The Millenium - Magic Time: The Millenium/Ballroom Sessions
I’d never heard The Millenium before, so I was surprised there were three CDs of material including them and their predecessor The Ballroom from the late 60s, as they’d only released one album at the time, Begin, which is included here. Most of that music is on the third disc, while the first two concentrate on The Ballroom, although it must be said, within the constraints of the style, the bands (or projects?) didn’t sound too far apart. Across the board, the band delivers surprisingly ornate pop numbers with sweet female (and sometimes male) vocal harmonies. From a certain direction early Beach Boys had to play a part, but I’m reminded more of the naive Wendy & Bonnie as an obscure comparison as there’s a lot of fragile, crystalline beauty and that classic sense of 60s naivete at work. As the discs weave on, we’re introduced to various sessions and I remember an interesting chain of songs somewhere in the middle that are more acoustic guitar dominated, which I thought was a little unusual for the era. In fact, for what is obviously pop music, there’s a sense of experimental or psychedelic production values at work that give the entirety a light sort of haze, which goes great with the group vocal pieces while dating the work succinctly. While this isn’t likely to go over well with the fuzz guitar and freak out psych fans, those who love that Summer of Love vibe with the airy, romantic, ethereal vocals are likely to go for this, in fact if the songs end up being as good as they intimate with a first listen, I may very well fall in love with this.
Prince - Paaro Van Troje 8/18/88
Picked up a couple Prince shows a while back. When I listened to the first one, I was reminded of just about everything I disliked about the music in the 80s and grew terribly annoyed with this high pitched call thing Prince would do between songs. But I did like the instrumental bits, short as they are. Well they’re not nearly as short here, in fact I believe this Paaro von Troje show is mostly instrumental, just a bunch of funk jams with blazing guitar and good rhythms. While the tones still remind me of the 80s and by all the correspondences Miles Davis around the same time (and just who was the trumpet player who came out for a song here?) and thus this won’t likely ever be a perfect fit, it does go to show you that the rage of the 80s actually had a pretty incredible musical pedigree.