Monthly Archives: September 2016

949. remember the future [part 1]

Posted on by
Reply

Nektar being one of those so-called prog bands that never quite made it over here in the Americas. Maybe because they were from Germany, and how many German bands made it in the 1970s? But they were English actually – they just met in Germany and ended up staying there. Maybe it was their live show, a little too ambitious and unwieldy to travel well. Or maybe they were just too musically out there, as they perhaps were with the entirety of Remember The Future a full album concept concerning a blind boy and an alien and everything, really. So we only have Part One listed, the first side, the better side.”

950. as you said

Posted on by
Reply

In which Cream, one of the key inventors of HEAVY, prove they can do dreamy acoustic every bit as well. “I always just assumed this was Donovan song, until one day I finally sat down and listened to all of Wheels of Fire, and what do you know? It’s Jack Bruce. A definitive 1960s artifact either way, sounding damned important, revelatory even. Not that I’ve ever actually cracked what it’s about. Change, I guess, seen through psychedelic shades. And you’ve gotta love that cello.” (Philip Random)

cream-jackbruce-cello

951. celluoid heroes

Posted on by
Reply

In which The Kinks, a little past their 1960s glory days, stretch out a bit and release one of the saddest songs known to man. “I remember hearing it on the radio as a kid and almost crying. And that was many years before I’d seen any number of friends (and friends of friends) throw everything they had into some kind of showbiz career, and not just for the art of it, but also the glory, the big dream of being loved by everyone everywhere forever. And none of them ever achieved it. Nobody ever does really. Because those famous folks you see everywhere all the time – they’re not even real, just hallucinations created by the hunger at the heart of the Spectacle.” (Philip Random)

952. beyond the valley of a day in the life

Posted on by
Reply

In which the Residents sample the Beatles and make such a glorious mess of things that rumours eventually surface that they are in fact The Beatles themselves, undercover. And all of this at least a decade before sampling-stealing-pirating in the name of art had even begun to achieve hip status. “I actually heard this when it was new in 1977. Not that I was remotely cool at the time, more the opposite. A friend’s big brother heard me talking loud about how progressive rock was the only music that really mattered, because it was so inventive, so ambitious, so strange … so he got me high and set me straight on the fact that there were far, far stranger things going on out there in the name of music than I ever could have imagined.”

residents-beatles

953. I don’t remember

Posted on by
Reply

“Peter Gabriel’s third album was a world changer for me, a 1980 call-to-arms from a guy who’d done more than his share to help define the 1970s. Which in retrospect was an all too rare phenomenon – a 1970s player who didn’t mostly just embarrass themselves in the next decade. What did Gabriel have that so many didn’t (including his own fellow band members, regardless of record sales)? If I had to narrow it down to one thing, I’d say curiosity. He had no interest in sticking with what he already had going. He wanted more. Not in terms of money, fame, whatever – but understanding. Or in the case of I Don’t Remember, enlisting the likes of Robert Fripp to unleash the right kind of heavy and relevant confusion.” (Philip Random)

petergabriel-remember

954. Holland 1945

Posted on by
Reply

“The cut-off date for this list is officially August 2000, because that’s when I started putting it together, though you may have noticed there’s precious little in the way of 1990s stuff included. This is because it’s an all vinyl apocalypse that I’m exploring here and I pretty much stopped buying new vinyl in 1989, mainly because that’s when CDs took over (for worse more than better, I’d argue, but that’s a whole other tangent). One album I did need to own on vinyl was 1998’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel. Because the cover’s a damned fine work of art, so I wanted it big, and because it just had to be heard in analogue form, with hisses and crackles, and all manner of other sweet imprecisions. And, in the case of Holland 1945, all that semen staining the mountaintops.” (Philip Random)

neutralmilk-aeroplane