Why I'm not ashamed to say that The Midnight Organ Fight by Frightened Rabbit is the album of the year

Here’s what’s wrong with The Midnight Organ Fight. The vocals are generally overwrought, barely in tune, and blessed with a Celtic yelp that we all thought we’d never have to hear again when the Cranberries fucked off. There are some appalling lyrics that occasionally rise to the surface with a dreadful jar – ‘It’s a choo-choo train, a rocket launch’ anyone? – and let’s just say that the drumming leaves something to be desired in terms of subtlety; it sounds like they’re being played with the hind legs of a cow. Most damning of all, if this album drifted out of the window of a passing car, the immediate assumption would be that Snow Patrol had decided to release an album of Counting Crows covers.

But here’s the thing. Despite all of these patent flaws, and the perpetual nagging feeling that you should somehow be embarrassed to be listening to it, The Midnight Organ Fight is indisputably the best album of 2008. It is a record of searing honesty, an unashamedly open vein of crushing, contradictory emotion. It is a record that, at once, it makes you fear for the sanity of the writer and yet be incredibly thankful that someone had the courage to so openly address issues that indie rock all too often ignores, or deals with only when doused in a safety coating of hipster obfuscation and irony, frozen by the fear of commitment, of real meaning, of saying something that could be taken down and used as unfriendly future evidence when the wind turns.

Ostensibly, The Midnight Organ Fight falls neatly into the classic break-up album category, not a genre lacking in members. But this is not a cliché ridden sop to some vague image of idealised love that exists only in hindsight. This is a self-lacerating paean to that all-too-real whirligig of regret, confusion, mourning and misunderstanding that accompanies the drawn out death of a relationship. It portrays in all its stark glory the paralysing disorientation that follows the dropping away of what you thought was the world, and of the first timid steps that follow the realisation that you are the only person stopping the building of a new one. It is so real it smarts, basically. It is nothing less than a still-beating, cracked heart lain out on the dissection table.

Viewed in this way, the music’s obvious anthemics become a boon rather than a flaw. When dealing so directly with emotion this bald, technical sideshows and attention grabbing song structures become another form of retraction – how much braver it is to lay out lyrics like The Modern Leper’s

‘Is that you in front of me?
Coming back for even more of exactly the same
You must be a masochist to love a modern leper
On his last leg’

on top of a chorus that instantly burrows its way into your skull, rather than bury them beneath layers of self-gratifying noise and cowardly experimentation. This is an album that deals with a pain and a healing that is universal, and it is entirely appropriate, if not necessary, that it should do so within a musical context that is equally accessible. Even if it does sound a bit like Snow Patrol.

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David Foster Wallace 1962 - 2008

In what was probably the best interview David Foster Wallace ever gave, he described how his masterpiece Infinite Jest drew upon the ‘particular sadness’ of living in middle-class America at the turn of the century. ‘[It’s] something that doesn't have very much to do with physical circumstances, or the economy, or any of the stuff that gets talked about in the news,’ he said. ‘It's more like a stomach-level sadness. I see it in myself and my friends in different ways. It manifests itself as a kind of lostness.’

Suicide is an act borne of too many angles, of too many personally esoteric conflictions and contradictions, for clear lines of cause and effect to be drawn between past words and final actions. Who can say if it was this existential drift that finally led to Wallace’s suicide last week? Too easy, too dismissive. What is true is that it was there. It was there at the end just as it was there throughout his writing; forever pressing upwards towards the surface of his prose, waiting for a hole to appear through which to seep and pervade.

I read Infinite Jest earlier this year after following my three strike rule – when I hear or read three mentions of the same book from different sources within quick succession, it must be read. To pretend it was an easy task would be hubris, and a dirty lie. 1000-plus pages (including 100 pages of alternately intricate and maddening end notes) of huge slabs of indent-less text that gave a new meaning to the word dense; a dizzyingly Tolstoy-esque range of painstakingly rounded characters; a confusing insistence on acronyms and a prodigious vocabulary that required a dictionary-check at least once a page (a result of DFW’s childhood dictionary reading habit). There were days when I got truly sick of lugging the great thing around with me. But, when it suddenly clicked, 200 pages in, it became an almost vicarious pleasure.

Never before have I felt such an emotional connection with a book by an author classed as post-modern. Yes, games were played with structure, form and language. But while the majority of post-modern authors, save Vonnegut, can deal with the emotional only through mockery and ridicule and games, and would rather dance upon the surface of things than risk flinging themselves off the all-knowing fence provided by an intellectual world happily devoid of even the mere search for truth, the themes of Infinite Jest – addiction, depravity, loss, confusion, longing, lostness – were rendered with such sympathy and belief and understanding, along with often wicked humour and always dazzling language, that its size was no longer daunting but wonderfully welcome. Wallace did not stand above events, laughing and congratulating himself on reaching an author’s higher plane of consciousness. He threw himself into the heart of them, refusing to forget that even heavyweight post-modern writers fall in love and get paralysed by grief sometimes too.

