In Keeping With The Punk Theme...

...here's a cool list of fan-rated punk songs. I've heard about half of them.

Link 'o' the Day

Here's a fun little website that I came across quite by accident while researching Glenn Danzig (don't ask). Enjoy.

Keith Richard's Brain Speaks

Tim Blair write this hilarious send up for The Bulletin.
(h/t Tim Blair)

Thomas Dolby On Freakonomics

In case you weren't aware, Thomas Dolby has a blog. He's quite the colourful character. Check out his post on Freakonomics here.

(h/t Instapundit)

On The Turntable I - Led Zeppelin I - Continued

"You Shook Me": Led Zeppelin falls into the White Blues movement of late sixties England, and so they are required by English law to have at least one slow grinder in their repertoire. Here you go. It's just like every other slow grinder ever, except with enough reverb on everything to make it sound like they recorded it twice. So it's great if you like White Blues and Jimmy Page style guitar playing, kind of slow and boring otherwise. There's a lot of interplay between the guitar and vocals, like a howling version of scat. Not much else to say, really. C+

"Dazed and Confused": The way the album was put together this song more or less slipknots (probably unintentionally, though they could have fixed it on the CD if they wanted to but didn't) from "You Shook Me". It's one Zep's all-time classic tunes, which is interesting because it's sort of a cover tune. I say sort of because it sounds nothing like the original "Dazed and Confused" written by Jake Holmes, as detailed here. Being Led Zeppelin and having an apparently unrepentant sex addict for a front man, they had to change the lyrics from bad acid trip to "Oh, ah, ow, you stole my soul, oh you woman creature, let's do it one more time for the road, ow".

There's an up tempo section in the middle of the tune which makes no sense accept as filler, and an excuse for Robert Plant to howl along with the guitar scat style again. Just thought I'd mention it, because it's there.

The thing I like best about this tune is the doubling up of the guitar line two octaves apart in the primary musical hook, which makes it sound spooky. And of course the doubling up of the bass line with the guitar lines, which is a Zeppelin trade mark that they use in pretty much every tune and that I probably should have mentioned before now. It's a very catchy tune in general. That's a good all-purpose description for pretty much everything Led Zeppelin did - proficiently catchy, not proficiently perfectionist. I give this song a B-.

"Your Time Is Gonna Come": This is probably the best tune on the album. JPJ's florid organ intro resolves to a neat little hook that continues once the rest of the instrumentation enters. The song has a nice tempo, relaxed but moving. Of course, the lyrical content is once again "woman got me down, she gonna get hers real soon" but there are actually entire thoughts and complete sentences involved, and none of that mock humping the amplifiers. I just noticed with this listening that the organ has more or less completely replaced Jimmy's usual wannabe blues blowing as the primary colour, relegating him to some cross picked acoustic rhythm guitar and Hawaiian guitar slidy noise in the background. I'm thinking that this is at least part of the reason for it sounding better than the other material. This is a Led Zeppelin song you can play at a bar mitzvah without scaring the old people. B

"Black Mountain Side": Another slipknot here, this time being surely intentional. This tune that has no doubt dazed and confused legions of inexperienced guitar players too stupid to realize that a guitar can be tuned in paterns other than EADGBE. I actually really like this tune. It's a nice break from "woman, oh woman, I'm sorry I done ever banged you". Leo Kottke et al have made entire careers out of playing this kind of stuff. There's some conga and maybe even tabla in there too, which is really appropriate and effective for accompaniment. The song ends abruptly without coda, which is maybe Jimmy's way of marring it enough so that it fits in with the rest of the album. B-

"Communication Breakdown": This is the stuff for which Zeppelin is best known. Up tempo, stuccato downstroke chopping on the guitar, fast walking (jogging?) blues bass line in the choruses, plenty of drum bashing from The Beast, and absolute gut ripping caterwauling and falsetto from Percy. (If haven't read Hammer of the Gods the last two are Bonham and Plant respectively. It's a read I recommend, especially if you're into lurid details of the seventies rock 'n' roll lifestyle.) This song foreshadows the driving power of later tunes like "Whole Lotta Love". It also includes the all time classic lyric, "Oooooooh, suck it". B-

"I Can't Quit You Baby": See the review for "You Shook Me". Ditto, except slightly more up tempo, and slightly more listenable. If you played these two tunes back to back without a break a casual listener might not realize there were two separate tracks involved. Blues, eh? C+

