Reviews ---- Tinsel : The Lead Shoes ------------------------------------------ Pitchfork Rating: 7.8 About five years back, 1 chanced upon a small article in my hometown newspaper's "Living" section about a local independent record company called Keyhole Records that, as its opening act, had released a sampler featuring local artists and ones from abroad. The now well-known Spanish band Nfigala was among them. 1 was thrilled to discover that there were peopie in my culturally hopeless city that were producing interesting independent music, rather than just bonehead punk rock and degenerate metal. I found the compilation, Songs from the Attic, at the library and checked it out. Tinsel's contribution to that record still stands as one of the most starkly depressing songs I've ever heard. Over a sparse guitar pattern, frontman Michael Hopkins repeatedly sung, "We sing from mouths that have no teeth." I felt like shit for hours afterward, and I assume, based on their recorded output, that Tinsel would take this as a compliment. The Lead Shoes is co-released by Mats Gustafsson's Broken Face label, so it looks like they've hit the big time, at least as far as indie cred is concerned. But Tinsel's music is still as bleak as it was in 1996, if not more so. I once read an interview with Michael Hopkins in which he stated that he preferred to live in a dead town as inspiration for his music. On The Lead Shoes, this concept is taken to an extreme: it was recorded inside of 'an old abandoned stone building in a former lead mining town." The result is a collage of fractured folk and dilapidated machinery. Its a document of vacated old- industry towns where few non-residents care to venture, despite realizing that these places are an integral part of our nations identity. And like other great illustrations of Americana, from the delta blues to Slints Spiderland, The Lead Shoes couldn't have been made elsewhere. This record sees Tinsel expanding the scope and palette of their apocalyptic folk. The songs are expansive, and incorporate samples more often than guitar. Rather than plucked melodies, rusty sewing machines and detuned violins comprise the backdrop of Hopkins disaffected Cohen-esque vocal delivery. Songs range from the love story of "Rebecca," which couples a spare guitar arrangement with "deeply blue annoyance' (to paraphrase David Cyrubbs), to ramshackle machine ragas like 'Eva's Window. " But regardless of musical variety, a sense of isolation and deprivation permeates every molecule of the album. All or most of the sampling and manipulation on The Lead Shoes is done with tape and other basic sonic devices. The unpredictable quality of analogue audio and the low fidelity complement each other perfectly. Its conceptually harmonious as well, the idea of getting ones hands dirty cutting tape rather than sitting in an office chair behind a computer being much more conversant with the workmanlike condition of The Lead Shoes. Perhaps the forward written by Mats Gustafsson's puts it best: "Tinsel has formulated the musical equivalent of this dark deserted town. Old signs hang loosely from their creaky hinges. Most of the windows have been smashed out, and the wind seems to blow more harshly than normal. That this ugly reality and the withering honesty hangs in the air like distant echoes... through all of the records 51 minutes of droning melancholia is nothing less than stunning. " I wouldn't be so hyperbolic as to call it stunning but The Lead Shoes is certainly an honest, gritty depiction of the sadness of isolation and dissolution. - Michael Wartembe Terrascope Greg Weeks' Bleecker Station is reviewed alongside The Lead Shoes here Although most aren't going to notice nor give a damn, its great to see the new guard of underground folk acknowledging some less-than-obvious gems from the past. In the case of Greg Weeks' brief but perfectly formed mini-album 'Bleecker Station", the 5x5 mosaic of the cover is a tribute to Italian band Saint Just's psych-folk obscurity "La Casa Del Lago'. I only mention this because there is a lot more to what makes Greg Weeks tick than just singer- songwriter melancholy. His encyclopaedia knowledge of European folk and progressive rock is a powerful tool for imbuing material multiple dimensions. The eight songs on this disc. are diary extracts from a life gone haywire, and the fruit of a personal goal by Weeks to write a song a day to chart the course