The point about post-modernism is an important one, as it is what turned Wallace, in my view, from the self-indulgent lyrical exhibitionist that his critics would have him, to the greatest writer of his generation. In the same interview quoted above, Wallace argued that much of modern literature’s cultural marginalisation stems from contempt for the reader.

‘If you, the writer, succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls,’ he warned. ‘Number one is the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you're writing for other writers, so you don't worry about making yourself accessible or relevant. You worry about making it structurally and technically cutting edge: involuted in the right ways, making the appropriate intertextual references, making it look smart. Not really caring about whether you're communicating with a reader who cares something about that feeling in the stomach which is why we read. Then, the other end of it is very crass, cynical, commercial pieces of fiction that are done in a formulaic way - essentially television on the page - that manipulate the reader, that set out grotesquely simplified stuff in a childishly riveting way.'

He continued: 'What's weird is that I see these two sides fight with each other and really they both come out of the same thing, which is a contempt for the reader, an idea that literature's current marginalization is the reader's fault. The project that's worth trying is to do stuff that has some of the richness and challenge and emotional and intellectual difficulty of avant-garde literary stuff, stuff that makes the reader confront things rather than ignore them, but to do that in such a way that it's also pleasurable to read.’

That is precisely what Wallace did. His work can be viewed as a marvel of technical mastery - the endless, homeric wordplay, the injokes, the effortless shifts of time, space and form – or of obsessive attention to detail and accuracy (I have never read such informed descriptions of drug taking, alcoholism, or – you’ll get this when you read it – tennis in a work of fiction). But, most importantly, it does all that while escaping from the straitjacket of intellectual detachment. It hits you in the gut while satisfying the head.

In his preface to the 2007 edition, Dave Eggers writes of ‘the constant tragic undercurrent’ that runs throughout Infinite Jest. ‘[It] concerns a people who are completely lost, who are lost within their own families and lost within their nation, and lost within their time, and who only want some sort of direction or purpose or sense of community or love.’ It seems that David Foster Wallace himself was one of those people. And now he is lost to the rest of us too.

Two points on this please

Fujiya & Miyagi - Lightbulbs

Kingsnorth - Diary of an ex-cynic

The dreadlocked eco-hero on the far side of the wooden barricade looked at the plastic vessels of sin he had been handed with thinly disguised disgust.

‘Two Sainsbury’s bags?’

I could almost smell the disdain on his breath.

‘Yeah, mine. Thanks.’

I quickly grabbed the offending articles, kindly hoisted over the guarded entrance by the otherwise friendly sentries, trying to work out whether I should be embarrassed or irritated. A day of work, ninety minutes on the train, a bus journey, a damp two mile walk, a full police search, another walk and a final police check to get to the Kingsnorth climate camp, and it was my post-office dash for bread and cheese that was spinning his moral compass out of control. It was only a moment, a flash of the eyes quickly extinguished, but it was enough to be tangible.

One of the reasons I have always felt uneasy about wholeheartedly throwing my lot in with the environmental movement, aside from the godawful music, is this disproportionate attribution of moral weight to individual action. Yes, individuals should recycle, they should change their light bulbs, they should temper their travel by car and air. But when the London sky is illuminated every night by thousands of glowing offices, when businessmen fly halfway across the globe and back for weekly meetings they could easily hold via webcam, when governments continue to chop down every tree that gets in a cow’s way and sanction investment worth millions in the very same means of energy production that got us in this searing, choking mess in the first place, in full complicitous knowledge of the damage done, the idea that my forgetting to bring a plastic bag to the supermarket is going to play the crucial role in any impending ecological disaster is, frankly, insulting.

Which is precisely why I went to the camp at Kingsnorth. For this was no finger-wagging lecture or communal tut – this was real. The attempt to shut down this Kent coal-fired power station was true direct action, not the shadowplay of gestures springing from disapproval or one-upmanship. It was action aimed straight at the heart of the problem, action with drive and focus and unity of purpose; action that refused to be splintered into a weak shower of individual harangues.

