[music, albums] March 16, 2005 at 8:40:00 PM CET

XXI: 1985 Lloyd Cole and The Commotions - Easy Pieces

Another Lloyd Cole (terrible website I didn't get). How is it possible? I didn't know that I liked him so much. But the main reason Lloyd Cole dominates the mid-eighties in my little world is that they are a musical wasteland in my collection. Those male androgynous voices which bother me now: Michael Stipe, Sting, Morrissey. Concerning The Smiths: one great song (That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore) does not make a great album. Sade's slick lounge muzak, the Dire Straits feel-good ballads on national guitar to which I listened night and day in 1985/86. The noise pop one-trick pony ridden by the Reid brothers. The first exciting experimental guitar noise records of Sonic Youth which have always been too hard for me to love wholeheartedly. Suzanne Vega's fine first intimate album which lacks the thrill. Jeffrey Lee Pierce's solo Wildweed where he sings for his soul in vain. I can't take him anymore. Maybe because I have passed that age.

And then there was Lloyd Cole. A guy with a voice in between Tom Verlaine's coolness and some glamorous mannerism (Matt Johnson maybe). Someone who could write catchy guitar tunes. Easy Pieces, his second album with The Commotions after the totally classic Rattlesnakes was their biggest commercial success in the UK (they cracked the top ten) and is even poppier and more immediate than the debut.

Rich is a great glorious start. The sparkling sunbeams pierce through the grey Scottish sky when the brass section plays that fat fanfare. Why I Love Country Music is the first summit of this immaculate album. And it goes on with string sections and accordion play fitting perfectly into the shining glistening sound. With the balladesk James (wasn't there a band with that name which never really made it?) it gets dreamy and a little wistful. Minor Character has got that lovely jangly guitar I absolutely adore. The lyrics mention Saint Christopher, did the excellent forgotten Sarah band take their name from there? Perfect Blue is as gorgeous as a song can get. Pure melodic beauty. That line Whatever I touch turns blue will stick in my mind forever. The last song Nevers End is romantic and sad.

Sorry, I can't offer any mp3 as I have only a tape copy of the album which I offered to a girl I was pretty much in love with some time ago. She never told me if she liked it, that's how it goes.

The lyrics.

Here is the overview of the series 40 years, 40 albums of which part XXI was this post.

 
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[music, albums] March 7, 2005 at 7:52:00 PM CET

XX: 1974 Steve Reich - Drumming

The choice of Steve Reich's minimal drumming piece reflects my current state of over-saturation with conventional music. As with 1982's On Land I picked the most experimental release from the poll. The one which comes closest to sound and is furthest away from traditional harmonic and melodic music.

There are only beats here. 85 minutes split in four parts. First we have bongos, then we have marimbas, then glockenspiels and in the last part all three of them together. There is a natural rhythm vibe which is totally hypnotic. The slow gradual shifts of speed and metre keep the attention of the listener.

Steve Reich (born 1936) composed his longest work in 1971 shortly after his trip to Africa where he studied the drum patterns of the Ewe tribe from Ghana (Writings on Music, 1965-2000, page 55ff.). He especially concentrated on the Gahu dance, a very popular dance which is not restricted to a special time or place. The music and the dance to it have the same name and can't be separated.

This is a world music composition which covers Africa with the bongos, South America with the marimbas and East Asia with the glockenspiel emulating the gamelan. There is a progression from the hardest most physical beats by the bongos which often sound like patter of horses hooves to the wooden sounding marimbas and finally to the higher metallic sounds of the glockenspiel. Reich calls them timbres. A movement from the body to the spirit. Additionally Reich uses voices in the marimba part and whistling plus piccolo flutes in the glockenspiel part to imitate the drum sounds.

I think this is one of the rare occasions in music where a highly original idea (minimal evolution) is realised in a perfectly compelling way. Especially when I think of the minimal music I know which always was more fascinating in theory than in practice (see Phil Glass's symphonic overkill, Michael Nyman's sugary melodies or Brian Eno's dull(!?) tape echo-delay experiment Discreet Music). A reason why this succeeds could be that Reich only focusses on rhythm, a basic component of music. There is an accordance of minimal movement and use of minimal, monochromatic instruments.

