Continuing in the vein of ‘Hammond Hits’ and ‘Organ Greats’, the collaborative pairing Jude Cowan Montague, who has many eclectic feathers to her bow, and Matt Armstrong return with an album of songs which aren’t simply steeped in retro vibes, but are conjured from the very essence of 1960s vintage. As their bio explains, they ‘live and work at 15 Kings Road, St. Leonards-on-Sea, which is situated in East Sussex on the English south coast. They operate an original fine print workshop upstairs and a music lab downstairs that contains transistor Hammond organs and vintage amplifiers, including a Supersound amp that was actually made on their street in 1960.’
There’s something both idyllic and idiosyncratic about this: it’s not simply a hobby, but an all-consuming lifestyle, and this is apparent in the music they make. Most retro-inspired works are just that: ersatz stabs at recreating pre-digital times using emulators, and there’s something about them that feels false: Montague Armstrong’s work has a particular authenticity about it – not to mention a sense of humour.
The title bears a certain element of tongue-in-cheek drollery: the 60s and 70s revelled in the newness of things, continuing the kind of ‘modernity’ which arrived in the 50s with the arrival of convenience for consumers. We now look back on that modernity with a combination of dewy-eyed nostalgia and pity for their lack of knowledge of everything that we would have now.
There’s another twist with ‘Modern Classics’, in that it also draws inspiration from Latvian music, and while largely instrumental, any lyrics are in Latvian, and the final track on the album, ‘Baltaitina’, is a Latvian folk song.
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It’s a lot of quirky fun, and it’s true that anything played on a Hammond organ sounds as if were recorded in the Sixties. Armstrong’s bass playing is stylistically in keeping: relatively simple lines which follow the chords, played with a certain bounce. There are some really neat grooves on here, with ‘Coder’ being an early standout, and ‘Zanne’ bops along nicely.
What makes ‘Modern Classics’ so enjoyable is that it captures the sense of future, something we may now see as naivete through our jaded twenty-first century eyes, which was in the air then. Simpler times, indeed, and it’s hard not to feel as if we’ve lost something in a quite tragic fashion. But listening to ‘Modern Classics’ is ultimately an uplifting experience which takes you out of the present and into some sort of musical parallel universe – and it’s a happy place.
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