Art - Supernatural Fairy Tales

Art is what eventually became Spooky Tooth, which, to me never tapped into the whig-out factor displayed hereabouts...though you can definitely see the grooves that came to the Tooth.

From AllMusic: Patchy but occasionally worthwhile British psychedelia, particularly when it's on the brooding side of that sub-genre. The heavy guitars and organ put this on the path to progressive rock, but the songs are rather more on the straightforward and popish side than those that Spooky Tooth would play when Art evolved into that group. "I Think I'm Going Weird" points to the morbid streak that would become sharper in Spooky Tooth; "African Thing," with its long African-styled drum solo, is the sort of strange, at least by the standards of 1967, item that groups would throw in to show they weren't limiting themselves to traditional rock forms anymore; "Come On Up" is almost a soul-rocker throwback to the V.I.P.s days; and the title track, with its mellotrons, is as close as Art got to the trippy baroque/whimsical mood that blew through so much British psychedelia in 1967 and 1968.

The album has been reissued on CD by Edsel.

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Television Personalities - And Don't The Kids Just Love It

One of my favorites - to me this record sounds very American, like Modern Lovers with Cockney accents. Really well-composed and spread across a rough four-track recording.

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Tar Babies - Fried Milk

Recently reintroduced into the lexicon courtesy of Bay, n since heavily quoted.

Last saw this vinyl floating atop six feet of water in a rented duplexes basement. Retrieved, caked in filth, unable to spin I craved the day this was returned in digital fashion. There were renditions found on the P2Ps but the levels too hot for easy listening. Bay sniffed out a winner and here it is for universal consumption as an homage to just how vicious this outfit was in their prime. Later releases fell on the side of too legit funk or straight up party music. Fried Milk is the essence of a schizo trio finding its way out of the doldrums of Wisco HC.

This was our Red Hots. Kiedis can suck it.

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Slovenly - Riposte (A Little Resolve)

A covert hybrid of finer Verlaine/Lloyd television moments and structures, and the amazingly abstract, off-key/off-kilter anti-singer, bawl n hawl, fat cerebral poesy of Steve Anderson.

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Hüsker Dü - Metal Circus

Hüsker Dü was never as pure as this. Indignation in every bent string. How revelatory this was when first heard. Like you just made contact with benevolent extraterrestrial life.

Find out who you really are!

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John Cale & Terry Riley - Church of Anthrax

An ole pal returned me to this just last summer. I had a copy in college that didn't see much needleplay as it was naively dismissed by this arrogant author as two avante egoist auteurs aping Kraut/Neu. Recent listens bring new angles.

The AllMusic bit: A one-time-only collaboration between former Velvet Underground co-founder John Cale and minimalist composer Terry Riley, 1971's Church of Anthrax doesn't sound too much like the solo work of either. Around this time, Riley's works were along the lines of "A Rainbow in Curved Air" or "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band": pattern music with an obsessive attention to repetition and tricks with an analogue delay machine that gave his music a refractory, almost hallucinogenic quality.

Though Cale was trained in a similar aesthetic (he played with La Monte Young, surely the most minimal of all minimalist composers), he had largely left it behind by 1971, and so Church of Anthrax mixes Riley's drones and patterns with a more muscular and melodic bent versed in both free jazz and experimental rock. Not quite modern classical music, but not at all rock & roll either, Church of Anthrax sounds in retrospect like it was a huge influence on later post-minimalist composers like Andrew Poppy, Wim Mertens, and Michael Nyman, who mix similar doses of minimalism, rock, and jazz. On its own merits, the album is always interesting, and the centerpiece "The Hall of Mirrors in the Palace at Versailles" is probably the point where Riley and Cale approach each other on the most equal footing. The low point is Cale's solo writing credit, "The Soul of Patrick Lee," a slight vocal interlude by Adam Miller that feels out of place in these surroundings.

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Funkadelic - Live: Meadowbrook, Rochester, Michigan, September 12, 1971

Holy Shit - Free yr ass, fer sure. Includes a Maggot Brain that will eat your whole family.

In celebration of Barack's selection of one tight honkie to fight the fight.

Hear part 1

Hear part 2