Album Reviews

The Blakey was cut from 96/24 files according to Chris Bellman at BG Mastering for the surmised reason: the songs were on multiple tapes and the most expeditious way to produce cutting masters was to first digitize. The annotation wasn't clear but I don't think anyone was "trying to pull a fast one"._MF). It was Beatlemania when Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers landed at Haneda Airport, New Year’s Day, 1961. Of course, The Beatles hadn’t yet happened, but neither had Blakey and his group ever been greeted in America with the rousing enthusiasm they encountered both upon landing and during the series of shows in which they performed in Japan that month.

Uniquely deviating from the overplayed standard holiday music fare, Yen Records’ We Wish You A Merry Christmas is a Christmas LP actually worth your time, energy, and money. With exclusive material from Haruomi Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi, Miharu Koshi, Taeko Ohnuki, Moonriders, and others, it creatively rounds up the YMO orbit in a cohesive holiday listen.

Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, released in September 1991, captured late 80s/early 90s UK rave culture’s peak. Unlike that era’s other UK “guitar bands” making dance music, Primal Scream was a Rolling Stones-esque rock band that—with the help of producers including Andrew Weatherall, The Orb, Terry Farley, and Hypnotone as well as singer Denise Johnson—drew from acid house in a seamless transition towards the current time. While it now sounds a bit dated, it remains a well-produced, relevant piece of rock history whose energy transcends any stylistic setbacks.

In June 1968, to record their second album Wow/Grape Jam, San Francisco psych rock band Moby Grape traveled to Columbia Records’ New York studios. Towards these sessions’ end, guitarist Alexander “Skip” Spence vanished with an acid mystic known only as “Johanna.” Her LSD induced a three-day trip, during which a paranoid Spence turned against his bandmates. Two days later, Spence reappeared at the band’s hotel with a fire axe; when he didn’t find them there, he hailed a cab to the studio, ready to attack. “His eyes were like one-arm bandits,” producer David Rubinson recounted in 2009. Police arrested Spence, who then spent five months in Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward.

Ella Fitzgerald's Christmas album is a secular holiday delight sure to please every listener, even atheists and agnostics. Originally released in 1960, the sound here is warm and inviting as a Yule log burning in the fireplace—once you get past the opener "Jingle Bells", which is somewhat brighter, brasher and more in your face than the rest, though having Ella in your face is hardly problematic.

The cover of Fishmans’ “new” live LP Wakainagaramo Rekishi Ari (“Young, But With History”) might mislead you: after all, the drummer is wearing his own merch, the bassist’s baseball cap is far from stylish, and the eccentrically dressed frontman appears disconnected from reality, completely lost in his own music. And unless you live in Japan, you won’t see Fishmans albums in record stores, nor find them on “greatest albums” lists. So, what’s all the hype about?