Ash Ra Tempel - Inventions for Electric Guitar

This album is sometimes credited to Ash Ra Tempel, but the music was composed and performed by Manuel Göttsching alone. All sounds were created with guitar, but Göttsching's use of echo, delay, and assorted treatments give these pieces the flavor of sequenced synthesizer music, occasionally reminiscent of Tangerine Dream's work from the period. The opening "Echo Waves" is a trance-inducing space guitar masterpiece, with repeating rhythm figures and gradual phase shifts creating a warped sense of time. The first 14 minutes of the track consist of short, subtly changing melodic phrases, until Göttsching questionably chooses to close with a searing, acid-fried guitar solo. "Quasarsphere" is much more contemplative, with Göttsching processing his guitar to sound like a synthesizer in the vein of Robert Fripp. The closing "Pluralis" consists of endless variations constructed around a simple guitar sequence; it possesses a structure similar to "Echo Waves" (down to the late-breaking blast of psychedelic soloing) with a bit more space and a slower tempo. In some respects a precursor to the groundbreaking proto-techno of E2-E4, Inventions for Electric Guitar is an essential document for space rock enthusiasts.

(Ash Ra Tempel - Inventions for Electric Guitar)

Solex - Solex vs. The Hitmeister

Solex, aka Dutch record shop owner Elisabeth Esselink, creates a pure, offbeat musical world on the 1998 debut, Solex vs. the Hitmeister. All of the songs contain the band's name; Esselink delivers her English-sung vocals with dreamlike, rhythmic phrasing, and the album's cavernous production makes it sound as though it were recorded deep inside her head -- it all adds up to an abstract, alien collection of songs that owes very little to electronica or indie rock as the outside world knows it. Instead, each song on Hitmeister flows to its own musical logic, built on samples of discounted, long-forgotten records and Esselink's expressive, sweetly foreign voice, supported here and there by touches of guitar and keyboards. "When Solex Just Stood There" suggests industrial dance with its relentless beat, one-note vocals, and screeching sound effects, while "Solex All Licketysplit" bounds around the room on a rubbery bassline and sparkly keyboards. "Some Solex" marries a somewhat ominous bass drum to a warm guitar line, while spaceship sound effects hover in the background. "One Louder Solex" and "Solex in a Slipshod Style" have a fluid, stream-of-consciousness style that recalls daydreams, adding to Hitmeister's overall surreal quality. A completely unique combination of beats, samples, and voice, Solex is insular and inventive, revealing an artist with a very personal kind of creativity.

(Solex - Solex vs. The Hitmeister)

Funkadelic - Funkadelic

Description from Wikipedia, as All Music Guide has no review.

Funkadelic was the debut album by the American funk band Funkadelic, released in 1970 on Westbound Records. The album showcased a strong bass and rhythm section, as well as lengthy jam sessions, future trademarks of the band. The album contains two remakes of songs from The Parliaments, an earlier band featuring George Clinton: "I Bet You" and "Good Old Music".

"Mommy, What's a Funkadelic?" and "What is Soul" contained the beginnings of Funkadelic's mythology, namely that "Funkadelic" and "the Funk" are alien in origin but not dangerous.

"I Got a Thing, You Got a Thing, Everybody's Got a Thing" was particularly notable for the epic guitar solo by Rare Earth's Ray Monette's. "I Bet You" was later covered by the Jackson 5 on their album ABC, and sampled by the Beastie Boys for their song "Car Thief". In more recent years The Red Hot Chili Peppers have combined the main riff of "Mommy, What's a Funkadelic?" and certain parts of the lyrics from "What Is Soul?" in live shows, a version appears as a B-Side on their 2002 single By The Way.

(Funkadelic - Funkadelic)

