Secondhand Daylight #2: T.Rex's Electric Warrior

I've been a fan of T.Rex and Marc Bolan since the last year of high school. My introduction to T.Rex wasn't the most auspicious: I first heard T.Rex songs while sitting in the movie theatre watching Billy Elliot. I remembered the soundtrack long after the film itself. Since then, I had picked up T.Rex tracks here and there and several years ago, I purchased a rather comprehensive compilation album. However, I just never got around to buying any of the T.Rex or Tyrannosaurus Rex albums proper. Then just a few weeks back, while I was browsing in a used music store, I found Electric Warrior. Released in 1971, the Tony Visconti-produced Electric Warrior was the second album under the re-vamped T.Rex name and it's the one that took Marc Bolan into the mainstream with hits like Bang a Gong (Get It On) and Jeepster.

It's no secret that Marc Bolan wasn't the most original musician or songwriter in the world; he essentially adapted old rock 'n roll for a new audience and had the ability to create snappy pop songs rather quickly. In fact, he ambitiously managed to adapt and reinvent himself through several subcultures including mod and folk-psychedelia. However, this doesn't take into account the other side of Bolan's music. While I enjoy the energy, sexy swagger and fun of songs like Jeepster, Bang a Gong (Get It On) and The Motivator, my favourite song on Electric Warrior is Cosmic Dancer, a song that has haunted me ever since I first heard it over the opening credits of Billy Elliot.

There is something beautifully sad about it with its mournful, yet soaring, acoustic guitar and string arrangement and the distinctive, magical quaver of Bolan's voice. It's wistful and tragic, but the tragedy remains veiled and not immediately apparent - there's something in the music and Bolan's vocal performance that lead me there without the lyrics being particularly dark. And while I could read Bolan's own untimely death into the sound now, I didn't know anything about that when I first heard it all those years ago, yet I remember shivering with the emotion of the song in the movie theatre. There's something of the lonely outsider in the song as well with the lines "Is it strange to dance so soon?" and "Is it strange to dance so late?" - it's a similar alien, dream-like darkness to that of Bowie's Space Oddity. The womb and tomb become interchangable refuges of void and free-fall.

This inexplicable sadness finds its way into other tracks like Girl, which reads:

O God
High in your fields above earth
Come and be real for us
You with your mind
Oh yes you are
Beautifully fine

O Girl
Electric witch you are
Limp in society's ditch you are
Visually fine
Oh yes you are
But mentally dying

O boy
Just like a boat you are
Sunk but somehow you float you do
Mentally weak
Oh yes you are
But so much you speak

Or on Life's a Gas:

I could have loved you girl
Like a planet
I could have chained your heart
To a star
But it really doesn't matter at all
But it really doesn't matter at all
Life's a gas
I hope it's gonna to last

It seems that these songs, in strong contrast to the jaunty, brash sexuality and hedonistic party attitude of the majority of Bolan's hits, reflect an awareness of transience and deceptive surfaces. In many ways, it seems Bolan was waiting for the other shoe to drop; he had carefully crafted his image his entire life, and there was always a chance it would slip and he would drown in his own reflection. Ultimately, that did happen, but at least Bolan briefly recovered before his death. Maybe the reason Cosmic Dancer crawls into my brain so thoroughly is because of my life-long inherent sense of nothing lasting and the bittersweet romance and regret over that.

Electric Warrior can be seen as the genesis of glam rock, but Bolan's re-imagining of 50s rock 'n roll chord changes, blues and acoustic folk paired with his nonsensical, fantastical lyrics and unparalleled vocal style, and burnished with his flamboyant, glitter-pixie image, did indeed change rock music. As much as I will remember him for the dirty-sweet glamour, I will also feel kinship with his sweet sadness.

