CD Odyssey Disc 1417: Lou Reed

Don’t you love when you discover some old classic record for the first time? It’s not new to the world, but it is new to you, and that’s what matters.

Disc 1417 is…. The Blue Mask

Artist: Lou Reed

Year of Release: 1982

What’s up with the Cover? As my wife noted when I showed her this cover, “that’s the t-shirt all the cool kids had in high school.” I wish I had this awesome t-shirt in high school, but I was busy sporting my Iron Maiden and Dio baseball shirts back then. There’s more than one way to be cool, kids.

How I Came To Know It: I was reading an article called “Top 80 albums of the Eighties” on Paste Magazine and “The Blue Mask” came in at #77. I don’t put much stock in how other people rank things, so the low rating didn’t put me off and I checked it out. After I knew I liked it I stalked the CD racks at my local record stores until a copy finally came in. This finally happened a couple weeks back.

How It Stacks Up: The only other Lou Reed album I have is a double-disc compilation anthology, so that doesn’t count. I expect “The Blue Mask” would rank extremely high out of all of Lou Reed’s albums, however.

Ratings: 5 stars

While it is fun to discover an album almost 40 years after its release, when the album is as good as “The Blue Mask” it is also bittersweet – all those years without this record in my life. And those cool alternative kids wearing Lou’s face to high school every day without it ever occurring to me I should check it out. Ah well, I’m here now.

“The Blue Mask” is a dark flower of a record, that opens to reveal the poet’s soul that lives within Lou Reed. It is raw and courageous but also so simple as to feel almost childlike. Lou speaks like a man with nothing to hide.

“Speaks” is the right word here, since the album is half-sung, half-spoken, with Reed channeling the spirits of sixties beatnik poets. He muses on all manner of topics, from his attraction to women, his struggles with alcohol, anxiety and the crippling doubt of an idealist seeking meaning in a world full of random tragedy and uncertainty. If that sounds like heavy shit, it is, but don’t worry – the journey is remarkably cathartic.

To pull this sort of performance off you require two things, immaculate timing, and great words and “The Blue Mask” has both. Reed’s delivery is deadpan on the surface, but immediately underneath there is a barely controlled turmoil of angst. This stuff will make you feel the feels.

Reed’s words are exceptional, and it is fitting that the opening track, “My House” is an homage to his early mentor and teacher, poet Delmore Schwartz. In the song Reed and his wife summon Schwartz’s spirit with a Ouija board. It doesn’t feel strange at all, a testament to the openness Reed approaches the subject. Whatever Delmore taught obviously stuck and then some and in that way and his spirit is present in the song, regardless of whether it’s in the Ouija board.

On “Underneath the Bottle” Reed delves into alcohol abuse with a brutal frankness, using basic imagery to capture the visceral excesses:

“Seven days make a week, on two of them I sleep
I can't remember what the heck I was doing
I got bruise on my leg from I can't remember when
I fell down some stairs
I was lyin' underneath the bottle”

The bottle here is a weight, holding Reed down, huge and menacing in a way the casual drinker will never know. The bruise is a metaphor for how the bottle abuses him as much as he it. Also, a reminder he fell down the damned stairs. It is dark but brilliant.

Musically, Reed has always eschewed complex melodic structures for basic tunes that nevertheless give weight to a story. On “The Gun” a menacing and restless bass line carries the tune with lots of low notes, and empty space for someone to do wrong with a 9mm in their hands. On “Waves of Fear” there is a powerful energy, even as Reed explores doubt and panic. The song has a strange empowering quality all the same, a “mosh the pain away” feeling that makes you feel better even as it wraps itself around old-fashioned primal fear.

Fortunately, Lou doesn’t leave us twisting. The final track of the album, “Heavenly Arms” is a romantic hymn. Reed calls for his wife Sylvia to come to his rescue. He’s shared all his doubts and now, like his listeners, he needs a hug. “Heavenly Arms” provides just that, reaching out to tell you it is going to be alright, and that the journey through the record was not only worth taking, but worth taking again and again.

