Wow And Flutter

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

Category: Music (Page 2 of 2)

The only five R.E.M. albums you need

May 27, 2019 /

My piece on the Bingo Hand Job (a/k/a R.E.M.) 1991 concert disc got me thinking about this band that’s been part of my musical DNA since they wormed their way into my brain in 1983, with the release of Murmur, their dark, mysterious, poppy and pretty fantastic full-length debut album. That disc sat on my turntable for a good solid month while I listened, headphones on, trying with all my might to figure out just exactly what Michael Stipe was actually singing about. And once I thought I had the lyrics figured out, I had to reevaluate that opinion the next time I listened to those songs. It was like they were a living being, constantly changing their shape and identity; but that’s what made those early songs so beautiful. Their meaning is what you want to believe it is. It’s like the ending of Lost In Translation: what is Bill Murray whispering in Scarlett Johansson’s ear in the last scene? Doesn’t matter: write your own poetry.

Which R.E.M. albums do you need to have? That your life will be entirely empty without? Well, let’s be honest: you need ALL of them, but if you had to pick only five, they are:

  1. Murmur (1983) Where it all began. Jangly guitars, and mood that mirrors the kudzu vines growing on the cover. Song You’ll Play On Repeat: Radio Free Europe.
  2. Reckoning (1984) Their followup, but deftly avoids the “let’s make another one like the last one” trap. Their lyrics are a little clearer, and the sound punchier. Song You’ll Play On Repeat: Don’t Go Back To Rockville.
  3. Document (1987) The album after Lifes Rich Pageant. NOT produced by John Mellencamp’s producer Don Gehman, but goddamn if “Strange” isn’t the spitting image of vintage Mellencamp. Side two gets murky (but worth the trip) after “The One I Love,” but side one is killer, including the song-for-our-current-times “Exhuming McCarthy.” Song You’ll Play On Repeat: It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).
  4. New Adventures in Hi-Fi (1996) A recent addition to my collection, and so fricking good that it kicked Out Of Time from the top 5 list. The last album with Bill Berry behind the drum kit, and the band playing (most of the tracks were recorded live, during their tour behind Automatic for the People) as if they knew it were the last time they’d all be together. Song You’ll Play On Repeat: The Wake-Up Bomb.
  5. Automatic for the People (1992) Saved the best for last. In fact, if you only had room for ONE R.E.M. album on your shelf, this would be it. There is not a single song on this album that is not a classic. Despite the album’s overall theme of (as guitarist Peter Buck noted) “mortality, the passage of time, suicide and family,” it’s inspiring, moving and (yes) funny. And it rocks hard (“Ignoreland.) Song You’ll Play On Repeat: Nightswimming.

The Flash of (Soundtrack) Recognition

May 9, 2019 /

I love the movies. More to the point, I love going to the movies. When I was a kid I loved seeing movies, but I really started going to the movies in college (the scene of so many discoveries, I know.) Everyone at the U had a writing requirement in their first year – everyone took the same course first semester, but you got to pick the second semester course. So, I picked “Rhetoric of Film.” NOT a gut course, I assure you. We had to write a lot, but the fun part was that we got to see a different film/program every week to write about. One week was Persona. Another week was a bunch of Max Fleischer cartoons (“Popeye”, the Superman shorts.) But every week was awesome, and I grew to love and appreciate every aspect of great film – the cinematography, the writing, and the music.

Music has always been a key tool of the filmmakers’ craft, used to create mood or convey thoughts without dialog. In the mid-70’s filmmakers (starting pretty much with Saturday Night Fever) began incorporating more popular music in their soundtracks, and relying less on traditional, original musical scores. (TV, too – The Sopranos was masterful in its music selection.) Blockbuster movies especially leaned heavily on pop music. It’s become a game of mine to rate movies based on how awesome the song selection is. High Fidelity, of course, gets top marks.

But I was very pleasantly surprised when I went to see Avengers: Endgame opening weekend and found that the filmmakers were totally on their music game, capped with a scene where two of the Avengers visited another (don’t worry, no spoilers here!) to the backdrop of The Kinks’ Supersonic Rocket Ship. Whaaaaat?

“SRS” is on Everybody’s In Show-Biz, the half-studio, half-(drunkenly) live followup to the Kinks’ classic Muswell Hillbillies, and the track is often overlooked by the titanic song that is Celluloid Heroes, a legit Kinks Klassic. But Supersonic Rocket Ship is a classic in its own right. It channels the same tropical vibe as Apeman, but spools out some of the well-honed Ray Davies social observation in a way he wouldn’t do this skillfully for quite some years later. So, Marvel: well-done! If Avengers: Endgame wasn’t great enough already, including this song pushed the movie into the stratosphere.

