Blonde Redhead / The Pre-4AD Years

Blonde Redhead

Per a request for Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, I thought an overview of Blonde Redhead's early work was in order. If you're more familiar with the later "4AD" years, you'll see the seeds of their future planted here... These earlier recordings are also where they were penned as the second coming of Sonic Youth (they shook that comparison off by 2000).

Blonde Redhead / Blonde Redhead
Released 1995

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Recalling the no wave movement of the late '70s, the self-titled debut of New York City's Blonde Redhead is a glorious piece of dense, art-damaged noise, with songs that move from drifting melodicism to raging aural assaults in the course of a few measures. Taking their cues most directly from Sonic Youth (Steve Shelley produced the album), Blonde Redhead revel in noise and create vast sonic landscapes out of which songs naturally emerge. The focus here tends to be on atmospherics, and yet there is never the feeling of utter chaos; instead, the album functions like a work of controlled mayhem, referencing a wide range of musical approaches. The opening track, "I Don't Want U," starts off like jazz-rock, building momentum until it erupts in a blast of indie rock noise, anchored throughout by a steadily rolling bassline. "Snippet"'s quite-loud-quiet dynamics are offset by the driving rock of "Mama Cita," and the album's closer, "Girl Boy," comes across like delirious dream pop. The entire album is drenched in dense, multilayered feedback, with a rhythm section that works to keep the guitars in control, underpinning the attack. Blonde Redhead have created a great record, especially for fans of experimental rock: difficult, noisy, and exhilarating. - Brandon Gentry, All Music Guide

Blonde Redhead / La Mia Vita Violenta
Released 1995

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With their second release, La Mia Vita Violenta, Blonde Redhead maintain their organically low-fi aesthetic and continue to prove themselves as one of indie rock's real triumphs. Even after the departure of guitarist Maki Takahashi, they still make more noise with three people than most bands could make with ten. Guitars tear into the songs -- pointed, direct, and tough -- while the vocals of Kazu Makino and Amedeo Pace weave tightly into drummer Simone Pace's impeccably precise backing. Timing is everything, and Blonde Redhead certainly have it. They're dirty when they need to be and crystal-clear when the situation calls for it. Never angry, the trio plays hard and fast to the point where the instruments seem to play themselves with the deftest of precision. The production is so skillful that even with the most Spartan of recording gear, guitars end up sounding synthetic, in that painting-looks-like-a-photograph kind of way. And the volatile changes -- from sweet acoustic strums to drilling power chords -- make this album a whirl of unexpected surprises. La Mia Vita Violenta is math rock without the nerdiness and art rock without the pretentiousness. - Ken Taylor, All Music Guide

Blonde Redhead / Fake Can be Just As Good
Released 1997

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It seems like New York trio Blonde Redhead have been dogged with Sonic Youth comparisons since the day they formed years ago, taking their name from an old song by No New York faves DNA. Such yakking only grew louder when the group, then a quartet, signed with Steve Shelley's Smells Like label in 1994 for a pair of LPs, and then let the Sonic Youth drummer produce them. Three years down the road, it's a resemblance still firmly in place on Fake Can Be Just as Good, despite the group employing producer John Goodmanson and switching labels to Chicago's venerable, powerful Touch & Go. But if this stubborn outfit of two handsome Italian-Americans and a pretty Japanese-American doesn't care about being branded copycats, and it seems they don't, then neither should anyone else. Improving with each release, the solid, crashing duo of guitarists (and alternating singers) Kazu Makino and Amedeo Pace may borrow an ethic, an anti-pop stance, and atonal tension that's super-familiar, but the clean sound, direct attack, and straightforward, tense delivery are all their own. Moreover, there's plenty of room for further exploration in these dark, forbidding, tempest-ridden post-punk seas. In fact, when Makino and Pace get cold, claustrophobic, weird, wired, and chilling (with help from borrowed Unwound bassist Vern Rumsey) is when they also nearly explode in deep undercurrents: see the best things here, the quietly terrified "Symphony of Treble" and "Bipolar." And unlike 95 percent of all bands based on the New York noise tradition, Blonde Redhead never just grind like nails to chalkboards -- their well-produced sound is never annoying or unpleasant -- nor forget that music is supposed to have hooks, no matter how much it eschews obvious pop melodic conventions. Far from mere protégés of any band or scene, Blonde Redhead are a unique sub-branch all their own on a fertile tree. - Jack Rabid, All Music Guide

Blonde Redhead / In An Expression of the Inexpressible
Released 1998

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The oft-used comparison to Sonic Youth doesn't really hold a lot of water, as Blonde Redhead's music has always been a bit less swirling, more spontaneous, and rougher around the edges. Further differentiating them from Sonic Youth is their bass-less approach. In an Expression of the Inexpressible, their fourth release, is as uncompromising as Fake Can Be Just as Good and La Mia Vita Violenta, but this time Blonde Redhead wanted to be produced by someone outside the band. The sound is fuller and more polished, and in the capable hands of producers John Goodmanson and Guy Picciotto (of Fugazi fame), they've never sounded quite as good. Still, Kazu Makino's high-pitched, Björk-ish vocals can get irritating at times, and the two guitars never quite reach a compelling level of interplay. Blonde Redhead, who sometimes are too clever for their own good, could, in fact, learn a great deal from Sonic Youth, since most of the tracks never come across with much urgency. - Matthew Hillburn, All Music Guide

Blonde Redhead / Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons
Released 2000

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For a record produced by Guy Picciotto (Fugazi, Rites of Spring), Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons is a surprisingly quiet affair. Rarely do the cuts on Blonde Redhead's 2000 release get much louder than an electric guitar. With their fifth record, Blonde Redhead finally emerges from the shadows of Sonic Youth's post-punk legacy by avoiding the expected detunings, distortions, and shrillness of the genre. The three-piece manages to create a record that is subtle, tuneful, and sublime. On "Loved Despite of Great Faults," instrumentation mainly consists of acoustic guitar, piano, and percussion rather than an assault of power chords, yet the mood of the song is just as effective. While the record may be quieter, it still manages to move in several different directions. "This Is Not" tips its hat to Ric Ocasek with a new wave-inspired piece while the opening cut, "Equally Damaged," and "Ballad of Lemons" suggest an influence from Danny Elfman. Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons may not accurately reflect the full body of Blonde Redhead's work, yet it presents an easy place to start. - Yancey Stricker, All Music Guide

Blonde Redhead / Melodie Citronique
Released 2000

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Blonde Redhead's Melodie Citronique reworks three songs from its excellent album Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons and adds two songs that highlight the group's multicultural, multilingual approach. "En Particulier" is a straightforward French translation of Lemons' dreamy "In Particular"; "Odiata Per le Sue Virtu" is "Hated Because of Great Qualities" with an Italian makeover. "Four Damaged Lemons," a remix of "For the Damaged," makes the song even more fragile and delicately lovely by adding a looped piano, brittle acoustic guitar, backwards sound effects, and chiming keyboards. The bouncy, sing-song "Chi É E Non É" sounds a bit like one of the Pixies' poppier moments sung in Italian, while the version of Serge Gainsbourg's "Slogan" suggests that his slinky, sensual style has become almost as big an influence on Blonde Redhead's sound as Sonic Youth was previously. Though it isn't quite as big a step forward for the group as Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, Melodie Citronique is an enjoyable companion piece to that album, as well as a further exploration of the group's softer side. - Heather Phares, All Music Guide

Blonde Redhead / Live at the Bottom of the Hill
Recorded in 2000

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A great recording on one of their best tours!

01 - Melody of Certain Three
02 - Hated Because of Great Qualities
03 - Futurism vs. Passeism Part 2
04 - Bipolar
04 - I Am There While You Choke on Me
05 - Loved Despite Of Great Faults
06 - Missile++
07 - Distilled
08 - In Particular
09 - Kazuality
11 - U.F.O.
12 - This Is Not
13 - Water
14 - For The Damaged
15 - Suimasen
16 - I Still Get Rocks Off

Blonde Redhead / Live on KCRW
Recorded 2004

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Another great recording...

01 - Anticipation
02 - Falling Man
03 - Misery is a Butterfly
04 - Melody
05 - Messenger
06 - Magic Mountain

Josephine Foster / A Collection

Josephine Foster

One of the most unique voices in the "singer-songwriter" category (hate that term), Josephine Foster shares a little bit of opera, a little bit of blues, a little bit of country and a little bit of Tin Pan Alley. Essentially, an incredibly haunting and unique sound.

Enjoy these releases by the indescribable Josephine Foster.

Josephine Foster / There Are Eyes Above
Released 2000

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Four track recordings of Josephine, a ukelele and her voice. This was released as a CD-R back in 2000. While not necessarily her best album, it certainly set the stage for the music she would release throughout the first decade of the millenium.

