Headphones through Time

 BARB is an one-off album by the Kiwi supergroup BARB, which was comprised of New Zealand indie rockers Liam Finn, Connan Moccasin, Lawrence of Arabia and Eliza-Jane Barnes (who might be Australian, but I believe lives in Auckland.) They have support here from a few other names from the New Zealand indie scene like Jol Muholland and Seamus Ebbs.  BARB was mostly written and recorded by the three main songwriters (Liam, Connan and Lawrence) in about a month at Liam's father's studio Roundhead STudios in Auckland. It was not meant to be taken too seriously, with the various members adding their bits without a lot of fuss or angst about things.  The music is kind of a dark, murky psychedelic pop thing that doesn't really sound like much else that I've encoutered, other than the work that the respective artists make on their own, of course.Fans of these artists will like the album, but most people have never heard of them, so it's no surprise this was not a smash hit. T...

 In 1966 Bob Dylan broke the momentum of his career when he was involved in a motorcycle and allegedly broke his neck. He spent most of the next year recuperating in his home at Big Pink in Woodstock, New York and recording dozens of demos with his backing band, which was rapidly developing from The Hawks into The Band. At the same time, The Band was recording thier debut album, Music From Big Pink, regarded as one of the classics of 1968. Many of these demos were compiled on a bootleg, perhaps the first ever bootleg: Great White. A few years later in 1975,  in order to beat the bootleggers, an album of the basement session called, appropriately enough, The Basement Tapes was compiled and released, along with eight songs by The Band, which were in fact recorded later but which  were mixed in such a way that they sounded as if they were recorded at the same time and place as the Dylan songs. Including the songs by  The Band was probably dishonest and misleading, and ...

  Arrival was Abba's fourth album, which was long labored over, to good results: it was a huge seller, even going gold in the stubbornly resistant American market, thanks to the giganto-hit "Dancing Queen", still in it's one of the most perfectly written pop songs of all time. The immortal image of the 17 year old girl awash in the first innocent glow of her full physical and sexual power dancing alone under the blue lights strikes tears in my eyes every single time I hear it. I'ts so perfect. .. Like their previous self-titled album  Arrival  runs through a lot of styles and moods, but the the album overall comes off as even more adult and overtly sexual: while the first two songs celebrate innocent girlhood: (girlish fantasies of kissing teacher, the innocent abandon of the 70s teen disco,) the themes seem to progress from innocence to materialistic and sexual cynicism. But the album never breaks a sweat doing this: it all still goes down like ice-cream. The de...

  The American Dream was an album that Emitt Rhodes recorded for A&M Records in the late sixties after his amazing psychedelic pop band The Merry-Go-Round broke up and he still owed them a record. Had they released it, it might very well have been released under the name The Merry-Go-Round, but in fact it is a solo album, self-produced by Rhodes and recorded with The Wrecking Crew. A&M sat on the record for a couple of years, releasing it only when Rhodes was releasing another album: his official debut,  Emitt Rhodes. Emitt Rhodes is a bit of a cult figure: a singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist from Hawthorne California (I swear there is something in the water there!), he recorded a few albums in a relatively short time, didn't sell anything and then decided to stuff the record industry  and became an engineer for his own studio in Hawthorne.  But the flame was kept burning by various retro-minded groups and musicians over the year, notably The Bangles w...

  The Bangles was a short but sweet 5 song EP released by the all-women L.A. rock group in June 1982. Like their first album All Over The Place this find the foursome sounding like a lost group from 1966: that magical time when Byrsy-folk rock of 1965  was metamorphosizing into the heavy psychedelic rock of 1967. No one who likes sixties rock will not like this or their debut. It's brilliant and the songs by The Petersen sisters and Susannah Hoffs are delectable, the playing on point, and the vocals exhuberant and the harmonies beautiuful. Maybe songwise not quite as good as All Over The Place and beaten by Chronic Town for best EP of the year, but a highly enjoyable  release. By the way this was the last release to feature original bassist Annette Zilinskas who left afterwards to form a number of other LA based bands, including Blood in the Saddle. She rejoined the band in 2018. 4.5/5 I don't have the original EP, which I believe was vinyl only, though a condensed 3-son...

  Band On The Run was recorded under duress: as he was preparing to record, Paul McCartney was surprised to find nearly his entire band leaving, leaving only he, his wife Linda and rhythm guitarist Denny Laine.  He pressed on despite this, playiing most of the instruments on the album  himself, which was partially recorded in Lagos, Nigeria, where McCartney was mugged at knifepoint.  So maybe it makes sense that Band On The Run is one of Paul's better post-Beatles albums -- maybe his best, though I prefer the more psychedelic and zany Ram. To be clear, I've heard most of Paul's albums at least once (with the exception of the last couple) and I don't think that he really does bad albums. He is reliably good...You can rely on Paul to always deliver four or five great songs and four or five good but not great songs on an album. "Band On The Run" stands out but really most of the songs are better than good -- I would call them great, though I think I'd only c...

