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VW's Top 1000 Albums

Started by The Boston Crab, March 07, 2009, 10:55:57 AM

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Vitalstatistix

#330
#914 - Zita Swoon - I Paint Pictures on a Wedding Dress (1999)



Zita Swoon is the pet project of one Stef Kamil Carlens, who is probably best known over here as one of the founding members of beloved Belgian art-rockers dEUS. For that band's fantastic first two albums, he played the tense, yappy backing singer to Tom Barman's warm croon, whilst honing his front-man skills in Moondog Jr. on the side. Around '96 he left dEUS to concentrate on Moondog, now renamed Zita Swoon.

In 1999 dEUS released the celebrated and (in my opinion) masterpiece Ideal Crash. I feel history has overlooked another release from the Antwerp scene from that year, I Paint Pictures on a Wedding Dress. dEUS went downhill after Ideal Crash, though whether this is from losing such an inventive and charismatic figure as Carlens is pure speculation. Zita Swoon would also refine and smoothen their sound during the next decade, with mixed results (Life = A Sexy Sanctuary is bloody brilliant, mind). In '99 though, well everyone was on point. 

Wedding Dress is a strange blend of delightful melodies, oddball instrumentation and enthusiastic, accessible experimentation, with moments of unexpected catharsis, left-turns and splashes of colour in every unusual song. As a record what it lack in cohesion it makes up for with ideas and a great sense of fun. The binding force is Carlen's affective, distinct voice.
The album careens through whimsical folk ("Ragdoll Blues"), funk ("My Bond With You and Your Planet: Disco") art pop ("Still Half my Friend?", "About the Successful Emotional Recovery of a Gal Named Maria") and beautiful ballads ("A Song for a Dead Singer", "Our Daily Reminders") with exuberance and skill.

She = Like Meeting Jesus - http://www.mediafire.com/?tv6mjmuh4o9w640

Song for a Dead Singer - http://www.mediafire.com/?povfpcbl2fgnujw

Shoulders?-Stomach!

#331
913.Label:Fire Records
Catalog#:FIRE CD14
Format:CD, Album

Country:UK
Released:1988
Genre:Rock
Style:Indie Rock



Since discovering this album nearly a year ago, no amount of listens has yet weakened my appetite for it.

The formula of the album is beautiful bright jangly indie-pop with a post-produced shimmer, gorgeous reverby piano and powerful drums. Throw in catchy choruses and the frankly beautiful, powerful, moaning, caramel voice of Fiona Gregg and there you go. I think it stands out among many other indie bands of the time due to the more adventurous production. There are 3 live tracks on the album which works out as a really good idea because they've got the more stripped down raucous feel which pushes the album on.

It's one of those albums where almost every song sounds like a classic you feel like you've heard somewhere. But you haven't, it's all fresh, sexy music that makes you want to stretch your arms wide and bask in the adrenalin of it like a hot summer's day. It's confirmation if we ever needed it that the sound of a woman with a good singing voice is still the best noise humans are capable of making.

I have no idea what their follow-up album sounds like but if anyone has it PLS CONTACT IMMEDIATELY!

Here's what to expect:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuy6-IZrueE


Shoulders?-Stomach!

912:

Artist: Biosphere
Album: Patashnik
Label:Apollo
Catalog#:AMB 3927 MC
Released:1994
Genre:Electronic
Style:Downtempo, Ambient




Having listened to this, Microgravity and Substrata, I am sure this is my favourite Biosphere album from what I've heard. Taking Microgravity's template of ambient house, house and club beats with distinctly atmospheric synth sections and sample, and more or less widening the scope and creating a more sophisticated end result. I find the album conceptually stronger as well, and as an ambient album it is deservingly a classic 90's ambient-with-beats album. Indeed I think this is probably one of the most successful albums out there at combining club structured beats and loops with freer ambient work.

One of the more noticable aspects of Biosphere's work from what I've heard is how he works with the same synths over and over again, so much so that I could hear two seconds of it and recognise it instantly.

Patashnik certainly doesn't feel rushed. It's a fairly lengthy album and the linearity of the instrumentation can make you feel that on one listen it's probably 3 or 4 tracks too long. However to his credit the main strength of the album is just how good it all is. No particular filler. Geir Jenssen is so sparing with more emotional movements, that in the best tradition of minimal work, when it does hit you it is an unexpected rush. The atmosphere of the tracks also has a habit of sneaking up on you. It's something to listen to in full to get that particular effect. Plus like lots of good 90s electronic music the ambient stuff will develop into swirling beaty stuff that raises the tempo and alters your interpretation of the mood, you start finding those sections just as evocative as the ambient stuff, one of the great successes of that period.

Moving on from Microgravity, Patashnik's beats have more in common with techno, breaks/trip-hop and big beat than house, though there are still elements in there.

I think the album is supposed to put you in mind of a cold icy sci-fi terrain, but I often find myself picturing cities and nightscapes. It's just wonderful. Tracks like Startoucher are about as involving and immersive as it gets, while Novelty Waves and The Shield are just as likely to get you going. It's a superb album of low bassy drones, cold deadly sounding reverby synth and changes of pace, with a human feel. It doesn't just feel stark, it's trying to tap into your head and make you think and feel. Wonderful stuff.

