The Cheerful Insanity of Me

Sunday morning... must be time for some contemporary Danish folk music. Luckily I recently got hold of a copy of Analogik's 2008 album "Søens Folk".

For those that aren't familiar with Analogik they play traditional music (particularly Balkan) with an electronic twist and clear hip-hop influences. It's generally the sort of music you should really do a Cossack break dance to.

Hard to get bored here, each track is radically different from the next and highly eccentric.

The album starts off sounding fairly traditional with Russisk Vuggevise (Russian Lullaby according to Google Translate), with minimal electronics, but complete with all the necessary "Hey Hey"s. They then launch the electronics at you in force in God Russisk (Good Russian) with it's wonderful oom-pa baseline, before slowing it down with Forbudt Sprut (Forbidden Booze) where the hip-hop influences start to really come to the fore giving a sound something like you might expect if you crossed the old style ballroom with the kia-ora advert. So it goes on for track after track, with each sounding almost like an entirely different band.

Other highlights include Ond Mand March (Evil Man March) which sounds exactly like the name implies, Godmorgen (Good morning) which capture that mechanic "I'm not really awake yet feeling" with added breakfast sound effects and Farligt Monster (Dangerous Monster) which for a few moments at the beginning sounds like it's going to launch into the theme from the littlest hobo, but then you're suddenly rescued by the other instruments and it starts to morphs into a blend of traditional folk and record scratching.

The whole album is available on bandcamp, but here's a couple of samples:

God Russik -

(Direct link)

Farligt Monster -

(Direct link)

Of all the stuff Nirvana produced Heart Shape Box has got to be one of my favourites.

Never heard it played quite like this before though.

(Direct Link)

(via cyberinsekt)

It's probably got Cobain turning in his grave, but it's quite cool all the same.

Take the "lar-de-dar lets sing a jolly little tune about having a sword fight and dying" of folk and blend it with the "rarh, I'm lower classed and oppressed by society and I'm going to make sure you know it" of punk and you'll end up with something like this:

(Direct link)

Inside the horse by Blyth Power - A true anthem for all those forced to be inside a wooden horse. It's kind of like a strange blend of the Strawbs and the Undertones.

Not bad for a group of trainspotters - The world clearly needs more folk-punk.

(via cyberinsekt)

So, moving on from obscure folk bands that's no one has heard of, here's something much more mainstream.

One of the best parts of being in your late 20s is that you can pick up all the albums you would have liked when you were a teenager, but couldn't afford, in charity shops for next to nothing. Just to prove the rule, I found Placebo's self titled debut album in Camberwell Scope for £2 (I'm guessing it would have set me back £15-20 if I'd bought it new when it came out).

So, 1996, I would still have been in school and my music collection would probably have just consisted of a few cassettes I never listened to because I'd had then since I was about 7 and the music tastes of a 7 year old and 15 year old differ quite dramatically. I wouldn't have even had a CD player, let alone any CDs at that point. Most of the stuff I would have listened to would have been the dire local radio station, which must have owned all of about 5 records which they cycled through endlessly. Intermingled in amongst ancient cheese they obviously played the stuff that was hitting the charts.

OK, as with any musical era, there was plenty off really bad stuff to make your ears bleed and the radio was plagued by boy/girl bands and dodgy dance covers. However, there was also all the indie rock stuff, the tail end of grunge, a bit of a punk revival and all of this was creeping into the charts too giving a bit of interest and chance for your arm to grow back before the next boy band comes on and you had to chew it off again.

As for "Placebo", musically it's wonderfully simple. I'm sure you could probably count the number of notes they use in each track on one hand and there's not an awful lot happening with the rhythm either. However, the simple tunes together with the grungy distorted guitar sounds come together to create this amazingly melodramatic sound. Molko's vocals are equally dramatic and the pitch of his voice makes a great contrast with the guitars.

I picked up a copy of their second album "Without You I'm Nothing" second hand a few years ago, which generally sounds much the same, but loses a lot of the dramaticism of "Placebo" and so doesn't hang together nearly as well.

Ironically "Nancy Boy", which was the biggest single from the album is probably the least interesting track on the album. The other singles "Bruise Pristine", "Come Home", "36 Degrees" and "Teenage Angst" all have a bit more punch to them.

