by Rick Krueger
This article rounds out my “best of 2017” series, focusing on older albums that I discovered — or rediscovered in one case! — in the course of the year. They’re listed in alphabetical order by artist after the jump:
Author: kruekutt
Grateful for my beloved wife, son, daughter-in-law, grandchildren and siblings. Also a lover of theology, music, history, philosophy, classic novels, science fiction, fantasy and Looney Tunes.
Pat DiNizio, 1955-2017
Pat DiNizio, vocalist-guitarist-songwriter for the tough yet tuneful New Jersey rock band the Smithereens, died Tuesday. He was 62.
The group announced his passing on their web site. No cause of death was given, but the musician had been beset by health problems in recent years; in 2015 he was sidelined after losing the use of his right hand and arm following a pair of falls that incurred serious nerve damage.
I remember being knocked sideways hearing the Smithereens’ “Behind the Wall of Sleep” on the radio in 1986. I was always scanning record stores and the airwaves for tuneful, Beatle-ish power-pop, and this filled the bill nicely:
Three things about the song grabbed me: the misquote of H.P. Lovecraft in the title; the 1960s callbacks in the lyrics; and the killer combination of catchy melody and hard-rock groove — more Cheap Trick than Marshall Crenshaw.
After that, I was always excited to hear the Smithereens on the radio. Maybe the melancholy skew of their lyrics (“Blood and Roses,” “In a Lonely Place,” “Only A Memory,” — sensing a theme yet?) was another factor in their favor during my self-pitying single years. When they had an actual hit (“A Girl Like You”) off a solid album (11, also featuring Belinda Carlisle’s duet with DiNizio on the Rubber Soul homage “Blue Period”), it felt like a triumph!
The window to mass culture closed on the Smithereens after their next album Blow Up, but not before they came to Grand Rapids and played a free show at the Civic Auditorium the night before my 30th birthday. You had to go to the main location of the local chain Believe in Music to get tickets, which is where the band autographed the t-shirt pictured above. It was a good show; I remember lots of audience interaction, including guitarist Jim Babjak venturing into the audience for the guitar solo on “Blood and Roses.”
The Smithereens made one more major label album, A Date with the Smithereens (first line of lyrics: “Guess what, there’s a black cloud inside of my head”) before fading into where-are-they-now territory. Which turned out to be their original stomping ground of Carteret, New Jersey. They made occasional albums: some new material — including a Christmas disc; some live retreads; some tributes to the Beatles and the Who — for my money, their take on Tommy has more guts than the original.
The Smithereens were planning live shows in 2018, but it wasn’t to be. In one of his final Facebook posts, Pat DiNizio turned to thoughts of Christmas:
In early December the church that I live directly across the street from here in Scotch Plains builds a life size classic manger scene that is among one of the most beautiful and detailed one that I have ever seen. I can’t say that I’m a church goer, but I was raised Catholic, and the aforementioned church was where I was baptized, received Holy Communion was confirmed, where my parents were married (as well as every other member of my family) and where the funerals were held for my father, grandfather, grandmother, aunts, uncles and virtually every member of my family. Most of them were married there too. So when Hollingsworth House, the home that I have lived in the past 20 years or so became available, it seemed to me a stroke of good fortune to be able to live a hundred yards away across the street from the church that was and has been such an important part of my life.
Here’s hoping that Pat DiNizio now enjoys the peace embodied across the street from his house. Buona Natale!
The Albums That Changed My Life: #9, Lutheran Mass for Christmas Morning by Michael Praetorius
by Rick Krueger
By the mid-1990s, more classical music was being recorded and released worldwide than ever before. Sony’s purchase of CBS Records had triggered a spending frenzy, both by the new Sony Classical and its competitors Polygram, EMI, RCA and Warner. Occasional crossover chart smashes like The Three Tenors, Henryk Gorecki’s meditative Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, or the odd compilation of Gregorian chant had a glut of major and minor orchestras, choirs and ensembles chasing the next fluke hit — usually with A&R men breathing down their necks to justify the expense.