The end of the composition comes as a shock. It is as if life ends. The heart beat of the universe stops. We are left with silence again. And I can maybe listen to some more normal music with tunes and stuff again.

Here is the overview of the series 40 years, 40 albums of which part XX was this post. I am half through. Ouff.

 
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[music, albums] February 28, 2005 at 6:34:00 PM CET

XIX: 1983 Meat Puppets - II

The contenders 1983 has been the most difficult year for me to choose a favourite from yet. At the time I did my military service and wasn't listening to anything featured in the poll. One reason was that I didn't have the cash to buy music. In the discotheques they played one song over and over: Nena's Neue Deutsche Welle smash hit 99 Luftballons. There have been a couple of good albums which I purchased later though but none was really outstanding. R.E.M.'s first sound longplay Murmur established a new voice in American alternative folk-rock but lacks in the urgency department. The Durutti Column released the new agey Another Setting, probably their most consistent album which is a little too much on the easy-listening side for me though. I also listened to some albums I forgot in the poll like Police's swan song Synchronicity which again is probably their best but still too hackneyed as the whole band. Brian Eno's airspace ambient Apollo was okay too but didn't grip me at all. Finally I realised that Yoko Ono's and John Lennon's posthumous album Milk and Honey was released in January 1984 and therefore per se excluded.

The cover The first thing striking about the Meat Puppets second effort is the colourful cover art. It has been made by the band and it reveals that they were on a special trip when recording the album. I see a red buffalo on a green pasture with the blue night sky around. The Meat Puppets hail from Tempe near Phoenix, Arizona. Already with the cover they allude to three aspects which give an idea of their music. Animalistic force, rural America and psychedelic consciousness.

The music Genre wise it has been described as cowpunk. The seemingly absurd fusion of punk rock with American roots music like country and bluegrass. Later on there have been other bands exploiting this fascinating approach further like e.g. Camper Van Beethoven but they never achieved the same degree of originality and innocence as the Meat Puppets, how could they? There is an immediate amateur lo-fi feeling to their music which really is in the spirit of do it yourself punk. When they play countryish tunes they can play them really fast (Magic Toy Missing). Like on speed, or ecstasy. They are also the masters of the slow intense sparkling two minutes ballad. No time wasted. Twelve songs. 30 minutes. Listen to the guitar instrumental Aurora Borealis, the polar light phenomenon as seen from the Arizona desert and judge for yourself.

I tried neither to mention Nirvana's Unplugged to which they contributed the most harrowing three songs (from II) nor Cris Kirkwood's (the bassist and brother of the singer/guitarist) drug addiction with some grave recent consequences here but I didn't quite succeed.

The 7 bonus tracks on the re-release shouldn't be forgotten as they are worth it for once. They only add a little more than 18 minutes which is good as well.

Here is the overview of the series 40 years, 40 albums of which part XIX was this post.

 
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[music, albums] February 26, 2005 at 2:33:00 PM CET

Tired of blogging

I reposted my review of the first Roxy Music album which started the 40 albums series on ILM. Sometimes I think I should give up this blog and ask questions on ILM instead. It is so much more fun...

 
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[music, albums] February 26, 2005 at 12:08:00 AM CET

The new New Order is absolutely amazing. For a band of old farts at least. It'll come out in spring time. That fits quite well.

 
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[music, albums] February 23, 2005 at 8:34:00 PM CET

1995 Readers' choice #1: Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie & the Infinite Sadness

As a thank you to those who participated in the year polls I have decided to write a little bit on the albums which got most of your votes. I'll start with the last closed poll on 1995 and I will try to slowly work my way back to the first poll covering 1972.

In 1995 I already had given up on the Smashing Pumpkins as their second much-hyped sticky over-produced MOR album Siamese Dream was such a letdown after the wonderfully rough and dynamic Gish. I taped the best songs of Mellon Collie... from a friend on a C90 and I was pleasantly surprised of what I heard. Especially as I had been extremely sceptical about a double album which seemed like a manifestation of the huge ego of Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan.

