Neil Young- Harvest

Ok, so it took me until I was in my 40s to hear my first Neil Young Album. I suppose he's such a big part of popular culture that, like many susch people, it's fairly easy to think " I must listen to him more" but never quite get round to it. Anyway,  my sister bought me 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die a couple of years ago and this was listed in it. I intially checked it ou on Spotify and could see pretty much straight away why it's "up there" among the greats.
I love the harmonica on  "Out on The Weekend" and "Heart Of Gold". Some might think the lyrics on "A Man Needs A Maid" pretty sexist on first listen but to me it sounds like the story of a guy looking for love and the "Maid" reference is simply a metaphore. The best track, rather than favourite, is "The Needle And The Damage Done". To call such a song a favourite seems a bit misplaced. The lyric about " Every Junky's Like A Setting Sun" is hugely powerful.
As you can probably tell, I was pretty into this album before I started the blog but it's included here for completeness.

Polica - Give You The Ghost

This blog's stated aim was to help me appreciate my recent musical purchases more fully and, hopefully, find something that would stay with me in the long term. I think in Give You The Ghost I might have got my first real success.

I think I first heard it on The Guardian's Website.. The first thing that strikes you is the singers' use of auto-tuning. Obviously, auto tuning has developed a reputation for being used in situations where, shall we say,  the singers voice might not be quite up to the job. It's also become so ubiquitous in some musical genres (I'm looking at you R&B) that I think we forget how unique it sounded in Cher's Believe . However Polica have managed to use it in really striking and affecting ways. In fact it's so striking that I think initially it distracted me from the album's other merits, particularly some great drumming and bass playing.

Also the auto tuning tends to make discerning the lyrics a little complex which is a pity since, although not exactly narrative, they are very evocative and match the music really well. It's a shame lyrics can't be automatically download with the album (at least not on  my player) and then get them to scroll across the players' screen. Having said that I made the effort to go to the band's website where I was able to read the lyrics as I listened, thus reducing any Me Ears Are Alight mis hearing.  Overall the album, lyrically and musically, sounds like some sort of auto tuned Goth/Reggae hybrid. Which is alright by me!

Musical (Wheel)chairs

It goes without saying that music can be powerfully evocative. The who, the where, the when etc of the listening experience all add to our attachments to a particular songs, album or artists.

In my case the fondest and most powerful memories I have of listening to music revolve around my early to mid teens at school with my mates.

My entire school career was spent at a "special" school for kids with disabilities. I started there at the age of four and left at seventeen. It was one of the least "special" places I've ever had the misfortune to find myself in! Basically it was a residential school forty or so miles from my home town, that I attended from Sunday to Friday.

The only thing that made it bearable and compensated for things like the separation from family and local community, the teachers who, in our view, were only there because they were too crap to be employed in a "normal" school and the, with hindsight, "Just enough to perform" standard of education, (it wasn't until a left school and compared the educational attainment of my non disabled peers that I developed a deep sense of anger and unfairness about the schooling of kids with disabilities that remains a big concern even now) were the friendships I had .

One of the problems of "living" in two places is the issue of how you cart your music collection between one place and another. For most of us the solution was to have everything on cassette rather than vinyl, at this point we were all in buying albums rather than singles which might have been easier to carry, although one guy did have a portable record player for his collection which consisted exclusively of Elvis records. However the next consideration is choosing which albums to take. I think I had a cassette case that held 20 cassettes but even at this time I hadmore than that in my collection. So at the beginning of every term I sat with my collection and tried to decide which tapes to take with me and keep at school, I seem to remember keeping the player and tapes at school rather than cart them back and forth every week, and which tapes I'd play at home at the weekends. Generally, I took my favourites as I spent more time at school than at home.

The handy thing about the cassette players for us was that they were small enough to be tucked down the sides of the chairs, this was slightly before combined radio/cassettes came on the scene, which allowed us to push around the grounds of the school while we listened to the music (we considered the possibility of developing a personal music player that people could use to listen to their music via headphones but didn't think it would catch on !!)This happened a lot since the school didn't seem keen on us actually going out into the local community an integrating with the local kids, even as we got older! The other thing was that all the chairs were identical NHS issue ones and, in order to differentiate who's chair was whos, until we customised them with stickers etc, we had our full names painted in white on the back, so on the rare occasions we did go out, we'd get some smart arse shouting your name all over the place!

