So, where the previous Duke record I listened to was a collection of his compositions played by another group of players, Ellington ’55 is a legitimate Duke Ellington record, with the Duke himself behind the piano and the men who played with him playing his tunes the way they played them.
And there’s a huge difference between Ellington’s band and anyone else.
Truly, it does not mean a thing if it does not have that swing.
The Doors never returned to the jammy, poetic, psychedelic jazz rock of their first two albums, which is a true shame (this is said with complete ignorance to their post-Morrison catalogue).
While it was touted as a comeback for the Doors after a couple less-than-impressive albums, Morrison Hotel never strays too far from heavy blues rock, lingering in their trademark low-key, jazzy drone jams only briefly for Blue Sunday and the debut-outtake Indian Summer. The end result is an record that is nowhere near as interesting as their far superior first two. I’m not sure how much longer this has on my shelf.
When a debut album is as lauded and as scattered as The Doors’, there’s usually a couple of misfires before they find their niche and release another great record. The Doors not only managed to release a sophomore record that overshadowed its predecessor, but they did so within the same calendar year. And to tell the truth, Strange Days has always been my favorite Doors record.
For whatever reason, the Doors have a pretty soiled reputation among music aficionados. I do not understand this. Maybe it has something to do with the late Jim Morrison, a charismatic, controversy-stricken frontman obsessed with drugs, obscenity, and Greek literature who was the only (really) good looking member of the band, who’s death at 27 (which now at 25 I realize is even younger than I thought) exalted him to the same heights as Jimi Hendrix, Robert Johnson, and Janis Joplin. His face has been put on t-shirts and posters and (in more than one case) blankets with the heading “American Poet,” which is a difficult case to make in the face of people like Walt Whitman, e. e. cummings, Alan Ginsberg, and even fellow musician Bob Dylan (the fact that these t-shirts are worn by teenagers who have never read a poem outside of English class only exacerbates the resentment).
It’s telling that even though I’ve never listened to this record before in my life, I know every single word of the excellent title track. It’s not an accident that American Pie is still in heavy rotation on radio stations across the country–every word (of all six verses!) is perfect, and the shifting arrangement, from piano country ballad to honky tonk rock to acoustic ballad, mix together to create a song that’s as epic as it is intimate, and as timely as it is timeless, because let’s face it: how many people who love this song are still torn up about Buddy Holly?
Four years before Dumb Luck, Jimmy Tamborello found massive success as one half of indietronic darlings the Postal Service (the other half, of course, being Death Cab For Cutie’s Benjamin Gibbard).
And when I heard that the other guy from the Postal Service was releasing a record, I promise you that I wasn’t the only person who bought it without hearing anything he had done on his own before.
Usually, records this obtuse and dense don’t end up being very significant, let alone making any sort of appearance on the Billboard 200 (this peaked at #65). And while it may not necessarily sound weird sonically, like the acoustic guitar that accompanies mastermind David Longstreth’s tenor on the intro of Temecula Sunrise, whatever is going on here is enough to confound, like the rhythmic detours that same intro takes between measures, or the lyrics that pay no mind to the meter of the line singing them.
It’d be incredibly easy to write DIIV off as too trendy to be worthwhile. After all, their formula of Real Estate + Joy Division x Krautrock is tailor-made for Pitchfork’s Best New Music designation. Pitchfork also featured them in their Rising column when their name was still Dive, months before they had even finished this, their first LP. And inevitably, when this album finally dropped, the hype Pitchfork created around them culminated with the coveted “Best New Album” stamp on the top of the review (a portion of that review was featured on one of the stickers on the shrink wrap around the record when I bought it).