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Fucking iTunes.
The MP3 files I sync'd with my iPod didn't have the track numbers filled in so iTunes order the files alphabetically instead of by the original filenames, resulting in me listening to the album in the wrong order.
I have now rectified the situation but most of my notes are now irrelevant. So I have to listen to it again.
I once owned a cassette tape of The Cream of Eric Clapton. I didn't choose to buy it. I was sent it by one of those mail order music catalogues and forgot to send it back so I was stuck with it. I never once listened to it all the way thru. I would fall asleep. I'd get lost in my thoughts. I've actually written other songs while that tape was playing. Not that it was shit. Blues just has to be truly special to hold my attention for longer than a few minutes.
Two of the tracks off that compilation are on this so I'm expecting three things from this album. (1) Addictive riffs (2) fine solo work and (3) to lose concentration often.
When it was in the wrong order I praised it for underplaying the opening and leaving the two belters until later. Meanwhile back in the real world, the first two tracks are _those_ two tracks. I won't say much about them. They're very well known and in some cases, so well known as for that to be detrimental.
Strange Brew is a staple for Halloween parties and together with Sunshine Of Your Love these whorey old standards have littered the set lists of pub covers bands since time immemorial. Well, immemorial to me, at least. So let's move on, although do check out Spanky Wilson's version of Sunshine Of Your Love. It's pretty spesh.
So instead of the daring beginning, we've got the best stuff up front with its tits out and if I hadn't already heard it I'd be thinking whatever's coming next has its work cut out. World Of Pain however, is unfazed by its task. It has that feel I associate with Ramble On, but it's slinkier: not the ball-searing anthem of transients the Led would scream for us years later. I fucking love this track. I'm gonna listen to it again.
Okay, _now_ they're struggling. Nothing can follow that. Dance The Night Away has a softer feel, playing to the plaintive side of the minor key. It's pretty quick nonetheless and keeping the pace up is the only move they have. There's this tinny, might-be-a mandolin on there? Annoying. If it was just trying to hold the fort until the next belter then job done but as Blue Condition shows, it's more the evidence of decline than the provision of variety. Blue Condition is sung by someone else I think. It's a very basic blues, not without its charm, but only time will tell if it becomes a blessing or a burden.
Tales Of Brave Ulysses is a harbinger of progressive rock, I think, both in the almost rubato prologue and the generally Gothic lyrics with the classical theme. It's still basically White Room once it kicks in but it has higher ideals that while a little pretentious are well executed. And that's the difference between good and a bit shit for not just prog but glam and musical theatre and probably some others too.
It feels distinctly like SWLABR is the opening of side two. A big instrumental tag that bookends every verse, led by what I think is a very compressed guitar gives way to another of those couldn-t-give-a-nutsack grooves but each carries with it an edge. Another song that's going to grow on me even more so, I think.
In the words of Simon Le Bon, "Oh my god, what's this?"
We're Going Wrong is an attempt at an ethereal, atmospheric kinda thing I think. It's some kinda warning, probably about society, lyrically could be anything. Builds up to a crescendo, doesn't go on too long, doesn't really earn its vinyl.
Outside Woman Blues gets us back on track tho. What the fuck, guys? There's this repeating riff at the end of every single line and you'd think you'd get bored of it but it's such a tasty tune, you sing along with it and then he starts harmonising with it. Just great.
Take It Back is the roadhouse blues I'd been expecting the entire album and it's every bit as pedestrian as you might expect. Not bad. You can even enjoy it. But it's not exciting. Let's move on to the last track, which is the band showing they've got a sick and weird sense of humour.
Mother's Lament is sung in full on mockney and tells the tale of a woman who didn't throw her baby out with the bath water. It was so thin, it went down the plughole. Nice vaudeville piano on and I bet they had a right laugh recording it. Leaves you with a smile on your face. Yeah....I'm coming back to this often, in spite of the shit ones.
Second album by this band very soon after the first. I didn't really understand why that record was on the list so I'm extremely dubious about what this has in store for me.
It opens up with Alone Again, going for the sharp contrast between an instrumental acoustic guitar with heavy reverb suddenly bursting with orchestral support for the hook part of this verse verse format. There's a spaghetti western trumpet solo in there that reminds me of Tom Jones for some reason. Weird, but certainly better than that last shower of shit.
Predictably, though, the second track, A House Is Not A Motel, shows signs of slipping back. There's a brave key change for the chorus but the accompaniment doesn't follow with enough gusto and he just sounds out of tune. It's trashy, fast hipster groove with hard rock instruments and a second go round reveals it wasn't a key change. Oh dear.
