Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile are streaming their collaborative album, Lotta Sea Lice.
You can hear the album in full below on Spotify.
It is released today on Matador.
The tracklisting is:
"Over Everything"
"Let It Go"
"Fear Is Like a Forest"
"Outta the Woodwork"
"Continental Breakfast"
"On ...
Courtney Barnett and Kurt Vile are streaming their collaborative album, Lotta Sea Lice.
You can hear the album in full below on Spotify.
It is released today on Matador.
The tracklisting is:
“Over Everything”
“Let It Go”
“Fear Is Like a Forest”
“Outta the Woodwork”
“Continental Breakfast”
“On Script”
“Blue Cheese”
“Peepin’ Tom”
“Untogether”
Annie Clark is streaming the new St Vincent album, Masseduction.
You can hear the album below, via Spotify.
Masseduction is her first full-length since her 2014 self-titled LP.
The tracklisting for Masseduction is:
"Hang on Me"
"Pills"
"Masseduction"
"Sugarboy"
"Happy Birthday, Johnny"
"Savi...
Annie Clark is streaming the new St Vincent album, Masseduction.
You can hear the album below, via Spotify.
Masseduction is her first full-length since her 2014 self-titled LP.
The tracklisting for Masseduction is: “Hang on Me”
“Pills”
“Masseduction”
“Sugarboy”
“Happy Birthday, Johnny”
“Savior”
“New York”
“Fear the Future”
“Young Lover”
“Dancing with a Ghost”
“Slow Disco”
“Smoking Section”
Beck is streaming his new album, Colors.
You can hear the record - his first since 2014‘s Grammy Award-winning Morning Phase - below via Spotify.
The album is released today.
The tracklisting for Colors is:
"Colors"
"Seventh Heaven"
"I'm So Free"
"Dear Life"
"No Distraction"
"Dreams"
"Wow"...
Beck is streaming his new album, Colors.
You can hear the record – his first since 2014‘s Grammy Award-winning Morning Phase – below via Spotify.
The album is released today.
The tracklisting for Colors is: “Colors”
“Seventh Heaven”
“I’m So Free”
“Dear Life”
“No Distraction”
“Dreams”
“Wow”
“Up All Night”
“Square One”
“Fix Me”
My Bloody Valentine have announced vinyl reissues of Isn't Anything and Loveless.
These are 'fully analog mastered 180g vinyl versions' which have been created from original 1/2" and 1/4" tapes.
They come in gatefold sleeves and are currently available exclusively to pre-order from the band's webs...
My Bloody Valentine have announced vinyl reissues of Isn’t Anything and Loveless.
These are ‘fully analog mastered 180g vinyl versions’ which have been created from original 1/2″ and 1/4″ tapes.
They come in gatefold sleeves and are currently available exclusively to pre-order from the band’s website – by clicking here.
Roger Daltrey has announced details of a memoir.
Currently untitled, the book is scheduled to come out next August, reports Rolling Stone.
"I've always resisted the urge to 'do the memoir,'" Daltrey said in a statement. "But now, finally, I feel I've enough perspective.
"When you've spent more th...
Roger Daltrey has announced details of a memoir.
Currently untitled, the book is scheduled to come out next August, reports Rolling Stone.
“I’ve always resisted the urge to ‘do the memoir,'” Daltrey said in a statement. “But now, finally, I feel I’ve enough perspective.
“When you’ve spent more than half a century at the epicentre of a band like The Who, perspective can be a problem. Everything happened in the moment. One minute, I’m on the factory floor in Shepherd’s Bush, the next, I’m headlining Woodstock.”
The Who have just concluded a series of South American co-headlining dates with Guns N’ Roses.
The Eagles are releasing a 40th anniversary deluxe edition of Hotel California.
As well as a remastered version of the album, the set comes with a live show from The Los Angeles Forum in 1976.
Presented in an 11 x 11 hardbound book, the set also features rare and unseen photos from the era, a repl...
The Eagles are releasing a 40th anniversary deluxe edition of Hotel California.
As well as a remastered version of the album, the set comes with a live show from The Los Angeles Forum in 1976.
Presented in an 11 x 11 hardbound book, the set also features rare and unseen photos from the era, a replica tour book and an 11 x 22 poster.
The track Listing is:
Disc One: Original Album “Hotel California”
“New Kid In Town”
“Life In The Fast Lane”
“Wasted Time”
“Wasted Time (Reprise)”
“Victim Of Love”
“Pretty Maids All In A Row”
“Try And Love Again”
“The Last Resort”
Disc Two: Live at The Los Angeles Forum (October 1976) “Take It Easy”
“Take It To The Limit”
“New Kid In Town”
“James Dean”
“Good Day In Hell”
“Witchy Woman”
“Funk #49”
“One Of These Nights”
“Hotel California”
“Already Gone”
Blu-ray Audio
Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound
Advanced Resolution Multi-Channel Surround Sound (96 KHz/24-Bit)
Advanced Resolution Stereo (192 KHz/24-Bit)
Sufjan Stevens has shared "Wallowa Lake Monster", a new track taken from his forthcoming The Greatest Gift mixtape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kwo_Ucs-wc4
The Greatest Gift is a mixtape of outtakes, demos and remixes from Stevens' 2015 album Carrie & Lowell.
