Chris Lyons - The Ill-Tempered Klavier Album Review: Saturday's Child by Ray Banks Book Review: Interview - Maps

Chris Lyons - The Ill-Tempered Klavier
Album Review
Apart from boasting the most pretentious sleeve-notes since Yes quoted the Shastric Scriptures on Tales of Topographic Oceans, The Ill-Tempered Klavier is simultaneously a brave attempt to push forward fusion and a lesson in why virtuosity is held in suspicion by the rock community. 

Chris Lyon is at his best when he sticks closely to the classical tradition - on opener Der Klavierspiel his proficiency supports an astounding array of moods and Molly's Blooming is a sensuous Cool Jazz strut. Unfortunately, Kevin Glasgow's busy bass frequently overburdens the songs, tipping Pterodactylic Hexameters towards the pomposity of its title and Lyon's tendency to noodle renders Free Market Orgonomics and Offa's Dyke as soporific as Elton John instrumentals. 

Still, when he lets the drummer have some - notably on Thus Swung Zarasthrustra and the almost rocking Everything You Know - he generates an intellectual art-rock excitement. His skills are not to be doubted, but Lyon is fusing the wrong influences, heading back to the overblown super-groups and Miles Davis' electric period rather than thinking about how God Speed! or Talk Talk allow jazz and classical to inform their music.

Saturday's Child by Ray Banks
Book Review
A Northern England of incest, alcoholism, drug abuse and casual violenceCal Innes is a hardboiled ex-con caught up in the search for a mobster's missing daughter. Leaving no cliche unturned, Ray Banks drags his ill-defined cast through a Northern England of incest, alcoholism, drug abuse and casual violence towards an unsatisfying conclusion.

Attempting the taut prose of Chandler or Spillane, Banks mangles working class patter into short sentences and garish similes, never capturing the authentic voices of his unpleasant and ignorant narrators. The protagonist Innes comes across as a moron, emotionally needy and ill-suited to his role as Private Investigator - his sudden rampage across Newcastle is jarringly out of character; his antagonist Mo is little more than a stereotyped thug. Female characters are, inevitably, defined by their sexuality. The worth of men depends solely on their ability to hand out or receive beatings. Dialogue is stilted, and the plot stumbles along driven by obvious surprises.

Ironically, there is nothing shocking about the violence: it is described with a glib realism that has been done before, and better. The descriptive passages are ponderous, characters lack interior lives and fail to learn from mistakes. If this suggests some purpose to Saturday's Child, the unsympathetic lead and mediocre storytelling render it impotent.

Donkey Punch by Ray Banks
Book Review
By transplanting his thuggish noir from Manchester to LA, Ray Banks' second Cal Innes novel has two sets of mean streets to pace. Not that his grasp of characterisation has gotten any stronger: Donkey Punch is as terse and macho as Saturday's Child, although his hard-boiled writing style has become more poised and confident.

As before, Innes is an incompetent investigator: it is his own stupidity that generates the various dramas that enliven the slim plot. Sucked into a world that turns out to be far less corrupt than it appears, Innes stumbles through his adventures, using his fists when a little intelligence would suffice. Other characters shamble in and out, barely defined beyond their usefulness - the rowdy youth, the boxing wannabe, the ambitious father.

The twists and turns of the narrative are evident to the reader, if not to the characters: if Banks is trying to create a grim reality where ignorance is dominant, he would do better if his protagonist was likable. As it is, Donkey Punch is like a British boxer - promising a great deal at the start, but lacking the discipline, persistence and strength to really take down the Americans. 

Maps: Not so much shoe-gazing as star-gazing.
It could be the consequences of a night out in Glasgow, but James Chapman is difficult to interview. He isn't surly, or rock-star arrogant - indeed, he is charming, enthusiastic about music and witty. At the same time, he appears slightly surprised at finding himself on tour and being interviewed.

"It's taken me a long time to get here," he admits, when asked about his expectations for the tour. "I never thought that I'd do a live tour, because I never thought that I'd get signed."

