Reviews by kuvien

The intent of this album was to forsake the studio trickery of Sgt Pepper's and create a live show feeling, a kind of return to the stage, but the sad reality is that the band lacked decent material amidst the worsening relationships and inevitable breakup. The "Get Back" sessions was McCartney's idea, as he wanted the band to work together properly again. He had this kind of boundless enthusiasm (poor guy), coming up with many new songs.

The bad atmosphere of Twickenham studios, however, mitigated against any positivity Paul could bring. It was too cold, they met too early in the morning, and Lennon was distracted by both Yoko and heroin. John had written very little new material, so Paul helped him arrange some of his song fragments. But John didn't care. He was sarcastic the whole time and eventually lapsed into comatose boredom.

And what about poor George? Lennon rejected his new material, and McCartney interfered too much. Harrison desperately wanted to go solo--and almost did!--having walked out of the sessions for a week. He came back only when they decided to bring in a guest, Billy Preston. You know how a family that always fights behaves itself when guests come over? Well, that's how the Beatles behaved when Preston came in to play the organ.

So, how to end the "Get Back" sessions? How about a rooftop concert, since the TV live show was cancelled? As we all know, the concert, which featured songs from this album, was shut down by the cops. (Cops suck in every galaxy.)

This album is, to be honest, quite derivative of the late-60s trend to have a back-to-basics stripped-down rock sound. This is both a fond farewell to the 60s and a requiem for the Beatles. "Let It Be": the epitaph of the Beatles' tombstone.

As everyone knows, the history of the band is a story of two halves, and this album is the transition. We have the Fab Four, known to the world as these zany, lovable lads, turning from their clean-cut image to marijuana. And I mean a lot of it. They smoked constantly during the making of Help!. This transitional phase is the map of the Beatles’ future, marked out not only by a newfound emotional maturity but also a polarization between Lennon and McCartney. The record companies could smell the death of Beatlemania, and producers sensed the end, too. They all wanted more material, wanted to cash in one last time. “Ticket to Ride” spent only a week at the top of the charts, a stunning blow to the Beatlemania machine. The old times were finished, and this shift was ushered in by the arrival of the band’s first drug album, Dylan having introduced the lads to weed the year previous, and Lennon and Harrison having experimented with LSD, having obtained some from George’s dentist.

So what are the positive and negative influences of drugs on Help!? On the upside, the band recorded some of their best tracks, the drugs audibly freeing them from the restraints of contemporary pop music. They explore new sounds, therefore, and new emotional depths, like “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”, an exploration of the dark corners of the Beatles’ psyche. “Ticket to Ride” is certainly an emotional ride, too, full of confusion and ambivalence. On the downside, there’s a clear lack of quality control, most likely caused by too much smoking. Pleasant songs like “Another Girl”, “Tell Me What You See”, and “It’s Only Love” (a track Lennon despised, though the first steps toward sitar use can be heard here), are, at the end of the day, merely filler. Some pretty trite lyrics, too, as well as some lackluster songs that made the cut; “Act Naturally”, “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”, and “You Like Me Too Much”.

The two pivotal tracks of the album come one each, from Lennon and McCartney, and here is planted the seed of a bitter rivalry. John gives us the title track as he emerges from behind the standard love-song metaphors. The song focuses on an overwhelming feeling of desperation, made attractive through a finely-wrought melody, complex harmonies, and Harrison’s fun descending guitar lines. Paul’s track is, of course, “Yesterday”, a song deeply ingrained in pop culture psyche. McCartney had it in his psyche, too, before he ever wrote it, because he says he dreamed the melody. And what a melody it is—it has over 1600 cover versions, the most recorded song in pop music history. McCartney was used to writing hit songs quickly, but he spend a year and a half on “Yesterday”, and he recorded it by himself, a first for a Beatle. Following in the trend of spreading their musical wings, “Yesterday” uses a string quartet, taking chances with non-traditional instruments for pop music. This song divided Lennon and McCartney. Contractually, Lennon is also listed as the songwriter, but he admitted and feared that he would never write a song this popular.

This isn't some great work of art, in my opinion, but it is everything it means to be: a soothing blend of indie pop and alt-country. I loved this the first time I heard it years ago on a friend's recommendation. This is a great singalong album, equally good in summer or winter, but for opposite reasons. "Old Sea Miner" is randomly an excellent song on this album.

It's li'l bit garbage?

I'm not the biggest Beach Boys fan. Not sure why. I respect their work, but to me they're just a pleasant singalong band and that's all. Despite what I know about their innovation. I do really love how they compose for the human voice and use it in such an impressive way. Everything sounds so...rich and full.

It’s got such a playful, carefree feeling, and I actually prefer it to some of the Boys’ canonical albums. I mean, when you make vegetables this appealing, how can even children turn up their noses at them? This thing is all over the place, and I approve.

Not often have I run across an album that both scratches my itch to hear complex music and yet have it be so easy on the ears, a wonderful blend of digestibility and a challenge against the expectations of 70s Italian pop. The more unexpected, progressive moments of this album are sheer delight.

More California punk that's pissed off about the government fucking them over.

