Comets On Fire - Blue Cathedral (2004)

Comets On Fire have elbowed aside all my plans for a while now, the overdriven genius of Blue Cathedral drawing me back time after time while other stuff stacks up unlisten to.

When I've not been playing it on the turntable I've been blasting it out on CD in the car, which isn't a great idea because it's hard not to floor the accelerator and blaze away towards the nearest coast. Mind you, from our house that would be Southport, which definitely isn't the kind of destination the Comets had burning in their collective mind's eye when they gouged out this steaming Rorschach inkblot of rock'n'roll viscera.

The apparent noise and fury that belch out of the speakers when you first listen to Blue Cathedral soon reveal themselves to be something a whole lot more nuanced. It's the balance between mayhem and melody, between chaos and control that really sinks its teeth into you.

Blue Cathedral is the album MC5 should have made after Kick Out The Jams, instead of succumbing to smack and the paltry pub rock ambitions of producer John Landau when they went into the studio to make Back In The USA. Had they just kept alive their love of Sun Ra and righteous love of warped psychedelia while discovering a whole raft of new guitar pedals...

Comets On Fire had released two previous (official) albums; the muddy blitzkrieg of their self-titled debut in 2001 and the following year's slightly less lo-fi but still highly noise orientated Field Recordings From The Sun. Noel Von Harmonson is largely credited on 'echoplex', his primary duty being to distort guitars, keyboards and most of all Ethan Miller's vocals, with his screams, wails and moans further warped beyond all recognition. The results are kind of noise rock, kind of weirdly psychedelic and shot through unlikely moments of rock classicism - an unholy mess, in other words, but an enjoyable one.

Guitar polymath Ben Chasny (best known for his work as Six Organs Of Admittance) stepped onboard for one track on Field Recordings... and the Comets persuaded him to stick around in a full-time capacity for Blue Cathedral. The idea was to add light and shade via Chasny's virtuosity, even though he complained in a Pitchfork interview that "I don't want to be the Six Organs... guy who brought in a pretty melody. I did the acoustic moments on the records but always under protest. In Comets I'd rather destroy".

Adding touches of acoustic guitar and quieter moments to go with the blunderbuss riffs and hysterical shreddage was smart enough but the Comets also upped their game massively when it came to production. It was still them and Fucking Champs dude Tim Green behind the mixing desk but suddenly they no longer sounded like the whole thing has been ripped off a badly recorded tape - now everything had burst into crazy DayGlo Technicolour.

The cover of Blue Cathedral features an elephant's eye staring out at you, offering fair warning of the massively heavy presence within. Opening track The Bee And The Cracking Egg (all the Comets albums are worth buying for their track titles alone) fires straight off with Ben Flashman's bass and Utrillo Kushner's pounding drums before Miller's warped vocals exhort, plead and demand that we do, well, something or other that probably involves expanding our consciousness and shaking off these earthly shackles, or such like. At this point, Von Harmonson unleashes what sounds like a raygun straight from Mars Attacks! and everyone piles in, with Miller's and Chasny's guitars howling as the whole song lurches up at you like a giant cartoon mud monster, which isn't a sentence I get to write often enough. Moments of Sonic Youth style detuning do battle with an absolute beast of a riff while Chasny's guitar wails furiously and there's even a brief interlude of gentle loveliness before it eventually collapses into exhaustion after seven and a half glorious, glorious minutes. Ah, sweet rock and roll.

Pussy Foot The Duke is Von Harmonson's chance to show off his chops with a haunted funfair keyboard riff that repeatedly pulls the song together after Miller and Chasny have finished chasing each other's tails before it all breaks down into a rather sweet slow fade-out with splashes of piano and warped bluesy guitar.

Whiskey River glides in on Kushner's symbols and a simple guitar riff before what sounds like a guitar impersonating a car alarm goes off and the band charge into a massive, churning groove while Miller howls like Robert Plant with his old lad caught in his zip. Another alarm goes off, inspiring Miller and Chasny to battle each other into another rising frenzy before Tim Dacy bursts in on sax, immediately bringing side two of the mighty Funhouse to mind.

The brief, gentle interlude of Organs brings side one to a close and you may need a stiff drink or a quick sit down before bracing yourself for round two.

Side two crashes in even harder than side one with The Antlers Of The Midnight Sun, as Kushner's drums scrap it out with Dacy's sax before Miller joins the fray in full bezerker mode on vocals and the guitars pile in on over the top for a four-minute blast of pure adrenalin.

Brotherhood Of The Harvest howls away for the first minute before churchy organ joins echo-drenched guitar for a series of wailing climaxes that ends all too soon. Wild Whiskey finds Chasny on acoustic guitar while Miller plays long distorted notes over the top.

