Yeti Lane

The Echo Show

Sonic Cathedral

Rating: 4/5

Fucking hell. Has it really been a month since my last post? Okay, I mean I have been writing stuff for Prog and DIY but that does seem like quite a while even for me. Sheesh. Anyway, it's time for an album that nobody else was foolish enough to let me have a crack at - Yeti Lane's difficult second, The Echo Show. Now, I'm going to spoil the ending by pointing out that nearly every review has been overwhelmingly positive about this record, and I'm not about to break that trend. I am, however, going to talk about something other than the stunning first track, 'Analog Wheel'. Yes it's brilliant, kosmiche, swirling, physchedelia, Neu! etc., but there's also like an hour of other music on there that isn't getting mentioned. 

Without wanting to get into a track-by-track style review, an example of this would be the title track, (and track two) 'The Echo Show'; as more consistently found on the rest of the record, though it's fair to draw krautrock comparisons, perhaps more relevant sonic touchstones would be The Beta Band and (latterly) The Aliens. I'll grant that the drums do come very much from that heritage, but the spindly electronic fragments and ethereal vocals that define the record are of an altogether more modern pedigree. 'Logic Winds', for instance has the ring of The Flaming Lips or Nice Nice about it, while 'Alba' is like Jason Lytle's finest post-Grandaddy downtempo offerings. 

For me the real elephant in the room however is The Secret Machines - I mean, once you get over the obvious fact that Josh Garza isn't in the drum stool then there's definitely something beyond a simple liberal referencing of influences. I listen to 'Faded Spectrum' and hear the noisy wig-out that could have occurred if... wait... hang on... how did the beginning of 'First Wave Intact' go?

Anyway, whatever bands it sounds like, the record is sort of what everybody says it is; a great alternative record that touches playfully on the most tongue-in-cheek electronic sounds while still having the nous to accomodate a good, old-fashioned guitar wig out now and then. Brilliant. 

ITC Day One

Alright, I'm reviewing for High Voltage, so I won't bang on about the live stuff here (why write the same thing twice?); instead, I'm going to write a short thought on each panel, do my day in quotes, and reviews of the evening's music from my Twitter feed. (Oh, look how down with the 'kids' he is....)

Quotes of the day (sorry if I misattribute any, I'm short sighted): 

Musician's Union: Pay to play? Ok

Chris Long: "I'm going to ask Guy [Garvey] whether he'd pay to play."

Guy Garvey: "Right now?"

Jay Taylor: "Except for Helienne [Lindvall], don't you think this panel looks like a ZZ Top covers band?"

To be honest, this panel kind of missed the point to my mind, and got bogged down in a lot of technicalities, particularly the issue of tour support. Somebody (I think Horace Trubridge) argued that since many bands have to pay for a tour support slot, a local band under a pay to play deal with a few friends might make more on the night. 

The thing with this of course is that pay to play usually doesn't offer good tour support slots, and more often you're playing to a room of quite unduly tribal fans of four bands of completely different genres. More than that, to give a local example, the costs are quite huge to the band- to play Academy Unsigned at Club Academy or Academy 3, a band has to front £250. That is fucking obscene, and everybody knows that gig will not get you anywhere. 

I was surprised to hear Jay mention a semi- pay to play deal at Ruby Lounge (required ticket sales, without fronting cash), for I don't remember any pressure when I played there a couple of years back. Anyway, the panel was made by MM's Cath Aubergine getting up and finally saying what everybody was thinking: pay to play is a bloody outrage and you're safer in the hands of decent independent promoters (here she singled out Dan and Hannah from Pull Yourself Together). Right on!

Afterwards, I ended up having an interesting conversation with Tom Hingley (Inspiral Carpets) about the music business, where I'm pretty sure I recieved a Marxist Interpretation... so maybe that history degree is useful after all?

Blogging the USA

A much less controversial panel, this one seemed more at pointing out the rather obvious- blogs are important, do pitch music to them, do treat them with some respect. There was appropriate mention of the fact that there's the much-maligned 'basement blogger', and then there is the blogger who strives towards something approaching Proper Music Journalism; of which categories, I presume to be in the latter. I think this panel was more aimed at the few remaining people (they must exist somewhere in the industry) who are clueless about blogs.

Would have liked to stay for the Q&A, but had to run over to work at the Keynotes, so...

"Bloggers would have been rock critics in another era" - Ryan Schreiber

"blogs are modern fanzines" - Ollie Russian

"it's only the most agreeable things that rise to the top" - Sean Adams goes on the offensive after arriving late...

"a free t-shirt or guestlist is how the PR gets a hold of the young blogger" - Ollie Russian

Right, so after that was a drinks reception and then the excellent Upside Down: The Creation Records Story film. Afterwards I caught Mark Gardener for just long enough to say "Drive Blind is one of my favourite songs", and get a sideways compliment about people my age still listening to that stuff. 

Whilst working the door, I overheard somebody say "no students know what they are talking about". Ok, so I am oft-quoted as saying "students are useless", but let's just remember that those of us who do know what we are talking about will save what's left of the industry, thank you very much.

Tweet Reviews

On my way to The Steals, a bunch of chavs tried to get us to give them our sandwiches. When that failed, they tried to mug us. We told them to fuck off. It was weird.

The Steals: "The Steals are like first album Verve meets the Cocteau Twins. This is a Good Thing."

Team Ghost: "Nat, you never told me that Team Ghost would be FUCKIN RAD live!"

