Monthly Archives: August 2001

The Sadie gig was fun, although the sound was rather poor, and the bass player seemed to get all of the available sound waves. It would be good to hear the singer more next time…Still, I’m glad I went, and the bar ‘Veruka’ in Soho was an interesting place to hold a gig. Oh, and I bought some used CDs in Kim’s before the gig.

Free Design: 'Cosmic Peekaboo' (CD; Marina; 2000)
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Hmm. I'm really not sure what to say about this album. It maintains many of the beautiful elements which made me like the band a lot in the first place - great vocal arrangements and group vocals, charming, light song etc. But I'm finding it hard to 'give myself' to this record, probably due to the rather polished arrangements, which are full of synthesized piano sounds and rather cheesy saxophone. Set in this context, the songs (which really aren't bad at all) seem to lose their charm. 'Younger son' might be great if it was an acappella, with its cute little nod to 'kites are fun' near the end. But the recording and in particular the sax sound ruin it for me. 'McCarran Airport', written by Bruce Dedrick, brother of the leader Chris, is one of the better tracks - a charming, very light pop number. Another good one is 'Springtime', with a gentle bossa nova guitar going on in the introduction, and some quite excellent vocals. The whole thing has a very 80s feel though, and I guess what has emerged for me is that a lot of what I loved about Free Design was the context - the totally late 60s feel which surrounded them. Set outside of that, even with some good songs, great vocals and a nice package (designed by my favorite record cover designer, Stefan Kassel, I can't imagine I'll be listening to this that often. What I'm trying to say is: this isn't a bad album; it's just not for me.

For some reason, I’m haunted by a few select Morrissey songs which I was obsessed by in my youth. And while I love ‘suedehead’, ‘every day is like sunday’ etc, I’m equally haunted by ‘My love life’ and ‘Oh well, I’ll never learn’ (an obscure cd and cassette single-only b-side to ‘suedehead’). It’s something about the noises he makes. Hmm. I’m off to see the group Sadie tonight, and their singer is decidedly Moz-esque, so maybe he’ll make some similar noises.

On a different note, I brought a few more CDs in from home to review. I’ll also soon start working on a proper search/index page and individual pages for each album review.

Compilation: 'Gems of Italian Cinema' (CD; Amsterdamned; 1967-1974)
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Weird CD - I bought it because it seemed to be a 'best-of' the right tempo italian soundtrack reissues, produced for the American market. It doesn't really deliver exactly what I expected though. From the pictures inside, I gather that these tracks are taken from Piero Piccioni's 'Camille 2000', Piero Umiliani's 'Il corpo', 'la legge dei gangsters' and 'svezia inferno e paradiso' and Gianni Ferrio's 'La Morte Accarezza' and Una farfalla conle ali insanguinate'. But there is no more information than the titles and the artists for the 12 tracks, so it's not often not clear which soundtrack each track is taken from.

I'm very big on Piero Umiliani, and many of these tracks were new to me, so I was looking forward to hearing them. They didn't exactly blow me away though - most are rather laid back jazzy pieces, with none of the shimmering brilliance of 'Angeli Bianchi...Angeli Neri'. One exception is 'le legge dei gangsters', which is a jazzy, 8-minute piece with a lot of brass. The mood is reminiscent of some of the wilder tracks on Henry Mancini's 'Peter Gunn' soundtracks.

More interesting to me are the Gianni Ferrio tracks. The first, 'amanda blues' is a nice beat number with organ, while 'soliloquio' is a nice piano piece which gets going quite nicely, with a cool electric harpsichord sound.

Alas, there's only one Piero Piccioni, the 'camille 2000' title theme. I'm not sure quite what to think of this. For the first three minutes, it's almost unbearably lush and sugary, and then a dense beat track comes in, with brass and moody organs. It's quite cool sounding, but rather monotonous.

So, all in all, this isn't a bad disc, but I can't help feeling they could have done a much better job, particularly since the purpose of the project seems to have been to promote the right tempo reiussues. Personally, what I like about soundtracks like these isn't really represented here at all.

Yesterday I recorded some outlandish cover versions for possible use in the band. I’m not going to tell you what they were, but they were kind of cheesy. On a related note, I was amazed yesterday at how many nice, sample-able drum beats reside at the beginning of early Joy Division tracks…

Astrud Gilberto: 'September 17, 1969' (CD; Polydor Japan; 1969)
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Well, I must admit, I'm actually listening to this today because I want to listen to the Margo Guryan album, but I don't have it with me. It's a great album in its own right though. Astrud's late 60s pop albums on Verve are strange items - they don't seem to have sold very well (and are very scarce on vinyl), and her voice often sounds strangely wimpy, but the arrangements are beautiful, and the musical selections are well chosen. The first track here is the superbly groovy 'Beginnings', a track originally recorded by Chicago, which I recommend at musical taste. Other highlights include 'Let Go' (canto de ossanha), a rather cool 'light my fire' and the fantastically catchy 'don't leave me baby'. She also keeps me happy by covering Margo Guryan's 'Think of Rain', which was also recorded by Claudine Longet on 'The look of love'. Indeed, Astrud takes her Claudine similarity to another level when she sings in French in the introduction to Francis Lai's beautiful 'Love is stronger far than we' (from 'A man and a woman'). Anyway, while there are some weaker tracks (e.g. I could do without 'A million miles away behind the door'), this is a nice album, well worth having.

