(HW) BOTE (my review)

[Jonathan Jarrett]

On Fri, 1 Apr 2011, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:

> On 01 Apr 2011, at 04:23 , Jonathan Jarrett wrote:
>> 	That's not so much that it's bad, though, as much as it's that 
>> they've been going for forty years and most people tuned out after ten. 
>> If, by some chance that I agree is unlikely, they produced a new 
>> _Doremi_ next year, they still wouldn't be remembered for it because 
>> only a fraction of their `fanbase' would ever hear it.
>
> Although I would bet that at least that fraction would be less ambivalent about an album that had Doremi's vibe.

 	Oh, certainly! But that's not the noise they make any more. And in 
fact, who does make a noise like that? Seriously, I'd like to know. F/i, I 
suppose, in their own eighties way. The closest I've ever seen was a doom 
band called Warhorse, who had all the requisite wokka-wokka noises on 
guitar *and* a bassist with mutton-chop sideburns playing a Rickenbacker, 
but they broke up before recording the (second) album that would have had 
that stuff on, which was a crying shame. Kyuss's _Sky Valley_ is a fairly 
honest homage as well as a fantastic album, and OK there is *a* Kyuss 
touring but since it is without Josh Homme or indeed Scott Reeder, I fear 
it cannot be the same and the frankly unrecognisable version of `Gardenia' 
here:
http://www.roadrunnerrecords.com/blabbermouth.net/news.aspx?mode=Article&newsitemID=148693
does not inspire me with confidence. Wikipedia says there will be a new 
album this year and you know, I'll buy it if there is, but it won't be 
_Sky Valley_.

 	Can one define the Doremi vibe, just in terms of technique? I mean 
obviously one has to actually have some songs too but if you had some 
songs and wanted to record them like _Doremi_, what would you need? (Apart 
from terrible microphones, a studio full of rattle and echo and a 
truckload of drugs, I mean.) Seems to me that the key ingredients are:

it's heavy but not distorted, which is not to say no effects obviously 
but just that a lot of the vocals and treble lines are clean and sound 
`true', so tune down but sing up (otherwise Farflung would already be 
providing this album with each release);

it's slow, it lurches, even the twelve-string bits are not exactly jigs, 
so write doom;

it's lyrically mantric but artfully arranged (for example, did you ever 
hear a non-folk band do the trick in `Time We Left...' where the call goes 
round in four but the answer goes round in three till it meets up again? 
they didn't even try this live, it would do my head in counting it for 
sure), so grab a performance poet with old-fashioned ideas for the lyrics;

it sounds *distant* in a way that compliments the theme of the lyrics (I 
don't know how to do this bit), and;

it's *continuous*, so that the whole recording (or its two halves) unfold 
as a whole, whether the tracks are actually run into each other or just 
linked by electronic interludes. So write with a mind on flow and 
sequence. (Again, note Kyuss's suites on _Sky Valley_.)

None of these are logistically impossible to achieve, or even that 
expensive surely; it just takes a certain amount of guts and perversity to 
compose that way, I guess. And, of course, you have to be a good enough 
musician and composer to do it at all!

> Whether it is "really Hawkwind" or not doesn't concern me so much as 
> whether it's really any good.

 	I agree. On that score I would say that the BotE studio disc is 
`all right' but probably not `good', and that the live disc is `good' to 
`very good'. Yours,
 		    Jon

-- 
       Jonathan Jarrett, Oxford       jjarrett at chiark.greenend.org.uk
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