Lost Coastlines

I'd as good as written off Okkervil River after last years damp squib, The Stage Names, and their live show I saw at Cardiff Barfly, where they honked out an hour and fifteen minutes of tuneless dirge, and tried to polish off a dreadful performance by doing a crowd singalong of Westfall, both made for dreadful 2007 for one of the bands on the cusp of being one of my all-time favourites. Likewise, Jens Lekman, whom I didn't get to see live, but managed to squeeze out an atypically and depressingly awful album last year which went pretty much against every reason I liked the guy in the first place. But these things can't be helped. I'm long past the naivety of expecting my favourite bands to consistently deliver. But although I'll probably never forgive Okkervil River for being total shit last December, I'm reconsidering The Stage Names. Well actually, I'm not, it's still not very good, but next month, they're releasing The Stand-Ins, which is either an accompanying album, or an appendix to the former album. Either way it explores similar themes and ideas that were brought up in The Stage Names, and the artwork even sits underneath the previous albums to make a complete picture. It's like Guns and Roses waiting a year inbetween the two Use Your Illusions instead of releasing them on the same day. Except The Stand Ins is more of a mini album, with three pointless instrumentals making up the full XI. And you know what, every single one of those eight tracks shits on the best bits of The Stage Names, massively. In Lost Coastlines, and the ridiculously titled Bruce Wayne Campbell Interviewed On The Roof of the Chelsea Hotel, 1978, they have twoof the best songs in their entire canon. In a way, I like the fact that what are clearly the best songs from this recording session all ended up on this album, rather than poorly diffused across the two volumes like a pungent odour. But despite this, they've been entirely overshadowed by Shearwater anyway, so I'm not why I'm really concerned with readdressing the situation.

I spent a few hours today in Pontypridd, for no real reason other than that I had to leave the house, and it didn't look like too shoddy a day. It did rain eventually, but it was such a not-as-bad-as-it-has-been day, that when I got home, I went onto the street and cleaned the outside of my window with windolene, and then opened the window and blasted blue collar indie rock into Rhymney Street. But Ponypridd was alright. I decided to go exploring more than I had done before. Previous visits with Anna involved looking at the down and very little else. The first time I went I only looked at the University of Glamorgan campus which was built on the side of a mountain and basically made me study twenty times for my A levels so I didn't have to go to university there. The person giving us a campus tour genuinely told us that he'd "only been to town (Pontypridd High Street) once, and (didn't) have any plans to go back there any time soon). He was a third year. The only times I'd been to Pontypridd in more recent years were on Sundays with Lisa when there were no buses out to Llantrisant, so we had to get the 132 at ten past seven in the morning, and then sit around at Pontypridd bus station for forty minutes either playing cards, or pop punk top trumps, or seeing who could skid further on the rain-soaked drain cover just inside the railway station. Then we'd get picked up by Abby and drink coffee in her garden, before being driven to work. It used to take nearly 3 1/2 hours to get to work. I don't miss that at all. Nor do I miss having a reason to go to Pontypridd, because it's not a particularly amazing place, and it hasn't really changed much since the very first time I went there. There's still a hill that I wouldn't ever dream of climbing because I know what's at the top (a boring university with an eerie Jim James thing going on where nobody ever leaves the campus) and a pokey little high street. Today was of little exception because the first shop I went into was a charity shop, and I had to pretend to look at books for an absolute age, because a drunk man who had no qualms with drinking Carling at just past midday in a charity shop, rifled through all the videos no less than three times. I didn'y dare ask him to move, but I had to wait because there were CDs I really wanted to buy. The rest of the town can fuck off, the only major difference was that the big stupid pointless joke shop wasn't there any more. It always amused me how such a big joke shop could ever thrive in a town where the only thing anyone does for fun is choke pigeons on the bandstand, and you can't package any of that in a Smiffy bag and hang it up next to the saucy nurse costumes. Alas, it's all gone now, it was replaced by some nondescript shit that had only filled half the building.

What I did like, though, was the side of Pontypridd I didn't even know existed, the park. The park was very pleasant, and walking around under the criss-cross shades of the avenues of trees and looking at the waterlogged crazy golf and the suspiciously clean looking swimming pool (which had done that thing a lot of open air swimming places do, which is to paint the bottom of the pool an obscene shade of turquoise which is so blinding it affects your retina to not even see dead twigs and Quaver packets when they're probably right there. The bandstand was closed to the public, because there was some sort of filming going on. I couldn't figure out what, and I did spend longer than I should have done milling around with my hands in my pockets waiting for something to happen. I watched a man who looked like Mackenzie Crook sweep some water off a path with a broom, but there were no cameras trained on him, so unless he's doing menial handywork because nobody went and saw Three and Out, I don't think the water sweeper was in the film. I wasn't really expectinh Russell Crowe or Viggo Mortenson to jump out and start pounding their chests on Pontypridd bandstand, not least when the surrounding area had been set up to look like a crappy little summer fete with coconut shys and hooplas. It was all very Sylvanian Families. I went home after that.

Post Script. I think from the comment below I didn't really express my point very well: The Stand-Ins is a GREAT album, and everything that I felt that the Stage Names lacked; imagination, a fantastic concept, memorable hooks and melodies, and a sense of the epic.