Blue Tomb is a suitably epic closer as slow, ominous chords are joined by a howling solo that steadily grows more distorted and out of control before running out of steam as Miller wails out some suitably psychedelic bon mots about "laying your soul down". The guitars surge up once more and Von Harmonson pulls out his raygun again before the song finally swoons into a hazy reverie.

Blue Cathedral is alive to rock's possibilities, so full of its promise, and ever restless in its desire to explore all of it that other albums tend to sound a little timid afterwards, including Comets On Fire's fourth and final LP, 2006's Avatar, which traded in a little of the craziness for a slightly more conventional approach.

Miller subsequently went on to form Howlin' Rain and the trade down from celestial bodies burning across the heavens to inclement weather when it comes to band names is sadly rather reflected in the music. Chasny, having complained about not wanting to be the "pretty melody" guy went on to make more beautiful music as Six Organs Of Admittance and another unholy racket with Sir Richard Bishop (former Sun City Girl) in Rangda.

Comets On Fire currently lie dormant - lets hope they erupt again before too long.

The Kingston Trio - The Last Month Of The Year (1960)

It perhaps says everything about the Kingston Trio's meteoric rise and fall that when I came across Last Month Of The Year in a battered cardboard box at a carboot sale I hadn't a clue what lay within and decided to hand over the required pound purely on the strength of the front cover of snow-covered benches. Having bought it in August, it then sat in my collection for 4 months before it got played.

What a pleasant surprise then to hear the sweet harmonies and eclectic song choices ranging from obscure English hymns, spirituals, folk rounds and a sprinkling of traditional Christmas songs. The Kingston Trio certainly don't deserve to be neglected as they have become but then who would have guessed that a close harmony folk outfit with roots in Hawaiian calypso music would have risen to such success in the first place?

Having released their debut album in June 1958, by November the following year the Trio had 4 albums in the US Billboard Top 10. At one stage, they were responsible for 15% of all of Capitol's record sales - at a time when Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole were also on the label - and appeared on the front of Life magazine.

Their combination of simple instrumentation, honeyed vocals and eclectic repertoire were a massive hit with the public and helped to launch the folk revival that would soon bring along the likes of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Joan Baez, though Simon & Garfunkel bore a more obviously direct influence.

But the Kingston Trio never had designs on being trailblazers. Having spent years performing at bars, restaurants and student events, the trio of Dave Guard, Bob Shane and Nick Reynolds saw themselves simply as entertainers. Having seen Pete Seeger's Weavers blacklisted for their left-wing beliefs, the Kingston Trio took a strictly non-political approach and unashamedly gave the old folk songs they sang a vocal sheen inspired by the rich harmonies of The Four Freshmen and The Modernaires.

The formula was massively popular with the public but it also stirred up huge indignation among old-school folkies, who accused them of "sallow slickness" and of being "prostitutes of the art". In a sour belch of pomposity, critic Mark Morris harrumphed about their 1959 Newport Folk Festival appearance: "What connection these frenetic tinselly showmen have with a folk festival eludes me... except that it is mainly folk songs that they choose to vulgarize."

Guard seemed the most stung by this criticism, publicly insisting that the Trio were not folk singers while privately pushing the band to get more serious about the music. He would eventually quit in 1961, with one of the reasons given being Shane and Reynolds' refusal to learn how to read music. The other two not unreasonably pointed out that having released 11 albums and played around 800 gigs in 4 years, they were already working hard enough, thanks. Not to mention the $25million in sales (approx $180m in today's money).

The first sign of Guard's keenness to appease the band's critics came with their Christmas album, The Last Month Of The Year. Reynolds later said: "Dave was responsible for a lot of that album. We really worked hard on that one, laying down a lot of the instrumental tracks before we did the vocals, working on harmonies over and over. Musically, it came off very well, it just didn't sell."

The band's sixth studio album, Last Month... was the first to miss out on reaching No.1, reaching a relatively lowly No.11 after its release in October 1960. The main reason for the public's indifference seems to have been the obscurity of many of the song choices (though the cheesy original cover can’t have helped - which perhaps explains the snowy benches on the reissue cover I’ve got).

Some of these songs are centuries old and the Kingston Trio's recording of them is now 51 years, but listening with 2011 ears what hits you is that Last Month Of The Year sounds both old and modern at the same time. Opener Bye Bye Thou Little Tiny Child would sound perfectly at home on a Fleet Foxes record. It comes from a 1534 mystery play and the only instrumentation is acoustic guitar and the twinkling sounds of what may be a bouzouki, over which the Trio's harmonies work their magic.

The White Snows Of Winter combines a melody lifted from Brahms' First Symphony with lyrics written and sung by Shane, plus Jordanaires' style backing from Guard and Reynolds, resulting in top-class crooning. A short and sweet burst of We Wish You A Merry Christmas comes with escalating banjo backing is quickly followed by All Through The Night, originally an old Welsh folk song (Ar Hyd y Nos) given English lyrics by Sir Harold Boulton in 1884.