Record Store Day 2019 Review: Bingo Hand Job (R.E.M.), Live at the Borderline 1991

April 25, 2019 /

One of the more anticipated releases from this year’s rich Record Store Day trove was a widely-bootlegged March 1991 almost impromptu live set from R.E.M., playing under the hilarious pseudonym Bingo Hand Job.  There are a couple of reasons I was stoked to get a copy: 1) the fairly limited number of copies pressed (3000 in the US); 2) R.E.M. was a band I sadly never got to see live, and 3) at the time, the band was not quite the biggest band in the world, though they were sure on their way.  So the chance to hear them in a really loose, mostly acoustic setting (they cover Love Is All Around, for crying out loud) was too good to miss.

[Craft Recordings]

The Borderline is a pretty legendary London club – holding only about 300 people, it’s pretty intimate.  You can get a sense of the room from the acoustic space generated from this recording.  For a bootleg recording, it’s not too bad.  I honestly don’t think they’ve cleaned it up at all, but it doesn’t matter: muddy sonics didn’t hurt Murmur, after all.

R.E.M. in 1990 (JA Barratt/Photoshot/Getty Images)

This is still the early R.E.M. I love so much – the songs on this two-disc set span their entire catalog up to that time.  The band is clearly loose and having a great time (as is the well-lubricated crowd), and the fun extended to the band members’ pseudonyms (Michael Stipe =“Stinky,” Peter Buck =“Raoul,” Mike Mills = “Ophelia”, Bill Berry = “The Doc,” as well as guests Spanish Charlie (Peter Holsapple of the dBs), Conrad (Billy Bragg) and Violet (Robyn Hitchcock).  As Mike Mills said recently, “” too concerned about being a professional band.”  Thank god for that.  If you can track down a copy of this at a not-insane price, (copies are going on eBay right now for about $75(!)) get it. 

Tracklist:

Side A

1. “World Leader Pretend”

2. “Half A World Away”

3. “Fretless”

4. “The One I Love”

Side B

1. “Jackson”/”Dallas”

2. “Disturbance At The Heron House”

3. “Belong”

4. “Low”

Side C

1. “Love Is All Around”

2. “You Are The Everything”

3. “Swan Swan H”

4. “Radio Song”

5. “Perfect Circle”

Side D

1. “Endgame”

2. “Pop Song 89”

3. “Losing My Religion”

4. “Get Up”

5. “Moon River”

Record Store Day!

April 13, 2019 /

It’s 6:30 in the morning at in Buffalo, New York. Where else would I be?

Revolver Records, Buffalo NY

It’s the happiest day of the year! It’s Record Store Day, the day where music lovers everywhere get to celebrate the great culture that is the record store, and get the chance to score some great new, often previously unavailable music from, well, everyone. Often the list includes a lot of limited edition, just-for-Record-Store-Day discs, but the real attraction is in the music itself.

This year’s list was really rich and diverse. Each of the past couple of years have offered one or two discs I was really interested in, but this year’s list was an absolute treasure trove of great stuff. Best yet, I managed to get everything I was looking for – I can’t wait to get these home and get them on the turntable!

This year’s RSD haul

Top to bottom, left to right:

  • Bingo Hand Job (a/k/a REM), Live at The Borderline 1991: an oft-bootlegged set from REM, now (presumably) sonically tidied up for the masses
  • Fleetwood Mac, The Alternate Fleetwood Mac: same track order as the classic first album of the pre-Rumours lineup, but all alternate versions/takes
  • Mission of Burma, Peking Spring: first vinyl release of the influential Boston band’s 1998 compilation/rarities disc
  • Courtney Barnett, Everybody Here Hates You: 12″ single B/W “Small Talk”
  • Elvis Costello & The Imposters, Purse EP: four track disc with Elvis collaborating on the songs with Burt Bacharach, Paul McCartney, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan
  • Bob Dylan, Blood On The Tracks (NY “test pressing” version): do I need another version of this record? No! But the record we all know wasn’t the one Dylan originally recorded in NYC in 1974. Right before Columbia was going to release the record, Dylan decided to re-record a bunch of it in Minneapolis. This is the complete NYC version.
  • Lou Reed, Ecstasy: one of Lou’s last albums first time on vinyl, from 2000, featuring the great Fernando Saunders on bass (limited edition, this one.)

