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Least and Most: The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle

/ Tony / 7 Comments

Might as well tackle the bull by the horns, as they say. Though who in their right mind would want to tackle a bull at all, let alone by the pointy end. Probably the same person who’s trying to find a ‘least’ track on a pretty-much faultless album. I reckon this is more one for Tom Cruise and his IMF team than it is for me. I don’t grin “like an idiot every fifteen minutes” though.

Put simply The Wild, The Innocent & the E Street Shuffle is the beginning of Springsteen’s unimpeachable run of albums. It delivers on a promise that wasn’t all too apparent on his debut released just eight months prior. After plenty of shows with the fledgling E Street Band and with keyboard player David Sancious as his first musical lieutenant, the songs on The Wild.. add strains of jazz and other styles to Springsteen’s street-life scenes and boardwalk characters and while the lyrics still feel like he’s falling through the pages of a thesaurus, they’re getting ever tighter and more evocative. The run of ‘Incident on 57th Street’, ‘Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)’ and ‘New York City Serenade’ mean that Side B is easily the greatest second half of any album out there alone.

Given the sheer brilliance of these early albums, while I hope it’s not needed, I’ll add a caveat to this that I’d rather take these songs other plenty of others and that ‘least’ is meant only in a relative sense. Now, with that being said I’m also fully aware that I’m probably committing an act of Bossphemy when I say…

Least: The E Street Shuffle

That’s definitely the sound of ‘boo’s not ‘Bruuuuce’ I hear right now, I’m sure. Again: I fucking LOVE this album. But there’s something about the opener in comparison to everything that follows that feels a little, well; lesser. It feels a little like Bruce is trying too hard to get that live show stopper song into the mix that he’d perfect with ‘Tenth Avenue Freeze Out’ and ‘Out In The Streets’.

Lyrically…. it’s a jumble. While just one song later we’ve got pure evocation with “the fireworks are hailin’ over Little Eden tonight, forcin’ a light into all those stoned-out faces left stranded on this Fourth of July” on ‘The E Street Shuffle’ we’ve got a ‘man-child’ giving double shots to ‘little girls’ and some dude called Power 13 and his girl Little Angel? Again, this is only a relative ‘least’ because I’m comparing it to the utter ‘provoke a gold-rush and mass migration to the west’ level of quality the rest of the album has both lyrically and musically.

There, that’s the hardest ‘least’ I’ve faced while putting this together. I need a lie down. But before I do…

Most: New York City Serenade

I’m not one to reinvent the wheel or work too hard – or hard at all – when I don’t have to. As such I’m going to borrow from my Least to Most take on The Wild The Innocent.. and say “there’s a few, a small few songs that I’ll listen to where the opening bar is so immediately ‘right’, so ‘spot on’ and tuned to me that it affects me to the core. It’s like an instant high. ‘New York City Serenade’ is one of those. That hammer of the piano strings, the cascade of notes that follows. Sometimes you’ll hear an intro that’s perfect and you’ll think ‘ok, how’s this gonna get marred?’ because not everything that follows can be as good. With ‘New York City Serenade’ everything works beautifully, the arrangement is so perfectly put together that every element just flows into the next in a way that makes it seem like effortless poetry. There’s not a single bum note or misstep in the entire song. Bruce Springsteen was 23 when he wrote and arranged ‘New York City Serenade.’ When I was 23 I though it was a good idea to call a band ‘Wookie Cushion’”.

This isn’t just my favourite song on this album, it’s one of my favourite songs of all time.

What are you thinking? Should I be strung up for suggesting ‘The E Street Shuffle’ is lesser than ‘Wild Billy’s Circus Story?’

Twelve Things for Twelve Years

/ Tony / 3 Comments

I receive a notification here a few days back (not quite a dozen) that I registered this blog twelve years ago. That’s quite a while ago though my current lapsed-blogger status means that there isn’t quite the multitude of posts that duration would normally indicate.

With both these facts in mind and that I didn’t get around to adding to the plethora of ‘Best of 2023’ lists that hurtled around December and early Jan, I thought I’d use this as an occasion to mix things up a little and share a dozen things within this blog’s wheelhouse that stood out in those twelve months of last year.

I’ll kick off with live music as the first point. Catching My Morning Jacket live, on the first show of their European tour and first in the UK for something like a decade, was an absolutely joyous experience. Live albums and their reputation as a great live act built the expectations and they thoroughly delivered. A belter of a Z-heavy set that kicked off with ‘Gideon’ and circled favourites like ‘Anytime’ and ‘Holdin’ on to Black Metal’ as well as ‘Touch Me I’m Going to Scream Pt.2’ made it magical on many levels but chief amongst them was that it was a rare date night with my wife and it’s a song that has a lot of personal connections (If you’re interested I chatted to the wonderful Geoff Stephen about just that).

If I think of films across 2023 my thoughts turn to those that I’ve added to the ‘to watch’ list but haven’t gotten round to. It’s safe to say that it’s more down to finding time – ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ looks like the mutt’s nuts but finding time for that or ‘Oppenheimer’, for example. I did start ‘The Poor Things’ but that didn’t sit well with me and I’ve yet to return to it a month on. The same, sadly, can be said for ‘Asteroid City’. Then again, of the couple I caught at the cinema rather than the couch, a real stand out was ‘The Boy and the Heron’. I fucking love a Studio Ghibli film and while it’s just over two hours long it’s just gorgeous in so many ways. I adore ‘The Wind Rises’ and thought that a beautiful ‘farewell’ from Hayao Miyazaki but if this is a thing to behold even if it isn’t his final film afterall.

We also caught Seth Rogen’s take on those heroes in a half shell ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem’ – a cool visual style and a great slab of nostalgia but the really cool stand out point for me was the soundtrack and how it leaned into that great ’90s hip hop era of De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and its efforts to introduce these to a younger generation of ears meant my son has been requesting them so the turntable will often be occupied by just that.

