Unfashionable Music Alert

Sometimes, especially when you are stuck in traffic in Glasgow, as I was the other day, something noisy and upbeat is the only thing that will do.

AOR, Melodic Rock, whatever you want to call it has never been fashionable, but scratch the surface and you will find a lot of people admitting to listening as a "guilty pleasure". Why feel guilty about it? There is as much dross as any other genre but there are some great records both old and new waiting for you to sing along.

When The X Factor had a moment with Don't Stop Believing a few years ago (why it wasn't the winners single that year I don't know),  the Journey original shot up the charts. While Journey are far from my favourite band the song has most streamed/downloaded song status on many portals and in lots of countries.

Who should you be listening to and where do you find out about it?

Work Of Art. Four albums into their career, they have yet to produce anything below an 8 out of 10 record. Play this loud

 

Radioactive. I did a whole post on Tommy Denander a while ago. His name is a mark of quality and you should buy anything he is on. The Radioactive albums are his best though.

A recent album from a new band The Defiants, 'Zokusho' has been hailed as album of the year for 2019 in many quarters.

Terry Brock has appeared on some great albums, solo, with Strangeways and as a guest artist. This is one of his best songs.

Hopefully that has whetted your appetite so where can you learn more? Best magazine by far is Fireworks. There is usually a free digital copy to be had of a back issue here, so give it a try.

Rob Evan's AOR Underground appears in Powerplay magazine, which is a bit more heavy metal focused than Fireworks but still worth a read. He is also on Facebook here.

Melodic Rock, run from Australia by Andrew McNeice is the best online portal, lots of reviews and news.

And that is AOR/Melodic Rock. Way more to it than Journey, Toto, or Giant. If you like a good tune then this is the genre for you, and one that gets a lot of play on the iPod, especially in the car.

CD vs Vinyl (again)

If you don't read the Super Deluxe Edition blog then you should. As well as all the latest releases, editor Paul Sinclair always has an interesting comment on the state of the industry.

This week he has posted on the format wars, and I'm pleased to say agrees with my opinion that the vinyl revival is over hyped and that CD is in fact king.

Read it HERE and subscribe to his newsletter which is a good source of though provoking views.

Giving snobbery the Byrd.

As you may have noticed music snobbery is rife. Extremists shouting in support of their thing, and ready to leap to social media to tell you why your thing is rubbish. I'm not getting into the is X or Y artist Prog debate here because, frankly, I have a life.   

The 70s output of Blue Note Records has been seen, mostly by those for whom Jazz froze in 1962, as way inferior to the "heyday" of the 50s and 60s. My taste in Jazz was largely informed by The Kyle Cathie book 'Jazz on CD' by John Fordham. This introduced me to Hank Mobley, Lee Morgan and many others. What it skipped over was anything that crossed over into fusion, funk or rock. Bill Bruford's excellent Earthworks was dismissed, more seriously so was Miles Davis after 1969. The Mahavishnu Orchestra got a brief mention under John McLaughlin, who himself only merited a 20 word bio and 1 album suggestion, from 1969. Even in the mid 90s there was a healthy cd reissue market so that's not an excuse.

So, until very recently I missed out on the 1970's at Blue Note. I picked up Donald Byrd's 'Street Lady' at a charity shop, and it's great. If you are of the view that Fender killed Jazz with their Rhodes Piano and Precision Bass then try this, and the rest of the Mizell Brothers' productions for Blue Note, and other labels. A friend then reminded me about Quantic Soul Orchestra and introduced me to guitarist Wilbert Longmire, who doesn't rate a Wikipedia entry it seems, but try his 'Sunny Side Up' album. Jazz Funk, or Fusion, or whatever has therefore entered my life giving me something new to look out for. The couple of compilations I have bought suggest the quality is much higher than my previous prejudice would have allowed for. Why Steely Dan never found Longmire I'm not sure he would have fitted them like a glove.

Now, on second thoughts I am getting into the Prog or not thing. The doyen of Prog writers, Sid Smith, has recently pointed out on Twitter some of the hypocrisy surrounding the magazine of the same name, as well as the lack of actual progression in much of the music that calls itself "Progressive". By the numbers Genesis and Pink Floyd retreads do seem to dominate, but that doesn't mean there isn't some good music within the rough confines of Prog. Prog Magazine itself seems to be less worried about the definition than their readers, embracing everything from material that is closer to Folk to electronic music of the Tangerine Dream type.

Duke Ellington is credited with saying "There are two kinds of music. Good music, and the other kind". The rest of the quote from an article called 'Where Is Jazz Going?' in Music Journal from 1962 is ... "the only yardstick by which the result should be judged is simply that of how it sounds. If it sounds good it's successful; if it doesn't it has failed." For me the definition extends far enough to include, if it makes you feel good it doesn't matter what label it carries or what other people think of it.

Keep right on 'til the end of the year.

2019 has come and gone, and with it music releases that I found and missed. As usual this is about the stuff I picked up on this year rather then what was actually released in 2019. 

Lonely Robot: John Mitchell's trilogy concluded this year with 'Under Stars' following Please Come Home (2015) and The Big Dream (2017). If you like updated traditional style Prog Rock then this is for you. Good tunes, good playing and enough "modern" to stand apart from the 70s pastiches.

Jazz has had a bit of an off year for me. With much of Jazz Journal's website disappearing behind a paywall, and off cuts of Miles and Coltrane being touted as earth shattering events I'm struggling to find much to recommend. However The Comet is Coming. 