So we spent hours after lessons pushing around the school taking it in turns to play various albums. I was a huge AC/DC fan so I'd play Back in Black or Highway to Hell before someone else would play Whitesnake's Come and Get It or Saxon's Wheels of Steel, a strangely popular choice amongst us! Another favourite, usually played on the first bus journey back to school after the holidays, when we hadn't seen each other for the most part, was Thin Lizzy's The Boys Are Back in Town.

There is a flip side to this of course. One of my earliest music/school related memories relates to my very earliest days in the infants/reception class. In the evening the care staff (weirdly referred to as House Mothers) would put records on before we went to bed. Most of these were compilation albums like the old Top of The Pops Albums ( One day someone will do a PHD on the importance of "Top of the Pops" to "institutional" settings). Sadly this practice has left me with an abiding hatred of the Beatles "Michelle" which I seem to remember being played over and over again!!!

ColdPlay - Viva La Vida

After watching the Paralympics the other night, I decided that, rather than letting shuffle decide which would be the next album I'd blog about, I'd jump straight to Coldplay.

In general, I have a bit of an odd "relationship" with Coldplay really. I've bought most of the albums, except the latest one, on the basis that I've enjoyed the singles they release. However, once bought, the number of times I've listened to the albums, as a whole, never mind individually, can be counted on less then two hands. It's for this reason that I didn't buy the latest album, well that and the stupid title, anything that dumb deserves to sink without a trace!

I've listened to the album several times in the last few days but i can't say that this resulted in developing a greater affection for it than I had previously. I've found listening to the whole album a bit of an ordeal really. I think the best way to listen  is to have it as a bit of background rather than making it the centre of your attention. At least then you can have something to distract from the blandnees and the singers limited singing ability. For me the best part of Coldplay is the drummer and if the best thing you can say about a band is that they have a greater drummer, I think they're in trouble.

Blind Faith - Blind Faith

Although I'd been listening to music from an early age, my parents bought be "Squeeze Me Please Me" by Slade when I was, I think, six years old, one of the first genres/tribes that inspired me as  i approached my teens was Heavy Metal and Hard Rock with bands such as AC/DC, Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. I can't really remember how I got into this music, although I do remember seeing Judas Priests' video for "Breaking the Law" on Top of The Pops once. It was also a time, the late 70s/early 80s when there was a thing called "The New Wave of British Heavy Metal" just starting up which Iron Maiden and Def Lepard were part of.

Anyway, As I followed these bands via magazines like Kerrang and Sounds, I took note of the bands/artists that had influenced them, which is where I discovered bands like Cream, Led Zepplin, Deep Purple and, obviously, musicians like Eric Clapton ( I also took note of their influences from the Blues etc but that's for another post maybe).

One of the things I like about this period, the mid 60s to the mid 70s, is that artists appear to have been prepared to "up sticks" and move on to something new when they felt the need and be willing to collaborate. So Clapton went from the Yard Birds to the Blues Breakers to Cream and on. And Steve Winwood went from Spencer Davis to Traffic etc. Blind Faith, the band and the album came about, of course, as a consequence of that spirit of collaboration. 

I'd been aware of the album since I first got into listening to Eric Clapton but at the time I didn't dare buy it, my mother would have had a fit seeing the album cover! So it remained one of the albums i always intended to check out but never got round to it until a year or so ago.

Originally, I checked it out on Spotify and then downloaded it, where it lay unlistened to on my ipod until recently.

There are some really good songs on it and Steve Winwoods' voice is brilliant, sounding like a Brummy Ray Charles. My favourite track is "In The Presence of the Lord". I also like the cover of "Well Alright", originally by Buddy Holly, one of my favourite artist from the early days of Rock & Roll.

Mumford & Sons - Sigh No More

Are there times when something in your music collection causes you to inhale sharply and wonder whether the gods of musical appreciation are having a laugh at your expense? Well, for me, today is one of those days. 

