Amph What Album Did You Just Hear?

Prince: The Vault Recordings from the expanded and reissued Purple Rain.

 

Ooh, how is that? How's the compression on the remaster? Is the previously unreleased stuff good?

 

It's the 2015 Paisley Park remaster, the compression is really bad.

But the new stuff has this ten minute vamp called "We Can ****" that I'm super into.

In conclusion, the expanded release of Purple Rain is a land of contrasts.

 

It's actually the first time i've owned a copy of the album so I don't have the original release for comparison.

But there certainly is a sterile feel to it. The same can be said about the Oasis reissues for their first three albums.

As for the vault material - it's good!

Dance Electric, Father's Song, Velvet Kitty Cat, Possessed and Wonderful Ass would make terrific album tracks, but just not for Purple Rain. They could have been a part of a "sequel" album. Good songs but none of them could really fit on the final album.

 

Rifles & Rosary Beads (2018) – Mary Gauthier

Rifles & rosary beads
You hold on to what you need
Vicodin & morphine dreams
Rifles & rosary beads

Folk musician Mary Gauthier (that’s pronounced GO-shay) has been a unique and compelling voice that’s never come close to getting her due for decades and with her new album, she may have just created her most arresting masterpiece. This album contains eleven songs and they’re all focused on the experience of soldiers and the family members of soldiers. Every song on the record was co-written by Gauthier and at least one service member or family member of a service member and if this means that the songs are somewhat less polished at times, it also gives the songs and the album the real ring of authenticity. The songs cover a broad range of topics and styles, despite being focused entirely on military and military family experience. Got Your Six is a real surprise, a swaggering bluesy number about the bond of soldiers on the battlefield. The War After the War is from the perspective of a soldier’s wife, struggling to carry on as her husband struggles with PTSD; it’s an agreeable country tune with a beautiful melody. Still on the Ride is a sorrowful meditation on survivor’s guilt. Iraq pulls a real twist on the listener by revolving around the repeated line, “My enemy wasn’t Iraq” is it details the plight of a female soldier dealing with sexual harassment. Morphine 1-2 and Bullet Holes in the Sky are spare ballads of, in the former case, the death of comrades and it’s perhaps the more well-structured of the songs. But Bullet Holes in the Sky packs a strong punch. It’s told from the perspective a veteran that can’t help but find a lonely Veteran’s Day a bitter experience. “Free meal at the Waffle House if I show them my ID,” Gauthier says as she opens the song and the bitterness is palpable as you realize that what this song is saying is that, as a society, we offer our veterans almost nothing of real value in return for their service. The best song on the record is probably Brothers, which has a compelling rock riff that drives forward its tale of a female soldier struggling to find her place in a military culture founded on brotherhood and masculinity.

Gauther’s voice, often haggard, is perfect for this material; she has a stripped down quality to her voice – deeply personal and utterly unconcerned with being impressive and it helps these stories really land. There are a couple of songs here that don’t work as well as the others. One of them is unfortunately the opening track, Soldiering On, which is the only track on the album that tries to be epic, with trumpets and rattling drums. The album works best when it’s simple. But even if there are a couple of songs that are less than they could be, the album as a whole really packs a cumulative punch and it’s an album that has moved me to tears every single time I’ve listened to it. Its perspective is so valuable and this album seems to be saying that, for all that we owe our veterans, we might owe them, first of all, a fair hearing, a good listen to what these men and women have to say. It’s an album that would still be an essential even if it were far worse than it is; as it stands, its rawness and emotional truth really elevate it. I imagine it was incredibly difficult for the soldiers who worked on this album with Gauthier to make themselves so vulnerable in the song-writing here. Well, that’s just one more service they’ve given to us, giving their stories and their perspectives to those of us who have no idea of the struggle and pains they suffer. But it’s also compelling that the album isn’t broken. These songs are deeply sad and occasionally even tragic, but they’re shot through with a surprising hope, a quiet one, but palpable. The people on this record are struggling, but they don’t want our pity; they could use our help, but they’re going to survive one way or the other. But though they may carry on, most of us will miss their struggles entirely. On one track, the chorus ends the same way every time: “Invisible; the war after the war.” Well, with Gauthier’s help, maybe a little more visible now. 4 stars.

tl;dr – folk album co-written with veterans addresses the emotional, mental and physical struggles of returning soldiers with a series of deeply powerful songs; an essential document. 4 stars.

