This is a Recording

For my money this is a heavily front-loaded record: had I bought it on vinyl, disc two would be near-pristine, and disc one would be in need of a clean by now. Owning it on cassette, as I did at first, was irksome, as there was a lot of rewinding involved. I suspect my current CD copy has been with me since '98 or '99. It's not a disc that's picked up all that much mileage as my Frank Black fixation was already beginning to wind down by then. I hadn't enjoyed The Cult of Ray or Frank Black and the Catholics . Even so, I still kept buying his records into the middle of the next decade, with Dog in the Sand and Devil's Workshop being the ones from those years that stuck with me. Much as I loved Pixies once upon a time, their post-reformation material hasn't drawn me back in. Back to Teenager... : it gets off to a flying start, with songs one, two and three all over within five and a half thrilling minutes. 'Thalassocracy', in particular, still gets ...

In the early stages of my Japanese music phase in 2006, I solicited music recommendations via a Q&A website I frequent. Among the bands and artists suggested were Nisennenmondai. At that time very little of their music seemed to be available to buy, but, searching anew on YouTube a few years later I found a powerfully impressive clip of the band performing their track ' Ikkkyokume ': the slow clang of the opening chords piqued my curiosity, then, when Sayaka Himeno's metronomic drums kicked in, I was hooked. Destination Tokyo was then their latest and most readily-obtainable CD. It comprises four long instrumental numbers, plus a brief interlude. The opening two tracks are fast & jittery, with discordant guitar and pulsing bass over astonishingly quickfire drums: impressive, albeit akin to a caffeine overdose expressed in sound. Marginally less intense is the absorbingly repetetive 'Mirrorball' - my favourite track on the disc, while the title-track brings...

Had I not been so short of funds in 2015, I'd have bought Perpetual Motion People as soon as it came out. I was already a fan of Furman's previous album Day of the Dog , and liked what I'd heard of the new one. I ended up acquiring it a few years later, having perhaps left it a little too long, my enthusiasms having drifted off to one side in the meantime. Still, it is a very good record, and a good-looking one on clear blue vinyl. It feels like a continuation of Day of the Dog , with the same '50s rock'n'roll ingredients, garnished with Tim Sandusky's contributions on saxophone: Sandusky produced both records too. A gifted lyricist, Furman delivers her well-turned words with a fervent sincerity. Among the songs, I'm fondest of are 'Lousy Connection', 'Haunted Head', 'Ordinary Life' and 'Body Was Made'. 'Pot Holes' is fun, too. Furman writes a good sleeve-note, and Perpetual Motion People comes with a veritable e...

George Enescu's opus 26, comprising his two Sonate pentru Violoncel şi Pian (sonatas for cello and piano) were issued for publication together but written years apart, the first dating back to 1898, when he was still a teenager; and the second from 1935. The earlier work "shows obvious influence" the CD booklet notes tell me "from both Massenet and Fauré, as well as Saint-Saëns and - especially - Brahms." It's happened several times that I've read of such-and-such a composer being influenced by Brahms, which typically leads me to wonder why it is I enjoy the music of such-and-such while deriving no such pleasure from Brahms'. The first sonata, with those conventional Romantic ingredients, is a piece I find a good deal easier to apprehend & appreciate than the slipperier second. I end up feeling as if I'm too inexpert a listener to grasp many of the niceties of Enescu's mature style. Having said that, some parts of the later sonata do hit...

I'd been intrigued by the reviews I'd read of Aphex Twin's music, but don't think I'd heard as much as a note of it before I bought my first CD of his (the Donkey Rhubarb EP). This more than exceeded my indistinct expectations and indeed knocked my socks off, so I was eager to hear more. Next up, purchased in mid '97 or so when I was still in Italy, was Selected Ambient Works Volume II .  Described by its creator as "like standing in a power station on acid," it is certainly hair-raising and potentially disorienting, although, when not in quite the right frame of mind for it, it's also not without its longueurs. Unlike my other Aphex Twin discs this one is still in reasonably good condition, as the right frame of mind only came along relatively infrequently, and then less often again as the decades wore on. When I play it nowadays, I'll tend to skip past quite a few of the tracks and stick to my old favourites. With all the tracks but one bein...

