Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

The Friendly Album

Well, this will probably be a slightly unusual review.

Some people out there will know that I have been extremely depressed of late. Since last night that depression has lifted. The reason seems to have something to do with the album I am about to review. Let me explain.

Exactly a week ago today I bought Momus' latest album, Ocky Milk. I don't know if it's just because I'm a bit world-weary, but Momus is one of the few musicians that I can actually bring myself to care about these days. That and long-standing lack of money meant that this was the first CD I had bought in some months. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting. In fact, I think I bought it without much thought at all.

However, I was aware of the manifesto behind the album. Momus described that manifesto on his blog before he began to record the album. An entry from the 9th of March, 2005, perhaps marks the conceptual inception (publicly, at least) of what Momus referred to at the time as "The Friendly Album":

"Let me go back to the music. When I imagine the music of pleasure, I imagine static music. There should be no yearning, no tension in this music. It has arrived at a plateau of pleasure. I can put a record of it on -- or, regally, command a lute player to strum away in my royal bedchamber -- and I expect it to decorate the air with elegant scrolls, but not to develop in any way, or build expectations, or dominate me. It should be self-effacing music, music which defers to my pleasure even as it subtly structures it... I'm planning my next album, 'The Friendly Album'. And I want to make something as static, as friendly, as consensual, as self-effacing, as Japan itself. It will be a feminine record and a friendly record. It will -- it should -- contain the deep sensuality of Renaissance lute music, or bossa nova. You should be able to put it on and just let it hover in the background all the way through, structuring your contentment in a self-effacing, classical, cool and elegant way. I don't know if I'm capable of making music that serene and sensual, but I want to try."

If you go to the comments section of that entry, you might find a comment from yours truly, partly in response to the idea that friendship is more pleasurable than love, because it is more static, as the proposed music of the friendly album would be:

"I, too, would value friendship over love. I like the idea of a friendly album. One of the first things that attracted me to The Smiths was that I sensed a lack of 'trying to be hard' in the music that was very different to the desperate, grasping street cred of the norm, and quite radical. Of course, there is also a vicious streak in the music of The Smiths/Morrissey that interests some (like me) and puts off others. In terms of friendly music, I personally find Kate Bush very agreeable in a friendly sense, though she does not make the kind of music you describe."

Later on in his blog, if I recall aright, Momus was to remark that, after having started work on his album, inevitably, it wasn't quite following the direction he had planned for it.

When the official title of the album was announced, it was no longer "The Friendly Album", but Ocky Milk. I can't remember the whole rationale for this title, but the 'O' at the beginning marked it as "the third in Momus' 'Stories of O' Berlin trilogy", the first and second being Oskar Tennis Champion and Otto Spooky. There is, of course, an allusion here to Bowie's Berlin trilogy of Low, Heroes and Lodger.

All this information was lurking somewhere in the back of my head when I bought the CD. On the day I bought it, after playing it once or twice without forming a particularly strong impression, I posted a small notice on Momus' blog, which read:

"I bought Ocky Milk yesterday.

"I feel it's too early for me to say anything particularly intelligent about it, but at the moment I like Nervous Heartbeat, Permagasm and Zanzibar. I'm not yet at the point where I can easily put the titles to the tracks, but these ones stand out so far.

"I recently came to the conclusion that Oskar Tennis Champion is my favourite Momus album."

I suppose I was feeling that Otto Spooky, despite having some great tracks, and despite being consistently inventive and interesting, had somehow failed to engage me as other Momus albums had, and wondering if Ocky Milk would be similar. Behind my mention of Oskar Tennis Champion was the fact that, for a long time after I first bought it, I felt it was an album with a great beginning and end, but no middle, since which time, I have come to appreciate almost all of the tracks from beginning to end (The Last Communist being a possible exception), and I half-wondered if such a thing would happen with the other stories of O, too.

Since I posted that comment, my impressions of Ocky Milk have grown somewhat firmer. First of all, I can say that it is very definitely a feminine album. This, of course, is nothing new for Momus. In the same way that I was attracted to the lack of testosterone in The Smiths, I have always found the lack of the same in Momus' music to be a great virtue. In relieving oneself of the testosterone that fuels the monotony of rock'n'roll, the musician becomes free actually to be creative. This I like. And Ocky Milk is even more feminine than previous Momus albums. It does not seek credibility in the way that is almost de rigeur in Western art these days - through confrontation - but, if it seeks credibility at all, it seeks it through exploration. So far, at least, everything is as according to the Friendly Album manifesto. To give one example, the opening track, Moop Bears employs backwards vocals (I believe that the title was something 'heard' in such vocals as pictures might be seen in an inkblot) to create a loop effect in the song. This is Teddybears' Picnic as it might be written by Dr Seuss for the Hello Kitty demographic. The song doesn't particularly seem to go anywhere, but circles around the celebration of cute little Moop bears, whatever they are. However, there is some deviation here from the friendly plan, too. It's not just the slightly sinister quality that might be read into the cuteness of these bears - who are repeatedly exhorted to "shoot, shoot, shoot" - there's also something being said here. In other words, the music is not completely self-effacing as per the manifesto. And there are dramatic tensions. A line like "Moop bears on the idiot sea" is even reminiscent of the kind of histrionic cut-up poetry that Bowie was employing on an album like Lodger.

