Category: 2020

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2004 2020 D Music Reviews S Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

The Don Davis Collection, Volume 1

4 min read

Order this CDIn 2004, the BBC aired an ambitious miniseries combining a little bit of “hard” sci-fi with an attempt to impart information to and educate the audience, framing it as a reality-TV-tinged mockumentary about a fictional crewed mission through the solar system. Keeping in mind that this was a year before the launch of 21st century Doctor Who, the resulting two-night event, Voyage To The Planets, was quite possibly the BBC’s most impressive sci-fi effort to that date (and thanks to a co-production deal with the Discovery Channel in the U.S., it was retitled Space Odyssey: Voyage To The Planets and shown Stateside as well). The mention of Doctor Who is not accidental; quite a few personnel associated with Voyage To The Planets, up to and including writer/director Joe Ahearne, played major roles early in the revival of Russell T. Davies’ version of Doctor Who.

And somehow – in between sequels to The Matrix, when his visibility was at a career high – Voyage To The Planets landed American composer Don Davis, and gave him enough resources to have at least a few live players, which he used to maximum advantage to keep an otherwise synthesized score from having too much of an icy, electronic sheen. The result is a score – unreleased for 16 years – that does have some hints of Davis’ Matrix stylings, but leans much more heavily on the kind of noble, give-the-French-horns-lots-of-whole-notes-in-major-keys feel that has powered many a space exploration epic. With Davis having to work to disguise just how small his ensemble of live players is, there are few opportunities for Voyage To The Planets to be as “big” as, say, James Horner’s Apollo 13 score, but it still successfully conveys the nobility and sense of wonder that the show’s fictional space mission demands.

The “Walking With Spacemen Theme” that kicks off the album is the backbone of the score, returning as a motif throughout (and giving a nod to the early working title of the project, which was initiated by the producers of Walking With Dinosaurs). Various locales visited by the crew of the Pegasus – Venus, Mars, the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and beyond – receive their own thematic treatments, tipping their hand as to the relative degrees of how inhospitable they are to human life. These tend to be the passages that get the closest to the dissonance of Davis’ scores for the Matrix trilogy, but the material in between returns to a more heroic default setting. (One of the most spectacular examples of Davis more dissonant “we’re in trouble” music arrives in “Forbidden Rays and Asteroid”, which may also be the peak of his skillful arrangements successfully disguising the live-player-to-synth ratio.)

4 out of 4It’s a wonderful score overall, and an unexpected surprise so many years after the fact. (This is also a testament to the lovely niche material that can be unearthed by niche and boutique labels like Dragon’s Domain, balancing out the much more mainstream selections offered by the larger soundtrack labels.) Voyage To The Planets is seriously obscure stuff by U.S. standards – following its one-and-done airing on Discovery, the premise of a mockumentary-with-flashbacks mission through the solar system was sold to ABC, where it was expanded with more fiction than science and became a bit of a soap opera in the 2009-2010 season, a time when ABC was trying to pattern nearly everything on its schedule after Lost. (For what it’s worth, Dragon’s Domain, Defying Gravity had an interesting score too, even though the show itself was a big letdown.) To get Voyage’s full, wonderful soundtrack after all this time was a true treat – it’s very much worth a listen, whether you’re familiar with the miniseries or not.

  1. Walking With Spacemen Theme (2:22)
  2. Main Titles and Apollo (2:38)
  3. Take Off and Venus (5:25)
  4. Hot Planet Venus (4:15)
  5. Time and Space (2:04)
  6. Mars (3:30)
  7. Flare and Storm Patrol (3:43)
  8. Forbidden Rays and Asteroid (4:14)
  9. Dispatching and Jupiter Turn (2:09)
  10. G-Force (2:46)
  11. Moons of Jupiter (3:08)
  12. Zoe’s Trouble (5:15)
  13. Europa (1:52)
  14. Pearson’s Peek (3:19)
  15. Deep Space Despair (4:26)
  16. Burial and Resuming Work (1:40)
  17. The Planet of Peace (2:18)
  18. Pluto People (5:06)
  19. The Comet (2:55)
  20. Comet Stroll and Danger (2:55)
  21. The Calamity on the Comet (4:06)
  22. Happy Homecoming and Finale (3:43)

