I suppose that after my (provisional) selection of Purple Mountains as the album of the year, I should at least make amends by officially ending the year on a slightly more uplifting note. I have a very small selection of DVDs from which I usually choose something to watch on the last day of the year as "wholesome family entertainment", and most of these are fairly predictable, so here is a slightly less conventional choice - the classic video of Fleetwood Mac's reunion concert from 1997. (Ironically, it does feature at least one of the most depressing performances of all time, but on the whole, it's all about raising your spirits rather than smacking them in the face).
It is an absolute tragedy and travesty that there is not a single complete, full-length, high-quality video release of a classic FM show from their mid-Seventies-to-early-Eighties heyday: the closest we have is a criminally cut and poorly shot video from the Mirage tour in '82, which is still great in its own rights but does not even begin to approach capturing what the Mac were capable of back when they were arguably THE greatest "traditional pop-rock" live outfit on the planet. The Dance, however, despite all the band members having visibly aged and cut down on the insane levels of energy and wildness of their coke-soaked youth, manages to at least somewhat compensate for that - and even with all the limitations, it still has to count as one of the finest concert movies of all time (now just imagine if they'd shoot it in 1979 rather than 1997!).
Changing our chronological perspective and comparing the show with tons of footage that we have from Fleetwood Mac's reunion tours in the 21st century, we can clearly see the difference: on The Dance, we see a somewhat nervous, on-its-guard band which has a clear task - prove to the world that they are so much more than just a nostalgic act - and to do that, they have to slightly amend their arrangements and their posturing to give the old classics a more polished, more thoughtful, more controlled feel. This is particularly obvious in the stage presences of Nicks and Buckingham. Stevie here is notably more calm and rational than usual, with 'Rhiannon' becoming more of a meditative piece than an act of exorcism which it used to be in the old days. As for Lindsey, each note that he plays here sounds meticulously rehearsed and pre-planned - he is taking no unpredictable risks whatsoever - but this is still seriously brilliant meticulousness, as he delivers arguably the best pre-constructed (as opposed to fully improvised) guitar build-ups for 'I'm So Afraid' and 'Go Your Own Way' of his career. And, of course, you get to fully appreciate his inimitable acoustic technique on a new arrangement of 'Big Love' that completely lays to waste the old synth-pop original from Tango In The Night (I know all you synth-pop lovers will probably disagree, but nothing brings out the aching soul in that song like a great acoustic guitar arrangement).
What marred such later Mac tours as the one captured on 2004's Live In Boston was that the success of The Dance helped them realize that they could pass off as crowd-pleasing superstars, and bring back some of the show-off-ey goofiness that they should really have left for good back in the Eighties. What I admire so much about The Dance is precisely its amount of restraint and maturity: the band lets the intrinsic quality of its pop material largely speak for itself, fully concentrating on the music rather than their stage presence and audience teasing. In all honesty, this is probably where Fleetwood Mac should have ended - one perfect last mature goodbye to their greatness (though I will be the first to admit that Say You Will had its share of excellent songwriting). Regardless, the filmed experience is here with us to stay, and we can always pretend for it to have been the swan song, especially if this helps us block out the ridiculous memories about the latest self-parodic Fleetwood Mac scandals (Lindsey "Twice Fired" Buckingham, etc.).
The obvious individual choices to post here would be either 'I'm So Afraid' or 'Go Your Own Way', but I don't want to overdo the gloomy depressing game in the first case and don't want to be way too predictable in the second, so here's 'Gypsy' instead - Stevie is sweet and gorgeous, and Lindsey's pitch has an exquisite golden ring to it here that sounds more clean and pure than on the studio version and on any other live one. Such an angelic experience.
Album of the week (of the year?), Dec. 27: Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains
I am ashamed to admit that up until about ten
days ago, I had no idea who David Berman was, had never heard a single song by
the Silver Jews, and suspected that this one-album project «Purple Mountains», which
for some bizarre reason kept cropping up on year-end lists all around, would
probably be a collaboration between another boring bunch of bearded
neo-folkies, nice for a couple listens and then gone for good (see Avett Brothers,
Band Of Horses, etc. — the list is actually endless, because for every generic urban
teen-pop sensation these days you have to have yourself a generic rural revival
band). I could partially be excused for this, of course, since Berman had very
consistently kept a low profile from the very beginning of his career, and the
only way I could have learned about it would for me to become a very big fan of
Pavement, which I never did become.
