review: cosmic american music

Cosmic American Music Club
@ the Maze (North Sherwood St., Nottingham), every month.

WESTERN ELECTRIC
NADINE

A couple of years ago, Uncut magazine gave away a CD called 'Sounds of the New West', which brought together seventeen of America's late-90s alternative country groups, most of whose records had only been available on import. Intended as an 'event', to give Uncut's thirty-something readership a music to believe in, it was an utter letdown. Over-long slow-to-medium paced songs with country changes played on electric guitars, their very mediocrity was thrown into sharp relief by the inclusion of a couple of genuinely great songs from Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, who were the first to play country music with a rock sensibility (stoned, sexual, and most importantly, knowing), some thirty years ago. Unfortunately, Parsons has been dead for most of those thirty years, and Harris's contribution was nearly that old.

'Sounds of the New West 2' has just been released, and it sounds just the bloody same.

Nonetheless, there is life out there. Alternative Country has been re-marketed as Americana, John Peel has been playing Neko Case records every night for a year, and the overt countryness is being slowly bled out of the movement. Still, with 'Paris Texas'-style desert spaciness becoming the accepted mode of expression (which means that the songs are getting even slower and longer), and the absurdly over-rated Lambchop leading the race commercially, good music in this field remains awfully hard to find.

To anyone who believes, as I do, that the Americana movement is capable of producing great music, the Maze's monthly Cosmic American Music Club is something to cheer. The name comes from a mission-statement that Gram Parsons once gave. Though easy to dismiss as the ramblings of a spoilt hippie (who was soon to die in a desert motel with a groupie shoving ice-cubes up his arse), the phrase still captures the heart of Parsons' vision, of a music springing from a new white South that accepted the black south as its equal and not-always-separate neighbour, listened to Aretha Franklin and smoked a lot of dope to boot, whilst retaining genuine spiritual and material links with all that it was rebelling against: the family, the church, and country music.

In this cynical age, it is too much to expect a truly cosmic American music. However, the Maze has done its best to book the best of the genre. Sid Griffin has been playing Byrdsy country-pop for nigh on twenty years. After his group the Long Ryders was soundly thrashed in the commercial stakes by the then-more-studenty REM, he just kept on at it, and he's still doing it. That sounds like a recipe for pub-rock, but Griffin is a prouder man than that. His latest venture, Western Electric, is as ambitious as anything in Americana. Only Wilco at their oddest share the desire to take all the spacey and filmic elements of the music, and turn it into something accessible and real, rather than merely clever. Beginning the set with noise and samples, Western Electric segued into 'Emily in Ginger', their longest and trippiest song. The charismatic presence of Griffin and his awkward foil, Pat McGarvey, complete with intense stares at anyone who looked as if they weren't following the song, kept the audience in their places until the music genuinely took hold. After that, they (we) were ready to lap up the more basic likes of 'When I'm out walking with you'. The next hour-and-a-half see-sawed between souped-up country and trip-hop-with-pedal-steel. Though their own publicity claims an affinity with Portishead, and all of the group bar Griffin are English, the electric side of Western Electric has more in common with Arrested Development's zonked southern hip-hop than anything from this side of the water - and can thus justly be called cosmically American. The 'western' side of the group remains dominant though, and when it comes down to it, they are still country. Either way, the small crowd was rapt. So was I.

This month's Cosmic American Music night featured Nadine, a Chicago four-piece who (minus their current bass player) had contributed a quite-good-but-still-like-all-the-others number to the New West CD. Nadine have nowhere near the musical ambitions of Western Electric. They are unambiguously American, easy to pigeonhole, and more competent than inspired. Adam Reichmann is physically the sort of kid whom scrawny weeds call a scrawny weed, and his voice is just as pale and vulnerable as his physique. Sometimes this is annoying, when a lyric could do with having the hell sung out of it; more often the effect is rather beautiful. Nadine clearly want to be Neil Young, and every so often, they come out with a melody of sublime simplicity to rival their master.

A few of the slower songs dragged, and where harmonies would have brought material to life, the group chose to sing lines in turn. Highlights were 'Dark Light', which was the number on the New West CD, but which shone in a context where it didn't sound like everything that was around it; also 'Back to my Senses', another fine Youngish country pop song.

I don't know if Nadine are ever going to make great music. Being part of the demographically-marketed American music industry isn't going to help them, because they're just going to be encouraged to plough the Young/Springsteen furrow until enough people of my age start buying their records - largely on the basis that none of the group are black and that they don't use those horrible sampler thingies. Western Electric, being stuck making a meagre living in this country, are free of such considerations, and can more easily explore music of whatever origin in order to create something unique. Nadine need one great song, which will make them rich and allow them to tell the marketing department to go play with themselves.

In the context of Nottingham, Cosmic American Music is a great night. When one reaches a certain age, when contemporary music has mostly passed you by, it is soul-destroying to know that all you're going to be presented with is beardy blues nights at the Running Horse. To be given something that is real and original is a rare and marvellous thing, whether or not one particular group happens to be brilliant or just OK. The Maze is a fine venue, which is a bloody good job considering most of the cabaret shit that gets put on there, and it deserves the CAM Club. We deserve it too.

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