of a particularly turbulent relationship. Six of the songs here were written in consecutive days, a personal corner of Gethsemane we can all relate to hut would prefer to observe from a distance. But unlike the more arranged and detached travails on Weeks' debut and masterpiece "Fire in the Arms of the Sun" you can't keep these songs at arms length. They force the reopening of wounds long- forgotten, push your face down in the mud of things that you handled badly, or not at all. The style is set with the troubled sleep of 'Front to Back", the unadorned acoustic guitar and vocal style inescapably recalling Nick Drake circa Pink Moon, while the text speaks of lovers "burrowed in a fever dream". The precious minute-and-a-half of 'When Galaxies Collide! shows that one thing Weeks knows how to do is say what there is to be said about an event or feeling and then leave it at that. Nothing is repeated for the sake of structure, all contributes to a specific end. Moving into 'Deeper Waters' the noise of jagged splinters of electric guitar channelled through buzzing amplification shatters the aesthetic, our troubadour is now securely strapped into an electric chair. Back to exquisite minor key eloquence on the apogee of this work, the icily- desperate 'Heart Murmure', tape hiss like life-blood draining out. And so it goes, through eight pieces of crystalline perfection, down-sliding through the over-medicated suicide ambience of 'Down a Dark Corridor' to a perfect terminus at 'Duress', a fine melody pulling the artist through to the point where he can "try and untangle the bedding where you used to lie". Its not comfortable but it is affecting, In the track 'Distance', Weeks writes that 'If life were a photograph then 1 could look away". Thankfully his isn't, and he doesn't. Mention should also go to the fine artwork in the booklet of this CD. As carefully thought out as everything else here, each track is illustrated by a different artist, Susanne Lewis and Stone Breath's Timothy Renner among them. Ifs worth mentioning too perhaps that such was Phil's belief in this man's work that he invested a small sum in co-releasing it so a percentage of safes of each copy sold go towards the "keep the Terrascope afloat" fund. You know what to do. (Tony Dale) At a comfortable distance of a few months, its good to note the Keyhole/Terrascope collaboration has been successful on several levels, not least of which is encouraging Greg Weeks to emerge from his shell long enough to do a little live work, and in the process discover first-hand what a strong following his music has attracted in such a short space of time. Just as important to my mind though is the discovery that a collaborative release between an "underground" record label and a like-minded magazine isn't such an extraordinary concept after all. Neither could exist without the other, yet rather feed off one another we should be working together for the common good of the community we serve. The Terrascope itself was born of the same lineage, and although the idea was considered by some to be untenable over a decade ago, I'm glad to see it gaining ground at long last - with none other than our Swedish cousins at The Broken Face following our Greg Weeks collaboration by investing in a first full-length album by Keyhole Records' own Michael Home band Tinsel. And what a fabulous result; clad in a hand-crafted silver-painted gatefold card sleeve, Ho~ hauntingly beautiful, bleakly fractured folk melodies shimmer like wind-blown petticoats on the moonlit bodies of eloping lovers. Songs like the eerie and dreamlike 'the Great Indoors'(based around a Greg Weeks composition, coincidentally enough) draw you in and paint an aural sand-dune in your mind with layers of diverse instrumentation, 'Golden City' takes a bow in the direction of Alistair Galbraith courtesy of some ethereal violin sawing whilst as the ever perspicacious Mats Gustafson (editor of 'IBF) notes, the 'Rusty Symphony' sound-collage reminds one of the mighty Tower Recordings in its endlessly shifting vibe, a ticketing newsreel framing each image as it flashes past your ears. The Lead Shoes' is a milestone release in many ways, and one which I earnestly suggest you investigate.... (Phil) Dream Magazine Simple sounds in circles grey toys in looped oblivion, swirling dust patterns in the attics and imagination of one Michael Hopkins of Wisconsin. He sings like a teenaged Leonard