Wow And Flutter

Long and short pieces on music you should listen to; audio gear; and pop culture.

Month: March 2019

You Guys, We Have To Talk About Thundercat

March 19, 2019 /

I have a TIDAL subscription, which lets me a) stream their tremendous catalog in VERY high fidelity anywhere I’ve got a broadband connection (some content even in the VERY VERY high fidelity MQA format) and b) dig in to a new artist’s catalog if I hear a new track I like, or read an article somewhere about someone hot or interesting.

Which brings me to Thundercat (Steven Lee Bruner.)  He’s been on the scene for about 15 years, joining Suicidal Tendencies as their bassist WHEN HE WAS 16.  Since then, he’s been in the forefront of the music scene, working closely with Kendrick Lamar, Kamasi Washington and Childish Gambino.  Just for starters.  And he’s released three albums as Thundercat, the most recent being 2017’s Drunk.

(Brainfeeder)

[Which I just started listening to last weekend!  Listen, I’ve got a backlog of music to get to!  Don’t give me shit!  Have you gone through your entire Netflix queue?  No?  Finished all those things around your place that you promised your roommate/wife/partner you’d get done?  Ok, then.]

Drunk is a 51 minute, wildly inventive, solid jam from start to finish.  Every track has an authoritative groove, and a lot of it is pretty chill.  Quite a few tracks actually remind me of early, downtempo Earth, Wind and Fire (without the horns.)  Which is not to imply that it’s in easy listening territory.  OK yes, Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins do show up on Show You The Way.  But the very same disc includes maybe my favorite song, Uh Uh, which is 2:16 of just insane bass playing that rivals anything Jaco Pastorius did in his most fevered sessions.  So, yes: nobody’s putting Uh Uh on at the company dinner party.   Or Walk on By, featuring Kendrick.  But it’s one of the most satisfying listens I’ve had in long time.  When I really like something, it pushes everything else out of the way for a good couple of days.  (In fact, prior to Drunk, my obsession for about a week was Stereolab’s Space Age Batchelor Pad Music.)  So, I figure this record has at least another week of the deep dive treatment; but, after that, Drunk is definitely going to occupy a permanent spot in my regular album rotation.  Highly recommended.

I need a 12 step program for vinyl

March 14, 2019 /

I was not always such a voracious music consumer (shocking, I know.)  Yeah, I’d always been immersed in the music scene and had lots of bands that I loved, followed and went to see, and I DID work in a record store for a couple of years.  But collecting?  That was for those Goldmine nerds chasing a mint condition Beatles butcher cover.  Nope, I bought stuff to PLAY.

Then, this happened:

1000 songs!

Yes, the iPod.  1000 songs in your pocket!  For the first time I could carry around all of the music I owned and listen to it, any time I wanted.  Problem was, I had way more stuff on vinyl than I did on CD.  So the bulk of my collection (maybe less than 100 LPs) was essentially languishing on its shelf. 

So I got working.  If I know how to do anything, it’s research stuff, so me and the Google figured out how to record LPs to WAV files with my audio rig, split the tracks, convert them to MP3s, stuff them into iTunes, then sync them to my iPod.  And for a good couple of months, I was on Cloud 9, walking around with my shiny white iPod and my Koss PortaPros, shunning the radio.

After a while, that little box got too small.  So as soon as iPods with bigger hard drives became available, I upgraded.  And after a while longer, those pops and clicks on some of my records weren’t so cute, so I found the magical Burwen noise reduction units (hiss and pop-and-click) on eBay and put them in my tape loop.  And once those iPods got big enough, I switched over the superior Apple Lossless format.  And all those files needed a bigger house in which to live, so I got them a nice NAS drive.  Which came in handy when I got a pair of Sonos speakers.  Etc. 

Now, I wasn’t afraid of those garage sale finds anymore!  But there’s something about garage sale records: they’re generally, um, pretty filthy.  And people, some of those dirty records are worth taking a chance on.  I wasn’t going to let a little dirt and dust keep me away from checking out those 50 cent treasures!  So, the thing that really turned me into a vinylvore was this little game changer, the Nitty Gritty 1.5 vacuum record cleaner:

CLEAN CLEAN CLEAN those records.

This was the portal to the Land Of Vinyl.  Now everything was in play (so to speak).  If a record can be cleaned (and it’s astonishing what a good cleaning will do), it’s playable, and nothing is off-limits.  You see something cheap that’s interesting?  (I’m looking at you, old-ass John Renbourn album.)  Dollar bins?  Yes please!  And, it’s liberating.  I’ve gotten into so much great music that I would have otherwise have passed on because noisy=unplayable.

But I’m not obsessed.  No.

Turntables – they’re for everyone!

March 11, 2019 /

Like anyone possessing superior musical taste, I saw High Fidelity upon its 2000 release and thought immediately –

“You get me.”

So much of the movie and Nick Hornby’s original book has wormed its way into my life since then.  I’ll try to spare you in this blog from endless quotations of this titanic cinematic achievement – that will get old real fast.  However: today I have to lead off this post with a quote from Barry, lecturing his customer on Echo and the Bunnymen: “The Killing Moon” EP – it’s almost impossible to find – especially on CD. Yet another cruel trick they played on all the dumbasses who got rid of their turntables.”

