Pity the remixer.
Usually they’re the ones who end up doing everything and owning nothing. Sometimes pimps, mainly Johns.
Normally it’s a thankless task, but every once in a while it makes the re-architect’s day, if only in that almost-sickly-being-happy-for-someone-else kind of thing.
Andrew Weatherall is dad to much of the music you might like, one way or another. You could say he was lucky that way, in so much as after an early career founded in the madness of acid house’s late eighties explosion he ended up taking on indie rock no-hopers Primal Scream with the brief of making them hip to a million kids off their tits every weekend. Against all odds, he managed it.
‘Screamadelica‘ may have set the tone for much of the two decades that followed it when it comes to fey young men mangling guitars and repetitive beats but, in typically British fashion, in the intermezzo that followed its cultural re-calibration Weatherall surveyed all the potential cash, glory and people cooing up his trumper it meant for him before promptly blowing a massive raspberry to everyone (including, most famously, U2) and then electing to plough his own highly idiosyncratic furrow, which he’s been doing pretty much ever since.
‘Covenanza‘ is not the first of his records on which Weatherall has the ackers to sing, but it appears to be a bone of critical contention – yet again – whether this is almost the most significant thing about it. This emphasis is of course unnecessary; when his voice duly appears for the first time on ‘The Confidence Man‘, it’s merely the sound of a human being trying wisely not to over-complicate things, rather than some sort of Pied Piper radiating auto-tuned white noise.
For a producer whose previous incarnations included having a thing for Gothic dub (Sabres Of Paradise) and high end, purists techno (Two Lone Swordsman), ‘Covenanza’ is perhaps surprisingly in fact a more streamlined, far less esoteric venture than either. In places it’s almost remarkably straightforward; closer ‘Ghosts Again‘ is a desultory final goodbye wreathed in hush and understatement, while the preceding instrumental ‘Thirteenth Night‘ is contrastingly upbeat and pristine, neither sounding like the work of a mensch who lives by choice in a rarefied hipster den of his own making.
Weatherall’s reputation invites this sort of prejudice, but as ever the reality is that issues of perception are all with the surveyor. This is no alternate universe, as the airtight funk chop and Kraftwerkian nods of ‘The Last Walk‘ and ‘We Count The Stars‘ plaintive trumpet demonstrate, merely one that bends to the veteran’s whims, a dimension still peripherally influenced by the studio alchemy of King Tubby and his ilk in possibly a throw back to his protean teenage years as a late coming punk.
Not to be classed as egomaniac art, it goes without saying that it’s a stretch to brand any of this “pop” in a traditional sense, although far weirder material by others gets put out under that pretence with every passing year. If ‘Disappear‘ begins like a relic from some 70’s sci-fi programme that never got made, it percolates into something which, whisper it, quietly could pass for Underworld playing on the Moon, whilst the urbane reverb-soaked guitar chop of ‘Kicking The River‘ is a cocktail napkin away from a dinner party, simultaneously underlining just how much Fat White Family‘s recent album was in dire need of some tunes like it.
The neutral observer, searching for a handle on things, may ask themselves what’s it to be then – rebel, rotter or refined? By way of a partial response, Andrew Weatherall continues to voluntarily stay out of the limelight despite how much the nostalgia machine would love him to be otherwise.
What’s evident is that ‘Covenanza’ is the latest and arguably most conventional chapter in a career history in which his rejection of the industry’s self eating model proved to be the most prescient thing he’s ever done. Doing it for no-one other than himself as a result, whilst making no new statements, it’s still a slick counterweight to much of the premeditated froth that occupies the space outside.
Vacuum sealed, both creator and his work are still locked in to a groove all of their own.
