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Soundtracks up to 10.10.15
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thesweetcheat
thesweetcheat
6214 posts

Re: Soundtracks up to 10.10.15
Oct 11, 2015, 16:38
Main repeats for this week:

Paul McCartney - McCartney II
1980 is smack bang in the middle of my favourite period of music, when a seemingly endless stream of wonderful albums was being released. Into this comes McCartney's first album after the demise of Wings. Now feted as something of a pioneering classic of electronic experimentation, I've never heard it before and thought it was about time.

The opening "Coming Up" (the only song on here I'd heard before) is a breezy and enjoyable piece of pop-funk, like the poppier end of the Talking Heads catalogue. After that we're into the now-famous "Temporary Secretary", which has a nicely frenetic electronic pulse under a rather throwaway lyric, but so far so fine. Sadly the quality seems to take a massive nosedive after this, McCartney slipping back into twee ("Waterfalls") and cod-blues ("On The Way"), coupled with a "what does this setting on my new keyboard do?" number in "Front Parlour". "Bogey Music" is the kind of nonsense that would lead to "The Frog Chorus". Only at the end does the quality reassert itself, with the slightly creepy "Darkroom" echoing the kind of unsettling thing Peter Gabriel might do lyrically and the nicely understated closer of "One Of These Days".

It's nice to hear someone as hugely famous as McCartney was in 1980 trying out a new direction - he's never been afraid to experiment - but this is hardly the future-predicting masterwork that it seems to be revered as. By 1980 electronic pop music was way ahead of this, think Travelogue, Metamatic, The Pleasure Principle, The Voice of America, Organisation, not to mention what Kraftwerk, Bowie etc had been doing three years earlier.

Autechre - Exai
After listening to this for four evenings solid I came to the conclusion it's not really doing it for me. I like the two 10 minute plus tracks "Bladelores" and "Cloudline" but the rest is hard work, quite disappointingly unlistenable after the previous Oversteps.

Pauline Murray & The Invisible Girls - S/T
Post-Penetration, Murray teamed up with Steve Hopkins and Martin Hannett's Invisible Girls for an album that I have on vinyl but haven't listened to for years. Now re-released on LTM/Les Disques du Crepuscule, it's not at all bad. Murray isn't the most accomplished singer but the more propulsive tracks like "Dream Sequence" are pretty decent. Hannett's instantly recognisable production isn't his best here though.

Otherwise:

Joe Gibbs & The Professionals - African Dub Chapter Four

New Order - Movement
New Order - Power, Corruption & Lies
New Order - Brotherhood
New Order - Technique
The Wedding Present - Bizarro

Lush - Gala

New Order - Waiting For The Siren's Call

New Order - Music Complete
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Soundtracks up to 10.10.15 (jb lamptoast-morsley)
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