Josephine Foster / All The Leaves Are Gone
Released 2004

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Placing All the Leaves Are Gone in the CD player is a little like a time warp. Is the album a reissue of an obscure '60s group from San Francisco? Or is it, perhaps, a contemporary recording (2004) that evokes yesteryear? In the case of Josephine Foster & the Supposed, it's the latter. The easiest comparison would be toJefferson Airplane, circa 1967, with out of kilter melodies in minor keys and the guitars barely in tune. Foster plays the part of Grace Slick here, but she sounds more like Maddy Prior on acid. Her hippie, drug-induced vocal delivery is supported by the Supposed, who are guitarist/bassist Brian Goodman and drummer Rusty Peterson. While instrumental parts seem to have been dubbed here and there on All the Leaves Are Gone, the arrangements are mostly spare, which works well for creating a spacious sound, even when things get kind of loud. How listeners react to the material will probably depend on how familiar they are with groups likeJefferson Airplane, early Grateful Dead, and even the Velvet Underground . The opening song, "Well-Heeled Man," certainly captures one's attention, and Foster's fragile vocal is evocative. While the effect here and elsewhere is often winning, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the experimental mood of the material. The music ranges from gentle to dissonant, from a hush to a crash, alternately pulling the listener in and pushing the listener away. The listener may be intrigued or overwhelmed by All the Leaves Are Gone, but he or she will never be bored. - Ronnie D. Lankford, All Music Guide

Josephine Foster / Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead You
Released 2005

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On Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead You, Josephine Foster trades the rangy psych-folk of her 2004 album with the Supposed for the lonesome chill of an empty studio. She handles everything on Hazel Eyes, from layering her vibrating saw blade of a voice to accompanying it with kazoo, dulcimer, harp, homemade percussion, and, at the center, her dry and spindly acoustic guitar. Foster's singing often consists of a wordless, moody sigh. But she also fills the corners of her lilting, swaying songs with talk of bones, treasure, and hominy grits. Her antiquated enunciation can be little trying -- she's from Chicago, not Kisimul Castle. But the style works if you let yourself believe that Hazel Eyes is a crazy old 78 you found in an attic. (Its runic, earth mother cover art helps.) Alongside the album's more esoteric material -- including "Pruner's Pair" and the raga-like "Celebrant's Song" -- are pieces with an at least an element of easygoing fun, like the casual, old-timey flair of "Good News," or "Golden Wooden Tone," which with its kazoos, harmonies, and tumbling jacks percussion is downright gleeful. Gleeful like the final song of Puritan girls condemned for witchery, but gleeful nevertheless. For fans ofEspers, Joanna Newsom, and Foster's own work in the comparatively less strange Born Heller. - Johnny Loftus, All Music Guide

Josephine Foster / A Wolf In Sheep's Clothing
Released 2006

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For her third solo album, Josephine Foster went for something simple, but extremely strange. Basically, A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing consists of renditions of 19th century art songs, with Brian Goodman's acid electric guitar providing the X factor. Foster has selected pages by Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms, which she sings in German, in typical lieder fashion (acute vibrato included), accompanying herself soberly at the acoustic guitar. Upon hearing the first few seconds of "An die Musik," the first track, you cannot help but wonder if you have put the right disc in the CD player -- is this a reissue of some old wax recordings miraculously restored? -- at which point the electric licks kick in and things take an unmistakable contemporary feel. Goodman seems to operate on his own level, weaving acid lines in and out of the songs, often with little relation to them. The contrast is downright shocking at first and remains disquieting for the first four songs. By the fifth track, "Wehmut," Foster changes her approach: an old piano replaces the acoustic guitar, while amateur harmonica and other miscellaneous instruments create something much closer to the free folk aesthetics some listeners are probably expecting from this album. The longest piece by far, "Auf Einer Burg" goes further in that direction, retaining only the ghost of Schumann's original melody, obscured by reverb and drenched in multi-tracked psychedelic guitar improvisations. The dislocation felt in the earlier tracks is dispelled in this case, which, paradoxically, makes this piece the "saner" one of the bunch and also the least effective. "Nähe Des Geliebten" comes back to the arrangements of the first few songs, closing the album on a more positive note. Some fans of Foster will argue that her two previous solo albums hinted at something like this -- Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead You had a certain antiquated quality to it -- but nothing can really prepare you for A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing. People who make up lists of "weird albums" will most likely take a shine to this one, but don't look at it as a novelty record; it has unique charm and can unexpectedly grow on you. - All Music Guide, Francois Couture

Josephine Foster / Was It That Ever Was
Released 2006

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What a far out release from Josephine Foster, we can barely describe the unusal mixing and melting on her newest self released effort. From the fire noise guitar blasting prelude to all manner of elegant folk musings and musical enchantments performed with piano, percussion, guitar, and Josephine's amazing and unique voice. Including many original compositions, improvised songs, Japanese folk songs, and a couple jam-backed spoken word performances, a very ambitious and captivating release!

Wim Mertens / Solo Recordings

Wim Mertens

Happy New Year! I'm back after a little bit of a holiday and wanted to kick the new year off with something a little different for the blog. If you're not familiar with Wim Mertens, he is a composer from Belgium that's been creating a combination of minimalism with New Music, since the early 80's. His music is engaging, relatively easy compared to some of the other modern composers and has a delicacy that's undescribable.

Today, I'm concentrating on his music for solo piano and voice.

Wim Mertens / A Man of No Fortune, And With a Name To Come
Released 1986

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"For many of the fans of Wim Mertens, one of the first things we did upon discovering the Internet was to search for him. I spent years unsuccessfully looking for his CDs in stores and catalogs before going online in 96, and was most gratified to find that I could now acquire them. And I have. His fans in the US are few but fierce, and releases like A Man Of No Fortune, And With A Name To Come, explain that ferocity.

This is an absolutely beautiful CD. Wim is like no one else, so if you've never heard him or of him, be prepared for the unusual. If you have heard a lick here or there and wonder where to begin, this is a great place for his solo output. His music is an intoxicating whirlwind of just enough repetition to be hypnotic, just enough movement to keep the mind engaged, and tunes that are almost surreal in their sublime beauty. Add his otherworldy voice soaring above those piano lines, and you have something truly extraordinary.

This is an older release, but still one of my favorites. The first track, Casting No Shadow, is among the most beautiful compositions of our time. I am amazed at how he makes so much out of so little. And You See is another that cannot be ignored, a pounding piano line that sucks the listener in and a sad and dervish-like voice that, while uttering syllables meaningless to me, sounds as if it knows all there is to know of time and history. That sounds melodramatic, but this is powerful music, expertly constructed and deeply intense. The other tracks are equally enticing.

That being said, not everyone likes Wim's weird soprano-like voice and minimalist style. But if you're open to the new and the offbeat, give it a try. It is just a stunner." - Amazon.com review

Wim Mertens / After Virtue
Released 1987

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Wim Mertens second major release for solo piano picks up where A Man of No Fortune leaves off. Somewhat uneven, there are some beautiful tracks contained in the album.

Wim Mertens / Strategie de la Rupture
Released 1991

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A few years ago I saw the documentary 'Here we are, waiting for you' by a brazilian filmmaker. During the film I had more and more problems paying attention to the visual content, because of the music. I had never heard anything like that before, and it was magnificent! The credits at the end told me the music was from Wim Merten's album 'Strategie De La Rupture'.

To be short: I have never heard music which 'hypnotizes' me more then this piece of masterwork. I have a classical music education, play the piano myself and have listen to a lot of piano music in various genres, but this album by far impresses me most. It's hard to tell what exactly attracts me in the music of Wim Mertens, but I think it's the simplicity and space in his music which gives you time for your own interpretation of the music. The simplicity doesn't make the music 'easy', but rather hypnotizing. No speedy fingerwork, no complex (jazz-)chords, no mind boggling chord progressions (which all have their charms), but pure true music. Sting once said that the power of music is in the silence between the notes; the emptiness lifts you higher, the notes being the helpful environment... I think Sting meant something like this album of Wim Mertens. Hear it yourself! - Amazon.com Review

Wim Mertens / Epic That Never Was
Released 1993

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Oh, the Mertens confusion. CDs all over, with duplicate tracks, different arrangments, obscure titles, and those prices! Solo? Ensemble? Which to choose?

Well, this is a stunner. I have had it for over 7 years, and enjoy it more now than I did when it first arrived. This is in many ways my favorite of the solo CDs. I cannot grow tired of it. Wim is an astonishingly talented musician who creates the most lovely and moving tunes out of the smallest pieces, tiny tunes, endlessly varied, repeated, twisted and turned upside down, played with a superbly confident pianism and that otherworldy voice that startles, then challenges, then finally comforts. And as the other reviewer says, the tracks available only here are absolutely grand.

