Here are the reissues and live albums from 2019 that grabbed me on first listen, then compelled repeated plays. I’m not gonna rank them except for my Top Favorite status, which I’ll save for the very end. Links to previous reviews or purchase sites are embedded in the album titles. But first, a graphic tease …
Continue reading “kruekutt’s 2019 Favorites: Reissues and Live Albums”
More new music, live albums, reissues (regular, deluxe & super-deluxe) and even books about music heading our way between now and Christmas? Yep. Following up on my previous post, it’s another exhaustive sampling of promised progressive goodies — along with other personal priorities — below. Click on the titles for pre-order links — whenever possible, you’ll wind up at the online store that gets as much money as possible directly to the creators.
Out now:
Andrew Keeling, Musical Guide to In the Court of the Crimson King, 10/50 Edition: composer/musicologist/online diarist Keeling’s revision of his 2009 book (the first of a series acclaimed by King Crimson’s Robert Fripp).
Marillion with Friends from the Orchestra: 9 Marillion classics re-recorded by the full band, the string quartet In Praise of Folly, flautist Emma Halnan and French horn player Sam Morris. Available on CD.
A Prog Rock Christmas: Billy Sherwood produces 11 holiday-themed tracks from the typical all-star cast (members of Yes, Utopia, Flying Colors, Renaissance, District 97, Curved Air and more). Download and CD available now; LP available November 1.
October 25:
King Crimson, In the Court of the Crimson King (50th Anniversary Edition): featuring brand new stereo and surround mixes in 24/96 resolution by Steven Wilson. Available in 3 CD + BluRay or 2 LP versions. (Note that the new mixes will also be included in the Complete 1969 CD/DVD/BluRay box set, which has been delayed until 2020.)
Van Morrison, Three Chords and the Truth: 14 new songs from Van the Man, available in digital, CD or LP versions.
Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Colorado: the first Young/Horse collaboration since the 2012 albums Americana and Psychedelic Pill, available in CD or 2LP versions.
What new music, live albums, reissues (regular, deluxe or super-deluxe) and tours are heading our way between now and All Hallows Eve? Check out the exhaustive (and potentially exhausting) sampling of promised progressive goodies — along with other personal priorities — below. Click on the titles for pre-order links — whenever possible, you’ll wind up at the online store that gets as much money as possible directly to the musicians.
Jeff Lynne’s ELO, Van Andel Arena, Grand Rapids Michigan, July 23, 2019.
Parsing this band’s name closely pays off. This isn’t an Electric Light Orchestra reunion by any means; rather, it’s reclusive ELO main man Jeff Lynne, touring North America with the music that made his bones for the first time in nearly 40 years.
Armed with fistfuls of Top 20 hits and key album tracks, Live Nation’s deep pockets, a dozen top-notch hired guns — including progressive rock role players Milton McDonald (Anderson Bruford Wakeman & Howe) on guitar and Lee Pomeroy (Anderson Rabin & Wakeman, Steve Hackett, It Bites, Headspace) on bass — and visual production rivaling Pink Floyd, Lynne delivered the goods to a pumped-up, near-capacity crowd Tuesday night. Sure, the show was polished and manicured (and doubtless click-tracked and auto-tuned) within inches of its life — but it was also irresistible to the ears and dazzling to the eyes, an unalloyed pleasure from start to finish.
The Who, Van Andel Arena, Grand Rapids Michigan, May 7, 2019.
Taking the mike as The Who casually took the stage, surrounded by a 49-piece orchestra, Pete Townshend saluted my adopted hometown. “Grand Rapids — on the Grand River — a grand occasion!”
As I’ve noted before, Michigan has played an outsized part in The Who’s history — the site of their first US hit single (“I Can’t Explain”, in Detroit) their first US gig outside New York (the Fifth Dimension Club, in Ann Arbor), their first car driven into a swimming pool (at Flint’s Holiday Inn). Tuesday night brought a new “first” — the opening night of an ambitious band-plus-symphony tour. Would it be a brave triumph? A crazy experiment? An baffling failure? A cynical cash grab? We would get to find out — first!
What we got was a mix of the first two possibilities — thoroughly intriguing and pretty gripping, worth some shaky moments and rough pacing for the sheer, audacious impact of the whole package. The evening was by no means a smooth ride or a safe play to a sold-out sports arena crowd; parachuting into unfamiliar sonic terrain, The Who had to blaze new trails forward. They stumbled at times, but when they found their feet, the musical vistas they discovered could be downright glorious.
