Beggars Banquet Revisited

Beggars Banquet was The Stones on the cusp of greatness. After the psychedelic misstep of Satanic Majesties, The Stones had to reinvent themselves. The Beatles may have created a masterpiece (Sgt Pepper) out of psychedelia, but the Stones were different- they were like the fab four's younger, delinquent brother. Keith Richards was more Street Fighting Man than flower power child. And for all Jagger's vocal bravura, this album is about Keef, the human riff machine who lived and breathed rock and roll, and took over the reigns of control. It was he who was primarily responsible for the creative high of this and the following three albums (Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile...) which, put together, form perhaps rock and roll's strongest purple patch. He cut the tunes and Jagger did the words. But as much as anything his contribution is intangible: it's attitude. The kind which is dripping all over his riffs and solos. As in 'Stray Cat Blues', where his guitar provides the perfect counterpoint to Jagger's lusty lyrics, full of sleaze and insinuation.

 This was 1968: the swinging sixties were closing and a darker, druggier time beckoned for Dartford's finest in the following decade. With Altamount's chaos and Brian Jones's demise next year The Stones stood on the edge of a precipice. And damn did they jump off that ledge.

From the first few bars of opening salvo 'Sympathy For The Devil' it's clear that the Stones have made an almighty leap- Jagger's whoops amid crazy marimba style bongos - is at once unhinged, supremely danceable, and very unhippy. It was a triumphant two fingered salute to convention and politeness.

This was the time when the Stones started consciously exploiting their own mythology - the "Would you let your daughter sleep with a Rolling Stone?" rhetoric which Andrew Loog Oldham used so effectively a few years earlier. They found their niche in provocation, raw sex appeal and sheer viscerality. It would all be quite aggressive were it not for the strength of the hooks and Jagger's (large) tongue being planted firmly in his own cheek. At this album's best it evokes the lovable sense of mischief at which they came to excel.

 Musically, this was the back-to-their-roots album. Said roots being the blues. But it was a new blues: rather than reverentially trying to ape greats such as Howlin Wolf, Robert Johnston et al, the stones used it to create something new, poppier and sexier. And, more importantly, their own. A white (middle class man's) blues. As odious as this sounds -it fucking worked. With a new tuning (open G stolen from Ry Cooder) under his belt, Richards felt it was like learning the guitar again. It was also like restarting the band again. Indeed, post Brian Jones all the great Stones riffs were in this tuning - and its force is firmly felt on 'Street Fighting Man' opening side B track and archetypal Stones song.

Primal, delinquent and gloriously vigorous 'Street Fighting Man' is The Stones condensed into three minutes. It's also strangely incongruous on this album, being less bluesy and more poppy than the surrounding fare.

This freshness is seen in the sheer gusto of the performances - the raw but sensational riff of 'Stray Cat', and the snarling belligerence of Jagger throughout being perfectly in unison. Jagger excels throughout celebrating the simple, seedy and working class.

 It seems once rid of the talented but consummate fuck up Jones (he was merely a bit part player by this stage), Richards could truly lead from the front and become closer to Jagger. Witness his restrained inch perfect solo on 'Sympathy..' or the slide lick on 'Jigsaw Puzzle' for evidence of his astonishing development from Chuck Berry wannabe to guitar deity.The album comes across as a relaxed but ferociously tight jam session. The meandering 'Salt Of The Earth' or the Richard's sung cover 'Prodigal Son' which sounds like a few thoughts being nonchalantly stuck together with a blues lick, being a case in point. And the subject matter too, girls, sex, all the gloriously unclean pleasures of life: it's plain as day that they felt at home.

The more I listen to this album the more I feel it is one of their best -definitely their best blues rock album- and perhaps even their finest record. It gives off such a good vibe- an ideal, knees up, drinking companion. It's so immediate and good fun that I think it might be my favourite if not their best (Exile.. is pretty unbeatable). As far as down and dirty Rock n Roll goes this is peerless. As good as anything they released.

Just an outlaw band of street urchins with a gift for provocation and a keen awareness of their own image. No ballads, no pomposity, just the god damn fucking blues.

Perfect Album

You Forgot It In People is almost ten years old now, and I can't think of an album that I've enjoyed more in that intervening decade. The Canadian collective will never better this, how could they? The album combines the best elements of indie (angst, intensity, umm, guitars) allied with an invigorating post rock instrumentation, and sense of expanse.

It's perfect music for daydreaming, (which suits me perfectly!) there's just so much to take in, so many layers of noise and texture to spark thoughts and emotion. It will always remind me of rainy uphill cycle rides during a particularly tumultuous period in my life, but that's by the by. Nothing's direct or obvious apart from the power ballad epic, "Lover's Spit", and that's just great. This is a work large and vague enough to encompass all a listener can bring to it. It's good as 'mood music' in the background but even better when given proper attention.

It effortlessly manages to conjure a sense of drama and scope without using the flawed medium of lyrics. A case in point is 'Anthems For A Seventeen Year Old Girl', where the song's title perhaps guides a listener towards viewing it as an ode to innocence lost, but it can essentially mean everything and nothing at the same time ( like a great lyric ). There are vocal samples, obviously, yet never narrative voices. In 'Anthems..', for example, it's almost like a voice over for a film, and the effect is much like a montage, image after image colliding and building atop of the previous one.

