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Music
Category: Music
Bone Rolling Reviews 33 – Pharoah Sanders : Summun, Bukmun, Umyun
Roll: 4 – 8 – 19
Result: Summun, Bukmun, Umyun by Pharoah Sanders.
Summun, Bukmun, Umyun (Deaf, Dumb, Blind) is the answer for those who ask the question, “Can world-fusion be anything other than watered-down, artistically innocuous schmaltz suitable only for Disney movies and zoo commercials?”
Of course, this album by Pharoah Sanders is also one which is partly responsible for the Putumayos of the world. Though world music has been recorded since the days of wax cylinders, the idea of blending it with Western musical styles really took off in the late-Sixties and seventies when African American musicians began exploring their roots beyond blues and jazz. Some of the best of these early fusions came out of the free-jazz scene
» Jakob, co-host of Nerd Hurdles.nerdhurdles.com | Nerd Hurdles' Twitter | Mr. Dapper's Splendid Online Diary
Category: Music, Simply Read
Bone Rolling Reviews 32 – Sufjan Stevesn : Illinois
Roll: 3 – 11 – 9
Result: Illinois by Sufjan Stevens.
Sufjan Stevens didn’t mess around with the second installment in his project to write an album about each of the 50 United States. Any tribute to Illinois, the state that is home to both Chicago and gave birth to John Wayne Gacy, would have to be epic and it is.
Perhaps a little too epic.
Even if it is a masterpiece of modern baroque folk, “too much of a good thing” is more than a pithy saying. If by the time you get to the 19th out of 22 tracks, ”The Seer’s Tower“, you’re not a little mentally and emotionally exhausted, you weren’t really listening to the album.
» Jakob, co-host of Nerd Hurdles.nerdhurdles.com | Nerd Hurdles' Twitter | Mr. Dapper's Splendid Online Diary
Category: Music, Simply Read
Bone Rolling Reviews 31 – Thom Yorke : The Eraser
Roll: 3 – 3 – 11
Result: The Eraser by Thom Yorke.
The level to which I identify with this album worries me somewhat. I suspect it doesn’t say much for the state of my mental health.
Especially since I’ve never been entirely sure too what the damn thing is about. Urban paranoia? Political paranoia? Interpersonal paranoia? Perhaps all three.
It would probably help if Yorke didn’t mumble like a hobo through the middle half of the album. But then fully understanding what he is prattling on about might ruin the illusion.
“The fences that you cannot climb. The sentences that do not rhyme. In all that you can ever change. The one you’re looking for. It gets you down. There’s no spark. No light in the dark. It gets you down. You traveled far. What have you found. That there’s no time. To analyse. To think things through. To make sense.”
When this album came out in the summer of 2006, the songs “Anaylyse” (exerpted above) and “Black Swan” (People get crushed like biscuit crumbs… I’m for spare parts, broken up) became my personal mantras. I remember sitting at my desk with headphones on while repeatedly applying them to my aching soul like a salve.
I realize now, of course, that I was having one of my periodic nervous breakdowns. But there’s something about the songs on this album which never leave me. Something about how it reminds me of Krishnamurti’s famous words: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”
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Category: Music, Simply Read
Ruff Cuts by Whip Buffley
Artwork by Jeremie Duval http://jeremieart.blogspot.com
Here’s a special treat for everyone! It’s a brand new EP by Whip Buffley featuring four tracks that aren’t available anywhere else. Wanna know what the best bit is? It’s free! All you have to do is click here to download the EP. That’s it, nothing else to do. No sign up, no email address, no nothing. Just click this link and download the free Whip Buffley EP.
If you’d like to hear more Whip Buffley tracks you can download his album Ruff Around The Edges on MusicalMouseMat.com.
Category: Music
Bone Rolling Reviews 30 – Pet Shop Boys: Very/Relentless
Roll: 2 – 10 – 20
Result: Very/Relentless by Pet Shop Boys.
Before the industry figured out that you can sell more units if you put out the “special bonus disc edition” of an album after the standard edition—forcing fans to buy both if they want to have the album right away and the bonus disc, which of course we all do—Pet Shop Boys released the initial run of their opulent 1993 album, Very, with an extra disc, Relentless.
It also featured some of the most innovative CD packaging, in both editions, yet designed. In 1993 people only just starting to think outside the jewel case box and Very/Relentless shattered that with its three-pocket, bubblewrap-esque sleeve. The subsequent single-disc edition of Very is, of course, the iconic orange “LEGO brick” design seen in abundance (5-million copies sold) at used CD shops worldwide.
Containing the hits “Can You Forgive Her”, “I Wouldn’t Normally Do This Kind of Thing”, “Yesterday, When I was Mad” and their cover of “Go West”, Very is very much essential listening for even the most casual Pethead, but is Relentless, very?
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Category: Music, Simply Read
Bone Rolling Reviews 29 – CocoRosie : La Maison de Mon Rêve
Roll: 1 – 6 – 17
Result: La Maison de Mon Rêve (2004) / The Grey Oceans (2010) by CocoRosie.
When Devendra Banhart came out with Oh Me Oh My…in 2002, there was an air of mystery surrounding him (her? it?). You could have sworn it was creepy, backwoods folk music made by an honest to god creepy, possibly toothless, backwoods witch from a southern swamp. By 2004, this illusion had been shattered, Devendra wasn’t an 80-year-old black hag, but a rather dreamy young hippie-boy (in drag). But before quickly heading off to more commercially viable pastures, he succeeded in opening the door to creepy folk music for a lot of people. Picking up the tattered shawl where he left it, CocoRosie gave us creepy, southern-operati,c folk-tronic, ragtime-blues with their debut album, La Maison de Mon Rêve. And after diverging into pop-music, like Devendra before them, it’s a sound they’ve somewhat returned to with Grey Oceans.
Category: Music, Simply Read
Bone Rolling Reviews 28 – Seefeel : Quique
Roll: 3 – 4 – 17
Result: Quique (2-disc reissue) by Seefeel.
Few artists have ever achieved recreating the sound of time folding in upon itself—like a fluffy cotton towel buffeted on the line—quite as well as the UK band Seefeel did with their 1993 album, Quique.
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Category: Music, Simply Read
Bone Rolling Reviews 27 – M/A/R/R/S : Pump Up The Volume
Roll: 2 – 6 – 17
Result: Pump Up The Volume (3-track CDS) by M/A/R/R/S.
Colourbox were the 4AD band who weren’t Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, Modern English, Pixies, Throwing Muses, Dead Can Dance or generally remembered for anything recorded under there own name. They were responsible, however, for the best UK dance track ever recorded: “Pump Up The Volume“.
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Category: Music, Simply Read
Bone Rolling Reviews 26 – The Cure: Three Imaginary Boys (2-disc)
Jakob rolls 1d4, 1d12 and 1d20 to select a CD from his collection to review.
Roll: 1 – 9– 16 Result: Three Imaginary Boys by The Cure.
There was a point in the mid-Eighties when The Cure’s UK debut album, Three Imaginary Boys, was a bit of a Holy Grail for North American fans. Not that it was utterly impossible to acquire, it just tended to be pricey. But it had a handful of tracks not available on their North American debut, Boys Don’t Cry, and in the days before iTunes and file-sharing that meant finding a friend who’d actually paid two or three times regular price just to hear them. General consensus was the friend who’d splurged on the over-priced import had taken a bullet for you. Boys Don’t Cry really is the better album and no one ever needs to endure all 53 seconds of “The Weedy Burton”.
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Category: Music, Simply Read
