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.