Youth Lagoon, Wondrous Bughouse

If The Year of Hiberation, Trevor Powers’s debut album under the name Youth Lagoon, felt like riding a slow-moving, psychedelic county-fair carousel, then his sophomore effort, Wondrous Bughouse, is like being strapped into the spinning teacups at Disney World while on psychotropic drugs. This woozy, slightly out-of-focus aesthetic is a sharp U-turn, arriving after the pixie-dust electro-pop of Hibernation — it’s as if Powers grew disinterested in idyllic prettiness and purposely decided to uglify and intensify his trademark sound.

“Through Mind and Back” opens Bughouse with two minutes of discordant, fractured ambience, and the vibe only gets weirder from there: “Attic Doctor” is a trippy spookhouse waltz with dilapidated carnival synths, and “Pelican Man” channels the proggy mysticism of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. Even the warmest, cuddliest tracks here (like the mortality-driven fairy tale “Dropla”) find curious ways to meander and wilt: Check “Sleep Paralysis,” with Powers just missing those high notes; or “Mute,” with its organs chiming in and out of tune; or “The Bath,” in which percussion loops abruptly shift in tempo — a detour from the track’s emotional crescendo. But these left-field nuances offer Powers’s music grit and dynamic range: Even at its strangest, Wondrous Bughouse is never less than fascinating.

Rotting Christ, Kata Ton Daimona Eaytoy (Do What Thou Wilt)

After 25 years together, many metal bands settle into a comfort zone and stick with a sound they’ve developed over the decades. Not Athens, Greece’s Rotting Christ, who continue to discover new approaches to sonic blasphemy. The band’s 11th full-length, Kata Ton Daimona Eaytoy (which translates to the Aleister Crowley motto “Do what thou wilt”), takes its title seriously, not just from a lyrical perspective but also from a creative standpoint. Rotting Christ have come a long way since their formation as a traditional black metal band. Grinding guitars and blast beats are no longer the cornerstones of their sound, they’re just some of the elements used to convey Rotting Christ’s messages of individuality. “In Yumen Xibalba” features chanted vocals and a twin guitar lead reminiscent of Iron Maiden, while “Grandis Spiritus Diavolos” dabbles in the gothic and theatrical. “Kata Ton Demona Eaftou” blends black metal ferocity with elements of folk, Pagan and power metal and “Cine Lubeste Si Lasa” opens with frenetic classical piano runs and spiritual female operatic vocals before bursting into a trudging tribal paen.

A natural evolution from theband’s last two releases, 2007′s Theogonia and 2010′s Aealo, Kata Ton Daimona Eaytoy should be a welcome addition to the collections of those that have enjoyed listening to the band develop over the past half-decade. Even casual fans should rejoice to the range of sounds on the album, from the thunderous blast beats, bestial vocals and rapid-fire guitar licks of “Gligames,” to the Arabic crooning in “Ahura Mazda-Anra Mainuu.” Whether Rotting Christ are exploring world music, gothic, black metal or (gasp!) melodic metal, Kata Ton Daimona Eaytoy is unified by the band’s penchant for sinister, cinematic sounds, leaving no question which path Rotting Christ are invariably driven towards. As the mighty Slayer once proclaimed, evil has no boundaries.

Caitlin Rose, The Stand-In

Given her avowed love of old Hollywood glamour (just check out that album cover), the title of Caitlin Rose’s sophomore full-length likely refers to the 1937 backlot comedy The Stand-In, about a love triangle between the title character, a hapless number cruncher and a hopeless film producer. While Rose does write about similar romantic confusions, the film reference nevertheless comes across as false modesty: On these dozen songs, she emerges as a confident, distinctive pop-country artist with a biting lyrical style and a smart way with a hook. Perhaps A Star Is Born sounded too cocky?

Like any good actress, Rose has impressive range. The Stand-In has roots in classic country, displaying the poise of Tammy Wynette on “Everywhere I Go” and the assertiveness of Loretta Lynn on “Waitin’.” Standout “Golden Boy” casts her as a countrypolitan chanteuse against a widescreen arrangement that recalls Owen Bradley, and she turns that chorus into a gently devastating plea: “Golden boy, don’t go away/ I won’t ask you what you’re here for/ If you stay.” Occasionally she holds her twang in check, but for the most part her vocals are expressive, building from the conspiratorial whisper of “When I’m Gone” to the full-throated belt of “Only a Clown.”

Rarely reverent to one style or genre, The Stand-In mixes country with classic rock, radio pop, and even speakeasy jazz on closer “Old Numbers.” The rollicking Hank- and Tennessee Williams-inspired “Menagerie” and first single “Only a Clown” both hinge on Byrds-style guitar riffs that suggest an affinity for West Coast nuggets, and the Las Vegas-set “Pink Champagne” is debauched country folk, a sad-eyed and slightly sloshed reimagining of Gram Parsons’s “Sin City.” No matter how blue she sounds, there’s always a lively hint of humor even in her despair — a distinguishing trait that suggests she may be ready for her close-up.

Son Volt, Honky Tonk

“There’s a reckless side of tradition, a push of the tide having its way,” sings Jay Farrar above a guitar, harmonica and accordion wailing plaintively in the background of “Livin’ On,” the centerpiece of Son Volt’s ambivalent seventh album. Farrar’s sense of tradition is hardly reckless as he celebrates both the wild and down sides of honky-tonk life — and its resident angels — through alternating midtempo waltzes and shuffles played by a stately country sextet. With the possible exception of its opening Cajun waltz (“Hearts and Minds”), this honky-tonk set is better suited for hard drinking than for dancing, and Farrar’s tear-stained laments about the ravages of time and the workingman’s blues (“No wage can buy what the world never wanted,” goes “Barricades”) are conveyed prettily through Brad Sarno’s pedal steel, Thayne Bradford’s accordion, and a pair of fiddlers. Even if it’s not necessarily for the honky-tonk, Farrar’s music convincingly conveys a world of hurt just across the tracks.

The Cave Singers, Naomi

On their sprawling fourth studio album Noami, Seattle’s Cave Singers continue to expand their brand of rootsy, psychedelic rock. Now officially a quartet (with the addition of former Blood Brothers bassist Morgan Henderson), they sound more like a legitimate “band” than ever before: Henderson brings a funky virtuoso edge to these groove-heavy anthems, punching up the high-octane soul of “Early Moon” and anchoring the jittery, two-chord pulse of “Have to Pretend” with deep-pocket propulsion.

