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It’s been a while, but I’ve finally got round to buying some new music over the last few weeks. A bit hit and miss, but some of them are definitely worth checking out:

My LCD Soundsystem fanboy status grows and grows. The first album is fantastic. The second album is fantastic. It’s no great surprise to find that I think 45:33 is fantastic too. Roughly equivalent to the second disk of the first album this is a harder and edgier version of Sound of Silver. Really very good indeed.

Oh look. It’s another LCD Soundsystem related item. FabricLive36: James Murphy and Pat Mahoney. Twisted disco at it’s finest. Right up my street. And back down the other side. On a BMX. On the pavement. Doing endos.  You get the picture.

Utterly different, this one, but equally awesome. People Pitch by Panda Bear. I love Feels by Animal Collective. This is the album most like it that I’ve heard from the Animal Collective stable. The latest (Strawberry Jam) is a bit too much for me, but People Pitch is fantastic - haunting, layered, driving, weird; impossible to define but, just, well, really, really, um, good.

Er. Wow. I wasn’t expecting that. Dub Side Of The Moon is not the comedy moment of reggae excess that I was expecting, but actually a genuinely original and really rather good reworking.

It paved the way for Woodstock, the Isle of Wight and Altamont. It was arranged by the Mamas and Papas. It was nowhere as slick as the ones that followed, and the sound quality of any of the recordings you can get your hands on is appalling (this one is no different), but… The Monterey Pop Festival is an iconic moment from the sixties…

… and Jefferson Airplane at the Monterey Pop Festival is an iconic performance. They’re just making their way from the Acid Tests where they played support to the likes of the Grateful Dead (the Prankster’s house band). The line up is (relatively) stable. They’ve just hit the charts. They’re migrating from the early folk-rock/psych-pop of Takes Off and Surrealistic Pillow to the darker After Bathing at Baxter’s. The world is watching. And they rock. They really rock. The Ballad of You, Me and Pooneii is worth the price of the CD alone. Ignore the sound quality (you stop noticing after the first couple of tracks) and revel in a band truly at the height of its powers, doing something it loves (playing live), knowing that everyone (and I mean everyone) is watching. This is a landmark. Buy it.

So. More reviews of albums that you wouldn’t expect to listen to, rather than of books. Parenthood and self employment has killed my reading habit, while as previously noted self employment has driven my music consumption through the roof. I’ve owned Searching for the Young Soul Rebels for a few years now, but it’s only recently that I’ve realised exactly how good the album is.

Punk-soul crossover doesn’t sound like a musical style that will work, but… Starting with a radio being tuned away from “Smoke on The Water” and then moving into the shouted intro, horns and hammond organ that sum up the album we go from the blisteringly angry opener (”Burn It Down”) through a scorching cover of a Northern Soul classic (”Seven Days is Too Long”) to delightful catchy pop (”Geno”). With a whole host of amazingly original numbers in between this album is a superb blend of an anorak love of Northern Soul and a real anger only possible in the first years of Thatcher’s government.

Twisted, fucked up, weirdly dressed, and misfit it may be, but it’s also uplifting, poetic, angry and brassy. Over the last few weeks I’ve come to love this album. This is soul, ladies and gentleman. And for �7 it’s a bargain.

A very quick one this time. Since going self employed my music consumption has gone through the roof. I’m working on my own most of the time and that means I can listen to whatever the hell I like as loud as I like. It also means that my taste is getting more catholic, and my curiousity often gets the better of me.

