Headphones through Time

  Alluvium was a digital album released by Eddie Rayner in 2016.  Eddie Rayner is the brilliant keyboardist wizard who was one of the main musical forces in the New Zealand band Split Enz, which those who know will know is one of my favorite all time bands: up there with the Beatles, The Beach Boys, and The Clash.  Eddie was not the chief songwriter, (Neil and Tim Finn were the main songwriters) but perhaps he was the chief architect of the Split Enz sound: a heady mix of prog, art-rock, pop and New Wave styles.  On Alluvium he delivered a rather long set of instrumentals that show the full range of his style: it's quirky and it's arty and there are bits of jazz and classical mixed in with the rock and pop stuff. It's all instrumentals and I suppose it's mainly good background music. If I ever open a coffee house, Eddie Rayner's full discography will be playing constantly. A few elements in the mix are lifted from Split Enz songs and there's at least one Split E...

  Neil Diamond has about five songs I love, ten songs I like, one song I hate and a whole lot of songs I coudn't possibly care less about. Still fifteen songs I like mean that a compilation makes more sense than buying songs piecemeal on iTunes or whatever. (Yes, I purchase music: physical form and digital form alike. I just have to, otherwise, there is too much choice.) This collection has almost all the songs I love and like. It also has the one song I hate and about seven or eight other songs I don't care about. About what I expected. Main quibble is for some reason the version of "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" is not the familiar duet with Barbara Streisand, but for some reason is a solo version. The song sucks without Streisand, and its surprisingly effective sentimental reminiscence on love gone stale just seems whiny when one singer is singing it, and even weirder when it's some ultra-masculine dude whining about not getting sent flowers anymore.  His pia...

  By 1970 George Harrison had built up a huge stockpile of songs to draw from for his first post-Beatles album (he had released a couple of albums earlier: the first one Wonderwall is actually a pretty good psychedelic/raga rock record; the second one, Electronic Sound is total shit, an "avant-garde"  rip off that John and Yoko could be proud of: one side is literally taken from an uncopyrighted sample on a Moog synthesizer. He literally just copied it and sold it as some original work.) Anyway, it turned out, that George Harrison's stockpile of songs was actually very good: so good that he was able to relase a double album with All Things Must Pass, and not only a double album but one of the great double albums of all time, with excellent, tuneful, intelligent songs that go from acoustic soft rock, to country-pop, to Dylan-esque folkish singer-songwriter, (George's friend, Bobby D. in fact wrote or co-wrote a pair of songs here)to straight up pop to pure guitar blar...

  All The Great Hits was a compilation of Diana Ross's solo career on Motown Records releaed in 1981 (I think) and  it pretty much collects all the great hits (as the title would suggest) as well as a couple of hits that aren't that great.  The original release on this was on double vinyl, which perhaps explains the rather weird tracklist which puts ballads as the first four songs (i.e. the first side). Most of the rest of the collection is culled from her later stuff, especially the disco era. And then Side 4 comes and there's a thirteen miinute (or so) Medley of Supremes Hits, Stars on 45 Style. Completely unneccessary for me, so that's a skipper.  On CD the tracklist comes off as unbalanced and rather unvaried, but the songs are mostly all good (save for the Medley and a maybe one of the ballads, which is a bit generic movie soundtrack pop balladry.) I rearrange this into a chronological playlist and cut the medley completely, as I have all of those songs elsewher...

The legend goes that The Beach Boys, the biggest band in the world in 1963,  were so frightened and shocked by The Beatles crashing onto American shores like a rock tsunami in early 1964, that Brian Wilson and Mike Love sat down with the intention of writing their best batch of songs yet.  The Beach Boys had kept their heads above water during this initial wave of Beatlemania, but only barely. Most bands and artists were washed away into far to the HasBeen Sea, with only The Beach Boys, The Neo-doo wop group The Four Seasons and the mighty Motown many-headed hydra staying afloat in the British flash flood (man, the water metaphors...almost unavoidable, though.) While the The Beach Boys' popularity and song-quality would increased due to this spirit of competition, they would never really challenge The Beatles on commercial terms, but they did deliver their best batch of songs to date here,  including the number one hit "I Get Around"and the familiar "Little Honda...

  All Over The Place was the Bangles first full length album and the first album with new bassist Michael Steele (who had actually been a founding member of The Runaways.) The Bangles maybe aren't as respected as I think they should be, probably because their massive late eighties success created a backlash -- though I will eventually argue that, as late eighties commercial groups go, they were actually one of the greatest.  But be that as it may, this debut album is something different than the massive synths and programmed drums of later albums would indicate: almost completely self-contained, with all of the songs penned by Susannah or Vicki and not a session muscian in sight, All Over The Place sounds like a lost record from 1966: jangly, sunshine,  driving pop rock songs with gorgeous harmonies and great vocals from all four (Debbie, Vicki and Susannah all sing lead. It's very L.A. sixgties retro, but in a good way, like a mash up of Beatles, Byrds and the Monkees; a...

  All Four One i s an album that I bought on a whim on the strength of it's incredible hit "Only The Lonely." Both "Only the Lonely" and the Motels other big hit "Suddenly Last Summer" are gorgeous slices of mature pop that bring tears to my eyes with their beauty. I believe that this album was their most commercially successful, and for a short time singer Martha Davis seemed on the brink of big stardom.  My understanding is that the success of theiir singles unbalanced the band and created turmoil and they ended up going too commercial.  But this album was a one-time listen for me. It tries valiantly to tread a line between dark, almost Gothic post-punk and pop/rock and mostly fails: it's just dated all around the songs aren't that good (not that they are terrible, mind, just unmemorable) and the easy brilliance of "Only The Lonely" far and away overshadows everything else on this album. Except for maybeGoffin-King's classic ode...

  The Album That Never Was is a curious compilation released in 1987 by The Kinks. It compiles ten Dave Davies tracks released or recorded in the late sixties or so. For those who don't know, Dave Davies was the lead guitarist and "second, junior" songwriter to his big brother Ray Davies, whose songs dominate and mostly define The Kinks.  A Kinks album track in 1967 ("Death of a Clown") was released as a single billed to Dave Davies, and it was an unexpected hit. Much talk of a Dave Davies solo album followed. Over the next couple of years, Dave released a couple of singles that were also to be included on his first solo albums, whose working title was A Hole In the Sock of Dave Davies. The singles flopped and the album never was released, though a few more songs showed up as Kinks B-sides.  Nowadays all of those Dave Davies songs are included on deluxe or super deluxe versions of late sixties Kinks albums ( Something Else, Village Green Preservation Society, Ar...

  ABBA: The Album sees  Benny 'n' Björn in their most ambitious mode: nearly every song is a grandly dramatic big production piece.  For the most part they hit their mark, and most of the songs are actually deceptively deep, from the grand cinemascape of "The Eagle" to the playful enticement of  "Take a Chance on Me", to the longing "The Name of the Game" and the sweet mid-century European ball-room strains of "Thank You for The Music".  A lot of the sillier, pop-for-pop's sake seemed to be jetisoned on this album  and are replaced with  these grand symphonic production pieces, though we get a bit of the old school Abba on the delightfully silly "Hole In Your Soul".   Slight quibbles: A lighter  production touch might have made the country-ish "One Man One Woman" come off better, and the last trio of songs, culled from the band's touring musical of the earlier in the year lays on the theatricality show-tune thi...