Gang of Four, 77-81, March 12 (vinyl), April 23 (CD)
I don’t need this boxed set. I already have Entertainment! and Solid Gold on vinyl. But I want this boxed set because of the ephemera that goes along with it, including an actual cassette tape of demos. I’m glad I still have my TASCAM 424 to play it.
MONO, Beyond the Past: Live in London with Platinum Anniversary Orchestra, March 19
I don’t think I ever got around to listening to Holy Ground: Live in NYC with the Wordless Music Orchestra. (NOTE: I’m listening to it now as I write this entry.) As much as the orchestra is important to MONO’s studio recordings, it’s not terribly important in a live setting. I have seen the band enough times not to miss it. Still — I’d love to see them perform with one.
Princess Goes to the Butterfly Museum, Thanks for Coming, May 7
I’m usually skeptical when Hollywood actors form bands, but Michael C. Hall (Six Feet Under, Dexter) played the title role of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, which is enough cred for me. Also, I’m definitely the target market for the trio’s post-new wave sound. I liked the self-titled EP enough, but I’m curious to see what they can do over the length of a full album. Thanks for Coming is already available on digital platforms.
Vinyl
PJ Harvey, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, Feb. 26
Yeah. This reissue is the one for which I’ve been waiting. I’m even going to get the accompanying disc of demos released separately. Next target: Let England Shake.
Bad Brains, Bad Brains, April 22
Because … Bad Brains.
Death Cab for Cutie, The Georgia EP, July 30
Death Cab for Cutie made this covers EP available for one day on Bandcamp to raise money for Fair Fight. With Senators Warnock and Ossoff now sworn in, the band is making it available on vinyl.
What is the memory you most associate with this title?
Before I moved to New York City in 1992 to spend two semesters on an exchange program, Honolulu had two classic rock radio stations. When I came back in 1993, one of those stations had turned into an alternative rock station.
Suddenly, it seemed like everyone had always been into Björk and R.E.M. when I knew for a fact I got confused looks whenever I mentioned these artists to my friends.
Despite my bitterness, I did feel somewhat gratified that people came around to my point of view. But the year I spent on the mainland also revealed I was actually pretty mainstream. It just took six months for Hawaii to catch up with the rest of the country.
What was happening in your life when it was released?
As much culture shock I felt moving to New York City, recalibrating to Hawaiian time was just as hard. I don’t think I managed to feel remotely realigned for at least a year.
Having tasted that independence, I asked my parents whether they would spring for me to live on campus. They agreed.
Honolulu isn’t nearly as walkable as New York City, and public transportation isn’t remotely as frequent. But I held onto as much independence as I could muster till I moved to Austin, Texas in 1997 for work.
What was happening in your life when you bought it?
I bought the album at the time of its release, so same answer as above.
Living on campus did confer a lot of conveniences, though. If I wanted to watch an arthouse movie at the now defunct Varsity Theatre, I could just walk from campus housing. A visit to Tower Records was a 20-minute bus ride to Ala Moana Center. Living on campus probably made it easier for the student newspaper to get its hooks into me.
No, it wasn’t like living in New York City. But I probably would have gone crazy commuting back and forth from the suburbs.
What do you think of it now?
The EP still ranks highly in my favorites for 1993. I listened to it a lot at the time, and I tried to catch Spiny Norman as much as I could, which wasn’t much given how few rock venues were available in Honolulu.
The chip on my shoulder about Hawaii’s lack of an independent rock scene probably got exacerbated by this EP. It was of such stunning quality that I held out hope my hometown wouldn’t be so much a backwater.
The band, of course, broke up, and my music tastes got increasingly esoteric as I explored that thing called the Internet (back when publications still capitalized the “I”.)
But the music on Crust still holds up well. Play it alongside other music of the era — your Siamese Dreams and your In Uteros — and you’d be hard-pressed to think Spiny Norman was a regional band.
Google killed off its Play Music service back in October 2020. I was a faithful user of the service till the end. When it first launched in 2011, downloads were still going strong, and Spotify had just reached the United States.
The idea of a music locker still had some legs back then because licensing deals didn’t cover everything, and even the biggest download services had gaps. A music locker could fill those gaps by allowing users to upload their collections to the cloud.
The locker was the feature that clinched it for me, and in 2016, I went all in. Japanese artists hadn’t yet expanded their licensing outside of Japan, so Spotify and their ilk weren’t terribly useful for me. Google Play gave me the best of both worlds — the ability to stream new music if I so desired but also having access to items not in their catalog.
YouTube, however, organically turned into the premiere music discovery service on the Internet, eclipsing Play Music’s strengths. So the product managers at Google have now shifted focus on Youtube, spinning out a music service on that platform and sending Play Music out to pasture.
The music locker is gone, its contents migrated over YouTube. The Music Manager desktop application has been replaced with an upload form. I liked the convenience of ripping my files and letting the Manager do its thing. So it’s no surprise I’ve uploaded nothing to YouTube Music since the migration.
I’m pretty much keeping my subscription alive so I don’t have to put up with ads on YouTube itself.
In fact, I’ve reinstalled Spotify and resubscribed to the Premium Plan. The Japanese artists formerly lacking on the service have jumped in, some more so than others. You can even find NUMBER GIRL now. The user interface is less clumsy than I remember, but it’s still not much of a joy to use.
Friends swear by the Spotify recommendation engines, but I’m skeptical. I’m not terribly surprised that when I play NUMBER GIRL, Spotify would recommend ASIAN KUNG-FU GENERATION. I just wish it could connect NUMBER GIRL to a band in the United States and not segregate by genres and regions.
