Moving over, briefly, to the Nineties, I listened to the album Penny Century by Australian group The Clouds to and from work today. This is in preparation for their upcoming Retroactive concert at the Corner Hotel in Richmond, which I’m attending. I was a big Clouds fan back in the Nineties. If you haven’t heard of them, think of the Pixies with two female lead singers (or maybe Kim and Kelly Deal). Maybe the Breeders are more to the point. Noisy powerpop, with lyrics about serial killers, mythology, witchcraft, alchemy, vampires, surrealism, and sex, lots of sex. I think they’ll be flogging some vinyl copies of their albums, but I already have PC on vinyl. That was their first full length album, and what a good album it was. I saw them at the Corner on a similar retro tour about 12 years ago. Whenever they tour, I will be there. Please check them out on Spotify and listen to their very first song, Cloudfactory. It will convert you!
While on my van run today I continued with the Clouds playlist in prep for tomorrow’s concert. This time it was the Octopus mini album, then second full album, Thunderhead. So many great songs on those albums. Say It was a the big ‘hit’ from Octopus. About witchy doings, I remember Jodi dedicating it at a show at the Prince of Wales, St Kilda, to Elizabeth Montgomery (from Bewitched), who had just died. Ghost of Love Returned, from Thunderhead, is the definition of majestic, and dynamic. Starts off languid and all ‘when you’re without love/the sun don’t shine’, then Raff’s drums come in like thunder from the Gods as if to bring down the rain, which comes in the form of shimmering guitars. I love how it has not one but two false endings. When played live, it always revealed the newbies, who would clap at the first false ending (and sometimes the second). Last track, Rocket, ends with something like seven minutes 
of thunderstorm sounds, before the coda from Ghost returns one more time. They’re not called the Clouds for nothing. I’d forgotten how the song Domino features Jodi’s voice transposed down about a whole tone to make her sound like a man. This used to annoy me, so I made a remix where I transposed it back up to her normal range. I may put it on my song rebuilds page in future. Thunderhead was supposed to be the album to make them megastars, but they were so willfully experimental and perverse, as in what they did with Domino, that too many people were challenged by it. Even the big catchy single, Bower of Bliss, was covered in a fuzz vocal – and that’s before we get to them lyrics (‘such a beautiful thing is to fornicate…you can drink my piss’, yowsah!). What chance did it have? Anyway, that’s my theory. Of course, all of this is why they were so great.
Had a listen to some of the Favourites compilation by the Clouds in preparation for tonight’s concert. It’s an interesting compilation, including an extra disc called Pretty Greens featuring unreleased tracks. There are also some b-sides included, like Midwinter and their cover of Witchita Lineman, which are nice but not essential. And there is one glaring omission, in my opinion. Why on Earth isn’t Never Say Forever on there? I could add a few more, but this is always the way with compilation albums, isn’t it? I guess they were covering their bets with that title: this is their favourites, not yours or mine. I won’t say much here about the concert, since I’ll leave that for a full blog piece. I went, I had a good time, that’s it.