Goodnight My Baby is a lullaby that starts with a gentle bass line from David 'Buck' Wheat, the fourth and unacknowledged member of the band at this stage, who played various instruments on the album, largely stepping in when the Trio were struggling with their own technical limitations.

Side 1 ends with Go Where I Send Thee, a spiritual previously covered by the Weavers and given a rousing hillbilly twist with banjos and an Elvis twang to the vocals.

Follow Now Oh Shepherds is a Christmas carol then popular in Puerto Rico and the lilting guitars have a subtly Spanish flavour. The globetrotting continues on Somerset Gloucestershire Wassail, an ancient folk song designed to inspire a good apple harvest for cider making and here given a Greek tweak with the bouzouki backing. Mary Mild is a variation on the old English folk song The Bitter Withy and tells the strange tale of a young Jesus wanting to play ball with the rich kids up the road and building them a "bridge of the beams of the sun" in order to persuade the snobbish brats to let him join in, which brings to mind bank bailouts, but lets not go there.

A Round About Christmas is a perky guitar and banjo-led romp through another festive child's favourite, and Sing We Noel is the other track most people have actually heard before, giving a gamboling rendition. Last Month Of The Year is an old blues tune first recorded by Vera Hall (best known nowadays for Trouble So Hard, which Moby remixed into Natural Blues) under the guidance of Alan Lomax, and the Kingston Trio throw in a little dash of rock'n'roll with their exuberant acoustic rendition.

Just 28 minutes and it's all over, which keeps you coming back for more of course. Only Shane is still alive of the originally trio nowadays at the age of 77 but the Kingston Trio name continues to this day minus his direct involvement. Perhaps he'll yet live to see this little gem finally receive the credit it deserves.

Betty Davis - Betty Davis (1973)

Betty Davis walked out on the music scene never to return before the 1980s had even got under way, fed up with an industry that just didn't know how to deal with such a force of nature.

For all the rip-offs and disappointments along the way, Betty still left a remarkable legacy behind both in terms of the huge effect her short marriage to Miles Davis had in transforming his career and the trio of earthy, incredibly alive funk albums she recorded in the early 1970s.

In his autobiography, Miles put the break-up of their marriage in the late 1960s after only 12 months down to: "Betty was too young and wild for the things I expected from a woman. Betty was a free spirit, she was raunchy and all that kind of shit."

Carlos Santana put it rather better when he described her as "indomitable – she couldn't be tamed. Musically, philosophically and physically, she was extreme and attractive".

She was Betty Mabry when she arrived in New York from Pittsburgh aged just 16 to study fashion, but she was soon DJing in a nightclub called The Cellar and making connections in the music industry.

There's a possibly apochryphal single, also called The Cellar, rumoured to have been recorded under the guidance of soul singer Lou Courtney, which no-one seems to actually own a copy of, before she released Get Ready For Betty in 1964 while still a teenager.

A stomping Spector-esque tune featuring the lyrics "All of you girls, you'd better hide your guys/ Cause I'm a gonna get the first one that catches my eye", it's a fascinating early run through for the kind of outrageous sassy confidence she would later take to extraordinary limits.

Another single followed before she hooked up with Miles in 1967 and, despite being half the jazz legend's age, she set about revamping his wardrobe and turning him on to the likes of her friend Jimi Hendrix and Sly & The Family Stone.

The impact was obvious when her face appeared on the cover of the following year's Filles de Kilimanjaro LP, with the songs Mademoiselle Mabry and Frelon Brun both inspired by Hendrix riffs - The Wind Cries Mary and If 6 Was 9 respectively.

They apparently also recorded an album together in this period, which we can only hope eventually sees the light of day - every scrap Miles ever recorded seems to get released on another boxset eventually nowadays, so fingers crossed.

Betty also wrote the superb Uptown (To Harlem) for the Chambers Brothers' The Time Has Come LP before moving to London to take up modelling again when she split with Miles, who nevertheless continued down the funky jazz fusion road she had opened up to him.

She returned to the States in the early 1970s with the intention of becoming a songwriter. The Commodores recorded several of her songs on a demo that helped them get a deal with Motown but the prospect of a Betty-penned album fell apart when she refused the songwriting deal offered by Berry Gordy.

"I never decided I wanted to be a performer - I wanted to be a writer. But I couldn't work out a writer's deal for financial reasons, so I was left with a lot of songs and that's how I got into the business," is how she explains the circumstances that led to her debut album.

Greg Ericco got involved, having recently quit as Sly Stone's drummer, and pulled together a band of top funk musicians, including Larry Graham on bass, Neal Schon on guitar, the Tower Of Power horn section and the Pointer Sisters and Sylvester providing backing vocals.

