Blogarhythms

A couple weekends ago I dumped a bunch of albums on my best friend and housemate m. Cody’s iPod. A lot of them were records I recommended that she wanted to give a whirl. But a few of them were requests, mostly records she owned on tape or CD, some of which had been lost or stolen over the years.

Perhaps she noticed how I’ve been reliving my misguided youth by loading up my Zune with digitally encoded versions of many of the Hip-Hop tapes I collected as a kid and wanted to get in on the action? I dunno… But among the requests were three Rock albums released during the same time period (the late 1980’s and early 1990’s) as most of my favorite Rap releases; Nirvana’s Bleach, Nevermind and In Utero.

Fond remembrances of the Seattle trio had already been flowing around the crib since Girl Talk freaked their “Lithium” (a song I’ve wanted to sample since my sister walked out of a local Record Express in 1992 and replaced the DJ Magic Mike tape in our car’s deck with the cassingle) on his Feed the Animals earlier this Summer. But even before that I’d been digging my Nirvana history since I stumbled across a couple of quotes claiming Kimono My House, the 1974 LP from previous Blogarhythms featurees Sparks was one of bandleader Kurt Cobain’s favorite records a few months back.

That little tidbit seemed so anachronistic that I had to do a little research. In my Googling I only came up with regurgitations of the same notion without citations or a direct quote from Cobain. But looking into his musical favorites did turn up other seeming inconsistencies that could support the assertion. I mean, at first glance Nirvana’s so-called “Grunge” sound and the experimental Glam/Pop of Sparks might seem incompatible. But one of the reasons Nirvana sold so many records was — despite their heaviness, both sonically and lyrically — that they made melodic, hooky tunes. So it’s not too much of a stretch.

Even so, I was having even more trouble reconciling another one of Kurt’s supposed favorite records — 1980’s Colossal Youth, the only album from Cardiff, Wales-bred Post-Punk band Young Marble Giants — with his own musical output. This time though, there were direct quotes from Cobain himself to bolster the claims. Quotes where he fesses tp having a crush on the lead singer, digs on the band’s cheesy drum machine sound and proclaims his love for the record. Wait… Did I just say he dug a drum machine? A cheesy drum machine? Holy crap! I guess I relate to Kurt over more than just a troubled childhood and angst after all?

Seriously though, the Young Marble Giants (a trio, plus one, comprised of brothers Philip and Stuart Moxham, Alison Statton, with the Moxham brothers’ cousin Peter Joyce supporting) were not a fast, loud, thrashy sort of Punk band. Their music was stripped down and languorous, built around Stuart’s twangy guitar and spectral organ, Phillip’s cavernous baslines, the chintzy rhythms and phantasmal lo-fi tones of Joyce’s primitive Bruce Haack-ian home-made drum-machine (which makes it sound like some Sly Stone or Shuggie Otis experiment gone awry) & synth, and fragile, trance-like vocals from Statton.

It’s still punchy, propulsive and spiky like Post-Punk often is. But it’s profoundly distracted, lackadaisical and quietly pretty as well. On the one hand it shares a number of things in common with the icy, dub-inflected Post-Punk of Joy Division and the minimalist Folk-Punk of Violent Femmes. But it’s deeply evocative of the cutesy, lo-fi, twee-as-fuck Indie-Pop made by any number of modern-day musicians. I mean, I can hear similarities to Deerhoof and Lullatone for Chrissake! But Nirvana?

I decided I had to go back and listen again, which I did. And in hindsight, it’s all there. The sonorous low-end? The prickly guitars? The detached monotone? The disaffected, surreally anti-establishment lyricism? Yeah, not only can I see how they might have been one of Kurt’s favorite bands, but I can see how they might have influenced him and his band as well. What’s weird is how obviously they prefigure the sound of so many other bands, some of whom I already mentioned — others, like Of Montreal, Portishead, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Gossip and even Cody Chesnutt, I hadn’t — many of whom wouldn’t arrive on the scene until relatively recently, and how none of those bands necessarily sound that much alike.

Regardless of who their musical descendants are, or which deceased rockers were fans, Young Marble Giants’ sole document Colossal Youth is as monumental a listening experience as it’s title, and the band’s name for that matter, would insinuate. In fact, while many of the albums I’ve profiled in Friday’s Records at Random are ancient curiosities to the average music fan, I’d go so far as to call Colossal Youth a must own.

Sadly, I’ve never seen a copy of it in my years of crate-digging, even when riffling through stacks in the basement of funky Indie/Punk spots. So it’s a good thing these giants have been propped up by a handful of labels (including Domino, who issued an insane multi-disc set last year) who’ve made it available as a CD reissue (and now, MP3 download) since early this decade.