Amph What Album Did You Just Hear?

I mean, why not?

 

You like that one @Rogue1-and-a-half ?

Not overly fond of it, myself.

Some great tracks buried in a wash of mediocrity.

Apparently Clive Davis wanted it to be Prince's Supernatural. The album suffered, as a result.

 

Allman Brothers Band At Fillmore East

 

No, I'm really not a big fan of that one overall, but it's a lesser one that rarely gets discussed at all, so I threw it a like because it's worth hearing, I'd say, even if it's a mess. And it's one I feel that I owe a revisit.

 

I recently purchased the re-issue which includes the remix disc, so I might create a hybrid album out of those two versions.

But yeah, it's the lowpoint of his 90s output.

Looking forward to the 1999 re-issue?

35 unreleased tracks!

 

Diamond Eyes Deftones
I bought this after enjoying Koi No Yokan so much. This is also very good.

 

New Nick Cave album.

Available online to be heard uninterrupted:



Once again, as with Skeleton Tree, i'm album of the year vibes already..

 

Haydn: Die Schopfung (2002) – Thomas Hengelbrock, Balthasar-Neumann-Chor

Haydn’s one of those incredibly prolific composers (over one hundred symphonies!) that I basically have heard nothing by. Based on my reaction to this oratorio, I’m going to have to change that. He’s (yet another) excellent candidate for one of my patented marathons, but with a hundred symphonies, I don’t know that I’m up for it at the moment. This oratorio, which clocks in just under an hour and forty minutes on two CDs, is based on the Biblical Creation narrative and also on Milton’s Paradise Lost. Haydn has the Biblical verbiage covered in recitatives and then builds the songs around selections from Paradise Lost. I really, really loved this. At almost a hundred minutes, it never drags and it ranges far and wide in terms of its scope and its emotions, which makes sense considering that it’s about the creation of the entire universe. Exuberant, vibrant praise choruses give way to thunderous, chaotic descriptions of the oceans or the mountains and then those are followed by witty, almost programmatic songs about various animals and birds and so on. The vocalists are all quite good; none of them really overdo it in a way that often bugs me in oratorios of this kind. The most beautiful song here is the soprano aria, Robed in Refreshing Green, which is about the creation of grass, trees & flowers; it’s given a great reading by Simone Kermes as Gabriel – all things considered, I think she was my favorite of the vocalists. The love duet between Adam & Eve is great as is the exultant The Heavens Are Telling the Glory of God, which is the first section to feature the trio of vocalists backed by the choir and it just builds and builds and builds. I mean, I think I liked this one more than I like The Messiah; it’s just very emotionally intense, lyrically vivid and everyone on this recording, from the soloists to the large choir to the period instrument orchestra, is just on their A-game. Good sound quality too. This one’s a masterpiece of a classical album. I’m only a bit nervous that I may have set myself too high a bar for Haydn; I may have come in on his best work. 4 stars.

tl;dr – oratorio of Creation is a staggeringly great epic of deep emotional intensity and wide range; all participants on this recording bring their A-game and create a fantastic classical album. 4 stars.

 

It's worth noting that, despite basically inventing them, Haydn very slightly predates the notion that the modern symphony was kind of a total glimpse at a composer's prowess; he came in at the tail-end of the theory that it was all about your masses, oratorios, and operas. The primacy we give the symphony these days grew out of Beethoven's catalog (and very quickly, I might add - Brahms, perfectionist that he was, was trapped in this paradigm despite being born a mere six years after L-Dog kicked the bucket, and it's generally not applied to Haydn even though he taught B-Money for a few years). Consequently it's a little easier to persuade yourself to stick to the highlights.

Also you totally came in on his best work.

 

What would be the symphonic highlights in your opinion? Conventional wisdom seems to basically say do the London symphonies and back-burner the rest. Would you agree? I'm leaning toward possibly exploring the London symphonies and The Seasons as his most significant work. Though, let's be honest, probably not for a while.

 

In addition to the Londons, definitely check out the Paris symphonies, those were basically pop hits at the time and were pretty influential as a result. They also hold up, which is nice.

In his lovely little "a bunch of composers I like" overview book, Language of the Spirit, Jan Swafford also gives "Maria Theresa" (48) a shout-out, but I haven't listened to it myself.

 

i'm listening to a tribe called quest's "we got it from here... thank you for your service" and i'm just like damn, why don't i listen to this record every day? so now i'm probably gonna have to do that for a while.

 

Not really an album, but I was listening to this Beatles compilation on Youtube, because Paul McCartney was on Colbert a while ago and I understood none of the references at all because I'm a millennial. Turns out I only recognized "Hey Jude" and much more vaguely, "Strawberry Fields Forever".

 

For a debut album of a fairly young thrash band at the time, this is some good stuff. Kill as One, Voracious Souls and Final Death being my personal favorite tracks on the album. Mark Osegueda in particularly proved himself as a lead singer with a overall strong performance with those moments of high pitched screams being especially memorable, despite only being around 18 at the time.

 

Led Zeppelin - Latter Days

 

Yeah, album of the year but not album of the decade.

The latter is a tie between Bowie's Blackstar and Cave's Skeleton Tree.

