Category Archives: All Vinyl Apocalypse

1,111 greatest records you probably haven’t already heard

845. pengosekan

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Vic Coppersmith-Heaven (now there’s a name) was a sound guy, producer, engineer (big in the early days of punk and before), who somewhere along the line, got his own thing going, tripping out some very earthbound grooves and sounds, including working with a certain monkey chant (from both beyond and before time) indigenous to the Indonesian backwoods. “I found Pengosekan on on 1982’s Music + Rhythm, a fundraiser for Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD Festival and, in retrospect, one of my essential compilation albums of the decade. So-called World Music started there. At least, it did for me.” (Philip Random)

846. big brother

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Even Stevie Wonder could see it by 1972  – just how f**ed up everything was, particularly if you were stuck in the ghetto, and the whole world was a ghetto in 1972, even that quaint, white, dull as death suburb you called home. Yet there was still hope, there had to be, because the music was just so beautiful.

steviewonder-1972

847. love in vain

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By 1969, the Rolling Stones were all messed up on heroin, cocaine, super stardom, yet still somehow capable of being true to an original Robert Johnson blues. It’s possible Satan was involved.

rollingstones-1969

848. five miles out

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“I don’t generally buy Mike Oldfield as a pop contender. That’s just something he had to do for a while in the 1980s to shift a few units so he could keep cranking out the big deal epics. But Five Miles Out (found on the album of the same name) definitely rates, if nothing else, as one of the weirder singles to ever at least flirt with the charts. Ethereal vocals c/o Maggie Reilly, vocoder and metal licks c/o Mr. Oldfield, and a story being told of a small airplane caught out in hurricane weather. Or if you’re thinking metaphorically, it’s about any of us at a crisis point. Sometimes, you’ve just got to fix a course, and hold true, either get to the other side of the storm in question or get annihilated trying. At least that’s how my friend Charles put it to me, late 80s sometime, having emerged from a very dark point in his young adult life. He made it.” (Philip Random)

(image source)

849. mind at the end of the tether

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It’s 1987 and Tackhead are already delivering it, even as Public Enemy are talking about  bringing it. The Noise, that is. Big beats, no bullshit, as many samples as you can jam into two inches of audio tape. And in the case of Tackhead, genuinely hot playing, because they were most definitely a band. “I seem to remember the original 12-inch single version of Mind at the End of the Tether being the better one – stronger, less cluttered. But the version on the Tape Time album speaks its the truth regardless. Superlative and loud and surrounded by tracks of equal cacophony. If you truly wish to know what the latter part of the mid-80s felt like, start here.” (Philip Random)