Not that there was any danger of Betty feeling overawed in such company, as becomes immediately clear on opener If I'm In Luck I Just Might Get Picked Up. Riding on the back of a monster groove built around Graham's hog-phat bassline, she warns 'I'm crazy/ I'm nasty/ I'm wild' before adding 'All you lady haters don't be cruel me/ Don't you crush my velvet/ Don't you ruffle my feathers neither'.

Any idea that she might be pandering to some kind of male fantasy is blown out of the water by Anti Love Song, which slows down the pace but not the intensity. 'I know you like to be in charge/ But with me you know you couldn't control me/ And I'd make you drop your guard/ Cos I'd have you eaten your ego/ I'd make you pocket your pride/ And just as hard as I'd be loving you, boy/ Well, you know you'd be lovin' me harder/ That's why I don't want to love you'. What wouldn't Madonna give to have written that?

Walkin' Up That Road is one of the songs originally written for the Commodores (that demo would make interesting listening too), with Betty's growled vocals and Schon's squealing funky guitar taking their place.

Your Man, My Man sounds like a female-fronted Funkadelic as Betty tells the story of a 3-way affair. A fearless soul sister she may have been, but Betty seems to be reaching back into the blues for inspiration from the likes of Lucille Bogan and Bessie Smith.

Side two starts with the steadily escalating groove of Ooh Yeah before Steppin In Her I. Miller Shoes tells the tale of Devon Wilson, Betty's friend who died just 5 months after former boyfriend Jimi Hendrix when she fell from an eighth floor window of the Chelsea Hotel.

You can only imagine what the Commodores' version of Game Is My Middle Name sounded like, particularly the idea of Lionel Richie singing 'Do me in, do me in/ You know I could dig it man'.

In The Meantime is the most soulful number on the album, with Hershall Kennedy on the organ, and suddenly it's all over after just over 29 minutes. But then Betty always did know how to leave them wanting more.

Two more albums followed, none of them selling well due to radio stations refusing to play songs they saw as too explicit. Millie Jackson watered down her schtick with some success but acts such as Macy Gray, Angie Stone and Erykah Badu keep Betty's spirit alive long after she disappeared into the suburbs of Pittsburgh to live her life away from the public gaze.

King Creosote & Jon Hopkins - Diamond Mine (2011)

Anstruther is a long way from most places, perched on the east coast of Scotland, looking out over the North Sea and buffeted by a chilly breeze.

By the time you've got up past Edinburgh and on to the A915, it feels like you've left city living a long way behind. Wrap up warm once you get there and walk down the narrow streets to the habour for a bag of award-winning fish and chips while you watch (and listen to) the boats bobbing about, and the charm of the place starts to impose itself.

This is where Kenny Anderson, aka King Creosote, grew up before joining a couple of largely unsuccessful bands and running the local record shop until it went bust. Sneaking a few of his home-recorded CD-Rs into the racks didn't save the business but it did launch the Fence Collective, a gathering of like-minded musical eccentrics for which Anderson serves as a rather bashful figurehead.

He's continued to record albums at the rate of several a year since 1998, some of them receiving major label releases in more recent years. Those early records have an endearing lo-fi, rueful quality borne of a man who is all too familiar with a small town existence and life's little disappointments. Acoustic guitar, accordian, banjo and uncleared samples have all featured heavily on the way, along with Anderson's high yet world-weary voice which may flirt with melancholy but somehow usually ends up sounding slyly life affirming.

Anderson's sound has steadily got bigger for his non-Fence releases, and occasionally you fear the guiding hand of A&R men with Travis/Idlewild-inspired pound signs in their eyes. However, he's just too much of a musical oddball/restless soul to quite deliver easily digestible mainstream pop and his sales have remained stubbornly in the cult bracket.

That stripped-back, lo-fi sound always suited his songs best to my mind, so Diamond Mine came as a pleasant surprise - just as I imagine the album's Mercury Prize nomination probably came as a big surprise to Anderson. Not that it's a return to his early sound as such, just a clearing of the decks to let Anderson deliver 7 of his most bruised and tender songs with minimal instrumentation over the velvety cushion of Jon Hopkins's ambient textures.

The two have worked together on and off for 7 years, with Hopkins originally brought in to give Anderson's major label releases a radio-friendly sheen as he's also provided for Coldplay and David Holmes. But his approach on Diamond Mine, a collection of tracks gathered from throughout those years yet still sounding remarkably cohesive, has much more in common with his work for Brian Eno on the Another Day On Earth and Small Craft On A Milk Sea albums, adding a subtle luminous undertow that's lush without ever overwhelming Anderson's gentle songs.

London-based Hopkins appears to have succumbed to Anstruther's charms, with his field recordings from the area woven into the songs, starting with local folk chatting in a shop (including a discussion of Granny Anderson's allergies) over gentle piano on opening track First Watch.

