[MUSIC]What Are You Listening To?

Debbie Harry the Glorious

 

Travis - Everything At Once
Stone Temple Pilots - self titled, new release
Phoenix - Te Amo
Jake Bugg - Hearts That Strain
MGMT - Little Dark Age
Liam Gallagher - As You Were
Johnny Marr - Call The Comet
Cardi B - Invasion Of Privacy
DMA's - For Now
BNQT - Vol. 1
Beck - Colors

 

Hal Ketchum's Past the Point of Rescue CD




Reached in to my box of CD and pulled this out. I was surprised how good it still is.

Past the Point of Rescue
I Know Where Love Lives
5 O'Clock World
Small Town Saturday Night
plus the other tracks are not bad either

 

I spent a good 45 minutes today watching videos of that Russian band that covers Chicago songs. They are so flipping talented.

 

Spiritualized And Nothing Hurt...beautiful album

 

Still one of my all-time favorite bands...

 

"If we put the truth in your hands, would you really like to know???"

In 1960, when I went to work for UPI, there was still talk about writing so that the story could be understood by a Kansas City milkman. He was the wire service symbol of the average American and if you worked for UPI or the AP you wrote simply and directly so a Kansas City milkman could understand it.

He soon faded as a symbol because more and more journalists had no idea what a milkman was. Before the 1950s a milkman delivered milk to homes because refrigeration technology was primitive and many families wanted fresh milk on a daily basis. The milk came in glass jars that held a quart of milk and you left the used jars outside in a bin to be picked up and replaced with fresh bottles by the milkman on his daily route.

 

2005

 

Now that the show is over and we have jointly exercised our constitutional rights, we would like to leave you with one very important thought. Sometime in the future you may have the opportunity to serve as a juror in a censorship case, or a so-called obscenity case; it would be wise to remember that the same people who would stop you from listening to Boards of Canada may be back next year to complain about a book or even a TV program or a Youtube video. If you can be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you can be told what to say or think. Defend your constitutionally-protected rights, noone else will do it for you. Thank you.

 

Thanks for introducing me to this band! Digging into their catalog and loving it...in a similar vein but a little older...


Edit: posted this vid before finishing this article and lo and behold...

Spoiler

Reaching for some kind of parallel or precursor, I could only think of David Byrne and Brian Eno’s 1981 album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, with its use of speech snippets as one-shot singularities (as opposed to the looped vocal samples that tend to figure in dance music and hip-hop).

Pretty cool

 

Bro, get the F in!! They're the Maestro's!!!! Check out EVERYTHING they've done, ALL excellent!!!

 

https://www.treblezine.com/talk-talk-spirit-of-eden-masterpiece-hall-of-fame-30-years/ …

The album opens with a lonely, yearning trumpet note, answered by strings and a casual strum of the deeper notes of a cello. Slow piano notes, mid-range and soft, pair against the gentle buzz of trumpet, only to be answered by the harsh industrial clatter of a distorted guitar. All this is built over a tense drone, one that seems to shift its chordal center from a major to a diminished chord, passing from brightness to ugly discord and back, no real progression but for the diaphragm of consonance and dissonance. Two minutes pass before a blues riff with light compression on a guitar shows, harmonica and drums and piano not far behind.

The introduction to “The Rainbow” is a far call from the synth-pop of UK band Talk Talk’s first three albums. Granted this was not so much a sudden and inexplicable shift; only their debut, the underreported The Party’s Over, holds keenly to the style, with the well-regarded It’s My Life and The Colour of Spring each upping the art rock and lite prog inclinations bit by bit. This process is not terribly surprising; while the style of ’80s synth pop has since coalesced into its own pocket musical world with its own microgenres, it arose at the time as a hybrid form of the art rock/prog-leaning New Wave intersecting once more with pop-rock in the caduceus of genre relations. Albums by Tears for Fears, Duran Duran, The Buggles and more interlaced their approachable synth-based pop rock with prog undertones and quiet influences. Talk Talk were, prior to Spirit of Eden, merely another of this caste, producing synth-pop/lite-prog art-rock hybrids.