I knew I wanted get a copy of Sign "O" The Times when I heard 'It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night' played in full on the radio. Up to then, I'd been in two minds: the title track had left me a bit cold (as it still does now), but 'U Got the Look' and 'If I Was Your Girlfriend' seemed to hold more promise. Most likely I didn't buy the cassette until the year after its release. By 1990, though, I had two copies - I think I must have lent out the first one, given it up as lost, and obtained a second - only for the original to be returned. When one of the students visiting my flat-mate from Košice asked if I might dub him a copy of the tape, it was my pleasure to just give him the spare one. The only Prince CDs I ever bought were an unsatisfactory pressing of Purple Rain , and his Greatest Hits , but, soon after getting my first record player, I found a lightly-used vinyl copy of this album, which has since been joined by a few other of his class...

Broadcast: the name of this band was, for me, actively off-putting. If it conjured up any kind of associations, they were anodyne ones. While I'd read about them any number of times, it was only after the release of their collaborative album Broadcast and The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age in 2009 that I began to investigate their work, and to realise what I'd been missing out on. Not much more than a year after that came the desperately sad news that their singer Trish Keenan had died. Having first obtained their music by way of file-sharing, there did't seem any great hurry to buy their albums on physical media, but, at length, I did the right thing and acquired the three studio albums on CD, beginning with 2000's The Noise Made by People . It often happens that I'm attracted to music with a cooler emotional temperature, and Broadcast's sound strikes me as particularly chilly, and also - figuratively - sharp-edged, metallic and bright - ...

On-line end-of-year 'best-of' lists are occasionally good for something. It was through one such listicle in 2014 that I first became aware of Weyes Blood, aka Natalie Mering. I wasn't quite interested enough at that point to buy her second album, but after I'd heard the featured tracks from its follow-up Front Row Seat to Earth , I reached for my wallet. 'Andromeda', the first song released from album #4, Titanic Rising , likewise motivated me to part with some money. On first listening to the album as a whole I felt a little disappointed by it, but, on further hearings, I realised that what I'd inititally mistaken as blandness was, in fact, subtlety. It took a few goes around before songs like 'A Lot's Gonna Change' and 'Wild Time' grew on me - with the latter now one of my favourites on the disc. I was a tad surprised when I read in an interview that Mering cited Enya as one of her influences, but, after the fact, I can discern it as a...

Masakatsu Takagi is a pianist, composer and film-maker who has accumulated an extensive discography  over the last twenty-one years. My only window overlooking that body of work is Private/Public , a live album comprising highlights from a series of concerts given in Tokyo in October 2006, and released the following spring. I aquired it during my phase of ordering CDs from amazon.co.jp. I'd previously obtained discs by the singer UA and the percussion duo OLAibi, both contributors to the ensemble here, and I'd probably found this album when searching for other recordings of theirs. The music is mellow and melodic, arguably a kind of contemporary easy-listening. One might call some of it chamber-pop. Some tracks resemble soundtrack cues, and, indeed, a couple of the pieces were apparently composed for use in TV commercials. There are classical music flavours too, with the vocals in a few of the songs backed by piano and string quartet. The opening track, 'Ceremony' begi...

An intelligent young woman in the big city observes her own life and the lives of others with cool detachment - she has lovers, but often feels alone - she reflects on it all & distils it into music. When I first heard 'Marlene on the Wall' and some of the other tracks from this album they held a tremendous appeal: I was sixteen, and longing to escape from the dead-end small-town I grew up in. The kind of urban milieu descibed in, or implied by her songs was where I yearned to be. The milieu I found in London when I moved there a couple of years later didn't match up, needless to say, with my prior fantasies. What I did find there, in a market stall somewhere, was a cassette bootleg of a Suzanne Vega concert. I believe it must have been a show she did at the London School of Economics in October '85 which had been broadcast on Radio 1. It was a fine performance, well-recorded, and with some endearingly awkward inter-song chatter. For some time that was the only musi...

