Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

A la Recherche de Temps Perdu

As mentioned in my last post, I picked up two Johnny Cash albums at the same time as Angels and Airwaves.  I just tried to listen to them and couldn't.  I had to stop after a few tracks.

The problem is not any lack of quality, or any distaste on my part.  I haven't listened to old Johnny Cash tracks for a very long time - as opposed to his American series of recordings, where he did unbelieveable things to tracks by people like Depeche Mode or Nine Inch Nails.  I love his voice, and his cover of NiN's Hurt was what made me pick up the guitar again after a long break.  The video to that, with June watching him (both would die within months), is terribly touching.

The trouble is that memory thing.  When I was a little kid - nine or ten I think, but I've been wrong before about this manner of thing - my grandfather had a Vauxhall Viva.  Built in Britain, it was a downright horrible car: vinyl seats and a soft suspension, though I'll allow that I didn't notice any of this at the time.  But one of the faults was that it swallowed a Johnny Cash cassette and wouldn't let it go.  It would play it those 24 minutes or so (no auto-reverse in those days), but that was your lot.

My grandfather must have spent hundreds of hours tinkering with that car up in his garage, and I don't think there were many parts he couldn't fix.  But whether it was a reluctance to tinker with a sealed box of electronics, or just an unswerveable liking for the Man In Black, he saw no need to fix the Johnny issue.  I must have heard that tape hundreds of times, on the way to visit aunts in Sorn or Catrine or Muirkirk, or travelling to picnics at the Bridgend Burn, or off to the Glen to walk Mac the Dug, the latter hound wisely escaping the repetition by standing over me on the back seat and sticking his big, boxer's face out the window.

I've heard some of the tracks since, on enough occasions to dilute the effect: I Walk the Line for instance. But listening today to Folsom Prison Blues, Ring of Fire, or He Turned The Water Into Wine for the first time since those hundreds of listenings, two and a half decades ago, I was transported back to the back of Mauchline Papa's car, raspberry canes flashing by to the right and crab apple trees to the left as we head over the back road to Sorn.

This shot to the hippocampus won't last.  If I use it up, the experience and richness of the memories will go.  Like memories prompted by photographs, the recollecion will increasingly become one of the reproduced image, and less that of the moment itself.

Angels and Airwaves Review

I got my hands on Angels and Airwaves' debut album (as well as remastered versions of Johnny Cash's classic prison concerts at Folsom and San Quentin, because leaving a music shop with only one CD is something I cannot do).  The band is Tom Delonge's new post-Blink 182 project, together with members of The Distillers, The Offspring and Box Car Racer.

Quite apart from the obvious and distinctive link that is Delonge's voice, the sound is very obviously a development of the Blink 182 sound.  These songs are continuations of the process that was already underway with Stay Together for the Kids, I Miss You and Down.  You can, in fact, sing Blink's Always along to most of the Angels and Airwaves single Adventure.  Scoring is big, the orchestration full of synthesisers - more obvious than the guitars for much of the album - and lavish.  Girls in particular will love this.  And because, as my Boys of Summer post made clear, I am a complete girl in these matters, so do I.

The other obvious comparison is to Box Car Racers: there is a resemblance to the atmosphere, pacing and subject matter of I Feel So, All Systems Go or (particularly) There Is, but the orchestration, again, moves the guitar away from centre stage and replaces it with more dominant synth sounds.  This also leads to less concentration on melody, per se, and more on the chordal structure of the songs.

I am interested as to where the influence of the Distillers and Offspring members is.  maybe they just fancied a change?  There does sem to be a very obvious split at the moment between the stripped-down sounds of bands like The Rakes, Felix Da House Cat, The Young Knives, Be Your Own Pet, and the more heavily produced route that Angels and Airwaves have gone down.  Both have their attractions, and this is certainly an extremely listenable album: I enjoyed listening to each song the very first time.

You'll notice I'm not mentioning particular songs that much.  That's the downside.  The pacing and orchestration are fairly universal, and while I wouldn't go quite as far as calling it one-paced, if you ilke or dislike the singles, you'll feel the same way about the whole thing.  The sound of each track tends to follow a certain pattern: a prolonged, instrumental introduction (usually fairly restrained in nature), followed by a sudden explosion into a massive, rich, layered sound that races on, building bigger and richer for the rest of the song, with a fairly poignant lyric.  Forcing myself to pick out tracks, first single The Adventure is particularly strong, as is It Hurts, a Blink-esque exploration of a relationship past its sell-by, delivered in an uncompromising second-person form.  A Little's Enough is an uplifting sort of spiritual (lyrically: in no way similar in musical form to a spiritual, though) for its time, and contains some of the most interesting lyrics, expressing a tension between perceived, personal spirituality and religion that speaks to a very common dynamic amongst the most likely audience demographic.

While we're on the caveats, there's not the humour of Blink 182: there is a place for more serious lyrics, and A&A certainly do that here.  just don't come here for a return to What's My Age Again?  I suspect Delonge made this album to escape that pressure.

I like reviews that say "if you like these, you'll like this album," or "if you like this album, how about these?"  So here are a few things it sounds or feels a little like:

Oceansize, Heaven Alive
Team Sleep, Ataraxia
The Secret Machines, Alone, Jealous and Stoned
The Wonder Stuff, Mission Drive
The The, This Is The Day