RJ Wheaton

I’ve been meaning to write a ‘how to buy’ piece on the early Bristol sound for a little while now, but quite a few of the key early releases remain unavailable for the casual buyer. This career retrospective fills at least one gap, including as it does Fresh Four’s 1989 cover of the Rose Royce song “Wishing On A Star”.

Rob Smith and Ray Mighty helped establish the production template at the heart of the Bristol sound, pulling the melange of influences (hip-hop, dub, lovers’ rock, rare groove, soul, punk, Two-Tone ska) into something distinct and coherent. Their version of Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie No. 1” was at the heart of “Stranger Than Love”, released in 1987 by Mark Stewart, a long-time member of the Bristol scene (and associate of Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound project). Along with The Wild Bunch’s “The Look Of Love” (1986), “Stranger Than Love” is considered by many the prototypical trip-hop record.

Smith & Mighty’s 1988 versions of the Bacharach/David torch songs “Walk On By” and “Anyone (Who Had A Heart)” built on “The Look Of Love”: crisp mid-80s hip-hop drum programming rivets down a wide-open arrangement that displays the dub influence; floating above is a dreamy, slightly distanced vocal track, taking full advantage of Bacharach’s airy and drifting intervals. Tim Simenon, of Bomb The Bass, was doing the same thing at the same time with “Say A Little Prayer.”

Smith & Mighty produced Massive Attack’s first single — a cover of Chaka Khan’s “Any Love” — and Fresh Four’s “Wishing On A Star”, which epitomized the formula and introduced (to ears outside Bristol) the signature muted, low-key rapping. The consequent commercial success brought a major-label record deal — with disastrous results. A series of protracted disagreements with London Records meant that Carlton’s 1991 LP The Call Is Strong was the only Smith & Mighty production released for years. In 1995 their contract expired and — with Peter D Rose — they issued Bass Is Maternal on their own More Rockers label. By that time Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky, among others, had taken the Bristol sound to an international audience.

Most of Fresh Four went on to become key figures in the Bristol drum & bass scene — as, indeed, did Smith & Mighty. But the Fresh Four LP retains its reputation as the great unreleased Bristol sound album (rivaled until this year by Earthling’s Humandust). In all likelihood it doesn’t exist in any kind of completed form — but I bet there are some great masters locked up somewhere.

This is a career-spanning retrospective issued by the German !K7 label, with whom they have released two albums since 2000. Most of the material here is, inevitably, post-1995 drum & bass; most of that is from the !K7 releases. There is one track from Carlton’s The Call Is Strong, the Fresh Four single, and versions of the two central Bacharach covers (both of which are also on their highly-listenable DJ-Kicks mix).

When the BBC finally get their act together (or I’m on the p2p networks at the right time), I will finally be able to hear Smith & Mighty’s apparently epic 1996 Essential Mix.

Smith & Mighty, Retrospective
(!K7, 2004)

Smith & Mighty, DJ-Kicks
(!K7, 1998)

An update on Boca 45’s Pitch Sounds LP. You can take a listen to “In The City” courtesy of Invada Records’ audio samples. It’s not to be missed—by far the standout track on the album and possibly one of the best singles of the year. It’s built around a static chord structure, ballooning bass tones and corny 60s backing vocals. There’s a great late-summer vibe to it, with the humid, charged atmosphere lit up by Stephanie Mckay’s electric timing.

If you missed Mckay’s astonishing debut album, co-produced by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow and Earthling’s Tim Saul, grab it while you can.

Boca 45, Pitch Sounds
(Grand Central / Invada, 2004)

Boca 45, “In The City”
(High Noon, 2004)

Mckay, Mckay
(Go Beat, 2003)

The time for dull and superficial articles about the ‘Bergen sound’ seems to have passed, but suffice to say that Ralph Myerz and The Jack Herren Band come from the same locale as Kings Of Convenience, Röyksopp, Magnet and numerous others. Much of their debut, A Special Album, was produced by Jørgen Træen, who owns Duper Studios in Bergen and produced both of Jaga Jazzist’s albums.

