Velvet Underground Series, #5: Lou Reed & John Cale- Songs for Drella (1990) / Songs for Drella: Live at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, 1989 (1990) / Songs for Drella: A Work in Progress, St. Ann's Church, NYC, Jan. 7-8, 1989 (Bootleg) MP3 & FLAC

"My skin's as pale as an outdoors moon, my hair's silver like a Tiffany watch. I like lots of people around me, but don't kiss hello and please don't touch."

Throughout the four and a half decades that Lou Reed and John Cale have known each other, their relationship has had few constants other than its consistently tempestuous nature, something that was evident from the very beginning. When they were initially introduced in 1964, Reed was working as an in-house songwriter for Pickwick Records (a job he has since likened to being "a poor man's Carole King"), writing commercially-oriented pop songs by day while exploring more experimental forms of songcraft (such as an early version of "Heroin") by night. The classically-trained Cale had recently arrived from London armed with a sponsorship from Aaron Copeland and plans to further his music education with American uber-elite avant-garde composers such as John Cage and La mont Young, and almost immediately, Cale was invited to play viola in Young and Tony Conrad's drone-oriented ensemble Theater of Eternal Music aka the Dream Syndicate. While Cale was none too impressed with Reed's lack of polish as a musician, he both admired and related to Reed's experimentalist tendencies, which took the form of alternate guitar tunings, droning effects, and lyrics that were both graphic and literary. They also discovered a mutual disdain for conventional artistic expression. John Cale on his first impressions of Lou Reed: "He seemed extremely vulnerable and with a very visceral sense of claiming his identity, in that it seemed like his identity was really clear when attacking things. And not that there was an ingrained hostility to everything on Earth, but I guess that's a common trait in many people that they think the best way to define themselves is to really attack, and this unnerving and psychologically disturbing persona was struggling to have an artistic expression, that was being stifled by this confusion between his surroundings and himself. This description could very well apply to myself as well [...] trying to find a role in classical music that really had anything to do with the outside world was certainly not clear in my mind."

John Cale

After recruiting Sterling Morrison, a former college roommate of Reed's, and Angus MacLise (later be replaced by Moe Tucker), an avant-garde percussionist whom Cale had met while playing in Theater of Eternal Music, Reed and Cale briefly formed a band called The Primitives; however, when Tony Conrad turned the band on to a book about the sexual subculture of the early sixties called The Velvet Underground, the band instantly adopted the name, recognizing a thematic continuity with the increasingly dark subject matter of Reed's lyrics (he had just written "Venus in Furs") and feeling that it was also evocative of underground cinema. While Reed and Cale were more than happy to accept the patronage of Andy Warhol after being "discovered" while playing a tourist trap called Cafe Bizarre, their time under Warhol's tutelage saw them become increasingly antagonistic over the direction of the band. Reed, being The Velvet Underground's primary songwriter, kept the band, whether intentionally or not, somewhat grounded in recognizable pop song structures even if they did have a strict "no blues" policy. Cale, as the band's other creative force who, musically, was far more experimental and technically proficient, functioned like a foil to Reed's singer-songwriter approach. This set up a tense intra-band dynamic that was responsible for both their unparalleled sound on the first two albums and, at least to some degree, Cale's exit from The Velvet Underground in fall 1968.

Lou Reed in the Mid-Seventies

Cale's dismissal from The Velvet Underground has been cloaked in mystery for decades, as all parties concerned have steadfastly refused to reveal any particulars about what actually took place; however, a close friend of Robert Quine, Reed's guitarist during much of the eighties, has offered some insight: "Lou told Quine that the reason why he had to get rid of Cale in the band was that Cale's ideas were just too out there [....] Cale had some wacky ideas. He wanted to record the next album with the amplifiers underwater, and [Lou] just couldn't have it. He was trying to make the band more accessible." One of the unfortunate effects of Reed's decision was that for nearly two decades, he and Cale had very little contact, with the 1972 Bataclan concert with Nico as the only notable exception. It wasn't until the untimely deaths of both Warhol and Nico in the late eighties that Reed and Cale renewed their working relationship. It was the artist Julian Schnabel who first suggested that Cale should do some kind of requiem for his former mentor Warhol. In fact, Cale was hard at work on an all-instrumental composition dedicated to Warhol when he and Reed crossed paths again in 1988 and decided to set about working on a Warhol-related project called Songs for Drella, "Drella" (a contraction of Dracula and Cinderella) being a nickname given to Warhol in the mid-sixties by Factory regular Ondine (actor Robert Olivo).

