Having finished my review of the Moth & The Mirror album I realized that I had yet to review what is, in my eyes, a more important record. One of the contributors to the Moth & The Mirror project is Louis Abbot, who’s day job is fronting the decidedly excellent Admiral Fallow, who’s debut album Boots Met My Face was re-released earlier this year.
Originally recorded way back in 2009 and released in 2010, the record managed to completely pass me by until the re-release on Lo-Five Records this March. What gripped me initially was the sound of this record, which sounds like a silly thing to say when talking about music – of course it’s the sound we’re concerned with! – so perhaps I would do better to say the texture, the colour, the aesthetic grabbed my attention. As any regular reader of these pages will attest, while I claim to be of catholic tastes there are most definitely some instrumental combinations that are almost guaranteed to pique my interest. Acoustic guitars backed up by sharp, trebly drums fall slap bang in the middle of that zone, and there’s plenty of that on Boots Met My Face. Add some non-rock instruments (in this instance it’s flutes and clarinets) and, lately, a Scots accent into the mix and you’re laughing all the way to the bank – regardless of the quality of the songs themselves.
Thankfully the songs on this record live up to the standards of the aesthetic; Abbot has a good turn of phrase on him, as well as an eye for scansion that’s proving surprisingly rare of late. It’s not a uniformly good record – here and there one stumbles upon a jarring texture or a melody that’s a little too repetitive and dirge-like – but despite it’s flaws, this feels like ‘a record of note’. A complaint I levelled at Abbot’s side-project, The Moth & The Mirror, was that their music lacked the little spark of inspiration necessary to make it an important record. As far as mood and texture and aesthetic are concerned there’s not much to separate Admiral Fallow from The Moth & The Mirror (except, perhaps, a braver touch when it comes to electric guitars in the latter), but I can see Boots Met My Face being a record that I still listening to occasionally for a good long while to come.
Despite being nearly two years old now, this album sounds fresh and current to my ears, and the news that Admiral Fallow are already hard at work on their follow-up fills me with hope for the musical prospects of 2012.
If reviews on this site included subheadings then this post’s would read ‘back-room boys done good?’. A first glance at the credits for this new band suggest that one is looking at a new ‘supergroup’ in much the same vein as Gary Lightbody’s The Reindeer Section, which in its day was a veritable who’s-who (or who’s-whom, if you prefer) of Scottish musicians. Frightened Rabbit, Arab Strap and Admiral Fallow can all be found in the bloodline of The Moth & The Mirror, but not in the way one would expect. Of the three groups mentioned, the only frontman included this new band is Admiral Fallow’s Louis Abbot, and for most of the time he takes a back seat in the line up. Fronting the band is Stacey Sievewright, who played cello for Arab Strap, and the FR connection comes in the form of Gordon Skene, who joined Scott Hutchinson et al in 2009 as an extra guitarist to reenforce the band’s live sound.
To be seduced by the lure of the ‘supergroup’ tag is to set yourself up for disappointment, really, but moreover such a classification misses the point of this band entirely. The point, in fact, is just that: The Moth & The Mirror are a genuine band. I don’t have any insights into the motivations behind this projects inception, but from the evidence of the music alone, this record is the work of people who just want to make music together. There’s none of the self-aggrandising, name-dropping, fun-to-be-in-but-terrible-to-listen-to sense that one traditionally gets from supergroups (will The Reindeer Section and Them Crooked Vultures please stand up?). Honestly, This World sounds like a bona fide album; a focused, coherent artistic statement with no agenda other than to stand on its own merit.
