Briefly review something you heard recently (or are listening to now)

I quite like Eliminator too, but all I've heard other than that is Tres Hombres and a Greatest Hits Album. I can at least tell you that Tres Hombres is worth looking into - they hadn't incorporated those New Wave-y synth drums yet, so they're more straight blues-rock-y, but definitely still had their propensity for simple but memorable riffs. Oh, and that one has "La Grange", which is probably their biggest hit that wasn't on Eliminator.

The First Edition - The First Edition. This band are now best known for being the Breakup Breakout launching pad for Kenny Rogers, and I picked this record up both out of curiosity and because of "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)", which I first heard in The Big Lebowski. The rest of the album is pleasant enough in a bubblegum easy listening psychedelic folk rock country way, but I don't know how much repeated listening I'm gonna give it. It's a fun one to have anyway though. Other strange facts: The album was produced by future television theme composer Mike Post, the liner notes are by Tom Smothers, and hay look it's Kenny Rogers in a puffy shirt◊.

Music From The Television Series My So Called Life. It's been a long time since I've watched it, but the only song I recognized straight off from the show was Juliana Hatfield's "Make It Home", since it was the musical centerpiece of an infamously cheesy episode where Hatfield made a guest appearance as a homeless singer/guitar player / angel. Nowadays this is sort of like a time capsule of mid-90's Alternative Rock/indie - aside from Hatfield you've got Sonic Youth, Afghan Whigs, Buffalo Tom, etc. Sonic Youth's "Genetic" would have been a great addition to Dirty ^note  It was later a bonus track to the deluxe edition of Dirty, so I guess it kind of is a great addition to that album now, and other highlights include Buffalo Tom's catchy, jangly Signature Song "Soda Jerk" and Daniel Johnston's eerie Obsession Song-ish "Come See Me Tonight".

edited 14th Mar '14 6:30:19 PM by MikeK

Tobacco - "Eruption (Gonna Get My Hair Cut At The End of The Summer)". The first single for the Black Moth Super Rainbow vocalist's next solo album, and it sounds pretty much exactly like something that could have appeared on Cobra Juicy, the last proper BMSR album. Not a bad thing at all, because I liked the "psychedelic synth-pop/funk" direction they went in on that album, and the vocal melody to this is simple but maddeningly catchy. It also might be the most Cluster F-Bomb-filled thing I've heard out of the BMSR camp: What's sort of interesting is that it's all Word Salad Lyrics anyway, so all the use of "fucking" and "motherfucking" just kind of becomes rhythmic punctuation. Some fans and I have been joking on facebook about what a radio edit would be like: "Lick that popsicle, like a monkey-fighting babe in the Monday-to-Friday wood / it's a nice frickin' day and I'm feelin frickin' good", etc.

edited 17th Mar '14 8:47:15 PM by MikeK

Crack: Si todo hiciera Crack

Rather unfortunate (hindsight is 20/20, folks) name for this one-shot band (album was released in 1979) that resulted from the “explosionette” of prog rock albums in post-Franco Spain. This one’s not high on originality, Yes and Genesis are obvious influences, as are Italian bands like PFM and Le Orme. It actually sounds more Italian than Spanish; had it not been sung in Spanish, it could easily be mistaken for a contemporary of Locanda delle Fate or some other late Italian band.

Low on the heaviness scale; guitars are either clean-toned or acoustic. Refinement is high, a very classy album with lots of flute, piano, some Mellotron and string synth and a whole lot of Moog, used very creatively. Male vocals; one of the singers has a high falsetto and I originally thought he was a woman.

Cover shows a Guinea pig in a birdcage, for whatever reason.

edited 18th Mar '14 6:06:06 PM by Bananaquit

• Libra: self titled (1975)

Better known nowadays for recording the soundtrack for Mario Bava’s last feature, Shock, than for their original claim to fame: being the only Italian progressive rock band signed to Motown. Yes, this was a thing that happened. For Italian prog, this is a bit poppish despite the song lengths. They are funky at times, but that element of their sound is a bit blown out of proportion on account of their record label; their actual sound is closer to Il Volo, contemporaneous Le Orme or PFM circa Chocolate Kings/Jet Lag but with a bit more of a fusion influence. And other contemporary sounds that I’m sure seemed sophisticated at the time, yet come across as rather bland now.

