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Here be the blog in which a group of music enthusiasts reviews various music albums in a series of challenges and games that include assigning records to each other, reviewing albums from a particular year, whole discographies of certain artists or just random albums of their own choice.
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Showing posts with label Dinar Khayrutdinov. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dinar Khayrutdinov. Show all posts
As it happens with many bands, KUKL split up some months after releasing their second album, and Björk formed a duo called The Elgar Sisters with their guitarist Guðlaugur Kristinn Óttarsson. Together they would subsequently record some songs Björk would use in her later career. At about the same time Björk married another guitarist Þór Eldon and shortly after gave birth to a son. And that was when Björk, Eldon, another former KUKL member Einar Örn and a bunch of lesser-known guys formed The Sugarcubes.
But enough with objective facts, here’s the highly subjective part: Life’s Too Good is easily the best album featuring Björk before her solo career but also probably the only Sugarcubes album you will ever need.
In spite of featuring two ex-members of KUKL, The Sugarcubes is not shamanic experimental avant-garde act but merely an alternative rock band. “Merely” but not actually merely! This is GOOD and quite idiosyncratic alternative rock with solid pop hooks, fine guitar riffs, postpunkish dance rhythms and, of course, young Björk in top form. But here’s the twist: the original idea behind The Sugarcubes was to create… a humorous band! Imagine that! This was supposed to be a parody of pop music with its shining optimism (hence the record’s title) but looks like that was sort of abandoned in the process because the actual music ended up sounding bigger and better than a bunch of novelty numbers. And there are really dark moments on the album, too. But hey, the fun and the mischief are still there! This is a very enjoyable record!
You might know the big single from here called Birthday and it is an amazing song but the rest of the stuff is no slouch either. Motorcrash, Sick for Toys and the comic Fucking In Rhythm & Sorrow are my particular favourites (the latter DOES sound like a novelty number but it’s so exciting and funny that I don’t mind). Should I even mention Björk doing a great job on all of these songs? That goes without saying, doesn't it?
On the whole, Life’s Too Good can sound too juvenile and quirky to some (then again if you don’t like quirky stuff you probably shouldn’t be listening to Björk at all) and too uneven to others but it’s so fun and weirdly exhilarating that I’d say it’s an absolute must even for casual Björk fans.
KUKL’s second and final album… is surprisingly different from the first one while maintaining the same overall direction at the same time (so yes, this is still post-punkish avant-rock and NOT “hard rock from some tasty geezers” like the caption on the album cover says). This is every bit as intense and surreal as their previous effort (almost as short too, at a little more than half hour) but golly! Look at the production this time round! A plethora of weird instruments, sound snippets, samples, diverse percussion, lots of bizarrely sounding horns and synths, some distorted guitars amidst all of this - this is some wonderfully messy avant-garde cacophony! There’s not much use in describing it though - it basically all sounds a lot like the album sleeve - chaotic and schizophrenic.
Björk’s voice, on the other hand, takes on the role of the element that brings it all together. Some reviewers express the opinion that she sounds a bit kimgordonish here, and I have to agree, the key difference being - Bjork can actually sing. Granted, experimental stuff like this doesn’t require actual “singing”, I guess, more of ecstatic shouting of the gloomy lyrics, but Björk’s vocal ability (or charisma, or both) still somehow shines through, especially when you compare her vocalizing to Einar Örn’s much less memorable yells. At any rate, this album deserves a listen (or even several listens, since this nightmarish music takes its time to reallyopen up to you), especially if you enjoy dark and noisy experimental rock. The record's total lack of structure might be a bit bewildering, though. But experiments are experiments - they are usually interesting yet short-lived, unlike Björk’s career which was basically only beginning at this point…
The Björk saga continues, my friends! After fun but short-lived Tappi Tíkarrass our heroine meets another bunch of creative Icelandic people and forms KUKL with them. ‘Kukl’ means ‘sorcery’ or ‘witchcraft’ and indeed this time m-lle Guðmundsdóttir and her pals set out to make some really shamanic music. This first of their two albums was inspired by a book by French author Georges Bataille that Björk loved reading as a teenager. The book was about some very young couple engaged in bizarre sexual perversions (you didn’t expect anything less from Björk, did you?), though, as far as I understand, that didn’t lead to this being a concept album but merely inspired a couple of songs and the album’s title and sleeve.
But let’s get to the actual music. It’s… intense. This is the first experimental record in Björk’s career which in this case means you get pretty dark, gothic, noisy post-punk with strong krautrock and acid jazz influences. The sound is quite awesome, and, although many reviewers compare it to Siouxsie and the Banshees, and it IS a fair comparison, I’d say KUKL have their own distinct face. This isn’t standard gothic rock by any means, what with all flutes, pipes, bells and even an occasional trumpet, as well as proggy passages and insane rhythmic patterns. Björk is ecstatic as always but something tells me this record doesn’t make full use of her vocal capabilities - at times she even sounds intensely restrained. The production values, though some levels above Tappi Tíkarrass’s, still leave a lot to be desired. And, sadly, so does the songwriting - I struggle hard to remember at least a single track from here in my head even after several consecutive listens.
But this is still something, at times this music sounds almost cosmic; not to mention that it’s Björk’s first truly ambitious, truly creative and innovative effort, which won’t be to everyone’s taste but lovers of dark, frantic, brooding post-punk will appreciate it. Also, David Tibet rated it 5/5! Now that should tell something about it to all of you avant-garde aficionados out there. Cheers!
Aaaand… Here’s where the fun begins. After meddling with some teenage pop punk and jazz fusion bands the 17-year old Björk teams up with bassist Jakob Magnússon to form Tappi Tíkarrass which roughly translates as “Cork the Bitch’s Ass” from Icelandic. Yep, that is their name. Cork. The Bitch’s. Ass. And the music lives up to this amazing title! Well, almost. Anyway, after a debut EP they release their first (and only) LP called Miranda which is enough to cork the ass of anyone who claims Björk has no talent. Seriously, this album rules! It isn’t amazing or groundbreaking or even innovative to any degree but damn me if this isn’t good! A collection of catchy, angry, energetic, melodic, new wavish post-punk (or postpunkish new wave, whatever) songs recorded with low production values (which basically amount to some distortion and echo effects here and there) and it’s all very, very enjoyable. Sometimes these guys sound like Talking Heads, sometimes like The Smiths, often a bit like The Fall or Gang of Four; there are also a couple of guitar ballads thrown in for good measure - in short, there’s a melting pot of cool influences on display but Tappi Tíkarrass hold their own. However, frankly they would still be good but wouldn’t be anything special at all without our future Icelandic diva - currently a boisterous teenager - on vocals. She nails pretty much every song and brings tons of charisma and attitude to the whole thing. This is her true arrival as a musical wonder, and it is on this album that you can already see how she would become a unique artist she is nowadays. Find this album and hear it - while it isn’t at all essential Björk listening, it’s very enjoyable and deserves way more recognition than it has. Good stuff.
