Mogwai / Kathryn Joseph - Live 2025.02.11 Admiralspalast, Berlin, Germany

Mogwai just released a new album, The Bad Fire, and kicked off this tour. I’m still a relatively recent fan, but I loved As the Love Continues (2021) and regretted that I missed their Berlin appearance in 2022. I didn’t want to make that mistake again, so despite still recovering from surgery, I bought a ticket. It helps that the venue is excellent and has relatively comfortable seating.

Kathryn Joseph, a Scottish singer-songwriter on Mogwai’s label, opened the night – a full quarter-hour ahead of the scheduled show start! She initially claimed her songs were all about “cunts” but later admitted her latest album was about people in her life dealing with emotional trauma. It wasn’t particularly easy to separate the songs into sex-positive and emotionally-heavy categories; they all seemed to occupy a similar space. That was the critical shortcoming of her set: it entirely lacked the dynamics that the headliner of the show is famous for. Her electric piano never changed tone, and while her vocals were strong, the vibe was fairly constant. On a few songs, she played an electronic drumbeat pedal, and I was hoping for the song to take off like Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place”, but that never quite happened.

Mogwai made quite a different impression: with five members (including touring guitarist/keyboardist Alex Mackay), a rack of lights behind the band, and a colorful lighting array intermingled across the stage, the visual experience was on point. While Stuart Braithwaite said little more than “Danke schön, thank you very much!” after each song (and no one else said a word), the music was, as expected, huge. I was disappointed that it wasn’t quite as physically intense as I’d been led to expect, but perhaps that had something to do with being in a back row of the second balcony, not exactly a prime seat. The mix was occasionally a bit muddy from my spot, but still good. I suspect it was a different experience on the floor, and for once I was a bit sad not to be there.

The band switched between songs from the new album and tracks scattered from throughout their career, including “Cody” from their second album (Come On Die Young, 1999), Spotify favorite “Kids Will Be Skeletons”, and one of my absolute favorites, “Friend of the Night”. They have too many albums to play something from all of them, but I was impressed by the diversity of their picks. They’re one of not many bands that still vary their setlists dramatically from night to night, which I find admirable. Nonetheless, I was sad that they skipped “God Gets You Back” from the new album, as it’s the best song from the album and the band played it every preceding night on the tour.

The Bad Fire is a bit darker than their last few albums, but that wasn’t especially obvious on stage, as the variation in moods from one song to the next flowed naturally. Their trademark dynamics were on full display, both across the set and within most of the songs. There were a few cases were it seemed that the transitions were a bit off, and I wondered if something was flubbed or if it was just hard to reproduce some auditory effects on stage. Beyond that, though, the performances were solid.

I was hoping for more when the main set ended after a mere 70 minutes, and was worried for a moment when they came back and said they had just one more song. It turned out to be “My Father, My King”, a 20-minute opus. It’s a bit hard to keep focus on one song for that long, and while it dragged in a few parts, it was still a powerful way to close out the night.

[Mogwai.]

Setlist:
01. Hi Chaos
02. Kids Will Be Skeletons
03. If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others
04. Friend of the Night
05. Cody
06. What Kind of Mix Is This?
07. Ritchie Sacramento
08. 2 Rights Make 1 Wrong
09. Fanzine Made of Flesh
10. Hammer Room
11. Lion Rumpus
12. We’re No Here
Encore:
13. My Father, My King

Scores:
Kathryn Joseph: C
Mogwai: B

Wishful Thinking: Revising the Cure’s Wish (1992)

Wish never felt quite right to me. It was made by a band at a crossroads, going through changing membership, navigating a shifting cultural landscape, and trying to follow up their biggest and most lauded album thus far. Somehow, the Cure both failed and succeeded. Wish was their highest-charting album yet, with one of their biggest singles, but the album is neither as cohesive as their early 80s gothic classics, nor as consistently high-quality as their bigger late 80s albums.

 

[Wish.]

The Cure clearly didn’t want to just repeat themselves. They didn’t want to make another album as thoroughly dark as Disintegration. They instead made a relatively lighter, broader, and more playful album, more in the vein of Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me (1987) or The Head on the Door (1985). But in every direction they explored, some of the results fell flat. They tried to go back to the playful fun of “The Lovecats” or “Six Different Ways”, and they certainly succeeded with “Friday I’m in Love”, but “Wendy Time” and “Doing the Unstuck” are awful. They wanted to rock, and while “Open” and “End” have their share of harnessed aggression, “Cut” is overlong, unexciting, and overfilled with tedious wah-wah guitar. They wanted a few more big, moody pieces, and while “From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea” captures that vibe, “Apart” is overblown, maudlin, and unnecessary. The rest of the album is fairly standard pop (“High”, “A Letter to Elise”) and a few bits of delicate beauty (“Trust”, “To Wish Impossible Things”).