By the way, Buffalo is a GREAT vinyl town, and Revolver is an amazing story. The owner, a great guy named Phil Machemer, got his start selling vinyl for a couple of years in popup locations around Buffalo before opening Revolver in another part of the city a couple of years ago. In December, he opened a second (!) location in Elmwood Village (the college-y part of town, where I went this weekend.) I can’t think of a better example of the strength of the vinyl resurgence than this! A must-visit if you’re up this way.

Sight Unseen™ – David Byrne, Grown Backwards

April 3, 2019 /

I’ve loved the Talking Heads from the(ir) very beginning.  Their entire career arc – until it came to a crashing halt with Naked – was one of joy, exploration, funk, noise, and flat-out weirdness.  It says something about how the world has finally caught up with them, that when you do your weekly shopping at Market Basket and hear “Take Me To The River”, it just sounds like the jam that it is rather than the eyeballs-open-oh-my-god-what-is-that-coming-out-of-the-speakers effect it had on everyone in 1978.  Although: when I hear “I Zimbra” or “The Great Curve” in the Produce section, THEN the world will have fully caught up.

Of course I’ve been engaged in David Byrne’s post-Heads work, although given how musically promiscuous he’s been over the past almost 30 years with solo work and collaborations, it’s a bit of a task to keep up.  I’ve liked selected singles of his like “My Fair Lady” (released in 2004 as part of a Wired magazine collection produced under Creative Commons) and his track “Who” with St. Vincent, what’s and of course his two collaborations with Brian Eno, especially 2008’s Everything That Happens Will Happen Today.

[Nonesuch Records]

Nonesuch released Byrne’s 2004 disc Grown Backwards on March 15th on vinyl for the first time (hard to remember the “no vinyl” days, I know.)  The quality, inside and out, is typical for Nonesuch’s recent vinyl re-releases (including the spectacular 180g remaster of Nashville by Bill Frisell.)  Although this is the lighter 140g vinyl, the pressing quality is great, and Greg Calbi’s mastering is likewise. 

Grown Backwards is, on the one hand, a typical Byrne outing, running the gamut from songs like the opener “Glass Concrete & Stone” (now one of my new favorites) to “Glad”, with its Talking Heads-like cute/quirky/insightful lyrics (“I’m glad I’ve got skin, I’m glad I’ve got eyes/I’m glad I got hips, I’m glad I’ve got thighs/I’m glad I’m allowed to say the things I feel”)  The tunefulness of the original material is on par with the same year’s “My Fair Lady.”  And, strings!  Lots of them.  So, the album’s a keeper just based on those.

What really clinched the deal for me were the two songs lifted from the opera canon.  Yes.  Opera.  Byrne’s voice has always been an almost-operatic sweet tenor, just “off” enough in places to make to make it sound more like a natural yawp, but the rest of the time quite sweet (rather like one-time Talking Heads guitarist Adrian Belew (his voice is all-the-time great.))   “Au fond du temple saint”, from an 1863 Bizet opera, and Verdi’s “Un di felice, eterea” are the standouts on this record.  “Au fond du temple saint” is a duet with Rufus Wainwright(!) and is, hands down, the best track on this record.  The twin voices complement each other – in parts where Byrne’s seems to falter, Wainwright’s soars.  And vice versa.  There aren’t a lot of «««««-rated tracks on my iPod, but: welcome to the club, “Au fond du temple saint.”

The nice thing about Sight Unseen records is that they often (not always!) surprise you.  Grown Backwards turned out to be a satisfying confirmation of David Byrne’s creativity.  Get yo’self a copy.

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.

Holding On To That Teenage Feeling

February 21, 2019 /

I’m lucky enough to have a dedicated listening room.  After I got married, my stereo bounced around to a bunch of different places, even (horrors!) getting boxed up for a couple of years.  Most of those rooms weren’t optimal – usually a place where the TV was always on, hence little opportunity to really listen, so it was off to the iPod.  Which wasn’t bad at all – certainly better than nothing, but not the same as having a space where you could settle in and just LISTEN.  Then, about 15 years ago, we did the basement over so the kids (and their friends, TBH) could have a place to hang.  Part of the plan included a room that was perfect for listening, where I could put my speakers exactly where they should be, and LOTS of wall space for vinyl.  And yeah, you could crank it up without any complaints from everyone else.