Before becoming a household name, Björk Guðmundsdóttir was a young Icelandic prodigy who learned to sing and play the piano and the flute at a young age and was naturally noticed by music producers of that small country when she was just entering her teens. The result was this little curiosity that only Björk completists and hardcore fans would now be interested in. What can I say about this album? It’s cute and totally inoffensive, and it’s precisely what you’d expect from a fairly talented 11-year old girl surrounded by fairly greedy producers, arrangers and managers. Pretty little songs with disco-ish beats and pedestrian instrumentation, three of them composed by Björk herself, the rest by some other (very mediocre) Icelandic composers, neither of these songs being terrible but all pretty unmemorable and performed in a perfectly childish voice. The two covers - Stevie Wonder’s Your Kiss Is Sweet and The Beatles' The Fool on the Hill add nothing to their respective originals except for the fact that both songs are translated to Icelandic. There is one instrumental track (which is also boring but at least performed by Björk herself on the recorder). And not a single hint at the great things to come, except maybe for a fairly experimental sitar opening of the album. Well… I guess it’s no wonder she named her 1993 album Debut, as if to insist that this ACTUAL first solo effort never happened. But let’s not be too harsh, she was 11 for Chrissake. The good stuff is ahead, so keep following my Björk reviews (in which I’ll also try to review every band she ever was in)!
Review by: Dinar Khayrutdinov Album assigned by: Joseph Middleton-Welling
I have to start this review with a confession. I tried to crack this album for years and was never really able to get into it. I forever memorized Robert Wyatt’s Rock Bottom as an absolutely murky, depressing, tuneless and joyless experience, made even worse by some really pretentious atonal experimental instrumentation and very weird singing. God knows I had tried my best to appreciate this music – for instance, I read up on it, learned the background. You probably all know that story: former Soft Machine drummer Robert Wyatt fell from a third-floor window and was rendered paraplegic by the incident. When he almost gave up on life while staying in hospital, he decided to write and record this album. And I thought the album felt… exactly like something recorded by a man who just gave up on life. It felt hopeless to me. It literally was rock bottom. I could find no pleasure or aesthetic satisfaction found from listening to it. That was what I felt about this record some time ago.
But then I was assigned it in the reviewing game. That meant I had to listen to it again (oh God! no! fuck! not again! please!), but it also meant I could try and look at it from a different angle. Which I did. And maybe I could also try to re-evaluate this album and finally find good things in it. Which, can you believe it, I also did.
Rock Bottom is indeed a difficult listening experience but everything kind of comes together when you understand that murky, depressing and uneasy is exactly what this album is supposed to sound like. The title and the water-themed album sleeve are not coincidental either – the record does feel like drowning under water with next to no hope of coming to the surface. This IS an album about pain and suffering – and very genuine pain and suffering at that. But I also discovered one more thing when revisiting Rock Bottom: there IS hope amidst all this depressing stuff. And when you finally notice these glimpses (or even flashes) of hope, you also start noticing that this album does have place for some love poetry (some of the songs are dedicated to Wyatt’s wife), some cool jazzy sax solos, some legitimately great musicianship and even some humourous and silly moments (I have learnt to especially enjoy Ivor Cutler’s nonsensical poem recital with a funny exaggerated accent in Little Red Robin Hood Hit the Road)! At some point I simply understood that, even if still I don’t really enjoy this record that much, at least it’s nothing like anything else I have ever heard. It’s absolutely unique, and that probably is where its brilliance lies. As for the musical enjoyment part, well… I guess it is a matter of taste.
It is also highly possible that all music is purely a matter of taste and our appreciation of it depends on our background, current mood and other insubstantial factors. So try and listen to Rock Bottom. Maybe you’ll love it at once and it’ll become one of your favourite albums. Or maybe you’ll hate it at once, turn it off and forget about it forever. Or maybe you’ll just feel indifferent. But I still urge you to give this record a chance. It might take a lot of patience, but with some effort you can learn to at least respect this music, like I did.
Review by: Dinar Khayrutdinov Album assigned by: Michael Strait
There once was a rapper named Cudi
Who thought he could move everybody
By singing his pain
In the wake of Cobain –
His brain must have gone a bit muddy.
How do you make a grunge album in the 2010s?
Acclaimed recording artist Kid Cudi has the answer! You know guys, this must seem like a revelation to you, but doing grunge is actually easy. You take a very badly tuned guitar (because grunge is basically modified punk rock, right?) and just thumb the fuck out of it while doing an imitation of heavily autotuned Eddie Vedder with your voice. Because that is what grunge is all about! That and the yelling. You have to yell a lot to be a believable grunge artist, Kid Cudi knows that. When you can’t yell, simply roar, moan or make humming noises. Show them how your teen spirit smells, you know?
Next, be sure to pay enough attention to the lyrics. Grunge is supposed to be edgy, right? You really have to show how thoroughly depressed, dark and brooding you are. So be sure to include win-win phrases like “I am losing it”, “dumb punk loser”, “fall in the void”, “everything and everyone sucks”, “one last fuck you to the world”, etc. The more you mention wishing to die, the better. Let the world feel your agony by literally describing it!
Yeah, and also, grunge is the NINETIES thing, right? So you gotta bring up the one thing that symbolizes the nineties the most, which of course is… the Beavis and Butt-Head skits! These guys are sure to underline the edginess of your creation AND entertain your audience at the same time! I mean, come on, you can never go wrong with the old Beavis and Butt-Head, right? It’s also pretty cool to have them mention explicitly what great artist you are and how well you handle grunge’s raw emotion… thing. Or whatever it’s called. Let subtlety be your best friend!