This is actually the English version of their 1975 Italian release, Musica e parole. Usually, Italians singing in English is bad news (see: PFM’s English-language albums), but the lyrics are coherent, and Federico d’Andrea’s (R.I.P.) accent is negligible; unlike PFM’s vocalists, he seems to actually understand the words he’s singing. The North American cover is also far cooler than the boring Italian one.

edited 21st Mar '14 10:34:38 PM by Bananaquit

So, I listened to Pharrell Williams's album the other day (G I R L)...it's really not worth a listen. Well, okay, not totally worthless. There's some good ideas in there, but none of them ever work out to a cohesive, really good song. "Happy" is pretty much the only really worthwhile track on there that can be fully appreciated. Like I said, there are some good ideas on the album, and some parts of some of the songs are alright, but they're hampered by sometimes being overly repetitious and monotonous, other times having terrible lyrics, and sometimes the beats themselves just don't sound very good. It's a weird, Mulligan's stew of an album.

Electric Light Orchestra - Out of the Blue

ELO is one of the black sheep of my music library (the other being Taylor Swift). They have a sound that I tend to dislike in other groups, yet they make it work well enough that I can listen to them for over an hour with pleasure. The songwriting is very skillful and produces quite a few EarWorms, and the big band instrumentals combined with slick production make it all sound great. Sweet Talkin' Woman and Mr. Blue Sky are my favorites, and not-coincidentally they're also the ones that get the most playtime on the radio.

Apocalyptica - Inquisition Symphony. Apocalyptica are a cello quartet who first received attention for their debut album Plays Metallica By Four Cellos, which was Exactly What It Says on the Tin - this is the followup, where they first started to branch out a bit - There are four more Metallica covers, but also covers of Faith No More, Sepultura, and Pantera, alongside three original compositions ^note They would go on to branch out further than this - apparently nowadays they focus more on original material, and have more frequently worked with guest vocalists. Their sound is often more aggressive than you might think - I'm not sure if they're using distortion pedals or just playing with unusual techniques of some kind, but they get some quite harsh, metal-guitar-like tones out of their instruments. Probably like most people who are new to the band, I'm Just Here for Godzilla ^note  on later albums, "Godzilla" just means "famous guest vocalists" instead of "cover songs", but they acquit themselves well with the instrumentals, which fit right in with the surrounding material. Actually, I'm totally unfamiliar with the Pantera song they do and one of the two Sepultura ones, so I couldn't quite tell which were the originals without looking at the credits.

edited 21st Mar '14 6:44:19 PM by MikeK

• Streetmark: Eileen

Streetmark were another one of those bands that never seemed to settle on a particular style, owing in part to their revolving-door personnel. The core of guitarist Thomas Schreiber and keyboardist Dorothea Raukes was constant for all of their albums, though.

This album seems to be their somewhat more accessible answer to the "Motorik" sound of bands like NEU! and pre-Autobahn Kraftwerk. They got the jump on the likes of Stereolab a good decade and a half early with this release, even featuring female backing vocals (from Raukes).

This was the album featuring the tragic Wolfgang Riechmann, prior to his hit solo album Wunderbar, Sky Records' biggest seller. So, to cash in on the association, Sky Records reissued it in different permutations with different titles and cover art over the years. The 90s CD reissue, for example, is entitled Dreams.

Garbage – Version 2.0. I guess of all the common pitfalls the follow-up to a hit debut album can have, sounding too much like the first one is a relatively forgivable one. The singles are generally pretty great – “Special” seems to be the best-remembered one, probably just because of the earworm factor. “Temptation Waits” and “The Trick Is To Keep Breathing” are standouts as far as album tracks go, but everything else strikes me as just okay, though that could change with future listens.

Suicidal Tendencies – Join The Army. The perils of buying a thrift store CD because you’re vaguely familiar with the band and have heard one song from it. The song in question is “War Inside My Head”, which I remember being a staple of a friend’s “punk rock” DJ sets, and is probably the album’s best vehicle for the album’s constant use of gang vocal choruses. There are some other enjoyable songs here and there, but overall this album just comes off as dopey – it doesn’t help that it has tinny, amateurish production that makes the whole thing sound too tinny to “rock out” effectively.

John Legend & The Roots – Wake Up! I previously sampled John Legend’s Evolver and found it pretty mediocre. This is more to my liking, though it’s also a Cover Album - the theme is soul songs from the 60s and 70s that are either Protest Songs or else promote social consciousness in a more general, abstract way. They’ve picked some fairly obscure material for the most part – the only song I’m personally familiar with in the original is “Wholly Holy” by Marvin Gaye. Picking less-remembered singles and deep cuts was a deliberate strategy on their part, and it works because unless you’re a pretty big soul buff, these songs are probably completely fresh to you. The one weakness is that whenever a song calls for John Legend to convey righteousness and anger of some kind, it tends not to work (“Hard Times” and “I Can’t Write Left Handed” for instance) – which is too bad, because The Roots are excellent at playing the gritty grooves that those songs tend to have.