Best tracks: all tracks

CD Odyssey Disc 926: Various Artists

I’m right in the middle of a very busy week where I have nine social engagements over five days. They are all fun activities but a bit more hubbub than even I’m used to.

Knowing in advance this would happen I invoked the rarely-used rule that allows me to choose the album I review, so long as it is newly purchased. I picked this one because it is a double album set with over two hours of music and I knew that I would have the time to listen to it and grok it in its fullness. Now that I have, so here it is!

Disc 926 is….Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys

Artist: Various Artists

Year of Release: 2006

What’s up with the Cover? This is a painting by 19^th century American artist Howard Pyle, titled “Marooned”. This painting resides in the Delaware Art Gallery. Cool paintings like this make me want to go to Delaware, but I admit there isn’t much else to draw me there, so I’ll probably skip it. Sorry, Howard.

How I Came To Know It: My coworker Chris sent me the song “Cape Cod Girls” by Baby Gramps. I loved it and when I found out it was on an album full of traditional sea chanteys I was very intrigued (I love a good sea chantey). The artist list alone compelled me to seek this out, but it took forever for someone to sell their copy so I could buy it used at the local record store for a good price. Recently, it happened!

How It Stacks Up:  There is second volume in the series called “Son of Rogue’s Gallery” released in 2013 but I don’t have it (yet) so I can’t stack it up.

Ratings: Since this isn’t really a best of, I’m going to rate it and give it 4 stars.

My last tattoo was of a kraken grabbing an anchor (photos below) so while I’m not a sailor it is fair to say I have an affinity for the sea. “Rogue’s Gallery” fed that affinity and then some, filling me with the rich history of the Age of Sail and the sea chanteys that tell the stories of the men that crewed its ships.

The album is appropriately named, with a treasure trove of artists contributing songs. These include big rock stars Sting, Lou Reed and Bono; folk and alternative stars Nick Cave, Lucinda Williams, and Richard Thompson; and a host of other folk artists obscure enough that I didn’t recognize their names. The whole of it is a labour of love by Producer Hal Willner.

The album covers a lot of ground, with over two and a half hours of content and 43 songs. Despite the length, I never got tired of it. Some of the chanteys are delivered very traditionally; others have a rock or alternative edge to them. I wouldn’t have wanted too many of the latter, and the album obliged me, having one appear only once every five or six songs.

I don’t usually research my albums, preferring to take the songs on their own terms, but with something so historically significant I couldn’t help but bury my head in the liner notes (which are excellent) and a few Google searches. Apparently many of these songs would have been sung by sailors while doing their various jobs on the ship. Different rhythms or tempos were used for different jobs. “Rogue’s Gallery” features tack & sheet chanteys, halyard chanteys, pumping chanteys, capstan chanteys, bowline chanteys and even a “stamp and go” chantey. Apparently this latter chantey was on large ships where a group of men would take a line and stamp down the deck, presumably to raise a large sail.

Along the way I learned new sailing slang (yes, I already knew some). I found out that the “Dead Horse” is the 30 days of labour before you are getting paid (since sailors got a 30 day advance when signing on). On the thirtieth day, the crew would celebrate by raising a horse banner and…wait for it…sing a song! “Bully in the alley” means you are too drunk to get back to the ship on your own power. We’ve all been there.

Musically, this record is a revelation. Every song has either a catchy rolling tune, a great story to tell or a bunch of ribald and racy lyrics; some songs have all three.

There are too many favourites to write about them all (see full list below) but I’ll note a few nonetheless.

The album starts with “Cape Cod Girls” by Baby Gramps which is a rollicking track with a gorgeous arrangement of guitar and what I think is a Jew’s harp. The rough and ready sailor’s voice of Baby Gramps is the perfect mood-setter for the record.

“Baltimore Whores” and “Good Ship Venus” are two of the dirtiest songs you will ever hear. They are so dirty I won’t even quote the lyrics to you, but I encourage you to Youtube them both.

