It’s been more than a year since I embarked on expanding my vinyl collection, and, naturally, the scope of the effort has changed a lot in that time.
At first, I concentrated on titles I would have bought before I moved away from vinyl. That meant examining the CD and digital collections and plugging holes in the corresponding spots in the vinyl collection.
By the end of 2013, I caught most of the low-hanging fruit, but a restlessness had set in — I wanted the care and attention required of vinyl to extend to recent releases, reissues and missed curiosities. So my wish list grew.
A year ago, I felt ambivalent about buying newer titles on vinyl. Back in June 2014, I downloaded the self-titled debut of Inventions, a side project of Eluvium and Explosions in the Sky. When I decided to get the album in a physical form, I chose vinyl over CD.
A year ago, I balked at the idea of paying more the $20 for a title I would have bought for less than $10 in my youth. On a visit to Austin in October 2013, I dropped $30 on an original pressing of No Depression by Uncle Tupelo. Pedro the Lion’s Control is priced at $15, and I consider that a bargain.
My vinyl collection has tripled in size as a result of these changing attitudes. Oddly enough, it’s increased my CD collection as well.
The price point for catalog CDs is dropping to the point where sometimes, it’s more economical to choose a CD over a download. For example, I had pretty much all the Eurythmics albums on vinyl but few in any digital form. Silver Platters priced those titles competitively enough that I opted to get CDs.
Immersing myself into so much catalog also made me curious about music I should have explored but never did. I hadn’t owned any albums by Neneh Cherry, Peter Gabriel, the Police, De La Soul or Public Enemy — till now.
The original targets of this vinyl renaissance have whittled down to some specialized titles that would require a goodly chunk of change to acquire. So now I’m diving the crates looking for anything that strikes my fancy.
Lately, it’s been modern classical music, especially titles on Nonesuch, CRI or New World. Duran Duran rarities are guaranteed to make me behave irrationally with my wallet. And there was no way I could pass up a beat-up copy of Vicious Rumours: The Album by Timex Social Club.
Next goal: A trip to San Francisco to dig through the stacks of Amoeba Records.
Back in junior year of high school, I got bit by the musical theater bug hard.
My music collection was practically an altar to the two titans of Broadway in the late ’80s — Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Both composers were the gateway drugs to a world of modern classical music. Without either one, I wouldn’t have developed a cozy relationship with dissonance.
Lloyd Webber has fallen pretty hard since then. His last hit show was Sunset Boulevard in 1993, and his work has made nary a ripple in pop culture consciousness since. Hell, I didn’t even know he made a sequel to The Phantom of the Opera.
A few weeks back during my usual crate digging, I ran across a vinyl copy of Variations, his pop/classical album of variations on Nicolo Paganini’s 24th Caprice. Lloyd Webber wrote the piece after losing a bet to his brother. It was later turned into the “Dance” half of the show Song and Dance.
At the height of my Lloyd Webber craze, I wanted to hear this album badly. The original album was released in 1978, and in 1988, it wasn’t available in any of the record shops I frequented in Honolulu.
I did find a cassette of an orchestral version performed by Julian Lloyd Webber with Lorin Maazel conducting the London Philharmonic. I had to use a lot of my imagination to hear a rock arrangement in an 80-piece orchestra.
By the time the work was reissued on CD in the US, my priorities had shifted. I started my own music studies in college, and I treated Lloyd Webber as a phase I needed to get through to find Igor Stravinsky, Philip Glass and John Zorn.
When I finished college, Lloyd Webber was completely out of my system, but my sister didn’t know that when she gifted me a compilation of his greatest hits. Till then, my entire experience with Lloyd Webber was through cast recordings. I listened to his shows in their entirety instead of cherry-picking the showstoppers.
That compilation revealed a weakness in Lloyd Webber’s canon. Well, any song excerpted from a show suffers from this problem but moreso with Lloyd Webber. Stripped from the dramatic context of the story, his songs can get pretty schlocky.
And it doesn’t help when interpreters milk the drama. Michael Crawford really drained that cash cow as much as he could.
