Driving under fog – or so it seems. Cloud skims the roof of the car until the incline takes us up and at it. Into the milk.
The soundtrack to this journey through trapped daylight is Sometimes You Just Drive by Michael Chapman. With its loose, locomotive rhythm and pedal steel tints, it echoes the wide open American west … by way of long, deep Yorkshire roots.
Chapman was 75 or 76 when he released 50. Backed by a bunch of younger players from the folk/roots/experimental scene, Steve Gunn among them, it’s a vital, honest sounding album. The voice might be weighted by mortality but the finger-picking remains ageless.
Let’s not pretend that I know anything about Michael Chapman, though. This album was my first encounter, followed by True North – the last album he recorded – and Americana. So, there’s quarry-loads of Chapman yet to mine but since first hearing 50, it’s become a winter fixture. Memphis in Wintershows why – and it’s not just for the title.
“We’re past the end of nowhere, all along the worn-out plain Where the devil lies in waiting And it gets too dark to rain. It gets too dark to rain.”
If we submit to music’s potential for seasonal and environmental appropriation (which is pretty much the point of these Cat & Fiddle posts) then the busker’s stomp of a beat in Memphis takes on a quickening air, like it’s trying to outrun a biting chill. Electric guitar, sliding in late with frayed distortion and lived-in experience, delivers the flickering licks of much needed heat.
And that’s where we’re going to leave 50. The loping lilt of The Prospector and the electrifying flourishes over Rosh Pina‘s hypnotic picking are among the many riches, but this isn’t meant to be a review. Instead, it’s an association, an evocation of a sound and a spirit that lives up to the surroundings – which, on this drive, look something like this:
Michael Chapman: moor reflections
Cue it up while it’s still cold.
Note: Ryley Walker played Sheffield a few days ago at the Sidney & Matilda. Solo set, wholly acoustic, stunning as you’d expect. He mentioned Michael Chapman. Said Chapman liked this song of his, which he then played. Think it was The Roundabout. Don’t quote me, but do go check Ryley if you haven’t already.
Storm Darragh made this drive a wild one. Moors and skies packed with portent – a glove-like fit for The Dictator.
Everyone knows Iggy has a voice for the spoken word. You hear it with Death in Vegas on Aisha. You hear it on Avenue B with She Called Me Daddy. You hear it every week on BBC 6 Music, grizzled as hell but warm as hell too, inviting you in hearth-side for anecdotes and insights on music. It’s a voice to sink into. And here, set to music that follows the contours of the peaks outside, it’s a voice to feed your imagination.
The music is far from Iggy’s riotous past, though not unexpected given his later output. Belgian violinist and composer Catherine Graindorge is the visionary, crafting four tracks of string-driven moods, shimmering electronics and haunting atmospherics. No percussion, no signposted beats – just surges, pulses, drifts and searing trails of light. Iggy relays poetic warnings in The Dictator, then takes an introspective turn on Mud I and Mud II:
I walk along the river in a thick fog. You tell me about a book your father once gave you. In my head turns this melody – no words. And you read me a princess story from a distance.
Pop’s words with Graindorge’s soundscapes? WIN. The instrumental last track of the EP, named Iggy in honour of the voice, echoes the violin-bow taps Jimmy Page did on Dazed and Confused live but here the mood is ethereal, not theatrical … a foundation for a symphonic swell which, like everything else, matches the land and the season.
Storm Darragh meets The Dictator
Try it. Add this EP to your cold weather listens, maybe even pair it up with Neil Young’s Dead Man soundtrack – and not just for the Pop connection. There’s a rustic, earthy spirit running through both.
Then again: it’s Low so what do we expect? And when do you listen to Low?
They’re a band I can’t play any time or too often because they’re just too intense, too special – especially those last two albums. Low seem to have a direct line to something way deeper than the rest of us. After pressing play on Hey What in the car, I become aware that the opening track White Horses builds in noise and distortion completely in sync with the incline and the gradually emerging, slowly unfolding landscape. Urbanity receding, wild moors welcoming. Beautiful. No, more than that: awesome. This happens to be an ultimate convergence of emotive music and scenery.
But if that wasn’t enough – and it would have been, easily – there’s a divine intervention from the goddess of good timing. White Horses hits peak distortion and noise saturation around 2 minutes 15 seconds – the exact moment a turn round a blind bend reveals the top of the world in full, unending glory.
Breath taken? Damn right. The combination of sound and vision is huge, which explains the F bomb earlier. Rendered speechless.