"How Many More Times": Groovey hep cat rhythm section to start things off with this radio unfriendly 8+ minute long number, which could have been a lot shorter if they'd skipped the protracted section of layered guitar masturbation in middle, including some of Jimmy's famous violin bowing technique. Plant of course ad libs howling nonsense about making out with school girls and fathering children numbering into the double digits. Then there's the whole "they call me the hunter section" which is typical sixties ad lib crapola. The tune then resolves back into the hep cat concept and a crashing drum coda. C+

I give the whole album a C+. It's very loose and except for "Your Time Is Gonna Come" it doesn't hang together very well. I've read that this album was recorded in 28 days, which sounds like maybe 2 days of rehearsal, 3 days of recording tunes and 23 days of Jimmy tinkering with guitar sounds and overdubbing. It's great source material for neophyte rockers who want to get together with their buddies on the weekend and drink beer and crank their amps up to eleven, because with a few months worth of practice you too can sound like Led Zeppelin. Which is kind of thrilling, really.

On The Turntable I - Led Zeppelin I

It's late but I'm on a roll and I have a quota to meet. (That's an inside joke.)

The title of the post is a euphamism in this case, because I'm actually listening to a CD. (Boo! For shame! What kind of 'Vinylator' are you!?!)

This album is a rock and roll classic that I happen to know my good friend Johnson DeLonghi despises. So in fairness to him I plan to rip it as much as possible, even though I love it.

"Good Times Bad Times": What hits me immediately is the importance of John Bonham's drumming. Even though he's a rock drumming god, he's still under-rated as far as Zeppelin goes, where he and John Paul Jones are unfairly made analogs of George and Ringo, kind of second class band members. Right from the beginning his drums are a pseudo jazz battery, very forceful and exciting. The recording quality for the kit is quite good too, though the snare sounds a little too wet for my ear.

JPJ's bass sounds like crap. It sounds like he's playing underwater. There's no high end or attack at all. I hate that tubby, sixties tube amp sound. And he's overplaying in parts, which is unfortunate because he can be a very solid player when he keeps to his limits. I saw him playing with the Nickle Creek kids last year in Cleveland and he was way over the top there as well. It's not that he plays too much, it's that he plays too much beyond what his playing ability allows him to play and stay solid. He's not Jaco.

Jimmy Page sounds like Jimmy Page, which is colourful and earcatching guitar gymnastics of low technical difficulty, just the what the doctor ordered for recording while high on smack. Page comes from the Yardbirds school of guitar cred, which puts him in the same league as Eric Clapton. Which isn't saying much. Sorry if I've hurt your feelings.

Robert Plant is a gorgeous, world-class front man, if you can get over the fact that he sounds like a whiny little girl. He's a wide-eyed scenery chewing prima donna in this track. (Hey, sometimes visual metaphors work best for describing music.)

They say when you taste wine, you should first examine the colour, the clarity, the legs, and the bouquet to give you an idea of the quality of the wine. And then you should forget all of that and actually taste the stuff, because that's what's really important. It's the same with music. The engineering and the individual performances can be horrible and yet have a chemistry that results in a great mix.

That has sort of happened with this track, and it's definitely a fan favourite. I'd rate it a C+.

"Babe I'm Gonna Leave You": Page's guitar sound is okay. His playing is a little off in places, but who cares? It's rock and roll, baby!

Plant's vocal style is suited to high pitched shrieking and does not include the ability to be confincingly quiet and soothing. And the lyrics are more or less drunken babbling about "leaving you, baby, baby, babe". Enough said.

After the initial guitar and vocal duet, the full band comes in with a train wreck of up tempo stuccato nonsense, sort of flamenco-ish. Whatever. It was the sixties and people were experimenting with all sorts of things. And then they put away childish things. Well, I assume some people did. Rock and Roll!!!

There's some spacey sound effects about a third of the way in, and later there's some obligatory rocking out, and so on. I've already panned this tune enough. D+

Well, it's way too late to continue this post for now, so I'll take on the rest of the album tomorrow, I promise.

Testing The Water

Since this is intended to be a serious effort at blogging, I started doing some research of the tools and services Blogger provides. I did a quick search on their blog search engine and immediately came across this little beauty:

aworks:: "new" american classical music

The writer is a serious reviewer of American classical and jazz music. Not for the faint of heart, as (s)he is writing knowledgeably about both the familiar favourites and people you for sure, for sure, have never heard of before. But very cool regardless. And the site is amazingly link-rich, in case American classical happens to be your bag.

Inaugural Post

Mmmm. Twins.