Amph What Album Did You Just Hear?

Chinese Democracy by Guns N' Roses.

I like most of the songs on this record. The songwriting is good and the arrangements are clever, if occasionally a tad oversaturated with guitar overdubs.

Most of all, Axl's voice sounds awesome and there are many great melodies in these tunes.

 

As a 'modern' (i'm using this term retrospectively given the album's age) rock record, it's a fine listen. I like it but I still find that you start to feel the length of the album around the mid-section of the disc despite the fact this isn't the longest GnR record.

Chinese Democracy should have been to GnR as what 'Smile' was to the Beach Boys. That is, make the record, shelve it and resurrect it one day as that lost album. Then, Axl could have moved onto another album without the hype or the build up. Then one day, Chinese Democracy would have its moment and simply enjoyed on its own merits; the album that never quite made it. Instead, we all expected the second coming, ala Duke Nukem Forever.

 

Either that, or he could have just released it when it was initially "done," instead of rerecording most of it and tinkering with it for over 10 years.
Then, like you said, he could have started making a new record.

 

The Lumpy Money Project/Object: An FZ Audio Documentary (2009) – Frank Zappa

I want to wrap up my Zappa project with a bit of an oddity. This box set contained three CDs and it’s the way I heard a couple of early Zappa albums. This contains both the original 1968 mono version & the 1984 remix by Zappa of We’re Only In It for the Money; the differences aren’t all that stark between these two. The set also contains an unreleased version of Lumpy Gravy from 1967 as well as the 1980s remix of the 1968 version. The Lumpy Gravy differences are quite stark; the 1967 version ended up being recalled due to legal issues and the 1968 version was very different, something like a solid ten minutes longer and it contains none of the track titles from the 1967 version. I was very positive on We’re Only In It for the Money and fairly negative on Lumpy Gravy, but I liked hearing them this way. The third disc is a ton of bonus tracks ranging from 25 seconds to 25 minutes. There’s a lot of real gold here, from a lengthy studio session on the 25 minute track to a lot of interview snippets and elements of the collages Zappa liked to put together. The instrumental tracks are pretty great too. I actually really enjoyed this set. Much as I wouldn’t really like listening to the elements on the third disc either when integrated into collages or just on their own as music, it was an interesting peek into Zappa’s process. It’s a good way to catch up to Lumpy Gravy (if you must) and We’re Only In It for the Money and get some extra insights as well. 3 stars.

tl;dr – box set has a couple of Zappa albums in different forms and includes an entire bonus disc of fascinating behind the scenes material; a fun peek into the process of creating Zappa’s music. 3 stars.

 

Brahms: Double Concerto in A Minor, Op. 102; Berg: Chamber Concerto (1990) – Isaac Stern

Famed violinist Isaac Stern leads both the Brahms & the Berg concertos on this disc. On the Double Concerto, he’s accompanied by Yo-Yo Ma’s cello and Claudio Abbado conducting the Chicago Symphony; on the Chamber Concerto, Peter Serkin accompanies on piano and Abbado conducts members of the LSO. This is kind of a weird pairing of works if you ask me. I’ve read people saying that placing these two works next to each other brings out hidden riches and similarities; whatever – I didn’t have that experience. I didn’t take to this album that much. I was very surprised to like the Berg piece far better than the Brahms piece; I have reacted very negatively to Berg in the past, but I think this one works. One of the reasons I have to say is Peter Serkin who gives a really nuanced and smart performance on the piano. He could get bombastic and he does at times, but he also finds the nuances and brings them out. Anyway, I wouldn’t say this is a particularly good classical album. Odd composition choices in an odd pairing with fairly flat sound quality . . . give this one a miss. 2 stars.

tl;dr – strange pairing of compositions doesn’t really work and the performances are only occasionally inspired; give this one a miss. 2 stars.

 

Rogue1-and-a-half Oh, I just heard that one. Frankly, I'd have to agree with your assessment. It's one of those albums that people have been telling me to check out but I've never gotten to until just recently and it turned out to be rather disappointing, especially due to the Brahms piece just not measuring up to Berg's.

 

Rogue1-and-a-half I just heard that one recently. I'd have to agree with your assessment, frankly. It just wasn't as compelling as what one would expect from this pairing.

 

Still holds up 36 years on:

 

Sorry for the double post. Thought the first post never sent. It's a problem I've been having lately.

It's tied with Powerslave as the best Iron Maiden album for me.

 

Never thought i'd be describing an album by Brand New as album of the year material but....yeah. And no, not just because i'm comparing it to lesser albums of 2017 - it's actually THAT good.