Two albums I could never have imagined owning a year ago are Sandie Shaw’s Reviewing The Situation and Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison. The first sounds hideously kitsch while the second is, well, country…

Both are true, but ‘Reviewing the Situation’ is a masterpiece of English psychedelic pop (her version of Led Zep’s Your Time Is Gonna Come is worth the price of the album alone) while ‘At Folsom Prison’ is one of the most powerful live albums I’ve ever heard and makes you realise exactly how close to the edge Johnny Cash really was, country or not. If you fancy a wander into the unexpected both are worth a try…

I’ve been literally waiting 15 years for this. Earth Inferno (the last ‘real’ Nephilim album) was released in 1991. Since then, like the collapse of the Sisters of Mercy, there have been side projects, acromonious exchanges, failed reunions and rumours of a new album just around the corner. 15 years is a long time. I bought Zoon when it came out (and if I’m honest, hated it) and then I gave up waiting. Brief returns to the official site showed little or no activity and despite continued rumours on fan sites there was nothing to hold my interest and I stopped even checking. Which was obviously a mistake, because in November of last year the new album finally arrived. And then immediately became unavailable.

It was worth the wait and the �12 off ebay though. Seriously this is old school Fields of the Nephilim, on a par with The Nephilim, if not Elizium. Floyd-esque soundscapes with Carl McCoy’s gravelly vocals pouring arcane spells over powerful bass and pounding drums. This is a real and unexpected return to form.

The other good thing is that although I can no longer take all this pomp and ceremony quite as seriously as I did back then, it appears that like Andrew Eldritch Carl McCoy has gained a bit of a sense of humour. The 9 minute epic reworking of Zager and Evans’ dystopian kitsch classic “In the year 2525” is simultaneously both classic Nef and fucking hilarious. No doubt those among the Watchmen that long ago I used to call my friends will disown me for saying it, but it is, and the album’s all the better for it.

Truly the great have returned, even if hardly anyone noticed.

Why the hell am I so taken with Goldfrapp’s new album, Supernature? The formula seems to essentially be to cram as much eighties retro as you can onto a CD and overlay it with an awful lot of ‘la la la’ and ‘noo nee noo’ rather than words (the first track is entitled ‘Ooh La La’, for God’s sake); one track (Satin Chic) even manages to throw in a detuned mockney ‘roll-out-the-barrel’ style piano, while another (Number 1) seems to steal a synth line from Close Encounters. At that description (and it’s not a bad one, seriously) the album should be really appalling.

But. Oh but. There’s something absolutely mesmeric about this record. Her voice is reminiscent of the Cocteau Twins at their finest hour; FX laden as she is throughout most of the record her breathy delivery is hypnotising (made no worse by the nonsensical words). And rather than making the tracks sound crass the retro references and weird instrument choices make the record otherworldly instead. There is an instrumental sensibility at work here that is simply transporting, everything designed to slowly divorce you from the real world, wrap you in a warm, fuzzy and slightly disorientated feeling. When it’s driving it’s really driving, when it’s sexy (which it is most of the time) it’s really sexy, when it’s wistful it’s really wistful.

Black Cherry was a shagging album. Supernature is for those of us who’ve been with our partners for a while and are really getting into the groove… It appears that Goldfrapp, like sex and wine, gets better with age…

There’s only one fly in the ointment. They’re supporting Coldplay on the next tour. How can they? At least they have the opportunity to slap Chris Martin I guess, although for the purposes of their career it might be worth leaving that particular activity to the end of the tour rather than getting overexcited and doing it right at the start. Unless of course Gwyneth turns up. The chance to do them both at once would be too tempting, career or no.

For God’s sake please don’t read The Da Vinci Code. Please please read Foucalt’s Pendulum instead.

I read it on the beach while on holiday. It’s the kind of book that you only have to read 4 words a page. You can spot the source material for each chapter within the first words… A guide to Paris. The Range Rover brochure. The Bluffers Guide To Rennaisance painting. It’s unremittingly poo. Don’t read it. Unless you really really need to kill a couple of hours and poking yourself in the eye with a fork is not an option.

In Search of Captain Zero is Allan C Weisbecker’s second novel, and a considerably different work from the first gonzo/physics/pot smuggling affair, Cosmic Banditos.

