What does it sound like?:

“Overnite Sensation” is one of my favourite Frank Zappa albums. Not too many snorks, turn-on-a-dime playing, a pile of knob jokes, and it’s kind of funky. (In fact, very funky; “I’m the Slime”, “Dirty Love”, “Zomby Woof”, “Dinah-Moe Humm” and “Montana” had Tina Turner and the Ikettes on backing vocals. “What is this shit?” Ike is alleged to have asked, as he insisted Zappa pay the singers, including Tina Turner, no more than $25 per song.) This album got me through many a 1970s “Good Friday”, providing a little victory to the stultifying miserabilist piety of my childhood home.

The 50th anniversary release – gosh, is it really that long? – has been made even more pristine, though was always a very well-produced album. Remixes have instruments leap out, but to me they always did. The earlier and alternative takes reiterate niallb’s observation re “The Yes Album”, that to a working musician, the album version of a song is often just one of a series of variants which passed a variety of decisions to become, to the listener with the album alone, the “definitive” version. There is lots to enjoy in these alternatives; » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

If you don’t know “Space Ritual” and you like rock music, you really should. It’s definitive in so many ways; of Hawkwind; of British-style psychedelia of the early 70s; of the intense loud music that would, in different later evolutions, become heavy metal, punk, post-punk, electro, and krautrock; and of a music that can unite Hell’s Angels, hippies, ravers, science nerds, and basically anyone who likes (or liked) to dissolve their egos into music and light. “Space Ritual” is a concept album of the concept performance which drew together many strands of psychedelic-informed thought on this side of the Atlantic. It conveys what happened when some heads in Notting Hill who were into science fiction and Marvel comics merged tripping off one’s nut while watching the Apollo missions and attending a re-run of “2001: A Space Odyssey” in a fleapit cinema into a song series and performance. The 50th Anniversary re-release comprises a remaster of the original album, live recordings of the show in Liverpool, Sunderland, and London (from where the original recordings derived), and a stereo remix by another Stephen; Stephen W Tayler (not Wilson, as can seem inevitable for these things); the » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

“Funky Nothingness” is a largely instrumental triple-CD package recorded in the period around which Frank Zappa released “Chunga’s Revenge” and “Hot Rats” (i.e., 1969 to 70). As always the case with Frank Zappa, there was an awful lot going on in the background, with touring, many production jobs (e.g., Captain Beefheart’s classic date-night album, “Trout Mask Replica”, and the even-more “Hot Rats”-like jazz rock album, “King Kong: Jean-Luc Ponty Plays the Music of Frank Zappa”), and, and, and …. Zapparians will know he never bloody stopped, and he generally recorded it all as he went along. Zappa saw the emergence of the violin in rock, and Don “SugarCane” Harris regularly obliges here. Zappa also saw blues-rock taking dominance for teenage rockin’ combos, and rightly wanted to mark his tree there. In a time when listening audiences were often mildly intoxicated and amenable to long-form bits of music which eventually showed a pattern, “jamming” was also a thing; again, if anyone could make this happen, Frank Zappa, with his musical bones, could.

This is both the glory and the tragedy of “Funky Nothingness”. As a single album, it is great. As a double, it’s good. » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

“Warrior On The Edge Of Time” (WOTEOT) is Hawkwind’s proggiest release, though retains the garage punch and Euro-motorik which always place them to the hipper side of the underground subculture, and later inspiring punks, post-punk, acid house, ravers, and new age travellers. By 1975 Hawkwind were quite a big (quid) deal; US tours, playing Wembley, slicker everything. Behind the scenes, it was getting messy as only Hawkwind know how, and over the next 18 months Lemmy, then Nik Turner would be out, the former for drug incompatibility, the latter as his saxophone playing was being intentionally played over vocals and other player’s solos, disrupting the musical performance, the band now being a more professional unit than the free-form happening of yore where this was no longer “cool”.