There are many pretenders to the throne of "The Best" in this field, which I guess would be minimalist/ethereal/ambient music, but there is nothing ambient about this CD. This will engage and grip and not let go, just as it did when performed to that lucky audience in Lisbon in 1993. - Amazon.com Review

Wim Mertens / Jeremiades
Released 1995

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This is Wim Merten's fourth studio album with solo piano and his unique vocal style. He stretches to the limit with the first track, a 23-minute repetition of a 4-bar piano theme that builds to an impossibly beautiful conclusion. Unlike most minimal or repetitive music, this piece shows that repetition can be a powerful device without alienating the listener. The first time I heard it, I didn't realize that there was such a short theme being repeated because the variations in melody and in the vocal work kept developing in a subtle way. Mertens sings in a unique "medieval falsetto" voice that some find irritating, but which is deeply emotional. He has developed a highly personal style in his piano/voice work that likely cannot be duplicated by others. While this is not the most accessible of his piano albums (try "After Virtue" for a starter) this is a strong, sometimes exhilarating album. - Amazon.com Review

Wim Mertens/ Lisa
Released 1996

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No voice on this album, just his great piano playing, and some additional whisteling. The album is hauntingly beautifull, but terribly short - it only lasts about 20 minutes. It's a kind of Brad Mehldau meets minimalism album; it might sound very simplistic, it still is beautifull enough to blow you away. If it would be a bit longer, it would be a five star album for sure. - Amazon.com Review

Wim Mertens / Der Heisse Brei
Released 2000

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It is hard to describe what Wim Mertens' vocal music sounds like to people who haven't heard him. The music is piano and voice; the piano is a kind of Philip Glass minimalistic music, though more melody minded, and quite a lot better. It has more direction, evolves and vibrates more. Wim Mertens makes you feel like you're not listening to 'his' piano music, but to the instrument in general. The tricky part is: he sings. I don't know anyone who 'likes' it. Either you hate, or you love it. Needless to say, I do love it. I have heard people call him the 'singing teletubbie', as he doesn't use words, but 'sounds' (comperable to Meredith Monk or Lisa Gerrard), and it's very direct, instictive, playfull yet haunting music. On this album, he seems to push to melodic powers of his voice further then on the previous ones; it album is less repetitive, though it still makes you think you've known these melodies forerver. If you don't know his music, you should check it out (especially his 'piano and voice' albums). If you do, I'm sure you've already bought it, and all of these words are in vain... - Amazon.com Review

Wim Mertens / Sin Embargo
Released 1997

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And we thought him an ordinary man! The Man, his Voice and his Piano now become The Man, his Whistle and his Guitar. WM plucks and strums decently. He ably transplants beautiful ordinary chords from the piano to the guitar and extended, painfully questioning melodic lines from winds to the single guitar strings. It's the sound that comes as a suprise, not the musical matter, which is of course carefully recycled WM vocabulary. And yes, this time he whistles where he would normally sing - just one piece, as on "After Virtue". WM's self-irony reaches its peak in this brilliant travesty. - Amazon.com Review

Wim Mertens / Un Respiro
Released 2004

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Un respiro, Mertens' new solo album offers 10 new compositions, often very rythmical tracks composed for two pianos and two voices all performed by the composer himself. It shows Mertens' passion for the voice, not using it as an instrument but presenting the voice as a guide for the piano, always looking for pure expression only. Un respiro is Mertens' 6th solo studio album as a solo performer pianist/singer. - Amazon.com

Richard Buckner / A Collection

Richard Buckner

Don't know why this feels so appropriate around X-Mas. Is it the "Holiday Blues"? Whatever it may be, Richard Buckner is probably one of the best "singer-songwriters" veering towards the alt-country vein. There is an incredible amount of passion, heartache and beauty in every note he sings. If you pick one, I highly recommend Devotion + Doubt, one of the finest albums of the 1990's.

Richard Buckner / Bloomed
Released 1994

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Buckner's debut is an accomplished but subdued affair with hardly a trace of rock in sight. The emphasis is on his rich-but-weary vocals and sober tales of romance and restlessness, with dignified Texas prairie backup by such esteemed regionals as Lloyd Maines (who produced) and Ponty Bon. Very much in the vein of Butch Hancock, but much more ordinary at this point, without the eccentricity and boisterousness that characterizes much of Hancock and fellow Lubbockite Terry Allen's work. - All Music Guide

Richard Buckner / Devotion + Doubt
Released 03.11.1997

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Richard Buckner's second album of cross-country folk is an exploration of love's paranoia and its resulting desperation and hopelessness. Stemming from the singer/songwriter's divorce, the 13 songs on Devotion + Doubt reflect and, to a lesser degree, celebrate both his newfound independence and loneliness. His road-weary voice (often calmed to a whisper here) coupled with the sparing strums of his acoustic guitar, strike a point of intimacy within the songs, giving the best of them ("Pull," "4am") the feeling that they were reluctantly cribbed from personal diary entries. But Buckner never sounds defeated on Devotion + Doubt, only a bit haunted, as if he's convinced himself -- based on past attempts at love and their eventual failures -- that he's destined to make the same mistakes again and again, no matter how hard he tries to make a relationship work. - All Music Guide

Richard Buckner / Since
Released 08.11.1998

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Richard Buckner's follow-up to his 1997 divorce odyssey Devotion + Doubt is a more upbeat affair, with questions of faith and being tossed into the electric mix. Moving from contemplative singer-songwriter treks ("Once") to blurry guitar rave-ups ("Believer"), Since is the picking-up-and-getting-on antidote to Devotion + Doubt's downer trip. Buckner still seems troubled by life's little hang-ups, but instead of falling into an acoustic-drenched funk, he rages against his blues with his guitar. That doesn't mean Since isn't without its distressing moments; there are plenty of hushed and fragile songs here that recall the breaking tone of his previous two albums. Yet, for all of the creeping positivity going on within the grooves, Buckner sounds more weary than ever, his already delicate voice cracking under the pressure as he trudges his way through his own brand of electric folk music. - All Music Guide

Richard Buckner / The Hill
Released 10.30.2000

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(Note: The CD is one track... approximately 35 minutes)

Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, a series of poems originally published in serial form in 1914-1915, provided the subject matter for nomadic troubadour Richard Buckner's 2000 release The Hill. In the poems, the dead in an Illinois graveyard relay details from their lives in matter-of-factly haunting tones. When originally published, Masters' believable characters tore away at the strict moral facade of small-town life through their tales of adultery, casual murder, and morphine addiction. Who better than Buckner to interpret these lost souls' voices in his growling, plaintive murmur, accompanied most often by sparse acoustic guitar and stark accompaniment. Through this earthy channeler, the names from ragged gravestones almost float in front of the listener while hollowed eyes reveal the details of their own deaths.

Unfortunately, while the subject matter and the musician are an ideal match, the album as a whole falls short of Buckner's famous heartfelt intimacy and inventive songwriting. Fans who have come to appreciate his snapshot imagery and dark wordplay may be disappointed at this interpretation of someone else's work, as appropriate as it may be. The 18 individual poems are recorded as one continuous 34-minute track, making it difficult to tell when one woman's childbirth death travels into another man's drunken despair, and the warm acoustic guitar, mandolin, and violin are on occasion jarringly interrupted by misplaced electronic sweeps and buzzes. Still, the haunting charm of "Oscar Hummel" and "Emily Sparks" show the familiar passion and honesty the singer is known for. Buckner continues to distance himself from the limiting country-folk label with increasingly ambitious projects, all of which are interesting but some of which fail to fully utilize his talents. - All Music Guide

Richard Buckner / Richard Buckner
Released 2000

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Richard Buckner first pressed up this low-frills, self-titled item for sale at his concerts following the 2000 release of The Hill; the self-titled disc consists of Buckner performing 11 songs armed only with his acoustic guitar in a San Francisco studio in 1996. All these songs were later re-recorded on the albums Devotion + Doubt and Since, and while listening one gets the feeling that these were really just demos cleaned up for release. That said, that's not to say these performances don't offer some surprises for fans; this version of "Boys, the Night Will Bury You" has a very different arrangement and melodic sense than the one which would appear on Since, while the more straightforward take of "Pull" gives the song a very different spin than it had on Devotion + Doubt. And anyone who has ever seen one of Buckner's solo acoustic shows knows he's a compelling and charismatic performer, and this disc manages to capture a bit of that presence on a piece of aluminum and plastic. However, none of the performances on Richard Buckner can honestly be said to be better than the studio recordings which followed. In 2003, Buckner reissued this disc in a widely available edition, which seems fitting -- while this is music worth hearing, it's too slight to merit the three-figure prices it was fetching among collectors. - All Music Guide

