Plenty of interesting psych stuff accumulated here over the past few weeks, while I’ve been distracted by a bunch of other things. A bit of a roundup today, kicking off with Daughters Of The Sun, whose “Ghost With Chains” is forthcoming on Not Not Fun. The label’s significant, because NNF seem to have found a sub for the recently-demised Pocahaunted, given that “Ghost With Chains” draws from the same well of strung-out, washed-out, groan-heavy hypno-dirge. Not sure they’ll be making cute indie-pop in a couple of years like Best Coast: Daughters Of The Sun come from Minneapolis (two Minnesota bands in two days must be a record, and this is my 801st post, incidentally) and appear to have been around a while. Good band; if anyone has more info/knowledge, please share. I’m on safer ground, I guess, with Metal Mountains and “Golden Trees”, out about now on Amish. Metal Mountains are essentially three survivors of the ‘90s band Tower Recordings, often – and justifiably – cited as key precursors of the latterday proliferation of homebaked underground bands on a, for want of a better phrase, acid-folk trip. Maybe the best known of the three Metal Mountains players, alongside Helen Rush and the much-employed violinist Samara Lubelski, is Pat Gubler, whose records as PG Six have been very important to me these past few years. It’s Rush here, though, who seems to be taking the lead, pulling the band through some pleasingly-adjusted, brackish reveries that bear comparison, perhaps, with Espers. From “Structures In The Sun” on, there’s a great feel of tempered, candlelit freakout, maybe a fraction heavier on atmosphere than tune, but that’s not a problem. Not much tempered about The Psychic Paramount, as you might imagine from the name. “The Psychic Paramount II”, on No Quarter (home of Endless Boogie, among other things) begins with a great eruptive roar, and initially seems kin to the blast and flail tradition of Monoshock and early Comets On Fire. Soon enough, though, a plot emerges, locating the trio (from New York, I think) as closer to Yamamotor-era Boredoms, when the chaos took on the form of ecstatic ritual circa “Super Æ”. If anything, there might actually be a tiny bit too much form for my taste in places, where the Psychic Paramount’s hard-driving spacerock takes on a mathematical aspect, a little more like, say, Kinski or Mugstar. But this is pretty cool; wonder how it works live?

Since I saw them play a series of shows at the Union Chapel in Highbury a good decade ago, I’ve always felt that Low’s music suited churches. Not because of the religious connotations as such, more because they were so suited to the space, stillness and reverberations inherent in those kind of buildings. It makes sense, then, that Low’s new album, “C’Mon”, has been recorded in a church close to their home in Duluth, Minnesota, the better to capture the trio’s monumental gravities. Unlike the frictional, treated environments of “Drums And Guns”, “C’Mon” represents a kind of return to a notionally purer Low, to the sound of an enormously controlled and self-contained band playing in a very big room. It captures a lot of what many of us cherish most about the band; a sound which has incrementally evolved over the space of 15-odd years, but still remained utterly identifiable. While not touching on the more experimental textures of the band represented on “Drums And Guns”, “Songs For A Dead Pilot”, “Bombscare” and so on, “C’Mon” would work pretty well as an introduction to this most stately and moving of contemporary American bands. One of the things that’s so interesting about their sound is how it identifiably emerges from an obliterated post-punk/post-hardcore continuum, but simultaneously flaunts affinities with a much longer lineage of classic folk-rock. When I listen to Low, I often end up thinking a lot about Neil Young, and how they seem to instinctively grasp his stunned dynamics, his uncanny harmonies, on a level that’s far more profound than most of his descendants (please check their collaboration with The Dirty Three on “Down By The River” if you can, an object lesson in impactful understatement). Alan Sparhawk might more overtly reference Young in his work with the Retribution Gospel Choir, but I hear resonances all through “C’Mon”. Sparhawk has recently talked up the new record as akin to Richard & Linda Thompson’s “Shoot Out The Lights”, as an anatomy of a relationship, though the prevailing theme – the trials and consolations of a long-term relationshop, as far as I can tell – is maybe closer to something like Yo La Tengo’s “And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out”. The Linda Thompson reference isn’t bad, though, at pinpointing the appeal of Mimi Parker’s voice: its affectingly muscular purity. I frequently think of Parker as kin to Judy Collins, which is a bit baffling, since while I love Parker’s voice, Collins tends to come across as cloying and sanctimonious to me. Even by her standards, she has some extraordinary songs on “C’Mon”: “Especially Me” and “You See Everything”, the latter having, I think, faint echoes of Young’s “Round And Round”. At this point, “C’Mon” feels like the Low album I’ve liked most since “Things We Lost In The Fire”; no mean praise. Pivotal to this are a couple of Sparhawk-fronted songs: “Nothing But Heart”, one of those hard-punching, epically repetitive Low songs, this time elevated further by a solo from Nels Cline. Then there’s “Witches”, which taps into that luxuriant Youngian wallow again and finds Sparhawk dealing with visions, childhood nightmares and a confusing frustration with men who “act like Al Green”, something which evidently makes him so angry he can’t articulate exactly what the problem is. It’s a magnificent song, one of the best I’ve heard in a while, and one, I think, of the best songs in a catalogue that has stealthily built up into one of the strongest of the past two decades. A good few of these songs are out there in live versions on Youtube, I think; if you have time, hunt them down and drop me a line.