I can see why the press for this release focusses on the pedigree of the performers, but this ‘maguffin’ approach to generating interest doesn’t do the band any favours. The first points of comparison for anyone hearing them are instantly going to be three of the best Scottish bands of the last decade or so; all hard acts to follow, I’m sure you’ll agree. As it stands, predictably, The Moth & The Mirror aren’t in the same league as their cousins. This is an assured, competent first record that any band could rightly be proud of, but it lacks the spark of inspiration that so successfully catapulted its ancestors into the giddy heights of genius. Sievewright’s voice is strong and in-tune, if a little bland for these ears, and interacts nicely with Abbot’s backing vocals. And if you’re a fan of the guitar-based aesthetic of FR and AF then you’ll find nothing to offend you in the 42 minutes of Honestly, This World. This is, on balance, a good record, and one that will most likely stay in rotation on my stereo for at least a month or so. Its downfall, for me, is that Sievewright isn’t interesting enough to hold my attention for a whole album, but that is – I’ll be the first to admit – a totally subjective opinion. In truth, I’ve been more critical of this record than I would have been had it come out-of-the-blue with no celebrity connections; I’ve given far worse records far better write-ups in the past, but in this instance I can’t un-hear the comparisons to better bands. This is a good record with much to recommend it, just don’t be lead astray by the cries of ‘supergroup’.
Mercury-nominated Jon Hopkins has caused quite a stir with his exasperated tweet, “Got paid £8 for 90,000 plays. Fuck spotify.” His outburst came just as anit-Spotify sentiment was reaching a head, and has effectively polarized the music community. With acts like Coldplay, Adele, and Tom Waits refusing to put their new releases on the platform, and with indie distributor ST Holdings’ recent decision to pull their catalogue from all streaming services, it seems the Spotify-refuseniks have the upper hand. But are they right to be so disparaging? Does Spotify really “cannibalise the revenues of more traditional digital services”, as ST Holdings claim?
When Spotify first launched it was universally applauded and embraced by the musical community. Online streaming wasn’t new, even then, but here, finally, was a service with the momentum and critical mass to genuinely change the listening habits of a nation. Only die-hard music geeks are interested in “possessing” music, went the argument; this was a platform aimed at those who would otherwise download or stream their music illegally. And that has been the rallying cry for all Spotify defenders of late: “the cheques might be small, but it’s still better than nothing!”
Stories recounting tales of woefully small royalty pay-outs get an awful lot of coverage in the media. The furore surrounding Hopkins’ outburst is much the same as the shock-wave that spread through the industry when it was claimed that Lady Gaga only received £100.76 for a million plays of Poker Face in 2008. That claim has since been proved to be false (in fact, Spotify paid out £201.53), and the streaming service claims the low payout was because at the time the platform was still in its infancy, but confusion still abounds. The fact remains that the only way to know how much Spotify pays out is to actually receive a cheque from them. The band Little Things That Kill released their sales data recently, and that showed in June 2011 they earnt about 0.4 Eurocents per stream; a figure that they suggest is on the rise. And this rise tallies with my own experience. In April 2010 I got roughly 0.04p for each stream, compared with 0.2p this June. If I got Hopkins’ listening figures then I’d earn £180 for his ninety thousand plays, but then I am self-released so I get all the label-cut as well.
At the current rate, it takes nearly three hundred Spotify plays to earn what I get from just one download on iTunes, and Jon Hopkins compared his £8 for 90,000 streams to the £50 he’d get from just one play on Radio 1. These figures are all accurate, but do they actually tell us anything? These kinds of comparisons aren’t really comparing like for like, and as such they’re of little use. If you take into account the number of listeners to Radio 1 and count each of those as a single stream, then the figures look a whole lot more favourable. According to RAJAR, Radio 1 reached just shy of 12 million people in the quarter ending September. Assuming only a tenth of those listeners heard a particular broadcast of Hopkins’ track, then according to his £50 figure he’d be making the equivalent of 0.004p per ‘stream’ and would only have made £3.75 from Spotify if they used the same rate. There are a lot of assumptions in that calculation and Radio 1 pay more than most radio stations, but even so it’s safe to say that Spotify is much the same as terrestrial UK radio play, and we shouldn’t get too upset about it.
Where the argument gets a little more tricky is when you consider that people might be using Spotify not as a radio service, but as a replacement for actually buying records. This is the argument made by Coldplay et al, and it’s one that looks less kindly on Spotify’s model. How many times do people listen to albums on average? Someone would have to listen to a ten-track album end to end 500 times to equal the £10 one would pay for an album direct from the band at a gig (again, lots of assumptions here, and the wholesale price of albums to retail outlets is markedly less than £10). Not an unreasonable task for my Desert Island Disks, perhaps, but the majority of albums in my collection have only been listened to a handful of times at least, and many have never been listened to end to end.