Richard Buckner / Impasse
Released 10.08.2002

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Grizzled folkie Richard Buckner evokes more dark snapshots of life and the intricacies of relationships on his fifth release, Impasse. Similar in feel and texture to his previous releases, Impasse winds around the same moody corners, experimenting with the intimacy of the best singer/songwriters and the quirky fuzz and crunch of indie rock. The spirits of frequent collaborators Joey Burns and John Convertino linger large over this project, and after an initial listen it is surprising to find out that Buckner played all of the instruments this time around (with the exception of the drums, performed expertly by his wife, artist Penny Jo Buckner). Mellotron hums and vibraphone chimes back the singer's familiar growl and warm, nylon-stringed guitar, with textures floating past like faded slides bought from a garage sale. Landing somewhere between Since's driving experimentation and the melancholy drones of Devotion + Doubt, the album fits squarely into Buckner's catalog, but may not push too far in either direction. While Since emphasized Buckner's grit with rocked-out guitar passages and wild sonic abandon and Devotion + Doubt pushed him nearly over the edge in its soul-crushing depression and beautifully haunting themes of loss and heartbreak, Impasse finds the author seemingly more comfortable with the cards in his hand. The tension between musicians on Since and the tensions between Buckner and himself on Devotion + Doubt are subtly missing on Impasse, but this wiser and gentler Richard Buckner seems to be embracing a more even keel. With no soul-baring a cappella tracks and no glitchy rave-ups, the album seems to be painted with the same brush from start to finish, which certainly makes for a more even listen, but there is something about the contrast in his previous works that is missing here. Listening to just the first few seconds of each track, there is a discomforting similarity in the way each song starts, almost as if Buckner has worked himself into a familiar pattern and is happy working within it time and time again. Still, every song on the album is fantastic -- starkly beautiful and unusually comforting. While this collection of songs is not Buckner's best, it still is head and shoulders above 99 percent of the angst-fueled singer\songwriters out there. - All Music Guide

Richard Buckner / Impasse-ette
Released 09.10.2002

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This six-song E.P. works as a combination sampler and companion piece to Richard Buckner's full-length release, Impasse. Like the full-length release, Impasse-ette contains the same churning mix of acoustic and electric sounds, sometimes breathtakingly intimate, sometimes fuzzed beyond recognition. The sampler contains acoustic versions of two songs from the album, and three previously unavailable songs. The charming and sweet "Stumble-Ette," along with "Remainder," work well as introductions -- or brief sketches -- and stand in sharp contrast to the chilling prayer "It's Still '56." None of these tracks are necessarily essential, but rabid Buckner fans will snatch it up just the same. - All Music Guide

Richard Buckner / Dents and Shells
Released 10.12.2004

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The darkness that surrounds Richard Buckner's writing always seems to be the focus of scrutiny for every judging ear, be it a professional critic's or an armchair critic's, and for good reason considering the elliptical, image-laden construction of Buckner's banter, but the constant reference to this blanket has almost unjustly glorified the artist into an impossible mystery. What isn't often mentioned is Buckner's ability to fill his music and lyrics with such a brutal and heavy heart that critics are quick to point to his lifestyle on the road, which implies a loner mentality, and his first divorce, which fueled his second album, Devotion + Doubt. When Impasse was released in late 2002, it was widely noted in the press that Buckner and his second wife, Penny Jo Buckner, were the only two musicians on the album and that, between the recording and the release of Impasse, the pair had split. The question on everyone's lips seemed to be what the follow-up would sound like and if essentially it would be Devotion + Doubt, Pt. 2. In some ways Dents and Shells treads similar ground in that it reflects some serious life change, but the impression Buckner leaves implies more a mutual understanding of why the two split rather than the paranoia that filled Devotion + Doubt. Much can be read into the lyrics of "Invitation" and "Her" -- and even, depending on how lucid one allows himself to become, the imagery of the artwork depicting two birds, one hovering above a circle and the other a square, flying in opposite directions away from a tree -- but what remains is another release that sounds how Richard Buckner has always sounded: grizzly, conceptual, fragmented, brooding, and plaintive. Dents and Shells also represents a change in Buckner's business, having moved over to Merge for this release, and back to a larger band (misery loves company?), recalling the approach to his third album, Since. The band Buckner assembled for Dents and Shells fits his standard of choosing notable musicians, the most prominent being Butthole Surfers drummer King Coffey and Meat Puppets alum and former bassist for Bob Mould, Andrew DuPlantis. The re-emergence of pedal steel in Buckner's sonic nomenclature, played expertly by Mike Hardwick and Gary Newcomb, further solidifies the connection with Since while the liberal use of piano and organs hint at the atmosphere of The Hill with a bit more ebb and flow in style than what was exhibited on Impasse. Naturally the chosen musicians' approach to arrangements are different than previous sidemen, but Dents and Shells might best be looked at as Buckner's catalog refined into a clear and cohesive effort with which fans should be very pleased. - All Music Guide

Richard Buckner and John Langford / Sir Dark Invader vs. The Fanglord
Released 2005

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"Jon Langford met Richard Buckner in the security booth at Buck Owen's Crystal Palace in Bakersfield, CA where they had been chained together for their own protection. Mouths taped shut with duct tape, they communicated via primitive Morse code messages tapped out on each other's foreheads with fish bones. The ordeal was brief but formative, and after countless power breakfasts and costume parties from Edmonton to Austin, from Brooklyn to the Bay Area, they fell exhausted into a photobooth and saw how fantastic they looked together in neat black and white rectangles and smelling faintly of eggs. They decided to spend a year in Sally Timms' apartment making this album for release on Buried Treasure Records."

-- Captain J. Langford of the H.M.S. Mekon

Richard Buckner / Meadow
Released 09.12.2006

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"Pretty destroyed/comin' through/sees your spin/around the room...are you sitting down?" These are some of the lyrics from "Town," the opening track on Richard Buckner's Meadow, sung to an urgent progression of distorted electric and acoustic guitars and drums. As unsettling as this is, the song is chock-full of Buckner's inherent melodic sense, and it's easier to bear, somehow, this darkness and melancholy. Produced by J.D. Foster at his home studio, and at Buckner's, with some additional work done at Brooklyn Recording, this is an album of absences, of ghosts so far down the highway only their traces remain. Buckner's sense of rock & roll is infused with images from country, folk, the desert, the blues, early American popular music; virtually everywhere he's been. In some ways one can say that these ten songs are his own companion to his recording of some of the Spoon River Anthology on Hill. Each track here has a one word title except for the final one, "The Tether and the Tie." But Buckner's revisiting the cautious grief and optimism on Bloomed, too. Everything here is written in a state of absence, of the previous, the past, and how it can be reconciled. The gorgeous shimmering piano, drums and guitars intro on "Lucky" ease into the startling words: "Forgetting where the roads align, bowing out and back again/Something made it over/A chance to cross the shards you see...." These lyrics are held together by bridges and refrains that further underscore their poetry. Its strength is in the missing middle, the hole in the middle, the thing that needs to be revisited but can't quite be because it's already gone and only gray shadows remain.- All Music Guide

Scott Walker / 'Til The Band Comes In

Scott Walker Per request, here's 'Til The Band Comes In by Scott Walker.

Scott Walker / 'Til The Band Comes In
Released 1970

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The 1990s' rediscovery of Scott Walker, hitherto the Pop Star That Time Forgot, was one of the most gratifying events of the mid 1990s. No man blessed with a voice like that, taste like that, talent like that, should ever have been consigned to the creaky oblivion of oldies radio. But one needs to tread carefully when plunging into the cult. Even at his best, and particularly at his most recent, Walker can be an excruciatingly difficult taste to acquire. Move into the early 1970s mid-point of his output, and oftentimes, it's simply excruciating.

Never regarded among Scott Walker's finest efforts, and a resounding flop when it first appeared in 1971, Til The Band Comes In is, retrospectively, the most shocking of all the singer's early albums. His first four, after all, are dramatic slabs of MOR-noir, crucial experiences for anybody anxious to discover Brel, Bergman and a taste for truly surreal pop tones; by their standards alone, surely album #5 should have traveled even further astray?

It doesn't. Two tracks culled for the It's Raining Today compilation, "Thanks For Chicago Mr James" and "Joe," are this album's sole concessions to such matters as reputation. A year earlier, the BBC gave Walker his own TV series, with the assurance that he would concentrate his tonsils on ballads and standards. He fulfilled the brief admirably, and released a soundtrack album to prove it. Unfortunately, Til The Band Comes In suggests he never got the sacharine out of his system. He even brings TV guest Esther Ofarim back into the action, but morbid curiosity and an incomprehensible fondness for "Cinderella Rockefeller" are surely the only reasons anyone could want to check out her solo contribution to the set.

There is a reasonable rendering of Roy Orbison's "It's Over," aptly closing the album on a merciful note, but while Walker's first four albums remain essential listening, and the TV LP at least has its moments, 'Til The Band Comes In is best left waiting at the stage door. Some "lost classics" were lost with good reason. - All Music Guide

Scott Walker / A Collection Day 2

Scott Walker

Day Two of Scott Walker takes us into the territory that I adore... the 1980's to now. Throghout this period, he would release album after album of incredible material.

I promised no 70's period Walker, but I think it's important to include one comeback album with The Walker Brothers.

