Whisky Online Blog

A couple of very dark, moody tunes from recent times today. Lets get stuck in with My Body Is A Cage by Arcade Fire.

I remember first hearing this when the album came out and they played it all the time in the Fopp on Byres Road in Glasgow. If you don’t live in Glasgow then you might not remember Fopp stores because they all got closed down a few years back (Amazon 1, Independents nil). Happily however two shops remained open in Glasgow, even if they are essentially owned by HMV (Amazon 1, independents 0.5). Anyway, I remember being struck quite deeply by the song, I have a big soft spot for plodding, deep, dark, emotional rockers and this one delivers quite astoundingly. These sorts of songs can be so easily overdone, like a whisky given too much peat, wood or distillation, its all about balance and control. The pulsing beat, the build, the arrangement, they all play a part, its never out of the performers grasp. You feel like you are listening to something that is micro-orchestrated from the most violent clatter of percussion down to the first foreboding glimmer of bass, its a very conscious piece of music. The song pulls you in for the ride and you don’t even realise it till you’re on your way back down. Even the lyrics are mesmerizing, “My body is a cage that keeps me from dancing with the one I love”, set to the initial fragility of the organ this is all the more haunting. As it builds there is nowhere left for it to take you except further down the same eerie and compelling path it started you on. However while Arcade Fire are very much a modern band, and this song is very well known, the next choice is not quite in the same vein.

House Of Wax by Paul McCartney, from his 2007 album Memory Almost Full. I always feel a little shy to bring up Paul McCartney in musical themed conversations, I think this is mainly because so many people’s opinions of him and his music are so clouded and ill informed that I end up giving up trying to defend him. He remains, for me however, a frustrating musical hero, in fact I suspect I will have to do a much more detailed post on him another time, but for today this is a good place to start on alternative McCartney.

McCartney circa 2007 during the recording of Memory Almost Full, not always thumbs aloft.

The song House Of Wax bears comparison to My Body Is A Cage, except not many people have heard it. It begins with a slow build, those dark, swirling closely grouped chord patterns, it recalls a similar mesmerising quality as the last piece but the vocal is starker and rawer, almost harrowing in its emotional nudity. Its the kind of song that really suits the aging rocker voice that McCartney has developed, it is a song of someone who has lived, it wears his years in its furious weariness. It is another one of those songs that lifts you with it, enraptured from your boots, through its screaming highs and back to where you stood, blinking in the sudden silence. Its a style of writing and musical structure that I can’t help but love. It is also the way the best whiskies affect me, that instant hair raising moment, the inevitable grasp and the journey that follows. Of course this is a rare experience with a whisky and the more you taste and become accustomed to the various styles the less likely it is to happen. However it also means that when it does happen it is a rare and special experience.

Some strange visitor from the Planet Fruit.

Ok, having a blog that pairs specific whiskies to specific forms of multimedia and art is admittedly daft, so I don’t want to go too far by then turning it into the Top Gear of whisky blogs and recommending products that most people could never afford. However, both these pieces of music really blew my mind the first time I heard them, they are special to me so I want to have a whisky experience to match. I have had my mind blown by incredible whiskies on quite a few occasions since october last year but the crucial thing about this instance, as with the songs, was surprise. I was at Oostende in Belgium for a certain festival, there were amazing whiskies flying about the place like miniature fruit-laden spitfires. I saw the Longmorn Centenary being opened (come to think of it I may have helped open it) and I had heard about its supposedly legendary quality but for some reason I doubted. I was in a mood to challenge established reason and sense, I knew what an utterly brilliant whisky Longmorn usually was and heard tell of this particular bottling but all that seemed to flutter around in my head was “Pah! We’ll see!”. Anyway obviously I stuck my nose in the glass and was immediately punched in the face by a fist fashioned from an indeterminable amount of different fruits. When I recovered enough composure to actually taste it I felt as if I had been assimilated by some sort of fruit-borg, like a very unusual episode of Star Trek.

The Lindores Whisky Society circa 2284. Their mission to discover complex and fruity new whiskies, to seek out whole cases of great bottlings for incredibly good prices, to boldly dram where no Belgian has drammed before. At least they changed the colour of their shirts.

So this was a pretty special whisky for me, it was brilliant like I had heard it would be but sometimes, as with music, its the ones that catch you off guard that make the biggest impression, the experiences that sneak up from unseen corners and change your whole perspective in an instant. There are many more examples for me that I hold very dear, the first time I heard my favourite album, the first whisky I tasted, the list goes on and long may it continue. Your experiences will differ for sure but that moment of surprise, that first few bars, that initial aroma, the moment you know you’ve been captured by something, those are moments that make life worth living.

Manager's Choice, part of Diageo's new 'controversy' range.

