Monday, 24. April 2006, 12:18:38
One of the LPs in my collection that seemed just right for setting the mood on a Saturday morning in my younger years. The music may have more to do with jazz sophistication than rock sensibility, but it's still a thrilling ride. It had to be, considering that Donald Fagen and Walter Becker are bona-fide musical geniuses and unyielding sticklers for perfection (the album was recorded in more than half a dozen studios over a three-year period!).
Though their beatnik whimsy and smarter-than-thou asides on songs like 'Babylon Sisters', 'Glamour Profession' and 'My Rival' tend to be tiresome at times, Fagen and Becker know how to hook you with their sinuous melodies, which are brilliantly burnished by the state-of-the-art production. And the long A-list musician lineup — Larry Carlton, Steve Khan, Mark Knopfler, Hiram Bullock, Rick Derringer, Michael and Randy Brecker, Steve Gadd, Joe Sample... — ensures consistency of performance throughout. Fans had to wait a decade after this to hear another new Steely Dan album... Just imagine that!
BUY
Monday, 24. April 2006, 12:17:08
Nightingales & Bombers
'Pluto the Dog', an infectiously chugging Moog-centred instrumental from 'Solar Fire' (1973), was on heavy rotation for a while in the mid-'70s on
Radio RAAF Butterworth. It was one of the first tunes that turned me onto Manfred Mann's remarkable prog-rock outfit. Not long after that, I bought this LP and became a firm Earth Band fan.
It kicks off with a hard-rocking version of Bruce Springsteen's 'Spirits in the Night' and gets into trickier stuff, like the richly atmospheric closer 'As Above So Below' which incorporates an accidental WWII recording of flying bombers. Mann's amazing Moog solos and the often intriguing interplay between him and guitarist Mick Rogers make this a thrilling ride.
BUY
Monday, 24. April 2006, 12:13:02
Bop Till You Drop
As one of Warner Bros.'s first digitally mastered recordings, the LP was packaged a bit differently than the standard releases. And I remember the thrill of putting it on the turntable to check out "the new sound", even though analogue seemed to work fine for me. I liked the music straightaway, but it took a while for me to get used to the somewhat overcompressed hiss-free sound.
While the set, a tribute to '50s pop and R&B, has some wrinkles, vibrant versions of classics 'Little Sister', 'Look at Granny Run Run' and 'Trouble, You Can't Fool Me' make the proceedings often irresistible. And Cooder's slide work is as sublime as ever, especially on a rousing rearrangement of 'I Think It's Going to Work Out Fine'.
BUY
Monday, 24. April 2006, 12:10:40
Dream Academy
One of the most graceful, evocative and shamefully underheard pop albums of the '80s, The Dream Academy's almost forgotten debut (it's out of print in the U.S.) has withstood the test of time marvellously. That's a big deal, considering that much of the pop from that time is rather unlistenable now.
I dove into this like a dolphin long deprived of water, and spent many hours soaking up its bewitchingly lush, luscious and painterly textures. The hit 'Life in a Northern Town', an exquisitely melodic and introspective piece of chamber-pop dedicated to Nick Drake, is the most immediately alluring thing here. But the other tunes are equally strong and sweet, treating casual themes with a subdued poetic elegance and a sense of brooding romanticism.
BUY(Check out the Archive for more albums once you're done with this main page!)
Monday, 24. April 2006, 12:04:04
I became a demented music freak from the time I got my first guitar at the age of 14. Growing up on a diet of mainly British rock in the '70s in Prai, a small railway town in the northern part of Malaysia, I was pretty much on my own, except for a few friends who seemed to like the same kind of music I was into.
We dug Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Uriah Heep, Manfred Mann's Earth Band and other pioneering rock bands. And as our tastes evolved, we started getting into Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, Genesis, the Strawbs, Rick Wakeman and some pretty weird shit (the Sparks, Captain Beefheart...).
One of the first LPs I bought to play on my spanking-new JVC quadraphonic system was ELP's 'Brain Salad Surgery'. It a constant source of excitement for many years. Another LP that never failed to give excitations was the Strawbs's 'Hero and Heroine'. I also got quite a sustained kick out of Rory Gallagher's 'Sinner... and Saint', Rick Wakeman's 'The Six Wives of Henry VIII' and Led Zeppelin's third album (all bought with wages from a factory job during school vacation) .
OK, OK... I don't want to turn this into a nap-inducing longueur so I'll just end here by saying that the whole point of this blog is to turn you onto the albums that provided me respite from the misery of life in a small town.
WIDGETIZE