The Walker Brothers / Nite Flights
Released 1978

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Every once in a while, an album comes along that doesn't simply surprise you, it takes you down an alleyway, rips off all your clothes, then hares away with your socks on its head, singing selections from South Pacific. And just before it disappears from view, you notice that David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Brian Eno are cavorting alongside it, sharing the spoils and plotting further misdeeds. The fact that the original miscreant then shrugs them aside and tears off on its own is neither here nor there. What matters is, when Scott Walker set to work (somewhat reluctantly, one feels) on the third post-comeback Walker Brothers album, that was the impression which he had in mind. Of course it wouldn't quite work out like that. Whatever else they may have been, as their rebirth accelerated towards its gory end, the Walkers remained a democracy, splitting vocals and songs between the three non-siblings, and only occasionally allowing any one the upper hand. But whereas John was still locked into the art country balladeering which had always been his forte, and Gary was having trouble completing his allotment, Scott had finally realized that he had more to offer than another Kris Kristofferson outtake. As a writer, he had been all but silent since the late 1960s, when his peculiarly twisted post-pop visions sent solo album after solo album hurtling into a commercial void. Now, however, he was reaching back into that abyss, and emerged with four songs -- "Niteflights," "The Electrician," "Shut Out," and "Fat Mama Kick" -- which not only realigned his entire future career, they also twisted the on-going landscape of rock music itself. Electro-pumping soundscapes of grandiose synth, all four were clearly inspired by Bowie's recent work with Iggy and Eno. But they took that role model so much further that within the year, they themselves were delineating much of what Bowie himself would accomplish on his own next two albums (Lodger and Scary Monsters). Elsewhere, Midge Ure later confessed that "The Electrician" inspired him to write Ultravox's "Vienna," and, from there, one can project the entire new romantic/synth-pop movement from Walker's presumably unwitting role models. In a perfect world, Scott would have completed the entire album himself, or at least been given an EP to himself. But of course that was not to be, and so Nite Flights appeared with the rest of the boys, the rest of the baggage, and, though both John and Gary at least tried to keep up with their bandmate, their failure was as painful as it was inevitable. Gary's "Death of Romance" and John's "Disciples of Death" are at least vindicated by their titles, but the songs are as thin as their composers voices and could be outtakes from another album entirely. They're certainly from another planet. - All Music Guide

Scott Walker / Climate of Hunter
Released 1984

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Walker's only album of the 1980s was both a blow for artistic credibility, and a blow against most of his old fans. The voice of the balladeer was still intact, and still even crooned sometimes. But the arrangements backed brow-furrowing, obtuse lyrics with '80s-oriented rock that incorporated some quasi-classical structures. Walker was seemingly more interested in painting abstracts in which the textures counted more than the content. This made for an album which may have been a hell of a lot more interesting than '80s efforts by other '60s pop stars, but at the same time it was rather impenetrable, and one's attention tended to drift off over the course of the set. Yet it was not half as radical as the avant-garde direction he would stake out with his next album ten years later, Tilt. - All Music Guide

Scott Walker / Tilt
Released 1995

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Tilt was Scott Walker's first album following over a decade of silence, and whatever else he may have done during his exile, brightening his musical horizon was not on the agenda. Indescribably barren and unutterably bleak, Tilt is the wind that buffets the gothic cathedrals of everyone's favorite nightmares. The opening "Farmer in the City" sets the pace, a cinematic sweep that somehow maintains a melody beneath the unrelenting melodrama of Walker's most grotesque vocal ever. Seemingly undecided whether he's recording an opera or simply haunting one, Walker doesn't so much perform as project his lyrics, hurling them into the alternating maelstroms and moods that careen behind him. The effect is unsettling, to put it mildly. At the time of its release, reviews were undecided whether to praise or pillory Walker for making an album so utterly divorced from even the outer limits of rock reality, an indecision only compounded by its occasional (and bloody-mindedly deceptive) lurches towards modern sensibilities. "The Cockfighter" is underpinned by an intensity that is almost industrial in its range and raucousness, while "Bouncer See Bouncer" would have quite a catchy chorus if anybody else had gotten their hands on it. Here, however, it is highlighted by an Eno-esque esotericism and the chatter of tiny locusts. The crowning irony, however, is "The Patriot (A Single)," seven minutes of unrelenting funeral dirge over which Walker infuses even the most innocuous lyric ("I brought nylons from New York") with indescribable pain and suffering. Tilt is not an easy album to love; it's not even that easy to listen to. First impressions place it on a plateau somewhere between Nico's Marble Index and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music -- before long, familiarity and the elitist chattering of so many well-heeled admirers rendered both albums mere forerunners to some future shift in mainstream taste. And maybe that is the fate awaiting Tilt, although one does wonder precisely what monsters could rise from soil so belligerently barren. Even Metal Machine Music could be whistled, after all. - All Music Guide

Scott Walker / It's Raining Today: The Scott Walker Story (1967-70)
Released 1996

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As the first Scott Walker album to be released in the U.S., It's Raining Today: The Scott Walker Story is an adequate 17-song overview of his solo career, containing many of the highlights from his first five albums ("Jackie," "Montague Terrace (In Blue)," "The Seventh Seal," "The Old Man's Back Again (Dedicated to the Neo-Stalinist Regime)," "Big Louise," "Lights of Cincinnati," "Joanna"), while overlooking some minor gems, including "Matilda" and the B-side "The Plague." Neverthless, it remains a terrific introduction to Walker's music. - All Music Guide

Scott Walker / The Drift
Released 2006

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There were intermittent soundtrack and score contributions of varying magnitudes, as well as a couple other low-key projects, but The Drift is Scott Walker's proper follow-up to 1995's Tilt, an album that also happened to trail its predecessor by 11 years. If 1984's Climate of Hunter put the MOR in morose, Tilt avoided the road completely and went straight toward the fractured, fraught images inside Walker's nightmares. It was entirely removed from anything that could've been classified as contemporary. The Drift isn't an equally severe leap from Tilt, but it is darker, less arranged, alternately more and less dense, and ultimately more frightening. Maybe it'll make your body temperature drop a few degrees. Working with what Walker has referred to as "blocks of sound," only a few of the album's 68 minutes have any connection to rock music, and many of those minutes are part of a harrowing 9/11 song that also obliquely references "Jailhouse Rock" as Elvis Presley cries out ("I'm the only one left alive!") to his stillborn twin brother. The songs swing from hovering drones to crushing jolts. The blocks that make them, then, differ tremendously in weight, from one that could be pushed by an index finger to one that could only be hauled by a forklift. Whenever a vast shaft of space opens up, it is eventually stuffed with drastic, horrific dissonance. While a song might contain a constant element or two, they're all in a constant state of unease and flux. Walker's voice matches the activity levels of the sounds, providing a kind of paranoid croon one minute and then, during another, casting almost demonic projections that are nearly as rattling as the accompaniment. From the outset, the album seems impossibly insular and impenetrable, especially if you've been led to believe that Scott Walker's name is synonymous with recluse, but it has everything to do with real lives (or, more accurately, real deaths). Walker is acutely aware of what's going on with the world outside his supposed candle-lit bunker; he's only finding very unique (OK, bloody minded) ways to bring them up. Any mystique behind the recordings is laid to waste by one scene from a documentary, titled 30 Century Man, which shows Walker — a baseball hat-wearing sixty-something man from Ohio — instructing another man on how to thump a slab of meat. It looks and sounds absurd, of course (the participants seem to be aware of this), but then again, the results are used in a song inspired by the public executions of Benito Mussolini and his mistress. Broken spells aside, how much more bleak could this album be? None more bleak. - All Music Guide

Scott Walker / A Collection Day 1

Scott Walker

What can be said about Scott Walker... from his early "Righteous Brothers" sounding recordings to the height of his career where he looked to artists such as Jacques Brel to his recent recordings on Drag City, he continued to push drama through music. Numerous artists claim Scott Walker as a major influence, from Momus to Nick Cave, from Belle and Sebastian to Antony and the Johnsons. With his songs of despair, loneliness to his love of the outsiders, Scott Walker had a major involvement in my own life. I hope you enjoy this collection of Mr. Scott Walkers recordings.

P.S. I skipped the 70's (not his finest hour).


