A Year of Music

Swervedriver were a terrific band. They released four albums that managed to mine just about every great rock and roll tradition of the preceding 30 years without ever sounding like anything other than Swervedriver. They were better on stage than on record, even though classic songs like “Last Train to Satansville” were minor masterpieces of invisible soundtrack work and they were clearly consummate craftsmen. Their songs have a transparent clarity that glows brighter the more attention you give them. They were, in short, a great British rock band, and these days almost entirely unknown.

The biggest reason for their relative obscurity is due to factors beyond their control; their first records were released by Creation at the height of shoegazermania, and while they had some brilliant dreampop moments (“Sunset” off their debut is my favorite along those lines), they were both more muscular and more traditional than most of their peers. I saw them open for Soundgarden in the spring of 1992, and I went from thinking they were also-rans to being a fan in about 10 minutes. They rocked hard, and played far more confidently than you’d expect from an opening act who were almost completely unknown in the US at the time. My favorite album by them, Mezcal Head, is a straight up rock and roll masterpiece – nothing “alternative” about it – and owes much to the Rolling Stones, Lee Hazelwood and The Byrds.

I picked up their third album, Ejector Seat Reservation, shortly after it came out in 1996. It was hard to find (it didn’t get released outside the UK until 2003) and so I was a little disappointed that it seemed so featureless and dry next to the effortless pyrotechnics of Mezcal Head. That feeling persisted until just a couple months ago, when I ripped all my Swervedriver and put it on my iPod. Having the opportunity to hear Ejector Seat Reservation while I was out and about allowed me to get to know it at a more leisurely pace, and I slowly realized that it is at least as classic a set of songs as anything else Swervedriver ever released. I use the word “classic” consciously; Swervedriver’s debts are more obvious than ever, but so is the care and conscientiousness of their songcraft.

This album really deserves to be in the same category as the best records by Blur, Ride or Pulp, and easily outclasses anything made by the odious Oasis (the Gallagher brothers are jerks, their records sound like overcompressed crap, and they had one great song they kept permuting over and over). It’s hard to say what Swervedriver could have done to get more noticed, but it’s a shame they weren’t.

Severed Head’s last album with significant distribution in North America was 1991’s Cuisine (with Piscatorial), and their last album to be released at all in the United States was Gigapus, which was released by tiny indie Decibel all the way back in 1995. Severed Heads didn’t disappear, though, “they” – Severed Heads has been Tom Ellard alone for quite a while now – just moved on, without looking back to see if we were keeping up.

Back around the turn of the millennium, you could download low-bitrate MP3s for their entire catalog from sevcom.com. You could buy their albums as shareware, although the purchase interface was clunky. Then, once the rights to their recordings had reverted to them, Sevcom started selling CD-Rs of their albums, but still offered streaming audio for the curious or chintzy. Now, digital distribution has finally caught up with Tom Ellard, and you can buy a large chunk of their catalog through iTunes, most of it as “iTunes Plus” DRM-free AAC files. Or you can buy them as MP3s straight off sevcom.com and get, as a free bonus, Tom Ellard’s demented liner notes included as PDFs.

I highly recommend you do so, because there are few experimental pop musicians at the level of Severed Heads, and even their oldest, most primitive material still sounds pretty fresh. Also, I’m sure Tom Ellard could use the money. I’ve always thought of Severed Heads as being like Wire: both are artists who outgrew their original style (in Severed Heads’ case, tape-loop based experimental industrial), developed an ear for sickly-sweet melodies that play on in your head for days, write stream-of-consciousness lyrics that have no relationship with reality, and are driven by irascible eccentrics.

Severed Heads have released 9 albums since they last had a distribution deal in North America. Well, actually, that’s not quite right: they’ve put out 4 standalone albums, a couple remix collections, a side project (Coklacoma, a purposefully awkward electro-pop project which doesn’t do much for me), and one continually mutating, versioned release, Op.

The Op releases are intended to be sketchier and looser than the “full” albums. In reality, they’re also punchier and contain more of the loopiness and elusive melodies that have kept me a dedicated fan of Tom Ellard all this time. My favorite is Op 2.0, both for “Symptom Symphony 2.0”, with its Autechre Lite breakbeat (turnabout is fair play, and anyone who thinks Autechre doesn’t owe a huge debt to Severed Heads needs to hear more Severed Heads) and nonsensical lyrics, and the “Hank” half of “Pinagoal / Hank”, which is a disorienting, almost melodic looping blurt. It also features “Kern That Bembo Tighter 2.0”, which is about the nerdiest type-related title I’ve ever seen. They all have their moments, though, and Op 3 is free.

While you’re over there, grab Gashing the Old Mae West / Kato Gets the Girl (which is also free), and then buy some stuff. I recommend Come Visit the Big Bigot or Viva Heads!, but all of it is worth hearing.

Minimal house is a genre that's made some artists a comfortable living via the simple philosophy of "give them an inch and they'll take a mile". There's a deeply odd disjuncture between the playful sense of humor on display in, say, Akufen and Ricardo Villalobos's work and the studied High Modernism of the music itself. Nowhere is this bizarre gap more obvious than in the Villalobos & Gillings track "Andruic & Japan" on Villalobos's recent Fabric mix. 12 minutes of unvarying house rhythm overlaid with taiko drumming and random vocalese and occasionally manic mutterings about chicken and sashimi. It's self-consciously experimental in a pop Stockhausen way (it seems evident to me, at least, that it wasn't created in a total bong haze, that there is some kind of intent behind it), but I'm not sure the underlying plan was meant to be deciphered. It all adds up to something, but what it is seems opaque, as if the creators were daring listeners to find meaning where there might be none.

Does anyone actually dance to this? And why? Its appeal seems almost exclusively intellectual, and even then on a fairly abstract plane.