1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: The 50's part 1

It begins! Yes friends, the latest and greatest listening project by yours truly! It took me a year and a half to get through the Rolling Stone Top 500 albums, who knows how long it will be for me to get through the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. I developed a bit of a hatred for Rolling Stone and their picks during the last one. Seeing how this new list skips greatest hits compilations and should cut down on repeats, I'm excited! Also, this list goes by decade and year of release as opposed to titles arranged in a debatable order. So there's none of the "Should Sgt. Pepper beat Pet Sounds since it wouldn't exist without Pet Sounds?" nerd arguing. Instead, it's going to be a history of popular music, and a study of recording techniques since it should get more sophisticated as it moves to modern times.

Truly, this will be fun! PLEASE LET IT BE FUN!

I'm going to follow my RS500 format of doing these in chunks of 10 titles. The exception is "The 50's" though since it only contains 20 odd items, so I'm doing it in two parts. I'm using the original 2005 edition list, if I can find the 25 albums from the updated "2010" I'll probably do them to. I currently have the first 675 albums, so that should keep me busy for a bit!


0001 Sinatra, Frank – In the Wee Small Hours
It's fitting that the list starts here, at the first concept album. The orchestration is lush, Sinatras' voice is smooth and velvety. My memories of Sinatra are from the later years when he was pretty much talking the songs as much as singing them, it was weird to hear this at first. The perfection in voice and music is completely counter to the subject matter of the songs. Song so full of love lost and despair, they seem better suited to a Tom Waits album. It all works wonderfully though, it's the type of album you want to curl up with at midnight and destroy a whiskey bottle and pack of smokes to. And I don't even smoke!


0002 Presley, Elvis – Elvis Presley (1956)
Elvis' first album is a cobbled together one of newly recorded tracks for RCA mixed with some of his Sun records work. It all fits together surprisingly well though. He's already showing the brazen commercial sense (forced by management, no doubt) that will drive his career into parody, but what's refreshing about this and makes it so fun to listen to is this. You can tell he's a dumb hillbilly with no musical direction other then a gut feeling of what he likes and an innocent desire to sing the shit out of every song he decides to have a crack at. So instead of insipid covers of Little Richard, you get balls out covers from a white kid with a shockingly thin voice, especially when compared to the later years, backed by a rather base band. It's pretty good alchemy, an image to be sold to the masses, who actually believes and loves what he is doing. This music is alive, beautifully alive, and the teener hit makers of today still have a lot to learn from the King.


0003 Louvin Brothers – Tragic Songs of Life
Man, did I ever fall in love with this record. It starts of with some fine bluegrass mandolin and the brothers voices are exactly what hillbilly harmony should be. A big echo guitar blends in perfectly to plant this old timey style music into the modern fifty's and it creates a timeless sound that blew me away. The songs are a mix of ballads and jaunty sounding hill tunes. All of them dealing with missing home, losing at love and other life hardships and the brothers absolutely nail them with heartfelt vocals and an interplay that surpasses most hillbilly style country and western. Amazing stuff, and I'm already tracking down some more Louvin Brothers work. A record that shows off all that Country music can and should be. Highly recommended!


0004 Prima, Louis – The Wildest!
Wild is right! Prima is probably best known as "King Louie" in Disney's Jungle Book. Ends up he was always a wild man. These tracks were recorded with his Vegas band at a time when Prima was to Vegas that Elvis was in the 70's. Not a bad track on here, the band is jumping and rocking, Louie's horn is great. Most impressive though is Louie's vocals. He sings like he plays the trumpet, loud, brash, holding notes most vocalists would pass, it's breathtaking stuff. Especially when he interplays with the female vocalist who's name I forget. A fantastic record that is sadly too short, I could listen to this stuff all day. And forget about David Lee Roth, you haven't heard "I'm Just A Gigolo" until you've heard Prima and his crack band belt it out. Highly Recommended.


0005 Domino, Fats – This is Fats
A good collection of pre-fame tracks can be found here. Before hitting it big with a series of rock singles, Fats was a fantastic R&B man who was embraced by Rock & Roll. All of these tracks would be great in a juke joint, and they are great here. It's the type of music that leaves a big smile on your face, much like what Fats probably had on his when he recorded it.


0006 Ellington, Duke – At Newport 1956)
When it comes to Jazz, there's probably no one more classy then Duke. This is a great one to listen to, a live recording of a historic concert for the band. My problem though is that this big band stuff is so polite that it makes me think of dinner music. It doesn't really stick with me despite the top notch playing.


0007 Sinatra, Frank – Songs for Swingin’ Lovers!
Sinatra follows up one of the saddest albums ever recorded with one of the most joyous. The music contained in this is exactly as advertised, and Sinatra sounds better then ever. Well worth your time.