So I forged ahead and pretty much forgot about Lloyd Webber. I made sure to get Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita and The Phantom of the Opera on CD, but I wrote off the rest of his canon.
Of course, that meant I couldn’t pass up Variations when I saw it in the record bin more than two decades later.
Lloyd Webber may have been a phase, but he was an important one. At the time I encountered him, I was impressionable enough to be swayed by his use of dissonance. He won’t be mistaken for Elliott Carter in a million years, but Lloyd Webber knew how to balance the showstoppers with the grit.
The overture to Cats isn’t anything you can hum, but to a 16-year-old dipping a toe into the larger world of avant-garde music, it’s not a bad introduction to how all twelve notes in a chromatic scale can be spun into a melody.
Variations was a lesson in how to construct a large-scale work from everything and anything. Some moments were pastiche, others pure sentimental manipulation. But Lloyd Webber threw in some ugly distortion at points, and none of it felt purposeless.
Yes, it was a concept album, but it was more than that.
In its own way, Variations opened up the possibility that music didn’t have to be exclusively high-brow or low-brow. It could synthesize both. It could be ancient and modern, melodic and discordant. It was what a teenager needed to hear to ease him into some thornier discussions about art and life later in adulthood.
Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings is one of those classical music one-hit wonders people may recognize without knowing they recognize it.
It’s the piece American media whips out for occasions of national mourning. Oliver Stone used the piece prominently for the film Platoon. It was played at the funeral of Grace Kelley, and I’m sure if I perform my due diligence, a Google search would confirm my suspicion that the piece was performed around the time of 9/11. I won’t do that due diligence because if I were a music director at that time, I would have had an orchestra rehearsing it.
An entire book, The Saddest Music Ever Written by Thomas Larson, focuses entirely on the piece.
What people may not know is the Adagio is actually part of a larger work, the String Quartet, Op. 11. Barber would not write another piece labeled as a “string quartet”.
My introduction to the Adagio was on the Kronos Quartet album, Winter Was Hard. The piece concludes the album, offering a sonic cleanse after the intensity of the Schnittke Third Quartet which precedes it.
Needless to say, I fell in love with the piece, and in my teenaged precociousness, I sought out the original work from which the Adagio was extracted. The only available recording at the time — we’re talking 1988, here — was by the Concord String Quartet, which paired the String Quartet, Op. 11 with one of Barber’s vocal work, Dover Beach, alongside George Rochberg’s String Quartet No. 7.
So I special ordered the cassette, listened to it and … wondered how the two halves of the piece relate to each other.
The fast, first movement, which is also reprised as a coda to its more popular second movement, isn’t really memorable. Where the second movement has that floating, off-kilter elegiac melody, the first movement seems to be just an intellectual exercise.
The second movement feels like a dialogue between the individual parts, where the first movement seems like the players are parroting each other, if not downright all saying the same thing. (I’m not entirely wrong — the quartet opens with a melody played in unison.)
I couldn’t put it into words at the time, but Barber didn’t seem to know what he was doing with that first movement, all the more evidenced by its return at the end of the piece.
In a way, it’s understandable how the Adagio has eclipsed its parent work. The rest of the quartet feels like an after-thought.
And it’s probably this underdog status that makes me seek out whatever recordings I can of the entire work, of which there aren’t many.
Currently, Emerson Quartet’s excellent American Originals album is the most readily available to contain the entire quartet. In my crate digging, I’ve run across vinyl LPs of Beaux Arts Quartet (paired with David Diamond’s String Quartet No. 4), the Cleveland Quartet (like the Emerson, paired with some quartets by Charles Ives) and that original cassette, the Concord.
Wikipedia alerts me to some others. That reissue by the Endellion Quartet wasn’t around when I was trying to find the work on CD.
I did take the score for the entire Op. 11 and program it into my digital audio work station, which you can listen to at the Empty Ensemble web site.
What I discovered is the first movement is in a very traditional sonata form, complete with modulation in the exposition and a recapitulation. Now that I can pinpoint the parts of the quartet, I’ve developed a better understanding of it.
