Amph What Album Did You Just Hear?

Pretty cool song. I do want to punch the guitarist though. He’s banging and posing like it’s a Behemoth riff he’s playing.

 

He's a big metalhead but either this video or Don't Wait Til Tomorrow makes it look like he's being slapped by ghosts.

 

Yeah the moves just don’t match the sound. But that aside I’m definitely keen on them and it’s good to find music I can play in the car on family trips!

 

I discovered them through a video game soundtrack too, that had a new Angel Witch track on it. It's a great track too.

 

Prince’s 3121. Felt appropriate for today.

 

White Noise - An Electric Storm (1969)

It's an experimental electronic album (from before synthesizers had keyboards attached to them) that's quite the trip--a bad one, probably. It all starts pretty whimsically and then it gradually drags you down into, well, some kind of electronic hell. Much of it must've been constructed by many, many, many tape edits--it sounds like it would've been a huge amount of work. It also sounds like various substances were involved, but I suppose that's par for the course from albums of this time period.



I generally love experimental music from this time period, and this is very interesting. Probably will revisit.

 

Been going back through all the Tool albums lately.

 

The Beatles - Abbey Road (1969)

You probably have never heard of this band, as they were pretty obscure, but they were pretty good for their time. You should check them out sometime.

Seriously though, I'm not sure there's anything that can be said about this album that hasn't already been said a million times before. But, I got the (hugely overpriced) "Super Deluxe Edition" of this album, because it includes a Blu-ray with a 5.1 mix of the album (it also includes an Atmos mix, but I'm not that fancy that I have an Atmos system. Yet. So for now I have to settle for the 5.1 version.) Which, I have to say, is highly enjoyable and immersive and makes me appreciate the album all over again. Amazing that an album that was recorded on an 8-track machine (pretty advanced for its time) can still be mixed to sound good on a modern 5.1 system.

Side note: every time I hear this album I'm struck by how heavy the end section of "I want you" is. That's like proto-heavy metal, there.

 

That’s because it is, basically. A lot of the heavier blues and psychedelic rock material that was circulating in pop music at the time (Blue Cheer, The Beatles’ own “Helter Skelter,” some of the tracks The Rolling Stones were putting out, the list can go on and on...) was being synthesized alongside the more proper blues musical traditions into the earliest versions of heavy metal by the likes of Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin more or less concurrently with the release of Abbey Road. It was in the air, basically; just waiting for a group to release a coherent and popular enough album to get the credit for a new genre when people were looking back on it... which Sabbath did just a few months later.

 

Yeah, that part's technically in the "She's So Heavy" part of the alternating "I Want You" and "She's So Heavy" sides of this song. And I love it. The way that part gets progressively heavier, while also getting washed over with waves of noise, and just keeps going and going until it just... stops.

 

Dethklock: Dethalbum III

Great way to wake up on the ride to work.

 

The mid-60s to early 70s was such an amazingly creative and fertile period for popular music. Music changed so much in such a short period; compare a random album from 1964 to an album from 1969--a five-year period--and the difference is enormous. And musicians were freer than ever--encouraged by the audience--to experiment. How times have changed.

 

Not really, you’re mostly getting the good stuff and not the dozens and dozens of worthless interchangeable dreck singles that tore up the charts (or, to put it a different way, I love Trout Mask Replica but nobody ****ing bought Trout Mask Replica). If anything we’re kind of in a golden age for experimentation because the barriers to distributing music have become so low - the problem is that with that sheer breadth comes difficulty in finding material that speaks to you, and a tendency for only the absolute safest, blandest stuff imaginable to actually get enough of a push from the big labels to become “popular” in the conventional sense.

 

Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city. It’s warming up here in Texas, and there aren’t many better albums to cruise around to with the windows down than that. Especially when Backseat Freestyle comes on while you’re in a school zone.

 

I don’t think so. Captain Beefheart might not have been all that popular (Zappa’s albums sold fairly well, though) but at least people created stuff like Trout Mask Replica. There’s nothing (or hardly anything) with that level of adventurousness being made today. I’m not sure it can.

TMR is of course just one pick, but you can have lots of examples of very adventurous music from that time that did sell well. The aforementioned Beatles and Zappa, and so on, come to mind. Nobody today has created a Sgt Pepper’s, a Pet Sounds, an Are You Experienced, a Freak Out!, or what have you; and more importantly, those albums couldn’t have existed a mere few years prior to when they were released. Music created this year sounds, to my ears, similar to music created 5 years ago. That wasn’t the case with the musical landscape of the ‘65-‘69 period.

Not that I mind contemporary music—I reviewed Devin Townsend’s Empath on the previous page as a very unique album, and I’m eagerly awaiting for the mail to finally deliver Steven Wilson’s The Future Bites.

But yeah, Trout Mask Replica is awesome.

 

I dunno, just based on my listening habits the jazz avant-garde is changing fairly rapidly as the newest generation is once again going through the timeless cycle of trying to figure out what “jazz” is. But my point is that nobody really has a total grasp on the “musical landscape” anymore and never will again - there’s too much, it’s literally impossible to listen to anything but a narrow slice of it. So there are probably dozens of albums that are as incredible and life changing as TMR... and they’re impossible to find.

So I do kind of agree with you in that we’re never going to see big name albums like those you mentioned pulling from the cutting edge of art music techniques (well, the cutting edge of art music a few decades back, but still), everything doing that is labeled too niche by the major labels and never gets off SoundCloud or CD Baby or Band Camp. No major musical artist is ever going to have the clout of The Beatles to just do whatever they want with sitars ever again. We’ve lost our visible Brian Wilsons and retained our visible [insert random member of The Cyrkles or something you get the point].

But meanwhile the majors are the most unrepresentative of the musical currents that they’ve ever been. And I’m confident that in 50 years there will be albums from now the next generations will look back on fondly as expressions of real creativity, painfully overlooked in their day, as they curse us all for dooming them to that climate change created hellscape of, like, Turbo Coronavirus Floods or something.

 

Khruangbin - The Universe Smiles Upon You

 

SAP by Alice In Chains
Format: Vinyl

A beautiful acoustic EP that features gorgeous lead and vocal harmonies by Layne Staley and Jerry Cantrell including guest performances by vocalists Ann Wilson, Mark Arm, and Chris Cornell.

The 4 main songs are all brilliantly composed, arranged, and performed.

The 5th "hidden track" is an experimental number that leaves a lot to be desired. But nobody's perfect.

 

I still think It’s All Too Much leans both into proto-heavy metal and deep into the psychedelic end.

Currently listening to Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin latest album, The Devil Is Back. It’s basically a sequel to Goblin’s 1976 non film score album Roller. Not quite sure it’s as prog rock as the original Goblin were. It’s quite good, I love Simonetti’s keyboards and the bassist is excellent. Like any song Claudio composes, the music transports me.

 

I agree with you 100% here. Though I'm not up to date on current avant-garde jazz But yeah, it's very hard (for me) to separate the wheat from the chaff these days. There's just so damn much chaff. (Translation: old man doesn't appreciate new music.)