HAHA by Irma Vep
Turquoise Coal's debut release, HAHA is in fact the tenth full length Irma Vep album, although the first to appear on vinyl. This was the album that inspired us to form a label in order to release it.
Original 2012 press release:
In the great tradition of drummers' solo albums, HAHA is more 'Oar' than 'No Jacket Required', more Nixon & Jarvis than Ringo Starr, and bears little relation to Klaus Kinski's fearsome "broken glass dipped in napalm and rammed up your nostrils" sound.
The LP is a stark, stripped down and intimate affair, achingly personal and uncompromising. Edwin plays everything himself... through amps... onto tape. The record was recorded in two days last November and the resolutely lo-fi result radiates an unpolished warmth seeped in melancholy, guilt, humour, sex, disgust and other stuff.
HAHA is no single-gear ride though – tracks like 'What's That in Your Mouth' and 'All People Are Poison' see Edwin rocking out with abandon, perfectly complementing the affecting poignancy of songs like 'There's Nothing Wrong with Feeling Wrong' and 'Be a Mother'. Edwin reckons that HAHA is the most normal thing he's ever done – happily on this occasion, 'normal' has no connection with 'mundane' and it turns out to also be one of the very best things he's ever done.
You won't hear a more human record this year. HAHA's understated magic stands alongside the likes of the Velvet Underground's 3rd album, Skip Spence's "Oar", Big Star's 3rd, Neil Young's "On the Beach", Leonard Cohen's "Songs of Love and Hate" or early Palace Brothers... without sounding at all like any of them.
Tracklist
| 1. | A Curse | 4:40 |
| 2. | Love Is Loving Someone Else's Baby Tonight | 2:47 |
| 3. | What's That In Your Mouth? | 4:30 |
| 4. | Breast Fed | 2:56 |
| 5. | There's Nothing Wrong With Feeling Wrong | 2:49 |
| 6. | Readers Wives | 3:22 |
| 7. | All People Are Poison | 3:16 |
| 8. | Nobody Came | 3:40 |
| 9. | Cold Light | 0:49 |
| 10. | Michelle (A Cold Dead Place) | 5:02 |
| 11. | Lovely Home | 3:15 |
| 12. | Bare In Mind | 2:46 |
| 13. | Be A Mother | 3:38 |
Credits
License
All rights reserved.
Turquoise Coal started in 2012 as a depository for archive recordings of north Wales music. Later that year we became a record label and have released several vinyl LPs, CDs and downloads. Some can be found here, and will be continuously added to over time. All our releases by Spectralate can be found on the group's own site (see link below).