Have A Little Fun Tonight

Jerry Lee Lewis – Live At The Star Club, Hamburg

It was another crazy weekend here at Wildebeest Asylum HQ and my head is totally frazzled, but this week I'm going to push on nonetheless and try and wring something sensible out of my fingers through the haze of a headachy hangover and serious sleep deprivation.

The subject of this week's musing is one of the 1001 albums. I anticipated Jerry Lee Lewis with little excitement, knowing little about him and following on the heels of the dire previous entry in the series, Buck Owens' ear murdering country drawling. I was expecting to just give it one quick listen and then move on. How wrong I was. Even half way through the first track I was thinking “Oh this is much better than I anticipated!” and as it transpired Lewis was just warming up. Three songs into his set when he drops into 'Money' (you know the song, “Thats. What I want!”) I was floored by the absolute insanity of his performance. Lewis' piano playing is phenomenal. His riffs may be simple but considering that he's screaming like a madman whilst bashing them out like the keyboard killed his parents, and combined with his reputation for playing behind his back or while standing on top of the piano it's very impressive. His singing is amazing too. Sure most of the time he's just shouting but there's no doubt that he's giving it all he's got both physically and emotionally. And his backing band keep up in the intensity department. The guitar solos may be just two note wailing but even the likes of Opeth or Dragonforce should envy the rawness and wild energy that they capture.

The songs themselves have been reduced to hoary, clichéd golden oldies by the decades. 'Good Golly Miss Molly', 'Great Balls of Fire' and 'Hound Dog' may garner a bit of intellectual respect for their place in music history but few of our generation have much genuine inclination to actually listen to them. All the same in this performance Lewis howls his way through them with an energy and yes even savagery that would give even the likes of Dillinger Escape Plan something to think about, and should cause half assed metal bands who treat a live performance as a job no more exciting than sitting in an office all day (I'm looking at you Satyricon, Slipknot and the Deftones) to hang up their scary masks, wipe off their scary makeup and admit that a forty year old album made by a devout Christian lad has made them look like a bunch of gutless pussies.

The concert recorded on this album was performed at a time when Lewis' star was on the wane, following the media response to revelations of a dubious nature about his personal life (and it's wasn't just some moral majority era wowserism either, marrying one's thirteen year old cousin would probably still be frowned upon today), and it's easy to hear in his manic performance the sound of self-destruction; as though he feels he's lost everything and has nothing left but the catharsis of throwing every piece of oneself into the primal thunder of rock and roll. One of the tragic things about art is that we can only ever achieve our full potential when one's personal life has wound up in such an unpleasant place that the anger or despair brings about some kind of transcendence to create something beyond the norm. Sure I've heard plenty of great performances where the performers are jazzed up in a positive way, usually simply by the pleasure they take in creating music, but those can never quite match up to the spectacle of seeing or hearing someone totally fucking losing it for real. And the appreciation of this is not schadenfreude or pity or voyeurism, but the feeling that you've witnessed something truly genuine; that the hands smashing that keyboard or throttling that guitar are driven by real emotion instead of a mere abstract passion to make some good music. It's a little depressing but of course it's the human cost that it took to create the performance that makes it special. And that's why this album is rightfully regarded as one of the greatest live albums of all time, and why when I see Sigur Ros tonight they're probably going to suck.

Unthemed Weekly Music Roundup

So I've listened to a whole bunch of shit this week, and all of it seems worth commenting on, even if none of it really grabbed me enough in a good or bad way to write a full post about.

Ambient Noise Madness:
Black Boned Angel – Bliss And Void Inseparable
Vargr – Northern Black Supremacy

This week I also became reacquainted with Black Boned Angel, who I'd heard before and really liked but never acquired until now. Black Boned Angel is a solo project of one Campbell Kneale, a Wellingtonian, who also records as Birchfield Cat Motel. In the Black Boned Angel incarnation his music is dark, avant-garde ambient, a genre that I used to love but which I have neglected in recent years. Bliss And Void Inseparable is an hour long piece that lurches unnaturally from one moody, disturbing piece of creepy noise to another, and if you're into that sort of thing it's pretty good.

