Manfred Mann started with jazz in his native South Africa, switched to the blues in early 1960s Britain and eventually got some international pop success. But come the 1970s, the times they were a-changing again. Now it was Manfred Mann’s Earth Band and things were getting expansive, progressive even, with Pluto the Dog a funky little number that featured the the kind of wigged out synthesizer freakout that the free world has never had enough of, then or now.
Note the question mark in the title. This is XTC telling it like it was in early 1978 – everybody confused about the new wild sound that was tumbling out of the punk eruptions and eviscerations of the previous year. But what was it? New Wave, claimed the marketing types, but that didn’t mean anything. That was just a way of selling stuff that wasn’t disco or metal or prog or just boring old rock. What it was, was pop, bullshit free, for the moment and all time.
Side one track one of possibly the greatest album ever, Negativland‘s Escape From Noise isn’t a song, but an announcement. Which is appropriate for 1987, it being a year where music didn’t suck so much as NOISE suddenly felt way too relevant. And nobody’s ever done NOISE as superlatively, as hilariously , as relevantly as Negativland, from suburban San Francisco (or is it Oakland?) – wherever Contra Costa County is.
Cool and soulful non-hit from Elton John‘s third album, 1970’s Tumbleweed Connection, which Philip Random maintains is his best “… mainly because it preceded the absurd levels of mega-hugeness that so devoured him by mid-decade. Apparently it’s a concept album concerning country themes, cowboys, dust, lust and, in the case of Where to Now St Peter? some heartfelt gospel yearning which truly sets the guy’s voice free. I mean, has any other white man, before or since, ever sung the word blue so thoroughly, completely, rhapsodically …?”
“Some bands flirt with the edge. Van Der Graaf Generator routinely operated as if it didn’t exist. Though routine is probably the wrong word, there being nothing remotely normal about anything they ever released. As for Killer (found on their second proper album), I tend to think of it as a white shark’s blues, concerning as it does the travails of just such a creature, loveless, having never known love, forever prowling, forever hungry, never sated, just keep moving, keep eating – oblivion either way.” (Philip Random)
The post Brian Eno, pre valiumized Roxy Music captured in full live force, taking an okay sort of half-country experiment from their first album and pumping it full of all kinds of delirious drama. Stick with it through the violin solo, the conclusion is as big and rich and mercurial as love itself. From 1976’s Viva! which was in fact recorded on Roxy’s 1974 tour.
Randophonic 