Momus - Quietism - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

2018 . Pantaloon sees Momus - veteran Scottish indie crooner Nick Currie - celebrating his return to Berlin (after eight years in Osaka) with a topical cabaret album which sets current political developments in a Inchneo-WeimarInch of the imagination a musical space influenced by Brecht and Weill's theater songs, the tribal rock opera Hair, traces of psychedelia and echoes of post-punk groups like Wire and Magazine. These thirteen songs - recorded in rapid succession during August 2018, they're some of the most confident and heartfelt of Momus' long career - address topics like Brexit, climate change, oligarchy and it's unholy alliance with populism, and the new politics of borders, blood and soil. But they're also about the satisfactions of personal life, and how we can offset the shadows in the newspaper headlines (not to mention the onrush of mortality) with various kinds of optimism, and with love, S*x, art, myth, and the imagination. The last word is given to Agnes Bernelle, a Berlin cabaret singer who settled in Dublin, having fought the Nazis by beaming black propaganda into Germany InchYou want to be rich, well isn't that what you are?Inch Album Tracks 1. When I Was An Animal 2. Burning the Flag 3. The Beckmanns 4. Good Time Coming 5. Glacier 6. Little Paper Humans 7. Brexochasm 8. Escalator 9. The Fisher King 10. Osip Mandelstam 11. Rootless Cosmopolitans 12. Goodbye Mr. Quin 13. The Nightingale

Many years ago, Momus wrote a song called The Homosexual about a man who isn't actually gay but delights in - and profits from - the fact that people think he is. Themes of sexual orientation and gender identity thrust and cluster through this, his 2022 album, recorded in Berlin and named after the writer Christopher Isherwood... or, rather, the way Isherwood's Berlin landlady mispronounced his name when, with the poet Auden and other sexual exiles, he lived amongst queers and cabaret singers during the dying days of the Weimar Republic, teetering at the eerie brink of Nazism. It would be nice to think that, a century later, we'd moved on. Fascism, alas, still menaces us just as it menaced Mr Issyvoo, limiting our personal choices with nannying safetyism or outright dictatorship. Other themes churn through this playful yet serious record guilt in the art world, the primitivist fantasies of expressionist painters, Britain's semi-feudal monarchy, the laughter of lawyers, the lonely battles of social media, the prettiness of monkeys and the splishy-splashiness of joy. The music this time is hooky and poppy. If we really are sauntering into a Inchpocket apocalypseInch here's a wonderful way to whistle some of it's big issues. Album Tracks 1. 1. Self-Identity 2. 2. Pocket Apocalypse 3. 3. Kirchner 4. 4. Monkey 5. 5. Dgaf 6. 6. It's Incredible 7. 7. the Art Creep Is Dead 8. 8. Lawyers 9. 9. My Wife Will Soon Forget Me 10. 10. in My Heart 11. 11. Bertie the Heterosexual 12. 12. Queerness 13. 13. Details 14. 14. Safetyism 15. 15. Issyvoo

2021 . In late 1969 young Nick Currie moved to Athens with his family and soaked up the Greek sun for a couple of years while listening to The Beatles' Abbey Road album and the rock opera Hair. Approximately fifty years later - now named after the Greek god Momus, and eager to investigate claims that Athens is Inchthe new BerlinInch - Nick returned to winter in the city with his French girlfriend. When Noémie left - and lockdown dragged on - Nick set about making an album called Athenian. The 2021 album from Momus, then, has a Greek flavor, and keeps getting drawn back to the years 1969-1971. Unlike Vivid, it's predecessor, Athenian is not about confronting the pandemic with a combination of darkness and dignity. This time the emphasis is on lightness and laughter. The same accordion-based sound might drive the record, but vintage British comedians like Frankie Howerd, Ted Ray, Kenneth Horne and Benny Hill keep popping up this time, spreading much-needed laughter and lightness. Much as in his novel The Book of Jokes, Momus slows their routines down, warps them, and fills them up with corpses, clowns, ghosts and zombies. We may be doomscrolling through a horrorworld, but at least we can still laugh. Even when serious names pop up - Karl Kraus, the apocalyptic Viennese satirist, or Wyndham Lewis with his Tyros, those toothy hooligans avid for novelty in the years following the flu epidemic and the First World War - they seem to be playing some of the same games as the comedians inventing characters, testing what you can and can't say these days, and making fun of the prejudices of people who seem to be living life with their values all topsy-turvy. Album Tracks 1. Swansong 2. Greyland 3. Chatternooga 4. Under the Volcano 5. Zooming 6. Horrorworld 7. Coco the Clown 8. My Moriarty 9. Francoise 10. Nono 11. The Drizzle of March 12. The Tyro 1