VOTD 8/25/2024

 A Certain Ratio: To Each... (Factory) 

Purchased used decades ago, I can't remember where

In my college radio days, I was playing a different A Certain Ratio record on the air, a 12" EP on Factory Records. Someone called in to tell me he was a Pitt student who had all of ACR's records. I suggested he come by the station. 

That person was Jason Gibbs. Yes, hello Jason. We became friends, and formed an improvisation group together with Chris Koenigsberg, Morphic Resonance. It was an exciting time. Jason and I also played together in the rock band Carsickness, and were also dismissed from that band around the same time.

History. 

I saw this just now LP and wondered how it held up. I loved the atmosphere of Joy Division, the signature band on Factory. An evocative singer who couldn't really sing, instruments draped in delay and reverb, primitivism.

ACR is first of all far funkier than JD. They are also steeped in atmosphere, but I think the sound-world is more involved. The singer plays trumpet, with the treble turned up in the production. He can't sing much better than Ian Curtis, but lacks the punch Ian had. It's the rhythm section here that dominates: funky bass, grooving drums, a haze of guitar/amp-based noise. 

"Forced Laugh" will always be one of my favorite songs for all these elements. Third song first side, it seems a bit buried in the flow of the record. To me it's clearly their best single song. 

The production sounds thin to current ears. In this respect it's dated.

My wife was listening to the top 20 on the radio today, just to find out what's going on and who will appear on Saturday Night Live the upcoming season. I don't like the sound of any of it. It's so thoroughly compressed, the vocals Autotuned and processed to the point of no life, and backing instrumentals lacking any distinction.

There's a female vocalist on the last track of side one. Who? No information is provided on the album except recording and graphics. The other ACR EP I have also lacks personnel information. Like Joy Division, they choose group identity over personal credit.

I wondered if I would remember the music on this album. In large part I do. I guess I'll take the dated sound of this over whatever's happening now. 

VOTD 8/21/2024

 Snakefinger: Live in Melbourne (Secret)

Purchased through mail order, limited edition #232/300

As I probably have written before, in 1981 I was off to study at the conservatory at Carnegie Mellon as a first year student, but had also started to become a Ralph Record fanatic. I had ordered some of their records directly from the source, later fueled when I discovered Jim's Records in Bloomfield. I could buy most Ralph titles there for $4.99. 

There was something great and distinctive about each of the artists, united only by being original and...weird. Too easy a word, but it cuts to the point. 

Imagine my thrill that Snakefinger was to play the Electric Banana in April 17 1982, the weekend of Spring Carnival at CMU. Imagine my disappointment that I was only 19 at the time and had no assurance I could get in. Thanks to my friend Dustin, with who I played in the George Gee Make Believe Ballroom Orchestra, he helped me find a WRCT friend of his who had a New Jersey driver's license that was valid but without a photo. (Thanks Chris, wherever you are!) I emptied my walled of anything but that license and cash. I walked in behind Dustin, and....they didn't check. He shook my hand. The graduate student behind me, clearly older, was carded though. No problem for him. 

I missed the opener, The Cardboards. Dustin said they were missable, but thankfully I saw them several times later. In between bands a projector was set up (16mm?), and the Ralph Records music movies were projected on a white sheet. That was amazing: pre-music video videos by The Residents, Yello, MX80 Sound, Tuxedomoon, Snakefinger, and (best of all) Renaldo and the Loaf. They're all great. 

And the band was great. I saw the same group two additional times: on my honeymoon in San Francisco in 1986 at the I Beam, and a Ralph Records tour in Cleveland within a year of that. (Those two shows were almost note-for-note identical, including between song patter.) 

This three-sided LP comes from an earlier time, March 5 1981. It's a quartet on this performance, more-or-less 4/5 of the band I saw, and the band on the third Snakefinger album Manual of Errors. Phillip his real name) played Pittsburgh in 1981 with Carsickness opening, and Eric Drew Feldman was with them at that time. I have that from Chris Koenigsberg, who was playing with Carsickness at the time. Eric most famously played with Captain Beefheart, and is supposedly the music director of The Residents now, since Hardy Fox's departure. 

I like the first two Snakefinger albums, but the Residents' (hence Hardy's) fingerprints are all over them. It sounds like The Residents but more pop-rockish, and lead by Phil's guitar and voice. 

I enjoy how grungy this album is. Inside the cover it reads, "This is a live from 1981!" It's a very good bootleg, hardly studio quality but very listenable. And maybe it benefits from the grunginess. Unlike the first two Residents-produced LPs, this is Snakefinger's band sounding like a rock band. 