What’s most surprising is that all of the period b-sides are good. They’re better than many of album tracks, even. “High”, “Friday I’m in Love”, and “A Letter to Elise” were each released as singles with two b-sides each that have since been gathered up on Join the Dots (2004). “The Big Hand” is a big, brooding song, seemingly about addiction, that was a fan favorite when it was previewed live in 1991. (At the time, it was a surprise that it didn’t make the album or even the first two singles.) “This Twilight Garden” is shimmering and celestial, and the band liked it enough to play it live when I saw them in Austin in 2016. “Halo” is surprisingly poppy. I could go on!

["High".]

So why are there duds on the album if there are such treasures among the b-sides? The band ultimately agreed that the album had its flaws, particularly in the mixing, which led to the live albums Show and Paris (both 1993). And indeed, some of the live versions are marked improvements, in particular “Apart”. Two-thirds of the album reappeared on Show, with two more tracks on Paris. Both live albums are good, but have few surprises. Paris is ultimately slightly better just because there are more subtleties and variations from the original versions. Show is a bit too predictable and by-the-numbers. Of the b-sides, only “The Big Hand” was played live in 1992, and it didn’t make the cut for either album.

["Friday I'm in Love".]

When Wish was reissued in a deluxe package in 2022, I was hoping for a reimagining of the album, or at least a new mix or some deep cuts from the vaults. My disappointments have already been recorded in my brief review. In the end, the only real draws were the Lost Wishes EP, originally a fan club cassette from 1994 that was never reissued, and one instrumental outtake, “A Wendy Band” (seemingly unrelated to “Wendy Time”).

It’s time to reengage with a pastime I haven’t indulged in a while: making my own tracklist for the album I wished existed. (For other examples, see my take on Get Back or The Velvet Underground’s “lost album”). So here’s what I listen to now when I want to get my fix for the Cure circa 1992:

1. Open
2. High
3. The Big Hand
4. From the Edge of the Deep Green Sea
5. This Twilight Garden
6. Play
7. Halo
8. Friday I’m in Love
9. Trust
10. A Letter to Elise
11. Scared As You
12. A Foolish Arrangement
13. To Wish Impossible Things
14. End

If 14 tracks at 70 minutes is too much and you’d prefer to stay closer to the 66 minutes of the original, cut “Play”. It gets a little too close to “Apart”, even if it’s still better. If you insist on 12 tracks, you could also cut “A Foolish Arrangement”. It’s a bit of a retread of familiar territory, although I wouldn’t normally complain.

On the other hand, if you’re craving some more and don’t mind instrumentals, try adding the best bonus tracks from the reissue:

15. Uyea Sound
16. Cloudberry
17. Off to Sleep…
18. The Three Sisters
19. A Wendy Band

I love the Lost Wishes songs; I find them all beautiful and better than some of the album tracks. “A Wendy Band” isn’t spectacular, but it fits the vibe, so why not? Of course if you don’t want to restrict yourself to just the Wish sessions, you could also throw in some other tracks from Join the Dots from nearby years. I do love “Burn” in particular.

["A Letter to Elise".]

Enjoy, and let me know what you think!

2024 in Review

It’s been yet another strange year, dominated once again by health concerns. I didn’t see many shows (and only one that I bothered to review), but I performed live four times with Transchor Plänterwald 2022 and three times with Soltero, and we released a new recording of “A True Indication”! As has apparently become tradition, here are my favorite releases of 2024:

