The New Cue #392 June 28: NightjaR, MJ Lenderman, The Waeve, David Keenan & Stephen Pastel, SOPHIE, Juniore, Fat Dog, Eddie Vedder, Wilco

"I took it home and stuck it in the CD player and literally everything changed for me."

Hello and welcome to another edition commemorating your favourite day of the week, Recommender Friday, Reccie Friday to its pals.

Today we’ve got mind-blowers from This Is Memorial Device author David Keenan and Stephen Pastel, who co-wrote the music for the stage play of the book, plus Ted, Niall and Chris fire up the Recommenders like it’s one of those tennis ball machines. Seriously, you better be ready, you’re about to be bombarded. Adopt the stance! Here’s this week’s playlist:

And here for all you Apple Music heads.

We’ll see you on Monday for a mammoth music chat with Billy Childish.

Enjoy the edition,

Ted, Niall and Chris

---

An Album To Blow Your Mind #1

Award-winning author David Keenan’s mind is blown by Japanese acid future-rock.

Today’s the release date for This Is Memorial Device: Music from the Stage Play by Stephen Pastel and Gavin Thomson.  The play, which ran earlier this year to incredible reviews in Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh and London, was based upon David Keenan’s landmark 2017 novel of the same name, a debut book which imagined the fictional history of the smalltown misfits that populated and coalesced around Airdrie’s post-punk local heroes, Memorial Device.

In a mind-blowing two-part special, first David spills his brains, and then, later on, Stephen plucks out his own choice.

Fushitsusha
Double Live (1991)

“I first came across Fushitsusha through a review of their second album, Double Live, written by Travis Crawford in an American fanzine that was accompanied by a picture of their guitarist/vocalist Keiji Haino. The combination of this picture of Haino looking like the most bad-ass rockstar of all time and the description of the music created a mad fantasy in my mind of the ultimate rock band that would combine blunt No Wave aggression, free jazz levels of psychedelic interplay and a devout Holy Music-style atmosphere. It seemed like everything I had been looking for. Back in the day it was near-impossible to find releases on the Japanese PSF label in the UK, so I hadda live with my fantasy for a few years, occasionally discovering things that almost came close to the vision I held in my mind, things like Tarot by Walter Wegmuller, before one day walking into Rough Trade in Covent Garden and discovering that they had a brand new PSF section. And there it was, the (double) album of my dreams, in a suitably enigmatic all-black gatefold sleeve with minimal silver Japanese lettering. I took it home and stuck it in the CD player and literally *everything* changed for me. 

The trio of Haino on guitar and vocals, Yasushi Ozawa on bass and Jun Kosugi on drums are the greatest rock band of my lifetime. If mainstream rock music had continued on the revolutionary trajectory set by Jimi Hendrix in the late 1960s then Double Live is the result. I had never heard a guitar sound like Haino’s, completely overdriven, with these emotionally epic, immolating leads that come on like a flamethrower soaring over Ozawa’s minimal, depth-charge bass and Kosugi’s martial/non-fluid drum cracks. It was completely original, a music made by three heads intent on re-wiring the rock canon completely. And then it came to “Track Four/Disc One” (all the titles are in untranslated Japanese) and it was as if the holy madrigals of Hildegard von Bingen had been re-scored for the ultimate post-Acid Test USA jam band. It was everything I had ever fantasised rock music could be and in the wake of it I spent the better part of the next two decades collecting, writing about and obsessively boosting new Japanese underground music, leading to me eventually bringing Fushitsusha over to Scotland for a series of revelatory shows. And it all began with Double Live, still, for me, the greatest rock album of all time.”

---

Recommender

Ted Kessler

You have to kiss a lot of frogs on Recommender duty, particularly as the dead space of mid-summer approaches. But metamorphosis always happens, nonetheless. Always.

My first princess this week is a 26-year-old young man named Jake Lenderman, who trades under his initials MJ Lenderman. Lenderman gestated as an artist over COVID, recording two albums quickly in that two-year period between 2020 and ‘22 in his native North Carolina, brewing a woozy, lo-fi country-rock around his distinctive guitar playing and writing. In 2022 he brought out a lovely, contemplative eponymous country-ish set, following last year with a live set. You may also have noticed him on that boat playing guitar for Waxahatchee on her Right Back to It.