Scott Walker / Scott
Released 09.16.1967

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Scott Walker's success as a teen idol singer of Spectorish ballads with the Walker Brothers in no way prepared listeners for the mordant, despairing lyrics of his solo debut. To compound the surprise, he does his best to imitate the vocal girth of Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra on this mix of original tunes and covers, which also features sweeping, bloated orchestral arrangements. It was hardly rock, and pop of a most oddball sort, but it found a surprisingly large audience -- in Britain, anyway, where it reached the Top Three in 1967. Poke behind the velvet curtain of the languid MOR arrangements, and one finds a surprisingly literate existentialist at the helm of these proceedings. His lyrical nuances were probably lost on his audience of predominately teenage girls, though they've earned him a small cult audience that endures to this day. Besides presenting three of his own compositions, Walker covers tunes by Weill/Mann, Tim Hardin, and Andre & Dory Previn on this album, as well as three songs by his favorite writer, Jacques Brel. Highlights include his exquisitely anguished rendition of Brel's classic "Amsterdam" and his dramatic cover of the early-'60s Toni Fisher pop ballad "The Big Hurt." - Scott Walker

The Walker Brothers / Images
Released 1967

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The Walker Brothers' third and final album of the 1960s was as wildly uneven as their other pair. Affecting pop/rock ballads and operatic crooner vehicles were interspersed with absolutely inappropriate up-tempo blue-eyed soul (always a weak point for the group) and rock covers; the lugubrious reading of "Blueberry Hill" could be the worst track cut by the trio in the '60s. However, Scott Walker's songwriting and singing exhibited a growth that foreshadowed some of the more ambitious aspects of his early solo albums. The almost classical-sounding "Orpheus" was a standout in this arena, and his "Genevieve" was a fine ballad reflecting the encroaching influence of Jacques Brel. "Experience" was a real oddity, with a German oom-pah-like arrangement backing Scott's exhortation "here's to the people who live in a shell"; he also digs into Michel Legrand's "Once Upon a Summertime" and "I Will Wait for You." The gentle John Walker-written and -sung "I Can't Let It Happen to You" is one of the Walker Brothers' best songs, and undoubtedly the best thing John Walker contributed to their records. The CD reissue adds the four tracks from their 1967 singles, including their covers of "Stay With Me Baby" and "Walking in the Rain," and a good overlooked Scott Walker-penned B-side, "Turn Out the Moon." - All Music Guide

Scott Walker / Scott 2
Released 1968

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Although Walker's second album was his biggest commercial success, actually reaching number one in Britain, it was not his greatest artistic triumph. His taste remains eclectic, encompassing Bacharach/David, Tim Hardin, and of course his main man Jacques Brel (who is covered three times on this album). And his own songwriting efforts hold their own in this esteemed company. "The Girls From the Streets" and "Plastic Palace People" show an uncommonly ambitious lyricist cloaked behind the over-the-top, schmaltzy orchestral arrangements, one more interested in examining the seamy underside of glamour and romance than celebrating its glitter. The Brel tune "Next" must have lifted a few teenage mums' eyebrows with its not-so-hidden hints of homosexuality and abuse. Another Brel tune, "The Girl and the Dogs," is less controversial, but hardly less nasty in its jaded view of romance. Some of the material is not nearly as memorable, however, and the over-the-top show ballad production can get overbearing. The album included his first Top 20 U.K. hit, "Jackie." - All Music Guide

Scott Walker / Scott 3
Released 1969

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Scott Walker's final British Top Ten album was the first to be dominated by his own songwriting. Ten of the 13 tunes on this 1969 LP are originals; the remaining three, naturally, were written by one of his chief inspirations, Jacques Brel. There are some interesting moments here. "Big Louise" talks about a hefty prostitute with shocking explicitness for a pop star album of the era. "Copenhagen" (like much of Walker's '60s work) foreshadows David Bowie. "Funeral Tango" is a particularly vicious Brel song. "30 Century Man" is an uncommonly folkish and focused tune for Walker. "We Came Through" is an oddball cavalry charge featuring one of his occasional forays into Ennio Morricone spaghetti Western-like production. The tension between Walker's dense, foreboding lyrics and orchestral production is unusual, to say the least. But too often, it's too difficult to penetrate Walker's insights through Wally Scott's string-drenched production. It shrouds the lyrics in a fog that's often too syrupy to justify the effort needed to fight through it. - All Music Guide

Scott Walker / Scott 4
Released 1969

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Walker dropped out of the British Top Ten with his fourth album, but the result was probably his finest '60s LP. While the tension between the bloated production and his introspective, ambitious lyrics remains, much of the over-the-top bombast of the orchestral arrangements has been reined in, leaving a relatively stripped-down approach that complements his songs rather than smothering them. This is the first Walker album to feature entirely original material, and his songwriting is more lucid and cutting. Several of the tracks stand among his finest. "The Seventh Seal," based upon the classic film by Ingmar Bergman, features remarkably ambitious (and relatively successful) lyrics set against a haunting Ennio Morricone-style arrangement. "The Old Man's Back Again" also echoes Morricone, and tackles no less ambitious a lyrical palette; "dedicated to the neo-Stalinist regime," the "old man" of this song was supposedly Josef Stalin. "Hero of the War" is also one of Walker's better vignettes, serenading his war hero with a cryptic mix of tribute and irony. Other songs show engaging folk, country, and soul influences that were largely buried on his previous solo albums. - All Music Guide

Scott Walker / Looking Back With Scott Walker
Released 1968

FOR THE COMPLETIST!

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When he was still in high school, Scott Walker made his first ventures into the record business as a teen idol-type singer (under the name Scott Engel) for several small labels. All of them sank without a trace at the time, although some were reissued (along with tracks that hadn't previously seen the light of day) in the latter half of the '60s, after Walker had reached stardom with the Walker Brothers. Looking Back with Scott Walker has 27 cuts from the late '50s and early '60s, and the music betrays not a shred of the one-of-a-kind talent that would generate his avid cult following. It's putrid stuff that would hold no interest whatsoever for latter-day listeners if Walker had not developed into something else entirely. He does sing well for a teenager (in a much higher voice than he would employ in the '60s), but the material (none of it penned by Walker himself) is of strictly hold-your-nose stuff. Much of it, in fact, isn't really rock at all, but son-of-Eddie Fisher-type pap, arranged with an oh-so-slight eye for the teen rock audience; some of it makes Paul Anka sound gritty by comparison. If you're a completist, it should be said, it's a well-assembled package, gathering most of his excruciatingly rare (and just plain excruciating) early sides in one place. Just beware that the relationship between this Scott Walker and the one that sang morose, complex ballads years later is nil. - All Music Guide

Godspeed You Black Emperor! / A Collection

Godspeed You Black Emperor

Ahhh... Post-Rock. The short-lived movement hoping to revolutionize rock into a new genre. Unfortunately, it wasn't meant to be. A lot of post-rock bands are indistinguishable from each other, but there are the few that stand out. Tortoise, The Album Leaf and of course, the mother of them all, Godspeed You Black Emperor! Enjoy this collection of their recordings...

Godspeed You Black Emperor! / F# A#
Released 1998

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"We are trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death." Few albums begin with such promise and foreboding, but this first full-length from Canadian genius collective Godspeed You Black Emperor! succeeds in the first few moments. F# A# (Infinity) contains three compositions that run the gamut from grotesque to sublime. The term "composition" seems an appropriate one to use as this band does not write songs. Each piece is at least 14 minutes in length, consisting of three to four sections. The band, a nine-member unit consisting of guitar, drums, bass, strings, keyboard, marimbas, and woodwinds, intersperses voice-over narrative with sprawling instrumental melodies. The arrangements move slowly, building from hushed silence to cathartic crescendo and back again. The narratives that accompany the music meditate on the corruption of the American government and the seeming emptiness of the postmodern era. At times, it seems that the music might offer hope, but alternatively, the haunting melodies can serve to emphasize the confusion encountered in these stories. As "Dead Flag Blues," the album's first track, unfolds, the speaker's voice is undercut by a poignant string melody and the piece builds to a beautiful peak. "Dead Flag Blues" is a four-part arrangement in an apparently symphonic pattern. A theme is stated, followed by a quiet interlude out of which the tension builds to disaster/epiphany and finally a quiet reprise of the initial melody is given. The albums second piece, "East Hastings," follows a similar pattern, producing brilliant results. "Providence" is the album's final piece, a bit longer than the others, but lacking the consistency and unity of its counterparts. The music on this album is unique and powerful. One would be hard-pressed to find any imitators of this revolutionary musical form created by GYBE! Its origins are as much avant-classical as they are rock & roll, and the band has achieved a true synthesis of the two forms, expanding them to new boundaries. This music is inherently inexplicable, and this is its beauty. - Marc Gillman, All Music Guide

Godspeed You Black Emperor! / Slow Riot For New Zero Kanada
Released 1999

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Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada may last only half an hour, but in that time it imparts an internal experience akin to that of watching a cast-of-thousands Hollywood epic. Godspeed You Black Emperor! are a Montreal-based nine-piece ensemble that uses massed strings, ringing electric guitars, and martial drums to evoke endless vistas and stir strong emotions. "Moya" opens with a solemn drone overlaid with resonant violin overtones, then builds to a crashing, unapologetically melodramatic climax. The CD's second (and final) selection, "Blaise Bailey Finegan III," is more ambitious. Like a director who grabs his audience's tear ducts with both fists, the group inserts field recordings of a ranting paranoiac between sweeping spaghetti-Western passages that rise to exhilarating multiple crescendos, then fall away to ghostly, echoed violins. --Bill Meye, Amazon.com

Godspeed You Black Emperor! / Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
Released 2000

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Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, the much-anticipated follow-up to Godspeed You Black Emperor's Slow Riot, is a double-disc achievement of four works (each with multiple parts): "Storm," "Static," "Sleep," and "Antennas to Heaven." It is a windfall for any fan of ambient pop, orchestral rock, space rock, or simply lush string arrangements who understands how powerful love, melancholy, and frustration can be. The main complaint voiced by critics of Godspeed's music is that their works just repeat the same pattern: start out sparse and slow, build-build-build, crescendo. While there are certainly crescendos, there is no such predictable pattern repeated among the works on Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven -- it's loaded with dynamics, unexpected sections, strong emotions and beauty.