Of course not every minute of these two hours of heavy 90's prog-rock is great. But there are many moments of brilliancy where Corgan's often unnerving shrieking nasal voice doesn't bother me. As the music occasionally is so intense that I don't perceive his self-indulgence. Like e.g. in Love which is a glistening psych mess with hard knocking beats. I can also savour the instrumental(!) title track which opens the album. A solemn piano ballad with some cheesy synthesizer strings on top of it which gives me this kind of Weltschmerz feeling. It segues into Tonight, Tonight like a soundtrack for a glorious western. But when Corgan starts to sing in his false falsetto I have to fast forward.

The pastoral songs are the ones which I can appreciate most. Galapagos is one of them. Corgan abstains from screaming most of the time and that is a benefit on its own. Or the shining guitar pop hymn of 1979. Thru the Eyes of Ruby starts out very promisingly with a yearning vocal delivery in the first two lines but loses me in the middle when things get loaded. The slow and moving By Starlight where Corgan has found his voice would have been the perfect closer. Of course there are also some great hard-rock songs I dig like Where Boys Fear to Tread with the infectious bass guitar riff.

On the whole this weighty multi-faceted double album would have been much more digestible if it had been condensed to one CD with maximal 45 minutes playing time. And would maybe have even been in my top five of 1995.

 
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[music, albums] February 21, 2005 at 7:16:00 PM CET

XVIII: 1995 SParKLeHOrsE-VIVADIXIESUBMARINETRANSMISSIONPLOT

I continue surprising myself when choosing my favourite albums on a year by year base. 1995 was such a safe bet before having relistened to anything from my top ten. Yo La Tengo who have been one of my most beloved bands for many years released Electr-o-Pura, their most hypnotic record with the melancholic drone monster Blue Line Swinger as the closer. Maybe I know them too well by now. Electr-o-Pura was too predictable to be no.1. The first surprise from 1995 was Vic Chesnutt's warm and folky songwriter gem Is the Actor Happy? which I almost forgot in the poll. There was also the first album Boire by Miossec, the troubadour from Brittany who came from nowhere and made the most urgent French album since Gainsbourg.

In the end I settled for Mark Linkous debut with the strange compounded one word name. As it combines catchy touching guitar tunes with experimental not listener-friendly songs like no other release I know of from 1995. There is a lot of variety in this record and it still holds together amazingly well. I don't know a thing about Linkous but he must be an autodidact to make music so totally apart from the rest of the world. And he must be totally nuts as well.

The first song Homecoming Queen sets the tone. A slow fragile piece on acoustic guitar with weird scratching noises in the background which turn into a music box theme near the end. The bass enters. Deceleration to slowcore speed. Gravity takes hold of us. Some airport tower speech bit. Linkous voice is distorted by now. Neil Youngish guitar fuzz. Self-indulgent. You bet. A tender acoustic guitar. Don't resist. Just let yourself be enveloped by such beauty. An alternation of speed. Hard rocking stuff hitting you right on your head. Short and not so sweet. A day dream. A love song. Surreal and down to earth at the same time. Banjo time. In cowgirl country. A sweet baroque country blues ballad. Not to forget the mouth-harp. The slowing down at the end. Without collapsing. Morphing into a strange found sounds instrumental. Just an interlude. Words fail me by now. Acoustic guitar treasure. Finally the pedal-steel arrives. And we have a sweet-sour country ballad with a morbid plot. Fittingly seguing into an instrumental full of noisy sounds. The saddest song. Grabbing you by your balls. Rocking out your heart. Give me some more pedal-steel. Let the world go under in beauty. You know it makes sense. It's all over. Everything is fine. Let's ride those gasoline horses. To where?

Here is the overview of the series 40 years, 40 albums of which part XVIII was this post.