It is this humility - as well as the years spent working away at his distinctive fusion of melody and electronica - that separates James from many of his peers. His well-received album, which has been variously compared to My Bloody Valentine and the intelligent techno that inspired Radiohead's foray into experimentalism, harks back to the original fusions of dance music and guitar pop. Having one ear for the melodic hook and another for lush texture, Maps' tracks are concise bursts of distorted exotica. James' presence on record is gentle, even melancholic, whispering secrets within whirls of guitar and keyboards. His tastes, and approach to making music, are eclectic.

"It's quite mixed: years of hanging around, working on it. I do like stuff that is ambient, but I love classical music as well. Vaughan Williams' Fantasia blows me away every time. I don't listen to a lot of really old stuff - except maybe the Beach Boys. But my real love is electronica: I got into it at university and it was a whole new world for me."

This doesn't mean, however, that he is trying to copy his influences. "I don't make music on a computer - but I use a sixteen track tape recorder and a drum machine. Every song is made differently - sometimes I record the melody first, sometimes the lyric. And I always wanted to have a band, and not just be me and a laptop. It's more interesting."

In performance, Maps recreate their studio sound using state of the art technology and old school guitar effects to whip up the orchestrated chaos that bands like Sonic Youth pioneered back in the late 1980s. Yet Maps are lighter, more pastoral - perhaps because of James' own background.
"I live in a village outside of Northampton - a nice place to relax in: there's a good vibe and a good scene. I am not really part of the Northampton gothic tradition!"

But comparisons have been made the shoe-gazing scene: bands that followed in the wake of My Bloody Valentine, but were swept away by Britpop.

"Some of my new stuff is a bit more poppy. I'm not so much shoe-gazing as... star-gazing. Yeah, you can use that. Star-gazing."

Getting Viler on the Audience

Beautiful Cyril

I luv a bit o the old Fight Club. Chuck Wasshisface caight that postmillennial vibe jus right, the crisis of masculinity collidin wiv vague anti-capitalist aggression. Ee's written sum ova stuff - baht chokin an that - an ee's back wiv a scathing satire on tha fashion fer BDSM books. Neva sure wevver Chuck's bein proper sexist ors makin a point abaht ow women get the shitty end of the stick most o tha time.

Beautiful You  is abaht this geeza oos a scientific and sexual genius. Ee's rich and desired, like him off Fifty Shades. Turns out ee likes to pump women not fer fun but ta learn abaht their desires. Then ee goes on to exploit is fantastic facts, and turns all the women in the ole world into zombies frew is sex toys. Then them Promise Keepas get into it, make a big bonfire out of the toys, which explode and NYC becomes like a war zone.

Anyway, the plot ain't important - is all a bit silly, wiv mystic burds up in the ills knawing abaht sex magic, science and crappy sex scenes. The writing is well sloppy in places - wat's a 'clipboard shaped bruise, FFS - but Chuck's more into the absurd than the narrative. He's avin a laff takin pot-shots at boy bands, vampire novels and the inability of men to please their wives wivaht shovin plastic up em. 

Mad Cyril is avin this one... easy to read, plenty of jokes, bit of nawty action an Chuck's distinctive fast-paced style. Gets a bit radio-rental at the end, mind. Still, took ma mind off the drubbin Chealsea jus started givin the orns. 

Archangel's Shadow by Nalini Singh

Archangel's Shadow may be set in a world inhabited by angels and vampires - the former representing a kind of theocratic oligarchy ruling a future dystopia - but its core romantic fantasy seems to have come from an X-Men fan fiction. The heroine is unable to touch people, lest she receives their memories, and the hero  - a vampire who wants his beloved to join him in immortality - is a Cajun who says 'chere' all the time. It's Gambit and Rogue, only chasing bad vampires and occasionally bursting into a chapter's worth of erotic action. It's surprising that the novel maintains a hegemonic dominance over comics when examples like this are clearly indebted to the most... democratic... aspects of fandom.