When Spotify can take Sam Hunt and Solange and recommend a band from Japan based on that intersection, maybe I’ll be impressed.
As much as I’m saddened by the demise of Google Play Music, I can’t say I’m greatly inconvenienced by the move. The gaps on Spotify have narrowed, with Japanese bands and modern classical music easily found. And I still have Exact Audio Copy and Winamp for all the music I pick up at the thrift shop, most of it available on the streaming services.
I had no idea this album was considered Ronstadt’s new wave album. Yes, three Elvis Costello songs are on this album, and “Hurt So Bad” has a scorching guitar solo more characteristic of the late Andy Gill. But it doesn’t sound like some new Romantic looking for a TV sound.
Carpenters, The Singles 1969-1973
There was a time when digging the Carpenters was an ironical act. The 90s are distant enough that I think we can sincerely dig the Carpenters now.
The Chemical Brothers, Dig Your Own Hole
I was skeptical of the whole attempt to make electronic dance the heir apparent of grunge. But that doesn’t detract from the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers releasing some durable albums from that late-90s era.
bloodthirsty butchers, Mikansei
bloodthirsty butchers have a talent from making long songs that don’t feel as long as they are.
The Fixx, Reach the Beach
I knew the Fixx were responsible for “One Thing Leads to Another”, but I had no idea they were also behind “Saved By Zero”. To be honest, the songs sound like they’re from different bands.
I bet you have albums in your collection — physical or digital — that you absolutely love but would find in a bargain bin of a record store or in neglected corner of a thrift shop.
I call these albums 99-Cent Masterpieces.
I’m always disappointed when I see Blue Sky Mining by Midnight Oil in a cutout bin, even though it’s an album every bit as consequential as Diesel and Dust. In Tua Nua is a band I thought deserved a bigger break in the US, as evidenced by the number of times I purchased The Long Acre for cheap.
And I bought Break Out by the Pointer Sitsters for $2 at Goodwill, thinking it would be fun to have the album with “I’m So Excited” on it. I wasn’t prepared for how underrated this album is.
Yes, the singles off the album are karaoke staples and can probably be encountered as background music for your shopping experience. But the deep cuts on the album aren’t just filler. “Easy Persuasion”, “Dance Electric” and the minor single “Baby Come and Get It” are every bit as solid as “Automatic” and “Neutron Dance”.
I’d almost forgotten about “Automatic”, a showcase for June Pointer’s deep alto and perhaps the most fascinating single off the album. Maybe it’s all the 80s synths, but it feels like it emerged from a dance club in Birmingham, England than Oakland, California. I like it more than “Jump (For My Love).”
It’s baffling this album isn’t consistently ranked on critics lists. Sure, it moved a lot of units in its day, but sometimes, a hit album actually deserves to be a hit. And Break Out certainly qualifies.
The only label to have shown this album much love is Cherry Red in the UK, which repressed a 2011 deluxe edition back in October 2020. Yes, this album is good enough that I recommend seeking out the expanded edition.
My piano teacher wanted me to learn Sergei Rachmaninoff’s prelude in C-sharp minor. I didn’t get past the first page. I bought a tape of Rachmaninoff’s complete preludes, and it sufficiently scared me off from trying any of those pieces at tempo.
At the time, my knowledge of classical music was scant. I knew the usual dead Germans — Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Schumann — from piano exercises, but it was all just a monolith to my junior high self. Then my piano teacher introduced to some 20th century Russians — Prokofiev, Khachaturian and Rachmaninoff. These composers started to break down traditional harmony, and I became intrigued by the dissonance of their works.
Except Rachmaninoff, of course. His music was firmly planted in the 19th century, but I hadn’t yet developed an ear to distinguish the various eras. I figured if Rachmaninoff lived in the early 20th century, that made him a “20th Century Composer”.
The more I explored music of the modern era, the more I found Rachmaninoff wanting, and the tape I bought with all of his preludes would get sold for cash to make way for composers who aligned more with my tastes.
But I had already played it so many times that they actually sunk into my subconscious. When I retook my undergraduate music classes some 25 years later, a classmate would rehearse one of Rachmaninoff’s preludes, and I could hum along in my mind’s ear.
I don’t remember much about that tape. I kept a barebones catalog of my collection, but I didn’t note who performed those preludes. I just remember it was an RCA recording.
The Alexis Weissenberg compilation I picked up at the thrift store seemed to fit the bill. Playing it felt familiar, as if it made an exact mental match to what I remember. The first recording you hear of any classical work becomes a litmus, and if you internalize it, you can tell when someone else’s interpretation rubs against that perception.
The Weissenberg recordings felt like I had come home.
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![[Big Pig - Bonk]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/BigPigBonk1988260495_f.jpg)
![[Spiny Norman - Crust]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/SpinyNormanCrust-300x300.jpg)
![[bloodthirsty butchers - Mikansei]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/bloodthirstybutchers2259980YGNY_f.jpg)
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![[Linda Ronstadt - Mad Love]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/LindaRonstadtMadLove198259767_f.jpg)
![[Soundtrack - Batman Original Score]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/VariousArtistsSoundtracksD125699_f.jpg)
![[The Pointer Sisters - Break Out]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ThePointerSistersBreakOu202514_f-300x297.jpg)
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![[Sergei Rachmaninov - Preludes (Alexis Weissenberg)]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/SergeiRachmaninoffPreludes230999OJTS_f-300x300.jpg)