Revolutions!
Selecter: Reformed Republican
Listeners: Glyph, Slade the Leveller, krogerfoot, aaron david
RR: Anathema are a band I used to listen to in high school. Back then, they were a slow, symphonic, death-doom metal band (Serenades is a good example of their sound from the time). At the time, they got a lot of play, but at some point my tastes changed, and I decided their stuff was boring. Last year, I started seeing them mentioned on some different prog-metal discussion groups, so I decided to check out their newer stuff, and instantly fell in love.
Weather Systems is their most recent release (though they have a new album on the way). It has been in my playlists almost constantly since I discovered it. I listen to it at least once per week, though is usually more often than that.
Selecter: Glyph
Listeners: Reformed Republican, Slade the Leveller, krogerfoot, aaron david
Spiritualized – Lazer Guided Melodies (1992 – 61min.)
The debut album by one-half of Spacemen 3 (Jason Pierce), it continues and deepens that band’s investigations into contemplative, despairing, or ecstatic states. As with their forbears in the Velvet Underground, those states may be induced by chemicals, religion, love, white noise, or any intersection thereof.
The minimalist-maximalist album has shifting layers of guitars, strings, chimes, and horns in its weave of rock, ambient, and alternately cosmic and pastoral orchestral music. Think Pink Floyd driving a Moonlight Mile down the Autobahn (or, as Robert Christgau quipped re: Spacemen 3, “Stooges for Airports”), and you’re getting there.
The album is broken up into four color-coded suites:
(Red) “You Know It’s True / If I Were With Her Now / I Want You” – 13:12
[Birth, molten magma. Love]
Where everything begins.
(Green) “Run / Smiles / Step Into The Breeze / Symphony Space” – 14:45
[Youth, nature]
The sound of wonder at being alive, and able to move, in the world. “Run” mashes JJ Cale’s “Call Me The Breeze” together with the VU.
But it ends on an ambiguous note – the burnt-out, confused hum of “Symphony Space”.
(Blue) “Take Your Time / Shine A Light” – 14:09
[Adulthood, sky]
Starts out brooding, with the narcotic pulsing drone blues of “Take Your Time”. Then comes the gentle space gospel of “Shine a Light”, the first of two overt Stones nods, ending on a rocketing, ascending noise freakout carrying us out of the blue, and into the
(Black) “Angel Sigh / Sway / 200 Bars” – 18:54
[Death, space. Enter the void]
Some editions of the CD have what is either a mastering error, or a great false-start prank embedded in “Angel Sigh”: after a minute-long, gradual fade-up intro, the song “skips” back to its beginning, sending thousands of confused ‘heads scrambling over to peer at their stereos as the build-up starts all over again.
We end with the reflexively-punning “200 Bars”, which finds our exhausted hero on a quest to obliterate his pain in the titular tippling establishments, and has a duration of – you guessed it – exactly 200 measures (“bars”), all metronomically counted off in deadpan monotone by band keyboardist and then-muse Kate Radley (their breakup several years later would fuel Spiritualized’s breakthrough Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space.)
Selecter: krogerfoot
Listeners: Glyph, Slade the Leveller, aaron david
krogerfoot: Tells the story of foiling the police’s attempt to plant a joint on him and arrest him at his self-declared Fela Republic in Lagos. He promptly swallowed the joint, and was taken to jail to await the evidence’s eventual reappearance. He worked out a deal with another prisoner to swap their, um, output.
Selecter: aaron david
Listeners: Glyph, Slade the Leveller, krogerfoot
aaron david: Best band ever, Marc Ribot, M’shel Degochelo, Ornet Coleman
These are my cans.
What are you guys using?Report
earbuds, until I can dig out my Sennheisers.Report
There are some nice (and inexpensive) earbuds out there now. I’ve had good luck with NuForce.Report
I think I got the discontinued precursor to those. It’s like having the back seat of a Lincoln Continental on your head.Report
Close the comments down, nothing is gonna top that.Report
I have the Bose ones. Missed the club, though.Report
I added you to the dist for next time.Report
I got some decent speakers for gaming, so I am using those. My headphones are not very good.Report
It just got a little shoegazey there, with the girl singing…Report
I’m a sucker for these kind of found spoken-word samples.Report
No headphones for me. I want the neighbors to hear!Report
Starting to sound like a dive bar in the chat room.Report
This album has a few things that appeal to me. The music is a bit dramatic, perhaps over-the-top at times, with orchestral elements and dynamics. Also, many of the tracks run into one another, and the have a fairly consistent mood to them. I like albums that are conceived as a whole, even if they are not concept albums, instead of those that sound like a bunch of individual songs thrown together.Report
Re Spiritualized, I passed up a lot of chances to buy this CD used. The cover art looked tinkertoy compared to Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space, which is a triumph of packaging, and the live record, so LGM just never wound up in my cart.Report
Honestly, every Spiritualized album to me has been diminishing returns, with fewer and fewer tracks I like on each one and more and more reliance on certain Pierce tics (notably the “everybody-play-everything-including-the-kitchen-sink-at-once-free-jazz-freakout” thing).
But IMO this album might be the single best album he’s ever done, and that includes my beloved Spacemen 3.Report
Ultimate headphones record.Report
I’ve long considered creating a Fela DIY app. Create your own Fela song.
Song length: 13, 19, or 25 minutes.