Released by: Dragon’s Domain Records
Release date: September 17, 2020
Total running time: 1:13:49

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Categories
10cc 1976 2020 Artists (by group or surname) Azimuth Barclay James Harvest Blue Mink Emotions Hamilton Jefferson Starship Joe Frank & Reynolds Liverpool Express Music Reviews Steve Miller Band Year

Bob Stanley presents ’76 In The Shade

4 min read

Order this CDWhat with the pandemic and all, the 2020s, as decades go, have been one hell of a long century. One of the things I’ve sought refuge in has been music. Soundtracks, of course, but also rolling back the clock and reacquainting myself with old favorites like Parliament (of which more later), and somehow, an Amazon search brought me to this compilation, curated by Bob Stanley of Saint Etienne. It’s not the only such compilation that’s been assembled by one or more members of Saint Etienne, but if they’re all as good as this one, that’s a collection I need to expand upon, because ’76 In The Shade is nothing short of amazing.

As the well-written liner notes point out, Stanley is trying to recreate what was being heard in England’s sweltering summer of 1976. But that doesn’t mean just what was on the radio. It means what random instrumentals were being played under the BBC’s pre-sign-on TV test cards in the morning. It means what pieces of production music were heard under other things, be they commercials or radio interstitials. And then, yes, there’s also what was on the radio, but even here, Stanley reaches deep into the playlists he remembers and rescues some true gems from undeserved obscurity, so while there are a few well-worn radio staples here – 10cc’s “I’m Mandy, Fly Me”, Jefferson Starship’s “Miracles”, Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds’ “Fallin In’ Love” – there is much here that has either been forgotten, or just seemed new to my ears on this side of the Atlantic.

The most obvious quality of all of it, aside from being really good music, is that it’s so mellow. This compilation is so laid-back that the hardest-rocking thing to be found is a Cliff Richard song (!), but even that selection is so sweetened by its production that it fits alongside the rest of the album without seeming jarring.

Some of the real gems are the instrumental tracks, many of them from production music library LPs that would’ve been in circulation at radio and television stations at the time. On the non-instrumental side, there are gems like the Motown-style “You’re The Song (That I Can’t Stop singing)”, credited to Hollywood Freeway although it was basically the songwriter’s demo of his new song. It was later covered by Frankie Valli, though I find myself preferring what turns out to be the original version of the song with its lush instrumentation and falsetto vocals. Other tracks by Liverpool Express, Sylvia, and Blue Mink make it seem like their producers had only just discovered reverb and were determined to drench these entire songs in reverb. It’s not unpleasant, but boy, are the results sometimes a bit on the trippy side.

4 out of 4Some 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.

  1. Walking So Free – Spike Janson (3:33)
  2. Sugar Shuffle – Lynsey De Paul (4:00)
  3. Miracles (Single Version) – Jefferson Starship (3:29)
  4. Get Out Of Town – Smokey Robinson (4:49)
  5. I’m Mandy, Fly Me (Album Version) – 10cc (5:20)
  6. Stoned Out – Simon Park (2:17)
  7. Nothing To Remind Me – Cliff Richard (2:59)
  8. Discover Me – David Ruffin (4:12)
  9. You’re The Song (That I Can’t Stop Singing) – Hollywood Freeway (3:10)
  10. You Are My Love – Liverpool Express (3:15)
  11. Liquid Sunshine – John Cameron (3:00)
  12. Not On The Outside – Sylvia (3:03)
  13. Stay With Me – Blue Mink (3:17)
  14. Wild Mountain Honey – Steve Miller Band (4:50)
  15. Fallin’ In Love – Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds (3:12)
  16. Flowers – The Emotions (4:28)
  17. Montreal City – Azimuth (3:18)
  18. Rock ‘n’ Roll Star – Barclay James Harvest (5:18)
  19. Miss My Love Today – Gilbert O’Sullivan (3:46)
  20. Music – Carmen McRae (3:29)

