FischerspoonerOdyssey

Fashion can be a fickle beast. Three years ago Fischerspooner could do no wrong. They looked fantastic, they gave good interview and they’d recorded a great debut album. In short, they were the favourites of journalists and fashionistas alike and the world was theirs for the taking.

But then, as is the wont in tales of this type, things started to go awry. They released an album, 2002’s ‘#1’, to a grand total of absolutely no sales at all. Not only did it fail to dent the chart, it barely even left a scuffmark on pop’s shiny surface. But that’s hacks and slavish fashion sheep for you. They might claim to like a record but that’s no guarantee that the majority of people making the assertion have ever heard it or even harbour the slightest desire to do so. Shot by the hand that feeds and all that.

Anyway, three years is a long time in music and an eternity in fashion. Which quite possibly goes in Fischerspooner’s favour. Last time around there was such a proliferation of like-minded bands that Fischerspooner were merely part of the crowd and probably missed out on a lot of the credit that they would have otherwise been afforded. But now, divorced from the vagaries of scene mongering and electroclash, it’s possible to judge them purely on the terms of their music, rather than as a prevailing trend.

And ‘Odyssey’ stands up to scrutiny very well. Their cover of Wire’s ‘The 15th’, on ‘#1’, should have suggested that there was more to Messers Fischer and Spooner than first met the elaborately made-up eye. Actually, Wire work well as a point of reference here. Much of ‘Odyssey’ is informed with a similar feel to Wire’s ‘154’, only run through a sequencer rather than bashed out with the more traditional drums, bass and guitar. If you take LCD Soundsystem as a barometer of modern post-punk, then, much as the likes of Q & Not U and Les Savy Fav are only a couple of steps more rock than James Murphy, Fischerspooner are merely one step less rock than the DFA boys.

In theory, ‘Odyssey’ represents Fischerspooner’s attempt to reconcile their music with their more traditionally rock based influences, including, at least according to the sleeve notes, the Stooges, Bowie and My Bloody Valentine. But filtered through a big shiny box scrawled with the legend dance-floor filler. In reality, this doesn’t make for any major sonic leap forward, or backward depending on how you look at these things, but it does make for a more coherent sounding record. ‘Just Let Go’ is probably the nearest that you’ll get to an ‘Emerge’ on here, all throbbing disco beats and pulsing rhythms, interspersed with stuttering guitars. ‘Cloud’ is closer to the electroclash (computer)blueprint, with its hint of Duran Duran, while ‘We Need A War’ takes a Susan Sontag lyric and turns it into a Pet Shop Boys classic that Neil Tennant forgot to write. And ‘Circle’ is, as much as this may take you by surprise, a Boredoms cover.

Three years ago, Fischerspooner came dangerously close to being written off as a pair of vacant performance-art chancers that had got lucky. ‘Odyssey’ shows that we should consider ourselves lucky that they bothered to stick around long enough to give it another try.

Einstürzende NeubautenKalte Sterne, Tabula Rasa

Band names are shit. Think of your favourite band. What is it with that name? When you really get down to it, what the fuck is it supposed to mean? What does it say about the band? What does it say about their music? All too often, the answer is nothing, nothing at all. This is where German bands tend to have the advantage. Kraftwerk, Neu, Einstürzende Neubauten. All three names say as much about the band as the music itself.

Translated, more or less literally, Einstürzende Neubauten means knocking down new buildings. Colloquially, it refers to the knocking down of high-rise flats of the type erected in the housing boom of the 60s and 70s. The type of multi-storey prefab shit holes that you find in new towns across Europe. Heavy-duty construction turned back into destruction, and that’s exactly what Einstürzende how sound.

‘Kalte Sterne’ compiles the abrasive primal pounding rhythms and clanging guitars of their early (1980-82) singles, laden with the sound of power drills rasping metal. ‘Tabula Rosa’ (originally released in 1993), a far less punishing listen, sees them honing their electro-industrial beating into more traditionally-structured songs while exploiting Blixa Bargeld’s Bad Seeds connection to bring in Nick Cave’s former muse and paramour, Anita Lane, to provide the feminine touch.

