This is a Recording

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...

Songs like ' Suddenly ', from her 2013 album One Breath had piqued my interest about Anna Calvi. When I heard the title track from her covers EP 'Strange Weather' the following year, the desire to acquire kicked in, and I ordered a vinyl copy of it (I can't recall why I didn't save myself a few pounds and get it on CD). In any event, I did not regret my purchase: it's an intriguing selection of songs confidently interpreted. I wasn't familiar with FKA Twigs' 'Papi Pacify' before hearing Calvi's version. The original's electronic instrumentation is replaced here by piano, guitar, bass, drums & strings (the last arranged by Nico Muhly), building in an unsettling crescendo from a spare & soft beginning. Another then-recent song follows, in the shape of Connan Mockasin's vaguely creepy 'I'm the Man that will Find You'. A couple of older compositions start and end side B: Suicide's 'Ghost Rider' and Dav...

Little Axe is a stage name used by guitarist Skip McDonald (itself an alias for the man born Bernard Alexander). It's also the name of one of his collaborations with producer Adrian Sherwood, aided by long-term musical associates Doug Wimbish on bass and Keith LeBlanc on drums, and also in this instance by percussionist Talvin Singh. Whereas Sherwood is best-known for his Jamaican-inspired dub, this record is built on the foundations of McDonald's formative blues influences. The clever title alludes to Howlin' Wolf, whose voice is sampled on some of its tracks. While there's virtually nothing of house music per se in its musical ingredients, it does involve programming & sampling used in ways which arguably owe something to it. The feel of the album is generally dark & weighty, with its mesmerising grooves the main attraction. McDonald's bluesy guitar work blends with as tight a rhythm section as one could wish for, with Singh's tabla a fascinating addit...

"Warmduscher" is, I gather, a mild German insult meaning "hot-showerer": that is, a person unwilling to undergo the bracing rigours of a cold shower, or otherwise rough it; a bit of a wimp. In this case it refers to a London-based band fronted by U.S. ex-pat Craig Louis Higgins Jr., aka Clams Baker. Their second album Whale City was one of my favourite records in 2018. I have it on CD. Whale City - as a locale - is a re-imagining of the decrepit and dangerous NYC of the '70s. The album has a loose concept, outlined in a few spoken-word interludes, of following one man's unscrupulous rise through the ranks of that city's underworld. The musical action begins with the second track ' Standing on the Corner ', whose unsavoury urban storylines play out over an invitingly insistent bassline.  The short & sharp 'Big Wilma' has more of a post-punk aura, while '1000 Whispers' feels like it's being transmitted from some '60s ba...

Having acquired the soubriquet "the walrus of love", Barry White thereafter became something of a figure of fun, something that misled me (and presumably others) into disregarding his music. Only within the last few years have I begun to pay it more attention. After picking up a copy of his '74 album Can't Get Enough last summer, which I loved, I sought out some of the music by his protegés Love Unlimited. From a Discogs seller I ordered well-used copies of Under the Influence of... ('73) and In Heat ('74) for only £6.25. The only unappealing thing about In Heat is its awful title. The songs and the singing are strong; the arrangements rich & warmly enveloping. As one would expect from White, the thematic focus is firmly fixed on amatory matters. The opening number 'Move Me No Mountain' (the only one on the record not written by White) offers a refreshing rebuttal to the kind of lyrical hyperbole in songs like 'Ain't No Mountain High E...

I can't pinpoint my initial encounter with Neko Case's voice with any precision. It would have been between '02 and '05. Perhaps I'd heard her on The New Pornographers' song 'Mass Romantic'. Or maybe one of the tracks from Blacklisted ('02) was included on a promotional CD affixed to a music magazine. In any event, Blacklisted was certainly the first of her albums I bought. And it's turned out to be the only record of hers I've held on to. I eagerly ordered Fox Confessor Brings the Flood ('06) when it was first released, but never did warm to it. Much more recently I purchased Hell-on ('18) which hit me only just a little wide of the mark. Even this record, much as I love the tone & timbre of Case's voice, is one I revisit quite seldom - annually or so - but each new listen has been a fresh pleasure, so its place on the shelf is secure. The tunes are lovely. Case's lyrics are often interestingly oblique. Her singing is...