Maybe it was all for the better, though, because these days I am so
short on pleasant surprises that to receive the biggest surprise of the year
right now made this Christmas a
little bit more endurable than it has been for me over the past two or three years.
Thirty seconds into the first song I was all "oh no, not another modern
country-rock singer-songwriter with nothing to say, and playing something that
sounds like Weenʼs ʽPiss Up A Ropeʼ at 30% the energy and 10% the humor,
too". Two tracks into the album, I was feeling a spiritual connection
stronger than with any other 2019 record Iʼd heard. Halfway into the album, I
was feeling as if Iʼd just made myself a new friend. By the end of the album, I
was literally tearing up — and it was only by the end of the album, mind you,
that I actually began looking for more information on Purple Mountains and the
man behind it.
If, like me ten days ago, you happen to be in the dark about David
Berman as well, let me just state a few brief facts about the music. This is a
collection of ten simple, unpretentious, unassuming tracks that should
generally be characterized as «country-rock» or «roots rock» or whatever and
offer no particularly new or challenging musical ideas whatsoever. Most of them
are moderately catchy in the same way that any traditionally-oriented country
tune may be catchy — in the sense that youʼve probably heard it before. The
arrangements, constructed by Bermanʼs small backing band, are just diverse
enough so that the songs do not completely blend into each other: a touch of
swampy harmonica here, a swoop of pseudo-Mellotron there, a sweet little slide
guitar solo here, a bit of quasi-Latin brass instrumentation there. The singing
is competent, but from a technical point there is absolutely nothing to write
home about. Based on all this evidence, this is an album that I should, by all
accounts, have hated or at least forgotten about the very minute it breathed
its last breath — and so should everybody else. Instead, it became the freshest
breath of musical air I remember breathing in in... well, quite some time.
Back in the old days, when I tried to carve out a crude, but workable
system of criteria according to which Iʼd rate records and artists, arguably
the most elusive of those — but also arguably the most important of them all — was
the criterion of adequacy. Not to be
confused with the easily understandable sincerity,
it is more of a question about whether all the parts of the whole come together
in an organic and unforced manner. Is the style of singing adopted here
suitable for the chosen musical arrangements? Do the words pursue the same
goals as the melodies? Is the level of atmospheric ambitiousness and pomp
justified by the complexity of the music? It was the kind of intuitive, but
efficient test that, for instance, a progressive rock band like Genesis would
typically pass with flying colors, while a progressive rock band like Kansas
would flunk face down in the mud (leading to a lot of bewildered people asking
me, «how can you hate Kansas if you claim to love Genesis?» — too bad I never
had enough time to finish that Only Solitaireʼs Dummyʼs Guide to the Art of Adequacy).
This criterion of adequacy is something that gets broken down over and
over again, more and more often as we advance through the first decades of the
21st century. Chances are that if you are a modern artist — commercial, indie,
doesnʼt really matter — you have probably violated it many times without even
suspecting. Crappy pop artists who toss their simplistic shit up in the air at
Glastonburies and Coachellas, hoping that it will rain down on their audiences
like a modern day Beethovenʼs 9th — or
crappy indie loners like Justin Vernon or Phil Elverum who think that the
surest way to get into your hearts is to ostentatiously deliver you their own
on a plate, cut up into small-size chunks and delicately wrapped up with a
silver ribbon each. Above and beyond everything else, though, most of those
people are busy creating their own personae.
More often than not, I find myself shying away from a record because I get a
distinct feeling that its author is trying to be somebody else — and, again, it
does not matter if we are talking about some insecure 18-year old girl trying
to be the next modern day Madonna, or about a perfectly normal next-door
neighbor going on stage and trying to become the next modern day Robert Plant.
Thereʼs this damn distance between the real person and the artistic personality
that seems to become wider and wider with each passing year, and it certainly
doesnʼt help things much in the adequacy department.