Cosmic Dancer - T.Rex

Life's a Gas - T.Rex

They Know Exactly What They're Doing: Helen Love's It's My Club and I'll Play What I Want To

The question is how did I manage to miss out on the Ramones-obsessed Welsh girl group Helen Love for so long? They've been around since 1993 and released four albums prior to the latest one, It's My Club and I'll Play What I Want To, which released last year. With a blend of punk, glam, bubblegum pop and electronic elements, Helen Love feel like the predecessors to bands like Robots in Disguise and Chicks on Speed. They don't take themselves seriously, and they come with some brilliant pop songs. With a pastiche of references from the 60s and 70s, Helen Love fuse the past with the future perfectly. At any rate, I'm going to review their latest album despite the fact it's come about a year late. They're that good.

Like Helen Love's previous work, this album is full of brief, speedy tracks and fantastic little spoken samples that remind me of a Sigue Sigue Sputnik album. The record begins with the title track, which had also been released as a single. It sounds like a Ramones song being played from a bubblegum pink jukebox in a Japanese retro arcade in the year 2050, replete with vocoder and laser sounds. Then the CBGB fantasy Debbie Loves Joey bursts in with guitar-laden pop-punk and cheeky references, including The Stranglers' Peaches. As its title suggests, the following track, Dance On (Solid Gold), takes its influences from disco, but adds an electro-rock feel while You Better Learn Karate is as crazy as anything Polysics could come up with as it kicks the stuffing out of you with hyperspeed. With its repeated snippet of "Great galloping gumdrops," The 1910 Fruitgum Company is an homage to the 60s bubblegum pop group of the same name; it has a bouncy compulsion to it that makes me think of Saturday morning cartoons and the abandon of a Kindergarten class.

After the whirlwind of Transistor Radio, the speed slackens for Jet, which features a snippet of the fantastic dialogue from the 60s Brit comedy The Likely Lads: "In the chocolate box of life the top layer's already gone and someone's pinched the orange cream from the bottom." "Bloody hell." With a springy use of synths, First Boyfriend recalls the ludicrous novelty in the mundanity of a first adolescent romance. A faster, pumping disco beat peppers Rodney's English Disco, yet another brilliant reference, this time to Rodney Bingenheimer's English Disco, a Los Angeles glam club in the 70s. At under two minutes, Honolulu Superstar is the fastest track on the album while Garage Band uses some jazzy piano interludes and surf rock to tell the story of forming your own band after listening to John Peel. The fun continues with Queen of the Disco Beat, which has blasts of brass and more than a passing resemblence to Rockaway Beach. An anthem to the homebound, Staying In has deadpan verses that are dry enough to peel paint. With 60s girl group flourishes, The New Squad Attacking Formation is a quirky track that makes me think of a gang of teenage girls on scooters terrorizing the neighbourhood. Released as a single, Junkshop Discotheque features a great guitar line as all of Helen Love's musical influences get jammed together very much as the title suggests. The album crashes to its conclusion with Saturday Nite, which surprises with a classical introduction before launching into yet another potential dance anthem.

Now that I'm aware of Helen Love, I eagerly await a new album called Stick It due out this year (it's preceded by the latest single called Calm Down Dad - a song in line with the theme of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, but with a sarcastic sheen that mocks adolescence cool and with a hilarious piece of White Riot at the end). There's something old-fashioned and child-like about Helen Love, but they fire obscure and not-so-obscure references on all cylinders, reminding you that they know exactly what they're doing.

Debbie Loves Joey - Helen Love

1910 Fruitgum Company - Helen Love

Calm Down Dad - Helen Love

The Life Trajectory of a Pendulum: stanleylucasrevolution's Evolutionary Sunset Call

It begins with some feedback and vocal samples and loops intermingled with a rollicking Old West beat like some psychotic, schizophonic Ennio Morricone. The track is called Wasteful Youth and it builds the faithless foundation for the rest of the LP. This fantastically experimental, existential album is the sophomore effort from yet another musical project shrouded in mystery: stanleylucasrevolution (SLR) from California. Released on Stroboscopic, the record is titled Evolutionary Sunset Call (which keeps reminding me linguistically of Sister Feelings Call) and these songs are ostensibly created by a terminally ill, fictional character called Stanley Lucas. Both the enigmatic set-up and the dark material refract from the heart of this album to create a 21st century world completely bent out of shape, but in doing so, it finds redemption and safety in the darkness. Mixing fuzzed out beats, glam rock, warped psychedelia, country-blues, and electronic effects, Evolutionary Sunset Call is like a pendulum, heavy with self-doubt and fear, being driven by inevitable laws of perpetual motion and futilely knocking its battered essence against other identical pendulums, all the while hypnotizing you with its incessant tell-tale heart.

