Sunday 3 June 2012

a load of random songs from the iPod


The iPod MUST have some sort of little brain sometimes it gets fixated on a particular artist, but not in any way that the iPod can actually know. For example the other day I had a whole batch of Stones related music. But not simply the obvious I Cant Get No Sympathy For The Street Fighting Jack Flash Rolling Stones stuff either; there was Jagger and Richards solo stuff and Stones covers too. Weird or what.

Parachute Woman live from the Rockn Roll Circus in December 1968. A superbly rockin little blues monster, with a storming slide solo.

Cant Be Seen from Steel Wheels. One of Keiths best ever solo songs, and certainly one of his best ever vocals, soulful and almost smooth at times.

Lonely At The Top from Micks 1985 solo album Shes The Boss. This is the only Jagger / Richards track on this record having been attempted by the Stones during the Some Girls sessions as a fairly dull shouty rocker. Heres its revamped into a rather more funky song, with lots of irritating stop / start moments and Jagger giving a performance that all but tips into Jagger Impersonator territory. Every annoying vocal tic and trademark yelp is present and correct here. Hes really trying WAY too hard. Overall Shes The Boss isnt a particularly bad album, there are notably some good ballads, but this really isnt a good song.

Youre So Vain Carly Simons classic. Brilliant performance, brilliant arrangement and yes thats Mick on backing vocals. He probably thought the song was about him Actually, has it ever been revealed who this song does refer to?

Eileen one of Keefs solo songs. A fairly unremarkable rocker though it does have a very catchy chorus.

And then we move onto even more random stuff...

Camarillo Brillo ahhh nothing whatsoever to do with the Rolling Stones finally. Yes, its Uncle Frankie attempting a commercial song, and succeeding on most levels (apart from the slightly risqué lyrics). One of my all time fave Zappa songs actually. Its so unapologetically cheery and summery.

Two from Bryan Ferry - "Windswept" from 1985's Boys And Girls has always been a favourite of mine, but how I wish that the production wasn’t so clunky. Today Ferry would be a lot subtler with a song like this. The overbearing percussion and overly flowery guitar almost swamp what is actually a very delicate song. On the other hand, the almost absurdly busy and cluttered mix of “The Right Stuff” just seems so right for the track, and this is a song which I’ve grown to like a lot more than when I first heard it back in ’87. Sadly the whole Bête Noire album of 1987 is an object lesson in how to spoil a bunch of generally excellent songs by way too much ‘modern’ production. I bought Bête Noire on the same day as David Sylvian's beautiful Secrets Of The Beehive and Sylvian’s less-is-more approach is wonderful on this uncluttered and unhurried album. The Ferry record by contrast has far too many screechy backing vocals, far too much clattering drum machine, far too many guitar lines overlaid on top of one another and far too much time spent on the whole thing leading to Ferry obsessing about the detail and missing the bigger picture by not realizing when he’d done enough. Having said that, the good songs on Bête Noire are great – “Limbo” is classic Ferry, “The Right Stuff” is superb (it’s based on an old Smiths instrumental b side – really! (Johnny Marr plays on this song and nearly toured with Ferry, but there was a clash of dates. Ferry said of Marr ‘I liked the cut of his jib’)), and the exotically latin title track is the sort of slinky song that Ferry does so well. So not a complete disaster by any means.

Moonage Daydream from the Ziggy Stardust album, and arguably the best track on that album with Mick Ronson's scorching guitar work and his amazing string arrangements, and one of Bowie's best ever vocals.  Just pure brilliance from start to finish.

Wall Street Shuffle I have but a small handful of 10cc tracks, but the ones I have are cracking and this is a prime example of the inventiveness of 10cc.

RDNZL Uncle Frankie lets his band go nuts with insane percussion and complexities galore for the first half; tremendous musicianship. Then Zappa lets rip with a real blast of a guitar solo possibly his most frenzied studio solo.RDNZL was a major fixture of the 1973 / 74 shows and this version was recorded in 1974 at the One Size Fits All sessions, but bafflingly wasnt issued until 1979.

Magic And Loss the title track from Lou Reeds most cheery of albums - all the songs address Death... This is a frustrating track. Its actually one of the best things on the album, with an unusually excellent melody and a pretty decent vocal from Lou, but the horrendously tight and constricted production really hampers the song. The drums are way too loud, as is Lous voice but when the song really should let fly towards the end everything is compressed to hell and what was clearly quite a wild and powerful performance (eg the big stonking power chords on the guitar) is mixed way too low (as is the bass). So the song ends on a something of an anticlimax. Good old Lou, starting off with something promising then squeezing all the life out of it though you can bet that he was insisting that it sounded like the best thing ever recorded.

Hallo Spaceboy more Bowie, this time from January 1996 in Paris at the end of the Outside gigs. This band really beat the you know what out of this track. Its always worked so much better in concert than it does on record. Live, the song becomes a massive bruising pounding noise machine, and its terrifically exciting. However, despite the sheer volume on display, the song is brilliantly mixed and always sounded superb in the concert halls. This is from a radio broadcast so it sounds fabbo to the max.

Valtari as always, the shuffle setting will come up with recent additions. This is the title track from the forthcoming Sigur Ros album and is wonderful within the context of the album, but doesnt work on its own, and certainly not after the pasting thatHallo Spaceboy has just dished out. The calming reflective strings and sense of drifting on clouds that the whole album conjures up is entirely lost with just the one piece. Also, a word of warning, the Valtari album is rubbish if you play it in the car. All the detail is entirely lost and you are left with irritating Jonsi squeals and snatches of melody that dont connect with anything. Some Sigur Ros is fine in the car, but this one really isnt. The album itself is really excellent though, but it requires a quiet evening and a glass or two of wine. Anything else just overwhelms it.

