This Is Not TV

Summer is over; the rains of August have become the rains of September have become the rains of October. Time to put away those summer hits (ermmm… not that I can name any off hand) and look to the falling of leaves, the starting of terms and the awakening of bands, touting their own particular brand of (insert sub genre here) rock to the eager young freshers high on independence, student loans, cheap booze and random meaningless sex. Sigh. Anyway, in the resulting aftermath, the consequential break-ups will be requiring some sort of anthem, so rather than some wallowing Coldplay misery-chord, why not live it up? Enter Rod Thomas – saviour of the newly singleton.

With an opening twinkle of banjo and glockenspiel and the confessional “well I know I’m not amusing,” you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d hit the tweecore, but with a quick dash of accordion, handclaps and… girly laughs it all becomes a lot more chirpy and amiable – like a mobile phone advert, but talking about break-ups, not make ups. The fully fledged chorus, with it’s backing singers cheerfully chanting ‘bored, bored, bored’ and “it’s not you, it’s me, it’s over” combined with Rod’s Brian Molko-esque mid-atlanticish twang make for a simple but appealing refrain. If your grasping for a comparison of a happy dumping scenario, think of Dylan Moran in Black Books talking about her summer girl. Obscure, but if you track it down, you’ll see what I mean.

Along with the obligatory electro remix (Human League with emotion) there is the heavily overdubbed ‘Make Myself Desire,’ a schizophrenic piece of electrofolkery that is charming and quirky – but having a distorted theremin in the mix will do that. It’s an interesting sound space with just a smidgeon of Enya – not enough to completely balls it up – that hints at a possibility of complexity beyond acoustic pop. On the whole, if he can escape from Bluntness, he might be quite good actually.

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I wasn’t certain what I was going to think of this 20 track compilation. Goldoolins are a folk trio from Israel who’ve released two albums since 2004 and this, their third, is a mixture of new songs and tracks from the two preceding albums. Quoting influences that include The Beatles, The Band and Fairport Convention didn’t entirely fill me with anticipation though. Isn’t there something a little less obvious happening around the Goldoolins campfire?  One quite definite inluence whose name isn’t on the press release is Arthur Lee: second track ‘Be My Friend’ and instrumental ‘Twlight Queen’ each owe something to Love’s intricate guitar mastery, in fact ‘Be My Friend’ has quite similar chordage to ’7 & 7 Is’.  And Goldoolins could easily rename ‘Ocean Song’ as ‘Beatle Song’ without raising any eyebrows, sounding as it does so much like an omission from the ‘Help!’ soundtrack, and other names possibly missing from the Goldoolin list of inspirations might include Scott Walker, Tom Lehrer and Alanis Morrisette, such is the range of abilities and styles on display here.  And while the trio might present themselves as an entirely acoustic group, some of the album highlights occur with the additions of other instruments – strings, horns, harpsichords, and while Goldoolins don’t stint when expanding on their basic format, the most effective moments on this compilation are entirely their own. The two longer songs on this album - ’I See Horizons’ and ‘The World Is Somewhere Else’ (eight and ten minutes respectively) are remarkable displays of form and improvisation that show the trio’s abilities in some depth and, drawing fully on the range of influences open to them, result in songs which reach way beyond the categorisable.  Certainly, describing these as Folk is less than half the story.  So, plenty going on and a range of serious talents make ‘We B Goldolins U B U’ a near perfect album for those long summer evenings; if we’d only had a summer this year, that is .

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