But even when The Cave Singers get loud, their sound remains earthy and raw, as intimate as a campfire moonshine-sing-along. Vocalist Pete Quirk is the band’s backwoods sage — and still very much an acquired taste — doling out country-boy witticisms and hippie wisdom in a throaty bark that often resembles Beavis from Beavis & Butthead. “All the weeds, the weeds are growin’,” Quirk croons on “Week to Week,” floating atop a dreamy Laurel Canyon churn, “That’s the way these flowers gonna learn.” Bullshit? Maybe. But, as always, The Cave Singers twist it into an unlikely revelation.

Autechre, Exai

One way for a long-running electronic-music act to ensure their listeners stay freaked out and confounded — two emotional qualities that have been Autechre’s specialties since their dawning IDM days — is to release a double-album that clocks in at a little over two hours. Another is to make a hectic opening track that falls apart so drastically that listeners might wonder if their playback systems have entered their death throes. So it goes about halfway through “Fleure,” the first of 17 pointedly eclectic tracks on Autechre’s superabundant Exai. The album begins its dissertation on variety with the English duo’s patented mix of abstract haphazardness and meticulous organization, and they expand outward exponentially from there. The 10-minute “irlite (Get 0)” opens with a grotty mix of refracted beats and noise before drifting into a spell of (comparatively) sumptuous groove science, almost like an Autechre version of house music. Melodies snake and swerve through almost every track otherwise, taking their time to develop and resolve, when they resolve at all. And the beats — well, they bristle, bray, lean back, zoom forward, break up, and beam out toward the outer edges of the cosmos, where music so serious and austere might provide a suitable soundtrack.

New This Week: The Men, The Replacements and More

Huge week! New ones from many of our faves, so let’s jump in and start with:

The Men, New Moon – Brooklyn’s most dynamic young rock band of the moment returns with its third expectations-raising/confounding record in as many years. Austin L. Ray writes:

Each of the last three years has produced a new album from Brooklyn’s The Men, and each of those albums has only increased the cultish glow of adoration for the fervent rock band, which has proven itself both capable and uncompromising. Like the subjects of Michael Azerrad’s ’80s-underground bible, Our Band Could Be Your Life — a book The Men would’ve been featured in had they been making music 30 years ago — this is a band that believes in the saving grace of a sweaty, anthemic rock song … New Moon is exciting transition, an anticipatory vision of how we’ll describe whatever’s next.

Waxahatchee, Cerulean Salt – This record. We are in love. A record that could have come out in 2003 on Saddle Creek and changed my life. Here’s Carrie Battan with more:

American Weekend, Katie Crutchfield first under the name Waxahatchee, felt like a whispered sacred document of youthful discontent and loneliness, the kind you could curl up and live inside for days. On the follow-up, Cerulean Salt, Crutchfield has plugged in the amplifiers and slightly glossed up the production. That might initially disappoint American Weekend fans, but the decision not to attempt to reproduce the holy rawness of her debut ultimately serves Crutchfield well. Her subtle gut-punches translate just as powerfully once the volume’s been dialed up.

Youth Lagoon, Wondrous Bughouse – Trevor Powers’ second full-length as Youth Lagoon expands outward from the internal Year of Hibernation to explore the big, bad, beautiful outside world. Shades of Sparklehorse, Mercury Rev, the Flaming Lips and Built to Spill abound in this colorful and textured guitar-rock suite. Ryan Reed says:

If The Year of Hiberation, Trevor Powers’s debut album under the name Youth Lagoon, felt like riding a slow-moving, psychedelic county-fair carousel, then his sophomore effort, Wondrous Bughouse, is like being strapped into the spinning teacups at Disney World while on psychotropic drugs. This woozy, slightly out-of-focus aesthetic is a sharp U-turn, arriving after the pixie-dust electro-pop of Hibernation — it’s as if Powers grew disinterested in idyllic prettiness and purposely decided to uglify and intensify his trademark sound.

The Replacements, Songs for Slim: A benefit EP for former Replacements guitarist Slim Dunlop, who was hospitalized for a massive brain stroke last month, Songs for Slim reunites Paul Westerberg and Tommy Stinson under the Replacements name. The results are loose and kinda bar-rocky, perfectly unpolished and surprisingly toothy.

Rhye, Woman­ – Quietly gorgeous, Sade-influenced chamber pop. Our own Jayson Greene wrote the review on this one, and here’s a sample:

You will discern the primary influence behind Rhye roughly 0.00002 seconds after singer/producer Mike Milosh opens his mouth: in his creamy, untroubled contralto, edged with lingering hurt, you will hear Sade materialize in front of you. Like Sade, Rhye seeks higher energies in the intermingling of the masculine and feminine. The full-length debut, tellingly titled Woman, it follows through on the fusion proposed by those early songs – chamber pop and Lovers Rock, poised with their mouths inches apart, whispering.

Olof Arnalds, Sudden Elevation –Our favorite Icelandic folk singer’s first English-language album. This is as light and pretty as we’ve come to expect from Olof, her voice curling around the notes like smoke from an incense stick. RECOMMENDED

Jimi Hendrix, People, Hell, & Angels - eMusic’s own Lenny Kaye wrote a beautiful, elegiac piece about the latest to be unearthed from the Jimi vault. It will be up and live a little bit later today, but here is a taste:

Out of a foreshortened lifeline and a relatively small body of work, it seems there is no end to the many miracles wrought by Jimi Hendrix to feed our insatiable hunger to hear every lick he played. For someone who did his fair share of burning the candle at both ends, as well as in the middle, he never lost sight of his work ethic and fascination with music’s byways — ceaselessly experimenting, recording and jamming with his peers. The level of commitment in the studio is high, and really, no matter whom he’s interacting with, Jimi doesn’t change so much as usher the chosen players into his spatial universe.

Josh Ritter, The Beast in Its Tracks – A wry, rueful divorce record from the country-folk singer Josh Ritter. Annie Zaleski writes:

In the artist notes for The Beast In Its Tracks, Josh Ritter wastes no time establishing the premise of his sixth album: “My marriage ended on November 1, 2010. It was a cold, blustery morning in Calgary, Alberta, and I was on tour. I hung up the phone and looked around me.” But while the impact of his divorce certainly hovers over The Beast In Its Tracks — the longing and regret coursing through the whispery acoustic opener “Third Arm” is breathtaking — the record smartly frames the breakup through the lens of optimism, not bitterness.

