Monthly Archives: November 2016
![[Sonic Youth - Murray Street]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/SonicYouthMurrayStreet2144605_f-300x298.jpg)
Rewind takes a look at past Musicwhore.org reviews to see how they hold up today. The albums featured on Rewind were part of my collection, then sold for cash only to be reacquired later.
Back when I first reviewed Murray Street, I was familiar with only three Sonic Youth albums, two of which I owned. I eventually let the album go because it had been played to death during my shifts at Waterloo Records.
I put a lot of pressure on myself to keep producing reviews for this site, and like any imposition, I eventually started making filler. A few tell-tale signs indicate how I struggled to get through that review.
First, I defer to the opinions of other publications. When I do that, I know I don’t have a strong opinion of my own. Second, I openly confess to the limitations of my expertise on the band. Sometimes it works when I’m moved enough to write about a style of music with which I’m not familiar. In this instance, it was a cop-out.
Murray Street found its way back to my collection only after I had developed an appreciation for the early-Steve Shelley era. I actually prefer Sister and EVOL over Murray Street, but I do like it enough to own it on vinyl.
I stand by my description of the album in the review — it’s tuneful and somewhat restrained, compared to the distortion assault of Daydream Nation or the grime of Dirty.
Something not mentioned was the fact I passed over the two albums preceding Murray Street. Waterloo had a policy where you could listen to anything in the store, of which I took advantage in the days before Napster. I heard enough of A Thousand Leaves and NYC Ghosts and Flowers to know I would like neither of them.
That made Murray Street appealing by comparison.
Tags: rewind, sonic youth
![[East of Eden- East of Eden]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/EastOfEdenEastOfEden-298x300.jpg)
I’m part of the last generation that knew what life was like before the Internet. For most people my age, we discovered new music by listening to the radio. If you hated radio — and I did — we found out about music through magazines. More adventurous listeners would seek out zines.
I picked up the self-titled debut of a Boston band named East of Eden because their album was on sale at Tower Records. There might have been a review somewhere. At the time, Boston was home to Throwing Muses and Pixies, so there was a chance some of that rubbed off on East of Eden.
Also, I liked the cover.
The album actually turned out to be pretty decent. It wasn’t Pixies or Throwing Muses by any stretch of the imagination, but it had all the requisite gloss of an ’80s record, and it wasn’t Richard Marx.
The album was released in 1989, a crowded year with a lot of stellar albums by XTC, the Replacements, the B-52’s and 10,000 Maniacs. East of Eden was good, but it didn’t have enough heft to elbow its way into regular rotation on my Walkman.
I bought the album on cassette, and in a crunch for cash, it was an early casualty.
East of Eden shares it name with a number of bands, and the Boston ensemble registers barely a footprint. Information is scarce on Discogs.com, which misattributes them as a Pennsylvania band. Google returns more results for a progressive rock band in the UK. The album itself is nowhere to be found on digital services.
I was surprised to find a copy of the album on CD at the Lifelong AIDS Alliance Thrift Shop. It was evidence I wasn’t the only person to have ever owned the album, nor the only one to surrender it. For $1, I was willing to explore why I let it go in the first place.
Back in 1989, I wanted every album I bought to change my life. East of Eden didn’t, which was pretty unfair to the band. They recorded a good album that was victim to inattention by a major label in a fertile period ripe with great bands doing excellent work.
Tags: east of eden, the ones that nearly got away
![[Soldier String Quartet - Sequence Girls]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/SoldierStringQuartetSeque153946D59P_f.jpg)
One of the most influential issues published by Pulse magazine was a supplement covering the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. Those 20-some odd pages was my encyclopedia of the downtown New York scene of the late ’80s and early ’90s.
Of course, I had no means to listen to any of the music described in that guide. Tower Records had a wide-reaching stock, but downtown New York albums just didn’t reach Honolulu unless it was released on a major label, i.e. Nonesuch.
Soldier String Quartet was one of those ensembles mentioned in Pulse, and my burgeoning interest in Kronos Quartet made me curious about Soldier as well. I wouldn’t spot any of their albums in the wild till I lived in New York City from 1992 to 1993. I had to leave them on the shelf because I was living on a student income (read: parents’ money).
I had honestly forgotten about Soldier String Quartet till I was flipping through the stacks of Crossroads Music in Portland, Ore. I spotted Sequence Girls selling for $6, and I had to sate my curiosity once and for all.
Kronos traces its lineage back to Josef Haydn, but Soldier can only draw a tenuous link to that tradition. With bass and drums augmenting the quartet, Sequence Girls is clearly a rock album. The quartet plays with a lot of fire, and David Soldier’s original works can get crunchy.
The album also includes arrangements of delta blues songs from Muddy Waters, Skip James and Charley Patton that don’t attempt to clean up the source material.
In addition to performing Soldier originals, the quartet premiered works by the likes of Elliott Sharp, Zeena Parkins and Fred Frith. Wikipedia mentions Soldier String Quartet served as a training ground for other ensembles, at one time employing Regina Carter, and the’ve appeared on Guided by Voices albums.
It doesn’t look like Sequence Girls was ever reissued on CD, but it is distributed digitally through CD Baby.
Tags: soldier string quartet, vinyl find
![[Philip Glass - Monsters of Grace]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/1999-03-16-Monsters-of-Grace-300x191.jpg)
I save my concert ticket stubs, but I’ve never taken an inventory of how many I have. So one night, I decided to scan them all. This stub is the oldest I could find.
Monsters of Grace is a multimedia piece by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, and this staging was part of the SXSW Interactive festival in 1999. It had been two years since I moved from Honolulu, so the idea that I could go to a Philip Glass performance left me awestruck. Better yet, the show was restricted to badge holders, and I had a media badge.
I remember nothing of the music. It’s Philip Glass, so I imagine there were a lot of arpeggios and harmonic motion in thirds to distant keys. Since he was a keynote interview that year, Glass conducted and performed with his ensemble.
I do remember it was 3D, which meant I had to wear glasses, and Wilson’s staging in that regard was quite stunning.
None of my ticket stubs date earlier than 1999 because I had an evil entry-level work schedule at a newspaper. For the first year and a half, I worked nights. Then I was moved to early mornings on a 4-day/10-hour schedule. I wouldn’t have an office-hours schedule till the start of 1999.
That year was the first SXSW festival I attended. Later in the week, I would go to my first Japan Nite.
I saw Philip Glass in person two more times. The first was a year and a half later with Kronos Quartet performing his score to Dracula. The last was in 2012, when he took a bow after a staging of Einstein on the Beach at Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley, Calif.
Tags: philip glass