Album of the Day 5/9/11

Every day, our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues all the way to #1. Monday’s album is #631:

Steely Dan – Katy Lied

Let’s stay in 1975 for another day, huh? This is self-mythologizing, deviously literate jazz-funk from Donald Fagen, Walter Becker and a cast of studio pros. Great band, but practically every one of their albums has a real clunker to go along with the good stuff, so that’s why we picked this one.There’s only a couple of super standouts here – Any World That I’m Welcome To, where Fagen lets down his guard and bares his fangs at the morons he grew up with, and the absolutely macabre Black Friday – but it’s solid all the way through. Bad Sneakers is a spot-on period piece, a couple of losers “with a transistor radio and a whole lot of money to spend” making their way up Sixth Avenue past Radio City. Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More works an oldschool blues vernacular better than any of the band’s contemporaries could, while Chain Lightning goes in a slow, funkier direction. Rose Darling and Everyone’s Gone to the Movies offer a leering, cynical look at romance, the surreal Dr. Wu was a pseudo-hit, and Your Gold Teeth II and the closing track, Throw Back the Little Ones reach for a distant, offhand menace. Here’s a random torrent via Walrussongs.

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Album of the Day 1/15/11

Every day our 1000 best albums of all time countdown continues, all the way to #1. Saturday’s is #745:

Earth Wind & Fire – I Am

This is as pop as we ever get here, although at the time this came out it wasn’t impossible for a good band to hit the top ten like this one did. The black ELO’s 1979 release captures them at their lushest and most ornate. Ironically (or, sadly, maybe not so ironically), neither of the big hits here were written by the band. Boogie Wonderland (brilliantly punked out a few years later by the Lemonheads) is a cover, and El Lay schlockmeister David Foster provided at least the groundwork for the woozy electric piano-and-synthesizer ballad After the Love Is Gone. The rest is what the band is best known for, catchy, tuneful funk with fearlessly gargantuan string and vocal arrangements. In the Stone is the one everybody knows; Can’t Let Go, You and I and Let Your Feelings Show have the same buoyant slink. With its off-center portamento synth, Star actually evokes what ELO was doing at the time; there’s also the harder-hitting vamp Rock That, a live concert standard. For those who question this album’s presence here instead of the band’s far more raw, psychedelic, Parliament-style funk from the early 70s, this may be slick, but it’s hardly stupid – and everything the band ever did prior to this point is also worth a listen. A Vegas-style version of the band, which might but probably doesn’t include any original members, continues to tour. Here’s a random torrent (when you see the album cover, click for the link).

Song of the Day 7/25/10

Our daily best 666 songs of alltime countdown is almost done. And when it’s over we’ll start with the 1000 best albums. Sunday’s song is #4

Bob Dylan – Idiot Wind

Probably the most vengeful kiss-off song ever written. And as a good a candidate as any for best rock lyric ever:

You hurt the ones that I love best, and cover up the truth with lies
One day you’ll be in the ditch, flies buzzin’ around your eyes
Blood on your saddle

Idiot wind, blowing through the flowers on your tomb
Blowing through the curtains in your room
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth
You’re an idiot, babe
It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe

That’s Dylan on the organ by the way. It’s on Blood on the Tracks, from 1975. The link above is a live take from a year later.

Song of the Day 7/11/10

Less than three weeks til our best 666 songs of alltime countdown reaches #1…and then we start with the 1000 best albums of alltime. Sunday’s song is #18:

The Electric Light Orchestra – Kuiama

This majestic, practically twelve-minute antiwar epic is the centerpiece of the vastly underrated 1972 ELO II album. The solo on the bridge, Jeff Lynne’s poignant slide guitar giving way to Mik Kaminsky’s wildly swooping violin, might be the most blissfully exhilarating moment ever recorded by a rock band.

Concert Review: Renaissance at Rockefeller Park, NYC 6/23/10

Some will find this hubristic, but this is the best edition of Renaissance yet – including the original 1969 lineup. Unlike a lot of their art-rock contemporaries during their seventies heyday, Renaissance opted for drama and majesty over any overwhelming sense of angst or wrenching intensity. Downtown tonight under a starless sky and a welcome sea breeze, they made every one of their fifty power-packed minutes count. Annie Haslam wasn’t even in the original band – she replaced the late, great Keith Relf – but throughout her time in the group she’s made a lot of people forget that. And she’s still got that awe-inspiring five-octave range. Other singers use all kinds of technology to disguise their flaws – not Haslam, and that made itself known not because she backed off from the demanding arrangements of the original recordings, but from the occasional slight imperfection. That she can still deliver those stratospheric notes, even if sometimes more gently than she did 35 years ago, is extraordinary. Not that Haslam would ever subject herself to the indignity of Eurovision or American Idol, but at age 63, she’d still win either one in a heartbeat.

The rest of the band played with passion and precision. Haslam’s longtime collaborator Michael Dunford’s acoustic guitar was too low in the mix most of the time, but when he was audible he was jangly and inspiring, while the two keyboardists, Rave Tesar and Tom Brislin matched piano to sweeping synthesizer orchestration. New bassist David J. Keyes was nothing short of brilliant, firing his way nimbly through a thorny series of changes, using a bristly, trebly tone much like Mo Moore would do with Nektar. Drummer Frank Pagano, a guy with a solid, four-on-the-floor rep from his work with Willie Nile and the Fab Faux, really opened some eyes with his spot-on, boomy and joyously orchestral attack on a big kit. From the first few notes of vocalese on the ornate, Romantically-imbued instrumental Prologue, Haslam held the surprisingly young (that word is relative) audience rapt – one can only wonder how many, relaxing on the lawn, were only now getting to see the band for the first time. Carpet of the Sun was a pleasant, artsy pop hit on record: live, the band emphasized its sweeps and swells, particularly the occasional Middle Eastern allusion (a device that would recur several times, to welcome effect). Strikingly, the best song of the night was a new one, a marvelously suspenseful epic, The Mystic and the Muse (to be released on a forthcoming ep of all-new material), a feast of spine-tingling vocals, a series of distantly Blue Oyster Cult-ish galloping crescendos and a perfectly powerful ending from Haslam.