• Cup Collector - On the Wing - A half hour of warm, soothing analogue synth drones. CC also released the wonderfully titled A Memory Warped by Time, which is darker, more experimental, and fairly challenging.
• The Cure - Songs of a Lost World - Their first album of consequence since Bloodflowers in 2000, uncoincidentally also coproduced with Paul Corkett. It is unmistakably The Cure, and sounds very much in the same vein as Bloodflowers, but hits dark nerves that they never quite reached before. Robert Smith may bemoan aging a little too melodramatically, but his voice is still in good form (excepting a few screechy stretches) and his trademark guitar riffs and 6-string bass leads are as impressive as ever. I can’t say the same for Reeves Gabrels’ guitar when it strays too far from texture into misplaced flashy solos, but that’s made up for by Simon Gallup’s reverberant bass, which underpins and drives the whole album. They should be proud to have put out such a good album after so many years!
• Dummy - Free Energy - delightful, playful, experimental, psychedelic shoegaze.
• Elephant Stone - Back into the Dream - Charmingly throwback psychedelia with sitar and tabla. The lyrics about depression, politics, and the pandemic really strike a chord with me. This band just keeps getting better with time.
• Godspeed You! Black Emperor - No Title As of 13 February 2024 28,340 Dead - Given the defeated, grieving title, the weeping guitars and sparse, sad strokes of violin should come as no surprise. It’s perhaps their album with the heaviest emotional tone yet, which is saying something. There are still moments of uplifting celebration, but perhaps fewer than most Godspeed albums.
• International Music - Endless Rüttenscheid - Deceptively simple melancholic folk rock with subtle German wit and a hint of Krautrock. I love the prominent bass and manifold harmonies. The wild psychedelia of the aptly-named “Kraut” is a jam.
• Lightning Bug - No Paradise - The shoegaze is pretty much gone, but their production has gotten even more elaborate. I might prefer the lushness of A Color of the Sky (2021), but there are more moods and atmospheres here, and even if many are dark, there is still a playfulness and sense of hope. The vocal prowess, rhythmic variation, and mixing have leveled up as well.
• Magdalena Bay - Imaginal Disk - Post-vaporwave psychedelic pop with social commentary about self-image, self-improvement, and interfacing with the internet. The points of view are hard to follow but the vibe utterly captures a slice of modern life.
• Memorials - Memorial Waterslides - Verity Susman of Electrelane and Matthew Simms of post-2010 Wire continue the experimentation that both their biggest bands are known for, with an emphasis on tape loops and historical literary women. The album title was inspired by the Susan Sontag Memorial Water Slide at the Austin Dyke March, which in 2023 was apparently based at Cheer Up Charlie’s, my favorite bar and SXSW venue when I lived in Austin.
• Chappell Roan - “Good Luck, Babe!” - A banger about comphet!? I came late to the party but it’s rare that pop music speaks to me so well. I swear it’s not just that she’s from Missouri and wore a Kansas City sweatshirt in the “California” video.
• Nala Sinephro - Endlessness - Apparently I like ambient jazz? The arrangements are consistently impressive, but the synths are what really do it for me.
• St. Vincent - All Born Screaming - I think I liked Daddy’s Home (2021) more than everyone else, but this is even better. It’s closer to her career bests (Strange Mercy, 2011, and St. Vincent, 2014), but more eclectic and emotionally authentic. Clark runs through genres like a box of chocolates. I particularly like the funk and electronic soundscapes, and the Nine Inch Nails bits speak to some deep part of my soul that I too easily forget about.

Here are a few honorable mentions:

• Einstürzende Neubauten - Rampen (apm: alien pop music) - Alien, certainly. Pop, not so much. After 44 years of improvising on stage, they finally dedicated a whole album to it. It reminds me more than a little of Jewels (2007), which had a similarly conceptual, improvisational foundation. It suffers the same faults of lacking melody, structure, and dynamics, but it does certainly contain multitudes of mildly unsettling vibes. (It is still Neubauten, after all.) Yet the weird rhythmic spaces that the songs inhabit under Blixa Bargeld’s bemused but subtle social commentary still draw me in. “Gesundbrunnen” appears to be a meditation on gender from a non-binary lens. I apparently caught an early version of “Before I Go” when I saw them at the Konzerthaus in 2022. (The Rampe that they played at the Columbiahalle didn’t make the cut.)
• Khruangbin - A La Sala - This feels like a conscious throwback to the simpler, more open, mostly instrumental, pure vibe-setting style of their early singles and first album (The Universe Smiles Upon You, 2015). I still enjoy the work they’ve done in the meantime, but I was slowly losing interest and worried they would give up on what made them special. This isn’t quite transcendent, but it is quite pleasant and still manages a few subtle surprises.
• Mannequin Pussy - I Got Heaven - The punkiest songs are too aggro for me, but the rest are a superb balance of raw power, careful production, and emotional vulnerability and ambiguity.
• Ride - Interplay - On par with their other reunion-era albums, and full of broadly painted feelings about the pandemic and (presumably British) politics. It’s nonetheless rather upbeat.