Caitlin Rose, The Stand-In – Confident, powerful pop-country voice comes into her own. Here’s Stephen Deusner with more:

Given her avowed love of old Hollywood glamour (just check out that album cover), the title of Caitlin Rose’s sophomore full-length likely refers to the 1937 backlot comedy The Stand-In, about a love triangle between the title character, a hapless number cruncher and a hopeless film producer. While Rose does write about similar romantic confusions, the film reference nevertheless comes across as false modesty: On these dozen songs, she emerges as a confident, distinctive pop-country artist with a biting lyrical style and a smart way with a hook. Perhaps A Star Is Born sounded too cocky?

Young Dreams, Between Places – Yearning, dramatic, fresh-faced indie rock, somewhere between Fleet Foxes and Vampire Weekend. Laura Studarus writes:

On their debut Between Places, the Norwegian collective Young Dreams rounds out a subgenre in your music collection you didn’t even know existed: well-adjusted coming-of-age anthems. As evidenced by the driving album opener “Footprints,” Young Dreams isn’t lacking for scrappy enthusiasm, and Between Placesbrims with youthful vigor and energy. Like Vampire Weekend of Fleet Foxes, they work in a light, retro-pop style that came to prominence that came to prominence years before they were born, updating it with lyrical signifiers of modern life: cell phone chargers, drinking games, and the otherworldly quality of summer vacation.

How To Destroy Angels, welcome oblivion – First full-length from new Trent Reznor project. Jon Wiederhorn says:

Welcome oblivion, the first full-length album with Trent Reznor’s new band How to Destroy Angels, is both totally familiar and unlike anything Reznor has ever done. It’s dark, brooding and filled with angst, but the anger that drives Nine Inch Nails is mostly absent, replaced with a sense of urgent desperation, as if Reznor knows time is passing and he wants to explore new, challenging sonic avenues, much like his idol David Bowie.

Rotting Christ, Kata Ton Aaimona Eaytoy – Athens, Greece-based black metal outfit continue to push hard at their chosen genre’s boundaries. Jon Wiederhorn writes:

After 25 years together, many metal bands settle into a comfort zone and stick with a sound they’ve developed over the decades. Not Athens, Greece’s Rotting Christ, who continue to discover new approaches to sonic blasphemy. The band’s 11th full-length, Kata Ton Daimona Eaytoy (which translates to the Aleister Crowley motto “Do what thou wilt”), takes its title seriously, not just from a lyrical perspective but also from a creative standpoint … A natural evolution from the band’s last two releases, 2007′s Theogonia and 2010′s Aealo, Kata Ton Daimona Eaytoy should be a welcome addition to the collections of those that have enjoyed listening to the band develop over the past half-decade.

Autechre, Exai – The electronic act, entering its third decade, continues to find way to blow synapses. Andy Battaglia wrote the review:

One way for a long-running electronic-music act to ensure their listeners stay freaked out and confounded — two emotional qualities that have been Autechre’s specialties since their dawning IDM days — is to release a double-album that clocks in at a little over two hours. Melodies snake and swerve through almost every track, taking their time to develop and resolve, when they resolve at all. And the beats — well, they bristle, bray, lean back, zoom forward, break up, and beam out toward the outer edges of the cosmos, where music so serious and austere might provide a suitable soundtrack.

Stubborn Heart, Stubborn Heart – Today is the US release of this indie Brit-pop/soul hybrid, about which Barry Walters writes:

One could be forgiven for at first believing there’s little about Stubborn Heart that sets this pair apart from their London EDM contemporaries. There are aching vocals from Luca Santucci, electronic backings from Ben Fitzgerald, and a sleek noir sensibility shared with James Blake, Jessie Ware and the xx. Eschewing sunlight, the duo favors shadows no longer radical. Their distinction is a frisson that aligns them with a highly specific offshoot of ’80s Brit-soul — the smooth-but-tortured AOR of the Blue Nile, Black and Danny Wilson.

Son Volt, Honky Tonk – The latest from Jay Farrar continues down his well-traveled road. Richard Gehr writes:

“There’s a reckless side of tradition, a push of the tide having its way,” sings Jay Farrar above a guitar, harmonica and accordion wailing plaintively in the background of “Livin’ On,” the centerpiece of Son Volt’s ambivalent seventh album. Farrar’s sense of tradition is hardly reckless as he celebrates both the wild and down sides of honky-tonk life — and its resident angels — through alternating midtempo waltzes and shuffles played by a stately country sextet.

Kate Nash, Girl Talk – In which Kate Nash gets impressively, spitting mad. Annie Zaleski writes:

When British singer-songwriter Kate Nash said that Girl Talk consists of her “blood, sweat, emotional puke and tears,” she wasn’t just being dramatic. Her third full-length is a messy chronicle of post-breakup grief that veers between relief (“Fri-end?”), soul-searching (“Conventional Girl”), wistfulness (“Are You There Sweetheart?”), sadness (“Lullaby For An Insomniac,” “O My God”) and anger (“All Talk”). Appropriately, Girl Talk‘s music is also all over the place; styles covered include wobbly, girl group-inspired indie-pop, brash punk, stormy post-punk, grimy new wave, sparkling Britpop and vulnerable acoustic pop.

Helado Negro, Invisible Life – Bewitching, endearing multiculti pop. Richard Gehr writes:

According to Invisible Life‘s credits, Helado Negro, the stage name of Ecuador-born Roberto Lange, “played the computer synthesizer to make this music.” That sounds about right. Invisible Life may be the most coherent of Helado Negro’s three albums of electronics con vocals, but it still has a distant, abstract quality to it even though it features, for the first time, four English-language tracks.

Daniel Amos, Kalhoun, BibleLand and Songs of the Heart: A trio of ’90s albums from this underrated California alt-rock band. Of the three, Kalhoun is not only the strongest, but arguably one of the best of the band’s career, a collection of finely-wrought rock with razor-sharp lyrics that are, by turns, scathingly satirical and startlingly sensitive. It’s start-to-finish perfect. The rest are a mixed bag: BibleLand was the group’s response to grunge that was polarizing when it came out (I was always a defender). Songs of the Heart was a well-intentioned misfire.

Jamaican Queens, Wormfood: Coy little band from Detroit proffers buzzy, nerdy indie rock with yelping vocals, sputtering drum machines and electronic crackle and fog.