 

Shakin’ the Rafters (1960) – Professor Alex Bradford & Abyssinian Baptist Gospel Choir

Said I wasn’t gonna shout for joy, but I
Couldn’t keep it too myself

On this album, gospel composer/instrumentalist/choir leader Alex Bradford leads a hundred voice black gospel choir in a live concert rundown of some of his own songs and some standards. And he creates an incredibly compelling, high-energy shake-up of pure black gospel as it was meant to be done. The soloists are good and the choir is phenomenal. This is some of that good-old call-and-response church music as only a fully engaged, anointed black gospel choir can give you. The album starts with a one-two-three-four punch of I Want to Ride That Glory Train, You’ve Got to Bear the Consequence, Heaven Belongs to You & Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody. The latter is perhaps the highlight of the album, an absolute frenzied explosion of exuberant joy. But those four songs all together just really drop you into the album perfectly. The slower tracks are also pretty good; You Can’t Make Me Doubt Him is a nice mid-tempo ballad and He Is Such an Understanding God is a slow, soulful, prayerful meditation. The live energy of this recording punctuates things with shouts of joy and shrieks of spiritual ecstasy to sometimes hair-raising effect. The 1991 CD re-release adds three songs that weren’t on the original 1960 album and, unfortunately, they’re the weakest songs on the album, which kind of makes the CD coast slowly to a stop instead of going out with the bang of the original closing song, I Can Call Him, which is a perfect track to end on. The overly mannered Restore Unto Me and a rendition of Thomas Dorsey’s The Lord Will Make a Way that is dragged to a tortoise like tempo are unfortunate inclusions. Regardless, the bulk of this album is a near flawless representation of black gospel and I absolutely loved this album. A disappointing finale detracts slightly, but this one is still a stunner and an emotional roller-coaster of a listen. 3 ½ stars.

tl;dr – live recording of a hundred-voice gospel choir is a touchstone of black gospel and with good reason; CD reissue adds on some forgettable bonus tracks, but it’s still a good time for all. 3 ½ stars.

 

Jubilation, Vol. 1 (Black Gospel) (1992) – Various Artists

This brilliant compilation from Rhino Records takes a look at black gospel music, predominately, of the forties & fifties, though there are tracks from the sixties & seventies as well, the music that people like Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin grew up with and then brought the sound of into the mainstream. This is a really, really great compilation. For the age of some of these recordings, the sound quality is pretty spectacular. There are a couple of tracks with a lot of crackle on them, but for the most part, the sound is really pristine. The album has a few mediocre tracks, as any compilation will, but they are far outweighed by the genuinely great tracks. Some of the tracks have an early R&B shuffle, while others are high-energy a cappella tracks. Jesus Met the Woman at the Well is a finger snapping a cappella quartet song by the Famous Blue Jay Singers. Brother Joe May contributes an up tempo, howling version of the old hymn Search Me Lord. Clara Ward & the Ward Singers absolutely rip things to shreds with a high-intensity rendition of How I Got Over. Shirley Caesar takes a pretty hokey country tune called No Charge and elevates it with her pure sincerity. The Golden Gate Gospel Quartet contributes a fantastic a cappella turn called Golden Gate Gospel Train; at one point, one of the singers pulls off an imitation of a muted trumpet that is breathtaking and he spins it into a lengthy “trumpet” solo. A couple of iconic tracks show up: the Swan Silvertones’ Mary Don’t You Weep is always welcome and Edwin Hawkin’s Singers’ Oh Happy Day is the pitch perfect album closer. A few tracks fail to land. Unfortunately, a couple of genuine greats, Aretha Franklin & James Cleveland, are represented by a duet track, Precious Memories; I’ve always hated the song and they drag the tempo down to glacial pace and stretch the song to nearly eight minutes in length and it’s easily the worst track on the album. By and large, however, this album lives up to its name. It has eighteen tracks and around an hour of good old black gospel experience. For those who already love black gospel, it’s a really good compilation; for those who have never gotten into this kind of music, I think it’s a fantastic introduction. Won’t we have a happy, happy time? Oh, yes. Oh, yes indeed. 4 stars.

tl;dr – brilliant compilation of black gospel music features iconic tracks and obscure delights; a great time in the grand old black gospel style and a good introduction to the genre as well. 4 stars.