How it is needed. E-On plan to replace the aging current power station with another one fired with coal, one which will produce more carbon annually than a country the size of Ghana. It will wipe out every carbon reduction achieved by renewables and individuals in this country in a single stroke. When science has clearly spelled out the consequences of such a scheme, when our leaders alternate between wringing their hands and pointing their fingers at China and India’s relentless expansion of coal power, when the alternatives arrived long ago – this is true madness. This is the insanity of the man who, seeing the fire straight ahead, shuts his eyes and plunges straight into the flames, for no other reason than that was the way he was going.

Aside from the prickly arrival, the Climate Camp was a cynicism-shedding revelation. My only previous experience of anarchists (their ecological wing were the central force behind Kingsnorth) had been on Iraqi and Palestinian marches, where their inane rhetoric soon tires. But here, the level of organisation and efficiency displayed on site was a welcome contrast from the erraticism of their ideology.

The camp was split on geographical origins, with each region centred upon a food tent, which provided communal vegan meals in exchange for a small donation. All power was renewable, most from the array of solar panels scattered about the site. Group discussions were arranged through a series of hand signals – one finger raised for a question, two for direct response to a speaker, jazz hands either side of your head for agreement, by your waist for dissent – which looked pretty stupid, but did ensure some semblance of discursive order, not something normally associated with leftwing debate. Most impressive of all was the toilet system, from which Michael Eavis could certainly pick up a few pointers. Wheelie bins filled with compost and sawdust were placed under elevated wooden shacks to provide for the more solid requirements and remarkably, didn’t smell. For the men, bales of straw were piled under tarpaulins, with the ammonia-soaked remains to be taken to a farm and allowed to compost, before being used to grow potatoes. As the poster attached to the urinals declared, it takes a remarkable movement to look its own shit in the face and still produce something from it.

I missed most of the widely reported confrontation with the police, including the 5am riot squad raids, due to not arriving until Friday night, but it was clear from the intrusive searches at the entrance, the floodlit squads at each corner of the field and constant drone of helicopters above that the force was taking no chances. At times, it all seemed a little contrived, on both sides – there was a sense that certain sections of the police and the protestors were willing things to kick off so as to feel their presence legitimised, to create a simulacrum of past riots in order to be able to tell a few tall tales down the pub afterwards.


On the Saturday, the day of action, my hopes at canoing down the river – the advertised plan was to attack the power station by land, air and sea - were dashed by the unexpected seriousness of the more hardcore activists, who had spent the preceding week holding training courses, brandishing blueprints and building replicas of pointed railings and electric fences on which to practice for the big day. I was therefore reduced to dressing up as a penguin and waddling along with the families and the other less military-minded campers. We arrived at the station at midday, where banners were unfurled, climate change crime scene tape wrapped around the gates, and hordes of police stood grimly by. A handful of protestors had managed to break into the site itself, but it was hardly the point anymore. It was enough, for now, to know that we had arrived, that our point was being made and heard.

As ever with these things, the array of speakers ranged from the lucid intensity of the local campaigner to the incoherent ramblings of the aged flower-child. And, as my friend remarked, it would be nice to be told once in a while that we were present in the middle of a great movement, or at least a third of the way in, not constantly assured that we’re at the beginning, in the vanguard, of something wondrous yet to come. I’m only 25, and I must have been at the start of ‘a great global uprising’ that is about to shake the world to its core about 30 times already. To paraphrase Jerry Lee Lewis, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lotta shakin’ going on thus far.

But then, that’s not really the point. The response cannot be controlled, but the stimulus can, and the Kingsnorth camp was nothing if not stimulating. Plans are afoot to maintain a constant presence at the station in the months ahead, with road blocks and check points set up to prevent future building work. It will be well worth joining in, even if you have to bring a plastic bag to sit on.

Liars>>>Deerhunter>>>High Places @ Koko 17/06/08

I never realised Angus Andrew was such a doofus. Not terminology I’d normally use, not being a 14 year old Californian princess, but there’s no other word for it. Even at their most accessible - as on their latest, self-titled album - Liars are not an easy listen, and when one delves, as they do regularly tonight, into the murky depths of their Drum’s Not Dead and They Were Wrong, So We Drowned material, the incongruity of such traumatic and occasionally terrifying music being fronted by a pirouetting buffoon in an oversized backwards boating blazer and comedy baggy trousers becomes a little overwhelming. It’s always good when a band doesn’t take themselves too seriously, but there is a line, and dancing around in a little circle pulling funny faces and making jazz hands while the aural equivalent of a nuclear holocaust in Hades is going on around you definitely crosses it.