After the opening track, the first song with proper lyrics included in the liner notes, Brand New Way, swaggers in with a bit of old-time glam fashion and brash piano. As the narrator sings "I'll find a way to a brand new way," you get the feeling that it's a lot like what an alcoholic person would tell him/herself when he/she is drunk. The following song, We Still Love Them, is the song most explicitly about the state of today's world: "a new suit, desk, shave and a handshake/you give your money to the company/we stand divided and the nation's hollow/everyone knows that dying's free." To accompany the articulation of the barrel rolls of emotion, blues bass and electric organ push the pendulum back and forth in its suspended rut. The first of many musical interludes, Le Batteur is a propulsive font to refresh you for further grit and disturbed mental states that come with New Stone 40. When the narrator sings "won't you change my life?," there's a fantastic slide into a minor tone that connotes a resigned desperation, and the chorus swings along as the voice reminds you of both Ziggy Stardust and Bon Jovi's cowboy wanted dead or alive. Consultation Valley Ruse begins with fantastic electronic beats and the vocals take on a rich deepness over a disco falsetto backing, which end up sounding more eerie than funky. Conversely, interlude (Intro in C) sneaks in sideways with squeaks and hesitant rhythms before giving way to Insatiable and its tanoy-inflected vocals addressing a female character with further expression of forward motion that goes nowhere: "maybe will you finally change your life?/and come out at night/doing all those things though they don't even amuse you."

With its tribal rhythms and swirling, spinning pinwheels of sound, I'm Trusted in the Sea (Outro) takes you over the rickety bridge to Two Ways, which repeats the vocal sample "What's the matter with you, thought you were asleep" as though someone left the TV on late at night while an old film was on and the picture is rolling through infinite static, slowly driving you mad in some wakeful nightmare. The track continues in a subdued manner that smooths the frayed nerves created by the sample. The music takes a more upbeat, vindictive tone with Sacred Sons and the strong anthemic tones break through and smother the chattering feedback for a moment of triumph and peace. The narrator declares, "I need to hold the flames, I love to see the light/the darkness comes berating the sunset turning it back to night...I want to touch the skin of everyone whose failing inside/I'd love to be the one there that comforts you in the middle of the night," becoming a messiah to the nighttime underworld. But the pendulum swings back with the quiet bluesy guitar in Mourning Star (Outro). With the coming of morning, the manic self-importance withers under the sun's glare as the narrator recognizes his reality anew, taking you into the next track called Downhearted. The wobbly, muffled vocal effects in Downhearted makes it sound like the narrator is drowning in his own sorrow and self-pity, but at the same time he's fighting with the breath he has left, leaving his own Rock 'n Roll Suicide note. The album concludes with the instrumental Happy Sun Day, which uses violin-like sounds to rouse you from the mire of the previous breakdown, only you don't know if it's to wake you or to serve as a wake.

As a whole concept, Evolutionary Sunset Call, tells the story of hiding in a darkness that you come to despise, where you wait out life changes and wish you could be brave enough to live after the sun rises. You can and should buy Evolutionary Sunset Call at Cd Baby. This one-man revolution is perfect for those who have ever regarded one of those perpetual motion toys in someone's office and felt an infinite sadness.