It was a mind-boggling time to be a classical collector. Bookstores like Barnes & Noble and appliance shops like Best Buy opened in smaller and smaller towns, with deeper and deeper stocks of CDs. Mall chains like Discount Records followed suit, and free-standing superstores like Tower Records went even deeper. Detroit’s local chain Harmony House had a dedicated all-classical store; nearby Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan, had at least two or three at any given time. Whether hitting 28th Street on my day off in Grand Rapids, or driving east to visit family, I knew there would be something great to find no matter where I went — I just didn’t know what.
Kruekutt’s 2017 Favorites: New Albums & Videos
by Rick Krueger
After the jump are the new albums and videos from 2017 that grabbed me on first or second listen, then compelled repeated plays. I’m not gonna rank them except for my Top Favorite, which I’ll save for the very end. The others are listed alphabetically by artist. (Old school style, that is — last names first where necessary!) Links to the ones I’ve previously reviewed are embedded in the album titles.
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Rick’s Retroarchy: Favorite 2017 Reissues
by Rick Krueger
I still have a few more albums to listen to before finalizing my favorite new releases of 2017. To warm up, here are the reissues from this past year that:
- I absolutely had to buy, and
- That grabbed me on first listen (whether I’d previously owned a copy or not) and didn’t let go through repeated plays. Except for my “top favorite” at the end of the post, I haven’t ranked ’em — in my opinion, they’re all equally worth your time.
Continue reading “Rick’s Retroarchy: Favorite 2017 Reissues”
The Albums that Changed My Life: #7, O Come All Ye Faithful by The Choir of King’s College Cambridge
by Rick Krueger
Hearing this album was what really confirmed me — a fourth-generation American of German ancestry and Lutheran upbringing — as a lifelong, diehard Anglophile. As a unlooked-for bonus, it reopened a vocational path I had taken for granted, if not outright abandoned, as I trained to become a musician.
“Wait a minute,” I hear you say to the first point, “every single album you’ve written about so far is by a British artist or composer!” Point taken. Throw in my love for the work of Charles Dickens, J.R.R. Tolkien and Shakespeare (as well as the adventures of Sherlock Holmes), and you might consider my opening sentence an overstatement. But hear me out.
Neil Young’s Archives Open for Business
by Rick Krueger
Remember Neil Young’s Archives Volume 1? Released in 2009, it was a comprehensive, though not exhaustive, box set of the man’s music from 1963 to 1972 — 137 tracks, 47 previously unreleased. If you ponied up a three figure sum (guilty), you could get the set in DVD or Blu-Ray format, and have multiple visual gimcracks to click on and view while the music was playing. Some of these were quite cool; my favorite was a candid camera video of Young pestering a New York City record store clerk.
Since then, Young has occasionally promised further Archives installments — but given his multiple interests and projects (along with his propensity to change his mind), it wasn’t surprising that nothing followed. That is, until yesterday, when www.neilyoungarchives.com went live. The site will ultimately provide audio/visual access to more than 900 recordings by Young from 1963 to the present, whether solo or with his collaborators through the years — Buffalo Springfield, CSNY, Crazy Horse and The Promise of the Real, among others. Songs and albums are searchable, and everything is also accessible via the “timeline” or “file cabinet” formats used for Archives Volume 1.
In the FAQ section of the new site, Young and his collaborators go into great detail about their proprietary “Xstream by NYA” format, claiming to offer up to 20 times more audio data than the 320 kilobytes per second of high-quality mp3 files. Listening to Young’s live Time Fades Away as I type, my streaming rate has ranged from 1600 to 1800 kbps. It’s an impressive-looking stat, but given the basic grungy sound of the album, it’s hard to hear any substantial difference — especially since my sound system is a solid performer, but nowhere near audiophile territory.
Of course, there’s no such thing as a free lunch; to quote the Archives FAQ, “all content and songs on NYA are free for a limited time only. After that, access will require a subscription. Duration and cost of subscription are still TBD, but we can tell you that the more users we have the cheaper it will be.” At least right now, you can log in through Facebook or Google and avoid setting up yet another online account. Since my interest in Young’s music basically extends through the Rust Never Sleeps era, I’ll hopefully have enough time to listen to the music of his “Ditch trilogy” period (when he made Time Fades Away, Tonight’s The Night, and On the Beach) before the subscription model kicks in. [Note: according to a “Welcome to Neil Young Archives” email I’ve received, my free trial period lasts until June 30. Plenty of time then!]