This is why Purple Mountains, despite all of its simplicity, immediately
stood out for me — first and foremost, it is one of the most adequate, if not the most adequate, period, record of the
past few years, hell, maybe even the entire decade, that I had the luck to come
upon... ironically, in the very last weeks of that decade. It is nothing more
and nothing less than David Bermanʼs personal diary, subtly arranged in poetic
and musical form — and its aim is simply to make public that diary exactly the
way it is, without omitting any significant details and without embellishing
any single one of them. The music perfectly serves its purpose: it makes
absolutely no pretense at innovation or «specialness», but it ensures that the
diary, all of its thoughts and sentiments, reaches and influences your senses,
much like a pharmaceutical capsule ensures that the relevant powder reaches
your infected organs. Likewise, Bermanʼs singing voice is completely devoid of
any artificial tricks or modulations that give vocalists their unique characteristics,
but it has this little natural quiver to it, you know, the one that sounds so
endearing when the singer actually manages to hit the right notes — your ears
are guaranteed not to bleed, and at the same time you have the impression of
dealing with a fragile, vulnerable human being who just might need a friend in
yours truly... and you might need a friend in him, too.
The amazing thing about Purple
Mountains is that, although all of the songs consistently focus on a long
series of disillusionments, disappointments, personal tragedies and global
catastrophes, it is not a record
about the narcissistic art of self-pitying. As the very first song tells us,
ʽThatʼs Just The Way That I Feelʼ: Berman simply wants you to know that after a
fairly long period of searching for the meaning of life, he has realized that
life has no meaning, or, if it has one, he has no way of ever finding it out.
At the center of it all lies a somewhat predictable breakup story: several of
the songs explicitly deal with the end of his long and troubled relationship
with his wife — a relationship that may have been doomed from the start, as it
typically happens with a relationship between one person who loves life to a
certain extent and another person who hates life in most of its forms. But,
once again, Purple Mountains is not
your average «breakup album». When he sings about how ʽAll My Happiness Is
Goneʼ, it should be taken not only in the context of its immediate lyrics about
the "light of my life", but in the general context of the album as
well — which covers quite a few irritating factors. Most importantly, he does
not present this situation as a tragedy: more like an inevitability of life, something to be accepted and dealt with in
the same manner that we accept and deal with bad weather, or, say, news about some
gruesome airplane crash in a country (or galaxy) far, far away.
I have not even mentioned yet that the album features some of the best
lyrics I have come across in this century — I normally tend to avoid quoting
specific lines, just so nobody could suspect me of being over-wooed by the
words rather than the music, but, hell, much of this stuff is easily Dylan- or
Cohen-level shit, and also, yes, this
time around I will actually allow myself to be over-wooed by the words, just
because it is downright scary how often they click with my own feelings. Just
see here: "The life I live is sickening / I spent a decade playing chicken
with oblivion" (ʽThatʼs Just The Way That I Feelʼ — not to mention rhyming
"destroyed" with "schadenfreude", which should score extra
points on any board); "Lately, I tend to make strangers wherever I
go" (ʽAll My Happiness Is Goneʼ); "Got a comb over cut circa Abscam
sting / Make a better Larry than Lizard King" (ʽStoryline Feverʼ); the
oft-quoted hilariously bitter "If no oneʼs fond of fucking me / Maybe no
oneʼs fucking fond of me" (ʽMaybe Iʼm The Only One For Meʼ); and probably my favorite of all — the ambiguity of "Light of my
life is going out tonight / With someone she just met... Light of my life is
going out tonight / Without a flicker of regret"; if these lines arenʼt
Nobel-worthy, I donʼt know what fuckinʼ is).
Once again, though, even if the lyrics are inarguably the albumʼs
strongest individual selling point, Purple
Mountains is not an album about brilliant word-craft. Nor is it an album of
«Americana», though you could technically file it under that label for lack of
a better one. Nor is it an album driven by ego and personality — nor is it a
conservative retro-statement; at times, Bermanʼs deep crooning might bring on
faint associations with Johnny Cash or even Frank Sinatra in his Wee Small Hours phase (Frank would most
certainly have endorsed the slow-paced, humbly gorgeous ʽSnow Is Falling In
Manhattanʼ), and at other times, I even had faint thoughts of J. J. Cale, but
Berman is not a minstrel, not a minimalist, not a deconstructivist, not a... in
a way, it is easier to define Purple
Mountains by all the things that it is not,
rather than the one thing that it is, and this is a good thing, because the
result is an album that is at once fully conditioned by its personal, social,
and cultural context and at the same time completely and utterly independent of
it. All that matters is the honesty and adequacy, and the implications of the awful pain, not an embellished, amplified,
hyperbolized version of it; if we do wish to find the closest analogy in
Americana rootsiness, I think the best example would be Hank Williams, though
that was, of course, a very long time ago and followed completely different
standards.
