SERvin’ Up! – w/c March 24, 2017

Jarvis Cocker & Chilly Gonzales – Room 29
Ronald J Bruner – Triumph
El Duende – Making Storms
Dayme Arocena – Cubafonia
Wire – Silver/Lead
Augustus Pablo – King David’s Melody
Kelly Dance – Wild Grass
D Henry Fenton & The Elozabethans – Twice I Fell Down Once
The Jesus and Mary Chain – Damage and Joy
Ondatropica – Baile Baile Bucanero

https://open.spotify.com/user/2ser/playlist/5NgMprG9ZOgd8n2wawG8SW

Hello,

John Belushi overdosed there. Led Zeppelin rode motorbikes through the lobby. Lindsay Lohan got banned after holing up there and cracking nearly 50K on her room service bill. And now the infamous Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles is the setting for the new album from Brit-pop’s ever-reigning king of observational dry wit, Jarvis Cocker, in collaboration with Chilly Gonzales. If that second name means nothing to you, the Canadian artist was a cutting and often crazily hilarious rapper and electronic producer but traded up to play piano and work arrangements for the likes of Drake, Daft Punk and Feist. Their album Room 29 is a song cycle’s surrounding the dank, grey side of Hollywood life when the bright lights have shut for good. Lifestyles of the rich and famous become ways of the aimless in the hands of Cocker’s droll delivery of his hapless characters’ exploits and musings, fatuously lavish and thus simultaneously empty. This is the stuff that crops up like a large ink splat on Cocker’s radar, and his lounge lizard delivery alongside Gonzales’ sparse piano makes this an unsparing set but not without some empathy in their caricature. Also, it has to be mentioned this is out on venerable classical music label Deutsche Grammphon, which makes Cocker now labelmates with Mozart.

Kelly Dance‘s second album Wild Grass sees her adopted home of China as the core of its lyrical concerns, circling both in its current state and future. But Dance doesn’t deal in a dry, academic treatise, taking flight from Chinese science fiction’s fantastical treatments of the nation’s whirring transformations. Dance’s songs don’t come easy but take time with them and they’ll absorb you, curling around like smoke with the same mysterious air as PJ Harvey’s dark rock thrust but also the airy and light way of folk that carries its essential outlook of open-ended possibility.

You might say The Jesus and Mary Chain were the surprise hit of the 2016 Spectrum Now Festival, but to be a surprise hit you really need a critical mass of people to be surprised. Not many people were there to witness a more-than-solid set that featured new songs that have found their way onto their first set of new material in 19 years, Damage and Joy. The formula hasn’t changed much but it case you need a refresher, the band led by the ever-bedraggled and detached brothers Jim and William Reid soup up blues riffs with fuzz to a psychedelic tip of art-damage rock. I always liked their slow, hazy, narcotic rollers rooted in a 50s ballad style and there are plenty of those on Damage and Joy – some featuring Isobel Campbell – to keep me happy. Nineteen years is a long time to sit on the raw, electric thrill they mastered, and there’s polish here than rightfully should be, but this chain isn’t quite all broken yet.

Also, new tunes from Melburnians The Meltdown and Poppongene, Sydney’s Belles Will Ring and the onetime Sydneysider we will still claim as ours, Tim Rogers.

Enjoy it all on 2SER,

Andrew