Rahsaan Roland Kirk - Blacknuss

From its opening bars, with Bill Salter's bass and Rahsaan's flute passionately playing Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine," you know this isn't an ordinary Kirk album (were any of them?). As the string section, electric piano, percussion, and Cornel Dupree's guitar slip in the back door, one can feel the deep soul groove Kirk is bringing to the jazz fore here. As the tune fades just two and a half minutes later, the scream of Kirk's tenor comes wailing through the intro of Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On," with a funk backdrop and no wink in the corner -- he's serious. With Richard Tee's drums kicking it, the strings developing into a wall of tension in the backing mix, and Charles McGhee's trumpet hurling the long line back at Kirk, all bets are off -- especially when they medley the mother into "Mercy Mercy Me." By the time they reach the end of the Isleys' "I Love You, Yes I Do," with the whistles, gongs, shouting, soul crooning, deep groove hustling, and greasy funk dripping from every sweet-assed note, the record could be over because the world has already turned over and surrendered -- and the album is only ten minutes old! Blacknuss, like The Inflated Tear, Volunteered Slavery, Rip, Rig and Panic, and I Talk to the Spirits, is Kirk at his most visionary. He took the pop out of pop and made it Great Black Music. He took the jazz world down a peg to make it feel its roots in the people's music, and consequently made great jazz from pop tunes in the same way his forbears did with Broadway show tunes. While the entire album shines like a big black sun, the other standouts include a deeply moving read of "My Girl" and a version of "The Old Rugged Cross" that takes it back forever from those white fundamentalists who took all the blood and sweat from its grain and replaced them with cheap tin and collection plates. On Kirk's version, grace doesn't come cheap, though you can certainly be a poor person to receive it. Ladies and gents, Blacknuss is as deep as a soul record can be and as hot as a jazz record has any right to call itself. A work of sheer blacknuss!

(Rahsaan Roland Kirk - Blacknuss)

Harpers Bizarre - Feelin' Groovy

One of the bands that came to Warner Bros. in their buyout of Autumn Records were the Tikis. They had only recorded a handful of singles, and in terms of musical direction and group identity, they definitely had potential. Enter producer Lenny Waronker and session musician/arranger/songwriter/general musical architect Van Dyke Parks. The two of them brought then-drummer Ted Templeman up to the front as co-lead vocalist, along with Dick Scoppettone, and created a soft-rock identity for the group, renaming them Harpers Bizarre. Their first single was perhaps their greatest shot: a cover of the then-brand new Paul Simon song, "Feelin' Groovy." Buttressed by an amazing Leon Russell arrangement and some great performances from the A-list of L.A. session cats, the song quickly went into the Top Ten. The resulting album is almost as great as the single, with songs by Van Dyke Parks ("Come to the Sunshine"), Randy Newman ("Debutante's Ball"), and others. An excellent and definitive slice of California soft pop. The 2001 CD reissue on Sundazed adds two bonus tracks, both taken from the 1966 "Bye, Bye, Bye"/"Lost My Love Today" single by the Tikis, the San Francisco group that evolved into Harper's Bizarre."

(Harpers Bizarre - Feelin' Groovy)

purchases

Remastered versions from Devo's live show at the 9:30 Club:
Devo - Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!
Devo - Freedom of Choice

The Zombies - Odessey and Oracle

Odessey and Oracle was one of the flukiest (and best) albums of the 1960s, and one of the most enduring long-players to come out of the entire British psychedelic boom, mixing trippy melodies, ornate choruses, and lush Mellotron sounds with a solid hard rock base. But it was overlooked completely in England and barely got out in America (with a big push by Al Kooper, who was then a Columbia Records producer); and it was neglected in the U.S. until the single "Time of the Season," culled from the album, topped the charts nearly two years after it was recorded, by which time the group was long disbanded. Ironically, at the time of its recording in the summer of 1967, permanency was not much on the minds of the bandmembers. Odessey and Oracle was intended as a final statement, a bold last hurrah, having worked hard for three years only to see the quality of their gigs decline as the hits stopped coming. The results are consistently pleasing, surprising, and challenging: "Hung Up on a Dream" and "Changes" are some of the most powerful psychedelic pop/rock ever heard out of England, with a solid rhythm section, a hot Mellotron sound, and chiming, hard guitar, as well as highly melodic piano. "Changes" also benefits from radiant singing. "This Will Be Our Year" makes use of trumpets (one of the very few instances of real overdubbing) in a manner reminiscent of "Penny Lane"; and then there's "Time of the Season," the most well-known song in their output and a white soul classic. Not all of the album is that inspired, but it's all consistently interesting and very good listening, and superior to most other psychedelic albums this side of the Beatles' best and Pink Floyd's early work. Indeed, the only complaint one might have about the original LP is its relatively short running time, barely over 30 minutes, but even that's refreshing in an era where most musicians took their time making their point, and most of the CD reissues have bonus tracks to fill out the space available.

