Monthly Archives: November 2015

I’m of two minds when it comes to Todd Rundgren. Part of me hates him, and the other part of simply loathes him. Oh, I’m kidding. I really liked the Todd Rundgren who gave us 1972’s Something/ Anything?. It wasn’t until he formed the synth-heavy prog rock band Utopia that things got ugly. Ugly as in pompous, long-winded (a song off the band’s 1974 debut clocks in at 30:26), and philosophically empty-headed. He became the kind of guy who referred to Ra, the sun god, as a “holy synthesizer.” And speaking of Ra, Utopia’s 1977 LP, none other than Robert Christgau complained that, “The first side is bad, the second unspeakable.” And that’s before he really starts getting insulting.

That said, I have a horrible confession to make. I actually owned Utopia’s 1975 LP Another Live, which followed the band’s self-titled live debut. And not only did I own it, I played it, on my 8-track boom box, while painting houses in Gettysburg, PA in the bicentennial year 1976. It seems inexplicable to me now, given that I would soon despise them, but what I really liked, looking back, were the songs “Heavy Metal Kids” and “Just One Victory,” both of which appeared on Rundgren solo albums before Utopia got around to performing them. My brother and I even painted the legend “Heavy Metal Kids 1976” in silver glam paint on the stone windowsill of one of the houses we painted. I went back to Gettysburg not too long ago, in part to see if it was still there. It wasn’t. Some people just have no respect for history.

Anyway, I decided to gird my loins and listen to Another Live again, just to determine whether it sparked any nostalgic memories. And I’ll be damned, but the LP isn’t bad. Or not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. There are, admittedly, moments of sublime banality, combined with large amounts of futuristic brouhaha, but a few of the songs actually get out of their wheelchairs and dance, which is certainly more than I expected.

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Press Play is our Monday recap of the new and FREE tracks received last week to inform the next trip to your local indie record store.

Lauren Marsh – Wildfire
The Retrospectives – Rolling Stone (Acoustic Version)
Sea Caves – Spanning the River
Wonky Tonk – Denmark
Gazebos – I Don’t Wanna Be Here
Stevie B Wolf – Nothing But A Name
VIOLENT MAE – In My Ring
Chris Storrow – Raised The Bar
Andrew Johnston – Take The Highway

TVD SINGLE OF THE WEEK:
Crowded House – Help Is Coming (with an introduction by Benedict Cumberbatch)

The Black Ships – Dead Empires
J Hacha De Zola – Strange
Scary Little Friends – In This Lifetime
Coldair – Denounce
Steed Lord X Sam Sparro – Night Games
Rex Riot – Tap Back
Dani Deahl – Cha Ching
NAT – Follow Me (Berger & Shaqiri Remix)
Dirt Nasty & Mickey Avalon – Top Down

“My first memories of vinyl are listening to my dad’s Simon and Garfunkel and Beatles records. Those were always playing in my house as a kid. I also remember poking in the dust caps of my dad’s speakers. Incidentally, my 2 year old daughter just returned the favor this month. I’ve had that coming for 30 years.”

“To be honest, I only recently was turned back on to vinyl. I appreciate the sonic differences for sure, but I’ve always chosen the convenience of using my phone over sonics. That said, six months ago, during the darkest and scariest time of our life, my wife and I decided to install a record player center-stage in our living room and start collecting vinyl records, for the first time in our lives.

A year ago my wife and I received the news that our fourth child, to be born a few months later, had a fatal disease and would most likely not survive birth. If she did, she would not live more than a few hours. We were turned over to grief counselors and referred to a funeral home to make arrangements. Miraculously, she survived birth, then her first few hours, then her first few days. Ten months later Olivia is still alive!

The first few months of Olivia’s life were beautiful and they were hell. We said goodbye to her more times than we could count, but each time she pulled out of it. It was an emotional roller coaster to say the least. We were tired and our nerves were fried. A friend gave us a check and told us to buy something that would bring us some joy. We decided to buy a record player and some vinyl.

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I wish I was as suave as Bryan Ferry, the tuxedo-clad Euro-sophisticate whose jaded crooning about love has made him the most elegant lounge lizard in rock history. Not a bad act of sartorial re-creation for the son of a miner from Northern England, not bad at all. I wish I could pull it off. God, do I wish. But what can I say? When I was at the age he formed Roxy Music I was still wearing bib overalls. And guys in bib overalls have zilch odds of being mistaken for dapper Euro-seducers, which never occurred to me at the time—I simply thought of myself as a ladies’ man in the midst of a long, lonely run of shitty luck.