Warhol and his band of Velvets

John Cale in 1989: "When we started playing together last May, it began as just the two of us having fun throwing ideas around [....] Gradually it turned into songwriting. It was a great opportunity to pick up the threads of The Velvet Underground and draw our original ideas about arrangements and subject matter to a conclusion. Obviously we're bringing a lot of baggage to the project, but we are doing it with a lot of love. Andy was an incredibly generous spirit." Lou Reed: "We tape everything we do [...] Musically, we begin with simple chord progressions to which John adds his Welsh riffs. The lyrics are a reflection of everything we talk about. Each of us has a notebook filled with ideas. I'm the official typist." What resulted from this collaboration was a multi-perspective song-cycle exploring many of the events and inter-personal relationships that defined Warhol's life. After playing several unadorned live shows under the title, Songs for Drella: A Work in Progress, the pair entered the studio to record the album, a process that by all accounts revived old animosities and creative tensions, leading Cale to vow that he would never work with Reed again (although he would soon renege on this claim when the original version of The Velvets would briefly reform in 1993).

Upon its release, Songs for Drella was met with a series of tepid critical reviews, most expressing disappointment that the album didn't sound more like The Velvet Underground, but such expectations were missing the point: on Songs for Drella, the narrative takes center stage, while the spartan arrangements, comprised of guitar, piano, keyboards, viola, & vox, though largely modest and unobtrusive, add greatly to the considerable emotional power of the songs, which is one of the reasons that, in the twenty years since its release, the album has come to be considered one the best post-Velvet Underground recordings by either Reed or Cale. One reason for this is that there is an intensely personal feel to many of the songs, something that helps the album, even though it is subtitled A Fiction, avoid any trace of romanticization or idealization in reference to Warhol despite the, at times, theatrical approach, a prime example of which is the opening song, "Smalltown," an ironically bouncy stage number that touches on the origins of Warhol's prodigious sense of ambition. Lou Reed: "'Small Town,' the first number, seemed the way to ease into the show, because we thought, 'people are bringing a lot of notions to this show before we ever play a note. How can we get their toes in the water without smacking them over the head, and before we let the electric instruments go as far as they're going to go?' It seemed like that little cabaret number was the thing that answered that. I think it disarms you a bit; it's not what anyone expected." One of the most beautiful and affecting moments in the song-cycle is "Open House," which features Reed describing, from Warhol's perspective, the bitter loneliness of the artist's early days in NYC before he had made his indelible mark on the New York art scene, a narrative for which Reed's wryly vulnerable, understated vocals are perfectly suited. On Cale's songs, his stately vocal-style tends to portray Warhol, whether by design or accident, in a slightly more glamorous light; thus, when it came to one of the centerpieces of the album, "A Dream," a long spoken-word narrative based on Warhol's diaries, Reed and Cale fought bitterly over which narrative voice to use, Reed favoring the "warts and all" approach. Songs for Drella concludes with one of Reed's finest moments on tape, "Hello It's Me," a painfully honest confession of guilt, anger, and loss that not only reveals his deep admiration and complicated love for Warhol, but also reveals something about what has made Reed so special in his own right: "I really miss you, I really miss your mind. I haven't heard ideas like that in such a long, long time. I loved to watch you draw and watch you paint, but when I saw you last I turned away." Goodnight Andy.

Brian Eno- Here Come the Warm Jets (1973) / The Winkies (Bootleg) MP3 & FLAC

"Oh perfect masters, they thrive on disasters. They all look so harmless 

till they find their way up there."