We Still Love Them - stanleylucasrevolution

Sacred Sons - stanleylucasrevolution

Downhearted - stanleylucasrevolution

I'm Not a Woman, I'm Not a Man, I'm Something You'll Never Understand: Of Montreal's Skeletal Lamping

I'll admit that I hadn't really given Of Montreal much thought up until a couple of years ago when I first heard songs off Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer. I had somehow dismissed them in my mind as being like The Shins or any other number of American indie bands, but as I often am, I was very wrong. And I absolutely adored the last album with its unhinged blend of David Bowie and Prince theatrics and glam-funk experimentalism - and when I found out how much the band loved Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, I just loved them more. Not only was the music fantastic, but it was fantastically performed, whether at live shows (which I unfortunately have only been privy to via YouTube) or on television (I recorded their performance of Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse on Conan O'Brien in which there were so many people and props involved that they had to be classified as a theatre performance act rather than just a band, and I watched it several times over in complete awe of the ambitious, slightly insane, costume changes - I believe there was a lot of Kevin Barnes stepping in and out of his guitar, and wearing a lobster claw for awhile before rather nonchalantly ending up in a miniskirt and one garter).

Of course I wasn't the only one who took notice of Hissing Fauna - this glam-experimental documentation of a mental breakdown ended up being quite a success around the world. When I heard a few months back that Of Montreal would be releasing a new album called Skeletal Lamping this fall, it was one of the few that I really anticipated. And now having actually sat down and listened to the record, I'm impressed with its scope which builds on the fusion of glam and avant-garde indie that appeared on the previous album. This LP becomes an epic one of sorts with its restless shifts between styles and tempos; somehow they all still fit together in a memorable hustle down an interstellar highway. Apparently, this album utilizes Barnes's Ziggy Stardust-like alter ego, Georgie Fruit, to fuller effect than on the previous album, and along with him, comes a Prince-like funky obsession with sex and its myriad permutations.

The album kicks off with Nonpareil of Favor, which features those overdubbed Barnes's vocals that end up creating a rather distinctive choir to back Barnes's Bowiesque yips and squeals. Like most of the tracks on the album, style and tempo is in constant flux, ending with a pounding rhythm, reverbing guitars and vocals sounds that mimic fingers spinning around the rims of wineglasses and creating a perverse music of the spheres. It melds into Wicked Wisdom, which brings in a funky bassline, and Georgie Fruit takes centre-stage as a "black she-male" while borrowing lines out of Queen's songbook. The album continues into a psychedelic disco number called For Our Elegant Caste, in which Barnes's falsetto coos "we can do it softcore...you should know I take it both ways" - it feels a bit like a transsexual Syd Barrett doing the hustle. This track, in turn, blends into the broad piano chording and brief moment of sober self-reflection ("Why am I so damaged? Why am I so troubled?") in Touched Something's Hollow before exploding into the trumpet-led symphony of An Eluardian Instance that carries hints of A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger. However, four minutes into this song, it decides it wants to be an entirely different song before abruptly entering into Gallery Piece, which reminds me of some of the sentiments in Prince's If I Was Your Girlfriend; the pumping rhythm backs the plethora of conflicting desires involving his/her lover (scratch your cheeks, tell you lies, write you books, crash your car, paint your nails, braid your hair, make you paranoid, etc.) as though the narrator's id has taken over and is calling the shots as they emerge.

Women's Studies Victims alternates between a heartbeat vibrating through walls of muscle and circuit board, ghostly voices that sound like they're drifting through a grey haze of cerebral matter, and Barnes's rapping over galactic organ. St. Exquisite's Confessions is an urban-weary ballad that uses brilliant, unexpected lyrics like "sky pregnant with maggots" and "we give each other sobriquets" over a slow jam with harp-like strums of guitar. Triphallus, To Punctuate! features more of Barnes's lyrical talents as he uses lines like "the greek chorus of my skull is choking on their dulcet tones" and "filling your womb with black butterflies" while bemoaning a lover's newly-found fame and success. This then leads into And I've Seen a Bloody Shadow where obstacles appear and there is "bad weather in my temporary head" as sonic walls of paranoia seem to close in. The transition between this track and the following Plastis Wafers is even more abrupt and sounds like someone tuning in an entirely different channel of the narrator's brain in mid-thought. This track is one of the more overt odes to sex as the narrator muses over what it feels like to be inside his/her lover and the kinkiness of role play extending to roles in Oedipus Rex. The Greek myth leitmotif stitches the song together as the narrator takes on yet another role as Orpheus and the music shifts into an echo-drenched, cavernous netherworld as though he/she could have finally entered fully inside his lover and curled up inside the darkness of another. The song ends with a tribal dance of demonic voices that feel like they're circling, dilating and contracting like discoball reflections on the ceiling and walls of this dark place.

