patrick wolf?

It was those WitW B-sides that flipped me from "I'm really not sure about this..." to "OMG I absolutely love this."

It could also have been situational. I was in the midst of a happy week yomping about on the moors above St Ives being teenage and moody, when Sick & his missus picked me up in their car and whisked me out to Sennen. In the car back, they played those for me, and it was the combination of spectacularly bleak, beautiful Cornish coast which I love so much, and then hearing those bleak, beautiful songs about that coast while driving along it. (Also that and the combination of risk of sudden DEATH being bounced around the back of the car while Sick raced along those incredibly narrow twisty, turny lanes, might have helped)

And now I can't hear those songs without thinking of that coast, and the way I see it, and every time I hear it, it's like "Yes, THIS"

There's this perfect balance between being all teenage and stroppy and actually hitting on something transcendently true and eternal about human longing, on that album.

I know there are bits of The Magic Position which are mazing in the same way - I mean, there's that duet with Marianne Faithfull to start with - but both it and the Batchelor have skippable bits in the way that there isn't a note of WITW that I would miss.

No Tilda = BOOOOOOOO tho

(Nick if you really wanted to be a hero, you could make me a B-sides compilation of all that stuff. I'll swap it for a print of that pic I'm working on that I know yr missus likes) ;-)

I do really like the Batchelor a lot, its high points are very very high (god damn, Damaris!) but there are just a couple of tracks I tend to skip.

I mean, Damaris is almost so close but not quite over the line to self parody that it ends up being incredible. It's a real guilty pleasure. The only way it could be better would be if it was a sin.

One of these days I will learn how to spell Bachelor.

Also, there was a lot of knee-jerk "The Bachelor is shit" stuff, which surprised me, it's miles away my favourite.

― THE Alan Moulder?!? (Ówen P.), Wednesday, May 25, 2011 11:55 AM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

Yeah, by no means is The Bachelor shit. The production values are off the charts and the arrangements feel like what some of the earlier albums would have been had he had a proper budget. I can't quite explain why I don't go back to it as often. Individually all of the songs are amazing, but the combination of all of them is very heavy. It's a lot to take in.

Track for track, it's definitely one of his strongest releases, but I can't really listen to it except as an entire album, and that requires time/mood/focus. Blackdown, Thickets, Theseus and The Bachelor are all astounding, though. I think maybe if I cut Damaris and The Sun is Often Out it might be a smoother listen, but the tone of the album would be affected..

Nah, I love those two songs. It's Count The Casualty and Battle (knock it off, are you Blur? you are not. stop it.) that I tend to skip.

^ Ah, that's interesting. I compiled all his b-sides from that era on to a single collection and it got more play than the album proper.

― THE Alan Moulder?!? (Ówen P.), Wednesday, May 25, 2011 11:54 AM (13 minutes ago) Bookmark

Were there that many? Off the top of my head there's:

Penzance
Afraid
The Hazelwood
Idumea
Souvenirs
Godrevy Point
Ignis Fatuus

which is a nice enough EP, and a complement to the album, but I'm not sure if it would get more play than 'This Weather' and 'Teignmouth' and 'The Gypsy King' etc. etc.

Just zipped-up 13 b-sides, will chuck the mediafire link here in a few minutes.

Oh, Count the Casualty and Battle also. Battle is fun enough live, but and Count the Casualty has a lovely little glitchy melody that's Lycanthropy-esque but it's now indelibly associated with Patrick choking himself with a microphone cord and collapsing to the stage, so...

Would cut Battle and Count of Casualty, probably. Not sure about Vulture, I don't normally skip it but... perhaps it adds some needed levity.

Lupercalia was recorded in Spain, Berlin, Paris, LA, and London. Which is interesting.

Vulture is the necessary shot of decadence to explain his (at the time) inability to settle emotionally.

Vulture is absolutely amazing. And really good for dancing.

Cheers, Nick! :-)

I have to be in the mood for Vulture. (And that mood is, willing to put up with the... discomfort that evocation of *that* video causes me.)

B-sides are uploading now; eta 18 minutes.

I'd just like to say that I drove accordingly for the roads and conditions thereof when in Cornwall.

I can't quite explain why I don't go back to it as often. Individually all of the songs are amazing, but the combination of all of them is very heavy. It's a lot to take in.

this pretty much for me. I never mind hearing Bachelor tracks when they turn up on shuffle, but otherwise, never really get the urge to put it on in full.

also lol k8 the video just reminds me of some ilxor clusterfuck now. :P

Also, it's surprisingly pleasant to realize that so many people on ILM dig Patrick. For some reason I always got the sense that his total earnestness would make him fairly trollable around these parts. Go figure.

13 PW b-sides.

http://www.mediafire.com/?gbab88m1k35737m

thank you muchness, nick.

@alex: heh, hasn't it always been generally the same five or so posters since this thread started though?

Ooh, thankee! I owe you 1 piskey now.