Recently, though, I had a chance to do the same thing upstairs in a room off the kitchen.  My kids are out of the house, and it became more convenient – and nicer – to walk down the hall rather than down to my underground lair.  Basically.  This room was a blank slate – it wasn’t as private as my old listening room downstairs, but I was able to turn it into a comfortable place that could double as my home office as well as a music room.  However, as part of the deal with my wife, the bulk of my vinyl collection had to remain downstairs 🙁 but all of my vinyl has been digitized to my NAS drive, I can access that over my Sonos. 🙂 

The whole experience has been a revival of my yearly back-to-college ritual – pack up the stereo at the end of the summer, set it up in the dorm room, get everything where you want it to be, tweak things here and there.  There’s that sense of newness, the promise of an amazing year, and the social bonding around music (parties, late night listening) that never gets old.  The vinyl revival taps into those very human feelings, which is why it’s lasted longer than the most jaded techies thought it would.  It’s easy to just call up a Spotify playlist and listen, and that (still) is an amazing feat, but the ritual of putting on an LP, or even a CD, and sitting down to listen is something that, once experienced, never leaves you.  Now, please excuse me as I slip into something more comfortable…

Vinyl Hunting Overseas

February 14, 2019 /

I’m a runner.  One of those obsessive runners that run marathons.  I’m up to seven now, the most recent being the Dublin (Ireland, not Ohio) Marathon in October.  We spent a couple of days in Dublin adjusting to the time difference, ran the race on the Sunday Bank Holiday, and spent the rest of the week in and around Galway.  Good food, great beer, and: ohmygodsomanyplacestofindvinyl!

Dublin in particular has a lot to sift through – lots of small independent shops like the one across the street from our flat in the Liberties, and (surprisingly!) the many charitable thrift shops, which are actually well-curated to be more of a place to find classy, vintage stuff as opposed to, say, the Salvation Army, where they pretty much dump everything out on the floor indiscriminately.  Anyway.  The key here is to really drill down and find interesting stuff that’s either hard to find or non-existent here, or something weird that you just take a flyer on.

So, my fortuitously-located shop across the street from our flat, Blind Dog Vinyl, had just opened a month or two before.  It was well-stocked with great British, Irish, reggae and indie music.  I scored three great records: Cocaine, by Dillinger, and Kid Creole and the Coconuts’ Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places and Doppleganger.  (Blind Dog Vinyl also has the distinct benefit of being located right next to the best coffee shop in the city, Two Pups Coffee, which I managed to visit a couple of times each day.  But, I digress.)

Now, all I remember Dillinger for is Cocaine In My Brain, a pretty bonkers mid-70’s reggae hit that I remember hearing on WBCN (“Jeem!  Jeeeem!”) so this disc, with at least a version of C.I.M.B. seemed like a keeper.  The cover was far from perfect, but: a flyer.



Over the years, I’ve become more impressed with the genius of August Darnell, the mastermind of Kid Creole.  They placed one song on the Against All Odds soundtrack that made that entire disc worth buying, My Male Curiosity.  It’s a witty and catchy song that harkened back to dance hall music, but it was never, never derivative.  My Male Curiosity has never left my iPod.  So, I started scratching the Kid Creole itch recently.  Stateside, I found a copy of Wise Guy, which features “Stool Pigeon” (famously sampled by The Avalanches in Close To You) and is uniformly great.  The band was way more popular in the UK than the US (stupid us), so it didn’t surprise me to find a good copy of Fresh Fruit and Doppleganger here.

Later on in the week, we found ourselves in Cork.  My kind of town: arty, hipstery, great food and great shops.  We only had a few hours to spend there, but I quickly found an amazing second hand store called The Village Hall.  Nicely curated, with a coffee bar inside, and a pretty respectable selection of vinyl.  I quickly zeroed in on a copy of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother shown at the top of this blog post – an original German pressing and and AMAZING cover.  Now, my Floyd love doesn’t go farther back than Meddle.  I just don’t have the time or patience for Syd Barrett-era Floyd.  But I’m a sucker for a Hipgnosis cover, and this one just called out to me.  No text, nothing.  Just that damn Holstein staring the viewer down.  Music?  We’ll find out.  Artwork?  Take my money, please!

Finally, on our last day in Galway, I hit up the thrift shops in the Latin Quarter and found Sing While You’re Winning by Robbie Williams (a MONSTER star in the UK, a footnote here (sadly), and Athlete’s Vehicles and Animals on CD. €1 each! The jewel cases were super beat up, and I had absolutely no idea how good (or bad) the music was, but did I mention they were only €1 each? Spoiler alert: the Robbie Williams disc is pretty great pop, and I’m warming to Athlete.

Not a bad haul, and I found just enough vinyl that it didn’t overload my carry-on on the trip back.  So, when you’re planning your next trip, be it across the state, across the country, or another country entirely, check out the local record scene before you go.  You’re probably not going to get one of those super-rare records you can retire off of, but I’ll bet you’ll find something that will expand your musical horizons.

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