=
×

Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

Head To Head
Log In
Register
Unsung Forum »
Soundtracks Of Our Lives w/e 28 August 2010 CE
Log In to post a reply
59 messages
Topic View: Flat | Threaded
IanB
IanB
6761 posts

Edited Aug 31, 2010, 11:58
Re: Soundtracks Of Our Lives w/e 28 August 2010 CE
Aug 29, 2010, 09:49
Ani Difranco - "Napoleon" (live track - 2007)
There are not too many songs about the record business that don't come off as whiny or bitter. This is one of the few. It is also one of the great three minute score-settlers. Not sure who the target was (theorists say Vega, artist says not) but I bet it stung like fuck. And it rocks.

Ximena Sariñana - "Mediocre"
Very mainstream moderne pop/rock with trip hop influences. Kind of a Mexican Emiliana Torrini. Nothing ground breaking but nicely done and there is something about this voice (as heard on the Omar Rodriguez Trio record) that makes me swoon.

Rolling Stones - "Plundered My Soul" (track)
The Stones sounding more like The Faces than themselves. That Bm chord is pure Ron Wood. Would not be out of place on "Never A Dull Moment" "Every Picture Tells a Story" or (more accurately) "Now Look".

Ron Wood "Now Look"
A great sloppy rock n soul record. Some bad songs but lots of gorgeous playing a la early Little Feat and 70s Stones / Faces (of course). And I love the way he pushes the tempos, especially on the lead-off track. Something the Stones forgot how to do after "GHS". Close your eyes and you can see him facing the drummer with a fag in his mouth and furiously pumping his leg ahead of the beat. If you love RW's playing and ever had a soft spot for the likes of Frankie Miller or Jess Roden then this is for you.

Mary Chapin Carpenter "Party Doll" (track)
Jaggers best song as a solo artist, reclaimed from the rather nasty Country pastiche on "Prmitive Cool" and turned into a tender adieu. A Sam Shepherd type song. Would have been great if it had turned up in either "Bug" or "Thelma and Louise".

Apollo 440 - "Electro Glide In Blue" (track)
The "No Quarter" keyboard riff geta a brilliant revamp. Sounds a bit like the Alabama 3 with John Paul Jones guesting. Albums like this tend to age really badly but this track and Billy Mac's gorgeous "Pain In Any Language" ensure that it rises above your general, three-hits-and-a-load-of-filler 90s dance album fodder.

Liz Phair - "Exile In Guyville"
I still hate the lo-fi sloppiness* of this record.

Guyville is not sloppy in a Mott / Faces kind of way, it's under-produced to the point of the artist being embarassingly exposed but without the diamond hard focus of "Dry" and "Rid Of Me". On the other side of the coin it is lyrically (and in part vocally) brilliant. Had these songs been given the "I Am Shelby Lynne" treatment then you could be talking one of the great records of the 90s. As it is, at its best, it sounds like a bunch of demos for Hole's "Live Through This".

Matador sold half a million of "Guyville" in the US alone. So there was an audience. Then again her first crossover lp ten years later sold as many and that's in an era when half a million is actually an awful lot of records.

I really don't have a problem with Phair's whole Avril's-Big-Sister career change. I wouldn't listen to the records but bravo for the honesty - the need to put food on your table for your family tends to concetrate the mind. Also her contribution to the "Exile on Main Street" dvd is in its own way more subversive than the album that made her name.

All that said it is worth giving this 90s touchstone a couple of plays for the genius of the words alone and the odd moments when it colasces into something really cogent and timeless ("Divorce Song" for one, "Mezmerizing" for another).

*I don't much like the Muses / Belly / Breeder thing either and their followers, immitators and inferiors of the 90s and 00s were worse still. Throwing everything that is great about classic pop and rock n roll out of the window does not make you a radical artist. The popularity of the flat (and flatly sung) joylessness of their records is a mystery to me. Maybe it was the (prescription?) drugs. Whatever it was the smallest insight into this world makes me want to walk the other way. Where the early Mekons and Delta5 (for example) were straining at the leash of their limited talents and produced brilliant records in the process, this kind of thing sounds like the product of a long list of deliberate must-not-dos. You can't do choruses, can't do dynamics, can't do tunefulness. You can do a little that is Country and Folk as long as it is not too winsome but you really can't do anything that sounds like the Blues. Belly's version of "Are You Experienced?" as good as proves my point. Why deliberately limp along wearing discography police leg irons when you know you can soar like that?

We're talking Flat Earth fundamentialist white suburban indie rock. First Commandment? Thou Wilt Not Rock Unironically. Which kind of misses the whole point of picking up an electric guitar in the first place.

Rolling Stones - "Loving Cup" (alt version - 2010 reissue of Exile)
This doesn't. Jagger at his most ludicrous, leering, lustful and priapic.
In reply to:
Soundtracks Of Our Lives w/e 28 August 2010 CE (1001realapes)		 Replies:
Re: Soundtracks Of Our Lives w/e 28 August 2010 CE (Dog 3000)
Topic Outline:
Unsung Forum Index