That doesn’t stop the work from being unwieldy, but I can empathize with what Barber was trying to achieve. Portions of the quartet can get pretty thorny, and while Barber works in a tonal framework, he’s not beholden to it.
It’s those moments of discord arising from its spirited pace that makes me like the first movement just a bit more, and it certainly makes the second stand out.
You probably won’t fall in love with the entirety of the Op. 11, but at the very least, it’s a fascinating study on how a piece of music can exert its identity at the cost of others.
Musicwhore.org made the leap to WordPress back in 2012, but a number of sister sites, which are no longer updated, remained on Ye Olde Movable Typpe system.
Well, version 6 of Movable Type did away with its open source license, which means support for old installations will one day bid adieu.
So I migrated those sites to WordPress, including the behemoth Musicwhore.org Archive. I haven’t updated the artist directory that hooks into the old blog since 2005, so I accrued quite a lot of technical debt.
I had intended to update this new iteration of Musicwhore.org weekly, but I got sucked into bringing the old site up to speed. That meant spending a number of weeks learning how to create a custom WordPress plugin and updating the database itself to correct some rookie schema design mistakes.
So now the Musicwhore.org Archive is back. I have no plans to do anything with Filmwhore.org, and my TV watching habits have pretty much disqualified me from authoring a site called TVWhore.org.
I’ve mentioned before how sibling rivalry affected my earliest days of music collecting. If one of us (out of four) claimed an artist first, we had dibs on everything that artist made. It was so territorial, no one was allowed to touch anything owned by another sibling.
At first, it started out as a four-way arms race, but my sisters eventually dropped out. Collecting just wasn’t their thing. That left my brother and me.
Occasionally, something would come along that put those border resolves to a test. In 1980, it would be the soundtrack to the movie Xanadu.
The album had something for everyone. Side A housed the wholesome pop of Olivia Newton-John, while Side B offered a modicum of rock respectability with the Electric Light Orchestra. The singles were ubiquitous, and they only fired our desire to see the movie.
My parents, however, disliked movie theaters, and in the days before video rentals, the alternative was to wait a year for network TV to air it.
My brother managed to snag the Xanadu soundtrack before any of us could lay claim, and yeah, my 8-year-old self was appropriately annoyed by the coup.
On those occasions when my brother deemed us worthy to listen to the album in his presence, I remember liking the ELO side better than the ONJ side. “The Fall” was the first hint of my fondness for darker material.
Also, I was too young to appreciate the genre-splicing in “Dancin'”. What’s with this jazz thing? Why is some dude interrupting Olivia? And why does Gene Kelley have to end Side A?
The movie eventually showed up on network television — my parents were also too cheap to subscribe to cable — and it was … OK. Still not sophisticated enough to detect bad screenplay writing, I found the movie fun, if a bit dragging.
Xanadu eventually became a distant memory as soon as Duran Duran entered my life.
In fact, I didn’t really think about it till I thumbed through a bin of newly-arrived used vinyl records at Silver Platters in SODO. For less than the price of a fancy beverage at Starbucks, I could possess an album snatched from my young hands by my quick-acting brother.
So I bought it.
A week later, Xanadu popped up on the cable listings. I couldn’t even sit through 30 seconds of that dialogue before I switched back to a marathon of Outrageous Acts of Science.
But the album itself? Surprisingly durable.
“Dancin'” is now one of my favorite tracks, although the rock half of the song doesn’t sound as aggressive as I originally perceived. “Suspended in Time” and “The Fall” could have been contenders as singles themselves.
The CD itself turned out to be cheaper than grabbing it on eMusic, so I bought that as well. If there’s one disappointment, it’s the exclusion of the b-sides, “Drum Dreams” and “Fool Country”. Surely the spacious capacity of a compact disc would allow their inclusion?
Of course, the territoriality of sibling rivalry is silly in retrospect, but without it, I probably wouldn’t have forged an identity with my own tastes. And honestly, I probably wouldn’t have deigned to make this kind of purchase before my 40s.
