Just Chill

This time out we'll go through a very chill collection: another outing from John Adams (this time The Death Of Klinghoffer, Johnny Adams' Johnny Adams Sings Doc Pomus - The Real Me, and Ryan Adams' Heartbreaker


. All in all these make a great listen for a lazy weekend afternoon.  This post also has the grand debut (for my site anyways) of Lala widgets: this site allows you to post full recordings (not just 30 second snippets) to websites as well as stream most or all of an album online (although I think it limits you to somewhere between 1 and 5 listens before asking you to pay) depending on the licensing agreement.  (Lala is no more, sadly).  Personally, I think this could have led to great things for music reviews in new media, no longer does the reader need to rely on just the word of the reviewer or a short snippet of song but they can preview the album for themselves before spending money on it.  A similar method is how I grew much of my collection during college: I would hear a song on a compilation CD and like it so much I went ahead and got the whole album.  This did garner mixed results but with the arrival of the site and other advances in new media the long term future looks rosy for music.  That all being said I will try and post my favorite songs (trying to limit it to 3 or less) of each album I discuss.

A rocker, a gospel singer and a classical musician walk into a bar...

Wow, three months between posts, sorry about that. In order to make this project manageable I'll try and cover 2 to 3 albums per post, starting now.

Structural Analysis

My apologies for the long delay from my last post, things got a little crazy around casa de deeper: from postal misappropriations to structural failures, it's been a month. I've also delayed writing this entry in the hopes that the materials (The Muhal Richard Abrams Orchestra's Blu Blu Blu) would grow on me, it didn't.

Turns out, I'm a fan of structured music (though not structured settlements): I understand Mr Abrams is supposed to be a visionary of free jazz but this recording sounded, in the words of an underwhelmed fan of another disc, like "everyone was doing a solo". While I'm sure there is some sort of coherence here I don't hear it, similar to a problem I had with Francis the Mute from Mars Volta, give me something with an understandable layout and composition and I'll let the day drift by. This may make me a philistine to some (especially a jazz fan relative from Abrams' hometown) but so be it. This recording was a little hard to track down in digital form, Amazon (linked above) has an overpriced CD that should be reserved for the true conosieur while Emusic actually had one for download (about the only thing worth downloading from this free to cheap service).  (August 2011: Emusic has grown greatly since original posting, I feel it is well worth a look)

A is for...*Shudder*

Make it stop! Oh, for the love of God! Make it stop!

I've gone through Abba's Gold: Greatest Hits a couple times now. Why did I start here? Partly for the challenge of reviewing something I don't like and partly because they were listed first in the book. While the production quality is quite good, the lyrics are so vacuous it made my ears bleed. True, it's said that the 90's remastered edition (which is what I listened to) lost a little when the tracks were not doubled up leaving what was once a choir-like effect an empty shell of it's former self; but, that doesn't remove the overall saccharine effect of the album, lots of words come through the speakers but not much gets said (kinda like this post).

That hollowness, that escapism is what I think makes this group, and disco, so polarizing: while a little escape, a little sugar can be a great harbor from the storms of life, a decade long fleeing of the woes of life left a very bad taste in many peoples' mouths.

So, was it worth it? To me, no; to a long time fan, probably; to someone looking for the perfect playlist to small animals with, instant classic.

Falme on!