Reviews by kuvien

Organ solos galore! Do it again, and make sure you get those mellow organ phrases all over me. I’ll be patient. I can wait for the band to come.

Eighteen different people play on this album? Whoa. Track B1 is my favorite here. As someone who takes his sex and his religion seriously, I always find it interesting to see how people on both sides of the argument are unable to reconcile the two. For me, they are complementary, and it’d be difficult to have one without the other, considering how intimately they are connected.

Frank Zappa’s manager used Zappa’s royalty checks to fund the recording of the original version of Bat Chain Puller in 1976, and, of course, Zappa got pissed off about that and withheld the master tapes from Van Vliet. Lawsuits flew, and the whole matter was settled privately out of court, but what we do know is that Van Vliet had to re-record some of that material two years later, and that re-recording, along with four new songs, is the album in question here. So what does this album sound like? Well, Captain Beefheart, obviously, which means it’s experimental and confident, and somehow it strikes me as simultaneously lazy and urgent. Anyway, this is excellent late-career Beefheart and my favorite of his. Kick your boots off, whistle along, and play your air guitar!

Yeah, I'm sure the song about Twitter is satirical, but that doesn't mean it's not cringey as fuck.

Every whiny screaming white suburban Midwest emo boy should be pressed into military service. They will either come out of the service of man or die in the process. Either result is a win.

This album has all the serenity of a waking dream, beautiful and comforting, with a masterful use of the harp, calling upon the rich Celtic tradition of the Galician people.

Although this band was a little late to the folk revival scene, Italy had its own canzone culture being revivified in the 70s, which inevitably led to collectives like this adding members, experimenting with sounds beyond trad folk, and, of course, going electric. Like the best weird Italian prog folk out there, carnivalesque indulgence lies at the heart of this music.

When this album goes too free with the jazz and too avant with the metal, it just becomes noise. For some people, that is a feature, not a bug.

The comparisons to BCNR are inevitable, and that's fine. There are worse bands to be musically compared to. What I love about this album is the way it expresses itself, expansively, emotionally, and how the music is not blindly Christian but, like Sufjan, wrestles with the reality of death (both its terror and its beauty) and questions of identity, especially national Chilean identity. The fences they're climbing could be political, or they could be the spiritual walls that divide man from man. Or both. This is music that not only expresses community but seeks it. It is deeply relational, even whimsical (death+plushies). What can we do with the brief time we have, and during that time how can we bear the weight of the prison of our flesh?

This doesn't sound like a compilation, so I'm not going to think of it as one. Also, shouldn't it be Father Sky? I mean, after all, the sky rains down upon the Earth. Well, since this album makes me feel like I'm standing in the middle of the desert, maybe daddy ain't doing his work. This album is like a convoy moving toward a far-off destination it will never reach, but that's all right, because the whole point is the journey.

Has a can of okra ever sounded better? Has losing your vitamin C ever been more dire? Every time I hear Damo sing, it's like he's sitting next to me at a party with really good but really loud music playing. And he's sitting beside me talking at polite conversation level, so I really can't understand a damn thing he's saying.

A lyric-less album due to copyright whining. Does the music evoke the lonely genius of a disabled artist? Can you smell the sea air from the lighthouse windows? Even in the heart of the horrors of war, love regenerates that which is broken.

A sense of weightlessness, evoked by mellow, introspective guitars and sustained organ chords, bewitching gravity of its power. The music swings between this and a more terrestrial feel through imagery evoked not only by the vocals but the pastoral flutes. Day is but a waiting for the re-appearance of the celestial orbs, the chief of which is our moon.

Anything referencing The Lord of the Rings scores big points in my book. Olórin he was known in his youth, and from Nienna he learned pity.

A beautiful, mellow album that focuses more on the instrumentals than the vocals. A lot of the music on this album makes me feel just a touch sad for some reason. An impressive debut, to say the least, with more funk than we hear from their later albums. Also, if you like Pink Floyd, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t like this album and perhaps this band. But definitely this album.

Act V, scene iii
A bar room.

"Beer."

[NARRATIVE VOICE OVER]
Where'd I go wrong? Been traveling the wrong river too long. Time to get back home and make love to her. She's fertile. Fly like an arrow back home. An arrow is a ray, and mathematically, a ray has no end. Fertile. She's the only beautiful thing left. Used to think the mountains were, but they don't need me to tell them so. Besides, I've got my death-warmed-over glasses glued to my face now. Been too many places. Traveled in circles. I'm lonely. Gotta get home. Gotta wake up, and then wake her up, too.

"Thank you."

Immediately the music sounds like something out of a Tarantino film. Hooked instantly, which may or may not be because of my love of all things Tarantino. The trembling gypsy violins are hypnotic. It's impossible for me to separate this music from vivid scenes of open, dusty roads, glaring, brutal sun, and lonely gas stations serving food that's far too spicy for me. And then I stumble across an abandoned mission church where echoes of this music remain unheard. Because of its sideshow quirkiness, there are moments where I hear Tom Waits, in its most gothic, cabaret flourishes. Quite possibly the most cinematic non-cinematic album ever made.

2h 24m DNF. How the fuck he gon sing that many words in Spanish?

Another haunted, lonely, vocally experimental album sung, wailed, and chanted over menacing drones and bursts of noise. Exactly what one would expect from this avant-garde duo. Music for high-level druids.

Moments of brilliance, stretches of tedium, intermittent explosive diarrhea. Basically, life.