22nd...Dawn of the Summer of Love

Surrealistic Pillow. Four stars.

The popularity of Jefferson Airplane always rather perplexed me. They were, it is true, an epitomizing sixties band, but I never found anything spectacular about them in musicianship, songwriting or anything else. So I concluded it was because of Grace Slick, first lady of rock (I know, I know, there was Janis, but she came from the blues tradition. Note all others at the time were into folk: a la Joan, Judy and Joni... or country). Now imagine my frustration when I heard this record and discovered she only sang two of the eleven tracks! Marty Balin got the job of lead vocals, and actually sounds a lot like a West Coast Paul Simon.

So what has my second listen discovered about one of 1967s most popular releases? Sheer enjoyability. These fellows were early on in the psychedelic movement and were just having a good time, making music and taking drugs - they weren't trying to be anything or make any sweeping statements. They were just a pleasant little San Francisco group. The excess and political posturing would come later.

Track 1, She Has Funny Cars (to the title I say "????"). Opening with drums and harmonies, it quickly reinvents itself as a shuffle. Marty Balin with Grace on counterpoint. Rather than your usual call-and-respond technique, they mix it up, singing different lines in tandem and occasionally harmonizing. The effect is disorienting but neat.

Surrealistic Pillow is primarily a pop record, and Somebody to Love makes for one of the few rockers, and a memorable single. It was written by Grace's brother-in-law, so she sings lead. Brilliant voice, cuts like steel and she projects so well.

My Best Friend is....cute. Dreamy, sunny pop, extremely dated, and Grace is back to being an accent again.

Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead guests on lead guitar for Today, an extremely beautiful ballad. Alright, it's sentimental and rhymes "you" and "true" more than necessary, but it still makes for a lovely moment.

Comin' Back to Me is Today Part 2. Replacing percussion with recorder, it's even more evocative. Garcia plays again and the lyric is an improvement. An acoustic gem.

3/5 of a Mile in Ten Seconds gets back to a rock foundation. At the last, the random title is shouted out but the song actually has something to do with freaks and the price of pot. Cool riff.

D.C.B.A. - 25 (Whose idea was that for a name?) is a pleasant, inconsequential California folk-rock number. You know, with the jangly guitars of the Byrds/Mamas and Papas....

How Do You Feel is more sunny harmonized pop, which blends nicely with the rest of the album.

Embryonic Journey is just one finger picking guitar played by band member Jorma Kaukonen. First song he ever composed, purely from the folk tradition, no rock and roll to it. Very short, yet a memorable addition.

The classic White Rabbit is next. Combining Alice in Wonderland with drugs and some kind of Spanish march, it drips with atmosphere for its two brief minutes. That is due to Grace, who wrote it. I can forget the sixties lyric and just savour the way she sings it. Mojo Magazine named it the greatest drug song ever recorded, for what that's worth.

Plastic Fantastic Lover finishes things off in the rock camp. I thought it was about a robot, but it turns out Marty had the television in mind. As the title indicates, the lyric is some kind of a mouthful.

The bubblegum pink cover strongly indicates Surrealistic Pillow as a pop record, and that's pretty much what you'll find. Oh, and notice the glum mop-top holding a banjo? Notice it has no strings? False advertising, or, to put it more kindly, a stylistic addition. No banjos were used in the making of this record.

I lump Jefferson Airplane in with Donovan, Simon and Garfunkel and The Zombies. Make a pot of tea, put up your feet and smile.

(Next week, I promise I'll review something frightfully obscure again. It'll be after Christmas then, so here's a Merry Christmas to all my devoted followers and to those who just happen by. Cheers!)

21st...Overlong review of an overlong CD

London Calling. Four stars.

First just let me say that in all the genres huddled under the rock umbrella, my favorites are folk/singer-songwriters and intellectual art-rock (Bowie, early Eno, Roxy Music, etc). I'm telling you this just so's you'll know how much store you want to set by this review.

