We’re sorry – we’re going on hiatus
Hello all. Due to intense work pressures on both the Ben side and the Jen side of things we’ve decided to go on holiday from Play It As It Lays until the end of May, when we’ll be back, we promise. And we’ll be better. If you’re in London you can also come hear us playing records at the King’s Cross Social Club in the near future. Dates will be on the right as soon as we confirm.
In the meantime, we’d recommend:
- Mississippi Records
- Scout Niblett’s cover of the Swearing at Motorists track “Duke Of Anxiety”
- These New Puritans
- Ran Blake
See you when the sun comes out!
Ben and Jen x
Filed under Uncategorized | Comment (0)these new puritans
Listening back to These New Puritans’ Beat Pyramid ahead of getting their much-praised new one, I’ve been mainlining this song for days. Snotty but oblique, full of anger struggling to find a name and target. With the words “And if there is a God”, and the yelping reach towards that top note, clarity seems to be coming together, only to vanish, leaving just a recitation of a telephone number without end as the song closes. Violent, empty and brilliant. This is the earlier (?) rougher version which just amps up the nastiness.
These New Puritans – Elvis (rough version)
anothony ’shake’ shakir
Three discs, £15. Not bad. The case to Detroit techno legend Anthony ‘Shake’ Shakir’s Frictionalism 1994-2009 is a sleek, paperback-sized jewel case. But inside it’s a record geek’s nightmare. The 3 discs are stacked directly on top of one another. Vulnerable – waiting for that one bit of grit to sneak in between them and ruin the party for everyone.
The best description I’ve seen is in The Wire, who said: “he finds a space for the foward momentum of Techno to coexist with the rotational torque of disco”, and while it’s much heavier on the techno than the disco, that’s far better than my own cack-handed blathering would be.
It’s hard to pick tracks, especially when I’ve only had three days with it. But it’s only going to get more difficult. The first is the opener, from 1996, really has that twisting torque thing going on. The micro-drop half way through The Fake Left, Go Right Plan from 2000, is classic. The third, from 2002, has addictive little twisting filters.
Get me that worrying jewel-case set too
Anthony ‘Shake’ Shakir – Mood Swing
Anthony ‘Shake’ Shakir – The Fake Left, Go Right Plan
Anthony ‘Shake’ Shakir – Frictional Beat No 5
mux mool
Since the 20JFG Darkstar 2009 mix I’ve had this on heavy rotation. Lazily, evidently, as now we’re three weeks into 2010, and then guardian music beats me and names Mux Mool new band/artist of the day. Serves me right for languishing in food, booze, and snow up north for so long.
The remix of Rhythm is a Dancer is woozy and chewy. I want him to rework some other dancefloor cheese too, to turn it into some hazy basement groove, all sloppy with dripping edges; sounds to roll your hips to with heavy lids closed.
Snap – Rhythm is a Dancer (Mux Mool remix)
I decided I won’t be doing a best of the decade to go alongside Ben’s. 10 years ago, I was 13. At 13 I still hadn’t made the switch from Boyzone to Papa Roach, and so really, there wouldn’t be much difference between the albums of my life and my albums of the decade.
Filed under new | Tags: 20jfg, dubstep, jennifer lucy allan, mp3, mux mool, play it as it lays, remix | Comment (0)courtesy of u-tern
Ever since hearing his fantastic remix of “Trilogy” by Kelis (who incidentally has spent the week working with La Roux and slagging off PETA), I’ve been following DJ U-Tern and his One Day Later… blog. It’s a consistently ass-compelling selection of nu-disco, electro, house and vintage boogie, with high quality vinyl rips, and as a special new year’s treat, zipped up collections of extremely sick disco classics. A track off it here from 80s Dutch three-piece Mai Tai: heavily artificial synth-funk conjured from hairspray, rayon and the sassily righteous fury of the wronged woman flanked by her BFFs. Like an outrageously overproduced En Vogue. Stunning. Apparently a UK top ten hit back in’t day! And this Boney M re-edit is so taut and lean it’s like it’s been to some sequinned boot camp. Reassessment clearly necessary.
Boney M – Ma Bakes (‘Ma Baker’ re-edit)
And there’s this One Day Later classic, which I always bring DJing but is too peacockingly strutting and camp for the well-heeled gastropub I play at. Like Eddie Murphy doing “Party All The Time” in drag with a mustachioed Italian backing band, at least in my mind.
Filed under old | Tags: ben beaumont-thomas, bobby nunn, boney m, mai tai, one day later, play it as it lays, u-tern | Comment (0)silver futures
Found this awesome cassette collaboration between Etienne Pierre Duguay of Real Estate and Mark McGuire of Emeralds lurking in a ectoplasm-splattered corner of the internet, entitled From The Swamp Rot Rises My Babies Dreams. Shimmering guitar tones and new age synth pads seep out through muslin-wrapped fuzz, for 10 shamelessly blissed-out droning minutes at a time. Here’s Transmutations, cut out and amplified from the much longer tape side. You could maybe ask this man or this man for a copy, but let’s face it, they’re probably all gone, so go here for the whole thing.
Silver Futures – Transmutations
sentimentality and keith jarrett
Keith Jarrett – The Koln Concert, Part I
One of my Christmas presents was The Koln Concert by Keith Jarrett, the biggest-selling solo jazz recording of all time with 3.5m copies, and something I’d managed to have never heard. With my diet of improv restricted to tentative forays into the spastic, plastic brilliance of the East London jazz scene, Jarrett’s performance was not what I considered improv to be: psychologically probing, occasionally hostile. Instead it was florid, evangelistic, and deeply sentimental. And I mean that as the highest praise.
