Music Blog

This survey has been propagating round the Blogosphere recently. Via Blogcritics.

First Record Bought: Pink Floyd, The Wall
First Concert: Hawkwind, supported by Vardis
Favourite Music Movie: This is Spinal Tap
Favourite Music Book: The Real Frank Zappa Book
Favourite Songwriter: Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser
Favourite Record Label: Harvest
Favourite Magazine: Modern Railways (Hey, you didn’t say it had to be music magazine!)
Favourite Bassist: Geddy Lee
Favourite Album Cover: Some Enchanted Evening, Blue Öyster Cult
Least Favourite Album Cover: Lovehunter, Whitesnake.
Favourite Teen Idol: If I was an American I’d take the fifth amendment on this one.
Artist Who Broke Your Heart: Phil Collins, by selling out.
Artist You Will Always Believe In: Marillion
Singer Who Makes Your Skin Crawl: Elvis Costello. Don’t know why, but his voice just grates badly with me.
Singer Who Makes You Swoon: Anja Orthodox (Closterkeller), Rannveig Sif Sigurdardottir (The Icelandic soprano guesting on two albums by Luca Turilli), Jon Anderson.
Favourite Sound: Mellotron or Hammond organ
Album You Will Always Defend: Drama by Yes
Album You Own That No One Else Does: Just about everything really obscure I can name, I can think of someone else who’s got it – even albums by Polish goth-metal bands or Hungarian prog-rock acts! I do have some LPs of train noises; do they count?
Classic Album You Own but Don’t Like: Layla by Derek and the Dominoes
Artist You’re Supposed to Like but Don’t: The Smiths
Song You Can’t Stand by an Artist You Like: Goin’ Through the Motions, Blue Öyster Cult
Band That Should Break Up: Oasis
Band That Should Re-form: Genesis with Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett
Guilty Pleasure: Rhapsody. Although why should I really feel guilty for listening to operatic pomp-metal with Dungeons and Dragons lyrics?
Favourite Music DVD: Don’t have a DVD player
Concert You Wish You’d Seen: Rainbow with Ronnie Dio
Dream Collaboration: Ronnie Dio and Yngwie Malmsteen

This is a bit of a bummer.

Karnataka were a six-piece British female-fronted band that combined atmospheric progressive rock with celtic sounds. They had steadily been building up a reputation on the live circuit, spread largely by word-of-mouth. After listening their very impressive recent live album “Strange Behaviour”, I was very much looking forward to seeing them on their planned tour this Autumn.

Sadly, it’s not going to be: this is the message posted to the band’s website, www.karnataka.org.uk.

Karnataka regret to announce that for personal reasons the band is no longer able to continue. We would like to thank all of you who supported us from our early gigs in 1998 up to the present, it is largely you who have made this journey so worthwhile for all of us and we hope that the music we have made together has been something that will continue to live on after the band.

So far, they’ve given no reason for the split.

A followup to my earlier worst guitar solos of all time, here are another five:

Child in Time by Deep Purple, solo by Ritchie Blackmore. No, not the well-known live version from Made in Japan, or the equally good original studio version. The one I’m talking about is the dire solo from the Man in Black’s very last album with Purple, the thoroughly mediocre live set Come Hell or High Water. By this time it was clear Blackmore’s heart just wasn’t in it any more; there’s none of the fireworks from axe-shredding 70s classics like California Jamming or Rainbow On Stage. Instead we get a couple of minutes of directionless tuneless strumming, until keyboard player Jon Lord puts it out of it’s misery by taking over on the Mighty Hammond. At this stage in his career, Blackmore’s tantrums were much more interesting than his guitar playing.

Sting of the Bumblebee by Manowar, solo by Joey Di Maio. The token bass solo in the list. The Flight of the Bumblebee played on a bass guitar. Is there really anything else you need to know?

Soldier of the Line by Magnum, solo by Tony Clarkin. OK, Tony Clarkin isn’t the world’s greatest guitar player; most of his solos are repetitive and clumsily structured. But what makes the guitar break section of the song so dire is the the way it exposes Magnum’s rhythm section of the time as complete waste of space. During the rest of the song Clarkin’s powerchords drive the music. But the moment he plays a solo, the bottom completely drops out of the song. Any when the solo isn’t up to much in the first place, the end result is just embarrassing.

Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana, solo by Kurt Cobain. For some inexplicable reason the late Kurt Cobain often appears on lists of great guitarists. While he undoubtedly was skilled at writing memorable songs and expressing White Wolf Games levels of angst, a great guitarist he was not. Not for nothing are Nirvana credited with killing off the guitar solo. While there is a ‘solo’ of sorts here, it’s just a few bars of tuneless nothing. I’d much rather listen to Neil Schon.

