Category Particular platters
RETURN TO MIDDLE EARTH
Perhaps it was the screening of the Hobbit films on TV this week, but for some reason I found myself wanting to revisit Middle Earth to wrap up of the Lord Of The Rings series from a few months ago. It returns us to where we began, with John Sangster and Hobbits. Sangster has written a […]
HIGH CONTRAST
With a morning to myself and a pile of chores, I sat with the start-me-up coffee and pondered what to spin. What would get me going for a few hours of productive office work? How was I feeling today? Pretty heavy, actually. A chesty cough and a bit distracted by a knotty work issue. Something […]
GROWN-UP FAN
I learned the word verisimilitude from WS Gilbert, he of Gilbert and Sullivan fame. Pirates of Penzance, Iolanthe, The Gondoliers… all those melodious light operas so beloved of earlier generations. The quote in question comes from arguably the best known of them all, The Mikado. I was about twenty years old and had just discovered […]
PERFECTION OF CIRCUMLOCUTION
What do we make of a new release by a rock veteran? As stars drop from the sky with numbing regularity, do we celebrate the simple act of survival inherent in creating new music? Perhaps triumph is tempered by a niggling disquiet. What if, Bowie-like, this is a last hurrah; a pre-planned final chapter for […]
THE BOURNE SYNTHESIS
Pianist / composer Matthew Bourne has been working in the area of improvised jazz for a number of years, but on acquiring an original Lintronics Advanced Memory Moog he became enamoured with the possibilities offered by this vintage analogue synthesiser. After having the device painstakingly restored, Bourne used the Memory Moog in performance and later […]
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 […]
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