Lady, Lady: Lady is a duo comprised of Terri Walker from London and Nicole Wray from Atlanta, but their combined effort recalls the slinky, high-gloss R&B of the late ’70s. There are big, bright horn charts, limber grooves and assured vocals. They’re balanced right on the precipice where R&B started to give way to funk; there’s been a deluge of retro-soul lately, but by shifting their reference point up a decade or so, Lady manage to give some shine to a part of soul history that has been heretofore ignored.

The Cave Singers, Naomi – The raw, intimate backwoods rock of The Cave Singers grows a little bigger. Ryan Reed writes:

On their sprawling fourth studio album Naomi, Seattle’s Cave Singers continue to expand their brand of rootsy, psychedelic rock. Now officially a quartet (with the addition of former Blood Brothers bassist Morgan Henderson), they sound more like a legitimate “band” than ever before: Henderson brings a funky virtuoso edge to these groove-heavy anthems, punching up the high-octane soul of “Early Moon” and anchoring the jittery, two-chord pulse of “Have to Pretend” with deep-pocket propulsion.

SUUNS, S/T – Grooving, hypnotic, Clinic-style rock.

Helado Negro, Invisible Life

According to Invisible Life‘s credits, Helado Negro, the stage name of Ecuador-born Roberto Lange, “played the computer synthesizer to make this music.” That sounds about right. Invisible Life may be the most coherent of Helado Negro’s three albums of electronics con vocals, but it still has a distant, abstract quality to it even though it features, for the first time, four English-language tracks. The best of these, “Ghost Dance,” delivers Lange’s hookiest moment to date in the refrain, “There’s no one home, just the ghosts who dance alone.” Lange’s nearly constant headphone-happy percolations are reminiscent of his Savath y Savalas folktronic collaborations with Prefuse 73′s Scott Herren. Invisible Life also scoops up some Prince-ly falsetto R&B (“U Heard”), hints at a psychedelic samba (“Arboles”), and switches on the disco mirrorball (“Junes”). Lange sings in a low, disaffected voice, all the better to insinuate the vaporous emotions around lines such as “we came so far to see that here is only to make sure/ there’s no chance for you.” Or perhaps it just loses something in translation.

Jimi Hendrix, People, Hell and Angels

Out of a foreshortened lifeline and a relatively small body of work, it seems there is no end to the many miracles wrought by Jimi Hendrix to feed our insatiable hunger to hear every lick he played. For someone who did his fair share of burning the candle at both ends, as well as in the middle, he never lost sight of his work ethic and fascination with music’s byways — ceaselessly experimenting, recording and jamming with his peers. With People, Hell and Angels, there is still more to discover, savor and put in the context of his time on this Earth.

Despite the fact that Hendrix owns the spotlight, the hook of the album is collaboration — his readying to take a step into his next music, the one that we can only tantalizingly hear in these tracks. He entwines easily with his rhythm section, whether it be the straightforward and propulsive Buddy Miles, whose mighty whack on the snare goes with his insistent right foot; or Mitch Mitchell, always the most airy and spatial of drummers, skittering around the kit. Hendrix mostly relies on his old army buddy Billy Cox to underpin the bass, when he’s not assuming the low frequencies himself. Others who drop by are Steven Stills, saxophonist Lonnie Youngblood, and his percussive Woodstock “band,” Gypsy Sun and Rainbows. No matter whom he’s interacting with, Jimi doesn’t change so much as usher the chosen players into his spatial universe.

Some of it is remarkably straightforward and at other times the seams show, but People, Hell and Angels is a listenable and fascinating tour of Jimi’s thought processes in the last years of his life.

How to Destroy Angels, Welcome oblivion

Welcome oblivion, the first full-length album with Trent Reznor’s new band How to Destroy Angels, is both totally familiar and unlike anything Reznor has ever done. It’s dark, brooding and filled with angst, but the anger that drives Nine Inch Nails is mostly absent, replaced with a sense of urgent desperation, as if Reznor knows time is passing and he wants to explore new, challenging sonic avenues, much like his idol David Bowie.

At the end of “And the Sky Begins to Scream,” Reznor whispers, “I wanna tear it down to the ground and build another one.” The song follows this aspiration; it starts with a shower of fuzzy keyboard notes that flicker in and out as if emanating from a short-circuiting soundboard, before evolving into an alien soundscape of layered noises, and mid-paced beats and ethereal pop vocals by Reznor’s wife Mariqueen Maandig.

In part, How to Destroy Angels is the natural hybrid of Nine Inch Nails and the spacious, inventive film scores Reznor wrote with Atticus Ross for David Fincher. Ross is also a member of How to Destroy Angels, and he and Reznor continue to work with unsettling noises, ambient tones and dynamic arrangements. Yes, Reznor’s industrial arsenal is ever-present, but most of the songs are built around a haunting, almost meditative combination of syncopated electronic beats and deep keyboard bass lines. Comparisons can be made to Tricky’s 1996 album Pre-Millennium Tension and many of the ambient structures resemble Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV. But writing off Welcome oblivion as an amalgam of Reznor’s past work sells the project short.

The track with the most commercial potential, “How Long,” weaves a Peter Gabriel-esque chorus through a mélange of clattering beats and skewed melodic keyboard lines, while “Ice Age” balances picked, muted and transmuted acoustic guitar with Maandig’s soft, soothing vocals. While there are undercurrents of feedback throughout, the song maintains its twisted folk roots until five minutes in, when waves of digital noise — some of which sounds like an underground bagpipe — starts to infect the beauty of the melody. In “Too Late, All Gone” Maandig and Reznor sing together, “The more we change, everything stays the same.” Maybe it’s a personal revelation that regardless of how far he strays sonically, he remains the same brooding artist that wrote 1989′s groundbreaking Pretty Hate Machine. If he’s not happy with that for some reason, at least it wasn’t for a lack of trying.

Waxahatchee, Cerulean Salt

Following a breakup two years ago, Katie Crutchfield found herself snowed in at her parents’ house in Alabama, where she recorded a collection of deeply personal, lo-fi acoustic guitar tracks. The resulting album American Weekend, her first under the name Waxahatchee, felt like a whispered sacred document of youthful discontent and loneliness, the kind you could curl up and live inside for days. On the follow-up, Cerulean Salt, Crutchfield has plugged in the amplifiers and slightly glossed up the production. That might initially disappoint American Weekend fans, but the decision not to attempt to reproduce the holy rawness of her debut ultimately serves Crutchfield well. Her subtle gut-punches translate just as powerfully once the volume’s been dialed up.

