FELT (Go Kart Mozart, Denim)... Lawrence is amazing!

the first two felt albums are like tapestries that just kinda unfurl forever, a ribbon that ties around the whole earth. deserts, snowy tundras, the pacific ocean, all that

I'm going to listen to them all morning

yes indeed
i was going to list the things i like but i don't need to
mostly on "cathedral" it's the spareness of the instrumentation and the interaction between the voice, the no-snare, no-cymbals perfectly subdued drums and the guitar solo that gets me. it's so dreamy and groovy at the same time
i love it

now that i think about it, there is a felt song that is on my ipod shuffle that always comes up and i love it but idk what it's called. it's more of a dirge. prob from the same album.
they are a band that is fun to listen to when i'm traveling from one place to another. also i didn't really hear them til my mid-late 30s so i know it's not nostalgia talking.

the first two albums take my breath away

I've been with various folks in bands who rock in a different idiom and don't know Felt, but when Evergreen Dazed or any track from Crumbling comes on in my car the tone of the lead guitar lines always stops conversation.

I am listening to the Stagnant Pool while my co-workers discuss possible punishments for a student here who accidentally left her handgun in a bathroom

good lord

since I posted that the campus police have reported a second unattended gun left in a bathroom in a different building

welcome to Texas/America/my nightmare

wth

Damn. Take care.

does that happen regularly?!?

most likely explanation is they've decided to start *reporting* such incidents. but I guess a gun is like a cell phone or a sunglasses, one more thing to scoop into your day bag or forget in the bathroom.

anyway, I'm torn on these Felt reissues. I want them, but they're 25 pounds a pop. and I don't really want the bonus 7" or need a signed sticker from Lawrence. sell me a 5-CD box set for 50 pounds!

The magical combo of Laurence and Deebank is so addictive and unique to me that I rarely go back to the latter day stuff

post-Deebank has a lot to offer, but it's absolutely a different kettle of fish

i feel like people don't give ignite the seven cannons enough credit. it's amazing for being the only album with lawrence deebank AND duffy

what happened to gary ainge?

ooh, look at this live recording from Spain from 1985, they sound great!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUcw_CkIkT8

bass player looks so sad though

Gary Ainge did this album with Marco Thomas (who I think is the sad bassist above?) under the name Fly in 2002:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrgOjndyyqo

Put The Needle Down And Fly by Fly is one of the albums listed in the sleeve notes to Instant Wigwam and Igloo Mixture, one of my happiest moments in a record shop was seeing Put The Needle Down And Fly and realising it actually existed after assuming that both the album and band were fictional

(the album came out a couple of years after Instant Wigwam but Fly had already released a single in 1998 - I wonder if it was Lawrence who came up with the album title, though)

Lawrence came up with all the song titles on the Fly album

bass player looks so sad though

no one is playing bass... that's deebank.

what happened to gary ainge?

gary plays with lawrence... and vic godard.

Loved On The Hot Dog Streets massively so can't wait for the new album.

no one is playing bass... that's deebank.

nah, I meant the guy to the left of lawrence... I guess he isn't holding a guitar though!

that's duffy.

looks like he just realized he left his gun in the bathroom

some clips of the new ignite mixes on bleep: https://bleep.com/release/95538-felt-ignite-the-seven-cannons

Hmmmm, it's a strange thing, the songs come through a lot more clearly, I feel like I'm hearing the lyrics for the first time, but also it sound a little leaden, lacking the lightness and subtlety of the earlier albums. The drums plod a little. Maybe it takes getting used to. I do wonder if Guthrie just didn't do an amazing job of recording felt and flung the dense cocteaus filigree all over it as a smoke screen.

Haha Duffy does look like a sulky 13 year old in that footage.

Maurice soloing blithely, obliviously through ballad of the band is also priceless.

