7 February 2013 – Love Will Keep Us Together (Day 38)

Let’s face it.  It’s become apparent I’ve started to select albums thematically to fit the blog entry I’ve decided to write on the day. Then there are other days, like today, where I take some albums, play stuff as the mood hits me and then try to make sense of my selections whilst in the act of writing the post.

I knew today wasn’t going to provide much opportunity as I had a number of commitments and meetings.  It could possibly explain why the two albums I did play were both albums where there is a sort of variety to the song selection.  No real point in playing a conceptually linked album or something that is designed to be consumed whole, is there?

But then I had to think of a title for the post.  Ideally, I try to link something to a song, album or band title or my own rituals such as delving into the plastic pending crate.  Nothing came for a while until I realised there was sort of a family connection, expect in one instance, the couple concerned are not married.  So I though some more and all I could come up with was the reference to the Captain And Tennille’s hit which seems quite perverse when today I’m writing about:

(110) Dave Rawlings Machine – A Friend Of A Friend

Rawlings is the musical and life partner of Gillian Welch.  Theirs is a true partnership; he plays on her albums and appears on her CD booklets, and she does the reverse.  They both co-write many of the songs that appear on their albums and play at each other’s shows.   Although this album is credited to the Dave Rawlings Machine, it is really a Rawlings solo album, or a Rawlings/Welch album in which Rawlings does most of the lead vocals.  (Why they don’t release all of their albums under a Rawlings/Welch or Welch/Rawlings moniker with each of them singing the numbers they predominantly wrote, a la using one totally inappropriate example, the Bob Mould/Grant Hart songs within Husker Du is totally beyond me.)  To me it is another excellent album with a great combination of bluegrass, Americana and country styled tunes. The Rawlings/Welch tunes are of their usual high quality, especially the opener Ruby which sounds like a great undiscovered song by The Band.   Other highlights are covers; Method Acting/Cortez The Killer welds a Bright Eyes track to one of Neil Young’s classics with a change in lead vocalist at the appropriate moment and To Be Young (Is To be Sad, To Be High) is Rawlings version of the song he and Ryan Adams wrote and performed on the latter’s Heartbreaker album.

(111) Martha Wainwright – Self Titled

This is the debut album by the daughter of Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III and sister to Rufus Wainwright.  It is a great mix of soft rock, soul and folk.  It’s notable for two things.  First the sheer power of her voice that is clearly able to adjust to songs with varying degrees of difficulty. Anyone who can, on my version of the album, take a song in French such as Dis, Quand Reviendras-Tu? and make it her sound like own clearly has a talent.  (And, yes, being born and raised in Canada helps too!)  The other is the unforgettable Bloody Mother F***ing A**hole, a song reputedly aimed squarely at her father. 

6 February 2013 – Music For Solo Road Trips (Day 37)

My job occasionally takes me into country Victoria to visit one of three locations.  Today was the first trip for the year and I was off after dropping “M” at the train station.

Unless I’m going to the footy or “M” has a day off, these trips are usually the only time I get to drive alone.  Given that we spend our travel time talking, these solo country trips are usually the only time I have the car stereo to myself.  My trips take a minimum of an hour to complete one way, so it provides a great opportunity to listen to a lengthy album or multi disc set and without “M”, I can also play some of the more extreme music (to her ears, not mine) in my collection.  In any case I like the idea of bring gratuitous urban noise to the peace and quiet of the country.

But, for once, I was in no doubt what I was going to play first, having decided the night before:

