The Concretes are a Stockholm-based, eight-member collective
(commune?) that sounds kinda like what you'd get if you put Nico, the
version of the Velvet Underground that recorded the group's awesome
third album, and the Jesus and Mary Chain in a recording studio with
best-of collections of The Ronettes and The Shangri-Las. In other
words, they sound sad and romantic and retro and sexy and downbeat
and heartfelt, and full of love and heartache. Which, as summer in
Northern California has given way to fall, is the right sound for the
moment.
The group's first real album, titled simply
The Concretes,
comes direct from Sweden on the group's own Licking Fingers label.
Formed in 1995, The Concretes began as a trio — singer/lyricist
Victoria Bergsman, guitarist Maria Eriksson and drummer Lisa Milberg
— but over the years have expanded such that at times, when they
perform, as many as 15 full-time and "Honorary Concretes" take the
stage. (The current lineup includes eight full-time band members.)
They began releasing singles and EPs in 1995, and in 2000 Up Records
combined two of the EPS, releasing them as a single CD album titled
Boyoubetterunow.
Somehow I missed all that. But Neumu Senior Writer Anthony Carew, who
keeps up on every cool obscure artist and band in the known universe,
recently filed a review in which he called
The Concretes "the
best record in the history of 2003 as it stands so far." Them's
fightin' words for sure, so I made use of Google and soon had an
email address for Licking Fingers. A few weeks later, what should
arrive at my P.O. box but a package containing both
The
Concretes and their CD single, "Warm Night" b/w "Final Goal."
To get this out of the way right at the start, Carew is right.
The
Concretes IS clearly one of the 10 best albums of 2003 (thus
far), right up their with The Wrens'
The Meadowlands and Jolie
Holland's
Catalpa, Damien Rice's
O, the Yeah Yeah
Yeah's
Fever to Tell, Songs; Ohia's
The Magnolia Electric
Co., Cat Power's
You Are Free, and the Pernice Brothers'
Yours, Mine & Ours.
The album's cover is a photo of a young man and a young woman,
walking along a rocky ridge. If they were walking along the sand with
the ocean behind them and sunny blue sky above them, this would be a
sappy Hallmark image. But instead of beach and waves, we see desolate
rock and dirt. The sky is grey with a strong chance of rain. And the
couple appears androgynous, wearing what could be post-apocalypse
outfits of grey and gold. Adding to the strangeness is a drawing in
red ink of a giant cat approaching them. Clearly there is no
guarantee of a happy ending to this story.
And yet the stylized cat, which reminds me by turns of Peter Max's
'60s pop art and Aubrey Beardsley's late-1800s drawings, brings a
whimsical feeling to the cover. You want to laugh. Which is so true
to right now, when so much of the day's news is so, so downbeat that
the only way out is just to pull back and laugh at the ridiculousness
of it all.
And that's where the timeless yet timely sounds and emotions of
The Concretes come in. I mean, they're off in Sweden making
this very European yet very American-influenced rock music. Check out
their pictures on the
lickingfingers.com Web site
and you'll find what looks like a bunch of '60s hippies who haven't
gotten totally over the British Invasion.
The Concretes make dreamy music that sometimes starts way minimal,
but over the course of a song grows as orchestration and background
vocals slowly build. They like that early '60s rock beat that showed
up on a number of The Shangri-Las' songs, such as "Remember (Walkin'
in the Sand)," and which was later borrowed by the VU and, two
decades later, by the Jesus and Mary Chain. The Concretes' music
would sound right at home in '60s Swinging London, yet since they
sing about the human condition, about love and loneliness and
betrayal, their songs are true for right now, just as they'll be true
for next year and the year after.
One of the album's many highlights is the gentle, languid ballad
New Friend, which begins with just a single repeating drum
beat, a bass line, and then this cool melodic guitar, before Bergsman
sings, "I called you/ She answered/ Got strangled on the way/ She
gave the phone/ Said it was for you/ Didn't know/ Didn't know/ Didn't
know/ Didn't know you got yourself a new friend." Her voice is so sad
to the point of numbness as she repeats "didn't know" and then
"didn't know you got yourself a new friend"; you hear the effect of
this betrayal on her. That line "got strangled on the way" might
seem odd at first, but when you think about it, isn't that the way
you would feel if you called up your girlfriend or boyfriend and
their "new friend" answered the phone?
The Punk Photographs of Charles Peterson
I don't remember when I loaded up my old Rio 500 MP3 player with a
bunch of Sleater-Kinney songs, but the other day, I took it along on
a walk through the cool Sonoma, California neighborhood where I live.
Listening to songs off Call the Doctor, Dig Me Out,
All Hands on the Bad One and One Beat, I thought of the
time I tagged along as the great Seattle-based photographer Charles
Peterson took pictures of the group on the streets of Portland for an
in-depth feature story that I was doing on them.
One of the photos from that session is included in Peterson's
wonderful new book, Touch Me I'm Sick (powerHouse Books)..
Peterson is the guy whose photos for a number of Sub Pop albums gave
"grunge" an image. While Seattle was the hot scene, Charles was the
photographer of the moment. This beautiful coffee-table book
convincingly yet effortlessly makes the case for Charles Peterson as
one of the great rock photographers.
I'm quite biased when it comes to Charles Peterson. I've loved his
raw black-and-white images since I first saw them in the early '90s.
His photograph of Kurt Cobain seemingly standing on his head while
playing guitar on a Vancouver stage in 1991 is pure genius (that
photo was featured on the cover of Peterson's first book,
Screaming Life, but thankfully it's also included in the new
book). When Emme Stone and I launched the Neumu Web site in June 2001
our first "Depth of Field" photo exhibit was a selection of photos by
Charles from what was then a work-in-progress, but which is now this
book, Touch Me I'm Sick.
By shooting with high-speed film, doing time exposures and using a
strobe flash unit, Charles created a unique personal style that
captures the raw power of rock 'n' roll. His onstage and offstage
photos convey the world of punk rock. Whether it's members of
Mudhoney peeing in a men's room, a tender, moody close-up of Beat
Happening, or Henry Rollins' heavily tattooed back, Peterson's photos
are unpredictable and non-clichéd and just plain great. I love
the photo of someone in Mudhoney plugging a guitar cord into an old
effects box. Another classic is of Cobain, crouched on the floor,
hand on his forehead at a Seattle record store in '91, fans standing
around hoping for an autograph. That one photo perfectly depicts the
toll on Seattle rockers from the attention that put "grunge" in the
spotlight for a few years.