1979's double album saw the introduction of post-punk and pointed the way for the Clash selling out. This is an artistic statement, you can hear ska, reggae, horns, honest to god pop tunes strewn across the record. It's all carried off well, but it means that, as far as punk was concerned, the Clash were making a fast exit.

Like all double albums, it's got filler. All the songs are short, making the weaker songs less noticeable (queue up Physical Graffiti), so taken as a whole, it mostly works.

Okay, song by song...Brace yourselves!

London Calling is a pull-out-the-stops apocalypse song. Flooding, nuclear destruction...heck, even zombies. Joe Strummer (lead singer) sounds quite pleased with all this, possibly because Beatlemania doesn't survive the experience...

Brand New Cadillac was an extra the band used to warm up before recording the serious stuff. It's dumb, basically rock and roll, and funny if you're in the right mood.

Jimmy Jazz is one of several songs dealing with criminals of one stripe or another. Horns show up alongside the guitar bridge, and Strummer sounds like he's ad-libbing through most of it. Not bad, not memorable.

Hateful is not a punk diatribe. It's about a drug addict and has a fabulous chorus.

Rudie Can't Fail is also gifted with a memorable chorus, and is driven by the brass section. Reggae inflected standout.

Spanish Bombs features grand, soaring guitar as the lyric looks to the Spanish Civil War, including a few lines in the language. When I first heard the CD two years ago, this was my favorite track, telling you how accessible it is.

The Right Profile is about the actor Montgomery Clift. This musically chaotic piece follows him down the drain. Hardly pleasant (that's the point) and Strummer's diction is really, truly horrible.

Lost in the Supermarket is gentle, a pop tune. Mick Jones, the other half of the songwriting team, sings it. The lyric is good and it's damn catchy...but it drops the ball in the second half by repeating the chorus over and over and over...Must repeat six times, rendering the song rather tedious.

We return to rock on Clampdown. Anarchy. The Establishment. You know the drill. High quality tune.

The Guns of Brixton is the real reggae moment. Paul Simonon wrote and sang it. An ominous story of civil unrest, it's one of the standouts, and that's saying something, since I've never liked reggae.

So, that's part one. It's all quite interesting, never excessive and surprising well paced. Part two?

Wrong 'Em Boyo is a ska-inflected pop song. It sounds like nothing so much as Madness. It's a riff on the traditional Stagger Lee murder ballad.

Death or Glory is archetypal from the title in. It's pretty good, and makes me curious to hear their first two albums.

Koka Kola has another strong melody, and at two minutes it doesn't overstay its welcome. In fact, it is my own favorite on London Calling.

The Card Cheat has all the instruments recorded twice to get a bigger sound, and includes piano and brass to make it swing.

Lover's Rock is the weakest track. Mildly interesting, but it drags out into a dull coda again. Superfluous; outshone by the rest.

Back to business with Four Horsemen. No, it is not another apocalypse song. Actually, I'm not sure what it is about, but never mind that.

By this point, the album is unbearable to me if not broken into two days of listening. So we come to I'm Not Down, a repetitive, uplifting little tune. Verse, riff, chorus, rinse and repeat is a mite bit predictable.

Last proper song is Revolution Rock, which is a misleading title. The brass calls up ghosts of Herb Alpert for God's sake! Though the lyric would be unacceptable in his world. Judging from the lyric sheets, I'd guess Joe Strummer was very fond of ad-libbing...

Train in Vain is an odd inclusion, a single tossed on at the last possible minute, so the original album sleeve didn't even mention it. I'd enjoy it more if it wouldn't play back in my head for the next 24 hours.

Okay, so it has more strengths than weaknesses. It makes a cohesive artistic statement and judging from what I've heard about Sandinista and Combat Rock, they didn't have anything to say afterwards.

If my review hasn't convinced you that this isn't a punk record, you can see my statement backed up by the cover art, which is both an homage to Elvis Presley and a shot recalling The Who more than anything else.

