Author Archives: Vinyl Connection
Dear Herr Froese
I met you soon after Tangerine Dream turned five albums old. Colleagues Chris Franke and Peter Bauman helped you craft the timeless Phaedra for new label Virgin. Purchased by instalments from my Friday/Saturday Record Store job, I took the album home one mid-winter night to a bedroom warmed by the faint splutter of a kerosene heater, […]
TRANS GILMOUR EXPRESS
Imagine a smooth, well-engineered train ride. You glide along, half-watching the countryside slip past the window, awake but not really focussed on anything in particular, enjoying a comfortable rhythmic ambience that rarely intrudes upon whatever reverie colours your mind. Such is the seamless swish of Metallic Spheres. The Orb mapped this journey, laying down tracks […]
GOODGIRLFRIEND
After extensively shopping around the demos for his third album, Matthew Sweet finally landed a deal with Zoo, who released Girlfriend in 1991. It’s fine songcraft, scintillating guitars from Television’s Richard Lloyd and Lou Reed alumnus Robert Quine—now chiming, now gouging—and deep understanding of pop music forms made it an underground success that poked its nose […]
THEY SAID, THEY SAID
Continuing a track by track spin through The Beatles Revolver which began here. SIDE TWO 1. GOOD DAY SUNSHINE I’m in love and it’s a sunny day McCartney blithely chirps about how wonderful it is to be in love [Kozinn, p. 144] Superbly sung by McCartney and exquisitely produced by Martin and his team, ‘Good […]
STILL REVOLVING
It is the album that marked the Beatles transition from mop-tops to musicians, from pop princes to progressive boundary-pushers and it has been part of popular culture for half a century. Ringo may well have remarked that ‘tomorrow never knows’, but it actually does. It knows that Revolver was a great album then, now, and […]
WAHNSINN
Tarot by Walter Wegmüller is one of those wonderful, dotty follies of vinyl packaging that transcend normal expectations with bravura wackiness. Released on the Cosmic Couriers label ((Die Kosmischen Kuriere, for those who do Deutsch) in 1973, it hovers near the very peak of my LP Grail list. I’ve never held a copy, never even […]
TWISTING THE KNIFE AWAY
“We never do anything with my friends, it’s always yours,” she said. It was true. In fact I had not realised until this moment that Penny had friends. She’d appeared at the educational institution where I worked without any visible attachments and in the months we’d been seeing each other, none had been forthcoming. If that […]
8 ALBUM COVERS THAT SCREAM “EIGHTIES!”
With this selection of bold and colourful 80s album covers, I’ve tried to steer away from the dead obvious – rolled up jacket sleeves, bushels of big hair, heavy metal cartoon covers – yet capture something of the vibrant self-belief embodied in these sleeve designs. Naturally there were many others vying for inclusion – Joe Jackson’s Beat Crazy and Cyndi Lauper’s […]
A MUCH NEEDED VOID
First up, apologies to those of you who have been awaiting this review for longer than you should have awaited it. The fault was mine entirely in that I was confused because I thought I had three different albums to listen to again but it seems that I sort of didn’t. More one-and-a-bit. Let me tell you […]
REGA-L AFFIRMATION
Imagine the excitement. First turntable purchase in over twenty years. Frown at the brain-bending decision: what to get? Stagger under the swirling weight of unanswerable questions. What will suit the rest of the system best? How does a Hi-Fi shop audition translate to a suburban lounge-room? Quiver at the realisation this is the biggest purchase—after […]
SHORTS
Three brief reviews of albums newly acquired or recently revisited * GARY WRIGHT—THE DREAM WEAVER [Warner Brothers 1975] The truth is, I bought this as part of an Op Shop haul simply because it was in good nick and I have a soft spot for the cheesy 1975 radio hit, ‘Dream Weaver’. But it’s actually […]
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