The music is incredibly pure and powerful. It has still its odd moments and sounds like classical piano music in places. The mood is melancholic but not hopeless. 16 tracks and almost 16 different styles. The music is so diverse but it still holds together. Gelb on piano & guitar, Burns on bass and Convertino on drums are exceptional instrumentalists.

Still strongly in debt to Velvet Underground (this time period of the self-titled third album) and to Neil Young, Gelb realizes some amazing consistent song-writing, e.g. in the opener (Well) Dusted ( for the millenium). You literally can hear the Arizona sandscape, Howe's dry baritone fits beautifully. Another highlight is X-tra Wide with some celestial casio maneuvering. There is not one bad track. No Reply is another favourite, the sound blend with pedal steel, electric bass, farfisa, Howes mellotron strings and an opera tune in the background is phantastic. The album ends with a beautiful slide-guitar solo by Rainer which reminds me very much of Nick Drake.
 
link (no comments)  ... comment  
 

Countdown Top ten 2000 almost finished
#2 Yo La Tengo: And then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out (81)
A short review of an album which captivates by its simplicity and slow flow:

This is lullaby music for the late summer nights. Beautiful singing of the nicest indie couple. With this record Georgia and Ira seem to declare each other their eternal love. The mellowest, calmest and most soothing music I know of. Night falls on Hoboken could go on for hours. I preferred the CD to the live performance. Live I prefer when they mix pop tunes with real rockers. Actually this is not their best release but still good enough to be one of the top 3 albums in 2000. My favourites are President Yo La Tengo and Electropura.

Another good site on Yo La Tengo is from their label Matador with a discography annotated by band members, news, tours, a mailing list, loads of live mp3s can be found here.

Countdown top ten 2000 continued
#3 Aimee Mann: Bachelor No.2 (or, the last remains of the dodo) (87)
Aimee Mann (excellent mailing list) recorded her album in 1999, released it in the US in 2000 and in Germany this year, so I guess it is ok to consider her record a 2000 vintage. And it is. When listening to this record I cannot refrain myself of thinking about Joni Mitchell (Jorn's portal), my favourite female songwriter. Aimee looks like her and writes similar songs from a very female point of view. Very emotional and clever stuff. She looks like an angel with her long blond hair and frail body. The song Susan reminded me so much of Amelia (from the superb Hejira) Joni's beautiful song on an unlucky relation about which she talks to her friend. Vapor trails appear in both songs and Aimee's story is the same: "I had some trouble with the goodbye / I checked my roman candle supply".

I have the impression that I have heard Aimee's voice before. Like her album which is an instant classic. As classic as Hejira. Her voice is like a blend of Karen Carpenter's for the poppier parts and Chrissie Hynde's for the rock element. It is crystal clear and warm at the same time. Bachelor no.2 is a Gesamtkunstwerk (synthesis of the arts) from the slightly green cover with the dodo, the lyric sheet with a small black and white drawing for each song, the lyrics itself, the song melodies and the voice. The melody, voice and lyrics are married like the bouquet, the colour and the taste of a great red wine. It is no coincidence that the stand-out single Red Vines also alludes to the alcoholic grape drink, like Joni Mitchell she would not mind to drink A Case of You. This music is perfect pop and perfect songwriting. And the songs are so varied and there is no weak track at all. The least convincing song is The Fall of the World's Own Optimist which Costello has co-written with her.

The meanings of her songs are like nuts in a nutshell and it is quite difficult to crack them. But when you succeed the nuts inside are bitter and sweet at the same time. I still have not opened most of them. One song I understood because she told us at the concert is Ghost World. It is about the first summer after high school when you still do not know where to go and what to do. A situation she has been in recently (she is 40 now). I guess I am still in that position: "And all that I need now / is someone with the brains / and the know-how / to tell me what I want". Another line from It Takes All Kinds about the disillusionment really touched me: "spreading the word / that you've become / what you hated". In Deathly from the Magnolia soundtrack the dying father says to his lost son: "Now that i've met you / would you object to / never seeing each other again". The last song You Do is a beautiful way to end this phantastic album. The remaining songs which I have not really decrypted up till now are like jam jars in my larder for the next winter.

