Music Reviews: Vinyl

It’s been over a month since drummer and pop songwriter extraordinaire Yukihiro Takahashi passed away at age 70, though acknowledging it still feels weird. It wasn’t unexpected—he was treated for brain tumors, and related pneumonia caught him in the end—but for 50 years, Takahashi never really slowed down and always seemed focus on what was next. Between his solo material, his work in Yellow Magic Orchestra and Sketch Show, other gigs like the Sadistic Mika Band, or... Read More

How do you know a reissue is a sonic success? There's no checklist but I've been playing an original pressing since it was first released and occasionally the Mobile Fidelity Anadisc 200 reissue, so when the stylus dropped onto "Jamming" (I always first play side 2) I wasn't expecting any major surprises.The opening drum flourish indicated a new level of transparency and clarity, which was nice to hear but the percussive jingle after Marley... Read More

Often it's a cry for attention or money when a veteran jazz artist releases a Christmas album or one of Beatles covers. Brad Mehldau's latest, an album of the latter with Bowie's meloncholic "Life on Mars" serving as a sort of denouement (or encore, as this is a live album recorded at the Philharmonie de Paris), is neither of those. Mehldau, 52, has been covering rock music without apology almost from the beginning of his recording career. His... Read More

Fast on the approach to 70, where do we find Robyn Hitchcock these days? For a start…lyrically opening his parlour door to “The Shuffle Man” – the spirit of disorder inhabits the kickoff track to his latest album. “He's sort of the cheeky face of Destiny really,” Hitchcock explained over the line from London. “Certainly in times like 2020.”Which is when the ethos of Shufflemania – his 22nd long player, partially came together. The turmoil of lockdown, as it turns... Read More

It has become customary for many film music old-schoolers like myself to lament the current propensity for the “Zimmerization” of movie scores: ie., the devolving of a film’s soundtrack into endless drum-circles and synthesized loops, harmonic stasis, motivic repetition, all of which have become the hallmarks of Hans Zimmer’s work of the last 20 years or so.Obviously this is a vast over-simplification, and not entirely fair to Zimmer himself, but his protégés and... Read More

"Wish", by English gothic rock band The Cure, was released just three months before I was born in 1992, and while this album might coincide with the beginning of my time on this earth, for The Cure, "Wish" was the bookend on a fruitful period of pop dominance in the late 80s. The band that once assembled barren, bleak post-punk landscapes on albums like "Faith" and "Pornography" had, by 1985, with the release of "Head on... Read More

Gabe Gurnsey is the former drummer of “post-industrial” band Factory Floor, but on the late 2022 LP “Diablo” he has teamed up with vocalist and girlfriend Tilly Morris to produce an electronic opus to dancing and lust. This release comes from Phantasy Records, run by English DJ Erol Alkan. Phantasy is also home to electronic producer and DJ Daniel Avery, and house and techno artists such as Fort Romeau and Red Axes. There is a strong flavour of 1980s electronic pop to... Read More

The Brazilian Bossa Nova flower had not yet bloomed in America when in 1959 the movie "Black Orpheus" became the Cannes Film Festival Grand Prize Winner. The movie is a re-telling of the Orpheus legend set in Rio de Janeiro with the Mardis Gras as backdrop. The music was by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luis Bonfa, one of whom, Jobim, would become a household name if not in 1963 when Stan Getz released Jazz Samba, then a year later when Getz/Gilberto exploded... Read More

Every so often, the artist usually known as Dean Blunt emerges from his residence in Hackney, London to appear at an event—to prove his existence, to reassert his status as art music’s most shadowy figure of current importance. The latest appearance was a DJ set at Miami Art Basel in December, for a party hosted by NTS Radio and NFT conmen Bored Ape Yacht Club. What did the rich NFT bros’ money get them? A fogged up stage and a bored Dean Blunt blasting Sleep’s... Read More

Vinyl Me Please could have had a home run with this beautiful-sounding and essential reissue, but fails miserably with an ugly cover sourced from a late '80s-era compact disc.

Cohearent Recording, Kevin Gray's new living room studio, which he jokingly calls "Hackensack West" was the venue for this, the first record released on Cohearent Records. The all-analog all-vacuum tube recording chain used to produce sound every RVG fan will swoon from was outlined in a video Gray recently posted on YouTube we've embedded here. So-Cal based jazz saxophonist/educator Kirsten Edkins, who's played in Bill Holman's Big Band,... Read More

What's unusual here is not the big band. James Brown toured and recorded with one throughout his career. "Soul On Top" is an outlier in the Brown catalog because he's backed by a jazz band— Louie Bellson's 18 piece orchestra—with arrangements by Oliver Nelson, who tried to conduct. Only saxophonist Maceo Parker, Jr. from Brown's band The J.B.s came along for the ride.Brown's 28th album, released in 1970 on King Records (KS1100) was... Read More

Frank Kimbrough, who died in December 2020 at the age of 64, was one of the great undersung jazz pianists of our time and an only-belatedly-appreciated composer of much talent as well. (Soon after his death, Newvelle Records assembled 67 musicians, in various ensembles, to play 58 of his pieces, many of which had the ring of standards. The resulting download-only album, "Kimbrough," was one of the best jazz albums of 2021.) Now Palmetto Records, his main... Read More

And as a recent perusal of the usual audiophile retail sites reveals, the latest limited edition reissue from ORG (Original Recordings Group) of this unique and spectacular record is very much in stock (even in some cases discounted), and so I felt it was the perfect time, indeed essential, to introduce Tracking Angle readers to this magical record.First, some background.The Mysterious World of Bernard Herrmann was just one of a series of records Bernard Herrmann... Read More

The pianist-composer Marta Sanchez has lived and actively worked in New York since moving here from Madrid in 2011; but, despite four albums as a leader and wide respect from fellow artists, she’s not nearly as well-known as she should be.Her latest album, SAAM (Spanish American Art Museum), on Whirlwind Recordings, available as a CD and as three sides of vinyl (2 LPs, one of them blank on one side), is a stellar display of her talents. She leads a standard jazz... Read More