Let’s discuss any and all music here. You’ve got a new artist who’s rocking your boat that you want to talk about? Post a video! Found out about that unearthed Coltrane album that has the jazz freak in you losing your mind? Lay it out for us! Do you have a theory about what your favorite band might do for their next album? Let’s hear it! Anything and everything music-related goes here, but do please remember to also pay attention to the more niche threads; if your post would either fit better or equally well in one of them, please post it there as well. I absolutely do not want to steal traffic from those threads.

Prompt for this week (suggested by Bobson Dugnutt): How do you find new music (word of mouth? online reviews? spotify suggestions? Bandcamp front page?)

 

Sigil’s Music Journal (2018-07-26/2018-08-02)

41. Volcano the Bear – Commencing (2015). This is a giant five LP, four hour, career spanning boxset for one of the weirder bands out there. Like a few other bands I like quite a lot (Sun City Girls, Nurse With Wound, Current 93), their approach is based less on the constraints of a genre or ‘sound’ and more on a sort of overall aesthetic. As such, there’s a huge variety of material here, from psych songs, to free jazz, to more traditional folk songs (sort of). I don’t actually own the boxset; I’m streaming this from Google Play. As such, this is a less than ideal listening experience. I try to break it up by only populating my play list with the tracklisting on each side, which does help, but it’s unfortunate that I don’t actually have the physical object. It’s intimidating to sit down and attempt to listen to such a huge endeavor (and I’ve got much huger endeavors in my collection), but I was pleasently surprised by the experience. There’s a lot of good stuff on here. I’ve been toying with the idea of just ordering the damn thing, but it’s $105, and that’s pretty damn steep. 9/10

42. Jesus Christ Superstar (1970).  I used genuinely enjoy this as a child, at some point I ironically enjoyed it, but now I’m back to genuinely enjoying it. Bombastic, overdone, and possibly too long. Also surprisingly heterodox, which I don’t think I realized until much later in my life. I do have to say, the fourth side is mostly garbage. It’s necessary for the narrative, but it isn’t particularly fun or interesting.  Right now, I’m really digging “Gethsemane (I Only Want to Say)” and it’s emotional delivery. That’s no surprise, though, The agony in the garden is my favorite part of the Passion (and really the whole gospels), it’s Jesus’ most human moment and the most relatable and most valuable, to me, from a literary and even theological perspective (even though I’m not religious). However, I don’t like when Jesus comes down and yells at his disciples for sleeping while he prayed. Dude, you were praying for an hour and they were drunk. Chill out. 9/10

 43. Lil Ugly Mane – Third Side of Tape (2015) At over two hours long, this collection of experiments, and oddities from an already experimental and odd artist, is a bit much. But that seems to be part of the value. Lil Ugly Mane is ostensibly a hip hop act, but this is only tangentially hip hop, there’s some portions with rapping and hip hop beats, but a lot of it is weird instrumental diversions. It’s overwhelming and somewhat unnerving, but it’s also interesting and unique. I would say, though this may not mean anything, that it is hip-hop version of Swans Soundtracks for the Blind. 7/10

44. Jim O’Rourke – Simple Songs (2015). Jim O’Rourke makes amazing pop records, but he is most definitely not a pop artist. So every once in awhile he’ll kind of shake out a pop album like a goose laying a golden egg. This is his latest, and the songs are bigger here, though he still sticks to his bitter lyrics for the most part. The sound is great, though it’s odd, the record is cut relatively quite. That’s probably an intentional decision as Jim seems like the kind of guy that completely rejects The Loudness Wars. 9/10

45. Reformed Faction – I Am The Source Of Light, I Am Not A Mirror (2009). And we’re back again to another overly long record. Reformed Faction has two ex-members of Zoviet France, Mark Spybey and Robin Storey. Zoviet France’s early output is great, but it’s been out of print for years, and it’s doubtful it will come back in print any time soon, as it tends to be one of those ‘art object’ things. So, when this came out, contained in a weird metal box, I jumped at the opportunity. Um… so Zoviet France traffics in atmospheric soundscapes and this is… Well, it’s dub, for the most part. It’s more informed by the ambient genre than reggae (though that’s still in there), but it is pretty much dub all the way through. that’s not a bad thing, per se, but I never really listened to this very much after the initial run, which is significant at three hours. It’s pretty good over all, but there’s a reason I sold it a long time ago: 5/10