It’ll come as no surprise that I listened to a good chunk of post-rock in 2023 and it was also the year of much-anticipated new music from two acts within that genre so, counting for two of these twelve points were the new albums from Explosions In The Sky and Sigur Rós, both of which followed lengthy gaps between studio efforts. While very different to each other, both End (for which the preceding announcement of End Tour caused many a concern that they EITS were calling it quits) and Átta (it’s Icelandic for ‘8’ as this is Sigur Rós’ eighth album) were well worth the weight and delivered what makes each of them great in spades.

I’ve slowed my reading of late, tackling heavier and heftier books that take a bit longer to chew through so I’m averaging maybe 25 in a year. On the fiction front a couple of stand out points were both books I was drawn to at random. Natsuo Krino’s Out is a slab of Japanese crime fiction that’s both familiar and yet like nothing I’ve read before. It’s the story of four women with hard lives that work the graveyard shift at a bento factory and how a random act of violence – one of them kills her husband – and the subsequent involvement of the others to dispose of the body and hide the crime. It’s an absolutely brilliant contemporary novel and I’m keen to find more of her work.

2023 was a year of more travel then in previous years, all of it aided by boat. I took (and take) as much advantage of the ease and cheapness (a return crossing in the car costing less than a return for three to London) of getting over in the ferry and where you can be within an hour or so of driving. However, while on a cruise in the Med and having finished the books I’d taken with me I found myself staring at the cover of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in the ship’s library. How this hadn’t cropped up in my reading to date or at uni all those years (ok, decades now) ago I will never know but holy-fuck what a book. As the blurb says “one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century.” I hadn’t finished it when we arrive back in the UK so drove into town the next day and picked up a new copy from the bookshop so I could do so asap.

Sticking with books(ish) for point 8 of these 12… I found myself with an itch to find out more about the Vietnam War last year. After finding they’d been removed from Netflix I located episodes of Ken Burns’ ‘The Vietnam War’ elsewhere and proceeded to reabsorb. But that wasn’t enough to scratch that itch. In a couple of bookshops in Oxford I picked up a few books I’d been on the hunt for. As with the WW2 books in my library’s history section, I’ve found it’s the personal accounts that make the most enlightening and gripping of reads but I really can’t abide those ‘guts and glory’ takes. So, along with the brilliant If I Die In A Combat Zone by Tim O’Brien, I picked up and hungrily devoured Robert Mason’s Chickenhawk and it’s that which is the standout point for me in the year’s non-fiction reading. More than ‘just’ a helicopter pilot’s diary this is an eye-opening account of what it’s like to fly over 1,000 assault missions in what was a clusterfuck-after-clusterfuck of a war and the devastating impact it can have told by a man that’s got a gift for detail and narrative. I know he’s got a follow-up out there and if I can get my hands on it at a decent price I’ll do just that.

Thanks to those aforementioned ‘Best of 2023’ lists there were a couple of late-year discoveries in what I guess was once the ‘Americana’ bucket that I’m oft inclined to look in, both from the same magazine’s CD of the year’s highlights and both from artists that have been around a while but never in my ears to that point. However, both Israel Nash and Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit’s 2023 albums got plenty a listen to as a result. Nash’s Ozarker and Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit’s Weathervanes combine what I like about that genre – great storytelling and a certain kind of heartland, big-sky vibe and, in both cases here, underpinned by some fucking tasty guitar work.

While I’ve mentioned a couple of stand out post-rock albums it’s worth giving a shout to some of those other albums of 2023 that got plenty a spin and stood out from the flock – there were quite a few great albums last year.

Slowdive’s Everything Is Alive was a real heavy-rotation holder. The second album of their comeback and while 2017’s self-titled album felt like a real victory-lap and celebration, Everything Is Alive pushes further into the electronic vibe that they’d left off with on 1995’s Pygmalion but with a warmer, lush sound aided by Shawn Everett (who’s engineered the likes of The War On Drugs) though it sounds like a key part of his job was in convincing Neil Halstead when to stop tinkering.

Blondshell – the musical project of Sabrina Teitelbaum – dropped her self-titled debut in the early part of the year and it got a lot of spins here even if its first-quarter release meant it got left off some of those end of year lists. Brisk and to the point (frustratingly she’d issue an expanded version later in the year with four new songs), Blondshell‘s nine tunes harken back to that ’90s angst and bite of Hole and PJ Harvey yet feel more like a contemporary reinvention of the vibe rather than an outright lifting of it.

The final point that I’ll make is perhaps surprising but then it was also that it was a surprise in itself that one of the albums I listened to most in 2023 was a new Foo Fighters record. I remember upon hearing of Taylor Hawkins’ passing that I figured the only way the band could go on would be with Dave sitting on the drums for albums and with a fucking good session player joining for live. Actually ‘replacing’ Taylor would’ve been unthinkable.

What I couldn’t have predicted would be just how fucking good But Here We Are turned out to be and how addictive I’ve found it. It’s not an occasion anyone would want to step up to but the Foos did just that and then some – Grohl lyrically wrestling with questions of grief, mortality and the big ‘what now?’ in the face of losing two people close to him against some of the most compelling and, frankly, brilliant tunes of their career. I’ve prattled enough about this album in a rare (for here) review so won’t do so again but having recently added both The Colour and the Shape and Wasting Light to my vinyl collection I’d say that this sits with those as one of the best they’ve made.

Someday our ocean will find its shore… Five from Nick Drake

/ Tony / 6 Comments

My Morning Jacket blew my head, and eardrums, off on Tuesday night. My wife and I hoped on the chuffer and caught the opening night of their UK / EU tour in the achingly glamorous Kentish Town. Two plus hours of intense and magical power (including a twenty minute ‘Dondante’) means I’ve been leaning toward a calmer soundtrack and indulging in the quiet majesty of Nick Drake’s all-too brief discography the last couple of days.

Nick Drake died at just 26. His mother, Molly, was a poet and folk musician and Nick’s love of music developed at a young age. A quiet child he was nonetheless confident and soon learnt the piano, saxophone and clarinet while his other studies suffered as a result of his love of music (how many musician’s biographies have that in similar?). He spent a chunk of time in France – studying in Provence – while pursuing both developing his guitar and smoking pot. Hey, it was the sixties after all.