“Bonnie Portmore” by Lucinda Williams is also gorgeous. When I first heard Loreena McKennitt sing this song in 1991 I didn’t think anyone could render a more heartbreaking version. Lucinda Williams plays it very differently, but the hurt and loss of a mighty tree felled to make the hull of a ship comes through just as strong. Great songs are great through many ages and many renditions. This one’s been depressing us since the 18^th century.

“Shenandoah” is a beautiful instrumental that will set your heart at ease and remove wrinkles from your brow (results may vary). It is beautifully played by Richard Greene and the scatologically named trio “Jack Shit”. Okay, then…

The only song that really irked me was a strange electronica version of “What Do We do With a Drunken Sailor” by David Thomas. It is great to be creative but when the experimentation is so great that the song ceases to be enjoyable you lose me. This version would be at home on the soundtrack to a Rob Zombie horror flick, but felt out of place on this record.

The first disc is better by a good margin, but the second disc has its moments including a beautiful vocal from Jolie Holland on “The Grey Funnel Line” and the aforementioned “Good Ship Venus”.

This record isn’t for everyone but if you like folk music then this will give you a lot of joy, and put some salt in your blood while doing so.

Best tracks (artist): Disc 1 - (12 songs): Cape Cod Girls (Baby Gramps), Mingulay Boat Song (Richard Thompson), My Son John (John C.Reilly), Fire Down Below (Nick Cave), Dead Horse (Robin Holcomb), Turkish Revelry (Loudon Wainwright III), Haul Away Joe (Mark Anthony Thompson), Blood Red Roses (Sting), Baltimore Whores (Gavin Friday), Rolling Sea (Eliza Carthy), Bonnie Portmore (Lucinda Williams), Shenandoah (Richard Greene and Jack Shit),

Disc 2 – (6 songs): Boney was a Warrior (Jack Shit), Good Ship Venus (Loudon Wainwright III), One Spring Morning (Akron/Family), Hanging Johnny (Stan Ridgway), The Grey Funnel Line (Jolie Holland), A Drop of Nelson’s Blood (Jarvis Cocker)

And as promised, here are a couple of tattoo photos to add a little more flavour to this nautically themed blog entry! I don't know how to put them all beside one another so this will have to do. 

CD Odyssey Disc 656: Gorillaz

I haven’t reviewed this next band in over four years, which just shows how long I’ve been at this damned CD Odyssey.

Disc 656 is…. Plastic Beach

Artist: Gorillaz

Year of Release: 2010

What’s up with the Cover?  This is what would pass for an island resort in a post-apocalyptic garbage world. Not terribly nice, and likely infested with rats or cannibals, but that’s what you get for booking without reading trip reviews first.

How I Came To Know It:  Sheila likes the Gorillaz and one day when I was buying myself some albums, I thought it would be nice to bring something home she would like as well, even if it wasn’t my first choice. That’s how I roll, at least on my better days.

How It Stacks Up:  We have three Gorillaz albums, and I’d put this one in the middle. Also, as this is the last Gorillaz disc in my collection, here’s the recap of how they stack up against each other:

1. Demon Days: 3 stars (reviewed at Disc 138)
2. Plastic Beach: 2 stars (reviewed right here)
3. Self-Titled: 2 stars (reviewed at Disc 74)

Rating:  2 stars but almost 3

I tend to only enjoy electronica when it is sidling up to generic pop music, and I find the Gorillaz a relatively painless listen for this reason. On “Plastic Beach” they are even downright enjoyable at times – just not at regular enough intervals. Like the flooded, doomed planet they depict on the album cover, the places where my ear can find a welcoming harbor are few and far between.

The album uses a number of guest vocalists, most notably (to me) rapper Snoop Dogg, seventies soul crooner Bobby Womack and alt-rocker Lou Reed. The Gorillaz are clearly interested in exploring music’s origins in multiple directions, and I appreciate this. Unfortunately, the various styles don’t always work.

Snoop Dogg’s appearance on “Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach” is one of the high points. The Gorillaz groove-based techno beats slide perfectly with Snoop’s rap style, and although I would have preferred this song with a real horn section, the way they use a synthesizer to get the same effect as a trumpet flourish works well enough.