As well as demos and alternate ve...
Sufjan Stevens has shared “Wallowa Lake Monster”, a new track taken from his forthcoming The Greatest Gift mixtape.
The Greatest Gift is a mixtape of outtakes, demos and remixes from Stevens’ 2015 album Carrie & Lowell.
As well as demos and alternate versions of songs from the original album, the mixtape features four previously unreleased new songs from the Carrie & Lowell sessions.
These include “Wallowa Lake Monster”, as well as “The Hidden River Of My Life“, “City Of Roses” and “The Greatest Gift“.
With Kamasi Washington's superb Harmony Of Difference now in shops, I thought I'd post the interview I did with him for My Life In Music a couple of years ago. Goes without saying, some great music here.
Follow me on Twitter @MichaelBonner
________
NWA
Straight Outta Compton
There was a tape stor...
With Kamasi Washington’s superb Harmony Of Difference now in shops, I thought I’d post the interview I did with him for My Life In Music a couple of years ago. Goes without saying, some great music here.
NWA Straight Outta Compton
There was a tape store near my house. It was called Wilson Music, or something like that, right on Western Avenue. I had to hide this from my parents! My grandmother lived in Compton, so there was that aspect to it. It really felt like it came from my neighbourhood; it felt like they were talking about something from home that made it out and big in the world. I liked the NWA film, it was astonishing to see how those records were made. Did my parents ever find the tape? Nope, they never did!
Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers Like Someone In Love
My parents were musicians. My dad was really into avant garde jazz: Archie Shepp, John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders. My mum liked gospel and R&B, Chaka Khan and Whitney Houston. This was one of the first jazz records that I really got into. I was probably 11 years old. There was a song on it called “Sleeping Dancer Sleep On” that I liked, it had a lovely melody. I got Art Blakey and then I really got Art Blakey. It was like West Coast rap. It had this real, deep rhythm to it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fm_aXAk77S4
John Coltrane Transition
The sax took over my life for a few years, thanks to this record. ‘Trane made Transition right before he went really avant garde. It had all this raw energy and the beginnings of a freedom. It was unlike any other record and it really showed me where I wanted to be. It’s heavy Coltrane. My dad tried to get me into this record when I was young, but it was too heavy for me. When I was about 13, I got it again, I was like, ‘Oh, my God. This is the greatest thing ever.’ All John Coltrane’s records are amazing. Ole Coltrane, Africa Blues, A Love Supreme…
James Brown Black Caesar
I started playing with this band, the Polyester Players. It was my introduction into funk. So I went and got a James Brown record. Black Caesar is a film score, but it’s so dope. I was so into West Coast hip hop, that sound was so familiar to me – but I had never really listened to the source. I liked the arrangements on Black Caesar. Brown always had great arrangements, but on this record they were rhythmically and harmonically really cool, with the horns and everything. The Polyester Players were wild. I was 17 and playing 21 and over clubs. I had grown women talking to me, until they realized I was 17.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw18rTF5OIQ
Ali Akbar Khan Legacy
I took a major in ethnomusicology at UCLA. This album was my introduction to North Indian classical music. I had to transcribe some of the songs. It’s when I started learning ragas, the scales, the whole approach to music. It was hard because they play notes that aren’t represented in Western notation, so I had to create my own little notation style and adjust it so you can write it out accurately. They use quarter tones as well as half tones. It was enlightening. It gave me an insight as to what they were doing, how they were doing it, why they did what they did, the timing… It made me appreciate it even more.
Busta Rhymes When Disaster Strikes
When I was at high school, I got into jazz and it was all I listened to. Even though I was into hip hop when I was younger, I had this period for a long time in my life when I didn’t want to listen to anything that wasn’t jazz. A friend of mine gave me this album and that brought me back to hip hop. It expanded my musical palette. It was so cool, so dope, it brought me out of my little jazz world. The cadence to his flow is really cool. The beats and his approach to production are really unique.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJUk45l4h8c
Igor Stravinsky Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky
When I was at UCLU, I added an emphasis on composition. I started studying orchestral music and writing for large ensembles. Stravinsky is my favourite composer. And on this record, hearing his music conducted by him, the way he heard it in his head, was really cool. There is an intensity to his music. His harmonic approach is very powerful. Its fun composing for big ensembles – there’s so many possibilities. It’s like adding a third or fourth dimension, you can play around so much with harmony, texture and melody. The possibilities become endless with that many instruments.
Kendrick Lamar To Pimp A Butterfly
It’s really opened the minds of so many people, I think it’s going to lead to so many possibilities. It’s the record of my generation. It’s so lush harmonically, rhythmically, lyrically, there’s so much to absorb in every way. In popular music these days, the notion is that you have to be simple and bland to appeal to mass audiences and I think this record is anything but that. It’s going to live beyond itself. It’s not just a great record, it’s an important record. Does it inspire me? Yes, it does.
Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings final studio album has been announced.
Soul Of A Woman will be released on November 17 on Daptone Records.
You can watch the music video for the first single, "Matter Of Time", below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipynkBxtMOc&feature=youtu.be
The tracklisting is:
M...
Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings final studio album has been announced.
Soul Of A Woman will be released on November 17 on Daptone Records.
You can watch the music video for the first single, “Matter Of Time“, below.
The tracklisting is: Matter Of Time
Sail On!
Just Give Me Your Time
Come And Be A Winner
Rumors
Pass Me By
Searching For A New Day
These Tears (No Longer for You)
When I Saw Your Face
Girl! (You Got to Forgive Him)
Call On God
Pink Floyd reissue A Collection Of Great Dance Songs and Delicate Sound Of Thunder on vinyl on November 17.
These are the first time they have been available on this format for well over twenty years. These are the band’s first ‘best of’ and live albums to be remastered on vinyl.
Both are m...
Pink Floyd reissue A Collection Of Great Dance Songs and Delicate Sound Of Thunder on vinyl on November 17.
These are the first time they have been available on this format for well over twenty years. These are the band’s first ‘best of’ and live albums to be remastered on vinyl.
Both are mastered from the original analogue studio tapes with album artwork faithfully reproduced.
A Collection Of Great Dance Songs was originally released in 1981 and contains alternative mixes and versions of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond“, “Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2)” and “Money“.
Delicate Sound Of Thunder was recorded live over five nights in August 1988 at the Nassau Coliseum, Long Island, NY. It was the first rock album to be played in outer space.
It no doubt says much about the ties that bind and the like that to back him on his first solo record, Ian Felice has basically reformed the original lineup of The Felice Brothers, the band he’s fronted now for 12 years and almost as many albums. So there are discreet appearances here by brother J...
It no doubt says much about the ties that bind and the like that to back him on his first solo record, Ian Felice has basically reformed the original lineup of The Felice Brothers, the band he’s fronted now for 12 years and almost as many albums. So there are discreet appearances here by brother James on keyboards and Josh Rawson on bass, while the LP also marks the return of the errant Simone Felice, as drummer and producer, following recent successful production work with The Lumineers and Bat For Lashes. Simone has been no stranger to subsequent Felice Brothers sessions, but this is his closest collaboration with Ian since 2008, when Simone quit the band to form the short-lived The Duke & The King and record a couple of his own well-regarded solo albums.
The Felice Brothers have covered a lot of sonic territory since their Loose debut Tonight At The Arizona in 2007. You think, for instance, of the angry scourging clatter of 2009’s Yonder Stands The Clock, the often sparkling and increasingly warped, off-kilter country, fucked-up folk, exclamatory rock and bashed-up pop of Celebration, Florida (2011), Favourite Waitress (2014) and last year’s Life In The Dark. Strikingly, however, In The Kingdom Of Dreams largely returns us to the crepuscular atmospheres – the imminent dusk and spidery twilight – of their second Loose album, 2008’s The Felice Brothers, in the opinion of many a career highlight, and songs on it like “St Stephen’s End”, “Murder By Mistletoe” and “Wonderful Life”.
In The Kingdom Of Dreams was mostly written just after Ian learned he was going to become a father for the first time, and several of the songs here appear initially guileless, enchanting, with simple rhyming schemes of the kind you might hear in a song made up by a father and sung to a dozing tot. To which extent, the album may at first be heard as a celebration of a freshly acquired maturity, the responsibilities of fatherhood, a child to bring up, nurture and protect in the hearth of newfound domesticity.
Of course, it’s no more a beaming paean to any of this than Dylan’s Planet Waves, another album ostensibly about familial bliss in a Catskills setting, whose greatest song was nevertheless the poisonous “Dirge”. Restless uncertainties swarm beneath the surface of these songs, gnawing anxieties, fears for what the world is becoming and a dread of a new American autocracy indifferent to the woebegone many, the eternally downtrodden. “My father was poor as the rain and his father was poor the same… And I’m wasted and nearly in tears with the same old working-class fears/Pulling coins from the children’s ears/In grief and despair,” Felice sings on the wracked and wistful “In Memoriam”. More personally, he worries on the ruminative wee hours murmur of “Water Street”, his wife and baby asleep in their new house, that he will turn out to be like his own father, who “walked out and just kept on walking, in the light of an ’80s moon”, abandoning his young family.
A degree of surreal whimsy has frequently attached itself to Ian’s songwriting, at least partly inspired by the fabulist churn of The Basement Tapes. It’s deployed effectively here on tracks like the sardonic “21st Century” and “Road To America”, an absurdist romp, accompanied by a porch-rattling, foot-stomping chorus whose windswept cadence evokes visions of the migrant columns trudging across Wyoming tundra in Heaven’s Gate. A more general sort of doom prevails on the beseeching blues lope of “Will I Ever Reach Laredo?” and the wry ghoulishness of “Mt Despair”, whose lovelorn narrator we find at the grave of his childhood sweetheart, remembering the lassie’s demise after jumping from the titular outcrop. “She leapt into the air and I watched her disappear,” Felice sings over a pretty guitar melody. “But I didn’t,” he adds with sick detachment, “seem to care.”
