âI wonât bother trying to describe the sound here suffice to say it has an awesome gut-level whack and that it just well, ârumblesâ inside of you.â
feedtime review by SIMON LONERGAN, Editor
B SIDE
Special Double Issue 17/18
page 41
Oct/Nov 1986
feedtimeâs recordings from the 1980s were issued as a box set The Aberrant Years on Sub Pop in 2012
feedtime at bandcamp
feedtimeâs Gas (In The Red) was one of FRRâs ⰠBEST REASONS TO WRITE FUCKINâ RECORD REVIEWS IN 2017 â°Â
B Side Special Double Issue 17/18 excavated and gifted to FRR by Skull Von Schiele
Every year, picking favorites seems more like an exercise in futility. You listen to a small subset of the available music, because itâs what people send you, itâs what comes on when you tune into WFMU, itâs what your friends write about or post on Now Playing, etc. and no human being can listen to everything or even a good portion of it. Then because of the way youâre wired and what you eat and who you know and a thousand other essentially random factors, you like what you like out of that small subset. I, personally, have never felt more out of the mainstream or less influential than this year. (Not that I was ever very on the pulse of whatâs popular, but stillâŠ)
So anyway, with that caveat, music was as important as ever in my life, and maybe more so, because of the continual flood of unbelievable, awful, comically evil events on the world stage. We somehow seem to have elected Voldemort as president, a sex-abusing, corrupt, traitorous idiot, who will not shut up even for an instant, despite having a vocabulary of approximately 20 words. So turn it up, drown it out, take it awayâŠthe music remained very good this year, even when nothing else did.
It was a year when Michael Chapman made one of his best records ever, 50 years into his career, and backed by a brash young collection of guitar slingers and new jack folk dudes â two of whom (Steve Gunn and James Elkington) came out with their own excellent records as well. It was a year when a fractious, not entirely comfortable collaboration between West African traditionalists and French punk rockers pretty much owned my stereo, when Mark Lanegan guested on a haunting album by Tinawaren and also turned in his own soul-stirring rock album. Â I might have listened to less straight up guitar banging this year than usual, but if you have to pick a couple, you could do a lot worse than Xetaâs Husker Du-ish The Tower or feedtimeâs back-from-the-hiatus Gas. More fantastic albums from Protomartyr and the Sleaford Mods, not surprising, but welcome anyway, and the wonderfully mordant, rueful and very Irish outing from Seamus Fogarty, which no one else seemed to pick up on, but I loved.Â
My two favorite songs this year will not appear on anyone elseâs songs of the year lists, but whatever, next time youâre feeling wistful, check out Jack Cooperâs âMemphis, Lancashireâ or hone in on the mesmerizing instrumental break (thatâs Chicago free-jazz cellist Tomeka Reid) on James Elkingtonâs âWading the Vapors.â  I could also listen to Laneganâs âEmperorâ any day, all day, despite or maybe because it kinda reminds of Iggyâs âThe Passenger.âÂ
 Reissues feel a little like cheating, because who the hell would reissue them if they werenât already great, but still, a few of them measurably enhanced my life. I spent months on Cherry Redâs Fall singles collection and another very happy week or so talking about them with my Dusted pals. And discovering  Jackie Shane â both for the quality of the music and the amazing story of her life â was unquestionably a highlight of this fall. Â
So with that, and out of the three hundred or so new albums that I listened to this year at least a couple times, and the maybe 100 that I played on repeat enough to have much of an opinion, here are the ones that moved me the most.
Michael Chapman â 50 (Paradise of Bachelors) Â
50 by Michael Chapman
I said in Blurt: Now in his 70s, Chapman sings with some authority about all the things you give up for a life in music â a settled abode (âSometimes You Just Driveâ), a late-model vehicle (âSpanish Incidentâ), a working relationship (âFalling from Graceâ) and cold hard wherewithal (âMoney Troublesâ). And yet, surrounded by younger and contemporary peers, in a translucent mesh of jangling, tangling guitar/bass/banjo tones, he makes a case for the difficult path heâs chosen. âYou know I donât scare easy⊠but I do get scared,â he rasps on the superlative âThat Time of the Nightâ (last heard covered by Lucinda Williams on the Oh Michael What Have You Done? tribute album and before that on 2008âs Time Past and Passing). The lilt in the line pulls the tune out of the darkness, the massed guitars and hushed group vocals bring shivering into the light.