Listening to the album just made me realize that, perhaps, here is the very
key to my being so disappointed with most of modern music — in its endless
quest for, on one hand, innovation and modernisation, on the other, imitation
and resurrection, most artists have simply forgotten that the artistʼs first,
if not only, task is to be able to express the artist himself / herself. They
all really want to be someone else: the
next Kate Bush, the next Springsteen, the next Mariah Carey, the next Britney
Spears, the next Pearl Jam, whatever. They donʼt draw their inspiration from
within themselves or even from what is happening around them — they draw it
from second-hand musical recipes, thinking that if, perhaps, they shuffle
enough ingredients between several of them, this
is what will make them them. How frickinʼ ironic, then, that it takes a goddamn
musical recluse like David Berman, who allegedly spent most of the last decade locked
in, to remind us all that true art comes from the heart, rather than cookbooks.
When it comes to individual examples, one link will certainly not
suffice for this masterpiece. Here is, arguably, the most intimately personal
song from the album:
— and here, for contrast, is the most directly «social» song from it, transparently
reflecting Davidʼs disappointment in humanity and religion while still preserving enough space for his little
phonetic games (note all the quirky internal rhymes in the bridge):
On an additional curious note, after discovering Purple Mountains, I had time to round up some highlights from
Silver Jewsʼ individual albums — and while they all predictably shared the same
Berman charisma and showed his excellent lyrical skills, nothing really hit as
hard as this album. Itʼs almost as if his entire life was really leading him up
to this moment: in one of the interviews accompanying the release of the album,
I saw him explaining to the reporter that he felt this might indeed be his best
work, despite how clichéd such a statement could feel coming from the mouth of
an old musician, what with all the old dinosaurs always boasting about their
«returns to form» etc. — except that he was 100% right about it.
SPOILER PART (Do not read this if
you have not yet heard the album and are not at all aware of the circumstances
around it — rather, go listen to it first and then come back here):
Believe it or not, it was not until I had finished listening to the
album and formed a clear understanding in my soul that it was something truly
special that I actually learned about the man behind it taking his own life
less than a month after the album came out. This was great news and this was terrifying
news. Great, because not even God himself could now come down and say that
"oh, you only really pretended to love this because the dude hanged
himself" — deep down in my soul, I know that Bermanʼs suicide is just as
irrelevant to the power exerted by these songs as, say, the killing of John
Lennon is irrelevant to enjoying Double
Fantasy as one of the greatest hymns to domestic bliss and tranquility.
Terrifying, because when you identify yourself so much with the moods, words,
and sentiments of a guy who spent most of his fourth decade in the pangs of
"motivational paralysis" (which I also suffer from more and more
these days) and finally took his own life at the start of his fifth... well,
you get my drift.
What is particularly sad is that Purple
Mountains are not at all suicidal in mood. Of course, on paper lines like
"Darkness and cold, darkness and cold / Rolled in through the holes in the
stories I told" and "All my happiness is gone / Itʼs all gone
somewhere beyond" might seem like quotes from a suicidal note, and in
retrospect, it seems as if they formally were; but even so, I do not believe
for one second that Berman actually thought of the album as his testament when
he was recording it. On the contrary, there is a stoic feel to these songs — an
acknowledgement that even if life seems to have absolutely no meaning at the
moment, and even if communication with the outside world has become one large
uninterrupted act of colossal failure, it may
somehow be in our interests to simply accept this as a given and adjust to the
grimness of the situation. This is, almost explicitly so, the lyrical message
of the closing song, ʽMaybe Iʼm The Only One For Meʼ, but the entire attitude
of the album is about that — rule of the day is «no self-pity, no overblown
morbidity» — and only now that the man is no longer with us, we can see how
hard it must have been for him to observe that rule, and how his brain actually
drove him to break it.