The sense of location remains on John Taylor's Month Away, which starts with the couplet 'I love to look out at the sea/ From the swing park here at Roome Bay Beach', and tells the story not of the Duran Duran bassist out on the road but a friend spending a month 'on a boat 110 miles east of Aberdeen' as Anderson simple strumming is joined by the slow watery swell of Hopkins's synths and wordless vocals.

Aging has long been one of Anderson's lyrical preoccupations (my favourite being  the blackly humorous Saffy Nool on 2005's Rocket D.I.Y. - 'You're growing old, you're growing tense/ I was past 35 before my face made much sense') and he's at it here again on Bats In The Attic, insisting 'I'm growing silver in my sideburns/ Starting to unravel' in the strange tale of a friend's novel over decaying piano chords and pattering drums.

Running On Fumes starts with drifting traffic before Anderson ruminates with dry humour about a friendship turned sour ('You and I we once looked fine / Until you split your lip against the side of my face') over gently plucked guitar and subtle backing vocals from Lisa Lindley-Jones, the song drifting into near silence before Hopkins creeps in with harmonium and slowly spiralling keyboards.

If side one is subtly marked by Anderson's self-effacing drollery, side two starts with heart firmly on sleeve with Bubble. A promise to a loved one that things will get better in hard times, the lines 'I won't let you fall as low as I've been/ I promise to crawl until I'm back on my feet' sound far more uplifting to the backdrop of banjo from Leo Abrahams (another Eno/Holmes collaborator) and Hopkins's swelling ambience than you might suspect.

Your Own Spell brings up the unlikely scenario of a summer drought in Fife, with Anderson deciding the best option is to let the roses die as Emma Smith plays beautiful violin.

He pays tribute to his daughter in typically tender, sincere and yet self-mocking fashion on Your Young Voice, gently crooning 'It's your young voice that's keeping me holding on/ To my dull life, to my dull life'. Perhaps the humour in these songs is only really apparent if you've seen Anderson play live, with a daft wee smile and a joke never far away, however heartfelt the sentiment.

Anderson has described Diamond Mine as a "soundtrack to a romanticised version of a life lived in a Scottish coastal village" and with Hopkins' assistance, this intimate portrait of his roots manages to use the smallest of gestures to conjure up big emotions.

Randy California - Kapt. Kopter and the (Fabulous) Twirly Birds (1972)

If ever I bought a record on looks alone, it was Kapt. Kopter and the (Fabulous) Twirly Birds, a surprisingly smart £2.99 investment from Sifters in Burnage.

Randy stands guitar in hand on the front, wearing the regulation 1972 'righteously stoned hippie rock star' look to a tee and about to clamber into an incredibly rickety looking helicopter with the rest of his power trio. Lord knows where they're going to fit the drums.

The cartoonish font just adds to the impression that Randy isn't taking this opening salvo in his solo career away from Spirit terribly seriously. A quick scan of the track listing on the back reveals not one but two Beatles covers, along with further covers of songs by Sweathog, James Brown and Paul Simon, plus just three originals. 

Three factors seem to be in play here. Firstly, despite having already recorded four albums with Spirit, Randy was still only 21 at this stage, so a little youthful goofiness is to be expected.

Secondly, Spirit's fourth LP, 1970's Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus, had taken six months to record, but initially failed to find much of an audience, with the public slightly baffled by a jazzy, experimental concept album about ecology and spiritual rebirth. It's considered deeply influential nowadays but it didn't produce a hit until 1973 and sales only reached gold record status in 1976.

The album's lack of early success had pulled the band apart, with Randy quitting to go solo in July 1971 and seemingly ready to get back to playing some old school rock'n'roll.

Thirdly, he'd been hit hard by the death in September 1970 of his friend and kindred spirit Jimi Hendrix. The two of them had been in a band, Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, for a short but intense period in 1966. Due to their being another Randy in the band (drummer Randy Palmer - now why would you want to change a name like that?), Hendrix had rechristened them California and Texas respectively to avoid confusion.

After three months of playing up to five sets a night, many of them at legendary Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village, the band split when Chas Chandler persuaded Hendrix to try his luck in England, with Randy unable to come along due to only being 15 at the time.

Kapt. Kopter and the (Fabulous) Twirly Birds makes no overt mention of Hendrix but his spirit lurks in the tumbling grooves of the songs, while one-time Experience bassist Noel Redding appears in rather more corporeal form on three songs, albeit under the unfortunate pseudonym of Clit McTorius.

The album opens with Downer, with a stomping groove laid down by Redding and drummer Leslie Sampson (credited as 'Henry Manchovitz') while Randy plays funky hard rock and sings about 'Been on a downer too long' in the vein of Hendrix's Manic Depression or Purple Haze.

