This is Lankum's third LP, which was pretty much their breakthrough album. They deserve all the critical acclaim that's come their way.
The band are the product of a union between trad and DIY punk. (Two scenes which have more in common than either would generally choose to acknowledge.)
The Revolutionaries - Kunta Kinte (Kentaro Remixes)
Tokyo's DJ Kentaro is one hell of a turntablist and, on this 12" from 2009, he throws the Kunta Kinte riddim around like a fucking blindfolded juggler on a unicycle...on a tightrope...over a tank of piranhas. It's all very fancy.
There's nothing at all wrong with that, in my book, but then I'm a complete sucker for the Kunta Kinte riddim however it arrives to me, although this does seem like a lot of hard work at times.
I'm also partial to a lock groove. Saves you having to get up to turn the record over.
Chick Corea and Return to Forever - Light As A Feather
The second RTF album, with Flora Purim on vocals, her husband Airto Moreira on percussion, Stanley Clarke on bass, and Joe Farrell on flute and saxophone, has them gliding through really complex Brazilian-jazz-fusion flavours, without compromising on complexity or losing the groove - a very hard balance to achieve.
It's one hell of an album, even on my rather shitty Australian pressing.
In 1988, when this album came out, I had a mate who was a rep for a record company, and I would leave his flat with my pick of whatever records/CDs he was promoting at the time. That's how I got this.
This was Eubanks' debut album and it holds up well, despite being festooned with slightly jagged eighties rhythms.
Eubanks is a player of some aplomb and is one of FOUR trombonists on this album. That's a lot of trombone.
There's a fucking awesome version of Stevie Wonder's Overjoyed, where Eubanks and his guitarist brother, Kevin, interact beautifully, and which I frequently experience as an earworm.
In the mid-80s, we all went mad for 'latin' music, after being exposed to the cross-cultural mix of sounds from across Latin America that had been introduced to us by Gilles Peterson, Chris Bangs etc in the upstairs or back rooms of rare groove clubs.
I reckon I picked this European issue (on Caliente!, a Charly subsidiary) at Camden Market around 1986/87. I know it would have been around that time, because it suffers from a bit of mould on the playing surface from my freezing and damp Dagenham flat (no insulation, draughty leaded windows, and a single bar electric heater that you couldn't afford to use.)
I love this LP and I must give it a good clean one day.
Such a strong album, this. It contains some of GSH & BJ's biggest bangers, strong musicianship, including the wonderful Harvey Mason on drums, and the TONTO synthesizer which had been used by Stevie Wonder a few years previously.
I was lucky to see GSH live a few times, and he was always brilliant. I remember being terribly sad when he died. I would have loved him to be around today, because no-one could eviscerate a right-wing politician like him.
Also, I'd always thought Pieces of a Dream had got their name from the track Willing on this album. According to their Wikipedia page, I was wrong.
This 1974 album by the 1970s Melbourne soul band takes a load of key ingredients of seventies soul, chucks them in a bowl, gives them a good old stir and comes up with a final product that just isn't moist or crumbly enough and has the cheesy tang of the working men's club showband.
I really want to like this, because Aussie, Aussie, Aussie etc, and I love music dug from the deepest, darkest corners, but...Jesus, their cover the Isley Brothers' version of Summer Breeze is an exercise in hubris, reminiscent of those white cover versions of rock n' roll songs in the 1950s by Pat Boone.
A couple of records by this band fetch reasonable amounts on the collectable soul scene, but that is no more an indication of quality than the bass player's 'fro is an indication of Pan-Africanism.
I thought I'd play a bit of Roberta Flack to mark her death earlier this week and discovered this LP, released in 1973, which I'd picked up somewhere and forgotten about.
For an album with an all-star cast of jazz players and arrangers, and dedicated to Rahsaan Roland Kirk, it's a remarkably low-key, MOR affair. There's nothing here that'll frighten the horses. Which is a shame, because she was at her best (IMHO) when she was in a less languorous mood.
The title track is still so much better than its better-known cover version, and her version of Leonard Cohen's Suzanne really works.
My copy has a slightly pointless die cut sleeve where a piano is overlayed on the cover in two flaps. I have one flap missing.
Tinselwig
in reply to John Spithead • •John Spithead likes this.