Crutchfield is an extraordinarily efficient songwriter, using each brief track to paint a very specific but familiar portrait of 20-something American youth. “I said to you on the night that we met, ‘I am not well,’” she sings right out of the gate over a spare bassline and a kick drum on “Brother Bryan.” Some tracks are jaunty pop-punk odes, like the 90-second “Coast to Coast”; some are delicately folk-fed, underscoring Crutchfield’s slight Alabaman twang. Others are uniquely entrancing, like “Misery Over Dispute,” a track that sways like a slow dance and shreds like a basement punk show at the same time. But no matter how she packages her words and stories, Crutchfield finds a way to poke at the world’s collective demons. “We will find a way to be lonely any chance we can, and I’ll keep having dreams about loveless marriage and regret,” she sings on “Swan Dive”. She might using “we” to talk about herself and her friends throughout Cerulean Salt, but she invites everyone in to reflect.

Ashley Monroe, Like a Rose

Ashley Monroe is best known as Hippie Annie, one fringe-dressed third of the country supergroup the Pistol Annies. Even before she proved she could hold her own against bandmates Miranda Lambert and Angeleena Presley, which is certainly no small feat, the Knoxville-born Monroe had a short, strange career. Her label may have fumbled the release of her excellent 2007 debut, Satisfied, but she proved an adept networker as well as collaborator who has since worked with Trent Dabbs, Brendan Benson, Jack White and…uh, Train?

Thanks to the success of the Pistol Annies, Monroe finally has a new label and a new sophomore album, Like a Rose, co-produced by Vince Gill. Much like her debut, it makes a fine introduction to an engaging talent in country music. Faster tunes like “Monroe Suede” and “Weed Instead of Roses” reveal a rambunctious energy and a lively humor, and she holds her own against Blake Shelton on “You Ain’t Dolly (And You Ain’t Porter),” a lively duet about karaoke singers lowering their romantic standards. The album’s best moments, however, are the wounded ballads like “You Got Me” and “She’s Driving Me Out of Your Mind,” where Monroe’s careful vocals actually do recall Dolly Parton at her most melancholy. “Used” in particular sounds both bruised and bold. Like the song’s narrator, Monroe may not have had the easiest time in Nashville, but those setbacks have obviously made her stronger.

Autechre, Exai

Given that Autechre’s music embodies a forensic minimalism, it’s remarkable that they give us so much of it. The Manchester duo of Rob Brown and Sean Booth’s 11th album (hence the Roman numeral XI-referencing title, Exai) is stretched out over two-and-a-half hours, which is no less than eight sides of vinyl. As the, um, quadruple album’s austere and arid glitch-pop also represents a decided retreat from 2011′s more accessible, listener-friendly Oversteps, it would be easy to regard it as an intimidating prospect. It would also be wrong; as is always the case with Autechre, the joy is in the detail of their forebodingly dystopian digitalia. Tracks such as the typically portentously named ‘irlite (get 0)’ and ‘runrepik’ may appear to be cryptically abstruse aggregations of glitch-pop beats, but a perverse joy and even humour underpins their alternate complexity and defiant, hypnotic repetitiveness. Brown and Booth’s emotional default mode remains a mood of twitchy, fidgety agitation, almost as if they are wary of becoming ghosts swallowed by the machines they are programming, yet Autechre still gleam brightest when they allow melody to augment their robotic machinations, as on the sumptuous Detroit techno sweep of ‘jatevee C’. Bizarrely, you exit this gruelling musical marathon still craving more: It’s too much, and not enough.

Lee Hazlewood, Trouble Is A Lonesome Town

A grouchy Texan with a fathoms-deep voice, Lee Hazlewood was one of American pop music’s great outsiders. He’s best known for masterminding Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” in 1966, then cutting a couple of brilliant, if risquéé duet albums with Old Blue Eyes’ daughter.

Before that, he was best described as a hustler, who’d enjoyed success producing fellow Texan Duane Eddy’s twangy guitar instrumentals, but had failed in his quest to make it as a radio DJ, and a solo artist. This first installment in a reissue campaign from Light In The Attic, the illustrious label responsible for Rodriguez, The Monks and many more, tells of his early steps in the latter direction.

Trouble Is A Lonesome Town was released by Mercury in ’63, which majored in country music at the time, but it didn’t trouble the scorers. Each of its 10 tracks features a spoken introduction from Hazlewood, in which, with typically mordant wit, he lays out a background narrative about Trouble, a fictional sleepy railroad town in the old Wild West, and the cowboy characters who inhabit it — all by way of preparation for their exploits in the songs that follow.

“The people that live in Trouble do lots of remembering — I guess that’s because they ain’t got much to look forward to,” he quips at the beginning, before an acoustic guitar strums, his rumbling singing voice takes over, and we’re off into Hazlewood’s macabre and somewhat bleak world. Along the way, we meet Sleepy the undertaker, who only smiles “when he sees one of the old folks looking pale” (“We All Make The Flowers Grow”), and the town’s glamour puss, Anna Mae Stilwell, whose husband woefully informs some jealous menfolk that “she can’t cook, she can’t love, she ain’t worth a dime” (“Look At That Woman”).

Trouble was certainly conceived in pre-PC days. Its format was hardly groundbreaking — Hazlewood, then a wily 34-year-old, borrowed it from Johnny Cash’s 1960 travelogue, Ride This Train — yet his style of campfire storytelling is uniquely his. Even on a cold winter’s night in Blighty, it can transport you to the dusty canyons of Nevada. Though, as with much country, it’s not for those prone to depression, it’s a record which provides a rare sense of one-on-one company.

The idiosyncrasy of Hazlewood’s vision is underlined across this superlative re-release’s 15 bonus tracks, most of which haven’t been heard in 40 years — if at all. Some were released under the prosaic, short-lived pseudonym, Mark Robinson, while two others were cut with Duane Eddy & His Orchestra.

On “It’s An Actuality,” an unreleased demo from as early as 1955-56, Hazlewood served up the couplet, “Normal people love perfection/ They read Playboy’s middle section.” He would rattle many a feminist’s cage right up to his death in ’07, but, just like esteemed men of letters like Norman Mailer and Henry Miller, he was a true American classic.