And after one hour of all this awesomeness, when your listeners are practically writhing in ecstasy and screaming in delight, BRING DISC TWO ON THEM! Fill it with acoustic demos of more incredible songs. Cause that is exactly what they wanna hear, right? It’s grunge, so it should be raw, okay? Raw emotion, acoustic songs, studio noise - it’s all good, cause they will get to see all of your multiple sides as an artist at once.
And that, my friends, was the recipe of a masterpiece. Right? Right?
WRONG!!! WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!!! FUUUUCK YOU KID CUDI WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING??? AAAARGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
AAARGH!!!
This. Was. Horrible. Atrocious. Abominable. Outstandingly bad.
I literally have nothing more to say. End of review. I hope to never hear this album again. You might wanna take a listen out of sheer curiosity of course, because this amazingly low level of quality is a truly rare thing. But proceed at your own risk. I almost died while making my way through this shit.
Review by: Charly Saenz Album assigned by: Dinar Khayrutdinov
Funny how commercial music can be totally impervious to their original country's culture. Or anything else for the matter. This music could have been made in Buenos Aires, Madrid or in Seattle, but well, the girls come from Russia (except Lena, the bass player who's from Poland: enough with the trivia).
They are bold enough to play a total “Satisfaction” ripoff in "Naslazhdajsja". Girls don't sing bad when they don't sing like a Powerpuff Army (chorus in "Mal'chishki - Kadety") and they don't scream (first track); in that case they are sound like my neighbour's wife when he doesn't cut the grass on sundays. These are efficient bubble-pop-fake-rockers, I guess. "Ej Ne Do Sna" stands out a little, with some interesting riff (only heard half of it but it was good). There are some ballads as expected. Not sure why "Serdce Ne Spit" has a slightly Brazilian vibe: does not work.
"Alisa" is .. Rock and roll. It made me laugh out loud. Almost to the brink of tears.
God this is a bit painful (I don't recommend to buy the album on vinyl) but Cheyenne is still way worse! By now the girls are older, let's hope they're moving to singer-songwriter stuff, we still need a new Joni Mitchell. Or Four!
Review by: Dinar Khayrutdinov Album assigned by: Roland Bruynesteyn
Ah, 1970! Right in the middle of the golden age of rock music, amidst such epically successful records like Paranoid, After the Gold Rush, Led Zeppelin III or Cosmo’s Factory, comes this effort by initially little-known singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez. Who is this Detroit-born Mexican-American with cool shades and a weird first name (given to him because he was the sixth child in his family)? Is he another Dylan-Donovan-Cat Stevens rip-off or the great forgotten hero of the hippie generation, overlooked in every country but South Africa and Australia? Yeah I’m serious, look it up if you don’t believe me – in South Africa they even thought he was dead at some point, with his fans considering him a great tragic artist akin to Morrison or Hendrix. Then a couple of decades later they found out he was alive and revived his career, but that’s another story… So who is this Sugar Man of rock music after all?
It turns out that he is just a very good songwriter and a pretty idiosyncratic singer who was merely unlucky to finish his recording career too early (after exactly two albums). Cold Fact is his debut and frankly it doesn’t feel much like a debut album – Rodriguez appears here already as an accomplished musician who has enough great material for a brilliant 30+ minutes LP.
And it is partly true as well – he polished his songs by performing them in bars and clubs for several years before releasing this album, so Cold Fact is a result of a lot of hard work that somehow still feels almost effortless. Of course, “Sugar Man” is his calling card, his most famous and memorable song, but this is not the case of Bowie’s “Space Oddity” at all, because the other tracks are in fact worthy of your attention as well. My particular favourites include the raunchy guitar-driven “Only Good for Conversation”, the lyrically bitter “Hate Street Dialogue” and the light-heartedly melodic “I Wonder”. I would also love to praise the hell out of playing and singing but I’m afraid this review will get overlong and boring if I start describing it in too much detail. So I’ll just say that the eclectic instrumentation is a delight to my ears, and Sixto’s singing breathes personality and gives off a shining charisma – I mean you can actually FEEL what kind of a man he is merely from the way he delivers these verses. He’s obviously a swell guy, this Rodriguez, though slightly disillusioned by the world around him. And have I already mentioned his cool shades? Well they are cool enough to mention them twice, and when you hear these songs you can almost see them in front of your eyes. And that calm and collected fella behind them, too.
So, long story short, this album rules, it might actually become one of my favourite albums of 1970. That’s a cold fact for you. Take care.
A YEAR IN MUSIC: 1982 Review by: Dinar Khayrutdinov
I LOVE Kate Bush. She is a unique artist that balances experimental approach and true talent with accessibility and pop hooks so well that I truly think all of her albums can be enjoyed by most music lovers. However, The Dreaming is still a very special offering in Kate’s catalogue, because this is where she REALLY sets her creativity and her typical brand of weirdness loose. So yes, this record definitely leans towards Kate’s experimental side, and that’s exactly what I love about it!
To be fair, “experimental” isn’t really the word here. This is still Kate Bush, not Nurse with Wound or Captain Beefheart or something. So most of the songs stay within “normal” and accessible melodic frames, except of course only Kate could actually come up with THESE melodies: they are perfectly accessible, but they are… unconventional, to put it mildly. On this album you really get the feeling she had a ton fun with them, letting herself do whatever she wanted.
Kate’s vocal range is another thing that’s totally let loose – hear that woman scream, pant, harmonize, sing in her normal voice, sing in an exaggerated theatrical manner, sing in a high-pitched voice, sing in a comically low “baritone”, whisper, record her vocals backwards and so on, and so on – sometimes within the same song!
The instruments and arrangements are VERY unpredictable too – sometimes you suddenly hear synths coming out of nowhere, sometimes gorgeous strings appear, or scary basslines, or murky percussion, or Irish violins, or a pounding drum-machine – welcome to Kate Bush’s flying circus!
Overall, this album is nowhere near as balanced and thought-through as Hounds of Love, not at all as melodic as The Kick Inside, not as mysteriously romantic as Never for Ever and not as… well, as sensual as The Sensual World. Instead, this is Kate’s “crazy” album, where you get all her split personalities at once in one package. That alone, for me, is worth naming this my favourite album of 1982.
