I like it better than the last couple. I tend to think Jeff Tweedy is a better bandleader than a songwriter, so I like the stuff where the band gets to play a little more straight ahead. I'm not as big a fan of the experimental, introspective stuff. So far, I like it, but I've only listened through a couple times. Wilco is not one of my all-time favorites, but I do generally like their stuff.
rhapsody just put all his albums up - ive been enjoying the first few that he did. i blame him most for the breakup of the beatles and he seemed like a bit of a prick, but alot of his solo stuff stands up against any of the best beatles songs. i do have that best of double cd - that was my intro into the world of solo-paul - good set of excellent songs all the way thru.
if you have their other albums you might as well add it to your collection. its not bad, just not very memorable to me and not very experimental. ive seen them about 10 times since '95 and this lineup is their best - thats what dissapoints me the most - i expect more on record from this band. it seems like they are holding back and playing conservative when i want them to ROCK and be noisy and weird doing it! i like them best when they are playing the roll of the american radiohead. jim o'rourke had nothing to do with this record - i think he either mixed or helped record the last couple - im a big fan of his production/recording work on records. i think bands tend to do their best work with him. (stereolab, sonic youth, wilco, tortoise, beth orton, bobby conn) so i think that he one thing i miss in wilco's new stuff. if you are a wilco fan i would highly recommend checking out tweedy's side project w/ the wilco drummer and jim o'rourke called loose fur. their last album was called born again in the u.s.a., which i think is the best. i think tweedy's songs on there are better than on the last wilco record.
i read this article yesterday - good read. i just bought the geoff emerick book "here, there and everywhere" too. lennon and harrison must have not treated him very well b/c he doesnt have much nice to say about them, while he gloats over paul and how nice he was to him and what a genius he is. i could imagine john ragging on the young guy and giving him a pretty hard time and he being bitter about it. i didnt know he was only 15 when he first started working w/ the beatles. lucky kid! as a huge beatles fan i know this is blasphemy, but i must say that i think while sgt. pepper is good (its the beatles afterall!), it is overrated. i wouldnt even put it in my top 5 beatles albums. revolver, abbey road, the white album, a hard days night, with the beatles, help and rubber soul are all better imo. http://www.sptimes.com/2007/webspecials07/special_reports/sgt-pepper/ The spark of genius It was 1967, and the Beatles were at work on a sonic masterpiece with a 20-year-old recording engineer at their side. It was a shocking declaration. The world's most successful pop band had gathered to record a new album. But first, the Beatles revealed a secret to their producer, George Martin, and sound engineer, Geoff Emerick. They had decided to stop touring. Instead, they would make music that couldn't be played live. They'd create something completely new, make sounds no one had heard before. John Lennon, the band's visionary and mercurial founder, was characteristically blunt. "We're fed up with making soft music for soft people, " Emerick recalls Lennon saying. In the four months that followed, the Beatles and the staff at EMI's Abbey Road studio created an album that still reverberates through the music world today. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released June 1, 1967 - 40 years ago next month. It helped launch the Summer of Love and elevate pop to art. The album's searing lyrics, its pop art cover, even the Day-Glo colors and new mustaches the Beatles wore, captivated popular culture. But most important was the music. Pepper's soaring, incandescent melodies, psychedelic sound textures and juxtaposition of rock against baroque, English dance hall and Eastern idioms make up the root of its power. There was nothing soft about it. Emerick, only 20 at the time, was entrusted to capture those sounds, and in some cases create them himself. In a wide-ranging interview, he explained how he did it. As the Beatles made their auditory ambitions known in that first meeting, the young engineer suddenly noticed that everyone was looking at him. Feeling the weight of expectation from music's biggest clients, he managed only a wan smile. - - - From the outside, it seemed the Beatles had peaked. The group had recently finished a disastrous tour of the Philippines, offending Imelda Marcos and getting thrown out of the country. In the United States, thousands burned their Beatles records, furious that Lennon had told an interviewer the group was "bigger than Jesus now." Journalists asked if the Beatles had broken up. But the Beatles themselves felt invigorated. Now they could make any kind of music they wanted, without worrying about reproducing it for ravenous fans. They began with two songs