Death is Not a Parallel Move takes a more clinical and mechanical electro sound as Barnes's detached vocals herald a final separation of the mortal and immortal pieces of the body and the second half of the song is delivered in a gentler, coaxing manner as self-destruction looms, inevitable. Beginning with scrambled distortion, Beware Our Nubile Miscreants uses a strutting glam to act as a warning to the anti-hero of this story not to fall for a particular male, who will "leave you in the k-hole to go play Halo in the other room." Mingusings warps you into a funhouse mirror kaleidoscope, where the music swirls like a dreamscape and the id struggles back against an impending re-imprisonment in a bottle. Id Engager, the first single to hit the Internet quite awhile ago, ends the record, "screaming from the depths of a phallocentric tyranny" and wildly grooving through an unbridled disco party where gender and sexuality is irrelevant.

While Hissing Fauna took us on a journey of sorts through Barnes's stuggle with depression and a possible nervous breakdown, Skeletal Lamping lays bare a different dimension of his psyche, especially an id preoccupied with sex and human relations. As schizophrenic as the album seems, it still has a cohesion that demonstrates a stream of consciousness that is repeatedly dammed and diverted in order to explore all dimensions of this psychological landscape. Through it all, it feels like the id is at the hedonistic party depicted on an updated version of Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights on the album's cover art, proclaiming itself in human form, a messiah for pleasure, independent of rules and classification. Georgie Fruit becomes as symbolic and controversially uncontainable as those that preceded him/her, born from a fevered, genius brain. Skeletal Lamping is truly a spectacular achievement and deserves to be remembered as one of the classic albums of the decade. Perhaps the surest way to accomplish something bigger than ourselves is to leap into bigger, alien shoes without looking. We can never fully understand all of our desires without becoming something our minds tell us we're not. I think Kevin Barnes has proven it with this brilliant record.


Nonpareil of Favor - Of Montreal

Plastis Wafers - Of Montreal

Everyday is Like Sunday, Except for Blue Monday and Ruby Tuesday, and...Well, Friday I'm in Love: Weekly Mix #12

I would have loved to be around for glam rock in the early '70's, especially at the height of Ziggy Stardust and T-Rextasy. It was such a colourful, purely fun time in music history. Rock music was tarted up and made no effort at authenticity, which was a dying concept in music anyway. Glam merely acknowledged that popular music was an act and could be freer as a result of wearing a mask. As with any music movement, it was short-lived and invited a backlash, but it was truly glorious while it lasted.

It's usually agreed that the transformation of Marc Bolan's band Tyrannosaurus Rex into T. Rex was the beginning of glam. Bolan left his psychedelic folk days and bongo player Steve Peregrine Took behind and started wearing glitter on his face on television. Thus, glam rock was born. David Bowie, who had been finding moderate success with his first few albums and who had also come from a folk background, watched and learned, and subsequently created the alien messiah, Ziggy Stardust, launching himself into the stratosphere. Once the art school band Roxy Music entered the fray, glam officially became a critical point in music history. While there wasn't necessarily a definite common sound between all these glam artists, there was a common aesthetic of outrageous fashion often extending to gender-bending androgyny. In many ways, especially in the more commercial bandwagon jumpers like Slade and Sweet, glam took the classic rock 'n roll of the 1950's and updated it with a shiny, glittery new look, while still remaining very masculine beneath the glamour. Of course artists like David Bowie and Roxy Music had a much larger impact on music innovation and continue to influence, and in many ways, they are the ones that legitimize the glam rock era. Roxy Music managed to incorporate the oboe into popular music, no small feat. Even T.Rex, who may not have been quite as innovative musically, created hugely memorable tunes, which continue to influence others - I think songs like Children of the Revolution, 20th Century Boy, and The Slider are brilliant. And T.Rex continues to be a popular choice for many film soundtracks.