Kings Of Leon – Aha Shake Heartbreak. So I still don’t love this band, but I guess I get their appeal more when they’re pitched more at “sweaty drunken garage rock” instead of “sweaty drunken arena rock”. Somehow the fact that I can almost never understand a word Caleb Followill is singing even adds to my enjoyment - For instance, my impression of the first two lines of “Slow Night, So Long” without looking at the lyric sheet was something like “The mental loss is prison of the flavor / She’s 17, but I don’t wear no pumps for Gollum”,

edited 25th Mar '14 5:51:44 PM by MikeK

Sad Lovers & Giants: Himalaya vinyl single.

This is not a return to form, for the band had not lost its form for 30 years. This new single, released in 2010, only shows that this post-punk quintet from UK is as strong as ever. The song is cleverly written, being about one man's childhood dream of visiting the titular mountain region. The players have not lost their mastery one bit; all the instruments are crisp and precise, as should be expected from this particular type of rock.

All in all, a buying recommendation from me.

• Bloodrock: self-titled debut (1970)

One of these days I need to start a review series for albums that received a "bullet" (i.e.: no-star) rating in the Rolling Stone Record Guide. All six of Bloodrock's albums got this dubious honour.

Apart from their notorious, unlikely hit "D.O.A." (off their second album), I had previously only heard the albums from the post-Jethro Tull/proto-Kansas prog phase from the end of their career. That might as well be a different band. Think of these Texans as Grand Funk Railroad's evil twin (both bands had the same management). They add lots of Jon Lord-esque funeral organ to the mix, and the lyrics tend towards morbid and violent imagery. They are sort of the musical equivalent of a Herschell Gordon Lewis film.

I'm guessing a lot of copies of this album made it to Europe. German bands in particular (Lucifer's Friend and Birth Control, for example) took this sound and ran with it.

edited 26th Mar '14 9:53:58 PM by Bananaquit

Boston - Boston

Despite being widely considered the better of the two albums, I actually didn't like this one as much as Don't Look Back. I mean, it's a great album (especially for a debut) and every one of its eight tracks is worth listening to, I just don't think it's quite as fist-pumpingly awesome as DLB. It also doesn't help that I've heard "More Than a Feeling" played on the radio so many times that I was sick of it way before I picked up the album. But hey, "Foreplay/Long Time" and "Smokin'" are still pretty cool.

Foster The People - Coming Of Age. Here's what I think. The lyrics are tippy-toe indie crap from the very first line, and as a lyrics guy that irritates me. Pumped Up Kicks was a lot better on that front. The instrumentation is not so good in the first verse, but it gets better from the second verse onwards. Also, the chorus is great.

edited 26th Mar '14 6:23:52 PM by Jinxmenow

Audiomachine - Epica. A while ago, I went on the recommendations thing asking for something similar to Lindsey Stirling which I could use in a work playlist - I posed the same question in a different music forum, and someone recommended "trailer music" and cited this as a good example. A bunch of this is maybe a bit too "intense" for background shopping music, but some of it is gentle enough to work, and it's a keeper anyway because it's just plain awesome. I see myself putting it on as "motivation music" - maybe it'd be too distracting for mental activity, like writing, but certainly for physical activity like cleaning or working out. One thing I find kind of interesting is that they frequently use a choir even in contexts other than Ominous Latin Chanting. For instance, if "Joyous Latin Chanting" were a thing, "Eternal Flame" would be a good example.

I listened to a mix themed around Cover Versions (as posted to a mix community) today, but rather than review the whole thing, I'm going to talk about my favorite and least favorite tracks:

Favorite: The Gossip - "Are You That Somebody". It's easy for a white "indie rock" band to cover an r and b or hip hop song in a way that sounds detached and ironic even if it's not meant to. This thankfully avoids that pitfall, even if the rendition of Timbaland's whispered intro sounds a bit silly ("Dirty south, can you really feel me? West coast, east coast...")^note thankfully, they skip his A Wild Rapper Appears! bit later in the song - it's pretty faithful to the arrangement of the original, with just enough of their usual dance-rock flavor added, and you can tell they're covering it as genuine tribute.