And here a few other 2024 releases that I have opinions about:

• Can - Live in Paris 1973 - This circulated as a bootleg for years, and although this official release boasts a better quality than what was previously available, it’s still not exactly high fidelity. It still ends abruptly and prematurely. These five jams are sometimes based on known songs, but it sounds 90% improvised. Damo Suzuki’s words are almost entirely incoherent, but that’s not unusual. It’s cool for hardcore fans, but certainly not for casual listening. They also released a couple live albums from 1977, and while both are pleasantly funky, they don’t reach the same heights.
• The Smile - Wall of Eyes and Cutouts - Very moody, often unsettling, and minimally exciting. The only release comes from the big crashing moment of “Bending Hectic”. Wall of Eyes feels a bit by the numbers for Yorke and Greenwood, and while Cutouts might be slightly better, neither is as good as A Light for Attracting Attention (2022). These albums take the band further away from Radiohead and more into Yorke’s familiar solo territory, albeit with Jonny’s orchestrations and better drumming. I’ve realized that I’m bored of that. I didn’t even bother buying Cutouts after my relative disappointment with Wall of Eyes.

In other news, I finally found an Element of Crime album that I enjoy without restriction: Romantik from 2001. It’s a perfect balance of their best parts (down-to-earth poetic texts, beautiful arrangements of an indeterminate era, Sven Regener’s baritone at its most melodic) with hardly a trace of their early roughness or later predictability. “Alle vier Minuten” is the best ode to the Berliner U-Bahn that I could ever ask for.

Soltero - "A True Indication"

Soltero has a new single and video out today! It's our first release as a full band with me on bass (and a bit of vocals) and Ludwig on drums.

https://soltero.bandcamp.com/track/a-true-indication

Soltero @ Schokoladen

It's time: Soltero is playing our first show of the year! We've got some new songs, new arrangements, and a new album.

It's July 3rd at Schokoladen. Show at 8pm, doors at 7pm, MDMAR opens. See you there!

Human Highway (1982)

It’s rare that I’m compelled to write a review because I consumed media that is so bad that I feel the urge to warn other people to stay away. (The only other time I can think of was after buying John Lennon’s Walls and Bridges in a fit of naïve, overzealous, completionist fandom.) As a great fan of Neil Young and at least a modest fan of Devo, it’s hard not to be curious about Human Highway, a film financed, cowritten, and codirected by the former and featuring the acting and music of both. Allow me to tell you now not to watch this movie. Wikipedia covers the “plot” and background details well enough, so let me summarize what this film features:

• Bad acting from everyone involved
• Bad writing, no character development, and a flimsy excuse for a plot
• Blatant racism, including both Young and Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh (as Booji Boy) dropping a slur
• Casual sexism
• Romanticization of car culture despite the vague environmentalist/anti-nuclear theme
• Nuclear apocalypse
• A senseless and gross milk bath
• Less focus on music than you might hope for
• Only one musical collaboration between Young and Devo

It is this last point that provides any reason to consider preserving any part of this film. The infamous early jam version of “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)” with Booji Boy on lead vocals (recorded in 1978 before the officially released Crazy Horse version on Rust Never Sleeps (1979)) is bizarre and wonderful. But you can find that online without having to endure the rest. I suppose there’s also Devo’s cover of “It Takes a Worried Man”, but you can find that on their delightful The Complete Truth About Devolution (1993) anyway. The movie also features parts of most of the synthesizer songs from Young’s excellent and idiosyncratic Trans (1982), which might’ve been novel for the very few people who caught the movie before the album was released, but that’s irrelevant today. (And yes, I loved Trans long before I understood myself to be trans!)

Young was clearly fascinated by the phrase “human highway”, as evidenced by recording and performing myriad versions of the song over the years, recording an unfinished album under the same name with CSN in the 70s, and ultimately making this film. Of everything he created that used the phrase, this movie is the worst by a wide margin.

I have some concern that by bringing attention to this movie, I may inspire someone to watch it. Please do not make this mistake. It is not even campy in a so-bad-it’s-good sense. It’s just bad. It makes me think less of Young. He was old enough to know better.