The program is largely what I remember his playing live, including a cover of Tuxedomoon's "Jinx", given a nasty ska groove here. It's faded out, and I would have preferred more. There's an uncredited version of Ennio Morricone's "Magic and Ecstacy" from the Exorcist II at the tail end of one song, and one piece I don't remember: the ska-flavored "Corrupted Man." 

It's a shame Phillip died so young at 38. I know through friends that he had congenital heart disease, and had one heart attack prior to his fatal one. I was told that despite this, he'd still eat steak for breakfast, though he was always pretty trim. Ticking time bomb I guess. 

He was trying to branch out, his Snakefinger's History of the Blues, writing and recording a boppish jazz tune, playing with the Club Foot Orchstra, it's all a clear indication he had some higher ambitions than being a Residents satellite. I'm enjoying this album a lot for its rawness. This was a great playing band. 

CDOTD 8/19/2024

 King Crimson: THRAK (Virgin)

Purchased used at the Future Zone at Jerry's Records

On a visit with my parents this past June, my father posted the question of whether rock (and by extension pop) music achieved the level of great art. 

Now right away, the very idea of great or high art is a tricky one, one that I won't really untangle here. There can be an element of cultural superiority to such designations, something I want to avoid. 

Nonetheless, his point of the music being lasting or disposable is valid. He said something about hearing a song and thinking, no, that's not good. Nor this song. Then he'll hear something really good, and it will be followed by garbage. Previously he told me he thought Jimi Hendrix really rose to the top of that generation of musicians, and he also liked the "big band" version of Talking Heads, as seen in part in the feature film. Augmenting that band with great musicians, he said, turned out to be a really good idea. 

In yet another conversation, he and I were in agreement that nearly all of the musicians featured on NPR, specifically Weekend Edition, are almost always junk. 

Even before all of these conversations, I contemplated how Robert Fripp fit into this scheme. Did his work ascend to the level of great art? There's little question about his dedication. And I'd say, at least some of the time, he achieves a very high level of artistry. No Pussyfooting is a good example. 

King Crimson, which now is basically whatever collection of musicians he gathers around him (well, and the repertoire too, to be fair), has had a spotty record. An original and influential first album, an arguably equal or better second album, followed by a mixed bag of albums, and then that powerhouse quartet with John Wetton. They weren't above crass misogyny and sexism ("Ladies of the Road", "Easy Money"), but so great moments from every version of the group to that point, ending with Red in 1974.

And then (really, the point I'm trying to get to) the reinvented quartet in 1981, originally named Discipline. I bought the Discipline album in high school, and saw the band touring on it Halloween 1981. I know some who hated it for not being the Wetton band, some who practically worshipped the album. I fell in the middle but positive side. It was very informative to see them play all that material live, and demonstrated how little production there is on the studio session. Now when I hear those pieces, I know exactly who's playing what. Discipline is pretty much what that band sounded like in performance.

Fast forward several LPs later to 1994, we have this configuration. It's the same four, but augmented by a second drummer and second Stick player; the double trio lineup. Crimson has entered the digital age; the graphics are digital, the sounds are often digital.

I can appreciate the fact that the Mr. Fripp and the band have moved on. The second and third LPs by the Discipline lineup were a bit of a mixed bag. (It's been suggested that's why the third is titled Three of a Perfect Pair. I don't know that to be true.)

But...it's a word you won't often hear with respect to prog rock bands, this lacks the charm of the quartet. Maybe part of that is my generally attraction to doing more with fewer elements. I mean, I've had a saxophone/bass/drums trio for over twenty years now. I think I simply prefer the smaller outfit.

This band sounds more monsterous. And sometimes it works; the instrumental title track probably hits hardest and nastiest. I wouldn't say Adrian Belew's songs have improved since Discipline. Does anyone really listen to these albums for the songs? It's always the instrumentals that shine, and mostly the instrumentals that survive in the band's book since the 70s. The irony of Belew's "Dinosaur" is pretty much on the surface, clearly about critics who would accuse them of being just that. I'm okay with that. 

Just a side comment: prog rock as a genre is synonymous with the word pretentious. And often that is thoroughly deserved. That said, my contention is that true pretentiousness is having a shitty band, playing stale, unoriginal music. 

I think it was in an early posting to this blog that I wrote about a recent Steve Reich album. My comment was that it didn't sound like anything new to my ears from Mr. Reich, but then, doesn't Steve Reich have the right to sound like Steve Reich? Likewise, despite the juicing of this band by the additional players and digital technology, what did I expect this to sound like? Shouldn't it sound like some version of King Crimson?

So has this been worth the time for a full listening? Sure. Does this rise to the level of great art? Mmmm....not so sure about that.