MIFfed

I've got a bit of a dilemma.  It's a nice dilemma to have, and I know which way I'm leaning, but someone may tell me I'm being a fool.  They're wrong, but it's not quite as clear-cut as I thought it would be.

First things first: I love Manchester, and one of the things I love about Manchester is the Manchester International Festival.  It's two weeks of new and interesting art and culture, and even when a show doesn't work, as with Damon Albarn's Wonder.land a couple of years ago, it's still something that makes me proud to be a part of the city.

When tickets for MIF17 went on sale, I immediately went and spent an unholy amount on them.  I've crammed all the things I'm going to go to see into the second week of the Festival, because during the first week, I'll be in France.  This is at the invitation of one of my closest friends and her family; she lives in Australia now, so I only get to see her (and them) every couple of years.  So the final few days of June and the first few days of July are going to be packed, but great.  I'm really, really looking forward to them.

Except...

Weeping Songs

It's not about Arthur.  Keep telling yourself that.  Nick Cave has said himself that only one song on Skeleton Tree was written after the death of his son (although they were all recorded in its wake), and he's not said what that one song is.  So the album isn't about Arthur.  Well, most of it isn't.  Well, it wasn't intended to be when it was written.  So let's put Arthur to one side.  We shouldn't make it about him anyway.  That'd get in the way of writing an honest review.  I mean: what if the album's rubbish?  What kind of heartless bastard would you have to be to slate it in that case?  Who'd slag off Kindertotenleider?

So let's treat Skeleton Tree as just another stage in the evolution of Nick Cave (and sometimes the Bad Seeds).  There was the old-time Old Testamential Nick Cave of, say, "Tupelo"; there was the gleeful Grand Guignol of "Stagger Lee"; the sleaze of Dig, Lazarus, Dig! and the Grinderman side-project (which might as well be a Bad Seeds spin off); the introspection of White Lunar (another Seeds spin-off in all but name) and Push the Sky Away.  This is just another layer accreted.  Front Row on Radio 4 talked about this album as a sequel to Sky, and it does feel something like that - more of a development than a sequel, but something in the same vein.  But there's a difference; a big difference.

Before now, at his darkest, Nick Cave offered a way out.  Either there was a knowing wink to the camera: think of the videos to "The Weeping Song", or "Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow", or there was a blast of noise that pulled you through to the other side, as in this live version of "Jubilee Street".  And in Skeleton Tree?

Repeating a Success is Still Repetition

Review: Nerissimo
Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld (Specula)
.....
"Hope."

That single word constitutes the first refrain of "DBX 2", the second track on Teho Teardo and Blixa Bargeld's second full album, Nerissimo.  The second time we hear the refrain, it's changed.  "Hope," it now goes, "Should be/ A controlled substance".

One shouldn't read anything much into the lyrics to pop songs.  All the same, it sounds like it's asking for trouble for people who'd been waiting expectantly for this followup to 2013's Still Smiling.  They - oh, all right: we - would have had no small amount of hope invested in the project; Still Smiling is a great album, and between that and this, Bargeld had overseen a brilliant return to form for Einstürzende Neubauten, in the form of Lament.  So there was every reason to be hopeful.  Yet, one can be too hopeful; as the lyric suggests, there might be times when hope ought to be kept in check.  Hope might be the kind of thing upon which we oughtn't to get too dependent.

After all, getting the Lament project together, and then touring it alongside a sarcastically-titled "Greatest Hits" set could easily have meant simply that there wasn't really time to get the new album to succeed as well as it might.  Faced with that kind of pressure of work, it's equally possible that a person would fall back on tried-and-tested formulae rather than doing anything all that new; and any innovations attempted, by the same token, may not have the fullest realisation.  On reflection, it's this more downbeat assessment that is the more appropriate when evaluating Nerissimo.

The basic problem is that, although there are elements that build on the last album - there's a use of steel guitars gives the album an almost country-rock undertone ("Animelle" having hints of REM's "Airportman", for example) - the bulk of the record is rather derivative.  Much of it relies on extensive recycling of material heard on Still Smiling: "The Beast" clearly fits the same mould as "Buntmetalldiebe";  "DBX 2" is a close cousin of "What If?".

Bargeld has been happily ripping off his own back catalogue for almost as long as he's had one to rip off.  Hence we shouldn't really be surprised to find that it's not only the last Teardo and Bargeld collaboration that is pillaged/ revisited (delete as appropriate), but Bargeld's contributions to the other bands with which he's been associated.  The lyrics to the titular opening track hark back to "Sabrina", the opening track of Neubauten's Silence is Sexy; "Ich Bin Dabei" has - alongside another hint of "What If?" - a clear echo of the Bad Seeds' "Stranger than Kindness".  He's even gone so far as to include what is pretty much the same song on two albums in the past: "The Garden" is more or less the same track that appeared three years earlier as "Salamandrina".  The pattern, of course, is itself copied from musicians through the ages: there's any number of composers from the classical tradition who quote themselves (and others) freely.  Yet it's one thing to be expected to churn out yet another Mass or cantata for an Esterhazy on a weekly basis - I'm guessing here, but I wouldn't be surprised to discover that a significant portion of what we take to be the musical canon either started out as hack-work, or informed hack-work shortly after its composition - but it's quite another to approach album-making in that way; the context is very different.  Not the least of the differences is that the album is released on Teardo's own Specula label, so there should have been no pressure on that front.  Hence it is perhaps pushing things a little to include two versions of the title track - once in English, and once in Italian - to top and tail what is anyway only a nine-track album.  It's one thing to want to return to a theme or idea to work it out as fully as possible; but I'm not sure that there's really that much of a new angle being taken here.  For what it's worth, the Italian version is preferable, but that's because I don't speak Italian; Italophones may prefer the English.

In passing, there's the odd moment when Bargeld's voice seems to be feeling the strain - "The Empty Boat" really could have done with another take.

Lest this sound like an attack on the album, it's really not meant to be.  Is the album any good?  Yes: it certainly is - with the possible exception of "Ulgae", which... um... well, you know that Simpsons Tree-House of Horror episode in which creates a whole civilisation in a petri-dish?  Yeah.  Let's leave it at that.  But if you ignore that, and the double inclusion of the title track, you're left with a long EP as much as a short album.  A good one, for sure, but - well, is it enough, and good enough?

The nagging suspicion is that if Nerissimo is a good album, that's because Still Smiling is a very good album, and Teardo and Bargeld have taken some of its component parts, spray-painted them, and released them again.  Control your hope.