When he returned to the UK he enrolled at Cambridge and was quickly got into the burgeoning folk scene, playing shows in London and Cambridge. He was signed to Island Records when he was 20 and recorded three albums Five Leaves Left (1969), Bryter Later (1971) and Pink Moon (1972). Lukewarm (at best) reception and poor sales – not assisted by his increasing reluctance to perform live. A troubled soul, his depression worsening, Drake returned to his parents house in 1974 where he died on November night following an overdose of an anti-depressant.

Years later with musicians such as Robert Smith, Peter Buck, Kate Bush and even The Black Crowes citing him as an influence, Nick Drake’s catalogue started to receive the praise and attention it so deserved. I think it appeared in a Volkswagen commercial Stateside. I think it was the late ’90s while at Uni I picked up Five Leaves Left and then very quickly thereafter his two other albums so, here, in no particular order or merit, are five of my favourite Nick Drake songs to lend a quietly majestic soundtrack to the day.

Time Has Told Me (from Five Leaves Left)

The Thoughts Of Mary Jane (from Five Leaves Left)

One of These Things First (from Bryter Later)

Things Behind The Sun (from Pink Moon)

Rider On the Wheel (from Made to Love Magic)

Live, tonight for one album only, at Budokan…

/ Tony / 7 Comments

In what feels like a fitting post to follow my take on Springsteen’s The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts, I’ve been thinking about live albums of late.

A friend and I have been debating their merits – his ‘no-thanks’ take on them driven by the fact that ‘you don’t get the same vibe as actually being there.’

I can understand that. But – is that really their purpose? I’ve got a lot of time for live albums – there are a lot of artists that really deliver the goods in concert more than others and more than they do in concert. They’ll throw their all into a show and there are plenty of live albums out there where that’s evident as well as the fact that a song performed live is often a different beast to that which graced a studio album. Not only that but there are many bands out there that I’ll never get a chance to see or shows I could never have been at.

Here I can quickly point to two staples of this blog – Springsteen and Pearl Jam, both of whom are renowned for their live shows with both (Springsteen only more recently) performing a different set list every night. Foo Fighters, by contrast, played an identical set (including the rehearsed ‘banter’) night after night.

Whereas once upon a time the live album was once a staple, if contractually obligatory, of many a rock band’s discography we now find ourselves in an era of Nuggs (or whatever service they chose to use) means that almost every show from a tour and many archival individual shows are available to fill up our iPods. Does the traditional live album, then, still have value?

I reckon there’s still a place for it. At least there is within my shelves – digital and physical. While it’s great to have a document of a specific concert – especially if you were there, say – it’s also great to have a live collection from a band at the peak of their power without, say, the mistake they made in the pre-chorus of a song that forced them to restart or a location-specific anecdote, as well as the mastering (not remixing, mind – I’m looking at you Van Halen) that an official release can give. Without having to pay a fortune for a pint of piss-poor beer, swim to the toilet or wonder if you need to duck out during the encore to get the last tube.

With all this preamble in mind I thought I’d take a butchers at some of those live albums that I would say are definitely worth giving a listen to, old and new.

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band: Live 1975-85

Keeping it Boss for another moment… Bruce’s first official live album was a suitably hefty 5LP / 3 CD / 3 Cassette beast that covered Springsteen and the E Street Band’s journey from theatres to stadiums across 40 songs. Springsteen had developed a reputation as a live performer and this set delivers upon that and then some – it’s a great listen even close to forty years on, even hearing his earnest story-telling ahead of ‘The River’ as he works to instil a sense of intimacy to the stadium-sized crowd still works and while he could easily have created another similarly-sized instalment to cover the decades since I don’t think (save a few obvious titles) you could want anything more than what’s here. It remains an unimpeachably great snapshot of Bruce and the E Street Band’s powerful peak and sounds as vital now as it did then.

Nirvana – Live at Reading

Nirvana’s second visit to the Reading festival was the stuff of legend even aside from the actual show itself. This was 1992, mind, when the Kurt ‘n’ Courtney show was dominating press coverage – there were rumours that the band wouldn’t show. That the band were on the verge of breaking up, that Kurt’s heroin addiction was so bad he was close to death (both rumours sadly not that far from true)…

Playing to this, Kurt took to the stage in a wheelchair. Wheeled on and wearing a hospital gown and wig, sang a few lines of ‘The Rose’ and collapsed before getting to his feet and the band delivered one of their most intense and powerful sets to date. Yes, there’s no way to capture being at that show – I hold that for every dozen or so people I’ve met that claimed they were there only two are probably telling the truth – but, fuck me, this is one hell of an amazing live album. The band seem to be giving it everything as a middle finger to the rumours and the setlist is everything you’d want, covering nearly all of Nevermind, plenty from Bleach and a few new songs that would later grace In Utero and is the superior live Nirvana document to From The Muddy Banks of Wiskah.

Johnny Cash – At Folsom Prison

This one’s got to be a given, right? Johnny Cash’s first live album, a career reviving release that starts with the now famous ‘Hello, I’m Johnny Cash’ and finds the then relatively-clean Cash singing songs like ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, ‘Cocaine Blues’ and ’25 Minutes to Go’ to an audience of convicts in a prison canteen that Cash would later describe as “the most enthusiastic audience I ever played” – lapping up every line like ‘I can’t forgot the day I shot that bad bitch down’ like it was written for them. While At San Quentin recorded the following year would have ‘Boy Named Sue,’ this album combines Cash’s strongest points – grit, balladry, the spiritual and humour – into one setlist that while tailor-made for his audience and became the stuff of legend.

