PFM (short for Premiata Forneria Marconi the name of a restaurant apparently) being the best damned prog rock outfit to ever come out Italy, Celebration being a playful rush of classically infused rock that’s so nimble and smart you don’t have time to realize how ridiculous it is.
Original San Francisco hippies Quicksilver Messenger Service lay it all out for us with the lead off track from their debut album, a cover of a folk tune written by a guy named Hamilton Camp which sees fit to condemn us all to perdition, or worse. For it is written in The Book.
“The popular argument is that the Alice Cooper Band peaked with Killer in around 1971 and were pretty much finished after 1973’s Billion Dollar Babies. But f*** the popular kids. Muscle Of Love had a bunch of cool and sleazy and deftly conceived highlights, including this little love letter to NYC, which was no playground in the 1970s, unless you were a rat. No idea who or what Hippo is.” (Philip Random)
Back in NYC‘s just odd and intense from beginning to end, and particularly in the middle, nothing really sounding like you think it should, but why would it? It’s Genesis (the earlier, better Peter Gabriel version) at the peak of their powers tearing all preconceptions to shreds. Found at about the one-quarter point of The Lamb Lies Down on a Broadway a double concept album concerning a Puerto Rican street punk named Rael who sees the world end one morning on Broadway, then somehow finds himself lost in a purgatorial netherworld wherein convoluted stuff happens that even Peter Gabriel (who wrote lyrics and sang the song) was probably never quite clear on. Which may just explain some of the rage here.
“Nobody’s ever going to care that much about what happened in 1997 unless they were born or maybe they lost their virginity, or they saw God on some acid trip. But the rest of us were all fixed on the End by then – the turning of the millennium, the future if we had one. Maybe that’s why Tranquility Bass’s mega double album Let The Freak Flag Fly made so much sense. Techno-hippie types getting lost in the music and likely a whole lotta drugs (a full thirty years after the Summer of Love) on some unnamed Gulf Island, mixing everything up, wondering what god must look like. Someone had to.” (Philip Random)
The unfriendly passion of Fall main man Mark E. Smith finds weird perfection in a six and half minute riff that seems to have something to do with painting. The work of it. Shit happens, friends disappear, strangers interrupt, war is declared. You got to f*** it all off, keep at your work, else nothing ever gets finished. Which is rather how Paint Work sounds. Unfinished, yet nicely so.
Randophonic 