about the group's Liverpool past, Lennon's Strawberry Fields Forever and Paul McCartney's Penny Lane. Together with McCartney's vaudevillian When I'm 64, the two songs suggested the new album's theme: a sentimental look back. But the concept was whisked away by the record company, desperate for a single from its biggest act. In those days, EMI kept singles and albums separate; thus, neither Strawberry Fields Forever nor Penny Lane would make the album. Such was the Beatles' creative metabolism at the time that EMI's decision barely registered. Instead of moping, they began working on the song that many consider their masterpiece. - - - Lennon's new composition was inspired by a couple of newspaper stories and his experience acting in an antiwar film. Emerick said the brilliance of A Day in the Life was clear from the first take. "Shivers just ran down our backs, " Emerick said. "It was just unbelievable." The song wasn't finished, but the group began recording anyway. They left a 24-bar section essentially blank, to be filled in later. Beatles roadie Mal Evans counted the bars and set an alarm clock that went off just as the gap was finished. Emerick found he could not scrub the alarm from the tape; it was locked in with other instruments. But in a happy coincidence, the song snippet McCartney offered to be placed among Lennon's verses began: "Woke up, fell out of bed . . ." There was still the matter of filling the 24-bar gap. McCartney came up with the idea: a full orchestra would play a climactic rush of sound. But classical musicians aren't accustomed to improvisation. The 40-member orchestra sitting in Abbey Road's cavernous Studio One looked dumbfounded. "The score basically was, well, two notes. Over 24 bars you go from this note to that note, " Emerick said. "It took about a half hour for that to be explained to them." The orchestra, wearing clown noses, party hats, funny glasses and other fanciful props Lennon wanted the session to be "a happening," played their parts several times, with Emerick and the studio crew recording each pass. The result was breathtaking. Yet the passage still needed an ending, a resolution to that dramatic buildup. McCartney's first idea was for the group to hum the final E chord, which they attempted after the orchestra left. After that proved unsatisfactory, three of the Beatles and their roadie took to the studio's pianos to play the final chord. Emerick wanted that chord to sustain as long as possible, so he kept turning up the volume as the notes decayed. Near the end, careful listeners can hear a small squeak. It was drummer Ringo Starr, moving slightly as he shared McCartney's piano bench. "I think Paul sort of gave him a glare, " Emerick said. Emerick quickly mixed the tracks and played it for the spellbound studio crew. "It was basically for the first time going from black and white up till that point to watching a color film, " he said. "It was like no one had ever, ever heard anything like it in their lives, you know?" - - - The album still had no unifying theme. McCartney proposed one by giving the Beatles alter egos. He created an imaginary band that, in his mind, further freed them from their fans' expectations. Sgt. Pepper was born. In the title track and especially in the song that followed, With a Little Help From My Friends, Emerick strove to capture McCartney's bass guitar in a new way. Instead of pressing a microphone next to the bass amplifier off in a corner of the studio, as was the norm, Emerick decided to pull the amp into the middle of the room. He chose a microphone that picks up sound from front and rear, and he placed it several feet from the amp. Because of the studio's ambience, the instrument suddenly sounded round and full. And because McCartney recorded his bass separately, Emerick was free to boost its volume in the mix without affecting other instruments. One of Emerick's enduring memories of the Pepper sessions is watching McCartney huddled over his Rickenbacker bass, laboring over every note, long after the rest of the band had left. "It was always the last thing I would bring into the mix, " Emerick said, "and it was always the loudest thing on the record." McCartney didn't limit himself to bass guitar. When lead guitarist George Harrison couldn't seem to nail his part on the album's title track despite hours of labor, McCartney picked up his Fender Esquire guitar and played it in a single take. - - - The Beatles' music was increasingly complex. But Emerick and the Abbey Road staff had to record it with machines that could hold only four independent tracks of music at a time. Some songs on Sgt. Pepper included more than 50 instruments. How did Emerick keep them all in order? He did it by "bouncing down" the first four tracks onto a single track of a second tape machine, freeing up three tracks for new parts. The technique meant that Emerick had to record each part correctly the first time - with the appropriate volume, equalization and other effects. Once they were locked into the preliminary mix, the instruments couldn't be adjusted individually. Such a