Scores:
Human Highway: D-
Young and Devo’s “Hey Hey, My My”: A
Trans: A-
The entirely unrelated Neil Young song “Human Highway” from Comes a Time: A
Either of the CSNY versions of “Human Highway” from Archives II (2020), originally recorded in 1973 and 1976: A+

Uwe Schütte (ed.) - The Cambridge Companion to Krautrock (2023)

About nine years ago, I reviewed Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler (1995), and I complained quite a bit about it and suggested finding a different guide. Despite my own recommendation, I never did so myself. I suppose I’d already made the plunge, so reading another book about Krautrock and kosmische Musik felt unnecessary. Nonetheless, I was always curious if the perfect primer would eventually come around. David Stubbs’s Future Days: Krautrock and the Building of Modern Germany (2014) got good reviews, and Ulrich Adelt’s Krautrock: German Music in the Seventies (2016) also looked promising, and maybe someday I’ll try one or the other. But after enjoying the honesty and depth of Uwe Schütte’s Godstar: Die fünf Tode des Genesis P-Orridge (2022), I decided to check out The Cambridge Companion to Krautrock, which he edited and wrote the introduction and Kraftwerk section for.

 

[The Cambridge Companion to Krautrock.]

Schütte assembled a superb team of writers to fill out the text, including both Stubbs (on Neu!) and Adelt (on “Definitions, Concepts, [and] Context”). That each section is somewhat independent means that there is unfortunately some overlap, but that’s a minor inconvenience. The benefit is a wide variety of perspectives with unique specializations and interests. The book provides a great overview of the social, political, musical, and geographic background that gave rise to the genre (or “discursive formation”, as Adelt prefers to call it, since the movement isn’t really a cohesive unit), thorough deep-dives into some of the primary artists, and a well-considered selection of the subsequent genres and artists that have been influenced by Krautrock.

The tone is academic but approachable, which I preferred quite a bit to Cope’s excited mess, even if I missed some of the passion. The book is in English, despite that several authors (and the music itself) hail from Germany, which occasionally means there are some awkward phrases, like describing music as “spherical”. (In German, “sphärisch” can mean something like “atmospheric”, “celestial”, or “spacey”.) Thankfully, this is rarely distracting. I also appreciated the attention paid to detail and accuracy, again unlike Cope’s wild exaggerations and reliance on oft-repeated rumors. The only mistake I encountered was the claim that Klaus Dinger never appeared on a Kraftwerk album. (He is credited with playing drums on “Vom Himmel hoch” on their debut album.)

The breadth is quite wide and generally quite balanced, with practically none of the idiosyncratic bias of Cope’s tastes. I was initially surprised how little mention the folk, prog, and jazz sides of the genre received, but since those are the factions that were most similar to contemporaneous Anglo-American acts, it’s an understandable choice. (I also tend to be less interested in those bands.) I would’ve loved a section on Agitation Free, but otherwise the choice of highlighted bands is probably the same set that I would’ve picked, both in terms of notoriety and quality. However, my favorite chapter was Jens Balzer’s “The Flip Side of Krautrock”, which was full of pleasant surprises. He openly acknowledges some of the conservative or even counter-revolutionary aspects of the movement, such as the relative lack of women and immigrant voices in the canon, and discusses some notable acts from adjacent genres, like Die Dominas, Inga Rumpf of Frumpy, and Turkish-German bağlama player Ozan Ata Canani.

I also particularly enjoyed the third part on Krautrock’s legacy, which includes chapters on punk and Neue Deutsche Welle, post-punk, and electronic dance music. Several of my favorite artists from the late 70s and 80s are cited in their connection to Krautrock, including Einstürzende Neubauten, Siouxsie & the Banshees, Bauhaus, and of course David Bowie. The discussion and comparison with German punk is quite insightful, particularly in exploring the shared desire to reject oppressive, received, Anglo-American norms. The final chapter on “Krautrock Today” also covers a great selection of younger bands in the kosmische mold, including of course Stereolab.

This is the book I wish I could’ve read ten years ago. We can safely forget about Cope now. (Well, not his music!) It’s telling how far the movement has gone in public perception that it can now grace the prestiged printing presses of Cambridge. It’s no longer just the domain of obscure fanatics. The internet has thrown open the doors, and academia has finally caught up.

Score: A-

P.S.: Two links buried in the footnotes deserve calling out. First is a Detroit TV show clip featuring a bunch of people in 1991 dancing to Kraftwerk’s “Nummern” (“Numbers”). Second is a Facebook post by Adelt in the Krautrock group in which he spawns the most absurd debate about the boundaries of the genre I’ve ever seen, only to be hijacked by The Crack in the Cosmic Egg coauthor (and group moderator) Alan Freeman pressing Amon Düül II vocalist Renate Knaup for Melody Maker scans from the 70s!