Still Corners: "Still Corners bashing out motorik beats... Cool, but not as intense as The Secret Machines."

The highlight of the day though was at the bus stop, where some dude told me he'd seen an ace band opening for Maps & Atlases earlier that week, and for the first time I was able to casually go, "oh really? It's funny, because they are on my label..." (smarm added for emphasis)

God I am a douche.


Twitter: @hipsters_unite
Web: http://www.superstardestroyer.co.uk

Making a stand for Progressive Rock....

Right, so first off the bat I’m going to deal with one potential criticism that I clairvoyantly anticipate coming my way: yes, Rick Wakeman is a tool. I know it, you know it, and deep down, I’d like to think that he knows it. Obviously Steve Howe was a genius, and the rest of the members of Yes were incredibly talented; but let’s be honest, their best album was The Yes Album, and that was their last pre-Wakeman outing. Your honour, I rest my case.

With that out of the way, we can move on to business. At the root of the problem as I see it is basically dogma surrounding the term ‘progressive’, as in ‘progressive rock’. At the time it was no slur- a by-word to describe those groups not moving within traditional pop structures, experimenting with textures, effects and time signatures, to me that’s the very essence of what is exciting about the creation of music. However, post-Wakeman, shall we say, people began drawing a line under the hallowed canon of mainstream-accepted Floyd, and discarding all that they saw as ‘pretentious’. It’s usually lazily attributed to the rise of Punk, but I’d say it’s more to do with the fact that the later crop of ‘progressive’ musicians were up their own arses. Phil Collins (and sorry to bang on about him, but seriously) Rick Wakeman epitomise this for me.

I’m prepared to let off Peter Gabriel purely because he was such a great musician, and because ‘Solsbury Hill’ is one of my all-time top records (as they say in High Fidelity)- but I strongly suspect that he, like my other super-leftfield prog hero Mike Oldfield, was, as I delicately put it earlier, up his own arse.

Prog never really recovered from this mainstream perception, at least for those under a certain age. It’s been a dirty word for many since the late 1970s. But ‘progressive’ rock did not die. It evolved. At the end of the 1980s, a young man was releasing bizarre, structureless psychedelic rock pieces on underground labels in the UK, supposedly by a mythical, lost ‘70s prog band. His name was Steven Wilson, and the band was called Porcupine Tree. The music, such as it was, largely consisted of home demos, but over the course of ten years he gradually accumulated musicians to make his ideas a reality. By the end of the decade, they released Signify, a turning point in their career. Progressive rock was back.

Except that it didn’t need to be revitalised by its parent scene anymore, for something rather more remarkable had happened. A cult British band, growing for sometime in stature on the basis of two well-laid out, accessible grunge records suddenly emerged from a lengthy recording process with a new record. The record was called Ok Computer, and it changed everything. Here was the record where every major trend in guitar music from post-rock to shoegaze to no-wave to prog to grunge to britpop met; sometimes it wasn’t coherent- not all of the tracks were universally adored by fans- but it represented the first mainstream success for a ‘progressive rock’ record for a young band in nearly twenty years.

As Dr. McCoy would no doubt have pointed out- “it’s Prog, Jim, but not as we know it!”- indeed so. Though Radiohead have always refuted links to prog rock, it is undeniably of the genre, at least in its purest, original meaning. The proof: is it progressive (i.e. does it intend to drive music to a new place)? Yes. Is it rock? Listen to ‘Paranoid Android’ and tell me it’s not.

After this, Radiohead lost their nerve in the face of success, and have moved on to create other, challenging sounds, but if anything are now more Krautrock than prog most of the time, but that’s ok, because Neu! and the others’ influence was soon to be felt elsewhere as well. 

At the turn of the 2000s, the modern progressive scene really re-emerged. The Pineapple Thief formed (though they would experience little success for many years); Oceansize began to write songs such as the first iteration of ‘Heaven Alive’ (that would end up on their sophomore Everyone Into Position, five years later); Amplifier were taking last-album Soundgarden and marrying it to space rock, all within a Rush-esque power trio. Elsewhere, Devon lads Muse had finally put out their debut, Showbiz, an album heavily indebted to Rage Against the Machine and Radiohead’s The Bends, but which showed an inkling of the genius which was to come on its successor. In Aldershot in the South, The Cooper Temple Clause and Vex Red were marrying the industrial approach of Nine Inch Nails and electronica of Squarepusher and Massive Attack with Nirvana and post-grunge bands such as Silverchair. Let’s not forget that across the pond, Tool were about to celebrate their tenth anniversary, and the krautrock-inspired garage prog monster that was The Secret Machines emerged on the New York scene. 

This new breed of ‘progressive rock’ bands were now truly progressive in the way the genre was always supposed to be- loosely connected by various threads of experimentalism, but united more by attitude than by sound. Scenes are bullshit, but attitude is genuine, and it is just this that these bands had in common. A desire to push the boundaries, to excite with the sounds, structures and effects they were using made all of these bands some of the most exciting things to happen to music in a long time. The sad thing is, that whenever these bands (most of whom deny the association) are mentioned in the same breath as ‘progressive’, it brings with it negativity, when surely the greatest accolade of all for the artist is that he attempts to be original?

Final thought: whilst I’m aware that Picasso said that “if you imitate nothing, you create nothing”, and that it’s basically impossible to be original, you can still try your best to take of your surroundings and make something more. That’s what unites these bands, and without them, my life would be a whole lot duller.

That’s why I say three cheers for progressive rock! Hip, hip, hoo- …oh. Just me then.