Album Reviews

1969 Velvet Underground Live (Mercury SRM 2-7504) starts off with Lou Reed talking up the crowd for a minute and a half before even starting “Waiting For My Man”.  He asks the crowd if they have a curfew, if they prefer one long set or two sets: “Whichever makes it easier for you”.  He encourages the handful of fans to “Settle back, pull up [their] cushions…and whatever else you have with you that makes life bearable in Texas,” and even mentions how the Cowboys killed the Eagles earlier in the day.  Pretty standard pre-show preamble—yet completely bereft of the ego-adrenaline fueled yawp of, say, “Hello Cleveland” that Spinal Tap made famous and that Van Halen apparently took as gospel.

 

I nearly lost my best friend in one of the worst taping accidents ever. Lending him my copy of 1969... to dupe for a much anticipated road trip, I was mortified when upon pushing it into the Blaupunkt that it went straight into song.  When I questioned (alright, interrogated) him, his response was: “I wanna hear tunes, not some schlep talk about football.” 

 

Suffice it to say, things were never the same between us again, and after losing him to the great Guns N’ Roses-Nirvana wars (he fought for the Axl of Evil) of the early nineties, we lost touch altogether.  However sad, and even true this story is, it proves that along with religion and politics, one should not discuss the Velvet Underground.

 

Bright Eyes, however, is a different story.  Conor Oberst is the petite protagonist of the piece in question, and for all intents, he is Bright Eyes.  What greets your ears when you drop the needle in the groove (or, ahem…push play) is not music at all, but the groggy voice of a young man who coolly sips at a glass of what I hope is water, and who proceeds to tell a story of a woman flying on a plane to see her fiancé.  After a futile attempt to converse with a fellow passenger, she reads an article about a third world country she can’t even pronounce to fight the boredom. Suddenly, an engine gives out and as the plane plummets towards the ocean, she asks the silent passenger where they are going.  His response is that they are going to a party: a birthday party—her birthday party, and that they all love her very, very, very much.

 

Just as with that Velvet Underground album, many a soul will be tempted to pass over the prose and get right into the lead song, “At The Bottom Of Everything.” A mistake really, as his rambling offers an important introduction to the piece you’re about to hear.  Indeed, it sets the tone and feel of the entire album, and is not some exercise in self-indulgent fulfillment, but an odd statement of purpose that makes the album wholly complete and understandable in such a way that you end up wishing it hadn’t.  Listening to I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning is like stealing someone’s micro-tape recorder cassettes that have been filled up with disturbing thoughts and observations that are so personal you can’t help but to feel ashamed as you listen from the confines of a locked washroom stall.  Like our recent voyeuristic-fetish fascination with “Reality TV,”  I’m Wide Awake evokes the feeling of a guilty pleasure.

 

The album is as New York as anything by Paul Simon or Lou Reed, but from the perspective of a transplanted Nebraskan who’s young enough to feel he can change the world, but wise enough to know he can’t.  He’s lovelorn and fragile, melancholically sedated yet hopeful in his new land of child prostitutes, drugs, and neon signs that call to him in a language he vaguely understands.  Yet at the end of day “it all boils down to one quotable phrase: if you love something give it away.” That line, from “Landlocked Blues”, can almost be seen as a signifier for the entire album—that he is in the excruciatingly painful limbo of awaiting the second half of that quotable phrase: if it truly loves you, it will come back.

 

The songs are wonderfully recorded with spare, mostly acoustic accompaniment that features: mandolin, vibraphone, trumpet, and pedal steel to round out the guitar, drums, and bass that typify the alt. folk sound that Conor Oberst has come to represent.  So affecting is his voice (delicate and nasally soft yet with an ability to scream out lyrics like he just punctured a lung), that combined with his lilting arrangements, it took me a while to realize the woman harmonizing with him on three of the tracks was indeed Emmylou Harris.  No small feat considering the impact her voice can impart on a song, and doubly so considering I’m a die-hard Gram Parsons fan who after many years still sheds a tear every time I hear “A Song For You” and “Love Hurts.” It’s a refreshingly uncompressed sounding album that has a live-in-the-studio type feel to it, with cracked vocals and bum notes (however few and far between) left on for time to judge; and for audiophiles to drool over as they call up their friends to see if they too heard the cough on track three coming from the left speaker that is undoubtedly to be blamed on that damn pedal steel player.