Paradiso
My girl friend, a friend of mine and me went to see Paradiso. Sieben Tage mit sieben Frauen. (Paradiso. Seven days with seven women.) [review DE] by Rudolf Thome (bio). And it was like paradise. Not the fact that the main character celebrated his 60th birthday with the seven most important women of his life for seven days in his house on the country side. It was the atmosphere, the landscape, the beautiful images and the sometimes funny and always subtle dialogues. The film evolves very slowly, it takes its time. When the guests arrive one after the other it is like a small brook which rises to a wide river and becomes a small stream again when everyone leaves at the end.

Adam is a composer of modern music. The model for him must have been Hans Werner Henze who has just turned 75. Adam was and is a casanova, has been married three times and had even more lovers. What is a little strange is that Adam as a character stays relatively vague. All his women who are all quite distinct one from the other seem to be much more special than him. Or let's say as characters they are more precisely depicted. After the week when the birthday community dissolves Adam is alone with the trees again. One of the women (I guess it was Lulu whose present were 60 poplars to protect the house from the wind and the bad spirits) had said before that she could not live together with him anymore as he spoke with the trees. She would have coped with a rival but not with trees. I just realize that Adam's current wife is called Eva and a snake also plays a role in this film. When thinking about his son whom he did not know before Adam characterises him as very masculine and boyish playful at the same time. And says that these are the qualities women love in men. Probably not too far from the truth.
What I like about films like this one is that they are full of small details you only realise later on when you rethink about them or even better discuss about them with someone else.

Together with Truffaut, Rohmer and Kieslowski, Thome is my favourite director of the "dialogue" (or author) cinema which focuses on the relations between men and women. Kieslowski minimises conversation so that each word in his dialogues is of utter importance.

Changing my mind
I get more and more the impression that I am very prejudiced towards certain things and people. Before I always thought I was extremely open and tolerant.
A semi-long digression about tolerance here: Yesterday we went to see a satirical political revue (Kabarett in German) by a Turk named Sinasi. The main theme of his show was the Greek-Turkish relation. Basically the non-relation. The Turks are quite jealous of the Greeks as Greece was the native country of civilisation, democracy, philosophy etc. And today the main foreign nationality is Turkish in Germany and those Turks are doing all the work the Germans do not want to do. Whereas most of the few Greeks in Germany own restaurants and make good money. Anyways Sinasi was speaking about being a Toleranzterrorist (terrorist of tolerance). That is a terrorist who does not kill, a terrorist who just practices openly tolerance. A little bit like a mixture of Gandhi (for the non-violent terrorist part) and Buddha (for the tolerance part). An interesting concept. That makes me think of (oh my God, a digression in a digression) Pat Metheny, the guitar hero of fusion and late jazz rock. A couple of years ago he recorded Zero Tolerance for Silence. A beautiful album title (actually it would be perfect for my blog) for a record which can compete with Neil Young's Weld or Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. Basically noise at full volume. Sometimes you need it. End of digression.
So back to my prejudices. I never liked Radiohead (we had this theme before). An acquaintance gave me The Bends from 1995 to listen to which he considers their best. And a strange thing happened. I listened to the album in its entirety and I liked it. The only track I did not like was the one I knew (nice dream). Must have been the single or something. And what I really found repulsive about Radiohead before, the voice of Thom Yorke was ok. Maybe it will be the same with Radiohead as with Neil Young. I used to hate Heart of Gold when I was in my teens because of his thin, non-masculine, high-pitch voice. Later on he became one of my favourite songwriters. Especially when being lovesick listening to his music has always been a big consolation for me.
[amended 29th July]

Sex sells
So finally I have been googlarized (remember that Captain Beefheart song?). Unfortunately they only have the June posts in their cache. That means they crawled my site about three weeks ago and only published the result now.
And of course the first unwanted visitors drop in. They look for things like gold sex (sounds good to me). Strangely enough I do not find my site in the first 100 results of that query. If you have got the time and a little patience you can scroll through the remaining 886,900 results, somewhere hidden in there is my page like a needle in a haystack.
So to please these smudgy people I have a sex special today. Some quotes on sex:

"My girlfriend always laughs during sex - no matter what she's reading." ~ Steve Jobs link credit: LibrisExMachina.