The album opener, "Storm," is a leap for GYBE! that, alone, makes this release worth getting. It's a rapturous work that rises with a potent melancholy, driven by heartrending emotions. "Storm" vents a powerful frustration (each listener can insert their own reasons why) with majestic screams of strings, guitars, and layers, resulting in a climactic and passionate soaring. It eventually winds down into an exhausted aftermath of piano, underlying drones, and frustrated rants. The second piece, "Static," is a wandering, isolationist piece of bleak expanses shaded with darker emotions, but the remaining two works raise the album back up to the impressive standard set by the opening cut, though with less furor and even more loveliness. "Sleep" opens with an elderly gentleman reminiscing about Coney Island, and his frank and amusing narration briefly recalls the recordings of David Greenberger and scenes from the documentary Vernon, FL. This narration is followed by a slow and melodic piece featuring a pseudo-theremin effect amidst all of the other instrumentation. "Antennas to Heaven" opens with someone playing acoustic guitar, singing "What'll We Do with the Baby-O," soon washed over with sound, which then gives way to a brief chorus of glockenspiels, and on.

During most of Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven, musical and emotional opposites alternate as regularly, and naturally, as breathing: delicate string work and rock-out guitar and drums, spoken word and walls of sound, gracious and possessed, tip-toes and cliff-diving, dark hallways and blinding sunshine. - Joslyn Lane, All Music Guide

Gospeed You Black Emperor! / Yanqui U.X.O.
Released 2002

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Montreal politico-art/music terrorist unit Godspeed You Black Emperor! has been working on the material for Yanqui U.X.O. (unexploded ordnance-landmines) for the past four years. Some of the material predates Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven and even Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada. Recorded with Steve Albini, the nonet that is Godspeed has issued its most mysterious recording yet. The sound over these three long cuts, like all of the band's recordings, develops slowly over time and creates layers of dynamic tension that expresses itself in waves and off-kilter, shimmering flows. Usually these elements resolve themselves in earth- and ear-shattering, dissonant intensity that leaves the listener emotionally drained — especially live. But here, a more minimal and — dare I say — quiet approach is used. For over 75 minutes, no "found" voices are wafting through the mix like displaced ghosts at a musical inquiry into the nature of mass control and fascism. The ghosts here are not disembodied or free to roam; they are contained within the vibrational structures and harmonic encounters along the dynamic field itself. There is more melody, not less; there are more sections in each piece, complex parts of compositions that articulate themselves more slowly and pronouncedly. Above all, there is beauty, aching, anguished beauty created by dissonance between electric guitars, keyboards, and a string section propelled by a drum kit that is barely contained within the frame of the music. Tonal extensions of simple melodic structures create new melodic fragments that are incorporated into an already growing mass of tension that is alleviated not by force, but by engaging silence as a compositional and improvisational tool. This is evident in all three tunes, but particularly in the second section of "9-15-00," which begins by stepping out of a void into a fullness of color and texture that eventually raises the tension bar over 22 minutes without resolution. For the second section, spare fragments and chords are placed carefully next to the altar of silence and engage it in dialogue, in contradiction, and in echoing its own concerns at how it is possible in our world, very possible, that at the whim of some fool, all of this — the music; it's haunted, hunted melody; the veritable grain of its voice; along with all life — could enter into the silence forever. A close inspection of the record cover with its photograph of bombs in free-fall and its indicting chart shows concretely how the major record labels are all involved with the creators and purveyors of weapons of mass destruction. This may be melancholy music, but this is a dark time. At least it isn't music of mourning — yet. And for the record, though the stupid critical backlash against Godspeed You Black Emperor! has already begun, the band is making the finest music in the history of its collective. This is music for a different kind of engagement — that of becoming aware of tyranny and disappearance. - Thom Jurek, All Music Guide

Godspeed You Black Emperor! / Tiny Silver Hammers EP
Released 2004

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These 2 tracks eventually became Redeemer=Motherfuckers on the Yanqui U.X.O. LP, but I think there are some slight variations here....

Godspeed You Black Emperor! / Live at The Iceland Opera House
Recorded 03.13.2002

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A great recording of Godspeed live. While their records are mesmerizing, nothing compares to seeing them perform live. Transcedental.

Tracks:

1. Storm/Dead Methany/Tazer Floyd
2. Tiny Silver Hammers/World Police
3. Moya

Godspeed You Black Emperor! / Live at the Scala, London
Recorded 11.20.2000

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Another great recording of their performances live.

Tracks:

1. 12-28-99
2. Gathering Storm
3. John Hughes
4. World Police
5. Tazer Floyd
6. Blaise Bailey Finnegan III
7. 3rd Part
8. Dead Flag Blues (Outro)

Nina Nastasia / A Collection

Nina Nastasia

The beautiful, haunting sounds of Nina Nastasia seems like an appropriate post on this cold gloomy day (where I am). With the growing number of "singer-songwriters" arriving into a crowded a genre, it's a joy to hear the ones that truly standout. With fans like John Peel and Steve Albini, you know there's something special in her sound. Enjoy this collection of Nina's recordings and please support the artist!

Nina Nastasia / Dogs
Released 2000

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Nina Nastasia's first outing is a captivating, melancholic affair of precision and emotional clamor and stands as a fantastic sibling to her essential sophomore album, The Blackened Air. Dogs has a calming atmosphere, occasionally flirting with dissonance, and stands as a remarkable work of minimal building by repetition to support Nastasia's pitch-perfect voice. It is a rare group who can pull off such a fluid shift from composed sophistication to raw, dangerous, and sinister energy and not only continue to be engaging, but make ascending demands so confidently as to require full attention for the span of 40 minutes without interruption. Hypnotic, luscious, and timeless, Dogs is an album whose freshness and immediacy will never falter. - Gregory McIntosh, All Music Guide

Nina Nastasia / The Blackened Air
Released 2002

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Just how beautiful is The Blackened Air? Remarkably beautiful, though it's far from a smooth train ride through the rustic southern town where it seemingly takes place. Chunks of falling ice nearly take the lives of pigeons, peeping Toms leer outside windows, communication between two lovers breaks down, and the days pass by slowly, only to repeat themselves over and over and over again. The clouds look more like coal than cotton, and one of the protagonists is capable of drowning the town's people in her tears. Backed by a skilled cast of musicians who take on the standard rock band instrumentation plus bowed saw, accordion, violin, cello, and mandolin, singer/songwriter/guitarist Nina Nastasia spins her lazy, elegantly adorned tales of rural life with a voice that effortlessly slips into your ears. She rarely belts it out, because her lithe voice is perfectly capable of gaining attention when it's just above a whisper. In fact, when her voice is just a little louder than audible, she's at her most powerful. Lines like "I want you...I want you...I want to strike you" fall from her mouth as if she doesn't want to wake the slumbering partner lying next to her, conflicted between lust and dread. This record flows so easily that it sounds as if it made itself. However, engineer Steve Albini should be commended for making this record sound as if it was birthed in a spacious, creaky farmhouse. Intimate, delicate, and laced with greatness, Nastasia's second release is one of those records that only takes one listen to be justly evaluated as special and timeless. The pain is sweet. - Andy Kellman, All Music Guide

Nina Nastasia / Run to Ruin
Released 06.03.2003

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For those who came to know each syllable and every note of The Blackened Air, Nina Nastasia's third album will take a little getting used to. Released less than a year after its predecessor, Run to Ruin is a much more skeletal and considerably starker album in comparison -- it's also nearly a quarter of an hour shorter in length. Even though the majority of it was recorded in France during the month of June, its lulling tempo, sparse sound, and tangible atmosphere all leave the effect that it was actually made during an extremely hot and humid August afternoon, somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Again, Nastasia and her guitar are backed by an assortment of drums, basses, pianos, accordions, violins, cellos, and banjos. Many of the musicians here also played on The Blackened Air; the Dirty Three's Jim White provides the drums instead of Jay Bellerose. While the head count of those involved is great in number, the notes they play are few and crucial. The first four minutes of the "The Body," a quiet but lyrically jarring song, consist only of a nearly silent Nastasia and her delicate guitar. Just after she completes her final line, a violent stirring of strings enters that comes closer to matching the nature of the opening verse's lyrics: "My blood for you, my lover's bruise/My clothes are scattered, my skull is fractured." The empty spaces and brief running time might make the album seem as if it doesn't contain enough substance to absorb. That's not the case. None of these eight songs sound unfinished in the least, and whatever spaces the arrangements leave enable the imagination to play as much of a role as the instrumentation. As for the running time, well, you'll just be more likely to play it from start to finish. - Andy Kellman, All Music Guide

