Big number crunching week and I can't listen to music while doing that kind of work so it has been a quiet week (literally) but these have been good company ....
Derek Sivers - Anything You Want
CD Baby founder tells his story in 90 minutes. Interesting listening for anyone struggling to get their whatever out there.
Argent - Circus
Under rated late period Argent, there are more than a few hints that the band must have been listenting closely to Queen, Santana and Supertramp among others. It's not going to convert anyone but as albums from the fag-end of the first classic pomp prog era go this is really good.
Bill Nelson - Getting the Holy Ghost Across
Some of his very best material as a solo artist (especially lyrically) gets swamped in tricksy 80s production with a bass sound that should have been outlawed well before 86. This album would be well worth approaching as a "Director's Cut" type project if he wasn't so busy churning out albums. Not quite in the Omar league in terms of work-rate but close. I'm on 66 albums stretching back over 40 years and not even close to having everything (or wanting to for that matter). This record is one of his most finished / polished sounding. Ironically, and as David Sylvian has noted, it is probably that very work rate that has held him back commercially.
If you haven't listened to anything past Be Bop Deluxe then I can highly recommend the following. Saying that if your sensibility in guitar players doesn't extend to Duane Eddy and Hank Marvin as well as Segovia, Fripp, Howe and Jeff Beck then the instrumental guitar records may not be quite your cuppa. He does like a twang and I think the "Thin Man" soundtrack must have caught his ear at some point.
Sound On Sound (essential and, ironically for what was percevied along with Drastic Plastic to be a career breaker, possibly the one record for which he will be remembered the longest and fondest by critics. it sounds like a melange of The Tubes and Devo were it to be produced by Conny Plank)
The Romance of Sustain Vol 1 (storming electric guitar instrumentals)
Magnificent Dream People (90s Art Rock)
Rosewood (two volumes of acoustic guitar gorgeousness)
Console (ambient but not to the point of invisibility)
Dreamland To Starboard (the other side of the Romance of Sustain coin)
Deep Dream Decoder (80s Art Rock)
Saint Jude (Ten Songs on MySpace)
A late comer in that I was only vaguley aware of them until yesterday. Saw them by accident at Cornbury on Saturday while waiting to see some friends play and was mightily impressed. It's a bit '73-by-numbers and it strikes me as odd that anyone can make any new music while completely ignoring 40 years of music history but they rocked up a sleepy crowd of largely 40 plus, well-heeled festival goers. Think Joss Stone fronting a Becket, a Quatermass or a Back Street Crawler and you wont be far off. Forty years ago Rabbit Bundrick would have been in this band without a shadow of a doubt.
Philip Glass - Glassworks
I know he has a rep for being a bit of a bourgeoise sonic wallpaper merchant these days but the 1982 release that he described as his "Walkman album" works brilliantly. Should be a standark work for fans of electronic music barring the fact that it isn't actually electronic. This is a band of human sequencers. Astonishing when you watch them actually doing it. Especially the singers and horn players. In temrs of circular breathing these folks make Roland Kirk look like a slacker. I saw the Glass band play a lot of this music at Sadlers Wells around the time of this release as partly captured in Peter Greenway's Four American Composers series and it sounds as fresh today as it did 30 years ago. At the time I was tad disappointed by the live show as I had been sold on it by the Einstein on the Beach stills in Time Out but the music hit home. Highly recommended to fans of Reich, TDream, Popol Vuh and cherishers of visionary music of all kinds. Of the mainstream "Systems" / minimalism brigade in their pomp I would only put Six Marimbas, Tehilim and the ECM recording of Music for 18 Musicians in this class.
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