Icy cold vistas, shards of broken electronic glass, relentless thumping disco beats and possible mysteriously encrypted bits of dialogue may not sound like something that would be particularly inviting on a full range audio system, but somehow Fuck Buttons makes it so on this album of artificial mayhem and just plain noise.
Very few singers can get this close to a dry microphone, be balanced way forward of the backup band and sound as good as Peggy Lee does on this series of standards backed by a pair of small ensembles, recorded in 1953 and 1956. Neither the original nor the reissue notes explain the album’s temporal context so perhaps there’s no story there.
No one has ever claimed PJ Harvey creates music made for easy, or even pleasant listening. Much of it is dark and painful, but even at its weakest, Harvey's music is provocative and worthwhile.
Whenever a record shows up I like to look at the lead out groove area to see who did the lacquer cutting. Sometimes there’s nothing to be found and that’s annoying, but with this double set I thought I was hallucinating because in plain view was “TML-M” a stamp not seen on a slab of new vinyl in decades. TML is the acronym for “The Mastering Lab” and the “M” means the main lathe at Doug Sax’s place.
Paul Simon can't go back to his folk-rock roots. It's too late for him to turn around, but a younger generation surely can use the hybrid genre as a start-up base of operations. The first and second Fleet Fox albums demonstrate that.
I turned 50 when the car manufacturer Saab turned 50, so I celebrated my half century, by treating myself to a day at the Skip Barber racing school held in conjunction with Saab's 50th anniversary celebration/annual Saab club convention, which took place that summer (1997) at the beautiful Waterville Valley Ski Resort-no dogs allowed.
Does it matter that the rattle and phlegm in Bob Dylan's voice makes it sound as if your midrange driver has blown? No. Hell no. In fact, despite the ragged vocals and 50 years since his debut, this is Dylan's best album in quite some time.
This performance and recording with Eiji Oue conducting the Minnesota Orchestra emphasizes the "symphonic" while downplaying the "dance" aspects of Rachmaninoff's composition.
Hunky Dory introduced a kinder, gentler David Bowie after two heavy albums laden with mythological imagery and pleasant dread—not that this album doesn't also include heavy doses of the latter.
There were good reasons British blues musicians like the original Peter Green led Fleetwood Mac or blues influenced ones like The Rolling Stones wanted to record in Chess's legendary Ter-Mar Studios in Chicago. One, of course, was the possibility of jamming with blues legends like Willie Dixon, Otis Spann, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolk and, well, you can run down the names yourself, including “Guitar Buddy,” what Buddy Guy had to be called due to contractual obligations. The other reason is to get that fabulous Ter-Mar Sound, which The Stones managed to do on some of their earlier albums.
We like promoting independent vinyl projects so when Nova Social’s Thom Soriano contacted Analogplanet about a review of their new album For Any Inconvenience we bit.
Leonard Bernstein was probably the first classical musician to boldly champion rock music when he enthusiastically endorsed The Beatles back in 1964-well before the group's true artistry flowered. Bernstein wrote a short, joyous, almost inappropriately flowery introduction to Geoffrey Stokes's 1980 book “The Beatles,” which you can read at http://www.frederickchorale.org/Beatles_2.asp.
"Why buy vinyl cut from a file when you can buy the file itself?". That's easy! If you've worked to get your analog front end to sound glorious, magical and the way you want your records to sound and it sounds better to you than your unyielding, unadjustable digital box, you might have the answer.