Wow And Flutter

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

Tag: Courtney Barnett

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.

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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