Reviews by kuvien

The earliest album I can find in the Vanguarda paulista movement is from 1979, and this album is 1980. So we're looking at an album that's right at the vanguard of the scene. A scene where artists with no access to recording contacts just made their own music, embracing the DIY aesthetic and all its attendant creativity and unpredictability. This album helped define the very heart of the movement, unafraid to embrace the weird, the carnivalesque, and the unmelodic.

This is objectively bad.

There is a lot of history to unpack here, so to keep this from getting bogged down... the essentials: Bela Bartók was a Hungarian ethnomusicologist who went around in the early 20th century and recorded native Romanians playing their traditional folk songs. He collected thousands of songs. This album is not a simple re-recording of those songs but rather a re-imagining. These three musicians (piano, sax/clarinet, viola) got together and took a selection of Bartók's field recordings as inspiration, composing their own pieces inspired by and drawing heavily upon those original tunes.

I think the greatest existential crisis humanity ever had was when they realized the stars are not eternal, as the ancients had thought. Literally no-thing lasts forever.

When folkies want to go clubbing, where the hell do they go? Well, here's your answer. I remember listening last year to a Scandinavian dark folk album with techno elements, and now here we got a house album with bagpipes, flutes, and hurdy-gurdies. And if that wasn't enough, Baiuca, who is from Galicia, uses avant-folk artists from his home region on these tracks. Weird and cool. Seems like this folk-club music thing is becoming more common. At a 34-minute runtime, this album is satisfying.

I first heard Baird's music in her role as a member of Espers, an American psych folk band with a Medieval tint. Imagine my joy to find a gem like this: bringing her talents to delicate, self-harmonized renditions of Child ballads and other traditionals (half the album). I'm a folkhead, so I've heard tons of variations on the same trad songs, but I must say that of all the Willie O'Winsburies I've heard, Baird's "Willie O'Winsbury" is my favorite. Perfect interpretation. Vocals, guitar, dulcimer, songwriting: this folk artist has it all. Helluva debut solo album.

Whether it's over the lush yet still tinny tones of a pop ballad, or the fuzzy psychedelic guitars, or the squelchy synths, or the more traditional-sounding songs, Selda's voice comes to my ears from miles away, from a megaphone set atop a tall pole. Also, this music sounds like something that should be ten years earlier.

A powerful a Capella opening about the confined, slave-like lives of women. There's poetry and passion in these old folk ballads, and Baez's voice evokes perfectly the immediacy of the themes of love and death. The highlights are "Lily of the West" and "The Cherry-Tree Carol", both traditional folk songs, the former an Irish tune, the latter a Child Ballad that has a history going back to the 1400s. Again, Baez, along with a handful of other folk artists, has contributed to keeping alive something of our musical heritage.

Basically, three Joan Baez albums in my collection are enough for me. Anything else gets a bit repetitive, but this, along with and, is sufficient to appreciate what she's done for the preservation of folk music.

Whatever I listen to next is going to get a higher rating that it probably deserves because of how much this album sucks.

This music, unsurprisingly, defines itself by what it's not, talking about what it doesn't need, talking about what it doesn't care about. Pretty empty, imo, but I guess that's part of its charm. Having no charm? Empty of negatives might be a positive.

I'm re-reading Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath right now, so "The Regulator" really hits home. Kill the rich. Guess it's good to be empty of all that bourgeois garbage.

What threw me for a loop even more than the reggae are the short guitar solos. Didn't know punk did such a thing.

This music is a warm, sinister embrace, grinning over your shoulder at what lurks behind you.

The only thing I know about this Bacharach clown is that he plays street piano when Austin Powers walks by.

Without the tight female polyphonic chanting vocals, this album wouldn't have grabbed me, but I admit I'm a sucker for vocals like this. Female, foreign, "freaky", folky? Yes, please, on all four counts. The complex, multi-part rhythms in the vocals makes this recording a wonderful addition to my rotation. Overall, a refreshing take on the stale indie rock genre.

Try this album on a lunch break during one of your hectic work days. It’s got just the right atmosphere to put you in a relaxed state of mind, and it doesn’t stick to just one sound like it seems it’s going to be at the beginning. Weird, too, that some of the vocals sound like a French version of Leonard Cohen.

As boring as a Lovecraft story.

You could base your entire White Wolf vampire character around this album, a bizarre trip through the dark side of Americana, brief sketches of fringe, outlaw characters and close encounters with the Devil. Blood drops in the dust, desert meditations on death.

This cures demon possession.

Being one with nature: hippy psych Japan edition. It was fine until the douchebag started singing in English, made worse by the woman simultaneously interpreting everything he sings into Japanese.

Much heavier than its predecessor,, this album couches itself in a power metal feel straight from the beginning, working in prog elements, like strings and flutes, sparingly. The narrative continues with the final human stranded on Mars. Getting a bit more curious/ambitious, he decides to set the controls of the machine to take him back to before the beginning of time, and there he witnesses the birth of the cosmic soul, called the Universal Migrator. The machine overloads, killing the man inside, but he lives on as he merges with the cosmic soul, thus becoming the new Migrator.