on deck

Colin Stetson - New History Warfare Vol 2: Judges
Duran Duran - Duran Duran
Klaus Schulze - Irrlicht
Prefab Sprout - Two Wheels Good
Robert Fripp and Brian Eno - No Pussyfooting

dead ends

Time to clear out a few things...

Harmonia - Musik von Harmonia, Tracks & Traces

These two albums chronologically sandwich my favorite Harmonia album, Deluxe. Deluxe is upbeat, melodic, elegant, and interesting. I expected something vaguely similar from Harmonia's other two albums but even after revisiting them multiple times I never form a better impression of them.

Dollar - The Dollar Album

I'll be talking more about the source for this one later but basically I've been looking for some more synth-pop and wow, this one is too much. If you were looking for a soundtrack to parody the '80s, this is a good choice.

Teardrop Explodes - Kilimanjaro

After reading a good bit of Julian Cope's music reviews, I wanted to check out some of the music he made. During the first few listens, I thought this sounds too much like U2; once I made that connection I couldn't get past it.

Psychic TV - Force the Hand of Chance

OK, so this is instructive. Psychic TV's Force the Hand of Chance was a blind download. I knew nothing about this other than it was suggested in a thread I made about 'song cycle' albums. This, by the way, explains how I come across about 5 percent of the albums I try.

Van Dyke Parks' album Song Cycle is undoubtedly a top-10 album for me. Going by the definition I found on Wikipedia:

A song cycle is a group of songs designed to be performed in a sequence as a single entity. As a rule, all of the songs are by the same composer and often use words from the same poet or lyricist. Unification can be achieved by a narrative or a persona common to the songs, or even, as in Schumann's second Liederkreis, by the atmospheric setting of the forest. The unity of the cycle is often underlined by musical means, famously in the return in the last song of the opening music in Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte.

The term originated to describe cycles of art songs (often known by the German term "Lieder") in classical music, and has been extended to apply to popular music.

In that case, some of my favorite albums would be considered song cycles: The Clash's Sandinista, Todd Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star, and perhaps Allen Toussaint's Southern Nights. (VDP's album, ironically, doesn't really fit the definition.)

I listened to this on repeat today, perhaps four or five times all the way through. I rarely do that with a new album, so this is what qualifies as excitement for me. I've been intrigued to research this album that I've never heard of before, but before I do that, I wanted to try something.

This is my guess: I'm thinking this album is from the UK and released in the span of 1988-1993. Influences include Television Personalities, Public Image Ltd., This Heat, and Bill Holt's Dreamies. I'm betting this was the band's only album. The genre is avant-garde post-punk, although it's a bit later than most post-punk albums.

So now I'll actually research it and see how close I got.



Update: Oh bruddah. I was right about the UK post-punk bit, so I should've known it was even earlier than I guessed. This was released in 1982, after Genesis P-Orridge was out of Throbbing Gristle (a band whom, despite their appearance on several post-punk compilations, I've never been able to get into). This album is as old as I am.

I was way off the mark thinking this was a one-off album. Then again, it appears Psychic TV is more of an audio/visual house collaboration among dozens of artists. They described themselves as a video group who does music, rather than a music group which makes music videos. In the mid/late-80s, they set the Guinness record for most releases in one year. Perhaps the rest of their work doesn't sound much like this one. Without digging too deep, it appears the rest of their work is more industrial and exotic before transitioning to house and techno in the 90s.

Something I don't yet understand is that Wikipedia describes this as a single album with 8 tracks. That's certainly what I've been listening to today. Yet AllMusic refers to a double-album with 13 tracks. I guess I've got to find the other five tracks.

sources

One of the sources for exploring Krautrock music was Julian Cope's Krautrock Sampler, which can be yours for a few hundred bucks. Or you can try to find the PDF online. Or, if you just want some album recommendations with minimal text, there's a list of his Top 50 Krautrock albums.

My favorite Krautrock albums all appear here, with the exception of Cluster and Eno, which perhaps is more ambient than Krautrock, but that's a blurred line anyway. Off the top of my head, my own top ten would include:

Ash Ra Tempel - Schwingungen
Can - Ege Bamyasi
Can - Future Days
Cluster - Zuckerzeit
Cluster and Eno - Cluster and Eno
Faust - IV
Harmonia - Deluxe
La Dusseldorf - La Dusseldorf
Neu! - Neu! 75
Walter Wegmuller - Tarot

I've tried a few of the other albums on this list from Amon Duul, Popul Vuh, and Tangerine Dream without much success, but I may try revisiting some of those while I'm checking out un-heard albums from Cosmic Jokers, Witthuser & Westrupp, and Tony Conrad.

on deck

Finally got a new computer and worked through the backlog so that I only have five more to comment on. So it's time to work new stuff into the rotation:

Dollar - The Dollar Album
Harmonia - Tracks and Traces
Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells
Nilsson - Sings Newman
Psychic TV - Force the Hand of Chance

John Foxx - Metamatic

After leaving Ultravox, lead singer John Foxx debuted his solo career with Metamatic. It generally occupies the same space as Ultravox's Systems of Romance, perhaps a bit more sparse and unfeeling. In many ways, this is stylistically similar to Gary Numan's The Pleasure Principle, released months before Metamatic, but Numan has admitted his debt to Foxx and 'Vox.