(The Zombies - Odessey and Oracle)

Jim O'Rourke - The Visitor

If there are more interesting albums that have come out this year, I haven't heard them. As intended, this is not available for download. The link takes you to Drag City, where you can have this delivered to your doorstep for $16 or $12 (LP/CD). AMG hasn't reviewed it, so I have excerpted another review.


O’Rourke wrote all the music, performed all of the instrumental parts, and recorded The Visitor in his home studio in Tokyo—and the finished product is a mile wide and several miles deep. Drums, bass, guitars (electric and acoustic), piano, organ, clarinet, banjo, and more steer one montage into the next, via slow transition or direct segue (important side note: according to O’Rourke, there are over 200 tracks on this record).

If your first reaction to the notion of an all-instrumental "pop" album is confusion, you have every right to be apprehensive. Prior experiments by lesser artists have produced results that usually splattered on the "dreadful" and "self-indulgent" parts of the spectrum. But O’Rourke is not a lesser artist: his awareness of minute details and the trump card known as "form" are in perfect balance, and it is because of this that The Visitor becomes more intriguing with every listen. Although it may be indexed as one continuous track, this album harbors variety in spades.

If you aren’t sold on this record yet, I would like to make a bold statement: you should buy it solely because Jim O’Rourke engineered it. The Visitor is sonically divine, a fact that should come as no surprise to fans of earlier O’Rourke recordings. Each individual instrument is allowed to breathe, and each layer provides the right support for every other one. If there must be one recent album to serve as an example of how glorious recorded instruments can be, The Visitor gets my vote.

--Jeremy Podgursky, NewMusicBox

(Jim O'Rourke - The Visitor)

Max Tundra - Mastered by Guy at the Exchange

Ben Jacobs is notable for his musical schizophrenia, his back catalog for Warp and Domino a jumpy collision of found sounds, Squarepusher-type beat thrashes, and jaunty wrestling with "real" instrumentation. His second album for Domino sees Jacobs find his voice, no doubt back-flipping around the sound booth as he laid down lyrics to his funk-fueled spliced tape excursions. "MBGATE" is typical of the album -- a magically messed-up fusion of horn pushes, distorted songs, and general subverted pop craziness that does nothing but encourage the belief that if Prince hadn't burnt out in the early '90s, he'd have taken the name Max Tundra and hung out with a certain Guy Davie at a mastering house on North London's Randolph Street.

(Max Tundra - Mastered by Guy at the Exchange)

Happy Mondays - Pills 'N' Thrills and Bellyaches

At their peak, the Happy Mondays were hedonism in perpetual motion, a party with no beginning and no end, a party where Pills 'N' Thrills and Bellyaches was continually pumping. The apex of their career (and quite arguably the whole baggy/Madchester movement), Pills 'N' Thrills and Bellyaches pulsates with a garish neon energy, with psychedelic grooves, borrowed hooks, and veiled threats piling upon each other with the logic of a drunken car wreck. As with Bummed, a switch in producers re-focuses and redefines the Mondays, as Paul Oakenfold and Steve Osborne replace the brittle, assaultive Martin Hannett production with something softer and expansive that is truly dance-club music instead of merely suggestive of it. Where the Stone Roses were proudly pop classicists, styling themselves after the bright pop art of the '60s, the Mondays were aggressively modern, pushing pop into the ecstasy age by leaning hard on hip-hop, substituting outright thievery for sampling. Although it's unrecognizable in sound and attitude, "Step On," the big hit from Pills, is a de facto cover of John Kongos' "He's Gonna Step on You Again," LaBelle's "Lady Marmalade" provides the skeleton for "Kinky Afro," but these are the cuts that call attention to themselves; the rest of the record is draped in hooks and sounds from hits of the past, junk culture references, and passing puns, all set to a kaleidoscopic house beat. Oakenfold and Osborne may be responsible for the sound of Pills 'N' Thrills and Bellyaches, certainly more than the band, which almost seems incidental to this meticulously arranged album, but Shaun Ryder is the heart and soul of the album, the one that keeps the Mondays a dirty, filthy rock & roll outfit. Lifting melodies at will, Ryder twists the past to serve his purpose, gleefully diving into the gutter with stories of cheap drugs and threesomes, convinced that god made it easy on him, and blessed with that knowledge, happy to traumatize his girlfriend's kid by telling them that he only went with his mother cause she was dirty. He's a thug and something of a poet, creating a celebratory collage of sex, drugs, and dead-end jobs where there's no despair because only a sucker could think that this party would ever come to an end.