So, to summarise, the Germans – good at band names, not currently so good at football.

Pit Er PatShakey

Ever wondered what a supergroup comprising members of Blonde Redhead and 90 Day Men would sound like?

No? Neither had I before now but you could hazard a guess that this is something that has occupied the minds of Pit Er Pat recently. Should such collaboration ever take place, there’s a fair chance that it would sound quite a lot like ‘Shakey’.

Off-kilter keyboards mix in with rapid-fire drumming, arrhythmic time changes and disembodied male and female vocals, with Fay Davis-Jeffers only a Japanese accent away from sounding just like Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino. However, the tone of much of ‘Shakey’ shuns the often frantic, high-tension sound of Blonde Redhead for a more laidback, slightly uneasy listening approach as voices and instruments entwine around each other to create an album driven by hypnotic drones and otherworldly sounds.

PavementCrooked Rain, Crooked Rain: LA’s Desert Origins

Let’s dispense with the dialogue. Pavement’s ‘Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain’ was one of the finest albums of the 1990s. Stop your internal debate. I’m right, you’re wrong. I can prove it on an Etch-a-sketch.

Admittedly, it has always been a moot point amongst Pavement fans about which of their albums is the better: Slanted & Enchanted’ or ‘Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain’. And the conclusion most commonly reached is that it’s practically impossible to decide. Personally, I prefer ‘Slanted…’ but not only is that neither here nor there, it also doesn’t mean that I think it’s the better of the two albums.

As with 2002’s ‘Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxe’ reissue, the tenth anniversary of ‘Crooked Rain’ sees the release of ‘Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain: LA’s Desert Origins’. And, once again, the original album has been expanded into a veritable Christmas stocking of a reissue stuffed to the brim with bonus tracks, b-sides, demos, previously unreleased songs, oranges, Toblerone and those little chocolates that look like coins.

Chances are that most of you will already be familiar with the album itself but let’s recap anyway. ‘Crooked Rain...’ was, quite simply, one of the most perfectly realised records to be released within my lifetime. It was the moment when Pavement made good on all their early promise and proved that they could be consistently wonderful.

In essence, ‘Crooked Rain...’ is the encapsulation of everything that ever had been termed slacker music - Stephen Malkmus’ loquacious lyrics and nasal drawl, a barrage of unstable guitars and a rhythm section that sounded both ridiculously tight yet utterly laid-back at the same time. Never before had an album recorded by a band so heavily influenced by the Fall sounded so tuneful.

Nestling in the midst of this masterpiece were the triumvirate of drop-dead great singles - alt.pop anthem ‘Cut Your Hair’ (allegedly a parting shot at former drummer, Gary Young), the slacker-country jig of ‘Range Life’, and the quasi-existential bop of ‘Gold Soundz’ - each of which helped the album be so well received that some felt inspired to claim that ‘Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain’, much like New York before it, to be so good that they named it twice.

Once you’ve successfully navigated the album itself the good news is that it doesn’t end there. There’s that glut of extra tracks to get through. The rest of the reissue adds the b-sides from the ‘Crooked Rain’ singles, and the ‘Jam Kids’ / ‘Haunt You Down’ seven inch. The first disc finishes with a pair of tracks lifted from compilation albums released around the same time as ‘Crooked Rain’: ‘Nail Clinic’ from ‘Hey Drag City’; and the rollicking REM tribute ‘Unseen Power of the Picket Fence’, from the ‘No Alternative’ benefit album.

Unfortunately the ‘Crooked Rain’ b-sides don’t hit the mark with quite such the same regularity as those from later singles though ‘Camera’, ‘Jam Kids’, ‘Haunt You Down’ and ‘Nail Clinic’ are all worthy additions to the album, and ‘Unseen Power...’ is easily as good as the majority of the songs on ‘Crooked Rain’ itself.