I think when it comes to synth pop, I need a bit more emotion than these guys want to conjure up. They're more in the meat-locker cold, Kraftwerk aesthetic with JG Ballard-inspired lyrics. Also, just way too repetitive. Come up with a song title and just repeat it a lot, huh.

Which isn't to say this is a terrible album; it's just not something I ever really want to listen to unless it's winter, much like Magazine's Secondhand Daylight.

Dieter Moebius - Tonspuren

Tonspuren is considered the first true Moebius solo album and--if AllMusic is to be trusted--his best. This release, in 1983, would've been well after Cluster and Harmonia had done their best work.

Which is not to say this sounds like the work of a has-been. Indeed, it's helpful to know what kind of album Moebius would make on his own. Some of the pleasant toy-sound rhythms in Cluster / Harmonia works seem to be Moebius contributions. Actually, there are a few songs here that wouldn't sound entirely out of place on Raymond Scott's fantastic Soothing Sounds for Babies releases. These songs aren't incredibly dynamic, though, so really these work best as background music.

dead ends

Gastr del Sol - Serpentine Similar

Too much solo noodling here. I need the crazy interplay / transitions of Camoufleur. Jim O'Rourke wasn't involved in this one; perhaps I'll stick to the other Gastr del Sol albums he was involved in.

St. Vincent - Strange Mercy

This did nothing for me. It will undoubtedly end up on plenty of year-end best-of lists and I'll shake my head like an old fogey.

Atmosphere - Lucy Ford: The Atmosphere EPs

This wasn't that bad but it's still a dead end. I can't avoid the mental image of a white guy who wears a hoodie in the studio and feels that he needs to yell all his lyrics. I prefer a more relaxed-to-the-point-of-indifference delivery.

exploring: Krautrock

For the next few months I'm going to try to have one or two Krautrock albums on deck. I have a few favorite Krautrock albums I'd consider among my favorites, but they're the usual suspects the better-known albums of Neu!, Cluster, Can, Faust, Harmonia, La Dusseldorf, among others. So I'm looking to dig a bit deeper, especially with some of the solo works of the major players.

What I'd really like to see is a Venn diagram of some of the main guys in those bands, as there's a good bit of overlap, either through band break-ups or side collaborations. Harmonia is a good example, formed of Cluster's Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius and Neu!'s Michael Rother. Their 1975 album, Deluxe, is one of my favorites. But I'm not sure what, for instance, Rother brought to the group compared to Roedelius or Moebius. So part of the exploration will be listening to solo albums in an effort to parse out those contributions.

Otherwise I may revisit Julian Cope's Krautrocksampler and some other sources of recommendations. I've also seen some recent reissues that look interesting. At any rate, I've probably have a list of 40-50 albums to check out before I feel like I've got a better grasp on the genre.

Nilsson - Pandemonium Shadow Show and Aerial Ballet

So after having not enjoying Nilsson's Son of Schmilsson, I'm glad I went the other way in his discography, as his first two albums are pretty swell. These two were loved by the Beatles, and it's easy to see why, with all the Beatles-baiting here, especially on Pandemonium Shadow Show.

Apparently at the height of Nilsson-mania, or around the time of his Grammy for "Everybody's Talkin', " Nilsson re-worked material from these two albums, re-recording some parts and crafting new intros, and merged these two albums into one album, Aerial Pandemonium Ballet. I think I'll explore his other albums, like Harry and Nilsson Sings Newman before I get to that one, though. [For some reason I've also been on a bit of a Newman kick lately.]

I'm glad I came across Nilsson; his brand of ambitious, if sometimes indulgent brand of singer-songwriter, pop/rock style places him a similar league to one of my faves, Todd Rundgren. But Todd never had a lullaby like this:

Deep Puddle Dynamics - The Taste of Rain...Why Kneel?

Clouddead (or cLOUDDEAD, more accurately) is one of the few hip-hop groups that would show up among my favorite artists. A brief collaboration between Why?, Doseone, and Odd Nosdam, only produced one album and one compilation of singles. And other than exploring Why?'s fantastic 'solo' career, I haven't explored other albums related to Clouddead or the left-field hip-hop label Anticon.

Deep Puddle Dynamics is Doseone and three other Anticon artists, Sole, Alias, and Slug. This album, named after one of Jack Kerouac's "western" haiku, came out in 1999, predating Clouddead's work. The first half was recorded in a week in 1998, and the last four tracks recorded in one day a year later, June 26th.

I suppose it's interesting and there are some memorable moments (beyond the sometimes annoying ping-ponging nasal delivery of Dose) but ultimately it's not as cohesive as I was looking for. It's essentially an Anticon sampler, so perhaps it wasn't a bad place to start. I'm still going to try to find some other related acts, though.

on deck

Atmosphere - Lucy Ford: The Atmosphere EPs
John Foxx - Metamatic
Spiritualized - Lazer Guided Melodies
St. Vincent - Strange Mercy
Teardrop Explodes - Kilimanjaro

And my computer died so it will be a while before I have anything else to listen to.