David Bowie - Toy (2000)

I wasn't going to bother on the grounds that I don't just automatically spunk up a wad of cash every time I see that the latest squeeze of the postmortem Bowie udder has yielded yet another boxed set of unreleased answering machine messages, this time issued as fifteen 8" picture discs depicting the master's kneecaps through the ages and yours for just fifty billion smackers, you fucking chump; but then the American government gave me a whole bunch of money and I thought, fuck it - I'll only regret it if I don't.

Toy, as everyone in the universe knows, was Bowie doing covers of songs first recorded by himself back when he was merely a calf. The selling point - aside from it being Bowie - seems to be how much fun you can tell they were having, despite which, the label were disinclined to release it at the time.

My initial impressions were that, firstly - it was better than I'd expected, and secondly - that despite being better than I expected there's not one song here which improves on the original version. I'm quite keen on Bowie's sixties crap, corny and overly mannered though at least some of it may be, and on close inspection I realise Toy mostly covers what I vaguely regard as the lesser tracks - I Dig Everything, Can't Help Thinking About Me and so on; on the other hand, the lad revisits The London Boys, and he does a great job, a powerful rendering which is almost there, except we're talking about The London Boys, the original of which is arguably one of the greatest things ever produced by western civilisation; so although middle aged Bowie produces as great a version as you'll hear, it will never be the original.

Anyway, after a week or so of listening to the thing, I begin to get a feel for it. There are actually four tracks I've never heard before for reasons given in the first paragraph, and they're pretty great; and the rest of Toy slowly establishes its own identity as something other than slightly more expensive sounding versions of songs I remember from when I was little. So, it's nowhere near as good as Heathen, but it's probably better than Hours, and Hours isn't actually bad so why not, I suppose. That being said, the reason this seemed to cost so much is that it's the same album three fucking times spread over twelve sides of vinyl, the rest of the material being outtakes, demos, alternate versions and - ugh - remixes, none of which I'm likely to bother listening to a second time. The twelve proper tracks fit very nicely on a natty wee 10" double album with each disc in an overly informative sixties style inner sleeve suggesting we play these phonograph recordings with such and such a stylus etc. etc. - and it's all you need, and probably all Dave needed us to hear.

PBK & Nocturnal Emissions - Erosion of the Monolith (2022)

Mr. Ayers seems to have engaged in some particularly fruitful collaborations of late, and here's another one. This time he's trading drones, clangs and scraping sounds with Philip B. Klingler who has been recording as PBK for over three decades and is himself renowned for works executed in collaboration with other purveyors of unsettling noise. I'm not sure what I've heard of PBK, although I know I've heard a few things here and there, and although I'm entirely familiar with the work of Nocturnal Emissions, it's difficult to guess at who did what for Erosion of the Monolith. That said, it doesn't really matter, the important thing being what comes out of the speakers. What comes out of the speakers is, in this case, fairly difficult to describe. Drones are involved, and a distant atmospheric howl invokes a near physical space suggesting environmental recordings made on a planet which probably wasn't Earth. Foreground ripples, squeaks and rumbles drift in and out of the mix without resolving into anything found in nature, or at least terrestrial nature; and the whole is emotionally powerful, despite that we're driven to depths of feeling - something almost like nostalgia, funnily enough - for a place which exists only on this record, so far as anyone can tell; and somehow it doesn't sound quite like any other album of its kind, possibly aside from distantly reminding me of the late, great Andrew Cox's Methods.

The Who - Tommy (1969)

I realise I've done this the wrong way around, being entirely familiar with Ken Russell's 1975 movie while only just having heard the original due to the Who never having been fully on my radar; not that I ever had anything against them. I own a few singles, and still think of them as a mostly great singles band at least up until the second half of the seventies, but the albums always looked a bit messy with those faintly gimmicky titles. Listening to this, I find I miss Olly Reed's slightly flat, slightly forced singing at least as much as that of Ann-Margret, Tina Turner, Paul Nicholas, and even Jack Nicholson, so thankfully the quality of the material soon overpowers such reservations. I had assumed it would sound like a mere demo version of the Tommy with which I'm significantly more familiar, but it's really its own thing.

Tommy, as you will know unless you're very young or an idiot, is the tale of a deaf, dumb, and blind child who somehow excels at pinball, regains his senses as a fairly heavy handed metaphor for spiritual enlightenment, and ultimately acquires a cult following; and the story is told through song, hence the term rock opera. I'm sure I've seen Tommy credited as one of those many albums which was apparently the first concept album, but really, who gives a shit? Fuck off with your silly time signatures and your fake goblin ears.

I'm not actually sure how well the tale is conveyed as just music, given how well versed I am with the movie - which follows more or less the whole thing beat for beat - but it seems to communicate an emotional truth regardless, even if you're wondering why Tommy's mum - and indeed everyone else - sounds like Roger Daltrey. Against my expectation, it has quite a basic, jazzy production with very little reliance on effects, and the instrumentation is all kept beautifully clear and expressive, so much so that one would hardly think this bunch once had the reputation of being the loudest band in the world. Additionally, I've never been entirely convinced by Roger Daltrey's voice - there's nothing wrong with it, and that's what's wrong with it as someone or other said; and yet he's great here - the blustering rock bellow presumably being still to come.

