Pink Flag & Send (Guest Post)

Last month, Christophe from the band La Forme wrote a guest blog post for The Album Wall about Neu! '75. A lot of people seemed to enjoy that post, so today Christophe is back to talk about another of his favourite bands: post-punk pioneers Wire.

There is little fat on the bones of Pink Flag. Wire's debut album, released in 1977, contains 21 tracks but whistles past in a blur of accelerated punk. Much of Pink Flag is an exercise in subtraction, the band exploring how much they could remove from a song without completely killing it. If punk was a reaction against the flourishes, indulgences and the technical musicianship of prog rock - music stripped back to its essential components - Wire seemed to be more interested in punk as an intellectual exercise as opposed to a simple act of rebellion.

You get the impression that, even as they were making Pink Flag, Wire were already keen to get somewhere else and explore something new. Pink Flag was already peeking out beyond the constraints of punk, suggesting that Wire possessed a bigger musical palette than their contemporaries and had better ideas. This was duly confirmed with the release of their next album, the brilliant Chairs Missing.

The band would spend much of their career largely ignoring Pink Flag, instead dedicating themselves to continually forging forward, never wishing to repeat themselves. Wire were not interested in nostalgia, and as a result they would rarely revisit any of their work once it had been physically released.

10 Questions for Hallelujah the Hills

"How do you make people like your latest album? Release another album."

Hallelujah the Hills are an American band based in Boston, Massachusetts. They released their fifth full-length album, A Band is Something to Figure Out, a couple of months ago; intellectual yet anthemic, accomplished yet thrillingly raggedy, it's a must-listen for fans of Titus Andronicus, The Hold Steady, and other purveyors of big rock music with brains.

Ryan Walsh, the man at the helm of Hallelujah the Hills, was kind enough to take part in a quick Q&A and shed a little light on his group's latest opus. Here's how that went...

Photo by Courtney Brooke Hall (Ryan Walsh is the one in the middle)

The Album Wall: Hi Ryan, thanks for agreeing to answer a few questions about your new album. Let's start with the title - is a band something for the listener to figure out, or something for the people in the band to figure out?

Ryan Walsh: It's both. Mostly it's a title about my personal relationship with music, being a fan of so many bands over the course of my life, and trying to understand what the purpose of music might be.

TAW: This album and its constituent tracks feel a lot more streamlined and straightforward than Have You Ever Done Something Evil?, the previous HtH album. Was this a deliberate move?

RW: It's always deliberate on our part to not sound like the rest of the other albums, most certainly the one that came right before it. There's a joke I made up. It goes like this: "How do you make people like your latest album? Release another album."

TAW: Why did you make up a story about Woody Guthrie predicting punk rock?

RW: We didn't make that up. Or we made up part of it, but some parts of it were true. Or what happened to us because what we made it up is true, I think. I honestly cannot remember at this point.

TAW: "Twister! Ouija! Fault lines! Freebies! Stag films! My maps! Bookmarks! Adoration!" What's the connection between all the things you're yelling about in We Have the Perimeter Surrounded?

RW: The connection between those things is that they are all things I thought of to live inside the song. "Every single thing that I could think of" is part of the chorus lyrics. The song was written, originally, with 80 verses. I stayed up all night writing verses. It was literally "every single thing that I could think of".

TAW: "What do the people want? The people don't know what they want!" Was this line (taken from album opener What Do The People Want) intended as a political statement? I feel like it's a pretty good explanation for recent events in both the UK and the US...

RW: It's political in the sense that it's about the tug of war that goes on between groups of people (a family, a town, a band, a country) when they try to decide what's best for the group. The decisions we end up making in groups suggests, to me, that on some level we really must not know what we want.

TAW: I love the song New Phone Who Dis - it does a great job of adding depth to the album's sound, and it serves as a much-needed breather between the intensity of Hassle Magnet and the two triumphant tracks that close the album. What does the phrase 'new phone who dis' mean in the context of this track?

RW: 'New Phone Who Dis' was/is a popular internet meme. I wanted to take a funny phrase I liked and write a very sad song around it.

TAW: Who is The Girl with Electronics Inside?

RW: My friend David has a website called Out of Stock where he assigns stock photos to various artists, and they have to create something in reaction to that photo. I pulled this photo.

I was trying to imagine sometime in the future where people will actually incorporate electronic elements into their bodies, like microchips or Google contact lenses and such. Maybe not so far off. The first thing I thought of was how much certain sections of the population were going to deem this to be an unholy abomination. Then I imagined pop songs that were, like, in defence of their sweetheart who had opted-in on some inner electronic enhancements. That was the thinking behind this song.

TAW: What were you listening to during this album's gestation?

RW: In the fall of 2015, I was listening to Joanna Newsom's Divers a lot, as well as an instrumental playlist I had made. And the rehearsal room demos of these songs we kept recording.

TAW: What's your favourite track on A Band is Something to Figure Out?

RW: Hassle Magnet.

TAW: I believe you're releasing a 'companion EP' to A Band is Something to Figure Out next month - what will this add to the work as a whole?

RW: The companion EP is called Movement Scorekeepers. It's out July 8th on Jealous Butcher records. It's six 1-minute songs meant to recreate the emotional arc of a 45-minute album in a few brief moments. We wrote a lot of it by band improvisation, which was brand new for us. Fun!

You can buy A Band is Something to Figure Out from Hallelujah the Hills' Bandcamp page.

Little My's Last Beeps

For a brief period in the mid-to-late noughties, it seemed like the surest route to indie acclaim was simply to form a band consisting of as many members as you could find. Groups like Los Campesinos! (7 people), Architecture in Helsinki (8 people), and Broken Social Scene (goodness knows) proved that more sometimes is better, with albums like Hold on Now, Youngster... and In Case We Die racking up high scores with the likes of Pitchfork, Stylus et al.

My experiences with these artists (all of whom are still active, although both AiH and Los Camps have fewer members nowadays so perhaps there's been a bit of streamlining in recent years) could be mapped into a kind of family tree: I first discovered Los Campesinos! when they supported Broken Social Scene at The Point in Cardiff, and in turn, it was a support slot at a Los Camps show that first brought Little My to my attention. They were another band with a larger-than-average list of members; according to their Wikipedia entry, Little My consisted of "nine core members, with up to 21 additional satellite members at any given performance". In fact, it wasn't so much a band as it was a collective of musically-inclined people from around Cardiff, kind of like the Welsh capital's very own answer to Broken Social Scene.

'But Joel,' I hear you cry, 'why are you referring to Little My in the past tense? Didn't they release a new album, like, less than a month ago?'

They did indeed, reader - it's called Beeps. and that's the album cover up there. Here's one of its tracks, entitled It Was Christmas When I Fell Apart:

Flux Capacitor vs. Painted Shut

Last summer, I discovered a wonderful album called Flux Capacitor by a wonderful band called The Burning Hell. Regular readers (if in fact I have any) may remember that I wrote a blog post around that time all about Flux Capacitor and how its characters repeatedly manage to find power in powerlessness.

More recently, I acquired an album called Painted Shut by Hop Along. Those hypothetical regular readers will no doubt have already heard the album's standout track - the spectacular Waitress - in my May playlist, but here it is again for everyone else:

"COMMON KIIIIND, COMMON KI-I-I-I-IND IT'S A VERY COMMON KIND"

While it managed to escape my attention until only a few weeks ago, Painted Shut actually came out last year. Shortly before its release, Hop Along gave an interview with Stereogum, and Frances Quinlan - owner of that tremendous voice you were hopefully just listening to - stated that the album was "about power and lack thereof...it's about powerlessness".

I came across that Stereogum interview just the other day (having already had Painted Shut on heavy rotation for a week or two) and Quinlan's description of her album's key theme sent me straight back to Flux Capacitor. Since then, I've been listening to both albums and thinking hard about the different ways that these songs and the characters within them respond to situations that make them feel powerless.

You Can't Have That Band - They're Mine!

Last month, I conducted an informal music survey to find out more about how we consume music here in the UK. The final question on this survey was this optional extra:

Recommend me a great album I've never heard before.

148 of my 217 respondents rose to this challenge, and irritatingly enough, most of them were successful - that is, the vast majority of those 148 people did indeed recommend albums that were completely unknown to me.

This left me with a long, long, long list of albums that I now feel honour-bound to check out. Excluding the few albums I already knew like Wolf Alice's My Love is Cool, I've managed to listen to 4 of those recommendations so far, the first of which was Earth & Earthly Things by a Nothern Irish outfit called Cutaways.

I made Earth & Earthly Things the first step on my journey of discovery for one simple reason: it was free. It proved to be a good choice: the album is packed with great riffs and melodies, and its general feel is reminiscent of a slightly more approachable Los Campesinos! which is a big plus in my book.