I am not one of those dumbasses.  I’ve been spinning vinyl since before college.  And while I will admit a flirtation with other formats (I reliably “saved” many of my LPs by dubbing them to cassette, then wearing those out in whatever car or Walkman I was driving), and YES I BOUGHT A LOT OF CDs, the light on my turntable never dimmed.

When I got to college, I was lucky enough to have, as my second roommate (and good friend) someone who knew folks (with employee discounts) at Acoustic Research in Canton, MA.  AR made a suspended turntable that they sold for 99 bucks.  WITH a cartridge.  The thing with suspended turntables is that they’re WAY better isolated from the vibrations that would otherwise pollute your cartridge with low-frequency sludge and random footdrops. (the very expensive but wonderful Linn Sondek is the purest distillation of the AR concept.)  I LOVED that cheapo AR – it was built like a tank and nothing short of picking the deck up and shaking it like a cocktail shaker could make that thing skip.

So when, a couple of years out of college, AR released a vastly improved (and much sexier) version of their turntable, I  fastidiously put away my spare change to buy it, with the best arm (Linn Basik Plus) and cartridge (the classic Shure V-15 VMR) I could afford.  I’ve had it ever since:

Yeah, we’ve been through a lot together.  I even tracked down an old radio shop in Chicago a couple of years ago that sold me enough new old stock replacement styli for my Shure to keep me pretty much set for life.  But getting a dream “deck” is not when my music consumption really spiked.  More on that in my next post on Thursday.

New feature! Sight Unseen™: Giorgio Moroder, Midnight Express soundtrack

March 7, 2019 /

Sight Unseen™ is a new feature here at WNF, where I write about a disc that I’ve taken in to my collection without knowing or heard anything about it, other than thinking that there may be good music in those grooves.

My most recent vinyl haul (from The Listening Room in Chestertown, MD) included Kurt Vile’s most recent release, Bottle It In (read my review here), and this gem from 1978.  It’s the soundtrack to the Alan Parker film Midnight Express, that late-70’s nugget that brought the phrase “Turkish Prison” into the wider vernacular.  To be honest, I’d never heard this record, even though it was ubiquitous in the years since its release (even I can miss stuff.  Yes, it is true.)

Recently, I’ve been digging back into Jean Michel Jarre’s groundbreaking 70’s works Oxygene and Equinoxe, and Moroder’s similarly important music in the same time parallels what Jarre was doing, but with a solid dance beat.  Moroder’s influence was everywhere then – see his work with Blondie, or with Donna Summer – straight through to the present, where no less than Daft Punk genuflected before him on Random Access Memories. 

As I walked into the shop that day, this very album was on the turntable  – the opening track, “Chase” was playing, and I just said, “take it off.  I need that.”  This music has aged very well, in contradistinction to its contemporaries.  One thing I appreciate about Moroder’s work is that the human element is always present.  No matter how cold the electronics may seem (e.g., I Feel Love) there is always a warmth that manages to work its way to the surface.  This ain’t Kraftwerk (and I love Kraftwerk, don’t flame me.) 

Review: Kurt Vile, Bottle It In

March 4, 2019 /

I am a massive fan of Courtney Barnett.  She showed up on my radar NOT when her 2015 album Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, was released, but instead when she appeared on the 2016 finale of Saturday Night Live, performing “Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party” and “Pedestrian at Best.”  Her performing style is completely without artifice – she tears it up, but you always know she’s having as much fun as you are.  Her songs are literate, funny and often moving, the best ones almost stream of consciousness, like “Dead Fox”, and “Depreston”.  “Elevator Operator” is firmly planted in my long run playlist, and will never leave my iPod. 


<Milk! Records>

Anyway.  After Sometimes I Sit And Think, I waited – like everyone else – for a followup, and was more than “partially” rewarded the following year with the album she did with Kurt Vile (yes folks, not just a clever nom de plume) Lotta Sea Lice.  The two had jammed together and decided to record a collaborative album, which turned out to be greater than the sum of its parts.  These kinds of pair ups can often be just the two artists dividing things up – five tracks for you, five tracks for me – but these guys melded their styles so well you’d have been forgiven for thinking that they were not bandmates of, say, twenty years or so.  Every track is charming, especially Vile’s Over Everything. 

Barnett returned last year with her excellent Tell Me How You Really Feel,  and recently it was Vile’s turn.  Bottle It In treads the same turf as Sea Lice (n.b. that’s good!), but it’s a little more electric in nature.  Supporting players like Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon add extra feel and texture to the songs, and Vile unspools a filthy guitar solo on “Check Baby” (containing the all-world lyric “rub my belly with a stick of hot butter”.)  You’ll like this. 


<Matador Records>

[A word about sound quality: it’s excellent.  I got the 180g split-color vinyl pressing; Matador Records is definitely sourcing from a good pressing plant, as my copy was clean and free from surface noise.]

“Good music is good no matter what kind of music it is.”  – Miles Davis

 

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