 

Other people need to start posting here again.




Golden Hour (2018) – Kacey Musgraves

It’s a cliché that goes back incredibly far in cultural history: artists create their best work out of misery and sadness. The examples of this being true are too numerous to go through, so there’s obviously some truth to the old saw, but Kacey Musgraves has pulled off an amazing trick with Golden Hour. She’s crafted an entire album dedicated to an essential state of bliss and given us maybe her masterpiece. Musgraves got engaged in 2016 and married in 2017 and it’s clear that the majority of these songs flow out of that blissful state of new love. The usually sarcastic, often sharp-tongued Musgraves has always been charming, but on this album, she embraces earnest emotions and eschews, for the most part, the kind of clever wordplay she first attracted notice for. Songs like Butterflies, Rainbow, Oh What a World and the title track are openly, passionately optimistic and with a lesser artist would probably come off as trite, but Musgraves’ sincerity is such that you can’t help but be lifted. Love is a Wild Thing is a stirring, anthemic ode to being swept off your feet. Happy & Sad is a fantastic, cathartic expression of tumultuous attraction. Even on the slower, more melancholy songs, there’s a generosity that really landed for me. Space Cowboy is about the ending of a relationship, but, while the narrator is certainly sad, she’s not angry and the guy who’s leaving is still the object of her affection, but in a kind of friendly, sweet way, not a tragic one. This album embraces the warm, summery sounds of the seventies in a lot of ways, a kind of seventies soft rock, though with enough country flourishes to make sure it still lands in Musgraves’ usual genre. High Horse is a surprising outgrowth of that seventies focus, a thumping track that’s more disco than anything else and also the one song on the album that’s a little rough-edged in its put-down of a big-mouthed acquaintance. There are really only a couple of lesser songs here. The opening track, Slow Burn, is more of a dirge than it should be and Velvet Elvis is overly silly, but Musgraves might know exactly what she’s doing with Velvet Elvis as it blows by in only a couple of minutes. Otherwise, this album is a real masterwork, Musgraves finding inspiration in an hour of sunny happiness and optimism and creating an album of catchy, clever, cathartic songs. “I ain’t Wonder Woman,” she sings on one track, “Don’t you know I’m only human?” Being human, she’ll go through some dark times again at some point and probably create more great music out of that. But for now, I’m glad to see her in the full sunlight. Here’s hoping this golden time lasts for quite some time. 4 stars.

tl;dr – warm-hearted, optimistic album is comfortable, catchy and charming; Musgraves is on top of her game with a surprisingly mature, blissed out masterpiece. 4 stars.

 

Focus is definitely one of my favorite prog bands from the '70s. It's kind of a shame that they're only really known just for Hocus Pocus and Sylvia (which is on Focus III) as material such as Carnival Fugue, Answers Questions! Questions Answers!, Round Goes the Gossip and Anonymous Two are some of the best material of the decade.

 

Yep...still the best that their 2000s have to offer.

Not tired of it.

 

Bert Jansch (1965) – Bert Jansch

It kind of feels like Scottish singer-songwriter Bert Jansch has gotten lost in all the mid-60s folk artists and that’s kind of too bad. To the degree that he’s well-known, it’s within the community of his chosen instrument, the acoustic guitar. He was undeniably a master and he pushed the folk community in a more complex, baroque direction. On this, his first record, he plays right to the indie artist template, recording the entire album on a tape-recorder in a friend’s kitchen. It’s a very assured debut. Jansch would eventually leave this style behind, but not for quite some time. The songs here are all of the lilting, somewhat melancholy, somewhat sardonic folk type. Jansch’s voice is pleasant in a genre fashion. The songs aren’t the whole story though; the album features six guitar instrumentals to divide things up and I actually liked the way the vocal songs and the instrumentals mixed in with each other to create a kind of unique feel. The instrumentals are incredibly technically impressive and the sound of Jansch catching his breath and making small noises of effort during some of the harder passages is incredibly intimate. That should tell you there how the sound quality is; I listened to a remaster from 2015 and it’s really perfect. A couple of the instrumentals are among the best tracks on the album: Casbah is a droning, jazzy Middle Eastern tune and the album closer is Angi, a cover of a song by fellow folkie Davey Graham and it’s got a swagger and a groove mostly missing from the rest of the album. It’s really the perfect way to send the listener out on a good feeling. Jansch’s songwriting is witty and evocative at the same time. At its worst, it’s not that bad, just a fairly typical folk pastiche. At its best, it’s very impressive. Needle of Death is the closest he ever came to a really famous song; it’s a hushed, deeply sorrowful ode to a friend who has died of a heroin overdose. Jansch’s use of imagery in this song is striking in its details and its slideshow kind of progression, capturing the devastation of loss in a series of still moments. “One grain of pure white snow dissolved in blood spread quickly to your brain,” isn’t a line you would imagine someone could sing gracefully, but it’s the most emotionally powerful moment on the album. There’s really only one bad song on the album, the wheedling protest song Do You Hear Me Now?, which overplays its hand at every turn. But on the whole, this is a solid album all the way through, making this an overall pleasant experience, divided at times by moments of real genius. Both taken as a debut and as a folk album, it’s incredibly impressive, even if it falls a bit short of greatness by taking the easy way a few times. Though whoever said the easy way was bad? 3 ½ stars.