Johann Sebastian Bach is widely revered as the best of all composers, and is frequently praised in the most extravagant terms. His second Partita for solo violin, and, in particular, the long 'Chaconne' which closes it, has further been singled out as one of his profoundest creations. In the unlikely event of this blog attracting any readers (even the bots have moved on elsewhere, it seems), they will find further confirmation here - if any were needed - that my taste is defective and not to be trusted: I don't much care for J.S. Bach's music. The BWV 1004 'Chaconne' is a partial exception to that rule: I have found it absorbing and impressive on the occasions I've listened to it, but those occasions have been few. I bought this 10" disc of a mid-'50s mono recording of it by Viennese fiddler Wolfgang Schneiderhan nearly twenty years ago, but have only seldom blown the dust off it. Other Bach pieces I don't mind include his Concerto for Two Violi...

When, in the early '80s, my musical tastes were beginning to take their initial shape, my perception of Stevie Wonder was coloured by some of his most successful but, to my mind, least appealing songs: the likes of 'Ebony and Ivory' and 'I Just Called to Say I Love You'. I mentally labelled his music as earnest and sentimental, qualities that, in typical teenage fashion, I affected to disdain. I had at least a passing acquaintance with several of his earlier & better songs, but, with prejudices in place, I gave them scant attention. Over the last decade, I have slowly and belatedly come to realise the error of those misapprehensions, and to recognise at least some of my prior dullardry. I'm now the proud owner of four Stevie Wonder LPs, two of them '70s originals & the others recent re-issues, my copy of Fulfillingness' First Finale being one of the former. And what a cover! If it didn't say ℗1974 on the back, one could readily guess as much...

This hybrid SACD brings together four pieces by the contemporary Swedish composer Anders Hillborg. I first heard his music on the radio, by way of a BBC Radio 3 'Proms' concert broadcast in the summer of 2015 which included a performance of 'Beast Sampler', the opening piece on the disc. Hillborg apparently characterises a symphony orchestra as a 'sound animal', and, in this work - a sort of collage of orchestral colours and textures - he conjures up a hair-raising succession of sonic creatures. The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, and conductor Sakari Oramo bring them expertly to life. After the opening track's exuberance, the short piece that follows, 'O dessa ögon' is a model of frosty elegance, featuring Hannah Holgersson's soprano soaring ever higher over the RPSO's strings. I find I prefer those two pieces over the others. 'Cold Heat' is another showcase for Hillborg's orchestral prowess, but one that I enjoy a little...

Only the other day I watched a YouTube clip of David Lynch explaining how he'd come to use Roy Orbison's song 'In Dreams' in Blue Velvet . Lynch's framing of it helped cement my own affection for 'the big O'. The Travelling Wilburys; the glorious Black and White Night concert video; and his posthumous Mystery Girl album all further contributed to that. My Dad, moreover, had been a long-standing fan of Roy's, and, also in the later '80s, had acquired a 'Greatest Hits' compilation cassette, a record he'd sometimes put on in the background when we'd have a few drinks together. Now I have an Orbison compilation album of my own ( The Legendary Roy Orbison : always a good choice on a really bad day) and I've also picked up a few 7" singles of his, including an Australian pressing of 'In Dreams'. The B-side, 'Shahdaroba', the handiwork of prolific songwriter Cindy Walker, is well-done, and beautifully-sung, but it...

In February 1997 I was handed an envelope containing 3,200,000 in cash. It would have been better had the currency not been Italian lire , but I was delighted, even so: it amounted to more than a thousand pounds. This was pursuant to my having been commended as part of a management recognition scheme. The whole cash-in-hand aspect of it was frankly, rather odd, but it was the sort of working environment where the peculiar was commonplace, so I never dwelt for long on any new piece of weirdness. With that money I bought my first ever CD player, and my first few dozen CDs, of which one was Life , by The Cardigans. I'd heard and enjoyed 'Sick and Tired' and 'Tomorrow' on the radio some time beforehand, but their music hadn't exactly been on my mind - it was just that when I saw the disc in the Rinascita music store on Via delle Botteghe Oscure, the cover image and design appealed to me so much I thought I'd pick it up and take a chance on it. The case still has...

'Mr. Pharmacist' (1986) was the first of The Fall's songs to catch my attention, although of course it wasn't one of their own compositions, but a cover of a twenty-year-old single by San Francisco band The Other Half. Presumably, Mark E. Smith would have heard it on the '85 compilation Nuggets Volume 12 . I had encountered a few Fall tracks before that, and would already have been aware of John Peel's reverence for the group, but, up to then, their music had struck teenage me as colourless and cacophonous. Even thereafter, I never became a true believer, and was, at best, a part-time, fair-weather fan. Without the efforts of the then Mrs. Smith to steer them a little closer to the mainstream, I may never have boarded that bus at all. The only one of their records I bought in the following years was The Frenz Experiment , almost no-one's idea of their finest hour, but, even so, I retain a fondness for it. Despite my on-off & sometimes lukewarm enthusi...