And from the Quotations Page:
"Life is a sexually transmitted disease." ~ Anonymous

"God created sex. Priests created marriage." ~ Voltaire

"The only unnatural sexual act is that which you cannot perform." ~ Alfred Kinsey (DE)

"Documentation is like sex: when it is good, it is very, very good; and when it is bad, it is better than nothing." ~ Dick Brandon

"Love is what we call the situation which occurs when two people who are sexually comptatible discover that they can also tolerate one another in various other circumstances." ~ Marc Maihueird

"Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex." ~ Karl Marx

"I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"In America sex is an obsession, in other parts of the world it is a fact." ~ Marlene Dietrich

"Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date on Saturday night." ~ Woody Allen

"Is sex dirty? Only if it's done right." ~ Woody Allen

"Sex between 2 people is a beautiful thing ; between 5 it's fantastic ..." ~ Woody Allen

"I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy." ~ Steve Martin

"Sex is hereditary. If your parents never had it, chances are you wont either." ~ Joseph (Joschka) Fischer

"Most men who are not married by the age of thirty-five are either homosexual or really smart." ~ Becky Rodenbeck

Top ten 2000 countdown continued
#4 Montgolfier Brothers: Seventeen Stars
I wrote the original version of this review in German for amazon.de. Let's hope that I won't have any copyright problems with them. It would be ridiculous anyway as they did not pay me.
When I heard Nick Drake for the first time, it was exactly the same as when first listening to this record: afterwards the world was somehow richer, deeper, more beautiful and sadder than before. It was the 100 second title pro celebrity standing around, which can be downloaded from the Poptones website. It tells a small history of a guy waiting for his girl-friend. While waiting he thinks about the reasons why she does not arrive in time: it could be that she confused the day or that all street names changed during the night (these blokes even have a sense of humour) or that she got stuck in a traffic jam. At the end when she arrives her kiss makes him forgive her immediately. The song is only orchestrated with some guitar and bass, the voice is a very pleasant baritone and well articulated with a slight Northern English accent. The Montgolfier Brothers have been compared to Durutti Column, this unsuccessful Factory band in the spirit and at the times of Joy Division. This is probably justified from the musical and geographical standpoint, both bands come from the area of Manchester, but the singing and songwriting of the Montgolfiers is a million times better.
With these songs you can hover in a hot-air balloon away from the terrible reality. The frequently used glockenspiel makes this dream music still more unreal, somehow like a far memory to the innocent days of the childhood. The gentleness, tenderness and ease of the singing and the instrumentation make this music so precious. The melodies are wonderfully melancholic, there is a certain touch of chamber music.
My absolute favourite titles are Even if my mind can't tell you and Une chanson du crépuscule. Every time I listen to the latter song and the sprechgesang begins a shiver runs down my spine, this music is too beautiful for this world. Alan McGee, the ex-boss of Creation and current boss of Poptones has discovered a jewel again. It would not surprise me if the title was inspired by Seventeen Seconds, the chef d'oeuvre of The Cure.

Top ten 2000 countdown continued
#5 Ryan Adams: Heartbreaker
Ryan Adams, the singer of the now dissolved alt.country band Whiskeytown has released the most astounding songwriter debut of last year. Extremely eclectic but also very personal. The bluesy mood is accentuated by the mouth harp play. It starts with an argument on which album(s) Morrissey's Suedehead can be found. The first song To Be Young (is to be sad, is to be high) (the title names alone are worth the purchase of this record) sounds like an outtake of an early electrified Bob Dylan album like Blonde on Blonde. Adams voice is slightly nasal but lower than Dylan's and he elongates the syllables. The song subtitle I Love a Woman that Rains is like a paraphrase on Rainy Day Women #12 & 35. The atmosphere and intonation of Call Me on Your Way Back Home make me think very much of Tim Hardin's Hang on to a Dream. And there is Shakedown on 9th Street a song Jeffrey Lee Pierce from the Gun Club would have been proud of. The lyrics are phantastic as well, mostly quite romantic and sad but funny at the same time, e.g. in Come Pick Me Up: "Come pick me up / Take me out / Fuck me up / Steal my records / Screw all my friends behind my back / With a smile on your face".