Bobby Womack appears on a couple of tracks, to varying degrees of success. On “Stylo” he croons away over top of an undeniably cool beat. The beat on “Stylo” is so effective, the Gorillaz could’ve gotten away with just putting atmospheric sounds over top of it, and that’s pretty much what they do for the first half of the song. When Womack’s “110^th Street” power soul kicks in it gives the song a whole other facet. It is partly the pure and organic nature of Womack’s singing (and his understanding of how to slide on and off a perfect techno beat) that gives this song its spirit.

Unfortunately, later in the album the effect is slow and ponderous. On the wonderfully titled “Cloud of Unknowing” Womack attempts to deliver a heartfelt dirge, but the dead quality to the music sucks the life out of the performance, and left me wanting more.

As for Lou Reed – let’s just say this was not a match made in heaven. “Some Kind of Nature” just did not work. It felt like he was guesting on a digital version of the Muppet Show, minus a fun skit going on in the background. Even scratching his voice a bit near the end didn’t make it funky.

The best pure Gorillaz song is “Rhinestone Eyes” which has a great groove and (unlike most techno) thoughtful lyrics and may be the best song on the record.

Unfortunately, they can’t replicate this throughout. A lot of the songs feel like they never develop into anything, or worse they develop into an atmospheric collection of sound that had me glancing at my MP3 player 2-3 times for some songs wondering how much longer they were likely to go on. The worst offender, “Glitter Freeze” sounded like an electronica version of having your teeth drilled.

A much shorter album containing all my favourite tracks might have worked, but this record just takes too long to do what it wants to do. Ordinarily 16 tracks is two too many, but on “Plastic Beach” I’d say it is about six tracks too many. It isn’t that these songs are terrible, but they are too ordinary to be piled up to this height.

Thematically, I’ll give the Gorillaz credit for putting together what amounts to a concept album warning us about our society’s disposable culture and the reckoning that is coming when we become flooded in our own garbage. I love the effort, even if it didn’t fully deliver for me on the music front. This is at least in part because techno music doesn’t speak easily to me, so if you like techno beats, you will like this record more than I did. For all that, the songs I did like, I liked quite a bit.

Best tracks:  Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach, Rhinestone Eyes, Stylo, On Melancholy Hill

CD Odyssey Disc 247: Lou Reed

For those wondering, 'where the hell is the next review?', rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. I am still on track to pull into the auditory equivalent of Ithaca in a few years, it is just the last album was rather long.

So long, in fact, I decided to skip my usual practice of listening to the news on the way to work this morning just so I could finish listening to it on the drive home.

And so, here it is.

Disc 247 is...NYC Man: The collection
Artist: Lou Reed

Year of Release: 2008

What’s Up With The Cover?: It is a picture of Lou Reed belting out a tune and looking cool because that is what Lou Reed does.

How I Came To Know It: I knew a couple of Velvet Underground hits all my life, and I had this great tape years ago that had a whole bunch of classics, including "Sweet Jane", "Walk On The Wild Side", and "Heroin". It also had this cool early song, "Pale Blue Eyes". After I sold the tape, for years I looked for a CD that had all the classics, but it had to have these four songs in particular. You'd be surprised how long it took (with "Pale Blue Eyes" usually the sticking point). I finally found this one in 2004 and bought it right away, heedless of just how many other songs were on it.

How It Stacks Up: This is a 'best of' and so can't stack up. Moreover, it is the only Lou Reed I own. I used to have "Dirty Boulevard" on tape and liked it, but likely won't buy it again. Maybe one day I'll get "Transformer" which is admittedly a rock classic.

Rating: best ofs don't stack up - even after four days of brainwashing in the car, I know my Odyssey rights!

This album was a bit of a haul to get through. Put simply, just a little too much Lou Reed/Velvet Underground in one go. It is a two CD set, with a total of 31 songs, many of them of the lengthy variety.