Released by: Ace Records
Release date: August 11, 2020
Total running time: 74:45

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Categories
2020 Artists (by group or surname) L Lickerish Quartet Non-Soundtrack Music Year

The Lickerish Quartet – Threesome, Vol. 1

4 min read

Order this CDLickerish Quartet is a collision of former members of Jellyfish and/or offshoots of Jellyfish, two categories you’ll often find in the same record collection. Jellyfish lasted long enough for two albums; a posthumous box set of live cuts, demos, and collaborations rounded out the band’s legacy, but still left a lot of potential on the table. Many a Jellyfish fan (like the scruffy fellow I occasionally spy in mirrors and other reflective surfaces) obsessively follows the individual former members of the group through their solo careers and later work with other artists – and sometimes minor family reunions like this one. With Jellyfish founding member Roger Manning and Spilt Milk-members (and former Umajets) Tim Smith and Eric Dover aboard, Lickerish Quartet is indeed something of a family reunion. The plan is for the band to gradually write, record, and release a series of EPs, each supported by fan pre-orders, so that the end result will be about an album’s worth of music.

Threesome Vol. 1 is the first of those, with the “threesome” in the title describing the band; “quartet” is actually a better description of the number of songs on this first volume, somewhat confusingly. But that’s the kind of perversely anarchic humor that we’re expecting from Jellyfish alumni, right?

That sense of humor also extends into the first song, “Fadoodle”, whose lyrics can best be summed up as “I cleaned house and did some chores, can I get laid now?” (Pro tip: guys…you should be doing your share of the housework because it’s part of the unspoken social contract of sharing space with other human beings, not because you’re expecting sex at the end of said chore.) Maybe I’m just showing my age here, but these lyrics and their dancing-between-sung-and-spoken-word delivery didn’t land with me, even though the music itself is fine; there’s a great bass line that makes it all incredibly catchy, and the instrumental bridge may be the best thing about the song.

“Bluebird’s Blues” is a definite improvement, and perhaps should’ve been first song (though I do get it, if you’re banking on the Jellyfish connection, “Fadoodle” sounds more whimsical and Jellyfish-esque than anything else here). Together with “There Is A Number”, “Bluebird’s Blues” really digs into that ’70s power-pop sound, which is really what I hope to hear out of a reunion of any configuration of Jellyfish, a lot more than I hope to hear whimsy. They’re both excellent songs, though I get a chuckle out of the first lyric in “There Is A Number”: “I never meant to cause you too much pain.” Is there really some acceptable amount of pain one can cause others before a line is crossed? (As with the playful lyrics of “Fadoodle”, I’m probably overthinking it here.)

“Lighthouse Spaceship” was the song most heavily promoted prior to the EP’s release, and with good reason: where “Bluebird’s Blues” and “There Is A Number” are classic bittersweet ballads, “Lighthouse Spaceship” is a straight-up, unapologetic rocker that reaches for – and just about achieves – a late ’60s/early ’70s psychedelic rock flavor with both its lyrics and its 3 out of 4instrumentation. At over six minutes, I get why this wasn’t the lead track, but it seems obvious that the band realized this was the strongest thing in this particular track listing.

It’s all worth a listen, and perhaps best of all is the promise that more from this lineup – and perhaps even better material – is yet to come.

  1. Fadoodle (3:46)
  2. Bluebird’s Blues (4:31)
  3. There Is A Magic Number (4:14)
  4. Lighthouse Spaceship (6:26)

Released by: InGrooves / Label Logic
Release date: May 15, 2020
Total running time: 18:57

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Categories
1977 2020 D Doctor Who Soundtracks Soundtracks by Title Television Year

