Spiritualized - Everything Was Beautiful: (I've completely changed my mind about this grower of an album but didn't feel like writing it up again. Here are my original thoughts.) Their new one. One review called this their best since Ladies and Gentlemen and they're wrong: I prefer the more subdued, personal albums such as the first few and some of the 2000s/2010s albums over the more extraverted stuff like this. (I didn't much like their last one, And Nothing Hurt). The album consists of seven long songs, easily the lowest number of tracks on a Spiritualized record. The opening "Always Together with You" is either love-struck bliss or a hook stretched to its breaking point, minutes too long. Good song, though. The rest of the songs are like that: kind of aloof grooves that have no emotional resonance but feel good (kind of like opioids themselves), without much of a melody. "The Mainline Song" distills the best of the album into a euphoric groove. Not terribly druggy, actually, as its title would suggest. The cover is absolute ass.
Bee Gees - Mr. Natural: Wow. They really hit the Seventies here, with production and atmosphere reminiscent of Elton John or ELO, stuck between balladeering and turning disco. With that edge there are a few rockers, which hadn't been in a Bee Gees album in years, and they lean hard into R&B influences. If you ask any black man what the funkiest Bee Gees album is, he'll tell you Spirits Having Flown, with this not close behind. Nearly every track has some kind of black-music element to it except for the closing "Had a Lot of Love Last Night", a farewell to the ballads-era Bee Gees, gently following "Heavy Breathing". "Heavy Breathing" lays the groundwork for practically their entire late '70s output. They hadn't developed their falsettos yet, but make no mistake: this is the beginning of the Bee Gees everyone knows. The album is really enjoyable though.
Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil - Temporada de Verão (Ao Vivo na Bahia): I ordered a lot of three Veloso discs on eBay for like ten bucks (hey, broadening my knowledge) and this is one of them. The subtitle means "Live in Bahia" and the liner notes (in Portuguese, dammit) say it was recorded in 1974. It's half, or more, really good; the other half -- sometimes in the very same song -- is not, mostly the longer ones with no chorus or really even any melody or refrain, the singer being the primary attraction. Since I don't understand the language I don't get much out of those ones. Veloso has a really nice voice. Gilberto Gil's music is happiness, although two of his songs here can test your patience. I guess Gal Costa is okay? There's but a morsel here (two short songs).
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Quincy Jones - This Is How I Feel About Jazz: This is one of those quasi-twofers that cut a couple of tracks to make it all fit on one CD. This Is How I Feel, Jones' 1957 debut as a bandleader, is entire, and the follow-up, unnamed on the packaging save for "bonus tracks", is poorly reviewed on AMG and is incomplete, so I'm ignoring it. If you've heard other jazz albums by Jones or Gil Evans or whoever, you've got the blueprint for this one: personable, hardly profound solos by big names over an easygoing big-band groove. You could go so far as to call it semi-background-music -- you can turn it on, shut it out, t hen dip back in and out of it when the music strikes your fancy -- but it's good relaxing music, too. Hard to believe Jones is still with us 65 years later (at age 89). One of his better albums overall but I've only got two others of his jazz albums (Walking in Space and Big Band Bossa Nova). I'd put this somewhere between the two, probably closer to Space (towards the top) than Bossa Nova. Again, lightweight stuff, but recommended. This "Walkin" (the song, not In Space) does recall the studio Miles version.
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Schubert - Piano Sonata D.960, three Lieder (w/ Ian Bostridge, tenor) (Leif Ove Andsnes):
Schubert - Piano Sonata D.960 (Wilhelm Kempff)
Recital album - Two Hands (Piano Sonata D.960 et al) (Leon Fleisher): The Andsnes is the new purchase. I don't know what number the sonata is; it's not in the tracklisting. I've actually barely touched the Schubert sonatas, but this is justifiably called a great one. Fleisher plays it very well, in the splendid style, but the Andsnes, I think, is the best. It's not as outwardly impressive but it beats the Fleisher in melody and feeling and structure; he uses his pauses quite well: before the exposition repeat (giving it the feel of a recapitulation); there's only the blink of an eye between the first two movements, highlighting the stark key change. For the equal and opposite reason, there's almost no pause between the scherzo and the lively minor-key rondo finale suggestive of Beethoven's third piano concerto. The generously-portioned songs ("Viola", "Der Winterabend", a shorter one) are ####ing beautiful and, if you're on the fence, should convince you to give the CD a listen.
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Cambridge Audio Melomania Touch wireless earphones/earbuds (still a loaded term)/IEMs: Bought these to use with my phone, and they're probably designed for it. For the last number of years I had been using shitty $20 pair of wired headphones with it, and they've started to fall apart (oddly the cord is still good). I have the receiver and CD player of Cambridge's entry-level line and am really happy with them, so when ads for the Melomania starting spamming my FB feel I naturally checked them out. The name comes from the fact that you can control playback by tapping and pressing the earbuds, which are touch-sensitive; this means that if you touch them at all you're going to, at best, pause the music. I actually don't have much trouble with accidentally touching them because (a) the buds fit in the ear comfortably and nearly weightlessly; and (b) you don't need a super-tight seal to get decent bass, so the only time I touch them is when putting them in or taking them out; I'm not constantly adjusting the fit when they're in the ear. They're comfortable for hours with no pain or discomfort (I have an unusually-shaped left ear canal that most in-ear earphones have trouble with). Sound is very good: it would be silly to expect wonders from a phone full of Opus files, and the Melomania are about as good as you're going to get there. With the Bluetooth I was able to link both my phone and my computer, and high-bitrate MP3 and FLAC files sound good. I didn't pay nearly as much as I did on my Sennheisers: $100 (regularly $120). Huge drawback: you have to re-pair every time you take them out of the case, and every time you switch from phone to PC (which I guess is unavoidable. They advertise a nine-hour battery life before they have to be recharged, but that's only with the very most conservative settings and low volume. In real-world conditions it's more like 3-4. But this is nitpicking.) What also will be irritating in the future is that the charging cable is proprietary, basically USB-C but fully oval and not trapezoid. There are a lot of gee-whiz features touted on the box that I haven't tried, like an equalizer and a "transparency mode", which doesn't filter out room noise. I can go anywhere in my apartment and keep connected to the phone signal; the balcony is spottier. The computer seems to have a range of ten feet, so I guess it varies. Recommended product.