(Happy Mondays - Pills 'N' Thrills and Bellyaches)

The Durutti Column - The Return of the Durutti Column

More debut albums should be so amusingly perverse with its titles -- and there's the original vinyl sleeve, which consisted of sandpaper precisely so it would damage everything next to it in one's collection. Released in the glow of post-punk fervor in late-'70s Manchester, one would think Return would consist of loud, aggressive sheet-metal feedback, but that's not the way Vini Reilly works. With heavy involvement from producer Martin Hannett, who created all the synth pieces on the record as well as producing it, Reilly on Return made a quietly stunning debut, as influential down the road as his labelmates in Joy Division's effort with Unknown Pleasures. Eschewing formal "rock" composition and delivery -- the album was entirely instrumental, favoring delicacy and understated invention instead of singalong brashness -- Reilly made his mark as the most unique, distinct guitarist from Britain since Bert Jantsch. Embracing electric guitar's possibilities rather than acoustic's, Reilly fused a variety of traditions effortlessly -- that one song was called "Jazz" could be called a giveaway, but the free-flowing shimmers and moods always revolve around central melodies. "Conduct," with its just apparent enough key hook surrounded by interwoven, competing lines, is a standout, turning halfway through into a downright anthemic full-band rise while never being overbearing. Hannett's production gave his compositions a just-mysterious-enough sheen, with Reilly's touches on everything from surfy reverb to soft chiming turned at once alien and still warm. Consider the relentless rhythm box pulse on "Requiem for a Father," upfront but not overbearing as Reilly's filigrees and softly spiraling arpeggios unfold in the mix -- but equally appealing is "Sketch for Winter," Reilly's guitar and nothing more, a softly haunting piece living up to its name. The 1996 reissue is the edition to search for, containing six excellent bonus tracks. Two are actually solo Hannett synth pieces from the sessions, but others include an initial tribute to Joy Division's Ian Curtis, "Lips That Would Kiss," and "Sleep Will Come," featuring the group's first vocal performance thanks to Clock DVA member Jeremy Kerr.

(The Durutti Column - The Return of the Durutti Column)

Harold Budd - The Pavilion of Dreams

All Music Guide didn't rate this very highly ("The opening "Bismillahi 'Rhahmani 'Rrahim" is the musical equivalent of a bubble bath") , so I'm using a different source for the blurb. It's also written about in more depth at Ground and Sky, but that reviewer cannot form sentences.

The 1978 recording debut from reformed avant-garde composer and eventual ambient forerunner Harold Budd consists of four chamber works (written between 1972 and 1975) that use varying combinations of harp, mallet instruments, piano, saxophone, and female or male vocals. Two years before his fateful first studio collaboration with Brian Eno (who produced this album), Budd was creating hypnotic music in an acoustic mode. All of the works herein--including "Two Rooms," whose latter half is an adaptation of John Coltrane's "After the Rain"--sustain a similarly dreamy vibe. An important credo for Budd was to make music as pretty as possible as an antidote to the noisy avant-garde he had escaped from. One cannot fault him for the lovely sounds he creates here, although fans familiar with his more cinematic works might be caught off-guard. Regardless, the pleasant Pavilion of Dreams provides insight into Budd's past, and it offers the same somniferous effect as a gentle lullaby, making it perfect for late-evening listening. --Bryan Reesman

(Harold Budd - The Pavillion of Dreams)