Mogwai – Special Moves

As a live band, Mogwai are one of the loudest out there. While they shy away from being branded as post-rock, their predominantly instrumental music takes its cues from a myriad of influences including bands like Loop, My Bloody Valentine and Slint – intricate pieces that build up layers and parts and not play with the quiet-loud-quiet- FUCKING INSANELY LOUD dynamic but own it. I’ve just finished Stuart Braithwaite’s fantastic memoir ‘Spaceships Over Glasgow’ which revealed – amongst other things – the level of nervousness with which he’d play gigs, hoping that the bands head-nodded signals would work when it comes to bringing in the different parts of each song, finding a sound-guy that could sufficiently mix them at the level of noise desired and joy they take in a set when it all clicks.

The New York shows captured on Special Moves – in terms of both setlist and the power of the performance – are as ideal an introduction to and one-hit slab of Mogwai you could ask for. It’s perfectly mixed – balancing all the elements of their music with a smattering of crowd noise to let you know they’re there and capturing the extremes of their sound (the pin-drop silence to absolute wall of sound in Mogwai Fear Satan, for example) perfectly.

Neil Young and Crazy Horse – Weld

Speaking of wall-of-sound…. Neil Young has got quite a few live albums out there – while Time Fades Away and Rust Never Sleeps were made up of entirely new songs and Live Rust felt like a bit of a cash-grab, Weld is the real deal for me and the more I explore Mr Young’s back catalogue the more I enjoy it. A live document of Young and Crazy Horse’s tour to promote Ragged Glory (my current favourite of Neil’s albums), it’s a ridiculously heavy document of the Horse in full gallop and blasting through some of Ragged Glory‘s highlights like ‘Fuckin’ Up’ and ‘Love To Burn’ along with storming takes on ‘Cinnamon Girl’, ‘Powderfinger’, the then-recent ‘Rockin’ In The Free World’ and a blazing cover of Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’.

Gary Clark Jr – Live

This is one of those examples where someone comes across so much better live than on record – to my ears at least and this is my blog, after all. I’d seen the praise heaped upon this enough to be curious and since picking it up it’s been a regular spinner. Having been compared to the mightiest of guitar slingers like Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan, Gary Clark Jr has both that glorious blues tone and dexterity to make his performances addictive listening while also flowing in a touch of soul and hip hop. On record the combo doesn’t really come across so well with his playing taking a back seat too often to slick production. There’s none of that on 2014’s Live – a mix of originals and covers shed of gimmickry and just highlighting how great and in-focus performance he – and his band – can deliver.

My Morning Jacket – Okonokos

The band captured following the peak of the mighty Z album deliver a brilliant set to a crowd at The Fillmore in San Francisco. While the recent compilation Live Vol. 1 adds newer songs to the mix and further cements how great a live draw the band are, Okonokos captures the band in all their intense power, it’s heavy on Z material with eight of its ten songs gracing the set and showcases the band’s musicianship and a rare ability to both jam out and deliver tight, focused performances.

Jeff Buckley – Live at Sin-é (Legacy Edition)

Jeff Buckley left us with just the one studio album before he took his fateful swim in 1997. His first release for Colombia, though, wasn’t Grace but the Live at Sin-é EP. The EP was just a four-song set was released to draw attention to the power of Buckley’s voice. The full set, released ten years later, instead gave us a captivating and wonderfully intimate (you can even hear the odd clink of coffee cups) performance of some twenty plus songs interspersed with monologues and jokes – we get works in progress of songs like ‘Grace’, ‘Last Goodbye’ and ‘Mojo Pin’ along with covers of Led Zeppelin, Dylan, Nina Simone, Van Morrison and, of course, his take on ‘Hallelujah’ all armed with just his voice and a guitar. For a small coffee house show, Buckley commits fully and for all the myth and mystery that’s build up over the years since his passing, it’s a beautiful document of pure talent and the enjoyment of music.

Bob Dylan – The Bootleg Series Vol.4: Live 1966, The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert

First – it wasn’t captured at The Royal Albert Hall, it was Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. It was mislabelled in the bootlegs that so pervaded before its official release. in 1998. It was so extensively bootlegged because it was both a brilliant show and, secondly, the “Judas!” concert.

All these years later it’s hard to conceive of the upset Dylan’s ‘going electric’ caused his folky faithful. Through his 1965-66 tour Dylan would perform a show of two halves: the first alone and the second with his backing band The Hawks for an electric set. Both the heckle and Dylan’s brilliant response – “I don’t believe you…. you’re a liar” – along with Dylan’s instruction to the band to “play fucking loud!” into ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ are captured here along with a fantastic performance of fifteen brilliant Dylan songs that are all worth the price of admission alone and captured with brilliant sound quality.

If you don’t trust my opinion on this, take it from Jimmy Page too – he found the bootleg to be the ultimate album and would buy a whenever he found one.

Some honourable mentions and few additional thoughts in place of a tenth for the list…. I’ve only recently begun listening to the Allman Brothers Band’s At Fillmore East but it’s a mighty fine thing…. The Clash’s Live at Shea Stadium is a great listen too but a little stiff in parts, capturing them opening for The Who – who’s Live AT Leeds is pretty decent too though I’m not that big a Who fan. Dire Straits deserved better representation than the too-short Alchemy and too-sterile On The Night while one of the best bands I’ve seen live, Pearl Jam have yet to drop a live album that really captures how arse quaking they can be live though Live On Two Legs tries and the same could be said for Pink Floyd – Pulse is another case of too much gloss and The Delicate Sound of Thunder features both an excess of gloss and an excess of songs from A Momentary Lapse of Reason.

Least to Most: Aerosmith, Part 1

/ Tony / 4 Comments

The Bad Boys of Boston, the Toxic Twins: Aerosmith. They’ve been around so long that JC was probably humming ‘Dream On’ from his lofty perch and yet are still packing in the crowds. Having kicked off from 1325 Commonwealth Avenue in 1970 their career has had a couple of dizzying peaks and some very seedy* lows. You can neatly slice their output into three decades and almost dismiss the rest, given that since 2000 we’ve had just two proper studio albums and there’s not that many acts out there that have had such success in each.