Following the jump, the reissues and compilations from this past year that:
Fifty years ago today — December 3, 1968 — NBC aired Singer Presents … Elvis.
At that point, Elvis Presley was generally considered a joke, a has-been. His pioneering rock and roll days were long behind him, his singing and acting career and earning potential shriveled by a stultifying run of half-baked movies (Girl Happy, Harum Scarum, Clambake) and equally awful soundtracks (featuring horrid novelty songs like “There’s No Room to Rhumba in a Sports Car” and “He’s Your Uncle, Not Your Dad”). Presley’s manager “Colonel” Tom Parker was pushing for a holiday special where Elvis would cavort with nominally famous guest stars and sing … wait for it … twenty Christmas carols.
But Singer’s execs had something else in mind: a show centered entirely on Presley, reminding the audience of his initial, explosive impact on pop music and propelling him forward, into a fresh phase of his career. Elvis bought in, the Colonel signed off, and Steve Binder (director of the spectacular 1964 concert movie The T.A.M.I Show, featuring The Supremes, The Beach Boys, James Brown and The Rolling Stones in thrilling live performances) signed on. Which is why, on that night fifty years ago, as 42 percent of the US television audience tuned in, they locked eyes with a man on a mission:
Continue reading “If I Can Dream: Elvis Presley’s Golden Comeback”
In the 1997 movie Men in Black, Agent K (aka Tommy Lee Jones) spoke truer than he knew:
This is a fascinating little gadget. It’s gonna replace CDs soon. Guess I’ll have to buy ‘The White Album’ again.
Fast forward to the 50th anniversary Super Deluxe edition of The Beatles — my copy is #0112672, if you’re interested — my fifth purchase of the 1968 album. Following the first CD release in 1987, Agent K’s prophecy was swiftly fulfilled, with 1998’s “30th anniversary limited edition” (CD #0438243), then 2009’s mono and stereo remasters each promising better sound and a more complete listening experience. So does this new box provide anything previous versions haven’t? And does it shed any new light on the “White Album’s” ultimate stature, both in the Fabs’ catalog and in rock history ?
Continue reading “A Deeper Shade of White: Notes on “The Beatles””
Capsule reviews of what I’ve listened to since the last installment follow the jump. Albums are reviewed in descending order on my Personal Proggyness Perception (PPP) scale, scored from 0 to 10.
Continue reading “Lightning Round Reviews: November 10-19, 2018”
Remembering the days of big metal bands or rock bands seems like a recurring theme:
“Where’s the iconic bands that initially came out with the sounds that you love? I’ve never seen a band that impressed me that looks like they’re going to be the next Judas Priest or Iron Maiden.” “ — Says Exodus Vocalist Steve “Zetro” Souza
“there seems to be no Led Zeppelin for the current generation of music fans” — Forbes
But, we need note that there was no Iron Maiden until there was one. In other words, emergence of The Beatles or a Black Sabbath or an Iron Maiden is sort of non-cyclical. We may assume otherwise, but history itself is non-cyclic. What’s generally cyclic is human behavior. Especially our propensity to repeat mistakes, or ask instinctive questions. Even outside of rock and roll, same questions might arise. For example, who is the Antoine Lavoisier or Adam Smith or Charles Darwin of the last century! But the answer is the same.
We definitely don’t have giant arena filling heavy metal bands anymore, but the question is do we even want to go back to that time? Dialing back a vibrant musical evolution of 40 years seems inane. Back then we just had heavy metal, now it has mutated into hundreds of sub-genres. Instead of arena filling giants, we have an ecosystem and an extended research worthy genealogy. So, do we go back to stadium filling old school purists or just sit back and appreciate a hybrid fragmented mosaic — of Tribulation, Meshuggah and The Dillinger Escape Plan! We definitely cannot have both.
Analogous to Charles Darwin or Karl Marx — Black Sabbath and The Rolling Stones were also originators of powerful ideas. Those ideas were transformative and spawned whole new schools of thought. They were giants because they were at the beginnings — of something captivating and novel. In other words, we simply cannot expect arena filling giants from an aging refined genre, for that we simply might have to look elsewhere.
— Image Attribution
By S. Bollmann [CC BY-SA 3.0 ], from Wikimedia Commons
Progarchy 