(107) My Bloody Valentine – Loveless

This is one of the absolute cornerstones of my collection,  an album that redefined the way I conceived of what constituted music. Is it a psychedelic album? Yes.  Does it revel in noise? Absolutely.  Feedback?  Yep.  Other things you can’t make out? By the bucket load.  It is an ambitious sprawling behemoth of a record melding sheer noise with effects, differing styles and song craft.  To these ears, there are effectively two layers of sound.  First there is an outer shell of continuous noise and effects which appears to never let up – there isn’t a note of silence anywhere on the album.  The songs constitute its inner core and these emerge, at times almost magically, from the abyss.  (The prime illustration is the last 40 seconds of rhythmic noise that marks the end of the delicate To Here Knows When as well as the start of the brilliant When You Sleep.)  This pattern is more or less continuous for almost the length of the album.  The penultimate track What You Want ends with 60 seconds of presumably a loop of electronic effects foreshadowing the dance beats that underpins the amazing closer Soon.  After listening to this the first time, suddenly a whole lot of music made a lot more sense to me.  For example, I was finally able to listen and appreciate PsychoCandy and Sonic Youth started to feel a lot more conventional.  It provided a form of framework that has allowed me to comprehend and appreciate a range of other acts that were even more extreme, such as Swans, Sun o))) and Boris and to distinguish them from lesser acts. And all that is before considering the range of acts that have no doubt been influenced by it.   No wonder it took 22 years for Kevin Shields to think about, conceive and record a follow up.

(108) Primal Scream – XTRMNTR

Kevin Shields was more or less a member of Primal Scream when they recorded this album.  It has a much harsher tone than the band’s previous output, one that is more in tune with Loveless.  At its best – and make no mistake, this is Primal Scream’s best album – tracks meld the Loveless sonic attack with great rock.  As a result the album is, among others, home to the extraordinary Accelerator, the relentless Swastika Eyes and the soundtrack-esque Blood Money.  But as great as this album undoubtedly is, it paled into insignificance when the band (with Shields) toured this album.  The show I saw at The Palace on 29 January 2000 is close to the very best gig I’ve ever seen with each track played with an intensity that bordered on the insane.

(109) Mogwai – EP + 6

Mogwai is a Scottish band that plays often heavily distorted instrumentals and has plainly been influenced by My Bloody Valentine among others.  This CD brings together 3 EPs for one 70+ minute album. The longest track here, Stereodee stretches for 13 and a half minutes sounding for the most part like The Beatles final cord on A Day In The Life played by massed guitars complete with feedback and effects.  There are wonderfully nuanced slower and atmospheric tunes such as Stanley Kubrick as well as tracks like the 11 minute Xmas Steps and  the wonderful closer Rage: Man which utilises the slow/fast/slow template they were to perfect on subsequent albums and especially on their classic track Like Herod.

5 February 2013 (Day 36) – My Bloody Coincidental Valentine

It was an extremely busy day at work and was able to listen to only one album.  It was:

(106) Steve Wynn – Dazzling Display

Steve Wynn has made a number of albums since the demise of the band with which he originally made his name, The Dream Syndicate.  (That is, The Dream Syndicate, one of the leading lights of the 1980’s so called “Paisley Underground”, not 1960's The Dream Syndicate, the avant-guard act containing underground legends such as La Monte Young and John Cale.)  This is the second album released under his name and arguably his best.  There is more light and share in these songs unlike the denser sounds of, especially the latter albums, his former band with only the single Drag and the track 405 sounding like outtakes from a Dream Syndicate record.  Bonnie And Clyde continued the tradition established on his first album, Kerosene Man, by talking the form of a duet with Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano.  My version is a deluxe edition containing six live tracks recorded for various radio stations, among them Sonic Youth’s Kool Thing, Paul Simon’s Boy In The Bubble and Bob Dylan’s Watching the River Flow.

Late in the afternoon I was finally able to check my work emails.  After dealing with the ones that required immediate attention, I saw one from a former colleague of mine who now works elsewhere.  He altered me that over the weekend just passed, My Bloody Valentine had released their new album (titled m b v) over the internet.   As soon as I read this, the sound  “ahhhhh” escaped from my lips as I realised one of life’s bizarre coincidences. 

On 15 November 1991, I was in the audience at the Prince of Wales Hotel, St Kilda for the third night of the band’s first Australian tour.  Their album Loveless was released a week or two prior to that night.  I remember that show well as it was my introduction to the band after agreeing to take a punt based on another colleague’s recommendation.  The venue was absolutely packed and it was difficult to see the band as the show took place during a time when the Prince Of Wales had a very low stage.  But despite this, the band blew me away. I’m not completely certain how much of Loveless was played that night, but I knew I was impressed by the immense power (and loudness), particularly of “that really long number” which was later identified for my benefit as You Made Me Realise. I was standing not far away from the mixing desk; on top of a speaker there was a projector which ran super 8 footage over the stage making for a psychedelic effect that meshed brilliantly with the music.