 
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[music, albums] February 16, 2005 at 8:27:00 PM CET

XVII: 1982 Brian Eno - On Land

People who have followed this series from the beginning on might be a little surprised by my 1982 choice. It is an album which didn’t feature in the poll. When creating the poll I didn’t think of On Land as I hadn’t seriously listened to it. Phil from one faint deluded smile mentioned it in the comments and after having realised that none of the ten records in the poll was exciting enough to be my album of the year I started relistening to On Land. When reading the liner notes with the music on the speakers it suddenly clicked. I was drawn in slowly like into a far away maelstrom in a sea which I had taken erroneously for totally calm. I have never cared a lot about Eno’s minmal and ambient music as put forward before on Discreet Music and Music for Airports. The kind of stuff to which Satie’s term furniture music fits quite well. It does not ask to be listened to. It flows along without any highs and lows. If it creates an atmosphere it is an atmosphere of void. Music with the aim of going nowhere, just turning around itself endlessly. Music which does not reward the listener.

On Land is different. It uses natural sounds to which the listener can cling to. They evoke memories. They tell stories of places. Brian Eno just forms those found sounds and weaves an electronic wrapping around them. He creates something highly unique and seamless by fusing the organic with technology. Eno recorded this album in New York. Like the city it is a melting pot.

A mysterious record which gives the listener the freedom to associate whatever his phantasy is able to come up with when exposed to this earth music. Exactly in between Tangerine Dream’s cosmic star track Zeit and Peter Gabriel’s tribal Passion soundtrack. In the past couple of years I got more and more attracted to simple environmental sounds like the waves hitting the coast (Jack Kerouac wrote a long poem on the Pacific ocean at Big Sur). Or wind chimes. There is a place near Big Sur where they have thousands of them which play a magnificent natural symphony when it is windy. Last summer in Norway we cycled to the end of an island where there were hundreds of screaming sea-gulls flying around. It was like the end of the world. You could forget about humanity when closing the eyes and taking in those rough bird screams.

Some track by track impressions:

1 Lizard Point Enormous insects buzz around.

2 The Lost Day Menacing sounds in the background. Like the rumbling of a far away thunder. Which does not come closer but stays there for the whole nine minutes of the track. Metal pieces hitting each other in the wind. Is there a boat passing by? A spooky atmosphere. Accentuated by the low symphonic soaring synthesizer sounds which give the piece an even more apocalyptic flair.

3 Tal Coat It is dark. I am undergound in a cave or something. A humid place. Snakes are all around. They make these hellish sounds with their tongues. They move towards me.

4 Shadow A hot summer evening in the steppe. Maybe in Australia. Crickets chirping. Someone hums. A warm enveloping guitar sound.

5 Lantern Marsh It is cloudy. The sky is low. Nothing is happening.

6 Unfamiliar Wind (Leeks Hills) Birds flying around making noises. Sheep. Where are the frogs? A short animal sound symphony.

7 A Clearing More animal sounds. In the water.

8 Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960 Piano echoes. Like played in the water. We are floating.

Some quotes from Eno and another contributor on the album:

On the origin of the music from the liner notes:

On the instrumentation and the sampled sounds (liner notes):

On the ideas behind and reverb:

Bill Laswell who plays bass on Lizard Point on the featured sounds:

Here is the overview of the series 40 years, 40 albums of which part XVII was this post.

 
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[music, albums] February 8, 2005 at 7:52:00 PM CET

XVI: 1993 Idaho - Year After Year

It was a tough choice between the first Tindersticks (excellent but too long), the last Gun Club (extremely touching but a little too fusionish) and this album. Which nobody seems to know except those French guys from Libération, France Inter (Bernard, you are the one and only radio deejay) and Les Inrockuptibles who made me get it in early 1994. Probably the most criminally overlooked album by the Anglo-Saxon critics in my discotheque.

Idaho are a slowcore guitar band from LA. Not the sunny kind of music you would expect from California. Leaning more towards the David Lynch sort of weird unworldly atmosphere. Jeff Martin has got this kind of grave baritone voice which in my mind is the apotheosis of existential melancholy. An extremely masculine voice I always dreamt of having myself.

