Saturday 16 March 2024

Therapy? Troublegum


Therapy? Troublegum 

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A high watermark of early alternative metal, Troublegum is a spectacular, powerful, clutter-free record. Densely packed at 14 songs in 40 minutes, there's sharpness on every level, demonstrating that the promise evidenced on Nurse was no mirage. Chris Sheldon's job on the boards provides separation among all the instruments, avoiding the mashed effect from Therapy?'s previous outings. Fyfe Ewing and Michael McKeegan basically do what they've been doing all along as a rhythm section, but the increased clarity really allows for one to fully appreciate their abilities. Andy Cairns' vocal range and ear for melody increase tenfold, and his guitar takes on countless tones and textures only hinted at before. Detractors might claim that the riffs are too predictable and too "metal," which is somewhat understandable but ultimately unfair. One could call them simple, and one could call them focused; it's more the latter. Since the songwriting is more direct and less concerned with merely knocking things out and stopping after three minutes or so, everything is fully formed and completely realized. It's the absolute opposite of aimless, which is something Therapy? was sometimes guilty of. There's much more variety, too. With each play, it becomes increasingly obvious that no two songs sound much like each other, yet each song hangs together to form a singular piece. Metal-phobes can't help but give in to the irresistable pop-punk hooks of "Screamager" and "Nowhere." An obvious influence is acknowledged in a storming version of Joy Division's "Isolation," which pays tribute and transforms at the same time. "Unrequited" can't be missed, featuring a rattling guitar riff that gets yanked away by a violent cello tug from Martin McCarrick.

 

Saturday 9 March 2024

Alice in Chains Dirt Limited Edition


Alice in Chains Dirt Limited Edition

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Dirt is Alice in Chains' major artistic statement and the closest they ever came to recording a flat-out masterpiece. It's a primal, sickening howl from the depths of Layne Staley's heroin addiction, and one of the most harrowing concept albums ever recorded. Not every song on Dirt is explicitly about heroin, but Jerry Cantrell's solo-written contributions (nearly half the album) effectively maintain the thematic coherence -- nearly every song is imbued with the morbidity, self-disgust, and/or resignation of a self-aware yet powerless addict. Cantrell's technically limited but inventive guitar work is by turns explosive, textured, and queasily disorienting, keeping the listener off balance with atonal riffs and off-kilter time signatures. Staley's stark confessional lyrics are similarly effective, and consistently miserable. Sometimes he's just numb and apathetic, totally desensitized to the outside world; sometimes his self-justifications betray a shockingly casual amorality; his moments of self-recognition are permeated by despair and suicidal self-loathing. Even given its subject matter, Dirt is monstrously bleak, closely resembling the cracked, haunted landscape of its cover art. The album holds out little hope for its protagonists (aside from the much-needed survival story of "Rooster," a tribute to Cantrell's Vietnam-vet father), but in the end, it's redeemed by the honesty of its self-revelation and the sharp focus of its music 

 

Saturday 2 March 2024

Talking Heads Remain In Light (Deluxe Version)


Talking Heads Remain In Light 

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The musical transition that seemed to have just begun with Fear of Music came to fruition on Talking Heads' fourth album, Remain in Light. "I Zimbra" and "Life During Wartime" from the earlier album served as the blueprints for a disc on which the group explored African polyrhythms on a series of driving groove tracks, over which David Byrne chanted and sang his typically disconnected lyrics. Remain in Light had more words than any previous Heads record, but they counted for less than ever in the sweep of the music. The album's single, "Once in a Lifetime," flopped upon release, but over the years it became an audience favorite due to a striking video, its inclusion in the band's 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, and its second single release (in the live version) because of its use in the 1986 movie Down and Out in Beverly Hills, when it became a minor chart entry. Byrne sounded typically uncomfortable in the verses ("And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife/And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?"), which were undercut by the reassuring chorus ("Letting the days go by"). Even without a single, Remain in Light was a hit, indicating that Talking Heads were connecting with an audience ready to follow their musical evolution, and the album was so inventive and influential, it was no wonder. As it turned out, however, it marked the end of one aspect of the group's development and was their last new music for three years.

Saturday 17 February 2024

The Wedding Present Watusi Deluxe Edition


The Wedding Present Watusi Deluxe Edition

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Arriving after a Steve Albini-produced trove of mopey wonder (1991's Seamonsters) and a collection of relatively more lighthearted singles (1992's Hit Parade), the Wedding Present's fourth album Watusi found David Gedge and company hitting a particularly brilliant stride in terms of songwriting and creative development alike. Produced by Seattle personality Steve Fisk in a time when "grunge" was a breathless buzzword, there's some rock muscle happening on tracks like "So Long, Baby" and "Shake It" that veers more toward flannel-friendly guitar tones than C-86 fuzz, but the jangly melancholy of the uptempoed "Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah" finds the perfect balance between the two, with booming drums locking in with spindly guitar lines and electrified organ. Tracks like "Spangle" tap into the band's trademark way with syrupy slow songs of crushing heartbreak, this time supported by the scratchy tones of Fisk's church organ drum machine. Watusi is one of the more dynamic Wedding Present albums, with both songs and production stretching into less predictable territory, presenting Gedge’s by now familiar ruminations on difficult love and disintegrating relationships with an extra dose of daring. The band's straying from the formula is at its best in forms as divergent as the long fits of Velvets-like guitar squall on "Catwoman," and the tender, a cappella back and forth between Gedge and Beat Happening vocalist Heather Lewis on "Click Click," the album’s finest and most impacti Moment

