It’s no use. Whatever I try to do, I am hopelessly distracted by the Athens Olympic Games. Synchronised diving, beach volleyball, women in top hats and tails performing impractical acts on horseback (no, wait, that was a porn channel I accidentally stumbled upon), and countless other, more traditional tests of human physical achievement: who’s got time for anything else? So I think I’ll bid farewell for a week or so, leaving you with one final instalment of this ongoing externalised interior monologue.
More CDs borrowed from the local library, ingested and returned:
Rickie Lee Jones “The Evening of My Best Day”: Ian Penman, whose own shortlived blog was the reason I got interested in this caper in the first place, has long been an advocate of Rickie Lee Jones’s voice. While I can appreciate its unusual mix of vulnerability and strength, her songs haven’t always grabbed me. It’s really the same with this disc. I expect I will come back to it someday, because it has left some kind of positive mark on my brain, and any record with guest appearances by Bill Frisell, David Hidalgo and Mike Watt (!) cannot be lightly dismissed, but I’m not yet ready to heap as much praise on it as I would like. Any song called “Tell Somebody (Repeal the Patriot Act)” would normally have me running for the exit doors (pop music and politics don’t usually mix well), but Jones manages to somehow turn into a handclapping, gospel-tinged singalong that even the right wing of the family can enjoy.
Velvet Underground “The Velvet Underground & Nico: Deluxe Edition”: boffins can probably itemise the differences between the mono and stereo versions of what is unquestionably a cornerstone of the canon. I will concede that the mono version has more of a sense of restrained menace, but that might be due to nothing more than a natural consequence of the confined physical space that goes with monaural sound. Would happily listen to either version, but can’t honestly see the reason to own them both.
Gene Ammons “Boss Tenor”: nothing particularly startling or ground-breaking here, just a session of good old straigh-ahead hard-bop blowing, and there’s always room for more of that.
“Scotch and Sofa”: if I had a “lounge”, and that “lounge” played “lounge music”, this is the kind of “lounge music” I would play. A themed “remix” of assorted songs from the Blue Note vaults is an appalling idea in theory, but works perfectly well in practice.
Ultravox “Vienna”: I had this idea that I had allowed my teenage hatred of Midge Ure (for backstabbing John Foxx out of one of the great early post-punk bands) to cloud my opinion of this record. I needn’t have worried. With the exception of the title track, which, if nothing else, was at the time a genuine new direction, this is puely and simply a bad record. Songs about a New Europe, the nuclear threat and future humans over unremarkable synth and guitar work. The upside, of course, was two bloody brilliant post-Ultravox albums by John Foxx, which we may not otherwise have had.
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Youssou N’Dour “Nothing’s In Vain”: I never really took to this supposed titan of African music (then again, I was never that much of a Bob Marley fan, either). Give me the simple purity of Baba Maal’s “Djam Leelii” any day. A curse on those French for luring so many great musicians to Paris and making them record albums containing synthesisers and horn sections.
Phillip Glass “Koyaanisqatsi”: a bad CD remaster means that this doesn’t add much to the vinyl version I have owned for many years. But it’s still a great soundtrack.
The Byrds “The Notorious Byrd Brothers”: the best bits of this fairly dull instalment of Roger McGuinn’s ongoing vision already appeared on the Byrds four-disc box set (in particular the remarkable David Crosby outtake “Triad”, which seems to be about shacking up with not one but two blonde underage girls (well, we are talking California at the turn of the 1970s). David, it may have seemed a fine idea of a thing to do, but the merits of then writing a song about it are lost on me.) This reissue is notable for “Moog Raga”, a totally self-explanatory song title for a piece which is interesting for 15 seconds and then goes on, and on, and on, and... DJ Shadow might be able to do something with it.
