Under the Western Freeway

When the track 'A.M. 180' was popularized by its use in the movie 28 Days Later, my inner hipster was able to stroke his chin and reflect on how he'd known and loved the song since '98, when Under The Western Freeway, Grandaddy's debut album, was released. What had happened in '98? A scenario that had played out many times, with wildly divergent outcomes: I'd read a glowing review of the album, and then bought it entirely unheard. Luckily, this proved to be one of the happier iterations of that risky process.

The opening notes of 'Nonphenomenal Lineage' assured me I'd made a wise choice: and there was better to come, with the abovementioned 'A.M. 180' and the glorious 'Collective Dreamwish of Upperclass Elegance'. It was a delight to hear music with such a distinctive, fully-formed & congenial ethos. Not every track was a winner: I wasn't so fond of 'Poisoned At Hartsy Thai Food', but most of them were, and I even loved the five minutes' recording of chirping cicadas and other buzzing insects that was tacked on to the end of the closing track 'Lawn & So On'.

I can't satisfactorily explain why it took me twenty years after falling for this album to get around to buying Grandaddy's masterpiece The Sophtware Slump, but at least it did eventually happen.

Comments

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...

This is a Recording

Search This Blog