As seems to be the norm with these reissues nowadays, the second disc is comprised of demos and previously unreleased tracks, which is where it all starts getting a bit patchy.

The demos include early sketches of a number of songs from both 'Crooked Rain...' and its 1995 follow-up, 'Wowee Zowee'. The most notable versions here are a bare bones take on ’Range Life', minus the Smashing Pumpkins diss, and a piano-led version of ‘Heaven Is A Truck’.

But, as usual, there’s a reason why many of the extra tracks on here never made it past the demo stage and that’s that they’re just not as good as other Pavement songs. ‘Rug Rat’ proves that the Fall influence can be taken too far, ‘Fucking Righteous’ is basically an uninspired Velvet Underground rip-off and ‘JMC Retro’ is little more than an unsuccessful Jesus and Mary Chain pastiche. ‘Flood Victim’ is barely even a song while ‘Colorado’ sounds like it was lifted straight from a John Carpenter score, only shorn of the sense of brooding menace that you would expect.

Fortunately, the balance is redressed by the ‘Crooked Rain...’ styling of ‘All My Friends’ and ‘Same Way Of Saying’ and the ‘Slanted & Enchanted’ nature of ‘Soiled Little Filly’ and ‘Hands Off The Bayou’ before things are bought to a close with the rather stunning jilted jazz lick of ‘The Sutcliffe Catering Song’ (which was eventually retitled ‘Easily Fooled’ and released as a b-side to ‘Rattled By The Rush’), which would have fitted perfectly onto the first side of ‘Wowee Zowee’.

Despite the filler overkill, ten years later and 37 songs richer, Pavement’s second album still sounds as much like a masterpiece as it did back in 1994.

‘Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain’: so good, they released it twice.

ElectrelaneAxes

It’s good to see progress in action. When Electrelane first arrived back in 2000 they were an intriguing blend of space rock and film soundtrack, incidental music that was so disparate from everything else around that it was practically coincidental to fashion and trend. Their second album, ‘The Power Out’ and the preceding ‘I Want To Be The President’ EP, added muscle and greater substance to that equation. Not only that, but where some of the tracks on their debut, ‘Rock It To The Moon’, were too drawn out for comfort, ‘The Power Out’ was a leaner creature, stripped of procrastination that just hunkered down and got on with it.

Axes, the Steven Albini-produced third album, and first to feature new bassist Ros Murray, continues this evolution. Although it remains true to the blueprint laid down on ‘The Power Out’, the ideas contained within that album have been now been expanded upon, allowed to grow organically, and revel in their own glory, while simultaneously looking to the past and future for sustenance.

Once the thrash of opener ‘One, Two, Three, Lots’ has died down, a riff akin to Neu’s ‘Isi’ signals the beginning of ‘Bells’, a krautrocking epic that can stand proud alongside it’s Teutonic predecessor. The shuddering stop-start rhythms of ‘If Not Now, When?’ build on this promising start, juxtaposing gentle piano arpeggios with a driving beat that gradually becomes more and more insistent.

The impressions of perpetual motion and locomotive power increase the further into the album you get and become most apparent as the sound of faraway howling train horns ushers in ‘Gone Darker’. As the track gathers pace, the horns are replaced by the background squeal of distant sax, locking into the groove and dragging the song along with its discordant shrieks.

It’s certainly not all easy sailing, ‘Business Or Otherwise’ and its jerky spazz-jazz rhythm and lack of recognisable notes gives the distinct impression that someone foolishly let John Cage in the studio, while “these Pockets Are People’ and ‘Suitcase’ sound suspiciously Electrelane by numbers, though the former does serve as a useful, if perhaps overly long, intro by a heavy and punishing cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘The Partisan’.

If you can ignore its couple of minor shortcomings, your perseverance with ‘Axes’ will ultimately be rewarded. All we need to do now is see where Electrelane go from here.