Cohen, often with Lesle Chalim singing along. Bleached by the sunlight till the wood was almost white and would crumble off in your fingers, we looked out of these long lost ghost windowsills and wondered at the world beyond our reach and over that far away hillside that's just visible peeking out between the trees. The places your mind takes out of melancholy and comfort and the distance between inside and outside. Fellow Keyhole recording mate Greg Weeks is sampled for The Great Indoors, and that make perfect sense. Kindred spirits in baring souls, and evocative simplicity, and both making a new and ancient kind of folk music, but Hopkins' is a bit more inclined to play with samples and sound textures than he is a guitar, but both meet and mix as well. It's a lovely set of home movies from another world, scratchy flickering smoky rooms lights projected rays piercing darkness. Has me dreaming pictures like the Brothers Quay, shimmering black and white and grey images, cycle and swirl in their warm mechanical humming lifelike activity. Or heartfelt near confessionals of love and loss, timeless lonely ruminations from the inside of a soul. I should also mention ifs all put together in a hand painted and assembled gatefold sleeve with foldout collages and gorgeous cover art by Jan Anderzen. From Aural Innovations #17 (September 2001) This is the first full-length album from Michael Hopkins' solo project Tinsel. Michael is a Wisconsin based musician and on this release he throws open the gates to his very surreal and sombre, yet strangely interesting word. This album definitely stirred a strange chord within me and it offered a lot of very well done dark and sometimes manic musical pieces. I hear shadows of Leonard Cohen in the songs 'Rebecca' & 'Sleep In Deep' for both are based upon the classic haunted Cohen style. Lesie Chalim's vocal accompaniments offer another dimension to Michael's tortured lyrics in both of these songs. Both are mainly Acoustic Guitar songs with strange atmospheres in the backgrounds and off key Piano's and Organs sweep along with the occasional lonely Accrdion or something. There is a lot of other dodgy stuff as well for Tinsel work weird soundscapes into most of the songs on this album, which 1 found perfect for their style of music. I loved the dark atmospheres and the conversations and the likes drifting in and out of ear range, similar to the stuff on Pink Floyds' Heart Beat Pig Meat' from The Zabrinski Point Soundtrack. I can also hear ' a Ron Geesin sort of unpredictable noise element as well with 'The Halo Seeds', Eva's Window', and 'Golden City'. Ena Ballard's Viola on 'Golden City' is insane to the ears, and all three are out of it pieces of music whose motions are very acid induced. Sort of Noise Experimentation stuff, good for those seeking enlightenment trough strange atmospheres and LSD. 'Keep Silent and Silence Will Keep You' is much the same while 'The Lead Shoes' has a sort of Cohen/Syd Barrett approach to it. There is a Roger Waters style darkness in the songs 'The Great Indoors', 'Here I Was' and 'Rusty Symphony'. They all have their Ambience set firmly in The Wall era Waters. 'Empty Spaces' is a good one to listen to, to get a sense of what ambience I mean. All the Vocals are a mixture between Leonard Cohen and sad Roger Waters style Droning. Sort of One of My Tums in a Chelsea hotel type banter. On this 10 Track CD Tinsel offer 51 minutes of very Experimentation based sounds mixed with songs of a dark feel; they offer a lot in the respect of strangeness that draws obscure images inside the music. Its deep stuff that could possibly make you cry? 1 loved it and cannot wait to hear the next offering. Keep it up lad! Reviewed by Albert Pollard Dead Angel My, but this is a nice one. The CD comes in two formats - 200 copies are being released in this nifty, hand-tooled gatefold CD album, 300 will appear in the standard jewel case -- and they look absolutely swell. The gatefold includes an artwork sheet on one side and a lyric sheet on the other (most useful, since Michael's vox are not always easy to decipher.. like Greg Weeks, he has a tendency to almost whisper when he sings). I like the gatefold album itself just for the colors alone - silver with a black and white picture on the front and the inside, but a black and blue print on the back... nice. This is the first full-length release from Tinsel, by the way, for those not already hep to