Work Of Art are an AOR/Melodic Rock group who in a parallel universe are the biggest band in the world. While still not quite equaling the highs of second album 'In Progress' 'Exhibits' is still the best of a cracking year of releases from genre leading label Frontiers. I'm going to be talking in detail about this unfashionable corner of music soon so will save some more suggestions for then.

I've done a couple of round ups of what I was listening to as the year went on, in September and March. My views remain pretty much unchanged on those records, although I may be a little less harsh on the Miles Davis disc having listened some more, still not a classic though. I did a review of the Americana world, which has had a classic year HERE. Visit my colleagues Jonathan and Helen's opinions on 2019 as well, clearly more music to pick up on in 2020. In fact read the whole of Americana UK from top to bottom.

One artist I have rather lost track of this year is Bill Nelson. His new website is slow to load, hard to navigate and thus I have largely stopped visiting. The forum is not the lively place it once was, and judging by the number of off topic posts those who do post are not finding anything to discuss in Bill's recent work.

Thanks for continuing to read my ramblings. The first couple of months topics are already planned, so let's see whats out there...

Neil Innes

I was a bit young for Monty Python and only really came to that with 'Life Of Brian', I was though exactly the right age for The Rutles. I had watched Rutland Weekend Television found some of it a bit baffling, but I remember the musical bits, from a band called Fatso as the best parts of the show.

I'm not sure when I saw the Rutles "biopic" 'All You Need Is Cash', but in my view it is far superior to Spinal Tap as a pop parody film. I did buy the album some time later but didn't really play it until some years later when I started to get interested in The Beatles. I hadn't appreciated that it was the quality of the songs that made the parody so believable. 'I Must be in Love' and 'Ouch!' have sat on mixtapes and playlists alongside Badfinger, Oasis and other less funny Beatles parodies for years.

The whole "Scousness" of this is just fab, or perhaps prefab...

By now I was a proper Neil Innes fan, I discovered the Bonzo Dog Band, going to school in Keynsham helped there, and when Innes Book Of Records started in 1979 I watched religiously. Again great songs, the standout "City of the Angels" stayed with me until getting the cd reissue of the resulting albums years later.

I have followed his solo albums, seen him at Edinburgh and elsewhere several times. I was one of the seven people who bought The Rutles 'Archaeology' and if you want to catch up, a bit late, then try Recollections – Le Duck’s Box Set which has a dvd of selected bits of Innes Book of Records.

Another Innes highlight. In 1997 I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue had him substitute for pianist Colin Sell, and he took part in the Pick Up Song round with I'm The Urban Spaceman. It must be online somewhere seek it out, sublime.

So, sad today, but thankful that I found Neil Innes and for the privilege of watching and listening to him. This is 'City of The Angels', my personal favourite of all his songs.

Americana UK

I've had a couple of articles posted on this august portal recently.

In the "What Is This Americana Thing Anyway…?" thread I got my turn to reminisce, so pretty much what I do here then. 

Then I had a go at the A-Z of Americana, and picked Alison Krauss. 

And in a last plug the Americana UK awards are open for voting. I can't join in, but you can...

A Physical Presence

For a blog that is meant to be about my iPod I do seem to spend a lot of time talking about physical media. As everything physical ends up on the iPod at one time or another I make no apology for this.

I follow Cloudland Blue Quartet on Twitter, and listen to his podcast, which you should also do. He ran a poll recently and out of 98 votes 58% went to CD 41% to vinyl. The interesting part though was the comments. The main vinyl supporters' arguments were based around sampling rates and kilohertz. That or have a valve preamp etc etc. The CD advocates talked about convenience.

Back in the mists of time, 1983, I worked with my Dad selling 78 records, valve radios and wind up gramophones. Every so often some high quality vintage hi fi kit would come along which would get snapped up by collectors. They would spend a lot of time telling me that it was far batter than anything you could buy new. Then the 78 collectors would come along and tell me that an HMV model 194 was the gramophone to have. In fairness a decent condition disc played on one of these things did sound ok. They weighed about the same as a small car however.

What this all says to me is that the hobbyist will always find a way of adding complication to the simple matter of sitting down and listening to the music. Their choice of music seems to be usually dictated by the "quality" of the recording rather than their connection to the music or words. I love The Nightfly (one of the audiophile gold standard albums) but it doesn't have the incendiary quality of the first Clash album with its cardboard box drums and
patchy (at best) mixing. Oh and my vinyl copy of Donald Fagen's album had pops and clicks and muffled sound. My CD has lasted since about 1990 and still plays perfectly.

I know 'each to their own', and 'live and let live' may be unfashionable views these days but let's embrace them. You play your vinyl, and I will carry on with CDs. Just please don't try and convince me that something that reproduces music by dragging a piece of diamond across a bit of plastic has some mystical "better sound".

The other thing that makes CDs the way to go is that they are cheap. There are some great second hand shops spread around the country, some of which I've mentioned here before, but also charity shops. I love charity shops, the thrill of the chase as you can never tell what you are going to find, and the chance that you will happen upon a collection having been deposited there by someone's ex spouse or whatever. I could tell you about some finds, jazz, prog rock, obscurities of all sorts. The only disappointment is when a shop, usually a books and media outlet has been rooting around on Ebay and massively overpriced something otherwise desirable. Yes I'm talking about you, Oxfam record shop Byres Road Glasgow.

So until the world notices I will carry on picking up CD bargains, and experimenting with new music, including after a bit more study of Mr Quartet's twitter, the undiscovered country... Classical Music.