I was teen-ager too, you know. And pagers were truly hip for a while but the world has changed so drastically since the time I went to school and was vaguely aware of that thing called "hip hop" (I knew it involved baggy pants) that I am not even sure it happened in the same life anymore. So I listen to this Tribe called Quest in hopes to get, you know, reminded of the glorious 90s. Or possibly even understand what was happening in the world when I was too young to understand anything.
A Tribe Called Quest are cool. They have a really cool name. They have cool verses. They have cool beats. They have a cool flow. They fuse jazz atmosphere with hip-hop attitude in a real cool way, if you are to believe the allmusic take on this record. They are just all-around cool.
So remember that comment about baggy pants before? Yeah, most of my peers grew on diet export hip-hop and some local examples. I kinda didn't. I didn't even suspect it qualified as music. I thought it was just for the kids with baggy pants who wanna act tough, yo! So in a way it is delightful for me to hear just how cool and even demanding respect a bunch of former teenagers without pagers can actually get.
What I am trying to say is that you can treat this record as a cool backdrop for your evening, something to jam to or even treat it as a research-worthy artefact of another time (and in my case another culture). If you want a more insightful take, I suggest you go read yourself some real reviews but really, why on earth would you reading about this thing instead of listening to it? The product is dope, I promise.
[Note: This album was assigned to me way back in February because I betted incorrectly that Leo will get no Oscar this year either]
Review by: Julien Mansencal Album assigned by: Dinar Khayrutdinov
Despite being French, I had never listened to anything by Daft Punk up to this point. I tend to shy away from massively popular stuff, including but not limited to music, and they were no exception. Still, Random Access Memories was already lurking on the fringes of my list of things to discover, if only because it features Paul Williams on one track and I love this guy. (And it makes me realize just now that his own “Just an Old-Fashioned Love Song” would have fitted the nostalgia theme to a tee. Shame I didn’t think about that before.)
Anyway, it was a bit of a lie to say that I had never listened to Daft Punk before. Of course it was completely impossible to avoid “Get Lucky” in 2013, and deservedly so: it is a brilliant slice of disco and hearing it once is enough to remember it for years to come. I knew I should expect more of the same retro vibe throughout the record, and it was indeed there: lots of crisp funky bass and vibrant piano lines; an aural paradise. The songs themselves are rather more complex than I’d expected, many of them have several parts and sometimes they don't fit together extremely well. “Touch” suffers a bit from that, but Paul Williams’ vocal helps giving it a sense of unity. On the other hand, “Giorgio by Moroder” does not seem as well-constructed to me, and listening to Moroder’s life story may be interesting once, but it gets boring after a while. The only part I’m not too fond of is in fact the vocals: apart from the featurings, they are Vocoderized all the way and it just kills the mood for me.
However, that’s not the main downside of the album. Its main problem is that everything goes on for too long: my attention keeps drifting away within some songs and I have trouble listening to the whole thing in one continuous sitting. Most of the time, once “Get Lucky” is done I could just as well turn off the sound; especially since the following track opens with a bombasting violin intro that’s so ridiculously over-the-top that even Jeff Lynne would think twice before putting it on an ELO record. Actually, that’s too bad since the following following track, “Motherboard”, is a gorgeous instrumental featuring an instrument called “Crystal Baschet” that sounds marvellous. The entire record is peppered with ideas that are just as interesting, but it’s just not enough to keep my attention focused for 75 minutes.
Still, overall Random Access Memories deserves a thumbs up, I think. The whole “funk revival” thing works quite well, apart from the robotic vocals. I don’t think I’ll put it on too often, but I won’t say no to one song from time to time. If I want to get my mojo working, I’ll still rather put on Sexuality by Sébastien Tellier; I think he channels better the Sleazy Seventies than Daft Punk do.
Review by: Dinar Khayrutdinov Album assigned by: Roland Bruynesteyn
Ketil Bjørnstad is a classically trained Norwegian pianist and composer who is one of those artists who recorded most of their output on the well-known ECM label which basically means it’s going to be some middle ground between jazz, modern classical and new-age. Interestingly enough, the album in question – Seafarer’s Song – was released on a different label (EmArcy) but it is still an ECM album in essence.
Due to the shortage of time I’m experiencing at this point of my life I’ll have to keep this review brief and basically break it down to certain thoughts that came to my mind when I heard this record:
1) It definitely requires the listener to be in a certain mood that is pretty nicely summed up by the album cover art – that of a vast and fairly peaceful sea expanse, but with heavy clouds above it and a slight rain falling on its surface. It’s a seafarer’s song indeed, mostly elegiac and longing but occasionally changing to more energetic and resolute.
2) To properly enjoy Seafarer’s Song you’d have to appreciate Kristin Asbjørnsen’s slightly gruff vocals which I do not. In fact I think that this album would be truly great if it were purely instrumental. The unique combination of the piano, cello, electric guitar and occasional mournful trumpet is pretty amazing and creates a very specific mood (see p. 1). The vocals do nothing for me though, unfortunately.
3) The album is labeled jazz, but in fact it has little to do with jazz – it does not sound like it was improvised and does not feature many dissonant chords, saxophone solos or anything like that. Some instrumental passages do feel jazzy, but saying that this is a jazz album means missing the point of the record entirely. In fact, here is a nominally “highbrow” record that can be perfectly enjoyed by classic rock lovers. It actually consists of rather conventional songs (most of them slow and melancholic), which is its strength and weakness at the same time. If you’re in the mood for this you’ll probably enjoy it, but if you’re not this can get boring as hell.
4) It slightly grew on me after repeated listens (I even got used to the vocals) and I actually wouldn’t be surprised if I felt an urge to return to this sometime in the future. No regrets on hearing this overall, good stuff.
It’s awfully weird listening to a dead man’s sex tape. On top of that, it’s weirder that this dead guy doesn’t have just one sex tape. He has over 55. All of which are graphic in their own way. Whether that way is wonderful or not depends on just how saucy you might be feeling this particular evening. I recommend you feel at least a Ragu before continuing.
