The car's washed and waxed. The top's down, revealing a bright sun and a clear sky. The hairs have been freshly cut.* And for the first time in over two months I am able to carve out 90 minutes to visit Amoeba. I tell you, a more rejuvenating Sunday morning in SF can hardly be imagined.
Today's inviolable ground rule is that I am not allowed to get anything new. There's just too much that I would buy otherwise, and I'd end up spending five times as much money. The results of today's treasure hunt:
Lambert, Hendricks, & Ross, The Hottest New Group in Jazz: OK, if you've listened to Manhattan Transfer but haven't heard Lambert, Hendricks, & Ross, get thee to a record store right now, because these folks are The Absolute Swingingest, way more than ManTran ever was. They were the "hottest new group in jazz" back in the late '50s, and this 2 CD set combines three LPs that were released on Columbia. Also got The Hi-Lo's, And All That Jazz; have I mentioned my thing about jazz vocal groups? And inspired by Heather, I picked up Sun Ra Sextet at the Village Vanguard.
Everything Comes & Goes: Matmos, Four Tet, and others take turns reinterpreting Black Sabbath. (Remember when the Cardigans did the same a decade ago with Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Iron Man? Maybe I'll put those on tonight.)
Prefuse 73, vocal studies + uprock narratives; Herbert, secondhand sounds; and Paolo Conte, Tournee: They didn't have Surrounded by Silence, Plat du Jour, or Elegia, so I got these as consolation prizes.
Autechre, LP5: I have to admit that I have been intimidated by Autechre for as long as I have been terrorised by The WIRE. Ae has always represented the most effete, complex and indecipherable of electronic music to me, and so I would flip through the bin, see those scary minimal covers with no type, and quickly move on to, say, Air. But today I found courage! The only type on the outer packaging of this album is "autechre" imprinted on the front and "ae" on the back; there isn't even a title. One must confront one's fears head on, that's what I say.
1 Giant Leap: This, however, is pure crap. So not recommended. I got it for Robbie Williams and Asha Bhosle and a few other folks, but the result is a whole lot of World Beat badness with exoticized non-Western vocals a la In Your Eyes. Plus Michael Stipe whining. "One Global Pulse"? One Steaming Turd. Ugh.
And to cap off this excursion, Meredith Monk's Volcano Songs, Beck's Guero, M.I.A.'s Arular, and Kanye West's The College Dropout—proof once again that TSR is hip-hop's equivalent of the New York Times Style section. If you're hearing about it here for the first time, you can be certain that the train left without you long ago.
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* I've been going to the same guy for my haircuts for some time now, and every visit he puts out some magazines for me to skim through: Details, GQ, EW, US Weekly. Today, he chose to give me Road & Track and Maxim. To reiterate, my hair stylist gave me a copy of Maxim. (Whom does one call to have one's gaydar recalibrated?)
I love love LOVE the new Beck album! Can't believe you got it used. That means that someone didn't like it?? Crazy. It's much more of the Beck we know and love, and less "I'm so sad" Sea Change Beck (who, truth be told, I also love). Enjoy!
Posted by: ACB | Jul 25, 2005 at 01:26 AM
What do the three heavens and hells look like?
Posted by: Nick | Jul 30, 2005 at 04:54 PM
Duh, they're all the same! (What a fucking amazing piece, btw.)
Posted by: M. C- | Jul 30, 2005 at 05:02 PM