Devil is another Randy original, this time with his new touring bandmates, drummer Tim McGovern and bassist Charlie Bundy, and particularly fine with its rolling groove and psychedelic guitars. They worked up this album jamming in bars in Topanga Canyon and Devil sounds perfectly of its time and place.

I Don't Want You is a cover of James Brown's I Don't Want Nobody To Give Me Nothing (Open Up The Door, I'll Get It Myself) with clipped, urgent funk replaced with a fuzzy guitars that work a lot better than you'd expect.

Day Tripper also gets a patchouli oil-scented Californian rock'n'roll makeover that works largely thanks to Randy's guitar and vocals that manage to simultaneously sound more uptempo and laidback than the original.

A quick romp through Mother and Child Reunion strips out the reggae inflections, with the lyric about 'that strange and mournful day' seeming more fitting to Randy's thoughts about Hendrix's passing than the original tribute to Paul Simon's pet dog.

Side two starts with an elongated rhythm-heavy jam through Sweathog's Things Yet To Come, featuring Redding on bass again plus two drummers. Two unnamed female singers provide most of the vocals with Randy's contributions sounding like they were recorded through a telephone, and it goes on to reach a fine climax after he starts to cut loose with his guitar just shy of the seven minute mark.

Rain bizarrely starts as a tripped out country hoedown before changing direction and giving the Beatles' original a scuzzy guitar workover with more fuzzed-up laidback vocals and a host of psychedelic studio tricks stirred into the pot over nearly nine kaleidoscopic minutes.

Kapt. Kopter signs off with Rainbow, another fine original that captures the Topanga vibe with it's backwards guitar and hippy vibe love song lyrics tainted with paranoia. Randy's father-in-law and Spirit bandmate Ed Cassidy appears under the moniker Cass Strange-Drums, which hints at the Spirit reunion that was to follow.

Randy would make more explicit tributes to Hendrix in the future, particularly the 1982 mini album All Along The Watch Tower, but few people have kept his spirit alive better than Kapt. Kopter.

The Bug - London Zoo (2008)

When riots and looting broke out around the country last week, I found myself drawn back to London Zoo, the claustrophic, tense, angry and flat-out brilliant ragga/dancehall/dub album by The Bug from three years ago.

There's much debate going on at the moment about the causes of what happened - police brutality, a loss of morality, alienated young people, a lack of role models, violent computer games, consumerist greed, a general fin de siècle malaise and even BlackBerry messaging have all been batted about by various parties. 

Events certainly appeared fluid and by the time teenagers were pulling overpriced jeans out a broken window of Diesel in Manchester, it was hard to detect any obvious link to the shooting of Mark Duggan by police in Tottenham that had sparked the original violence.

But does the country really descend into mass rioting just because people think getting some stuff for free and chatting about it on social networks is a bit of a lark? And does it really only take a bit of Churchillian rhetoric, a few late-night court sessions and ditching a load of health and safety regulations to see the problem off?

London Zoo emerged in 2008 just as the financial crisis was peaking (well, let's hope so...), and I was staring down the barrel of losing a job I enjoyed and had been in for nearly ten years. The simmering tension and frustration, not to mention the gloriously deep, dirty bass, struck a chord.

The P45 duly arrived and London Zoo was slipped away on the shelves, too much of a reminder of bad times. It was only the arrival of the Arab Spring last Christmas that led me to finally dig it out again, when the angry crowds and petrol burning on heavily armed vehicles still seemed a long distance away.

Perhaps the idea of people rising up to finally overthrow oppressive regimes helped to detoxify the album in my mind, but I found myself actually enjoying it even if the vibe is still distinctly heavy.

Now I've found myself returning to it in the wake of what has just happened closer to home. After three nights of watching TV footage of London aflame in a manner seemingly better suited to the age of Samuel Pepys, it's hard to escape the yearning for some kind of answers. In truth, I'm not sure if I'm listening to London Zoo in search of truth or simply because the post-apocalyptic feel seems to suit.

London Zoo is Kevin Martin's third album under his Bug alias, having previously worked a wide range of interesting but demanding projects on the more extreme edges of recorded music, including industrial jazzcore (God), slurred blackly psychedelic hip-hop (Techno Animal) and illbient (compiler of the Macro Dub Infection albums).

Drawing on his love of Jamaican music, Martin collaborates with MCs he cheerfully admits mostly hadn't heard of him before they worked with him. It's the quality of his productions that win them over (and a reputation for actually paying), and that suits him fine.

Martin freely admits that for him "part of the attraction of dancehall has always been the sex and violence", and makes a very valid point that white artists such as Nick Cave can use extreme violence is their work and rarely get criticised for it, but you never get the feeling he's trying to be shocking on London Zoo. There isn't a lot of sex either, though there's plenty to shake your booty too.