Luke Haines On His Great “Lost” Solo Album

[Featuring savagely funny songs about Gary Glitter, Jonathan King and the music press, Luke Haines's third album, Off My Rocker at the Art School Bop, was an overlooked gem of 2006. To celebrate its digital reissue, we invited Haines — author of the brilliant memoir Bad Vibes: Britpop and My Part in its Downfall — to write about what happened to his great "lost" album. — Ed.]

Things May Come And Things May Go But The Art School Dance Goes On Forever. So runs the title of a 1970 album by prog-rockers Pete Brown & Piblokto!, a title that I referenced for my third solo album. Trouble was, my own art-school dance was coshed with an early curfew. Off My Rocker At The Art School Bop was originally released in November 2006, but by early 2007 was pretty much unavailable, due to the ebbs and flows of the industry (the distributor went bust, if you must know), thus depriving future generations of the chance to meditate on its merits, or otherwise. But, friends, dry your eyes, for the wise people at Fantastic Plastic Records have made this essential bit of glam clatter available again, and the re-release gives me the chance to reflect on the all-too-brief life of this album.

Off My Rocker was not exactly conceived within earshot of the trumpet fanfare of confidence. In 2004, I was writing a musical for the National Theatre, and the songs that make up Off My Rocker were probably written as some sort of antidote to being prodded and interfered with (in the creative sense) by the Lance Corporals of the NT. (All this is recounted in my second book, Post Everything — Outsider Rock and Roll. If you like sledgehammer sarcasm being dumped on the hapless heads of arts administrators, this is the book for you.)

The original idea was that Off My Rocker should be a non-conceptual album, with a garage-band feel. My initial thought was to record with Steve Albini again, the only drawback being that I didn’t have a band, garage or otherwise, and the last time I had recorded with Steve, I did have a band. So I abandoned Plan Albini, and went with Plan Haines.

I bashed out all the instruments myself, bar a bit of cello. Half the album was recorded over Easter weekend 2004, and the other half was recorded almost a year later. The album was finished, a few labels were interested, a deal was done and a plan was concocted to release it early in 2006. But as the old saying goes, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” When it became clear that the label were not going to be paying me the agreed advance, I extricated the album from the floppy halfwits, and went looking for a new record label.

Off My Rocker was finally released by the tiny imprint Degenerate Music in late 2006. It had been a while since I’d had an album out, enough time to be forgotten, but not long enough away to be welcomed back with enthusiasm. I wasn’t that surprised, as I stood in WHSmith reading Mojo and Uncut (carefully hidden inside a copy of Asian Babes to cover my shame) to be greeted with postage stamp-sized, half-assed three-star reviews. Possibly because there was a song called “The Heritage Rock Revolution” mocking the monthly rock mags and their mouldy old prose. It wasn’t until The Guardian gave the album a great big review that anyone noticed that it was pretty good. But by then you couldn’t buy it.

If there is a theme (not a concept) to Off My Rocker it is folk devils. All the English devils. The idea of the folk devil crops up first in ‘Leeds United’, a song I wrote after reading Gordon Burns’s book about the Moors murderer Peter Sutcliffe, Somebody’s Husband, Somebody’s Son. “The devil came to Yorkshire in the Silver Jubilee…” There are folk devils in the track “The Walton Hop” [about the teenage disco in Surrey frequented by convicted sex offenders including Jonathan King], and there’s a really nasty one in “Bad Reputation (The Glitter Band).” Prescient? Nah. That’s the thing about folk devils, just when you’ve convinced yourself that there’s nothing there…Boo! Up jumps the devil.

The title track of the album was the last to be recorded, and it was almost an afterthought. In my cocoon of the National Theatre throughout 2003-04, I hadn’t paid much attention to what was going on in the rock ‘n’ roll world, and was only dimly aware that there was a new wave of art school-aping apes on the rise. If “Going Off My Rocker at the Art School Bop” has got anything to say, it’s that there’s a difference between being arty and being artistic. For fun, I re-recorded the song with my pal Richard X, not because I wanted a hit, but because as much as I admired Richard’s work with Liberty X and Rachel Stevens (and I do), I wanted his sound on a song that referenced both the Vorticist Blast manifesto and László Moholy-Nagy.

I took off around the country to promote OMRATASB, mainly as a favor to Degenerate Music. The tour was a drag and by the end I’d had enough. I had been approached by a few publishers who suggested I could turn my hand to writing a book. So that’s what I did: In early 2007 I knuckled under and started writing Bad Vibes. I recorded a few more tracks for the Leeds United EP, all of which would have sounded good on Off My Rocker, but in my mind, that was me done. It wasn’t, although I didn’t really write any more songs until early 2009 for what would become my album, 21st Century Man album. Things may come and things may go but the art school dance really does goes on forever.

Who Are…Popstrangers

Formed in 2009, Popstrangers started off as a low-profile local Auckland band fueled by a dislike for their day jobs and a passion for playing music. Very quickly, however, the noisy psych-pop trio found its footing: A nationwide band competition landed them a coveted slot at Auckland’s 2010 Big Day Out fest, and they released two EPs by the end of 2010.

Still, this forward momentum wasn’t without its setbacks. A record deal with legendary label Flying Nun only yielded one single, and Popstrangers cycled through a long line of drummers before settling on David Larson in 2011. The band’s debut full-length, Antipodes, reflects this restlessness. The New Zealand band rarely settles on one style; stormy jangle, gloomy post-punk and grungy riffs contrast with vocalist Joel Flyger’s sleepy-eyed croon and moments of brittle guitar-pop are balanced by languid shoegaze.

A few weeks before Antipodes was officially released, Flyger answered some questions via email about his ultimate goal as a band — “To play lots of shows, release lots of records and never have to work a proper job again” — and about Popstrangers’ place in music.

On recording Antipodes in the basement of a 1930s-era dancehall:

It was dark. There was a lot of concrete. But the studio itself was great. [There were] lots of rugs on the ground, and equipment everywhere. We were able to feel at home there and come and go at any time of the day or night. It’s very large, as well, with other people coming and going. There was always something happening. Mostly, people hanging around trying to find acid.

On how restlessness and dissatisfaction inspired his lyrics:

A lot of my lyrics for Antipodes came from just wanting something different and more than what was on offer at the time. I wasn’t very happy with what I was doing, the room I was living in, or what I was doing for a job. And at the time, I couldn’t really see anything changing. Most of the themes on the album are about unrest, or lust or certain people in my life during that period.