I stumbled across Bliss and Void Inseparable while purchasing Vargr's Nothern Black Supremacy, which bridges the gap between my old and new listening habits by taking ambient industrial and infusing it with a gritty dose of black metal. They do so by taking the BM genre trappings, gurgled vocals, tremolo guitar riffs and blast beat drums and cranking up the murkiness of the production, reducing it all into a distorted wash that blends in perfectly as a backdrop to the industrial noise. The two genre's really do make a surprisingly good match, not just because the sounds mould together so well, but also because they share a few aesthetic and philosophical principles, such as their charming fascination with fascist imagery.

1001 Albums:
The Beatles – A Hard Day's Night
Jacques Brel – Olympia 64

I quite liked With the Beatles which I listened to a month or so back. The songs were nothing special but they performed with a youthful vigour that surpassed any other similar album I've reached on this list so far and introduced the rawness and energy that characterises rock and roll in my mind and is lacking from the likes of say the Everly Brothers. A Hard Day's Night in comparison was a little bit of a disappointment. Perhaps it's just because I've been exposed to these songs literally since the day I was born, as an inescapable part of the pop cultural atmosphere, but the whole album just breezed right past my ears and left little impression.

Jacques Brel on the other hand is a total revelation. I've never heard of him before but in his native France (well, actually he's Belgian, but his musical career was based in France) he is considered an influential singer songwriter. I'm at a real loss as to how to describe his music. It certainly fits into no category I can think of, although iTunes has classified it as 'caberet', and that's as good a guess as any. Brel sings accompanied by a sprightly orchestra which includes plenty of accordion and piany (as opposed to piano!), giving it an definite French character. I guess superficially you might compare this album to those of Frank Sinatra, in that it's a single male vocalist backed by an orchestra which acts in a purely supporting role, but Brel's vocal quirks and dramatic, bitter delivery put me in mind of Mike Patton more than anyone. Brel is clearly a big influence on Patton, at least when he's in crooning mode. And I almost forgot to mention, this album is really good! I love it even though Brel's best quality is supposedly his lyrics and I can't understand a word of it, as it's all in French.

One other random chain of influence. British singer songwriter Scott Walker was heavily influenced by Brel, covering him often. Walker's 2006 album The Drift is one of the albums Mikael Akerfeldt has been citing as an influence on the latest Opeth album. Coming from such a far flung corner of the musical map I'm totally surprised (but also delighted) by just how relevant this guy is to the obscure corners of metaldom.

Sigur Rós - Með Suð Í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust

Sigur Rós are one of the few upbeat, happy bands to make serious inroads into my music collection, which in general resembles a grim nightmare world of hatred, despair and violence. I was a little disappointed with their b-sides album Hvarf/Heim that was released last year, but didn't think too much of it since their last two real albums (() and Takk) were so damn good. Sadly their new album with the nonstandard character filled title too long for me to be bothered typing out again disappoints in a similar way to Hvarf/Heim. At first I wondered (as I often do) if perhaps I haven't stuck my head so far out into the world of extreme metal that I've lost the ability to appreciate music without blast beats, vocals howled by a madman and lyrics about strangling people with their own intestines, so I made a point of listening to Ágætis Byrjun, one of their earlier albums, again and found that I still thought it rocked. By this highly scientific method I have proved that it is indeed Sigur Rós that have started to suck, not me.

Upon consideration I've decided that the thing that's changed about them is that their older albums had more flavour to their emotional landscape. While their main angle has always been prettiness, twinkling piano and uplift, on earlier albums it was leavened with moments of melancholy (and on () even heaviness) but they seem to have discarded these shades of subtlety in recent years. On this release the climactic, soaring conclusion to 'Ára bátur' (backed by the London Oratory School Choir) would on an earlier album have been the triumphant, redemptive centrepiece of an emotional journey that visited a variety of moods, but in this case is just the point where they crank things up from 'really really happy' to 'super extra fucking happy'.

On the other hand these guys are touring here next month, and I am still looking forward to it.

1001 Albums: Number God Knows What

The Freewheelin' – Bob Dylan

So I am still digging through this '1001 albums you must listen to before you die' list. At the current rate it will take me about twenty years to get through them all, so who knows if I'll ever actually listen to all 1001, but at least to this point (from the mid 1950s to 1963) it has been for the most part an interesting and educating project.