So what’s the coincidence?  On next Saturday, 16 February, My Bloody Valentine will be appearing in Melbourne for the first time since that 1991 show.  And once again, it will be about 2 weeks since the release of their last album.

It’s also given me an idea for tomorrow……

4 February 2013 (Day 35) – Weekly purchase update

It was a long day at work in the office as my colleague Jack had the day off.  Still it was a good opportunity to catch up on my purchases from the past week.

(101) Ornette Coleman – Twins

I’d never heard of this album when I came across it on Saturday.  According to the liner notes, this was an outtakes album released in 1971 of sessions made during Coleman’s brief time on Atlantic Records between 1959-1961.  All tracks were made by a quartet led by him and also featuring trumpet player Don Cherry (father of Neneh).  The main reason to hear this album is its opening track, an alternative version of First Take, an epic track also featuring Eric Dolphy and Freddie Hubbard.  It seemingly starts off at a random cacophonous point and susequently rises and falls in intensity for seventeen minutes.  At times, it employs a bare bones approach that reminded me very much of the later and equally intriguing Don Ellis movie soundtrack to The French Connection, a real favourite of mine.  The remaining tracks are all good but pale in comparison.  Perhaps these should have been sequenced first.

(102) Kaki King – Dreaming Of Revenge

Like many, I first became aware of King when she toured Australia with The Foo Fighters around 2007 and played on their instrumental track dedicated to the Beaconsfield miners.  That has coloured many people’s perceptions of her music, obscuring some of the stylistic shifts she has made.  For this album, she employed Malcolm Burn as producer and his production values are very much in evidence here.  A warm sound is wrapped around this combination of instrumentals and gentler songs making the latter sound eerily like an Ani DiFranco recording.  Her renowned guitar playing is subdued here, basically limited to subtle flourishes and it is only on album closer 2 O’Clock that she appears to let fly.  But the highlight is the preceding track, a lengthy instrumental with one of the longer titles in my collection; Can Anyone Who Has Heard This Music Really Be A Bad Person?

(103) La Dusseldorf – Self Titled

This was part of my first internet delivery from overseas for the year.  La Dusseldorf was the first project initiated by Klaus Dinger after the breakup of Neu! following their ’75 album.  Anyone wanting to get into 70s German experimental music (with or without exposure to Kraftwerk) might very well wish to start with this.  Tracks here are generally more up tempo than usual and, for the first time, I can distinguish non German influences at work, particularly on the title track which has a distinct Roxy Music feel to it.  This is understandable; Roxy’s Brian Eno recorded with Cluster and Harmonica, similar bands of the era but neither included Dinger. The highlight of this disk is the opening track, Dusseldorf, which is about as frantic as any track from this scene that I’ve heard to date.  (For the record, Dusseldorf does not feature in the titles of the two remaining tracks.)

(104) Laibach – Laicachkunstderfuge

Let’s break down that title.  This album is by the Slovenian industrial/prog act Laibach.  Included in the band’s name are the letters bach, as in the classical composer J.S Bach.  Separate the remainder and add a die and you have Bhe title of Bach’s unfinished piece, Die Kunst der Fuge.  Apparently Bach did not specify the instrumentation for this piece and so Laibach decided to turn it into a piece of electronica.  It’s another of the intriguing concepts Laibach has pursued over the years including their re-recording of The Beatles Let It Be album, an album with seven different versions of The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy For The Devil, and Volk, an album that seems to be about various countries of Europe based on their respective national anthems.  Once you become accustomed to the concept, the album does actually sound like an electronic version of classical music with about a 10-15 sequence where it threatens to become a fully-fledged industrial track.  An interesting listen and one I’ll need to come back to, although as I’m not a classical music buff in the slightest, I don’t know how radically the source material has been reinterpreted.

(105) Kathryn Williams and Neill MacColl – Two

Kathryn Williams is an English singer/songwriter with a wonderful voice.  I’d been impressed by her Little Black Numbers album and, as her albums seem to be rarely stocked here, jumped at the opportunity to get this.  The songs are all delicate with MacColl providing guitar, dulcimer and autoharp and Williams, guitars, organ, harmonium and melotron.  Given that combination, it is no surprise to hear that there is a Tom Waits cover (Innocent When You Dream) and that the overall effect of the album is not unlike the wonderful sounds made by Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings.