Having listened to this properly, there's less to it than meets the ear, from my perspective anyway. There's a couple of "catchy" tracks such as "Roll Away You Stone" but there's also something strangely irritating about the whole thing. After the first three or four songs I found myself waiting impatiently to get to the end and it was quite a relief to get there.

I consider this to be the "First Mrs Rochester" of my recent collection. It's going to get locked away in the attic and fed on a diet of rotten fish, mind you it'll have to fight for it with the first (only?) Transvision Vamp and Mansun albums which were also locked away up there in years gone by.

I think I'll put this down to a momentary aberration caused by a combination too many vouchers and too easy access via the net.

 In the days before downloading or, more generally, buying off the net, I doubt I would have made the effort to go out and buy this. In those days,  getting music involved a trip into town to Woolies or, for something outside the top 40, a trip of about 20 miles to the nearest HMV/Our Price/Independent record shop (the last independent record shop here closed, I think in the early 80s). As a consequence you had to think about stuff before you bought it. Now the careless click of a mouse can cause all kinds angst and self doubt!

On another matter, I mentioned in a previous post that I'd got another voucher for my anniversary. Well the only thing I've purchased so far is the new Elbow "B" sides collection "Dead in the Boot". I'll probably add it to to the play list for this blog but I don't intend blogging about it for awhile. I'm deliberately going to put new stuff towards the back of the cue.

Charles Mingus- The Black Saint & The Sinner Lady

In many ways it's this sort of album that caused me to create this blog. Basically I bought it on a whim having been given some vouchers over Christmas.

I've never been a fan of Jazz, particularly this avant garde form. I've always felt you needed to be amusicologist to get the best from it. However, I thought since it wasn't my money I'd be spending, I'd give it a go and it always comes up on those lists of the "best ever" albums so there must be some merit to it.

 Having bought it, I've listened to the album sporadically, usually in the car when it's not safe enough to reach for the "shuffle" button. However, when it shuffled this time, in the house with no on coming traffic or pedestrians to worry about as I looked down to search for the ipod, I decided to stick with it and really have a listen and I'm actually pretty glad I did.

I won't pretend that I know much about Charles Mingus except that he played the Double Bass and was a noted composer of Jazz, as opposed I suppose, to "simply" being a good writer  or player. I'm also aware that he had a history of mental illness and a relationship with some British aristocrat or some such thing. I was tempted, prior to giving the album my full attention, to do some further research but I resisted so that I could approach the album afresh.

One disadvantage of this approach concerned the albums' concept i.e. what's it about? Who are the characters mentioned in the title and how do the titles of each composition relate to these? Maybe a greater understanding of these questions might have aided my enjoyment still further?

The other question I have concerns Charles' Mingus as the musician. Maybe it's the nature of his instrument, the double bass, or maybe it's to do with the nature of the ipod  and the type of files it uses ( digital formats tend to be compressed so they lose some "bits" that are supposed to be imperceptible to the human ear) or the fact that my headphones aren't that great (they should be given what I paid for them!!) but I expected the bass to be a major instrument. Perhaps his role as a composer was more important and it's only since I listened to the album properly that I noticed that the bass isn't to the fore as much as I'd expected. I think I'd assumed that he would be noodling away on his bass like Eric Clapton on his guitar at a "Cream" gig.

Anyway, to the music itself. There's no doubt that to a jazz "nimby" like me, this is a pretty challenging album. However, having listened to it a few times, there's much I enjoyed. Yes, there are bits that are quite "atonal" (if that's the right expression) which are difficult to listen to but there a flashes of things, such as a bit of flamenco guitar and, I think, I detected snippets of bits of more traditional jazz that you might have expected to hear in the 1920 & 1930s, which allowed me to find a way in to the rest of the pieces. There was an interesting use of, I think a base or baritone saxophone in an early part of the first piece which was reprised later on. A flute was also used at one point and I have to declare a prejudice in this regard, I hate the sound of the flute with a passion unless it's been hidden away at the back of an orchestra, I don't know why I just do! However, on this album it wasn't too hideous.

All in all it was good getting to know this album. I still think I need a few more listens to appreciate it properly but It's something I intend to do.