Among the several strands of '60s revivalism in the '80s there was a re-exploration (and re-exploitation) of the classics in the Tamla Motown songbook. A new generation grew to appreciate the musicianship of "The Funk Brothers" and the vocal talents (and songwriting skills) of the likes of Smokey Robinson. Not that his music had exactly faded into oblivion: songs like 'The Tears of a Clown' (a UK No. 1 upon its re-issue in 1970) were oft-replayed oldies that had formed part of the background radiation as I was growing up. In recent years I've acquired a few of Robinson's singles: a '67 copy of 'I Second that Emotion' (a song I'd first come to know via the cover version by art-pop outfit Japan); 'The Tears of a Clown' (from the hit '70 re-release); and his '81 hit 'Being With You' (previously mentioned in passing here ). While the former two numbers were by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles; the latter was a stric...

As the Britpop wave crested in 1995, my albums of the year in that vein weren't by front-runners Blur or Oasis (though I did buy (What's the Story) Morning Glory? ) but those by dark horses Pulp and Supergrass, with the latter's debut full-length release I Should Coco issued that May. My head had been turned late the previous year by their first single 'Caught by the Fuzz', and I'd been keeping my eye on their progress in the meantime. It's an excellent album, fizzing with youthful energy and with plenty of good tunes. The songwriting is generally solid too, with a distinctly English lyrical sensibility on display in the vein of influences like Madness and The Kinks. The opening run of eight tracks maintains a high energy, with 'Caught by the Fuzz', 'Alright' and 'Sitting Up Straight' my favourites among them. The tail end of the running-order has a more laid-back air, with the closing triple-decker of 'Time', 'Sofa (of m...

My introduction to TV on the Radio was via the TV, not the Radio. In 2004 I caught the video for 'Staring at the Sun' on MTV2 and realised at once it was something well out of the ordinary. I didn't love it at first acquaintance, but after seeing and hearing it a few more times, I'd changed my mind and was inclined to pay some money for it, ordering a CD copy of the 'Young Liars' EP from Amazon.  I'm glad I ordered the EP first, rather than their debut album Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes as I think it's the better effort. Had it been the other way around I may have been discouraged. 'Satellite' comes first: with its rapid heartbeat-like rhythm and layered vocal harmonies - it's a good song, but better is to come. The eerie and disconcerting 'Staring at the Sun' follows it, which still sounds out on its own nearly twenty years on. Coolly world-weary - and a tad less unconventional - 'Blind' is the EP's longest numbe...

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...

If I have an album by a particular artist on vinyl, I'll generally try to get any others of theirs I want on vinyl too; or if I have one CD of someone's music, I'll typically aim to get more CDs when I choose to explore their work further. But not always. Having been given a vinyl copy of Curtis , Mr. Mayfield's excellent debut solo album, last Christmas, and having much enjoyed playing it, getting a copy of Superfly seemed to an obvious next step. Trying to find a vinyl copy of Superfly for less than £30, however, proved difficult. I placed orders on Discogs twice for copies that seemed to be marginally below the going rate, only for both orders to be cancelled on me. Meanwhile there was no shortage of CD versions of it on offer, for a quarter of that price or less, and ulimately I gave up on the idea of format uniformity, saving myself some money and hassle by buying one of those. I ended up with a copy of the 2002 "special edition" on Charly Records which...

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea has attracted a great deal of fervent praise and no small measure of derision in its time. As is to be expected, given that I own a copy, I count myself among its admirers. It was already five years old before I'd even heard of it. Come 2003, intrigued by laudatory reviews I'd found on-line like this one , I downloaded an mp3 copy via LimeWire. A first cursory listen to a few snippets failed to impress me, but my on-line peers kept going on about it, and in due course ('04) I ordered a CD copy from Amazon. On sitting down to properly listen under headphones for the first time I became a convert within its first five minutes. By the end I was deeply impressed and moved. I revisited it very often in the years that followed, and tried to spread the word among my off-line friends and acquaintances (absolutely none of whom were interested). Not only did I find it a fascinating work of art in its own right, it also served as a gateway to further won...

