Archives for category: rock and roll

David Cross Band / David Jackson Cultuurpodium Boerderij 19 May 2017

May 22, 2017 //

David Cross and David Jackson

So I saw this gig announced a few months ago after I’d spent several weeks listening to almost the entire Van Der Graaf Generator catalogue. David Cross played violin on Starless and Bible Black and Larks’ Tongues In Aspic by King Crimson. Jackson played horns with VDGG for most of their run. So, yeah, two incredible musicians who had each been in the game for more than 45 years. It was a gig I didn’t want to miss. Especially given the recent resurgence of King Crimson, I was quite surprised that the gig was far from sold out. Fine, I’ll take middle front at this relatively small club. (When packed, Boerderij can hold an audience of 750 or so and my guess is there were about 300 there.) To open, Cross and Jackson came out alone and traded a little humour before taking on Starless Loops from the recent Cross/Robert Fripp album of improvisations on the Starless theme, Starless Starlight. After a few more pieces, they played another from Starless Starlight. There’s one ripple of chords from Starless that always gives me the shivers and did again when Cross played it Friday night. My friend Corniel, who joined me for the gig complained that it would have been better for him if they’d just played and not joked around so much. There’s some merit to that argument, as the joking detracted from their sheer expertise. Their duo work owed more to improvisational jazz than to the progressive rock they’re best known for. After a 30-minute set, they took a break before coming back with the full David Cross Band.

In the main set, the band played several numbers from the new (very good) album, The Sign of the Crow including Starfall, the title track, Rain Rain and The Pool. Current vocalist Jin Wilde has a very interesting voice (having come out of a dance music background, it seems) handles the new stuff quite well. His tenor is well suited to the music, generally. The band’s set includes (and if the 2008 live album I bought at the merch counter is anything to go by, has included for a long time) three King Crimson songs: Exiles (from Larks‘), Starless (from Red), and the encore 21st Century Schizoid Man (from In The Court of the Crimson King). The last of these featured Greg Lake on vocals, and the other two John Wetton. On these songs, Wilde doesn’t seem to take ownership. He seems to be trying to sing like Wetton, but his voice is too different. The band, however, quite made up for it. After Exiles, the band left the stage to drummer Craig Blundell who did an appropriately hair-raising solo. (Blundell has played with numerous folks including Steve Wilson.) The band returned playing George Martin’s Theme One (recorded in ’72 by Van Der Graaf Generator) before a slightly ragged Starless. Paul Clark and his Gibson Flying V are very very good and he doesn’t try to be Robert Fripp. After a quick moment back stage they closed with an appropriately wild Schizoid Man. I wasn’t expecting it and was well impressed. (Someone commented on Blundell’s facebook page that Crimson currently has three drummers and was impressed with how well he did his part solo.)

Overall a great evening with a couple of bona fide legends.

Tags David Cross, David Jackson, King Crimson, Sign of the Crow, Van Der Graaf Generator

Categories Music, rock and roll

AVDGAD – 15 – Do Not Disturb

February 23, 2017 //

And last year’s fine effort brings the Van Der Graaf Generator saga to a close. Clocking in at just under an hour, Do Not Disturb is a curious effort. They three remaining members only worked together on the music for about two weeks (according to the wikibox), but it sounds much like another well-oiled VDG machine.

vdgg-dnd (Oh No I Must Have Said) Yes seems to be a response to the various failings of the electorate in the past year, though the recording was complete before, for example, the Brexit referendum…

But let’s not talk about the old days
except to say the consequences run,
to be plain, what’s over isn’t done
and you thought you were only having fun.

As always, most of the songs seem to contain epics within them, slow movements calmly orchestrated still go measure to measure with slamming drums, weirdly overlaid vocals, and histrionic keyboards, but if they didn’t, we’d question whether we were listening to the right band.

It’s definitely good stuff, but not the gut-grabbing musical assault that we were once used to.

I realised there’s another live recording: Live at Maida Vale, recorded at the BBC in 2010 and released in 2012. It’s not on the band’s Wikipedia discography, but it’s up on Spotify. I’ll probably give that a listen next week.

Tags Van Der Graaf Generator

Categories Music, rock and roll

AVDGAD – 14 – Merlin Atmos (2015)

February 20, 2017 //

You’ll note that I skipped one. 2012’s ALT was an interesting enough instrumental album, but nothing really to jump and shout about.

Merlin Atmos, recorded in 2013, is a live album featuring the trio line-up that had recorded ALT, A Grounding In Numbers, and Trisector. A such, it leans on these later albums, It opens with Hammill’s solo epic Flight from the 1980 release A Black Box. It’s a proper full-side piece in multiple parts in the vein (sort of) of A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers (which takes up side 2 of Merlin Atmos‘ vinyl release).

There were two CD releases – a single and a double. The single includes the two epics and closes with a tight version of Hammill’s Gog, previously heard in a poor 1975 live recording as a bonus track on Still Life.

Disc one also features Lifetime and All That Before (Trisector) and Bunsho from A Grounding In Numbers.

It’s quite an interesting affair, a good balance of the old and the more recent trio work. It’s interesting that both this and Vital were recorded by lineups that weren’t the classic quartet. As such, David Jackson’s horns are especially missed on the older material. On the other hand, the recording is clean and the performances are as intense as one would expect.