In conclusion, I'm pleased with London Calling, though I'd hardly call it one of the greatest records of all time, and the length deters me from taking it off the shelf for another two years.

20th...Roxy's second

(Bonus points to anyone who's already noticed that this is my third "For" somebody or other)

For Your Pleasure. Five stars.

So, 1973 gave us the last Roxy Music album before Eno split, and it takes the darkness hinted at on the prior's Ladytron and lets it loose. From album cover in, this is the excessive, even decadent expansion of everything originally presented.

To start, the camp is campier. Do the Strand is essentially a joke song, and wears off as all such numbers will if overplayed. But man, the bridge is killer and the band cooks... Even on silly throwaways the band puts in a five star performance.

Beauty Queen is a poetic, strangely touching end-of-love song. Romance in Ferry's world always seems expensive, glamorous and entirely superficial, yet he really wrings the pathos out of it. This is probably the best song on here, as the band gets to rock out, and Ferry's ballad shines through with fabulous turns of phrase. And his voice is unmatchable.

Strictly Confidential is a macabrely rendered deathbed lament (every songwriter has got one of those inside them). It creeps slowly upward, becoming more and more otherworldly. All details are left to the imagination.

Editions of You is an all out, chaotic slice of art-rock with more extreme camp and a great trade-off among lead instruments.

Then there's In Every Dream Home a Heartache, more like spoken word than song. It's a peek into an empty space, a world where the excessively rich have every convenience but no soul. So (the narrator at least) turns to the gothic and perverse right in the middle of suburbia. When the music does kick in it's worth the wait, even though it contains a false stop (and I really hate those).

The Bogus Man is further creepiness, but the least effecting work overall. Oh, it's loungy and strangely upbeat; the brief lyric is about an emotionally stunted man and simmers with undercurrents of stalking and violence. That lasts about four minutes and then we're fed minute after minute (five in all) of instrumental noodling. It doesn't build or go anywhere terribly interesting, it just proceeds aimlessly along. Why?

Grey Lagoons is underrated. A bit celebratory, but it, like Beauty Queen, brims with energy and isn't camp. It's not as good as the earlier track, just because the lyrics are a bit lightweight.

And Eno, I hear you ask? Oh, he's running riot on the title track, a rather sweet last minute note. It does it's fair share of noodling too, but coming at the end and mimicking a sunrise, it goes somewhere and fades out where you can't follow it.

Roxy Music would never sound like this again. Take heart though; their second phase was equal to the first, though only lasting another two albums. Then they caught the most unfortunate of rock's maladies...they sold out. But all those stories will come later. This week, my concern is For Your Pleasure, one of the best CDs they ever made.

19th...Lyrical craftsmanship

For the Roses. Four stars.

1972s For the Roses was supposed to be Joni Mitchell's farewell to the music industry. Uncomfortable with her progressing popularity, she released this album and took a relatively short hiatus, returning in 1974.

So in my mind, this record marks her farewell more to the heart-on-the-sleeve singer-songwriter style she'd epitomized on Blue, and the groundwork for later obscuritantism. (I don't believe that's a real word)

Banquet is the uncompromising start-up, taking a simple metaphor of life as a banquet and expanding it into something just a titch more complicated. The beauty of much of the album is found in the structure. Joni knew how to arrange a song, even a simple piano ballad.

Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire is as impenetrable as the title makes it sound. Jazz inflections on a guitar track, a beautiful melody if one has the patience to tease it out, her voice turning hollow and spooky and a lyric far too deep on a thematic level for me to understand.

Barangrill is much easier, thematically and melodically. The denizens of a Bar and Grill are lovingly described, while woodwinds and reeds highlight a memorable tune. It is pleasant and easy to overplay, since there isn't a whole lot underneath the charm.

Back to piano with Lesson in Survival, and back to the seaside painted in Banquet. Journalistic free verse, set to a vague tune. It details the straining elements of a relationship. "I came in as bright/as a neon light/and I burned out/right there before him." Moving story, excellently crafted and immediately forgettable.