I’d been mulling over how I’d rank Aerosmith’s albums in my notebook of lists for sometime but John over at 2Loud2Old Music got straight in with both an album by album review series and his own ranking. So I thought it time to sit down and spit out my own Least to Most ranking of Aerosmith’s fifteen studio albums – a number that neatly divides into three – based on nothing scientific other than personal preference.

So let’s get started with the least favourite – and there’s no prizes for guessing that we start with….

Just Push Play

I mean it’s a fucking dog of an album from its cover to its contents. It came after yet another successful decade with plenty of great tunes and the band reaching the dizzying heights of chart-topping with that tosh from Armageddon but Just Push Play was a massive misfire from which they never really recovered. Forget hitting self-destruct with drugs, this time it was self-destruct with an album that relied on computer production, co-writes galore and a huge lack of genuine band interaction.

There were no demos left at the end of this record to be able to say ‘well there are the bones of a good album here’ because everything was plugged into ProTools and layered up like a wedding cake. There’s a song called ‘Trip-Hoppin’ for fuck sake. There’s not a single Tyler / Perry joint on here that isn’t also shared with other song-writers as Tyler, by all accounts, was so desperate for another monster hit that he wouldn’t work alone with Perry. Instead of the rawer power of Nine Lives we got over-glossed balladry and over-produced, gimmicky attempts at rockers that sounded like what it was: a group of blokes in their fifties trying to appeal to a dynamic that wasn’t interested in a group of blokes in their fifties. Instead of playing to their strengths they indulged in the wrong stuff. Thankfully ‘Jaded’ did the business in the charts enough to keep them going and playing the hits to large audiences but this really killed their momentum.

Music From Another Dimension

And, in two hits at the bottom of the list we’ve covered the only albums of original material the band have put out in this millennium. I was really rooting fro Music From Another Dimension when it came out – all the right ingredients were in place: the band were recording in the same room again, Jack Douglas was back on board. Hell, when it came out I really dug it…. for a while. Yet time and comparison to the rest of their catalogue doesn’t do it any favours.

There a lot more better songs on here than on Just Push Play yet there are also some utter howlers. I / you / we couldn’t expect the band to out an album this late into their career that sounded ‘like the old days’ and yet it seems they tried to do that. Only instead of going back to the 70s, say, they went for the kitchen-sink approach of Get A Grip only without the tunes or the edge. For every great riff attack like ‘Out Go The Lights’ there are two turds like ‘What Could Have Been Love’ or ‘Can’t Stop Lovin’ You’ – featuring Carrie Underwood for fuck sake! Why? Probably because Tyler was still thinking that this is how you make a hit.

Here Aerosmith managed to both play to their strengths and their weaknesses in an effort to cover every possible base. Unfortunately there are too many of the weaknesses and a little too much filler to make this the album it could have been – at least the sound is more organic and suited to Aerosmith than it had been in a while.

Rock In A Hard Place

Come back, Joe: all is forgiven. There’s no Joe Perry on Rock In A Hard Place, he’d left to return some video tapes. Brad Whitford also left during the recording of the album. Jimmy Crespo filled in on guitar. ‘Bolivian Ragamuffin’ and ‘Lightning Strike’ bring home the goods and ‘Jailbait’ has got to be one of those songs Perry heard and thought ‘why the fuck am I not on this?’ – it’s a real strong Aerosmith song. There’s not a lot more though.

Crespo and, later, Rick Duffay may have tried to inject some new momentum into the band but with addiction sucking the life and creativity out of Tyler, Rock In A Hard Place feels like a plaster over a gaping wound rather than an attempt at real damage control – management pushing for another album and to keep the thing rolling as long as they could rather than taking a much-needed pause. If Night In The Ruts was sounding like the beginning of the end, Rock In A Hard Place sounds like the batteries have run dry.

There are a few pleasant surprises and what remained of the band could sting bring the power but the overall feeling is of a rudderless ship. They even put bloody Stone Henge on the cover to give Spinal Tap plenty of ammo.

Night In The Ruts

And here we go – a band running out of steam. More appropriate this is a band falling apart. Night In The Ruts was started early in 1979 with Jack Douglas and a full band. It was finished late in 1979 with Gary Lyons. In between was a lot of conflict, a lot of stalling and a whole fucking lot of drugs.

With basic tracks laid down Tyler couldn’t come up with lyrics. For months. During which time Perry discovered he owed $80,000 in room service bills (that’s a lot peanuts and cable porn, Joe) and was encouraged to cut a solo album to pay it off. The band’s management, desperate to get another hit as Draw The Line hadn’t cut the sales figures they wanted – and to get the band back on the road – and their pockets lined fuller, decided Jack Douglas couldn’t control the band and fired him. It was true; he couldn’t. But then nobody could. Substance abuse had control. This was the blow-up point for Aerosmith and by the time the album came out Perry wasn’t in the band anymore and Brad Whitford was sauntering slowly toward the exit.

But for all that – Night In The Ruts has it’s fair share of good cuts. ‘Cheese Cake’, ‘Bone to Bone (Coney Island White Fish Boy)’ have all the right moves and ‘No Surprize’ is an outright Aerosmith classic. Unfortunately – and telling of Tyler’s issue with lyrics – three of the album’s nine tracks are covers, though both ‘Reefer Head Woman’ and ‘Remember (Walking in the Sand)’ are both worth tuning in for. Night In The Ruts may be Aerosmith’s worst of their first decade but the good stuff here is still really good, giving it the riffs even as it all falls down around them.

Honkin’ On Bobo

The start of ‘the naughties’** were a weird time for Aerosmith. After serendipity lead them to the sweet spot in each of the previous three, it was eluding them in this decade. With the taste of disappointment from Just Push Play lingering even after judicious application of topical cream attempts to get back into the studio for a new Aerosmith album were failing.

