Here's the first cut "Yang Yang" off of 1972's Approximately Infinite Universe:
Over the course of the past couple of years I have fallen in love all over again with Lennon's post-Beatles work and with much of Yoko's solo work, and can hardly bear to listen to the Beatles at all (even though I own the Mono Box). [As to Macca's post-Beatles work? I find all of it to be absolutely dreadful save for one song. One song? That's right, one song. I'll reveal which song that is down the road.]
Here's song #2 on Side 4 of the double-LP:
Gosh, who is Joel Nohnn on this song? He sure is a great guitar player!
Another album that has been in heavy rotation day and night at Jams, Mofo headquarters the last week or so is the fourth album, entitled Mines, from the Portland, OR group Menomena. A friend gave me the MP3s and I liked the album so much I purchased the vinyl record. Here they are doing TAOS, the second song off the album, on Oregon Public Broadcasting's music show:
While this is an album that is best heard on the home hi-fi with the volume level way up, you can also check out the complete album for yourselves at grooveshark, mofos:
I have been on somewhat of a Wynn Stewart jag the last couple of days. Wynn was an early adopter of what would come to be known as the "Bakersfied sound" in C&W music--some of the first country music to incorporate the backbeat and shiny electric instrumentation. He paved the way for the Bakersfield scenesters Buck Owens and Merle Haggard who followed in his musical footsteps. Stewart was born in Missiouri in 1934, moved to California with his family soon after WWII, and died of a heart attack at the age of 51 in 1985 in the middle of an attempted musical comeback. If you want a collection of his material, find yourself a digital or physical copy of this album: The Very Best of Wynn Stewart: 1958-1962.
Even better than Grinderman 1. Check out the latest release from this side project of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds for yourselves, mofos (and check out the guitar playing by guest Robert Fripp on track 3):
I have been listening to Nick Cave for 20+ years now and it makes me strangely happy that he is still relevant and kicking ass.
I have been listening to the new of Montreal album a whole bunch this last week and am bummed that I will likely miss seeing a show on their joint tour with Janelle Monae.
It just doesn't get much better than this. Here we find Frank in his TV debut only a short 2.5 years before the March 1966 sessions that would result in his first album entitled Freak Out.
Sometimes it is the case that a band is better than the sum of its parts. For me, the band Wolf Parade is a clear example of this. I like Dan Boeckner's other band Handsome Furs pretty well. Likewise, Spencer Krug and his recordings with Sunset Rubdown are darn good. As well, I have fond memories for a couple of the Hot Hot Heat albums from earlier in the last decade and Dante DeCaro's guitar playing. But I like Wolf Parade better than these other bands. And I like the new Wolf Parade album Expo 86 a whole damn bunch. Though it came out in late June, it is only the last week or so that I have been listening to it on a regular basis.
I think it smooths out some of the raw edges (for better and for worse) of the band's first album (2005's Aplogies to the Queen Mary) and kicks out the jams as compared to 2008's At Mount Zoomer.
If you want to know what my guitar playing sounds like today, take a listen to Thompson's two solos on this recent rendition of "Shoot Out the Lights."
Here we have Lou on the 1985-released tribute album Lost in the Stars: Music of Kurt Weill. This is the upbeat and rockin' version. [For the multi-artist Weill biopic soundtrack album from 1997 entitled September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill, Lou rerecorded the same song, but that recording is a more low-key affair.]
Here is Lou from the Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration. [Has it really been almost 18 (October, 1992) years since that pay-per-view broadcast and subsequent (in 1993) album/video release? I chipped in at a viewing party in a friend's Austin, TX house. Good times.] Anyway, here is Lou from that night:
Track #15 on the almost completely atrocious release from 2003: We're a Happy Family: A Tribute to the Ramones. [The other songs on this are awful, just awful. This is perhaps the worst tribute album ever recorded. A great Tom Waits cover and 16 other horrible tracks. U2? Late-period Metallica? Rob Zombie? The Offspring? Green Day? Peter Yorn? Kiss? Give me a break. Tom Waits and the Ramones are easily better than all of the other bands/musicians on this album combined. Bono singing "Beat on the Brat" is f&%$ing atrocious. Seriously, this might be the worst tribute album ever made. Can anyone name one that is worse?]
The song was also released as track #12 on Disc 1 of the 2006 Tom Waits rarities boxset entitled Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards. If you don't have this 56-song set in some format, your life is incomplete, mofo.
The simple and stunning new video for "Cold War" off of Janelle Monáe's stellar 2010 release The ArchAndroid:
I have had a half-finished review of the album sitting around for nearly 3 months now. I'll post it soon and I am sure the album will be near the top of my year-end "Best Albums of the Year" list. So, in sum, you are guaranteed at least 2 more postings about her before the end of 2010...