It shifts superbly into Let the Wind Carry Me, detailing the strain between a rock n roll rebel and her parents.

For the Roses moves back to guitar and is an informed, detailed song about life as a singer-songwriter. After the last couple, the melody is especially nice and the imagery proves how adept Joni Mitchell is with a lyric.

See You Sometime is a continuation of it. And it occurs to me that I'm not recommending her as being fun to listen to. In fact, the singer-songwriter genre is not replete with light-hearted self deprecation and absurdities. No, it's like art, recommended as thought-provoking material. It's just not good time music.

Where was I? Electricity; another simple metaphor, faulty wiring = a relationship. It's rather touching, just for that simplicity.

Harmonica! You know this one. It's You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio. Got into the Top 25, without benefit of a chorus, and it is a sweet little love song. It makes me smile. Oh, and it's Nash supplying the harmonica.

Blonde in the Bleachers is a vignette, brief but interesting. Stills gets on this one as the whole rock n roll band that invades the coda.

Woman of Heart and Mind is the most scathing song, though the delivery is merely contemplative.

Judgement of the Moon and Stars (Ludwig's Tune) is certainly the most ambitious of the lot. Obviously, the subject is Beethoven. It settles into a longish bridge, but the actual song is good, though it doesn't wrap up so much as pieter out.

Verdict? A good job all around. Not the study in excellence of Blue, nor her best collection of songs, since a lot of them only dimly register on a melodic level. Yet Joni's capability and strength of craftsmanship make it a splendid continuation record, though I wouldn't recommend it as a good starting point if you haven't heard any of her other work. She's got a good voice too.

18th...Some indie obscurity

For Emma, Forever Ago. Four Stars.

In 2006, having recently lost his band and relationship, Justin Vernon sped off to a hunting cabin in Northwestern Wisconsin and recorded this record over the winter. His nom de plume, incidentally, is an intentionally misspelled "bon hiver" (bohn ee-vair) which means good winter in French.

Once he got out of the woods in 2007, he did a little bit of extra recording, but this is mostly a one-man, one-time effort, and also a true indie album, as I've never heard of the publisher.

Flume sums up the entire style of Bon Iver. Driven by acoustic guitar and Justin's overlapping falsetto blurring an already vague, imagistic lyric. Neat effects in the overdub department, and a guest drummer.

Lump Sum pretty much repeats the formula, so one must accept the cohesiveness of the sound from song to song. What it lacks in variety is made up for with atmosphere. It forms a perfect compliment to a snowy day.

Skinny Love is the angriest track, one on which Justin ditches the falsetto to help accent the feeling. It's patched together and messy, like he'd only barely got the song together and then used the demo.

The Wolves (Act I and II) takes its sweet time, starting with repeated lines and pauses that reminded me of a gospel hymn. Then it stretches out into a long strummed refrain "what might have been lost don't bother me." With nowhere left to go, it eventually splinters apart, leaving just this little timid voice spouting an unfinished line.

Blindsided is more of the same; a confusing lyric married to a lovely melody with some interesting musical effects. Your mileage will vary. Heck, even mine does.

Creature Fear has a rousing chorus, but is in fact the most despondent, depressing song herein.

It blends seamlessly into Team, rendering the song by itself pointless. It's about a minute worth of drumming and a bass riff, with affects and whistling.

The almost title track, For Emma, is next. Feels like a hopeful finale, thanks to trumpet and trombone from the guest players.

But the last song is Re: Stacks. Longest, most coherent lyric settled on the least catchy melody by far. I always get lost on this song; it feels like a bonus track.

Well, I'm really rather ambivalent about this CD. I've been listening to it heavily this past week, trying to figure it out. Sometimes I think the whole thing's dull, at others it seems to possess a most extraordinary beauty. What is Justin Vernon trying to convey? It takes concentration for me to even begin to figure it out. I find that snow outside the window really helps the cause.

