Pink Floyd - The Early Years 1967-1972 Cre-ation, album review

Listening Trip

Of course I think Pink Floyd are brilliant, but this is yet another premier group with a history of seminal and deeply enduring music/albums that I do not know that thoroughly: I wouldn’t be able to name tracks on particular album, nor claim to have over my many years listened to their albums as I have others.

Therefore, this 27 track collection of their earlier music is a delightful selection and snapshot, and the starter listening is as obvious as one would expect, and obviously superb – Arnold Layne, and one of the first truly psychedelic songs See Emily Play. Apart from that psychedelia [and still some pop sensibilities] it is sweetly nostalgic to listen to the playful lyrics and the accentuated English/British accent/voices: requisites for stamping the popular focus of the time. Those lyrics – whether the nonsense of poetic mystery, or as with Matilda Mother, telling stories/legends, and in this case, the self-referencing of fairy tales:

You only have to read the lines
They're scribbly black and everything shines.
Across the stream with wooden shoes
With bells to tell the king the news
A thousand misty riders climb up
Higher once upon a time.
Wandering and dreaming
The words have different meaning.

I don’t know why the fairy tale genre became such a fashionable narrative, apart from its own innate fantasy psychedelia. And then there is the playful orchestrations as in Jugband Blues [did this pre-date or ape Sgt Peppers?]. It is the fun before the seriousness.

Then in Paint Box the lyrics are the storytelling of genuine oddity, capturing the experiences of experimenting and other new discoveries:

Out of the front door I go
Traffic's moving rather slow
Arriving late, there she waits
Looking very angry, as cross as she can be
Be - a - be - a - be - a - be - a - be
Getting up, I feel as if I'm remembering this scene before
I open the door to an empty room
Then I forget

This is a lovely pop song in so many ways.

The album is scattered with live recording too, as with the first Flaming, a live BBC Radio session from 1967,

Watching buttercups cup the light
Sleeping on a dandelion
Too much, I won’t touch you
But then I might

Screaming through the starlit sky
Traveling by telephone
Hey ho, here we go
Ever so high

this so simply capturing the trip of the time. And as I have said, it is a delightful listening trip of that time to take.

Citroen Music

Rachael Yamagata - Tightrope Walker, album review

Gratefully Complex

This is an excellent album of songs made engaging by building production in each – it could be guitar rhythm riffs, horn bursts, electronic breaths and pulses, blues and jazz, dissonant sound [but never just noise] and Yamagata’s vocal always there thrust in the centre. Take Let Me Be Your Girl that begins with a sassed guitar and sultry vocal, drums on simple but effective rhythm, and then that build which is here [and which reminded me to write it in] those blasts of horn and vocal harmonies being added to the melody. Next, just for example, Break Apart is a much more brooding affair, an elegant elongated drift across its expanse. The opening title track is a Latin jazz, guitar off-kilter and percussive rich, complex song. Second Nobody has some great rock guitar work. Third EZ Target begins with banjo. Not pop/easy listening/stupid staccato vocal and so, so much better for this.

Pool Music

Rossington - Take It On Faith, album review

Stir Your Stew With Attitude

Southern rock royalty, Gary and Dale Rossington sizzle through twelve polished tracks, rock that contains most of its grit in the historical vocal of Dale and is produced with just enough shimmer to keep it sitting on a stool rather than crawling on the barroom floor.

Opener Highway of Love is generic AOR with intrinsic sass, and second I Should've Known is the blues played to that polished perfection, a studio band who know exactly where to plug in the leads and set the knobs, Dale Rossington yet again rooting it all in class. Third, the title track, is an acoustic number, and Dale roughs up the edges with a lament on hardship, slide dobro and piano plonks widening out the pathos.

Similar rolls out for the rest, a raunchy to restful range, gospel for example in fourth Light a Candle, a hopeful anthem on making a new start when lit by its comfortable metaphor, better to light a candle than curse the dark. Perhaps this was meant to presage the first day post Trump's election....

Volkswagon Music

Paolo Fresu & Omar Sosa - Eros, album review

Jazz Love

This is a gorgeous, soothingly eclectic album in terms of its internal shifts, exemplified in seventh track What Is Inside-Himeros which begins so gently with Paolo Fresu on calmly paced horn, Omar Sosa interspersing with piano, and the somnambulant strains of Nico Ciricugno on viola. Then the pulsing beats join in, and Fresu injects pace with his Miles-esgue muted horn riffs, and Sosa layers keyboard effects across this, Piero Savatori adding deeper cello as the panorama expands.

Opener Teardrops is another plaintive soundscape, Fresu joined in an echo of his warm notes and the sung Arabic lyrics by Natacha Atlas. This track suspires throughout, ripples of echoing sound underscoring the soft pulses of vocal, keyboards and restrained effects providing other platforms. Next Sensuousness is just that, the string foregrounding conveying classical strains within the jazz frame. It really is beautiful.

Chevy Music

The Olympians - The Olympians, album review

On Mount Funk

The Olympians session musicians band, like the gods themselves, does not exist, but if you feel the need for 70s soul/R&B/Jazz, like a reason for being, then this is a recent release to remind that some cultural reference points can last forever [well, if we are intoning the 70s, then that is just under 50 years, so not quite immortal].

Lots of horns, funky piano, funky organ, wah wah guitar, but mainly great horns in the TSOP vein as near as I can place it for an instrumental touchstone. On the Daptone label which will mean much more to those who know this wonderful church of funk and soul. Europa and the Bull is an early favourite encapsulating.