motel de moka

Animal Collective - people
(People ep, 2006)

Judging by their People ep that was being sold during their australian tour, Animal Collective seem to be quite comfortable still exploring the gorgeous highs of songs like “Banshee Beat” or “Loch Raven” from their 2005 lp Feels. The twinkling mesh of shouts and hums on the song “people” swell warmly up through the song’s locomotive refractions of drums and guitars. Pure morning bliss.

The Durutti Colum - sketch for summer
(The return of the durutti column, 1980)
Disco Inferno - love stepping out
(Summer’s Last Sound 12”, 1992)

My hometown and my musical aptitudes are not enough for the musical ambitions I have in my mind (a continuos chapter of my mental masturbations) but if I ever had the chance of leading a rock band I’d have it ripping (well, not ripping, homaging) the echoing guitar stylings of bands like the Durutti Column or Disco Inferno, specially the delayed and tape-manipulated riffs of the later. Disco inferno we’re unjustly ignored more than a decade ago by all but the most observant critics - It may be sad but they are still the first band I think of when I think of music that sounds ahead of its time. That’s how fucking mind-blowing I find all of their output. I’ve been ruining parties this weekend by playing a cd I burned with all of their eps’ songs and by boring people with extensive odes to the band, in guilt I have promised myself not to do the same with this post, so I’ll just leave a song and let you judge.

The Verve - gravity grave (edit)
(The verve ep, 1992)

As you may have noticed, I grew listening to too much space rock and shoegaze for my own good and I’ve always been a sucker for drifting soundscapes. There’s three things that will always make me fall for a song: patterns of static or glitch, vocoded vocals and the use of guitar to full effect, with insane amounts of delay and reverb in tow.

That said, I recently had the luck of finally running into The Verve’s magnificent debut ep from 1992 on a record store near my house at only 5 dollars and I couldn’t resist getting my hands on it. I’ve never been much fan of the band but I admit finding some of their songs on “storm in heaven” fairly interesting and I’d already downloaded 4 out of 5 songs of this ep so it seemed like a natural purchase to payback for those fleeting minutes of joy I got back then when I downloaded after having no luck on the record stores. The whole ep is an obliged listen to me at this time of the season, the opener “gravity grave” is one of the best spacerock jams I’ve heard in my life, the guitarwork is great - it has layers and layers of delay :] - and even though I don’t care much about Ashcroft’s lyrics most of the time, this song does have a heavenly line that goes “To me you’re like a setting sun, you rise then you’re gone.” Beautiful, ain’t it?

Image: Mike Egan.