Tommy includes some of Townsend's greatest, most powerful songs, in my opinion, here in a more vulnerable, raw emotional form than the version with the visuals and explosions; and although I still can't tell which version works the best, or even if there's a comparison to be made, the narrative seems arguably richer, more mutable, more open to variant interpretations in sound only. It's about enlightenment, but it's about abuse of power, and even about yesterday's underground becoming tomorrow's establishment - revolution and even enlightenment colonised and transformed into the new orthodoxy. The Who returned to that theme more than once, and it seems particularly fitting for the tail end of the sixties - and for right now, come to think of it.

Public Image Ltd. - That What Is Not (1992)

 

I came across an online review of 2012's This is PIL claiming it to be the best thing since 1984's This Is What You Want… This Is What You Get thankfully preventing the possibility of the PIL legacy concluding with one of those crappy nineties records. This irritated me because, aside from the possibility of Album actually being their finest moment, I happen to like those crappy nineties records despite their failure to deliver another Metal Box. That said, I wasn't actually sure about That What Is Not because I'd somehow forgotten its existence. So I dug it out, stuck it on the turn table, and there it stayed for the next couple of weeks.

It's still very much stadium PIL, perhaps even more so than the previous three with the occasional guitar solo which could have been lifted from REO Speedwagon, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, and it's probably more Pearl Jam than any of the seventies hairies. Above all, the strangest element is that it's almost an uptempo happy record, and Lydon is smiling on the back cover - not necessarily unusual but it's a genuinely cheery, unconditional smile rather than the one we're used to which suggests he's just seen Strummer go flying after stepping on a banana skin. It communicates the possibility that he was probably very much enjoying living in a significantly sunnier part of the world, which is something I understand very well, and - excepting the customarily caustic commentary - that's what That What Is Not sounds like.

I wonder if it would help if we thought of this as a John McGeoch album, because it's that too. I assume we haven't yet found a reason to sneer at McGeoch, although if we have I'm not really interested. That What Is Not has a massive, punchy sound, thanks in no small part to the horn section, harmonica and soulful backing vocals floating around in the mix just like on an eighties Rolling Stones record, and the bile is seasoned with a surprising quota of joie de vivre, or possibly just glee; and it would almost be a slightly more jagged Pearl Jam but for one of Lydon's greatest ever performances, at least technically. I know he mostly does just the one thing, but it's arguably at its greatest and most expressive here in voicing what may even be amongst his finest lyrics. Unfairground and Good Things are in particular face-punchingly wonderful and deserving of inclusion on whatever the next greatest hits package happens to be; and it's a shitload better than This is PIL while we're here.

So there.

Lil' Flip - I Need Mine $$ (2007)

As a disclaimer for the benefit of anyone reading this blog for the first time, I'm nearly a million years old, I write about what I like, and I make no claim to have had my finger on any pulse since around 1997 at the very latest. Barely literate comments along the lines of thiz opinon iz garbage Dogg Pound is tha $hit are pretty much wasted on me, even if you're not actually some little white dude lurking in his mother's basement. By the same token, I picked this one up because it was there and I enjoyed The Leprechaun. Flip could be the most successful rap artist of all time for all I know and you may already be bored shitless of the guy, but I can't really be arsed to do my research and you'll just have to humour Grandpa as he muses about this new fangled Beatles band.

No, I don't know if you're literally expected to pronounce it I Need Mine Dollar Dollar and it probably doesn't matter. The Leprechaun was decent, if not enough so to have me actively hunting down the rest. Nevertheless, this was in the rack and I had the money, so here we are.

Freestyle king or not, I don't recall Flip as being particularly gymnastic in the lyrical department, but here he's come on somewhat since the debut, and not in the direction I expected. Whenever I try to work out what happened to rap since I stopped listening - or at least got too old and too busy to continue giving it my undivided attention - I always seem to find trap music on the end of the line - guys I've never heard of growling out a few pages of bank statements over what sounds like an 808 being rogered by Sonic the Hedgehog, and all recorded on a fucking smartphone. If Lil' Flip ever went down that road, as I felt certain he probably would, there was no sign of it in 2007. Lyrically, if he's not quite Nas, you can tell he's thinking about this shit and putting in the work, developing his own voice beyond being one of those guys who turns up on someone else's CD to remind us that he also finds himself in a financially enviable situation; but two whole discs…

Not many rappers can manage the double disc thing, and yet Lil' Flip succeeds where other, possibly better publicised artists have fallen on their arses. The key seems to be variety. The standard is already high for this slightly expensive sounding album, with even those beats steering closest to the trap demonstrating a certain wide screen polish elevating them above the usual ringtones. Elsewhere we have tracks recalling the golden age of west coast g-funk and Real Hip Hop which swings across to the other side of the country, and it all blends seamlessly into a genuinely eclectic whole, feeling, if anything, a little like one of the Neptunes era Snoop albums. For someone so firmly rooted in his home soil - Houston, Texas for those unaware - Flip does a great job of covering all bases, in terms of both geography and even era, acknowledging the east coast roots of the culture as well as the usual roll call of greats; and we have guest spots from names similarly diverse as MJG, DJ Squeeky, Scott Storch, Mannie Fresh, Nate Dogg, Three-6-Mafia, Yukmouth and others. There's very little that's not to love about these - holy mother of God - thirty-nine tracks spanning social conscience to good old fashioned boasting, somehow amounting to a surprisingly soulful, feelgood set.

I probably need to have a look and see if he did any others.