Have you all heard the first single, “Chinese Democracy”? It’s pretty good in my opinion, but also with me knowing full well that this is not gonna affect me the way the Appetite for Destruction did when it came out when I was a senior in high school. Jesus, do you know how many times I listened to that album drinking beer and smoking pot at Louie Robinson’s house on a Tuesday night? Well I won’t tell you so that I can still run for President one day! But these guys came along when I had just about had it with the metal scene turning into a bunch of pussies.
Rolling Stone has heard the album (I think Axl listened to it with the reviewer and then after the review had been writ, Axl destroyed him)…and they gave the album 4 stars out of 5. Good, says I! I hope that it will be great and don’t want to hate it. But I do know that I would love it 10 times more if the original band played on it. Shit, I’d just take Slash…although many think it was Izzy that gave them their true rock edge. He is very Richards-esque. Anyhoo (did I just say anyhoo?), go check out the review over here. It looks like it will be a very financially-lucrative holiday season for Mr. W. Axl Rose. Now release another album at this time next year, corn row boy!
ROIR Records has just re-released some excellent live and historic Skatalites music on CD, LP, and digital download, which was previously only available on cassette. Stretching Out, from 1983, is historically significant because it is from the year when the band had just reconciled the differences that had driven their 2-year career apart in 1965. Peter Tosh’s manager, Herbie Miller tracked them all down to play at the 1983 Jamaica Sunplash. Prior to the big gig, the band got together for some rehearsal nightclub gigs at Miller’s Blue Monk Jazz Gallery in Kingston before a crowd of local fans, friends, and fellow musicians. There were no restrictions on the length of their sets, no barriers on soloing, and no boundaries in general…which led to a stretched out, spontaneously joyful Ska reunion.
You can feel the small-room vibe of the club in the recordings and you can almost smell the ganja smoke and feel the heat and the sweat created by those in attendance, who were most likely moved by the endless backbeat skank to dance the night away. The Skatalites are a large group of players (9 of them, with 3 guests) whose playing is as smooth as cocoa butter over the 2 hours. There never seems to be any confusion as to who is soloing and when the band comes back in; this is a group of musicians who fully support each other. And the results make it all sound so easy, as the best musicians do. The band cooks its way through classics like “Guns of Navarone”, “Confucius”, and “Lee Harvey Oswald” and flow like melting moonlight over stretched out numbers like “Black Sunday” and “Ska Ba”.
The Skatalites horn blowers are stunning throughout. They were clearly inspired by the bebop players (like John Coltrane, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker) and the musical freedom and boundary-bursting those players pioneered. And the Skatalites, in turn, helped pioneer the sound that would later morph into rock steady and reggae. Unfortunately, all but one (Lester Sterling-alto sax, who still blows with the band) of that original horn section has joined that big band in the sky, with the passing of Johnny “Dizzy” Moore in August of this year. But the music certainly lives on and the live music on Stretching Out is just about as lively as it gets!
And be sure to check out this review published on Blog Critics and leave me some nice comments there
I’ve never really stopped to think about what our friends across the pond think about our New York-centric Steely duo, but it comes to mind now that I’m checking out the UK release of the new Walter Becker joint, Circus Money, on Sonic 360. Perhaps they didn’t grow up sneaking their parents’ Steely Dan records like I did, giving them spins in between Iron Maiden and Def Leppard albums, and becoming addicted to the sheer sonic quality and unique songwriting of Becker and Fagen. There was always something special to the quality of Steely Dan music; it walked the musical tightrope between jazz and rock, but sneering at you before you are able to dare lump it into the same pile of other fusion garbage that came from the mid-70’s. There was some really good stuff that came out of that fusion era and there was a lot of bad…and then there were the innovators like Steely Dan.
With Walter Becker’s new Circus Money album, only his second solo album overall and his first in 14 years, you shouldn’t be surprised to get the kind of high-gloss production that we’ve been used to from the Steely brothers, at least ever since 1980’s Gaucho or perhaps, arguably, Aja (from 1977). Yes, the production is very sleek and maybe some fans yearn for the grittier (yet still super-smooth) style of the Dan’s first 5 albums leading up to Aja…but we know better than to expect that from any post-70’s Steely productions. All that said, Circus Money is certainly up to par with the high-level of quality that we’ve always known we could expect in any era of Steely Dan.
