Reviews by kuvien

The way jazz sounds through metal shades drawn to keep out the blinking neon light of the cheap hotel across the street. This recording is all about smooth, rich atmosphere, worthy to be played on nice speakers in a quiet room during a rainy night. Eventually, though, the music's space expands, obliging it to leave the city behind and wander a bleak yet beautiful wilderness.

This kind of music in no way appeals to me, but I just got done listening to, so this is the Choir of Heaven compared to that!

For being avant-garde, this album is easy to listen to. Either that, or my ears are just more and more accustomed to experimental, freeform-sounding music. I love the interplay among the alto sax, flute, and drums throughout this album. The tuba gives it an overall sense of playfulness, slightly reminding me of some experimental big band stuff I've heard.

It doesn't get much worse than this.

Ever see that movie Event Horizon? The ship comes back from another dimension where it gained a malevolent sentience. This is the music of that ship. I can hear it filling up and echoing down the empty corridors and across the cold blackness of the void. But no matter how much the music expands, it can, because of the perceived infinity of space, be no more than an infinitesimally small herald of what lies beyond.

I'm Sheriff Bell, and she's one of the denizens of Terrell County I just stare at and cannot understand.

Fuckin' 'slitter, man. The shit I'll listen to for my bingo!

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This album is Slobodan Milošević-core, back when Serbians were so poor, the only recreation they had was sex... and, apparently, shitty music.

Is it the best thing Bley has done? No. Does it push boundaries, which is why we love her so much? Not really. But this is a solid album. Remember she's not trying to be avant-garde here. She's taking more of a prog jazz rock route, which is fine, too. This is a great collection of tracks that have a lot of variety among themselves.

I like self-indulgent music if it's done well and the people know what they're doing. I also don't have the attention span of a goldfish, so this being long doesn't bother me. This is basically avant jazz theater, so people who are into weird, quirky shit are going to like this. Don't look for a beat here. Don't look for anything you can hold onto, cuz it's all slippery. It lacks internal meaning. And if you're falling asleep while listening, don't worry: the vocalist will caterwaul at you, telling you to stay awaaaake. McLaughlin plays guitar on this one, Jack Bruce of Cream sings the male lead, and Linda Ronstadt has the female lead. The libretto is Haines' poetry in all its glorious pretension.

Brilliant. I fell in love with Carla Bley's jazz at first listen, and every time I re-listen, I just love her off-the-wall vision more. Someone called this "jazz in opposition". Yeah. That is pretty much the best three-word review I've ever read. Take what jazz offers and what rock in opposition offers in terms of weird structures, and you get this wonderful mess.

fox knows exactly what kind of album I want to 1-star. Japan, girls, punk? Fuck yeah, this is some good shit.

This one is me trying to branch out more into the other kinds of jazz that came before my best beloved jazz fusion. I’m warming up to hard bop, and I’m starting to recognize names and their attendant sounds, like Hubbard and Shorter. Whee! Blakey is a new name for me, though, so let’s dive in and give this one a good listen… what impresses my untrained ears most is the interplay among the trumpet, tenor sax, and trombone—and that’s clearly no mistake, since they are the three composers of this album. It’s like a conversation among old friends, one of mutual support, where one friend will finish another’s sentence, for they are so close they can almost read one another’s thoughts. I just feel like the horns are agreeing with one another.

Here's a fine little folk album, and a curious one, too, since the project was formed in France but they're clearly doing American folk music. Tia is an American girl who flew to Paris with nothing in her pockets but 60 bucks and the name of a record shop scribbled on a slip of paper. After checking into a five-bucks-a-night hotel nearby, the next day she went to the shop and fit right in with the countercultural crowd. Once they found out she could sing in her trademark, unaffected manner, they cut a record. Oh, and one of the regulars at that record shop? None other than the Colette Magny! I love Tia's understated vocals (the opposite of Magny's, by the way). This one album is the only document we have of the band. The renditions of "Polly Vaughn" and "Hangman" are respectively heartrending and poignant, but both wholly beautiful. Of course I heard "A Man of Constant Sorrow" in O Brother, Where Art Thou? and "Plastic Jesus" in Cool Hand Luke before I'd ever heard this album, so I wasn't sure what to think of these renditions, but they have grown on me and now I love them.

This guy's like...."holy shit! There's 50 minutes of this? I thought I was cool for sitting through 'Revolution 9'."

Is anyone else weirded out hearing that progressive rock guitar licking about the tracks? I guess it's a refinement. No complaints. Just a bit weird. The grooves and riffs of "Megalomania" kick so much ass. I actually said "this kicks ass" out loud on my most recent listen. Good Sabbath is good / Bad Sabbath is good. In the words of Ozzy himself: "Oh yeah!"

Does anyone else feel that Ozzy's voice is healing magic? His singing of death, for example, is just so alive. Like a good heavy metal band, Sabbath knows how to do the acoustic and the delicate perfectly, and, as always, they are asking difficult philosophical questions. "Spiral Architect", the lyrics of which purportedly came to the bassist in a dream, is a masterpiece of symphonic hard rock, and the use of the word "should" in the song reminds me that it is indeed my human duty to give thanks, for life is, in itself, good.

"Idealistic" isn't a word I've heard when people discuss Black Sabbath, but that's what a lot of their music is, hoping for a better world tomorrow, a world where people don't kill in the name of God, where people aren't afraid or embarrassed to believe what they believe, where people don't worship evil and death, where we actually care about the natural global environment. This album is basically decrying the collective leap humanity is taking into the void.

What a curious album! Every song is worse than the one before.