Doctor Who: The Sun Makers – music by Dudley Simpson

4 min read

This is a Doctor Who soundtrack release I never expected to be holding in my hands or hearing. Composer Dudley Simpson was as close as classic Doctor Who had to the kind of singular composer-in-residence that seems to be the norm for the modern series; other composers were occasionally employed at the whim of individual directors, but from 1964 through 1979, Dudley Simpson was Doctor Who’s default musical “setting”, composing for and conducting a small ensemble occasionally augmented with synthesizers by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. But despite his music gracing most of the series across that fifteen-year span, most of the original session tapes of Simpson’s Doctor Who music have been lost. The only remaining specimens, in fact, can be traced to the Radiophonic Workshop – if they added their wobbly analog synths to Simpson’s music, a copy of that was retained in their archives. And that’s where the score from The Sun Makers, a 1977 Tom Baker four-part story, comes in – it’s one of only two Simpson scores that still exist in their entirety, both of them thanks to the Workshop’s involvement. (The other, still unreleased, is 1971’s The Mind Of Evil, a Jon Pertwee adventure that was the second-ever appearance of Roger Delgado as the Master, and as such heavily feature’s Simpson’s sinister theme for that character.) To have a complete Simpson score is a gift; for that score to hail from a fondly-remembered story featuring the fourth Doctor, Leela, and K-9 toppling a regime embracing capitalism-to-the-point-of-ridiculousness is just gravy.

Tracks like “Mahogany”, which starts out with a somewhat plaintive bassoon before bringing the rest of the ensemble in to create a rich, warm harmony, exemplify what Simpson was best at. The same goes for “One Thousand Metres” and its interesting keyboard arpeggios floating over the acoustic instruments. Let’s be clear – a lot of people probably wouldn’t have chosen The Sun Makers to be one of the only complete surviving examples of Simpson’s work; they probably would’ve chosen City Of Death or Genesis Of The Daleks or a more “obvious” entry in Simpson’s canon, but The Sun Makers didn’t exactly burn itself into everyone’s memory the way those stories did. That’s actually what makes it a canny choice for a release: it’s a bit of a surprise because you probably don’t remember the score that well.

“Six Suns”, “The Others”, and “K-9, Bite!” remind me a lot of Blake’s 7, of which nearly every episode was also scored by Simpson. (The Sun Makers has a Blake’s 7 connection too – it’s where director Pennant Roberts met actor Michael Keating, giving Keating a hearty recommendation for the role of Vila.) “Subway 13” is a bit more menacing, and, at less than a minute in length, it’s a reminder some Doctor Who stories lent themselves to lengthier musical travelogues, and The Sun Makers wasn’t one of those stories. It’s comprised of shorter, punchier vignettes without the opportunity for the kind of extended musical interludes that, say, City Of Death afforded the composer. In that regard, The Sun Makers is absolutely a straight-down-the-line typical bit of Doctor Who scoring from the ’70s.

A word about the sound quality: The Sun Makers was remastered extensively by Mark Ayres, himself a Doctor Who composer of a later era (but also a die-hard Dudley Simpson fan, as he himself admitted to when he was interviewed for this site quite a few years back). Ayres is also behind the audio remastering of Doctor Who’s DVD and Blu-Ray releases, so it goes without saying 4 out of 4that this entire disc is as crisply, lovingly listenable as if the tape had just been recorded last week.

As a whole listening experience, The Sun Makers is a time capsule that may find an audience only among completist collectors, and the older generation of Doctor Who fans who were there for this story the first time around (he said, addressing the mirror). It may not appeal to everyone. But it’s a lovely little slice of the past where, rather than striving to be epic or futuristic, the sound of Doctor Who was quietly, politely going for baroque.

Order this CD

  1. Doctor Who Opening Title Theme (0:46)
  2. Death And Taxes (0:28)
  3. Mahogany (0:51)
  4. One Thousand Metres (2:12)
  5. Six Suns (1:53)
  6. The Others (1:29)
  7. Subway 13 (0:36)
  8. Subway 13 (continued) (1:07)
  9. A Heart As Big As Your Mouth (0:30)
  10. A Little Hop (0:23)
  11. Jelly Babies (0:31)
  12. Something In The Air (0:24)
  13. K-9, Bite! (0:54)
  14. Humbug (1:25)
  15. The P45 Return Route (1:08)
  16. The P45 Return Route (reprise) (0:55)
  17. Morton’s Fork (1:09)
  18. I’ve Heard That One, Too (1:05)
  19. The Rebellion Begins (0:46)
  20. Static Loop (3:20)
  21. The Steaming (1:18)
  22. The Steaming (continued) (1:10)
  23. Gentlemen, Good Luck (0:40)
  24. Nobody Works Today (2:11)
  25. The Gatherer Excised (0:43)
  26. Doctor Who Closing Title Theme (0:55)