SlowdiveCatch the Breeze

Is a cliché still a cliché if it happens to be true? Similarly, do clichéd descriptions remain clichés when they are the most appropriate way to describe how a particular band sounds? Is it possible to talk about a Slowdive – shoegazers to a (wo)man – compilation which brings together highlights from their entire back catalogue, without using words such as transcendental (cliché #1), or celestial (cliché #2)?

Part of the then infamous scene that celebrates itself, Slowdive stumbled out of the Thames Valley area at the start of the ‘90s to make beautiful music laden with soaring (cliché #3) guitars and lots and lots of effects pedals. The likes of the eponymously titled ‘Slowdive’ and ‘Catch The Breeze’ do a pretty good job of setting out the initial Slowdive blueprint, hovering as they do around the point of equilibrium between the squally feedback (cliché #4) of Ride, and Lush’s ethereal (cliché #5) wall of sound (cliché #6), topped off with Rachel Goswell dislocated, elfin vocals. Elsewhere, their cover of Syd Barrett’s ‘Golden Hair’, from the ‘Holding Our Breath’ EP, takes the concept of building sonic cathedrals (cliché #7) to extremes, managing to sound as if there was got a whole chapter of Franciscan monks locked away with them in the recording studio.

After their early EPs and first album, ‘Just For A Day’, Slowdive began to refine that blueprint, and 1993’s ‘Outside Your Room’ EP and ‘Souvlaki’ album, which included the Brian Eno collaboration ‘Sing’, signalled a move away from volume and towards a gentler, more ambient sound.

By the time that the ‘Pygmalion’ album was released in 1995, Slowdive barely resembled any of the bands that had been considered their peers five years earlier. The percussion had been stripped right back to a series of minimal beats that were overlaid with sparse notes and spacerock drones. This change left Slowdive having more in common with Seefeel and other bands mining the seam between guitar music and electronica than with the likes of My Bloody Valentine or the Pale Saints.

Since the demise of Creation Records, much of the Slowdive back catalogue has been unavailable. ‘Catch The Breeze’ is the first step towards rectifying that, and should allow a new generation of effects pedal geeks to learn to celebrate the scene that celebrated itself.

Delia Gonzalez and Gavin RussomThe Days of Mars

Not content with re-appropriating some of Can’s finer moments with LCD Soundsystem, DFA boss James Murphy has obviously decided that the label could do with some more groovy proto-krautrock, which is where Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom come in.

While LCD have become the sound of now (well, the sound of ten months ago anyway), ‘The Days Of Mars’ could have crept out on an obscure German label at any point during the past twenty years.

‘The Days Of Mars’ is one of those records that breaks free of such petty notions as trend, fashion or era. Much like an updated take on Tangerine Dream or a subdued Kraftwerk, its minimalist bleeps, looping motorik and melancholy soul mean that this record will still sound fresh this time next year and that’s not something that could be said about everyone on the DFA roster.

SuicideA Way of Life, Why Be Blue?

Five albums in 28 years is not a very impressive record. To put it into perspective, it’s about 397 albums less than the Fall have released in a similar period. But that’s all that Suicide managed so far, and this could well be one of the main motivating reasons for the re-release of their rather modest back catalogue over the past few years.

Suicide’s third album, ‘A Way Of Life’, was first released in 1988, shortly after the duo reformed following an absence that spanned the majority of the 80s. Nowhere near as harsh or abrasive as its predecessors, it’s a still a fairly unforgiving album, full of repetitive dirges, atonal droning and spasticated rhythms, though lacking the strangulated screams that had made their 1977 debut album so hard to listen to on a regular basis.

Essentially, this is the sound of Suicide with the drama and aggression turned down. ‘Jukebox Baby ‘96’ sees vocalist Alan Vega overdoing the Elvis sneer and murmur in a manner that Billy Idol would pee his pants to mimic. ‘Surrender’ seems to be set to the tune of A=ha’s ‘Manhattan Skyline’ and is, bizarrely, the closest thing that you’ll find to a Suicide ballad, and if ARE Weapons ever take to covering the Jesus & Mary Chain’s ‘Honey’s Dead’ album, it would sound just like ‘Rain Of Ruin’.