  Bambu (The Caribou Sessions) was a record store release from 2017 that repackaged disc two from The Legacy Sessions reissue/remaster of Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue onto a double vinyl album. Confession: I did not buy this album, but as I have the  2 CD Pacific Ocean Blue reissue, and this is simply disc 2 from that release --less one song -- it's quite easy for me to review it. Bambu was intended to be Dennis Wilson's second album, but when The Beach Boys sold their studio in circa 1978, he was deprived of a cheap and easy way to record and as Dennis was rapidly spiralling on a downward trajectory,   Bambu very sadly, was never really finished. This release goes to show that he wasn't too far from releasing a decent album however, and one that stands in contrast to the lusher, and more colourful,  Pacific Ocean Blues, his debut album that he'd labored on for years.  The songs on Bambu rock a little harder than they did on Pacific Ocean Blue , and there...

  The Ballad of Easy Rider is the second album by the third version of The Byrds, and by now, with Jim (Roger) McGuinn the only remaning original member, The Byrds bear little resemblance to the chiming jingle-jangling folk-rock band of the mid-sixties. Which is not to say they are bad or anythiing. And McGuinn's singing is as charming and guileless as ever....This band veers more into Blues-rock and country-rock territory, and the playing overall seems slicker and tighter than the Clark-McGuinn-Crosby-Hillman-Clarke incarnation.  It's a very well produced album with a handful of real classics on it , especially the Dylan-co-written title track (Dylan wrote the lyric of the chorus), the gospel cover of "Jesus Is Just Alright"(the arrangement of which which the Doobie Brothers -- I think-- would probably much steal note for note on their own seventies hit version -- and a psychedelic country version of Bobby D's "It's All Over Now Baby Blue." Having d...

Bachelor No. 2, or the last remains of the dodo is often considered Aimee Mann's masterpiece, and there's no doubt that it's got nothing but great songs on it.  Interestingly, the album barely got done at all: most of it was recorded in the late 90s when her record label Imägo, went bankrupt and was bought up by Interscope who basically told her that they weren't going to release it. A legal struggle ensued and Aimee finally bought back the rights to the recordings for a figure "in the low six figures." She then released an early version of the Bachelor No. 2 via her website...finally fortune struck when Paul Thomas Anderson featured her songs heavily in his movie Magnolia, whose script was, in fact, inspired by several earlier Aimee Mann songs.   The money from the soundtrack allowed Mann to buy back the songs and set up her own private record label, SuperEgo Records,  whiich has been releasing her music ever since. In a way this was kind of a new model, tho...

  When The B-52's burst onto the American New Wave scene back in 1978 with "Rock Lobster", they must have seemed like aliens. Their whole make up and exisitence seem wildly original, yet made up of such familiar yet uncelebrated elements.  Trash culture, obvious flaming homsexuality, pre-'64 hairstyles, instrumental surf guitar music, de rigeur futuristic sci-fi synths with an unmistakeable dose of disco, punk, girl group and Yoko Ono added in for good measure: The B-52s are both a very much a group of originals.  Originally based in Athens, Georgia, they inhabited a weird niche in American culture:  music was somewhere poised betwen the drop-out sixties hippie underground and  the darker, keener-edged sounds of nascent New York punk scene....and the collision of all these elmenets  sounded like such a party that it literally established the sleepy southern college town as a Mecca for would-be artists and musicians that eventually gave rise t...

Automatic For The People is a beautiful and melancholy, perfectly-sequenced album that concerns nostalgia, death, aging gracefully, and the acceptance that one's youth was over. It would have been theperfect swan song from R.E.M., The Little Band That Could,: the small college town indie rock post-punk party band that rose from  the sweaty dingy punk clubs of America to become the biggest band in the world in the early nineties. Unfortunately it was not R.E.M.'s swan song. But it should have been!  Some songs are this are murky and a couple suffer from overplay for sure - "Everybody Hurts", drummer Bill Berry's last major song with the band was played so often in 1993 that I'm sure many of us are still sick of it. Still, I'm not as sick of that one as I am with "Losing My Religion" which definitely I could happily go to the end of life without ever hearing again.  Really though, this album is a masterpiece, though and on some days it rivals even...

  Autoamerican   is a little bit of a comedown after Blondie's twin masterpieces Parallel Lines and  Eat to the Beat , but it still saw the band experimenting and expanding, branching beyond their punk-meets-girlgroup roots to foray further into disco, pop,  and on this album,  lush orchestrated music, jazz, reggae and hip hop. In fact, "Rapture" may be the first song by a rock band that I know of that really incorporated rap into it -- The Clash's "The Magnificent SEven" was probably recorded earlier (in April 1980) but was released a few weeks afterwards, in December 1980.  In fact, you can compare Autoamerican with Sandinista! by The Clash: released at almost the same time, both are really, really electic albums that are meant to push the boundaries of New Wave -- Autoamerican is less eye-poppingly audaciou than The Clash's three disc opus, and maybe less impressive overall,  but it's also probably easier to digest and certainly contains less fil...