While A Special Album (following A Special EP, naturally), did not benefit from comparisons to Röyksopp’s Melody AM, it was still very solid feel-good downtempo, if a bit glossy and formulaic. It certainly matched anything by Blues States or Kinobe, and tracks like “Nikita”, “Think Twice” and “A Special Morning” were well worth the asking price (which doesn’t seem to be very high at the moment: you can’t go into a second-hand CD store in Toronto without finding a copy). It also had some of the best kitsch cover art for some time.

Your New Best Friends seems only to have had a Norwegian release thus far. The formula has become even glossier. There are moments — the chorus of “Surprise” — that remind you of what was good about A Special Album. But only a few tracks (like the churning “Dubspace”) break out of the nightclub-friendly combination of disco guitar, pop-toned bass, chirpy synth riffs and closely-harmonized backing vocals. It sounds a Jamiroquai album, in other words.

If you like albums that come with a big ‘chillout album of the month’ sticker on the front, this is for you.

If I can say that without making my disdain too obvious.

They have managed to keep up the deliberately naff cover art, though. Consistency is valuable.

Info and audio samples at Emperor Norton and MIC Norway.

Ralph Myerz And The Jack Herren Band, A Special Album
(Emperor Norton, 2003)

Ralph Myerz And The Jack Herren Band, Your New Best Friends
(Emperor Norton, 2004)

The latest of an absurd quantity of Bristol-related releases (with more to come), and after Four Tet’s LateNightTales, the second mixtape series contribution this month. This is the latest addition to the DJ Kicks series, mixed by Wild Bunch and Massive Attack member Daddy G (Grant Marshall).

The tracklist looks extremely promising. It should suit those who miss the humid warmth of Massive Attack’s original reggae and dub influences. There’s some great Studio One material, including the reverb-soaked beats and paving-stone bass of Willie Williams’ classic “Armagideon Time”. There’s Barrington Levy’s early dancehall hit “Here I Come”, Foxy Brown’s Maytals-sampling “Oh Yeah” and Melaaz’s French cover of Dawn Penn’s “No No No”.

Plus there’s a handful of rare Massive remixes — Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s “Mustt Mustt”, Les Negresses Vertes’ “Face A La Mer”, the ‘Napoli Trip’ remix of “Karmacoma”. Many of the Massive remixes seem to me to promise more than they deliver; those that strip the original material down to its guts (or, more usually, it’s bassline) seem to work best. I suspect that these will work very well in context, since it looks to be a remarkably consistent mix. Almost everything here features a wide, uncluttered mid-range and a thunderous bassline. In an excellent interview (it’s in English: scroll down), G recalls the Bristol scene in which the Wild Bunch came together:

We were sort of punks and stuff like that, we used to go to a lot of the reggae things and so there was a cross pollination of the reggae and punk thing at the time. So it did in Bristol actually get a lot of punks going into reggae sound systems and stuff like that. And that was a really big thing to go to a sound system and to see wall-to-wall speakers and stuff like that it was amazing. We were all into our sort of reggae at the time, so to have your stomach blown through your mouth by bass was amazing.

This mix seems designed to do the job.

There’s all kinds of other treats, including the Mos Def collaboration that appeared on the Blade 2 soundtrack, the Meter’s classic “Just Kissed My Baby” (everyone who knows EPMD’s “Never Seen Before” will have the riff hardwired into their brain). Most excitingly, there’s an early white label version of Tricky’s “Aftermath”, and the Danny Krivit remix of Aretha Franklin’s “Rock Steady”.

Worth looking out for.

UPDATE: Scissorkick is all over it. You can check out the very high-quality Melaaz track, and Paul Oakenfold’s remix of Massive’s peerless “Unfinished Sympathy”. In the words of Joe Cocker, it makes me wish I was home again in England.