‘Why Be Blue?’, originally released in 1992, is the more focussed, and therefore better, of the two albums, powered by heavy staccato beats and doom-laden electro-pulses that veer between the Fall’s experiments with electronic music, Cabaret Voltaire and the an abstract take on the clipped pop of the Pet Shop Boys.

While ‘A Way Of Life’ sounds a bit too much like a collection of ideas gathered together for posterity, Suicide’s fourth album appears to have been recorded with a more carefully thought out vision in mind, meaning that ‘Why Be Blue?’ makes for a more comfortable listen than your average Suicide album.

The Dirty ThreeCinder

You almost wonder how he finds the time. Despite having been a member of the Bad Seeds for the past few years and working on other solo projects, ‘Cinder’ is the seventh album that violinist Warren Ellis has released with the Dirty Three.

Much like the previous six albums, ‘Cinder’ is a tautly wrought with dueling violin and guitar, melancholic sounds and funereal longing. Unfortunately, with the exception of ‘Great Waves’ – on which Cat Power's Chan Marshall provides the vocal for the first Dirty Three song to ever feature lyrics – it sounds a lot like the previous six albums.

If you can ignore that fact that it’s also overly long, there’s nothing wrong with ‘Cinder’, it’s just that Ellis has done it before, and done it both better and more concisely.

Juliette & the Licks…Like A Bolt Of Lightning

History says that this should be terrible. Actors should rarely be encouraged to pursue a recording career. But, against all the odds, Juliette Lewis has not only managed to release a credible mini-album, but a rather fine one too.

‘…Like A Bolt Of Lightning’ is brimful of the sort US AM radio three-chord Joan Jett meets David Lee Roth’s ‘Living In Paradise’ turned 80’s new wave punk rock that you suspect that Juliette’s ‘Natural Born Killers’ alter ego, Mallory Knox, would have listened to while fleeing the scene of her recently butchered parents.

If Courtney Love hadn’t wasted her talent flashing her tits, beating up passers-by and making monthly court-appearances, if Hole were still be with us, this would quite probably be what they’d sound like now.

CanUnlimited Edition

Quick wake up call for anyone that thought Krautrock started with Kraftwerk. It didn’t.

Can formed back in the late ‘60s and, along with the likes of Tangerine Dream, laid down the original blueprint that was merely updated by Kraftwerk a few years later. Originally released in 1976, Can’s eighth album, ‘Unlimited Edition’, was compiled from a series of recordings made over the previous eight years, and runs the gamut from nasty hippy music to juddering and heavily syncopated motorik.

Despite the vintage of ‘Unlimited Edition’, it’s obvious how influential Can still are. Just a single listen to ‘Connection’, recorded in 1969, shows that, at least in spirit if not actually in person, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy really was there.

Killing Joke

Following the acrimonious and very public dissolution of the Sex Pistols, John Lydon claimed that his new project, Public Image Ltd, would reject the notions of punk, instead replacing them with the bass-heavy throb of dub, frantic polyrhythms, and unstable frenetic guitars; in short, Public Image Ltd were going to deal in little short of anti-music. Unfortunately, no matter how good the rhetoric behind PiL, their first album still sounds that bit unfocussed and disappointing.

“This morning, shortly after eleven o’clock, comedy struck this little house in Dibley Road. Sudden, violent, comedy. Police have sealed off the area, and Scotland Yard’s crack inspector is with me now.”

Which is where Killing Joke come in. Formed by singer and keyboardist Jaz Coleman and drummer Paul Ferguson in early 1978, eventually filling the line up with Geordie and Youth (no real names around here), on guitar and bass respectively, Killing Joke sonically sat that much closer to Lydon’s concept of the death-disco, brutal beats pregnant with ominous pulsating keyboards and a snarling desperate vocal that carried lyrics that painted a grim view of the present and an even darker prediction of the future.