Happiness Is A Warm Gun Lennon having fun on the White Album. One the best late period Beatles songs for sure.

Election Day from Arcadia. Which was basically the pretentious half of Duran Duran (while the rock half of DD went off and did the Power Station with Robert Palmer and Chics rhythm section, Bernard Edwards on bass and Tony Thompson on drums). Anyway, Arcadia just sounds like a slightly funkier Duran (Le Bon and Rhodes being the main architects of DDs sound anyway) and what with the addition of Roxy Musics Andy Mackay parping away on multilayered saxophones its all darned fine, if overly pretentious, fun.

Dazzle Ships (Parts II, II & VII) - ha ha ha ha.what a load of nonsense this is. How on earth did OMD think theyd get away with such silliness? But what I really like is the implication that there are other parts ofDS kicking around somewhere, perhaps they are waiting for a deluxe edition or perhaps the subtitle(Parts II, II & VII) is just soarty that there arent actually any more parts at all. In fact, I like that idea. Its exactly the sort of thing OMD would do!

Warm Leatherette brilliantly sinister stuff from Miss Grace Jones. Cracking performance on this track. Knocks the original by The Normal for six - the sheer power of Jones version, and especially her superb vocals, are way better than the rinky dink synths and rubbish vocals of the original. Fortunately Daniel Miller stopped being the Normal and set up Mute Records soon afterwards. (Mute of course, soon scored massive success when they signed Depeche Mode. Mute is still going as a subsidiary of EMI, still overseen by Miller and still releasing oddball stuff such a reissues of Residents albums and the Kraftwerk Katalog box). Grace Jones also popped up onElection Day muttering incoherently, which only added to overall silliness.

No Orders from J Peter Schwalms Musikain. A good song, with lyrics and vocals from Brian Eno. A nicely lopsided beat runs through the song and Eno delivers one of his patented unemotional vocals with some inscrutable lyrics -We had no orders to. Go that way. So we go that way so we go that way…” Good stuff, and yet another reason why Eno really should sing on more songs.

Blue Oyster Cult's swirlyDont Fear The Reaper. For what at first appears to be such a classic rock song its extremely laid back, with layers of seventies sheen squashing the sound into a weird kind of hazy mush. Dont get me wrong, its a cracking song, but I question the production choices here.

Prisoner Of Love one of the best Tin Machine songs, a mid paced almost-ballad which reigns in Hunt Sales blanket bombing drumming and allows the band to rock out in a fairly conventional manner over one of the best melodies on the album. This also allows Bowie to contribute a cracking vocal without resorting to shouting over the noise.

And finally some Walker Brothers on shuffle. The title says it all - "The Saddest Night In The World" Oh the drama! The heartache! The loneliness!

the wine of silence

Back in 2003 the Metropol Orkest performed a concert of soundscapes - orchestrated versions of Robert Fripp's guitar improvisations. 

On the face of it this doesn't sound like a very enticing proposition as much of the power of Fripp's original pieces comes from the element of chance or hazard that surrounds the music. Much of Fripp's soundscaping is unutterably beautiful and deeply emotional at a spiritual level and I wasn't sure how an orchestra could recreate such personal music. But they did. 

Andrew Keeling and Bert Lams painstakingly transcribed and orchestrated a number of original improv pieces. The original performance was broadcast on Dutch radio back in the day and has existed 'out there' in trading circles for the past nine years. And it was wonderful. Mixed with the lengthy soundscapes the Orkest played three King Crimson numbers, which perhaps didn't fit with the prevailing mood terribly well, but did nonetheless illustrate how cinematic and orchestral in scope much of Crimson's music actually was. 

Over the past couple of years long time Fripp associate and producer David Singleton has been working with the 2003 recordings. The recently released result is The Wine Of Silence, an album of such breathtaking beauty that it's very to hard to describe. With the Crimson pieces now absent the album seems more complete, a suite of sometimes hazy, sometimes crystal clear beauty. Touchstones might be Gorecki, or Tavener or Arvo Part, but although there is a reverent, almost religious aspect to The Wine Of Silence there's a calming, stunning stillness at the heart of the soundscapes, one which absolutely transfixes me and prevents me from doing virtually anything else. In Fripp speak - Music leans over and take me under it's wing. It envelops the listener so completely that the outside world becomes as nothing. It is quite simply a totally transcendent experience. 

Ok, so this may all sound way over the top, but I've quite simply never heard music like it. Singleton has taken the raw tapes and mixed, folded, overlapped and expanded the sound so it sounds like a thousand orchestras are playing with a hundred different choirs. Whilst the two versions of "Pie Jesu" and "Midnight Blue" are stunning enough in their unadorned orchestral beauty, it's perhaps the two pieces augmented by a choir that are at the heart of this suite. The sheer emotional power of “Requiescat” and “Miserere Mei” is almost overwhelming. “Midnight Blue” reminds me in many ways of the three tracks on side two of Eno's Discreet Music. The hazy dreamlike qualities of that record's “Fullness Of Wind” et al are echoed here, but magnified into something that is so enveloping and entrancing that it’s hard to believe. 

Much as I would love to hear / see / experience Fripp continue his guitar soundscaping, I would, even more, love to hear / see / experience a full orchestra playing this stuff. 

But in the meantime I can’t recommend this recording highly enough. It is nothing short of perfection. If you don't have The Wine Of Silence then I suggest you get hold of it immediately. Your life will be immeasurably richer for it. Really. 

Only ten pounds at the Burning Shed... what are you waiting for??