It was 1988 when I ditched radio and depended on magazines to direct my choices in music, and it was Pulse! magazine in particular that directed me to Throwing Muses. Back then, my knowledge of post-punk music extended to Midnight Oil, R.E.M., In Tua Nua and the Sugarcubes. I was hoping Throwing Muses would be the same.
Boy was I ever off the mark.
I bought House Tornado and listened to it. I couldn’t get into it. I played the album for a friend also exploring the same music as I was. He didn’t get it either. Thus humbled, I sold the album and used the proceeds to get something else. I’d buy The Real Ramona a few years later, but that was the extent of my interest in Throwing Muses.
In the ensuing years, I would listen to a lot of music. Some of it more challenging than Throwing Muses, some of it nowhere near as challenging as Throwing Muses. The Real Ramona would turn out to be a staple in my collection, an album so enduring it never got tired after years of repeated play. After a while, a little variety felt needed.
Nearly 20 years after my first encounter with House Tornado, I wondered what would happen if I heard it again. So I found it again, and I listened to it again.
At the time of its release, Blind Man’s Zoo finally found 10,000 Maniacs making music appropriate to Natalie Merchant’s increasingly dark lyrics. Previous singles such as "Like the Weather" and "What’s the Matter Here" seemed a bit too bouncy to be dealing with such subject matter as depression and child abuse.
"The Big Parade" and "Dustbowl" are two of the album’s most vivid songs, while "Headstrong" has a backbeat as stubborn as Merchant’s bullheaded narrator.
Then I went back in time to discover The Wishing Chair and started to perceive shortcomings in Blind Man’s Zoo. Merchant’s literary settings on that first album — a graveyard in "Lilydale", an old house in "Tension Makes a Tangle" — were concerned more with imagery than message. With Blind Man’s Zoo, the balance started to shift in the other direction.
As I moved my vinyl collection to CD in the ’90s, Blind Man’s Zoo didn’t make the jump. The album had fallen out of favor as the band itself started to run its course. It’s taken me 19 years to revisit this album, and I have to say — I was right the first time.
Blind Man’s Zoo is perhaps the band’s most focused album, if not one of its most powerful.
Ex-Boyfriends’ first album, Dear John, has such a contemporary sound — that’s a euphemistic way of saying it’s, like, totally in with the emo kids right now — it feels like it could date fairly easily.
The immediately likable hooks and the brash energy give Dear John a fighting chance at endurance, but there’s no betting on fashion. And Dear John is tres indie fashion.
In With, the band’s follow-up, shows definite signs of maturity. It’s not so quick to reveal its strengths, and its amiability can only be appreciated with multiple listens. What it lacks in quick gratification, it makes up for in long-term rewards.
As much of a Kronos Quartet groupie I am, they are not the be all and end all of classical music ensembles. Yes, Kronos was the first quartet I heard play a vast number of works — many commissioned by the ensemble itself — but taste can be fickle.
The Fitzwilliam Quartet reading of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 8 has a bit more bite, and the Emerson Quartet’s take on Charles Ives’ Scherzo: Holding Your Own is slightly more expressive.
Duke Quartet’s performances of Kevin Volans’ string quartets perhaps mark the first time I preferred another group’s version of works actually commissioned by Kronos. Hunting: Gathering includes two quartets also recorded by Kronos, plus the composer’s sixth quartet commissioned by the Duke itself.
Reviewing popular music is easy, especially when the people who write the music also perform it. Classical music, on the other hand, is more about interpretation, since the repertoire in question has already been thoroughly vetted. So it can be somewhat problematic when reviewing a piece that’s relatively new and doesn’t have very many recordings.
The only recording of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians I’ve so far heard is the 1998 performance by Reich’s own ensemble on Nonesuch. The piece itself has been recorded only five times, twice by Reich. The Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble is the latest ensemble to give this landmark piece a shot.
The story of the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble is something a Cinderella tale. The ensemble’s director, Bill Ryan, programmed a performance of Music for 18 Musicians to commemorate Reich’s 70th birthday. Sensing the group of college musicians (and one volunteer) could successfully pull it off, he brought five of the group’s members to New York City, where the "Reich @ 70" festival was under way.
Subsequently inspired by the trip, the ensemble’s performance in November 2006 was impressive enough to garner an invitation to the Bang on a Can marathon in June 2007. Ryan also sent a demo of the rehearsals to Innova Recordings, which recorded the group in January 2007.
At the end of his book The Rest of Noise, author Alex Ross describes a "great fusion" where "intelligent pop artists and extroverted composers speak … the same language." He demonstrates the point by comparing Björk with Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov.
If you were to listen blind to Björk’s "An Echo, A Stain," in which the singer declaims fragmentary melodies against a soft cluster of choral voices, and then move on to Osvaldo Golijov’s song cyble Ayre, where puslating dance beats underpin multi-ethnic songs of Moorish Spain, you might conclude that Björk’s was the classical composition and Golijov’s was something else.
With Oceana, my first reaction to the piece was pretty quick: Finally! The follow-up to Spiritchaser Dead Can Dance never recorded!
If you’ve ever watched Platoon, you’ve heard Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Go to any classical music section of a record story, and you’ll find the Adagio on just about every Barber CD in the bin.
Barber, essentially, is a one-hit classical music wonder with the Adagio. He joins Johann Pachelbel (Canon in D) and Carl Orff (Carmina Burana).
The Adagio, however, is the second movement of Barber’s only string quartet, a work seldom recorded. Even Kronos Quartet opted to focus on the Adagio instead of the whole work on Winter Was Hard.
The only recording still in print to contain the entire quartet is Emerson String Quartet’s Grammy Award-winning album American Originals. (At least, it’s the only recording I could find.) The album focuses on two American composers traditionally seen as opposites in new music history: Barber and Charles Ives. This album, though, shows Ives and Barber had common ground at some point — perhaps not ideologically but maybe aesthetically.
The story of my change of heart toward UA’s turbo is the story of my change of heart toward reggae music.
turbo is often described as UA’s dub album, and while there are tracks with an obvious reggae influence, it’s not the album’s overriding aesthetic. Thing is, the description of the album keyed into a bias I already had — I don’t like reggae music.
When I downloaded "Private Surfer" from Napster at the start of the century, I said "Ugh" when I discovered the track was reggae. So I explored UA’s other albums, eventually buying most of them, and I even acquired turbo from the Evil Sharing Networks just to be a completist. But I would make no effort to drop the cash for a physical product. That was in 2000.
I can usually zone out during the first quarter of any year. Releases generally don’t pick up till about March, and the holiday slumber takes about half of January to shake off. 2008 doesn’t seem to be conforming to that pattern.
Last night, I made a trip to Waterloo Records to pick up a number of releases from the last two weeks, and I’ve dropped quite a lot of change over at YesAsia for some new releases, which should be arriving in my mailbox in the next few days.
So the items on this list also join the items from my last post for hours and hours of auditioning. At some point, I’m going to have to write about them.
I had a lot of stuff I was auditioning to write about on this site a month back, but I had to do a purge and get some new stuff on the playlist.
Sometimes I’ll write these entries and wonder how I can put Kylie Minogue next to Karlheinz Stockhausen on a playlist, beyond the compulsion to alphabetize. Is there some tenuous thread in my subconscious to link the two? No. The point is there is no link. It’s easier to gauge the complexity of Stockhausen’s phrases next to the simplicity of Kylie’s hooks, as much as it’s easier to see the crudeness of Stockhausen’s electronics next to arsenal of effects employed by Kylie’s producers.