Group Doueh & Cheveu â Dakhla Sahara Session (Born Bad)Â
From my Dusted review: This is not the kind of collaboration where you have to untangle who does what. The focus shifts from one band to another within the space of the song, and each comes out of the fray more or less as he or she went in. Cheveuâs members make no attempt to bend to the West African aesthetic, and Group Doueh plays from their rep book right over whatever punk mayhem Cheveu has put on offer. Thereâs a great deal of tension in these tunes, as two very different sets of musicians block out space for themselves. And yet, itâs a wonderful thing, feistier and more belligerent than most cross-cultural meetings. âTout Droit,â the CDâs most exhilarating cut, sets up a rousing, shout-chanted Cheveu chorus, punctuated by grunts and âhuhs,â then cuts it to ribbons with ravaging flourishes of guitar, ebullient forays of singing. The two bands are doing entirely different things, at the same exact time, and it works like a motherfucker.Â
Mark Lanegan Band â Gargoyle (Heavenly)
I celebrated my long-term affair with Mark Laneganâs voice in this review at Dusted: Mark Lanegan can sound like a voice from the crypt, his hollowed out, deep-black whisper almost too low to hear properly, a whisper like Leonard Cohen if heâd recently been to hell, a whisper that could frighten children into eating their vegetables. In Gargoyle, though, he uses this whisper sparingly; the hairs on my arm rise to it just once, during âNocturneâ and for the rest of the time, the one-time Screaming Treesâ front man sticks to melody. Gargoyle is a singing record, a tuneful record, a densely, headily arranged record that surrounds Laneganâs gothic reveries in soft glowing light. Thereâs almost no negative space in these ten songs. All are filled, end to end, with enveloping textures and sustained sounds.Â
Xetas â The Tower (12XU)
The Tower by XETAS
Hail, hail, rock and roll, say I in Dusted. Xetas, out of Austin, make an unholy racket, a noisy, feedback blurred firehose spray of sound that does not quite obscure a tendency towards tunefulness. The hooks bristle with barbed wire abrasion, putting this band more in line with HĂŒsker DĂŒ than the Wipers, but theyâre in there, glinting out of a cyclone of broken glass and diesel smoke. So, also, a kind of positivity radiates intermittently through the rage and turmoil of this bandâs attack. The Tower, Xetasâ second, vibrates with the brash, brave defiance of 99%-ers who have been beaten down, but arenât quite finished yet.Â
Jack Cooper â Sandgrown (Trouble in Mind) Â
Sandgrown by Jack Cooper
Bill Meyer and I both wanted to cover this one, and then we each did a âno, you go aheadâ kind of thing and neither one of us ended up reviewing it for Dusted, but I wrote about it for Blurt thusly:  These shimmering songs are full of ellipses, the spaces between guitar notes clouded over with wistful nostalgia for Jack Cooperâs lost seaside childhood. Cooper has gotten a fair amount of ink lately for his quietly subversive, acoustic dueling guitar duo Ultimate Painting (with Veronica Fallsâ James Hoare), also rather luminously introspective, but Sandgrown is more personal, with the smell of salt air, the sting of sea breezes, the sharp sense of loss and change running through every track.
Sleaford Mods â English Tapas (Rough Trade) Â
Back into the Sleaford Mods fold with this one, the words again appearing in Dusted: Key Markets and the follow-up EP T.C.R., to me, sounded a little thin, as if the concept of Sleaford Mods, whatever it was, had already been fully explored, the meat pried out, the beginnings of self-parody creeping in. English Tapas reverses this trend. It returns to the sly humor, the hypnotic barking aggression, the occasional whiffs of wistful tune-ish-ness slipped in between robotic beats of Divide and Exit and maybe does it one better.Â
James ElkingtonâWintres Woma (Paradise of Bachelors)
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Wintres Woma by James Elkington
I listened between the lines at Dusted: Â James Elkington, once of Zincs and now the go-to guitar guy for any number of indie icons (but most prominently, Jeff Tweedy and Richard Thompson), has an effortless skill in this latest solo album, the kind of picking prowess that dissolves like smoke into mood and atmosphere. He is a very good player, a lovely relaxed singer (in the vein of Bert Jansch) and an eccentric writer, whose songs borrow liberally from British folk tradition, but veer into unexpected directions. But if you want to know whatâs mesmerizing about this slow burning beauty of an album, listen to the intervals, where Elkington dreams jazz-inflected fever reveries with a set of musicians that includes bassist Nick Macri, drummer Tim Daisy, and, most remarkably, violinist Macie Stewart and improv-jazz cellist Tomeka Reid.
