Tame Impala - Innerspeaker
Marvellous, off-kilter psychedelic rock from from Perth, Australia, which -for a band who weren't even born when it happened - admirably captures that moment in the late 60s when the benevolent anything-goes hedonism of the Montrerey Pop Festival gave way to the Chicago riots, the King/ Kennedy assasinations and Altamont. Not only that, it doesn't sound remotely retro even on the occasions where it rocks as hard as Led Zep. Are you listening, Jack White? Ah I forgot - Jack White's burned his computer and only listens to wax cylinders and shellac 78s these days. I wish he'd go the whole hog and stop pressing his creatively bankrupt music on any other format too.
Apostle of Hustle - Eats Darkness
Littered with between-song samples like a hip-hop album, this mercifully avoids the tendancy of many hip-hop acts to turn their second albums into over-wrought 2CD epics that serve no purpose other than to convey the size of their record collections (remember "Wu-Tang Forever"? Well, I hope whoever told the Clan that the world was looking for a rap eqivalent of "Use Your Illusion 1 & 2" is feeling very guilty for leading the genre so far astray). In fact it's a mere 33 minutes long, and consequently there's nary a wasted second. How to describe the music? Like a more upbeat and wistful counterpart to their parent group Broken Social Scene.
V/A - Mojo Presents Journey to Love (Rare and Early Elektra Classics)
"Oh Joy!" I can hear already hear you wailing. Yet another attempt by Mojo to produce an aural document of a label that's already been anthologised to death (well, there was that 4CD box a couple of years back), and I must admit I nearly threw up myself whern I saw THAT dick-wielding beer monster with the Arthur Rimbaud complex on the cover for the 469,972nd time. But this freebie mainly covers Elektra's early days as a folk/blues label, before they decide to join the rock fray by signing the Butterfield Blues Band and Love. COnsequentlythere are some real gems here which I hadn't heard before. Stand-out tracks are by Jean Ritchie, the Dillards, Fred Neil and Phil Ochs. Tim Buckley's "Morning Glory" would also have made the list if I hadn't already been familiar with it for 25 years.
The Third Eye Foundation - Ghost
Grunge? Died along with Kurt. Britpop? A Frankenstein's monster created by coke-addled public schoolboy music journalists who either misguidedly romanticised the working classes (in the case of Quoasis) or lauded bands who mimicked them badly (Bleurgh). The so-called Post-Rock underground was where the REAL excitement lay in the mid-late 90s, (even if post-rock was a non-existant and largely indefinable genre made up by Simon Reynolds). Unclassifiably brilliant albums like this one are the proof.
Quite how a bedroom auteur from the West Country had the imagination to open the album with a darkside drum'n'bass track built around an uncredited (and probably unauthorised) sample of "Metal Machine Music" and follow it up with a track containing an even more chilling sample of what sounds like an old man screaming in a mental home (according to my other half) against a background of old Turkish folk tunes slowed down and maniuplated to the point where thy sound like pigs being slaughted in slow motion is beyond my powers of reckoning. I See Matt Elliot put out his first release under the 3EF name for 10 years recently. Commercially, he might have been better advised to sit out the current 80s revival and wait for the 90s one, but then I always admired the guy's blatant disregard for marketing considerations.
Murry Wilson - The Many Moods of Murry Wilson
I'd be lying if I were to claim that this album has any intrinsic merit other than as an obscurantist curio. Even taken on its own terms - as a piece of pleasant but unimposing lounge music - it's not particularly outstanding, noticeably lacking in imagination when compared more established lynchpins of that genre like Les Baxter or Martin Denny. The kitschy sleeve does give the impression that Capitol intended to market this album as part of their longstanding tradition of exotica-flavoured arists. Then again, their lack of willingness to promote it also suggests that they only reeleased it in order to get the terminally pushy blowhard who recorded it off their backs so they could get on with being sued by the Beach Boys.
That said, the opening track "Love Won't Wait" and the instrumental cover of his son Brian's "The Warmth of the Sun" are rather lovely. There are also two tracks written by Murry's plumber, Eck Kynor, that sound exactly like that guy who used to ascend from the ground playing a Wurlitzer fairground organ in Blackpool Tower. By and large though, it's creepy schlock, conceived and recorded by a creepy man, and the main rerason I included it here was to draw attention to this rather excellent cartoon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDNM7dy2WjI&feature=related
That's all I've got, unless you want the shirt off my back. Blame those intransigent fuckwits at Argos who sold me two defective I-Pods in six weeks and told me they couldn't replace the second one without sending it back to the manufacturer to see if it had been "misused" first, as if I were in the habit of feeding I-Pods to my pet alligator.
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