Opening track Angry features Tippa Irie and is most lyrically eloquent tune on the album, with the Brixton MC spitting out everything that incenses about the world, from the the ozone to the abandonment of New Orleans, over an almost military beat.

Ricky Ranking turns up next on Murder We, the first of his three fine contributions, and a bleak vision of Babylon, where the streets are "flowing blood red". He slows things down to plead that we "remember my children, like I remember your children", but this vision of a community slowly melting down into molten rage seems a particularly pertinent one.

The consciousness side of things goes out of the window on Skeng (meaning knife or gun), which finds Killa P and Flowdan in pure raggamuffin bad boy mode. 'Shot you in the face/Make you send for the nurse/Doctor can't fix you/Send for the hearse' they growl over a minimal throbbing bass, with tongue very discretely stuck in cheek.

Ricky Ranking returns to team up with Aya on Too Much Pain, a haunted swirl of parched percussion and horror film dramatics. 'Top tune, Kevin!' Ricky blurts out at one point in a welcome moment of levity.

"What's wrong with the world/ Has the world gone mad?" wonders Warrior Queen on Insane over another precision-tooled groove before Flowdan returns with a scattergun toast about the coming Jah War.

The dark heart of London Zoo arrives with Fuckaz, a remarkable surge of disgust and anger over a migraine throb of sub-bass. Frequent Kode9 collaborator and dubstep scene stalwart Spaceape gets out some serious bile for nearly four minutes before asking several times: "How did we get here/ And where do we go now?". Spaceape and Martin seem to be inviting us to ponder this point as the song slowly ebbs to a close.

Poet/lyricist Roger Robinson, who also appeared on second Bug album Pressure, turns up on You & Me to take the temperature a notch or two. His light, dreamy delivery and Kevin's whispering, drifting production suddenly take you to a very different place. This would prove a step-off point for Martin's next move with the duo collaborating over a whole album as King Midas Sound in a more downtempo dubstep style.

Freak Freak is a dry, echoey and ominous instrumental, the sound of the underpass, glass crunching underfoot and your fingers tightening around the keys in your pocket.

Flowdan returns for Warning, another blast of inner city dread that dubs out midway through into slow decaying tones before firing back in with a martial beat and a flurry of patois.

Warrior Queen returns for the excellent Poison Dart, her voice somewhere between singing and toasting over yet more speaker-battering bass. The Skream remix seems better known but Martin's original version still does it for me.

Ricky Ranking is back for final track Judgement, showcasing his sweet singing tones between gruff voiced toasts. He concludes with "We are living in serious times/ I guess it's coming like a judgement sign/ The people have killing on their mind", so perhaps we should have considered ourselves warned.

London Zoo came out on Ninja Tune, who did a beautiful job of it, splitting the album into three 12-inches to do full justice to all that awesome bass and packaging it in a gatefold sleeve featuring artwork by Fefe Talavera. Even dystopia comes with design flair nowadays.

Louvin Brothers - Tragic Songs Of Life (1956)

The story of the Louvin Brothers is so strung out between good and evil, joy and terror, harmony and strife that it feels like the work of one of those southern gothic writers, from Edgar Allan Poe to William Faulkner to Cormac McCarthy.

The brothers, born Ira and Charlie Loudermilk, were certainly children of the Deep South, having been born in 1924 and 1927 respectively and grown up in the Baptist religion in the Appalachian mountains of Alabama, a time and place touched by hardship and where Jesus and the Devil seemed to walk side by side.

The 2004 BBC documentary In Search Of The Wrong-Eyed Jesus, which featured alt.country singer Jim White as its narrator, explored an American South seemingly little changed, with its junkyards, churches, bars and overfilled prisons. As White also points out, this is a place where 'stories was everything and everything was stories'.

Ira and Charlie embraced all the contradictions of their background, both in their music and their lives. Ira, the elder brother, played mandolin, sang in high sweet tenor, wrote most of the songs and was frustrated that he'd never persued his dream of becoming a preacher (he'd have been a charasmatic one too, based on his spoken word section in the title track to Satan Is Real). He was also a mean drunk, whose third wife shot him six times after he tried to strangle her with a telephone cord. When they toured with Elvis, Ira attacked him calling his music 'n****r trash'.

Not even surviving being shot cured Ira's ways and his behaviour caused the brothers to go their separate ways in 1963 (their last single was called Why Must You Throw Dirt In My Face). Ira died alongside his fourth wife in a car crash two years later - both he and the driver of the other car were drunk.

In contrast, Charlie played guitar, sang in a lower register and lived a long and seemingly contented life before dying at the age of 83 in January this year. He left behind a widow, Betty, after 61 years of marriage.