In the physical world, these records – bought but never played – fall under the category of ‘breakage’, and constitute a not-inconsiderable proportion of the income for old-fashioned labels. What the try-before-you-buy nature of the current market is doing is effectively eliminating this kind of breakage from the system. The move toward streaming as the primary method for consuming music is rightly scary for those who stand to lose a substantial portion of their income, but it’s nevertheless the way the market is heading. And isn’t a world where music is paid for on a per-play basis a more equitable one? Eventually streaming subscription rates and music producers expectations will level out, a compromise will be reached, and bands will get paid for being popular. We may never see the like of super-star multi-million-pound advances again, but the success of what musical stars we do have will be founded on the willingness of people to actually listen to their music. I’m sure the few remaining major labels will find a way to circumvent this naïve and idealistic meritocracy, but it’s still a nice dream to have.
And just to labour the point, here’s a stream Hopkins won’t get ant money for (other that what I paid for the album initially, of course):
Scott Hutchinson, frontman of Frightened Rabbit, seems to have developed a taste for duets. The 7″ single for The Loneliness and the Scream featured a duet with Craig Finn from The Hold Steady (a quirky cover of Don’t Go Breaking My Heart), and there are two new ones on the band’s latest release, a 3-track EP called, imaginatively, A Frightened Rabbit EP. Here Scott duets with Tracyanne Campbell – of Camera Obscura fame – and Scottish folk-mainstay Archie Fisher.
Being the over-eager FR fanboy that I am, I pre-ordered the limited edition of the 10″ vinyl release which means I get to enjoy the always-impressive artwork as well as having the special joy that comes from actually being able to hold a record in your hands. But for those of you less impressed by the constraining world of atoms, you can get this EP for free (in exchange for nothing more than an email address) over at the FR website.
If you follow the link to the EP’s page you’ll also find a track-by-track explanation of the record written by Hutchinson himself, and it’s always interesting to hear someone talking about their creative process. The downside of this approach (and I say this as an avid, nay obsessive, consumer of ‘extra features’, DVD commentaries and the like) is that it can demystify the act of creation, and – more importantly – forever affects the way you think about a song. In much the same way that I can’t watch Luke Skywalker struggling across the icy wastes of Hoth without thinking about Irvin Kershner and the rest of the crew filming it from within the shelter of a hotel doorway, I now can’t hear Scottish Winds, the EP’s opener, without thinking about [spoiler alert!] the fact that it was written on a bus. Now whether or not this has any impact at all on ones enjoyment of a piece is something we could debate for hours, but thankfully the songs on this EP are of a high enough quality that it doesn’t really matter. That’s not to say, however, that they are up to FR’s usual high standards.
Of the three songs, Fuck This Place is the only one that I imagine I’ll listen to with any regularity. The duet with Campbell is a much more polished effort that the other two; Scottish Winds is nicely acerbic and vulgar but just sounds a little half-cocked to be a real FR classic, and Fisher’s vocals on The Work are just a little too arch for these ears. As a treat for fans to keep interest up between albums, this EP serves its purpose admirably, but if you’re new to the band I’d strongly recommend that you seek out their earlier work first. Production duties on this record were handled by the band themselves, which is always nice to see provided the band are actually any good at production. FR can get the job done, for sure, but I can’t help but feel the lack of Peter Katis’ reassuringly steady hand at the tiller. Katis brings out the best in the band and gives their records their distinctive sheen, so I certainly hope his influence will make a return for the band’s next full-length; a record which can’t come soon enough in my book.
Having finished my review of the Moth & The Mirror album I realized that I had yet to review what is, in my eyes, a more important record. One of the contributors to the Moth & The Mirror project is Louis Abbot, who’s day job is fronting the decidedly excellent Admiral Fallow, who’s debut album Boots Met My Face was re-released earlier this year.
Eaten by Monsters 