tl;dr – singer-songwriter’s lo-fi debut is an acoustic folk classic, with impressive instrumentals and melancholy, sardonic songs; a pleasant listen from start to finish with greatness in the mix. 3 ½ stars.

 

It Don’t Bother Me (1965) – Bert Jansch

Jansch’s second album, released the same year as his first, is basically more of the same. Pithy original songs and technically inventive instrumentals all featuring mostly just Jansch and his guitar. John Renbourn, another legendary figure in the acoustic guitar community, shows up and plays guitar along with Jansch on a couple of tracks. The two would end up co-founding British folk group Pentangle eventually. This album starts out incredibly strong and at first it seems like it’s going to be better than Jansch’s debut. Ring-a-Ding Bird is a lovely, lilting nursery rhyme type tune with a beautiful melody. Anti-Apartheid is a scathing political song, one of the few Jansch ever did. A Man I’d Rather Be is a witty, clever musing on existence with a wonderful vocal delivery. But right at about the half point the album takes a big downturn with My Lover, a droning, eastern-influenced tune that features Renbourn. It’s Jansch trying something very different with his vocals and they really don’t work and the guitars don’t seem to be working in concert and so create a really chaotic backing. After that, the album never quite recovers its energy, though the ending song, a cover of traditional folk song 900 Miles is a very good track. Want My Daddy Now, the next to last track, is a needling little tune that is serious competition for My Lover as worst track on the record, but the album does briefly recover with the final track, a nice cover of traditional folk tune 900 Miles. The first half of this album is really, really strong, but, on the whole, I found the album disappointing. It’s not the follow-up I wanted and not near the album Jansch’s debut was. 2 ½ stars.

tl;dr – Jansch’s second album has a really strong opening, but it goes off the rails; only rarely awful, this album still ends up averaging out at very mediocre. 2 ½ stars.

 

It's time to revisit Coheed and Cambria with a new album on the horizon. Listened to Second Stage Turbine Blade. Still a classic

 

Jack Orion (1966) – Bert Jansch

This third album is a departure for Jansch in a couple of big ways. On this record, John Renbourn, who would later co-found Pentangle with Jansch, plays on just about every track; Jansch’s usual tack has been to be predominately solo on his records before this. But the bigger change is in the material; Jansch’s albums have typically included a traditional folk song here and there, but they’ve mostly been given over to his own material. On this record, Jansch covers eight traditional folk songs, but instead of making this album his most traditional, this pushes him to actually make his boldest album to date. The centerpiece of the album is the title track, a tale of sexual desire, deception and bloody vengeance that stretches to over nine-and-a-half minutes, well more than twice as long as any of Jansch’s tracks have been to this point. Near the end of the track, you hear him flub a lyric or two, but it’s a real tour deforce, especially given the complex interplay of Jansch and Renbourn on their guitars. The addition of Renbourn allows the arrangements here to become really deep and complicated and interesting. But it’s the thematic consistency here that really elevates this album above Jansch’s previous, more scattershot & varied albums. This album is given over almost entirely to songs of darkness, violence and isolation and this tonal focus makes the album a really dark and claustrophobic atmosphere all the way from the very opening to the very ending. On the opening track, The Waggoner’s Lad, Jansch and Renbourn lay down a circular, repeating riff that’s grim, plodding and minor key. The album ends with a track called Pretty Polly and if you think the album is going to end on a single note of grace and/or hope, you’re wrong. Let’s just say that Pretty Polly herself ends up stabbed to death by her fiancé and buried in a shallow grave. I’d say there’s not a bad track on this chilly, haunting album. But that makes sense. Some of the songs here had already survived hundreds of years before Jansch recorded them and nothing survives that long without having an elemental, primal power. Jack Orion, the album, may end up surviving about that long, I suppose, if that’s the marker. It’s certainly Jansch’s masterpiece and his first truly great album, an album visceral in the moment for the very reason that it reaches so far into the past. 4 stars.