This is a great piece of music oh and look it has the good cover of Patashnik too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXneI3FeXgQ&feature=related

Retinend

I'm pretty embarrassed about my early posts in this thread (stretching back a year and a half), but I'm enjoying writing these reviews, as it helps me understand why I like the music I like. I'm very interested in how my writing comes across to others, so be harsh if you like - or just say anything because I never share my writings with anyone outside of this thread. Hopefully it's 'passionate' and not pretentious, although I don't like that word either.


#911

Artist: Ry Cooder
Album: Chávez Ravine
Label: Nonesuch
Released: 2005
Genre: Latin



--
This album is a good example of what I feel good art should do. The first of a trilogy of historical concept albums that Ry Cooder made in the second half of the last decade, completed with My Name Is Buddy (2007) and I, Flathead (2008), the songs on the album detail with warmth the lost Latino community of Chavéz Ravine, once located in central Los Angeles, and its liquidation by private contractors for the construction of public housing, and eventually the Dodger Baseball Stadium in the late 1950s. It's a fascinating history, and whilst Cooder clearly wanted to bring the subject to some increased level of public awareness, as a piece of art it has a force to do more.

Amongst the many glimpsed images on the album are plenty of odd turns that might ultimately seem like diversions or dead ends alongside the central plot; one that involves McCarthyist denunciation of local leaders ('Don't Call Me Red'), the coming of the 'dozers ('It's Just Work For Me'), the soliloquy of the real estate contractor ('In My Town') and the eventual erection of the grand, modern baseball stadium ('3rd Base Dodger Stadium'). This plotline grows surprisingly defined, the more focus you invest in the structure and lyrics of the album, but so also it becomes apparent that the 'dead ends' are essential to the wider picture of time and place. In the fantastic cover art, the UFO hovers alongside the real machine (though driven by an unreal, baseball-cap wearing figure) tearing apart a real community. The image reflects the music. On the album, distrustful songs about the mysterious Chinese minority of this minority town ('Chinito Chinito'); a tragedy in the boxing ring ('Corrido de Boxeo'); local heartbreakers ('3 Cool Cats', 'Muy Fifí'); UFO sightings ('El UFO Cayó') all share equal artistic importance in the portrayal of the town as that of the mechanism of its destruction. It feels like a much more immersive and truthful portrait of a community than a fact-based history has the power to be.

Chavéz Ravine is a work of anger, but more importantly, of affecting humanity. Cooder, and the remaining Ravine musicians he could track down, rebuild and remodel the community the "'dozers" destroyed. Of Cooder's trilogy of historical concept albums, this first collection of songs is by far the most warm and moving. With less talented musicians, it would be a polemical history set to music, however the album is foremost a suite of living landscapes - with the sense of melancholy remaining an undertone, and not seeping anachronistically into the music. I mean to say, that this album is a tribute to the extinct community first, and a story of the town's destruction second.

That said, it's with great anger that Cooder writes the lyrics to the album's most tender, yet most politically charged, song, 'In My Town' under the persona of the real estate contractor, who looks upon "old town, crook town, wop town, and spic town / Black town, shack town, and hick town / From my room" with tiresome disdain. However he sees "the future going my way" - "Can't you see a 50-story building / Where a palm tree used to be?". From this wistful opening, oddly paired with the speaker's utter unpleasantness, the song shifts tone from the contractor's 'idealism' to his burning hatred of this obstacle to his vision. The community that has been portrayed to us in all its detail is reduced, in the narrator's eyes, to a pack of "commie rats"; a nuisance to be replaced by "cement mixers" and "50-story buildings": "a town that's flat", "a town that's clean". The narrator's conception is that land is not a place where people build lives, but build profits; that with a few tricks the outdated idea of land-ownership can be surpassed to make way for beautiful modernity, with no evidence of the ugliness that lay in the past. The sublime yet heartbreaking scene-final of the narrative, '3rd Base, Dodger Stadium' gives the lie to this philosophy, in the form of the voice of an ex-Ravine resident; now "working night, parking cars" at the stadium which sits on top the ground he grew up on, and talking post-game to one of its baseball stars.

The concept of building atop a legally annexed community is put stark and poetic. As he watches the game, he sees the players running over where "Johnny Greeneyes had his shoeshine stall". He sees "grandma in her rocking chair", and "in the middle of the first base line", remembers the location of his "first kiss (Florencina was kind)" - "if the dozer hadn't taken my yard, you'd see the tree with our initials carved". Speaking to the "baseball man", whom is clearly "anxious to go", the man once from Chavez Ravine lets him know that "if you want to know where a local boy like me is coming from: 3rd Base, Dodger Stadium".
--


http://famishedcandiru.blogspot.com/2010/12/ry-cooder-chavez-ravine-2005.html

#910



Animal Collective - Here Comes The Indian

Paw Tracks (2003)

The first overwhelming flutters of a panic attack. Every sonic warped and twisted to the edge of recognition. Guitars like sunlight strobing on choppy waters. Vocals decoded from the spirit realm. Battery to raise the dead. It's a transgressive madness, the euphoric hell of avalanche.

This is 'Hey Light', a song in two parts. The first is being plugged into the mains. The second is Danse Macabre gospel.

http://www.mediafire.com/?rl8i400w2kt32rk

'Infant Dressing Table' through 'Panic' into 'Two Sails On A Sound' is the greatest sequence of music Animal Collective will ever make.

Take your time catching up.