Circus Money has a decidedly reggae flavor throughout, a style that we’ve seen crop up on a few Steely tracks over the years… The Royal Scam’s ”Haitian Divorce” comes to mind. Becker told Rolling Stone he has long been a fan of…“ska, Rock Steady reggae, rockers, steppers, all these different variations on the patterns as the drumming changed a little bit and the tempos changed. A lot of Lee Perry stuff, the stuff that the rhythm section from the Wailers played on — Style Scott, Sly & Robbie, Flabba Holt.” And Becker’s band pulls off the skanking in a most delicious way…just listen to the deep-bass dub groove on “Bob Is Not Your Uncle Anymore”, probably the standout track for me.
The usual clever Steely wit is here in full-force (“Selfish Gene”), the songwriting is top-notch (“Paging Audrey”), the players are fantastic, the production is crisp, and the only thing you might find yourself missing is that classic Dylan-meets-Manhattan-R&B-jazzbo vocal of Donald Fagen. These two are always at their absolute best when they work together, but since it’s been five years since their last combined offering, Everything Must Go, the next best thing is grabbing the two superb solo works that these guys have done during that time off from Steely Dan recording…Fagen’s 2006 album Morph The Cat and Becker’s just released Circus Money. You can’t go wrong.
Check out this original post on Blog Critics Magazine…and leave me some comments over there!
So here’s my review of a UFO Best-Of album that I did for Blog Critics magazine. Keep in mind, I only do positive reviews so if the album sucked, you wouldn’t see it here! It was fun to write about UFO since I missed out on them back in my budding hard rock days, which were filled with the sounds of AC/DC, Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Motley Crue, etc. Dig…
Okay, is it cool to like 80′s Metal again? With the hugely triumphant return of David Lee Roth-era Van Halen to the old hair metal guys even having their very own 4-day Bonnaroo-like camping festival, Rocklahoma, in July, it seems like the scene is set for the 80′s Metal Gods to rise again. So you’ll definitely see a hasty repackaging of catalogs and best-ofs from bands like Ratt and Poison and Motley Crue and Dokken, and even new albums from some of these guys. Some will be be great and make us wonder why we ever stopped listening to them and some will be quite the opposite… as with any genre of music.
Then if you’re really searching, you’ll find a brilliant compilation of songs from a band whose music informed that whole genre; a band who actually had little to no success in the 80s, but whose sound you could find all over the popular hard rock music of the decade. The band is UFO and the new compilation is Chrysalis Records’ The Best of UFO (1974-1983).
Now, as the band was coming to the end of their powers in 1983, I was turning 11-years old and beginning to be turned on to hard rock and metal. So I had definitely heard the name Michael Schenker since the Scorpions were just starting to see huge success in the States, as I was eating up their Animal Magnetism, Blackout and Love At First Sting albums, and knew that Scorps guitarist Rudy Schenker had a brother who was once in the Scorpions in the 70s and currently had his own creatively-named Michael Schenker Group. But I had not properly been introduced to the work of Michael Schenker in UFO until the last couple years. That’s pretty damn late for a band that formed in 1969 and who started hitting their creative stride in 1974, when I was 2-years old!
Over the past year, I’ve slowly been acquiring classic UFO albums and digging further into their catalog and just now, somewhat serendipitously, I was called upon to review the new Best Of UFO (1974-1983) collection, as it saw its April 2008 release.
I was happy to hear a great sequencing of songs when I first popped on the album, and a pristine remastering job! The comp kicks off with the 6 1/2-minute scorcher, “Rock Bottom”, from the time when the band lost their trippy space rock sound of old (another era of UFO I like a lot for different reasons) and picked up the aforementioned German guitar guru, Michael Schenker who gave them a more straight-ahead rock sound for their 1974 Shenker-debut album, Phenomenon. If this song doesn’t hook you, then you may want to check your pulse, for perhaps you’ve expired!
You’ve gotta read this brilliant review of Ween’s brand-new album, La Cucaracha. An accurate review, but what’s more is that it says so much about Ween that everyone else has trouble putting into words…including critics!