Now, I’m assuming that everyone knows just who and what Prince (or whatever you want to fucking call him at this point) is. But in case you don’t know who he is, this is the lowdown:
Prince, born (and presumably died) Prince Rogers Nelson, is effectively the epitome of sex and all sexual things. For all intents and purposes, sex did not exist until the face of this grey Earth was graced with his time here, and we reproduced as if we were some sort of amoebous mass of glop previously. Although his first album, For You, didn’t exactly lead to him exploding onto the scene-it was more a dribble-he was able to cream the r&b/funk/soul/whatever you want to call his music scene with his sophomore self-titled effort. At this point the tale becomes too nuanced for me to really care to tell you what happened, so I’ll skip to the record in question.
Okay, so the album here is N.E.W.S., which stands for North East West South, and, although this album’s cover features the planet Earth, there are no environmental undertones to be found. In fact, this album is entirely instrumental. Also, it is his lowest selling album ever (approximately 30,000 copies sold). Also, there’s the greatest invention in the entire existence of the human race making great features all throughout the album: low quality midi instruments. With all these factors, it just sounds like a total crapshoot, right?
Funnily enough, this album isn’t as much of a crapshoot as you might think. Given, it isn’t the best thing since sliced bread, but it certainly isn’t awful. A big part of the reason behind why this album didn’t sell particularly well is because it is an instrumental record, and who wants to buy a record by a sex god if he doesn’t even vocalize himself in the bed of the music? Certainly not most people. Who wants to bed down for an hour with someone who doesn’t even make a sound, even if they finish?
All joking aside, the real problem is the quality of the instrumentals. In fits and starts, there are quite excellent moments instrumentally. It’s an early 2000s record (specifically 2003), and surprisingly it has the sort of uncomfortable production style I find common with most artists from the era, as if they aren’t quite sure where to go and put it in (the production, that is). So seeing Prince hit this trapfall is not a very good sign for the record at all. The atmospherics on the songs are good, they have a weird iciness to them, which is especially prevalent on the first track, “North.” The instrumentals range from sex music to really interesting atonal jazz fusion breakdowns to really cool and funky jams to more sex music. Now, on those atonal fusion bits, they’re not technically “atonal,” but I don’t want to get into theory discussion very much.
Basically the largest problem with this album is that it’s instrumental. Now, when it gets really interesting and mixed up in those instrumentals, as with the groovefests and the atonal jazz breakdowns, it’s really engaging. But so much of it is just a shitty porn soundtrack, honestly I swear I’ve heard excerpts from these songs before. And no, you can’t ask where and why, I discussed that the last time I reviewed something and it did not exactly go over very well.
Honestly, the worst part of the album is the fact that at points, it is REALLY fucking good! It’s got absolutely stellar musicianship and really can groove as intensely as Prince is known to be able to. But the droll sections of the album (a majority) fall that much harder because of it. It’s more than a little irritating to have some cool groove to become overwashed with those early aughts synths and have it return to the shitty porn soundtrack it-for some reason-so badly wants to be. This weird drift from sublime to subpar leads the album to be more than just a bland disappointment and it becomes just plain bad.
So is it worth actually listening to? I mean, for completists, of course it is. And for those who are willing to give it a good honest chance because “maybe it’s not as bad as he says it is.” Or of course maybe you, the reader, have quite the affinity for porn soundtracks. Or maybe you are so tantalized by the concept of fusion jazz that you are willing to sit through ANYTHING to get another taste.
Otherwise, stay away.
Best track: I’m not listing out different timestamps for the goddamn songs.
Am I always glad to spend some more time in the philosophical company of the only Russian musician we have heard of on this blog - namely the great otherworldly bearded bardic guru Boris Borisovich Grebenshchikov. He certainly wasn't always bearded though and while I have no idea what the progress of his facial hair was by 1995, which is when Navigator got released, what I do know is that after the fall of the Berlin wall, Mr. Grebenshchikov had also already tried to use this new opportunity to export his creative efforts to the West. Here, Wikipedia tells us that he didn't quite make it and this could be partly attributed to the fact that Russian song tradition emphasizes lyrical complexity over hook and drive, which in the West earned him comparisons to Dylan and not much chart success, and I think it wouldn't be a stretch to imagine that his music was considered for one of the two primordial categories (has hooks: "ooh, Beatle-esque pop!!" vs. has an emphasis on lyrical content: "ooh, Dylan!!!"), as you do, in musical critique, with anything that is new.
Saddened with this new development, Mr. Grebenshchikov decided to go full-on Russian apparently and released the so-called Russian Album, a beautiful acoustic folk-rock affair that relies even more on Russian songwriting tradition, and later, in 1995 came Navigator, which continued in this unmistakably Russian bardic vein with some French chanson flavour and bluesy touches (fourth track “Не коси”'s blues guitar contributed by Mick Taylor stands out here) for good measure. The album was recorded in London, so it also featured contributions by Dave Pegg on the double bass and Dave Mattacks on drums. And since it made use of a bunch of additional instruments: strings, flute, recorder, harpsicord, accordion, mandolin, Tibetan drums, I was curious to look to a previous eclectic Aquarium effort, and nothing spells eclecticism quite like a Russian album named Radio Africa with some Chinese characters plastered on top of a photo taken at the Gulf of Finland, for comparison. While on 1988's Radio Africa the creative use of the additional instruments to drive the beat or make the texture of the music more complex can rock your socks off with delight, here on Navigator these instruments serve more of a background atmosphere role because it is the bardic narration that takes the front and centre. This is especially so on the title track “Навигатор”, which can really be used as a textbook example of a touching bardic ballad. Well, if you are touched by this type of thing, anyway.
And for all the talk of Dylan, I think that namedropping Mark Knopfler would also not be too out of reach here because didn't Mr. Knopfler also have a reputation for being a young man who writes good music for old people? (at around 40 at the time of Navigator’s release, Mr. Grebenshchikov was not even eligible for a midlife crisis yet). But more importantly, I feel that both Mr. Knopfler and Mr. Grebenshchikov have been able to pull of songs that are pretty much driven by a lyrical narration and have a comforting melancholy sound with remarkable ease. However, while the majority of Mark Knopfler’s narrations are concerned with ordinary life drama, with most of Boris Grebenshchikov’s composition aspire to levels of Byronic spleen and irony paired with incredible erudition, a combination that has over the years become somewhat of a staple for the model tortured soviet artist (and while soviet times are safely behind us, such artistic types still hang around, inexplicably, mostly in the sphere of fine arts and film education, proudly passing this refined tradition onto their students). Still, Boris Grebenshchikov was made to pull this archetype off and make it very likeable: let’s not forget his friendly melancholy voice of ancient wisdom, talent for lyrical detail and the aforementioned erudition that allows him to slip in the occasional religious or mythological detail for full impact. It is really comforting in a sense when he tackles this aesthetic in his music, and whatever the wry commentary in a particular song might be, you’d accept it with the “I know what you’re talking about” reserved for your closest friends with which you’ve suffered the blows of fate together for God knows how long… yeah, the 90s weren’t the most cheerful of eras in Eastern Europe.
