Swell Maps - Jane from Occupied Europe poll

The Raincoats - s/t poll

Now i feel like I'm overcompensating for leaving off "Fairytale in the Supermarket" in the last poll by including all these extra songs.

I feel like some of these choices are, of course. Of course Swell Maps comes after The Raincoats...

Going to have re-listen but I can confidently state, even at this stage, I won't be voting for "Mining Villages".

o shit did i vote for the wrong secret island

Ooooh. They made it a bit hard. Some of the instrumental tracks do feel like part of integrated suites, etc. Might end up falling back on a relatively poptastic early track.

Sleeping in a cave beats any kind of tree...

"helicopter spies" is always amazing to me — how is that song from 1980?!

Always liked how they spelled "drums" as "drumns" on their records.

I like about half of this but it's a kind of bewildered enjoyment. I guess "Border Country".

The version I heard only had two of these bonus tracks, "The Stairs are Like an Avalanche" and "New York".

I've wondered in another thread why all four of their 45s haven't been re-released in a single package, or placed as bonus tracks, instead of being scattered within a bunch of records containing demos, alternate takes etc, with some of the singles completely unavailable.

ha yes their discog is an insane mess before you even get into the mastering differences among reissues

I cheated and voted for "Let's Build A Car" although it was from a 45

I've wondered in another thread why all four of their 45s haven't been re-released in a single package

they have https://www.discogs.com/release/543070-Swell-Maps-Swell-Maps but now even that's expensive

I voted for Border Country because I disapprove of bonus tracks on album polls, don't see the point. yes yes what's the point of polls in the first place

my LP proper vote would prob be for Big Maz

they have

OK, but that's a box of actual 45 rpm discs released in Spain twenty years ago, I may as well try to collect the originals if I were that motivated.

Don't even want to think when I first heard this album, played it hundreds of times but probably not heard it for over a decade but it all came rushing back to me! I really like the bass playing on this album! Helicopter Spies and Secret Island are sheer class. They picked the wrong Big Maz, In the Country is much better than Desert From the Trolley. Collision With a Frogman is a total banger, love the drumming on that track. Blenheim Shots ----> A Raincoat's Room is a great way to end an album. Still not sure what to vote for.

Big Empty Field is by far the one for me--funky sevens FTW.

border country is the one i used to get stuck in my head all the time, solid choice

Blenheim Shots ----> A Raincoat's Room is a great way to end an album.

secret island always my clear favorite tho just hope i didn’t vote for the bonus track (instrumental) by mistake

The version I heard only had two of these bonus tracks, "The Stairs are Like an Avalanche" and "New York".

Mine too, I went down the rabbit hole a bit on the track listing and it gets very confusing. I will have to youtube the rest before voting.

This album is mind boggling, glad to get to know it.

+ that album cover picture is all-time

This is incredible and include three of these songs in about 15 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S51XKGYABtg

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

The second Swell Maps album, 'Jane from ...' is a completely different thing to both 1) their first LP, 'A Trip To Marineville' and 2) their four 'classic' singles --- unlike those relatively conventional previous releases, the second LP can't really be broken down into individual songs, even though that's what the track listing / voting template implies. Swell Maps members frequently mentioned 'The Faust Tapes' as a major inspiration, providing 'permission' to record whatever they wanted (songs, audio experiments, Brummie-inflected Krautrock) and, especially, to mix together tracks of wildly varying sonic quality into seamless montages. It's been pointed out that Swell Maps was destined to fail once they'd grown out of their (very young) teenage excitement at making a group noise together --- 'Jane From Occupied Europe' plays out like the final battle between Nikki Sudden's song-based conventions -- his desire to become a junior Bolan/Faces/Keef representative of Real Rock Music --- and the rest of the Maps' (successful!) attempt to swallow up Sudden's rockist leanings within the group's eclectic and wildly inventive chaos. So my vote goes to Side 2 of 'Jane from ...' as a whole, BUT since that's not allowed, I've voted for 'Collision with a Frogman vs. The Mangrove Delta Plan', which is credited to the band as a whole, because it opens Side 2 and proceeds to take over the rest of the record, which is, going by the writer credits, a batch of Nikki Sudden solo tracks topped off with a beautifully integrated postscript from his brother Epic ('A Raincoat's Room'). Somehow the Swell Maps identity wrangles the individual songs into one side-long groove. If I could, I'd vote for 'Blenheim Shots/A Raincoat's Room' as a single track, But since I can't, a vote for the 8-minute long side-opener best serves an album which isn't really about songs, unlike 'Marineville' and the band's glorious singles. 'Jane from ...' is my fave 'proper' Swell Maps Album by far (and one of the all-time great early Rough Trade long-players). But as a compromise between stand-alone songs and stand-alone sonic experiments, the Antar 'Train Out Of It' odds and sods LP is my go-to Swell Maps record (with an album jacket as groovy as the two Official Albums!) (As others have noted in the thread, the inclusion of the various Bonus Tracks from the later Mute and Secretly Canadian reissues muddies the waters as far as voting goes, and also obscures the self-sufficiency and the particular character of the original album. Although not as fatally as with latter-day reissues of The Fall's vinyl-era classics --- one of the most pernicious aspects of the CD era, although it was hard to argue with 'free extra bonus tracks' when CDs first appeared, at twice the price and with all that extra empty space going to 'waste'.)

x post Thanks Bee OK for the YouTube live footage! Scrappy as it is, wow! Never seen it before. THX

A Trip to Marineville is relatively conventional? Er, OK if you say so.

Maybe it's a corny choice but Cake Shop Girl started playing in my head as soon as I saw the poll title, so that's my pick.

(Although I haven't heard all the bonus tracks so maybe I'm cheating!)

"relatively'! (It's got songs!)\

So has Jane. I mean the second side of Marineville has 6 and half minutes of Full Moon/Blam followed by 16 minutes of Gunboats/Adventuring Into Basketry, it's pretty unconventional!

I've had (and still do) that Jowe Head solo LP, where he remade "Cake Shop Girl" - so that was my pick.

I put it on a mixtape, and realised I'd used three tracks that referenced "Do You Love Me" - Lou's "I love you Suzanne" and I can't remember the third one.

I don't regret adding songs to the original albums at times. I feel you can just ignore them if needed. But I will take it into consideration while doing the rest of this batch. I'm going to dig really deep for the next few.

It was between "The Helicopter Spies" and "Let's Build a Car" for me, voted the former.

I didn't even notice "Let's Build a Car" was in the poll tbh, I was only considering the tracks on the original album.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

XP: Same. Gave it a listen and chose one of the songs-with-lyrics-and-stuff on the first side, but I've already forgotten which.

Regarding the cover: do those perhaps look like garage doors at the back, in a UK context? Until this instant, I think I casually misperceived a fireplace/mantlepiece on the right, but it's surely a ladder and a shelf of (potentially) garage-y things!?!

lol who voted for "...Then Poland"??

I was going to do The Residents Eskimo next but just finished listening to it. It's more of a piece than pick a song so abandoning that one. A fluid situation...

do Commercial Album!!!

40 one minute songs? That would be a hoot

I've always been confused by Let's Build a Car. There are two versions and they both have an amazing guitar intro, but one is a gnarly distorted riff and the other is a proto-shoegaze heavenly riff. I remember some interview, maybe with Seefeel, where someone said their goal was to build a career on the tone of that guitar intro...but I'm not sure which of the two they were referring to.

The single version, which shows up on the Jane CD is the gnarly one. The other version is on Train Out Of It.

Regarding the cover: do those perhaps look like garage doors at the back, in a UK context? Until this instant, I think I casually misperceived a fireplace/mantlepiece on the right, but it's surely a ladder and a shelf of (potentially) garage-y things!?!

It looks like a garage to me. They were very much from middle class suburbia where actually having a garage was pretty common, even in the UK in the 70s.

Thanks! :)

Lots I disagree with in that post, marjory

Honestly I think the biggest difference between the 2 albums is the general mood and tone. Marineville was my favorite album ever in my sophomore year of high school, and maybe into my junior year. And when I listen to it now, the reason why is obvious: it encapsulates exactly what it’s like to be an arty, misfit, angry, vulnerable teenager bolstered by the invincibility of a tightly knit & protective clique. The goofy nicknames and assumed comic book identities only recognized within the confines of the group! The spontaneous creativity and repartee like sparks flying, the relentless energy rush of distortion and cymbals crashing. Above all, the individual personalities recklessly and gleefully colliding. The reason it’s so exciting is specifically because there is very little boundary to speak of between an aimless hangout session, or telling a joke, or making art: in the context of all the extraneous clatter, a song is still just incidental. *Jane is where those boundaries start to appear in their work* and if it sounds like there’s two competing visions, maybe that’s the reason: ‘Now that we’re buckling down and getting more serious about it, what is the statement we wanna make?’ It’s much more sober and everything is premeditated (even stitching disparate things together is an editing process). I miss the lightness, the humor and joyful abandon, the sense of instability. What convention does Jane defy that trumps playing with balloons for 10 minutes on a punk rock record? Don’t get me wrong, I love Jane too. But compared to Marineville? It’s mostly an afterthought.

And don’t trust the Richard Earl take of ‘Nikki Sudden wanted to be a corny rockstar and the rest of us were not into it’. It’s always come across to me as the member of the band with the least distinct identity going after the one with the most. On Marineville, at least, Sudden’s camply standoffish persona feels fully incorporated into the group dynamic and in no way set apart; he’s just one of the gang, and that he aspires even a little to a kind velvet smoking jacket elegance at odds with the ramshackle noise they make is funny and endearing. You don’t choose your influences and the performed brattiness is imo way more Dylan than Bolan or Richards, anyway (his spectacularly tuneless voice is all attitude, he’s great with a second-person put down lyric). What’s with the “rockist” framing here? He oozes personality.

There’s a great bit at the end of one of the odds and sodds comps where Jowe is spontaneously composing a folk song about a thing with lots of legs, and Sudden says it should be “he’s really up to date”- both vmic!!! - and that moment is kind of a nice window into how they operate at their best- a very dynamic exchange, where everyone’s a character and everything is in flux.