WOTEOT always sounded quite clean relative to the grimey skinning-up surface that was their previous output, and Stephen Wilson has done a lovely job making it even more pristine, layers of er, “nicotine”, being removed, and making “Assault and Battery/ The Golden Void” (oh, those titles!) even trippier than dimly recalled. The poem “The Wizard blew his Horn” follows – a bit fantasy for me, as » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

“Holidays In Eden” (HiE) was the first Marillion album where all the material was written by the band and then newboy, Steve Hogarth. There had been inevitable development in the band (then together for a decade, more or less, drummer and singer coming in a bit later), but huge success in the mid-80s then loss of loud frontman meant that while big enough to play 2 nights at Hammersmith, in relative terms, as the phrase goes, their “appeal was becoming more selective”. They needed more hits like “Kayleigh” to get the pop market as well as the regular fans, so hopefully replacing the fans who moved on when Fish did, or soon after. A poppier sound had worked for Peter Gabriel and Genesis, so why not Marillion too? The band were happy to create and try new things, but not to compromise TOO much. In came producer Chris Neil, who had form livening-up The early 90s Moody Blues and “Mike and the Mechanics” (be still, my beating heart). This is better than that sounds, being an album very much in the spirit of later albums by The Police, late-80s U2, or enormodome Simple Minds. » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

“Erie” is the latest in the series of archival Zappa concert recordings. Shows were captured for Edinboro, Erie, South Bend, Montreal, and Toledo from between 1974 and 1976, and involve configurations of his line-up involving variously double-drummers, Eddie Jobson, developments of the “Roxy and Elsewhere” band, and a show from several weeks after the band recorded “Zappa in New York”. If you like an awesomely tight band with jazzy rhythm and blues, crunchy guitar solos, not too much in the way of snorks and avant-garde experimentation, but plenty of knob jokes, and with songs like “Stinkfoot”, “Cheepnis”, and “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow”, and the formative versions of “Tryin’ to Grow a Chin” and “City of Tiny Lites” (a super variant complete with George Benson-like scat singing and funk), you’ll be in excelsis. The later concerts have quite a bit from the then current “Zoot Allures”, too; what’s not to like? FZ is in his cheesy-carnie incarnation with wry, sardonic, and stage comments you love or hate, and “The Poodle Lecture” will separate the men from the boys depending on where this differentiating dimension you lie. For the older, TRUE FANS, who think he » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Bill Bruford is the Zelig of interesting non-4:4 music, and he (mostly) moves on, suggesting he is genuinely “progressive”, rather than “just playing nostalgia for the old folks” (see what I did there?). “Making A Song and Dance: A Complete Career Collection” is a 6-CD retrospective of Bill Bruford’s work as collaborator, leader, guest, and improvisor of his and other people’s music. CD1 comprises his work with “Yes” and the “Larks Tongue’s” era of “King Crimson”, with all the best bits of both, perhaps because the focus is on the ,music and the arrangements. “Starless” remains a stately gem, and “Larks Tongues in Aspic (part 2)” (on CD 2, with all of the 80s “Talking Crimson/ King Heads” content) defines intellectual-instrumental heavy metal. How I’d like to hear Metallica cover something from LTIA or “Red”. UK is represented with “Nevermore”, which is a bit ho-hum compared to if they’d included the “In the Dead of Night” Suite with the tour-de-force of percussive syncopation, “Presto Vivace”. Maybe there wasn’t space, or licencing was a concern.

CD2’s “Talking Crimson” compilation sees the emergence of what I consider Bruford’s Achilles heel: electronic drums. Yes, I know they » Continue Reading.

What does it sound like?:

Marillion are an act which could have a t-shirt with their name on a Marmite jar, such are the polarised views about them. They are a very different band from 35 years ago, and really shouldn’t have to keep apologising. They took a different direction with the change of singer (we cannot call him “new”, given Steve Hogarth has been with them since 1989 and the band have rarely looked back). Yes, there were still soaring guitar breaks, but they were concise and to the point, the focus is on tunes and ensemble playing and excellent arrangements rather than flash mock-classicism, and lyrics are contemporary. The last album, “FEAR” was far superior to that normally heard from a bandof their age, and the response from a mature audience desperate for a decent album from a name band in this field led to Marillion’s star rising again, with sold-out tours, and grown men (and long-suffering wives) overcome by the emotional sensibilities and harsh realities of the lyrics. And that was before COVID and the invasion of Ukraine. This album continues that arc.

“An hour before it’s dark” is a reflection of mortality and tempus » Continue Reading.