Top 10 Albums 28/01/14

I started this list and realised that all of the choices were albums I listen to all the way every time. No favourite tracks here, more soundtracks for occasions or the ol' quotidian.


Ambient 1 Music for Airports - Brian Eno: A series of sparse piano and mellotron themes loop until they start going out of synch and providing chance harmonies. After a few iterations (all of which sound like their own tracks) we are treated to a beautiful warm synthesiser version. I used to walk home after a night visiting friends or float away on it while the endone put some neural distance between me and my post op leg in 2012 and these days whenever I need to concentrate. I never get sick of it.

Ross Edwards/Symphony No. 3 (Da Pacem Domine): One of my first cds ever, it replaced one of my last tapings of the radio. This gentle plaintive theme builds to a gigantic climax before retreating back into something like acceptance. Unofficially for the sufferers of AIDS, seldom was such grave music used in celebration of life.

 




XX: I first heard this shy sounding UK band as a broadcast of a live show on 3RRR. At one point the make singer murmured, "fuck, it's hot," and transported this lonely cool sound through the heatwave I was escaping by lying in the dark of my loungeroom. I bought the album soon after. It's highly derivative (particularly of the Young Marble Giants) but has a quiet insistance that gets past all that early on.

 



Evol - Sonic Youth: Turn it on. Leave it on. SY's masterpiece, IMHO, the one that provided them with decades of more of the same. This is from when it wasn't. A cinematic journey through mental states and emotions, never afraid to get creepy, with each side of the LP ending in an endless grooveloop, it felt like falling into the Harkonnen planet in Dune.

The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society: Every single song is so good that the album all but protests if you try to stop it.

White Album - The Beatles: Often my fave fabs outing this double presents no problem at all in my hearing the lot at one sitting. This despite my disdain for some of the tracks and indifference to others. The whole creates a constantly shifting soundscape made out of great rock music until you get to the rock song that turned into a great soundscape, Revolution 9. Even when it mushes out at the very end it just feels complete. From the chunky rock of Back in the USSR to the sinister Happiness is a Warm Gun, through the singsong satire of Piggies or all out metal nightmare of Helter Skelter, and through so much more, you get the result of a few weeks spent in meditation in India. Wonder how serene those mantra whispering retreats were.

Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me soundtrack - Angelo Badalamenti: From the lilting jazzy sax playing under the starless synthesised sky of the titles, the psycho bebop rap, the metal clang and fragile beauty of the quieter moments, this highly evocative score suggests even more worlds than the hi calorie imagination of the movie it served. Always aches a little to know the final track has started.

Dummy - Portishead: From the time my first full hearing rendered the heatwave cool and mysterious to now I travel with this album along roads and landscapes not always pleasant but forever intriguing.

 









Singing Bones - The Handsome Family: Not necessarily my favourite songs from the Albuquerque Two but as a run of musical thoughts and textures, Brett's Grand Canyon baritone takes us through the shviery pictures of The Forgotten Lake to the reprise of the hymnlike Should the World End in Ice we are taken through the funny and freaky world of Rennie's mind. More than all the other albums this one rewards continuous play.

The Doors: The debut platter from the LA foursome blossomed in the first flush of hippy but couldn't have been less peace and love. When Morrison gets close with white boy blues he uses his tongue. While it took me a while of listening to allow that into my ears when I did this album became a continuous player. From the erectile blues through Sinatra like croons about masturbation fantasy, wild sex trips like Light My Fire that threw a few memento mori lines into the mix, through the icy End of the Night and finally arriving at the big beautiful and scary opera of The End, The Doors is of its time and one of the strangest wallflowers of its mainstream. Play it, Sam, play all of it!

Top 10 Albums 21/01/2014

This Year's Model - Elvis Costello: Caustic reports from the human swell spat into the microphone over something that sounds like 1965 but feels like 1978. Fave track: You Belong to Me







 

Station to Station - David Bowie: From the epic lumbering nightmare juggernaut of the title track, to the cool Gregorian funk, skyscraping prayer, horror bubblegum, and mighty pathos, this is frequently my favourite Bowie outing of all. Fave track: Wild is the Wind

Debut - Lamb: In the high tide of 90s electronica this Mancunian duo added song craft to the breakbeats and made something new and engaging. Didn't last long but it lasts all through this one. Fave track: Gorecki

Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols: Changed my life with its sheer force, cheek and fury and bade me sever the ties to the traditions of my older siblings as well as mainstream culture in general. Still love it just as a rock album. Fave track: Holidays in the Sun

The Kick Inside - Kate Bush: I was 16 when it was new and I found the spookiness of the lyrics and strong melodism as powerful as any punk. There was great light in the quiet moments. Fave track: L'amour Looks Something Like You

Let it Bleed - The Rolling Stones: At a time when the only Stones stuff I liked was their mid 60s pop era I was in a situation where I had to do a lot of waiting (film set 1982). The farmhouse we stayed in had a small record stack from which I chiefly remember Monty Python's Contractual Obligation and this which was a revelation. From the eerie guitar play of Gimme Shelter to the shivering swell of Can't Always Get as the choir comes in, this is my favourite of the big four. Fave track: Midnight Rambler

Wilder - The Teardrop Explodes: Of the early 80s UK acts with big voices and exploratory lyrics I easily favoured TTE for their high melodism and non-slavish links back to their 60s inspirations. Fave track: The Great Dominions.

