Leica M9, Summilux 35, Georgetown
Was The Reigning Sound’s “Time Bomb High School” The Great Lost Album of The Aughts?
Posted in Uncategorized with tags The Reigning Sound on October 29, 2009 by johnbuckley100It’s not exactly lost. You can find it on iTunes. It’s not like Oedipussy’s Divan, which took arduous Google sleuthing and a PayPal account to get delivered from across the pond.
But the more I listen to the Reigning Sound’s superb 2009 release Love and Curses, the more I realize their 2004 album, Time Bomb High School, is the one that got away, the one that should have put them on the map.
Yes, I bought it at the time. It didn’t escape notice. But how is it I went three years or more since the last time I’d listened to “I Walk By Your House” or “Your Not As Pretty”? And those aren’t even the rockers. Greg Cartwright’s voice — previously described on Tulip Frenzy as an amalgam of John Lennon, Plimsouls-era Peter Case, and Paul Westerberg, but let’s add The Saints’ Chris Bailey to the mix — is as gripping, and endearing, as any in rock’n’roll.
Love and Curses is ascending the Tulip Frenzy 2009 Top Ten List consideration with a bullet. Somehow, the fact that we weren’t pulling all-nighters waiting for its release seems like some kind of failing.
Halloween Draws Closer
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Leica M9 on October 28, 2009 by johnbuckley100M9, 35mm Summilux
Devendra Banhart’s “What Will We Be”
Posted in Uncategorized with tags "What Will Be", Devendra Banhart on October 28, 2009 by johnbuckley100On his last album, Smoky Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, Devendra Banhart channeled Jim Morrison to delightful effect. Of course, that quaver in his voice could also harken Bryan Ferry to mind. I say “of course,” but really, the connection to Ferry wasn’t made until seeing on What Will We Be — Banhart’s far more successful Topanga-circa-’69 follow-up to Smoky — there’s a song entitled “16th And Valencia Roxy Music”. Interestingly, the connection here is as much to some of those mid-’70s Eno albums — or maybe even last year’s Eno-Byrne collaboration — as to anything by Roxy Music or Ferry’s solo work.
Beardless and trying harder, Banhart still occupies a unique corner of the musical cosmos, a Venezuelan-Texan hippie leprechaun who can effortlessly capture early ’70s SoCal folk-rock. What Will We Be is less ambitious but more consistent than Smoky Rolls Down Thunder Mountain, and recaptures some of intense magic of Cripple Creek, still the high water mark in his oeuvre. He’s no naif, but neither is he faux-naif; he’s somewhere in between, which is a hard balancing act. Devendra Banhart is a funny, highly intelligent craftsman with a unique voice and touch, less contemporary than Beck, and yet operating in that same timeless manner, respectful of rock’s traditions while also highly original.
The problem here is we want a complete album, and as always, there’s noodling and boredom pooling between islands of pop genius. Someday he’ll put it all together. Until then we marvel at what we have, and what he will be.
Georgetown Monday Evening
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Leica M9 on October 27, 2009 by johnbuckley100Leica M9, 75mm Summicron
The Beatles In Mono And The Bose Music Player
Posted in Uncategorized with tags The Beatles In Mono on October 27, 2009 by johnbuckley100So of course the answer is that The Beatles In Mono sound perfect on the Bose iPod player. It’s a single speaker, not a stereo. And having these songs optimized for a single speaker fits it to a T. Too bad for Bose they couldn’t run a marketing campaign around the concept.
Philly Rock Gods Drink Up Buttercup Check Into DC’s Rock’n’Roll Hotel
Posted in Music with tags Drink Up Buttercup on October 26, 2009 by johnbuckley100Jeez, it’s not enough that the Phillies are in the World Series, now they actually export good rock bands? No fair! Go see Drink Up Buttercup, freshly signed to Yep Roc so you know they’re good, at the Rock N Roll Hotel on the H Street Corridor on Thursday the 29th. At which point, you may as well start celebrating Halloween.
King of The Road
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Leica M9 on October 25, 2009 by johnbuckley100Leica M9, 35mm Summilux, ISO 160, f/1.4 @1/4000ths
The Beatles In Mono: Depth, Not Width
Posted in Music with tags The Beatles, The Beatles In Mono on October 23, 2009 by johnbuckley100Tulip Frenzy took up a collection around the office, looked under sofa cushions for change, and returned all the 5-cent deposit bottles that had collected in corners in order to buy The Beatles In Mono. We did so because numerous published sources had declared the mono mix of each of the albums from Please Please Me to The Beatles (White Album) were superior to the stereo mixes we’ve been listening to on CDs since the late 1980s.
It seemed counterintuitive but intriguingly possible that the claims were correct. Though weird, we have to say, to think that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band might sound better in a mix made for one speaker than two. How could it be possible that, say, “Tomorrow Never Knows” would sound better in mono than stereo?
The truth is, it doesn’t. Or not quite. Just because more care went into mixing in mono than stereo, and just because the state of the pop music art as George Martin knew it at the time was aimed at optimizing the sound on dashboard AM radios, it does not follow that it actually sounds better to listen to a mid-period and later Beatles song in mono than stereo.
When listening to, say, “Baby You Can Drive My Car” in the mono mix, and then immediately following it with the 1965-stereo mix included here as well, it’s clear that by not separating the drums in the left channel from the piano in the right channel, the song has more punch.
Yet the human head has two ears, one on the right, the other on the left. While “Taxman” on Revolver may take the entire middle part of your face off when you listen to the mono version loudly on your stereo; while the backwards guitars on “TNK” may scramble your cerebellum just the way it was intended, the mono versions are deeper, not wider in sound. They may take off the top of your head, but they don’t conform to the exigencies of the human anatomy.
Listening to the mono and stereo versions of mid-period Beatles back to back, you can tell Martin was a little lost in how to separate instruments and tracks from one another. The mono versions are more coherent, more consistent. They build from bottom to top, and don’t get lost plugging instruments in from side to side.
And yes, for the earlier works, songs like “I Want To Hold Your Hand” sounds pretty great in mono. But once the Beatles had shared a few spliffs and were thinking of “the studio as an instrument,” it just fails to reason that the version mixed for a single speaker is “better.” It may be more authentic, and it may capture better the way the Beatles were thinking — the mix as they heard them — but it isn’t necessarily more pleasing. It’s like listening to two different Dylan takes at the same song; each is interesting, and tells you something about the artist, but let’s listen to all of them, and not have to choose.
The entire gang at Tulip Frenzy admires the reasoning behind the effort — and the completists among us appreciate the offering in this expensive box of not only the mono mixes of all non-album tracks (think “Rain” and “Paperback Writer”) but the original stereo mixes of Help and Rubber Soul, which heretofore have never been available on CD. We could have stood not to have the hype that says the mono mixes are superior to the stereo mixes. We’re awfully happy to have them — though now our iPod library is groaning, and the thought does occur to us that Apple Corps Ltd might be in cahoots with Apple Computer to drive us to one of those new iMacs with their 2 Terrabyte hard drives.
The Beatles were great enough as is. No need to hype the mono versions of their albums as even greater than they were.
Tulip Frenzy 