What’s that traditional-sounding horn blowing at the beginning? That evocation certainly grabbed my attention, along with the disturbing, wordless vocals. The tribal, mantra-inducing percussion is juxtaposed nicely with saxophone and flute phrasings soaring high above. This gives way to more pleasant call-and-response vocals and more melodious flutes. Overall a festive atmosphere pervades this album. What is it about so much music from the African continent that makes it bright, full of energy and happy (at least to my Western ears)? All that energy coalesces in the fourth track, what I would consider the centerpiece of the album. A fifteen-minute epic, this track unfolds its themes slowly and beautifully, and it’s like I’m listening to the crafting of a song.

What a delightful and somewhat mysterious little collaboration by two native Polish music collectives! The polyphonic vocal folk and the clarinets move up and down like water boiling in slow motion. But it's not all soothing and pleasant chamber music: the distant loneliness gives way to a conflagration of invocative passion in the vocals as the clarinets and cellos raise the pulse of all who have hearts to respond to the wild music. I love the singsong conversation these ladies have while the cello pulse-drones on.

I'm not big into fado, but Amália Rodrigues enchanted me the first time I heard her, and I dived into her music. So when I saw that a Polish chamber music trio had teamed up with a modern fado singer to re-interpret some classics of the genre, I was intrigued. And this album pays off! What I find most interesting about this collaboration is how the musicians aren't afraid to break the rules. Oh, this is mainly Portuguese vocal music accompanied by guitar? Sure, let's keep the guitar, but let's add in clarinets and cello, too. The result is that though the fire of the original music is subdued, the low-light atmosphere retains the compositions' immortal beauty.

I became familiar with Bastarda a couple years ago through their albums and, lovely albums where the clarinets and the cello enchant the ear, but it seems that the trio has branched out in 2021, publishing two collaborations in the same year, the first being an exploration of fado variations with, the next being this album, a collaboration with the evocative vocalists of the SWPS University Choir, though the tracks are all composed and arranged by Bastarda. Apparently the concept for this album is a look at the ceremonies and rituals surrounding the cycle of the seasons. Grunts, chants, yelps... yep. It's all there. I can't help but think about the opening line of The Waste Land:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land

But it's not all avant-garde vocals. The cello establishes itself like the deep arms of the Earth, embracing the entire soundscape, cradling the dual clarinets and allowing them space to rise in punctuated spurts, like shoots.

This is a beautiful debut. Plain and simple. This trio just gets better, but here's where the magic starts, making a kind of music so soothing and lovely that the best thing to do is just wrap yourself around a pillow and let Górczyński's contrabass clarinet envelop you in its deep, rich tones, while Pokrzywiński's earthy cello vibrates beneath you. Szamburski's clarinet is more playful, bringing a buoyant delight to these original interpretations of the Medieval music of Petrus Wilhelmi de Grudencz.

The fingerprints of God are evident in the scattering of fireflies in the darkness. And that scattering gives rise to the advent of the human voice singing.

Only three instruments here: clarinet, contrabass clarinet, and cello. Creating such rich, beautiful music that is for the most part soothing as it dances slowly along, but then come the moments of frightening harshness, when the cello sounds like it's going to break under the strain. Are those slight vocal moments the exhalations of the performers as they throw all that they are into their performance? Actually, I think it's people in the audience sneezing or coughing. Nice. Eventually the actual non-lyric vocals break in with beautiful all-male choral singing. Anyway, this is all very Jewish.

The name of this album is taken from 15th-century Latin texts about how to die well within the precepts of the Christian religion, especially considering the horrors of mass death in times of plague. I wonder if this album is meant, in some small part, to be an auditory companion to one's hour of death. The music is beautiful, a little haunting and strange, and feels like it's stalking you, like it's walking slowly, yet deliberately and inexorably, toward you with each pulse of the cello. I'm surprised at how subdued the greeting for the Queen of Heaven is, though. I would've expected more... joy. Well, I guess when one is dying, there are other things on your mind. This recording is all very minimal (for the most part--except for the wonderful braying of the contrabass clarinet) and full of nuance.

Psychedelic flutes climbing, soaring, circling, diving through the low sky the music creates. The guitars are of the earth, meandering and serpentine, like ancient roads. And between the earth and sky, the air is full of spices. This vinyl LP was released without a label and is a highly sought-after rare music artifact.

lmao people take this guy seriously?

A charming little collection of early Floyd tunes and Barrett numbers, ranging in sound quality from pretty good to very rough and lo-fi, the bootleg being peppered throughout with short radio bits and contemporary criticism--both positive and negative--of Pink Floyd and their "repetitive", "psychedelic" sound. I'm not sure if some of these tracks are live or just studio-demo live versions, but they are very low quality indeed, accompanied by a smattering of applause. A curiosity, but not something to spin over and over again.

This is Barrett’s second solo album, and in my opinion, it’s as good as his legendary first one. Everything that makes Pink Floyd’s first two albums is infused into this record: the imagination, the surrealism, the whimsy. This was produced by Gilmour and Wright, so I guess the Floyd connection wasn’t completely severed yet.