I moved to Bristol for the first time in May '94, with my seventeen-month stay there happening to coincide with the releases of Dummy by Portishead; Protection by Massive Attack; and Tricky's Maxinquaye . Just being a hard-up office drone with no connection to whatever remained of the scene that had given rise to these talents, there was, from my standpoint, scant visible evidence of the city's new status as epicentre of trip-hop. I learned about these albums the same way most people did: via national radio and through the music press.  With Portishead, it was love at first acquaintance; whereas I was slower on the uptake with Tricky: only after I'd heard 'Aftermath' and 'Ponderosa' several times apiece on the radio did they sink their hooks into me. Now I'd rate Maxinquaye as the best of those three albums - I think it carries its twenty-seven years remarkably lightly. Those first two songs I got to know from it, together with 'Overcome...

Or, Nuclear power? No, thanks! Earthstar formed in the US, but were based in Germany by 1979/80 when this album was recorded. Atomkraft? Nein, Danke! , their third album, was their second for the Hamburg-based Sky Records label, whose roster also included the likes of Cluster and Michael Rother. Main man Craig Wuest was a keyboardist/composer with a fascination for European electronic music, who had been encouraged to relocate from his native Utica, NY, by synth guru Klaus Schulze. The use of electronics is balanced by piano and electric guitar on the opener 'Golden Rendezvous', a mellow & meandering number with a spaciously pastoral air about it. Synthesizers dominate on several other tracks, however, such as the sprightly 'Sonntagsspaziergang' ('Sunday Walk'). Among the instruments Wuest is credited as playing, is something called a Birotron B-90, a mellotron-like contraption of which only a dozen or so examples were ever made. 'Cafe Exit', the fir...

Or, to give its full title, Barbirolli Conducts English String Music , the music in question being Edward Elgar's 'Introduction and Allegro for Strings' & 'Serenade in E minor'; and Ralph Vaughan-Williams' 'Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis' & 'Fantasia on "Greensleeves"'. It's a 1970 reissue of a recording made seven years earlier where Sir John Barbirolli conducted the Sinfonia of London. A stiffly formal note on the back cover warns that "this record is intended for use only on special sterophonic reproducers. If you are doubtful of the suitablity of your reproducer for playing this record, we recommend you to consult your record dealer." When I play this record on my stereophonic reproducer, it's nearly always just Side 2 - the one with the Vaughan-Williams pieces - that I put on. There are a few of Elgar's works I enjoy, but those included here have yet to grab me. On the other hand, Vaughan-William...

I'm still getting to know Calexico's second full-length release The Black Light . It's a relatively recent acquisition, and, while I enjoy it when I play it, I haven't played it that often. I listened anew last night, taking some notes as it went on: once again the music was good - but no fresh insights were forthcoming, and the notes are mostly useless. It didn't help that I was also drinking a large glass of cheap Sicilian wine. I found my way to Calexico's work around the time their fourth album Feast of Wire came out; then lost interest again after Carried to Dust (album number six). Only in recent years have I sought out their earlier stuff. Among the tracks here are a few akin to rough sketches; while others are more fully fleshed-out artworks - but in combination they make for a pleasingly varied exhibition. What seldom fails to impress is the warmth and living presence of their sound, and of the distinctive atmosphere it conjures up. A chilly January e...

Of all the long novels I've managed to finish, 1Q84 might be the one I enjoyed the least. Despite that, I am much obliged to Murakami for his prominent mention of Leos Janáček's 'Sinfonietta' in the book's opening pages. Until reading about it there, I'd hitherto failed to pay due attention to the piece. Supposedly, Janáček intended the music to express "contemporary free man, his spiritual beauty and joy, his strength, courage and determination to fight for victory," but, for me, its bold and slightly off-kilter fanfares conjure up a sense of otherwordliness in tune with the themes of Murakami's novel, so the novelist's referencing it there didn't strike me as gratuitious. Janáček, however, does much more with his twenty-odd minutes of music than Murakami manages with 900+ pages of prose. I have it in a 1971 recording from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa. It's paired with an older performance of the same compos...

