This is a Recording

I didn't get into Deerhoof until after the release of their acclaimed 2005 album The Runners Four , but, for reasons lost to the mists of time, the first record of theirs I bought was Apple O´ from 2003: perhaps it was more readily-available via Amazon UK at that point, or just slightly cheaper. In any case, it made a favourable impression, and I obtained The Runners Four soon afterwards, along with the Green Cosmos EP. Allmusic reviewer Heather Phares wrote "As the title implies, Apple O' (my eye) revolves around the band's musings on love, sex, and creation". But is the last character in the title really an apostrophe, when, on the cover, it has the look of an acute accent? My theory is that the O´ in the title is an emoji-esque representation of a cartoon bomb ( Apple 💣), which happens to match up  with the title of track 6: 'Apple Bomb' - which, to my ears, is the best song on the disc. It's a number that builds from delicate beginnings to an...

If I hadn't all but stopped listening to the radio in the wake of the pandemic, I may well have found my way to this album sooner. As it was, its appearance on several best-of-2021 lists tempted me to take a listen, and what I heard induced me get it on CD. I think I bought it from the HMV in Cribbs Causeway back in January. It's a lovely thing: mellow songs with heartfelt lyrics, neatly packaged to sound at once classic and contemporary. For me it's front-loaded, with the more arresting songs on the first half of the album. I'm especially fond of 'Hurt' and 'Hope'. Here and there the mellowness skirts around the edges of blandness, but not off-puttingly so. The first track - the title track - is a short poem recited over  acoustic guitar and synthesizer chords. Although I can't say I love it as a poem, I do appreciate it as a confident statement of intent ahead of the songs that follow. The closing track, meanwhile ('Portra 400') joins the s...

When I found a vinyl copy of Infected by The The in the wild last summer, I was in two minds as to whether I should bring it home or not. It's an album I liked and admired when it was new, enough that I bought it on cassette at the time. But it was never a record I unreservedly loved. I did bring it home and had the peculiar pleasure of hearing it all for the first time in what must have been at least twenty five years, if not thirty. Why then had I hesitated to pick it up? I doubted I'd revisit it - and, sure enough, since then I've yet to play the LP a second time. I had misgivings about the state-of-the-art mid-'80s production when it was still the mid-'80s. The songs still stand up pretty well, but I didn't always enjoy how they were dressed up, and nor do I now. The political concerns it addressed, sharply here; clumsily there; are largely still relevant, yet it's such a serious record, to the extent of being po-faced. My favourite tracks on it are ...

Although Caroline Shaw's composition 'Partita for 8 Voices' made waves when it won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Music, I didn't hear it until a few years afterwards. When I did, it made an immediate impression and I ordered a copy of the present CD, which at that point contained the only available recording of the piece. The album's eponymous title is that of the vocal ensemble for whom the 'Partita' was created, and of which Shaw is also a member. Perplexingly, the 'Partita' is presented out-of-sequence on the disc, and to hear it in its proper order involves listening to tracks 9, 11, 5 and 1 respectively: to my mind a bad and easily-avoidable decision. Perhaps it was ordered that way to guide the listener to pay more attention to the other pieces on the album, variously composed by William Brittelle, Judd Greenstein, Caleb Burhans, Sarah Kirkland Snider & Merrill Garbus, all unfamilar names to me except the last - some of whose work as tUnE-yAr...

I bought Barafundle on CD when it was released: a little something Welsh while I was still in Rome. I'd become aware of Gorky's Zygotic Mynci a couple of years earlier, after the release of their Llanfwrog EP, when I heard the track 'Miss Trudy' on the radio, and had thereafter acquired a cassette copy of the Bwyd Time album. Barafundle is my favourite GZM record, hitting what is for me an ideal balance between the band's weird and whimsical sides. Barafundle Bay is an out-of-the-way beach in Pembrokeshire, and a few of the songs have an uncrowded sea-side feeling about them, including some of my favourites on the record, 'Starmoonsun' and 'Sometimes the Father is the Son', the former featuring a rare outing for the mediæval-style shawm on a pop/rock recording. Other favourite tracks of mine are 'Heywood Lane', 'Miniature Kingdoms' and 'Hwyl Fawr I Pawb'. Much as I usually enjoy this record, it doesn't suit every mood...

I bought the Buena Vista Social Club album on CD the year after its release, with a great profusion of laudatory reviews having piqued my curiosity. I'd not had any significant encounters with Cuban music up to that point (nor indeed with Latin music in general) and at first hadn't imagined it would interest me.  As so very often, I was wrong, and I did enjoy it, if only half-heartedly on first acquaintance. It took repeated listenings over several years for me to better appreciate its many charms. A major part of the record's appeal for me is its atmosphere: expert musicians playing together in a big room with joyful spontaneity.  Initial favourite songs from it were the insistent 'El Cuarto de Tula' and the wistful 'Amor de Loca Juventud'. Nowadays I love the whole thing & it still gets a few outings every year - an excellent soundtrack for a warm summer evening.

Dire Straits were, for me, a band I ultimately heard too often. Brothers In Arms and the never-ending stream of singles therefrom were so ubiquitous that my prior affection for their music soured due to over-exposure. Before that, I had been a fan, with 'Romeo and Juliet' in particular having been one of my favourite songs when I was twelve. A less discriminating nine-year-old when 'Sultans of Swing' came out, it didn't make that same kind of impression, but I did like the song, and when I turned up a 7" copy of it last year, I gladly brought it home. Apparently the version on the single is longer than the one that ended up on the band's debut album, and some aficionados consider it superior. The B-side is 'Eastbound Train (Live Version)', a rather jaunty number about a figurative missed connection on public transport. Musically, it goes in a direction I think they were wise not to pursue much further.