Oh, and a reviewer on Amazon recommended hearing it alongside Neil Young Live at Massey Hall. So I bought them both, and did just that. Yes, they do form a natural compliment to each other, sharing acoustics, falsetto and a predilection for loneliness.

Looking back, this does seem a tepid review. I simply don't know whether I like Bon Iver or not, let alone if anyone else would. The frost obscuring the window on the cover really tells you everything you need to know. Sometimes one accepts the obscurity with a philosophical nod; other times it's "get a windshield wiper and say what's on your mind already!"

17th...An elegie

Gone Again. Five stars.

Except for a brief return in the 80s, Patti Smith had retired from the music business, opting instead for a private life with her husband Fred "Sonic" Smith and children. But in the years leading up to 1996, several close friends (Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith Group pianist Richard Sohl) and her brother Todd all passed away. With the loss of her husband, to whom Gone Again is dedicated, she returned to the studio.

Gone Again is an incredibly organic, sincere record. Though themes of death and loss are dealt with in every song, it is neither morbid nor depressing; rather, the underlying emotion seems to be recuperation, renewal of strength and the attempt to make peace with death and also create an adequate tribute to life.

The title track is a powerful attention grabber, and therefore somewhat misleading (as the record afterwards is mostly in a quiet vein). It heralded at the time that after such a long hiatus, Patti Smith could still rock, still capture poetry and still draw on incredible emotional resonance.

Beneath the Southern Cross is acoustically driven, with John Cale on organ and Tom Verlaine on electric guitar, both of which form unobtrusive textures. The song is astonishingly good free verse, but takes time to appreciate, lacking hooks. And listen to the heavenly, pure vocal at the end...That is Jeff Buckley, within a year of his death, making the song chilling, in retrospect.

About a Boy is a lengthy eight minutes, full of atmosphere, washes of guitar far in the background. Patti's vocals are the centerpiece of the entire record. The subject? Kurt Cobain's suicide, and each verse grows more bitter, more angered, as is only fair in the case.

My Madrigal is made of piano, cello and the most emotional of all the lyrics. The refrain is simply "till death do us part" and Patti's voice is at its most beautiful.

Summer Cannibals is oddly placed, being even more abrasive than Gone Again. The catharsis of the take must have been incredible; she practically spits each word out. It's very strong, working on the surreal story of cannibals in Georgia, but (perhaps on purpose) it forms a harsh put down of the romanticism just prior.

Dead to the World is nearly a country song, and Patti adopts a rather severe twang for the telling of the tale, which I found annoying at first...But the sheer appeal of the song, and the fabulous whistling contributed by one Oliver Ray (who I know nothing about) soon won me over, and it is now one of my favorite moments on the album.

For all the shifts in tone and texture, the record is remarkably consistent in its vision. Wing, the only song written for it that does not clearly deal with death or absence, is almost entirely on acoustic guitar.

Ravens features a Spanish inflected mandolin (played by Kimberly Smith, who I can't believe isn't related) and the best poetry included, as it reads good on its own. "All the gifts that God had gave/and those by fate denied/gone to where all treasures laid/and where the raven flies."

At 55 minutes, the CD is longer than is preferable to me, and so we come to the only superfluous song, a cover of Dylan's Wicked Messenger, transforming it into hard rock and obscuring the lyric. Nothing wrong with it - she belts it out - but it is the only weakness to Gone Again.

Fireflies is the other long track, and could never run in any one's head, but the atmosphere conjured is breathtaking. Verlaine, Ray and Buckley are all on it, along with the regular band. The lyric starts in a gospel theme before Patti's muse reasserts itself in a haunting devotional ode.

"This little song is for Fred," she says softly, and lists the chords before playing Farewell Reel, an unaccompanied song that could very well be a first take. It's a fitting end, encapsulating the theme of life making its peace with death.

Gone Again is an essential Patti Smith recording. To me, it is her finest work. The price paid, the degree to which she rose above what must have been incredible pain and the statement hewn from the experience all point to her being on the highest tier available to artists of any order.