Brian Eno on the random circumstances leading to his tenure in Roxy Music: "As a result of going into a subway station and meeting Andy [Mackay], I joined Roxy Music, and, as a result of that, I have a career in music. If I'd walked ten yards further on the platform, or missed that train, or been in the next carriage, I probably would have been an art teacher now." Although initially, Eno's role in the band was behind the scenes as "Technical Adviser" due to his lack of experience as a performing musician, it didn't take long for him to join his Roxy Music band-mates on stage where he quickly evolved into one of the most flamboyant figures on the British Glam scene (which was an achievement in itself). Truth be told, Eno was never going to last long as part of the supporting cast for a figure like Bryan Ferry, who was becoming more and more concerned with mainstream success just as Eno was trying to push the band in a more artsy, proggy direction. Eno: "My position in Roxy Music was always half-way between the musical and the theoretical. I was never the sort of person who could sit down at the piano and hammer out a song, or says, 'Here man, play this.' I'm much more interested in talking about the ideas behind the music. Working things out from the aesthetic." Things came to a head immediately following the tour in support of Roxy Music's second album, For Your Pleasure, when Eno as well as several other band members expressed concern over Ferry's increasingly domineering control of the band's direction. What resulted was Eno's June, 1973 departure from Roxy Music and the beginning of one of the most innovative and uncompromising solo careers of the rock era.

Brian Eno: "I'm always prone to do things very quickly, which has distinct advantages- you leave all the mistakes in, and the mistakes always become interesting. The Velvet Underground, for example, are the epitome of mistake-filled music, and it makes the music very subtle and beautiful." As would prove to be his habit throughout the remainder of the seventies, Eno took very little time after exiting Roxy Music to finish his first solo LP, Here Come the Warm Jets. Armed with a highly suggestive title, which, in an infamous NME interview with future-Pretender Chrissie Hynde, Eno hinted might refer to the dreaded "golden shower," the album was all but guaranteed to turn heads, but Eno's time in Roxy Music had also garnered him quite a following among critics; all of this helped make his debut one of the most commercially successful albums of Eno's career. The sessions for Here Come the Warm Jets included Roxy Music sans Ferry, Robert Fripp & John Wetton from King Crimson, as well as members of Hawkwind and Pink Fairies, and aside from taking over lead vocals (for the first time), Eno was apparently content to reprise his Roxy-era role of master sound processor, something which lends the album its uniquely manic feel. While in some ways the album is clearly grounded in the artier margins of the U.K. Glam movement, which had more or less defined the early seventies but by late '73 was beginning to lose steam, in other ways, its avant-garde flourishes and heavily processed sound are anticipatory of the Post-Punk and Shoegaze movements that would respectively punctuate the closing years of the seventies and the eighties. Among the album's many standouts, none is as instantly memorable and confounding as "Dead Finks Don't Talk," a song which Eno has admitted was, at least on an unconscious level, a riposte directed at Ferry. With its military drum beat, darkly humorous lyrics, lovely piano part, heavily distorted guitars, and multitude of vocal effects (including an Elvis impersonation by Eno), it is a tour de force in tension-building and integrating the unexpected. The loveliest song on Here Come the Warm Jets is "Some of Them Are Old," which sounds almost like late-period Beatles with its psychedelic organs and multi-tracked vocals, but what really sets the song apart is the off-kilter Hawaiian-style guitar solo that sounds like it's being played underwater. Eno's early pop-oriented solo albums are often a shock to those who are only familiar with his ambient work; however, they stand as some of the most inventive and prescient records of the Glam-era. Eno: "I'm more of a technologist, manipulating studios and musicians in a funny way. It sounds fantastic but one of the things I tried to do with Warm Jets was to bring musicians together who would normally never play together and to play a music that they couldn't agree upon. The music would come from the chemistry."

Velvet Underground Series, #3: The Velvet Underground & Nico- Psychedelic Sounds from the Gymnasium (2008) / All Tomorrow's Parties: Remembering The Velvet Underground (1996) MP3 & FLAC

"I'm searching for my mainline. I couldn't hit it sideways. I couldn't hit it sideways,
just like Sister Ray says."

