problem, but I couldn’t think of anything new worth investigating for February.  So I took a look around and at first pass wished I hadn’t – there is so much new stuff, but hang on - half the albums I’d like to hear aren’t released until mid- to late-February and so aren’t available to hear online yet! Suddenly the prospect of a very long March long list emerges along with

Funny old world! I’ve been listening to these five albums (you remember, the latest from The National, Salem, Oneohtrix Point Never and Wire plus an oldie, Cluster ’71 by Cluster) since the start of January and my thoughts about almost all of them have changed several times.  At least I didn’t rush out and buy them all: chalk one up to the experiment! I had planned to write an interim posting of thoughts on the albums so far, but in fact time has overtaken me: this post announces the winner of the January album of the month instead. Before announcing the winner, what of the other albums? King Night the debut album from Salem : I had high hopes for this one. I like it. It has the sort of ‘dark’ sounds I find appealing, but if anything it’s just not dark enough. Nevertheless it has quite a unique sound somewhere on the fringes of dubstep, dark core drum ‘n bass and industrial electronica, much of it slowed down to a crawl.  On the basis of ‘King Night’ I’ll keep a look out for the nex

Nine Feet Underground was saddened to hear of the untimely death of Trish Keenan, lead singer of Broadcast, earlier this month. I've been a fan of Broadcast and Trish's voice since I first heard the band on John Peel's radio show way back when. Most recently I have been entranced by Broadcast's recordings with The Focus Group, especially 'Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age'. Apart from sending me back to the albums - including the aforementioned joint EP with The Focus Group and 'The Noise Made By People' - I've also been looking and videos and live recordings on You Tube. As a small gesture in return for the pleasure their music has brought me, here's a link to them performing 'Come On Let's Go' from the album 'The Noise Made By People' on Jools Holland's show way back in 2000.

In this post I’m presenting my short list of 5 albums for January along with a few words about why this particular 5: From left to right and top to bottom these are Cluster ('71), Oneohtrix Point Never (Returnal), Salem (King Night), The National (High Violet) and , bottom left, Wire (Red Barked Tree). I’m sure you’ll have been following this closely, so I’ll not repeat the original list, though I do have a few words to say about why the other 8 albums didn’t make it. First off the Mothers of Invention and Khan albums: these albums, like Cluster ’71, are from way back in the mists of time, and the rules only allow for one old album at most (the use of the term old is purely time related, the album may still be new to me) and Cluster won that honour, but why? Well, the Mothers album – much as I’d like to hear it - isn’t available online, so it lives to fight another day (perhaps).  The Khan album is available through Spotify, and is reported to be excellent (if you like that

So, the next step in my experiment is to identify a list of music to listen to in January 2011.  This really isn’t going to be difficult as a list has been bubbling under since well before Christmas.  At the moment it’s a fairly long list – a long list I need to whittle down to just five (or maybe six – the rules are not that prescriptive) candidates for my album of the month. This post heralds the full list of hopefuls, possibles and downright eternal optimists that are fighting it out to be included in my January short list. I’m sure you’re wondering how I get to hear the albums in the first place:  any way I can!  In practice this means if it’s not on Spotify , the band’s / artist’s My Space page or streamed somewhere ahead of release ( Pitchfork , the guardian music blog or wherever) it’s not that likely to make the shortlist. After all, one of the rules is that the album must be heard in full, more than once, in order to stand a chance of becoming album of the month. That way

I love music.  I don’t love all music, but I’ll listen to anything. Once. Probably. Overall though it would be fair to say the vast majority of the things I love fall under the heading ‘popular music’, just to avoid unjustified expectation. Beneath that the musical categories, genres, sub-genres and tribes get a bit confusing.  Plus I don’t really like labels.  Just “I like that”, “I hate that” and “that’s so unambitious and mediocre to the point of boredom”. This love of music has made me into a voracious consumer of music.  Probably too much [nah, impossible] – but certainly to the extent that over Christmas my wife accused me of being addicted to music, or at least to buying CDs.  Inexplicably this struck a chord and is the inspiration for the experiment which this blog will record during 2011. So, to this blog then: It’s called ‘Nine Feet Underground’ because it’s named after one of my favourite pieces of music – that’ll probably come up at some point in one of the blogs. That as