16th..."Bizarre"

(Sorry about the hiatus, folks. Will try to keep on top of things from here out, but everyone needs a vacation now and then)

Roxy Music. Four stars.

Fairport Convention. The Beatles. David Bowie. Bob Dylan. On the whole, debut records bear the marks of influences and the musicians' own uncertainties. Roxy Music is one of the exceptions. In 1972, they put this record out, already sounding like veterans. Supremely confidant, with a unique sound, watertight band and fabulous front man, Roxy Music already seemed to know the exact sound (slightly camp art-rock with a strange lack of choruses) and look (glam rock) they were going for.

Make no mistake, this is classic Roxy down to the cover art.

The only clue that this is their earliest effort comes from Bryan Ferry: lyricist, pianist and singer. Compared to the work to come out in just a year or so, his voice herein is pale and washed out. And don't just take my word for it; Ferry himself must have harbored some dis-satisfactions, as he reworked almost half of these songs on his 1976 solo record Let's Stick Together.

The other members of the band: Paul Thompson on obligatory drums, Graham Simpson for bass, Phil Manzanera on the electric guitar, Andrew MacKay playing oboe and saxophone and a man the reproduced liner notes refer to only as "Eno" playing synths and tapes.

The album starts and ends quite fittingly, with party sound affects. Then Re-Make Re-Model kicks off. It's the straightest rocker in the set, and the saxophone is even better than the guitar. Highlight is the "band introduction" where everybody gets their own 10 second solo. It comes across as a well-rehearsed jam (which it may well have started as).

Ladytron is quieter, with a haunting soundscape crafted from oboe and synth and an elegant, darker lyric. It finally implodes as a dense rocker, but Manzanera does not get a solo.

The campier elements of Roxy Music come to the foreground on If There is Something, a woozy forerunner to the more American sounds of songs like Prairie Rose. However, it won't be pigeon-holed and shifts into epic, heartfelt territory with Ferry belting out his cliched declaration of love ("I would climb mountains..." etc... though he'd also become a gardener, growing roses...and potatoes?!).

Virginia Plain, the single, made the Top Ten in the U.K. and was performed on Top of the Pops. It's purely ridiculous, full of weird little asides and what might be the most abrupt ending of any pop song ever recorded.

2 H.B. is a sophisticated ballad whose title is actually "To Humphrey Bogart," explaining the almost-chorus of "here's looking at you kid." It focuses on Casablanca, but makes a touching ode to his entire screen legacy.

The Bob (Medley) is naturally the most schizophrenic song, starting off with pure Eno invention before abrasive rock...war sound affects, smooth jazz and Eno glitter (best part)...and so on until it eventually pivots back to the starting point. Art-rock with a capital A.

Chance Meeting is a stripped down piano driven work. Ferry's speciality is lost love between glamorous, beautiful people, and it's on display here. Less is going on musically, but incredible, ominous noises come from Manzanera's guitar...

Would You Believe? Snazzy melody, percussion and sax and more campy takes on what strikes as California rock. This is the last swinging song on Roxy Music and it's a great tune.

Sea Breezes (yes, surf sounds are lovingly included) is evocative, haunting and well-structured at first. MacKay's oboe is fabulous for three minutes, then the song goes into a herky jerky faster tempo with lots of noodling from all involved. It loses coherency at this point and is the weakest track.

Bitters End is, as the backing vocals so aptly sing "bizarre, bizarre, bizarre, bizarre." Every thing's here: the pink gin, the parties and yet also the loneliness and nostalgia for bygone romances. And it is cloaked in eccentricity from the delivery of the lyrics ("too late to leap the chocolate gate"...?) to the nominal music backing it up.

The debut of album of Roxy Music doesn't really put a foot wrong. In hindsight, better things were to come, and I'd recommend a newcomer start with Country Life, but this is a good little CD for fans of unpretentious art-rock or who just want something different.