Category: Record Reviews
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Top 40 Over 40.6: Unplugged Youth
I can think of few artists more identified with the electric guitar than Thurston Moore. Unlike the guitar god of classic rock, Jimmy Page, who layered his hard rock records with gobs of acoustic fretted instrumens, the guitar god of post punk / undie music always stayed electric. The only exception I can think of…
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Top 40 Over 40.5: Sun Ra, live in 1989
One of my great regrets in life is that I never got to see Sun Ra and his Arkestra live before the great man passed. If I had arrived a little earlier, I would have. They played the campus of the University I attended the year before I got there – which was in fact…
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Top 40 Over 40.4: Prarie Wind
I don’t usually pay much attention to stories about the circumstances in which a particular record came to be. However, the stories about the timing of this record are an exception. Neil Young made this record in Nashville in 2005, shortly before going to the hospital for surgery for a brain aneurysm. Combined with the…
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Top 40 Over 40.3: Dimanche a Bamako
My next fave record in this series is Dimanche a Bamako by Amadou & Meriam, which came out in 2005. I have to thank this record for introducing me to the amazing music that has come out of Mali over the years. I heard this album on the radio after it came out on WERS…
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Top 40 Over 40.2: Let England Shake
When I quit making records in 2001, I had a lot of different thoughts bolting around my brain. One of them was that since musicians almost always do their best work in their 20’s, I was heading for a period of diminishing creative returns, even if that didn’t mean diminishing rewards in terms of money…
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Top 40 Over 40.1: She walked in through the out door
Emmylou Harris : Coat Of Many Colours (1977) I’ve just finished listening to Wrecking Ball by Emmylou Harris. It’s a phenomenal record. Why have I never heard anyone talk about it? Below the above picture you’ll find a link to an early clip of her covering another underrated songwriter, Dolly Parton. Could it be that…
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Jumping to Conclusions
I’ve been listening to some records by Kurt Vile this week. (Smoke Ring For My Halo, Childish Prodigy, Constant Hitmaker, God Is Saying This to You…) I first heard his name from an ad on NPR music. I assumed at the time that it was a play on words referring to the composer Kurt Weil. …
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Stuck Inside Samsara With the Karmic Blues Again
I’ve managed to fulfill one of my new year’s resolutions – to start this blog and website. But I don’t put a lot of stock in the whole new year’s ritual. If I did, I might be posting “Getting Better” by the Beatles or “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” by Fleetwood Mac, instead of the…
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Pick a Bela Bartok
This week I am listening to a few records by Béla Bartók, (1881-1945,) a composer from Hungary I got interested in after hearing that he influenced my two favorite musicians, Ornette Coleman and John Fahey. (Check out Ornette’s violin playing on the Town Hall Concert, for example.) I don’t usually listen to much classical music,…
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It’s Only Right and Natural
Following up on the last post about Han Bennik and Peter Brötzmann: I mentioned that most animal sounds that appear on records are samples. We used multiple tracks from this disk on the Folk Implosion song Serge – they all have different characteristics. Both the tracks, and the frogs, I mean. They remind me of…
johnhdavis / inundation records 