I hadn't listened to Live MCMXCIII, the VU "reunion" 2.5 hour-long double-album from 1993, in a fair bit of time. It is quite the fun listen. Suprisingly so. It isn't where you would want to start with the band, but if you are familiar with the band and at least part of the VU story, it is a compelling listen. The double-CD set is a compilation of songs from a three-night series (mostly the second night) of reunion shows that the VU did at the L'Olympia Theater in Paris on June 15th, 16th, and 17th, 1993. These dates were part of a longer European tour that the reunited Reed, Cale, Tucker, and Morrison did during the summer of 1993.
I think wikipedia has the 1990s VU reunion timeline about right: In 1990, Reed and Cale released Songs for Drella, dedicated to the recently deceased Andy Warhol. (“Drella” was a nickname Warhol had been given, a combination of “Dracula” and “Cinderella”.) Though Morrison and Tucker had each worked with Reed and Cale since the V.U. broke up, Songs for Drella was the first time the pair had worked together in decades, and rumors of a reunion began to circulate, fueled by the one-off appearance by Reed, Cale, Morrison and Tucker to play "Heroin" as the encore to a brief Songs for Drella set in Jouy-en-Josas, France.
The Reed–Cale–Morrison–Tucker lineup officially reunited as "The Velvet Underground" in 1992, commencing activities with a European tour beginning in Edinburgh on June 1, 1993, and featuring a performance at Glastonbury which garnered an NME front cover. Cale sang most of the songs Nico had originally performed. The band's opening act was Luna. As well as headlining, the Velvets performed as supporting act for five dates of U2’s Zoo TV Tour.
Given the success of The Velvet Underground's European reunion tour, a series of US tour dates were proposed, as was an MTV Unplugged broadcast, and possibly even some new studio recordings. However, before any of this could come to fruition, Cale and Reed fell out again, breaking up the band once more.
On August 30, 1995, Sterling Morrison died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
I spent most of 1994 thinking that we were going to get a reasonable U.S. tour by the VU and would have done anything in my power to make it to one of those shows, but it was not to be. I have seen Lou several times, but I am still holding on hope for a Reed/Cale collaboration some time down the road...
The "first set" from Live MCMXCIII jumps across all different VU albums and settles into a nice groove on "All Tomorrow's Parties" and "Some Kind of Love." The "second set" starts with a shot across the bow in the form of "Hey Mr. Rain" and thrashes some more later on the disc on "Black Angel's Death Song" and "Heroin."
Listen for yourself at grooveshark, or find this for yourself online mofos...
disc 1:
disc 2:
P.S. Hey Lou, John, and Mo. How's it going? Not to rush you or anything, but could you maybe put out Vol. 2 of the VU bootleg series? Vol. 1 came out in 2001, and it would be great to have another release. Send me an e-mail and I'll make some suggestions on what should be remastered and released from the VU archives...
It is a truly amazing time for free-riding off the hard work of other obsessive world music collectors.* The 2010 release Brazilian Guitar Fuzz Bananas: Tropicalia Psychedelic Masterpieces 1967-1976 is an absolute joy to put on the hi-fi. Released and compiled by Joel Stones and the same folks that brought us the Psych Funk 101compilation that came out in 2009 and had 14 prime cuts of late 60's and 70's global psychedelic music, Fuzz Bananas narrows the scope and examines the heaviest of the heavy 7" tropicalia releases from the heyday of the movement.
As to the Brazilian Guitar Fuzz Bananas release from the promo materials:
...this album should serve as a master class for those entranced by the funky, heavy psychedelic wonders of the Tropicalia movement and all that it spawned.
Each song contained on this album has never been reissued, and has been restored from the best source possible and remastered for near-perfect sound quality. The Enhanced CD comes with a 48 page full color booklet and contains a wealth of imagery and detailed annotation and liner notes in both English and Portuguese. The documentary contained on the CD – What Are Fuzz Bananas – details the making of this anthology and sources interviews from Rio de Janeiro to Los Angeles with the likes of the compilation’s Marisa Rossi and Cut Chemist, Egon and Elijah Wood. The gatefold 2LP comes with an oversized 12x12” full color booklet with all of the liner notes and photos from the CD and contains original artwork on the inside (3D glasses included in the first pressing).
*While not freeriding per se, $17 seems like an obscenely inexpensive price to pay for the work that went into this 2LP (or 1 CD) collection and documentation.
Stream the album for free on grooveshark (also available at amazon.com on vinyl and CD):