Benny Green, one time jazz critic of The Observer , begins his sleevenotes for this UK pressing of The Oscar Peterson Trio's Night Train with a heavy-duty literary reference: "'The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of the intellect,' wrote Proust, 'in some material object we do not suspect'". Green is thereby setting up his contention that "it is a brave man indeed who would make an album composed of material which he knows belongs to the past consciousness of those likely to listen to it", a roundabout way of explaining most of the tracks here were well-worn, familiar standards by 1962, when the album was recorded. The telescoping effect of time's passing inevitably gives the listener from a later generation a foreshortened perspective and a less acute sense of the historical truth: I know in the abstract that Duke Ellington's 'C-Jam Blues', for example, evokes the early '40s rather than the early ...

Among my favourite songs of 1981 was The Teardrop Explodes' breakthrough single 'Reward', a UK No, 6 hit in March of that year. I was thinking it was as good a song as Julian Cope ever wrote, so was surprised to see on the label that it's credited to "Gill and Balfe", the band's guitarist and keyboardist at the time it was recorded. While Alan Gill reportedly came up with the memorable bassline and blaring trumpet fanfare, it seems Cope did provide the lyrics, and was responsible for shaping the song's final frenetic sound. According to Cope, "Gary [Dwyer] could only drum two ways, reggae and soul, so he played it soul and we had a song..." The B-side, 'Strange House in the Snow' is a rather more experimental concoction, with something resembling scraped violin strings prominent in the mix, along with piano (plus the usual guitar, bass & drums) and an unhinged-sounding vocal performance from Mr Cope. Drugs may have been involved.

I distinctly recall seeing Jeffrey Daniel's famous 1982 appearance on Top of the Pops promoting 'A Night to Remember': which introduced "body-popping" to a fascinated British public. The song, and the three other hit singles that followed it ('I Can Make You Feel Good', 'There It Is' and 'Friends') were very often on the radio and TV that year - and I found them pleasant enough, but my musical attention (such as it was, when I glanced up from my new Sinclair ZX Spectrum home computer) focussed more on the likes of Madness, Soft Cell, The Fun Boy Three, XTC and Yazoo. Why then should it be that on picking up a copy of Shalamar's Friends at a charity shop six months ago, seeing those song-titles in the track-listing should provoke such a heady surge of affectionate nostalgia? Snippets of the music began playing in my head, and I thought that for the £1 asking price it was well worth taking it home to see how I'd enjoy the album. I ...

About twenty years ago I aquired a wonderful and educational 3-CD box set called OHM: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music . Among its tracks was an excerpt from Karlheinz Stockhausen's piece 'Kontakte'. As with much of Stockhausen's output, it's not the most immediately-accessible music, but I did acquire a fondness for it, and became curious to hear all 35 minutes of the piece. I suspect I would have ordered my CD copy a couple of years later from a long-defunct UK on-line classical specialist called "Crotchet". It's a 1992 re-issue of a recording made in 1960, the same one from which the excerpt on the compilation had been taken. 'Kontakte' exists in two versions: the original all-electronic one; and the better-known "hybrid" version with parts for live piano and percussion backed up by electronic sounds on tape. The possibilities of modern "live electronics" would doubtless have thrilled Stockhausen, but were a lon...

For a few years I was haunted by a song I could not identify. On the infrequent occasions I listened to the radio during my time in Rome, whichever station it was I'd settled upon as the least objectionable might play a jazzy-sounding number in which a deep male voice sang in Italian, but with some words of English in the chorus: "It's wonderful... good luck my baby...I dream of you... chips, chips". It was the kind of song where it seemed likelier that these were the chips one might be given in a casino, and not any potato-based foodstuff. I grew to love the song, but each of the half dozen or so times I heard it I never caught the artist or track-title being announced. I resigned myself to its remaining a mystery. But then I heard a snippet of it again a few years later in Amsterdam, issuing from a hotel-room TV as the soundtrack to an ad. On returning from that trip back to the UK, I resolved to see if the internet might be able to solve the puzzle for me. This w...

The Id is an album which gives the impression of having had a great deal of talent, time and money thrown at it in a way that by no means guaranteed a successful outcome. Recorded in the wake of the runaway success of her first record On How Life Is , Macy Gray's second features a large cast-list; seems to have been recorded all over the place; runs to nearly an hour long; and includes many thickly-layered production jobs. Yet (for me) it does mostly work very well, just about holds together, and marks an improvement over what had been an excellent debut. I don't think I bought this from a record shop but rather from some other kind of retail space - a petrol station or a department store maybe - it would have been somewhere in Sweden in late 2001. While I was a tad nonplussed by it at first, it has grown on me, and I've played it so often that the disc is now in a sorry-looking state: I probably ought to get a new one. The opener 'Relating to a Psychopath' sets up...