If you’re as unfamiliar with the performance as I was, it’s of two half-hour piano improvisations, with a shorter encore to finish up. Recorded in 1975, it apparently became a post-hippy, pre-punk staple in university dorms, a crossover hit in a way that no other improvisatory music had been. Jarrett works from a series of chords and motifs, and pushes air through them until they unfurl in dazzling runs, or allows them to get into soft-rocking or faintly ragtime grooves. The mood is of hopeful romance, and of passionate yet tenderly-voiced beliefs. The two most immediate reference points to these ears are the patriotic vistas of Aaron Copeland, and the white-bread soul of the Doobie Brothers. It is, like all sentimental music, profoundly uncool.
Something I wondered about while listening was what critics and players would make of it if it was performed today. I’m sure many would see it as gauche or misguided, but really, in a global music scene where difficulty and anger are now much-explored, a truly sentimental performance is one of the few radical gestures left…
Filed under old | Tags: ben beaumont-thomas, improv, keith jarrett, play it as it lays, sentimentality, the koln concert | Comment (0)kurt vile live
Last year I had an epic and still somewhat ongoing obsession with Kurt Vile’s “Beach On The Moon”, which saw me listen to absolutely nothing else on my iPod for days at a time, addicted to its Balearic saltiness and free-associative musings. And now I’m now hooked on the live recordings Chocolate Bobka recently posted of Vile playing an acoustic set in Washington DC.
Vile is the master of the heavy downstroke, big mind-filling chords that punctuate his songs and tie their fabric tight; he also lets them breathe out again with impulsive but steady chord shifts, and of course his brilliant vocals, all Dylan street-shaman rambling and high-school sniping. There are gorgeous little details too, like the faint arpeggios behind the steady listlessness of “My Best Friends (Don’t Pass This)”, and when he gets fixed into a groove you feel like he’s hovering on the edge of the spiritual planes cruised over by the likes of Fahey and Rose, before shrugging and deciding against it. Get the whole awesome set here.
Kurt Vile – My Best Friends (Don’t Even Pass This) (live at DNA Test Fest, Washington DC, 28/4/09)
Kurt Vile – It’s Alright (?) (live at DNA Test Fest, Washington DC, 28/4/09)
ben’s album of the decade: lambchop – nixon
It was a tough call between this and the Strokes’ first album, which I danced to at my school leavers’ ball, throughout university, in house parties beyond and even at a friend’s wedding this month, and I know I’ll be dancing round my residential care home to. They reminded us that traditional cool signifiers are still the coolest – cigarettes, hair, leather, denim, staring, New York. And they made them human with a faint undertow of desperately wanting all the uncool human things – acceptance, friendship, love. And all with sensational, sneer-resistant songs. I deeply, deeply love it, and it will certainly provoke the most vivid Proustian rushes in the future.
But Lamchop’s Nixon still has the edge for me. Discarded by a family I babysat for aged 15 because the singer “couldn’t sing”, this is a seemingly bespoke album, designed to exactly my specifications. Unapologetically sentimental, with Disney strings and last-dance guitars, and a man ruminating cryptic American poetry across gutteral mumbles, tender baritone and cr0oning falsetto. Nixon’s world is the obtuse American bleakness of Carver tempered and given meaning by the happy stoicism of Garrison Keillor; it’s the sound of the observer falling in love and becoming observed. Though not without difficultly: take the boozing couple in Nashville Parent, and the freaky American Gothic of the last two tracks, which bring it to a disturbing and brilliant end.
Lambchop – What Else Could It Be?
It’s a completely realised masterpiece, whose naked vulnerability and twisted humanity is checked and consoled by immaculate, full-bloom music. Buy it.
Check below for the rest of my favourite albums of the noughties…
Filed under old | Tags: ben beaumont-thomas, lambchop, list, nixon, play it as it lays | Comment (0)ben’s big noughties list
Like all massive nerds and men, I like a good list. So I’ve spent literally hours compiling my favourite 200 tracks of the decade, while my body cries out unheeded for post-Christmas exercise. It’s after the jump if you’re interested, but first here’s a few downloads of tunes from it that haven’t been featured on any list I’ve seen, but should have been.
First this, from Tortoise. The inquisitive child of a riff, the porno-soundtrack rhythm guitar, the splattering drums, the hip hop breakdown – it’s all perfect.
Next is this hugely underrated bit of driving microhouse (is that still a term?), with lupine howling and precambrian utterances coming from a boat off San Antonio.
Black Dice – Smiling Off (Luomo remix)
Copied in beefy 320kbps quality from the 7″ is Hot Chip’s alternate take on “Boy from School”, with Morodery undulations, frantic New Order guitars and a gutpunching bass drop after the breakdown.
Hot Chip – Boy From School (Maida Vale version)
One of the greatest recommendations I ever received from John Peel is this from Laura Cantrell - playing from a prep-kitchen radio, this country ballad had a melody and elegantly resigned sorrow that left me with eyes moister than any onions could provoke.
Brooding clouds, Paul Van Dyk cheese stabs, IDM clattering, and, oh yes, a sax solo freakout running through the whole thing. Fake tan and afrocentric beards collide with demented results.
Laurent Garnier – The Man With The Red Face
Ty is tainted somewhat by the dread hand of the backpacker hip hop fan, which does him a major disservice. Two streams of consciousness rage through a weed fug, with moist-eyed overdriven guitar soloing bleeding its heart everywhere.
And so here’s the countdown (or rather countup), with only one track per artist for variety’s sake…
Filed under old | Tags: ben beaumont-thomas, black dice, hot chip, laura cantrell, laurent garnier, list, luomo, noughties, play it as it lays, tortoise, ty | Comment (1)