“I shall be aided by the sound of sombre music, played on gramophone records and also by the chanting of laments by the men of Q division. The atmosphere thus created should protect me in the eventuality of me reading the joke.”

Originally released in 1979 and 1981, Killing Joke’s self-produced first albums – the eponymous debut and the sophomore ‘What’s This For…!’ – laid out their uncompromising blueprint for all to see and hear. Often credited with being one of the instigators behind the nascent Goth scene of the early ‘80s, Killing Joke transcended the movement before it began, becoming ever more vicious and punishing while their black-clad peers slid towards humourless self-parody.

In fact, ‘What’s This For…!’ saw Killing Joke refining the post-punk elements of their sound. ‘The Fall Of Because’ is the aural embodiment of PiL’s ‘Metal Box’, ‘Tension’ is the bleakly claustrophobic cousin of the Knack’s ‘My Sharona’, the effervescence joy of the latter supplanted with paranoid sense of alienation and despair, while ‘Follow The Leaders’ sounds like nothing less than a dub version of Joy Division’s ‘Isolation’.

“It was not long before the army became interested in the military potential of the killing joke. Under top security, the joke was hurried to a meeting of allied commanders at the ministry of war.”

Not being a band to mess with a winning formula, 1982’s ‘Revelations’ takes up where ‘What’s This For…!’ leaves off, but benefits from a much cleaner, and therefore more readily accessible, sound courtesy of producer Connie Plank. Although it’s essentially business as usual, much of ‘Revelations’ hints at a new found urgency and a desire to heard, a feeling in part created by the simple fact that the vocals were just that much clearer in the mix.

“In 1945, peace broke out. It was the end of the joke. Joke warfare was banned at a special session of the Geneva Convention, and in 1950 the last remaining joke was laid to rest here in the Berkshire countryside, never to be told again.”

Around the time of ‘Revelations’, relationships in the band started to go awry, prompting Youth to abscond, leaving the way clear for Paul Raven to take his place. ‘Ha!’ – Killing Joke’s fourth album – was recorded shortly after, pieced together from live recordings taken from a number of shows in Canada. From here on in, infamy beckoned, but it was during this period in their early days that Killing Joke most mattered.

TigaSexor

Well, it was long time coming. Despite having been around for what now seems like years - as a remixer to the likes of Felix Da Housecat, Cabaret Voltaire and Fischerspooner, working alongside Zyntherius for the mighty 'Sunglasses At Night', and so many appearances at Trash that the term guest DJ no longer seems appropriate - it has taken three years for 'Sexor' to finally reach completion.

In some ways that may actually be a good thing. Back in the day, it was hard to know who to take seriously and who was just along for the ride, in it for the fame and out for kicks rather than to actually do anything as banal as add substance to the musical cannon of the genre. As such, Fischerspooner were often ridiculed and dismissed as thrill-seeking one-trick party animals and Peaches was hailed as nothing less than a spokesman for a new generation.

In the four years since the cold heart of electroclash not only seems to have warmed but also gain the ability to emote more than a superficial desire to buy Prada shoes, take coke and act as if you're too good to be seen to be having fun at Nag Nag Nag. Not only that but now that most of the feckless chancers have abandoned what they believed to be a sinking ship, it's possible to the more fresh and vital acts to stand out from the thinning crowd once again. And in such an environment, Tiga stands out like a beacon.

Given how fast music evolves and trends come and go, it's almost surprising how much 'Sexor' sounds like it could have been released at any point in the last six years. Had this album come out in 2000, it would have been proclaimed as groundbreaking, in 2006 it's merely very, very good. Maybe it's a result of having spent so long in gestation - 'Pleasure From The Bass' was recorded in 2002 and originally saw the light of day, or at least the shiny chrome-plated neonlicht of nightclubs, in 2004 - but when you consider that this has been spawned by a genre that wasn't expected to survive a year without imploding, Tiga has pulled a masterstroke by managing to divorce this album from the vagaries of fashion to deliver something that, if not exactly timeless, sounds just as at home on your stereo right now as it would have a few years ago and will still do so in a couple of years time. Just as Kratfwerk's gleaming exterior housed an emotive, progressive soul, the pulsating rhythms of 'You're Gonna Want Me' and the incessant motorik of 'Good As Gold' conceal the sort of humanity that electroclash's detractors could never have expected to find lurking within.