Anyway, Navigator is a fine record put together with loving care and intelligence, featuring no less than two accordion-driven waltzy numbers, two bluesy tracks, a rousing folk epic (track 3 – “Кладбище”) and a whole lot of gentle intimate singing in the finest Russian bardic tradition. The reaction it got out of me was “aww, how cute and so very admirably authentic” but it might get some even more cathartic reactions from other listeners and truly cement Boris Borisovich Grebenshchikov's status of everyone’s favourite great otherworldly bearded bardic guru.
Review by: Dinar Khayrutdinov Album assigned by: Syd Spence
It’s 1972, and an Australian band called The Master’s Apprentices fully justifies its name by releasing this album that sounds like a bit of everything from that era – a bit of prog, a bit of hard-rock, a bit of folk-pop, a bit of late 60s psychedelia… Atomic Rooster meets Black Sabbath meets Caravan meets Blue Oyster Cult? Yes, that would pretty much sum up what A Toast to Panama Red sounds like. Don’t get me wrong – these guys were obviously talented and could even come up with some catchy hooks (the chanting coda that closes “Beneath the Sun”), some cool hard-rock riffs (“The Lesson So Listen”), several fine bluesy guitar solos (“Southern Cross”), some “medieval-style” acoustic strumming here and there, plus they could definitely play their instruments really well, but… There is still something missing in all of this, and this something is called originality.
Indeed, there are few things on this album that you haven’t heard before if you’re familiar enough with all the rock and prog classics from the 1967-1972 era. It is pretty much the definition of “by the book” hard/prog rock. The worst offenders are, of course, passages that bear a bit too much resemblance to Black Sabbath (see the beginning of “Games We Play I”). Other tracks – such as “Melodies of St. Kilda” may not strike you as much with “this is clearly a rip-off of this” kind of feeling, but instead they sound like a bunch of influences thrown in a melting pot with only a half-assed attempt at weaving them together into actual songs.
Yeah, songwriting is another weak point of the album, as most of these tracks feel half-baked, and the sudden instrumental solos in the middle of the songs certainly don’t help – they are good on their own but they break the flow of these songs, ultimately messing them up and leading them nowhere.
However, this isn’t such a murky mess of an album as my above evaluation of it would make you believe. There are still a couple of good songs – the ones where everything worked, seemingly against the odds. “Love Is” is a great psychedelic anthem that’s catchy, memorable, well-constructed and bombastic without being too cheesy. The background horns appearing in the chorus midway through the song are a very nice touch, too. Another one that really worked for me was the album closer – “Thyme to Rhyme”. This one is all about production – that amazing acoustic guitar tone and all the bleeping and whistling sounds in the background create a unique psychedelic atmosphere. These two songs are where the Apprentices become the Masters for a short while, and, of course, if the whole album was like this, it would be a great lost gem of the classic rock era. As it is, though, it’s a very flawed and rather derivative but occasionally interesting historic artifact.
P.S.: After completing this review, I look at the title of the album again and realize that they are saluting to a cultivar of cannabis… HEY, MAYBE THAT IS THE KEY TO ENJOYING THIS RECORD! I guess I’ll have to get some hemp then, and listen again, and write a proper review... See you then, I guess.
By Fahad Khan, Dinar Khayrutdinov and Roland Bruynesteyn
Fahad Khan
One of the hardest things to writing about Prince’s music is in knowing just where to start, after all, the fecundity of the man’s creative faculties can very often leave you at a loss: I can’t tell you how hard it’s been to try and describe his music, and the effect that it’s had on me, in the space of just a few paragraphs here. The purple one’s talents, extravagant as they were, tended to manifest themselves as a super-abundance, not only in terms of the prolific nature of his output -- and in later years, or so it’s claimed, he suffered from an inability to edit himself, his compulsion to producing music far overtaking his judgement and paralysing his sense of quality control -- but also in terms of the multiplicity and diversity of the sources of his inspiration, all of which he managed to yoke together to make a seamless whole. You see, the man had a fantastic disregard for the whole plethora of conventions and (binary) norms that had grown up around popular music in the post war era -- with the boundaries between different genres like soul, funk, rock, jazz, and the blues, with what is white music and what is black music, essentially -- but not just: he also was more than happy to play around with racial and sexual preconceptions and fixed notions as well (which open mindedness around sex he was later to repudiate almost totally after becoming a Jehovah’s Witness). Those types of rules and conventions were all well and fine, insofar as they enabled lesser mortals to orient themselves this hostile, essentially alien existence of ours, but for Prince they just got in the way of his muse.
At the end of the day, Prince’s genius -- what it was that lifted his status as a musician a rank above that of the merely outrageously talented -- lay in his ability to make it all look so ridiculously easy, that musical high-wire act of his, like complete child’s play in fact. The fact is that regardless of just how far Prince may have pushing the envelope from a musicological point of view, he was still composing pop music: and pop music which the wider public consumed rapturously in its millions. That singular and prodigious gift of his would lead him on to release a series of dazzling pop masterpieces that not only allowed him to dominate the mainstream musical scene of the 80s -- and in this his only real peers back then were Madonna and Michael Jackson, neither of whom had anything even distantly approaching Prince’s musical chops -- but he also made drooling fanboys out of serious music critics and pop culture intellectuals too and won him the acclaim of chin stroking musos everywhere.
Listening to some of Prince’s best stuff now, you want to ask yourself why it still sounds so vital and urgent, why it is that more than 30 years on it still sounds so fucking futuristic? Prince may have prematurely ended his earthly (purple) reign but the freshness and vibrancy of his music is undimmed and testament to the vigor and intensity of his talent.
