Chris Hunt – “Painter Man: The Eddie Phillips Interview” (1988)
Taken from Guitarist magazine, March 1988. An in-depth interview with unsung guitar legend Eddie Phillips of the shoulda-been-huge 60s band The Creation…
Ask anyone who was the first musician to put violin bow to guitar and you’ll inevitably be told Jimmy Page. Now, being first to play the electric guitar with a violin bow perhaps doesn’t rank among great human achievements like discovering penicillin or walking on the moon, but it is an achievement none the less. And credit is due where credit belongs. In this case the credit belongs with Eddie Phillips, guitarist with the mid-Sixties pop art experimentalists, The Creation.
Eddie Phillips’ reputation as a guitarist has always been criminally overlooked in established guitar-playing circles, possibly because The Creation never achieved the level of success attained by their contemporaries, The Who. Despite huge success in Germany – where they were a Top Ten band, touring regularly as support act to the likes of the Stones and Cream – the Creation only succeeded in scoring two minor hits in the British charts. Read the rest of this entry »
Poly Styrene – “Virtual Boyfriend” (Video – 2011)
Another tribute to Poly Styrene, former leader of punk legends X-Ray Spex, who sadly passed away yesterday. This song is from her brand new album Generation Indigo…
X-Ray Spex – “Oh Bondage, Up Yours!” (Live – 1977)
A tribute to Poly Styrene, one of the original punk heroines, who passed away yesterday from cancer. She had just recently released a new album entitled Generation Indigo.
This is her in her prime performing her most well-known song sometime in 1977. This is taken from the Punk in London documentary.
May she rest in peace…
Paul Simon – “So Beautiful or So What” (2011)
An LA Times review by Margaret Wappler, dated April 11th, of Paul Simon’s brand new album…
More bad news for the recently deceased: According to Paul Simon, the afterlife is a bureaucratic bummer as bad as the DMV.
The second song on his first solo album in five years, the deeply philosophical So Beautiful or So What, kicks off with one of the most memorably deadpan lines in Simon’s already-packed canon: “After I died and the make-up had dried, I went back to my place.”
To crack open a celestial beer? Not so much. From there, “The Afterlife,” with its zydeco-inflected shuffle, paints a picture of the freshly dead filling out forms and waiting in line to catch “a glimpse of the divine.” Ah, but the vast unknown is a slippery beast. “All that remains,” Simon sings, “when you try to explain is a fragment of song.”
Pushing 70, Simon has mortality on his mind: the grand zigzag of life, the decisions we make or that make us, the accident or destiny of love and the big questions that can’t be answered. After all is said and done, Simon seems to say on his 12th solo album, there’s only love and beauty, both of which can reach their ecstatic heights in music. Read the rest of this entry »
The Flaming Lips with Neon Indian – “Flaming Lips 2011: The Flaming Lips with Neon Indian” (2011)
A recent EP collaboration by The Flaming Lips with Texas’ Neon Indian, this review comes from Marc Masters, April 6, 2011 from the Pitchfork Media website…
Outside of geographic proximity (Norman, Okla., and Denton, Texas, are only 150 miles apart), psychedelia is the only obvious link between the Flaming Lips and Alan Palomo’s project Neon Indian. The Lips often veer to the darker side of psych, especially recently (see their 2009 dread-filled opus Embryonic), while Palomo deals in a day-glo take on 1980’s pop. So when Wayne Coyne revealed that they were banging out a fast collaboration — as he put it, “that shit should be ready to go pretty quickly” — the first question that came to mind was whether the result would lean more toward sun or shadows.
That’s settled immediately by the opener on this four-track, 22-minute EP, the ominously titled “Is David Bowie Dying?” It’s not completely clear what the lyrics have to do with Bowie’s potential demise, but the music feels like an elegy, a kind of spaced-out funeral march. With its slow, crunchy beat, cutting sonic debris, and Coyne’s weary intonations, it would fit well among Embryonic‘s doomy mantras. “Take your legs and run/ To the death rays of Read the rest of this entry »
Adele – “21” (2011)
A recent review of Adele’s excellent new album, taken from the Music OMH site, written by John Murphy, Jan. 24th…
With her extraordinary voice, reassuringly dirty laugh and down to earth personality, Adele Adkins seemed manna from heaven from those looking (musically at least) for ‘the new Amy Winehouse’ back in 2008.
Her debut album, 19, certainly had some standout moments but was marred by an over-reliance on filler tracks — understandable enough for a debut. But there was more than enough potential there to bode well for the future.
With 21, that promise is well and truly delivered upon. And the Winehouse comparisons aren’t likely to disappear — for, in a similar way that Back to Black was a massive step up in quality from Frank, 21 represents Adele’s coming of age.
As the old adage puts it, from great pain comes great art. And it really seems as if Adele has been through the emotional mill here. Almost every song Read the rest of this entry »
Bob Dylan – “Infidels” (1983)
A Nov. 24, 1983 review by Christopher Connelly from Rolling Stone…
Infidels is Bob Dylan’s best album since the searing Blood on the Tracks nine years ago, a stunning recovery of the lyric and melodic powers that seemed to have all but deserted him. Under the aegis of Dire Straits guitarist Mark Knopfler, Dylan has produced eight vigorous songs that teem with self-effacing introspection and wit, free of the cant that’s weighted down his recent efforts. The songs on Infidels touch on religion and politics but are rooted in an ineffably deep sadness: the sadness of broken hearts and broken dreams, the sadness of middle age, the sadness that has been the wellspring of great rock & roll from Robert Johnson to “Every Breath You Take.” Flaming through that sadness is the sort of hell-hound-on-my-trail passion that you’d have to reach back ten years to find in Dylan’s recorded work.
Who could have expected so strong a rebound at this late date, especially after such flat, lifeless records as Saved or Shot of Love? Those LPs culminated a process that began with 1975’s Desire, wherein Dylan was purging himself of the metaphors and personas that had vaulted him to Sixties sainthood by rendering simple, limpid tales about his personal life. To hear the man of a thousand poses wailing “Sara, oh Sara/Don’t ever leave Read the rest of this entry »
The Beat Patrol 