However, the real stars of the album are "Lady of the Flowers", where all the melodrama on the album gets concentrated into one song, and "I Know" which just goes to show how well guitar and didgeridoo go together.

All the tracks are available to listen to on last.fm, but have a link to "I Know"

As I've said previously, I tend to buy quite a few second hand CDs. I had this idea that I'd start posting reviews here, the upshot of which is that rather than ending up writing lots of reviews and boring you all, I end up with CDs slowly piling up next to the computer, so it's probably time to start rectifying this again.

That said I didn't buy the CD currently on the top of the pile and second one isn't second-hand, so that first sentance is complete rubbish and I probably should throw it out the window and start again, but we'll carry on and see where this goes instead.

Anyway, top of the pile is a copy of "Silkie" by Frock which I picked up from bagrec at the first Blackheath practice I went to. Hands up who's heard of them then? No-one? Oh well, there's a surprise. I hadn't either.

Frock were a psychedelic folk-rock group in the late 70s presumably based somewhere around SE London given the last track. The album does have a similar feel to it to some of the work of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span and is generally well executed throughout. Instrumentally the album is dominated by traditional instruments (particularly fiddle) mixed with electric piano, which works really well as a combination giving it the whole folk with a contemporary edge feel.

They also benefit from a really strong vocalist and on many of the tracks (not the instrumental ones obviously) they're able to let her just take the center of attention.

In short, this is an album composed of 9 excellent folk-rock tracks. Apparently, it's so good it's worth £137 (at least that's what someone recently paid for it on ebay), but I'm not sure I'd go that far.

And if your not satisfied with the first 9 tracks, they round the album off with something a little different. Namely this:

The Blackheath Morris Stick Throwing Dance (mp3) (via bagrec)

As the name implies, it's an audio recording of morris dancing, namely Blackheath performing their own special version of "Young Collins" to a backing of Frock.

It's utterly excellent! The world clearly needs more audio recordings of morris dancing...

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This is ...erm... different

(via dizzythinks)

I do like following cyberinsekt on here, for the occasional musical gem you find in amongst his posts.

I must admit, I'm not familiar with much Turkish psychedelic jazz, but this is excellent:

Okay Temiz - Denizalti Rüzgarlan

It's somewhat like the Ozric Tentacles gone ethnic in a toy shop with a pet monkey, only more so!

...and I can't stop listening to it... help!

There's nothing quite like Norwegian Medieval Folk music to wake up to on a lazy Sunday morning:

Agnes Buen Garnås & Jan Garbarek - Margjit Og Targjei Risvollo (via cyberinsekt)

Generally, when a contemporary twist is put on Scandinavian folk music the result seems to go down the lines of heavy metal and it works. I'm sure they could have done something very similar with this, but by going down gentler lines they've just come up with something totally hypnotic. It would have to be to keep the attention for 16 minutes though and it does it without you even consciously noticing.

However, I don't seem to be able to get away from the idea that it somehow sounds like it should be used on the soundtrack for an epic fantasy film like the Lord of the Rings and it just brings to me sweeping images of New Zealand countryside as a result.

(LJs spell checker doesn't seem to like New Zealand - well more the Zealand part, it's happy with New - are there no New Zealanders on here in that case or are they just happy to be told they're always spelling their home country wrong?)

So, we've danced in some really odd places, but Bourne and Hollingsworth must be one of the most bizarre bars I've ever visited.

As Time Out, so aptly put it, it's "not so much a bar as a reproduction of your granny's sitting room"

You've just got to love a bar where the DJ plays this as soon as you finish dancing:

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Last Saturday I went to see Methera at Kings Place.

They really were as good as they sounded, with all the feeling of a traditional string quartet, but playing folk tunes.

Rather than facing the audience, they sat in a circle of four facing inwards and kept rotating between sets so you got to see all of them. This was apparently so they could communicate to each other during the performance.

There are some samples on Myspace - well worth a listen.

Having bought a copy of the CD on the day, I was impressed when I got home to find it was numbered YAN001, very fitting for a band called Methera.

*goes off to count sheep*