Starfish and Coffee
Prince’s genius at its most effortless. ‘Starfish and Coffee’ is brittle and shiny and achingly soulful all at the same time: a joyous ode to non-conformity, eccentricity, and the spiritual necessity of embracing otherness, it represents just one of the numerous career highlights that Prince’s legendary double album, ‘Sign O’ the Times’, has to offer -- standing for the moment in his career where his manic prolificacy managed to temporally attain a state of complete and perfect equilibrium with his extraordinary pop nous. The brief trrrrrrrrrrrrrrilling of the alarm clock immediately sets the scene and you’re back in the schoolyard, ready to go off and pull some wee girl’s hair. Prince, sincere and wide eyed, is completely at his ease in this adolescent milieu. The vulnerability in his voice, the delicacy and the tenderness of sentiment, are accentuated by the repetition of the bluesy piano figure and the whooshing backward-drums, the backward rush of nostalgia.
Let’s Go Crazy
The opening song to what everyone says is Prince’s greatest album -- and for once everyone is completely right -- Purple Rain's mushrooming reputation allowed it very quickly to outgrow its original, slightly utilitarian, status as the soundtrack to a fairly dull and unremarkable film. ‘Let’s Go Crazy’, an electrified fusion of gospel, rock, blues and soul, serves as the perfect entrée to this revolutionary suite of songs dedicated to the redemptive power of sex and sex and rock and roll (yeah you read the right, the drink and the drugs, it seems, were completely out of the picture). Make no mistake Let's Go Crazy is a call to arms: it’s all about sensuality and the libido as a means to personal and social liberation, or at least that was the thinking way back then. That kind of utopianism never lasts long anyway, but the music and the art endures. Really I could have picked almost any song from the album as one of my six, since Purple Rain has a pretty much peerless selection (Take Me With You, Darling Nikki, When Doves Cry). In the end though, Let's Go Crazy wins just because, being the first song on the first Prince album I ever bought, it was the beginning to my appreciation of the great man.
Kiss
Kiss manages to be simultaneously the cutting edge of funk, the cutting edge of soul, and the cutting edge of rock -- not bad for what is, in the end, really ‘just’ a pop song. Kiss’s jagged, juddering Princely minimalism sounds like a reinvigoration, or better still a purification, pop music pared down to its most ritualistic -- that little judder you hear repeated throughout the song is the shudder of orgasm. Sparse in its instrumentation but utterly impeccable in its elegance and urbanity. Because it’s one thing the irresistible momentum and poise of the rhythm, but Kiss also gives you Prince’s voice at its most delicate and seductive, that quiet serenade, scarcely more powerful than a breath and delivered with an remarkable degree of intimacy.
Alphabet Street
A perfect example of Prince’s all out fearlessness (not to speak of all out freshness) when it came to putting his songs together. The rhythm is breathtaking in its audacity, and the guitar line, especially, is off the scale: play this song a few times on a loop a few times just to get the full how in the fuck did he think of that effect. And best of all, as the engorged, horny pony squeal that kicks off the song testifies, it’s remarkably perverted too, even for Prince -- in the most wholesomely hedonistic sense of the word of course. I mean, come on, how often do you see such flamboyance and charisma wedded to such jaw dropping musical virtuosity? The occasions are few and far between, although Hendrix comes most readily to mind. If the true genius of pop is to teach you to never ever settle for the mediocre, the commonplace, then Alphabet Street is shockingly, disarmingly effective.
Raspberry Beret
An all conquering, stomping, candy pop juggernaut of a song. Raspberry Beret wins you over right from the very first pulse beat of the intro, and from then it doesn’t take long for the song to finally explode into full iridescent life, transitioning into the aural equivalent of a peacock’s train. Although it’s driven on by the urgency of lust and an all-embracing hunger for sensory pleasure, Raspberry Beret’s core is a bittersweet one: pangs of tenderness and nostalgia and perhaps also that thing called regret, an acknowledgement that the hunt after novelty comes at the expense of having to always start over again.
Diamonds and Pearls
I went for one of Prince’s dreamiest, most gorgeous ballads as my final choice. To hear people talk sometimes you’d think that Prince was some kind of debauched idiot savant completely out of touch with everyday reality: that he was only capable of dealing in the most far out and deviant feelings and emotions. And it’s true that he did sing about those quite often, but he sung about normal stuff too, even if it was often in the most special way. In Diamonds and Pearls he takes on the role of indigent lover, unable to offer his beloved anything beyond the purity of his devotion and his promises for the future; strange that one of his most magical, sumptuous songs came with such an ostensibly humble message.
Dinar Khayrutdinov
Prince is quite possibly one of the most underrated artists in pop music. A great songwriter, an amazing multi-instrumentalist musician, an unbelievably productive entertainer, a fantastic singer and a godlike guitar player. He is often compared to Michael Jackson and I do see some grounds for that; however, a much better comparison would be David Bowie or Jimi Hendrix. Though he made unquestionably mainstream music, Prince rarely followed trends, instead preferring to set them for other artists to follow. His absolutely unique music blended R’n’B, funk, synth-pop, soul, rock and blues in a way nobody had ever tried to blend these genres before. Not to mention that he was so musically talented that he would often record albums ALL BY HIMSELF, by literally playing every fucking instrument available. Frankly, Prince is just so HUGE that for a long time I did not know how to approach this review at all, let alone single out six (only six!) songs out of his enormous catalogue (which I haven’t even yet heard in its entirety).
But anyway, here is my humble take on Prince's career (mostly the 80s part of it) in the form of my top 6 Prince songs. Mind you, I had to limit myself to not more than one song per album, otherwise I would have never been able to do this. And I also allowed myself to cheat just very slightly and in each case name several other tracks I like from the albums I mention. I can’t resist it, sorry, I just love the man’s music so much.
6. Dance On (Lovesexy, 1988)
This song amazes me just for the sheer amount of things going on in it – all the insanely weird sounds, changes of melody, complex drumming and production gimmicks that make your head twirl when you listen to this. It is sort of industrial rock meets dance pop, if you can actually imagine such a thing. The evil menacing synth riff suddenly turns into shiny poppy chorus, then back to menacing grinding, then turns into a whirlwind of sounds. It’s absolutely crazy but it somehow works for me. Other highlights of the album: “Eye No”, “Alphabet St.”, “Glam Slam”.