Least favorite: Gym Class Heroes - "Under The Bridge". The original is one of a handful of Chili Peppers songs I like to begin with, and I think this version does things that just weren't meant to be done with it - they play up the funk element in a way that adds (probably) unintentional Lyrical Dissonance, and it just sounds too happy and breezy to have a chorus that starts with "I don't ever want to feel like I did that day". In that regard, I'm not sure if it makes it better or worse that they replace the bridge that's blatantly about drug addiction (and thus the Title Drop) with an original rap ^note Even though Travis McCoy is both the singer and the rapper, there's an A Wild Rapper Appears! vibe going. A few "coolness points" are added for throwing in a Shout-Out to KRS-One's "The Bridge Is Over" though.

edited 3rd Apr '14 11:35:13 PM by MikeK

I forgot to add that they change all the L.A. references to New York ones (i.e. "the city I live in, this big rotten apple"), which is fair enough, but given the other stuff I mentioned, almost makes me think they just thought it was a song about how cool Los Angeles is.

So I'm listening to Led Zeppelin's Communication Breakdown. I found myself humming the melody earlier and thought it could make a kickass punk song and on repeat listening, I realize it kinda is already.

• Carita Holmström: We Are What We Do

Really taps into the same "jazzy folkie" vein that Joni Mitchell was mining around the same time. Being from Finland and having access to talented Helsinki jazz players as session musicians helps. She's got an expressive and crystal-clear voice. The lyrics have a bit of that post-hippie folky naïveté which can come across a bit cheesy.

There's a cover of Yes' "Time and a Word" here, the only non-original. The highly atmospheric album-closer "The Knight" (seek out the video on Youtube) is, for me, the highlight.

Robert Plant And Alison Krauss - Raising Sand. I'm way more familiar with the Plant half of the equation here, and even then this is the first non-Led Zeppelin work I've heard of his - with that as my comparison point he's often surprisingly subtle here, especially on songs where he takes a backseat to Krauss in the vocal department. This is also a Cover Album ^note Though one song is a "cover" of a Jimmy Page & Robert Plant song written and recorded 10 years earlier, though the one song I'm familiar with is one I only know through another cover (The Rolling Stones' version of "Fortune Teller"). I think their voices sound really good together, and I like the overall stark, eerie vibe of the production and arrangements... But a lot of it seems to kind of run together. My favorite tracks include "Rich Woman" and "Nothin'".

edited 7th Apr '14 11:15:17 AM by MikeK

I freaking love that album. T-Bone Burnett produced it and played a bunch of the guitars, so that convinced me to check out some of his stuff, specifically The True False Identity. It reminds me of Raising Sand but I can't put my finger on why.

Yeah, I did research on wikipedia and saw he had a hands-on role as a producer, even picking the songs. I've definitely heard his name around as a famous producer, but the only other album he's produced that I've heard is Counting Crows' August & Everything After... Though I have the Until The End Of The World soundtrack, which includes an interesting song of his called "Humans From Earth".

Janelle Monáe - Metropolis: The Chase Suite and The Archandroid. These two releases are of a kind, but I feel like aside from having more time to develop the ongoing story her albums tell, The Archandroid is just that little bit more musically developed. It's kind of like Metropolis is a pilot episode and The Archandroid is the rest of the first season. Anyway, I found all of her discography in the same place on the cheap, so I'll probably be back here to talk about The Electric Lady soon too.

VHS Head - Red Ocean Apocalypse

New track from VHS Head, one of Skam's (home to the first Boards of Canada and Autechre releases among others) finest artists and sound wizards, who famously uses as his only sound material old VHS tapes, culling sounds from ads, idents, trailers, b-movies, producing a hybrid of 90s Warp-esque material and vaporwave. This is a cut from his upcoming album Persistence of Vision.

I feel he's always been gradually improving, his first album Trademark Ribbons of Gold (which was already on Skam, here's the title track) was excellent but sometimes so dense it felt head-numbing, and getting through the entire album was almost a challenge.

This new track shows the continuation of the evolution displayed in the ep following that first album, which tended to be more focused on melodies with a lessened tendency to cram in as many samples as possible into each beat. Red Ocean Apocalypse retains the wonderfully lo-fi quality of VHS Head's music but manages to make it sound more epic, grander and more mysterious all the same. If the whole album is in that vein it might very possibly be the Geogaddi to Trademark Ribbons of Gold's Music Has the Right to Children, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Monty Python - Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album. This album actually was a "contractual obligation" in that it was thrown together because they had one more album left on the contract, and it kind of shows... But on the other hand, it's still very funny, and might even have more replay value for me than the other Python albums I've heard. See, for whatever reason when it comes to the audio format, I'm more generally attuned to "musical comedy" than skits, and this has much more of the former than the latter; this sort of feels like an Eric Idle solo album with a few Monty Python skits on it, and that's an appealing enough proposition to me.

