Articles about music

Tunes for the body, heart, mind and soul.

With Teeth — Nine Inch Nails (before)

11 Jul 2005

With Teeth is Nine Inch Nails’ new long-anticipated five-years-in-the-making album. I loved The Fragile, their previous long-anticipated five-years-in-the-making album, and I had heard that this new one is quite different. Unfortunately, it is.

With Teeth album cover

Initial reports were that this album goes straight for the jugular. “The is the album they should have released five years ago,” they said. It was meant to be the album that would get a wide audience after the long meandering The Fragile. Pop music fan that I am, I was looking forward to a set of punchy tracks like those on the Broken EP from last decade.

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More great BBC online music shows

22 Jun 2005

Here’s some more of my favourite online radio, following on from my earlier list of great BBC online music shows.

There are several customised online radio stations out there now. These purport to divine your unique taste in music and give you what you really want to hear. Some of these are definitely worthwhile too, but there’s no substitute for a good human selector. These BBC shows have some of the best.

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Great BBC online music shows

23 May 2005

I learned to love BBC radio when I lived in the UK last century; the shows covered every kind of music, and every week I would discover some new (or old) musical treasure. Now that I’m back on the other side of the world, I still listen in most days, thanks to their Radio On Demand — you can listen to any show up to seven days after it goes to air. Here I’ve put together notes and links to the shows that I listen to regularly.

Normally you’re supposed to use the built-in player on the BBC website to listen, but with a bit of poking around, you can get the RSTP URLs and listen using RealPlayer. This is much more convenient, since you can easily rewind, fast forward, and bookmark shows partway through. I have done the requisite poking around, and included the RSTP URLs in the notes below.

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Thunder, Lightning, Strike — The Go! Team

4 May 2005

Half bouncy and exciting, half pleasant and inconsequential. Like so much in life.

Thunder Lightning Strike album cover

This album isn’t as good as I was expecting. About half the tracks sound like instrumental fillers from indie pop albums; they’re all worth a listen, but they don’t really hold the attention. Other tracks are better: there are a few energetic, lo-fi hip hop pieces with a bit of rapping. They sound old-skool in a good way to me, though why you’d trust the opinion of somebody who can’t even spell “school” is anybody’s guess.

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Want One — Rufus Wainwright

1 Mar 2005

The first two songs on this album are so good that I can’t even remember what the rest of it is like.

Rufus Wainwright’s music had never really appealed to me before: what I had heard seemed a bit too earnest and folky. But last year I heard and liked a track from this album on the radio. Intrigued, I read some reviews and finally bought the album.

Want One album cover

The first two songs are magnificent. Oh What a World interweaves its lament nicely with Ravel’s Bolero, building to a stirring crescendo. I Don’t Know What It Is is a lot quieter, with a nice quirky melody and toe-tappin’ rhythm. This was the song that had piqued my interest last year.

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Jazz in the Park — Vaucluse House

22 Nov 2004

Live jazz, fine weather, snacks and drinkies – just another evening in Sydney. Last night we went to Jazz in the Park, held annually by Sydney’s Historic Houses Trust in historic Vaucluse House. We sat on the grass, nibbled, drank coffee and listened to three bands, each taking us to a different corner of the jazz universe.

Jazz in the Park at Vaucluse House

As usual at outdoor events in Sydney, the place was packed – we were lucky to find a spot for our Winnie-the-Pooh picnic rug. (sadly, our Keroppi rug is packed away at the moment.) It was a pleasant afternoon as we arrived, and The Dan Barnett Big Band had already started: they were the first of three extravaganly named acts. After their set, Bridie and The Boogie Kings continued, and as the sun started to disappear, Armondo Hurley and The Funk-O-Matics came on. They lifted the tempo a bit and got dangerously funky – there was a lot of dancing going on by this stage.

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Talkin’ Honky Blues — Buck 65

30 Aug 2004

It’s the blues, but it’s also folk music, C&W and rap. Buck 65 rhymes like an old-school MC, but has the lyrical sensibility of a beat poet and the voice of a grizzled old trucker. His hard-luck tales of life on the downside are backed by dark, country & western inflected hip-hop beats. Of course, this is an oversimplification: there are a lot of different sounds and styles in here.

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Chet Lam + The Pancakes + Ketchup — live in Hong Kong

8 Mar 2004

This was meant to be nothing more than a concert featuring three local Hong Kong singers. But it turned out to be lots of fun, if often incomprehensible, and had more strange, unexpected moments than you could shake a stick at, unless you’re really good at shaking sticks at strange, unexpected moments.

As a nod to the independent pop music scene in Hong Kong (such as it is), the Arts Festival included this show, featuring three local singer-songwriter types performing with a four-piece backing band.

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Jan Garbarek Group — live in Hong Kong

23 Feb 2004

I got this jazz saxophonist’s album Rites years ago, so I was glad to finally see him perform with his group. Some say his playing is evocative of vast snow-covered plains, but I think they just say that because he comes from Norway.

Most of their pieces were build from soundscapes made by the four players, with a healthy dose of the extended solos you’d expect from a jazz group. Frequently, during a solo, the other players would chat to each other or wander offstage for a few minutes. But always the flow of the piece remained unbroken.

The percussionist, Marilyn Mazur really stood out – her rack of instruments looked like a huge version of one of those baby’s toys strung across a playpen, and she did seem to have a lot of fun. She was the only one of the four to smile much, and she definitely had more zip, vim and vigour than the other three all put together.

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Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section — Art Pepper

22 Feb 2004

Legend has it that Art Pepper, in the midst of one of his habitual drink and drugs binges, picked up his saxophone for the first time in months and recorded this classic album with Miles Davis’s rhythm section.

Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section

Maybe not true, but a great story. Certainly his playing seems pretty sharp, but still you can imagine there was maybe the odd bottle of gin around during the recording. I’m certainly no expert, but this is an album that’s hard to dislike – good jazz standards with a mellow feel, by top players. It’s fun to listen to this and remember that the man who played this pleasant music had a lifestyle that would put Ozzie Osbourne to shame.

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