Bee Gees - Cucumber Castle
Bee Gees - 2 Years On: Treating them together because (a) this was the beginning of their pre-disco commercial peak (who hasn't heard, and loved, "How Can You Mend a Broken Heart"?), (b) the two albums fit on one CD-R, and (c) I know and love them inside and out. If you know the Bee Gees only as a disco or psych-pop act, check out their "ballads" period between the two. The two albums have one major difference in the person of one major Gibb: Robin left the band in a snit, coming back only after Barry and Maurice had put out Castle. Nevertheless, the closing, country-tinged "Don't Forget to Remember" is in the top three or four Bee Gees songs. Similarly country-tinged "Sweetheart" is luscious. God #### this album is cool. 2 Years On is good, too; the highs are a little less high but it's a great little "slab" with the favorite "Lonely Days". They even gave the Prodigal Gibb lead vocals on the pretty if overwrought closer. This is such a great period for the band.
Bee Gees - Trafalgar: Yo Trung, this album is better than From Genesis to Revelation. The first side is among their very best: I'm thinking the first, all-Bee-Gees side of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack is the only side that compares. The album is very lush-sounding, one might say schmaltzy; you might call the immaculate recording and production slick. Me? I eat this shit up. All the songs -- all of them -- are great; the disc kind of reminds me of Pills 'n' Thrills & Bellyaches. The soaring, Robin-led "Remembering" is both exquisite and ridiculous and you need to hear it right now. "Lion in Winter" is one of the best songs they ever did. This and the samba album (see below) I've spun a metric assload of times while making my way through my recent purchases. Acquire this one! Probably the group's best album. (Note: I'm blazed off my fundament right now and I just smoked, then turned this album -- that is to say, Trafalgar -- on and typed this. So if I'm not making sense, it's the reefer talking. Q: How do you know somebody is high? A: They'll tell you. Yeah, old joke, with vegans, New Yorkers, evangelical Christians, etc.)
Bee Gees - To Whom It May Concern: Meh. The worst of the ballads era. There are some great tunes here, but a lot of forgettable ("I Can Bring Love") or generic ("Run to Me" -- a very nice song but among the blandest of melodic songs from this era) tracks, too. I've spun the hell out of this one, hoping for it to catch steam with me, but half of it still passes completely by. "Paper Mache [sic], Cabbages and Kings" is at least different, a fine throwback to the quirky upbeat tracks of a couple of years before; it's catchy as hell. I remember "Alive" being really good but for the life of me I can't remember anything else about it except that it's slow and is better than the Pearl Jam song (which, contrary to Billdudian belief, is not bad). They had shot their wad with Trafalgar and rushed out this album a year later. Not awful, but their fourth album in three years, and all pretty similar.
Bee Gees - Life in a Tin Can: Criminally underrated, or at least underrated by George. This was one of the first albums of theirs I bought -- a thrift-store find -- and loved it, and still do. How is this any worse than To Whom It May Concern? There are only eight tracks over about 35 minutes, both numbers on the Brothers Gibbs' low end, and maybe the songs are a bit janky. "Living in Chicago" ("If you're living in Chicago, it's your home / If you're living in Chicago, you're alone") is goofy, yes, but it's oddly touching in its nonsensicalness. I put it on a mix CD for an old friend who had moved to that city and wasn't doing well; he appreciated it. "Come Home Johnny Bridie" is the obligatory fast number on the otherwise all-/mostly-slow album and the obligatory country number. It's awesome. Maybe a couple of songs are shit and others are (sometimes nastily) underwritten, and melody isn't the record's strong suit, but this isn't nearly as bad as George says/has said, with something like five or six songs in blue. I haven't heard the next album but wouldn't blame them for changing direction. In any case the R&B/disco era is right around the corner.
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Various - Brazil Classics 2: O Samba (comp. David Byrne): Listed first because it's just that damned good. I wouldn't want this to be my only music, but it's pretty perfect as a CD. All the songs are Exactly. The. Same. but that's part of what makes it so glorious. The liner notes are impenetrable, full of pretentious essays about the soul of the samba; reading about the religious aspect twisted my melon. Also in the liners was that this collection spans the decades, but with the odd exception (mostly from telltale production signs) I can't tell them apart. Nitpick: there are translations of the lyrics in the book, which is great, but not the original texts. Kind of jarring is how these voices (and in a lot of Brazilian music) are coming from ordinary-looking black dudes. I don't know if I really need another samba album after this but when I want that beat, the melodies, and the incessant backing vocals on every track, I know what to put on.
Gilberto Gil - Quanta Live: This is one of those fun live albums like those of Mano Negra/Manu Chao or Pet Shop Boys where it's like a big party-atmosphere lovefest and where the overall experience is greater than the sum of the tracks (well PSB made great songs but you get the idea). It's a 1998 recording, well into his career, which was Jesus! 24 years ago. There are a few reggae songs, Bob Marley covers, even, which is the perfect number of them. As usual, the fewer and less generically reggae-like the songs, the better; it's like the blues in that it's an influential genre that gave rise to some better ones, but in themselves can be dull as dishwater and good mostly for seasoning. More than a handful will spoil the batch, but that handful can be a real highlight. I don't usually read reviews when I'm listening to an album but the Wikipedia page lists a good half-dozen musical styles for the disc, if not more. In any event Quanta Live is a wonderfully good time, even if I overplayed it a little and got kind of sick of it after a while. Pace yourself.