Burning Rope by Genesis, solo my Mike Rutherford. From the album that marked the beginning of their descent from sublime progressive rock to bland corporate pabulum. Rutherford might be a decent melodic bass player, but his lead guitar never rises above the banal. Steve Hackett he ain’t.

Pitchfork Media have compilied a list of the 50 Worst Guitar Solos. A few of them are on target, many more are not. (Blue Öyster Cult ‘Awful musicians’? You must be joking). But they have the guts to put an overrated icon at number one. (Link from Dodgeblogium)

Anyway, here are my list of bad solos. There’s only five of them, but I’m probably treading on sacred cows too…

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath by Black Sabbath, solo by Tony Iommi. This song contains three of Iommi’s monster riffs, but the solo is the weak spot in what’s otherwise a classic song. It’s a thin, weedy thing. Although Iommi is known for his riffs rather than his solos, he’s still capable of doing far better than this.

Everything by Vardis, solos by Steve Zodiac. I’m not naming any individual songs, because I can’t remember any titles. But Vardis were one of those bands that only really had one song, and played it over and over again. I remember a review of a live album of theirs, that described it as sounding like “A thirty second excerpt of Dave Edmund’s ‘Sabre Dance’ in a continuous loop for forty minutes”. And that’s exactly what they sounded like.

Paranoid Android by Radiohead, solo by Johnny Greenwood. This is an album which would have really benefitted from some proper solos. But all we get is one note strummed really fast going “EeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeEe”. Was that supposed to be a solo, Johnny?

Champagne Supernova by Oasis, solos by Noel Gallagher and Paul Weller. Noel seems to think that Paul Weller is a great guitarist. He’s not. And Noel himself is an order of magnitude worse. Anyone who thinks Noel Gallagher is a good guitar player simply does not have a record collection that goes into double figures.

The live solo spot by Nigel Tufnel of Spïnal Tap. I’m old enough to remember the New Wave of British Heavy Metal in the early 80s. Every band gave their guitarist a solo spot where the rest of the band walked off stage leaving the axeman to go Weeeeeeeee widdlywiddly widdlywiddly widdlywiddly eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee ngngngngngngngngngngngngng for a few minutes. And the audiences went wild! Well except for the people who hadn’t already gone to the loo during the drum solo.

Ah, the eternal popular culture vs. High Art argument. To this ridiculous piece of fogeyish drivel, Uncertain Principles has this response:

The only distinction I really see between most “high culture” music and the pop that people sneer at is what you might call the “Agyar Criterion,” after the narrator in Steven Brust’s Agyar, who responds to questions about the quality of art by saying “ask me again in fifty years.” The main thing distinguishing pop music from classical music is age, and the filtering that comes with age.

I’m not going to attempt to claim that all pop music is the equal of Mozart– the occasional channel-surf past MTV would make clear that that’s a foolish idea. Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of Everything is Crud”) applies to music as well as literature. 90% of what people listen to these days is total garbage, but 90% of what people listened to in Mozart’s day was also total garbage. It’s just that nobody remembers the garbage from back

The thing about taste in music is that it’s very personal and quite subjective; I think your appreciation of a particular piece of music is strongly influence by whatever other music you’ve heard. If you only ever listen to opera, or heavy metal, or jazz, or top 40 pop or whatever, it’s going to be more difficult to appreciate something from a quite different musical genre. But that doesn’t mean that any one musical genre is inherently superior. I take exception to those people, either classical snobs or pseudo-intellectual rock journalists, who insist that their tastes in music are not subjective opinions, but objective truth, and anyone who disagrees with them is an idiot.

As an aside, and at the possible risk of contradicting myself, I wonder if some of the classical-is-good, popular-is-bad attitude comes from the apparent fact that the first half of the 20th century seemed to be lean times for popular music. Judging by the relatively few popular songs from that era that have passed the test of time compared with those from the 50s and 60s (which is still long enough ago for the test of time factor to come into play).

I wonder. In the year 2100, which of the following is most likely to be revered as a great composer of the late 20th century?

• Harrison Birtwhisle
• Andrew Lloyd-Weber
• Roger Waters
• Pete Waterman

At the moment, I think we have no way of knowing.

Where all the hippies go to…

Stonehenge!
Where the demons dwell
Where the banshees live and they do live well

Stonehenge!
Where a man is a man
And the children dance to the pipes of pan

Stonehenge!
Tis a magic place
Where the moon doth rise with a dragon’s face

Stonehenge!
Where the virgins lie
And the prayer of devils fill the midnight sky

And you my love, won’t you take my hand
We’ll go back in time to that mystic land
Where the dew drops cry and the cats meow
I will take you there
I will show you how

It could have been worse; I might have posted the lyrics of Big Bottom…