Urban's Journal Of Half Assed Ideas
 

I wanted to do something a bit different that's not constrained by a list format or have to hack out a huge long assed review everytime I wanted to post something or do something that has a defined beginning , middle & end. Basically I just wanted an excuse to have the freedom just to write bull****.

So what I will be doing in this thread is just listen to stuff at random and post whatever goes through my mind when i'm listening to it. It might give you an idea of what an album is like or on the other hand I might go off on a tangent & hardly mention it , you never know. i'll be listening to anything & everything from albums I am hearing for the first time as I write to stuff I grew up with.

I will be putting up a rating system for the stuff I write about , but don't expect it to be consistent or conventional.

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Sun Ra - Space Probe

You have to love headcases in music.

Nutjobs in music are the cornerstone of my record collection. There's nothing better than listening to someone who should be certified expressing himself through the art of music. I mean I could listen to some singer songwriter crying over his guitar about some long lost love. Or I could listen to a collection of songs inspired by space travel BY A MAN WHO THINKS HE WAS BORN ON SATURN !!!!!!.

I'm not really that big on jazz. I try and listen to some of the greats from that genre but it's more out of curiosity than any love for it. I'll keep on nibbling away at it and maybe one day i'll get it as I can see a whole world of music there thats just waiting to be heard. I can appreciate the talent behind it which is always a good sign as that's how I normally approach something like this that I am not familiar with. And I do like some of the modern jazz bands such as Acoustic Ladyland & Soil & Pimp Sessions.

Although for someone perceived as a jazz musician there doesn't actually seem to be a lot 'jazz' on this album although the second track 'Primitive' does have some avate garde trumpet noodling on it , and the third track 'The Conversion of J.P.' is basically tribal style bongos with some flute & piano accompanying them with some smooth mellow sounds. The first track and the title track of the album sounds like a 20 minute robot orgy and is much more radical than anything bands like Kraftwerk were doing in 1974 when this album came out.

Do I like it?
I have no idea , I mean how do you judge 20 minutes of bloops & bleeps. I quite like the last track though.

Am I glad I listened to this?
Hell yes , I got much more enjoyment out of this album than some dull faceless rock album that currently clogs up the British media.


Rating
a bag of KP nuts
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reading this made me less un-happy . here is a good JAzz ting

I could rename most that list of albums 'albums that I have thought about getting at some point but decided to leave it for now and get them another day.'

I find it hard to 'hate' Sun Ra's music simply coz I got no fkn idea whats going on half the time :p:
Alas it hasn't stopped me for buying a fair % of his albums for some reason...

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Jean-Michel Lorgère - Homere Instrumental

I think I must have spent too much time in front of the TV as a kid.
As I think I may have possibly found the album the BBC use when they put up pages from ceefax , and I love it.

Ceefax was what we had before the internet for those of you who have never heard of it.

Some people listen to acoustic stuff to chill out to , some people listen to reggae , some listen to trip hop , some post rock.
My chill out tunes of preference are 60s / 70s French lounge pop. This is kind of instrumental lounge pop bordering on musak but it doesn't matter because i've had a hard day and listening to flute , mellotron & moog solos with a swinging backing track really appeals right now.

So fuck off.

I love you. + 56 billion points for writing a post about Ceefax. You need to recommend me some of this french lounge pop, this is my guilty lounge-skeleton in the cupboard. (for want of a better phrase)

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The Cult - Love

I think Love is one of the best albums ever released in the 80s and sadly one of the most overlooked.
It's strange to look out how things develop over time. Back in the late 80s The Cult were virtually unique in that they had enough post punk / goth background to appeal to your average NME / Melody Maker indie kid AND at the same time enough chunky riffs & rock god posing to appeal to your average Kerrang reader. The only other two bands I can think of who had this cross appeal around that time were Nirvana & the Manic Street Preachers , and even then they came a few years later.
And yet if you look at them now both sets of fans have virtually disowned the band. Rock & Metal got more extreme over time , a typical 80s metal fan could probably find something to like about The Cult , something that would be inconceivable in 2008. And of course give a Cult album to and indie fan in 2008 and they'll probably be put off by the AC/DC like riffs and just dismiss it as hair metal. Funny to think that what initially was a plus point came back to haunt them in the end.
Regardless of what other people think The Cult were the first band I ever made a concious decision to fly over to London and see live. In fact I remember when ordered the tickets I didn't even bother asking my boss for the weekend off , I just told her I was going :laughing:

I still listen to this album a lot. It was recorded just around the time that they were just about to ditch the goth stuff and develop a more 'rock' sound (I.E. Copy AC/DC) so in other words it's a bit like a goth album but a goth album by someone in tight trousers who'd fuck anything in a skirt as opposed to being miserable & arty and hang around in boring black & white music videos.

It's just a shame after this album they decided to jump on every musical bandwagon going (See The Cult go industrial around 1991 and the less said about the self titled 'grunge' album the better) and Ian Astbury's Jim Morrison fixation got more & more ridiculous to the point they just became a parody of themselves is just sad really. But no matter how much shit they try & taint this album with none of it sticks , I just love this record too much.

Oh and that wah-wah pedal ..... mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm :D

I was'nt a big fan of this album even then. A couple of good tracks (title track FTW), but it has'nt dated well and seemed to me to be a calculated move away from the typical pseudo goth sound that was around (The Mission especially). to me it's just an average 80's rock album. I thought Spear Of Destiny's 'Outland' was far superior (admittedly I love 'Electric'-so my judgement is clouded :D)

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Fennesz / Dafeldecker / Brandlmayr - Till the Old World's Blown Up and a New One Is Created

Fuck me this is boring.

I do wish people would stop labelling boring generic ambient shit as 'experimental'
This is no more experimental than eating a ton of beans and discovering if a fart comes out of your arse.

I was so comatose after a couple of 'songs' I had to listen to some simple 3 chord garage rock as an antidote to this pretentious claptrap.

And naturally the opening track is 35 minutes long.

Tossers.