Some of this decadeʼs best albums have already been associated with
death (Bowieʼs Blackstar, Cohenʼs You Want It Darker), yet, for some
reason, Bermanʼs little oeuvre strikes me harder and harsher — not just because
he was so much younger and took his life himself, but also because both Bowie
and Cohen had long since built themselves their own cozy ivory towers,
definitely not shutting themselves out but privileged enough to look at this
degrading world of ours from a bit of a safe distance; Berman, for all his
reclusiveness and mental issues, always sounded like he was very much of this earth — probably one of the reasons
why his engagement with Judaism after heʼd dissolved the Silver Jews turned out
to be short-lived and only led to yet another disillusionment. Itʼs all about a
guy who would very much want to be friends with everybody, who would be happy
to see the world return to the light, but who has finally realized that the
entire system, from the political to the personal, has become too fucked up for
him to be able to solve this problem. And I donʼt know about you, but I
definitely sense quite a bit of David Berman inside myself. Heck, who am I
kidding? If you donʼt have a bit of
David Berman inside yourself, you must be Donald Trump or something.
[Since this review has definitely outgrown the "mini-" format, video of the week will come separately, a couple days later].
By the middle of the second track on this album, I made myself a mental note: "I shall not find even ONE negative review of this album from anybody who makes a living writing reviews". As the other tracks rolled by, I googled a couple dozen sources and found this opinion completely vindicated. I cannot exclude that if I spent a couple more hours, I would have found a dissenting opinion or two, but instead of wasting those two hours away, let me waste just ten minutes to provide this dissenting opinion on my own part.
First and foremost, let us take this record completely on its own terms, without knowing anything about its author, its lyrical subjects, its sociological context in 2019. The only context in which we are allowed to take it is the musical context - it would, at the very least, be disrespectful to the genres of Neoclassical, Industrial, Goth, Darkwave, etc., if we pretended that they never existed and that "Caligula" arose out of nowhere. The question then is: is "Caligula" outstanding enough in terms of all those traditions to merit being noted?
Unfortunately, I am not that well acquainted with all these musical styles to answer that question objectively. Subjectively, though, the musical backbone of "Caligula" largely seems to consist of boring minimalism - very, very long, ambient-ish pieces, usually milking the shit out of a small bundle of bass piano chords (for understandable reasons, she doesn't favor the right side of the keyboard too much) and toccata-and-fugue-ish organ runs. Any kind of development is generally confined to the vocalist's voice, which works in three different modes: (a) gravely whisper, (b) lithurgic chant, (c) banshee scream. Modes (a) and (b) are passable, but not particularly outstanding; mode (c) is pretty much the record's major selling point, because even in this world of liberated and empowered ladies, this kind of high-pitched, guttural, tear-your-lung-out screaming can be more shocking than, say, female growling vocals (which are no longer a rarity at all).
The problem is, this is precisely one type of gimmicky attitude, and it is reproduced ten times on ten tracks that often run close to 7-8 minutes, making for one hell of an exhausting listen. Almost like the DNA of a living cell, each of these songs on its own contains the entirety of Lingua Ignota's message: a combination of medieval / baroque church atmosphere + an artistic recreation of the spirit of "I Spit On Your Grave". That's fine enough for one song - why extend it to ten, if all they have to support them is atmosphere, rather than interesting melodies?
And this is, of course, precisely where all the extra-musical context comes in. It's 2019, it's the age of liberation, it's the age of protest against domestic abuse, and apparently that's what it is: Kristin Hayter's loud and proud symbolic artistic statement on the horrors experienced by women at the hands of their abusers. Brilliant move, for sure: dare to write that this album is MAYBE not very musically interesting, and MAYBE not exactly as shiver-inducing and terrifying as it insists it is, and what you're doing is you're disrespecting victims of abuse and protecting men's rights to beat up their girlfriends. Give "Caligula" anything less than an A- (the minus, of course, is only for being way too short) and you're probably a male chauvinist who deserves all the multiple curses set upon him by the protagonist.