Michael's solo (mostly) adventures. This release is also being presented as a joint production by Keyhole and Broken Face, which means it should be available to some degree overseas. Tinsel, for the unfamiliar, is best thought of as a combination of Leonard Cohen at his most melancholy 'with Tom Waits and his most experimental - imagine dumping all the tracks from Cohen's SONGS OF LOVE AND HATE and Waits' BONE MACHINE into a blender and you're in the generate neighbourhood. Lonesome acoustic guitar and other "traditional" instrumentation bump up against bizarre sounds and samples, rhythms made of squeaks and strange sounds, while drones wind in and out of the work. The sound is both bleak and oddly beautiful, grounded in the sounds of the ordinary world yet otherworldly at the same time. Syd Barrett is referenced in the promo sheet thingy, and I suspect he would have approved of this album, Certainly in the overall ambience there are parallels to Syd's work, both in early Pink Floyd and his solo work. (It also helps to keep in mind that Syd was heavily influenced by legendary experimentalists AMM, something most people aren't terribly aware of, and that side of Syd shows up as an influence here, I think.) What I've always liked about Tinsel is Michael's ability to transorm ordinary sounds into something mysterious, suggesting that even within the everyday world there is a bidden, secret universe of emotion just waiting to be discovered. The recording environment probably plays a great part in that sound - these songs were largely recorded in an abandoned stone building, and I have no doubt Michael left in the sounds happening around him as he recorded (and then added more of his own later). The album opens with tones from a glockenspiel (maybe) and wind on "The Halo Seeds," sounds that are soon lost in a cycling whirlwind of eerie noise - eventually the sound dies away and segues into the lovely "Rebecca," driven by a slow but deliberate acoustic guitar and a shimmering, unidentifiable drone over when sings lines like 'You're a crooked lady and I'm a crooked man / But we both give straight answers." Lesle Chalim supplies backing voice from time to time, but in such subtle fashion that she's easy to miss if you're not paying attention. The instrumental "Golden City' is interesting as well - it opens with plucked viola strings, which are eventually joined by crazed chittering sounds and muted screeching. Even better, however, is 'The Great Indoors," a something melange of guitar, ambient sounds ' and cryptic samples to provide the "beat." The lines "The melodies make me weak / The harmonies let me sink 1 Into my shoes" might well be the mantra for Tinsel's entire existence. "Rusty Symphony" is another nice one, filled with exotic sounds and drones and one mumbled verse (repeated twice) that sounds more like a dream than an actual song. 1 also really like "Sleep in Deep," with its cicada-like rattle and sleepwalking vibe, and "Keep Silent and Silence Will Keep You" is most pleasing as well, with its cyclotron background and. repeated motifs (mostly found sound and samples, as best as i can tell) from a hypnotic background over which Lesie Chalim's ethereal vox float like the wind in the trees. The album's tenth and final track, "The Lead Shoes," is minimalist in its sounds, and while those sounds begin in the background, behind the singing, they eventually creep to the forefront until Michael's voice is almost lost in the swirl of sound. A fine, exotic-sounding album from start to finish. Be sure to track it down while it's still available. Splendid e-zine The band wears their albuml title literally, with their fragile melodies squashed by all the dramatic weight they're shoehorned into their songs. In 'Rebecea", which sets the tone for this sometimes-experimental work, the bands bookish words ('1 will carve a woodcut of your name/ Ink it up so proudly") do not thrust through the song like a passionate lover; instead, the, band sends us on a 'Gutenberg Museum" field trip. No feelings of romance and longing are generated, but you will swear to have seen each piece of rusty metal type that was used to set the lyrics. Its an o sensation, successfully maintained throughout the course of this droning and strangely compelling album. Every instrument used in the albums creation - be it viola, accordion, guitar or found noises - supports the male and female talk-sing vocals with an