On how Antipodes emerged so cohesive:

It’s a document of what we were doing about midway through last year. The songs came out fairly quickly in the recording studio, and we knew what we wanted. We had recorded more, but the 10 songs on the album were the cohesive ones and fit together best. It’s taken longer to release the album, but we are very happy with that, too. We recorded it over two or three weeks, with a little more time spent on guitars.

On being influenced by the Cure:

I’m a big fan of the Cure, especially the melodies. Three Imaginary Boys is one of my favorites.

On the current New Zealand music scene:

There are a lot of great bands coming out of Christchurch at the moment, which suffered due to an earthquake a few years ago. It’s good to see the music scene there going well again. I think the NZ music scene is diverse, genre-wise, and there are not prevailing trends as such — but [there are] lots of shows that need more attention by the general public here outside of the music community.

On other New Zealand bands they admire:

I admire the Clean and Bailterspace, as they started something different and developed a “sound.” Also, Bic Runga is a talented vocalist who still makes great music.

Deer Park, Rackets, The Transistors, Salad Boys and Males are the bands we are playing with during our New Zealand album release tour. They are all great people and play a good mix of music.

On how New Zealand has had an impact on its music:

I guess, of course, the surroundings of where you make music has a direct impact on things, but it’s not something I think about or take into account. Perhaps the isolation plays a part in the themes and energy in the music.

On his unexpected musical influences:

I think perhaps ’80s and ’90s mainstream pop music has an influence, as I lived with my mother and sister growing up and they listened to a lot of pop music. A lot of that has stuck with me. Also, opera music and its different movements and journeys are personal influences.

Stan Getz Quartet, Live at Birdland 1961

Tenor saxophonist Stan Getz gained commercial success early in his career because of his limpid tone, elegant phrasing and selection of strong but easily-accessible repertoire. In the 1960s, he scored a monstrously big hit with the Jobim tune “Girl From Ipanema,” and things soared to a level he was able to maintain for the rest of his life. But for all his mainstream success, Getz was always a great, and totally committed jazz musician, esteemed as much by his peers as by his public. And, in spite of his well-established reputation as an urbane, ultra-smooth player, he was more than capable of feverish improvisation over an extended set.

Live at Birdland 1961, although a nicely balanced set, leans toward the more aggressive aspect of Getz’s playing. The musicians who round out the quartet — Steve Kuhn on piano, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Roy Haynes on drums — were particularly sharp on this date, playing with keen attention to the leader. But the rhythm section was also oddly mismatched in an intriguing way: Kuhn was an allusive player, seldom working along orthodox configurations, while Garrison was stalwart and propulsive, but holding to the middle ground. And Haynes was mercurial, his reflexes honed through years of playing in the jazz vanguard. Starting with a bristling “Airegin,” Getz alternates between fast geometric patterns and staccato bursts, Haynes’s commentary goading him on. Kuhn decides that discretion is the better part of valor; rather than going head to head with the leader, he opts for lyricism. Deejay Symphony Sid, who announces throughout the program, is given a brief tribute during “Wildwood,” where the tenor fluctuates between a relaxed “Jumpin’ with Symphony Sid” and 32nd-note dazzle.

Getz is all over the horn, and it’s good to be reminded of how absolute his control of the instrument was, even at its lowest register. The ballads are predictably stellar too; Harold Arlen’s “When the Sun Comes Out” maintains a meticulous balance of emotion and intellect, with Getz setting the mood and Kuhn sustaining it. Getz also shows his bop bona fides on the intensely burning “Jordu.” Live at Birdland 1961 puts out in the center of an outstanding set of live jazz played by one of Getz’s most engaged quartets.

Robyn Hitchcock, Love From London

Robyn Hitchcock is one of the most enduring cult figures in British rock history: There’s something almost impressive about spending more than four decades recording fundamentally tuneful songs without once having a hit, even by accident.

Hitchcock’s relative lack of commercial success is entirely everyone else’s loss. Love From London is a quietly mesmerizing illustration of Hitchcock’s facility with a specifically English strain of pop: pretty yet dark, bright but mournful. Now on the verge of his 60th birthday, his career-long inspirations are much in evidence:¬ John Lennon on the gently acerbic “Be Still” and “Stupefied,” Syd Barrett on the delirious psychedelia of “Strawberries Dress” and
“My Rain.”

Fossicking for explicit meaning in Hitchcock’s oblique sketches is no less a folly than usual, but the watery cover image of a mournful eyeball clutchinga London Underground sign communicates something of the overhanging sense of imminent deluge, or possible environmental catastrophe. Love From London is all at once just another installment of Robyn Hitchcock doing what Robyn Hitchcock does, and yet another reminder that nobody else is doing much like it.

Steve Lacy, Barry Wedgle & J.J. Avenel, Live in Lugano

Despite being one of the most singular voices to come out of jazz, and one of its most prolific and productive chroniclers, Steve Lacy may not be afforded the seminal status that his playing, composing and band leading warrants. Lacy was a specialist: He played only one reed instrument, the soprano saxophone. And although that horn gained great currency during the last quarter of the 20th century (and has maintained it), the soprano is still thought of largely as a doubling instrument. Even though Lacy is unquestionably one of the three most important soprano saxophonists in the instrument’s history (Sidney Bechet and Evan Parker are the others), his legacy will fall short of canonization. Still, it’s worth nothing that when John Coltrane wanted to take up the soprano, he went to Lacy for advice and instruction.

Live in Lugano features Lacy joined by the well attuned guitarist Barry Wedgle and the saxophonist’s longtime bassist J.J. Avenel. It’s a smart and edgy trio. Lacy’s powerful voice never threatens to topple the established group balance. The players use markedly different approaches to the music, but each listens closely. Lacy’s distinctive tone, unusually full bodied and always perfectly in tune throughout its entire range (the soprano is notoriously subject to going out of tune) contrasts nicely with the woody sounds of Wedgle’s acoustic guitar and Avenel’s bass. “On a Train Going By” begins with a standard Lacy compositional approach: a repeated figure, followed by melody simple and deliberately stated. Behind this, guitar and bass set up a resolute chugging pattern; the train is on its way. Lacy alternates between patterns, solidly-chosen melodic lines, and an astonishing array of “train” effects done through the use of harmonics and false fingerings.