5. Slow Love (Sign o’ the Times, 1987)
This great soul ballad is my pick from Sign o’ the Times – the most epic of Prince’s releases. It’s rather conventional but it’s absolutely inspired and has tons of feeling. Love the vocals, love the jazzy horn section and the beautiful atmosphere. ‘Nuff said. Other highlights of the album: “Sign o’ the Times”, “Starfish and Coffee”, “Strange Relationship”, “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man”, “The Cross”, “Adore”.
4. Do It All Night (Dirty Mind, 1980)
Prince’s third album is arguably his first truly great one and very possibly his most groundbreaking album, because it was here that he introduced that classic ‘Minneapolis sound’ – Prince’s own brand of synth-heavy pop-funk with the amazing use of bass and occasional Satriani-like guitar soloing. This song is one of the best examples of this style, with an infectious synth riff that you won’t be able to get out of your head soon, a cool bass-driven rhythm, some soulful singing and of course Prince’s gloriously lewd lyrics. Other highlights of the album: “Dirty Mind”, “When You Were Mine”, “Uptown”.
3. Little Red Corvette (1999, 1982)
Pop, soul and funk are great, sure, but personally I am a rock guy. Did Prince have rock songs as well? Sure, and what rock songs! This amazing track from Prince’s first double album, 1999, is one of his (not so numerous) straightforward rock songs but GOD DOES IT DELIVER. The atmosphere, the imagery, the fantastic guitar tone, the wonderful double-entendre filled lyrics – and we have us an all-time classic. Not to mention that the guitar solo here is to die for – that part of it that starts at 1:55 is among my all-time favorite moments in the entire rock history. This is no joke. Amazing song, full of unmatched passion and pure sexual energy. Other highlights of the album: “1999”, “Let’s Pretend We’re Married”, “Lady Cab Driver”.
2. I Wanna Be Your Lover (Prince, 1979)
An early hit, but what a great one. This one is at the same time a heavenly pop song and a heavenly funk track (if you listen to the album version). It begins with some amazing synth/guitar interplay (again, good luck getting this hook out of your head) and exactly halfway through turns into a killer funk jam! Groovy as hell, the musicianship is a real highlight here. Play this song at a party and you get six minutes of fantastic dance music. Other highlights of the album: “Why You Wanna Treat Me So Bad?”, “Sexy Dancer”, “Bambi”.
1. Purple Rain (Purple Rain, 1984)
Whoa, the big one. Seriously – how could ANYTHING BUT this song take the No 1 spot? It might not be the most quintessential Prince song music-wise (cause it’s not funky), but it is an anthem to everything Prince stood for – sexual freedom, music, beauty and courage of being different. ‘Gorgeous’, ‘epic’, ‘majestic’, ‘transcendental’ are the words that don’t even begin to describe this song but that’s the closest I can come up with to what I feel when I hear it. It closes Prince’s greatest album on a triumphantly satisfying note. This is his “A Day in the Life”, his “Bohemian Rhapsody”, his “Stairway to Heaven”. His “Purple Rain”. Other highlights of the album: EVERYTHING on it, literally. “Purple Rain” is a perfect record if there ever was one.
Roland Bruynesteyn
Prince is to disco and funk what Steely Dan is to somewhat jazzy pop music:
intricate rhythm charts
somewhat sleezy lyrics
technical virtuosity by (all) musicians
revered by colleagues
writing, arranging, performing and production all done by the artist: independently pursuing his vision
a level of sophistication that makes for repeated listening, even if the actual melody seems perceptively simple on first hearing.
On top of that he’s an outstanding guitar player and he’s very productive. Whatever he sometimes lacks in quality control, he more than makes up for with the amount of good ideas and his sheer output of good dance pop that more or less defines the genre for the last thirty years.
Disco and funk is not my preferred genre, and one thing I don’t like about his music is his signature synthetic hand clap (to my ears even more annoying than the typical Phil Collins drum break in most of his hits from the 80’s and 90’s). Still, when he’s good, he’s very good. Parliament/Funkadelic mixed with Jimi Hendrix is one way of putting it, and it has been put like this often…. Although he peaked in the 80’s, most of his later work is interesting, if you allow for his chosen genre.
Temptation (Around the World in a Day, 1985)
Prince does blues! The handclaps and his singing may make you recognize it as a Prince song, but otherwise this is totally unlike him. Paradoxically, this goes for many of his album tracks, that often differ greatly from the hit singles. Ruining his vocal chords, driving bass, soaring guitar (and sax).
Sometimes it Snows in April (Parade, 1986)
You have to have a ballad in your list of great Prince songs, and it might as well be this one. Nice melody, great use of acoustic guitar and piano (always better in ballads I think) and stunning vocal delivery. It’s simple, comforting and sad in a not too depressing way. Try to listen to this somewhere, or rather buy the album. If you buy the cheap 5cd set (Original Album Series) you only need Sign o’ the times, and possibly Musicology as a later work.
I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man (Sign o’ the Times, 1987)
How could one not include a song from Sign o’ the Times, his early career high, and probably his White album in terms of variety in song writing. This song just sounds so happy and energetic, white at the same time somewhat sad, considering the theme. The song more or less condenses all the lyrics of all his songs in the whole of his career, set to a great tune and with great guitar work. After grudgingly admiring his singles off Purple rain, and much preferring him over Michael Jackson in the 80’s, this was the song that more or less made me a fan, or at least someone who followed his career. The album version has a long outro that shows his production skills and his guitar work.
Strollin’ > Willing and Able (Diamonds and Pearls, 1991)
These two songs again show his great command of different musical styles and his great arranging and production skills. Strolling is a romantic jazzy number, complete with walking bass, Fender Rhodes, subtle electric guitar and jazz drumming, sung with a falsetto voice. Willing and able is partly exuberant gospel (mainly because of the great backing vocals) and partly a typical Police song, as redone by Prince.
A Million Days (Musicology, 2004)
This song has somehow always seemed to me to be a better version of Nothing Compares to U. The song sounds completely different, with less synthesizers, more guitar, heavier (it’s hardly a ballad), but there you go. And whenever you think it moves into Bruce Springsteen territory (and Bruce could do justice to it if he covered it), Prince has some weird production tricks up his sleeve, elevating the song above your ‘ordinary’ rock song.
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