But the power of Spirit of Eden is not diminished for lack of being some mystical, inexplicable deliverance of a record. The album, in one of many ways it is comparable to Miles Davis’ landmark b****es Brew, has an easily understood history that undercuts some of the popular myths of its creation but whose aura is left undiminished when dispersing the mystery. And this is because of the very simplest reason any record remains potent throughout time, regardless of myth or social atmosphere: It is, without question, a masterpiece album and one of the very finest long-form art rock records made.

Talk Talk began with a traditional pop-rock lineup of vocals, keys, bass and drums. After their relatively underrated debut, though still their weakest, their follow-up It’s My Life saw them drop original keyboard player Simon Brenner for studio assistant Tim Friese-Greene. It was with Friese-Greene that Mark Hollis, the vocalist, guitarist and main songwriter for the group, would form a tight partnership, helping to spur them further out of their traditional space by encouraging pursuit of things like trumpet performances and more elaborate keyboard arrangements with more striking tones and timbres for the upcoming record.

The biggest contribution of Friese-Greene, on paper at least, was in helping co-write the title track, which became far and away their biggest hit and most enduring song outside of the art rock, art pop, post-rock and prog worlds, as well as co-writing two others on the album. But in practice, perhaps his biggest contribution was encouraging Phil Spalding, the bassist of Mike Oldfield’s band who was making an uncredited stand-in on a track for technical reasons, to record dozens of takes of the single song he was performing on, which were then meticulously combed over and assembled into a highly-edited final cut for the record. This method would later go on to define the totality of the sessions of Spirit of Eden and to the sole record that would follow it, something that is sometimes wrongly attributed as new to those records. It actually finds its roots on their biggest selling record.

In many ways, The Colour of Spring is a dry-run of the two masterpieces that would follow. The brief experiments with replacing synth sounds with organic and acoustic sounds on It’s My Lifewas deemed a success and, off the back of the commercial performance of that record, they were granted an advance large enough to procure players such as the long-time guitarist of Peter Gabriel, the harmonica player of art-rock weirdo savant Rory Gallagher’s band, and (inexplicably) Steve Winwood. The resultant album was a trial of the more open arrangements that would come to dominate the form of Spirit of Eden, with the average run-time ballooning from four minutes to six and a closing track coming in at just over eight. The songs were still written in largely the traditional manner, Friese-Greene having graduated to full composer alongside frontman Hollis as they worked out skeletons for the tracks that collaborating guest musicians would fill out with improvisations which were then highly edited to fit the cloudy classical/jazz-inspired timbre of the record. It is easy to imagine a world where this tentative experiment did not fare well, and instead of moving on to produce the two masterpiece foundational records for post-rock and contemporary prog and art rock, Talk Talk had instead been relegated to return to traditional synth-pop. However, despite faring slightly worse in the U.S., The Colour of Spring became their highest selling record up to that point.

What follows after The Colour of Spring is a widely-related tale; the band entered the studio, 13 collaborators and a choir in tow, and set about emulating the studio methodology of Miles Davis’ electric fusion years, producing dozens of hours of group and solo improvisation around keys and themes that were later painstakingly edited into form. The work was so fruitful that the first three tracks were originally sequenced a single tri-part 20-plus-minute epic, the foundational song for post-rock that would go on to be a key inspiration for Bark Psychosis in the creation of their record Hex that would be the first album to be named post-rock by critics. The band had graduated from synth-pop to art-pop to the broader experimental world of art rock.

As intriguing the methodology is, we are not moved by mere methodology. Nor are we compelled by mere history. What mattered then as matters now are the songs and how they sit together, what they evoke in us and what colors they play with.

 

Yeah, I know I'm old. Nice hearing some of these newer bands playing styles I liked from my youth. Ash Ra Tempel stuff is hard to find but worth it.