It’s still cool to discover things about this music I was too young to know was even there.
Just because this site is no longer review-driven doesn’t mean I’ve stopped listening to newer releases, and no music writer worth her salt can resist the compulsion to make lists.
The first half of the Favorite Edition 2014 are the titles I anticipate will keep some sort of ranking by year’s end. The second half of the list is up for grabs.
Juanes, Loco de Amor: This album could very well be Juanes’ best. The writing is some of his catchiest since La Vida es … Un Ratico, and producer Steve Lillywhite gives him a big arena sound. (It’s there in the drums.) Loco de Amor finds Juanes rejuvenated after the lackluster P.A.R.C.E.
The Bad Plus, The Rite of Spring: I’ve been waiting for this album since a video of The Bad Plus performing the seminal Stravinsky ballet hit the Internet many years back. Similar to the trio’s reworking of Ligeti etudes, The Bad Plus rely on their virtuosity to give The Rite of Spring a fairly faithful reading.
Royal Wood, The Burning Bright: I wasn’t very impressed with Royal Wood’s hitmaking album, We Were Born to Glory, and neither was he. So Wood retreated to Ireland, where he crafted The Burning Bright, an album steeped in heartache and cautious optimism.
Shiina Ringo, Gyakuyunyuu ~Kouwankyoku~: I had to listen to this album three times before I could orient myself to what was happening. Gyakuyunyuu is billed as a “self-cover album,” featuring songs Shiina contributed to other artists. I was half-expecting another Utaite Myouri, but instead, I got her strangest and most baffling solo album to date. The stylistic whiplash makes the album something of a hot but fascinating mess.
Meredith Monk, Piano Songs: Double Edge recorded Monk’s Phantom Waltz back in 1992, and I’ve always wondered if there was more from where that came from. This album answers that question.
Molotov, Agua Maldita: The blistering anger of Molotov’s previous decade has evolved into something much more tuneful.
Inventions, Inventions: My first listen of Inventions’ self-titled album left no impression at all, but an extended coding session made me realize this album is actually quite compelling. I would put the Eluvium/Exploisions in the Sky ratio at around 60/40, though.
Sam Smith, In the Lonely Hour: Sam Smith does indeed possess an incredible set of pipes. What he has yet to acquire is an adventurousness on the level of James Blake. This debut is appealing, but like Janelle Monae, Smith has potential that is not yet tapped.
Ben Watt, Hendra: Do you miss Everything But the Girl? Hendra, Watt’s first solo album in a number of decades, picks up where Amplified Heart left off before Everything But the Girl ventured into electronic dance music.
I’m not sure how to explain my fascination with Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.
It’s not fandom. I’ve reviewed her work before, but I don’t follow her the way I do Steve Reich or John Adams. Nor have I internalized any of her pieces the way I have Lou Harrison or Meredith Monk.
But in the last six months, every time I run into a Zwilich album, I end up buying it. Tonight, it was a CRI vinyl album of her Chamber Symphony, String Quartet and Sonatina for violin and piano. During the winter, it was a New World CD of Symphony No. 1, and at the Austin Record Convention back in October 2013, I bought a sealed vinyl album of a vocal work, Passages, and a String Trio.
I first learned about Zwilich back in high school. My piano teacher introduced me to modern classical music, hoping to capitalize on my 10-key finger span. I also began relying on the rock music press than pop music radio to find new artists.
On my way to campus one morning, I tuned the car radio to the local public station. A piece was playing that was vaguely melodic but not entirely atonal. It ended, and the announcers piped up to talk about the piece. I couldn’t really stop the car to jot down the name of the composer, but I made sure to note the composer was a woman.
A few weeks later, I ran across a magazine article about Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, and I realized she created that piece I heard on that drive.
Today, I can point my phone at some music playing in the air and have it tell me what it is. If streaming services were available in my high school days, I would have looked up Zwilich’s music and given it a go.
But as the final decade of the 20th Century began to unfold, my resources were thin. I had a name. I had a text description of some music. And I had a fleeting encounter with said music in the terrestrial air. But I had little to no cash, and shops in Honolulu weren’t clamoring to stock modern classical music.
