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album // Pop Crimes
Listening, belatedly, to Pop Crimes,
Rowland S. Howard's second solo album is hard to
contemplate without considering that Howard was suffering with what
would prove to be terminal liver cancer during its recording, passing
away while promoting the LP. Nevertheless, that feeling of listening
to a ghost aside, Pop Crimes stands as a strong final chapter
in the musical career of an uncompromising musician whose work in
The Boys Next Door, The Birthday Party
and beyond marked him out as an inventive guitarist and songwriter.
Pop Crimes contains six new Howard compositions, as well
as covers of Talk Talk's 'Life's What You Make It' and Townes Van
Zandt's 'Nothin''. The album saw Howard working with JP Shilo (credited
with guitar, violin and other general strangeness), bassist Brian
Hooper (who also co-wrote the title track and appears on 'Wayward
Man' and 'The Golden Age Of Bloodshed') and saw Howard reunited
with former Boys Next Door / Birthday Party member Mick
Harvey (here on drums and organ). Pop Crimes was
produced by Lindsay Gravina.
In spite of his ailing health, Howard's voice had
rarely sounded so interesting, containing a gruff tenderness and
the barest trace of a sneer at the very edge of his delivery, while
his guitar playing drew on the same style of layered anti-playing
– skeletal notes that descend into howling static - that made
The Birthday Party's axeman such a thrilling proposition. The two
covers are cases in point. Covering Mark Hollis and Tim Friese-Greene's
epic Eighties hit 'Life's What You Make It' was always going to
be a brave move, but Howard / Harvey / Shilo give it an added edge
of grungey nihilism, stalking bass and droning organs augmenting
a defiant, reflective but bitter Howard, the spaces in his vocal
allowing his distinctive, subtle guitar riffs to feed through. As
with all the best covers, Howard takes 'Life's What You Make It'
into new, unchartered territory, taking Talk Talk's optimistic original
and turning it into a darker, somewhat sinister paean to individualism.
Meanwhile the cover of Van Zandt's 'Nothin'' showcases Howard's
strangled vocal style, a world-weary but mysterious quality with
doomed blues backing from Howard / Harvey / Shilo that sounds like
a nag sluggishly bearing its rider back from unspeakable horrors.
Occasionally there are small moments of levity which
leaves you with the impression that this LP isn't uniformly misanthropic,
even though it really is. Opener '(I Know) A Girl Called Jonny'
is one. A duet with Jonnine Standish of Australian
Blast First Petite band HTRK,
'A Girl Called Jonny' is an occasionally joyous, mostly dark Spector-esque
ballad with simple organ and drums, and gentle bass from HTRK's
Sean Stewart (who was found dead in the spring
of 2010). Howard's vocal weaves alongside Standish's detached own
while whining guitar drifts alongside. 'Pop Crimes' is another.
The album's title track consists of ponderous bass, guitarwork that
straddles Howard's punk-blues licks from 'Nick The Stripper' and
the searing feedback / noise of 'The Friendcatcher' while Harvey's
drums contain a jazzy swing which has that effect of lightening
the mood ever so slightly. I have no idea what the lyrics are on
about, but it's delivered with a sense of muted anger by Howard
and so I guess he's railing at the pop music industry somehow.
Elsewhere there is a sense of the personal drifting
into the songwriting. 'Wayward Man', with its great wedges of metronomic
bass and carefully-wrought feedback, has lyrics that find Howard
resignedly accepting that he can't be the wayward man whoever he's
singing to wants him to be. The whole thing hints at rage, at darkness,
like an updating of Leonard Cohen's sinister 'I'm Your Man'. Likewise,
'Ave Maria', which is an introverted, quiet and sorrowful piece,
all fragile percussion and gentle layers of guitar, organ and plucked
bass. The piece has a filmic, emotional quality, marking it out
as a low-key but tear-jerkingly moving highlight of Pop Crimes.
As the music fades away, Howard closes the track with the words
'we didn't dance upon our wedding day', singly the most
regretful thing I've yet heard in a song. Then again, this is the
man that wrote 'Shivers', perhaps the most beautifully depressing
song ever written.
The album was supported posthumously by 'The Golden
Age Of Bloodshed', which is a wry, apocalyptic piece that is strangely
cynical at times; white hot feedback is draped laconically across
and through an bleak, sparse backdrop. It's hardly the most optimistic
way to close out an album, but if you had terminal cancer, with
no liver transplant on offer, I wonder how cheerful you would be.
lp+cd/cd/dl:
A1. / 1. (I Know) A Girl Called Jonny
A2. / 2. Shut Me Down
A3. / 3. Life's What You Make It
A4. / 4. Pop Crimes
B1. / 5. Nothin'
B2. / 6. Wayward Man
B3. / 7. Ave Maria
B4. / 8. The Golden Age Of Bloodshed
single // Pop Crimes / (I Know) A Girl Called Jonny
Review forthcoming.
7":
A. Pop Crimes
B. (I Know) A Girl Called Jonny
single // The Golden Age Of Bloodshed
Review forthcoming.
7":
A. / 1. The Golden Age Of Bloodshed
B. / 2. Lost In Space
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