Instead we got another compilation with ‘new’ songs – one of which was so bad and obviously cloying attempt at a hit the rest of the band refused to be in the video for it – and soundtrack contributions. There was talk of an album made up of previously discarded tracks (I’ve got a feeling some of them ended up on Music From Another Dimension), Tyler wouldn’t write alone with Perry. Perry didn’t want to be tied to writing with Steven’s ever-present co-writer Marti Frederikson who, like Tyler, wanted to make more attempts at pop hits. Somehow the idea of a ‘blues’ covers album was floated and jumped on. Tyler wouldn’t have to worry about writing lyrics and a sense of letting off steam can be heard in the finished result.

Jack Douglas was back on board and the sound here is a welcome step away from the polish of Just Push Play. It was never going to be a blues album proper – Aerosmith always leaned to blues rock vs pure blues so no Blue and Lonesome revelations here, just Aerosmith giving it some juice to eleven covers and one pretty tepid original. The band are tighter than a duck’s arse and while there are no big surprises on the track listing, they’ve come up trumps here.

Why doesn’t it sit higher? It’s a covers album, essentially. The sole original track doesn’t quite hit the sweet spot and sounds a little contrived in the company of those that it’s clearly aping and the album feels a little overdone still in the way that they seem to have become stuck in. A blues album should’ve been the opportunity to loosen up a little, feel free to roughen up the sound and production a little and get raw, but they didn’t subscribe to that notion.

*I’m not going to go into it but convincing your under-age girlfriend’s parents to give you legal guardianship so you can take her on tour, get her addicted to drugs, pregnant and into an abortion clinic is pretty fucking seedy, Steven.

**I fucking hate that phrase too

Hey hey, rise up: Friday’s spins

/ Tony / 3 Comments

As I seem to be slipping back into the habit of posting more frequently, it feels like a fitting time to drop one of those ‘this is what I’ve been listening to’ posts that have peppered this blog previously as we head giddily into the weekend.

Pink Floyd – Hey Hey, Rise Up

Is this cheating? It only came out today but I’ve listened to it a good half dozen or so times already and it grows on me more each time. The first new Pink Floyd song in 28 years (songs from The Endless River were re-heated leftovers after all) is real grower – a gentle very-Floyd strum accompanying a powerful vocal from Ukrainian singer Andriy Khlyvnyuk giving way after a minute or so to a suitably screaming solo from David Gilmour that seems to be more an anguished scream of a protest song and keeps reaching those glorious notes so associated with the guitarist and Floyd. I’ve got a feeling that this song – a reaction to extraordinary times with added fuel as a result of Gilmour’s personal connection – is likely a one-off though.

The War On Drugs – I Don’t Wanna Wait

It took me until this year to fall head over heels with The War On Drugs’ I Don’t Live Here Anymore because Atlantic Records are one of those major labels who seem to enjoy taking the piss with prices. The album was going for close to £40 on my preferred format and the fact that I could usually pick up a double on a lesser money grabbing label for half that meant I didn’t add it to my collection until I picked up the CD for under a fiver this year. It’s a brilliant album that’s been in the car pretty solidly over the last month or three. ‘I Don’t Wanna Wait’ is both a highlight and representative of the album as a whole – it builds from a deceptively simple very-80s beat before expanding into a much more involved, seemingly boundless song that’s dripping in that sun-kissed AOR vibe circa ’87 (think Tunnel of Love) underpinned by a guitars whose tone and fluidity leave me feeling sticky and satisfied.

The Mysterines – Hung Up

I’ve mentioned this group before and have been digging every song they’ve released thus far as they were on of those bands oft-played on 6Music during my commute. I’ve been spinning and loving their debut Reeling this week after I was able to make it to my usual dealer to collect my pre-order and I’m looking forward to where they take it next.

Loop – Heaven’s End

I have to wonder if the guy that owns my usual record shop has one of those ‘I will now sell five copies of “The Three EPs” by The Beta Band’ moments before I visit because when I stopped by to pick-up The Mysterines’ record he was playing an album to which both my wife and I both said “who is this?… it’s good!” As a result Loop’s debut Heaven’s End from 1987 is nestled in my collection and has been played quite a bit since. Think raw, Detroit-punk imbued trance-rock with hypnotic, discordant guitars and you’re on the way. I thought it was early Mudhoney at first but there’s elements of shoegaze in the mix with these drone-like soundscapes. I read a review that referred to this as “sound(ing) like the soundtrack to a missing hallucination scene from Easy Rider.”

Monty Python – I Bet You They Won’t Play This Song on the Radio

My son has been discovering and generally enjoying Monty Python of late. Given that he’s only 8 there’s plenty that gets skipped or simply not shown but he was so loving ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ that the ’45 was added to the collection. This one was on the flip side and has probably been played more as it seems to hit the same mass enjoyment buttons shared by 8 and 41 year olds.

Dire Straits – News

I went to a record fair last weekend and all I got was this lousy t-shirt the only record I walked away with was Dire Strait’s Communique. A nice, clean and well-kept copy for a fiver hits about right for me. I think Communique gets a bit of a bad rap – it was a bit of a rush job after their first album took off and doesn’t have a hook akin to ‘Sultans of Swing’ and isn’t a patch on Making Movies but in ‘Once Upon A Time In The West’, ‘News’, ‘Where Do You Think You’re Going?’ ‘Angel of Mercy’ and ‘Portobello Belle’ does has have five cracking Dire Straits song and it’s more laid-back, subdued style is perfect for a certain vibe.

Ten of ten for ten

/ Tony / 16 Comments

Apparently it’s my ‘WordPress Anniversary’ today. Well, at least with this blog. I say this only to make those of you who have failed to send gifts my way feel guilty.

To mark this most important of events I thought I’d be achingly original and put together a list – Ten great Track Tens.

Ten. In the seventies some couldn’t keep it up that long whereas by the nineties’ era of CD bloat some went on much longer. Some use it as a ‘leave them wanting more’ final track while for others it’s the point at which they’re in the midst of their second wind. For many, though, it’s just filler.

Anywho, without further prattle, ceremony here’s a sweep of some pretty solid tracks that also happen to be the tenth tune on an album – while a little bit of a sausage-fest* – also serves to cover most of what this blog has in the last ten.

