I pick up a lot of CDs from Charity Shops - often for a £1 or less! For example this week I came across Robert Plant and Alison Krauss's Raising Sand album which I'd heard a lot about but had never listened to (it's a cracker).
Of course there's always a lot of junk in the charity bins too - the same old rubbish gets recycled before eventually ending up in landfill presumably. It is rare to find a good album - logically the good stuff is usually kept so rarely recycled. Think about it - you don't see much Neil Young or Bob Dylan do you?
On the other hand there are a lot of artists that repeatedly show up in charity shops. It occurred to me that the most common album I see in charity shops is this one from Texas. I've never heard it but it must be a complete duffer. I imagine an anaemic middle of the road pop/rock band with a crap name fronted by an attractive singer. Ubiquitous in the CD collections of middle England. "Tick standard" as Keith Lemon would say. I could be wrong. I really should hear at least one track before my condemnation. I'll try one. Hang on... I tried Say What You Want. Don't know if this is representative but it's the first one that came up on Youtube. Predictably the video just centres on the singer who is all breathy and sultry with the occasional breaking croaky (sexy) voice in an X-factor style. The music was less expected. More disco and easy listening than I imagined.
Maybe it deserves an award? What other consistent showers in charity bins would give this one a run for it's money?
Perhaps as more and more people go digital old collectors like me may have further chances to pick up gems amongst the rubbish as people give away their whole collections.
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1. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss - Raising Sand
2. Neil Young - Hitchhiker
3. Beck - Colors
4. Genesis - Turn it on Again, The Hits
5. Can - Ege Bamyasi
6. Can - Sacrilege CD1
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The 2009 Grammy Award winning Raising Sand album was a very pleasant surprise. There are moments with these sorts of records where it's a case of "you go", "no your turn", "no after you" with the key players taking it in turns to lead. So we get some Alison Krauss songs and some Robert Plant songs and not all that many that feel like genuine duets. There's also some country and some rock, but mostly it's old time rock with production by T-Bone Burnett giving the sound a nice live band feel. Actually the songs are nearly all old covers mostly from the 60s written by the likes of Gene Clark, The Everly Brothers and Allen Touissant. There's also a song by Tom Waits and Waits' long time guitar collaborator Marc Ribot features in the band. Plant's voice has matured well beyond his 70s screaming heyday and now exudes a much more laid back and effortless confidence.
Lots of good songs including current favourite Please Read The Letter featured below:
I think I'll be checking out Plant's latest album Carry Fire soon too having heard some impressive samples somewhere recently - probably on Jools Holland.
A quick word on the Can albums this week (there will be more in a Can retrospective review currently in production). Ege Bamyasi is just about the perfect Can record covering all their best bases in barely 40 minutes, which is quite remarkable when some of their extended jams usually take up half of this time alone. The Sacrilege album is a set of remixes circa 1997 (when drum 'n' bass was the flavour of the month) by artists like Brian Eno, The Orb, Sonic Youth and U.N.K.L.E. The results are mixed and most successful where the remix artists have moved the furthest from the original. Where the originals are already very drum and bass heavy it is not sufficient to just augment the drum and bass which seems to me to often be the case with remixes.
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