Reviewed by: Peter Parrish
Ghost Rock is a term which crops up a lot in relation to Piano Magic. Possibly haunting them somewhat, if you’ll excuse that lazy metaphor. It even had a cameo role in the group’s last outing on Stylus, materializing inside our review of their 2005 full-length Disaffected. There, the phrase was defined as “... a new genre name for pop music refined from the Durutti Column and Disco Inferno.” Which was a handy summary, because when I tried to do a spot of research the only other thing I found was a dreadful looking film. (“The old West.....with a new attitude!”)
In truth, it seems rather strange that a band who so regularly morph in style would acquire an attempted catch-all tag in the first place—to date they’ve enticed us with enveloping swirls, Black Box Recorder-esque electro-mope, baroque music-box chimes, and First World War concept albums, to name but a few. But it’s fitting that they’ve at least gained a pigeonhole which is somewhat unique, as Glen Johnson and his rotating squad of cohorts can usually be relied upon to deliver something out of the ordinary. To the extent that they’ll merrily hop between record labels until they find one which leaves them alone long enough to do precisely what they want. It’s this uncompromising attitude which gives the majority of their assorted albums and EPs a sense of timelessness, or historical displacement; and, as far as I can tell, Ghost Rock provides a tangible phrase to apply to this intangible nature.
At this point, a cheeky fellow might say that the one thing Piano Magic haven’t tackled thus far is the comforting embrace of consistency—and then nod towards Part-Monster with an unspoken suggestion that it’s not hugely different in scope or feel from Disaffected. That would be broadly accurate, at least insofar as Johnson’s fascination with chopped and processed electronic samples has been scaled back even further (perhaps because he now has an alternative solo outlet for these adventures). There’s also a repeated sense of accessibility, at least as far as holding back on experimental song structures and instrumentals comprised purely of birdsong are concerned. To interpret any of this as a stumble in the ideas department, though, would be unreasonably harsh—and only a deeply troubled soul would be upset by the return of Angèle David-Guillou’s wonderful guest vocals (even if she is using them to describe terminal diseases and military duplicity).
Guy Fixen’s appearance as producer has affected Part-Monster in the way one might reasonably expect from his CV, which includes work with My Bloody Valentine and the Pixies. The coarser guitar sounds stemming from Fixen’s fixin’ are at odds with the ennui and quiet despair that ran throughout Disaffected, but contribute handsomely to the prickling anger that spills from “The Last Engineer”; a song indirectly lamenting the death of traditional working class industries in Britain. Similar squalls propel “Saints Preserve Us” with a flurry of noise, offering the faintest of echoes back to the drifts of “Snowfall Soon” from Low Birth Weight—and billow beneath the prominent bass and enigmatic narrative of “The King Cannot Be Found.” The mysterious subject matter offered by the latter track—which could be alluding to monarchs past, taking its cue from literature, or simply weaving an extended metaphor about something else entirely—is precisely the sort of otherworldly Piano Magic resonance that meshes so effortlessly with the echo and delay of their current incarnation. Through this maze of shrouded references, harrowing personal experience and national unease, the group generate a hazy, illusionary world of gentlemen and steel—evoking imaginary steam-punk Victoriana, recognizable to anyone familiar with The Chaos Engine.
During their quieter spells (which become more regular as the record progresses, as if it were gradually folding inwards upon itself), the group tend to dwell upon matters that are rather mournful; be they concerns about the rapidly passing years and approaching shadow of death, or a softly-spoken rumination which could be a tribute to Joseph Merrick—but may just as easily be about the issues of disfigurement in general. All of which serves to demonstrate that, even if the aural direction has begun to settle in recent times, Johnson’s emotional state is restless as ever—ensuring that creativity continues to flow from his vexed mind. Ditching the glitches for guitars hasn’t chased away the spectres, but it has energized the very same phantoms in interesting ways; so hide the fine china and bid a chilly welcome to the unpredictable moods and occasional violent outbursts of the new Poltergeist Groove.
hroughout the ten gloriously contrary years of Piano Magic’s existence, there have been two regular driving-impulses that have channelled Glen Johnson’s unfeasibly rich songwriting; one being a love/hate affair with England/Englishness, another being an innate inability to lie about himself in his lyrics. The former dichotomised compulsion has expanded even further in recent years; with the band increasingly untroubled by the continued indifference of the British music industry as the pull from Continental Europe grows even stronger (noticeably manifest in relatively large live sojourns in Spain, Italy and Russia), whilst the group’s eulogising of early-to-mid ‘80s English musical exotica has become even more blatant and unrepentant. In respect to the latter stimulus, Johnson’s lyricism has drifted even further into naked diarising; magnified intensively through the evocatively empathising tones of French chanteuse Angèle David-Guillou and his own increasingly strong vocal presence.
