Catfish, Eggs

Deep in the old creek
Patiently guarding her eggs
Whiskers are twitching

Elvis Presley by Elvis Presley

Elvis has to be the ultimate rock and roll cautionary tale. At heart, he was a simple country boy who just wanted to play music and make a few records, but he quickly fell into the grasp of a greedy manager and an entourage of moochers living off his money. This album opens with a blast of Blue Suede Shoes which certainly got white American teens jiving, but for every rock and roll banger there’s a bunch of maudlin torch songs or plodding country numbers.

A bigger problem is that the version of Tutti Frutti on this album doesn’t have any of the in-your-face energy and attitude of Little Richard’s original. Adding it all up, you are getting less than half an hour of cover songs that are not quite as good as the originals, but they just happened to catch the zeitgeist and open the door for rock and roll to reach the predominantly white mainstream audience.

Blue-suede-shoes-tastic!

Mist, High

I’m pretty sure that
Frank Darabont was high when
He changed King’s ending

Sunday At the Village Vanguard by Bill Evans Trio

A great live jazz album from three musicians at the absolute top of their game. Bill Evans takes the lead on piano, with drummer Paul Motian keeping time and Scott LaFaro laying down a solid bass line on top. Each of them complements the others perfectly and listening to the different versions of the tracks recorded over several sets included here shows how effortlessly they improvised around the basic structures of the composition.

Sadly Scott LaFaro was killed in a car accident just eleven days after this recording, and by all accounts the loss was devastating to Evans who was also struggling with his own personal demons of heroin addiction at the time. This makes listening something of a bitter sweet experience.

Moon , Friend

Cunning Cavorite
Craft carelessly crashes
Captured by moon friends

Your New Favourite Band by The Hives

Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Maybe I’m being a little harsh, but a 28 minute compilation album with 12 songs is a bit of an odd choice. Looking back, the previous two albums were of similar length so they could have just chucked them both on a single cd for the UK release. Anyway, I’ve nothing against short albums per se, and this is a good example of short songs that don’t feel short, all around the two minute mark with only one over 3 minutes.

They are most entertaining post-punk/garage rock sung and played with considerable enthusiasm. Nothing revolutionary, but they sound like a lot of fun and looking up clips on YouTube shows that they are indeed an excellent live band - not quite main stage headliners but there’s nothing wrong with that.

Café Bleu by The Style Council

Paul Weller is a very serious man. Adam Buxton tells the story of interviewing him on the radio one time and making the joke “Ah Weller, Weller, Weller, ooh - tell me more” which was received in stony silence. His previous band, the Jam, was laser focused on making sharp political points through a mix of mod and punk, without any of the joy or spontaneity of either of those genres.

With the Style Council he made an abrupt change into a mix of easy listening jazz, soul and hip-hop, seemingly aimed at the after dinner yuppie CD crowd. As a general rule if you have to state that you are cool or stylish, you are probably not, and councils are more generally associated with bin collections and the like, but we’ll let that go. It’s pleasant enough listening, with jazzy instrumentals and songs that sneak in some of his previous left wing politics hoping that the yuppies won’t listen too closely.

There’s a guest appearance from Tracy Thorn of Everything but the Girl which is probably the high point of the album, but then a couple of tracks later we come to A Gospel which has some bizarrely out of place rapping and drum machine beats, thankfully not performed by Mr Weller.

The overall effect is something of a curate’s egg and probably not something I’d go back to.