Rated 10/10
As it says on the tin, wait until night is falling to listen to this delicate, magical session of mysterious storytelling and exploration, in that border-realm where baroque meets electronics.
Rated 10/10
So warm and round overall with sharp, cutting sounds that keep me at just the right level of slight discomfort, like how I might feel on a broken carousel rotating slowly at the center of my tilted brain. Apparently this whole thing is a balletic interpretation of a novel played on a modified pump organ. The music, not the book. I feel like these vocals remind me just a little bit of some things Meredith Monk likes to do.
Rated 10/10
What's with those droning, proggy keyboards in my groovy Fela music, and why does Fela make it work? How can he defy my expectations and turn everything he tries to gold? Those horns sound like echoing ducks holding a conversation across the expanse of a lake's surface.
Being used to two-track under-30-minute Fela albums, I am pleasantly surprised to see this one clock in at 45 minutes and contain four tracks. There's some Fela talking to the audience a bit, but most of this live album is jamming and soloing, and it's all good. Groovy from beginning to end, sweeping the listener up into the festivities.
Rated 10/10
Most of the time, I just listen to albums and write my own responses to them as if I'm listening to them in a cultural vacuum, but with Fela Kuti, I always skim the Wikipedia entry for any of his albums because I enjoy learning about the political circumstances in which his music arose. In this case, "the cover artwork's depiction of a monkey's head superimposed on a suited body is a reference to the album's title track, which Kuti composed as a commentary on the colonial mentality of Africans who adhered to European customs and clothing." Yeah, that's very clear. A grimy saxophone dominates the first part of this album, with Kuti telling the world that he's not going to play the game, not going to be a "gentleman" but rather take pride in being an Africaman. The warm keyboard offset the croaking sax nicely. Kuti wants to get his hands dirty in a land full of proverbs I will never understand.
Rated 10/10
The readily-identifiable Fela groove doesn't even kick in until six minutes of confused relative-silence. Quite a weird, unexpected, ominous beginning before the chorus of brass and bright keyboards come in to raise our spirits. Actually, I love the juxtaposition. This is the most Fela-norm-breaking Fela I've heard.
Rated 10/10
Most of this album is sung and chanted in Yoruba, a language spoken mainly in southwestern Nigeria. This has all the festive energy Fela Kuti regularly summons, and it's fun to hear Tony Allen on drums here. Still early on in Kuti's career, so only one of the four tracks deals with any sort of political activism. The other songs are more steeped in traditional Nigerian tales and fables.
Rated 10/10
Upstate NY horse lady weaves her waking dreams into music in her bedroom after many years of practicing her craft without a studio release. Hence the title of this album: that state of quasi-consciousness as you drift off to sleep. Comparisons to Björk vocals are inevitable. It's all weird and meandering, repetitive and overlapping. Just wonderful off-Björk stuff!
Rated 4/10
I pissed off a boomer one time by saying, "It's nice that four brothers got together and made a punk band."
Rated 10/10
Alceu Valença co-writes a couple of tracks, but for the most part, this album is purely the mushroom-taking medical-school-dropout Zé Ramalho. Beautiful instrumentation, especially the soothing flutes and the bright guitar work, effortlessly evoking deep pathos. Music that is simultaneously head in the clouds and feet buried in the soil of the people.
Rated 10/10
Václavek leads the violinist from After Dinner, a couple of fellow countrymen on guitar and violin, and a stunning vocalist in a wonderful exploration of eclectic folk music sung with vocals both male and female, both subdued and lively, in languages ranging from Czech to French to Japanese, all with the backdrop of strings that drizzle fiery sparks over this album.
Rated 10/10
A wonderful cross-pollination of passionate, fiery, string-driven folk, from Czechia to Japan.
Rated 4/10
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Rated 8/10
This one is all over the place, sometimes rubbing your back, sometimes kicking you in the nuts. Not sure which part I prefer...
Rated 10/10
Part of the "Oracles" series on Zorn's Tzadik label, this album--nine years into the project--is a further exploration of female experimental musicians. The ever-excellent guitar of Marc Ribot supports the improvisation of Răducanu's vocalizations, meandering from fado to funeral music, from the blues to rembetika (urban working-class Greek music). There's something about the voices of Eastern European women that sets my ears and brain on fire. Love them to death!
Rated 6/10
All my friends sleep-scrobble this shit.
Rated 6/10
This dude is worse than, and if you've heard, you know how hard it is to be worse than that!
I don't know if these guys are actually rabbinical school dropouts. I kinda hope they are, because the idea of rabbis-to-be dropping out of school and saying, fuck it let's make some jazz, is a fun idea. I thought these guys were Israeli, but it turns out they're American. Are they even Jewish? Dunno. Anyway, the kazoo and the glockenspiel are the first instruments to get the spotlight on this album, so it lets the listener know right away where it's going and gives you the chance to nope-out early if this isn't your kind of music. It's very Jewish, but not the hallel psalm look up at the sky and spin around until you're sick Jewish, but rather more of an on tiptoes pretty stalking cat Jewish. Whatever that means. There's only one track on this album that goes hard, and strangely it's right in the middle of the tracklist. The album's end comes suddenly, with a weird, short space-age tune complete with whirring dials.
Rated 10/10
This album is, of course, perfectly named, for it is the companion piece to the flip-side of a night out. This is played after the keys are tossed on the table, after the tie is loosened, after the heavy sighs and the falling into your favorite easy chair. The first track soothes and revitalizes, so when the second song comes along, you smile, realizing you've still got a bit of groove left in you. The pacing of this short album is impeccable. Close your night with this question: Does beauty exist if it is not beheld?
Rated 8/10
It's not enough that Side A has all that cozy jazz fusion sound I love, but it's also got some unexpected experimental big band moments. Head-shaking funk. But then Side B throws a curveball with some deliberately off-key and off-kilter vocals, slapped together to maintain that looseness which is the hallmark of this album. After that, the reins are cut, and Sun Ra decides to use the moons of Jupiter as a pinball machine. You hear those vibraphones? That's them registering a New High Score.