Even mordant humour is absent from the album’s closing tracks. “Ten To One” and “In The Final Reckoning” broodingly contemplate a coming gloom and are full of omens, portents, plausible indicators of wretchedness to come. Only the title track’s briefly euphoric king-for-a-day chorus allows optimism into the picture. Elsewhere, there’s only darkness, an extinguished light.
Tom Waits, as you probably know, is right about most things and amusingly duplicitous about most others. He is not, though, infallible. In October 1985, NME's Gavin Martin met Waits at a diner on New York's Lower West Side, for an interview squeezed in between Sunday babysitting duties and a visit f...
Tom Waits, as you probably know, is right about most things and amusingly duplicitous about most others. He is not, though, infallible. In October 1985, NME’s Gavin Martin met Waits at a diner on New York’s Lower West Side, for an interview squeezed in between Sunday babysitting duties and a visit from the in-laws.
Among the tall tales, Waits attempted to put journalistic pretensions in perspective. “Music paper interviews,” he told Martin, “I hate to tell ya but two days after they’re printed they’re lining the trashcan. They’re not binding, they’re not locked away in a vault somewhere tying you to your word.”
Those old interviews with NME, Melody Maker, Vox and Uncut might not constitute a legal contract: Tom Waits remains, to this day, free to contradict himself whenever he wants. They have, though, been locked away in a vault, waiting to be exhumed for this latest in Uncut’s series of deluxe, updated Ultimate Music Guides; available in UK shops on Thursday and, of course, from our online shop.
Tom Waits is regularly feted as one of the most inventive musicians of the past 40 years, but in these pages he’s also revealed as one of the most compelling raconteurs. Here, rescued from oblivion, we’ve republished a tranche of interviews that are full of beatnik strangeness, arcane wisdom and the most phantasmagorical shaggy dog stories. There is a trip to Bedlam, talk of “demented kabuki burlesque” and a career in golf, interviews sold for $29.95, and a great yarn about how Waits met Keith Richards while their wives shopped for bras. “The truth of things is not something I particularly like,” he admitted to Pete Silverton in 1992.”I go more for a good story than what really happened. That’s just the way I am.”
More reliable – and hopefully just as entertaining – are the comprehensive reviews of every Tom Waits album, provided by Uncut’s crew of nighthawks and junkyard scholars, and fresh insights into the making of those records by Waits’ closest collaborators. The antic spirit and evolving brilliance of Waits’ music is a given here, but it’s the remarkable consistency that becomes most striking as we chart a path between Closing Time and Bad As Me; a discography full of unexpected turns, but startlingly free of wrong ones.
Welcome, then, but proceed with care: don’t go into that barn!
It's a good week for David Bowie fans. The latest box set - A New Career In A New Town (1977–1982) - is in the shops, covering the back end of the Seventies, from Low to Scary Monsters (and Baal!). Meanwhile, in case you missed it, Uncut's handsome new sister title, A Life In Pictures, dedicates i...
It’s a good week for David Bowie fans. The latest box set – A New Career In A New Town (1977–1982) – is in the shops, covering the back end of the Seventies, from Low to Scary Monsters (and Baal!). Meanwhile, in case you missed it, Uncut’s handsome new sister title, A Life In Pictures, dedicates its first issue to Bowie: you can read more about what it contains by clicking here and buy it here.
So I thought I’d add to the general Bowie ambience by posting my interview with Tony Visconti, which originally appeared in Uncut issue 245…
In spring 1979, David Bowie arrived in New York with unfinished business to attend to. Work had begun on his latest album the previous September at Mountain Studios, Montreaux; now Bowie and producer Tony Visconti entered the Record Plant Studios to complete Lodger. Alas, events did not go quite according to plan.
“We had a horrible studio to mix in,” remembers Visconti. “After Ziggy Stardust, David’s big hits were mainly in the rest of the world; they weren’t big sellers in America. By the time we got to Lodger, he’d dropped in status. So we were assigned Studio D. It was really bad. But we had a deadline to finish the mix.
“Over the years, David and I bemoaned how we wanted to remix it,” he continues. “But we never got around to doing it until there was a break in recording Blackstar. I thought, ‘If I don’t do something about Lodger, it’ll never get off the ground.’ I started remixing it on my own time, without David’s knowledge. When I had five mixes done, I played it to him. He absolutely loved it and gave it the green light.”