While I usually gripe about overlong albums (and just did again, in a way), you have to cut some slack to an artist when you buy something called an 'anthology' or a 'collection'. By definition, these kind of compilations tend to be a little bit more comprehensive.

So with this in mind, I'll say no more about it and get to the music.

Wasn't Lou Reed cool as a fallen angel/artist in that German movie about angels many years ago? I really believed him in the role - the guy is a pretty good actor, as well as being an accomplished visual artist and musician.

OK, now I'll get to the music, scout's honour.

Lou Reed has been making music since the late 1960s, and has left a significant mark on alternative rock and punk music that I don't think can be easily summed up by an anthology of 31 songs, much less by this little slice of a review, but they don't not-pay me to publish a blank entry.

The first thing that jumps out is the range to the music. Reed switches from understated melodic pieces with exquisite guitar ("Pale Blue Eyes") to catchy rock riffs that remain timeless forty years later ("Sweet Jane") and into punk songs full of distortion and reverb ("White Light/White Heat" that went on to influence a generation of east coast punk bands in the seventies).

My knowledge of Lou Reed albums is extremely limited, but having had a previous 'best of' on tape, a number of these tracks were recognizeable. I also knew "Dirty Boulevard" from the album of the same name. As late Lou Reed goes, "Dirty Boulevard" is a pretty sweet track, and I recall it even being a minor hit in 1989 or 1990.

It is a song much like his earlier work, in that it captures the lives of the down and out in all their grim majesty. Much like Tom Waits, Reed has a special ability to talk about the type of person that society mostly considers forgettable, and ensures we remember them.

The difference is that Waits' characters always seem like they are pulled from a dimestore novel - they have a charm that is somehow separate from their reality. Reed's street characters are all grit, and little glory. Grim poverty clings to their stories, even when they are ostensibly enjoying themselves (often by shooting up drugs).

On this listen, I was struck by the 1973 song, "Caroline Says II" about an abused woman in such a life.

"Caroline says
As she gets up off the floor
'Why is it that you beat me
It isn't any fun.'

"Caroline says
As she makes up her eye
'You ought to learn more about yourself
Think more than just 'I''

"But she's not afraid to die
All of her friends call her Alaska
When she takes speed
They laugh and ask her
What is in her mind"

Lou Reed tells you just what is in her mind, but as a listener you almost wish he hadn't. At the same time, he helps sensitize you to the next time you see someone down and out just why they might be like they are. He shocks you into noticing things that many people walk by every day without a second thought.

Another song that stood out from the ordinary this time around was "The Last Shot", which is from the 1983 album "Legendary Hearts." This is a song about addiction, and trying to give something up - in this case alcohol, although the song later relates obliquely to heroin. Whatever the drug of choice, it provides the unique regret of the addict trying to kick their habit. I love the double meaning of the chorus:

"When you quit, you quit
But you always wish
That you knew it was your last shot."

This is the wish that you wish you savoured that last drink more, and at the same time, the uncertainty that it actually will be. On top of this, "The Last Shot" is a great rock song, with a kick ass riff.

These are the brilliant moments on this record, but at times I found myself trapped in an overlong noodle fest. Such as in "The Bells" a song that immediately follows "The Last Shot" and is over 9 minutes of saxophone noodling, murmuring and guitar drone. "I Wanna Be Black" is more noodling - this time the blues version, clocking in at 6:30 and making me want to throw the disc out the window of the car. For every brilliantly used eight plus minutes ("Heroin" or "Street Hassle") there is one of these little self-indulgent turds.

Overall, I both enjoyed and admired NYC Man. I could've used about ten less songs, but every anthology that short was missing "Pale Blue Eyes" and so I took a deeper dive to get what I wanted. If it felt a little hard to breathe from time time to time, I don't regret the pearls thus uncovered.

Best tracks: Sweet Jane, Rock and Roll, I'm Waiting For the Man, Street Hassle, Caroline Says II, Walk on the Wild Side, Vicious, Legendary Hearts, Heroin, The Last Shot, Dirty Blvd., Pale Blue Eyes