Saturday 10 February 2024

John Foxx & Robin Guthrie Mirrorball


John Foxx & Robin Guthrie Mirrorball

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Mirrorball is a melodically affecting exercise in ethereal ambience -- precisely what you might expect from two artists whose CVs list collaborations with Harold Budd. That's not to set Budd up as an overarching influence, though: Foxx and Guthrie come to this album with their own long-established and distinctive pedigrees, the former as an electronic pioneer and the latter as chief architect of the Cocteau Twins' unique dream pop lullabies. Mirrorball bears the musical fingerprints of both, combining Guthrie's trademark hypnotic, echo-laden melodies with the kind of otherworldly, cavernous spaces that Foxx mapped on Cathedral Oceans. Like David Bowie on "Warsawa" (and Guthrie's former bandmate Elizabeth Fraser), Foxx sings lyrics that aren't recognizable as English; he favors improvised vocals that suggest a hybrid of Latin and glossolalia. Foxx's sonorous baritone -- often set amid austere synth washes, slow, droplet-like piano notes, and Guthrie's reverberating waves of guitar -- contributes a hauntingly beautiful, almost liturgical gravitas. Most memorable are "The Perfect Line," "Spectroscope," and "Empire Skyline," relative miniatures that conjure up cathedral-sized ambience; and "Luminous," a more amorphous, oceanic piece, whose sounds and words overlap and bleed into one another, spreading like ink through water. Foxx and Guthrie also explore more boldly defined arrangements on "Sunshower," with its Cocteau Twins' lilt, and on the string-adorned "Estrellita," which could be the theme from an imaginary James Bond film. While these tracks are more direct than most of the material, Mirrorball is by no means a predominantly abstract endeavor. Far from it. Alongside Another Green World and the instrumental suites on Low and Heroes, Mirrorball shows that ambient music isn't only about epic soundscapes: skillful practitioners can also bring that aesthetic to bear on more compact tunes whose brevity belies their richness. Foxx and Guthrie's work makes that point emphatically. Much like its namesake, Mirrorball is a shimmering, multi-faceted artifact.

Saturday 3 February 2024

Fripp & Eno Evening Star


Fripp & Eno Evening Star

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Robert Fripp's second team up with Brian Eno was a less harsh, more varied affair, closer to Eno's then-developing idea of ambient music than what had come before in (No Pussyfooting). The method used, once again, was the endless decaying tape loop system of Frippertronics but refined with pieces such as "Wind on Water" fading up into an already complex bed of layered synths and treated guitar over which Fripp plays long, languid solos. "Evening Star" is meditative and calm with gentle scales rocking to and fro while Fripp solos on top. "Wind on Wind" is Eno solo, an excerpt from the soon to be released Discreet Music album. The nearly 30-minute ending piece, "An Index of Metals," keeps Evening Star from being a purely background listen as the loops this time contain a series of guitar distortions layered to the nth degree, Frippertronics as pure dissonance. As a culmination of Fripp and Eno's experiments, Evening Star shows how far they could go.

Saturday 27 January 2024

Edward Ball Catholic Guilt


Edward Ball Catholic Guilt

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Ball's second album in a row to obsessively chronicle the aftermath of a romantic breakup (the first was 1996's If Ever a Man Loved a Woman), Catholic Guilt posits Edward Ball as the middle-aged, balding, British male equivalent to Lili Taylor's character in Cameron Crowe's Say Anything, endlessly writing songs about her ex-boyfriend. The difference is that Ball's songs are actually really good. Starting with the self-lacerating single "The Mill Hill Self-Hate Club," which has the horn-driven groove of an early Style Council single, Ball examines the relationship from every possible angle, with leavening doses of dry wit and warm-hearted compassion to balance out darker tunes like the lengthy, almost Dylan-esque "Docklands Blues." The witty "Controversial Girlfriend," which sounds almost like Nick Lowe backed with the Barenaked Ladies, is another clear standout, but nearly all of the album mixes intriguing lyrics with catchy, hook-filled melodies and substantial production. For Ball, whose albums with the Times seemed more concerned with fashionable mimicry than emotional directness, this album is surprisingly weighty and thoughtful

Saturday 20 January 2024

Hüsker Dü Zen Arcade


Hüsker Dü Zen Arcade

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In many ways, it's impossible to overestimate the impact of Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade on the American rock underground in the '80s. It's the record that exploded the limits of hardcore and what it could achieve. Hüsker Dü broke all of the rules with Zen Arcade. First and foremost, it's a sprawling concept album, even if the concept isn't immediately clear or comprehensible. More important are the individual songs. Both Bob Mould and Grant Hart abandoned the strict "fast, hard, loud" rules of hardcore punk with their songs for Zen Arcade. Without turning down the volume, Hüsker Dü try everything -- pop songs, tape experiments, acoustic songs, pianos, noisy psychedelia. Hüsker Dü willed themselves to make such a sprawling record -- as the liner notes state, the album was recorded and mixed within 85 hours and consists almost entirely of first takes. That reckless, ridiculously single-minded approach does result in some weak moments -- the sound is thin and the instrumentals drag on a bit too long -- but it's also the key to the success of Zen Arcade. Hüsker Dü sound phenomenally strong and possessed, as if they could do anything. The sonic experimentation is bolstered by Mould and Hart's increased sense of songcraft. Neither writer is afraid to let his pop influences show on Zen Arcade, which gives the songs -- from the unrestrained rage of "Something I Learned Today" and the bitter, acoustic "Never Talking to You Again" to the eerie "Pink Turns to Blue" and anthemic "Turn On the News" -- their weight. It's music that is informed by hardcore punk and indie rock ideals without being limited by them

 
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