Low’s fragmented, techno-glitch density opens portals to a parallel universe. But the effect that comes from wrapping their fragile/euphoric harmonising within and around such sonic manipulation is unfathomable and unexplainable. It’s why Hey What and Double Negative transcend so much other music. It’s electro-noise gospel. Those albums just cannot be played in casual conditions that lessen the mystique. They need to be played with intent: night darkness with volume cranked, wild walks in storm force gales, the deepest of snows and winter freezes
Entry #1 of Music for Cat and Fiddle scenic soundtracks … and there’s something about the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss pairing, and Raise the Roof especially, that really lifts in this kind of space.
Which is no surprise given the general love/unfettered worship of all things Plant that I’ve been carrying forever, but even allowing for such fanatical tendencies, there are times of year when his music touches even higher levels. The Carry Fire album begs for a misty autumn or winter morning – play it one day when you’re up before the rest of the world awakes and tell me it doesn’t belong right there in that cool, quiet, open-to-reflection moment. Raise the Roof carries a similar torch for dawns and dusks and half lights, to my mind. Darker in tone than the also excellent Raising Sand, it’s tailored for the barren beauty of the Cat and Fiddle road drive
even when you can’t see shit:
And it’s those opening two tracks that do the business here. The gentle desert shuffle of Quattro (World Drifts In) reveals an existential reckoning while The Price of Love slows the beat to countrified lilt dripping with lyrical truths of love ended. You don’t need to know the Calexico and Everly Brothers originals to feel something but, as we said with Midwife, dusty Americana works in conditions that elevate the remote. It’s the very opposite of urban. And in the hands of Plant and Krauss, these songs touch on the devotional. They did for this drive.
But I guess I would say that.
[if you missed the link above or are just confused by the music words and fog picture combo you fell into, here’s the background to this music-as-soundtrack thread]
What do you do when a new 30-minute drive to work takes you through scenery so epic, vast, bleak and beautiful that it threatens to melt your opticals and steal your oxygen?
Try not to career off the road on a hairpin bend is the first thing, I guess – ultimate life-preserver move.
But before long, you get to thinking: what music could be the soundtrack to this?
It’s got to be more than something you like. It’s got to be something you love AND it’s got to fit – it has to be deserving of the jaw-drop views from behind this widescreen windscreen lens. Anything less would be a disservice to the gift outside.
This has been my nicely indulgent task on a new but short term drive to work. Having just moved to Buxton and got a temp role through December, my drives took me on Macclesfield Road, aka the Cat and Fiddle road.
It is spectacular. The road climbs into the official Peak District and splits the moors 1,689 feet above sea level by the Cat and Fiddle Inn, a former pub that’s the second highest in the UK. The highest is Tan Hill Inn in North Yorkshire who, at the time of writing, was caught in a snow-in.
The road then carves a winding, hair-pinning zig-zag descent to Macclesfield on the other side. The moors are vast in their brown-purple haze. Dense fog is common, even when it’s clear down below. When adverse weather moves in, the road quickly becomes impassable. It’s been closed across the last three days since snow moved in on January 4th.
Fortunately, my drives didn’t encounter any snow beyond an occasional light flurry but joining that road at 5.20 am in the pitch black dark is a little bit of a test. All you can do is lean forward, follow the dots and block out the drops to the side. When there’s fog, it’s milk. Tunnel vision. For this, there is no music. Got to focus.
But the return journey a few hours later is different. Music becomes a possibility so … what’s it going to be? Melvins and Metallica might well be massive favourites but such riff-heavy, beat-driven manna is not going to be on the cards, not for this – not yet, anyway. The newness of the views and shifting natural lights is too fresh. We’re looking for an emotional, more than a physical, response from our tunes. Something to swell hearts.
It’s a time/place thing, too. If you’ve ever chosen not to play, say, David Bowie’s Low because it’s the wrong time of the day or the wrong time of the year then you know what we’re talking about here. Some music has conditions attached, even if you’ve made them up yourself. And some environments have conditions too. This is one of them.
So, the next few posts are short rambles about music that matches up to the mother of mid-winter views. See what you think of their seasonal potential.
After days of trying and failing this week, Cult of Luna‘s Somewhere Along the Highway finally got played in full yesterday. Glorious. But why the protracted arsing about just to play an album?
The conditions weren’t right. Nearly, but not quite. It is winter, which is a start. And we had the sub-zeros outside, finally. But it was also TOO BLOODY SUNNY every morning to do justice to Highway’s cold weight.
Winter music. Seasonal listening. Frosty bites. What gets you through?
Scratch that last question – it makes winter sound like the enemy, a battle to be endured and escaped from. It’s not. It’s Optimum Music Season. Short dark days and the great indoors are primed for music, books about music, and winter music selections.
This gives you every excuse to dig out some music specifically for the time of year and then agonise over exactly the right time to play it. You want to turn it into a 3-D experience: surround sound with seasonal mood and vision.