Andy Warhol's "Exploding Plastic Inevitable" (originally called the "Irrupting Plastic Inevitable") debuted in early April 1966 at the Open Stage, a ballroom located above the Dom Bar & Restaurant in New York City's East Village, which Warhol had rented and turned into a makeshift nightclub. Early the following year, the son of the Polish owner of the restaurant approached Warhol about opening a new club on East 71st Street called The Gymnasium in a space that had originally housed a Czechoslovakian fitness & social club and that was still filled with old gym equipment. Not unpredictably, Warhol, whose plan was to create "New York's most happening discotheque," decided to leave the equipment in the club for his patrons to use if they felt so inclined. As can be imagined, the cavernous Gymnasium was not an ideal place to play a gig; however, during the club's tenuous existence (it was in a poor location and Warhol did not have an exclusive lease), Warhol was able to attract a number of bands/musicians to play there in addition to his "proteges," The Velvet Underground, who held residency at The Gymnasium during the club's first month, more or less using the gigs to fine tune their live act for the "Exploding Plastic Inevitable" (which they would play for the final time the following month). On April 30th, which was the last night of The Velvets' residency, the opening band included future Blondie guitarist Chris Stein (then a teenager): "We hung around for a little while and they played records, then we headed up for the stage. It was a big echoey place; we had absolutely no conception of playing a place like this whatsoever, but Maureen Tucker said we could use their equipment. So we plugged into their amps and the amps were all cranked up superloud [....] We must have played five or six songs and then we just gave up. By that time, the rest of The Velvets had arrived. After a while they started to play and they were like awesomely powerful [....] I was really disappointed that they didn't have Nico, because we thought she was the lead singer, but I distinctly remember the violin and their doing "Venus in Furs" because a couple of people in dark outfits got up and started doing a slow dance with a chain in between them. There were maybe thirty people there. It was very late, but it was a memorable experience."

The final night of The Velvets' residency at The Gymnasium was billed as "National Swingers Night," and at some point the fateful decision was made to capture the band's performance on reel-to-reel tape, which was a very uncommon occurrence during The Velvets' association with Warhol; what's even more surprising is that the parties concerned decided to do so in the absence of the band's "chanteuse," Nico, who had not returned from a trip to Ibiza. Psychedelic Sounds from The Gymnasium features this reel-to-reel recording (though there is some disagreement over whether it is the complete performance), and it is, quite possibly, the most important "unofficial" Velvet Underground recording in existence. This is due not only to the historic value of the recording and its surprising sonic clarity, but also to the performances, including a song that appears nowhere else in The Velvet's official and unofficial discographies: "I'm Not a Young Man Anymore." Listening to Reed's spidery guitar figure and his dark, mantra-like vocals, it's hard not to wonder how the song was never recorded in the studio, as it is easily the equal of a number of songs from both The Velvet Underground & Nico  and White Light / White Heat. Another gem is the first public performance of the epic "Sister Ray," whose crunchy guitar groove likely inspired Stein's description of the band that night as "awesomely powerful." Psychedelic Sounds from the Gymnasium captures The Velvet Underground at their grimy, arty best and makes pointedly clear what set this band apart both musically and lyrically. John Cale: "There was commitment there. That was the powerful advantage that all of Lou's lyrics had. All Bob Dylan was singing was questions- How many miles? and all that. I didn't want anymore questions. Give me some tough social situations and show that answers are possible."

Velvet Underground Series, #2: The Velvet Underground & Nico- S/T (1967) / The Velvet Underground & Nico Unripened: The Norman Dolph Acetate (1966) / Yesterday's Parties: Exploding Plastic Inevitable (2005) MP3 & FLAC

"I'll be your mirror, reflect what you are in case you don't know."

Simply put, The Velvet Underground & Nico was a game-changer that, over the course of four+ decades, has served as a guidebook for everything from Glam-Rock to Punk to Industrial and beyond, a deceptively unassuming album whose particular effect was best summed up in Brian Eno's famous pronouncement: "The first Velvet Underground album only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band." As the album cover suggests, the back-story of The Velvets' debut is very much about their brief stint as members of Andy Warhol's Factory, for it was through Warhol's mentoring and patronage that they were able to record (a now legendary) album that they themselves never thought would happen. However, from the beginning of their association with Warhol, there was conflict. Paul Morrissey, an avant-garde filmmaker and factory regular, convinced Warhol that The Velvets needed a more appealing lead singer, as Lou Reed was prone to appearing withdrawn and abrasive on stage. German fashion model and fledgling singer Nico, whom Warhol had used in a few of his films, most notably, Chelsea Girls, was Morrissey's recommendation to Warhol, who in turn set about convincing Reed and John Cale to accept Nico as the band's "chanteuse." Despite their hatred for the idea, Reed and Cale were eventually persuaded to not only accept Nico into the band, but to write a few songs specifically for her; being the intelligent opportunists that they were, they likely realized that being given new instruments, free rehearsal space, food, drugs, sex (of all kinds), and Warhol's pop-art cache were perks that few, if any, bands could ever dream of enjoying. Despite all this, at their first rehearsal with Nico present, the band reportedly drowned her voice in guitar noise every time she tried to sing. As Sterling Morrison once revealed, Nico was often a detrimental force within the band: "There were problems from the very beginning because there were only so many songs that were appropriate for Nico, and she wanted to sing them all [....] And she would try and do little sexual politics things in the band. Whoever seemed to be having undue influence on the course of events, you'd find Nico close by. So she went from Lou to Cale, but neither of those affairs lasted very long." Warhol's first major project involving The Velvets was a multimedia exhibition called the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, which involved the band playing in front of a silent 70 minute black & white film entitled The Velvet Underground & Nico: A Symphony of Sound.