Number of horn and sax intro solos: 5, 9, 13
Number of baritone saxes: 3, 5, 8Report
I can’t understand the Lagos pidgin Fela uses when he sings, but Nigerians happily have a penchant for quoting vast selections of lyrics in YouTube comments.Report
Oh, my gosh, what a great time. Terrific meeting you all. And I though I had eclectic musical taste.Report
Sorry Slade! Next time…thanks to everybody, and feel free to make suggestions as to how to make the next one better…Report
Lazer Guided Melodies is in the top 5, along with Loveless, Ramones, Raw Power, and White Light/White Heat.
I remember when I first listened to it, I was going to work, my car wasn’t working and I had been taking the bus for a few weeks but that day my roommate let me borrow his car. I put the cassette in (yeah, I bought it on cassette) and things were so easy that day.
It is really amazing how much great music came out in 1991-92.Report
LGM is 100% awesome. Pure Phase is maybe 80%. By Ladies and Gentlemen…, we’re down to 50-60%- don’t get me wrong, the good songs are real good (and the packaging as krogerfoot notes is excellent), but Pierce is really starting to rely on that one “noise” trick.
The ones after that usually have a few good songs, but…
…and man, his voice sounded like hell on the last one. I know he’s been very sick, but yeesh. Plus that was an awful album cover.Report
@d-clarity – if you want to be added to the invite for the next one, just let me know.Report
Sounds cool but Friday night is band practice, I will have to watch from the sidelines.Report
Oh man, someone chose a Joe Henry album!!!!
I am so sorry I missed it.Report
We had some technical difficulties at the start, and poor Slade couldn’t catch a break, but overall I think it went pretty well.
I think next time I am going to change the rules slightly: people were getting a little antsy by the end of an hour album, so I think we want to cap albums at an hour (though if someone goes like 65 minutes, I am not going to cry). But krogerfoot and aaron both chose what was essentially a “side” and not only is it easier to hold people’s attention, we got more variety in the time allotted. There’s some good, long albums out there that get disqualified, and that stinks, but maybe if someone chooses one of those, they can cut a “side” to get it down to an hour; or else, we’ll do occasional parties where longer albums are accepted.
The other thing was, for some stupid reason Google Hangouts doesn’t let you get a transcript of the chat. I had originally thought I’d just copypasta the whole thing, but it would have required constant work (so I wouldn’t be listening) and I would have needed to be careful to scrub ppl’s real names from it before posting it here, and I didn’t want to risk that. So I am not sure the best way to resolve that awkwardness of trying to chat AND comment on the post here; but the comments here don’t really reflect the total conversation.Report
@glyph https://support.google.com/hangouts/answer/3115403?hl=en
Maybe try this? We would NOT want the witty repartee lost to posterity.Report
@slade-the-leveller – thanks, but as near as I can tell from my research (Google comment boards, and also opened a video Hangout to see if there were settings I could change), that doesn’t apply to Video Hangouts, just the chat-only ones (if you can confirm otherwise, please let me know).
Which of course, we could ALSO run, but I’m not sure that’s any easier to manage than a concurrent OT post…Report
Glyph, thanks for your charming hostliness the other day. The carpet was clean, the beer was cold, I’m sorry about what apparently happened to your pool and I’ll bring back the sofa cushions that somehow ended up at my house as soon as I can.
Though it might go against the traditional listening party concept, how about making it a YouTube party, where the participants go karaoke-style, cuing up a video at a time? I love albums, but as we discussed in the Sonic Youth thread, most of my favorites are like novels, with lulls punctuated by occasional blasts of terror. Making it a singles party would let us get in a lot more variety—concert clips, TV appearances, interviews, short films, etc. I know that might be a little too like the Friday Night Videos format, but part of the appeal is hanging out together and commenting in real time.
What do you think?Report
I like the idea, but with a few ground rules – no choosing a 25-minute GY!BE track for your turn. We’ve got to keep things to a relatively short duration, so people don’t get crowded out (and have to sit through 25 minutes of something they hate, and then they cue something 30 minutes long next, for revenge). Each clip would need to be =<5 min,. IMO.
But along with this, I can think of a few other permutations - say, choose a theme for the night and everybody comes with something that fits the theme.
Or, like I say above, we do some nights where long (> 1 hr) albums are the rule. Or EPs, or album sides, or whatever.
Let’s leave the next one as-is for now – I want to judge interest and turnout – but we may want to do them more frequently, and try out some of these variations.
The other thing I want to check next time is whether I have to be present for the scheduled Hangout to work. I plan to show up a few minutes late, and see if y’all are able to start the party without me. I definitely can’t attend all the time, but if I don’t have to be present for them to work, we could designate a “Dungeon Master” to host each one, and they could set the rules for theirs as they wish.Report
I tend to be unfashionably early for everything, and I was the first one there last time. I had no problem getting into it, though I did not attempt to start a video or anything.Report
Next time, go ahead and start up a video, and see if others can see it. If they can, we’ll know that it works without the scheduler there, and that means I can schedule as many as makes sense for the interest level.Report
Start up the chat too. I could also schedule a placeholder MD post to appear at the same time, that way even if nobody with posting privileges is attending, there would be an open comment thread to use.Report
Note to anyone creating a gmail address specifically for this (say you don’t want your secret identity revealed): use a plausible name. I was unable to attend this week’s party because Google had suspended my Google + access (which is apparently required for Hangouts) because the name on my 10 year old gmail account was rejected (it was just “Mixing Memory”).Report