Hey, I finally got around to doing some of what I always meant to do here – actually post some things as I buy them! We missed the train to LI yesterday, and so I took the opportunity to rush to chelsea markets to buy a few records before the next train was due. I’ve also entered a few of the other Al Caiola records in my collection, as a tribute to the great man himself, who actually emailed me today! Al, you rock, man….

Astrud Gilberto: 'September 17, 1969' (CD; Polydor Japan; 1969)
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Well, I must admit, I'm actually listening to this today because I want to listen to the Margo Guryan album, but I don't have it with me. It's a great album in its own right though. Astrud's late 60s pop albums on Verve are strange items - they don't seem to have sold very well (and are very scarce on vinyl), and her voice often sounds strangely wimpy, but the arrangements are beautiful, and the musical selections are well chosen. The first track here is the superbly groovy 'Beginnings', a track originally recorded by Chicago, which I recommend at musical taste. Other highlights include 'Let Go' (canto de ossanha), a rather cool 'light my fire' and the fantastically catchy 'don't leave me baby'. She also keeps me happy by covering Margo Guryan's 'Think of Rain', which was also recorded by Claudine Longet on 'The look of love'. Indeed, Astrud takes her Claudine similarity to another level when she sings in French in the introduction to Francis Lai's beautiful 'Love is stronger far than we' (from 'A man and a woman'). Anyway, while there are some weaker tracks (e.g. I could do without 'A million miles away behind the door'), this is a nice album, well worth having.

My silly site was down for most of yesterday thanks to my buddies at phpwebhosting.com, sorry about that. I scored the much anticipated ‘Morricone RMX’ on ebay for four bucks… Other than that, I’m keeping busy working on stuff for the band. More to come on that soon…

Compilation: 'Morricone RMX' (CD; Warner/Cinesoundz; 2001)
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I was excited to get this new CD compilation featuring electronic reworkings/remixes of the work of Ennio Morricone. Morricone has continued to dominate my listening in the last five years, in spite of the hundreds of other things I've been getting into.

That said, I actually don't own much of his original soundtrack work on vinyl, due to the scarcity of the records, my own laziness, and most importantly, the outstanding quality of the CD compilations out there. 'Mondo Morricone', 'More Mondo Morricone', and 'Canto Morricone' (esp vols 1 and 3) are cornerstones of my collection, and so any new Morricone project was always going to interest me.

At the same time, I'm not the biggest dance music fan, and have been known to be disparaging about lazy electronic artists who borrow loops and then repeat them for 8 or 9 minutes per song, with little or no regard to harmonic interest or structure.

Anyway, I'd say this compilation both disappoints and excites in equal portions. Many of the tracks remixed are from Morricone's Spaghetti Western work, which in fact is less familiar to me than the more obscure B-movie material compiled on the 'Mondo Morricone' discs (I always get into things in a funny order…).
The first track is definitely a highlight: Apollo Four Forty's excellently executed remix of 'the man with the harmonica'. It maintains the doomy force of the original and updates it quite tastefully and cohesively, unlike Terranova, whose 'for a few dollars more' sounds like a terrible mess to me. I feel as if this is one of many tracks on the album which would probably sound great to fans of the remixers involved, but which is really not to my taste. Another example of this is the the spikey drum'n'bass and vocals combination on Copasetic Con Vivi e selda's version of 'Here's to you'.

I have mixed feelings about Fantastic Plastic Machine's remix of 'Belinda May', one of the tracks I was most looking forward to hearing. Like the remixer, I love Morricone, and this is possibly my favorite track ever by him. So not surprisingly, the addition of a high NRG beat to this track doesn't exactly thrill me. That said, he maintains all of the original song, and adds some interesting brasilian beats and sounds. I guess that since I know every sound in the original recording, even a DJ of such prodigious talent as Tomoyuki Tanaka was never going to be able to make this one seamless for me.

Other tracks I enjoyed included the spooky beats of Bigga Bush from rockers hi-fi (er, I've never heard of them, incidentally), and Thievery Corporation's pleasant if not desperately exciting 'il grande silencio'. Tommy Hools's 'doricamente' is also pretty cool, smooth and rather groovy at the same time as being haunting, and he adds some clever chord changes and twangy guitar to spice it up. De Phazz's 'La Lucertola' is quite good. I have a couple of their records, and for me, they're very hit and miss - they can do something really beautiful, and then suddenly lapse into something completely tasteless. This track is actually very nicely done. My only complaint that I consider 'La Lucertola' to be a work of such genius that is seems ridiculous to omit any of its musical parts. While this isn't as repetitive as some of the tracks here, it misses some crucial elements of the piece, such as the killer hook in the middle with wordless vocals, which is cut out altogether. It's a track which I imagine those who had never heard the original might like, but unfortunately it takes away as much as it adds. Some tracks, while pleasant, chop the originals up too much - e.g. Groove Corporation's 'giocoso, giocoso' has some cool sounds in it, but I need more harmonic variation in my music, man....

I think the highlight for me is Ali N. Askin's version of 'Il bacio', just about the only track on here which is as beautiful as the original. The remix approach employed here is different from most on this album - along with the samples and beats, the remixer adds a new vocalist who plays around with the melody rather charmingly, if not quite as exquisitely as Edda Dell'Orso.

Anyway, I'm very glad I bought this, but I’m also glad I didn't pay full price. I would love to see a 'funky morricone instrumental covers' CD compilation. I’m thinking of tracks like the great Al Caiola version of ‘For a Few Dollars More’, or the bouncy ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ from 1996’s ‘Stereo Cocktail’ compilation. If I can get enough tracks together, I’ll compile one.