La Düsseldorf - La Düsseldorf

After Neu! broke up in 1975, Klaus Dinger formed La Düsseldorf with his brother Thomas and Hans Lampe, who had both contributed percussion on Neu!'s swan song album. Neu! always displayed a split personality, rooted in the conflicting temperaments and sensibilities of Dinger and guitarist Michael Rother, differences that were dramatized on the duo's final record, where Rother's mellower, melodic atmospherics contrasted with Dinger's anarchic, noisier inclinations. Recorded in 1975, La Düsseldorf's self-titled debut effects something of a compromise between those two aesthetics. Built on driving beats and fleshed out with expansive synth coloring, the 13-minute "Düsseldorf" is a grand, pop-friendly homage to Dinger's hometown. Although its repetitive glide recalls Neu!'s signature Motorik groove, there's something more playful and joyous about Dinger's approach here, especially at the moments when the vocals venture briefly into mock operatics and a glammy piano hammers away. The title track involves similar sonic ingredients but puts them to more concise and aggressive use. As with Neu!'s "Hero" and "After Eight," Dinger injects this song with a speedy, sloganeering rush that anticipates punk; at the same time, though, its incorporation of a soccer-crowd chant seems almost a prescient parody of the brainless variant of punk that would later turn the movement into self-caricature. Indeed, while Dinger was punk avant la lettre, he already had a foot in the post-punk era, something that's most evident on "Silver Cloud" and "Time." These tracks are more minimalist, looking forward to the pared-down, monochromatic austerity that would follow punk's color-cartoon demise. On "Time," an oceanic ebb and flow and somber church-organ sounds eventually yield to a hypnotic, nodding pulse. The album's standout, the mesmerizing instrumental "Silver Cloud," sees prominent synths and mechanical rhythms impart a cool electronic aura that certainly resonated with Bowie and made its presence felt on his Berlin recordings.

(La Düsseldorf - La Düsseldorf)

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)

Kevin Ayers - Whatevershebringswesing

Melancholic and reflective, Kevin Ayers' third solo effort, Whatevershebringswesing (this time sans the Whole World as a collective), finds the ultimate underachiever languishing in a realm of ballads, free (for the most part) from the façade and pretensions of prog rock that plagued the previous project. Released in January 1972, Whatevershebringswesing was Ayers' most commercially accessible album to date. The opening track, the "There Is Loving" suite, was both apropos and deceptive. The song picks up nicely from the previous album, linked by its Soft Machine/prog rock sound and fronting the lyrics from the single "Butterfly Dance"; however, for the very same reason, this was a deceptive opener for an album that was far removed from the prog subgenre. In the interim between Shooting at the Moon and Whatever, Ayers gigged with his friend Daevid Allen's band, Gong, on a European tour, the results of which can be heard on the phenomenal Peel session recording Pre-Modern Wireless. Afterward, Ayers plucked saxophonist Didier Malherbe out of Gong momentarily to supplement the sound on his next album. The perfect substitute for Lol Coxhill, Malherbe and flute are a standout on the opener, "There Is Loving," with moving orchestral arrangements by Dave Bedford on the "Among Us" midsection. Initially released as a single, the album's highlight and concert staple, "Stranger in Blue Suede Shoes," is classic Ayers. While many outstanding guitarists have ripped up this grooving, occasionally aggressive blues/pop riff, Ayers himself laid down the guitar and piano tracks on this maiden recording. In line with Ayers' most appealing, successful compositions, "Stranger" and the majority of cuts on Whatever are uncomplicated and frank, allowing the listener to immediately step inside. Ayers' tunes may be light and semisweet, but he doesn't beat around the bush. "Oh My" and "Champagne Cowboy Blues" are exquisite examples of Ayers' ability to immediately pull in the listener via his lighthearted, slightly skewed approach. "Champagne" features the signature Mike Oldfield sound/style that would soon sell millions of records for him as a solo artist. Noteworthy are "Song From the Bottom of a Well" and "Lullaby." Intoned with darkness and foreboding, "Well" harks back to Soft Machine's "Why Are We Sleeping?" and foreshadows Ayers' Dr. Dream album, particularly "It Begins With a Blessing." But like much of the experimental material on his previous release, "Well" just doesn't build up to anything of substance. And the instrumental "Lullaby" (appropriately titled) closes the album on an odd note. Reminiscent of King Crimson's "Cadence and Cascade" (from In the Wake of Poseidon) and highlighted by Malherbe's fluid flute, "Lullaby" is an early example of new age ambience, complete with running brook in the background. Whatevershebringswesing falls short of the ambitious peaks found on Ayers' previous record; however, the material is much more consistent, focused, and devoid of that album's pitfalls. Ayers sounds comfortable and in his true element on Whatever, but like much of his post-'70s output, the compositions lack challenge. Whatevershebringswesing has often been cited as Ayers' magnum opus, but the term should be reserved for his follow-up, Bananamour, or even The Confessions of Dr. Dream.

(Kevin Ayers - Whatevershebringswesing)