Outer Music Diary

Ken Watson - Assembly

There’s a song right in the middle called “Yuppie Jazz” that adds a note of unintended irony to the album. Originally released in 1985, Assembly was released smack dab in an era when a lot of fusion suffered from the desire to move from analog equipment to digital. Now it’s always a little uncomfortable criticizing an album with poor production and thin instrumental timbres, after all it may be all they had at the time, but on the other hand any album still has to go a long way to make one notice it in a sea of releases. Part of the issue for me, is that when a guitar tone like this dominates the sound of what is basically sort of a shred player, it feels very flat. In a way, however, Assembly isn’t just your average shred fusion album, it definitely has a lot of avant-rock touches, but I find these tend to confound the accessibility problem already brought to the table by the production. I don’t want to demean what is obviously strong musicianship at work here, but this is an album that doesn’t strike me as being anything other than average and I think my 7 fits the bill. If you enjoy slightly avant-ish fusion and 80s tones don’t bother you, please ignore these caveats.

David Bowie - Heroes

I’ll probably never be a huge Bowie fan, but my appreciation of his music does increase with exposure to his 70s canon. It’s almost the quintessential American definition of “art rock,” at least in the way it still connotes pop music of a sort, well crafted, accessible, with innovative songwriting. Heroes is apparently the second collaboration with Brian Eno, and you do get bits of that “Another Green World” sort of sound throughout, the compressed, buzzsaw guitar tone in particular. Heroes, like Low, also presents a great deal of instrumental music and strangely enough these songs often have quite a different feel from what you might expect from Eno, likely due to the presence of Robert Fripp in soundscape mode (although nothing like Fripp & Eno). I feel this one is on a climb, overall, despite my reservations for this niche of art rock. There’s a lot to like here.

Dr. Z - 3 Parts to My Soul

Everything about this one is rare from its original value on Vertigo records to a keyboard trio being fronted primarily by harpsichord or piano. Unfortunately the good music is pretty rare as well, this is an album that deserves its rarity status based on the musical quality as well as vinyl scarcity. The vocals are quite similar to many of their contemporaries, a cross between the styles of Van der Graaf Generator, Gnidrolog and Still Life, although the music is vastly different. I find keyboard trios to be often a little too thin and Dr. Z is no exception, no third melody line to weave within and around rather than triplicate. It’s also a concept album and one occultically based although I’m not sure what school inspired the album, it often seems Zoroastrian or gnostic. There’s not really a lot of variation in the sound, in fact it could be a keyboard player’s solo album with a couple of guests to back him up. Overall it’s a bit pathetic in that even so many of the third and fourth tier albums from the era are worth owning. My 8 seems about right, although were it in a different era with a new set of instrumental timbres I could see it a point or two lower.

Mark Shreeve - Embryo (MC)

Shreeve is now part of the ever-dependable Redshift and the difference between that band and these early cassettes is vast and probably has more to do with equipment procurement than anything else. Shreeve’s strongest influence is obviously Klaus Schulze although he brings in a side of Schulze you don’t see as often that maybe only Adelbert von Deyen touched on, a similarity with the early albums, especially Blackdance. Shreeve uses sequencers here, but only barely and they’re never of the type Tangerine Dream used. For the most part it almost sounds like he’s dinking around on one of the more expensive Crumar models, there’s a lot of weird string synth sounds modulated in a Timewind-ish fashion. Overall, with the low cassette quality and rather cloneish features, it really isn’t much of a keeper, I’m getting the impression there were hoards of these sorts of cassette releases coming out of England. If anything they were precursors to RMI, Airsculpture and the like, so we’re better off for them having existed.

Eloy - Dawn

I was introduced to Eloy years ago at a CD shop where the owner told me that Eloy sounded like a different band on every album and he could usually name the band: Tull, Floyd etc. It’s true to some extent, from the first album to Inside and Floating and then afterwards, but there’s a large part of the 70s where they sound exactly the same to my ears, morose minor key space rock that sounds too similar from song to song. Dawn is smack in the middle of all this. Maybe if I hadn’t heard Ocean first and had that solidified as the “one” from this period, I wouldn’t be so down on Dawn, but I found it pretty tedious. It did get a bump from the 7 to the 8, but I’m going to cut it loose, there’s really no reason to have it. I think the strings take it down a bit of a notch as well, a little too sickly sweet for a band who seems to write just about everything in minor key.

Flanagan/Coltrane/Burrell/Suleiman - The Cats

There are scads and scads of these in-the-pocket hard bop releases from the late 50s and feel that my life will never be long enough to give them the time they deserve, the multiple listens needed to be able to parse one from others, to tell the 8s and 9s from 10s and 11s. I had quite a nice listen to this piece, but still ended up feeling like I can’t tell whether it might be special or just an average sort of thing. I may never know because it’s hard to want to give this the time to move up from an 8. Coltrane is relatively sedate here compared to his work with Miles Davis from the time, and consequentially it’s a bit less satisfying for it. Burrell I barely noticed.