Since I last posted here this list has exposed me to some truly dire music. Marty Robbins' schmaltzy Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs was by far the worst. I can handle cringeworthy lyrics and themes as long as there's good music for it to hide behind, but straightup cornball country will do little to mask or forgive the inanity of old west clichés and nauseatingly sincere Christian morality tales. Jimmy Smith's Back at the Chicken Shack and Booker T. and the M.G.s' Green Onions both make strange and misguided attempts to fill out half an hour of instrumental organ led jazz. Don't get me wrong, the organ is a fine instrument, but its use in this context evokes the very worst kind of cheesy Seventies muzak and I have a hard time imagining why people who appear to be talented musicians seem so enthused by it.

Fortunately there have been some good discoveries as well. Muddy Waters Live at Newport is fantastic and I actually sat down and listened to a Beatles album (the very early With the Beatles) from beginning to end for the first time in my life and found it not disappointing. But the highlight so far has to be Ray Price's Night Life, which provides country music with a redemptive counterbalance to the godawful Marty Robbins (perhaps aided by the more engaging subject matter of getting trashed in seedy bars and cavorting with loose women).

But anyway, on to the ostensible subject of this post. The most recent album in this list I listened to is The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, which contains many of the famous folk singer's most notable songs, opening with the legendary 'Blowin' in the Wind'. Folk is a new genre to me, but the iconic image of one dude with a guitar and a harmonica railing against the man has its romantic appeal and Dylan is more strongly associated with this image than anyone else. However I found that, on this album at least, Dylan's more didactic songs were pretty grating. Not in a musical way but just because of the subtly unpleasant aroma of self-rightous Sixties hippydom. Sure, on 'Masters of War'

You fasten the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you set back and watch
When the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion
As young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And is buried in the mud

I might agree with Dylan's sentiments, and I may nod along in a pleased manner when Jim Morrison sings almost exactly the same thing on 'Dead Cats, Dead Rats', but this particular song, and others like it, radiate a particular smugness and arrogance that belie the message of the song and cause me to grind my teeth and roll my eyes ever so slightly.

I like Dylan a lot more when he's only half serious. You can read whatever meaning you like into 'Blowin' in the Wind', but taken at face value at least the lyrics are little more than romantic nonsense. It's Dylan's knowing, assured performance that infuses the song with weighty meaning and has rendered it a classic, and I like this persona of his much better. I also really liked 'Talkin' World War III Blues', where Dylan affects a rambling mumble and injects a healthy dose of humour, while still maintaining a political slant as implied by the title.

There's shitloads more Bob Dylan coming up on this list, so we'll see whether I grow fonder of his pompous hippy side or if generation Y cynicism will cause me to grow weary and dismiss him as an outdated, overly earnest faded Boomer icon.

1001 Albums Number 20

Miles Davis – Kind of Blue

I didn't think that much of the last Miles Davis album on this list (Birth of the Cool) but the highly regarded Kind of Blue works a little better for me.

It's much more of an arty album, divided into five long tracks which are still in Davis' 'cool jazz' style, but which have more of a modern, bebop influence in the stuttering rhythms and chromatic melodies, making it immediately more appealing to me. All the same the music is still laid back and inoffensive to a degree that I find almost aggravating, but I still appreciate the artistry even when the mood is not my cup of tea.

I do particularly like the last track, 'Flamenco Sketches', which has some nice tension between the mellow jazz and a melancholy flamenco guitar, but it seems to be the case that, by and large, Miles Davis and I just have fundamentally different desires as to what we want out of music.

1001 Albums Number 19

Ray Charles – The Genius of Ray Charles

I've got to admit, I know next to nothing about Ray Charles, other than that he died recently and that everyone thinks he's awesome, so it is at the risk of sounding like an ignoramus that I must admit that, for the most part, The Genius of Ray Charles doesn't do much for me. It's not to say that it's bad, but the poppy jazz that he plays has a tendency to float through one ear and out the other. Mind you, I like the enthusiasm of his singing and I think that his piano playing is pretty good. In fact now that I think about it I do really like a few of the mellow later songs on the b-side (such as 'Come Rain Or Come Shine' and 'Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying') where the noisy, rambunctious jazz band is reigned in and Ray's voice and piano take the spotlight.