As we know, some albums just sound better at certain times. Not like there are any rules, rights or wrongs about it, it’s down to preferences. But, more than any other time of year, winter encourages this hibernatory Right Moment fixation.
For example, David Bowie‘s Blackstar and The Next Day (and a few other Bowie albums) are never bright-light listens, not for me at least. They’re autumn-winter affairs or soundworlds for the smallest hours. The dead of night? That’s when they’re most alive. Never the heat.
Henry Rollins touches on music’s relationship with time, season and place a lot in his books, and it’s one of the things that makes him a really good music writer. He writes as a fan, not a critic. You won’t get in depth reviews or high brow critical perspectives, he knows that’s not his space. But you do get words and fanaticism about buying music, playing music, what memories it stokes, when it got/gets played and what it soundtracks in life. And when you read this, you realise you’re not alone in your nerd-world musical indulgences. He’s out-nerding everyone, doing it for a living. It’s on a different scale. But it’s good to know because it validates your own quirks.
Back to the seasonal sounds, though. Which albums make for a winter-enhancing selection box?
It starts with the nice long seasonal build-up to Christmas. Childhood pop for the magic-of-Christmas mainline (Frankie Goes to Hollywood ALWAYS, some other pre-teen pop as well usually). Uncool 80s metal for another childhood link. Lyrical storytelling and sparse folk – Bob Dylan, Mark Knopfler, Michael Chapman – for long nights, low lights and late mornings. Accessible jazz or blues, ditto. Post/Scandi metal for the harsher realities once the Christmas vibe is retired.
Winter selection box
On top of that there’s a pull towards music that’s warm. Not sunny warm but intimate warm. Close-up instrumentation warm. Analogue 60s/70s productions warm. Late-era Beatles, that kind of stuff.
Something new that really tuned in to the 70s analogue spirit this winter was a 2021 album:
If Words Were Flowers by Curtis Harding.
Ho-lee shit, go check it. Ultra warm soul with just enough backbone funk to swing a tail. Gospel sweep and widescreen strings. Bass clarinet rasps and tenor sax uppers. Soft psychedelic fuzz. Hip-hop stiffness on the beats. And I dare you not be melted by The One‘s gentleheavy groove.
File near Mayfield, Axelrod, Kiwanuka? This might be glib and obvious (what did you expect) as a batch of references, and maybe I’m riding high on the first-plays thrill of a new discovery that’s fitting the mood, but it’s all we can manage right now. Haven’t even checked the lyrics yet.
Tip? Crank it up on a walk out in the frost. Soul with a scarf on.
Veering off now to a different thought:
When will Nick Cave and Warren Ellis do a winter album? Even wilder, what about a Christmas one?
Surely it would leap to the top of the seasonal stack with Low’s Christmas and the Sufjan Stevens box set. Quiet moods, small-watt ambience, ghost tales, long shadows – Cave & Ellis are surely built for this? COME ON FELLAS! Let’s get the rumour started. They’re a fixture in my seasonal listening anyway, might as well go full hog with an official St Nick Christmas Album.
Right, that’s it for now. Nice talking with you. See below for a few words on three winter aces, lifted lazily with no edits from a previous post. The sentiment’s the same.
BJORK – Vespertine
Top of the winter pops is Vespertine, always. Somehow, it’s the essence of snow in musical form, yet it doesn’t sound like it’s contrived to be a winter album – it feels like it just turned out that way. Hidden Place pushes against wind and snow drifts before the chorus sweeps you up and out, flying over white patchworks. Frosti, Aurora and An Echo, A Stain make for an especially frost-twinkled run of three, but the whole of Vespertine has a softness of sound that is flakes falling, ice forming. Magical. It only ever gets played at this time of year. That’s the deal.
NICK CAVE AND WARREN ELLIS – White Lunar
Where Vespertine exposes your inner wonder to winter’s call, White Lunar tracks the harsh, bleak end of the same season – let your mind go with The Rider #2 or Zanstra and conjure a whiteout. Song for Jesse and Micro Sucker could have fallen from Vespertine’s branches, but really, it’s isolation and loneliness that dominate these heavy scores …. like Srey Leak, disc 2. Plug in for barren, wintry detachment from civilisation this Christmas.
CULT OF LUNA – Somewhere Along the Highway
Or Salvation. Or Vertikal and Vertikal II. But probably Somewhere Along the Highway. Less seasonal than the others here, but I always get more Cult of Luna in the diet in winter. Slow-moving, heavy and intense, the Swedish post-metal masters rarely waver far from their template and yet, like Mogwai, refine it pretty much every time they put a record out. This, their fourth album, may be their best. Dim soars to a higher mellow than they’d managed before, and Back to Chapel Town is a timeless snowbound pounder. Just get the whole album on, it’s a class act.
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