In fact, along with Fischerspooner's 2005 album, 'Odyssey', 'Sexor' is proof that, far from being dead and buried as many had predicted and hoped, not only is there life in electroclash, it seems that the genre may in such rude health that a resurrection may not be that far off.

Chris BrokawIncredible Love

Some people don’t like to make a lot of noise, they’re not overly eager to draw attention to themselves, they tend to keep things on the quiet side. The career of Chris Brokaw appears to be a case in point.

Brokaw first cropped up in New York slow-core luminaries Codeine – a band so slow that glaciers can cross continents before a song reaches its chorus and narcoleptics could fall into slumbers between beats, yet still wake up in time for the next stroke of the drums. And as Brokaw was the man supplying that beat, you have to wonder if maybe the sloth isn’t the only creature that lives out its life at a fraction of the speed of the rest of us.

After Codeine’s ’Frigid Stars LP’ and ‘Barely Real’, Brokaw headed off to Boston, laid down his sticks for a bit in favour of a guitar and joined forces with Thalia Zedek in Come, a band only marginally less sedate than Codeine. More recently, Brokaw seems to be making something of a habit of playing in bands featuring other established musicians. He’s returned to the drums in the rather spectral New Year (alongside former Bedhead brothers Matt and Bubba Kadane), plays in Doug McCombs intricate post-Tortoise post-rock outfit, Pullman, and also in Consonant, the band formed by former Mission of Burma man, Clint Conley as well as making guest appearances on recent records by the likes of Evan Dando and Karate.

And if you think that that sounds like enough for most people, you may be surprised to know that he’s also found the time to hold down a solo career (though if that is the case, you’d perhaps also be wondering why this article existed in the first place). So it’s no mere coincidence that Brokaw is about to unleash his second solo album, ‘Incredible Love’.

You know the way that Bjork’s ‘It’s Oh So Quiet’ starts off all soft and tranquil, then suddenly shouts ‘arrrgghhhhhh!!!! I’m a bit loopy me’ in your ear just when you were about to drift off to la-la land? Well, ‘Incredible Love’ is a bit like that. OK, so it’s not like Brokaw gone and torn his larynx out screaming like a good ‘un or ripped the volume knobs off his guitar trying to turn it up further than it was designed to be played, but compared to what has come before, this still feels like something of a departure.

It all starts innocuously enough. ‘Blues For The Moon’ is a gentle and engaging number that nicely draws you in and leaves you with the false impression that this Brokaw is going for the less whiny Jeff Buckley aesthetic. All of which means that the opening bars of ‘Move’ feels somewhat like a slap in the face, as the volume increases and it all starts to get a that little bit rowdy, and it doesn’t end there. Things continue in this vein across the album – soft songs interspersed with hard-edged rock outs, gentle melodies begetting pounding drums and rough-hewn rockers, beefed up by the presence of Karate’s Jeff Goddard and former Rodan man, Kevin Koultas.

But the most intriguing thing about ‘Incredible Love’ is that when you go back for another listen, which you will many times over, you find that the majority of the songs are not actually anywhere near as loud as you first thought. So how you have just been tricked into thinking of this as something other than it really is?

The answer can only lie in Brokaw’s willingness to understand that delicate doesn’t necessarily have to equal indistinct, that it is possible to take intricate songs and record them in a manner that means that listeners won’t have to strain themselves trying to enjoy the album, that gives a depth and strength to the sound that most people would never think of using, something that has been apparent on nearly every record on which he’s ever played. And not only is ‘Incredible Love’ is all the better for it, it is indeed quite incredible.