This deluxe production has excellence right through it: Sinatra near his peak; Basie and his band; Quincy Jones conducting & arranging. The recording quality is first-rate too, and puts the listener right in the room that "has that peculiar air about it that only successful clubs have: a combination of cigarette smoke, overheated air, smouldering dust, Lysol Clorox cleaned linen, even the silverware smells different from home silverware" to quote Stan Cornyn's notes in the gatefold. As well as instantly-recognisable songs like 'Come Fly With Me' and 'It Was a Very Good Year', there are also a few brief, but thrilling Basie instrumentals, and a pair of Sinatra's monologues - one longer ('The Tea Break'); one shorter ('A Few Last Words'). Collectively these do heighten the sense of a single evening's entertainment, but would it have been any less of a record had the monologues been omitted? Nat 'King' Cole's At The San...

I don't know why I should have been so surprised that a Mr. & Mrs. Dearie named their daughter Blossom, and that no, it wasn't a nickname or stage-name, but I was. What we have here is a 1996 compilation, no. 51 in a series of Verve Jazz Masters releases, which brings together a selection of material recorded between 1956-60 and previously dispersed over half a dozen LPs. I found it in my local charity shop in a boxful of light jazz and easy listening CDs, all with a yellowish nicotine patina and a faint residual aroma of tobacco smoke. Dearie's is a disarmingly small and girlish-sounding voice, but she makes of it a versatile instrument despite its limited power. An accomplished pianist, she accompanies herself on all but one of the tracks included here, joined by musicians such as Kenny Burrell, Ray Brown and Jo Jones. What stands out most are her thoughtful and effective arrangements, notably taking old chestnuts like 'Tea for Two' and 'Surrey With the F...

I knew Jay Berliner's name from his contributions to Van Morrison's Astral Weeks and Charles Mingus' The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady , so when I saw this curiously-titled LP at the local charity shop I was intrigued, and bought it even though I had no idea what kind of music it might contain. This was after the days when one could still buy records there for a pound apiece, but I don't think I paid more than a fiver for it. The music turned out to be an all-instrumental blend of funk, soul & jazz. Berliner's virtuoso lead guitar is only one of many attractions here. The band of first-rate session musicians behind him are all uniformly excellent too, and, crucially, sound like they're having a blast. Cornell Dupree's supporting guitar work, while less showy than Berliner's, is beautifully-judged, and the rhythm section is terrific. Arranger/conductor Wade Marcus was no slouch either, judging from the way everything comes together. Two of the funk...

Philip Glass' second symphony gets off to a sombre and somewhat austere start. The first movement is mostly slow, stately, with muted colours. Its rising and falling passages put me in mind of being on board ship in a slight swell. In the second movement, a solemn beginning gives way to more urgent music, redolent for me of apprehension & anxiety. The busily pulsing third (and concluding) movement doesn't feel cut from quite the same cloth as the preceding two, and it's my least favourite part of the piece, though ny no means an outright let-down. Overall it's still a work I greatly enjoy. The brief interlude excerpted from the chamber opera Orphée that follows the symphony on this CD is a delight, a most beguiling two and a half minutes of music (not six and a half, as the booklet notes claim). That, in turn, is followed by the 1995 'Concerto for Saxophone Quartet and Orchestra': not a composition which has firmly lodged in my memory, but when I listened t...

It seemed for a while that nearly all the jazz I loved was over half a century old. While not a problem in itself, I did feel a nagging dissatisfaction at not finding much of anything newer that floated my boat. The proliferation of newly-popular 'nu-jazz' and jazz-adjacent releases from the middle of the last decade was timely for me, and while I've plenty more still to explore, I've already found much to enjoy in this newer music. Nubya Garcia's debut album Source is a case in point. The title track is particularly appealing, with its jazz-flavoured solos built upon dub-like foundations, and further embellished by vocal harmonies. Among my other favourites on the album are the two where Garcia's saxophone is complemented only by percussion and voices: 'Stand With Each Other' and 'La Cumbia Me Está Llamando'. Despite their relative sparsity, in both tracks the available space is filled with admirable economy, and with impeccable timing. Other t...