3 February 2013 (Day 34) – Marley, I and I

Last night, I finally started watching a documentary I’d had in my possession for a few months and then completed viewing today.

(Audio Visual 4) – Marley

Released last year, this is a documentary of the Bob Marley life story.   Given that it is released by Tuff Gong Pictures, presumably an offshoot of Tuff Gong Records Marley’s record label, it is probably the closest thing to a documentary authorised by the Marley estate.  Usually, I shy away from authorised biographies, visual or written, as these usually airbrush the subject who usually has had the final say.  However, it is to the credit of all concerned that nothing of substance appears to have been ignored (which, of course, is easier to do when your subject has been dead for 31 years).  This covers everything, including Bob’s childhood, his earliest adventures in the record industry, fondness for soccer, ganja and women, tours, the assassination attempt, his battle with cancer and eventual death.  There is great footage from key moments in his life including the Smile Jamaica Concert (held a few days after the attempt on his life), his final ever show and his funeral.   Everyone of note in the story is interviewed on camera including various Wailers, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Rita and Ziggy Marley and an honest Chris Blackwell justifying his decision to “rock up” the soul of the band’s debut Catch A Fire for the benefit of non-Jamaican audiences.  (The live footage in support of this is musically sensational.) Even one of his school teachers gets a word in.  A number of clever devices are used to maintain the story without ever needing to resort to a narrator.  These include, radio or TV accounts, simple statements placed on screen and, in a number of telling moments, Marley’s own voice.  Add this to some stunning shots of the Jamaican countryside that eloquently explain his roots and the result is one of the finest documentaries of a musical figure I’ve ever witnessed.

Although Marley is reggae’s most well known figure, I know that I didn’t develop an appreciation of the genre due to his mighty efforts.  I didn’t know enough about reggae generally or Marley in particular when he played his only shows in Melbourne during 1979.  I knew it was a big deal and, wanting to develop an appreciation, asked the only person I knew who was into reggae to loan me an album.  This turned out to his second live album, Babylon By Bus and I didn’t warm to it at all.  Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, I suspect this was due to my then hatred of disco which I found monotonous due to its repetitious nature.  Anything at the time which reminded me of that was automatically consigned to the same fate.

But, bit by bit, I started to develop an understanding and it was a range of rock acts that helped me get there.  At the time I listened to Babylon By Bus, Elvis Costello had already released Watching The Detectives which I didn’t realise was based on a reggae rhythm.  In the next couple of years came The Pretenders' Brass In Pocket which employed a subtler rhythm and the Peter Tosh/Mick Jagger duet Don’t Look Back.  (Yes, I know now that Tosh is a reggae act, but let’s face it, if Jagger wasn’t on the record, it wouldn’t have been played on the radio here.)  But it was two acts that really deserve the credit.  The obvious one was, of course, The Police, whose first couple of albums effectively took reggae and by mashing it with rock made it palatable enough for me to eventually investigate the real thing.  The other was The Clash, and more specifically, their criminally undervalued opus, Sandinista!  This was the record which opened my ears to dub.  I was fascinated by One More Time, and One More Dub from that record as well as the third disc of the original vinyl release.  I could hear sounds and rhythms that I hadn’t heard before and I suspect my curiosity constituted the first realisation there were beats or rhythms other than the standard rock could possibly exist that I would like to hear and like (and which wasn’t disco).  Eventually I obtained their Black Market Clash mini album too and gave that a battering.  Over the course of the next 10-20 years, I started adding basic reggae texts  into my collection; Marley’s Live! , Legend and the Songs Of Freedom box set, The Harder They Come soundtrack, Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Super Ape, Burning Spear’s Marcus Garvey/Garvey’s Ghost, the multi artist Tougher Than Tough box set, the Perry box set Arkology and compilations by Toots And The Maytals, Third World, Aswad, etc.  I appreciated these without feeling the need to delve deeper….