Babypop - France Gall: The sheer bomping joy of the bigger numbers and the surprisingly earnest kitsch of the slower sadder numbers do more for me than a swag of Beach boys albums to convey the teenage experience so that it's both serious and fab. Fave track: Attends Ou Va-T'en

Children of God - Swans: The junction of the version of the band that played headcrushing industrial manifestos and the band that calmed to refine those statements and find power in more intimate places, COG is one long celebration of religious charismatic preaching and condemnation of the religion itself. Gira's vocals found such power in the lower register, leaving Jarboe's cool mezzo space to add glowing light into the darkest and most brutal passages. Fave track: Our Love Lies

Closer - Joy Division: The album that launched a million scowling conversations about suicide remains an architecturally sound monument to anyone who has glimpsed the scars around every smile. Or a collection of great songs. You decide. Fave track: The Eternal

Top 10 Albums 13January14

The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society. My favourite of the late 60s concept albums bar none (even beats Tommy!), this often funny, bittersweet and melancholy reflection on passing timewins me every time. Ray 'n' co were never better.

The Ballasted Orchestra - Stars of the Lid. Recently recommended by a friend and now devoted to the Texas duo who make such dreamscapes possible. I could listen to this for days on end.

Tommy - The Who. It took me decades but I did finally come round to how enjoyable it is to ride on this one with its sunshine vocal harmonies, the genius orchestration of the rock trio and big boomy spaces where you can lose yourself as easily as in some fantastical woodcut from ages past. The 5.1 mix on hi res formats is even better. A great adventure holiday of an album.

Rubber Soul - The Beatles. The point at which it is easy to look forward and backward in time to know where the Fabs had been and where they would go. Shimmering harmonies and tight song structures look back to Love Me Do but the instrumentation was getting restless. Sitar, fuzz bass, sped up piano to sound like harpsichord, tough biting organ tints and a far greater range of electric guitar tone all added more colour to the pallette than ever before. And the songs themselves were breaking and entering. Drive My Car is self-effacingly funny, Norwegian Wood has one of the best opening lines of any mainstream pop song, Michelle had lines in French, long toking inhalations for the chorus of Girl. It might have sounded like it here and there but this was not the local folk club but a brash art directed Swinging London.

Hex Induction Hour - The Fall. It's easy to forget how much good guitar band riffing and playing happens on this album as the vocal assault from Mark E. Smith is always so pugilistic. Nevertheless a few listens in and these sides grow compelling and mesmerising. Once that's settled the combined forces of the harranging vocals and wandering music reveal hooks that surprise after years of repeats.

Replicas - Gary Numan. Though it was old at the time this was a big part of the soundtrack to Schoolies' Week 1980. The icy textures and densensitised tale of a society freezing itself to stasis seemed to reveal the undercurrent to all the often desperate surrounding revelry. I clearly recall  catching sight of the Coast's skyline as the huge and sombre Down in the Park boomed and a week later driving back to Brisbane through the rain while You Are In My Vision hammered from the stereo.

Ambient 4: On Land - Brian Eno. A series of atmospheres or textures of landscapes that put you in the middle of scenes that seem to change a little each time. One of the best dream-aids I've known and the pinnacle of Eno's Ambient series.

VI/Led Zepellin/Zoso/Untitled/? - Led Zepellin. From the warming up rotors of the first few seconds of Black Dog to the gigantic flooding wash of When The Levee Breaks we have a set of tracks leaves the era of their appearance back in the prog/country rock sludge and flies beyond the clouds of rock invention. From the storm of the rockers to the silvery middle-earth folk of Battle of Evermore, their Joni Mitchell tribute (Going to California) to the hugest drum sound on record (Levee) done simply with location mic-ing and a drummer who knew that slower meant bigger.

A brief soapbox moment: It's fashionable to point out the similarity between the opening of Stairway to Heaven and the instrumental track Taurus by Spirit. Personally, I think Page did lift it but to say that Stairway is a ripoff of Taurus ignores the facts that the simliarity ends after the first four chords and that part of the song is only played four times in the Led Zep piece before completely changing never to return. The vocal melody is absent from Taurus and the clever thing of it is that it is the same whether in a major or minor context. So apart from a passing similarity in a small slice of each song there really is no resemblance. Taurus was meant to be a brief instrumental. It's nice. Stairway, as numb as it became for me in the years before punk, is a mightier achievement. If you want to call ripoff be honest about it. Anyway...