Like the rest of the first crop of art-rockers, Renaissance were not opposed to pilfering a classical motif or two, most obviously on Running Hard, which makes a rock song out of the theme from the great French composer Jehan Alain’s Litanies. It’s hard enough to do on the organ and must be even more so on piano, but Renaissance’s keyboardist nailed it with staccato abandon. They went out on a high note with the epic Mother Russia, a seamless suite of themes closer to Tschaikovsky than Shostakovich, ending with Haslam belting out a long, low note (low for her at least – D next to middle C?), fearless and unwavering. What’s impossible for most of us still seems easy for her. The rest of the North American tour schedule is here.

Song of the Day 6/15/10

Every day, for the next month and a half anyway, our best 666 songs of alltime countdown continues all the way to #1. Tuesday’s song is #44:

The Electric Light Orchestra – Laredo Tornado

Raw, wounded, careening anthem mourning the loss of a better time and place. The tradeoff from Jeff Lynne’s lead guitar over to Mik Kaminsky’s electric violin midway through the solo out is one of the high points in rock history. From the Eldorado album, 1975.

Concert Review from the Archives: Blue Oyster Cult at Westbury Music Fair, Westbury, Long Island 6/13/97

[Editor’s note – out of town for the weekend, we’re mining the archive as we used to do during slow periods, our first year. This doesn’t qualify as a NYC concert since it was out in Westbury but here it is anyway]

Spur of the moment decision: ten minutes after dinner, we were on the LIRR on a cruise to nowhere. The crowd was as expected: kids from the smoking section in high school, twenty years later, with bigger beer guts and more cellulite. Pat Travers opened and only got about 25 minutes ending with Snorting Whiskey and Drinking Cocaine – he actually has good technique and a sense of melody, but bends every note he plays gratuitously like Jimmy Page at his most, well, gratuitous. Foghat followed and got a standing ovation. A long, long cover of Sweet Home Chicago (looks like they didn’t have enough tunes for a whole set), led into a wildly applauded Fool for the City and Slow Ride: enough mindless, audibly painful guitar masturbation for a lifetime. How someone as cool as Lynda Barry can like a band this awful stretches the imagination. Blue Oyster Cult vacillated between boredom and inspiration: half of lead guitarist Buck Dharma’s solos went nowhere. But the best wailed, hard. This particular version of the group has a new rhythm section (the Bouchard brothers haven’t been in this unit in awhile), but Dharma, guitarist/keyboardist Allan Lanier and frontman Eric Bloom are still in the band and game to be plying the nostalgia circuit. Bloom, in fact made it a point to mention how they were playing their old stomping ground, lapsing into his best Lawn Guyland accent with the knowing authenticity of someone who’d had the misfortune to grow up here. They opened with a swinging version of the art-rock anthem Stairway to the Stars opened, later ripping through a fast take on the drug dealer murder ballad Then Came the Last Days of May, where the band picked up the tempo and went almost doublespeed on the break before the last verse. The instrumental Buck’s Boogie screamed, like ZZ Top if they’d been born in Europe (impossible, but just try to imagine it) and featured a pleasantly brief drum solo; Cities on Flame and Godzilla were metal by the numbers as expected. The powerpop smash Burning for You was absolutely smoking; Dharma’s solo started wildly metallic, then suddenly note for note with the furious version on the live On Your Feet or On Your Knees album. Without much fanfare, Don’t Fear the Reaper closed the show, stripped down and a bit cursory. Since the venue was on a tight schedule, there no encores; Steppenwolf or whatever’s left of them were next so we were out of there after Sookie Sookie and two other awful tunes.

Song of the Day 6/8/10

The best 666 songs of alltime countdown continues every day, all the way to #1. Tuesday’s song is #51:

David Bowie – Five Years

The best track on Ziggy Stardust is a little uptight compared to the lush, almost symphonic grandeur of the even more angst-ridden version on Bowie’s live 1979 album.

Song of the Day 6/4/10

In case you might be wondering, we continue to do a lot more than just count down the “song of the day” here – in fact, in less than two months, we’ll be done with that list and we’ll move on to the 666 best albums of all time. More news and reviews coming momentarily. In the meantime, the best 666 songs of alltime countdown continues all the way to #1. Friday’s song is #55:

The Electric Light Orchestra – Mission

Another one of Jeff Lynne’s brilliant, towering apocalypse anthems, this one from A New World Record, 1976, an alien guard “watching all the days roll by” on a barren, desolate, depopulated earth.

Song of the Day 5/31/10

The best 666 songs of alltime countdown continues every day, all the way to #1. Monday’s song is #59:

The Electric Light Orchestra – Big Wheels

Towering, watery alienation anthem and centerpiece of the sidelong “Concerto for a Rainy Day” on Out of the Blue, 1977, electric piano on the intro and outro absolutely dripping with angst.