But then, Archangel's Shadow has no pretentions: it's a rollercoaster read et c. There's an almost postmodern panache in the way it flips between genres. At various points, it is a police procedural (with vampires), a love story (with a telepath, of sorts), erotic fiction (telepath and vampire), fantasy politics (archangels), a detective story (vampires again) and an old fashioned tale of family values (an angelic mother-in-law). It hits all the markets for trashy cheap fun. 

The sexy bits are laboured, and the sexual tension between Ashwini and her Janvier goes on for way too long (like, more than half the book before he turns out to be a great shag). There is a strange fascination with BDSM relationships (generally seen as bad, unless the vampire bites nicely) and a bit too much enthusiasm for the torture of immortal criminals (these are really rather more explicit than comfortable). But Nalini Singh does create an intriguing alternative universe and the action never stops - and the heroine, if sometimes a bit too familiar as she chats on her mobile about small matters in the middle of chasing some vampire drug cartel, is good and tough enough to get the epithet of feminist hero.

Rusty Sheriff's Badge Brand and Me (part 3)

I need to push on with my meditation on Russell Brand. It's likely that I am going to become so frustrated by the rampant egotism of Booky Wook 2 that it is going to end up back at the British Art Foundation shop, returned to its home like an orphan who looked all cute when I first adopted him, but rapidly turned into a shit-machine and a bawling brat.

It's not just the constant bragging about all them birds what he pumped (Sachsgate is turned into a story about that one time he had group sessions with all of a burlesque dance troupe), it's the inability to structure even the most amusing anecdote without assurances that it is well funny. For every odd zinger - and ol' Russ can slip these in with the agility of David Gower flipping the ball to the boundary past the slips - there's a mangled repetition of some story that got him a laugh in the men's room. Brand doesn't so much polish a turd, he sprinkles diamonds into elephant shit and hopes someone will mistake it for a necklace.

Apparently picking up shit. I know how that feels.

Recounting the MTV awards (or the VMAs - I have no patience to go back and check), he almost tells a brilliant joke, that combines Foucault's critique of the Victorian cult of chastity and the marketing of the Jonas Brothers as virgins. Had he pulled it off, I reckon that could have been my favourite joke of all time: it mocks the Disney empire and has a message from my favourite post-modern thinker. Yet he frames it, deconstructs it, stamps the joy from the humour until it reads as if he is just showing off his wide range of references (which I am impressed by).

That's the feeling I get from Booky Wook 2: disappointment at a missed opportunity. Fair enough: he dedicated it to Katy Perry, and he probably feels the same about his marriage to her.

However, the real reason I keep reading and writing is not to fish out the magic moments but to engage in an evaluation of the subtext of Brand's anecdotes, and to dive into the sea of his subconscious and to discover the secret subterranean passage that leads to the loch of my own performed identity.

It is time to talk about sexism.

My Father's Notebook - Kader Abdolah

Kader Abdolah weaves Sufi myths, political intrigue and biography into a charming meditation on the relationship between father and son

BOOK REVIEW BY GARETH K VILE.

PUBLISHED 14 AUGUST 2006

Aga Akbar is a deaf mute, born in an isolated Iranian village. His son, an exile in Holland, escapes from the theocratic regime of Khomeini, receives his father's notebook and reconstructs his life. Kader Abdolah weaves Sufi myths, political intrigue and biography into a charming meditation on the relationship between father and son.

Abdoulah's prose is crisp and concise: he moves characters through revolutions and family dramas at a steady rate. He never descends to cliché or melodrama, and his descriptions of historical events are clear and precise. The early chapters' magic realism gradually gives way to grittier modern realism, mirroring the changes in Iranian society and the struggle of the son to integrate in the West.

The book gives an insight into the role of Islam in Iranian communities - many of the strongest passages revolving around the status of a shrine - but it is also a domestic story, recreating lost rural communities and exploring the experience of wives, daughters and the disabled.

'My Father's Notebook' is a moving account of one man's life that serves as a fascinating reflection on conflicts between religion and politics, homeland and exile, the past and the present.