Nina Nastasia / On Leaving
Released 10.03.2006

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It's been three years since Nina Nastasia released Run to Ruin on Touch & Go. The indie label also re-released her 1999 debut Dogs, making On Leaving her first new recording in three years and her debut on Fat Cat. While Nastasia is well-known for her minimal arrangements and Southern Gothic approach to purging hurt, rage, and disappointment, it was always held in beautifully by her elegantly simple but arresting voice. On Leaving is different. The charts have been stripped back to the very bone here. A piano, a small string section instead of a bass, the acoustic guitar, and Jim White's (Dirty Three) drumming, make for a small, spiny recording that is wrapped in notions of restlessness, passage, travel, change. Memory takes its place at the head of a labyrinthine road beginning with the album's opening track, "In Jim's Room." A single fingerpicked guitar playing an abbreviated chord sequence ushers us in as White's tom toms underscore Nastasia's vocal lines. The viola and cello (arranged by Dylan Willemsa) play shimmering sounds, rather like melodic accents slipping through the lyric: "For a month I wasn't me/A thief would wait for me outside/There were nights I wouldn't let him in..." It's remembering as a cinematic act, slides flashing through, juxtaposing themselves against an undefined present. In "Counting Up Your Bones," her lone guitar picked hesitantly creates a space for Steven Beck's piano, and Nastasia's voice, full of heat, ushers in a love song that reveals the present tense, but it's so far under the derma, it fills the space between derma and blood. "...Your bones glide in/a silent tear, that mingles marrow when you disappear/A dance we weave beneath our skin/I keep you in me where the breath had been..." the guitar gets strummed, the piano becomes a percussion instrument, White's snare pops and the strings support her revelation of a love so utterly close, so completely smashface enmeshed, it sounds like she'll stop at any moment. On Leaving is brief, a mere 33 minutes, but in its sparse presentation where the singer's voice is the chief instrument, it would be almost unbearable to hear any more. Let it be said that this is not mere confessional songwriting. It doesn't fit there; but it does create a new place in the listener, one where lines, a piano chord,a skitter of a brushed snare or a swooping line by a cello or viola, puts you in the singer's world, in her very frame of execution, and it becomes breathless. On Leaving is a deeply poetic record that doesn't need to wrap itself in anger any longer, because genuine sadness has taken its place. But it's not only the songs that set On Leaving apart -- not only from her peers, but from her own catalog as well -- engineered and co-produced by Steve Albini (Nastasia and her partner Kennan Gudjonsson were the other producers) creates a simple clarity and sonic presence so that these elements also become part of the songs themselves. While it's true, those who have followed her brief career have been utterly taken with the searing honesty in her songs, virtually none were prepared for something so utterly and skeletally and hauntingly comely. - Thom Jurek, All Music Guide

Nina Nastasia / Acoustic BCB Radio Sessions
Recorded 10.20.2006

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A great live radio session recorded at the Bradford Community Broadcasting center. Featuring songs from On Leaving and Dogs, it's a chance to hear an even more intimate Nina Nastasia.

Nina Nastasia and Jim White / You Follow Me
Released 05.28.2007

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What do you get when you add Dirty Three/Tren Brothers drummer Jim White to a Nina Nastasia record? It all depends on what you are expecting to hear, of course. White was part of the spiny little band that accompanied Nastasia on her initial Fat Cat offering On Leaving in 2006. While that record was skeletal, this one is positively minimal, yet in some ways it is also bigger. With only White's syncopated, iconoclastic beatmaking as a foil, Nastasia is challenged to get her songs across with her guitar playing carrying more of the weight. White is not an accompanist here, he is a collaborator, even though he didn't write the songs. In just 31 minutes the pair look into the strange shapes and images that are at the root of her mostly hummable songs and stretch them to the breaking point. Steve Albini recorded the set at his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago, and his trademark is on White's drum sound, full of bassy tom toms and wispy brushwork, even as his bass drum and his rim shots color the end of each line Nastasia sings, and creates breaks in the heart of lyrics to underscore a line or two, offering a portal to the meaning of her sometimes elliptical lyrics, or providing a tunnel into the emotion in a song. Topically, You Follow Me has reflections on family, broken commitments, memory -- bitter and bittersweet -- and death. These are bright and shiny subjects to be sure, but Nastasia's voice emits tenderness no matter what she is singing, creating a sense of equanimity in all of it. Her notions of regret, reverence, anger and fear are all offered matter of factly, yet there is no doubt of her devotion to the truth a song dictates. White gets that vocal instrument, and he does his best to point toward it in every song. - Thom Jurek, All Music GuideNina Nastasia / What She Doesn't Know Single
Released 02.25.2008

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Following 2007's stunning 'You Follow Me' album collaboration with Australian drummer Jim White, Nina Nastasia returns with a brand new 7" single, 'What She Doesn't Know'. Maintaining the pared-back airs of that album, the record features two previously unreleased songs, each showcasing the stunning vocal talents and high quality songwriting that are Nina's hallmark.

Both tracks here were recorded with Steve Albini at Electrical Audio in Chicago, during the time Nina recorded 2006's 'On Leaving' album (her first release for FatCat). As Nina explains, "We recorded a bunch of songs we'd been playing at the time. Some were meant for future records. ['What She Doesn't Know' and 'Your Red Nose'] came from that pile and seemed to be a good complement to 'You Follow Me'." Both tracks featuring on this great AA-side single feature the same stripped-down instrumentation (drums, guitar, vocal) as 'You Follow Me', whilst each was recorded with a different drummer.

Nina Nastasia / Live at the Roundhouse
Recorded 08.13.2008

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This came from the excellent blog: Love Live! Botolegs From Buckleberry. Check it out here!

A great recent recording from Nina that highlights some of her best songs as well as a couple new/unreleased pieces.

Belle and Sebastian / Live!

Belle and Sebastian

Well... I'm back from a short holiday with some great recordings of Belle and Sebastian over the past decade. Great recordings by a great band.

Belle and Sebastian / Bowlie Weekender
Recorded 04.25.1999

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The Bowlie Weekender was a one-off music festival curated by Belle & Sebastian at the Pontin's Holiday camp in Camber Sands, Sussex between Friday 23rd and Sunday 25th of April 1999. This recording was broadcast on Radio One. A great soundboard recording of their 'early' years.

1. Slow Graffiti
2. Seeing Other People
3. Dog on Wheels
4. The Wrong Girl
5. Winter Wooskie
6. If You're Feeling Sinister
7. I Don't Love Anymore
8. Paper Boat
9. The Boy With An Arab Strap
10. Photo Jenny
11. Lazy Painter Jane

Belle and Sebastian / Random Live Audience Recording
Recorded 09.10.2001 (?)

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Don't know much about this recording, but the sound quality is fair... the show is great... and the selection of songs has some of my faves.

Belle and Sebastian / Live on KCRW
Recorded 08.26.2003

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A great radio performance by Belle and Sebastian on the eve of Dear Catastrophe Waitress release.

1. Intro
2. Lord Anthony
3. Women's Realm
4. Step Into My Office, Baby
5. Interview
6. Scooby Driver
7. A Travellin' Light
8. Judy and the Dream of Horses
9. The State I Am In

Belle and Sebastian / Live at the Hollywood Bowl
Recorded 07.06.2006

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A decent recording of their amazing performance with the LA Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. Holds a special place for me, as I was at the show. Wish there was a soundboard recording from this one... but this will do.

1. Nic Harcourt Intro
2. Fuck This Shit
3. I Fought In A War
4. La Pastie De La Bourgeoisie
5. The Model
6. Sukie in the Graveyard
7. Don't Leave The Light On Baby
8. I'm Waking Up To Us
9. Jonathan David
10. If She Wants Me
11. Lord Anthony
12. Dear Catastrophe Waitress
13. If You're Feeling Sinister
14. You're Cover's Blown
15. Dirty Dream #2
16. I'm A Cuckoo
17. the Wrong Girl
18. If You Find Yourself Caught In Love
19. Sleep The Clock Around
20. Encore Break
21. The State I Am In
22. The Boy With The Arab Strap

Belle and Sebastian / Tom Robinson Session
Recorded January 2006

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Wow! I love this recording. Essentially a stripped down acoustic recording of four of their songs... it has a lo-fi feeling that shows what their songs would have been without the production of their later recordings... and you know what. I love it! These are some of my least favorite songs in their original recordings (except the excellent Get Me Away From Here), but here... I wish there was more.

1. Sukie in the Graveyard
2. The Blues are Still Blue
3. Funny Little Frog
4. Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying