supersoul

I recently met a friend who told me that this morning John Martyn has died. He has stopped moving through solid air. May the earth be light upon you, John, thank you for records like this.

...(h)ardcore...

@bubi wait a moment, it seems rather unfair to put the Blasters on the same train as the Stray Cats or the English Restless who were dedicated to the classic rockabilly revival. The Blasters, like the seminal Levi & the Rockats, have their own sound that is gritty, raw, and rooted in black music compared to the polished sound of the Cats. After all, Dave Alvin's associations were with hardcore punk bands like the Circle Jerks and especially that Chris D. and that extraordinary album "A minute to pray a second to die" credited to the Flesheaters, featuring Dave and Steve Berlin.

It's always the same issue; if someone only knows the Negrita and the Stadio from Italian groups, then it's true: the Pooh are the greatest Italian band. However, if one starts to delve in and listen to, say, Osanna, Area, Le Orme, Biglietto per l'inferno, etc., people whose names make others bow down to hear them abroad, then perhaps they realize they've said something foolish.

I'm sorry, but I can't access or translate content from external websites. If you provide the text you'd like translated, I'd be happy to help!

Given that I haven't read the book or seen the film and therefore don't judge, from what I've been told, it seems nothing new under the sun, the same old story that in itself isn’t a handicap, but it needs to be retold well. For example, I thought of that beautiful film by Katherine Bigelow "Near Dark" (which I reviewed when I was dabbling in ophthalmology) where it was a boy who fell in love with a vampire girl. A film from the years of obsession and the plague of AIDS. It meant and wanted to say something; this one, I don’t know.

What a coincidence, just a few days ago in the review of Starblazer that gave 5 (yes, five) stars to that kitschy album by Rufus Wainwright, I mentioned Van Dyke Parks, to whom Rufus should clean his shoes (like Moriero did with Ronaldo in Simoni's Inter). In short, I was saying that Van Dyke in the midst of '68 was among those who were dismantling and reassembling the musical machine (just listen to Donovan's Colours reduced to a music box and street pianola) along with other spaced-out artists like Zappa's Mothers or the Holy Modal Rounders. The review is excellent also for the references and learned allusions, but the blunder regarding Tom Rapp as the singer of the Holy Modal Rounders is concerning and significant, and to be more picky than Sharunas, I must say that he was not the only voice of the Rounders (who, according to him, has a cartoonish nasal voice that bears no resemblance to Rapp's epic timbre); Steve Weber also contributed, and he has a more normal voice (the differences between the two can be easily distinguished in a piece like Euphoria on the first album).

Hi bubi, although the French idolize Tav Falco, Cramps, Gun Club, which the French label New Rose has reissued multiple times, this record is very far from that kind of homage to old rock. As the review states, they tend to push beyond rock, and this is especially evident on the second side where the free jazz nature of Gong, which will later develop into the Canterbury sound, fully manifests itself, while on the first side it is "mitigated" by the psychedelic folk of Hedayat. After all, Allen came from the early Soft Machine, and Pyp Pyle will be one of the protagonists of the Canterbury sound. But this is not a record tied to that genre; on the contrary. It’s a record connected to the oddity of the alien Bert Camembert/Dingo Virgin/Daevid Allen.

santamental

Yes, it’s a really interesting record; you can listen to a couple of tracks on Myspace by clicking the link of the name Dashiell in the review, although the main attraction is the suite on the second side. Out of curiosity... among the credits of the album, besides Heyadat and the band Gong, who will record right after Camembert Electrique, there are the names of William Burroughs and Robert Wyatt. In fact, at the end of "Long Song for Zelda," there is a brief excerpt of a recitation by Burroughs, while it’s not Robert Wyatt participating with a children's nursery rhyme in the last minutes of the suite "Cielo Drive," but rather his little son Sam.