So they’re all finally out, everyone scrambles to get a bottle of the Lagavulin, collectors and drinkers bang their heads against blogs over the pricing, and we can all sit back and wait for the next controversial series of bottlings to arrive. I will say right now I was never fussed by the Manager’s Choice series, its a nice idea for Diageo to release a series of single casks from all its distilleries, although I’d sooner have a closed distillery selection (hint hint diageo), but it was always going to be out of my and many other people’s price range. The price seems to be where everyone is getting their knickers in a twist, its one thing to complain about festival bottlings being overpriced, but these are a limited range of premium whiskies and this is just what people are charging for them these days, I don’t agree with it but its not much use sniffing about it.

Nobby Nodrams never got any manager's choice, boohoo.

My only problem is one of price versus quality, I haven’t tried many of the Manager’s Choice range, I tried the first set of releases and out of all of them it was the Oban that stuck out. I remember scoring it something like 90/100 but I don’t have a sample to do proper notes now so take that with a pinch of salt. The point is more that the others failed to impress, there was nothing there that you could not get from another independent single cask bottling from the same distillery for at least half the price. Take the Oban again, it may have been excellent but it was nowhere near as good as the old 19yo OB Manager’s Dram from way back in the 90s, a bottling you can still buy for less than what it cost to buy the new one.

Oban Manager's Dram, why spend more for less?

I haven’t heard much to impress me from people who have tried the whole series who’s opinions I trust, certainly not enough to justify the price tags in terms of what’s inside the bottles. It seems to be difficult as there is an increasing void in taste and opinion on whisky, those who enjoy the more modern style, lots of wood technology, quite sweet. And those who prefer older style whisky, dryer, more mineraly and fruity. I would count myself amongst the latter and it is difficult to indulge many new bottlings, especially supposedly premium ones, when you feel their quality pales in comparison to more obscure, difficult whiskies and older bottlings. This is a very narrow view to take though and it is very much a personal one, the opinions of whisky nerds like me will not change the fact that all these bottles will sell anyway and the releases will be largely successful. There are also no doubt some great whiskies dotted throughout the range, not all of them will be top notch but I’m sure the Lagavulin will be excellent, it seems impossible for Diageo to bottle a bad one. I would also be very intrigued to taste the Clynelish as I have an ill disguised passion for this whisky and I already loved the Oban. Not to mention that Serge already gave the Caol Ila 94/100 on Whiskyfun, so there are surely some bottles amongst the range that justify their price tags.

Caol Ila, dependable as ever. Already considered one of the highlights of the range.

Anyway as I already said complaining will not change the fact that high prices are here to stay in terms of many official releases, and maybe that is ok in some respects. Collectors who want to have bottles to look at can save up and buy these bottles, those of us who want bottles to drink can search out the independents. The joy of finding something obscure and delectable at a great price to share with your chums is still very much a possibility. I would probably be much more frustrated if these bottlings were all amazing, precious liquid gems unearthed from cavernous warehouses that everyone would be clamoring to own and taste. What if they became the 21st century version of the old Samaroli bottlings or something similar? Thankfully they are not, they are good whiskies, solid examples of their distilleries from good casks, they just don’t make the earth move. Its reassuring to not feel tempted to scrape every penny I can together in a desperate bid to get that amazing cask of Blair Athol that I simply cannot live without! Diageo has made the effort to do these bottlings and for that they should be commended, it is obviously a big effort for a big company to produce such a fiddly series of bottlings, maybe this partly explains the cost. I would like to see them do more unique bottlings like this but maybe they could dig a little deeper into their warehouses next time, what stocks remain of Port Ellen, Brora, Glenugie, St Magdalene, Rosebank, Banff, Millburn, Glen Albyn, Glenury Royal? Maybe you could spare some of those Diageo rather than drowning them all in the pointless whisky graveyard that is Johnnie Walker Blue Label. Oh and while you’re at it Diageo, have one last little look for some Malt Mill, go on please..?

Glasgow, a city with a big soundtrack.

When I was at university in Glasgow I listened to lots of music and drank lots of whisky. So far so normal. I tended not to listen to a lot of the modern bands my friends listened to, party because I liked to think of myself as ‘different’ but mostly because my music tastes stopped, for the most part, somewhere around 1978. However as time passed I started to notice that Glasgow did seem to have a tendency to churn out a lot of bands and a lot of music. After a while I realised that this was not the case with every city or every scene, and Glasgow really does have a ‘scene’. The music from these ‘indie’ bands, for want of a better descriptor, was like a background noise in my life after a while, it hung around, it moved and permeated all aspects of a day. Uni life is admittedly a very social life, at least it is if you study a silly arts degree in Film and TV like I did. So you’d expect us to be listening to music in our flats, our unions, clubs, parties and we did but in Glasgow music is such a big thing, people seem proud to have so many local bands, to go and see them, to root out new and cool artists, to know them, know the scene, be part of the fabric of it all that it felt much bigger. I say all this but I’m sure there are a thousand students in a hundred different cities having the same feeling these days, maybe it just felt big to me as it was part of a big musical awakening, I still loved all the old music I’d always listened to but now I found new music that suddenly wasn’t all by boy bands, it wasn’t all commercial shit in other words.