 

Silversun Pickups - Swoon

 

The X-Files: Volume Two (2013) – Mark Snow

I feel like I’m probably on record somewhere that I think the music Mark Snow produced for The X-Files is probably the best music ever produced for television. Well, that theory gets put to the test for sure with a series of soundtracks Snow released in the early 2010s. This is the second volume and it collects nearly five hours of music on four CDs. It has selections from over thirty episodes with at least one from each of the original series’ nine seasons. And, man, does it hold up. I’ve listened to this entire set numerous times and I’m not frigging done with it yet. This music spans the gamut from moody atmospherics to pulse-pounding action music, from gorgeous piano melodies to grinding industrial soundscapes, from ethereal beauty to dissonant terror. This music is just as much of a roller coaster ride as the series was. It’s kind of amazing to realize just how varied Snow’s output was and also to realize that, while he occasionally reused some themes or hooks, that he essentially wrote a new thirty to forty minute score for every single episode of the series, which is absolutely crazy. And some of the tracks here run twelve or thirteen minutes; what that means is that Snow was creating a single music cue to run from commercial break to commercial break, covering an entire act of the show with one unbroken piece of music. I mean, that’s crazy. Sure, one could quibble about some things. Some of the episodes get incredibly brief selections. Grotesque, a grim fourth season episode, has a kick-ass industrial score and it gets a single track that clocks in at less than a minute-and-a-half. Other episodes get eighteen or twenty minutes. Not sure how those selections were made. But there are only a couple of tracks out of the sixty-two that make up this album that are what I’d call not good. The four minute track from Biogenesis is the worst, Snow indulging his cheesiest tendencies with big brass hits. Maybe I’m biased; a listener without all the baggage I bring from the show would find this music less interesting or compelling, but I’m willing to bet they’d still be impressed. The only question now is: do I buy Volume One or Volume Three next? The truth is out there. 4 stars.

tl;dr – nearly five hours of the best music ever created for television; Mark Snow’s scores run the emotional, thematic and genre gamut and never cease to impress. 4 stars.

 

The Tyranny of Distance (2001) – Ted Leo / Pharmacists

Ted Leo is a guy I’m mostly familiar with because of his friendship with a couple of people I really love, Aimee Mann and Scott Aukerman. He’s collaborated with Mann and he’s been on Aukerman’s Comedy Bang Bang Podcast a handful of times. This is the first of his proper albums I’ve given a listen to and it’ll probably be the last. I don’t mean to say that it’s that bad, but it’s not particularly good either. It’s kind of interesting that he’s clearly a lyricist in the singer/songwriter mode, but his band cooks like hard. So, you’ve got very elliptical, poetic (often downright pretentious if I’m being blunt) lyrics, but backed up with these grinding hard-rock riffs and searing guitar hooks. That’s, you know, someone besides me could, and probably has, done a whole essay about the fusion of those two things, but I’ll skip it. And I’ll say that it is immaculately produced; in a hard rock style, so it’s grungy, but it sounds fantastic really. I quite liked Under the Hedge, the closest thing to a memorable pop song here, and Timorous Me, which just has a great, slowly evolving sound and lyrics that revolve around the same kind of thing Morrissey used to call a “shyness that is criminally vulgar.” The rest of the album isn’t bad, but it’s also just kind of there. “I’m not the great communicator that I used to be apparently,” Leo sings on one song. Well, okay, that is a good lyric, but it’s also kind of true. 2 stars.

tl;dr – marriage of bookish, intricate lyrics and hard-rock sound is slightly interesting, but there’s only a couple of good songs here at the end of the day. 2 stars.

 

Fear Of A Blank Planet - Porcupine Tree

 

I never posted my thoughts on this album after it came out, but I really like it (minus some of the short filler tracks that aren't really proper songs). I love the song Fear Inoculum, and Invincible, 7empest, and Pneuma are really good too.

 

Le Frissons des Vampires (2010) – Acanthus

This is the soundtrack to a horror film from 1971, directed by cult director Jean Rollin; Acanthus was basically a psychedelic rock group formed to record the soundtrack to this movie and then never do anything again. It’s not a particularly easy soundtrack to get ahold of, but it’s worth it. The movie is, going by the music, pretty weird. This isn’t at all a traditional horror score. It’s got elements of psychedelic rock and lounge music and even a little bit prog at times. It’s got a wheedling electric guitar tone that just cuts through all the noise around and a great sixties organ sound. I venture to say that this soundtrack contains every bit of music from the film because it tops out at around thirty-eight minutes and it includes some tracks that are less than thirty seconds, including a couple that are just basically somebody beating a floor tom a few times. But, at its best, this is great, idiosyncratic music. Sometimes, as on La Chateau, it has a nice rock groove; other times, like on Sleeping Beauty, it has a lilting acoustic vibe. It’s interestingly produced, which isn’t to say that it sounds great exactly, but it has a sixties garage type production and I really enjoyed it. The album also contains a few snippets of dialogues and some sound effects and, seemingly randomly placed throughout the album, blood curdling screams. Let me tell you, it’s real fun when those happen the first time through. After my first listen, I was kind of cool on the record on the whole and thought it was sloppy and not particularly great. But I found myself just listening to it over and over again and that sloppiness ended up becoming a big strength of the record to me. It’s a thing that sometimes really works for a soundtrack, when it kind of becomes almost like sound collage art at various points. This isn’t an album to just give somebody and say, “Hey, you’ll like this. This is good music.” But it’s a weird listening experience that got better every time I listened to it and I kind of think I love this now. 3 ½ stars.

tl;dr – bizarre psychedelic rock meets lounge music soundtrack for cult vampire film is weird, unsettling and idiosyncratic; on repeated listens, it just keeps getting better. 3 ½ stars.