(Oh god, Roz, I'm too afraid of the clusterfuck to look above the fold on this thread.)

awesome, thanks for that

2/3s of the way through a second listen, this time via speakers (Zepellin) rather than headphones (Grados), and this is a fucking great record. Amazing, surging, heartrending pop music. 11 tracks, 40 minutes, 10 songs and one interlude halfway through. Very delicate and beautiful in places, stomping and forthright in others. Bits of it are making me almost well-up with happy.

I think he's just matured into a really astonishing songwriter. Like, Bacharach awesome, almost, at points. And yet he has this whole mad persona going on too. Kate Bush is seriously his only peer to my ears.

The samples on iTunes made the stuff we haven't heard yet sound mostly ballad-y. Any other barnstormers left to hear besides Together?

Kate Bush is the artist he most consistently reminds me of, if only for that windswept epic romantic Englishness of the small places.

Though it is still driving me crazy whose vocal tic he has appropriated. For a few weeks, I thought it was maybe Lloyd Cole, but it's not, it's someone else, sometimes I think Brendan Perry but not that over the top.

At our record club Tom reckoned he sounded like Josh T Pearson from Lift To Experience.

The first half is really quick, direct, driving pop, mostly, then the second half is a bit more lush, romantic, drawn-out. Together is awesome.

Bermondsey Street, though, fucking he'll, what a song. Perfect pop.

Stupid North America's lack of release dates. And UK import prices. Grumble grumble etc. Have ordered it anyway, clearly.

Yeats?

I mean, really? Yeats?

o_0

Followed by Sacred Harp?

Knock if off, you contemptible dandy.

This really is great.

http://sickmouthy.com/2011/05/26/patrick-wolf-lupercalia-first-impressions/

Let's POX Patrick Wolf.

Augustine
Wind In The Wires
Bermondesy Street
The Bachelor
Bluebells
Oblivion
Hard Times
The Libertine
Godrevy Point
Penzance

Can we POX Patrick Wolf's haircuts and outfits, or will I get kicked off the thread again for doing that? ;-)

In no particular order:

A Boy Like Me
Wind in the Wires
This Weather
Bluebells
Augustine
The Stars
Hard Times
Oblivian
The Libertine
Penzance

do it kate.

mine:
Teignmouth
The Stars
Wind in the Wires
Ghost Song
Souvenirs
The Libertine
To the Lighthouse
Bluebells
Oblivion
Tristan

(special mention: Bloodbeat)

OK, top 5 PW styling moments:

1) long, ragged black hair, bare chested (WITW video)
2) Aryan bondage boy (Vulture video)
3) Cloud from FFVII (Hard Times)
4) Alice in Wonderland psychedelic troubadour (I think this was Magic Position promo?)
5) Naughty Victorian Jailbait Schoolboy (early days)

ha ha j/k j/k

This Weather
Damaris
Thickets
Magpie
The Sun Is Often Out
The Gypsy King
Godrevy Point
To The Lighthouse
The Bachelor
Tristan (and I'm ALIVE! HA!)

(I haven't spent enough time with the B-sides to adequately pick)

Funny, because even though WITW is my fave, I think of it as one long movement and can't separate it out into individual songs, apart from This Weather which stands out SO MUCH I tend to carolanne on it. And going through, some of my fave individual strongest songs are actually on The Bachelor. But I haven't spent long enough with any of this music to really know what I'm talking about.

Likewise about WitW being one long piece; The Libertine, title track, and This Weather are the only ones I can separate, maybe Tristan at a push.

Wolf Song
Bloodbeat
Pigeon Song
Tristan
Hard Times
Oblivion
Thickets
The Sun Is Often Out
Theseus
Messenger

So. The Bachelor takes the prize here. Not sure I can even call myself a proper Wolf fan with that balance... I don't get on with WITW and I just don't know why, it just glides over me, water and ducks' backs and all that. My favourite track is Tristan which is obviously a Lycanthropy hangover; the title track and This Weather are ok y'know but they just don't have the zest of Lycanthropy or the emotional depths of The Bachelor.

xxpost :D

HOLY SHIT. Bermondsey Street. Wow.

Halfway through, and this is the LP that Magic Position wanted to be, perhaps? The joy doesn't feel as shiny and Disney as it did on TMP and Get Lost, and the album still has its somber moments, but they're suffused with deeply felt contentment.

PW albums always have this undercurrent of restlessness and searching - whether its the youthfulness of Lycanthropy, or WitW's running away to the country, or TMP's escapism, or The Bachelor's darker nihilist search-of-self thing. But the resolution that happened at the end of the last album with Blackdown/Theseus/The Messenger's really stuck.

The back half will take more getting used to, specifically 'The Days' and 'Slow Motion'. ' Time of My Life' is good, but was better as that loop-y rough demo from two years back. 'Together' is fucking awesome and between that and the Who Will? (Buffetlibre Remix) I still want PW to do a front-to-back dance/house album.

So do I, definitely.

Oh shit. I just realized. I was mentally describing Together as New Order/Kraftwerk production, but that synth line is a straight lift from Moroder and 'I Feel Love', isn't it?