Performing in the EPI allowed The Velvet Underground to regularly explore and indulge their interest in musical improvisation, a trait that would be put to use soon thereafter while recording their debut album. In 1966, the first step a band would typically take before recording an album was securing a recording contract. In the case of The Velvets, Warhol decided instead to finance the album himself with the help of Norman Dolph, a Columbia Records Sales Executive who hoped Columbia would ultimately agree to sign the band and distribute the record. In mid-April 1966, after much rehearsing and endlessly working on new arrangements intended to accurately reflect the innovative approach they had honed earlier that spring playing in the EPI, The Velvets entered an old, decrepit recording studio in New York City with Warhol as ostensible producer to record an acetate that would be peddled to various record companies. Lou Reed has clarified Warhol's role during the recording sessions: "Andy was the producer and Andy was in fact sitting behind the board gazing with rapt fascination at all the blinking lights. He just made it possible for us to be ourselves and go right ahead with it because he was Andy Warhol. In a sense he really produced it because he was this umbrella that absorbed all the attacks when we weren't large enough to be attacked. As a consequence of him being the producer, we'd just walk in and set up and did what we always did [....] Of course, he didn't know anything about record production, he just sat there and said, 'Oooh that's fantastic,' and the engineer would say, 'Oh yeah! Right! It is fantastic isn't it?'" Despite the austere recording conditions, The Velvets made the most of the opportunity. The result, known as the Norman Dolph Acetate, ended up being roundly rejected by Columbia who didn't feel the band had any talent (ditto Atlantic and Elektra); however Morrissey managed to sell it to Verve/MGM, who promptly decided to sit on it until the following year because they had just released another "weird" album, Freak Out  by The Mothers of Invention and weren't quite sure how to market The Velvets. The delay gave the band a chance to rerecord a few songs under better conditions in Los Angeles while on tour as part of the EPI and to record some new material (including "Sunday Morning") with Verve staff producer Tom Wilson in New York.

An often overlooked characteristic of The Velvet Underground & Nico is the album's sonic diversity. At the time, The Velvets were derogatorily referred to as an "amphetamine band"; they were especially reviled by the so-called "flower children" of the San Francisco music scene who saw the band as excessively dark and out to destroy the last shreds of rock music's innocence. For the 10,000 or so who actually bought the debut album when it was released, they were treated to a varied and uncompromising journey into the nether regions of the growing counter-cultural phenomenon. Not surprisingly, drug-culture steps forth front and center in the form of the album's then-scandalous centerpiece, "Heroin," which features some of Reed's most brilliant lyrics, equally evocative of a love-letter and a suicide note to the song's namesake. In addition, the song's slowly building dynamic mimics the effect of heroin as it hits the bloodstream, thus lending even more emotive power to the lyrics. On "I'm Waiting for the Man," Reed's lyrics treat the listener to the other, even darker side of heroin addiction: the perpetual need to score more skag: "I'm feeling good feeling so fine, until tomorrow but that's just some more time." The song's grimy, staccato feel provides a powerful counterpoint to the dreamy insularity of "Heroin." Much to her chagrin to be sure, Nico ended up with only three songs on the album, all of which are gorgeously off-center due to her singular vocal style. The album is at its most innovative and confrontational on the more avant-garde songs such as "Venus in Furs" and "The Black Angel's Death Song," both of which make heavy use of Cale's haunting electric viola. Not long after the release of the album, the relationship between Warhol and The Velvets began to badly deteriorate due to contractual issues relating to the distribution of album royalties as well as Warhol's decision to focus (again, at the urging of Morrissey) on Nico's solo career. In hindsight, The Velvet Underground & Nico can be viewed as an early death-knell of the hippie movement; as such, it is an abrasively avant-garde, unprecedentedly literate, unflinching existential journey into the dark soul of the sixties, while simultaneously functioning as a harbinger of nearly every underground music scene that has followed in its wake.