I'm reminded of Little Richard, where I admired the performance, but not so much the songs.

Next up: I give Miles Davis another go.

1001 Albums Number 18

Ella Fitzgerald – Sings the George and Ira Gershwin Song Book

Our third consecutive female jazz vocalist is the most famous of them all, Ella Fitzgerald. As the title tells us, on this album she sings over the course of three long discs the songs of old timey songwriter George Gershwin.

Fitzgerald's voice is obviously deserving of it's reputation. When compared to Holiday and Vaughan she surpasses them with her strength and confidence, and while the other singers have their singular qualities, Fitzgerald's is the obvious candidate for iconification with her bold, poised and assured character shining through her singing. Even if you never knew who she was, you'd recognise her voice as it's solidly embedded in the public consciousness.

Gershwin's music deserves note too. This album is in the same musical style as Billie Holiday's Lady in Satin and the Frank Sinatra's albums but where I found the backing music of those recordings to be lacking substance, the guy whose name is in the album title is well done by here. His songs blend the accessibility of pop and the sophistication of classical, and his brother Ira's lyrics defy the cheesiness that's inevitable given the songs' Broadway origin and remain compelling and witty throughout.

There are two surprising omissions on this album. There are no songs from the Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, which is perhaps understandable given that Fitzgerald had already recorded an album of the whole opera (with Louie Armstrong), but I was really looking forward to hearing her acclaimed version of 'Summertime'. There's also none of Fitzgerald's scatting until the last track, which is a little disappointing since it was one of the things that she was most famous for.

This album clocks in at a fucking long 180 minutes, so it's a testament to Fitzgerald and Gershwin's considerable skill that I quite happily sat through the whole thing three times!

Next up: Ray Charles.

1001 Albums Number 17

Sarah Vaughan – At Mister Kelly's

For the first time since I started these I've found myself unable to track down a record on the 1001 albums list. Soulseek and isohunt have both failed me, so if anyone knows where I can get a copy of Ramblin' Jack Elliot's Jack Takes The Floor, let me know. Instead we're skipping ahead to the next one, Sarah Vaughan's live album At Mister Kelly's.

Vaughan is a jazz singer but unlike her peer Billie Holiday the backing music is more in line with what I normally consider jazz – the piano and drums take a more constant rhythmic role, rather than as merely popping up for a treacly response to the vocals as they do for other jazz vocal performers like Holiday and Sinatra. There are an almost endless number comparisons and contrasts between Vaughan and Holiday that I could make, and I'll just list the most obvious. The first that comes to mind is that while both singers lived a life characterised by drug use and hard partying, Vaughan kept it together and died respected and successful at age 66 as opposed to Holiday's sad story. It makes sense therefore that while Lady in Satin has a sad mood engendered by Holiday's fragile, weary voice, Vaughan is perky and full of energy, and obviously enjoying herself greatly even on the more sombre songs.

Vaughan's voice doesn't have anywhere near the pathos of Holiday's, but it has a combination of strength and character that I find quite enchanting. I also prefer Vaughan's phrasing, perhaps it's just more 'rock' like in manner, but for whatever reason I find her singing to be a lot catchier and more immediately appealing to my ears.

Most notable among the charms of this particular album are the entertaining and charming in between (and during) song stage banter and the more substantial, interesting backing music (when compared to other music of this genre that I've heard). This one is definitely another winner.

1001 Albums Number 16

Billie Holiday – Lady In Satin

This is another one that I've been looking forward to. Even though I'm unfamiliar with Billie Holiday's music she's (in)famous enough to have caught my attention more than a few times in the past.

Although she's considered a jazz singer this album had far more in common with Frank Sinatra's In The Wee Small Hours than say Duke Ellington or Thelonious Monk. In fact on the two albums Holiday and Sinatra perform three of the same songs.

The arrangements are very similar to what is found on Sinatra's albums - sad, swooning strings submissively complement the vocals while other jazz instrumentation quietly keeps restrained time in the background. And, just like with the Sinatra albums, I found these arrangements to be dead boring. Fortunately this isn't as much of a disaster on Lady in Satin as it was for old Frank, as the album is easily redeemed by Holiday's voice.