So forceful has the flow of these twining tributaries become, that one singular unsegregated outlet is not currently enough to contain Johnson’s hyperactive muse. Thus, the ostensibly ‘solo’ Textile Ranch alias has allowed Johnson to indulge in his penchant for brittle bedroom-based electronica (notably on a recent split-EP for Static Caravan) and his partnering with Piano Magic keyboardist Cedric Pin in the newly-formed Future Conditional (for the alluring We Don’t Just Disappear LP, even more recently) has celebrated the late-‘70s/early-‘80s synth-pop experimentation of OMD, New Order and Kraftwerk. Having siphoned-off his intoxicating overspill, for the newly-minted Part-Monster Johnson has trimmed-back Piano Magic to a raw and nervy essence. Whilst this doesn’t exactly mean Piano Magic unplugged, unproduced or unfinessed, Part-Monster is the closest the Johnson and co. have come to capturing the thrust of their live shows or - at the very least - revisiting the dark beatific menace of 2000’s Artists’ Rifles and 2003’s The Troubled Sleep of Piano Magic. Put in cruder terms; Part-Monster is essentially Piano Magic’s “big-guitar, big-heart and big-autobiographic” record, albeit without the clichés that such a demarcation might entail.
Very much a record of two ‘sides’; the first-half holding a more wide-screen vision and the second constricted by claustrophobic introspection. The opening jerk of “The Last Engineer” is as raucous and soaring as Piano Magic get; all swirling reverb ‘n’ delay-heavy guitars, insistent driving drums, ethereal keyboard washes and a lyric referring to Johnson’s bittersweet dole-driven migration from Nottingham to London in the mid-‘90s (“I tried to follow my father/He was the last engineer/But they’d closed all the factories/And his steps disappeared”). In its wake, comes the majestic slow-motion centrepiece of “England’s Always Better (As You’re Pulling Away)”, an astute vocal/lyrical collaboration with Simon Rivers of The Bitter Springs, that both celebrates and denigrates notions of Englishness through Morrissey-like bleak wit; “Watch the sun going down on our rusty crown/All apologies and queues and bright red people with ludicrous views”. By track three, Johnson is back inside himself via a guitar-driven rebuild of “Incurable” (previously heard in more electronic form on 2006’s EP of the same name); finding Angèle’s bewitched pipes drawing-out Johnson’s self-deprecating dourness with effortless grace. Contrastingly, the solemn Dead Can Dance-indebted baroque of “Soldier Song” finds Angèle enunciating Johnson’s sarcastic satire on British military traditions; “You fought for your country, you fought for your queen/Now everyone’s happy, now everyone’s free.” The album mid-point of “The King Cannot Be Found” is more easy to decipher sonically than lyrically, as its swathes of Durutti Column guitars and its forthright Joy Division bass-line defiantly fly-in-the-face of the English fashionista-mafia Johnson so despises.
The instrumental “Great Escapes” goes even further into the realms of rampant 4AD/Factory Records retro, with wave-upon-wave of sublime proto-shoegaze shimmering leading the album into its more oblique second-half. On “Cities & Factories”, Johnson is back to a more sedate setting, musing upon on his tangled-heartstrings by way of epic and unashamed verbosity; “This heart, it is proud to have loved you/This heart is not cold to the touch/This heart never ran from your kindness/This heart never asked you for much”. On the equally mid-tempo and introspective “Halfway Through”, Johnson perhaps loses the long-player some of its momentum, but then the subsequent six-string churning of “Saints Preserve Us” helps to reignite the band, as well as throwing out a choice Piano Magic manifesto commitment; “Kick out this notion that anything goes/You’re better off sticking to what you know”. By the closing whisper of the titular track, the dust settles into philosophical reflection as Johnson and Angèle are locked-into a sparse acoustic duet. With his demure deadpan offset by Angèle’s serene harmonising, more of Johnson’s self-descriptive bone-dry humour drips into the ghostly ambience (“And I’m tired of easy music/And I’m tired of pretty girls/And I’m tired of being tired”) to end proceedings with the forewarning that Piano Magic’s convoluting character will, of course, be reborn once more.