David Bowie- Aylesbury Friars Club 1971 (2006) MP3 & FLAC

"But the key to the city is in the sun that pins the branches to the sky."

David Bowie's September 25th, 1971 appearance at the Friars Club in Aylesbury, England was, for all intents and purposes, the first live appearance of the band that would soon come to be known as The Spiders from Mars (for this show, they were joined by ex-Animal Tom Parker on piano). Bowie had spent the previous summer months appearing at the Glastonbury Fair (in June), completing the recording sessions that would eventually yield Hunky Dory, and traveling to the U.S. to do a publicity tour (he couldn't perform due to not having a union card), during which, while in New York, he entered the orbit of Andy Warhol and Lou Reed. At this point in time, Bowie was still in the process of building a fan base on both sides of the Atlantic despite his brush with success two years earlier with the "Space Oddity" single. However, it was no secret that he had nagging doubts about his ability to ever gain the kind of popularity he desired in the U.K. And legend has it that it was the 1971 Aylesbury gig that convinced him otherwise. As audience member Rick Pearce recalls, "Bowie arrived on stage to a collective "Oooh!" worthy of Frankie Howerd. I'm not sure what some people were expecting. Major Tom, or a drag act or something of both, but he certainly looked different. Wearing huge blue oxford bags, a white satin jacket and the red and black platforms seen on the reissue of the Space Oddity  album, he was light years away from your average beardy, shaggy, muso bloke." Drummer Woody Woodmansey has said that the band spent weeks rehearsing for the Aylesbury show, as it was their first as a group and something of a "coming out" party for Bowie. Interestingly, the show begins tentatively with Bowie and Mick Ronson doing an acoustic set, which includes a couple of Biff Rose covers, Jacques Brel's "Port of Amsterdam," and "Space Oddity," which Bowie self-deprecatingly prefaces by saying, "This is one of my own that we get over with as soon as possible." Eventually the entire band joins Bowie and Ronson on stage for a 10-song set that includes great renditions of "The Supermen," "Oh! You Pretty Things," and an early version of "Queen Bitch" with different lyrics. Aylesbury Friars Club 1971 offers a rare live glimpse of pre-Ziggy era Bowie, alternating between a modest hesitancy and an awareness that he is on the cusp of something great. While the audio source is certainly an audience recording, the sound is quite clear, if not slightly distant. Despite the sonic limitations, this show captures a key moment in Bowie's meteoric rise to fame in the early seventies, and as such, it is nearly as essential as the more famous Santa Monica Civic Auditorium show recorded the following year.

Sigur Rós- ( ) (2002) / Live at St. Andrews United Church, Vancouver, CA (2001) MP3 & FLAC

Sigur Rós' third album is, in many ways, an attempt to re-define the band's glacially sprawling sound after the breakthrough success of their previous album, Ágætis Byrjun, a lush, often string-drenched affair that garnered the band, among other things, their first significant exposure in Europe and America, which culminated in an opening slot on tour with Radiohead. Three years later, the cryptic ( ) appeared giving every indication Sigur Rós had no desire to chase mainstream Indie success (at least not yet). First, there is the title: parentheses surrounding empty space, suggesting not just the absence of a title, but absence as interlude, which, of course, hints at the music itself: silence as an interlude between notes and/or the note as an interlude between silences. Then there's the artwork, which is both lovely and noticeably free of all the liner material one usually expects with such lavish packaging, save for the band's website address. Musically, ( ) represents a more "stripped-down" approach relative to their previous album, trading in the strings (well, most of them), enveloping melodies, and recognizable song-structures for more atmospheric Post-Rock arrangements, an emphasis on guitars and instrumental loops, and a good (and welcome) dose of dissonance. Whereas Ágætis Byrjun allowed some warm textures and rays of light to intermingle with the glacial Sturm und Drang of the song arrangements, ( ) sustains a more funereal tone while avoiding the kind of emotional dynamics that made the previous album so affecting and in places irritatingly overwrought. As with the album itself, the songs comprising ( ) bear no titles; the effect of which is to render the songs unidentifiable except for their order and what differentiates them musically. On the opening track, things begin with a deep, somber, almost dissonant electronic hum, which lays the foundation for the basic melody that repeats, as if on a loop, throughout the entire song. Soon the electronic effect is mimicked by icy piano notes and Jon Thor Birgisson's highly-treated cooing vocals, thus creating a slow, dirge-like movement that is both achingly beautiful and hopelessly adrift. The sixth song features some lovely vocals by Birgisson backed by thumping percussion amidst a surprisingly spare arrangement until things build toward a dramatic crescendo of guitar chime and distortion. There is no denying that ( ) is not as accessible as Ágætis Byrjun; however, the album's darker inclinations lend it a different kind of emotional depth that makes it one of the more memorable recordings of the Post-Rock genre.