Visconti’s 2017 mix of Lodger is included in David Bowie: A New Career In A New Town (1977–1982), the third in a series of boxsets spanning Bowie’s career. This new set spans Low to Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps) and gives particular focus to Bowie’s so-called ‘Berlin trilogy’, covering Low, Heroes and Lodger. “Lodger wasn’t really part of the Berlin trilogy,” says Visconti. “People gave it that name. It was done in the spirit of the Berlin trilogy and of course it was the last album featuring Brian Eno as a composer and musician, so it kind of belongs in the Berlin trilogy. But it was recorded entirely in Switzerland and mixed in New York!”
Aside from this new mix, the producer promises a surprise or two from the vaults. “I found some little gems on the tapes,” he reveals. “At the end of ‘Yassassin’, David does a little Arabic rap that didn’t make the record. I put it on the mix this time and it sounds wonderful. David was proud of these re-releases, but he didn’t want to get involved. There are so many capable people, including his own staff and myself, who could deal with it. He’d hear the final test pressing and say, ‘Great, it’s wonderful. Release it.’ But he always wanted to move on.”
Presently, Visconti is preparing for his latest venture – a new Sky Arts show, Tony Visconti’s Unsigned Heroes. A follow-up to his previous series Guitar Star, this show finds Visconti and fellow mentors Stewart Copeland and Imelda May tasked with discovering untapped musical talent from across the UK. “I bought some bass strings in Denmark Street, and on my way out a clerk ran out after me,” says Visconti. “He was a pedal steel guitar player. He said he plays the Eno composition ‘Moss Garden’ from ‘Heroes’, on pedal steel. I said, ‘You’re in the show!’ I’ve invited him to join the house band. I am really proud of discovering him in the street!”
The show follows the three mentors as they nurture their charges and travel to their hometowns to explore the local music scenes; it culminates in a live show at London’s Union Chapel, with the acts performing songs either produced or arranged by Visconti. “I’ve been followed around by a cameraman for the last two days,” Visconti laughs. “This is friggin’ weird! Tomorrow we have a 12-hour technical rehearsal, with cameras following everything we do, which is something I’m not used to.”
Of course, Visconti is something of an expert when it comes to working with unknown talent. “When I came to the UK, I didn’t have any real experience,” he recalls. “I had to start at the bottom – and the bottom was Marc Bolan and David Bowie! I met the two of them in the same month in 1967. It was very much the way I’m meeting these musicians now; people who’ve been around the block a few times, but nobody knows who they are. I’m hoping the show will change that.”
As for Bolan – who died 40 years ago on September 16 – Visconti retains fond memories of his late friend. “I met him one night when Tyrannosaurus Rex were playing in a club,” he remembers. “There was an audience of about 100 kids sitting on the floor, cross-legged, silent. It was obvious that he was a star. I approached him and Steve Peregrin Took afterwards. Marc was very cocky. He said, ‘Oh, man. You’re the seventh record producer who came in this week. I’ll consider you.’ I gave him my card and he showed up at our offices the very next day at 10am, that’s how eager he was to get a record deal!”
Aside from the television series, Visconti’s other forthcoming projects include new albums from Daphne Guinness and Perry Farrell. At 73, it seems Visconti is showing no signs of slowing down. “I do an hour of t’ai chi every day,” he explains. “That’s my anchor. I don’t drink or take drugs any more. That’s why I’m able to work into my seventies.
“My hearing is still very good. I still practise bass and guitar. I go to the studio about midday every day. I work for about eight hours. I’ve hardly had a holiday in years. I don’t know how to do anything else in my life except travel and make records.”
A New Career In A New Town (1977–1982) is available now from Parlophone Records
Frank Zappa’s name isn’t featured on the front of 1967’s Absolutely Free, The Mothers Of Invention’s second album. But, as his looming mustachioed face on the cover hints, the disc would serve as the introduction of the real Zappa, for whom the word “iconoclastic” seems to have been inve...
Frank Zappa’s name isn’t featured on the front of 1967’s Absolutely Free, The Mothers Of Invention’s second album. But, as his looming mustachioed face on the cover hints, the disc would serve as the introduction of the real Zappa, for whom the word “iconoclastic” seems to have been invented. Reissued with a rich remastering job, eight bonus tracks and a reprint of Zappa’s mail-order-only libretto, Absolutely Free remains a difficult and ambitious manifesto a half-century later, a sometimes literal overture for the more major works that would follow.
Released in May 1967, at the dawn of the Summer Of Love and a few weeks before Sgt Pepper, Absolutely Free was Zappa’s first crack at freedom in the recording studio. With producer Tom Wilson (Bob Dylan, Velvet Underground) helming the Mothers’ Freak Out! debut, Zappa buried his avant-garde tendencies on the double LP’s second disc. In a drastic tonal shift on Absolutely Free, Zappa puts his classical ambitions upfront, leading with it and never letting up, trading Freak Out!’s pathos-bent R&B for a sound collage of dialogue, “Louie, Louie” references, jazz bursts, and dazzling through-composed interludes.
As the title suggests, Zappa was as interested in the ever-popular ’60s notion of being free as any of his flag-adorned psychedelic contemporaries like the Grateful Dead or the MC5. But instead of interpreting “free” as an excuse for freeform jamming, the drug-free Zappa’s Absolutely Free challenged music’s very structures through rigorously hyper-cut experimental composition. There are vocal hooks and/or choruses on nearly every song, including the opening “Plastic People”, but only as islands in a vaster network of interconnected motifs.