Belle And Sebastian are probably one of the best known bands to come out of Scotland in the past decade. I’m A Cuckoo is also one their most famous songs, I chose it over their many other wonderful songs because for me it is one of these songs that perfectly illustrates what I’m trying to say. When those first opening bars play it is immediately familiar, I have no idea when I first heard it or when it entered my life but it is impossible to hear it without thinking of sitting in one of the student unions, of dancing lightheadedly with friends, a pint of ‘magic drink’ (don’t ask) in hand. It typifies the style of melodic, vibrant pop that so many bands have spewed forth in recent years but unlike so many cheap imitations Belle And Sebastian seem to be able to make the sound all their own. Music like whisky is a powerful trigger of memory and this song sits in the ears like a roll call of places, parties and people that make up much of the four years I spent at uni. There really is something about the texture of the sound, the noise it makes that conjures up these feelings.

If Belle And Sebastian were something of an aural backwash to uni life then Camera Obscura were an altogether more focused borderline obsession. I remember when I first heard them, sitting in a friends room being played their music and it really put the hook in me. One of the first songs I heard was the one I selected here, Lloyd I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken. Its a soaring, lush, almost anthemic piece of pop, lyrically obscure and joyfully melodic. They are worth investigating further if you haven’t heard them because they deserve so much more recognition then they get and all of their four albums are wonderful. To me they speak of specific times and places, they are the band I played while working long afternoons in the Oddbins on Byres Road, they are the soundtrack to sitting up late with a big dram ploughing though my dissertation, they are the gig I went to at the ABC one summer’s night several years ago. They are what I like to think of when someone says the words ‘indie music’, a small but harmonically tight band that sings topically diverse and musically seductive tunes, they have a sound, an identity. They were a big part of my last two years at uni.

Sunny afternoons in Glasgow, music percolated every part of life there.

If I were to choose whiskies to match these songs it would not be in terms of flavours, moods and textural patterns, it would have to be simply in terms of memory, nostalgia and association. Just as these songs speak of a particular time in my life so too do certain whiskies. I remember what I was drinking in those days, I already had a keen knowledge and passion for whisky but it was not so honed or specific as it is now, I had yet to discover many things and I was also, truth be told, a little less bitter about the whisky industry and about modern whisky styles. I was working at Ardbeg during my summers so obviously Ardbeg plays a big role in this, I would talk about it to friends, extolling its virtues and usually ordering them in bars to illustrate my points.

Uigeadail, an old favourite.

I remember having bottles of Uigeadail, 17yo and latterly the great, great 1990 at my flat and the joy of seeing people discover them for the first time. As much as music was an essential part of these social experiences, whisky went hand in hand with them also. I was renowned for my habits of bringing good bottles of malt to parties and a tasting glass to boot, sitting enjoying some daft single cask while chatting away to a friend with a can of strongbow, it was great. There was a time when I had a bottle of Bunnahabhain Moine at one of our flat parties, I had tried it in the Pot Still bar the previous month and been so knocked out by its flavour that I had sought out a bottle. It was an important dram for me as I remember being amazed by it, I didn’t know whisky could taste like that, like a heavily peated carpet put through a washing machine with a bottle of TCP and a bag of seaweed. It blew my mind and turned me on to a world of young, heavily peated cask strength whiskies, it paved the way for my love of Ardbeg Very Young later that year and, ultimately, for me seeking out work on Islay.

Moine, an early peaty milestone for me.

So its difficult for me to find drams that match these songs as they are already so closely bonded to certain styles of whisky in mind. It is also sad in some ways that while I still love these songs and much of the music I was listening to while at uni, the whiskies I drank are, for me, perhaps more of that time than now. It is safe to say that I am over young peat monsters these days, I tend to taste such whiskies a little more objectively, its rare for me to be so inspired by one. I haven’t re-visited the Moine in a long time, not that I wouldn’t like to given half the chance. I suppose on one hand that snobbery has a role in this, I am lucky enough to have tasted some incredible spirits, when I think of great whiskies these days I think of old bottlings, I think of pre-67 Clynelish, Glenugies, Springbank local barlies, old St Magdalenes and very old Glen Grants and Longmorns to name a few. I always try and find something to enjoy in all whiskies but inevitably the more you taste and learn the more you understand about what you perceive as quality and what you enjoy. These drams I enjoyed several years ago would probably not thrill me so much nowadays, but then isn’t that the nature of nostalgia? Some things are better looking back than in the cold light of day. In the end its too personal to make any grand factual conclusion, I have found that whisky and music have one big thing in common, they are both about 90% opinion and 10% fact and what sounds and tastes good right now may well change so maybe its better to just enjoy the ride.