Talk Talk Series, #5: Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man- Time Out of Season (2002) / Live Barcelona (2003) MP3 & FLAC

"If only you had told her the words to unfold her long ago."

During Portishead's interminably mysterious ten year hiatus, Beth Gibbons collaborated with ex-Talk Talk bassist Paul Webb (aka Rustin Man) on something approaching a solo project, which musically is quite a departure from her better-known work. In the context of Portishead's sample-heavy musical approach, Gibbons vocals, while serving as emotional catalyst for the music, really only comprise one treated element among many in the mix, which is, of course, one of the things that make their sound so distinctive. In contrast, on Time Out of Season, Gibbons' vocals step out front and center, something which accentuates their trademark pathos but adds a fragile nakedness not heard from her on previous recordings. The mood of the album is one of ethereal desolation, as Webb and Portishead's Adrian Utley provide a mostly acoustic backing that moves back and forth between folk and jazz inflected arrangements. For example, on the haunting lead track, "Mysteries," Gibbon's heartbreaking vocals are accompanied by a simple acoustic guitar arpeggio; however, it is Gibbons' multi-tracked backing vocals that take the song to another level, giving it an eerie nursery rhyme-like feel. "Drake," true to it's title, sounds like a lost track from Nick Drake's Bryter Layter, with Gibbons' laconic delivery and the funereal Jazz arrangement tapping in to Drake's unique brand of despair. It's truly a shame that (so far), Time Out of Season stands as a one-off collaboration because the album is brimming with intriguing possibilities that could have only been pursued to more stunning results on a second go-around. Quietly devastating indeed!

Paisley Underground Series, #4: Various Artists- Live at McCabe's Guitar Shop: May 24, 1987 (1994) MP3 & FLAC

"It's just the wasted years so close behind."

Although it is rarely mentioned, the thriving underground music scene in Athens, GA. during the late seventies and early eighties was, in many ways, a guiding inspiration for L.A.'s Paisley Underground. The Athens scene, much like the L.A. underground at the time, was comprised of an eclectic and closely-knit mix of groups, many of whom were instrumental in bringing, among other things, Jangle-Pop and Big Star-style Power-Pop back into vogue in America. One of the most influential of these bands was R.E.M., who had released what is arguably the holy grail of American alternative music, the timeless Murmur. Throughout the eighties, it was not unusual for bands from both scenes to find themselves billed together on tours, which is how Steve Wynn of Paisley Underground legends The Dream Syndicate and Peter Buck of R.E.M. struck up a friendship. One of the fruits of this artistic cross-pollination is Live at McCabe's Guitar Shop: May 24, 1987, an informal acoustic concert featuring Steve Wynn, Peter Buck and Michael Stipe from R.E.M., Natalie Merchant, and Kendra Smith from Opal. There are many gems to be had here, chief among them are R.E.M.'s contributions, which are early versions of songs that would appear on their soon-to-be released breakthrough album, Document. For example, "The One I Love" is presented as a gloomy acoustic 12-string dirge, while "Disturbance at the Heron House," here in acoustic form, provides Stipe plenty of aural space to work his esoteric magic. Steve Wynn's material seems a little more "off the cuff," but a true highlight is his collaboration with former band-mate Kendra Smith on "Too Little Too Late."  Live at McCabe's Guitar Shop: May 24, 1987 is by no means the place to start with any of these artists, but it does capture an interesting, and occasionally beautiful, moment in time. Wish I had been there (not sure why I wasn't since I was living in the area at the time).