He used to be an Internet sensation. Back in 1989 (ish) he wrote his first novel - Cosmic Banditos - a riotous tale of quantum physics and marijuana smuggling. It didn’t sell in either the US or the UK and, in a fit of generosity, the author sent all of his copies to the soldiers on active duty in the first Gulf War. Slowly but surely it got read, got passed around and eventually turned into a cult classic. Here in the UK it hit the remainder book shops and got picked up by students and the like who again read it and passed it round, turning it into a cult here as well.

At the same time, as legend had it, he disappeared, apparently disillusioned with the lack of success of his novel, leaving no way to be contacted to discuss reprints when they suddenly became required. This left a whole raft of readers who had read the book once, lent it to someone and never seen it again; desperate to find another copy. So desperate in fact that copies were going for stupid sums on ebay and some people had actually converted the entire text of the novel to HTML. Like The KLF’s The Manual or Albert Hoffman’s My Problem Child it was easier to get hold of an A4 printout than a real copy of the book.

The story of In Search of Captain Zero is inextricably linked to the mythology that had built up around Weisbecker. It is written as an autobiography, filling in the missing years from the original failure of Cosmic Banditos to his return and the publication of this novel.

It was with a real sense of expectation that I opened Captain Zero. I’d read Cosmic Banditos in 1991, one of the many brief owners of the few copies that circulated, and again upon its republication in 2001 so I was pretty excited to have his new book in my hand….

In fact my enjoyment of Cosmic Banditos tainted my first attempt at reading it. This is why I’m writing a review in 2005 of a book that I bought in hardback in 2001. When I first got it I opened it up, read the first chapter and thought “what a bust.” It was nothing like the previous book. All serious and worthy and deep in mid life crisis. No pot smuggling, no physics; even the dog wasn’t funny. So I put it back on the shelf and went on to something else. It was only when a good few years had passed and I was scouring the shelves for something that I hadn’t read that I decided that I should try it again - it had cost me �16 after all - I shouldn’t just leave it there.

So with a fresh mind, not expecting pot smuggling or quantum physics or Mexican gangsters or comedy dogs, I set about reading Captain Zero properly…

It begins as a story of a man in crisis. Written in a wholly believable first person the narrator tells of his failed novel and many failed relationships and pines for his life as a young man in the 60s when surfing was king and he was in on the ground floor. Mid-life crisis has finally hit and for him the sports car and younger woman turns out to be instead a mad quest down the coastline of Mexico in a ramshackle motor home looking for a long lost friend (Christopher Connor, the Captain Zero of the title) last heard of surfing the waves somewhere down South.

As the journey develops so does the narrative - slowly we are introduced to 3 strands that will remain throughout the book. The story of the road trip itself is gloriously detailed, providing a loving travelogue of the surf routes around the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific coast of Central America intertwined with a detective story as he seeks out Christopher. At the same time we are treated to reminiscences of his youth with Christopher, spent living the high life as professional surf dudes and part time pot smugglers. These are wickedly funny stories, laugh out loud tales of stupid boat trips and ridiculous plans hatched in a fug of marijuana smoke. But. These two strands play supporting roles to the real meat of the book. This is really a book about surfing. About loving to surf more than anything else. About how surfing makes you feel. About the long board versus the short board. About Johnny-come-latelies versus the live-to-surfs. About sport versus lifestyle.

I can’t really let you into much of the plot without ruining the story, but suffice to say that there are Mexican gangsters, there is pot smuggling and yes, the dog does turn out to be funny. It surpasses Cosmic Banditos with ease, which is no mean feat.

This is an exquisite book. It’s the best book I’ve read this year and it’s put me off reading anything else for a while. It was really that good. It was one of those books that I found myself making time to read - not because of a page turning plot but because the insight into Allan’s character and why of life is so all encompassing, so beautifully written and most importantly so welcoming that I did not want to leave the world that the book created. It’s in turns hilarious, tragic, moving and empowering; yet it’s also completely daft and unreal.

I highly recommend you read this. I also recommend you read Cosmic Banditos, and that you sign up to get his irregular newsletters from Down South. He’s a joy to read.