 

i listened to the fugees' "blunted on reality" for the first time in a while. it's such a weird, messy, quintessentially 90's hip hop record. i much prefer it to the more polished sound of "the score" and consider it a big influence on my own music.

 

These were my favorite elements of this soundtrack anyway.

 

Faure: Piano Quartets (1992) – Emmanuel Ax, Jaime Laredo, Isaac Stern, Yo-Yo Ma

I’ve never really heard much by Faure; I’m a big fan of his Requiem, but that’s about all. The cast of assembled players here is pretty well all-star. Everyone knows Stern & Ma, but Ax & Laredo are close to rock-stars in the classical world, even if not so much in the crossover world. But I really didn’t take to this album at all. The sound is pretty bad, really quite flat and not mixed very well. The sound is muddy and everything just seems to run together into a sonic soup. Hard to say if the pieces themselves are particularly weak or not. I honestly think the majority of the problem here really is the engineering & production. Might have to check these pieces out in another version. 1 star.

tl;dr – horrible production creates such an annoying sonic soup that I’m not even sure if the pieces themselves are any good or not. 1 star.

 

Baroness, Yellow/Green

Baroness does melody and psychadelia.

 

Silk Road Journey: When Strangers Meet (2001) – Yo-Yo Ma & Silk Road Ensemble

The idea of the Silk Road Ensemble is a really great one. Yo-Yo Ma assembles a group of stellar international musicians and composers and mixes and matches them in interesting ways. So you might have a Chinese vocalist and an Indian musician performing a Mongolian folk song or what not. Interesting idea, like I said, but unfortunately it only works sporadically. There’s a couple of piano based folk songs from Finland that I really loved and the fifteen minute Blue as the Turquoise Night of Neyshabur is a masterful mood piece for strings. Most of the rest of the album, for me at least, just fell kind of flat. I will say one surprising thing about the album is that . . . well, this sounds so weird that I’m almost unwilling to say it: the sound quality is not good. It’s mixed at a really low level and you have to really crank the volume to be even to hear the details of the music; some sections are so quiet that they kind of drop off the audible scale completely, but like eighty percent of the album at the very least loses detail and nuance. You have to turn the volume up so loud, in fact, that you get a really loud level of hiss. I’m not sure how the producers behind this record let this happen. It’s a really fascinating premise and you’d think the people doing the behind the scenes work here would really love music all the way down to the details, but I can’t figure how they could let this album come out in a way that makes it this hard to listen to. Well, whatever. We’ll just call it a missed opportunity. 1 ½ stars.

tl;dr – surprisingly poorly produced album has the brilliant idea of mixing and matching an international ensemble of musicians and composers, but it only occasionally really clicks. 1 ½ stars.

 

Brilliant Trees (1984) – David Sylvian

It seems to me that Sylvian is a pretty forgotten artist. He’s most known, I think, as the lead singer of Japan, which is itself an incredibly forgotten group, so he’s not an icon or anything. But he is a genuinely interesting musical artist; he worked a lot with Ryuichi Sakamoto, one of the great film composers of all time and was heavily influenced by David Bowie, I’d say. He has a strange, quavering voice that is definitely Bowie influenced, but it has its own, more vulnerable quality. He creates, on this album, a wide variety of tracks. Some are very eighties rock, but in a good way. The album opener, Pulling Punches, is probably the best of these. But he also meanders into a stranger, more ambient tone on some of the tracks. Sometimes it works, but it never quite hits the transcendence I think he’s looking for and sometimes, as on the nearly nine-minute, mostly instrumental title track, which closes the album on a very somber, unsatisfying note, it gets pretty tiresome and dull. I do like the record as a whole, though it’s neither a full-on success or for everyone. Backwaters has a weird, dissonant kind of jazzy piano hook. The Ink in the Well is an acoustic, jazz inflected piece with a drop dead, gorgeous horn solo. Nostalgia is really gorgeous and strange. The first half, really, of the album is the best. Pulling Punches, The Ink in the Well and Nostalgia are the first three tracks and the album never really recovers from the drop off after those tracks. The last half is pretty weak and the tracks are a bit long, particularly Brilliant Trees, the nearly nine-minute album closer, which brings the album to a dull, somber, unsatisfying ending. It’s definitely an interesting album and those first three tracks are genuinely brilliant, but it was typically trying my patience by the time I got to those last two or three tracks. It’s worth mentioning that this album got a spectacularly good remaster in 2003; the ambient parts are really deep and layered on the remaster and the instruments are, on the whole, just really well layered together. If you’re going to track this one down, make sure to get the remaster. 3 stars.

tl;dr – interesting artist creates an interesting album of diverse sounds from jazz, rock, ambient and more; starts out very strong, but the last half meanders too much & reaches a dull ending. 3 stars.