Formed at the dawn of the seventies, Roxy Music featured a core band that included Ferry on vocals, Phil Manzanera on guitar, Andy Mackay on saxophone and oboe, Paul Thompson on drums, a seemingly endless succession of guys on bass, and Brian Eno, who initially joined as a technical adviser, on synthesizers. Eno played a profound role in the band’s sound but left after two LPs due to creative differences with Ferry, and was replaced by keyboardist and electric violinist Eddie Jobson, formerly of Curved Air. You’ll run across gads of avant gardists who think Eno’s departure marked the end of Roxy Music as a great band, but I’m not one of them.

Me, I love all of their albums, but know I’m in the minority for believing 1977’s live Viva! Roxy Music is the best of them. But I’ve reviewed that LP already, which leaves me with my second favorite LP, 1975’s Siren. I’m not going to lie to you; I wish it had “Do the Strand,” “Virginia Plain,” “Street Life,” and “Pyjamarama” on it, but it doesn’t. Which is why the smart bet is to buy one of their “best of” compilations and be done with it. But then you’d be without “Just Another High” and “End of the Line” and all the other cool songs on Siren that you won’t find on any greatest hits package, and won’t you be sorry then? Eh?

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“Nat King Cole’s Christmas music is the first memory I have of vinyl.”

“My parents had a record player and would mostly play records around the holidays. Nat King Cole, George Winston, The Carpenters and others are my earliest musical memories. But my first personal experience with vinyl of my own accord, was at local resale shops as a teenager.

I knew very little about music, but I would scour every resale shop I could, to find interesting records I had never seen or heard of before. I’d buy them based on their album art alone, which led to some really interesting finds that ended up inspiring me and the music I make today, at least in some subtle way.

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Aaron Livingston just can’t stand still. Originally from LA, he traveled cross the country to New York and Philadelphia, eventually collaborating with hip-hop legends The Roots. Last month, he released an album under his solo monicker, Son Little, and he’s scheduled to tour Europe this December, eventually making his way back through the states in March. 

Son Little’s varied geographic influences are clear in his musical style and he picks up the subtleties of every spot he visits on the map, creating an intricate, and highly memorable, blend of America’s musical terrain. His new self-titled album eludes the bounds of just one genre—beginning at the confluence of rock and R&B and trailing down a river banked by the blues.

“Carbon” opens with a gritty riff against strong chords beating in the background, giving the track its hip-hop punch. Livingston’s vocals fill the song with a soulful fluidity, providing the perfect contrast to the guitar’s overdriven staccato. The track ends before you even realize it, clocking in it at only two-and-a-half minutes.

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Herb Alpert is often praised as a veteran bigwig of the record industry who possessed a measure of taste alongside his business acumen. He’s even more notable for his trumpet playing and leadership of a crucial if not necessarily hip 1960s outfit; Whipped Cream & Other Delights is the most popular LP from Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass; it’s also their best, and it sees 180gm vinyl reissue on November 20.

Let’s get it out of the way right up front; nobody in the Tijuana Brass was from Mexico. They were in fact a purely studio concoction at the outset with Alpert overdubbing his trumpet for increased vibrancy. Naturally, these realities have led many to rashly assume the (largely) instrumental venture effectively putting A&M Records (stands for Alpert and Moss, as in executive Jerry Moss) on the map was an exercise in total squaresville.

The theory ain’t necessarily wrong, as the Tijuana Brass albums remain amongst the highest profile artifacts produced in the Easy Listening era. Make no mistake; beginning with 1962’s The Lonely Bull and continuing well into the ‘70s, Herb Alpert strenuously avoided grating upon even a single human nerve. The objective was to sell a ton of records, which he and A&M did by undertaking a generationally inclusive approach and by appropriating a neighboring culture in a manner that, while surely dated today, was far less contemporaneously niche-driven than Alpert’s stylistic relatives in the Exotica field.

But like Les Baxter, Martin Denny and their ilk, there seemed to be a point where the consumers of Alpert’s records arrived at the conclusion that his stuff was either old hat or all of a sudden utterly out of step with their lives. The abovementioned heap of records was unloaded, though not necessarily into the bins of used record stores; instead, the Tijuana Brass was a staple of the antique shop, the consignment store, the Goodwill, the flea market, the yard/garage sale, and the Salvation Army.

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