While “Call Any Vegetable” offers the first whiffs of the smirking, scatological themes that would dissuade many listeners from enjoying Frank Zappa’s later music, Absolutely Free is mostly the sound of a young composer at play with the biggest canvas he’s yet been afforded. Expanding the Mothers to include additional horns and a second drummer, “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It” also includes strings and woodwinds, and the entirety of the album’s production and construction obscures the band whose name is displayed in a far larger font than the album’s title.
Attempting to create a critique of freedom itself, Absolutely Free opens by mimicking the sounds of an American news telecast of a presidential address. Continuing themes of “plasticity” from Freak Out!, Zappa set out images he would employ for the next quarter century, his pop smarts confined to tantalising fragments. Unlike Brian Wilson, working across town on Smile, Zappa had no problem compartmentalising his pop inclinations and linking them into a broader tapestry, like the infectious harmony-drenched “Son Of Suzy Creamcheese” (all of 94 seconds) and the chiming “The Duke Regains His Chops” (also under two minutes).
But throughout is the pervading sense that Zappa is cramming too many ideas in, creating a tension with his constant channel changes, resolved only when the Mothers themselves finally appear for an extended stretch on “Invocation & Ritual Dance Of The Young Pumpkin”. On Freak Out!, they’d been not-uncharming purveyors of greasy, underdog LA R&B, a vibe they would continue under the guise of Ruben & The Jets in 1968. On “Young Pumpkin”, they reveal themselves as a dense and thrilling jazz-rock unit with Zappa’s guitar shredding over, under and in collusion with a weaving horn section, anchored by the double drumming of Jimmy Carl Black and Billy Mundi.
Like the pop fragments, the fully operational Mothers would be deployed sparingly on Absolutely Free, and always to good effect, only really stretching out on future albums. While he shifted to session musicians later in his career, the Mothers carried a homegrown mojo as important to Zappa’s early music as Zappa himself. On a contemporary single, included with the bonus tracks, the Mothers find skewed and swinging grooves for both of Zappa’s vague attempts at accessibility on the muscular “Why Don’tcha Do Me Right?” and swinging “Big Leg Emma”. On the album itself, the only song that comes close is “Status Back Baby”, which itself dissolves into a glittering pool of sound midway through. Other bonus tracks include Zappa’s own 1969 remixes of a few tracks and several fourth wall-busting radio ads.
While undoubtedly a massive creative breakthrough, Zappa would articulate his experimental vision and freedom-loving philosophies far more clearly on his next two albums. The equally experimental but more coherent Lumpy Gravy came a few months later, his proper solo debut, while the Beatles-roasting We’re Only In It For The Money turned Zappa’s pop smarts up to the max, including the anti-corporate “Absolutely Free”, and finding an effortless flow of melodies, clever constructions and studio burps, held together by withering but spot-on takedowns of ’60s idealism.
“The present-day composer refuses to die!” Zappa quotes Edgar Varese (from 1921) in Absolutely Free’s liner notes, as he did on Freak Out!. And, in the 21st century, Absolutely Free projects Zappa as just as alive as ever, and just as ornery and obnoxious. Unlike other ’60s artists, whose sounds have long been subsumed into constant revivals, he remains unfashionable enough to be unrepeatable. Absolutely Free’s ideas, arrangements and productions remain ready to challenge any comers over just how free they really are.
A new collection of Leonard Cohen's unpublished work is to be officially released next year under the title The Flame.
Cohen himself chose and ordered the poems in the book, of which “the overwhelming majority” is new material, The Guardian reports.
Publisher Canongate has called new collectio...
A new collection of Leonard Cohen‘s unpublished work is to be officially released next year under the title The Flame.
Cohen himself chose and ordered the poems in the book, of which “the overwhelming majority” is new material, The Guardian reports.
Publisher Canongate has called new collection The Flame “an enormously powerful final chapter in Cohen’s storied literary career.”
It will be published next October.
Cohen’s manager, Robert Kory, told The Guardian: “During the final months of his life, Leonard had a singular focus – completing this book, taken largely from his unpublished poems and selections from his notebooks. The flame and how our culture threatened its extinction was a central concern.
“Though in declining health, Leonard died unexpectedly. Those of us who had the rare privilege of spending time with him during this period recognised that the flame burned bright within him to the very end. This book, finished only days before his death, reveals to all the intensity of his inner fire.”
In addition to his poetry, The Flame will also draw on his notebooks, which Canongate describes as “poetic” and said will provide “an unprecedentedly intimate look inside the life and mind of a singular artist and thinker”.
R.E.M. have shared an unreleased demo, you can hear now hear another called "Devil Rides Backwards", from their upcoming 25th anniversary reissue of album, Automatic For The People.
The forthcoming reissue feature the album in its entirety mixed in Dolby Atmos by original producer Scott Litt and en...