This is the album to which we have made love most to. 55 minutes full of relish. Inciting the most tender and attentive parts of me in the old ceremony. A slowly unfolding affair. Lugubrious and solemn but creating a precious warm and cosy enveloping atmosphere like few records. When Jeff Martin starts to sing I feel like having come home. An album I was always afraid of killing by listening too often to it. The restraint did pay off and the magic has been preserved till now. A perfect record without a dud. Music to slit your wrists to has never been so soothing. An album of an incredible consistency. It goes straight to my heart and body and soul.

Lusher than Mark Kozelek's Red House Painters. Sadder and darker than Low. Less self-pitying and pompous than Mark Eitzels's American Music Club. White man's blues. A bath in wistfulness. A quartet playing four string guitars. The often leading electric bass guitar is accompanied by fuzzy guitar textures underlining the atmosphere. They have all the time of the world. Gorgeous harmonies. I bought two more CDs by them but they were lame in the sense of more of the same stuff but much less compelling compared to their phantastic debut.

Please forgive me all the clichés in this review. Without clichés the world would be an even sadder place as it already is though...

mp3: Save

Here is the overview of the series 40 years, 40 albums of which part XVI was this post.

 
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[music, albums] January 31, 2005 at 10:23:00 PM CET

XV: 1979 Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures, pt. 2

(continued from here)

When you open the CD tray (I wish I had the vinyl) you can read the name of the band on the CD: Joy Division. This mysterious seemingly innocent name is a provocation with a sexual allusion. Like the names of the two punk bands which played in Manchester, July, 20th 1976, the Sex Pistols and the Buzzcocks. When three of the later members of JD were in the audience. The mauvais goût of their name is unprecedented in rock history though. Joy Division is a quote from the book House of Dolls by Karol Cetinsky, referring to the brothels in the concentration camps for Nazi officers and/or camp detainees. JD flirted with WWII-Germany, eg Bernard Sumner changed his name to Bernard Albrecht, shouted "You all forget Rudolf Hess" in the 1977 Electric Circus concert and there was the cover of the Ideal Living EP with the Hitler-Jugend look-alike drummer boy. I guess it was a juvenile opposition thing without any political meaning. They wanted to shock, they wanted to be extreme. And they were. Just listen and forget about all this...

Next to the name of the band you will find the title of the album imprinted on the CD. Unknown Pleasures. We all know the pleasures of life. Be them physical like drinking, eating, having a shelter, having sex. Or immaterial. Like having friends, being in love, being loved, hoping, believing in something. Unknown pleasures are the ones we didn't know they existed. Pleasures we never imagined, we couldn't even dream of. Pleasures which may hurt occasionally but which are still pleasures. Moving pleasures. In the physical (those hard-hitting beats) and spiritual sense. Touching something deep inside the listener. JD offer these kind of things. To those who are willing to lose themselves to JD's music. It is as simple as that.

There are at least two prejudices about Joy Division which are totally wrong. Their music is neither cold nor depressive. Unknown Pleasures is a manifestation of intensity. It is dark and occasionally heavy but what really sets it apart from punk and most of post-punk is the energetic cohesive band sound. Stephen Morris drums kick forward and reverberate backward reversing the movement of the supernova on the cover. Exploding first and imploding after within a millisecond. Peter Hook's bass is playing the melody most of the time. Fast and full like an apple tree in October after a hot summer. Martin Hannett's synthesizer and noise samples add the sometimes ethereal sometimes discomforting touch. Bernard Sumner's electrical guitar provides the melancholia when gyrating in distortion around the bass. Ian Curtis finally aspires human life into this music with his baritone. Even when he intonates like someone singing the dirge for his own funeral. His first line is:

Here is the overview of the series 40 years, 40 albums of which part XV was this post.

P.S. I have been too lazy to upload an mp3. Just tell me if you are interested and I will try to do something about it.

P.P.S. I lost more than half of the post last night. That's maybe one reason why this review is a little bit on the shallow side. I finally more or less gave up on the chronological order thing.

 
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