David Axelrod - Earth Rot

No, not that David Axelrod. The one who produced and composed some pretty fantastic music in the '60s and '70s, working with Lou Rawls, Cannonball Adderley, the Electric Prunes, and many more. His first two solo albums, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, still sound fresh. The break-beat rhythm style he favored became staples for crate-diggers like DJ Shadow; listen to "Holy Thursday" and you'll hear the foundation of the future of hip-hop.

So his third album, Earth Rot, is a bit of a weird turn. Labeled as "a musical statement on the state of the environment," it's basically an album about environmental destruction--the first side is about warnings, the second about the signs themselves. The music here is amazing. It's jazzy, it's funky, the arrangements are amazing, it's all very fluid; parts of it I like even better than his first two albums.

But there's a catch, and that happens to be a choir that delivers the vocals. Lordy, they are annoying. Just when you start to enjoy the music, the choir comes in, singing about the decaying environment: "There! Is! A! Grow! Ing! Rahhh! Tennnnn! Nesssssss!"

I so wish there was an instrumental version of this album; it would be really phenomenal. As it is, the vocals are just too distracting and I can't get past them.



Allmusic characterizes this as 'obscuro'--a label they also applied to Bill Holt's Dreamies. I imagine I'll be checking out a few more obscuro albums in the near future.

Bill Holt - Dreamies

Inspired by the aural collage of the Beatles' "Revolution Number 9," as well as the musique concrete of composers such as John Cage and Terry Riley and Bob Dylan's conscientious rock lyricism, Bill Holt quit his straight job in 1972 to follow his musical muse, hoarding various electronic gadgets and an acoustic guitar and holing up in his basement. He emerged a year later with Dreamies, one of the finest pieces of experimental pop from the era. Unlike the Beatles' White Album collage, though, the pair of sidelong, 26-minute epics -- "Program Ten" and "Program Eleven" (as if progressing directly from "Revolution Number 9") -- that Holt created were much more than symbolic representations of the chaotic times. At its heart, the album is a blend of folk and pop/rock, and in many respects, Dreamies fits in with the singer/songwriter scene that flowered in the early '70s. Instead of relying simply on the juxtapositions of his sound samples to impart subjective meanings, Holt composed lovely, downhearted melodies (very much recalling John Lennon) and trippy lyrics as a jumping-off point for each collage and then let acoustic guitar guide them through the gauntlet of sound. In fact, "Program Ten" is a combination of two identifiable songs, "Sunday Morning Song" and "The User," the two melodies weaving in and out of the cacophony of noise-crickets, atmospheric sounds, a John Kennedy speech, NASA chatter, news reports, glass breaking, a thunderstorm, sports broadcasts, and gunfire while a synthesizer spits out spacey alien sounds or cuts like a kettle whistle, and an ominous bassline oscillates beneath it all. "Program Eleven" exchanges that white noise for airport sounds, creepy Sgt. Pepper-style chants that bubble up from beneath the single melody fragment ("Going for a Ride"), game show catch phrases, and popping corn. Of the two pieces, "Program Ten" is the more socially charged commentary, setting the innocent recollections of youth -- the sounds of summer and nature -- against the misanthropic confusion of war and politics to powerful effect. "Program Eleven" is more psychedelically eerie and haunting, aurally dense, and thick with bad vibes, but wonderful nonetheless. The spoken samples are mostly more buried in the background and difficult to make out. It adds both intrigue and mystery to the piece, a foreboding end to what began optimistically. The music, in other words, ingeniously mirrored the sort of evolution of consciousness that was so much a part of the era. Dreamies went virtually unheard when it was released, perhaps because it was the antithesis of commercial rock at the time, but, despite its grounding in the ambiance and issues of the '60s, it still sounds outstanding decades after the fact.

(Bill Holt - Dreamies)