Declan Welsh and The Decadent West – Feeble (Feat Helicon and Al Lover)
Trainspotting-core. That’s the genre we should’ve got once Irvine Welsh’s novel was turned into a globally successful film. But, instead, all the actors got job offers from sugar-sweet comedies, the writer moved on to other things (only occasionally returning to his characters), and the audiences just sat around getting older and losing energy.
It’s an especially sad turn of events for most of the Scottish bands. With popular culture suddenly zooming in on Edinburgh and nearby areas, most of the recording artists who achieved success opted for friendly, polite pop-rock soundscapes. What a wasted opportunity!
But maybe there’s a way to redo it all. Maybe we can still get Trainspotting-core. Declan Welsh and The Decadent West are mad and talented enough to do it. “Feeble” is one of the best post-punk singles you’ve heard all year!
And, chances are that you’ve heard a lot of post-punk, plenty of lads from England barking about the weather being terrible. On the other hand, there’s a sense of urgency about “Feeble,” the feeling that the person singing it might just collapse at any moment, which makes it truly special, and with Scottish-tinged vocals, might mean that we finally get what we needed all along.
Dima Midborn – Papa Pop
If you were a typical pop-rock listener and music collector years ago, you had to pace yourself when it came to eccentric figures, quirky releases, and bizarre sonic experiments. There was only so much room in a collection, likely dominated by more conventional recordings, and only so much money you felt that you could spend on acquiring those records.
There was, likely, no Dima Midborn on the shelves of your record store. The strange visionaries weren’t many, and they were fighting each other for real estate. Buy that strange Captain Beefheart record that critics kept raving about, and there didn’t seem to be any reason to get one by his one-time protector, Frank Zappa, for example. Spend money to get someone to tape for you a strange Eastern European record, and you might regret it once you actually listen to the recording.
We can rejoice at the fact that now, the vast majority of us have access to all music. That’s wild! But the doors to musical experimentation have opened up, and you need to make smart choices.
Stick to what you know, perhaps! What is clear is that modern Serbian eccentric, sophisticated pop records like Dima Midborn’s “Papa Pop” have made a bit of a splash in recent years. Perhaps this is a way to fight against the simply dreadful ethno-pop that’s turned into something of an internet meme.
Listening to the record, it also becomes clear that Midborn’s aim is more than simply to create jazz in odd time signatures. “Papa Pop” is a strangely mournful, unusually orchestrated song, the art-rock equivalent of the wedding reception floating away on the river at the end of the film. It’s the crazed celebration of life in the face of certain death that is wholly a Balkan trait.
