Log #183 - Two Sides Of Bonnie Prince Billy

Penguin Cafe Orchestra - Union Cafe

Penguin Cafe Orchestra - Music From The Penguin Cafe 

Bonnie Prince Billy - The Letting Go

Soft Hair - Soft Hair

Jerry Paper - Like A Baby

Bonnie Prince Billy - Summer In The Southeast

Bonnie Prince Billy's The Letting Go album fondly reminds me of his Lie Down In The Light album (which followed). Fairly down tempo and relaxed, as with most of his albums, The Letting Go contains one of my favourite Bonnie songs, the haunting Cursed Sleep, with its amazing video...

The beauty and eccentricity of The Letting Go doesn't provoke deep absorption or self-reflection so much as a kind of fond familiarity.

Pitchfork 

Indeed, perhaps not Bonnie Prince Billy's most daring album but he is effortlessly great in almost anything he does. I haven't yet come across an album that has disappointed...

Which takes me on to the live album Summer In The Southeast. This is stunning. Not least as it was so unexpected. Whereas The Letting Go's easy vibe is typical Bonnie Prince Billy this noisy heavy warts and all rock gig from 2005 is a new Bonnie Prince Billy to me (in fact I'd never heard of the album until it popped up on a youtube feed I was listening to one evening).

Boosted by electric guitar from collaborator Matt Sweeney BPB reinvents his back catalogue with "a delightfully drunken racket of tangled guitars and thunderous percussion" (Pitchfork). The sound verges on grunge or even punk and reminds me of The Velvet Underground. So hardly representative of any of his albums I've heard, or I imagine most of his gigs, nevertheless an exciting addition to the Bonnie catalogue. A great find. 

The other new entry this week comes from LA producer Jerry Paper. This came on to my radar via the unusual Soft Hair album. I was in a Brighton cafe one afternoon and this music came on and the weird distorted electronica sounded to me just like Soft Hair. I asked the patron and he told me it was Jerry Paper. Name lodged in notebook and album investigated forthwith.

Read More

Log #182 - Welcome To The Penguin Cafe

Penguin Cafe Orchestra - Union Cafe

Penguin Cafe Orchestra - Music From The Penguin Cafe 

Tangerine Dream - Zeit

Soft Hair - Soft Hair

Brian Eno - Ambient 4 On Land

Lift To Experience - The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads (CD 1)

Two excellent albums spanning the career of instrumental chamber group The Penguin Cafe Orchestra this week. Music From The Penguin Cafe was their debut album released in 1976 on Brian Eno's fledgling Obscure Records label. It's fully reviewed here>>.

Union Cafe was the original band's fifth and final album released in 1993 before band leader Simon Jeffes' premature death in 1997. The double album takes the listener through a variety of styles - classical, minimalism, jazz, swing and experimental - yet does hold together as an enjoyable whole.

Various versions and offshoots of the original ensemble under the names The Anteaters, The Orchestra That Fell to Earth, and Penguin Cafe (with Simon Jeffes' son Arthur), continue to record and tour today.

Read More

Log #181 - A Lift To The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads

Why have I not heard this stupendous album before? Loving the The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads album from Lift To Experience and I've only played the first half. Fronted up by Josh T Pearson I was vaguely aware of his original band but had never heard this, their only album. 

This is the story of three Texas boys busy mindin' their own business when the Angel of the Lord appeared unto them.

The double album (I've only just realised there were 2 CDs in the carboard sleeve!) was released by the Texas-based indie trio in 2001. Mixed by Cocteau Twins Simon Raymonde and Robin Guthrie the album is a marvellous mess of noise casting Texas as the "promised land" in a "second coming of Jesus" concept. Having seen Josh T Pearson live solo where he projected a hardly disguised "messiah" persona I'm not surprised. 

Josh "Bear" Browning's, Josh T Pearson and Andy "the Boy" Young

Indeed Pearson's solo album Last Of The Country Gentlemen is certainly unusual. When I first heard it I couldn't decide if it was the worst or best record I'd ever heard. But The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads is a whole new level. 

Readers' Note - there are two versions of the album, the 2001 original and a "remixed as God intended" version released in 2017 (my version is the 2001 release).

Cluster - '71

Cluster - II

Tangerine Dream - Zeit

Fennesz - Endless Summer

Brian Eno - Ambient 4 On Land

Lift To Experience - The Texas-Jerusalem Crossroads (CD 1)

The Lift To Experience offering is opposite to the other records in the player this week where we have 5 ambient favourites - although maybe not completely opposite. Where last week's Eno album Apollo is no doubt lovely musically, his Ambient 4 On Land is much more experimental in terms of soundscapes and odd noises. Then the Cluster albums, certainly the debut '71, is the industrial sound of an electrical power plant. The Fennesz album Endless Summer has its moments of beauty but these are submerged in plenty of grating clicks and fuzzes, and the strings heavy Zeit comes from the discordant school of classical mininalism.

Read More