Rock - what are you listening to?

[tweber]

[DaveF]

Over the weekend, usually early in the morning and late at night......... :-)

[cybot]

Great selection Dave. Which label is the Laughing Stock album on? What does it sound like pressing wise? My own copies of their two classics need to be replaced due to poor pressings. I'm threatening to do it a while now - since their respective release dates in fact :)

[DaveF]

Great selection Dave. Which label is the Laughing Stock album on? What does it sound like pressing wise? My own copies of their two classics need to be replaced due to poor pressings. I'm threatening to do it a while now - since their respective release dates in fact :)

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/159 ... rk-hollis/

Sounded just fine to me.

[cybot]

Great selection Dave. Which label is the Laughing Stock album on? What does it sound like pressing wise? My own copies of their two classics need to be replaced due to poor pressings. I'm threatening to do it a while now - since their respective release dates in fact :)

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/159 ... rk-hollis/

Sounded just fine to me.

Ba Da Bing. That's good enough for me. Thanks Dave :)

[mcq]

Rounding off the day's listening with one of my favourite albums from the great Jackie Leven, a singer whose work deepens in emotional depth with each passing year.  It is impossible to listen too much to Leven.  He put so much of himself into his work.  

A man exposed to too much of life - beaten up and left for dead with his throat slashed after walking home following a late-night recording session (an experience that permanently damaged his larynx), followed by an oblivion of heroin-fuelled depression, and somehow pulling himself out of this darkness to become one of the most prolific recording artists of the last 30 years (over 400 songs, all told).   A man with an unquenchable appetite which was satisfied only by his devotion to his music and the poetry that he turned to for solace.  Regardless of the song he sang, he possessed a voice of rare and grave beauty, haunting and yearning and resonant and lived-in, which imbued his poetic lyrics with a hard-won sense of truth.  His greatest songs can be the quietest of epiphanies or they can rage at life's injustices, but they are all inhabited by people on the periphery of our societies trying desperately to make sense of their lonely predicament, and are united by a tragic sense that the happiness we search for is ultimately fleeting.  Leven found his happiness in articulating his life's passions  in his songs and communicating them to others.  I never attended one of his concerts but the bootleg footage I have seen show the man at his best and in his natural element.  Like the best performers, you see and hear somebody utterly transported and possessed  by the music.  The depth of his commitment to his music was real and tangible and that is why his songs linger in my mind and have a haunting presence in my life.

One of his most striking songs is The Sexual Loneliness of Jesus Christ which presents the Messiah as a man crippled by self-doubt and puzzled by the blind faith that his followers have in him.  As mesmerising in its own way as Bob Dylan's Series of Dreams, it is a compelling and fascinating song that I am utterly entranced by.  I am reminded of Nikos Kazantzakis' masterpiece, The Last Temptation (which I am currently re-reading), a deeply controversial book that was blacklisted by the Vatican for a time.  It's actually a profoundly spiritual work that directly questions the reality of Christ made Man and Christ as the Son of Man (as opposed to the Son of God), a Christ who is profoundly human in his conflict between the spirit and the flesh.  




A really wonderful album, heartfelt, personal and thought-provoking.  Very highly recommended.

[mcq]

Rounding out the evening's listening with the exquisite, deeply moving and utterly heartfelt  music of Kath Bloom.  Rather like Iris DeMent, she posesses one of the most natural and unaffected voices imaginable, which breaks my heart every time I hear it.  

The first song I ever heard her sing was Come Here on the Before Sunrise soundtrack.  At the time, Bloom's music was unavailable and long out of print and was circulated in tape form by a devoted coterie of fans.  The director, Richard Linklater, happened to hear one of these tapes and was struck by Come Here in particular which he used in a crucial scene in the film.  There is a quite remarkable sense of anguish in her voice.  She sounds continually on the brink of breaking down, a woman broken by life's disappointments and utterly exhausted.  It makes heartrending listening.  Her masterpiece is The Breeze/My Baby Cries, an unbearably powerful vocal performance.  You feel, in a intensely visceral way, her sense of rejection, betrayal, loss and, yet, an utterly desperate yearning for love. 

 Perhaps the best introduction to this woman's remarkable music is Loving Takes This Course, a 2-CD set comprising a single disc compilation of some of her finest work and a disc of cover versions (the highlight of which is Bill Callahan's quite brilliant version of The Breeze).

[mcq]

Strange Overtones, which David Byrne co-wrote with Brian Eno, is a miracle of a song, which expresses as much about the anguish of songwriting as Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.  The difference here is that Strange Overtones is sung from the perspective of the songwriter's neighbour as she overhears him undergoing the daily ritual of working through a song.  The brilliance of the lyrics lies in the parallel between the songwriter's failing powers to articulate himself through his music as well as a sense of an inability to express himself emotionally to other people.  His neighbour senses the difficulty that he is having in fashioning the lyrics that will express the emotions latent in the music.  An image is gradually formed of a man locked within himself out of step with the music around him and frustrated with his waning powers of articulation.  There are oblique references to a relationship that might form between him and his neighbour but the impression is of a man dislocated from himself, unable to love others and thereby unable to give a voice to the love buried within the music in his heart ("It is strong and you are tough but a heart is not enough.")  His neighbour senses these "strange overtones" of a great emotional yearning buried within the melody that he is obsessed by but the tragedy is that he unable to express in his lyrics what he may feel in his heart but is unable to communicate to other people.  "Strange overtones though they're slightly out of fashion/I'll harmonize/I see the music in your face that your words cannot explain."  

The image of "strange overtones" strikes me as a general metaphor for the aesthetic impression of music on our minds and the powerful emotions that it is capable of evoking.  We sit and listen to a song for the first time and it moves us in a strange way that we do not understand.  To try to identify the source of these emotions, we play the song again and again and again and each time these feelings deepen and resonate within us with progressively greater force.  Sometimes the song contains a perfect lyric that expresses clearly the emotion suggested by the music but, more commonly, it is the weight and emotional force of the music that magnifies the apparently innocuous lyrics and gives a sense of meaning and truth to the song.

It was an inspired choice to include this song in the setlist for the tour that Byrne undertook with St. Vincent last year.  It gains so much from the addition of a female voice.  Also, the crucial line, "I see the music in your face that your words cannot explain", is followed by a guitar solo of such compressed and intense emotion that ably communicates the wealth of unexpressed feelings that lie dormant in the songwriter's face.  An amazing performance.

[tweber]

This is probably nostalgia but these all sound great out loud on vinyl (using headphones only since I got a TT a few months back). Digging through my collection from years ago plus new ones...heaven

[cybot]

My kind of heaven too Shane :)