A Rattle Through Fragments & Curiosities by Armstrong

Some years ago, I downloaded A Brilliant Escape. a free sampler from Ontario-based record label The Beautiful Music. This compilation (still freely available here if you fancy a listen) brightened up many a dreary afternoon at work back when I first acquired it in 2013, and even now I find it a far more enjoyable listen than many albums I actually paid money for. A Brilliant Escape is very generous for a free sampler, offering up lots of good songs and several great ones: my personal favourites are the weepy I Hope He's Everything You Wanted Me to Be by Scottish miserablists The Just Joans and a wonderful track called This One by somebody named Armstrong.

Love, Unlove: This by Tammy

Brooklyn duo Tammy bill themselves as a 'sex folk' band, but if you're looking for songs about throbbing members, quivering womanhoods and screaming orgasms, you'll have to look elsewhere. Tammy tell the stories either side of the sexual encounters; they sing the moments leading up to sex and the moments that come afterwards.

Vampire Stories: An Interview with Adam Klopp of Choir Boy

Released towards the end of 2016, Choir Boy's Passive with Desire is a haunting, lushly-textured album that sounds like it was torn directly from the dark underbelly of the 1980s. Some of its songs are beautifully bittersweet; others sound downhearted and despondent; still others sound utterly tormented.

It all makes for a rather bewitching listening experience, and it's all pinned together by the gloriously ghostly falsetto of Adam Klopp from Ohio, USA. Adam was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about Passive with Desire - read on to find out all about his musical influences, his fondness for vampire imagery, and quite a bit more besides. 

photograph from facebook.com/choirboychoirboy

The Album Wall: What does it mean to be 'passive with desire'?

Adam Klopp: The phrase 'passive with desire' is a reference to a conversation I had with a friend near the tail end of the writing process. She brought up how people can be passively suicidal - not necessarily actively trying to die, but hoping the universe might take control and do away with you via car crash or something. I hadn't  heard the concept articulated like that before, and it really resonated with me. I think a lot of people get depressed or nihilistic and fantasize about not existing, even if they're not at risk of ending their own lives.

Damien Rice & The Story of O

Damien Rice's debut album O came out exactly 15 years ago today. To mark this anniversary, I thought I'd take a look back at the most delicate LP of 2002 and try to work out exactly what it's all about.

Why did Damien Rice call his first album 'O'? Several years ago, I wrote a blog post suggesting several possible explanations: it's an exhortation to God, it's a reference to his Irish heritage, it's a number zero signifying worthlessness! I felt very clever and insightful and pleased with myself until someone on Twitter came along and burst my smug little bubble:

@TheAlbumWall in amie the lyric goes "read me the stories of O" surely it's that?

— Craig (@craigpearce) January 13, 2014

How could I have missed it? In all my pondering and theorising about the symbolism of the letter O, I had overlooked the fact that Amie, O's sixth track, contains a whopping great title drop:

"Amie, come sit on my wall
And read me the Story of O
Tell it like you still believe
That the end of the century
Brings a change for you and me"

As you may be aware, Story of O (or Histoire d'O if you speak French) is an erotic novel that was originally published in the mid-20th century. Its central character, only ever referred to as 'O', is a fashion photographer who willingly becomes a sexual slave and grows more and more submissive as the story goes on; I won't go into the beady details right now, but Story of O can be read in full on the Internet Archive if you're so inclined. I must admit that I haven't read it myself, but from what I've heard it makes 50 Shades of Grey look like an issue of Jackie.

A Ghostly Yearning: Passive with Desire by Choir Boy

The artwork for Choir Boy's Passive with Desire (released late last year on Team Love Records) features a pair of vampires with pale faces, black cloaks, fearsome fangs and blood-stained lips. One of them is eyeing you up hungrily, while the other twin appears to be in a state of near-orgasm as he imagines biting into your neck and bursting open your jugular vein.

Choir Boy mainman Adam Klopp - the man who dressed up as Dracula for those two photos - will offer you a dozen different explanations as to what the bloodthirsty vampires on the cover of his band's first album represent. They reflect the album's themes of death and depression and darkness, but there's also a nostalgic element to the image, which was conceived - at least in part - as an attempt to recreate a Halloween photo from Klopp's childhood. Then there's the way in which vampires, with their habit for feeding off of others, might be seen as a metaphor for abusive relationships, or our greedy capitalist society, or...

Yes, one can read lots of different things into the vampire imagery that adorns this album (and has also shown up in Choir Boy's gig posters, band photos, and a music video). But funnily enough, when I actually *listen* to Passive with Desire, I don't hear vampires at all - I hear a ghost.