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Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

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Soundtracks of Our Lives week ending 30 January 2016 CE
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IanB
IanB
6761 posts

Edited Jan 31, 2016, 10:54
Re: Soundtracks of Our Lives week ending 30 January 2016 CE
Jan 31, 2016, 08:43
Steve Wilson - 4 1/2
Wilson reasserts his status as the undisputed king of "quiet desperation" Prog with this one. For a mini album of outtakes it hangs together remarkably well. Although most of the music is from the 'Hand Cannot Erase' sessions, this set sits sonically for me more neatly next to 'Raven'. In terms of referencing his past there are plenty of elements redolent of Porcupine Tree, Blackfield and No-Man but personally I could do with some sharper edges, a bit more 'Master of Puppets' and a bit less 'Division Bell'. Still pretty great though. I hope he resists the temptation to revive Porcupine Tree (who were as patchy as they were self-repeating) as he hasn't looked back since leaving their collective conservatism behind. A Wilson / Mustaine collaboration is high on my wish list!

No-Man - Flowermouth
Blackfield - Blackfield
Scott Walker - Five Easy Pieces 4: This Is How You Disappear
John and Yoko - Double Fantasy Stripped
Deutsches Symphonieorchester Berlin & Kent Nagano - John Adams: El Nino
Season of Lights...Laura Nyro in Concert (Complete Version)
Laura Nyro - Angel In The Dark
Bowie - Blackstar
Dead Boys - Young, Loud And Snotty

Dream Theater - The Astonishing
This goes to reassert everything that has nagged at me about US Prog bands since I first heard Kansas. The singers nearly always sound like they have been recruited from a particularly anodyne branch of musical theatre. The sing like they are inhabiting a role not living it. RJ Dio is probably the only singer from America who makes Prog subject matter sound in any way convincing and he wouldn't have been seen dead around such a lightweight musical palette. Whatever you say about the Andersons, Hammill, Lake, Gabriel et al in their pomp - they sang like they meant it, man (even if they now say they didn't really).

As for this record you get a couple of hours of woolly AOR with some clever bits under-pinning a plot basically borrowed from Rush, Ben Elton and Pete Townshend's Lifetime. The music is ambitious in sheer width and length but not on an atomic level and the whole future-dystopia-medieval-feudalism thing needs some credible human interest to make it stand up. Why are the heroes in these things so priggish and unsexy?

There are of course plenty of people who will love this to bits and will pore over every nuance but you would get more watching Hunger Games with the sound down while listening to Gates of Delerium on a loop.
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