Andmoreagain: see what they did there? They pushed all the words together like a domain name. Edgy, huh? Sadly that's the only thing about this that could be described as ahead of its time. His voice is reminding me of Carol Decker (singer with T'Pau). Sings fine about 70% of the time then goes a bit pitchy and comes back in. Repeat that a couple of times before landing squarely flat on a long, high note and instead of correcting it, bottling it - or, god forbid, doing another fucking take - just holds this flat note in the hope people will think it's deliberate or else blame themselves for hearing it wrong.
"Keep smiling and call it jazz" only works for jazz, dickhead.
On and on we lurch from track to track in search of greatness that never comes.
The Daily Planet - surprise, it's got nothing to do with Superman. It's very reminiscent of The Who - a mix of Magic Bus and I'm A Boy, perhaps. The intro is a stomp but then turns into that generic 60s beat with the syncopated snare. It's a perfectly decent song but lacking the magic.
Old Man could be a secret tribute to some father figure. A couple more of listens might reveal its sacred beauty but for now it passes by almost unnoticed.
The Red Telephone is searching for a progression to do the job of melody. It's struggling to be interesting and you could argue we have that in common but at least it's trying. The anachronistic pseudo rap at the end is pretty naff though and is an admission of defeat.
Live And Let Live. Six years later a title playing on this axiom would become an all time classic. No such future for this bland sojourn in a house of blunt scissors, which opens with the line "the snot has kicked against my pants". Yeah. I'm pretty sure that's a mondegreen[*] too, but still.
I'm working on a theory that if a song has more than 6 words in the title, it'll be shit[**]. And the next track, The Good Humor Man He Sees Everything Like This, is no exception. In spite of this, there are some nice chords created by the strings and horns but not much else.
The final song, You Set The Scene, is an up beat pop song to close with more of that chromatic shift we've been seeing in the progressions throughout. But then it switches pace and goes into a different section. Ahaaa. Fancy ourselves a concept closer do we? No, you're just a cut n shut. Two songs blutacked together with no real care. The arps in the final bars are elementary school band further underlining an album trying far too hard to be something it hasn't the chops for.
[*] - this seems to be a little known fact. When words are mis-heard, as in "hold me close and tie me down, sir" and "excuse me while I kiss this guy", it's called a mondegreen. Read more about mondegreens.
[**] - One notable exception to this rule is of course When The World Is Running Down You Make The Best Of What's Still Around.
I'm just gonna come right out and say it. This guy's voice is just plain weird. There's a vocal range in the opera world called Counter Tenor my dad told me about. He says the voice gives him the willies cuz it doesn't sound like a man. Now, the latent trans/homophobia aside, I can see his point. It's like you can hear that a bloke's larynx is making that noise but it's too high a register so it sounds like it's been processed or sped up or something.
Tim Buckley is definitely on that spectrum but there's another texture to it too. It's like he's closing this throat to do a silly voice like the nerdy ones in Monty Python sketches likes Bookshop.
Outside the issues with his voice, there are two consistent qualities running through this. One is the melodies all seem to be around the same pattern and the other is the repeated use of a loosely strung acoustic guitar that gradually becomes more and more chaotic as the song progresses.
I Never Asked To Be Your Mount is a great example of this ruining an otherwise decent piece. He could've been done at 4 minutes but he pushes it too far, creates this cacophony again and then starts taking risks with his vocal range that come off sounding like Bobcat Goldthwaite in a spin cycle.
Knight Errant is the only one I really liked from start to finish but then it's just under 2 minutes long and has a genuinely interesting progression.
All of these criticisms notwithstanding, it's just about bearable until the title track begins. There's nothing particularly foreboding about it other than the tired old melody and the tired old descending bass but a glance at the i-Tunes window tells me this track is nearly 9 minutes long. Every 2 or 3 minutes, there's a break in the repetitive dirge of a few bars of double tempo that promises relief but then pulls the rug out and returns to the land of gimme-the-scissors.
Why does everybody think they're the ones who are gonna get it right? They're gonna write the extended song that doesn't go anywhere or do anything that will blow people's minds. The fuck they are.