Only within the last five years have I begun to appreciate the delights of Haydn's music, and even now I know very little of it beyond his later string quartets. It had formerly struck me as ungraspably remote music, but after acquiring, and properly listening to, a couple of '60s quartet recordings on vinyl, its finer qualities belatedly started to sink in. With a few quartets obtained piecemeal in that way from nearby charity shops, I thought it would be good to get a larger set of them on CD, and, to that end, bought the Op 71, 74 & 76 quartets in early '90s performances by the Kodály Quartet on four discs for a few pounds via ebay. I was perfectly happy with those excellent recordings except, with each disc being in its own separate jewel case, they took up what I felt was a disproportionate expanse of my limited shelf-space. When I read the praise of the recent recordings by the London Haydn Quartet on the Hyperion label, with the same pieces available as two doubl...

William McKinley "Red" Garland, Jr. was a jazz pianist, best remembered for his work with Miles Davis between 1955-8. This 4 CD set ( The Albums Collection Part One ) collects eight albums featuring his own trio (with Paul Chambers on bass and Art Taylor on drums) or in quartets or quintets, recorded over roughly that same timespan (1956-9). A few years back I'd become particularly enamoured of long & languidly bluesy jazz numbers like Grant Green's 'Idle Moments' & 'All Day Long' by Kenny Burrell, and was keen to hear Garland's All Mornin' Long album with its twenty-minute title track. Garland is on fine form in 'All Mornin' Long', but it's a little too much of just him for my liking with sidemen Donald Byrd and John Coltrane, no less, being given ample time for a smoke-break during the pianist's lengthy solo. Coltrane's contributions to that record, and to John Coltrane with the Red Garland Trio are by no mea...

Discogs' ostensibly 'random' button has brought up another of my records on the Soviet Melodiya label only four days after the last one : an early '70s recording of Tchaikovsky's 4th symphony, performed by the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of the USSR, with Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducting. Apart from the composer's name - prominently transliterated on the front cover, and the four movments' tempo indications given in the customary Italian on the back, all the remaining text on the sleeve is Cyrillic. Of the many nineteenth-century symphonies I've heard, there are only a handful I keep returning to, among them Beethoven's 7th; Schubert's unfinished 8th; & this one. Why the 4th, which often seems relegated to the bronze medal position in rankings of Pyotr Ilyich's symphonies, and not the 5th or 6th? I don't know: the brash, attention-demanding fanfare at the outset must have something to do with it, conjuring up as it does a sense...

  I have the 2004 CD version of this album. While CD bonus tracks are often superfluous and even unwelcome additions, here we have such fine extras as the band's collaborations with The Dubliners: 'The Irish Rover' and 'Mountain Dew'; 'The Battle March' medley; and a spirited rendition of 'South Australia'. As for the album itself - it's a slightly unfocussed collection which, for all the good things in it, doesn't quite hit home with the same force as did Rum, Sodomy and the Lash . Among its moving parts is, of course, 'Fairytale of New York'. When first released, it seemed like a breath of fresh air: a song about Christmas that didn't partake of the of usual festive clichés. This held true the first several dozen times I heard it; and even, some years later, when it began to creep into mainstream Yuletide playlists. Now, though, I've heard it so many hundreds of times that it's become a cliché despite itself, and I perso...

Soundtrack aficionados tend to consider the score for Bram Stoker's Dracula to be Polish composer Wojciech Kilar's finest, and deem the one he produced for Roman Polanski's 1999 film The Ninth Gate to be a slightly lesser work in a similar vein. Somehow, though, I scarcely noticed the music when I watched 'Dracula', but was immediately drawn to that for the later movie, which I saw on a rented DVD in 2001. Obtaining the OST CD shortly thereafter, I played the disc a great deal in the first years of the century, and now the jewel case is cracked and the disc itself scarred with scratches. I love the slow & very low strings over the opening titles, Liana's eerie theme, and the touches of harpsichord throughout. I even enjoy soprano Sumi Jo's wordless warblings on several of the cues, even though, in general, operatic vocals aren't to my taste. Some of the faster-paced pieces like 'Boo!/The Chase' and 'Balkan's Death' I like less. ...