Album Reviews

True, The Who were once called The High Numbers, but can you imagine a more self-loathing album title than The Who By Numbers? Painting by numbers or doing anything by "the numbers" usually connotes rote work. It was an honest assessment of the album.

Dennis Wilson didn�t sing very well in the conventional sense of the word: his pitch was frequently off, he warbled, his vocal timbre was raspy and calling his range �limited� would be an overstatement.

Very few singers can get this close to a dry microphone, be balanced way forward of the backup band and sound as good as Peggy Lee does on this series of standards backed by a pair of small ensembles, recorded in 1953 and 1956. Neither the original nor the reissue notes explain the album’s temporal context so perhaps there’s no story there.

You had to be there, and I was.

Listening to a straightforward, blues/gospel-drenched comping session like this reminds you that jazz has lost its soul today and aims mostly for the head. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s good to get back to the essential, visceral nature of the genre. This set, recorded in New York at an unidentified studio or studios on three days during the summer of 1963, let’s you know why.

In the nervous, jumpy, wiry world of guitar-driven late ‘70’s-early ‘80’s post-rock intellectual punk, popularized by bands like Gang of Four, Buzzcocks, early XTC and (more broodingly) Wire, Mission of Burma was America’s premier practitioners. They probably accrued more legend than record sales, though.

Memories can play nasty tricks on the mind. Events long since past that once seemed sublime can turn out to be anything but when the time machine slides them into the present.