The two hundred and thirty-fifth album: #235 Flamin' Groovies - Teenage Head
Teenage Head goes back to an earlier era of rock, taking the Stones' blues-inspired sound, using a simpler sound that avoids the more eclectic sounds contemporary rock took on. Sure, it bypasses the innocence of earlier rock, but with this listed as garage rock, the album takes on that simpler rock sound that we'll later see flow into punk and its companions. It makes for a compact half hour, with some good different riffs between tracks - Teenage Head sounds more threatening and darker than what came before, but also brings in more blues stylings than previous tracks, while Evil-Hearted Ada could easily be an Elvis Presley song.
It's in a weird way more timeless for it - a throwback to the early 60s that also fits in with the early 70s and at least resonates further down. I'm not sure I'd consider it a masterpiece as such - it doesn't line up with my tastes quite well enough for that, and there's something lacking here, but it is just a really good rock album.
The one hundred and fourty-sixth TV show: #314 The Chinese Detective
In theory, the concept of this show should have appealed to us. A Chinese detective in the Metropolitan police - a distinct minority, especially in the eighties - faces prejudice as he does his job. He's also a maverick and pursues the case of his father being thrown off the force unfairly and the corruption that underlies it.
In practice, the case of the week structure doesn't blend well with the ongoing plot and while the two can inform each other, it feels like usually, the weekly case gets removed and stays unresolved in exchange for a favour or two. It's missing some connective tissue and I think the show was made a t a time where this structure hadn't necessarily developed far enough yet. It feels like it's best when it avoids that plot and deals with a maverick detective who also fights against prejudice - creating enough of a tension to work. However, just as much of it seems to come down to Ho's father abusing him, the chief going a bit further just to be mean and it all feeling unnecessary. I guess I may have missed part of the timing, but all in all it was too much of a mixed bag to keep diving into.
The show was the first British show to feature a British Chinese lead and, I believe, might still be the only one to do so, and it's certainly notable for that. When it addresses that, the show is as interesting, as the way John Ho deals with it in the context of its day works well, but it doesn't do enough to elevate the story - an ongoing plot that built further on that might have suited better.
The two hundred and thirty-fourth album: #234 Faces - A Nod is As Good As a Wink... to a Blind Horse
It's not hard to draw a parallel between this album and the blues rock of the Rolling Stones. There's the same drawl, the same instruments, the same country-ish guitars. The album follows tha pattern, without any major surprises - not going into the really hard numbers the Stones tended to put one or two of in an album - but it flows along with some experimentation. It's still pretty straight up country and blues rock, a formula that works here.
The eighty-ninth classical recording: #718 Alexander Zemlinsky - String Quartet no. 3
I'm still not sure I've fully got the vocabulary down to talk about these recordings, which means that for these string quartets it gets harder to say much here. They can be fairly abstract - creating nice music without feeling like they have any story to them.
For me, there's always some longing in a melody using only string instruments, with this piece having a lot of those moments. There are the bursts of energy, but it really lives in the quieter parts. The main change to this is in the final part, described as 'burlesque' in one of the lists I have for this, with a far more upbeat sound. It feels a bit of an odd choice to put that at the end - usually the energetic piece comes earlier - but to be honest, it was the pick me up here that I did need today.
The two hundred and thirty-third album: #233 Fela Kuti & The Afrika 70 With Ginger Baker - Live!
How should I address an afrobeat album? As a fusion of west African music, soul, rock and jazz, there is a lot to unpack in these, with some complex arrangements that take some time to really make sense of. It's an interesting style of music, removing the droning repetition of soul while maintaining its call and response in places. It has the rock energy and mood, jazz's at times looser style and drum solos that last for ages. At the same time, this is its own sound, an album with a different style of percussion and a different way in which it makes music. Does it get tedious to listen to? Yeah, sometimes, but there's a craftsmanship in here that's incredible to listen to, and at times feels more like a classical symphony arranged using modern instruments than anything else, and that's good enough for me.
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.
The two hundred and twenty-ninth album: Leonard Cohen - Songs of Love and Hate
I've covered enough folk from this era before, between Bob Dylan and other contemporary artists. From that, I know that it's a hit and miss genre for me, sometimes dependent on my mood at the time as so much of it relies on hitting that emotional core. Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate hits an odd spot for me in that, as it has some lyrics that connect with me, but then adds some flourishes that don't feel quite right to me, with Diamonds in the Mine feeling really off for me there. Perhaps it's the vocals: Leonard Cohen's gravel suits some songs, but not all, and right now it feels like it goes between pulling me in on the smaller one and pushing me away when it's bigger. Folk, more than anything, thrives on that emotional connection, and today it felt like it fluctuated so much that I couldn't decide where the album fell.
The one hundred forty-fourth TV show: #367 Eastenders
Is it bad to say that all soaps feel the same? Other than different faces and a different setting, so much of it feels the same that I genuinely get quite bored with the episodes and don't see the point of them as much. I get that the appeal is in part in getting to know the different people, but I saw so many faces in these few episodes that I couldn't catch up with all of them and there were a bunch of storylines I couldn't really follow - and this is while watching several omnibus editions that meant they shoudl have gone through.
I mean, oddly, the acting feels better here than I've seen in other soaps and it seems like some more are was put into it, but the stories are just fine and most of them feel repetitive one way or another. Again, this is a genre I'll never quite understand, with its sheer size making me even less likely to get there.