I'm kind of passively approving of mozarts minimart without expecting to like it overmuch. It's great that he's stuck to the GKM remit and made a hugely irritating and slightly disturbing collection of novelty pop as opposed to the Denim on a shoestring of the last two. They were a hoot in Brighton, Vic Godard leapt on stage and tucked a tenner in lawrence's pocket during relative poverty.

these mixes r weird

It sounds like there's a little more space and separation. You can hear the dinky drums better. Might just be me, those are some lofi clips

the clips I posted aren't actually the remixed versions 😔 they're available on streaming services tho

Moazart's Mini Mart is all that matters

I was more going by the clips in these excellent interviews:

https://www.mixcloud.com/sohoradio/morning-glory-13022018/

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09rws9l#play

(scarlet servants and i don't know which way to turn),

by the way, "Denim on a shoestring" & "hugely irritating and slightly disturbing collection of novelty pop" are in no way meats as pejoratives, i adore them all...

sorry that 2nd link should have been:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09rn2mb

& I highly recommend it, Gideon Coe is a big fan & lawrence is on good form.

If you love Felt but dismiss Denim or Go-Kart Mozart give them another chance. The idea that they are all novelty songs is wrong. Yes, there's "The New Potatoes" but that's an anomaly. There's a lot of serious, clever and creative songwriting about consumerism, drug addiction, failed love affairs, being in a band etc - which Felt also covered - instrumentals not much different from Let The Snakes Crinkle Their Heads or Train Above the City. The vocals are more upfront than Felt and delivered much more confidently. There's waves of instruments that dominate the songs but instead of Deebank doing his endless guitar solo or Duffy doing his endless organ solo you get endless synth soloing and sequencers. The production aesthetic is a bit different but on albums like Instant Wigwam or Denim On Ice the DNA is 95% the same.

"In the seventies there were Osmands" is excellent

Genuinely feel sorry for the Felt fans who don’t realise everything he did afterwards is superior

Don't knock "The New Potatoes", by the way, Charlie Brooker picked it as his no.1 musical choice on Desert Island Discs.

Back In Denim is Lawrence's masterpiece. It's the perfect balance of everything I love about him. Denim On Ice isn't far behind. The Go-Kart Mozart albums haven't quite been in the same league.

Totally agree with that but as per thread title Lawrence is a genius and Instant Wigwam proves it also imo..

Tearing Up The Album Chart is my favourite of the Go-Kart albums. It seems the most fleshed out and songs like Glorious Chorus, Listening To Marmalade and City Centre are up there with the best Denim songs. Instant Wigwam has grown on me over the years but a lot of the songs seem like good ideas that are underdeveloped. We're Selfish, Lazy & Greedy and Here Is A Song are nice songs that suffer from being way too repetitive. Mrs Back To Front is the highlight. It's Lawrence at his most inspired.

Mrs. Back to Front is genius. Good example of where instant wigwam works so well - songs, jokes, angst, pastiche, kitsch, experimentalism all in one track.

Instant Wigwam does sound like a nervous breakdown set to music

are these albums actually remixed? I missed that, I assumed tey were just remastered (if that)

oh only six songs on Ignite were remixed. I wonder why.

Yeah, it sounds weird that some of them still have that old style production. I'm glad they didn't touch Primitive Painters. It's perfect as it is.

From reading interviews Lawrence has said that the guitar effects were recorded to tape rather than recording the guitars dry and then adding the effect later so I dunno how much he had to work with. I don't mind the original production that much, it certainly works on Primitive Painters.

Lawrence says in the radio interview that he took the master tapes for the songs that had vocals and they used those tapes to do the remastering. I assume the rest of the untouched songs are instrumental + Primitive Painters.

from recent interview at the quietus:

He did one song that was really good, which was 'Primitive Painters'. But that was because when we got back from Scotland where we'd recorded it we remixed it in a big London studio, because it was going to be a single. But on the rest of the album he just applied his Cocteau Twins techniques to Felt, which I didn't want him to do at all.

So I knew that one day I was definitely going to remix those six tracks, the ones with singing on them. And what I did was I took the master tapes home from Edinburgh at the end of that session. I stole them and I kept them with me for all of these years.

call me crazy but i listen to felt for the endless guitar/organ solos paired with some catchy singing sometimes by a guy who sounds like a goofy tom verlaine. no so much in it for hyper ironic lyrics and production

i gave GKM a listen and it's not bad and i'll be spending more time with it. but all yall saying that it's better than felt are out of your minds. taste is subjective and all but that's about as close as you can get to having an objectively wrong opinion

Go Kart Mozart - Marc Riley Session #2 12th February 2018