Well, having already sacrificed my credibility so many times anyway, I'll go ahead and say: "Caligula" is a curious artefact if taken in a small dose - preferably just one track, any track will do. But in general, it is murderously overlong; its "classically trained" artist is a musical amateur who spends way more time on self-aggrandizing than on mastering her craft; and it takes itself more seriously in depicting horror and suffering than an Auschwitz survivor probably would. Adding insult to injury, Hayter has the nerve to adopt an artistic pseudonym based on the life and art of St. Hildegard von Binden, unquestionably one of the most unique female talents of the Medieval ages - whose penchant for all things weird and mystical was fully compatible with writing some of the most technically accomplished and challenging (AND beautiful) vocal melodies of her time, and whose art, for that matter, never ever focused on self-aggrandizing or self-pitying.
Consequently, my humble piece of advice: if you are unfamiliar with this phenomenon, go listen to one track - like I said, any one will do, I'm just providing the link to the one tune that has all the ingredients in their right places - and then rather take some time to listen to Hildegard instead. (The early music ensemble Sequentia specializes on her works, and though they, too, are all atmospherically similar, each simple antiphon has more dynamics in it than all of "Caligula").
Video of the week: Peter Gabriel - Live In Athens 1987
Since I don't have any DVDs of Goth-type women playing Satan's brides (I do so wish at least a single complete Nico concert would become available one day, but it's probably not going to happen), let's go for something completely different and promote this wonderful live show from a still relatively young Peter Gabriel instead. This was filmed soon after the commercial success of So, so that he probably finally had a large enough budget to afford a proper filming crew - and here we see him still in top form, with great prancing energy, a head full of hair, and a superstar confidence that has not managed to erase the cute shyness and modesty of his early days.
There is a price to pay, for sure: this being the mid-1980s, you're gonna have to tolerate the hairstyles, the trench coats, the portable keyboards, and whatever other trappings have not survived the era for good reasons. But once you get past that and just concentrate on the awesome music, the unbridled enthusiasm, and the always amazing Tony Levin on bass, pretty soon you won't be noticing the side effects - more likely, you'll just be saying to yourself, "oh God, how young and dashing that guy actually used to be!"
But I probably wouldn't be recommending this show so heavily if it wasn't for one particular performance that cut straight to the heart - the hypnotic 9-minute rendition of 'Mercy Street', a song I didn't even remember all that well in its studio version, here expanded to the status of a heartbreaking Christian prayer for the ages. If it's rock theater (and, in a way, everything that PG does has always been rock theater), then it's a prime example of how to work that "suspension of disbelief" thing and make the viewer reach catharsis and purification through art, something that all the Lingua Ignotas of 2019 will probably never learn to do.
I really really like Angel Olsen. I think she's smart, she's "intelligently beautiful" in the most respectful way possible, she's got great taste, she's got some useful lyrical insights, and she has now mastered the art of Phil Spector echo arguably better than any other female singer-songwriter in 2019 (is that a compliment? please tell me it's a compliment). I can even forgive her that on a few of these tracks, as long as they still do not get their bombastic pop groove up and going, her icy nasal vocal twang may occasionally sound like Lana Del Rey's Siamese twin. Because Lana Del Rey just isn't capable of such friendly Ray Davies-inspired piano pop as 'Spring', for one thing.
What I cannot forgive - well, I CAN forgive, but I certainly cannot forgo - is that All Mirrors is basically just My Woman Vol. 2, and it seems that Olsen is now stuck for good with that particular formula: she has completed her journey from acoustic balladeer to symph-pop operator, and now seems fully content about having found herself, exploring herself under a magnifying glass from a variety of angles and always coming out with the same result. I gave the record a couple of spins, it all sounded good... and each song escaped from memory the second it was over. Nothing new for me, of course, but damn it kinda hurts every single time when it happens with an artist towards whom you feel so warmly pre-disposed at the outset.
At times, it becomes unbearably frustrating: she has these technically gorgeous string arrangements scattered all over the place, for instance, but she can't find a single truly breathtaking swoop - come on, it's not THAT difficult, girl, Jeff Lynne was picking them all over the floor back in the Seventies. Nope. These melodic moves just don't move me ('What It Is' is a good example - she tries all sorts of weird orchestral tricks throughout its martial progression, but they never hit a nerve). In the end, it always comes back to the same old same old: yet another nice artist so totally in awe of and dependent on her influences that they never allow her to prove that she is really SHE and not a synthetic homage to somebody else. As usual, a tip of the hat for the effort, but one more record that won't be staying with me for long.