limitation would cripple modern sound engineers, who often have 50 or more separate tracks to play with. Emerick believes it actually helped. "There was nothing superfluous, " he said. "Every overdub meant something; it added something to the track." But sometimes it was hard to decide what to overdub. Brilliant and intuitive, Lennon also was musically inarticulate and struggled to explain what he was looking for, Emerick said. When it came to his song Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite, essentially the text of a Victorian circus poster set to music, the composer told the studio staff he wanted to "smell the sawdust" in the final recording. Before Emerick could get him to explain, Lennon left for the night. Emerick's solution involved finding some tapes of old steam organ music. He cut the tapes into pieces, threw them up in the air and reassembled them randomly. The resulting swirl of sound was just what the song needed. "We did what we could for John, " Emerick said. "We tried to smell the sawdust." - - - The album sent shock waves across the pop music landscape. People held Sgt. Pepper parties, putting the record on the player and sitting on the floor, just listening. The Times of London said, apparently without irony, that the album marked "a decisive moment in the history of Western civilisation." Beach Boys composer Brian Wilson, already struggling to top the Beatles' previous album, abandoned his Smile project and sank further into a lethargy of drugs and mental illness from which he took decades to recover. Thirteen-year-old American Walter Everett had "no comprehension" of the album's lyrical content. But its sound "blew me away, " says Everett, now a music professor at the University of Michigan, who has written two books analyzing the group's music. "Nothing stands out like the Beatles and Pepper, for me, " he says. To rock producer-engineer Kevin Ryan, who spent a decade researching and writing a book on the recording methods of the group, Sgt. Pepper "is the sound of a group of guys who just realized, 'Hey, the sky really is the limit!' " "I think Pepper was the apex of their career, " he said. "The group finally, completely shed the mop-tops image and emerged as something else altogether: true musical visionaries." As for Emerick, EMI didn't even list his name on the album credits. His groundbreaking work on Pepper won him a Grammy anyway. After an accomplished career as an engineer and producer, Emerick last year wrote a book about his Beatles experiences. Today, 40 years after the Pepper sessions, he remains content with the final product. "There were moments on every track . . . that no one had ever heard before, " he said. "Someone asked me the other day would I ever have changed anything. No. I would never have changed one thing." Christopher Ave can be reached at cave@sptimes.com or (727) 893-8643.
Hispanic? Are you talking about the really long thread?? That thread was more about songs than CDs or albums. Plus it seemed like there were some complaints about how long that thread had gotten.
Handsome Furs- Plague Park The National- Boxer The Bravery- The Sun and Moon Beirut- Gulag Orkestar Bombay Bicycle Club- The Boy I Used to Be Great Lake Swimmers-Ongiara Voxtrot- Self Titled The Cribs- Mens Needs, Women's Needs Whatever Sufjan Stevens- Seven Swans re-release Cocorosie- The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn Kings of Leon- Because of the Times Junior Boys- Dead Horse EP Explosions in the Sky- All of a Sudden, I Miss Everyone Arctic Monkeys- Favourite Worst Nightmare
Early Day Miners-Offshore Foo Fighters-There is Nothing Left to Lose Explosions in the Sky-All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone Modest Mouse-We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank
Re-release?! How many albums is that now? Is this guy trying to be the wimpy, narrow-minded Zappa or what?
He re-released Seven Swans with two new songs. They are decent, but not as good as anything on the original album. I saw a cool video of Sufjan playing some music on top of a roof in Cincinnati. I'll post it later.
The Cure I missed out on the 80's music <object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/g0vdt7f2YRw&hl=en"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/g0vdt7f2YRw&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object> <object width="425" height="355"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/4CgWhNSD3KI&hl=en"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/4CgWhNSD3KI&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="355"></embed></object> Is this considered emo music by today's standards? sorry for bumping an relatively old thread.
In the CD player right now... Becoming the Archetype - The Physics of Fire All That Remains - The Fall of Ideals Avenged Sevenfold - Avenged Sevenfold (My God these guys fell off the metal map, this is what happens when you try to produce your own album) Protest the Hero - Fortress
slow show - the national fake empire - the national we illuminate - northern return to me - matthew ryan street map - athlete