 

Yet for all the audio-knobery (an affectation, I promise) and great melodies this album offers, it’s Conor Oberst’s ability to express dark feelings that every human at one point in their lives has felt that makes him so engagingly endearing.  It’s not some gloomfest, “my world is falling apart at the seams” type diatribe going on here, but rather a heart- felt outpouring of emotions that most of us are too self-conscious and ashamed to verbalize in any real way lest we be seen as abnormal and weak that sets this album apart from others; that more often than not come off as self-serving and contrived.  Oberst has had enough of, to quote Modest Mouse mainman Isaac Brock, "that Mad Max bullshit,” and has in the process served up a platter that almost approaches Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks in transcendental- soul scouring- scope and complexity.

 

The classic Phil Spector Christmas album is Sundazed’s holiday gift to us all. Mastered in glorious mono from the original mono master tape (while Phil didn’t do stereo the late Larry Levine, Gold Star Studio's premier engineer produced a very good stereo mix in the early 1970's).

Scoring a concerto for violin and cello provided pianist/composer Brahms with an opportunity to create a piano like texture by simultaneously using the low and high-pitched strings to create keyboard-like chords.

If you're saying Monk's creative juices had begun to dry up by the time he signed with Columbia Records and released this 1963 label debut album you'll get no argument from me. But Monk, all of 46 when this was recorded, had a secret weapon: his rock'n'roll band of the hard-blowing Charlie Rouse on tenor sax, John Ore on bass and Frankie Dunlop on drums.

A cold-steel stoic intensity inhabits the faces of Canadian folksingers Ian Tyson and Sylvia Fricker on the cover of their 1965 Vanguard album Northern Journey. The photo’s low light and blue cast amplify the title’s message. Combine the front cover with the scholarly ethno-musicalogical liner notes you’ll find on the back—perhaps a reflexive reaction to the commercialization of folk music back then and an attempt to separate Ian and Sylvia from many trite, packaged folk acts of the time—and you have an almost forbiddingly chilly surface.

This Memphis Slim record is special because it was an impromptu session, occurring at the end of his first “scripted” Candid date. As the tunes rolled out, it became clear to producer Nat Hentoff that Memphis’s playlist was comprised of “Traveling Music.” The blues great suggested the album title. I learned all of this from the liner notes.

Sundazed's decision to issue Blonde on Blonde using the much sought after mono mix is indicative both of the company's dedication to doing what's musically correct, and of the vinyl marketplace's newfound maturity. There was a time a few years ago when no "audiophile" vinyl label would dare issue a mono recording; audiophiles wouldn't stand for it was the conventional wisdom. Perhaps back then it was even true. Today, with Sundazed, Classic, Analogue Productions and others issuing monophonic LPs on a regular basis (and one has to assume selling them as well) listeners are appreciating the music for music's sake, and equally importantly, for the wonderful qualities of monophonic sound reproduction. The choice was also pragmatic, as the original stereo mix-master reel was rendered unusable back in the 1970's. It wore out from being repeatedly used to cut lacquers. That tells you that second, third and possible higher pressings were cut from the original tapes and probably sound pretty good, but there's nothing like an early "360 Sound." Subsequent remixes from the 4 track masters were made, including a particularly bad one used on Columbia's early '90s "longbox" gold CD - a must to avoid. A recent remix, supposedly supervised by Dylan is said to be much better, but even an original stereo doesn't hold up the nuanced, musically coherent mono mix.