It almost goes without saying that Part-Monster is not an easy entry-road in the shadowy dominion of Piano Magic, thanks to its jagged geography, its desolate climate and its remorseless ramparts. It is, however, a fearless and powerful piece of work that should - if there were any true cultural justice – remind British music-lovers of the importance of Piano Magic’s forever-potent ‘enemy-within’ status.
-Adrian P.
01/05/07
Piano Magic
Part-Monster
[Important Records; 2007]
There's a moment on Piano Magic's excellent The Troubled Sleep of... album from 2003 where singer Angele David-Guillou sighs, "You turn on your side, like you have to face north/ Or else you can't sleep: The unwritten law." It feels important, this moment, to the extent that any pinpoint coalescence of a new phase in a random indie band's musical development can be. Where before one sensed that for Piano Magic the song was simply a framework notion in which other, perhaps more interesting things could be achieved, on the gentle "The Unwritten Law" it's like the two levels, sound and song, merged and became indistinguishable: For better or worse, Piano Magic were now songwriters, rock performers.
And yet, even though it was done with a typically measured grace, Piano Magic's transformation from their original status as Glen Johnson's revolving-door avant-indie "project" into a full-fledged rock band still surprises, and perplexes a bit, four years on. Perhaps it's simply that, whatever story it was that earlier, amorphous pieces such as "I Am the Sub-Librarian" were meant to be telling, it surely couldn't end in glove-sniffing guitar dynamics. But here we are with Part-Monster, the group's loudest and most straightforwardly songful effort yet. For the first time, a new album from Piano Magic heralds no new stylistic shifts (even 2005's Disaffected included a few winsome homages to Be Music's electro-pop), instead building on the controlled riffs and moody post-punk songforms that dominated Disaffected, interspersing them with quiet moments that could come from any stage of the group's evolution.
It would make sense for the group's embrace of post-punk revivalism to recall the chilly sparseness of Joy Division or Wire circa 154, but instead Part-Monster's rock songs are voluptuously thick, coloured in with ethereal keyboards but giving full reign to a guitar sound whose fuzzy raggedness recalls The Cure and The Comsat Angels in its baroque prettiness and ember-like smoulder. This thickness works admirably: the arrangements on the throbbing album owner "The Last Engineer" or the careening "Great Escapes" are vast and stormy enough to add a certain grandeur to Johnson's plaintively murmured apocalyptic visions. It's on the sprinkling of softer tracks that Johnson's camp miserablism (in the Morrissey sense) becomes wearisome: "England's Always Better (As You're Pulling Away)", sounds exactly as you'd expect, its melodramatic melancholy only saved by a charmingly dolorous extended detour into a spoken word piece courtesy of The Bitter Springs' Simon Rivers, over a funereal horn arrangement kidnapped from old Mogwai records (it's better than that makes it sound though). No such luck for the acoustic whimpers of the title track, which offers no relief from Johnson's carefully staged self-pity.
Perhaps Johnson's art is more compelling when he keeps it at arm's length from himself, giving breath to an idea of something (or someone) else else rather than infusing the song with his own persona. Part-Monster works best when he lets his guitars speak for him, or when he shares around vocal duties: David-Guillou's shimmering, partly electronic "Soldier Song" harks back to the antiquarian stiffness of Artists' Rifles, and is a powerful reminder that Johnson's songs are often best performed as if staring through a window at something occurring off-stage, their chilly reserve giving shape to some emotional content by carefully observing and tracing its outline.
Part-Monster's mild drop-off relative to its preceding albums is not yet cause for concern: Piano Magic have stumbled before, only to right themselves marvellously. It's arguable, in fact, that there's no drop-off at all: Song-for-song this is as strong as they've ever been. But there's a nagging sense that they may finally have tiptoed into redundancy, that the noise and motion of this album is designed to conceal either a failure to find new ideas or complacency about searching in the first place. Perhaps I'm simply concerned that "a strong collection of new songs" is all that the new Piano Magic have to offer these days: it's an idea the old Piano Magic probably would have scorned.
-Tim Finney, August 20, 2007
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