And maybe it's just that I'm in the mood for this now and two years ago I was very much feeling The Bachelor-type feelings, but 'Together' epically murks so much of everything.

I'm excited to hear this in its entirety; glad it's made at least six people here super happy.

And I forgot to do a POX, but could only get down to 11. Arbitrary constraints, anyhow.

POXI

Teignmouth
A Boy Like Me
Godrevy Point
Paris
Together
Bluebells
This Weather
Bermondsey Street
Blackdown
Hard Times
The Stars

I feel like making an excited post where I go "BERMONDSEY STREET!!! WOW!!!!! AMAZE!!!!!!!!" so I can be one of the cool kids, while actually just going up there to visit my hand doctor.

He turned up in my dreams last night, which means I have really, REALLY got to stop caning his music so much. Why couldn't I have dreamed of Tilda Swinton instead? Sigh.

Haven't heard Lupercalia yet but Bermondsey Street did sound great the two times I've seen it live.

My POX includes a lot of the singles, and, having got into him through Wind in the Wires, Lycanthropy is the one which I enjoy but don't immediately think of any individual songs from apart from Bloodbeat.

The Libertine
Accident & Emergency
Tristan
Hard Times
The Stars
Bloodbeat
Get Lost
The Stars
Oblivion
The Sun is Often Out

I absolutely hated this album on first listen.

But, given that was my reaction to PW as a whole, and I relented upon intensive relistening, I'm going to try and spend some more time with this album to try and find a way in.

My biggest problem is that I simply cannot relate to it. Albums about love - fuck 'em - they make about as much sense to me, as albums about god make to atheists. It's not just the blankness of "I don't get it" but this actual loathing of "I think this construct of romantic love and 'happily ever after' is actively harmful to people." The cynic in me wants to say "check back in 5 years, he'll write a brilliant divorce album when he hits his 30s." Because PW is brilliant at capturing that pure, visceral, completely in the moment sense of being so consumed by emotion that whatever he is feeling RIGHT NOW, he is unable to even contemplate ever feeling any other way, whether that is the ecstasy of romantic love or the misery of isolation or frustration. But the problem is, right now, he is in-a-moment that I cannot share. I could viscerally understand and relate to songs about restlessness and alienation and trying to rediscover his heritage and his identity through a sense of place. I cannot get with "I'm in love happy skippy lovey lovely love love land"

(Which brings up the issue of, does one *have* to relate to songs to love them? No, of course not, sometimes it is the very strangeness and complete foreign escapism of songs about things which are so completely out of your experience as to be new and exciting which is appealing. But this whole "happily ever after" is not strange and foreign in that way, it's so overly familiar because it is the pink, Disney shaped oppression on which I have been choking my entire life.)

But there's another part of me that thinks it's brave and amazing that here is an album which is not written in metaphor or code or double meanings, but is openly written as a love letter from one man to another. BUT at the same time, I get angry and disappointed at the sense of missed opportunity. I'm going to use a very very clumsy metaphor of marriage vs civil partnership - that I understand why gay and lesbian people want legal, social, cultural recognition of their partnerships, that is 100% important and necessary. But marriage is such a thoroughly rotten institution, riddled with sexism, inequality, patriarchy and corruption, why the *fuck* would you want to buy into that? If you have the opportunity to create an egalitarian, fair and progressive form of partnership without the awful religious and legal baggage of marriage, why can't we create equality of straight people and queer people by opening up civil partnership as this better, wider thing for all, and kick marriage as a concept back into the dark ages. And that's kind of how I feel about PW writing about The Redemptive Power of Romantic Love and "Happily Ever After" - Romantic Love and "Happily Ever After" just make me want to *vomit* no matter who is singing about them.

And sorry, I wasn't impressed by the cosmic disco stylings of Together. Too pastichey for me, feels more like PW just trying on another outfit change, rather than any real genuine affection for the genre. Like cosmic disco is supposed to be about the tension between highly controlled mechanised synthetic music and utter abandonment and ecstasy in the vocals. PW is too mannered, he always seems like he's got too much of an eye on the mirror checking out how his wig looks to surrender to the real ecstasy necessary for that kind of music. Which is odd, because he has certainly, in the past, shown that he can do *real* abandon in his vocals, but often it's at the point where his music is at his most stylised and mannered classical or folk.

I think I would absolutely *hate* if PW made a full on disco or house record. I think I would only like such a thing if it were strange and formal and mannered with lots of odd classical allusions and soft electronic piano and wibbly space strings and featured a video of PW wearing white shorts and a tank top, running in slow motion across pristine Scottish beaches with his blond hair flapping in the wind - oh wait, that record has already been made and it was by Vangelis.

Anyway those are my confused and probably controversial thoughts on first listen. I will probably flipflop on this, because the *strength* of my negative reaction and loathing of it has such an emotional force, and things I feel that emotional about, I can switch from hatred to love much more easily than disinterest to love. I will probably regret posting this. Please don't SB for this post or misread it as "OMG K is against teh gays" because feh! romantic love, vomit, fullstop.