I’m a massive fan of Jeff Noon. There’s no getting away from it. From his early days with the massive cult sci-fi classics of Vurt and Pollen right through to his modern incarnation as rave generation literary theorist I’ve been captivated and motivated by his work. So, to say that I was looking forward to reading Falling Out Of Cars is a bit of an understatement.

To understand what’s going on with Jeff Noon’s books at the moment and to understand why he’s no longer writing books like Vurt and Pollen you have to have read (or at least got the gist of) his CobraLingus manifesto [overview]. He describes it himself as a way of applying the methods of dub reggae to writing - endlessly sampling remixing and resampling the text to produce a work both completely other yet strangely similar to the original piece. Think of it as a 90s version of William S Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s cut-up technique, but with a lot more style. Noon himself says that he first used the method in the chapter beginnings of Nymphomation, before going on to formalise it and use it for the entire of Needle In The Groove. In fact, since Nymphomation Noon has found it hard to leave this method alone…

Which gets us neatly back to Falling Out Of Cars. This is Noon’s road trip. Through another one of his trademark disintegrating worlds the narrator and a rag taggle band of followers/helpers/hinderers attempt to make sense of the strange mission they’ve been given and the wasting disease that is affecting everyone, themselves included. The disease affects the mind, causing its sufferers to slip into a trancelike state, becoming further and further lost to the outside world. What is unclear is the cause, or even real effect, of the disease; what is clear is that there are drugs available to control the effects, but they seem few and far between, and that mirrors and photographs seem to be at the very heart of whatever is going on.

It’s a novel of language, as with so much of Noon’s work. He has written a beautiful book with some tremendously evocative moments and some extraordinarily rhythmic language - there are moments where you are left staring at the paragraph you’ve just read and others where you are driven on by the pulsating beat, almost unable to stop reading. What he hasn’t written, however, is a book that makes any sense. At all. The plot is incredibly simple (almost non-existent) and the way the book ends is simply an ending - there is no great coming together of the strands, no denoument, not even really a satisfactory conclusion to the narrator’s tale. What we have instead is a couple of hundred pages of thought provoking poetic text with little purpose or direction.

And this is where being a Noon trainspotter either helps or hinders. You can clearly see the influence of the CobraLingus method throughout the book. I spent a large time reading the thing trying to spot the source texts, picking up whichever ‘gate’ he was using at the time. It kind of spoilt it for me, to be honest, but then I’m not sure I would have got any more out of it if I didn’t know what was going on. For me Nymphomation was one of the finest pieces of contemporary writing I’d read at the time; he had truly captured the mental state of the times, and the powering rhythm of the writing combined with his trademark confusion of modern imagery made it one of the most striking books of the 90s. Since then the short stories (Pixel Juice) and novel (Needle in the Groove) were difficult, and only brilliant in flashes. Falling Out Of Cars is like that. There are moments that stop you dead in your tracks but there are unfortunately more moments where you really wish you knew what was actually going on.

Along with the publication of the CobraLingus manifesto there was a brief statement by his publisher that he was “not a systems writer.” The fear clearly would be that, like Naked Lunch (and even more so the cut-up trilogy) from Burroughs people would think that Noon would start to write by numbers, that the system would rule his writing rather than his creativity. I didn’t have that fear at the time, but I’m afraid that I do now. Falling Out Of Cars is so clearly a CobraLingus text and so clearly little else that it’s hard to really enjoy it….

So. If you’re new to Jeff Noon you should be reading Vurt, Pollen and Nymphomation right now. Seriously. Right Now. You’ll love them. If you’ve read those three and nothing else why not try out CobraLingus next and then pick anything that was published after Nymphomation - unfortunately one will probably be enough. Personally I think that the CobraLingus method lends itself more to poetry than to prose, as is shown by the examples in the CobraLingus book. Hopefully Noon himself will realise this and do two things I’d really like to see - publish a book of poetry that uses it and publish a novel that doesn’t.