Thanks to my newfound enthusiasm for Pixies' Surfer Rosa in 1988, I soon afterwards became aware of  Throwing Muses, the two labelmates often being mentioned together in the music press. The next year I bought the latter band's third album Hunkpapa , only to find it easier to admire than enjoy. It wasn't until '91, and The Real Ramona (album #4), that I properly became a fan. The opening track 'Counting Backwards' was my favourite of its songs. Decades later & with those cassettes long gone, I was intrigued, ca. 2018, to find a vinyl copy of The Real Ramona in a Chepstow charity shop. I couldn't see a price on it, so queried the cashier who shrugged and suggested £2, which seemed like a bargain. On getting it home I found there was a price sticker, but inexplicably affixed to the inner sleeve where neither of us had seen it: £12. Having been briefly pleased at landing a good deal I then felt bad at having snatched a tenner from the hands of the needy...

Early in 2017, a correspondent asked if I knew of any contemporary Brazilian instrumental music. I did not, but on searching in YouTube I found a goldmine of such material in the form the channel of "Programa Instrumental SESC Brasil". It contained many dozens of 50-55 minute shows, each one devoted to a performance by a specific musician or group. Not only were practically all of the featured artists new to me, but, judging by the frequently very low view counts, many must not have been widely-appreciated even in Brazil. One of my favourite such videos featured a band called Quartabê. I liked their performance so much I bought their debut album: Lição #1 Moacir .  It's among a handful of records I've bought in download form from Bandcamp and then burned to CD-R. I can't then make much comment about the cover design (I snagged the image from the Discogs listing) or the insert/booklet notes - which, in any case, would be in Brazilian Portuguese. The band's ...

The clumsily-titled Stay Awhile / I Only Want to be With You was Dusty Springfield's debut US album release. As often seemed to happen, the track-listing differed from that on her first UK 12" A Girl Called Dusty , issued a couple of months beforehand. Gone are the tracks 'Do Re Mi', 'My Colouring Book', 'Nothing' and 'Don't You Know'. In their places are - as the album title suggests - her first two 7" A-sides 'I Only Want To Be With You' and 'Stay Awhile'; along with 'Something Special' (B-side to 'Stay Awhile') and 'Everyday I Have to Cry' (which, in the UK, had been one of the four tracks on the 'I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself' EP). A Girl Called Dusty peaked at no. 6 in the UK, but Stay Awhile... despite its higher hit-content, only made it to no. 62 in the US. As with the British original, Springfield is pictured on the cover resplendent in double denim & iconic ...

The Supersuckers took a sharp turn off the rock'n'roll highway in 1997 with their fourth album Must've Been High , which saw them travel for the first time "down that old dirt road to the country". I'd previously heard 'Born With a Tail' (from The Sacrilicious Sounds Of The Supersuckers : album #3) so had an inkling of where they'd driven from to get there, but this was my first proper introduction to their music. It's far from a perfect record, but twenty-five years on I still get a kick out of playing it. Mine is a German-made CD copy. The sleeve-notes promise "Simple [...] three-chord songs, sung from experience", and that's what we get. The subject matter encompasses the pleasures of recreational drug-use ('Non-Addictive Marijuana'); the end of a long night's revelry ('One Cigarette Away)'; the morning after the night before ('Hungover Together'); the hazards of being on stage ('Barricade') ...

Travelin' Light is the fourth and last album jazz singer and pianist Shirley Horn recorded in the '60s, before taking time away from the limelight to devote to family life. Thereafter she performed only occasionally in and around her home city of Washington D.C., until the first stirrings of a career revival in the late '70s. Her early records had been well-reviewed and earned admiration from her peers (no less a figure than Miles Davis singled out her debut LP Embers and Ashes in some rare public praise), but they had sold poorly. I first heard of her via YouTube, having searched for versions of a song I'd taken a shine to called ' You're Blasé '. At length I got around to tracking down a copy of the album it had appeared on, i.e. this one. Specifically I bought a mid-'90s French-made CD re-issue. While not terribly rare, it's uncommon enough that it took me a while before I found an affordable copy. I think I ended up paying something in the ...