Released by: Silva Screen Records
Release date: May 8, 2020
Total running time: 28:49

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Categories
2020 Artists (by group or surname) M Non-Soundtrack Music Paul Melancon Year

Paul Melançon and the New Insecurities – The Get Gos Action Hour!

3 min read

There’s certainly no shortage of practitioners of power pop, but I’m always happy when one of my favorites resurfaces, as Paul Melançon has done after a lengthy spell punctuated by side projects, live shows, and an EP or two. Melançon’s 2002 opus Camera Obscura is still one of my favorite specimens of the power pop genre, and while he’s an excellent guitarist, his voice may be his most potent instrument, capable of straight up belting out a song in the best rock traditions as well as handling all the nuances of his homemade singer-songwriter fare. I couldn’t even point you to anyone I can honestly claim he sounds like – maybe a little hint of Robin Zander at the height of Cheap Trick’s popularity? – because he just sounds like himself, and I’m a big fan of that sound.

Armed with a three-piece backing band that perfectly complements his sound, and a clutch of new songs exploring some experiences he’s had confronting chronic anxiety in recent years, Melançon delivers a surprisingly sunny musical meditation on mental health that you’d expect to have been the result of 2020’s non-stop roller-coaster of mental-health-challenging events, but instead it arrived, pleasantly enough, right at the beginning of it, and it’s been one of my go-to albums for my self-quarantining playlist. Some of the songs are obvious with the subject matter – “Hyperventilate” conjures up images of a drowning man – while others make the listener work a little harder to get to the song’s center. Which is an absolute delight, since each song is coated in layers of ’70s-inspired pop-rock confection. There are hints of something new in Melançon’s musical vocabulary here too – I definitely picked up on a newfound love of a good freeform jam, which crops up such songs as the jaw-droppingly hummable “The New Decay”, among others. (And when Paul and the New Insecurities bust out a jam like this, they’re not kidding around either. It’s heady stuff.)

Highlights include the aforementioned “New Decay” and “Hyperventilate”, as well as “St. Cecilia”, a fantastic ballad with – yet again – that terrific ’70s vibe, and “Here And Now I Was” and “When Do We Get Smaller?”, the two songs most reminiscent of Camera Obscura. “Fitzcarraldo” is a mesmerizing mid-tempo rocker that challenges you to figure out which is the verse and which is the chorus, but when the whole song sounds great, does it matter? “Mareación” is an eleven-minute journey in the form of a self-contained, 4 out of 4interconnected song cycle that also features that jamming element mentioned earlier. It may be the album’s most challenging listen, but it’s a mini-epic that earns the “power-pop-era” label on the front cover.

All of this is wrapped up in a package suggesting some lost, band-centric 1970s Saturday morning cartoon, an element that also carries over to the videos produced for some of the songs here. In short, this album has just about everything that power pop fans love – new music wrapped up in a dash of nostalgia, and it’s really good new music to boot. Highest recommendations.

Order this CD

  1. Theme from The Get Gos Action Hour! (0:40)
  2. Permanent Makeup (2:34)
  3. Robot World (3:14)
  4. This Shaky Lullaby (2:40)
  5. Hyperventilate (3:56)
  6. The New Decay (5:00)
  7. St. Cecilia (4:36)
  8. When Do We Get Smaller? (3:54)
  9. Fitzcarraldo (3:45)
  10. Mareación (11:09)
  11. Here And Now I Was (4:29)
  12. The Answer Is Yes (3:40)

Released by: Paul Melançon and the New Insecurities
Release date: April 10, 2020
Total running time: 49:37

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