Seamus FogartyâThe Curious Hand (Domino)
I fell in love with this album the first time I heard the line in âMexicoâ about getting reamed out by the boss for a smoke break. I also reviewed an album that doesnât really exist (it was revised between promo and release) at Dusted: Â Seamus Fogarty makes shaggy songs, rumpled as if theyâd been slept in rough, and plaintive at their core but with a shrugging, wry, what-are-ya-gonna-do sense of humor. Though mostly acoustic, leaning heavily on strummed guitar with some lovely melancholy fiddle, viola and maybe cello for accents, his songs also incorporate electronics and evocative field recordings.
ProtomartyrâRelatives in Descent (Domino)
Relatives In Descent by Protomartyr
Four great albums in a row, who else is doing this?  My Dusted review: Protomartyr ruminates on the nature of knowing in its fourth full-length album, tangling knotty intellectual conundrums over an obliterating roar. Backed again by a Detroit post-punk freight-train clamor  â Greg Ahee on guitar, drummer Alex Leonard, bassist Scott Davidson â Joe Casey, the bandâs rumple-suited, bile-spitting nerve center, finds a free-associative space for rant-poems about consciousness, memory, free will and the refracted shards of current events.
 FeedtimeâGas (In the Red)
Naturally, I root for the old guys, again from Dusted:  You might expect some throat clearing, some tentative beginnings, in a band that had taken off the previous generation, but no, from the opener, âAny Good Thing,â you hear the same noisy slide-bent guitar riffs, the same rough and furious rhythms, the same growling, monster-voiced vocal attack as ever. feedtime might have gone out for a pack of cigarettes, slipped back in casually and ramped up to eleven.
  Loved these, too.
Julie ByrneâNot Even Happiness (BaDaBing)
Jaimie Branch â Fly or Die (International Anthem)
Joseph ChildressâRebirths (Empty Cellar)
Heron OblivionâThe Chapel (self-release)
TinariwenâElwan (Anti-)
Stef Chura â Messes (Urinal Cake)
Feral OhmsâS-T (Silver Current)
Pere Ubuâ20 Years in a Montana Missile Silo (Cherry Red)
Upper WildsâUpper Wilds (Thrill Jockey)
MelkbellyâNothing Valley (Wax Nine)
Kelley Stoltz â Que Aura (Castle Face)
The ClienteleâThe Age of Miracles (Merge)
Algiers â The Underside of Power (Matador)
Avey Tare â Eucalyptus (Domino)
Golden BoysâBetter than Good Times (12XU)
Gunn-Truscinski DuoâBay Head (Three-Lobed)
ContributorsâST (Monofonus Press)
Mark EitzelâHey Mr. Ferryman (Merge)
 Reissues/Comps
The FallâA Sides and B Sides (Cherry Red)
Jackie ShaneâAny Other Way (Numero Group)
V/AâOte Maloya (Strut)
 I really like books, too, so here are my favorite reads from last year as well.
 George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo
Hamid Moshin, Exit West
The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert
Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere
An American Sickness, Elizabeth Rosenthal
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, Desmond Matthew
Feedtime - Billy. Amphetamine Reptile records. 2017 reissue. This is the other record sent to me by my friend in the States. This is the "tour" edition, not sure how many of each version was pressed. Classic album by this Aussie band. Cover artwork by Haze XXL.
âIf you sill havenât heard feedtime, youâre missing out on all the fun of sucking gravel.â
fEEDTIMEÂ review by GERARD COSLOY, Editor
CONFLICT 46 Nov./Dec. 1987 (page 12)
2017 finds the world with a brand new feedtime long player! âIn The Red is proud to announce the first new album from Australiaâs favorite misanthropic noise-makers in over 20 (!!!) years. Gas finds the band sounding exactly as they always did - pummeling, gnarly and AWESOME! Limited edition on green vinyl. First come, first served. No guarantees.âÂ