Then one day I was going through a JB HiFi bargain bin in the now closed Camberwell store on Burke Road.  I came across a sampler titled Dubwise And Otherwise issued by a British reggae label called Blood And Fire.  The music was extraordinary; a mixture of prime 70’s roots reggae, DJ and dub.  The liner notes identified the albums from their catalogue which included such soon to be discovered gems as Keith Hudson’s Pick A Dub and The Congos mighty Heart Of The Congos.  It began to dawn on me that a Blood And Fire album was a guarantee of quality and over the course of the next few years I accumulated the bulk of their catalogue, including albums by giants such as King Tubby, I-Roy and Yabby You.  I even lucked out and picked up a copy of their long deleted version of Burning Spear’s classic Social Living.

Blood And Fire do not appear to have released anything for a few years now.  Fortunately, other reggae reissue labels have emerged to fill the gap, notably Pressure Sounds, and the bottomless gold mine that fuels the Trojan Records programme.  Trojan has released an amazing variety of multi artist compilations, thematic two or three disc box sets and two disc anthologies of key artists such as Horace Andy, The Heptones, Prince Far I and many others.  And Tuff Gong has released the two disc Collector’s Editions of the key Marley albums, most of which contain live material far superior to Babylon By Bus.

There are some great guide books such as Lloyd Bradley’s Reggae On CD (now a little outdated but valuable in its time) and his narrative history Bass Culture.  Jon Savage described the vital role reggae played in the punk era in the text of England’s Dreaming as well as providing guidance in its awesome discography.   These sources have enabled me to isolate yet other classics; The Abyssinians Satta Massagana, Culture’s Two Seven’s Clash, Ossie Hibbert’s Earthquake Dub and Augustus Pablo’s King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown. 

Collectively, this voyage of discovery has made me realise that there is a great deal more to reggae than Bob Marley.  Although his legacy looms large, artists such as Lee Perry, King Tubby, Jimmy Cliff, Burning Spear, Toots And The Maytals and many others have produced music that is every bit as vital.

2 February 2013 (Day 33) – Derek, Eric Clapton and Me

It was a fine morning.  I woke up, walked Lady and then had a coffee with “M” who reminded me that I have an appointment with my dentist.  Now anyone reading this might just think that the first sentence of this post is intended as an ironic comment or simply an avoidance of reality.  Fortunately my dentist is not an odontic monster such as Laurence Olivier’s character in Marathon Man but is one of my oldest and closest friends.

I met Derek at secondary school in the same class we shared with Mickey.  It didn’t take long before Derek and I realised we were kindred spirits.  With an ancestral heritage back to the same neck of the Mediterranean woods, we bonded over a fanatical determination to succeed academically and other interests.  In this instance these were soccer (Derek was an exceptional player), tennis (many a summer’s holiday spent at tournaments at either Kooyong or Melbourne Park) and music.   

Derek’s musical taste has never diversified one bit over the decades I’ve known him.  There has been no wearing of skinny new wave ties, no dabbling in electronica, not even a spandex wearing, head banging heavy metal phase.   Rather, Derek has devoted a lifetime to the most noble and dignified of genres, The Blues, or even more specifically, the Blues Guitar.  Within that sphere, Derek has moved with the times.  Whilst his love for the classic guitarists - Albert King, Albert Collins, B.B King,  Buddy Guy, etc has remained, I’ve seen it encompass the rise and death of the great  Stevie Ray Vaughn and onto a range of present day gunslingers, notably Derek Trucks and Joe Bonamassa.   Derek and his older brother caught a gig by Bonamassa recently.  In fact, one of the most predictable aspects of my musical life is that if I’m going to a gig by a visiting blues guitarist, Derek will be somewhere in the audience, usually with his brother.  When we catch up, I don’t need to ask if he saw, say, Eric Clapton recently.  All I have to do is ask “How was Eric?” and the response will come.