tl;dr – grim, haunting album focuses on deep, complex readings of old folk songs & ends up being Jansch’s first true masterpiece. 4 stars.

 

Bidding farewell to the world of Bert Jansch with one last review . . . a very inauspicious ending with the worst of his first four albums.



Bert & John (1966) – Bert Jansch & John Renbourn

After Jack Orion, which was a real artistic triumph for both Jansch & Renbourn, it makes sense they would collaborate again, but they’ve followed up the deep, haunting and powerful Jack Orion with one of the fluffiest trifles imaginable. This album consists almost entirely of instrumentals. Of the twelve tracks on the album, only two of them feature vocals. The rest are instrumentals that were doubtless a lot of fun to compose and clearly really technically accomplished. Unfortunately they don’t really add up to much of anything. Half of the tracks here (that’s six tracks, if you’re keeping count) are under two minutes in length and the album adds up to around twenty-eight minutes all told. This album feels, not exactly tossed off because there’s certainly skill on display, but kind of thoughtless. The album is kind of pleasant in the moment, a sort of wall-papery easy listening style of acoustic guitar instrumentals. But you’ll be hard pressed to remember a single thing about any of the tracks an hour after you finish the record. There is one exception, a gorgeous version of Charles Mingus’ lovely elegy Goodbye Pork Pie Hat. It’s a surprising choice and it’s given a really emotional reading. It is, perhaps not coincidentally, the longest track on the record by nearly a minute. On the whole, this album is totally forgettable. I get it: Jack Orion was probably exhausting. But try to make an effort next time. 2 stars.

tl;dr – forgettable trifle of an album features mostly undistinguished instrumentals and barely registers as it goes by, though there’s certainly technical skill here. 2 stars.

 

Solo: A Star Wars Story OST

 

UNDERRATED

 

YOU'RE RIGHT

 

All this album could do was fail.

It wasn't Definitely Maybe or Morning Glory while Be Here Now was the album that people loved to hate at the time.

Meanwhile, Britpop was dead by the 2000s.

So yeah, unless the likes of Oasis, Blur and Pulp were going nuMetal or Industrial, it's card was marked.

But, it's that reason that this album is the PERFECT soundtrack for the state of Britpop in 2000s. Standing On The Shoulder of Giants is bleak, psychedelic, heavy, downbeat and at times, dark. It's the sound of a band realising that they weren't the darling saviours of their country as promised by their management and government. People seriously expected "Don't Look Back In Anger" and "Live Forever" after the death of Diana or Blair's propaganda machine that was Cool Britannia?

If Gas Panic were a Nine Inch Nails song, it would be a staple of their set lists.

Don't like the sound of this album? Fine.

But don't accuse it of not being worthy as being an Oasis album. It is every bit as much an Oasis album as those first three records because Oasis were capturing the essence of what was happening around them just as they were during the "good" times. This time around, they were just that bit more cynical and well-deserving of the angst.

 

You've given it a lot more thought than I have and those are interesting thoughts and kind of make me want to listen to the album again. But for my part, I just thought it wasn't really a fair criticism to do the whole "this isn't what I want when I want an Oasis album" thing. It still had hallmarks of them being an above average band for sure and it's a solid listen. It's not a classic or even a great album in my opinion, but it's not the disaster a lot of people said. For ******' in the Bushes alone . . . I mean, that's such an aggressive, borderline hostile opening track.
It's like "this isn't your dad's Oasis, okay, so strap in or get the **** out."

 

One of the best instrumental albums ever made.