Dogs in the Rain: A Review in the Form of a Poem of ‘Warp and Woof’

warpwoof(ANALOGUE FLASHBACK BOOKS, 2016.)

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Reviewing reviews can be tricky,

As if the repeating of viewpoints can

In some way distract. And so charged

With the task, and with the need to distinguish,

I choose the form of a poem to draw attention

To detail and to in my own small way, interact.

 

The pamphlet is dense, as all chapbooks are

With opinion; appraisals of albums, and their affects,

Sharp and smooth. Gregg Fiddament’s

Absolutely She Cried’ strikes me most, being as it is

A prose-poem, capturing The Doors’ ‘Alive She Cried’,

With his needle scratching ‘a warped ouroboran groove.’

 

Roselle Angwin, stoned, remembers a distant Cambridge,

Listening to the Floyd she’s transported by ‘Echoes’

And ‘the motionless albatross in the air.’

Her recollection is brief but shot through with detail,

The privilege of the place breeds a conflict

Between what is elite and what’s shared.

 

John Gimblett’sThe First and the Last’ talks of Fripp

And all he’s accomplished. From Bowie to Blondie

And all the way back to KC. But its on the first Peter Gabriel

Tour that Robert is most praised and pictured, sitting

On the side of the stage, flagged by curtains ‘throwing out

magnificent music like the sun and it’s neutrinos, speckles..’

………………………………………that rise, bright and free.

 

Charlie Baylis writes of Rain dogs by Tom Waits,

In terms of World War two and the legacy it engendered.

He sees Waits as a phantom from a ‘muddy hole in that war.’

An album for the ‘urban dispossessed’ and

Their ‘heavenly drinking’ the dark world Tom waits

Leaves us is certainly worth waiting for.

 

Sandra Tappenden speaks of La Mystere Des Voix Bulgare

With aplomb, ‘a music belonging outdoors, to raw women’

And all of its ‘strident calling’ for the intimate

Realm of the heart. Her writing is rich, her immediacy clear

As she listens, transforming time in her ‘morning kitchen’

From so called normal encounters to those close to art.

 

Andrew Darlington Jefferson’s the old Airplane for us,

Democratising the cultists from LSD’s ancient reign.

Rupert Loydell evocatively Azimuths, as Norman Jope

Returns to Miles Davis. Clark Allison cleanses senses

By exploring Merzbow’s Tauromachine, risking pain.

From Dylan’s Basement tapes to an Abearareon campsite,

 

Bert Jansch’s Jack Orion sits next to the Convenience Kings.

Editor Loydell chooses well and the voices are both

Eloquent and instructive, as we align tastes as readers

To those writing for us, who in these gentle pages

Celebrates those who inspire

Through what they play, share and sing.

 

The weather is warm but still it cuts through us.

As it changes and weathers us we find music to alter

The soul and assist. The dog barks. The voice breaks,

Taking the heart along with it. These reviewers choose songs

That reveal the rain and warp within living

Is soon saved by singing and what it teaches us to resist.

 

 

David Erdos 24/10/16

 

 

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