Notably, Suzi Quatro was the only female artist to be included in the glam scene, showing how glam was still unfortunately very much a male-dominated scene; however, Quatro did get to bend gender back the opposite direction and provided her own androgynous look and style, often looking like Mick Ronson. My personal favourites are David Bowie, T.Rex, and Roxy Music (before the departure of Brian Eno), but I also love those who straddled garage, punk and glam simultaneously, including Iggy Pop, Lou Reed and New York Dolls. And while many seem to consider Jobriath to be a poor man's David Bowie, I appreciate his songs and his image, and in a brave move, rather than just flirting with homosexuality, he blatantly declared it. He continues to garner respect from artists ranging from Morrissey to Siouxsie to Gary Numan, and T.Rex's song Cosmic Dancer is supposedly a tribute to Jobriath. In the early '90's, Morrissey even wanted Jobriath to open for him on tour, unfortunately not realizing that Jobriath died in 1983.

While primarily a British phenomenon, glam rock did spread to the US in various ways, including Sparks, Suzi Quatro, Jobriath, and both Iggy Pop and Lou Reed, who were greatly influenced and produced by David Bowie. Glam eventually gave birth to many other movements, including the New Romantics, goth, glam hair-metal, and despite its seeming reaction against artificiality, punk (many of the kids who got into punk bands were glitter kids only a few years earlier). Any band who pushes gender boundaries and glams up their image, any band that is proudly preening and flaunting their own artificiality owes their existence to glam. The influence of glam can be traced through a variety of interesting places. For example, Johnny Marr admitted that The Smiths' Panic owes a debt to T.Rex's Metal Guru, possibly leading to Smiths fanatics Oasis stealing Bang a Gong wholesale for Cigarettes and Alcohol. Who knows, that's just my theory.

If you want to read more about glam rock, I recommend Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music by Philip Auslander, an accessible academic text that uses performance theory to dissect T.Rex, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Wizzard and Suzi Quatro. If you want to watch some fantastic glam rock, watch Born to Boogie (the Ringo Starr film about T.Rex), Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture, or the Todd Haynes' film Velvet Goldmine (one of my all-time favourite movies), which artfully blends the myths of Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Roxy Music, and Jobriath into one character played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers. I've included all the classic glam artists in this mix (David Bowie, T.Rex, Roxy Music) in addition to the ones who were the less acclaimed but still very much a part of the movement (Slade, Sweet, Cockney Rebel) and the American offshoots of glam (New York Dolls, Sparks, Alice Cooper). Of course I also included the Bowie-penned glam anthem All the Young Dudes. To round it all off, I added a couple of tracks from the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack, including a Shudder to Think original tune called Hot One and a cover of Roxy Music's ode to Humphrey Bogart, 2HB, by the fictional band in the movie, The Venus in Furs, which consists of Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Bernard Butler, and Andy Mackay. Both bands replace some of Jonathan Rhys Meyers' vocals, which were featured in the film, for the soundtrack. I'm going to call this mix Glitter Lives. Who needs TV when you've got T.Rex?

NOTE: This mix should be played at maximum volume.

Moonage Daydream - David Bowie

Metal Guru - T.Rex

Wigwam Bam - Sweet

Daytona Demon - Suzi Quatro

Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me - Slade

Trash - New York Dolls

TV Eye - Iggy Pop and the Stooges

School's Out - Alice Cooper

Baby's on Fire - Brian Eno

Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me) - Cockney Rebel

This Town Ain't Big Enough For the Both of Us - Sparks

All the Young Dudes - Mott the Hoople

Beauty Queen - Roxy Music

Make Up - Lou Reed

I Love a Good Fight - Jobriath

Hot One - Shudder to Think

2HB - The Venus in Furs