CD Albums - Reviews by ppint.

CD Albums - Reviews by ppint.

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Member	Item		Review/Comment
ppint. 13th May 2021		CD Album Skip James - Cypress Grove Blues (2004)	Review i bought this cd to get a copy of one track i heard someone - almost certainly john peel - play from an import lp in 1968: "cypress grove blues". all i knew about it (because i didn't realise I'd want the information until after he'd started playing the track) was that it was "delta blues" - which didn't mean anything to record shop staff in north london, newark-on-trent, kendal, durham, or newcastle. (it probably didn't inspire confidence either, that i said i thought the track was called "cypress tree blues", and it was really old...) - just by chance, i happened to spot this skip james cd - at a reasonable price - and knew i had naught by this classic bluesman - and there it was, not just the title, but in the track-listing on the back of the digipak! - and the rest of the tracks on this album are pretty fine, too... classic delta blues from one of the original great bluesmen as lived into the recording era. 3 people found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?
ppint. 26th Aug 2017		CD Album Spooky Tooth - Collected Singles	Review strange title for a compilation that doesn't collect all the band's singles, and comprises mostly album tracks. a good collection, but the title'll surely've put many potential buyers off even checking it out. 1 person found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?
ppint. 9th Feb 2017		CD Album Trees - The Garden Of Jane Delawney (2008)	Review the remastering (and original mastering of the bonus tracks) of the two trees' albums by bias boshell & adrian hardy have - deliberately - been done to a pretty different sound from previous remasterings: do not throw away or sell your earlier cds until after you've compared them - you may want to keep both! 5 people found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?
ppint. 8th Mar 2016		CD Album Tex Morton - Australia's Yodelling Boundary Rider (1996)	Review ergghhh. . . 1 person found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?
ppint. 26th Jul 2015		CD Album Julian Bream - Julian Bream: The Ultimate Guitar Collection (1996)	Review i can't see a way to submit something with two SECTIONBREAKs that works, as doesn't introduce a blank track. (maybe there isn't one - yet?) anyway, fabulous music, superbly well-performed: should have everyone wanting the complete breamcatalogue on lute and guitar - and you'll still want to hang onto this compilation. i think only the pieces on which he's playing the lute are from 1959, but this is indicated on neither the inserts nor the disc, and i haven't tried tracking (sorry) them all down. yet. 1 person found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?
ppint. 20th Jun 2015		CD Album The Liverpool Scene - The Amazing Adventures Of... The Liverpool Scene (2009)	Review an amazing compilation of an amazing band's adventures in sound, space and meaning - i wish they'd found sufficient space to include "the day we danced at the dole" too - but that's a minor detail, compared with having so much by them available again, so easily - and a lot more affordably, than the original vinyl (if you can find it). adrian henri was an avid reader of sf, too, and loved damon knight's capsule summation of a.e. van vogt - "cosmic jerrry-builder" ! 1 person found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?
ppint. 11th May 2015		CD Album David Ackles - American Gothic (2002)	Review david ackles' magnum opus; by turns wry, sardonic, loving, lampooning, happy, hopeful, critical, and, above all, understanding in his appreciation-from-sufficient-a-distance-for-perspective upon the america he knew, grew up in, and appreciated. one of the greatest lps to come out of the merkin singer-songwriter tradition - or any other country's. 2 people found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?
ppint. 11th May 2015		CD Album David Ackles - David Ackles (2002)	Review doomy, gloomy and magnificent. 1 person found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?
ppint. 16th Mar 2015		CD Album The Kinks - Arthur Or The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire (1998)	Review "arthur, or the decline and fall of the british empire" was one of the two best albums the kinks produced for pye records, originally released with a quirky, and very funny - but somewhat shoddily-manufactured - centre-loading, ah, three-quarter gatefold sleeve (the front half was single-thickness card, flimsy, and easily creased, and torn); but, apart from that, pye records didn't seem bothered by it, any more than they had by "the kinks are the village green preservation society". it seems that the kinks had been pigeon-holed by pye as a hit singles group, and that was all pye records wanted of them - or, perhaps, could handle. in "arthur", ray davies continues and expands the scope and depth of his song-writing depiction of a "great britain" slowly recovering from having bankrupted itself resisting the evils of nazi german and fascist italy, and - to a lesser extent, maybe - the militarist near-junta controlling japan, being in the process of losing its empire and, for the people of the uk-of-gb'n'ni°, for what? the semi-mythical land of australia is seen as both an el dorado, a land of unending sunshine and opportunity inhabited by warm-hearted, white english colonists(!), with fruit like pineapples, and bananas(!) just waiting for english immigrants to come and take advantage - and do a bit of work, naturally; but mostly, just relax on the beaches...° - but also, impossibly far off, a distant and effectively separate planet, to which one might maybe lose one's family - relatives, children, grandchildren - forever. meanwhile, "export - or die!" was the word, and, once the tories'd overthrown the atlee labour government for providing one of the longest and hardest winters this century, as well as committing the obscenity of setting up our national health service, and failing to lift the wartime rationing system fast enough, to allow tory-owned car - and sweets! - manufacturers to sell most easily & profitably to brits, rather than concentrate on much harder work of export sales in competition with merkin firms, to earn £,£££,£££,£££,£££ to pay off our debts to merkia°°, where was this wonderful new world we'd fought and sacrificed - and many of us, been wounded, crippled or killed - for? - a new hat or a new raincoat, a new hair-do or a motorcycle combination, and nights out at the dances would have to do. - and, for a while, it did. - ray davies' memories of the times - and of his close relatives' - are conjured up again by the two albums, wonderfully well. . ° - rude awakenings from these siren scenes in the imaginations and too many immigrant brits' reactions giving rise, at a guess, to the phenomenon of the "whinging pom" caricature °° - not finally cleared until during tony blair's first premiership! 1 person found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?
