Oh, if that’s all you know, you’re in for a treat with Sail Away. Also highly recommend Good Old Boys, a concept album about Huey Long. No, seriously.
As @FMera kindly bumped this thread (after I took a sabbatical from posting in it last winter - not sure why) I’ll pick it up again. The weather has been lousy these last few days…
Three new albums to listen to! Actually, part of my motivation for restarting this thread is that I almost - almost - started a new thread just to enthuse about From The Pyre by The Last Dinner Party. which came out Oct 17 IIRC. Man is it good - I love this band. Are they pretentious? Hell, yes, but I have track on that (early Genesis, Roxy Music). The album is darker than their debut, but even better, I think. I won’t generally bore people with “You Must Listen To This” - but try this out…
Another second album: Moisturizer by Wet Leg - whatever happened to that difficult second album? It’s another peach. One review I read used the word “confident” and yeah, it absolutely is,
I see it has already done pretty well in the US, so I’ll leave it at that.
And then there’s Taylor Swift, to whom I was an instant convert (post 65). I get that she will be intensely personal so I guess the fact that The Life Of A Showgirl is substantially about her relationship with Travis Kelce shouldn’t be a surprise (though there was one song, Wood, which appears to be about golf clubs)*. I didn’t mind that at all, and I enjoyed the album - fine pop music with heart. What’s wrong with that?
j
* – yes, I know, it was just a joke 
So - what did I listen to last winter? I kept a list, but there must have been some tidying round here. Let’s see…
I know I ended the winter listening to albums by Parliament and Funkadelic because, well, they’re really important. The world has moved on, and they do sound dated now, but interesting and enjoyable none the less.
Somewhere along the line I listened to Something Else By The Kinks which apparently almost finished the band because it was such a flop. And it really is not good, apart from one song - what was it called? - oh yes, Waterloo Sunset. I mean, that must be the world record for an uneven album, surely?
One of the really big surprises - I was really dreading Close To The Edge by Yes (I’m a child of Punk and New Wave, remember). I really enjoyed that - melodic and with thoughtful lyrics - not at all what I was expecting. Which is one of the reasons I started doing this in the first place.
j
Funny, I just bought a batch of YES albums. I’ll listen to The Yes Album and Fragile, then Close To The Edge and Tales…
I’m actually putting it off because I know that listening will take a lot of Paying Attention (not my long suit when I’m busy).
The deal is that a friend mentioned Steven Wilson, who’s remixed a TON of '60s/'70s/'80s albums… but only his favorites. With the blessings of the bands (King Crimson, Roxy Music, YES, Gentle Giant, Tull, Sabbath, XTC, and a few single albums like Who’s Next, P.Floyd Live at Pompeii, American Beauty, etc etc… lots of misc. studio tapes, too, so plenty of deep tracks).
So I bought two by Jethro Tull that I remembered being “muddy” (Stand Up and Benefit) and OMIGOD, now I get to hear every guitar string, every bass run, every breathy note on that flute!
Here, take a look at all that he’s done, and read about each album:
Wow, I’ll have to check those out. Especially Tull’s Broadsword and the Beast sounds like it was recorded in a toilet bowl (at least the CD version I have), so I’d love to see what was done with it.
The difference in sound quality has been amazing on his other albums (even stuff I’d never planned to re-buy, like Chicago II).
I checked, and he’s remixed all Tull albums from This Was to A (a solo Ian Anderson “too electronic” experiment that his label pressured him to release as a Jethro Tull album).
https://www.instagram.com/p/CuWwYdNuAZu/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
OK, back to the business at hand, filling in those gaps. Grateful Dead, anyone?
I knew nothing about the Dead, but recently read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, so that pointed me in their direction, but without any point of entry (so to speak). Googling to find their best work led me to this site, which probably needs to be explored.
Anyways, they pointed me to Live/Dead - which is kinda daunting, as the first track is 23 minutes and change long (!). Also, last winter I sampled Jefferson Airplane (Surrealistic Pillow) and really didn’t get on with them at all - they haven’t aged well and seemed extremely dated to me.
Back to Live/Dead - I really liked it. Rhythm and Blues noodling, I guess you could call it. Perfect background music for reading the Dope. I liked it so much that I moved on to
(How’s that for a coincidence?) and I really liked that too, pleasing, poppy RnB. So that’s a pretty good start to the winter.
j
ETA - a BTW: this is the sort of helpful stuff you get from UCR. Describing the Dead’s 17th best album (they rank them) Steal Your Face:
In 1974, the band took a break from the road, but not before a hometown stop at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom. This 1976 live album is a lazy mess. Nobody likes it, not even the band…
Useful, no?
I’m not much of a Deadhead, too much noodling for my taste, but I like certain albums. If you like “American Beauty” (like I do), you’ll also like “Workingman’s Dead”. Both straight country rock, short songs without the usual jamming.
I may just give it a try, then! Workingman’s Dead was #3 on UCR’s best Dead albums (behind the two above.
j
The Dead’s main work of course happened on the stage, and nobody’s live career has been preserved and documented more thoroughly than theirs. So if you want to dig a little deeper into that part of their oeuvre, I recommend the album “Cornell 5/8/77 (Live)”. It’s an almost three hours long 3 CD album and contains a fantastic funky version of Martha and the Vandellas’ “Dancing In The Streets”.
Allow me one more observation about the Dead: they had tremendous instrumental chops and interplay, but their weak spot always were the vocals, there just wasn’t any outstanding singer in the band. If they had had the vocal harmonic power of the Byrds or the Beatles, they could have been one of the greatest rock bands in history.
I have two buckets. Records and live performances. The Dead will never be in my record bucket. I regret I never had the chance to put them in my other bucket.
I don’t think I can spare three research hours right now ("Who’s Next* awaits…) but it is a mighty cover. Indeed, here it is:
I can see that. What occurs to me (after 16 minutes of Dancing In The Streets) is this: if there was a law that required all elevator and call holding music to be The Grateful Dead, the world would be a much better place.
j
Sure, I’m all for it!
Wow. Who’s that girl singing with them?
I was wondering about that too, but I’m not even sure if it’s a woman singing background or a male falsetto voice.
Could be, but it sounds like a woman to me.
Yeah, could be both ways, I’m not deep enough into the Dead to know if they ever had a female background singer or a band member who could sing falsetto.
This. I was never tempted to listen to much Dead, because I never liked Jerry’s vocals. A friend observed that “Jerry Garcia had a flat, ordinary voice. One of the few singers with no vibrato.”
But then I listened to Bob Weir’s solo album, ACE.
Wow, some of the album became part of the Dead tours (Playing In The Band, and the fun Mexicali Blues… oh, and Cassidy tops my “Moody/Haunting” playlist).
Oh, I should tell you how I came to appreciate the Grateful Dead, even though I didn’t care for the vocals or the hour-long Nothin’ But Noodlin’…
I found DEADICATED, an album of great artists doing their favorite Dead songs. And I realized there’s some great songwriting there. Still one of my favorite LPs:
Los Lobos making Bertha into a street festival, Bruce Hornsby’s jazzierJack Straw, Jane’s Addiction transcendent Ripple.
Oh, and I barely recognized Estimated Prophet, now a reggae anthem to California, thanks to Burning Spear (just listen!).
The highlight, though, is Lyle Lovett’s lonely take on Friend Of The Devil.