Janelle Monáe - The Electric Lady. Unlike The Archandroid, this album has more of a stylistic divide between the "suites": Suite IV is a bit more rooted in conventional funk/r and b and is where the majority of the guest appearances are; But at the same time, it doesn't lose what's unique about her as an artist. Some of the Suit IV tracks deserve to be actual hits - I'm particularly thinking of the title track and "Dance Apocalyptic". Suite V is where the more progressive, idiosyncratic, and/or personal material is, but there's more of an organic funk/soul feel that separates it a little from such material on Archandroid.

Siouxsie - Mantaray. I like this more than I expected to - that is, I quite like what I've heard from her best-known band, but wasn't sure what a 2007 solo debut would be like. There's a very contemporary "Post-Punk revival / dance rock" sound to this, but then again that just highlights how much that scene was influenced by Siouxsie & The Banshees to begin with. Oh, and I love the album cover◊, particularly because such a thing would just look silly coming from just about anyone else.

edited 17th Apr '14 4:35:05 PM by MikeK

• Steve Roden, Stars On Ice—Being known as the godfather of the lowercase micro-genre of ambient music might give one a misleading image of Roden as an artist. His work is indeed very quiet and fairly minimal, but it is far more layered and emotive than the "rustling paper" stereotype might imply. This album consists of one 34-minute piece focused around manipulated recordings of and played variations on the titular Chinese Christmas carol, transforming from warmly eerie turntablism to a lovely round of fiddles and taped voices.
• Christopher Smith, Irish Breakfast—Where do I even begin? NWW List-worthy cassette weirdness featuring outré free guitar stylings, tape manipulation, metal and kitchenware percussion, unexplained noises of various genera, trippy spoken word, and, last but not least, a fifty-five minute musical suite on the cosmic significance and power of tea-drinking. I kid you not. Definitely not for everyone, or really most people, but thoroughly enjoyable for someone like me. Will listen again.
• Swell Maps, International Rescue—A nice little compilation of the song-oriented side of this band's work, serving as a complement to Sweep the Desert's overview of the group's more experimental, instrumental side. Lots of songs that rollick on a simple riff or two only to digress into gleeful calamity, whether in the form of sloppy improv or silly piano jamming. Ends with a cute little bit of banter about music and who might be listening. Overall very fun, if less diverse than the band's two proper LPs.

Talking Heads - Speaking In Tongues. This is one of the stiffest "funky" albums I've ever heard, but it works because it's a very "Talking Heads" approach to funk... That said, a lot of these songs do sound better on the live album Stop Making Sense - "Girlfriend Is Better" in particular. Oh, and "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)" is probably my favorite Talking Heads song, if not one of my favorite songs ever.

Talking Heads - Little Creatures. This is a pretty good album, it just feels like a step back in terms of ambition. Actually, I've decided a lot of this has similarities with Talking Heads 77, just with more "eighties" production.

Mark Everett - Bad Dude In Love. The unearthed 1985 solo debut by the Eels front-man that he probably wishes had remained, um... earthed. It sounds very 1985, it's probably about as corny as you'd anticipate from the title, and there's only the occasional sign of future songwriting prowess. But it's kind of charming in it's goofiness and actually sounds pretty good for a self-produced demo by a one man band. It's even kind of interesting to me that a lot of the songs sound like transparent attempts to ape other popular artists of the time: "Everybody's Tryin' To Bum Me Out" sounds like Huey Lewis And The News, "Gotta Get Out Tonight" sounds like The Cars circa Heartbreak City, and the title track seems like some sort of ZZ Top spoof. I've actually heard the theory that this album is a semi-fake, recorded by E himself but much later than the supposed release date; That is, he fooled around with some vintage 80's equipment, tossed off some Cover Songs and deliberately So Bad, It's Good originals, and personally leaked the result as a supposed early album of his. I don't think that's true, but his singing voice was pretty much exactly the same as it is today (just with the slightest bit more of an obvious southern accent), and it seems like he would in fact go that far to troll his fans ^note See his alter-ego MC Honky, or the time he leaked the supposed lost liner notes to the Levity soundtrack, wherein director Ed Solomon depicts him as an over-the-top Small Name, Big Ego.

edited 21st Apr '14 9:22:21 PM by MikeK