Skip to main content

Superfly

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 comes with a bonus disc of additional material. 

It did not disappoint. I'd previously heard at least four of its tracks: the knockout opening combination of 'Little Child Runnin' Wild', 'Pusherman' & 'Freddie's Dead', and also the title track. Of the others, only 'No Thing On Me (Cocaine Song)' seemed to me not quite up to the same standard. The alternate versions on the other disc were unexpectedly interesting too, though I doubt I'll re-visit those nearly as often as the album proper.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...
Post a Comment
Read more