We can never know
If any given program
Will come to a halt
If any given program
Will come to a halt
Thursday, April 02, 2026
Risqué by Chic
All genres of music have their time and place. Some you will listen to in a quiet room, some you will whistle along to on the radio, and some simply call for a huge celebration with all of your friends dancing along. It’s no surprise that this record falls firmly into the latter category - it opens with the absolute banger Good Times which does exactly what it says on the tin and follows it with a varied selection of moods and tempos to suit every party.
This is also a very human record - no drum machines or programming here, just pure metronomic precision from Tony Thompson on drums giving a solid foundation for Bernard Edwards’ iconic bass lines and Nile Rodgers’ hypnotic guitar. There are strings, brass and backing vocals layered in to give a coherent mix of pure joy on every level.
Studio-54-tastic!
https://album.link/gb/i/1442986865
Wednesday, April 01, 2026
Bitches Brew by Miles Davis
Miles Davis defined the sound of jazz for a decade with his effortlessly cool album Kind of Blue. In 1970 he evolved his sound again, adding electric instruments to the mix and moving from hard bop to the fusion sound that was revolutionise jazz in the 70s. He included some of the finest musicians of the time on this recording, giving them chords to improvise around a basic musical sketch and letting the music flow.
In one memorable section Joe Zawinul, Larry Young and Chick Corea are all playing electric pianos and bouncing off each other in different parts of the sound stage (left, centre and right, respectively) - this really benefits from being heard on headphones and it feels like you are in the room with them. Nice!
The only thing that I really don’t like about this album is the title, but you can’t have everything
https://album.link/gb/i/168376392
Tuesday, March 31, 2026
The Holy Bible by Manic Street Preachers
Welcome to the world of the Manic Street Preachers. There is no room here for warmth or ambiguity. Every song is a meticulously crafted manifesto written with icy moral certainty, just in case you hadn’t realised that all right wing politicians, Nazis and serial killers are BAD PEOPLE, m’kay? To sweeten the pill, the music is generally banging rock but interspersed with on the nose sound bites about concentration camps and prostitution just in case you start enjoying it too much.
It’s impossible to listen to this without a profound sense of sadness. When this was recorded, guitarist Richey James was severely depressed and suffering from alcoholism, anorexia and self harm. It seems that the band were happy to put up with him starting drinking first thing in the morning as long as he wrote another song about pain and suffering.
The music press also colluded with this. A notorious incident saw James cutting himself with a razor blade to prove that the band were ‘4 real’ and the response was just to write articles about how edgy the band were instead of getting the poor guy some professional help.
It was not really a surprise that James disappeared after the recording, never to be seen again. Draw your own conclusions.
https://album.link/gb/i/942562485
Monday, March 30, 2026
Chore of Enchantment by Giant Sand
The first two tags on the word cloud of reviews for this album are ‘Interesting’ and ‘Boring’, and for once I think that sums it up pretty well. There were definitely moments when I thought it would pique my interest - I always like an album with an overture and there were some snatches of opera thrown in too, as well as some nice bits of glitchy noise. However, it would soon drift back into a sort of Lou Reed style pastiche.
Also, this album wasn’t in my edition of the book - always a worrying sign when a comparatively recent release (and yes, I’m old enough that 2000 does count as recent for me) is bumped for something else.
In the words of the Chernobyl plant manager - not great, not terrible.
https://album.link/gb/i/1668346488
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