Where Sinatra cooed pathetically with less convincing pathos than Bumblebee Man from The Simpsons, Holiday's distinctive singing contains genuine depth and the sadness that a life of abuse and drug addiction had given her is inescapable. While I may turn my nose up at many aspects of this album that I normally judge music on (songwriting, originality), it would be incredibly heartless for anyone to not appreciate something so honestly soulful...

1001 Albums – Numbers 14 and 15

So we've got a couple of these to catch up on. First up is Little Richard and his literally titled album Here's Little Richard. The style of music is early rock and roll with a swinging boogie feel, but the main focus of the songs is Little Richard's distinctive wailing voice. He's a great performer and there's no denying the energy and showmanship he exudes, but the arrangements that he's put in tend to be predictable and lifeless. Sure, it's hard not to enjoy 'Tutti Frutti', but the rest of the album drags more than a little, save for when the sax gets a chance to blast out a wild, impassioned solo, or when Little Richard gets to unleash a few of his trademark howls.

Next up is Tito Puente's Dance Mania. I generally disapprove of listening to dance music without doing any actual dancing, but in the interests of science I did my best to give this album a chance anyway. The dance in this particular instance is of the latin variety, encompassing subgenres such as cha cha and mambo, and numerous others that I won't even try to pretend I can name. Like all dance music it suffers from an excess of faked enthusiasm, especially in the vocals, when listened to at home on headphones rather than in its intended setting (a busy social environment supplied with psychoactive substances). Nevertheless once I got past that and really paid attention I was impressed by the musicianship, especially of the jazz style horns. There's actually a lot more going on here musically than my initial sneering dismissal of it as Ricky Martin's drunk, abusive parent, and it's certainly not possible to listen to without tapping your foot. In fact, maybe I should try starting latin dance lessons again...

1001 Albums - Number 13

Machito – Kenya

Given the title (and the explicitly ethnic cover art) I was expecting something very African from Kenya, perhaps even more so than Palo Congo, so I was surprised to find that (to my ears at least) this album sounded about as African as the queen in blackface. This is really just me speaking from my modern presumptions of course, while my immediate association of peppy upbeat jazz is with unfunky white guys, it is of course perfectly correct to say it is an African art form.

Kenya's sound is roughly in the same genre as Palo Congo, but not by much. Where Palo Congo overlays African rhythms with Latin American guitars, Kenya tramples over those same rhythms with super cheesy, upbeat jazz.

But don't think that I didn't like this album, it's actually pretty enjoyable. Yes, the jazz is cheesy, (putting me in mind of kitsch classics ranging from the themes of old James Bond films to that of The Love Boat), but it somehow did more for me than Miles Davis last week. I guess it is at least partly because Machito doesn't make playing relaxed and happy music sound like such serious hard work. The conga rhythms are shoved far further into the background here than on Sabu's album, but they sound just as good as those on Palo Congo when they are allowed their own space.

To my surprise I'm quite liking this genre. Next up, Little Richard.

1001 Albums – Number 12

Miles Davis – Birth of the Cool

Miles Davis is one of those legendary names that has so much respect attached to it that you just assume that he must be as good as everyone says he is. After enjoying Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington as much as I did I was quite surprised to find that I didn't rate this album much at all.

On Birth of the Cool Davis has assembled a large (nine piece) jazz ensemble, with his trumpet taking the lead role, and they play music that reminds me a little of Ellington's Live at Newport album, but a lot busier and more upbeat. My main complaint is that it lacks the almost classical compositional elegance of The Duke.

As implied by the title this album represents one of the starting points of 'cool' jazz, a laid back and accessible reaction to the aggressive and complex bebop movement. Me, I like my music aggressive and complex so it's really no surprise that this leaves me cold while Thelonious Monk blew my fucking ears off with awesomeness. It's by no means bad, but I'm so far removed from it's target audience that it's almost unfair for me to judge it. Plus the infectious peppyness of it all can't help but bring to my mind the dread thought of cool jazz's nightmarish spawn, smooth jazz...

Next up, more African music with Machito.