The second disc (Bonus Atmos) features:

Interference Patterns, Over the Hill (Trisector)
Your Time Starts Now (A Grounding In Numbers)
Scorched Earth (Godbluff)
Meurglys III (World Record)
Man-Erg (Pawn Hearts)
Childlike Faith In Childhood’s End (Still Life)

They’ve been doing this work a long time and the renditions are generally tight. I think the solos, such as the keyboard adventure in the middle of Childlike Faith, seem a little tightly bound to the original versions. At two hours twenty, I don’t feel driven to compare the live tracks to their studio counterparts in the moment, but these versions are certainly satisfying. Hammill lets his vocals soar in a way he hasn’t on the recent studio recordings. I’d say it’s as good an introduction to their work as you’re likely to find.

Tags Van Der Graaf Generator

Categories Music, rock and roll

Tom Robinson – Only The Now

October 24, 2015 //

Tom Robinson is best known in some circles as a DJ on BBC 6, in others as the leader of the Tom Robinson Band in the 70s which produced such great tracks as Up Against the Wall, Sing If You’re Glad To Be Gay, and Grey Cortina. He had a couple more hits in the 80s (War Baby, Atmospherics, a cover of Steely Dan’s Rikki Don’t Lose That Number), and continued to record in the 90s, including a gorgeous collaboration with Jakko Jaczsyk called We Never Had It So Good. Only The Now, his first album of new musical material since 1999’s Home From Home, is in many ways an album about mortality, and (as the title suggests) about living in this moment because we don’t know what we’ll lose in the next.
The first piece I heard was Don’t Jump Don’t Fall, a very personal address to a boy Robinson knew intimately who committed suicide. As it’s half spoken, I was quite worried that this album might be more Shatner-esque than one wants from someone of Robinson’s talent. I shouldn’t have feared, the album is as musical as one could wish for.

Most of Only The Now is comprised of meditations or addresses to mortality. In this category is a duet with Martin Carthy on the Beatles’ In My Life. Bringing something new to any Beatles title at this late date is hard work, but the two singers pull it off. They let their halting voices carry the pain of the lyrics over a sparse arrangement. At 65, Robinson and Carthy (74) have a greater share of people who have come in and out of their lives than Lennon had at 25, and they don’t make any effort to let it be otherwise.

Merciful God is a rocker about soldiers ‘doing the job that God put me here for’ that in arrangement wouldn’t have been out of place on Power in the Darkness or TRB 2, though it’s lyrically much more ambiguous than those early punk tracks. In contrast, The Mighty Sword of Justice is great old-fashioned hootenanny protest song in which Robinson, Billy Bragg, and folk singer Lisa Knapp address the topic of ‘one law for the rich and another one for the poor’.

The album’s one moment of sheer weirdness is Holy Smoke, a heavily produced song about using pages of the bible for rolling paper on which Ian McKellan provides the voice of God and a rap from Swami Baracus the dissenting view. McKellan also appears on One Way Street, another song about dying young, intoned with a certain Noel Coward-ish irony.

Cry Out, Home In The Morning, and the title track all speak to mortality in different ways. Home in the Morning is in the voice of someone planning to commit suicide and hoping his best friend will tie up the loose ends. It brings to mind Isherwood’s A Single Man. Cry Out is the other side, the pain of those whose friends must remember the names of those who have left. Both are in the first person. The title track, which closes the album is an entreaty to his children and listeners to live in the moment and not take any moment for granted.

I give it four stars. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Only-The-Now-Tom-Robinson/dp/B012ZFAP1G

Tags Only The Now, Tom Robinson

Categories Music, rock and roll

Just a fool waiting on the wrong block…

August 12, 2015 //

Israeli cover of Led Zep’s In Through The Out Door.

In August, 1979, in the midst of the punk revolution in the UK and after two years off the road (four since they’d last played in the UK), Led Zeppelin staged two huge shows in at Knebworth over two weekends in August, performing for about 400,000 people. These shows included the first live performances of Hot Dog and In The Evening from the forthcoming album In Through The Out Door. The album should already have been released, but there were production issues and it wasn’t released until the week after the second show.
The following year, the band toured Europe, but on the eve of the American tour the following year, drink finally did in drummer John Bonham. Given that lead singer Robert Plant’s son had died during the American leg of the 1977 tour (thereby putting the kibosh on the European tour for Presence), this was pretty much the last straw for the band and they called it a day.
In Through The Out Door is a curious affair. In terms of production, it’s cleaner than 1977’s Presence, but as a whole, it’s a less focused affair. I may feel this way only because my sister and I bought it the week it was released and played the hell out of it. I don’t think I owned a copy of Presence until I bought one of those dreadful tinny CDs in the mid-90s. (The mastering of the whole catalogue for CD in the late 80s was horrible. The range was shrunk, the warmth pulled into some kind of musical black hole, and even to someone who listens to most music on relatively cheap earbuds, the overall sound was painful.)
Of ITTOD‘s seven tracks, one is a straight-up country tune (Hot Dog), one could be boogie-woogie without too much effort (South Bound Suarez) and others sprawl into disco territory (Carouselambra, In The Evening). But from the faded in digeridoo of In The Evening to the slow blues of I’m Gonna Crawl, I find it their most interesting album – at least the most interesting that was recorded in one go. (Physical Graffiti reaches farther and has greater heights, but pulls on music the band had created over the course of the three previous albums.)
After 36 years, the new reissue is as pleasing as any vinyl I’ve ever owned. It’s the only one of the new reissues I’ve purchased so far (tempted by Physical Graffiti, to be sure, primarily for Night Flight and to listen to Boogie With Stu sped up to 45 the way my sister and did way back when).