Zwilich’s name would pop up now and again as time passed, but my priorities always seemed to be stationed elsewhere.
So it’s a quarter of a century later, and I find myself chasing Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. But what am I really pursuing?
A resolution to a thwarted discovery, that’s what. I heard something I wanted to pursue, but circumstances stood in the way. Time eventually blunted the urgency.
I wonder now what would have happened had I delved into Zwilich’s work when my tastes were most malleable.
Would her Chamber Symphony occupy my listening memory the way Lou Harrison’s gamelan works do? Would I have sought the score for her String Quartet the way I did with George Crumb’s Black Angels?
It’s a far different experience listening to a piece of music as an adult than as a teenager. I wouldn’t have known how to listen to her music, and I would have used my instinct to make a judgment.
Conversely, I may have ended up missing something I could have only caught with a better grasp of the Western music canon.
In a way, Zwilich remains elusive. Search for her music on the streaming services, and a you get those same recordings I pursued two decades ago. Not much has been recorded since.
Around 2002, I got rid of my cassette collection. I had moved into a smaller apartment, and the cassettes hadn’t been played in years. In fact, I donated the boombox with a cassette deck to Goodwill to make room.
So now I had no convenient means to play these cassettes, and most of them had made the upgrade to CD anyway. The ones that hadn’t were on their way to the cutout bin, if they weren’t already there.
I brought the cassettes to Half-Priced Books down on South Lamar and Manchaca in Austin, Texas and bid all but five farewell.
Why five? Well, I wanted to upgrade those select titles to CD eventually, but I didn’t want to relinquish ownership of them. So I kept them on cassette as a reminder to one day make that transition.
A self-titled compilation from Yano Akiko was one of them.
At the time I bought the Yano cassette, I fell down a rabbit hole of anime pop music. Megazone 23, Macross: Do You Remember Love? and Bubblegum Crisis sent me on a spending spree that introduced me to Hamada Mari, Nakamori Akina and Nagai Mariko.
Japanese imports weren’t cheap, so I gave any US-released Japanese artist a shot.
Akiko Yano, the compilation, had the unique distinction of intersecting two of my teen-aged interests — Japanese pop and downtown New York improvisation.
John Zorn and Nonesuch Records president Robert Hurwitz put together the compilation, and Yano went on to release two additional albums on the label.
My 18-year-old ears could recognize a maturity and depth to Yano’s music that maybe those anime soundtracks didn’t quite possess, but at that age, I wanted ear candy. So I listened to the cassette a few times, then headed back to Miyasato Kumi and Iijima Mari.
The cassette ended up in box, which ended up in the closet. Out of sight, out of mind. But somehow it survived two interstate moves.
Another cassette that survived the purge was Oranges and Lemons by XTC. Finding it on vinyl spurred me to seek out the remaining survivors. I fished out a 4-track recorder I bought in the early ’90s — my first piece of recording gear — and transferred them to digital files.
It had been nearly 25 years since I first listened to Akiko Yano, and now I had a decade worth of listening to Shiina Ringo, NUMBER GIRL, Cocco and Utada Hikaru under my belt.
Yano was the proto-Ringo, perhaps even the proto-UA. She took the J-pop template and embellished it with traditional Japanese music, Latin music and even some classical.
She doesn’t have the powerhouse vocals of Shiina or UA, but she predated their inventiveness. For all I know, she could have influenced them.
And being a child of the ’80s, I find something reassuring about all the analog synths that wind their way through Yano’s more conventional tracks.
I’m glad I possessed enough of my wits back in 2002 to spare Akiko Yano from the cassette purge, and it’s luck that allowed me to make that upgrade many, many years later. The CD version is out of print, and it’s not even available through the digital services. Thank you, Silver Platters, for having a used copy on hand.
Truth be told, I don’t actually hate Billy Joel. I just recognize I’m not the target audience for his music.