1001 Albums – Number 11

Sabu – Palo Congo

After a solid diet of early rock and roll and jazz, we take a little diversion here into latin music, or more properly, Afro-Cuban music. While about half the tracks are upbeat, fun latin numbers, the rest are based around traditional African drumming with strange (to my ears), wordless vocals.

I actually really like this album. It has a truly alien sort of quality about it which I attribute to it's roots in genuine traditional African music, rather than the commodified tripe they call world music nowadays. The percussion is really impressive. Even those of us conditioned by prog metal drummers pushing the envelope in any way they can can't help but be drawn in by the pulsating polyrhythms on display here.

My favourite track is 'Choferito', which is one of the fun latin songs and which I love for it's kookily slurred vocal line.

Next up, Miles Davis.

1001 Albums – Number 10

Thelonious Monk – Brilliant Corners

So far the best thing I've gained from listening to these albums has been a bit of an introduction to mainstream jazz. Some of it hasn't worked for me but mostly it has been very worthwhile and we can now add a second name to the 'pretty damn awesome' list (after Ellington).

On Brilliant Corners Monk assembles a small jazz ensemble: drums, bass, sax, trumpet and Thelonious himself on piano in order to play some baffling, complicated music. At first it seems like standard cool jazz. The mood may be warm and intimate but before long you'll notice the continued intrusion of deliberate dissonance and arrhythmia, so gracefully composed that it almost doesn't register as such to one's ears.

The centrepiece of the songs is Monk's piano, although the degree of this focus ranges between songs. 'I Surrender, Dear' is a solo piece for keys, while all the other songs break the seven minute mark and give ample attention to the rest of the band.

As both a performer and a composer Monk is something special. His style is based around an aggressive, staccato way of stabbing the keys in a deliberately counter-rhythmic way, and his melodies have a noncommital relationship with tonality. The miracle of his music is that despite such a difficult approach the result is still upbeat and easy to listen to while also being rewarding to the careful listener. Definitely a keeper.

Next up, Sabu Martinez.

1001 Albums – Number 9

Count Basie – The Complete Atomic Basie

I don't have a whole lot to say about this one. This is another jazz album and I did enjoy listening to it, but it had an unfortunate tendency to blow in one ear and out the other while I did so without leaving much of an impression. I am a little surprised that this should be the case, Basie definitely has a bit more edge than other jazz albums I've heard and enjoyed recently such as Louis Prima or Duke Ellington, which are examples of jazz in it's poppy and sophisticated forms respectively. This album on the other hand brings to mind dimly lit basement bars with names like 'The Jazz Hole' where this band perhaps shares a billing with Bleeding Gums Murphy. It's not dangerous music by any means, but it does have that low down swing that brings to mind the earthier pleasures of life.

Despite the very cool mood the music is a little substanceless from a more serious musical perspective, especially when compared to Ellington, despite having some nice hooks. I could do with something that took the swing of this band and made a bit more dangerous.

Next up, Thelonious Monk! One of the first albums on this list that I'm really looking forward to.

1001 Albums - Number 8

The Crickets – The “Chirping” Crickets

After sojourning in the realm of jazz for a few albums we're now back in the familiar and comfortable territory of rock and roll. Buddy Holly and his group The Crickets, like Elvis, are clear forerunners to most of the music I listen to and write about here. The production might be super old-timey, with twangy guitars and barber shop style vocal harmonising, but the format and arrangement is really not so different to that of Meshuggah or Sigur Ros. The song 'That'll Be The Day' is found on this album and (assuming you haven't lived your whole life under a rock and don't know it) it gives a pretty good indication of what this band sounds like.

I wasn't looking forward to this one all that much but I have to say I rather like it. Sure the lyrics are pretty conventional (they all revolve around how crap it is to be dumped) and I can't attribute my fondness for this album to plain old 'balls' as I did with Elvis and Louis Prima but I think there's just some good old fashioned solid songwriting and competent performing here. On its own it doesn't make up for Sinatra but I have to say that the old 1001 albums seems to be coming up mostly positive so far.

Next up, Count Basie.