But perhaps that example is too obvious.  For Derek, Eric Clapton stands head and shoulders above all.  Do you know a football or sporting fanatic who waits for the release of the fixture for the next season before submitting applications for leave for the year?  Derek decides which weeks he’ll be available at his practice based on Clapton’s annual run of shows at the Royal Albert Hall in London.  He’s attended over a few years, each time taking in multiple gigs.  The same applies this year, should he decide to go. He already has tickets to three shows.  As he treats me, Derek fills me on the latest Clapton news.  There’s a new album coming, a world tour that he fears will probably miss Australia and the 2 disc Collector’s Edition of Slowhand has been released.  Naturally he’s already got it and is very enthusiastic about the live material on the second disc.  It also encouraged some experimentation on his part. He went through his Collection, found that with the Slowhand package, he now has nine versions of After Midnight and decided to play them all in succession.  When I seek permission to write about him and ask if he wants a psedonym for this post, the answer comes immediately.  “How about Derek?”  I don’t need to ask whether this is a reference to his favourite Clapton album.

But  one thing about Derek has always intrigued me.  How does someone fix on a musical path so early in life and then maintain it?  I finally asked him the question and the answer is one of the great rock clichés and one that has never applied to me.  It is the influence of an older brother – the one with whom he still gigs – and his record collection. As I journey home, I muse over this; how would my tastes have evolved if I had an older brother with a collection?  Would it have been dramatically different?  Would it have removed the initial basis for determining some of the closest friends I have?  I know I haven’t influenced any of my siblings, or “M” for that matter, very much so decide to let the question remain unanswered.  Life is a lot less complicated when you just accept your friends (and wife) for just being there rather than torture yourself about how you might never have met. 

On that vaguely blues note, today’s listening was limited to the album I played whilst writing this post.  Deciding against a Clapton album, I went for one by two of the very best blues guitarists;

(100) Albert King and Stevie Ray Vaughn – In Session

Derek has probably forgotten but he gave me my copy not so long after this album was originally released.  (Then again, I’ve forgotten what I gave in return.)  This is a recording of a TV performance these two giants made for a Canadian television program which provides the album title.  The set features King’s then band and Vaughn and contains some real blues classics. Call It Stormy Monday, Blues At Sunrise and Don’t Lie to Me are the highlights and a great interplay between them is apparent.  King apparently claimed not to know about  SRV  when the idea for this show was first pitched but he then remembered he was “this skinny little kid” he played with in Austin 20 years previously.  He mustn’t have been that familiar with his output up to that stage because only one SRV track is included.  The version of Pride And Joy here, which King confusingly refers to as that “rap thing”, is one of the better renditions of this I’ve heard.  If you don’t have a release by either act, this is as good a place to start as any other.

1 February 2013 (Day 32) – iPod space death matches # 1-3

In the ongoing battle to find space on my iPod for future additions, I’ve had to make tough decisions about what to add and leave out.   

Until recently just about anything new I obtained was imported so I could listen to it whenever I wanted.  The purchase of the boom box for work has meant that I no longer need to do this as I can play the disc before making the decision to import. 

I have basically one criteria now that an album must meet in order to be the granted the ultimate accolade of an iPod import.  It must be an album I love listening to in its entirety.  I don’t subscribe to the digital notion of selecting choice tracks because I’ve never collected songs.   I collect and listen to albums; always have, always will.   My emphasis on listening to albums means I do not omit any tracks from albums on the iPod except in the most exceptional of circumstances.  This means tracks which I particularly loathe (such as More Than Words by Extreme from Pornograffiti ); tracks that annoy me to the point of wanting to commit violence (prime example, Her Majesty from Abbey Road; why anyone would want to hear that after The End has brought that suite to a glorious and definitive conclusion is beyond me); oddities or jokes that no one in their mind would want to hear even once (such as the hidden Mudhoney track at the end of, I think, their Piece Of Cake album which is the entire album played backwards); or, sometimes unfortunately, hidden tracks that are “part” of the final track having been preceded by 10 or more minutes of silence.   (The classic example here being the Something In The Way/silence/Endless Nameless track at the end of Nevermind.)

 I also have no problems whatsoever with my practice of not importing bonus cuts tacked onto the end of extended versions of reissued albums.   Those that have made it to iPod immortalisation are exceptional tracks in their own right, such as most of the non-demo tracks at the end of the extended reissues of the early Elvis Costello albums, contemporaneous  singles recorded and released at the same time as an album (such as Hey Joe, Stone Free, Purple Haze and The Wind Cries Mary which now all appear at the end of Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced), exceptional one off contributions to charity or tribute albums (such as the Pavement tribute to R.E.M, Unseen Power Of The Picket Fence, among the mass of bonus tracks included on the first disc of the Collector’s Edition of their seminal Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain album), or exceptional B-Sides from singles lifted off the album (a good example here being Patti Smith’s version of The Who’s My Generation, the only track appended to the end of the reissued version of Horses).