Nor am I the target audience for Bruce Springsteen or Bob Dylan. My music experience pretty much started with Duran Duran, although ABBA did lay a bit of ground work. So I don’t see much point for dumping on music that’s not intended for me.
At the same time, I understand why my peer group would despise Billy Joel.
If I had any disdain for Joel during the years I was exploring Duran Duran and all those invading British bands, it was rooted in sibling rivaly. My brother liked Billy Joel, and if one of us four siblings claimed an artist, we weren’t going to share.
So I kept my mitts off his Billy Joel, so long as he stayed away from my ABC and Tears for Fears.
That sibling Cold War started to defrost in the late ’80s. I encroached on my brother’s monopoly on Sting, while he warmed up to U2 and Sinéad O’Connor.
By the time Storm Front came around, neither of us really gave much thought to Billy Joel. He was so ubiquitous during the first half of the decade that he induced a No Jacket Required-level of fatigue.
The minimal album cover — a red flag against a dark gray sky, the title in a stark sans-serif typeface — caught my attention. The darker hue of the songs also seemed to line up nicely with the weirder music to which I was starting to gravitate.
Also, a guy I had a crush on liked the album, and I wanted to figure why he liked it.
“Downeaster Alexa” probably cinched the album for me. It’s one of those songs I can find myself humming without any prompt. “And So It Goes” appeals to the incompetent pianist in me.
Mick Jones’ big production gave Storm Front an edge that made me momentarily forget about “Uptown Girl” or “Tell Her About It”.
I liked Storm Front depsite myself.
But that wouldn’t suit well with my peer group.
I was playing the album one night at work ca. 1998, and my co-worker asked why I was listening to Garth Brooks. I hadn’t realized Brooks turned the song into a country music hit. Her question dripped with disdain.
When the Dot-Com Bubble burst, I had to cull my music collection for cash. Remembering that exchange, Storm Front went on the chopping block. I did back it up on CD-ROM, though — just in case.
At another job ca. 2008, a different co-worker professed his love for Billy Joel, and I kept my poker face on. I could no better understand his love for Billy Joel any more than he could understand mine for Alfred Schnittke.
Slate explained what makes Billy Joel ripe for ridicule, and yeah, I see it. If Joel were an actor, he’d be the kind who tears the scenery. He can’t come across as anything other than a blowhard.
And yes, Storm Front is not immune to those moments where you just have to roll your eyes at Joel’s earnestness. See “Leningrad”. See “We Didn’t Start the Fire”.
I found that CD-ROM with a rip of Storm Frontand gave the album a listen. And I remembered “Downeaster Alexa”, and I remembered “And So It Goes”.
If I can make peace with the inner homophobia that prevented me from re-embracing ABBA, I can certainly get over the judgmental comment of a co-worker from the distant past.
There was a time in my life when it was absolutely not OK to admit to liking ABBA, and that time just happen to coincide with junior high school.
Well, it extended throughout high school as well, but a very specific incident in junior high school schooled me in what was then conventional wisdom. I had drawn the ABBA logo with the backward “B” on my copy of the Webster dictionary, and it opened me up for ridicule.
This being junior high, such ridicule had a lasting effect.
It became acceptable to like ABBA again in my sophomore year of college (ca. 1993) when a column in the Village Voice signaled the all-clear. The column tied ABBA’s resurgence with the gay community, and I was another two years away from being in the psychological mindset to come out.
So I clung to my internalized homophobia and maintained my ABBAmnesia.
Muriel’s Wedding hit theaters in 1994. Mamma Mia opened in London in 1999. In 2000, the members of ABBA turned down 1 billion dollars to reunite.
It’s been OK to like ABBA for a very long time now, but up until last summer, I couldn’t do it.
And I had long run out of excuses.
The biggest obstacle was my rockism. Straight guys with guitars — that is the bulk of my listening, and a lot of those straight guys instilled in me the idea that “disco sucks”. ABBA, even today, has not shaken off the perception of being a disco band, even when close examination of their output demonstrates otherwise.