1001 Albums - Number 7

Frank Sinatra – Songs for Swinging Lovers

http://wildebeestasylum.blogspot.com/2006/04/1001-albums-number-1.html
In the wee small hours

The scene is a darkened office, 1954. Frank Sinatra stands before the desk of a fatcat record exec, who is probably puffing on a cigar. “It's a disaster Frank,” he says, “Your morbid opus of despair, In the Wee Small Hours, is responsible for over four hundred suicides in the last month alone. In the news this morning I read that a young girl saw you stop smiling for a split second at your last show and bashed her own head in with a brick.”
“So.. hard... to keep... smiling”, Frank forces out between the gritted teeth of his fixed, rictus grin.
“Don't worry.” Says the executive. “We have a plan...”
And so was born Songs for Swinging Lovers, an album so grotesquely upbeat that the Surgeon General recommends playing four hours of Ren and Stimpy's 'Happy Happy Joy Joy' afterwards in order to bring the listener back down to the grim reality of life on this cold, forsaken earth.

Like In the Wee Small Hours before it, this album is a short collection of lite jazz arrangements so substanceless that they barely impinge on one's consciousness, overlayed by Sinatra's hammy crooning. However this time around the 'emotion' switch has been flicked from 'sad' to 'happy', and instead of the unconvincing moping Frank delivered on the former we get a selection of perky, upbeat tributes to sunshine and puppies. It's really impossible to overstate just how insipid this album is. Here's a selection of lyrics from 'How About You':

I like potato chips, moonlight motor trips, how about you?
I'm mad about good books, can't get my fill
And James Durante's looks give me a thrill

This is a joke right?

The first half hour is hard enough to stomach, but then we get to what is probably (and I honestly say this without a speck of hyperbole) the most offensive song I have heard in my entire life: 'Anything Goes', a heartfelt tribute to puritan conformity. It totally shits me that this is considered by anyone to be good music. I know I often sound like a cynical misanthrope who hates any kind of positive feeling in music or art, but surely I'm not the only one who's horrified by the thought of legions of middle aged, middle class drones tapping their feet contentedly to this soulless nothing-music and nodding in approval at Frank's condemnation of the young people nowadays and their bad language. If we can take comfort in one thing from this song, it's that even back in the Fifties conservatives were sternly disapproving of the ever worsening morals of society, and that

most guys today that women prize today
Are just silly gigolos

You tell 'em Frank! It just goes to show that that attitude is all a bunch of bullshit.

And that's the last I'll be hearing of this guy, at least assuming I remember to delete the songs off my ipod.

Next up, Buddy Holly.

1001 Albums Number 6

Duke Ellington - Ellington At Newport

I've decided I should start doing these a little faster, since at the rate I'm going it will take two hundred and fifty years for me to get through all of these. This one is a live album recorded in 1956, and it's release re-ignited the career of Ellington and his band after a long period of unjust obscurity.

This is my first explicit exposure to Ellington and indeed the first 'real' jazz album I've ever listened to properly (I don't think Fats Domino or Louie Prima really count). Even despite my limited knowledge of the genre I can readily appreciate The Duke's compositional skill, and the performers are every bit as talented as you'd expect from a world class jazz act, hitting that fine line where cool sophistication overlays frenzied passion. It's not as wild and intense as say Charles Mingus (and I'm really looking forward to getting into that kind of stuff soon), but if you're in the mood for a light, upbeat, swinging time then this is the album to get.

The original release of this album was actually (shockingly to my modern expectations) rerecorded in the studio because the tapes of the performance weren't loud enough. The reissue contains these recordings but also restores the originals, thank goodness. Ellington's presence as he introduces the songs is charming and evokes the idealised figure of the classic polite but suave jazz front man. The band members are given plenty of chances to show off their chops in solos, and their personalities really come through in their playing. The centrepiece of the album is an impassioned performance of 'Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue', in particular the bridge containing a twenty seven chorus solo by Paul Gonsalves which single handedly brought the sedate, seated, middle class audience roaring to their feet. To be honest I don't quite feel what made the performance so amazing (I prefer Sam Woodyard's drum solo on 'Skin Deep') but it's hard to argue with the crowd, who can be clearly heard yelling and screaming and generally going crazy in the background.

Nice stuff. I shall add Ellington to my very, very long list of artists to listen to more of.

Next up, more Sinatra. Groan...

