This is a Recording

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...

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...

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...

At an illicit teenage party thrown by my sister while our parents were out, one of her friends, under the influence of a flagon or so of Strongbow, had put his copy of Motörhead's Ace of Spades on to my Dad's turntable and, as close as he could get to the speakers was shout-singing along utterly enthralled by the title track's chorus, meanwhile accompanying himself on air guitar. Two years her junior (I would have been twelve or thirteen), I was under strict instructions to say nothing to anyone about their revelry: an injunction I have respected until now. I'd heard 'Ace of Spades' before, but witnessing that moment I properly felt some of its mind-altering power for the first time, and learned a new respect for it. I don't exactly recall, but this event may have taken place in 1981, the year that "Headgirl's" (i.e. Motörhead's and Girlschool's) collaborative St. Valentines Day Massacre EP was released. Few would argue it's a hig...

"A stunning introduction to music's freshest new voice!" boasts the hype sticker on my copy of Janelle Monáe's Metropolis: The Chase Suite EP: a bold claim, but not, in my opinion, too much of an overstatement. This "Special Edition" of Metropolis came out in 2010 around the time her major label debut album The Archandroid was hitting the shelves. Its original release (as Metropolis, Suite I Of IV: The Chase ) had been in 2007, with two further tracks included here. The scene is set by the opening number 'The March Of The Wolfmasters', where pseudo-orchestral music underpins a spoken introduction to the fictional world of the tracks that follow. The fun really begins with the uptempo 'Violet Stars Happy Hunting!!!', a thrilling rollercoaster ride through that world. Almost as good is 'Many Moons', where real world imagery overlays Monáe's imaginary city. 'Cybertronic Purgatory' is a short, ethereal interlude. Another hi...

For about seven months in 1997 I shared an apartment in Rome with a fellow ex-pat, an Englishman with a taste for the acid jazz and neo-soul music of the day, and it was through him that I first heard the likes of Erykah Badu, D'Angelo and Maxwell. For all its merits, it was a style I couldn't seem to get a proper grip on at the time, and indeed, it was only really during the recent pandemic that I gave these artists another hearing, at last developing more of an appreciation for them. About this time last year I spotted a few Maxwell CDs in a box at the local charity shop & thought the MTV Unplugged EP might provide a digestible introduction to his work. So it proved - it's a record I very much enjoy. At over 34 minutes I'd say it's more a short album than an EP. On the strength of this disc I also acquired a copy of Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite but I found that a bit too much Maxwell for me in a single sitting, succumbing as it did to a common late-'90...

The Moonlandingz began as a figment in the imaginations of the Sheffield duo The Eccentronic Research Council, whose idea for a concept album about a fictional band by that name and an obsessive fan of theirs ended up with the no-longer-altogether-imaginary group recording some real songs. It helped matters no end that they were able to recruit Lias Saoudi and Saul Adamczewski of London-based reprobates The Fat While Family to take part. The first song to surface from the project, ' Sweet Saturn Mine ', knocked my socks off when I first heard it in 2015. In time there was a full Moonlandingz album ( Interplanetary Class Classics ), but before that there were a few EPs, including this one, Blak Hanz , a 10" record with four tracks issued in a limited edition of 500 copies in 2016. I'd missed out on the first couple of releases owing to lack of funds, but eagerly snapped this one up.  As well as the queasy psych-pop of the title track, there's ' Drop It Fauntlero...

Pye Records in the UK had a "Big Deal" series of four-track 12" EPs. Most brought together tracks by a single artist, but this one comprised four numbers first released on Stax Records. I've had it since 2015 or so. It would have been a local charity shop purchase. It's a quality item: Side A features (Theme From) 'Shaft' by Isaac Hayes and 'Who's Making Love' by Johnny Taylor, while on Side B are 'Private Number' by Judy Clay And William Bell, followed by Booker T & The MGs' classic 'Time Is Tight'. Tracks A1 and B2 are my particular favourites (both #4 hit singles in the UK), but the whole thing is a delight. I hadn't known until just now that Booker T. Jones produced and co-wrote 'Private Number', and that he, the MGs and Isaac Hayes all played on 'Who's Making Love'.

On-line recommendations had alerted me to the existence of The Decemberists, and, in late 2003 or early '04, I set about ordering their available releases: Castaways and Cutouts & Her Majesty the Decemberists ; and also the 5 Songs EP. I can't remember in what order I obtained them. I subsequently acquired The Tain and Picaresque CDs, but, in proper hipster style did not then follow them on into their major-label years.  This, the 2003 re-issue of 5 Songs comprises six songs. The expansive opener 'Oceanside' immediately sets up a distinctive mood. On the more melacholic 'Shiny', acoustic guitar is augmented by pedal steel. Accordion features prominently on the tall tale that is 'My Mother Was a Chinese Trapeze Artist'. More upbeat, and, to my ears, less memorable, is 'Angel Won't You Call Me?'. Flute and trumpet play together on the mournful 'I Don't Mind'. I can't say why 'Apology Song', the sixth of the five...

A really good EP can make for a particularly satisfying listening experience when there are three or four first-rate tracks in snappy succession. Grant Hart's All of My Senses is just such an EP. I mentioned in an earlier post how I came to acquire it. On the A side is the title track, an expansive song which feels at once cyclical and uplifting. On the B-side the mood is altogether darker, with 'The Main', an acoustic number about heroin addiction whose melody is reminiscent of The Pogues' 'A Pair of Brown Eyes'; and the Arthur Lee song 'Signed D.C.', another tale of addiction, supposedly based on a letter sent to Lee by the original Love drummer Don Conka . The B-side tracks were originally recorded for a session broadcast by BBC Radio Scotland. Overall, it's a highly enjoyable nine-and-a-bit minutes of music. I like the photomontage on the front cover too.

At the British Heart Foundation charity shop in Chepstow (now seemingly closed) one pandemic Saturday morning I found a cache of late '80s/early '90s indie records including a single by Bob Mould's band Sugar and this 12" by Grant Hart's Nova Mob; as well as Hart's first two solo singles. I wondered if perhaps there had also been some Hüsker Dü vinyl that another punter had snapped up first. I'd been slow getting in to Hüsker Dü, only climbing aboard that bandwagon when it had stopped moving, after the release of Warehouse: Songs and Stories . But I listened with interest to what I heard of Mould's and Hart's subsequent work, almost buying Sugar's Copper Blue ; and hoping to buy (but, at the time, failing to track down) the self-titled Nova Mob album, having taken a shine to their song 'Old Empire'. On the A side of this record are two mixes of 'Admiral of the Sea'. The 'First Ave. Mix' has the drums pushed right to the ...

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...

At the PDSA charity shop in Thornbury a few years ago I spotted a 10" record with an orangey-red sleeve on which the title and artist (so I presumed) were spelled out in Cyrillic text. I recognised the Melodiya logo on the cover: that being the USSR's state-run record label. I already owned a few Melodiya records, and on the prior occasions when I'd bought LPs with titles in Russian it hadn't worked out badly: one being a fine performance of Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony; the other an interesting compilation of balalaika music. My weak recollection of the Russian alphabet failed me in the moment, but, as the record was only £1, I thought I'd buy it anyway. This wasn't such a successful purchase: I'd acquired some performances of Государственный Гимн Союза Советских Социалистических Республик - that is, the State Anthem of the Soviet Union, and of 'The Internationale' (Интернационал). Side A begins with the Anthem sung by the Bolshoi Theatre Chorus,...