The See See, on GPS, doing their 1968 San Francisco thing. The b-side is particularly good.

Thelightshines, on GPS, doing their 1968 San Francisco thing. The b-side is particularly good. (And sounds like The House of Love.)

I’d heard this compared to all kinds of things, but what it reminds me of is Angel Corpus Christi. A possibly bonkers lady with a sweet, accented voice, with somewhat odd keyboard accompaniment and a neat line in cover songs. The Space Lady was west coast, Angel was east coast. It’s Biggie and Tupac. You feel me?

Surely I’m not the only one who finds the “prince” extraordinarily irritating? I’m not too keen on the beard either, but at least he had a stupid beard before 90% of the twats in the western world decided they should have one too. I buy pretty much everything with “Christmas” in the title, including this year’s totally brilliant Sweet Christmas, by Shonen Knife. This came in the same batch, but got overlooked. It’s good, but I don’t feel Dawn McCarthy brings a lot to the party. If I were a disgusting sexist making unfounded and stupid assumptions, I’d wonder if they were special friends. Like him from Ash and that absolutely bloody awful girl he dragged into the spotlight. But let’s not get distracted. This is a good record.

Side b is much fun, with a German oompah band running into an onion chomping French accordianist (perhaps in Strasbourg?).

Mr Oldham is a good singer, but the cover of Spiderland is the closest he’ll ever get to a really brilliant record.

During my long and varied career, I’ve worked with a Windy and a Karl, though neither, to my knowledge, were veteran practitioners of blissed-out drone guitar ambience. This sounds like Christmas, though that may just be because we’ve still got our decorations up and I feel sick from eating too many biscuits. You spend the first couple of minutes wondering what’s wrong, because all you’ve got is Windy singing over a couple of glockenspiels, but eventually you notice that huge, familiar cloud-bank of noise approaching. It fades in, and it’s like a big cuddle. Everything’s going to be alright.

Side b sounds like… well, it sounds like Windy and Carl. And that’s exactly how you want them to sound. Twenty years, and they’ve still got it. Lovely record, and a great sleeve too.

A vinyl issue of a bunch of ridiculously obscure stuff I’ve never heard of before. It has a cool, timeless-but-retro lounge/soundtrack feel to it. A particularly lazy comparison would be a spaghetti western Broadcast, which is about all I can manage tonight. They work from a pretty small sonic palette, but use it cleverly, making cool, slick, engaging music that sounds like a lot of things but isn’t at all derivative. The sleeve art is the same: Aubrey Beardsley illustrations appropriated into a new, original piece.

A high-class compilation. I like the first track the best.