46. Noah Found Grace (2010). My experience with this record is a bit contentions, and has tainted my view of it. In 2010, I signed up for a subscription service from the now defunct Social Music Records. I forgot how many releases it was, but I ordered the cheaper cassette version, rather than the vinyl. Well it never came. After awhile I started contacting the label owner and he said that he was working on the cassettes, and that they’d be there soon, in the meantime, here’s the digital files. After a couple months, I said fuck it and just put a complaint into PayPal. He paid me back right away, but I never got the cassettes and I didn’t get the second package of releases. Over all, what I did get wasn’t spectacular (which included this along with a Sir Richard Bishop album, a Califone split and some band called Cloudcraft). So I’m a bit bitter at this record. But it’s not bad. It’s a compilation of Jamaican Gospel music, obviously recorded and released in a fairly amateurish way. The title track is particularly good. But, at the end of the day, I’m not sure I need a whole record of this. After awhile I get a bit bored. There’s a good variety, but it’s just not very exciting to me. 5/10

47. Death Blues – Ensemble (2014). One of many projects by Jon Mueller, most notably from Volcano Choir. On one of my 33rd birthday, my wife and I decided to go see this band play. The show was good, but, much like this record’s packaging, the presentation was a little overwrought for what you got, featuring a visual component and spoken word before the show. The music is middling to pretty good post-rock, but that’s about it. The last track, Masked however, actually does go to some interesting places as it builds to a climax with horns that’s a little more free jazz oriented than the rest of it, which sounds almost too polished to be interesting. 6/10

48. Squarepusher presents Shobaleader One – d’Demonstrator (2010). Tom Jenkinson will never reach the heights of creativity that he displayed on Music is Rotted One Note. All of his other albums have been a sort of let down. This is a late stage album, and I don’t really know why I bought it. It’s sort of rock music with autotuned voices and kind of crap sounding electronic instruments in place of the typical instruments. It’s very okay. The first few tracks are the best, by the end it just turns into a dirge. 6/10

49. DKV Trio – Sound in Motion in Sound (2015). Okay, sure, here’s yet another enormous boxset in the same week. This one is six hours long. Thankfully it’s all great (if a little overwhelming). The DKV Trio consists of Hamid Drake (drums), Kent Kessler (double bass), and Ken Vandermark (various reed instruments). I don’t think I’ve heard a lot of drum, bass, sax trios, so I can’t speak definitively about how they operate, especially in a free improvisation setting, but in this case the drum and bass create a very groove oriented back drop for Vandermark’s reed work. None of the participants are strangers to looser improvisations, but there’s a lot of repeated phrases here, along with more ecstatic solos. It’s a fabulous set. 9/10

 50. Pink Floyd – The Wall (1979). I mean, it’s The Wall. Pink Floyd represents a formative moment in musical preferences. This certainly isn’t my favorite Pink Floyd album, but it’s up there. I can’t really objectively judge them or this album now. I’ve largely moved on from Pink Floyd, but I don’t feel like I could downvote this because it’s so central to my personality. Exempt

51. Exploded View – Exploded View (2016). This is a bit of a hidden gem from a couple years ago. Really deep bass heavy vamping with Annika Henderson, sounding like a ghost Nico, haunting over it. I’ll admit, I was heavily influenced by their video for Orlando, which features a couple of drug addicts crashing a country themed party, before riding on bicycles in ecstasy. That sort of dirty, depraved beauty is a major part of the appeal of this record. 9/10

52. David Bowie – Stage. 2017 Edition (2017/1978). There’s probably another version of this floating around my library. In general I don’t really like live rock albums (even though I’ve had many of them over the years). Often times, it’s inferior versions with crowd noise. Of course, that obviously depends on the band, and I do think a part of it is that they just make me want to be at the concert instead of sitting in front of my computer. That’s all to say that I’ve never actually listened to this whole thing, until now.  As far as selection goes, I don’t think I could have a better set list for Bowie than the one presented here, and there’s plenty of jamming going on. The version of “Jean Genie” on here is fantastic, it’s crazy that this was the first time it was included. 7/10

53. Miles Davis – The Complete On the Corner Sessions (2007). Seriously? You’re going to give me 7-hour boxset now? Guh. Anyway, this was part of Columbia’s milking reissuing of Davis’ entire output on their label. These were the last sessions Davis was a part of before he dropped out of music (and everything else) for three years. They’re probably the pinnacle of the fusion studio work (Agharta and Pangea are probably better in total), and as a result they’re just totally wild. 7 hours, admittedly, is a bit much to sit through of this stuff, but that has more to do with how I’m approaching my listening than any deficiency in the package. Regardless, I feel like fusion is a younger man’s game. I would never dismiss this like it was by jazz critics for too long, but I prefer the more Melodic Miles, I think. 8/10

Record of the Week: Exploded View – Exploded View. For some reason, picking any of the big boxsets seems like cheating, and this is such a good album I want to highlight it. Plus they’re coming out with a new album next month.