The past few days I’ve been reading, on Rob Young’s recommendation, Alexandra Harris’ Romantic Moderns, an excellent survey of how British artists and writers in the mid-20th Century tried to reconcile a modernist impulse with the residual lure of English cultural traditions. This morning, I was deep in the chapter on artistic responses during wartime; studies and collections on the subject of Englishness designed as a kind of emotional consolation in the midst of battle and austerity. It provided an interesting analogue to PJ Harvey’s “Let England Shake”, which I was listening to at the same time, a record about nationality and the meaning of nationality, especially in times of war. I’ve been meaning to write about this quite brilliant record for the best part of two months now, and I’m conscious that a lot of what I could say has been effectively superseded by Andrew Mueller’s review in the new issue of Uncut, the work of a man who knows far more about war than I could ever wish to. I can’t recommend his review enough, but I still think it’s worth adding a few notes; after all, one of “Let England Shake”’s many virtues is its easy deployment of ideas, its capacity to be thought-provoking. Increasingly, it’s becoming very clear that PJ Harvey approaches her albums as distinct and self-contained projects, each with a finely-wrought, cohesive and fastidious plan behind the set of songs. With some serendipity, “Let England Shake” arrived at Uncut around the same time as Anna Calvi’s debut album: not a terrible piece of work, by any stretch, but one which seems to take the most obvious and commercial of PJ Harvey’s creative personae and runs with it. Calvi’s album, with its slightly hackneyed, crimson-lipped sense of melodrama, feels very much like the sort of record the more pragmatic parts of the record industry would have liked Harvey to make as the follow-up to “To Bring You My Love”. Instead, she embarked on an unpredictable and generally hugely rewarding trajectory away from what was expected of her, so that in 2011 she’s arrived at an unusual place for an artist of her generation: a genuine auteur who, in spite of being signed to a major label, appears able to develop her career and follow her muse into relatively esoteric corners, more or less unaffected by marketing expediencies. That said, “Let England Shake” is full of catchy, insidious tunes, much more immediate than its uncanny and lovely predecessor, “White Chalk”. It remains, though, a strange-sounding record, at once strident and ethereal. A song like “The Words That Maketh Murder” seems to roll along at an odd bucolic skank, while the spidery guitar jangle vaguely recalls – not for the last time on “Let England Shake” – the hazier reveries concocted by Johnny Marr in the earlyish days of The Smiths. There’s something of The Cocteau Twins here and elsewhere, too; the occasional whoop in Harvey’s voice seems pitched in an unlikely space between Liz Fraser and Ari Up. As the album begins with the title track, the high register she unveiled on “White Chalk” has gained a new pointedness; if the word weren’t loaded with pejorative implications, “witchy” might not be a bad word for it. With the rustic brass puncturing songs at unexpected moments, and a predominantly rickety, handcrafted air, “Let England Shake” sometimes feels like indigenous folk music modernised in an eccentric way, not least when Harvey’s voice is pitted against the blokeish, conversational harmonies of John Parish and Mick Harvey. I keep thinking of Trembling Bells, and their way of finding a new method of negotiating with English tradition. But then again, there’s a spindliness to the sound which also, less canonically, seems to echo a certain strain of wan indie-pop, given an unexpected new imperative: “On Battleship Hill”, in particular, is reminiscent in parts of Belle & Sebastian’s “The State I Am In” (no bad thing, I should say). As an album, dense with allusion and knowledge, constructed with a meticulous thematic unity which extends across both sound and content, and performed with a vigour and passion which belies any suspicions of academic detachment, it’s an unqualified success; a marker for major British records in 2011. As ever, I’d be interested to know what you think, when you’ve heard it…