0008 Holly, Buddy - The "Chirping" Crickets
Buddy's first album, and it's a good one. He's already mastered melody, and the original found on here are still top notch rock cuts. It's raw and sounds like it was recorded in a garage, you can here the spaces between the mics on some tracks, and it makes for greatness. Recommended


0009 Basie, Count – Atomic Mr. Basie
The Count is like a bluesier Elington, which I prefer. It's still big band though, so it all washes over me and sounds the same.


0010 Monk, Thelonious – Brilliant Corners
More jazz, this is closer to the Be-Bop style I prefer. It's peppy, but ultimately there is too much stuff on here that sounds out of tune and it loses me.


0011 Sabú [Martínez] – Palo Congo
This is Latin jazz. And that's all you need to since if you click that link you'll learn that not even wikipedea has any idea about what this is all about. All you need to know is that it's more latin drum then jazz, and it kicks some ass. That's factoring in my xenophobia of hating music sung in languages other then English.

The Broken Record

Phew! Been kind of a whack past week or so. I can't seem to get anything right on the ball, and floundering a bit. Seeing how recent events in my personal life have once again lead to me having nothing but oodles of spare time to fill, I feel the need to post an update of what I'm doing as a reminder and motivation for myself. not like anyone else is going to do it eh! HA!

Current projects, latest activities ETC:
Exercise: Since dropping out of the gym a year ago, I never got back into the fitness thing and have found myself getting fatter. Since space in the Porn Bunker is limited, I have come up with what I was calling "The Prison Workout". A series of exercises that could be done in a 6'x3' space. My plan was to start this last week, but I'm piss poor with self discipline. However, Robot Girl Tron on her Blog mentioned the 100 push-up challenge. So I decided last week to start that challenge this week. Today actually, when I get home from work. I did the test last week, and I scraped out 8 push-ups, so I'm going to try tier 2. I'm not fully convinced that I was doing them correctly, but what the hell.

New Listening Project: A few weeks ago I mentioned seeking out the "50 Greatest Out Of Print Records" as picked by Mojo magazine. Hard to believe, but these are a bitch to track down via legal means or torrents. In searching for these though, I have found a great start to the "1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die" collection. Up to 675 anyways. A few years ago I did the Rolling Stone Top 500 Albums of All Time". It took me a year and a half and was dead annoying. I didn't learn my lesson though, so I'm going for the 1001 list, and have already begun. Future blogs will detail this list, in chunks of 10 albums similar to my previous experiment. Anyone interested in joining me can feel free to let me know and we can go about trading.

Red Dead Redemption: This game is like heroin to the eyes. You just kind of daze over and get hypnotized by it. When I first got it last Wednesday, I was a bit unimpressed since it felt like I only played about 20 minutes of the 90 minutes of cut screens and what not in the story mode. Then a friend came by and we dicked around in the "Free Roam" multi-player for about 6 hours and decided this was one of the all time greats. Having played another hour of the story mode, and there is a shit ton of stuff to do in this one. Much like "Grand Theft Auto", I'll never finish this game, but it's dead fun to just wander about getting into trouble with out doing the actual missions. Good stuff.

I really hate Green Day now: I was never much of a fan of this band. Kind of thing where if they came on the radio I wasn't offended. A few weeks ago they came out with "Green Day : Rock Band" and since I'm a useless slut for the Rock Band games, I snagged a rental copy and imported all 40 odd tracks into ROCK BAND 2. Fuck me but was that a mistake! Easily, this is the most annoying band to ever be declared "The most important band of the decade". To play the songs on Rock Band, you find that they are either shit hard strum patterns for a plastic guitar or dead simple, and in both cases so repetitive you're just waiting for the songs to end only to find that they average 5 minutes for these turds. Forget about the monotone wine for Billy Joe Whatshisnames vocals... I was hoping for a case of what usually happens with Rock Band, and that's getting a better appreciation for the music. Instead, my general non-caring of the band has turned into a full blooded hatred of them. I can't wait for RB3 to come out so I can block these fuckers and never have to play them again!

That's about it I guess. Been a lot of sadness the past week, and this is all the kind of positive stuff I can think of.

Comic Book Round Up! "DC Legacies"

Well, I've already fallen terribly behind in the blogging thing. I was going to attempt numerous blogs a week. Obviously that hasn't happened. Fail! Anyways, here's a quick review I meant to write last week but didn't get to it.