It’s a virtuoso performance, and it’s followed by others: The glissando in the “Wickets’” theme is executed with jaw-dropping ease. Wedgle’s accompaniment here is cranky commentary that serves as an effective counterweight to Lacy’s increasingly fervent lines. “Clinches” features African thumb piano playing an ostinato figure as the soprano comes in, moving from off-mic toward the center, then backing away. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever heard, and it’s enormously effective. Lacy is back, front and center of “The Eye,” while J. J. Avenel sets up a dangerous sound pattern, resonant and dark, rhythmically tensile. Wedgle strums metallically, alternating this with dry, almost toneless sounding chords. Above this all, Lacy lays out the desolate theme. It’s yearning music of remarkable power.

10 Things You Didn’t Know About Robyn Hitchcock

Robyn Hitchcock first emerged as the singer with The Soft Boys, Cambridge misfits whose against-nature fusion of punk, prog and psychedelia peaked with 1980 masterpiece Underwater Moonlight, an album that would later burrow into the brains of US heroes The Replacements and REM. As a solo artist (or with backing bands The Egyptians and The Venus 3), he continued to explore the clammy absurdities and cosmic mysteries of human existence with a slew of beguiling albums, alt-rock heaven Fegmania! (1985), emotional exorcism Eye (1989) and the richly spun Ole! Tarantula (2006) among the very best. On the eve of the release of his 19th solo album, the luminous Love From London, he turned 60 and celebrated with a birthday retrospective show. As he sings on “End Of Time,” Love From London‘s closing track, “it’s been wonderful.”

You may think you know all there is to know about Robyn Hitchcock, but Victoria Segal uncovered 10 little-known facts about the iconic singer-songwriter.

He is available for weddings.

“I’m a minister of the Universal Life Church of Arizona: I can marry people in the States, although I’m not sure I can do it in Britain. I married Colin Meloy of The Decemberists and his wife [artist] Carson Ellis five years ago. I haven’t done a marriage recently, though.”

He likes a birthday party.

“There’s nothing more significant in your life than your birth. I’ve signed on for the long haul, like John Lee Hooker or Bob Dylan or Martin Carthy. You no longer have to knock off when you hit 30. As far as I’m concerned, the songs aren’t necessarily better now, any more than they were at 40 or 50, they’re just expressing different things and reacting to different things as your metabolism changes. But I’m really happy to put flags in the map of my life and anyone who is interested can come along and celebrate with me.”
　
He was born with trousers on.

This is a line from my song ‘Birds In Perspex’ (1991). It’s a very British angle. You are born already embarrassed, concealed, shamed by emotions and your physical existence. I came from a very squeamish kind of middle-class background — we were all born with trousers on. But I don’t necessarily think the Brits have a monopoly on it — I think it can be universal.”

He played at Yoko Ono’s 80th birthday show.

“It was a complete accident. I was in Berlin, visiting my daughter. I knew Michael Stipe was also there, and we were going to meet up. We attempted to get tickets to Yoko Ono’s show, but it didn’t happen so we went to get coffee and then Michael rang up and said, ‘You’ve got tickets.’ So we bolted down some prawns, hopped on the U-Bahn, then Michael texted and said, ‘You’ve got front-row seats.’ We squeezed past everyone and sat down. And then Yoko and Sean appeared. I’d never seen either of them before. Legend central, really. They did an amazing show. Sean’s a great bandleader, I’ve never seen a mother-son thing like it — I tried to imagine my mother and me doing a similar thing and I couldn’t at all.

Then Michael tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘We’re on in the encores.’ I didn’t even have a shirt on — I was wearing a V-necked sweater, and was basically dressed for coffee on a chilly Berlin night. Thank God I was wearing trousers! So these encores came and we were duly hauled up to sing ‘Give Peace A Chance.’ Then they gave us some birthday cake.”
　
He’s not prone to Soft Boys nostalgia.

“The Soft Boys didn’t have any fun. I hadn’t really learned how to write songs — I’d bring in all these lines and the other guys would play them back like a very mild version of Captain Beefheart. Then we’d try to play in bars but often I’d have drunk too much to be able to play — I hadn’t worked out the alcohol-to-performance ratio at that point. What we left behind was better than how it was at the time. I like to meet up with Morris [Windsor, drums] and Kimberley [Rew, guitar] and talk about who’s alive and who’s dead , but it’s not something I pine for at all.”

The Soft Boys played at The Mudd Club and Danceteria, bringing neurotic British rock to the epicentre of NYC grooviness.

“We were very excited to be in America. Lenny Kaye always says how he saw us at the Mudd Club. It had a garage door — you’d stand on stage and this garage door would just roll up and reveal you. I don’t know if anyone ever went on stage naked to play with that. It wouldn’t have happened with us — we all had our trousers on.”

Arthur Lee wanted to kill him.

“I’d written this song, ‘The Wreck Of The Arthur Lee’ [on 1993's Respect]. Arthur hadn’t taken this very well and had issued various threats to kill me in interviews after which he was put away for waving a gun in a supermarket. I was then invited to be a guest on stage when they did Forever Changes [at London's Royal Festival Hall, 2003]. It was very odd. Arthur invited me up on stage a song early so I had to play something I’d never played before, introduced me as ‘Alfred Hitchcock’ and mimed shooting me with a gun. After that, he was very friendly.”

He suspects cats may one day rule the Earth.

“The dinosaurs ruled for something like 100 million years and we’ve been here 30,000 years. I don’t know if we’re going to outdo the run of the dinosaurs. Will a feline dynasty in 5 million years be looking back at us, the super-cyber cats who survived the next apocalypse? Have you seen those Bengal cats with silver skins? I can imagine them walking around museums that have our iPhones in, looking in wonder.”
　　
He doesn’t like “schlepping electric guitars around.”

“I prefer playing acoustic. Electricity is a barrier. Jonathan Richman said the fewer plugs and wires between you and the audience the closer you can be. I’m not really drawn to widescreen gestures — I don’t make widescreen records either which may be the limit of my appeal. I’m not like a hoarding or a poster, I’m more like something in an antique shop next to the stuffed owl.”

He isn’t giving in to despair.

“My elegiac records were when I was much younger. Things like I Often Dream Of Trains, I wrote that sort of stuff in my 30s. Love From London is celebration — we may be having a party on the Titanic but it’s still a party. Time is finite for all of us, whether one of us goes or everybody goes, each of us only dies once. Look on the label, it never said we were going to last too long.”