almost unhealthy hesitation; indeed, to hear the instruments "cough", you'd think that The Lead Shoes was the equivalent of an exotic new disease. - td From Jeff Penezak If Cave is maudlin, Michael Hopkins is downright suicidal on this, his second full-length release under the Tinsel moniker (following '98s I Wish The Talkies Never Would Have Ended, also on his Wisconsin-based Keyhole Records. Mike also keeps great company: Keyboles' last release the Greg Weeks 'Bleecker Street' EP (reviewed on these pages a few months ago was released with the great fanzine, Ptolemaic Terrascope; this one is aided and abetted by PTs "sister'zine" Mats Gustafsson's The Broken Face out of Sweden.) Accompanied by female protagonist, Lesle Chalim, Hopkins deadpan delivery at times recalls Stone Breath's Timothy Renner in its inexpressiveness bordering on catatonia, not necessarily a bad thing considering the dire surroundings. The sparse loneliness of these tracks (especially "Rebecea" and "Sleep In Deep") also harkens back to the home-grown alienation of Charalambides duo Tom and Christina Carter, making The Lead Shoes the perfect soundtrack to a post-nuclear holocaust. The sense of impending doorn and claustrophobia on "Here 1 Was" (with its haunting church organ) and "Ev&s Window" (with its Eraserhead-like industrial clattering) sound like these songs were written and recorded in an air raid shelter, far removed from human contact and emotion. "Sleep In Deep" is as dark as Cohen in a month-long funk - its somnambulistic, tale of out-of-body experiences reminds me of the German expressionist classic Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. This relentless hopelessness and resignation may well be too bleak for some listeners, but fans of The Cum's "suicide trilogy" (Faith, 17 Seconds and Pornography, as well as their Carnage Visors soundtrack) and other doom mongers and naysayers such as Nine Inch Nails, Psychic TV and Skinny Puppy may enjoy this in an "I told you so" sort of way. Just hide the razor blades! Delusions of Adequacy File Under: Avant garde. deconstructed folk soundscapes RIYL: Leonard Cohen, the Velvet Underground, surreal movie music The soundtrack for hiking across the desert plains of the Mid-West during an eternal midnight, "Michael Hopkins crafts strangely emotive songs around hypnotic samples, deconstructed guitar, and his thin Leonard Cohen-ish croon bathed in detachment and creepy disillusion. A highly evocative songwriter, Hopkins employs an intensely deconstructed folk aesthetic to inhabit the lives of characters lost to themselves and lives lost to the world. A stark and abrasive collection of sounds and words. The Lead Shoes is an uneasy - though occasionally beautiful - jaunt through land rarely visited on the musical landscape. Opening with the swirling, bubbling strings and lonely piano strikes of "The Halo Seeds," a vortex seems to be opening up right in front of your stereo speakers, giving fair warning of the desolate landscape you're going to be drifting through for the next 51 minutes. The following 8-minute "Rebecca," a hauntingly vivid love song with tip-toeing guitar and humming atmospheric drones, immediately follows up on that promise. Similarly, the rising and falling background moans of "The Great Indoors" help portray a life lived inside the crushing isolation of one's own mind, trying to draw the inherent beauty out of a solitary existence with only meagre possessions for company. Though Hopkins is an occasionally indecipherably obtuse lyricist, he fully captures these scenes vividly with lines like "The box is where he left it on the shelf / Full of branches, coils, and the feminine ideal" wrapped around a simple repeated guitar pattern. In fact, when an organ-carried counter melody shatters the song's hypnotic solemnity before the song's exit, the effect is nearly revelatory. The appropriately titled "Rusty Symphony," with Carl Johns of Noahjohn adding moody accordion, is a study in dizzying detachment, with vertigo inducing images of "a rusty little symphony endlessly shifting before my eyes." As Hopkins tends to grab very few rungs on the melodic scale, his vocal performances tend to sound somewhat improvised and random. That ultimately contributes to the displaced feel, though, as the moods created by machinery rhythms and chants of "Eva's Window" almost to be lifted from some sort of yet-to-be discovered aboriginal tribal ceremony. ...