Rock - what are you listening to?

[markof]

And a happy Crimness to all.

[cybot]

Both double vinyl sets - 12" and 10".







Happy Christmas 🎄

[cybot]

If anyone needs a wake up call about this thing called music, listen to this. As peerless as they come and, quite possibly, one of the finest ever.

[Ivor]

If anyone needs a wake up call about this thing called music, listen to this. As peerless as they come and, quite possibly, one of the finest ever.

Yep, I was listening to a bit of Frank the other night.... easy to forget just how fantastic his music was.

[cybot]

If anyone needs a wake up call about this thing called music, listen to this. As peerless as they come and, quite possibly, one of the finest ever.

Yep, I was listening to a bit of Frank the other night.... easy to forget just how fantastic his music was.

Nice one Ivor....

[Cyndale]

Sinatra at the Sands is one of my favourites, you can hear the whole album here...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoZZ08S4eyw

[cybot]

Sinatra at the Sands is one of my favourites, you can hear the whole album here...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoZZ08S4eyw

Nice one Cyndale :)

[tony]

Argh forced to get a family Spotify account today!!
Hooked already. Listened to some albums that I just can't understand are albums of the year but the following sound promising

Ry Cooder The Prodigal Son
Jack White Country,Bluegrass & Folk
Dirty Projectors Lamp Lit Prose
Low Double Negative (Never heard of them but will have to do some digging)

[mcq]

I have been obsessed and haunted  by this album over the last few weeks and find it impossible to shift from my mind.  I think it is one of the most powerful listening experiences of recent years.

Laura Gibson released her fifth album, Goners, last October, but I only became aware of it a few weeks ago when I happened upon the song, I Don't Want Your Voice To Move Me, online and I found myself utterly captivated.  The album itself is essentially an extended essay on grief.  Gibson has spoken in interviews about the losses that she has suffered in her life which inspired this work, most notably the loss of her father to cancer when she was 15.  That innate understanding of grief in her voice is palpable in the way she phrases her lyrics and it is this depth of emotional delivery that essentially communicates the underlying truth behind her lyrics, the feeling of life being viewed from the periphery, abstracted from any kind of social connection, adrift in one's own personal grief.

Vocally and lyrically, she reminds me of Adrienne Lenker (particularly her excellent solo album, abysskiss).  There are lyrics here that are suggestive, aphoristic, elliptical, difficult, oblique, shrouded in vagueness but, through repeated listens, gradually take hold of and inhabit the imagination with a firmness not to be denied.  There is a tension here, in the lyrics and music, which unsettle the mind and makes a beeline for the gut, the instinct, the soul.  There are lines here which are unforgettable, crushing in their emotional intensity,  which follow you around in your daily life and which urge you to to confront their underyling truths about the love that enriches our life and the grief that encompasses our life when that love is  wrenched from us.

The cover shot for this album is particularly effective.  A lone wolf sitting before an open window, front paws placed on the sill as if ready to jump out at any moment into the wilderness but frozen within herself, still lost within the domestic confines of the house.  That arresting image is what comes to my mind when I hear the final track, I Don't Want Your Voice To Move Me.  This is the first song I heard from this album and it immediately grabbed my attention.  There was something deeply wounding that I heard on my first listen that I just had to revisit.  The cold passivity of the vocal delivery matched by the numb phrasing of her guitar playing  - simple, repetitive downstrokes  - and the gently insistent firmness of the refrain, "I don't want your voice to move me", stopped me in my tracks.  Written from the perspective of a woman who has nursed an ailing lover and then witnessed him die before her eyes, this is an unremittingly bleak experience.  She rejects a cathartic unburdening of her grief  -  "I don't wanted to be cracked open, I don't want the knot to loosen in my throat"  -  because she fears for her sanity, what will happen when the "landmine in the rabbit hole" explodes.  The final lines, sung straight through without pausing for a refrain, build with an inexorable and overwhelming intensity.  

"I don't want your voice to move me
I don't want to be cracked open
I don't want the broken headlight flicker,
the bright pines, the silver sigh of the moon behind you
When I find you, driftwood bones, fire and smoke, 
the pull, the yoke, a knotted oak, a joke, 
a hymn we only spoke and never sung
Those of us born in loss, you know we only trust the line on the horizon
When I find you, I don't want your voice to move me"

She has seen something in her life and that something has broken her and that something still resonates deeply within her and this song is her giving voice to thst fearful something.  This is a song ostensibly about a fear of cathartic release and a desire to be crushed by grief, to be forever held in that moment and paralysed by shock like a rabbit caught in a car's headlights.  And yet, the singing of the song is itself a release.  

There are two outstanding moments in this song which together serve as the emotional fulcrum of the album and hint at the necessity of finding release in her songwriting.  "Honey, all I know of hope is throwing stones into the void" speaks to a recognition of her songwriting gifts and utilising them as a vehicle to articulating her fear as, ultimately, a way of emerging from the void and coming to terms with a rupturous loss.  And, in so doing, she can articulate that "hymn we only spoke and never sung", that language shared between two human beings at their lowest ebb which holds the greatest value of all.  And, in the articulation of those words into songs, as she tosses stone after stone into the void, she regains her hope of a life with fulfilment and meaning.  

"That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones."    
Raymond Carver - "On Writing"

[cybot]

As always thanks for sharing Paul. But.....that cover shot is mesmerising. If I see it next time I'm in town I'll definitely buy it. Then I'll read your notes again and everything will fall into place.