And it's this kind of mix, with variations, that is in evidence throughout the album. Momus has always been very good at song narrative, and I feel that he has not quite been able to rid himself of his narrative habits in order to make the truly 'static' music that he originally intended to. At first, I wondered if this constituted failure. The album reminds me of David Bowie's Low in some ways. Bowie was very enamoured of Brian Eno's idea that the voice should be just one more instrument in the mix of the songs, seemed to drift in and out of the music. However, with Low, the lyrics are extremely spare, and have an ambient rather than an intellectually stimulating quality. This ambience was taken to its conclusion when, instead of sining actually lyrics, Bowie chose to sing made-up phonetics on the largely instrumental track Warzawa. At first I thought Momus was attempting something similar here to Bowie's slightly android-like vocals on Low, and that the words were little more than phonetic decorations for the music (the lyric "Like aeroplanes on snow/We're only people" strikes me as very Low in atmosphere), but it soon occurred to me that, either such an attempt really was a failure, or Momus was doing something different here. And I have decided that the latter is the case. The narrative of the songs is not as linear as it has been in the past with Momus the singing auteur, but is instead looped or prismatically shattered. Nonetheless, there is a kind of narrative. And sometimes - often, even - we find the tension and yearning in that narrative that was to be avoided in the original manifesto.

Having said that, I think enough of the original manifesto remains here for the album to be satisfying from that point of view. But we have more moods here than a merely static 'friendly'. In fact, overall, I find the album just a little more spooky (another Momus forte) than friendly. Birdcatcher is a peacock's tail of bad-trip imagery:

After the ritual suicide of Mr Mickey Mouse

On his outrageous throne of blood in Cinderella's House

On the blue suburban line I met a careless god

Past the pines by the glassy meadow

Where the coaches jerk a little

The bird catcher of Hades took his net of flesh and bone

The headless horse was talking on the kitten's telephone

In the house of horrors I had recently burnt down

All this is set to an elegantly restrained and fey mix of disco and Japanese enka. This is followed by Nervous Heartbeat, seemingly influenced by J-pop love ballads, and trembling beautifully just this side of slushiness. Elsewhere we have the slowly unfolding, balmy meditations of Permagasm and Pleasantness. 7000 BC has an eerie, half-falsetto vocal set over sparse, eccentric plucking on different stringed instruments. Zanzibar has the haunting quality of Tennyson's 'The Lotos-Eaters'. There seems little doubt of the presence of yearning in this particular song. Being something of a dreamer, I have found myself listening to this one rather wistfully, conjuring up in my head opium visions of waterfalls and warm, spice-scented winds over desert sands, and other things harder to describe, but composed of some otherwordly sadness and fragments of half-forgotten dream and reality, in a compound that achieves an exquisite balance of pain and pleasure:

And the pain goes

Further and further

And deeper and deeper inside

And the time goes so slow

In the winter time

Rolling in straw and hay

For a fox-hunting man

Who can stand in the fire

And just fade away

You are lovely of face

You are lovely of body and soul

These are some of the intricate moods that Momus has managed to weave out of the original tesselations of the Friendly Album's static patterns. However, I will not list the songs one by one. Not all of them work equally for me, and I dislike shopping-list reviews, anyway. Suffice it to say that, despite my declining lack of interest in what is happening with music, Momus remains essential for me, still managing both to satisfy and surprise.

Before I finish, I would just like to say that this review was prompted by the fact that, last night, I came across the video to the song Frilly Military on YouTube. I watched it and immediately, although it had been one of the weaker songs on the album for me before, it struck me as absolutely joyful and brilliant in a way that I could not hope to describe. Silly, ephemeral, but nonetheless, art-for-art's-sake. It seems to have nothing to prove, somehow. It's enough that it's there. I realised after watching the video, with some surprise, that I was not depressed. I was thinking about all the fascinating, gorgeous, sensual things in the world around me just waiting for me to explore and play with. There was the Soseki novel, Mon, in its lovely fabric bookcover. How wonderful that the Kanji were streaming down the aromatic paper of the pages like waterfalls, just waiting for me. There was my tea-burner, and all my packets of green-tea given to me by friendly folk from Japan. There were all the stories I'm in the middle of writing. There were Momus albums galore. It really is the strangest thing.

I have no idea how long my current mood will last. I know from experience that, as Blake puts it, "He who binds to himself a joy, Does the winged life destroy", and I would not be surprised by another terrible crash of mood at any moment. But it will be interesting to see how long this lasts. Wouldn't it be strange if the depression never came back?

Anyway, I sincerely hope that Momus will come to Britain to play this material live.