Paul Gonsalves - Gettin' Together!: Gonsalves is well known as Duke Ellington's tenor saxophonist, but he signed on with his band in 1950, a later period that I either am not familiar with or don't particularly care for, and my greatest association with the guy is the famous "diminuendo/crescendo in blue" at the Newport Festival. The blurb and liner notes stress that Gonsalves performs admirably and without sounding like simply a "Duke's man" in this solo effort, playing with young performers in an idiom far different from big band: this is a quintet performance with Nat Adderley on cornet. Again, I'm not familiar enough with Golsalves' career with Ellington to say, other than that he's quite versatile. "Walkin' sounds totally unlike the Miles Davis version. (From what I've heard, the live Miles Davis versions sound nothing like "the Miles Davis version".) Solid disc.
Andrew Hill - Eternal Spirit: A 1989 album, still LP-length, with Hill joined by Bobby Hutcherson, Greg Osby on alto, and Rufus Reid and Ben Riley on bass and drums respectively. Osby eats up most of the time. He's good, but doesn't thrill me (I'm not too hot on the alto sax in general though). Reid is a very solid bassist with some imagination; he mostly doesn't content himself with being in the background and will spice up a lot of what would otherwise be more generic jazz. He works masterfully backing Hill. Hutcherson doesn't have as much of a role. The songs on the album are just fine and it's very listenable post-bop; I wouldn't go out of my way to pick it up, but give it a shot if you see it. Hill held up over the decades: I have the later/final album Time Lines and that's even better than this. (There's a split-second intrusion of a woman's voice about five minutes into the opening track: glad I established that; it can be disconcerting when you're hearing voices in the jazz album!)
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Rameau - Pièces de clavecin, suites in A, E, D minor (Sophie Yates): These -- the sorts of pieces, not the particular recording -- were what I was looking for when I bought some of Couperin's, which were very good. Rameau was almost an exact contemporary of Bach or, rather, Rameau's life encapsulated Bach's. It's useful to compare this kind of harpsichord suite to Bach's, and to illustrate French vs. German music. There are three suites on the disc: the first is a grand introduction, the third is filled with those little character pieces they did where a piece was titled things like "les danseuses" or "le clochard". The second, middle suite has a couple of those but otherwise use the typical sonata-da-camera dances as in a suite. The second suite couldn't quite hold my attention, long after I had absorbed the other two, which are quite good. Recommended.
Reger - Piano Concerto (Gerhard Oppitz; Bamberger Symphoniker/Horst Stein): In 1976, the members of Yes went their various ways to record their solo albums, and the world was without a Yes album for the year. Enter Starcastle, a soundalike band, whose self-titled debut sold massively and then the band was never heard from again once Yes got back together. It's like Delta-8. Well what do you do when you've played out the standard Romantic piano concertos? Play this Reger work. The recording and music are both totally fine. Kind of takes you back to when you were first getting into classical music, when Brahms and Grieg were still fresh. Is the Reger concerto a great work? Probably not, but, for me, that's beside the point.
Reger - Mozart Variations, Symphonic Prologue to a Tragedy (Norrköping Symphony Orchestra/Leif Segerstam): Max Reger had five names! Johann Baptist Joseph Maximilian Reger. The symphonic prologue, I have no idea if it's any good, because it's a single 32-minute track that will not unfurl itself. It'd be awfully nice if it had been broken into more cueing points (or cueing points at all) because it's hard to get into as it is. The other work -- the Mozart variations, on a theme I don't think I'd known -- is exactly the sort of thing you think it'd be. Another throwback to Brahms' Haydn variations, if not further. I paid $7.99, which was awfully steep for an enjoyable if lightweight set of a variations and an impenetrable blob of a "prologue", but I'll probably be coming back to this one. I read somewhere that Reger anticipated 20th-century harmony but I don't hear it at all.
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Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar: I just beat this and I'm worn out. I put in 28 hours (well, the program was open for 28 hours; actual playing time is more like 26) with a walkthrough. (I played it in two bursts separated by seven months because I switched to Final Fantasy.) Without a guide we're looking at like 50-100 hours: the dungeons are unfair -- the last one took over an hour, and it's the most difficult dungeon in the game; if you die or answer a question wrong you're taken back to the very beginning, for another hour of hacking and slashing. There are also a lot of secret dungeon passages that don't show up on maps. Thankfully there's a major glitch that you can exploit to get essentially unlimited money, and with that money you can easily max out your party's stats and buy the most powerful weapons and armor and stuff you need to beat the game. You can't use the glitch until you're most of the way through the game, naturally, although fighting is easy and I never came close to dying: the hardest workout is your brain. It's a great big open world (in 1985!) with some of the least intuitive and user-friendly controls, and with some of the more primitive graphics, out there; there are some elements to the game that make sense once you're aware of them, though you wouldn't have been able to figure them out on your own without a huge amount of patience. Most of the game is spent collecting the items you need to beat it. One of the greatest games ever, and incredibly, deceptively, difficult. Now back to FF4! Next PC game will be Shadowgate (a high-tech remake, quite far from Ultima's tile-based EGA graphics.)
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