I don't know how The Monkees were formed. I seem to remember hearing somewhere they fashioned by the industry rather than being discovered by it. The Spice Girls of the 60s. Perhaps. I haven't checked.I remember the theme tune and those 2 Believers: Daydream and Indefinite Article. I shouldn't be surprised they ran out of ideas so quickly. I loved the TV show, and of course the theme, but I was never inspired to buy an album off the back of that. Good thing too. At that age this insipid piece of aural excrement would have soiled my taste for more musically worthy fair like the Zeppelin, Who, Slade, Queen and Bowie my older brother was giving me the benefit of in my listening infancy.You Told Me is a pretty good song I suppose and the following two hold their own pretty well as long as you don't pay attention to the lyrics, whose tone smacks of that adolescent whining only the whiniest of adolescents can enjoy.But then the album begins a descent from barely average toward total sonic sewage at the sort of gradient usually only seen on cliff edges.For Pete's Sake could've been so much better if they'd got a session guitarist instead of the string buzzing twat embarrassing himself on this. Throughout the drummer clearly can't keep time without out the bass player. J K Simmons would've eaten this guy for breakfast and spat out the sticks.
Zilch is trying so hard to be psychedelic and they come off like a bunch of accountants trying to prove they're a fun bunch of people. Apologies to the accountants but you get a lot of stick for being boring and some of you tend to over compensate.
Littered with attempts at different styles, peppered with nods to intricacies executed well by other bands, Headquarters sounds like they're trying to prove one thing but sadly confirm the other.
I am not a believer anymore.
This is a surprising little album. The country and folk influences are clear from the outset but there's a lot more to it than diddly-twang-dicky-dido, "My mama calls me Lizbeth but I got a 3-inch-diiiick."
The songs are built on a core of acoustic guitars, accordions and violins but there are some choice decisions made with the layered orchestrations, most immediately noticeable on Only Dreaming Now. The song is one of those with no chorus, but rather a crescendo on a strongly resolving melody at the end of each verse that serves the purpose after a fashion.
The percussion is minimal, letting us hear the delicately darting strings underpinning the vocal.
When that crescendo comes, it is a sparse bass drum that enters in support of the swelling strings, not obliterating them.
The progressions too aren't your usual country standard, to which the opening track Are You Happy is testament. All the way through you get different rhythms and cadences and his voice has a rich timbre.
Now, there is a certain conversational tone to some of the words and a distinct similarity to a particular guitar-playing rodent, who by now I'm sure I need not name.
I mention this, not because it's off-putting but because the singer on this album is doing exactly that: singing. Fans of Dylan have berated me for slagging him off just because I don't understand his style. This album is my answer to those people. The vocal here is very much a-la He-With-Eyes-Like-A-Robber's-Dog but I'm enjoying it immensely.
Other conspicuously good takes found herein include The Painter Of Women, which again impresses with its arrangement, prodigious in its sparsity. The Keeper Of Time is just an old stomper, but it's full of life and that mix, that gloriously well pitched mix helps it carry you away, as indeed it should.
Watch out too for Nine Pound Hammer which is a great little groover that builds in intensity up to a frantic climax.
Most of the songs come in closer to 2 minutes than 3, so the appearance of The Wolf Of Velvet Fortune at nearly 5 minutes constitutes Progressive Rock. It's an odd song with violent changes of mood, which are a bit harsh on the ear but they ease back quickly, seemingly self aware.
It's that kind of control and attention that leave me feeling relaxed and ready for a bit of fun by the time the old hillbilly standard Old Kentucky Home kicks in as an epilogue to this, a most unexpected pleasure.
At 36 minutes, this is a very short album and while that's not particularly noteworthy considering the period, I mention it now, cuz it'll be important later. Consider it the Chekhov's Gun of album reviews. Pretentious? Certainly, but then so is this poor excuse of a long player that plays fast and recklessly loose with the definition of long.
I've given it a star, which tells you there is something positive I can say about it. The flute and the harpsichord are, at times, phenomenal. They're not sitting on top of much, but they're good enough to cause a lapse, however brief in the feelings of frustration the initial 6 tracks evoke.
They're so short but nevertheless create an air of being too long. If your song runs 1:18 then you have a choice. Either develop your idea properly or let it stand as is. There is a veritable fuck-tonne of short tracks that demonstrate the effectiveness of their interlude-approaching brevity. I intend to check this list out when I have more time. Most of the songs on it I've never heard and I'm more than slightly miffed that neither of the qualifying songs on Prince's Parade made the cut but the very existence of this list is proof of my point. There's nothing wrong with a short song.
They may have felt a certain obligation to breach the 3 minute boundary for the sake of radio play and the wildly ambitious notion that one of these quasi-baroque mincettas* will give them a hit. That's more likely, perhaps, than my other theory, which is that without the needless repetition, the total running time would downgrade the release to an EP.
Too often these people miss the mark with a poor choice of singer or by.jamming out a riff for too long and if the first 6 tracks didn't teach you that, then get a load of side 2.
For those who like jokes that hinge on some implicit mental arithmetic taking place, the running time so far is just over 17 minutes with one track remaining.