ppint. 25th Feb 2015		CD Album Hedgehog Pie - Hedgehog Pie	Review wonderful music, and it found (what i presume to've been) official, legitimate release on cd - eventually. - i hope the band saw some income from this - does any 45/33/78/cd/tape-catter know for sure? - and hedgehog pie's rendition of the march of the king of laois is the equal of the march of the montagues and the capulets for swagger and parading peackockery - with armed ominousity. . . notes: section rewritten anonymously by someone introducing some hiccups, errors, and infelicities. the assignation of composer credits should read "traditional, arranged hedgehog pie" for tracks 4 & 9 at least; i must find my copy of the original lp to check whether they gave the full and proper attribs. whilst they - and rubber records - were a going concern. 1 person found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?
ppint. 23rd Feb 2015		CD Album Keith Jarrett - The Köln Concert (1984)	Review this is superb. keith jarrett discovered upon his arrival that the piano provided by the köln opera house management was not the bösendorfer concert grand he'd asked for, and concert promoter vera brandes had specified, but an old (bösendorfer) baby grand in poor condition found backstage, and used only for rehearsals, which needed hours of tuning, with treble and bass sounds *far* inferior to the concert grand jarrett had specificied - and on top of this, neither the sustain nor the "soft" pedals worked properly... jarrett decided to go ahead with the concert nevertheless, at least in part because ecm records engineer, martin wieland, had fully set up the recording equipment, and what was caught on the tapes was an hour-long tour-de-force demonstration of extemporisation exploring the piano's limitations, determining how to compensate and then exploit them, to advantage - all the while giving a brilliant series of improvised variations upon the themes - sometimes simply on one chord - that he chose. followed after the deserved applause from the delighted audience by a seven minute encore... brilliant. simply brilliant. 2 people found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?
ppint. 15th Feb 2015		CD Album Steeleye Span - The Lark In The Morning (2003)	Review * - boys of bedlam is an arrangement - to original music, so far as i know - of the anonymous poem, "tom o'bedlam", found in the british museum ms. "everyday book" i first saw ref'ed as "giles earle, his booke" c.1615 a.d./ce in the wondrous anthology edited and feetnoted by walter de la mere, "come hither" (q.v.). it doubtless has its own british museum ms. ref. no, as important to it (and to scholars) as any 45cat or "33cat" no.- but i do not know it, offhand. (if i remember to, i'll look it up & emend this.) it's highly recommended, and has been a mild obsession of mine for some fifty years :-). giles earle's everyday book is dated to the first half of the seventeenth century a.d./ce as he was a living musician and collector of songs "floreat" ("flourishing" = alive and working) circa (around) 1615 c.e.(a.d.) "when i was on horseback" is also, and perhaps better-known as "lock hospital"; this was a common name for the secure - and armed-guarded - hospitals set up to restrain the incurable infectious to prevent them spreading the diseases they carried, frequently venereal diseases. 1 person found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?
ppint. 14th Feb 2015		CD Album Procol Harum - 1st Album... Plus (1998)	Review tracks 1-10 were the mono lp, regal zonophone lrz 1001 q.v. remastered in 1997 from an original first generation production master. the original lp was ready for release summer 1967, but was delayed by essex music & straight ahead productions until january 1968 as part of the negotiations in placing their whole artists roster with, as it turned out, emi; tracks 11 & 12 were the original first single, deram dm 126, no.1 for six weeks straight in the summer of 1967; track 13 (with 9) was the stunning follow-up, regal zonophone rz 3003 9/67, which only made #6 in the charts - a tastecrime seldom equalled in the mid-sixties: it's doomy, gloomy and magnificent; what more did the record-buying public want? (as it happens, what the "serious" side of the r-b p now wanted was lps and not singles any more; and lps that were more-or-less coherent albums, rather than unprogrammed assembleges of totally unrelated songs. procul or their managers, were slow on the uptake, and it wasn't until the third lp they achieved this feel of the whole album being more than the sum of its parts); tracks14-20 are bonus alternative takes & mixes, stages on the way to the released versions, and make for further interesting listening rather than "essential (re-) discovery"; but i'm glad to have them. 1 person found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?
ppint. 13th Feb 2015		CD Album Gladys Knight And The Pips - Soulfully Yours (1996)	Review all eleven of these tracks were originally released on the merkin fury label (1050 5/61, 1052 6/61, 1054 11/61, 1064 4/62 & 1073 1/63); why the twelfth track from these six singles ("i want that kind of love") was not included on this very short - albeit cheap - cd is anyone's guess. see the equally budget-priced compilation cd, "letter full of tearss", musical memories rgcd1031, for all twelve of these six singles' a & b-sides, plus thirteen other tracks by them from bobby robinson's fury/fire new york mini-conglomerate of soul, r&b and blues labels. 1 person found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?