Daddy G, DJ Kicks
(!K7, 2004)

RZA’s score of Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai remains the best downtempo/abstract soundtrack. But Massive Attack’s score of Luc Besson’s film Danny The Dog is just out on Virgin, well in advance of the film’s 2005 release date. The film — also known as Unleashed — stars Jet Li as an enslaved fighter who is befriended by a blind musician (Morgan Freeman).

It is perennially hard to tell who comprises Massive Attack from one album to the next. At the moment it seems (not least from the sound of this release) that Massive Attack is currently 3-D (Robert Del Naja) and co-producer Neil Davidge, with Daddy G (Grant Marshall) remaining ‘on leave’ from active collaboration. It was the Del Naja-Davidge partnership that wrapped up 100th Window in six or seven months, after scrapping months of sessions with rock band Lupine Howl. Danny The Dog has appeared after a considerably shorter interval than divided past Massive releases.

It’s always been interesting to chart the ebb and flow of influences as successive members of Massive Attack have arrived and (mostly) departed. The charm and innocence of Lovers Rock, which informed Blue Lines, seem to have disappeared entirely with the departure of founding member Mushroom (Andrew Vowles). In Daddy G’s absence, the reggae and dub influences have taken a back seat. That left the finely chiseled — almost clinical — sound of last year’s 100th Window. While the album was more immediately accessible than 1998’s Mezzanine, it had a glassy production sheen that enhanced the feeling of claustrophobic paranoia.

Danny The Dog feels more open, though perhaps that’s in the nature of the soundtrack genre. Moody piano loops and staid string figures abound; moments of brittle prettiness in “Sam” and “Two Rocks & A Cup Of Water” veer towards generic soundtrack time-filling. On the other hand, it’s plainly a Massive release: there are drum samples so muddied that they are almost indistinguishable from one another, recalling the underwater quality of Req’s 1995 album One.

As for the influences, there remain tantalizing hints of Britain’s late-70s Two-Tone sound; the guitar riffs that open “One Thought At A Time” have some of the pace and attitude of punk but the blocky and jumpy shape of ska.

Any Massive Attack release is welcome, and this one has several moments of opaque brilliance. In any event, it’s nice to hear a step back from the closed production density of 100th Window.

There are audio samples via the Massive Attack site.

Del Naja and Davidge have also worked on the score for Saul Dibb’s film Bullet Boy. Rumours persist that Daddy G will return for the fifth studio album, to be released sometime next year. Apparently Mos Def and Tom Waits will be involved. In the meantime, there’s Daddy G’s DJ Kicks.

Massive Attack, Danny The Dog (OST)
(Virgin, 2004)

Manitoba has had to change his name.

The avalanche of choice music available this month continues with new contributions to two long-standing mixtape series. First up is Kieran Hebden’s Late Night Tales (audio samples via Azuli). Anyone who has been listening closely won’t be surprised to learn that Hebden’s taste in jazz, folk and hip-hop strays pretty far from the mainstream of each of those genres. This collection begins eclectic and doesn’t really let up.

One of the advantages of the Late Night Tales series is that artists can put together a fairly unfiltered portrait of their influences. No doubt there’s always a little ego-stroking: the temptation to demonstrate how extensive, refined or varied is their record collection. But in general the idea works: the listener gets an accessible and fairly inexpensive sampler of music somewhat like the artist in question. Buyers of Jamiroquai’s contribution to the series get a mix of Johnny Hammond, Ramsey Lewis and Sister Sledge — exactly the kind of thing most casual fans wouldn’t otherwise hear.

And there’s usually at least one hard-to-find gem otherwise unavailable without some expensive and time-consuming crate-digging.

This kind of thing works especially well for popularizers and updaters like Jamiroquai, but for an genuinely original artist like Four Tet, it risks highlighting how much greater is what an artist makes of their influences than is the sum of the parts.