That's right, the final song is longer than all the previous tracks put together. Oh my tormented soul! What manner of heathen torture is this?!
Y'know "Da Capo" is a musical term, which literally translated is "from the beginning" and they certainly seem to be living up to that over and over again in this hideous extended jam of an unchanging chord sequence so impotent I would struggle to justify referring to it as a vamp let alone a progression. The singer attempts increasingly ambitious lines, which fail embarrassingly. And there is nothing at the end to conclude the song, nothing to suggest this section took us anywhere or had a destination in mind. Its only purpose was to extend the running time.
To Thirty. Six. Minutes.[**]
[*] - mincetta (p. min-chetta) n. - a short piece of music, not necessarily instrumental that is a vague composite of styles; part one, part another, but all mince.
[**] - there isn't an emoji for "derisive sneer" but if there was, this'd be where you'd find an apt usage
Once upon a time there was a band called The Beatles. They were very successful. Then once upon an every-year-after-that, some band would open up an album with the same guitar strummy and vocal harmony thing hoping to magnetise the screaming and the cash in their direction.
This is one of the better imitations and to be honest there's enough variety in the songs for me not to miss my ear infection but it's still a bit dull on the whole.
The Beatles were copied extensively in the sixties and ever since to varying degrees of abstraction slash annoyance depending your proclivities. Hey Grandma is a pretty good effort like a cross between Get Back* and that one that goes "you're making me feel like I've never been born"? She Said I think.
So, thinking "that's it for the next 30-40 minutes", I sat back and waited for the assembly line clean guitar and four part harmonies to carry me all the way to the run-off but then Mr Blues came along. Don't get me wrong, it's not a mind blowing track by any means, but with its almost funky groove it was an encouraging surprise.
Naturally, I perked up as I was taken thru Fall On You, an upbeat rock thing with some country twangs and chops that was remarkably pleasant and I started to feel a definite flavour with these chaps.
Track four (whatever it was called) sewed a seed of doubt. A ballad at this point is a predictable change of pace. "We're gonna take it down for a while now y'all, so feel free to smoke a jayjay and feel each other up." It's all that Eversly Brothers slow bossa with contrapuntal melodies. Nice, inoffensive and as forgettable as whoever that was you were feeling up just now.
With the ambivalently predictable but refreshing Come In The Morning acting as the crash cart, it's difficult to dislike this Keep On Running, hard soul, snare-on-the-one soundtrack stock for any movie with a road trip in it. I was definitely still in it until Omaha kicks in.
It's a frenetic and confused little number that much like the girls I wasted my affections on as a youth, it didn't seem to know what it wanted other than to be fast. The percussion was noticeably arrhythmic and if that's deliberate then I don't get it. Suggest drumming circle people have a listen. I don't get *them* either.
Someday is another slow one. This arrangement of tracks may well not have been an established pattern yet but they were certainly sticking to it. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with having ballads and nobody's a bigger softy when it comes to Nielsson or Carly Simon than my speckled, portly self. But the slower ones here are lacking that special quality that makes couples want to adopt it as "our song".
Aint No Use, another forgettable one and despite the well crafted, layered guitar work it's dull dull dull lyrically and the gravitas he tries to lay on just grates. It seemed like an announcement that we were officially into the filler section now until Changes began.
I like Changes a lot and it's the main reason I will return to this album. Bass players, keep an ear out for the arpeggios in the closing section. I do like the way the bass is recorded in on this album. It's very rounded and certainly present if not forward in the mix, but not dominant.
Lazy Me - there's something very Beefheart about the melody but thankfully that's as far as the comparison goes. At the end it sounds like it's gonna go off into one of those experimental sections that last for days and who knows? Maybe it did but the engineer had the decency to fade it out before the band heard it and severely pissed me off 50 years later.
The engineer again saves their bacon on Indifference, which is a pretty basic 12/8 played at speed that gives way to straight 4 for the chorus. It's a neat trick I've seen enough times to no longer be impressed, but it at least saves the track from the tedium it first appeared to be aiming for. The track finishes and does one of those resurrection endings - I'm soonest reminded of the closing track on the Foos Colour and Shape album*. These endings need to be short or fucking awesome and our friend the engineer leaves just enough in there to once more remind us of Get Back.
Which wouldn't be released for two years. Huh.
Ah, fuck it.
Altogether it's not too bad and some I actually would like to come back to at a later date, but it's not quite good enough for 4 stars.
[*] Mostly cuz I was listening to it a few days ago ahead of their Wembley gig, now cancelled due to Dave Grohl breaking in his leg falling off stage in Stockholm. Read more about Grohl's injury and his awesome response to the situation here.