Tied to rockism is internalized homophobia. Yes, even after nearly 20 years out of the closet, there are acceptable conventions of gay male culture to which I just say no. I don’t get drag. And I didn’t get ABBA.
It wasn’t always the case.
I drew that ABBA logo on my dictionary because I really did like them when I was 8 years old. I was in mall record store when the clerks put a LaserDisc of ABBA’s music videos on the TV. After that, I was hooked.
Pac-Man later derailed my attention from ABBA, but by then the group had broken up. And then came Duran Duran.
A recent holiday conversation with my sister in Chicago revealed that her own 7-year-old daughter was absolutely addicted to Mamma Mia.
Maybe that was it.
ABBA’s melodic sense is so basic and tuneful, it’s children’s music. I was a child when at the height of my ABBA fandom. I didn’t understand the words — and there were no lyric sheets on my albums — so all I had to go one was melody. Have I really been looking down on that instinctive appreciation all this time?
Today, I recognize that Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus wrote some sophisticated pop music. And while “Dancing Queen” put a lot of cash in their coffers, “Intermezzo No. 1” showed the band could do a lot more.
I’ve culled my music collection numerous times over the years, but the four vinyl albums by ABBA survived each purge. I put those albums on my turntable after purchasing some decent stereo speakers in May 2013, and I realized I was just way too freaking old to hold onto a slight from more than 30 years ago.
I’ve since added Super Trouper, The Visitors, Arrival and The Album to my collection. I’m passing on Voulez-Vous, and the jury is still out on Waterloo and Ring Ring.
I was right to draw that logo on my dictionary. Too bad I was too young to recognize it.
![[Shelfie: Record collection, 2013]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/20131111_142254.jpg)
![[Andrew Lloyd Webber - Variations]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/AndrewLloydWebberVariatio112519_f-300x297.jpeg)
![[Concord String Quartet - Rochberg: Quartet No. 7 / Barber: String Quartet, Op. 11; Dover Beach]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/GeorgeRochbergStringQuartetNo7-300x300.jpg)
. The piece concludes the album, offering a sonic cleanse after the intensity of the Schnittke Third Quartet which precedes it.
album is the most readily available to contain the entire quartet. In my crate digging, I’ve run across vinyl LPs of 
wasn’t around when I was trying to find the work on CD.![[Xanadu - Original Soundtrack]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/VariousArtistsSoundtracks112505_f.jpg)
![[Juanes - Loco de Amor]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/JuanesLocodeAmor2014104982_f-293x300.jpg "[Juanes - Loco de Amor]")
![[Shiina Ringo - Gyakuyunyuu]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/2014106512_f-150x150.jpg "[Shiina Ringo - Gyakuyunyuu]")
Shiina Ringo, Gyakuyunyuu ~Kouwankyoku~: I had to listen to this album three times before I could orient myself to what was happening. Gyakuyunyuu is billed as a “self-cover album,” featuring songs Shiina contributed to other artists. I was half-expecting another Utaite Myouri, but instead, I got her strangest and most baffling solo album to date. The stylistic whiplash makes the album something of a hot but fascinating mess.![[Sam Smith - In the Lonely Hour]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/SamSmithIntheLonelyHour112085_f-150x150.jpg "[Sam Smith - In the Lonely Hour]")
Sam Smith, In the Lonely Hour: Sam Smith does indeed possess an incredible set of pipes. What he has yet to acquire is an adventurousness on the level of James Blake. This debut is appealing, but like Janelle Monae, Smith has potential that is not yet tapped.![[Last Exit - Iron Path]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/LastExitIronPath198840031_f-150x150.gif "[Last Exit - Iron Path]")
Favorite reissue: Emmylou Harris, Wrecking Ball (Deluxe Edition)![[Ellen Taaffe Zwilich - Passages / String Trio]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/EllenTaaffeZwilichPassages-300x300.jpg)
![[Akiko Yano, self-titled]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/YanoAkikoAkikoYano199140159_f-300x300.jpg)
![[Billy Joel - Storm Front]](https://musicwhore.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/BillyJoelStormFront198940003_f-300x294.jpg)