DC comics is currently running a 12 issue mini-series called "Legacies". Basically it's a retelling of DC continuity from the first appearance of superheroes until (I'm guessing)the modern day. Now I'm woefully behind on DC continuity. The last series I read was "Batman: Cataclysm" back in 1999. Since then the DC universe has had about 3 crisis's, a couple of Bright Days, Blackest Nights, who knows what else. I'm guessing this series is an attempt to give 70 years of continuity another revision so that it all makes sense. The odd thing is, no one really notices continuity too much if they pick up a Batman book and start reading it. I've never really felt the need to read a 1960's "Green Lantern" in order to understand what was happening in "Zero Hour". It is a fictional world after all, and not a real history. Anyways, DC and it's continuity has been a real can of bees for the company since the first Crisis (of infinite Earths) back in 1985, so who knows how this will all play out in 5 years time.

That said, this book is good. It does a masterful job of updating DC history while telling a story that is genuinely interesting. I always have had a bit of a soft spot for these types of things, and this one succeeds wonderfully since on top of the great storytelling, the guest artists working on this are all pretty top notch as well (Joe Kubert kicked off the golden age!) It's great seeing the golden age heroes dealt with (the first two issues basically deal with the JSA, issue Three isn't out yet)in this manner, where you get a bit of nostalgia for the old books without it being corny. The creators also don't presume you know everything about these people, so you're never lost wondering who the hell Hour-Man is either so it's great for noobs or people like me who have fallen out of grace with DC continuity. Really great stuff.

So yeah, it's a recommend so far unless it all falls apart in the coming months. It might be worth waiting for the inevitable trade paperback, but if you're a weekly comics rack type of geek, pick it up and check it out. Now I have to find out if this real is going to be the bible to current continuity or not!

The New Pornographers : The Big Mall, June 8, 2010

Managed to catch The New Pornographers last night playing the Edmonton Event Center. First off, this venue really is pretty shit. It's hard not to feel like your jammed in a cattle shoot instead of standing in front of a stage. The acoustics leave little to be desired as well. The giant, hanger like open roof needs some dampeners or something to clean up the sound. More on that later.

The New Pornographers. I have a confession to make. I'm only familiar with them due to hearing that Neko Case sings with them periodically, and a song they have in Rock Band. As a result, this review is automatically biased in that this pretty much could of been "Neko Case and The New Pornographers". Mostly singing back up and harmonies, Nekos voice combined with keyboardist Kathryn Calders pretty much overpowered the band and turned many of the songs into magic. It would be hard to imagine the line up without Neko being a part of it. Which isn't to say that the band is nothing special in it's own right. Masterfully switching up instruments and genres, yet always sounding original and like their own thing, they're well worth checking out on their own right. Neko just bumped it all up past 11 and made a great show amazing. As far as the junkie guy who only wandered out half pissed to sing on his own songs, he can bugger off as far as I'm concerned. Especially with a drummer in the band that sang, played drums and acoustic guitar, all in one song, that Junkie Fuck didn't bother to come out for even though he plays guitar! If you don't want to participate or find something to do with your band, then you shouldn't be in it! Anyways, they're out on tour so if they hit your neck of the woods, you could do a lot worse.

Openers The Mountain Goats sadly didn't fair as well. Another band I'm mostly unfamiliar with. Hell, I mostly know them from a guy suggesting them to me from when I participated actively in an internet cult! Ends up they're not from the UK either, despite the singers voice sounding like a better version of Danny O'Donnel or whoever that PBS singing piece of shit is. They put on a hell of a show as well. A tight trio that plays confidently, they echo at turns The Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan. The problem here is that leader John Darniell clearly has something to say and the lyrics mean more then music. The acoustics in the damned event center made those lyrics into gibberish, highlighted a rather repetitive acoustic guitar and added with a wonk guitar cable, the band clearly suffered through a set that only their sheer joy at performing got them through it. This was supposedly their first stop in Edmonton. I hope they make a second one. To see these guys in a room like the Haven Social Club would fantastic.

So there it is. Two bands I barely know, one left me blown away, the second interested me enough to see them in a venue that doesn't sabotage them from the get go. Both well worth shelling out for if they come to your town. So order a CD or something!

Comic Book Round Up! "iZOMBIE"

I read comics. There. Now that I've got that alcoholic like admission out of the way, I'm going to blather on about my pick for best comic of last week. I'm probably going to do this for my possibly one reader each week based on the comics I buy. Last week, I bought a whole 2 books, which considering I usually buy trade and hard covers, is a HUGE comic week for me.

Anyways, I was too intrigued by iZombie not to buy the first issue last month. The $1 cover price certainly helped. I love zombies, and I love the zombie genre. I tend to hate zombie comics. There's too god damned many of them! Marvel has a zombie-vers, DC had a bunch of zombie heroes come back as lanterns or some shit in the never read by anyone "Final Darkest Brightest Night Crises Day"... forget about all the independent publishers pumping out between 1 and a 1000 books a month. It's too much zombies!