Pearl Jam – Present Tense

Bob Dylan – The Man In Me

Bruce Springsteen – Darkness On The Edge of Town

Noir Desir – Lost

Snail Mail – Mia

Tom Petty – Alright For Now

Pink Floyd – Lost for Words

Weezer – Only In Dreams

The Replacements – Skyway

Mogwai – Mogwai Fear Satan

*only down to the lack of stand out tracks that happened to sit between the ninth and eleventh ones.

Self-compiled: Led Zeppelin

/ Tony / 10 Comments

“They are an immovable force in music... I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t like them.” Jack White

Jack White may be many things but wrong about Led Zeppelin isn’t one of them.

Often imitated, never bettered. They burst out of the gate white-hot and tighter than a duck’s arse, delivering jaw-dropping rock with a capital ROCK and never really slowed down. Their last few albums may have suffered from the shadows of personal tragedies but even then they could bring it like few others. I can’t write anything about them or better than what has already been written.

But… as a result of prepping a room for redecoration I did come across a pile of old cd compilations that I must have made some ten years gone and – while they’ve travelled and been spun here and in Romania before picking up dust and scuffs that cause the dreaded skip just as you’re getting your head bang on – it was a real pleasant surprise to find my old self-compiled Led Zeppelin cd again.

I know… why would I want such a thing, it’s not like there are already several Led Zeppelin compilations on the market but we all know that those compilations are invariably altered based on Jimmy Page’s preference at the time, there’ll be a little too much focus applied to later tunes that don’t really stand shoulder to shoulder, suffer a little from CD bloat etc…. besides: this is my single-disc all killer, no filler blast of my favourite Led Zeppelin tunes (well, as they were back when I made it) that – I think – covers every aspect of what made them great, get in, hit em hard and get out compilation. It’s probably also the only Led Zeppelin compilation with no ‘Whole Lotta Love’ and without a trace of ‘Stairway to Heaven’. I know: denied.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot…

/ Tony / 3 Comments

Despite another morning of waiting for the ice to dissolve from its windscreen before blasting the Ferrari’s mighty engine off of my drive and into the school-run and commute, the steady bead of afternoon sunlight in my eyes and the calling of the blogging urge has pulled me from my hibernation.

Where have I been? Fucking nowhere there’s a pandemic on and the rules change as much as that cockwomble-in-charge’s excuses do, triple-jabbed or not.

What have I been doing? The break wasn’t intended it just happened, maybe I’d lost my mojo, maybe I just needed to switch off a little. I’ve been reading a lot (potentially to be detailed later but Franzen’s latest was as excellent as expected, The Passenger is an amazing ‘lost’ novel rediscovered and Anna Karenina is proving the Russian beauty I wish I’d read sooner), using the festive break to watch films old (unlikely to be detailed later so Bad Boys 2 was as awful as I thought it would be, Face-Off has not aged well at all while Beverly Hills Cop is still a time-capsule joy) and new (Don’t Look Up suffers from split-personality only one half of which is very good, the other shite) of an evening instead of falling asleep in a cattle-truked daze. Oh, and watching Get Back*.

Of course, I’ve also been consuming music across as many formats and mediums as I can including catching up with some 2021’s finest. As Aphoristic Album Reviews points out in his fine summary of the year: putting together a list of a best albums during the year in question always feels a bit weird. What if your favourite artist surprise released a new album on Christmas Day? There’s also the fact that I don’t always get to absorb ‘new’ albums until that end of year break. Anywho, with that in mind and keeping it short and sweet, here are my five favourites of 2021.

Mogwai – As The Love Continues

Mogwai came out swinging in February with As The Love Continues. After the restrictions of 2020 (especially tougher in Scotland than here) gave them an opportunity to work distraction-free on their album, they produced one of their finest ever some 24 years after their debut and a very early and easy contender for AOTY. It bristles with great tunes, a warmth and thrust that they’ve not exhibited in a decade. A big hit with critics and fans alike it actually hit the top of the album charts here (surely that’s the first post-rock album to do so?),it felt too good to be true at the start of 2021 and, tens of plays later, still feels too good to be true at the start of 2022.

Snail Mail – Valentine

I was already hooked on this album on Spotify but after finding the vinyl under the tree this year I’ve fallen ever deeper under its spell (more reason to leave those lists until the year has passed). ‘Sold’ to me as a midway point between Hole and Lucy Dacus, Snail Mail’s second album is a glorious slab of 90’s inspired, emotionally fuelled alt-rock with real range and power.

Dinosaur Jr – Sweep It Into Space

The reunited Dinosaur Jr ‘classic’ lineup have now put out more albums than the three of their original run and one more than the various iterations of the band put out during its major label run. What’s surprising is that they’re still bitingly keen and putting out solid and inspired albums that always have plenty of great tunes on them and a lot of J Mascis’ always dazzling guitar solos. The addition of Kurt Vile as co-producer and occasional rhythm and acoustic guitar player has yielded one of their most sonically interesting and just plain-fucking-great-to-listen-to albums thus far and has been a regular spinner since it dropped in April.

Lucy Dacus – Home Video

I loved Lucy Dacus’ 2018 Historian. Why, then, it took so long for me to pick up Home Video is beyond me.. perhaps it was too much to listen to and too little time but, when my local announced a re-stock I made sure one of them had my name on and I’m glad I did: Home Video is just brilliant: Dacus goes from strength to strength here with an album richer in sound and more personal in lyrics – a compelling mix of alt-rockers and gut-wrench ballads.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor – God’s Pee AT STATE’S END

Two post-rock giants releasing great albums in the same year? Yup. Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress and Luciferian Towers were ok but didn’t move me in the way that ‘old’ GY!BE and even ‘Allelujah! Don’t Bend Ascend did… yet AT STATE’S END is a powerful return to that earlier form. Reintroducing found recordings and, like Don’t Bend… delivers two monumental slabs of post-rock with the band’s glorious build-ups from scratchy, static transmissions to crescendos that make your soul go ‘oh fuck YES! interspersed with a couple of drone tracks as if to cleanse the palate.

