My music on heavy rotation up to July 16
The last few weeks have been enlivened (in my ears) by a lot of the following records:
Beastie Boys - ‘Licensed to Ill’ I still find it bizarre, thirty years after the event, that three Jewish kids adopting bratty frat-boy personae to make comedy records, managed to come up with one of the finest hip-hop albums of the classic era. Their beat-making became more sophisticated as they took over production duties on later albums, but the raw enthusiasm and youthful intensity of this one, as well as Rick Rubin’s cartoonish, primary-colour production, make it as exciting as it it hilarious.
Tengger Cavalry - ‘Blood Sacrifice Shaman’ This is the debut release from one of the two(!) Mongolian folk metal bands to achieve international recognition. Its combination of brutal riffs and the traditional acoustic music of a rampaging warrior people makes surprising aesthetic sense, and there is a clear continuum between the extensively featured throat singing and death metal shouting, which somehow makes the whole extreme metal project seem less daft, and more culturally grounded. An intensely stirring fusion.
Frank Zappa - ‘Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger’ Pierre Boulez conducts his own Ensemble InterContemporain in performances of three of Zappa’s ‘serious’ compositions, which are collected on the album with four of Zappa’s synclavier arrangements. It’s fairly ‘difficult’, avant-garde music, but it owes a lot to composers who got their widest exposure through Hollywood, and much of it sounds programmatic or narrative – the tuned percussion elements in particular sound like cartoon music! Like most of Zappa it’s not very moving, or emotionally generous, but it makes for fascinating listening.
Trojan Horse - ‘Trojan Horse (Redux)’ This album is redux in that its original release contained some mastering errors: it’s Trojan Horse’s debut, and it’s an absolute blinder, a self-assured, erudite, and powerful exposition, that takes the history of prog and forces it through a mincer. What comes out shows as much affective affinity with psychedelia, with punk and with riff-worshipping crust metal as it does with the classical aspirations of early prog, but it retains that music’s sophistication, accessibility, variety, musicianship and sheer nerdy joy of invention.
Zenjungle & TunedIn52 - ‘Mesh’ An album of experimental improvisations, based broadly on a jazz vocabulary, but with a considerable interest in ambient music, and a wide range of techniques, ranging from straightforward instrumental prowess, through electronic manipulations to field recordings. Sometimes gentle, sometimes quite hectic, Mesh is a very atmospheric recording, that rewards to the extent that the listener is willing to accept its challenge. Rigorous, immersive, and frequently beautiful music.
I’ve also been enjoying some top-whack shorter releases from Fit and the Conniptions (literate Bohemian songcraft), Chestburster (ultimate gruelling terror), Karen Grace (leftfield acoustic songcraft), Marley Butler (observational art-rap) and Chocomang (unexpected danceable mash-up).