Try as he might, though, Andrews’s perpetual clowning can’t detract from what is a startlingly impressive Liars performance. Nimbly skipping across a back catalogue that is as stylistically diverse as it is avowedly groundbreaking – they seamlessly switch from propulsive punk funk to primal experimentalism via cyber-noisecore faster than most bands can pull on an oversized backwards boating blazer – Liars specialise in constructing a fearsome sound collage of razor blades and baseball bats: at once scything and thudding, screeching and shuddering. Guitarist Aaron Hemphill is chief suspect here – guitar ratcheted up high, bespectacled like a young Albini, he alternates between wrenching chunks of searing fuzz from his fretboard and leaping behind a booming effects-laden drum kit.

Be Quiet Mt. Heart Attack! and a wistfully mournful The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack – both from Drum’s Not Dead, surely their magnum opus – are the predictable highlights, but a resounding Plastercasts of Everything leaves the question of which version of Liars (the harbingers of percussionist hellfire? The dumb snotty punkers? The careering jokers? Err, maybe not) is the definitive open to debate.

Tonight is a joint headline show with Deerhunter, and Bradford Cox’s crew don’t let down their side of the bargain. Cox is a far less simpering frontman than I feared from his ‘ooh, look at my funny poo’ blog, and as he stands, red hoodie covering his stick thin Marfan syndrome arms, relentlessly pulling out a single chord as the band reach Octet’s eschatological climax, he looks nothing less than domineering. The volume regularly verges on the unbearable, their live sound far closer to the white noise of mid-90s Spiritualized or My Bloody Valentine than the bubbling undercurrents of their records. Forthcoming single Nothing Ever Happened is displayed in all its neo-Neu glory, Wash Off threatens to grind the crowd to dust with its scatter gun shots of tremolo and the only real disappointment is the odd lack of Little Kids, the stand alone highlight of new album Microcastle, if not their entire career to date.

A quick mention must be made of bottom-of-the-billers High Places, who consist of a boy thwacking what looks like a xylophone from a Patrick Moore wet dream, in that it seems to have the capacity to make any sound from earth or beyond (particularly favouring resonating tribal pounding and twinkling toy boxes), and a girl looping chants of half-remembered nursery rhymes into a melange of winsome melody and psychedelic squall. It’s pretty great, and deserves a far greater audience than the handful of early arrivals who were lucky enough to witness it.

Gig of the year then? So far, perhaps. Maybe if the crowd weren't so predictably jaded that they seemed to swallow all of the bands' energy as soon as it was powered out of the speakers. Let’s wait until My Bloody Valentine on Monday first…

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Dananananaykroyd - Sissy Hits

For a week in October 2006, Dananananaykroyd were the News of the World's favourite band. Then their singer quit. Perhaps he wasn't expecting such a rapturous tabloid reception to the release of debut single Totally Bone, although I'm not sure why, given the Screws' reputation for tireless support of the Scottish underground post-hardcore scene. Anyway, he left, and, despite promoting their drummer to singer – a failsafe tactic for success if ever I saw one – and then drafting in two more drummers to replace him, Dananananaykroyd disappeared. Which was a pity, because Britain isn't exactly overburdened with twelve-legged schizophrenic hyper-post-punk-hardcore bands.

But now, 18 months and a couple of aborted comebacks later, they've finally returned, offering a six track EP in penance. Worth the wait? Well, let's just say Rebekah Wade won't be disappointed. Somehow managing to incorporate elements of every worthwhile movement in guitar music since 1980 in the space of six songs, Sissy Hits is a record overflowing with ideas and ambition; the band have the confidence to consistently let their music take its time to gleefully explore all possible tangents before making a triumphant rendezvous.

Lead track The Greater Than Symbol And The Hash is a case in point – those duelling drummers open proceedings on their own, before Argument-era Fugazi guitar chops herald the arrival of vocals that rapidly shift from a yelp to a bark as the song suddenly explodes into a double time sprint for the line. Another tempo switch and the skies turn dark, the guitars now roaring where they once twitched, before collapsing in a feedback ridden heap.

The rest of the EP continues in a similar vein, never settling for one direction when ten will do. It's an exhilarating and refreshingly disorientating listen - all Cap'n Jazz-style technicality one moment, At The Drive-In power-drive the next. Most importantly, for all their technical mastery and invention, Danananaykroyd never forget that their primary concern is to entertain – they sound like they're having the most fun you can have with a bunch of guitars, and it's truly infectious. And if that's good enough for the News of the World, then who are we to argue?

Further linkage

More bits and pieces...
Foxes ' relegation has been a long time coming - The Guardian
real tearjerker, this one. Some frankly hilarious comments as well, including 'Hank Scorpio is a nob'. That kind of reaction is what dreams are made of

'I always wanted to be different': the return of Krautrock - The Guardian
would you believe it, this one also comes in paper form