Otherwise the only reason I will not import a track is simply to prevent a duplication or worse of the same recording of a track.  Invariably that means a track has appeared in both its original album context and a compilation.  If that is the case, it is the duplicate on the compilation that gets the flick.  If a song is duplicated because it exists in two or more compilations, a decision is made based on the merits of the compilations in question.

Additionally, I’m also prepared to delete tracks from single artist compilations and, especially, box sets.  After all most Best Of or Greatest Hits compilations are arbitrary selections in the first instance and so there is no real harm to the conceptual unity of the record.  Sometimes, in fact, deletions actually assists in developing an appreciation for the act.  Recently, for example, I purchased a 4 disc compilation of Carter Family tracks entitled Country Folk.  Listening to it, I realised (backed up by the liner notes) that the Carters released all of their truly memorable and ground-breaking material relatively early in their careers.  Whilst the entire package is a good one, I’ve only put the first disc on.  Occasionally, I do the same thing with live albums, especially with long indulgent tracks featuring guitar, bass and drum solos, triple or box disc sets or crowd calls for encores masquerading as a track.

But all of these practices do not free up sufficient amounts of space to place a large number of new albums.  An iPod space death match occurs when I decide to review two albums, usually by the same artist, with a view towards deciding whether to delete one or both.  Sometimes, neither occurs and both are spared. 

Today’s listening on an otherwise wholly unremarkable day, comprised 6 albums forming the first three death matches for the year.

Death Match 1

(94) Grinderman – Self Titled
(95) Grinderman – Grinderman 2

Grinderman is the band formed by Nick Cave with just a few members of the Bad Seeds.  The debut album begins with Get It On a declaration of sorts with Cave bellowing the need to start over again and getting in the basement.  This is one hell of a gritty album with a primeval feel pervading raucous tracks such as the titled track, No Pussy Blues, Depth Charge Ethel and Homey Bee (Let’s Fly To The Moon).  (I Don’t Need You To) Set Me free is a grand scale ballad that fits in well within the chaos.  The follow up is a fine record in its own right but pales in comparison to its older brother.  The second half of the album contains tracks such as Evil and Palaces Of Montezuma that really sound like proper Bad Seeds tracks.

Verdict: Grinderman by a knockout.

Death Match 2

(96) The Dead Weather – Horehound
(97) The Dead Weather – Sea Of Cowards

The Dead Weather is one of the bands put together by Jack White formerly of The White Stripes.  The first album was reputedly put together accidentally as circumstances led to the musicians finding each other as White was recording some tracks.  This seems to be confirmed by the album which employs – by White’s standards anyway – a variety of styles.  A couple of tracks towards the end, New Pony and Bone House employed a heavier, bluesier style not generally associated with White’s other bands.  This view appears to have been shared by the band as Sea Of Cowards picks up from these tracks.  The result is an album that is more cohesive and a significant improvement.  Old Mary, The Difference Between Us and Die By The Drop ranks among the finest tracks in the White portfolio.  In many ways, this is a repeat of what happened with White’s other non White Stripes project from the era, The Saboteurs (or The Raconteurs in countries other than Australia) where the second album Consolers Of The Lonely was a major leap forward from the debut.

Verdict: Sea Of Cowards decisively.

Death Match 3

(98) The Only Ones – Self Titled
(99) The Only Ones – Even Serpents Shine

Oh dear what was I even thinking in trying to match these up!  I suspect the vague reasoning in my mind went something like, “Well, the self titled album has Another Girl, Another Planet and City Of Fun on it and perhaps the other will pale in comparison”.  No.  Let’s just make two basic points here.  First, the Only Ones produced magical power pop in the punk era and these are their two best albums.  Second, if anyone wants to understand The Strokes’ main inspiration just play them these two albums, especially Even Serpents Shine. 

Verdict: Otis.Youth knocks himself out.