Outer Music Diary

Yma Sumac - Miracles - Peru 1972

Wholly holy high-heavenistic, pass the purple lipstick. This is a soaring psychedelic affair that warrants a fusillade of praise! At times, she’s like a cross between Catherine Jauniaux & Urszula Dudziak in here, but only with a heavy dash of Betty Davis, baby, simply hot swizzle sticks, mates! Soulful and avant-garde, that’s a pretty danged tall order. Chugging organ swelling the runs and riffage like a red-fat nosed drunkard passes on the custard to save room for his liquid bluster-muster-ade; periodic bouts of pi-ah-no. Clean a guitar picked taking the neat-note frenzy spark on a lark, popping up stealth in a few spots to run slippery fingers on a lysergic chart or one-time flamenco-coo. Spitter-splatter on the kit drums like licketty-split and all that good drop-trick with sticks tapping fills to the skins and rims and hi-hat and cymbals a-crashing this gnashing. Bass rumbles flipped left and right along, ambling in a sidewise kick-step jump-offs. A little before th’ halfway mark, she flips into a major Pascale Son mode! Yet, difference being, she has more body & soul on it (..and I *love* Pascale).

Pneumatic, funky, AND psychedelic. The perfect blend Avant-Garde and resolute earthiness.
It has been a very long time since I was compelled to spin something 5 times in a row!

Outcome:
Just wow, man, men, women, and children - - -> Don’t take this album for granted.
- ~ -
This is yet another cash-in attempt by the majors to get a slippery hand in the pot of the mixed kettle: big artists in other genres with session folks backing them for a psychedelic foray. In seeking out and collecting this stuff, one is actually bound to catch a fair gambit with several. Namely, there are a few others in this vein to be sought out: Chubby Checker “Chequered (aka New Revelation)” - classic; Muddy Waters “Electric Mud” - excellent; Howlin’ Wolf “This is Howlin’ Wolf’s new album. He doesn’t like it. He didn’t like his electric guitar at first either.” - very good; and the only one I am missing (that I know of) is Bo Diddley “Black Gladiator.”

::14/15 - a near-perfect classic::

Sikth - Death of a Dead Day 

Sikth come off like a far more intense and complicated Soilwork, they’ve got the whole death/clean vocal tandem thing going, contrasting heavy blast beat sections with straighter melodic metal. In fact part of me gets this mixed up with Sebkha Chott, even if they’re apples and oranges due to the number of elements being added to the stew. Unfortunately with this sort of thing (we’ll call In Flames “daddy” for simplicity’s sake), there’s an element of the epic or pretentious at work, which is why I find so many of the melodic death metal bands to be rather ridiculous, it seems as if the brutal nature of the pounding and the sweetness of the melodies work oppositionally. On the other hand, Sikth have far more progressive stylings with their music, often mixing things up just when it needs to be. I probably should sum this up by saying I like Soilwork, at least some, so this is still continuing to interest me.

Scott McGill’s Hand Farm - Ripe

McGill is one of those guitar players so beyond the realm of mortal men that it often appears to the unprepared as a wall of notes (or more uncharitably, wanking). I’m making it a point to work a little harder than just sluffing it off, important for an album that didn’t go over quite as strongly as his later material. For a first listen I wasn’t disappointed at all and found it pretty enjoyable, if a little samey at times.

Ravi Shankar - Portrait of Genius

The World Pacific Ravi Shankar catalog is something of a goldmine, or at least it is if you like your sitar. I doubt I could pick out, say, An Evening Raga/A Morning Raga from Live in San Francisco, but I do find that the more attention I play to Shankar’s music, the more I absorb and enjoy it, while it doesn’t seem to work as well as non-ambient background music.