The British Stereo Collective – Mystery Fields
Fair warning: this review may contain more offhand references to now-undeservedly-obscure British cult fantasy & sci-fi shows than the usual stuff I write. You have been warned.
Soundtracks for things that don’t actually exist to need a soundtrack are increasingly a favorite sub-genre of mine. What you’re getting is that particular musician or composer’s unfiltered ideas, freed from the time constraints of having to match something that actually exists in visual form. (And by the same token, such a release is also an instant demo “calling card” for the artist in question.) But Phil Heeks, the mad genius behind the British Stereo Collective moniker, does observe many time constraints on this release, because he’s emulating such past classics as BBC Radiophonic Music, which was itself kind of a publicly-released calling card for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, showing off the vast range of their radio and TV theme tunes, station identification sounders, and jingles. Everything, from the name of this musical entity down, is part of that tribute. … Read more
Some of the songs here I remember from my childhood, and the rest I’m delighted to make their acquaintance here. Various artist collections are sometimes a bit of a crap shoot, engaged in a tug-of-war between what the issuing label can afford to license from other labels, or for that matter what’s even available at the time the compilation is assembled. But ’76 In The Shade is remarkably well-curated, and since I discovered it in 2021, it has gotten a lot of repeat listening time over these past couple of sweltering 21st century summers. It’s a nicely selected, relaxing album that, even though it contains only a handful of songs I recognized from my childhood, managed to take me back to that time.
Back when Ben Folds embarked on his solo career, I distinctly remember listening to some of the songs and thinking that the difference in style wasn’t enough to justify dissolving the band; The Unauthorized Biography Of Reinhold Messner was already a significant departure from the strictly-piano-and-drums-and-fuzz-bass sound that Ben Folds Five started out with, so where was the dividing line where this album was still Ben Folds Five, but the next album’s material was no longer suitable? (As it turned out, the dividing line was actually the distance from South Carolina to Australia – Folds moved down under to get married.)
Arriving as a bit of a surprise in between albums of sublime original material, Jason Falkner’s original Bedtime With The Beatles had a curious mandate of its own: recasting Lennon-McCartney classics as lullabyes for little Beatle-fans-to-be. And so help me, it worked – I always thought it was an incredibly relaxing album, but I didn’t realize the true power of it until years later when my own first child came along. Bedtime With The Beatles was a godsend. The arrival of this second volume of Falkner’s lullabye arrangements came out of nowhere too; maybe it’s because I don’t keep up with very many artists via fansites or MySpace or what have you, but I didn’t know it was in the works, and eagerly picked it up, because now I knew how handy it could be. It wasn’t just a matter of my personal tastes for enjoyment – I had a kid who desperately needed some new sleepytime material.
And what does the little E think? Maybe it was just because it was new music to his ears, combined with his general tendency toward trying to avoid sleep at all costs, but my attempt to introduce him to Bedtime With The Beatles Part Two confirmed my suspicions: he got too involved with listening to it to really relax. But in the end, soft-pedaling my one-year-old into his indoctrination as a potential Beatles listener can’t be all bad – but it’s not all meant for bed either.
Better known for covering Cole Porter tunes and Broadway standards, John Barrowman takes his first swipe at mainstream pop – largely from the ’70s and ’80s – and reaches for the same earnestness and grandeur with that material. He manages to hit a few right out of the park, too – his covers of Billy Joel’s “She’s Always A Woman” and Elton John’s “Your Song” are winners. I’m not saying they’re replacing the originals in my musical affections, but they’re top-flight as reinterpretations go. There are even a few songs whose original records I don’t care for, but do enjoy here – Air Supply’s “All Out Of Love” and, perhaps most surprisingly of all, “Feeling Good”, a musical number that takes on an almost sinister air with Barrowman’s performance. I don’t know if that was actually the intention, but something about the arrangement and his vocal take on the song screams “seedy & dangerous” to me, which isn’t something that I get from the lyrics alone. (I’ll fess up here that I’m not a great consumer of musical theater, so I may be missing something in that context that has though in the know saying “Duh!” to me at this point.)
Picking up work on a late ’90s solo album where he left off – originally, the album was called A Gift Of Screws and would’ve been a follow-up released only a few years after Out Of The Cradle – Lindsey Buckingham goes into territory that quite a few of his loyal fans will find unfamiliar: the music is stripped down to its bare essentials, sometimes almost all-acoustic, without the trademark elaborate studio production which became the trademark of his early work and his heyday with Fleetwood Mac. But there’s something just as elaborate about Under The Skin, though instead of studio trickery, what’s elaborate here is Buckingham’s sheer staggering musicianship.
So, Blue Man Group’s going to do an album with lyrics, eh? A rock album no less! But fear not – the Blues haven’t sold out. If anything, The Complex expands their repertoire in a way that keeps even their seasoned, long-time fans on their toes, and demonstrates that their distinctive instrumental sound can serve as the core of some great rock music.
Butterfly Jones is a new band that might sound familiar to fans of early-90s alternative rock – the group’s core is guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Michael Gurley and drummer/songwriter Phil Leavitt, two-thirds of the band dada. They bring their guitar-driven alt-rock sound to Butterfly Jones, with up-tempo songs that charge forward with great enthusiasm and thoughtful ballads that don’t go overboard on the emotion.
The premise of this double-disc compilation is simple: various modern pop artists, most of them enjoying cult indie label status (and a few of them refugees from major labels too), revisit the songs of one of their musical heroes, ELO’s Jeff Lynne. Colorado’s own Not Lame Records has been teasing the heck out of this release for months, only to watch it be bogged down by politics (the father/son duo of Randy and Tal Bachman, each of whom were originally slated to contribute a song, pulled out) and delays (a printing error in the first run of liner notes booklets which caused the collection to slip well past its original pre-Christmas 2001 release date). And now that it’s here, was it worth the lengthy wait?
One of the few bastions of the performance-art world to hit some level of critical mass in the eyes of the general public, Blue Man Group – consisting of three guys in black bodysuits with blue skin who create music with any number of invented musical instruments (including lots of PVC plumbing pipe) – has only just recently issued this, their first recorded studio performance.