Five discs of Steve Reich works for roughly $40 comes out to $8 per disc. That alone is reason enough to get the "specially-priced" boxed set Phases: A Nonesuch Retrospective.
Sure, you could squabble over what was included or excluded — no Clapping Music? — but Nonesuch had already released a comprehensive set of Reich recordings in 2005. The composer celebrated his 70th birthday in 2006, and the label compiled Phases to commemorate the occasion. It serves more as an introduction to the composer for new listeners, and for the bargain-minded, it’s a real deal.
I’ve admired Reich for years, and I own some of the recordings included in Phases. But I can’t say I’ve explored his works as thoroughly as I would have liked. This set gave me the opportunity to fill in some gaps.
There’s nothing incredibly impressive to hear the first time you play Dark Light Daybreak by Now It’s Overhead.
There are no flashes of virtuosity, no stretches of intensity, no trickery behind the sound board, no gimmickry in the songwriting. It’s a guy in a studio with a bunch of guitars, a rhythm section and at times a drum machine.
Now It’s Overhead started off as a studio project for sound engineer Andrew LeMaster, but it’s evolved into a full-fledged band. Dark Light Daybreak sounds like the result of such a development.
The only thing that could possibly reel a listener in is the sense there’s more to music than what the surface indicates. It’s catchy if only because it’s not trying to be.
I decided within the first week of listening to Mindy Smith’s Long Island Shores I was going to give it a lukewarm review.
But real life kept interfering with my writing time, and I kept putting it off. By the time I was ready to set word to pixel, something strange happened — Long Island Shores took root in my subconscious.
I would wake up some mornings with the songs from the album playing in my head.
What happened between that first week of listening till now?
The Killers made me realize something about how I pass judgment on the quality of music I consume. To wit:
Some albums are good, and some albums are good enough.
The albums that are good are ones you take for a spin time and again, and you look forward to that kind of repetition. The albums that are good enough are ones you take for a spin, just because nothing else at the moment appeals to you.
In terms of the Killers, I made the following distinction:
I have a hard time perceiving St. Elsewhere by Gnarls Barkley as anything but an indie rock album.
Yes, Danger Mouse comes from the hip-hop underground, and Cee-Lo was a member of Goodie Mob. By virtue of those credentials, St. Elsewhere is a hip-hop album.
But there’s a level of psychological exploration happening in the lyrics that go far beyond the few hip-hop albums I’ve encountered in my largely rockist life.
"The Pills Stopped Working" is the pinnacle track on Hem’s third studio album, Funnel Cloud. It also effectively kills the album.
Having mastered a lyrical, pastoral style of songwriting, Hem had only one way to challenge itself — write something in a quick tempo.
The two songs sporting this newer, extroverted style — "Too Late to Turn Back Now" and "The Pills Stopped Working" — mark the midpoint of the album. It’s a welcome change the band handles incredibly well.
There’s a bit of Engrish word play happening when UA and Kikuchi Naruyoshi bill cure jazz as a "standard jazz" album.
Indeed, there are jazz standards on the album, but the strictly acoustic setting — not a pop hook or an exotic sample to be found anywhere — makes it a "standard jazz" album.
In classic UA fashion, she once again challenges her listeners by making another seismic creative shift. It’s fitting with the big band abandon of Sun and the avant-garde electronics of Breathe.
Like Number Girl or fra-foa, the sum of Supercar was greater than its parts. The chemistry between the band’s four members — Nakamura Koji, Furukawa Miki, Ishiwatari Junji and Tozawa Kodai — gave Supercar a forceful presence as a unit.
Now that unit has disbanded, and it’s a challenge for a listener (that is, me) to see past the whole and to appreciate the individuals.
Ishiwatari and Tozawa have gone onto production and session work. Nakamura embarked on an impenetrable electronica project named iLL. Furukawa, on the other hand, picks up where Supercar left off.
Mirrors, Furukawa’s debut solo album, features the mix of British rock and electronica that fueled Supercar’s muse.
I can appreciate from where Love Psychedelico comes. The duo loves their classic rock, but there’s little point in slavishly recreating that era’s low-tech sound. So they indulge in the convenience of a drum machine or the cleanliness of a studio environment.
And it’s not like they’ve written bad songs.
But it wasn’t evident just how much gets lost in the studio till Love Psychedelico recorded some performances at Budokan for its live album, Live Psychedelico.
The band is on fire from the start, and the songs possess an energy lacking on their original recordings.