Album August Music Reviews - Week 3 Recap
Thanks to the people of NPR, we kicked things off with a streaming listen of Muppets: The Green Album, a full week ahead of release. The Green Album is an interesting mix of covers of songs from The Muppet Show and The Muppet Movie. With cover albums there is usually a make-it-or-break-it song that can by itself determine if the album is worth listening to. That song here is "Mahna Mahna" and The Fray nails it, doing a straight up rock interpretation and not going too experimental. There were some surprisingly good performances turned in, but for me the stand out track is The Airborne Toxic Event's take on "Wishing Song" which they truly make their own. This incredibly talented group takes a song, originally sung by Gonzo to Madeline Kahn after she doesn't accept his wedding proposal, and turns it into a performance that is truly their own and would not feel out of place amongst the band's own songs in a live setting. Muppets: The Green Album is a fun listen, with the less well known songs being the most interesting.
Next up was a blatant, unabashedly retro trip to 80's for a listen to an exquisite remaster from the Golden Age of the Music Video. It's like finding sonic buried treasure when you hear the entire album from which you've only heard the hits previously, and such was the case with the remaster of The Motels classic, All Four One. There are so many songs from the 80's that received heavy rotation on radio and MTV which came from albums with fantastic deep cuts. Such is the case with All Four One which is a pristine mix of New Wave and AOR with great songs beyond the hits.
For the first Progressive Rock listen of Album August, we went to the Golden Age of Prog and the year 1976, for Jethro Tull's under appreciated Too Old to Rock 'n' Roll: Too Young to Die! I'd featured Tull when I did #AlbumAugust in 09 and had a surprising amount of positive feed back tweets about them. If you only know Jethro Tull from songs like "Aqualung" (or their polemical Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance Vocal or Instrumental) the band is exceedingly prolific, releasing an original album every year, for their first 14 years of existence. Prior to spinning it, I'd not known Too Old to Rock 'n' Roll: Too Young to Die! is a concept album about how music may go out of style but comes back round again to be popular, which is appropriate, as it is a solid, if unfairly overlooked entry into Jethro Tull's oeuvre.
We shift gears from Prog to Funk for Thursday's Album August listen, as suggested by my friend Joshua, who had just run across The New Mastersounds that very morning. Breaks from the Border is, in a word, stellar! This set is so strong I was thrilled to learn The New Mastersounds have been around for more than a decade and have a catalog of albums to explore.
05 Freckles by The New Mastersounds
The band's Twitter profile description of their sound is hilarious: "Try to imagine Grant Green and Lou Donaldson having a fight in a Hammond Organ shop while James Brown holds the coats." It was exceedingly great to hear from so many about also enjoying hearing The New Mastersounds for the first time. Real musicians. Real instruments. Real funky. Fantastically good sounds. Please do check them out yourself and stream the whole album for free right here!
Heading into one of the last weekends of the Summer of 11, we listened to a band suggested to me via Twitter. Great White Caps describe themselves as "Landlocked Surf Rock from Pennsylvania." Frankly, these guys are so good at what they play that you'd never know they're not from So Cal! The band dips its toes in both bodies of the surf rock waters: instrumental style and vocals, and perform each equally well. They even pull off a gutsy cover of The Everly Brothers classic, "All I have to do is Dream" done very well.
Despite being from a landlocked state Great White Caps play surf rock like they're from behind the Orange Curtain (that's what natives of Orange County, Cali referred to it as before it became known as "the OC") where a bus load of surf bands have originated from. Sting of Death is a 14-track romp in the surf of Pennsylvania from a quartet with gnarly surf rock skills.
Quite unintentionally, we revisited Finland for the weekend's Album August listens. HIM (or His Infernal Majesty if you prefer) is one of those bands which I really enjoy but always seem to not pick up new releases from until they've been out for a bit. Such was the case with Screamworks: Love in Theory and Practice (Chapters 1 to 13). It was quite fun how the band included Time, Key, BPM and (what I believe to be) the song's waveform graphic next to each track listing.
Bands from Finland seem to enjoy glossing themselves with unique genre names, and HIM is no exception. Not quite metal, not quite goth, not quite alternative, but just the right amount of each, Screamworks is another solid listen of this Finnish band's "Love Metal.
Closing out the week is probably one of the most highly regarded female vocalists of Finland; Tarja Turunen. On her third solo foray after departing from symphonic metallers Nightwish, Tarja expands her sound but doesn't stray too far from what makes her such a wonderful singer to listen to. Tarja is unique amongst heavy music singers with her incredible lyric soprano voice giving operatic gravity to her performances.
What Lies Beneath is a great follow up to her sophmore album, and features the bass talents of Doug Wimbish of Living Colour, cellist Max Lilja formerly of Apocalyptica and guest performances from Joe Satriani and a cappella metal band Van Canto.
Even if you aren't following me on Twitter, you can follow along with nightly #AlbumAugust listens by clicking on that hashtag. After three weeks we've checked out 21 never-before-heard albums with 10 more to go! You can catch up here on #AlbumAugust week 1 and week 2.
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