In the meantime, the Archives website provides a window of opportunity to hear a seminal artist’s music for free. If you have any interest in Young’s work, it’s worth checking out.
Rick’s Quick Takes: All Is As All Should Be by The Dear Hunter
by Rick Krueger
The Dear Hunter first caught my attention when I saw them open for Coheed & Cambria and Porcupine Tree in 2009. Imagine a group of hardcore punk rockers who’ve raided their parents’ record collections, only to be captivated by the Beach Boys and Queen records they’ve found. It was hard-driving, deeply melodic, richly textured, over-the-top melodramatic, way impressive stuff.
Since then, I’ve happily followed TDH’s career, enjoying their Acts I-V concept albums, but more drawn to unrelated projects like their Color Spectrum EP set. This new EP, their first self-released project, distills what makes Casey Crescenzo and company’s music special into just 25 minutes and 6 “all killer no filler” tracks.
As always with these guys, if your attention drifts, you might think you’ve accidentally stumbled into a completely different song. For example, the agile Latin groove and warm, open-hearted verses of opener “The Right Wrong” slam directly into a stratospheric chorus of shreddy vocals, simultaneously putting the hardcore hammer down, then morphing into and out of a giddily rocking bridge in a flash. “Blame Paradise” encompasses a seriously badass beat, a off-kilter opening riff, call and answer vocal patter over surf-music guitar, an unstoppable harmony chorus, a spooky instrumental bridge, an ominous vocal/synth duet, and an atonal dead-stop finale. Whew!
“Beyond the Pale” slows things down in a riveting ballad that piles on the rich vocal harmonies, unexpected harmonic shifts, and synthesized strings and percussion. When it can’t do anything else, it collapses into stasis, then seques into “Shake Me (Awake),” an utterly glorious Brian Wilson pastiche for the emo generation (with Freddie Mercury-like rhymes and a vaudevillian softshoe bridge to boot).
“Witness Me” aims true at mid-tempo existential yearning, telling its tale through multiple vocal characters, the verses downshifting into a gorgeous synth turnaround before the theatrical chorus, the hardcore holler of the bridge, and the “keep dreaming” electronica-laced fade-out. The closing title track starts softly, climbing through muted verses to a floating chorus as a gently funky beat gains strength. Edgy, ascending guitars build to a big choral climax — only to wrap around to the song’s muted beginning, with a final half-verse just hanging there, suspended in mid-air.
And here’s the thing about The Dear Hunter’s music: as wildly disjunctive as all this sounds, the whole EP flows brilliantly from start to finish. Every new element is a surprise, even a shock, as it kicks in — but almost immediately it feels inevitable and right. This is great progressive punk-pop, made with open-hearted emotion, craft and commitment. When Crescenzo sings and TDH locks in around him, they’ll sweep you along with them, no matter how bumpy the ride gets.
All Is As All Should Be is available for download now on ITunes and Bandcamp. I completely missed the pre-order for physical formats (vinyl and CD), which are already sold out; here’s hoping a second pressing follows soon! The EP is released to streaming services on December 8.
A Proggy Christmas, 2017 Edition
First the Big Big Train Christmas single, then the new Tiger Moth Tales album, now this — our Founding Progarchist’s stocking is filling up quick! From Cosmograf’s Facebook page:
“Cosmograf will be releasing a single record on December 1st, entitled ‘A Festive Ghost’. Exclusively distributed in digital only format via Bandcamp, this unconventional Christmas song is a wistful reflection on the pressures of maintaining damaged relationships at the time of the festive season.
All of the instruments on this record are played by Robin himself including the drums.
A donation is being made to MacMillan Cancer Care for each download purchased.”
Bruford: Seems Like a Lifetime Ago, 1977-1980 — A Review
by Rick Krueger
I think it’s fair to say that this 8-disc set is going to be my reissue of the year. It’s pure delight from first to last, covering three brilliant studio albums, two distinct live sets (one previously unreleased) and a fascinating batch of rough-draft outtakes — all spearheaded by paradigmatic progressive rock drummer Bill Bruford.
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Progarchy 