Mediocre Music In Brief

Listed in ascending order of shittiness.

Lamb of God – Ashes of the Wake

Ashes of the Wake is Lamb of God's most recent album before the mainstream breakthrough Sacrament. It's a perfectly decent record but I have absolutely nothing to say about it. The riffs are rhythmically complex and very catchy (and are a lot more metal than Sacrament) and it's delivered with respectable technical precision by all members of the band, but after I'm finished listening to it I'm just left with an underwhelming feeling of 'Meh. It was OK'.

Burzum – Hvis Lyset Tar Oss

My Burzum listening schedule is still fairly haywire. I've skipped one of the older ones, meaning that this is the third album, and therefore one of the mid-period classics. However I'm still not that impressed. For the first half an hour it's a total bore, retreading the same old stripped down riffs, ghastly vocals (his voice cracks like a school boy at one point during 'Inn i slottet fra drømmen') and grungy production that I found endearing but ultimately lacking substance on the first Burzum album.

Having said that I do really like the fifteen minute ambient closing track 'Tomhet' (Emptiness), which makes me hold off a little before judging this guy to be the most overrated musician this side of The Edge.

Fats Domino – This is Fats
1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die Number 5

Like the last album in this series, Louis Prima's The Wildest, this is a soft jazz album, but while I found a lot about The Wildest to enjoy, This is Fats was just a total bore. It's completely gutless with no swing or bite. Some of the later songs perked up my ears a little but by and large this is a dull affair.

Next up, Duke Ellington. My expectations are high.

The Blinding Light – The Glass Bullet EP

This came into my collection along with Converge's Jane Doe and Old Man Gloom's Christmas so I was half expecting yet another major musical revelation. These guys play fast, intense hardcore very much in the vein of Converge, and with a hint of Dillinger Escape Plan's rhythmic insanity. But despite being so similar to bands that I love, for some reason this EP does absolutely nothing for me. I'm at a loss to explain why, since it contains so many elements that have been proven to light my aesthetic fire in a big way, but even with a mere twenty minute running time I found the whole disc to be a serious chore to sit through.

1001 Albums - Number 4

Louis Prima – The Wildest!

Despite a poor start the old 1001 albums list seems to be holding up OK. Louis Prima, while no major revelation, is good, fun listening, and 'I Ain't Got Nobody' (come on, you know it) is a genuinely great song.

Prima is a jazz trumpeter, although this takes back seat to his singing on most tracks, and this album bops jazzily along in an agreeable manner, aided by his sweet voiced wife Keely Smith (twenty years his younger, so scandalous!)

Unlike the grim and mournful Tragic Songs of Life, this album is bright and bouncy the whole way through. The subject matter is a bit dirtier than on the other albums from this era that I've listened to. '(I'll Be Glad When You're Dead) You Rascal You' is about exactly what the title says, and describes Prima's heartfelt desire to see this person (or perhaps it's an animal) dead in an extremely jovial tone.

This album is similar to the Louvin Brother's album in that, despite the poppy manner of the music, it's content (in this case a little bit of raunch, in theirs murder and edginess) has a little of the transgressive nature of later styles of rock music that would descend from it.

1001 Albums – Number 3

The Louvin Brothers – Tragic Songs of Life

I'm pretty sure this is the first country album to show up on these pages.

Like most country music the compositions on this album are quite sparse, and the focus is on the vocal harmonising of the brothers as they sing sorrowfully about unrequited love, untimely deaths and southern American states.

The first couple of songs are twang-mungus paeans to Alabama and Kentucky and their distillation of everything cringeworthy about country music provides a challenge to getting into the album, but once past them it's generally a pretty agreeable listen. 'Agreeable' as in 'good to listen to' not as in 'happy fun times'. These guys sure have a heavy morbid streak, well over half the tracks are grim murder ballads or not much milder tales of broken hearts. The 'tragic' part of the title is well earned, and their maudlin style is a good fit for Nick Cave who covered 'Knoxville Girl' on his b-sides album.

Country music is not the best fit for my temperament, but when the mood strikes this album goes down pretty well. What I wrote about Elvis definitely applies here as well, in that these guys sing like they mean it, and that makes their sad stories (mostly autobiographical I believe) resonate even so many years later.