It’s good to have Andrew Culture of the very fine Beat Motel Podcast contribute a review to the blog. If you haven’t caught up with his podcast, do so as it fits very nicely with the way we do things here…
I do love a good collaboration, but with this one it’s a bit challenging figuring out what the motivation behind the effort was. The (excellently monikered) Black Market Karma have a liberal littering of collaborations on their new album. But having heard six of the tracks on the album I’m not sure how much sauce each of the collaborators contributed. With one strong exception – the voice of Tess Parks on ‘The sky was all diseased’ melted some chocolate I had on my desk, and caused a gently refreshing rain to fall from the sky. It’s broken, fragile, strong and is the aural equivalent of rubbing a paper cut on your tongue with novocaine. I love it. Tess’s voice compliments everything about this track and enhances it magically, in a gently warming way. Think Moe Tucker on ‘After Hours’, if she’d been channelling Mark Lanegan. Black Market Karma have an incredibly consistent sound throughout each of the tracks we were sent. I have one, very accurate, way of describing the sound the band have, and I’ve been toying over whether it’s too subjective to you, dear reader, but it’s a starting point so here goes… This band sounds like the feeling in my head after an episode of The Word had aired circa 1991. Having spent an hour watching people in their early twenties make a living from having floppy fringes and baggy long-sleeve tee shorts while holding guitars I always felt the same way – I’d enjoyed the general flow and laid back semi-enthusiasm of the bands, but they felt very distant to me. Not quite magical, but certainly inaccessible, and yet appealing for reasons I’d never quite figure out. The remix of ‘Heady Ideas’ by Joakim Ahlund cements the early 90s vibe by sounding almost exactly like something Andy Weatherall might have knocked out after a late-night session with Primal Scream. It’s up to you whether you think that’s a good thing or not. Other tracks like ‘War in the streets’ still embrace the early pschye-Beatles jangle, but have a strange threatening wooziness that’s not a million miles away from Spaceman 3, or (inevitably) Spiritualized. Until the chorus, at which point we’re lifted into a few seconds of pure beauty. It’s like burly drunk fella in the street, after the clubs have cleared out, threatening you with fisticuffs, but offering you a tug on their joint to make up for it. Like a lot of reviewers, I listen to music through the foul filter of ‘so what’ and ‘what’s it doing for the progress of music development’. For Black Market Karma the first question is easy to answer – they are making music that has an gently emotional tang, and stays far enough on the right (gruff) side of inoffensive that it remains interesting. The second question is harder to answer. Does all music really need to be moving us all forward as human beings. Can’t bands just make music that’s decent? Absolutely yes, but for Black Market Karma the decent songwriting, of which they have plenty, is in danger of becoming a pastiche of niche scenes that have come before them. But will I listen to them again? Absolutely. If I remember to. After six tracks I was already in danger of remembering that I had pressed the ‘play’ button.