 

Secrecy are one of the unsung heroes of progressive metal given the fact that they have a perfect discography.

 

L.A.M.F. (1977) – Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers

Standing on the corner with the rest of the kids
I say what is it, baby, what is it?
Let go, let go
I don’t know why you don’t just blow

It’s safe to say that The Heartbreakers live up to their name. Formed by Thunders and Jerry Nolan after the implosion of their previous band, The New York Dolls, the Heartbreakers built a reputation on intense and cathartic live shows. After finally getting a recording contract, two years after their formation, the Heartbreakers laid down a stupendous set of songs and then fractured over a tumultuous series of editing & mixing sessions. By the time this album came out, the band was no more. After blasting one of the greatest debut salvos of the punk era, the band created nothing else. And that’s heartbreaking because L.A.M.F. also lives up to its title; it slams out of the gate and over an unstoppable thirty-five minutes, it rocks, as advertised, like a mother-******.

But let me talk briefly about the best way, in my opinion, to hear this landmark album. I checked out the Deluxe Edition, a box set contain four CDs. The first CD contains the entire L.A.M.F. albums, along with a couple of extra tracks; these are alternate mixes from the marathon mixing sessions that resulted in the album. The second disc is the original album remastered; the main difference between the original remastered album and all the other alternates you’ll find here is that the bass is pumped through the roof; in some ways it’s these mixes that actually feel the most modern for specifically that reason. The third disc features demo recordings of some of the songs on the album. It also features two demos for songs that never got officially recorded; one of those, Flight, is a real outlier with its compelling Allman Brothers feel. The demos also feature Richard Hell, another seminal punk figure, who formed Richard Hell & the Voidoids after leaving The Heartbreakers; that band would end up releasing one of the 70s punk scene’s most intense battle cries, Blank Generation. And finally, the fourth CD includes various alternate mixes, of tracks from the album, mixes that didn’t quite make the cut to be on CD one, but that are also considered of interest. Did I mention that the people behind this set unearthed a whopping 300 alternate mixes in order to assemble this set?

Anyway, I think this is absolutely the way you need to hear this album. Despite the fact that some of the songs appear five or six times over the course of this box set and only a couple (the two demos mentioned above) appear only once, I listened to this entire set at least four times and I could very easily pop it in right now and listen through it again. The set of songs here is just superlative. They have the raw energy of the 70s New York punk scene, but they aren’t of the variety where every song basically has the same structure and sounds the same. The songs here are often surprisingly vulnerable in their lyrical content; Born to Lose, I Wanna Be Loved and I Love You are all quite emotional. Then there’s the unbearably intense Pirate Love, the thundering cover of Chinese Rocks, Dee Dee Ramone’s ode to heroin, the lightning fast fifties style rockers Goin’ Steady, Do You Love Me? & Let Go, the bopping, off beat All By Myself (a song Thunders himself hated for some reason). Maybe strangest and most brilliant of all is It’s Not Enough, a nuanced, surprisingly slow song about emptiness and loneliness that has a truly plaintive, country influenced tone to it. The songs are strong enough that you enjoy hearing them over and over again, especially because all the alternate mixes actually sound different. A lot of times on albums like these, I find all the different mixes to kind of be indistinguishable, but on this record, you really can hear the differences. On one mix, the pounding piano might be particularly loud; on another, the bass is through the roof or the vocal might be buried behind the thundering drums. They’re all genuinely different versions.

But I’ve gone on an extremely long time about this record, not that it doesn’t deserve it. The Heartbreakers didn’t have that bad of a run as a band. In the New York punk scene at this time, the personalities were extremely strong and the lifestyles were erratic and fractured; two years is a pretty long time by comparison with a lot of bands at the time. But it is a shame that, their lives shows being out of our ability to experience, they only left this one real document of their time together. With this deluxe set, you get to experience their music in new and different ways, which is the next best thing to some sort of windfall where we discover two or three unreleased albums from the band. It’s too bad things ended the way they did. This album encompasses raw power and energy; surprisingly emotional lyrical depth; and a wide variety of musical influences. It stands, in my opinion, as one of the greatest punk albums of all time and the deluxe edition is exactly the release it deserves. 4 stars.

tl;dr – brilliant punk album captures a snapshot of a genius group; raw passion and power, clever & surprising songcraft – and get the Deluxe Edition. 4 stars.

 

Listening to an Ennio Morricone compilation:

 

Both released today