The brothers started out singing gospel, soon adopted the stage name of the Louvin Brothers and increasingly began to draw on the influence of other brother-based close harmony country acts, notably the Blue Sky Boys, the Monroe brothers and the Delmore Brothers. But so closely entwined were their vocals, Ira usually singing higher but both brothers modulating their voices with great skill, that their songs can still raise the hairs on the back of your neck today.

Despite being sometimes misinterpreted as a novelty act nowadays, largely thanks to the frequent appearance of their 1959 LP Satan Is Real in those collections of amusing album covers that float around the internet, the Louvins Brothers' influence runs deep, touching the music of artists ranging from The Byrds to Elvis Costello to The Handsome Family to The Everly Brothers to The Lemonheads to Johnny Cash over the years.

Tragic Songs Of Life was their second album (their first for Capitol) and a step away from gospel towards more secular songs, ranging from hokey but heartfelt dustbowl sentimentalism to lurid murder ballads.

Opener Kentucky is the perfect showcase for those incredible harmonies, with Paul Yandell adding some delicate flourishes on guitar and the tone wistful rather than anything darker. 

A cover of A.P. Carter's I'll Be All Smiles Tonight captures the forced happiness of a discarded lover attending the wedding of their former beau and side one settles down to its theme of thwarted love. 

Let Her Go, God Bless Her ups the pace but keeps wrongfooting you with a lyric that starts out musing about a sweetheart's hair in church, before planning a night of carousing if the right horse comes in at the races and then suddenly dropping in the verse 'Sometimes I live in the country/ Sometimes I live in the town/ But sometimes I take up the notion/ To jump in the river and drown', all sung in a confusingly upbeat manner.

What Is Home Without Love is another traditional song, this time about a rich man who marries a woman who only wants him for his wealth. Walking past a humble cottage one day, he spots a husband, wife and baby happily embracing together and is reduced to tears. Corny, of course, but those beautiful heartfelt harmonies somehow manage to transcend cynicism.

Anyway, if you thought that sounded cornball just wait until you hear A Tiny Broken Heart, the brothers' first songwriting credit on the album and a schmaltzy tale of a 7-year-old who discovers that his young sweetheart on the neighbouring farm has to move away because of the family's money troubles. He begs his father to sell his Christmas presents so he can give her family the money. It's like a particularly tragic episode of Little House on the Prairie, so it's just a relief to get to the end of the song without anyone going blind or dying in a threshing machine.

Side one finishes on a high - or rather a wonderful low - with In The Pines, another traditional tune and one that the Louvins probably heard from Bill Monroe. A dark and chilly song, the harmonies on the yodelling sections after the chorus are stunning, giving their interpretation a haunting quality without overcooking it. It also draws a direct if unlikely line between the Louvins and Nirvana, who covered the song on their Unplugged album in the Where Did You Sleep Last Night incarnation made famous by Lead Belly.

Side two starts with Alabama, another declaration of devotion to the south and the only other original Louvins composition on the album. Probably the most joyful song on Tragic Songs Of Life, it gives no hint of the remarkable run of murder, suicide, depression and betrayal that is to follow.

Katie Dear is a Blue Sky Boys song based around the melodrama of two young lovers who kill themselves with a golden dagger not because they are told by her parents that they can't marry but rather that they are too afraid to ask them.

My Brother's Will crams a remarkable amount of tragedy into three minutes, starting with the death of the protagonist's brother from a stray hunter's bullet when out walking in the country. Promising to marry the dying brother's sweetheart, we then discover that this the same woman who broke his heart years ago. It then turns out that Sally has also betrayed the now dead brother by marrying someone else. It's like a soap opera in stetsons.

Things turn really dark on Knoxville Girl, another traditional song that has roots going back to medieval England (when it was known as Wessex Girl). Willie takes a walk with his girl during which he beats her death with a stick for some unspecified transgression before dragging her body around by the hair and dumping it in a river. The violence is so unflinching (when she begs for mercy, he simply beats her more) that it brings to mind Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, which had come out 4 years earlier.

Take The News To Mother is a tale of a terrified soldier preparing to die on the battlefields of France, and sounds rather plaintive and sweet after Knoxville Girl.

Mary Of The Wild Moor is another traditional tale that had made its way over from England, being passed on by mouth from generation to generation, telling of another family tragedy as a father fails to hear his daughter crying at his door over the wind only to discover her child clasped in the dead woman's arms in the morning. If that wasn't all gloomy enough, the father soon dies of shock, the child isn't far behind and no one ever lives in the house again as it turns into a collapsing monument to poor Mary.

Tragic Songs Of Life certainly lives up to its title but Ira and Charlie's rich, pure voices still retain their power 55 years later. Pretty much everything they recorded in their 8-year recording career together is worth listening to and this is no exception, raising the bar for harmony singing that the Everly Brothers or Simon & Garfunkel more than matched in terms of financial success with but rarely bettered when it came to pure drama.