So dear reader, you may be wondering "Gee mister, why'd you buy the zombie book then?" It's because I like Michael Allreds work. "MADMAN" comics (up until the yet unread IMAGE books from last year) was brilliant, RED ROCKET 7 was great, his Book Of Mormon was pretty to look at and ignore... I wanted to see what he did with the zombie books. It's also published by Vertigo, the DC imprint that is actually unafraid to deal with supernatural subjects in a non-retarded way. So it's all a recipe for success!

Except it isn't a total success. The art is fantastic as Allred tends to be. It's written by Chris Roberson, a writer I'm unfamiliar with. Issue one was a pretty good first issue in that it introduced a shit load of characters in an interesting way. The problem in issue 2 is that there's too much going on in too few pages so none of it really ads up to much. It's too cut up and this seems to be (as far as one can tell in one issue) a story that needs to breath a bit. It's not so bad that I'm dropping the book. It's more a case of being intrigued enough in the subject to want more then I got. Instead of quick glimpses of the characters, I want to see more of the characters which is impossible with about 4 plots that have yet to fully converge into a linear story. If this was a limited series, I wouldn't be as concerned. This is being billed as an ongoing though, so I fear that it will become a convoluted, rambling mess.

So there it is, "iZOMBIE" has been thoroughly judged before getting a chance to come in to it's own thing! If you're a zombie fan, I'm sure you'll enjoy this since it really is a different take on the whole zombie genre, and an interesting one. Just hold your thumbs that it doesn't all fall apart.

3.5/5

Kids and their damned music these days!

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Review! The Sadies Live At The Starlight Room

I had a rare leaving of the house last week, and caught a live show at the Starlight Room. I still have fond memories of this place from back in the day when it was "The Bronx" and you could catch an SNFU show for $5... but I'm old and this is not about nostalgia!

Show started three Jack n'Cokes late, as seems to be the live show trend in Edmonton these days, but eventually The Pack A.D. hit the stage. This is a band I am totally unfamiliar with, and had no expectations. They appeared at first song to be a lezbo "White Stripes" based on it being two girls and a guitar/drum combo, and me being a judgmental asshole. Ends up that while a bit White Stripe-ish, they are certainly their own thing, and put on a fine set. Not fine enough for me to rush out and buy a CD at the merch table, but fine enough that I'll check them out a second time if opportunity arises and maybe eventually buy a CD. They certainly won over the crowd, and really, that's good enough eh?

Pack A.D. played a tight set of about 30 minutes (it went by fast, another good sign of a good band), then it was a piss break and time for The Sadies. Now The Sadies are near mythic in some circles, but in my hermit circle, I know them mostly from backing up others like Neko Case, John Doe, etc. Well fuck me, are they good. Ridiculously good. In a perfect world, this is what country music would be. Passionate, heartfelt and balls out, instead of the over produced ignorant hair metal that it's become. The Sadies are typically billed "Alt Country", but that's a bit of a disservice since their range is large and their powers mighty. The encore of "10 Songs" was so impressive, I think I watched it with my mouth all agape. The Good Brothers were born to play this music, and it pours out of them while they play. If it wasn't for an upcoming Flaming Lips* show in September, I would confidently declare this "Best Show of 2010". It still might be. If they come around your neck of the woods, go see them. Buy their latest album, it's not as country as their other stuff, but it's damned fine.

That's about it for this one, it's new comics Wednesday, but I got a hell of a cold and couldn't be assed into going to the comic book shop.

*My expectations for this Flaming Lips show are way to high, it's probably going to be an epic fail.

Right, I myself am bored with the past.

So, the intent of this blog was to copy all my old blogs onto this website so as to keep an archive. I've discovered after one attempt at doing this, that I am simply uninterested in doing this. Even I myself am bored by reading about my past boring (albeit with some amazing life changing adventures periodically thrown in) internet adventures! So this blog will be a brand new blog, if you want to see my past, there's links to copy in my profile info.

So there.

That's about it for now I guess. I recently picked up the latest issue of Uncut Magazine to check out an article called "The Top 50 Lost Albums". "Lost" in this case means currently out of print, as opposed to unfinished albums like "Smile", or albums based on mysterious TV show shows that ended this year. Anyways, with most of them being unrecognizable to me, I've decided to attempt to collect all of these and see if any of them are as great as they say they are. I currently only have copies of about 5 of them though, so it may take a while to get all these. At any rate, if it's awful, it shouldn't be nearly as awful as my "Rolling Stone Top 500" attempt from a few years ago (see link in profile to read about that) and should hopefully be a good bit of fun.

Other then that, I'm pretty much still in hermit mode. I've seemed to annoyed all my friends again with no explanation of what it was I exactly did, so things are quiet... too quiet. So quiet I'm blogging like a 12 year old girl. Yay internet!

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