Stealing, copying and recycling
Some quoting (mainly myself) from ILM of a recent thread about Radiohead:

"I loved Creep when it came out. Nowadays I find it unlistenable. Somehow this image of Yorke as a creep has stayed in my mind. After that nothing touched me for a while. Then there was the Help sampler for the children of Bosnia and the standout track was Lucky, the best song they ever made I guess.
Kid A did not impress me, Soft Machine and King Crimson have made similar stuff in the early seventies. I used to love those groups but somehow progrock has become a bête noire for me.
A week ago I purchased Amnesiac and I am still not sure what to make of it. The first track I liked was Knives out where the sadness in Yorke's voice really hit me. Of course Pyramid Song is great as well. The progressive stuff I have to listen to again. But the big problem with Radiohead I guess is Yorke's voice. It really touches me in the beginning but after listening to one whole album or several times to one song, it really gets annoying.
I do not really hate Radiohead but I hate all the fuss about them. They are a group like all other groups. They will not save rock music. On the contrary I think maybe rock has saved Thom Yorke's life (remember that Lou Reed song?). "
-- alex in mainhattan (alex63@...), July 18, 2001.

"which King Crimson album would that be?Radiohead have committed the crime of releasing albums that have to be listened to in their entirety,and all of a sudden they are prog-rock?they do one song that's got a bit that's not in 4/4 time and they are prog-rock? examples,please - but try not to list Pink Floyd.it's partly the truth,but it's also lazy. "
-- Damian (spacelab@...), July 19, 2001.

"What's wrong with being prog? Oh, and RH were only prog circa OK Computer. "
-- Sterling Clover (sterling_clover@...), July 19, 2001.

"Radiohead were prog for a few minutes in Paranoid Android,and as far as I'm concerned,that was it.I don't hate prog - hell,I like King Crimson and Yes - but just because Radiohead made something thematic and remotely complex,it doesn't mean they are prog,does it?They used mellotrons - does that make them Genesis?I don't think so. "
-- (spacelab@...), July 19, 2001.

"Ok. Ok. I guess I have to row back a little. The prog-rock comparison is maybe a little dubious (OK Computer nevertheless is not so far off this drawer) considering that Radiohead reinvent themselves every two albums or so. But the point is something else. They are deeply eclectic. And not in a way like Beck who I think is the genius of eclecticism (where is he now, haven't heard of him for a while). They do not create anything groundbreakingly new. The sum is not more than the parts in their case. But the press celebrates them as the most innovative group of our times which they are definitely not. When I listen to them I always feel that I have heard it before. They are chameleons. Yesterday brown today green. They do not have a distinctive sound except Yorke's voice. And that is something I really have to reproach them. Every great band has a unique sound, be it The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Fall, The Cure, Joy Division, The Cocteau Twins, The Gun Club, My Bloody Valentine, Nirvana just to name a few. "
-- alex in mainhattan (alex63@...), July 20, 2001.

"I don't really know what to say to that to change your mind, but I really disagree. At the very least, I think that the guitarists, drummer, and vocals together make them pretty distinctive, when they're playing like a "real band" with instruments in real time etc. The last two albums are pretty distinctive, too, in my opinion. One might cynically say that they just sound like the sum of their influences, but for the most part they still sound distinctive even when you might be able to say, e.g., 'this sounds like a Warp Records outtake'. "
-- Josh (kortbein@...), July 20, 2001.

"I thought that part of the beauty of the new Radiohead was that you could turn your radio on and hear something fucked up and there was always a possibility that it could be a new Radiohead song - there's an element of surprise that none of the wouldbe Radioheads can provide.A distinctive sound is something that surely can only be established through repetition,isn't it?And that's something that can only sustain itself for so long,which is why it was fitting that you used Joy Division and MBV as examples - their music is great,but there isn't much of it. "
-- Damian (spacelab@...), July 20, 2001.

Strange thing here as soon as one person criticises Radiohead there are at least two people joining in to defend them. Yesterday I listened for the first time to Amnesiac in its entirety. It is probably their best album (though I do not really know them). But there they do not have any sound whatsoever, every song is different and there is this surprise element but I still do not think they are innovative. The album seems like patchwork to me. Not the sequencing of the album is bad, but the songs do not fit together. Radiohead still have ordered them in the best possible way. Mostly alternating between an experimental and a more tuneful track. What I like about them nevertheless that they are keeping such a low profile. What we really do not need nowadays is another Sting or Bono.

Classical lines then and now
"My life is an open book, you can read it on the radio" (Neil Young).
My life is an open window you can scroll it on the internet.

"The times they are a-changing" (Bob Dylan).
We all are, even me, 'cept you Bobby boy.

"My life was saved by rockn'roll" (Lou Reed).
Techno destroyed mine.