There are some wonderful highlights here, and if it boosts sales of Max Roach and Joe Henderson records even slightly, it will be a job well done. It is also plain to see from what sources Hebden draws his intricate studies of noise and space and repetition. But since most post-hard-bop jazz fans are not also Fairport Convention fans, and most Manfred Mann fans are not also Prince Paul fans, there’s a fairly high chance that there will be something here that you won’t enjoy. At all.

On the other hand, there’s Four Tet’s hypnotic dismantling of Hendrix’s “Castles Made Of Sand”, and Four Tet-esque tracks by Icarus and fellow-traveller Manitoba. David Shrigley’s hilarious “Dont’s” (‘There is no such thing as a metal frisbee’) is probably worth the asking price on its own.

“Castles Made Of Sand” is also available as a 7”, and there’s a stream online (thanks to Disquiet).

Hebden seems to come out with an album almost exactly every two years, so we’ve got a little while to wait yet. The single of “My Angel Rocks Back And Forth”, coupled with a DVD of all the Four Tet videos to date, came out on Domino a while ago.

There are also some mp3s currently available for download, including a no-sound-left-unexplored 23-minute life rendition of “As Serious As Your Life”. It may partly make up for the fact that you — like everybody I know — missed out on the limited edition Copenhagen concert release.

What we’re really missing, of course, is a collection of Four Tet remixes.

Four Tet, LateNightTales
(Azuli, 2004)

Four Tet, My Angel Rocks Back And Forth
(Domino, 2004)

The Bristol fun continues. Boca 45 (a.k.a. Scott Hendy) has a new album out on Grand Central. From the sound of things, Pitch Sounds is an eclectic mix of hip-hop breaks, cheerfully corny funk samples, and a couple of moody downtempo loops.

One of the standout tracks is “In The City”, originally released as a 7” on High Noon earlier this year. It features New York vocalist Stephanie Mckay, whose astounding debut album, Mckay, was one of the highlights of 2003. Hendy co-wrote “Thinking Of You” on that album, which was produced by Geoff Barrow (Portishead) and Tim Saul (Earthling).

Juno have some audio clips; it’s also available from Amazon.co.uk.

For those trying to follow the plot, Scott Hendy is one half of Dynamo Productions, along with Portishead’s DJ Andy Smith. Before that, he was half of Purple Penguin, which was on the sorely-missed Cup Of Tea Records, along with long-standing Bristol acts like Grantby, Statik Sound System and Monk & Canatella.

Boca 45, Pitch Sounds
(Grand Central, 2004)

Gotan Project’s La Revancha Del Tango came out in 2001, with a small fanfare of publicity about its blend of Argentinian tango and dub-lite hip-hop beats. It was a little too conservative to be as innovative as billed, but that made it a natural match for the downtempo coffee-table market. After a thorough amount of licensing it was everywhere, as viewers of the BBC’s slickly stylized crime series Hustle can attest. We’re not talking about Moby levels of saturation marketing, but there was a certain point at which it seemed to become part of London’s collective mental furniture.

Inspiración-Espiración is a mix by Philippe Cohen Solal, one of the three French musicians-DJs at the heart of Gotan Project (along with a number of Argentinean musicians in Paris). On one level, it’s more of the same, with the new Gotan tracks and assorted tangos fitting the mould. The reworking of Chet Baker’s “Round About Midnight” remains tidy and tasteful, eschewing even the bendy crispness of the Sarah Vaughan remix that they contributed to the Verve Remixed series.

But it does include a handful of remixes that were on some editions of La Revancha Del Tango. Those by Pepe and Bradock and Peter Kruder (in solo and Peace Orchestra guise) club things up a bit; Antipop Consortium’s “El Capitalismo Foraneo” and Al-Shid’s “M.A.T.H.” (produced by J-Zone around a classical sample) put some edge on the mix. But there’s not much to disrupt the easily-accessible vibe. If you liked the tastefulness and sedate pace of La Revancha Del Tango, there’s probably something here for you.

Gotan Project, Inspiración-Espiración
(XL, 2004)