If this were a Top 10 it would also have included The War On Drugs’ I Don’t Live Here Anymore (a brilliant album that’s way too over-priced on vinyl to have been added to my collection and made the Top 5), Explosions In The Sky’s Big Bend (three post-rock albums in the Top 5 would be pushing it though), The Weather Station’s Ignorance and My Morning Jacket’s self-titled album while Ben Howard would’ve taken an honourable mention for his Collections From The Whiteout.

My favourite ‘Old Stuff Revisited’ release of 2021 is a tie between Tom Petty’s Finding Wildflowers and the re-cast Angel Dream (Songs and Music from the Motion Picture ‘She’s the One’) – that Rick Rubin helmed era of tunes from ’94 thru to 99’s Echo was a rich seam for Petty and these archival releases and new versions are like visiting a golden era and finding it even better than you remembered.

That was 2021… 2022 already has some promising releases on the horizon. I’m eagerly anticipating new albums from The Mysterines, Big Thief, Eddie Vedder (of course), Placebo (for the first time in a while) as well as ‘it could still happens’ like Springsteen’s Tracks 2 to name a few.

*Finding a way to summarise my thoughts on Get Back is likely to take a while

Let the music do the talking… Five from Joe ‘fucking’ Perry

/ Tony / 7 Comments

Aerosmith’s ‘Walk This Way’ was the first band ‘auto-biography’ book I’d read back when it dropped in back 1997 and the well-thumbed hardback on my shelves is testament to how many times I’ve either re-read or consulted it since. I also picked up Steven Tyler’s ‘Does The Nose in My Head Bother You’ at, I think, an airport or similar some years back so I was keen to read to read Joe Perry’s ‘Rocks’ when it was published yet, somehow, hadn’t.

Until, that is, while hitting up the local library with my son to stock up on books for him to read (it gives me a massive sense of pride that he takes joy in sitting down and reading to himself already) I saw Joe Perry’s ‘Rocks: My Life in and out of Aerosmith’ waiting for me to pluck from the shelves – it’s probably worth pointing out that the music and biog sections sit close by the children’s section, this tale of excess wasn’t nestling alongside the Hilda or Roald Dahl books.

An expectedly calmer read than that of Mr Tyler’s prose – though Perry too was assisted in his auto-bio – while ‘Rocks’ offers a counterpoint to some of his singer’s arguments as well as picking up on the tumult within the band since 1997 (numerous fallings out, injuries, Led Zeppelin auditions and finding out about X-Factor gigs via the internet) as well as just how excessively manipulated by the toxic approach of their manager Tim Collins. Perry gives an insight into his personal life, how event recent addictions to pain pills nearly derailed his marriage and, of course, his relationship with Tyler.

One of the biggest take-homes though is the Perry’s dissatisfaction with his working relationship with Steven Tyler and his singer’s seeming reluctance to write with him alone anymore despite supposedly seeing them as a Jagger / Richards songwriting team. While Tyler – even as recently as Aerosmith’s last studio album Music From Another Dimension – seems inclined to keep trying to write a ‘hit’ single, Perry would rather stick to what the band is good at. If ‘Rocks’ is truth then he and the rest of the band were so appalled at ‘Girls of Summer’ as a song so non-Aerosmith they refused to be in the video.

While Tyler may think that a band into its fourth decade has another chance at a massive hit (likely the reason the last album was so dampened by the cheesiest of ballads), one thing’s clear – Joe Perry has a love for and a real knack for the dirty blues (as opposed to ‘pure blues) rock riffs that make up the band’s finest work.

In fact whenever he hasn’t had an outlet for them in Aerosmith, or when he’s not been in the band, he’s put out a good body of solo work that’s stuffed with great tunes. While there’s something missing in the lyrics or vocals that only Mr Tyler can provide, so many of these could well have been more of a massive Aerosmith song than the schmaltz the group-writing sessions stuffed their later album with.

Here are five of which:

Let The Music Do The Talking

Perry walked away from Aerosmith in 1979. There’s plenty of reasons as to why but it was a glass of thrown milk that proved the final straw. While Perry would later discover that his / Aerosmith’s management team were working to hinder his solo career, the Joe Perry Project’s first album Let The Music Do The Talking shifted well enough, went down nicely with the critics and made it clear that Perry had the riffs that could’ve kept Aerosmith going for a lot longer (by 1980, Aerosmith were playing increasingly smaller venues and Tyler was collapsing on stage more frequently). So clearly an Aerosmith song that when the group reformed it was their first single, albeit with altered lyrics.

South Station Blues

Perry may have had the riffs but he still had an active addiction, a wife that was spending his money as though he were still drawing down Aerosmith payola and as the years went by the Project’s output decreased in quality though, with a new album a year after his first, Perry was already outpacing his former-band’s output. This, from the group’s second, is a pure belter.

Shakin’ My Cage

Years…. decades in fact after his last solo output, Joe Perry decided to ditch the Project element for his first proper ‘solo’ album in 2005. With Aerosmith on another rest period, Perry seemed determined to keep on the bluesier side that had leant itself to their last album Honkin’ On Bobo and put out an album on which he played everything but the drums. It’s not a very varied album but Perry showed he’d still got a fuckload of those classic heavy riffs in his bag even if Tyler didn’t want ’em and if you happen to dig those crunchy guitar workouts then it’s a pretty strong album.

Mercy

Also from Joe Perry and one that was up for a Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental Performance – fittingly Perry lost out here to Les Paul.

We’ve Got A Long Way To Go

With Aerosmith’s plans in the toilet after illness, injuries and strife called their tour with ZZ Top to be cancelled, Perry pulled together Have Guitar Will Travel – billed as a solo but much more of a band album and a lot less ‘produced’ than his previous album, feeling more like a warm, home-studio rave-up than polished, it feels like a relief in that respect but doesn’t hold together too well. Still, he also had songs like this which were clearly written with his usual singer’s pipes in mind and would’ve gone down well as an Aerosmith tune.