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me Soundtrack - Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch & co. A towering effort of atmosphere built of dark corners, stormy interiors and aching pathos. Even if the movie wasn't to your taste you might find inspiration in the textures and colours of this music. I still draw to it.

Mezzanine - Massive Attack. After three genre-defining albums the Massies called off the search with this spatial odyssey that is born in a lightless pusling room, continues through quiet fields of brutality and cinematica to the final orgasmic exhaustion of the culture the group had nourished. It's still my favourite of theirs.

CDs: The Bridge in the Jungle

Another day another article among my subscriptions that heralds the resurrection of the vinyl LP. Some of these sleazily suggest that digital audio equals mp3 which is completely misrepresentative. There are many articles out there that explain why vinyl records will never return to their former place as the mass format of preference. I don't need to add to them. What I will do, however, is offer a mercy plea for the medium that gets lost in this discussion time and again and, though it still outsells vinyl by lightyears, if mentioned at all is often dismissed as a defunct format: the CD.

The poor old silver disc: it took us from a medium that died a little more each time they played to one that was durably exact each time with a lot less maintenance. From the zero noise between tracks to the rapid programability to the sheer might of the audio quality, CDs won their battle in less than a decade and won it fair and square. But they have become the drunk uncle at the Christmas table who pretends he's still about twenty-five and rarein' to go. Why?

Well, as superior as the new discs were they weren't without their problems. The rush to fill the back catalogue resulted in a lot of embarrassing moments as the same worn masters that had drained the blood of vinyl reissues were used for the CDs and their tinny emptiness was even more exposed. The culture of remastering the ol' chestnuts reversed this but only until the loudness wars infected even that. Between the emergence of a delicate approach to curation of audio quality and the prevalent football stadium chant approach to volume we ended up with a lot of sludge that was blamed on the medium rather than its abuse.

My first two CDs were the then new Debut by Bjork and the first reissue of Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti. Bjork's album sparkled, roared and crooned in what felt like endless space and light. The Led Zep sounded like it had been found on a cassette on the floor of a panel van. Both of these phenomena were to change the first for the worse and the latter for the better.

The loudness wars of 90s new releases which offered increasingly saturated audio gave us a lot of sludge for the new music that sadly made it easy to rate the sonics of an album by how it sounded through earbuds on a W-class tram. Next stop, the mangle of mp3s and the tsunami-like rise of iTunes.

The remastering culture which corrected the disasters of early reissues of classics (the 90s remaster of Physical Graffiti sounds aptly like the work of titanic artisans) found a comfortable new home in the newer hi-res formats of DVD-Audio and SACD. The 5.1 mix of the traditionally mono Pet Sounds was a revelation; I still didn't like the album that much but by Christ I had even less excuse this time. The new discs sounded good on bargain basement rigs but you needed special players for them and who could be bothered? This points the way to the online retailers offering lossless compression files for download. These are great, play in normal computers but suffer from profile shadow (everyone knows about itunes, few know of HD Tracks).

What's left is the headphone regiments and the goofball substrate of vinyl enthusiasts who are futilely self-convinced of their place in the groundswell (and remind me of apocaylptic Christians holding hands on the beach) and the infinite superiority of their team. Some know the science (before it just gets down to taste) most do not (same for the digital side, btw).

But what a pity. Oh, I don't miss the growing bulk of the discs. It seemed the more you amassed the more excessive and fat the collection looked. This was, for me the sole advantage of the svelte LP cover over the CD jewel case. As soon as I worked it out (and the available technology allowed it) I boiled my cd collection down to rarities and donated most after reformatting everything as flacs. This is not just for the suburban dad boast of being able to tote my thousand plus albums in a pocket hard drive it also has to do with another great advantage the CD brought to music lovers: the erosion of sentimentality of records as things. The tiny remains of my vinyl collection adorn the walls of my dining room, sentimental favourites from my life story. They look nice. When I want to listen to The Kinks or Stars of the Lid I'll click it up on Winamp. The sound is as good or better and the sound endures. I loved LP cover art but it's the first thing that went.

The pity is that the cultural bone pointing at the CD has legitimated the notion that digital audio equals mp3 simply because it's an easy sleight of hand in an argument. One of my great epiphanies with CDs was with non rock music. I replaced my vinyl copy of a choral album that included a sublime performance of Allegri's Miserre and found my face tightening into a wince in anticipation of the treble's high note signature to the piece. After a few months of play of my copy bought on vinyl back in 1983 this moment was a brief torture of fuzzy distortion. But the moment passed with the purest, clearest silken phrase that hung in the air like a beam of sunlight through stained glass. That's the moment I converted.

CDs brought us this beauty and the facility of mutability without which every ipod or smartphone music lover would be an emotional wreck. CD was the messenger for a world to come that allowed us more self determination than we ever had thought possible. We are trying to forget it when we should be honouring it, not fetishising, mind you, but honouring, a touch to the forelock as we move across the bridge they made for us and head into the next jungle.