Here, take a listen to this and tell me if I'm a fool for thinking that this song gets stuck somewhere in mid-air in its desperate leap for beauty:
Video of the week: Jeff Lynne's ELO - Live In Hyde Park (2014)
Since I mentioned ELO anyway, why not put in a bit of promotion for this concert from 2014? Purists will most likely prefer some footage from the more "authentic" period of the mid-Seventies (fortunately, there's quite a bit preserved), but the thing with ELO, really, is that (a) Jeff Lynne is one of those dudes over whom time has no control whatsoever - he still pretty much looks the same, sings the same, plays the same, and has the same corny sense of humor that he did forty years ago; (b) ever since Roy Wood left ELO, nobody in ELO has ever really mattered other than Lynne, certainly not in live performance. So if you can have your Jeff Lynne in perfect video and audio quality, playing all the beloved hits and almost none of the duds, why bother with anything else? The setlist consists of 16 numbers, EVERY one of them being a pop masterpiece - and the band, which includes at least one more veteran (Richard Tandy on keyboards), is in top shape to do them justice.
Even those who think only Roy Wood-era ELO deserves true hero status will have a big surprise waiting for them in the shape of a flawless performance of '10538 Overture':
Typically, bands like ELO with their kind of sound are far better suited for the studio than the live experience - there's no room for improvisation, and the emotional effect is very much dependent on getting the polyphonic sound exactly right - but this is precisely where modern sound-generating and sound-capturing technologies come to the rescue, and why I actually enjoy this more than, say, the Wembley recordings from the late 1970s.
Album of the week: Blood Incantation - Hidden History Of The Human Race
I know that RateYourMusic has an oddly out-of-bounds fetish for all things metal, and I'm certainly not going to listen to another metal album just because it's in the current top-100, but it's been a long time since I subjected myself to some good old-fashioned death metal, so I thought, hell, why not. Apparently, these guys hail from Denver, Colorado, and while I know absolutely nothing about the Colorado death metal scene, I'm guessing that the Grand Canyon and all the dinosaur experience are just as good in terms of influence and inspiration as the fjords and peaks of snowy Scandinavia. Because these guys are actually fun, at least for a short while.
There is absolutely nothing innovative about this stuff (except for, perhaps, certain atmospheric ambient passages that are their main claim to "merging death metal with psychedelia", but they always serve as interludes anyway), but the sound is thick and juicy, the riffs are distinctive, the solos are technically unimpeachable, and the growling vocals are well tucked into the background so that the eeriness is not completely offset by the ridiculousness. The bad thing is that they never really stop for one second to ask themselves the question, "how can we make this thing REALLY terrifying?" (like, say, a Celtic Frost). The good thing is that they have such superb production values that you really get to feel it in your bones just how massive and overwhelming a well-oiled death metal machine can get.
The album is pretty short, just 4 tracks running under 40 minutes, but still feels overlong in places, especially because they decided to make the final track into a lengthy multi-part suite without a particularly good reason. The lyrics are not worth discussing, either, just some random apocalyptic New Age shit ("quantum desolation opens the Gate of Mind" and the like). But I like the energy level, and perhaps death metal is one of those genres which, since it was never all that great in the first place, could actually benefit from modern production values rather than sound like a pale shadow of its former self wrapped up in shinier clothes.
Here's the album's instrumental track that is probably the most creative of the bunch, constructing a crescendo from ambient atmospherics to apocalyptic pomp and then to all-out blood rage:
Video of the week: Heaven & Hell - Radio City Music Hall Live 2007
Since we're on a metal vibe anyway, I haven't seen a particularly large amount of metal concerts, but this one is kinda special. Unfortunately, classic Ozzy- or Dio-era Black Sabbath have very little high quality footage left behind them, and more recent Ozzy-led Sabbath videos suffer because of... well, Ozzy. But when Iommi and Butler went on tour with Dio in the mid-2000s, Ronnie was still in peak form (in fact, he probably left peak form the day he died), and this show is an absolute must-have for all lovers of good old fashioned heavy metal. They play most of the highlights from the 1980-81 Dio period of Sabbath, and the dedication is simply astonishing - as is the image and sound quality, which gave me a new level respect for that material (which I, like many others, used to regard as too corny and cartoonish). This, too, is one of those shows where you'd expect self-parodic deterioration on the part of aging rock dinosaurs, but the thing is, Tony consistently plays better here than on the old studio recordings - particularly his soloing is impressive - and Dio is totally free from studio restraint, while at the same time always remaining in tight control of his voice. Even if mystically flavored theatrical heavy metal isn't your thing at all, I can't imagine not being impressed by the amazing tightness and inspired exuberance of the band. If you can only allow yourself one live DVD with Iommi on it, definitely go for this one rather than for any actual Sabbath concerts, even if those allegedly feature better song material.
