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Unknown Pleasures 1: Margot Guryan - “Take a Picture”
By Lady Foursquare | August 10, 2008
This is the beginning of a little feature I will be regularly offering on the Noise Floor Crew blog, wherein I chronicle and review my purchases of the week, or sometimes more frequently. Yes that’s right folks, you heard it here first: I still buy music.
So, I was reading a review of “Tender Buttons,” an album I already like by Broadcast from the venerable Warp label. No big secret there (however I do strongly recommend “Tender Buttons”). I noticed that the review compared Broadcast to an artist by the name of Margot Guryan. I looked up Margot on a whim and found only one review of her 1968 album, “Take a Picture.” But in that lone missive she was compared to no less than the grand pubah of pop himself, Brian Wilson. YOU HAD ME AT HELLO!
If this is the best pop album that you never heard, you aren’t alone, friend. Apparently, Guryan’s 1968 debut has become the holy grail for the notoriously nutty Japanese pop vinyl collectors. And with a pedigree like that…I’m in…way in. At first play, I immediately saw why and so will you. Margot was a trailblazer for women in popular music, writing and arranging her own perfect sugar sweet indie gems and singing them in a distinct breathy voice over strikingly modern chamber pop arrangements. Yeah, you heard me right: chamber pop. Say somethin’! I dare you! I was spellbound. Guryan even riffs on a variation of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” in the standout track of the album, “Someone I Know.” The main theme, worked over by the brass section, is a near perfect compliment to Guryan’s icy delivery.
Woodwinds, electric organs of the era…none are omitted. It’s all there, kids. How easy it is to forget how great recording of this period can sound. Records like this explain the existence of someone like DJ Shadow. How can you not fall in love with a lost masterpiece like this once and spend the rest of your life digging basements with mummified bats (which he famously found on one expedition - hence the title of this feature) and toxic dust for another album that will make you feel that way one more time? The lush instrumentation reproduced on glorious saturated tape makes the most advanced studios of our millennium look silly in all their gadgetry. The wispy analog reverb on her vocals alone is enough to break your heart forever.
And so in introducing the first feature in this continuing series on my iTunes purchases, I guess I get to come out of the closet as a pretty serious indie pop fan. Like the Liger, it’s “pretty much my favorite animal.” Don’t let the Noise Floor Crew or Klientele stuff fool you. My heart belongs to Margot Guryan…and Belle and Sebastian and Brian Wilson and all those damned Swedes making such great simple pop music.
There I said it. And without further delay… here is Margot with the delightful, “Someone I Know.” So stop hatin’ and get to appreciatin’.
(One quick afterthought: I checked out Margot’s more recent work, the single for “16 Words.” I’ll save you the time/clicks. Skip that one and buy this and perhaps the rarities collection too. Like Maria Muldaur, that heavenly little voice that wins you over here, departs with age and the result is more Laurie Anderson than Isobele Campbell, if you know what I mean. FORGIVE ME
Margot Guryan - Someone I Know
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Topics: Main, Pop Music, Unknown Pleasures |
September 15th, 2008 at 12:17 am
spot on!