R.E.M. have shared an unreleased demo, you can hear now hear another called “Devil Rides Backwards“, from their upcoming 25th anniversary reissue of album, Automatic For The People.
The forthcoming reissue feature the album in its entirety mixed in Dolby Atmos by original producer Scott Litt and engineer, Clif Norrell.
Arriving on November 10, the album will be released in a variety of formats, including a 4-disc Deluxe Edition will include 20 previously unreleased demos from the Automatic For The People sessions.
Here’s the tracklisting for the Deluxe Edition. The edition is also available as a 2-disc set, featuring discs 1 and 2.
Disc 1 – Automatic For The People Drive
Try Not to Breathe
The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite
Everybody Hurts
New Orleans Instrumental No. 1
Sweetness Follows
Monty Got A Raw Deal
Ignoreland
Star Me Kitten
Man On The Moon
Nightswimming
Find The River
Disc 2 – Live At The 40 Watt Club Drive
Monty Got A Raw Deal
Everybody Hurts
Man On The Moon
Losing My Religion
Country Feedback
Begin The Begin
Fall On Me
Me In Honey
Finest Worksong
Love Is All Around
Funtime
Radio Free Europe
Disc 3 – Automatic For The People Demos Drive (demo) Wake Her Up (demo) Mike’s Pop Song (demo) C to D Slide 13 (demo) Cello Scud (demo) 10K Minimal (demo) Peter’s New Song (demo) Eastern 983111 (demo) Bill’s Acoustic (demo) Arabic Feedback (demo) Howler Monkey (demo) Pakiderm (demo) Afterthought (demo) Bazouki Song (demo) Photograph (demo) Michael’s Organ (demo) Pete’s Acoustic Idea (demo) 6-8 Passion & Voc (demo) Hey Love [Mike voc] (demo) Devil Rides Backwards (demo)
Disc 4 – Automatic For The People Blu-Ray Automatic For The People (+ bonus track: Photograph) mixed in Dolby Atmos Automatic For The People (+ bonus track: Photograph) Hi-Resolution Audio Drive (music video) The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite (music video) Everybody Hurts (music video) Man On The Moon (music video) Nightswimming (music video: British version) Find The River (music video) Nightswimming (music video: R version) Automatic Press Kit
The action takes place in a ramshackle part of New York City; perhaps a corner of Greenwich Village which has yet to be gentrified. The focus is on a once-storied intellectual family whose overbearing patriarch has yet to comprehend that his career is on the wane; meanwhile, each of the family’s n...
The action takes place in a ramshackle part of New York City; perhaps a corner of Greenwich Village which has yet to be gentrified. The focus is on a once-storied intellectual family whose overbearing patriarch has yet to comprehend that his career is on the wane; meanwhile, each of the family’s neurotic children harbour petty grievances against once another and also their parents. There is betrayal, failure and potential disaster before, finally, some kind of resolution takes place.
On paper, at least, Noah Baumbach’s latest project The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected) – available on Netflix from October 13 – recalls the filmmaker’s breakthrough film, 2005’s The Squid And The Whale. Instead of Jeff Daniels’ insufferably pompous novelist, we have Dustin Hoffman as a prickly, conceited sculptor; while Baumbach’s earlier film focused on a callow 16 year-old and his precocious younger brother, this new film is filtered through the experiences of older siblings, the likeable, underachieving musician Danny (Adam Sandler) and the unlikable, overachieving accountant Matthew (Ben Stiller). This time, there is a sister, the seemingly dour Jean (Elizabeth Marvel), whose own traumas are not revealed until late in the game.
Regular followers of Baumbach’s film will also spot assorted themes that recur throughout the filmmaker’s crisp body of work. In its depiction of quarreling siblings, it is as bilious as Margot At The Wedding. Elsewhere, it throws highbrow references around with the charming abandon of Mistress America: one marvelous set piece takes place during a sculpture exhibition at MoMA, while a painting sold to the Whitney Museum some years previously becomes a point of repeated irritation to Hoffman’s Harold. There are broader comparisons, too – to JD Salinger’s Glass stories, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (Baumbach worked on a pilot for HBO) and Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums.
For all its familiar strokes, The Meyerowitz Stories (New And Selected) is one of Baumbach’s best. Stiller – on his third film with Baumbach – finds ways to subtly endear us to Matthew. Sandler, meanwhile, is superb as both fretful son and doting father, delivering a performance of comic precision that’s arguably his best work since Punch Drunk Love. Hoffman, meanwhile, is as you’d expect as the rambling, cantankerous pater familias. There is strong work from Marvel and – in an amazing piece of casting – Emma Thompson as Harold’s florid current wife. Camoes abound – Adam Driver, Candice Bergen, Rebecca Miller and Judd Hirsch – though it is the three male leads who dominate, particularly Sandler.
OK this week’s key additions coming up if you’re in as much of a rush as I am. The Breeders! The Four Tet album. The ravishing Brigid Mae Power single I’ve been trailing here for a couple of weeks. A new project from Che Chen of 75 Dollar Bill. A serene Kevin Drumm drone. Hologram Teen, which ...