I don't usually listen to a lot of instrumental music and it's refreshing to not have a singer's ego at the centre of proceedings for a change. There's no coherent, continuous voice guiding and limiting the songs. Instead there are myriad vocalists and talkers from Leslie Feist, to (most often) Kevin Drew  to anonymous effect drenched mutterers, buried in sound. This is an album unashamedly about the music; instead of choruses there are hooks (see 'Cause=Time'), and they use all of their fifteen or so players to the limit making a cacophony of noise, which must be a delight to behold live. I really hope they do that tour thing so en vogue at the moment where bands play a classic album in its entirety, as Dinosaur Jr did with Bug recently. The record has such a continuity to it that it's paying the work a disservice to take any given track out of its context. Each cut bleeds into the next like a long, languorous jam session. I mean, it's unthinkable for me to hear 'KC Accidental' without its tension taut prelude, 'Capture the Flag', which, equally, is meaningless on its own.

That's what I mean by perfect. Few albums are so coherent and unified, resisting the modern impulse to cut and chop into ipod sized pieces. Just sit down. Put it on - and forget about it. Forget about people, even. Sorry, couldn't resist.

Overlooked Album #1

Adore sounds as good to me now as it did over ten years ago as an over serious, acne ridden teenager. I remember listening to the album in its entirety, alone, in my room, in the dark. On a now long obsolete tape player, whose slight incessant whine seemed to augment the mystery of the music.
      As a fifteen year old just beginning to see that the world wasn't such a great place, it's hardly surprising that I found a friend in the vivid melodrama of Corgan's most divisive album, Adore, an ode to love in all its various guises. An unequivocally dark and desolate work, Adore dwells on the bleaker aspects of love and human connections. As its macabre, monochrome cover suggests, Adore is a thing of restless, gothic beauty. Solipsistic, self involved, and gloriously indulgent. That Adore was a perfect match for the self important teenage me is obvious, but what's surprising, is that it's still such a good fit.
    When I say overlooked I don't mean to say Adore is obscure or maligned, just that whenever people talk about Smashing Pumpkins they always talk about either Siamese Dream, or the their 1995 opus, Mellon Collie...(MCIS) never Adore, which I feel is superior to both, and contains indisputably less filler than MCIS.  Written following Corgan's divorce and the death of his mother (see the gorgeous 'For Martha'; an ode to her), and also after the massive success of 18 million selling (in the US alone) MCIS, Adore had to be a break with the past. Where could they go after this success? The answer was to a darker, more emotionally resonant place.
      Moving away from the pomp rock of their past, Adore leans heavily on piano based ballads and icy electronic flourishes. Opting (mostly) for a drum machine instead of the power house of Jimmy Chamberlin, Adore  was a bold move that probably alienated a lot of fans. It had little for the hard rockers who probably dug tracks like 'Zero' and 'Bodies', or the poppier followers who would have loved 'Tonight, Tonight', 'Disarm' and '1979'. That's not to say there isn't much to stick your teeth into on first listen, 'Ava Adore' and 'Perfect' are two great singles. But it's the album tracks that really shine, 'To Shiela' is perhaps their most beautiful ballad, and 'Behold! The Night Mare' illustrates what a great match Corgan's misery was for his new electronic inclinations. Sounding as if recorded underwater, the lyrics, as do many on the album, see Corgan working out his grief: 'I can't go on / digging roses from your grave / to linger on / beyond the beyond'.
              The album is split into a sun and shade dichotomy. 'Tear' is one of the latter."Where has your heart, Where has your heart gone to?", asks Corgan over a black nimbus cloud of organ-like synths. The song builds from nothing to a cacophonous din in seconds and then back again, symbolising, perhaps, the "flash of neon" that captured the object of his grief. It is an epic song that anyone who has ever suffered a loss in their life could definitely relate to.
        This painful catharsis is tempered with moments such as 'Once Upon A Time', which is the Pumpkins at their sweetest and most melodic, displaying the flip side to the rancorous rage of (above mentioned) 'Tear'. Corgan seems accepting and almost resigned: "To the last goodbye / Who cares why," he sings over gently strummed acoustic guitar and tambourine. The album is full of these peaks and troughs of emotion, and I feel if any Smashing Pumpkins album should be called Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, it should've been this one. It's a work so achingly sad yet rewarding that I still love it a decade on.
      It's also a great document of a band in transition, reinventing themselves into purveyors of superior alt electro-pop, as seen in songs like Daphne Descends, which resemble the stronger moments of the unfairly maligned Machina.
            In a career littered with high points (not least Corgan's mighty return with Zwan in 2007), Adore deserves credit as perhaps the Pumpkins' most beautiful album. A work that is both baroque and austere in its sound, it has a song for every emotion. It may have appealed to me as a teenager, but Adore is a mature work in every sense. It speaks more quietly than their other works, but what it does say lingers longer.