Bob hates pretty nearly everything

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Published: July 21, 2010

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Bob hates pretty nearly everything.In fact, the only time Bob sounds remotely happy is when he’s playing Cassandra on “Deep Karma Canyon”, cheerily spreading his personal gloom around a little. It’s soon past, though, as he dives back into the stream of misery that leads ultimately to the suicide threat of “Roll Over and Die”. To which the obvious riposte is: well, stop playing it then, and maybe we’ll all be a little more cheerful.Though not quite as abysmally bleak as his last solo outing, Black Sheets of Rain, this eponymous effort is steeped in gloom, slashed and pierced with the shards of a disintegrated relationship. There are one or two nice moments – a harmonic overlay here, a guitar part there – but the trouble is that, to coin a phrase, Mould never sleeps: the self-lacerating anger and recrimination seeps out from split-up songs like “Next Time That You Leave”, “Thumbtack” and “Hair Stew” to infect the entire album with its bitterness So: Bob hates alternative rock Bob hates himself.

But there’s only so much death a single album can withstand, and this one sails blithely across that Stygian line.Bob MouldBob MouldCreation CRECD 188″I hate alternative rock,” gripes Bob Mould on his return to solo mode after several successful years fronting Sugar. If you gave Mother Teresa or Princess Diana a howitzer and a barn-door issue, they’d be hard-pushed to hit it with quite the spectacular obviousness of. It’s a shame, because musically the band are developing some neat little variations on their indie formula, notably the fairground organ and oompah rhythm of “Will You Remember?” and the country/ doowop cross of “When You’re Gone”, by default the most appealing track here. Is there no death, one wonders, that Dolores isn’t prepared to use as fuel for her muse? No, it appears, not even the prospect of her own; for even the album’s lone shaft of light, the marginally positive “Free to Decide”, is defined by the extremity of death, its chorus continuing “.. and I’m not so suicidal after all”. Is that really the only alternative?She’s a proper Catholic girl, all right: when not holding up the spectre of death to terrify her congregation, she’s full of little finger-wagging lectures about such passe, tabloid concerns as big-city depravity (“Hollywood”) and drugs (the single “Salvation” – message, “don’t do it”).

Yet another, “I’m Still Remembering”, finds Dolores recalling her marriage day and counting her lucky stars, a mental route which, as you’d imagine, leads to musing over whether the great and the good – specifically, Kurt Cobain and “ever saintly” John F Kennedy – will be remembered. Who?Most dubiously of all, “I Just Shot John Lennon” concludes with five gunshots, a tasteful little touch perfectly in keeping with a song that has nothing to add to the subject but the sentiment “what a sad and sickening night”. One song pays tribute to Dolores O’Riordan’s dead grandad, “Joe”. Two others, “War Child” and “Bosnia”, are about the Balkan unrest. Fading in, it’s like a continuation of that album, a warning of impending doom and gloom couched in funereal keening.As such, it’s a fairly accurate representation of the contents of To the Faithful Departed, which is probably the most death-fixated record to appear since Joy Division’s Closer. And I’m always looking for trouble.”‘The Argyll Cycle Volume One’ is out on Cooking Vinyl on 29 April. The Cranberries

To the Faithful Departed
ISLAND CID 524 234-2′ third album in a little over four years opens with the stern plod of dirge-guitar and that odd hiccuping vocal sound – rather like a breathless marathon runner on the verge of collapse – which dominated its predecessor No Need to Argue.

“I suspect we haven’t got over the whole Culloden experience, the subjugation to English will .. Everyone’s got a story. You either think there’s a universal value in your story, or you don’t. People are on different trees and I’m on the tell-your-story tree, because I’m a good story- teller. A man of passion.”Music is still the first of Jackie Leven’s passions, however. His newest album is The Argyll Cycle Volume One, including songs that he wrote in Scottish seclusion, recuperating from the horrors he had suffered in London. Sung in a strong, clear voice, it’s modern folk music to soothe the scarred psyche. Now he plans an album entitled Fairy Tales for Hard Men, inspired by the tensions he perceives in Scottish masculinity.

Princess Diana aside, it’s had backing from public bodies and private benefactors such as John Paul Getty Jnr, Genesis, Pet Shop Boys and Eric Clapton. Funding is a recurrent headache, but Leven’s music business connections have been invaluable. The former Waterboy Mike Scott has even donated a library to the Core HQ; he describes Leven as “an old-style gentleman, cultured and charming with a touch of the rogue. A lot of people who still take heroin are fantastically successful, more so than people who just watch TV and want to talk about Cracker.”Now in its 10th year, Core employs 10 staff with 30 therapists on call. “They’re important places, where I’ve had splendid moments of reverie,” he says. “You’re allowed to think about your life.”Such a boozer-friendly outlook is unexpected from the head of an addiction charity.


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