OK this week’s key additions coming up if you’re in as much of a rush as I am. The Breeders! The Four Tet album. The ravishing Brigid Mae Power single I’ve been trailing here for a couple of weeks. A new project from Che Chen of 75 Dollar Bill. A serene Kevin Drumm drone. Hologram Teen, which is Morgane Lhote ex of Stereolab. A document of Southern Albanian folk music, produced by Joe Boyd, that had us spending an interesting hour or so trying to work out iso-polyphony the other day. A killer Hiss Golden Messenger live set. The return of Zombie Zombie (a nice adjunct to the James Holden album, given how Etienne Jaumet’s a key player in Holden’s Animal Spirits set-up). Zimpel/Ziolek, which is a quite hard to describe – avant-folk maybe? – find from Poland. Mavis Staples. The new incarnation of Thee Oh Sees, not to be confused with Ocean Colour Scene. A lengthy and promising departure from Real Estate. And finally, as I start digging through our writers’ end of year lists, a sweet ambient steel album I missed from Chuck Johnson. That do?
Paul McCartney is to release the eight albums in his Archive Collection as limited edition 180gram colour vinyl.
The reissues come from MPL/Capitol/UMe on November 17.
As well as the limited edition coloured pressings, they will each come as single CD digipak and 180gram black vinyl single LP form...
Paul McCartney is to release the eight albums in his Archive Collection as limited edition 180gram colour vinyl.
The reissues come from MPL/Capitol/UMe on November 17.
As well as the limited edition coloured pressings, they will each come as single CD digipak and 180gram black vinyl single LP formats. All vinyl LPs in the Archive Collection will feature a download card and fully restored artwork.
Paul McCartney: McCartney – RED
Paul McCartney: McCartney II – CLEAR
Paul McCartney: Tug Of War – BLUE
Paul McCartney: Pipes Of Peace – SILVER
Paul and Linda McCartney: Ram – YELLOW
Paul McCartney and Wings: Band On The Run – WHITE
Wings: Venus And Mars – RED & YELLOW
Wings: At The Speed Of Sound – ORANGE
The Rolling Stones have announced details of a new album, The Rolling Stones - On Air.
Released via Polydor Records on December 1, the album collects rarely heard radio recordings from their formative years. The songs, including eight the band have never recorded or released commercially, were orig...
The Rolling Stones have announced details of a new album, The Rolling Stones – On Air.
Released via Polydor Records on December 1, the album collects rarely heard radio recordings from their formative years. The songs, including eight the band have never recorded or released commercially, were originally broadcast on UK BBC shows such as Saturday Club, Top Gear, Rhythm and Blues and The Joe Loss Pop Show between 1963 and 1965.
The band have shared a track from the album, “Come On“, which was recorded for Brian Matthew’s Saturday Club in 1963.
The album will be released on CD, double CD deluxe edition, heavy-weight vinyl and special limited-edition coloured vinyl. This album follows the recent release of The Rolling Stones – On Air coffee table book, by Richard Havers and published by Virgin Books.
‘The Rolling Stones – On Air’ Track Listing
Come On – Saturday Club, 1963 (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction – Saturday Club, 1965 Roll Over Beethoven – Saturday Club, 1963 The Spider And The Fly – Yeah Yeah, 1965 Cops And Robbers – Blues in Rhythm, 1964 It’s All Over Now – The Joe Loss Pop Show, 1964 Route 66 – Blues in Rhythm, 1964 Memphis, Tennessee – Saturday Club, 1963 Down The Road Apiece – Top Gear, 1965 The Last Time – Top Gear, 1965 Cry To Me – Saturday Club, 1965 Mercy, Mercy – Yeah Yeah, 1965 Oh! Baby (We Got A Good Thing Goin’) – Saturday Club, 1965 Around And Around – Top Gear, 1964 Hi Heel Sneakers – Saturday Club, 1964 Fannie Mae – Saturday Club, 1965 You Better Move On – Blues in Rhythm, 1964 Mona – Blues In Rhythm, 1964
Bonus Tracks (Deluxe)
I Wanna Be Your Man – Saturday Club, 1964 Carol – Saturday Club, 1964 I’m Moving On – The Joe Loss Pop Show, 1964 If You Need Me – The Joe Loss Pop Show, 1964 Walking The Dog – Saturday Club, 1964 Confessin’ The Blues – The Joe Loss Pop Show, 1964 Everybody Needs Somebody To Love – Top Gear, 1965 Little By Little – The Joe Loss Pop Show, 1964 Ain’t That Loving You Baby – Rhythm And Blues, 1964 Beautiful Delilah – Saturday Club, 1964 Crackin’ Up – Top Gear, 1964 I Can’t Be Satisfied – Top Gear, 1964 I Just Want to Make Love To You – Saturday Club, 1964 2120 South Michigan Avenue – Rhythm and Blues, 1964
