The two hundred and thirty-second album: #232 Janis Joplin - Pearl
I am certain that the initial reaction to this album was coloured by Janis Joplin's death a few months prior. Further removed from her and her work, my first thoughts went to my time in a supermarket where, for various reasons, the ambient music track that played wasn't swapped out for almost a year. As the tape played two or three times a day, you got to know the songs intimately, and even now, nearly twenty years later, I associate the pop of Burt Bacharach and the gentler soul songs on this album with those days.
Janis Joplin has a great blues voice in these songs and the lament in her voice is real - not raw and unpolished, but she carries a lot of emotion in her songs. While these are on well produced tracks, they genuinely feel hollow without her and instead feel a lot more shallow. There's a lot of emotion in her voice that carries through and knowing the circumstances of the album's production, it becomes that much more harrowing.
The eighty-eighth classical recording: #898 Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis
It's interesting how in the 20th century, especially after the second world war, classical music became more experimental. Metastatis has a lot of theory behind it, based on mathematical constructs, and uses 61 musicians playing different parts to create an uncertain, chaotic work. There's no single melody, it's unsettling, but there's a method to how the music combines - not by repetition, but by overlapping at the right time to create these moments. It's probably not a piece to just listen to, but it's an interesting experience and I can see how live, this would be even more amazing.
The one hundred and fourty-fifth TV show: #489 Riget
Riget is a true split show for us. We watched the first season as part of the 1001 movies list about five or six years ago, while we left the second season until more recently - something I'd still count as part of the list. Having watched this second season, I feel it was important to see as a sequel, even if it didn't quite live up to the first.
Riget is probably best described as Twin Peaks via Lars von Trier, with a hospital drama replacing the cop show of Twin Peaks. Lars von Trier explicitly cited that show as inspiration, so it feels natural to compare. It has that show's weird vibe and at times odd storylines, mixing the mundane with the supernatural. It also doesn't live up to it. Twin Peaks presents a living town with a lot of sympathetic characters, while Riget - in part due to its shorter runtime - doesn't take the time to set up the characters that well. It takes its time with some seeming non-sequiturs, but it feels like it doesn't let the characters live. Each has their own arc, odd and bizarre, intersecting as they do.
This works best in the first season, as the weirdness slowly amps up - the first episode is mostly hospital drama, but from the end of that episode it slowly starts changing. The second season, where it's constantly there, doesn't work because it's leaning on that too much, with people getting too accepting in places. It's the weaker half, at times serving to ramp up the weakness without being committed to resolving as much that's going on. Again, to use the obvious comparison, Twin Peaks had open endings, but wasn't as afraid to end stories as others start.
That's not to say that this is a bad show. I enjoyed Riget immensely, even if some arcs suited me better than others. It's the first season that's truly the masterpiece though, with the second season at times buckling under the need to replicate it or missing the tone a bit.
The two hundred and thirty-first album: #231 Funkadelic - Maggot Brain
While funk is far from my favourite genre, funk rock and its variations that are covered by Maggot Brain works better. Some of the rhythmic repetition works better when pushed into a rock song, more as a chorus than the whole theme of the song. With that said, Maggot Brain pushes for different reasons. It starts with a ten minute guitar solo by Eddie Hazel. While it's a good performance, it is also quite different from the rest of the album, with its larger focus on vocals including the call and response parts from funk.
The sound of the album is far enough off the beaten track that I need to get used to it - no doubt in part because this is the first time the book seems to pay attention to it - but once I did it was good, something to cheer you up and keep you happy throughout. It is, for the purposes of this exploration, a new innovation in music that i know will be influencing R&B and probably feed back into mainstream rock in a way that I believe I'm really going to enjoy.
The two hundred and thirtieth album: #230 Joni MItchell - Blue
It might be the specific ordering of the book, but we're getting more folk songs in the list lately. Blue is the first of four of Joni Mitchell's albums on the list and provides some more welcome folk songs, a mix of the more maudlin works and upbeat songs occasionally verging towards rock. Musically it's lovely, the mix of instruments, underscores the songs nicely, sometimes just supporting Joni's songs while in others, such as Carey, feeling like its own story. Then the lyrics work well. There are no calls to change the world here, instead these feel like personal stories, lamenting the end of a relationship as well as celebrating better times, and I think there's something to find in most of these songs - something that connects. It's a lovely album - nothing big, but it works well at this size.
The eighty-seventh classical recording: #616 Arnold Schoenberg - Gurrelieder
Two music performances in a day? Yeah, it was time to dust off this list following everything else that's been going on in the world. Not just that, we're starting with a two hour performance of various poems, with a full orchestra, solo vocalists and a choir. While partially telling a love story, there's no other performance - it's purely the music and the songs, and although it feels it could be an opera at times, the staging doesn't work that way. The music is big and majestic, creating and invoking the fantasy landscape this seems to take place as a medieval romance.
It's a grandiose work, requiring a large orchestra and a large chorus, which means the entire work feels big. It feels like an intentional choice, in part because the story could be smaller, but intentionally isn't made to be that way. It certainly has its tender moments - the speaker's part feels that way - but it's that much bigger at other times, which is what makes this special.