Here's an example of a song that I never ever paid much attention to on the original Heaven & Hell album, but which I ended up watching at least a couple dozen times. Gotta just love the "evil cackle" of Tony's guitar at 3:20 - corny the song may be, but how many people ever get to scale that particular level of sonic painting?
What with all the talks about diversity, it seems that more popular artists these days emerge from one and one place only - London, England - than back in musty old 1964. These particular guys, who have named themselves after a silly digital gimmick, are occasionally toted as the current saviors of at least math-rock, if not prog-rock as a whole, so I checked the record out with interest. Apparently, they even played live with the legendary Damo Suzuki (of one-time Can fame), and if this isn't an endorsement, I don't know what is.
Approximately one and a half listen to Schlagenheim yields no final verdict, but the interest has largely been satiated. Disassembling the sound leads to the following conclusions - these guys have a really good, all-over-the-place drummer, who is almost singlehandedly responsible for the energy level; a professional, but unremarkable bassist; and two guitar players who seem to have honestly passed their exams in King Crimson-style playing, but are advancing that art about as far as I am advancing the art of writing in the English language (which is to say, backwards rather than forwards). On top of that, they have a very ugly vocalist who would perhaps be suitable for a post-punk band, but not for a math-rock outfit like this. In fact, killing the vocals altogether would have been preferable for this thing.
It's not ALL jagged-edge math-rock, though: the record has plenty of lyrical moments, and the boys' bag of influences clearly covers Yes and Genesis just as naturally as it covers King Crimson, Pere Ubu and Primus. The problem is, if they ARE adding a new twist to all those old-school influences, I cannot even express in words what it is. In terms of virtuosity, they are nothing particularly special (the already forgotten Adebisi Shank were a far tighter and more complex band, and those guys never got their dues - admittedly, Wexford, Ireland is a bit more obscure than London, England). In terms of memorable melodies, well... listen to the opening riff of the opening track on the album and, believe you me, this is as memorable as it ever gets. In terms of it all making sense... well, it doesn't. They're just making lots of organized noise. Also, they stole the bassline of "bmbmbm" from Alan Parsons Project's 'The Raven', so there. And for just about every song on here, I could name half a dozen prog / fusion / math-rock classics that do this shit better.
But if you haven't done your homework on those genres properly, who knows, maybe you'll love this. Plus, they seem to be very young kids, maybe one day they'll figure out their own sense of purpose:
Video of the week: King Crimson - Live In Japan 1984
Naturally, watching and listening to this couldn't save me from associations with the mighty Crims, so why not profit from the moment by drawing attention to this? For all his love for capturing concert performances on tape, Fripp is a known enemy of the camera, and his discomfort seems to extend to professional filming - there are very few official videos of KC concerts out there. Fortunately, at least we have this bunch of footage from a Tokyo concert hall on April 28, 1984 - just three months away from the legendary Absent Lovers performance - and it is a fantastic show, capturing the (arguably) best live version of KC in all its glory. Much of the fascination, like with a great classic Who video, comes from watching the distinctly different musical personalities harmonize with each other - the unmovable Fripp on his stool vs. the madly flapping Adrian Belew, or the oddly insectoid Tony Levin flashing his weird bass instruments vs. the steady man-machine of Bill Bruford. Great setlist, decent (not phenomenal) camera angles, a couple superfluous psychedelic effects here and there, and tons of energy - above everything else, one simply HAS to see actual human beings generating this kind of sound in order to believe it.
Here's 'Frame By Frame' which deserves to be worshipped frame by frame - enjoy it while it lasts, the Frippolice will be there any minute now:
