Antje Duvekot - The Near Demise of the Highwire Dancer
Germany-born Antje Duvekot has a voice, on some of the tracks on this record, that reminds me of Emmylou Harris, but her music is more “proper” folk than country - mostly acoustic instruments, layered arrangements, and songs about characters and places that are off the beaten track. The genre is sometimes labelled “Americana” - and who am I to go against modern marketing categories?
I was first attracted to her 2009 record The Near Demise of the Highwire Dancer by the circus-themed artwork, but what made me stay was the songwriting and the music.
Duvekot holds three songwriting awards including the Kerrville New Folk Competition's Best New Folk Award, Boston Music Award for Outstanding Folk Act, and Grand Prize in the John Lennon Songwriting Contest and as I was looking for information about her and her work I chanced upon her blog, and discovered a person that’s very interesting outside of the recording studio.
But here it is the music that counts, and Duvekot’s quiet, deceptively simple songs are fascinating and original, and for a change of pace and a change of perspective you can listen to The Near Demise of the Highwire Dancer on Spotify.
https://open.spotify.com/album/1PP0zLdlcQAfsIKJ3XMVQn
#antjeduvekot #folk #americana
Sara Bareilles - Kaleidoscope Heart
A record about crises and writer’s block and how some people are best left behind (or actively asked to get lost), Sara Bareilles’ Kaleidoscope Heart from 2010 was described as proof that Bareilles was destined to disappear, lacking as she did “mass appeal”, while others criticized the record and the singer as being too popular and commercial.
Just like a kaleidoscope image different observers can find different shapes and stories in this artist’s work, and almost a decade on Bareilles has not disappeared, and probably having mass appeal is not that big a thing - her voice is beautiful and original, her lyrics are poignant but also nicely cutting, and her piano playing and arrangements (vocal arrangements in particular) are not the run-of-the-mill, cookie-cutter Top10 fare. What else could we ask of popular music?
Ranging from intimate ballads to killer tunes like King of Everything, to shout-out-loud songs, the thirteen songs on Kaleidoscope Heart are a fine example of quality popular music, and despite what some critics said, they are not “chick music”.
On a personal note, Uncharted, the song that thematically ties together all the other compositions in the album, is certainly one of my favourite songs of the last few years. So sue me.
You can judge for yourself and listen to Kaleidoscope Heart on Spotify.
https://open.spotify.com/album/627ukPRwYxyBREHxBq0vGJ
#sarabareilles #singersongwriter #pop
Shelly Manne & His Friends - My Fair Lady
Recorded in 1956 and recorded in a single sitting on the 17th of August of that year, Shelly Manne & his Friends* (*André Previn and Leroy Vinnegar): modern jazz performances of songs from My Fair Lady (this the complete title as shown on the cover) is a history first: it’s the first jazz record consisting exclusively of arrangements of songs from a single Broadway show, to wit, My Fair Lady.
The trio (that sometimes recorded as “André Previn and his Pals”) consists of Manne on drums, Leroy Vinnegar on bass and André Previn on piano, and the executions have become a sort of classic - the record was supposedly the most popular jazz album up to that time (or one of the more popular). The arrangements are simple but not simplistic, elegant and tasteful, and the record is very atmospheric.
Manne would collaborate later with John Williams for a completely different take on the My Fair Lady songs, but the work he did with his friends on this record remains the stuff of legend.
I have this one on vinyl, but you can listen to it on Spotify for free. You’ll thank me later.
https://open.spotify.com/album/5icRBIV4XTgwYWXm9vG2vR
#shellymanne #shellymanneandhisfriends #jazz
Supertramp - Paris
I skipped a post yesterday, so I thought, to make up, why not review a double album?
Recorded live in Paris in 1979 and published in 1980, Paris (that is playing in the background as I write this) is probably one of the finest live albums of all time. The sound is perfect, and captures the band at its peak, right after the release of the milestone Breakfast in America.
When I was a kid, Supertramp was one of the bands peopled loved to hate: they were to pop for hardcore proggers, they were too artsy for listeners of pop, they were too slick and “technical” for those that were into punk, they were too soft for hard rockers and too hard for soft rockers. But they were damn good - and the unlikely collaboration of Roger Hodgson and Rick Davies produced a body of work that remains impressive to these days.
The live recording showcases a lot of the best from the Hodgson/Davies catalog, including all but one songs from Crime of the Century, three songs from Crisis? What Crisis? (1975), two from Even in the Quietest Moments (1977), three from Breakfast in America (1979) plus a forgotten B-side, "You Started Laughing". The mix goes the full range from the positively sombre to the upbeat to the mystical, and the performance is as tight and clean.
I literally destroyed my first copy of the record - a cassette a schoolmate recorded and I played obsessively on my Sony Walkman - because it was the early ‘80s after all. Later I bought the vinyl, and later still the CD. I sort of felt guilty for that pirated tape, you see.
Today, you can listen to Paris in all its glory on Spotify.
https://open.spotify.com/album/0LnGhdkTo5SEoIosiydUaR
#prog #supertramp #livemusic
Martin Denny - Quiet Village
This is an artefact from a previous age - not necessarily a better age, possibly a more civilized one. Released aòmost exactly sixty years ago, in August 1959, Quiet Village was the eight album by Martin Denny, “the father of exotica”.
Exotica was a strange mix of ethnic sounds, lounge jazz arrangements and sound effects, purporting to capture the exotic flavor of those places that the American public was discovering thanks to PanAm international flights and package tours: Hawaii and the South Seas, Africa, South America.
The sound of the new empire stretching into its new borders, this was the soundtrack of the cocktail generation, the sound of the tiki bars and the bachelor pads.
Sixty years on, the music of Denny - himself an accomplished pianist and composer - may sound weird and possibly silly, with cockatoo calls, birds chirping, pianos and xylophones drowning in assorted percussions, playing unlikely Asian or “primitive” rhythms. A curio, stranger and more distant from us than Gregorian chant or Thomas Tallis’ 16th century masses, somewhat tainted by Orientalism and more than a whiff of cultural appropriation. Martin Denny’s work had probably a stronger impact on music production than on the music to come. As Martin Denny’s records reached the top of the charts (Quiet Village made the Billboard Top20), rock’n’roll was playing on the jukebox, and in Liverpool the Quarrymen were about to turn into the Beatles.
This is really the sound of a different age, and we today call it exotica or space age pop, but it was actually what grown-ups were listening while their kids dug Elvis.
You can find Quiet Village on Spotify, together with a gazillion different records from Martin Denny’s catalog. https://open.spotify.com/album/6W1nP47Yt36em8y9mNKn74
#exotica #martindenny #spaceagepop
The Style Council - Our Favourite Shop
Having listened to The Paris Match’s Our Favourite Pop, it was natural to take out the CD of The Style Council’s Our Favourite Shop, the band’s big seller second album from 1985.
Paul Weller had quite a following as the leader of harder rocking The Jam - and at the time the move to a softer sound was watched with a certain suspicion. That the lyrics can still be hard-hitting and political while coupled with more nuanced and eclectic sounds is a sure sign of Weller’s growing skills as a writer.
But if the politics of the record did cause some discussions at the time, I was seventeen, and The Style Council was - with The Pretenders - the answer to my decidedly Anglophile musical tastes.
Our Favourite Shop tackles a number of social and political issues and it’s strange how, thirty-five years on, the fourteen songs on the record remain painfully current and relevant. Weller’s & Co’s anger and pessimism at the growing front of conformity and passive acceptance of a rapidly-deteriorating status quo are highly relatable, and at points it feels like these songs were written last year, and not a generation ago.
Our Favourite Shop is eclectic and elegant, mixing string quartets and electric guitars. It is also a very angry record, and yet a hopeful one.
If you are in the US, you might have heard this record when it was called Internationalists, and distributed with a different song list.
Right now you van listen to Our Favourite Shop on Spotify, both in the original and in the much expanded, thirty-odds-tracks Deluxe Edition. I’ll link the original here - it’s the one I listened when I was seventeen, and talks to me about angers of a non-political nature, and people I used to know.
It was good going back to it.
https://open.spotify.com/album/6pcTnmWK8NCOAeyZWABsFX
#thestylecouncil #paulweller
Paris Match - Our Favourite Pop
I picked up Paris Match’s 2007 album Our Favourite Pop because of the cover. It takes quite an amount of cheekiness to steal the Style Council’s iconic Our Favourite Shop art. So I said, why not?
I had no idea who the band was, and what music they made.
Turns out Paris Match took their name from the Style Council’s Café Bleu, that features a song called “The Paris Match”. And the connections between the two bands stop there.
Paris Match is the brainchild of Yosuke Sugyiama (composer/arranger) and Tai Furusawa (lyricist), that employ a roster of session men and singer Mari Misuno to execute their smooth jazz/Shibuya-kei/urban soul/bossa nova numbers.
Our Favorite Pop is a collection of covers, ranging from Elvis Costello to Sly & the Family Stone, from Lisa Stansfield to Roberta Flack, to Cheap Trick and the Blown Monkeys, in original arrangements that often make the songs almost impossible to recognize. Which is good, because… why make a cover that’s an exact copy of the original, right?
Many of the songs were previously released.
The sound is smooth and clean, and if the overall effect is lightweight, Our Favourite Pop is high quality easy listening, with enough ideas and inventions not to be simply musical wallpaper.
While I browse Paris Match’s catalogue to check out some of their original compositions, you can listen to Our Favourite Pop on Spotify.
https://open.spotify.com/album/0WlnYlbtgJ8CI11JtS5zEU
#parismatch #shibuyakei #lounge #jazz #bossanova
The Julian Bream Consort - Fantasies, Aires and Dances
Founded in the 1960s by guitarist and lutenist Julian Bream, a giant in classical music, the Julian Bream Consort was one of the first groups to present a repertory of Elizabethan and Jacobin music. Differently from other, later groups, the Julian Bream Consort was a “broken consort”, deploying a non-canonical selection of instruments (flute, lute, cittern, three violas, with the occasional addition of tenor singer), that is similar to what could be found in an upper class house in the 16th and early 17th century.
Fantasies, Airs and Dances, recorded in 1987, includes 19 works by Byrd, Dowland, Morley, Phillips and many other fundamental composers of the circa-Elizabethan era. It is light years away from what is generally and popularly associated to the concept of “classical music”, and truth to be told I do not now if I came to the Julian Bream Consort and this record in particular following the policeman’s tears in Philip K. Dick novel, or because a certain album of “galliards and lute song served in chilling ale” I quite liked, but this was for me the start of a fascination for Elizabethan music that lasts to this day.
Notably, the program includes “The Earl of Essex his Galliard”, a Dowland-scored poem written by the Earl of Essex to beg pardon of the queen for an indiscretion - the song is also known, in fact, as “Can’t she excuse”. Elizabeth did not excuse, and Essex was beheaded. There was a time when writing songs was a risky business.
Fantasies, Aires and Dances can be found on Spotify - it is a long program, and likely to be interrupted by some ad from some X Factor phenomenon. We can’t excuse them, but it’s a sacrifice worth making.
https://open.spotify.com/album/3P9KbjwwCXZO9LbDAXnFRV
#elizabethan #classicalmusic #consortmusic #rcaredseal #julianbream
Stackbridge - The Man in the Bowler Hat
Produced in 1974 by George Martin, Stackbridge’s third album, The Man in the Bowler Hat always sounded to me as a spiritual heir of the Kink’s Village Green. Granted, Stackbridge don’t sound anything like Ray Davies’ band, but the quintessential British atmosphere of the album is almost thick enough to cut with a knife.
And I mean that as a positive thing.
An eccentric band that specialized in songs about downtrodden and misunderstood animals (The Indifferent Hedgehog being the one example on this album) that still manage to be more than novelties, Bristol/Bath’s own Stackbridge fell in the confused territory between prog rock and folk, telling strange stories with arrangements that were complex but incredibly easy on the ear, and if the impression is sometimes of being witnessing a tongue-in-cheek circus act, well, it’s a damn fine act anyway.
This recipe for success failed to establish them as a household name, despite a fair number of hits, and they are today a cult object for people of excellent taste and refined culture. And you can be one of them, listen to The Man in the Bowler Hat on Spotify, and be amazed.
Do it. This is a record featuring a song called Dangerous Bacon. You know you need to listen to it.
https://open.spotify.com/album/4PuhrjdER0ER5pl8UKVT9e
#stackbridge #progrock
Mylene Farmer - Ainsi soit Je... In a career spanning three dacades and counting, Quebecois singer/songwriter Mylene Farmer has consistently shown that you can write highbrow lyrics and set them to catchy, synth-laced pop melodies, and achieve megastardom.
Ainsi soit Je..., from 1988, Farmer’s second album, is a perfect example of what has made the artist so popular with both critics and audiences. Thematically dark, melancholy and sombre, quoting from Poe and Baudelaire (his poem L’Horologe provides the lyrics for the opening track), the song are still catchy, lively, musically intriguing. You can dance to some of these tunes, never mind that they talk about sexual ambiguity, death, suicide and other not-so-top-ten-like subjects. And if the overarching mood is indeed pretty dark (so much so, the album is often classified as “darkwave”, whatever that can be), still the effect is uplifting, and in some moments even cheerful.
Endowed with a supple voice, great looks and a show-stopping persona that would make her a wonder to behold live, Farmer took full advantage of videos to promote her work - and Ainsi soit Je... sold one million copies by 1989. Not half bad, for a record produced in France and sung mostly in French. Farmer would go on to hold the record for most n° 1 hits in the French charts - twenty in total, with eight being consecutive.
Ainsi soit Je... is still considered one of her best records - if not the best - and is worth a listen. I got my copy on vinyl back in May or June ‘88, because I liked the style of the cover (sue me). Two days later I lent it to a friend. She disappeared without a trace, and kept the album, thus breaking mu heart (more for the loss of a record I loved than anything else, actually). But if you are curious, you can listen to the record on Spotify…
https://open.spotify.com/album/2Y4MGWQ2mCJ9Fr7gcEd8S0
#mylenefarmer #frenchmusic #synthpop #darkwave #baudelaire
