The Listening Threads Thread

To keep this all in order.
Add and keep track of them here.

Metal Thread:
Mordy's Metal Listening Club Volume #3: April 26 thru May 3, 2010 - Amon Amarth, GridLink and Manowar... All ILXors and Lurkers welcome!

Week One picks: Herman G. Heuname

Album #1: Kyuss - Blues For The Red Sun (Stoner Rock/Metal - 1992)
Album #2: Entombed - Wolverine Blues (Death Metal - 1993)
Album #3: Mastodon - Remission (Sludge proggy metal? - 2002)

Week 2 Picks: glenn mcdonald

Album #1: Fates Warning - Parallels (Progressive Metal, 1991)
Album #2: Cradle of Filth - Nymphetamine (Gothic Metal, 2004)
Album #3: HIM - Screamworks: Love in Theory and Practice (Love Metal, 2010)

Week 3 picks: unperson

Album #1: Amon Amarth, Versus the World, 2002 (Their fourth album, and the one that found them settling into the sound they've explored ever since.)
Album #2: GridLink, Amber Gray, 2008 (Ultra-tight grindcore featuring vocals from former Discordance Axis frontman Jon Chang. 11 songs in as many minutes.)
Album #3: Manowar, Sign of the Hammer, 1984 (Like Amon Amarth, this is their fourth album; but in Manowar's case, this album marked the end, not the beginning, of a sound. On later discs, they'd be just as aggressive, but more pomptastic and less rocking.)

Funk Thread:
THE ILM FUNK LISTENING CLUB! Vol #2: April 27 - May 4 with James Brown, Chairmen of the Board and Dr. John... All ILXors and lurkers welcome.

Week 1 picks: Herman G. Heuname

Album #1: Funkadelic - Standing On The Verge Of Getting It On
Album #2: Ohio Players - Pleasure
Album #3: Mandrill - Is

Week 2 picks: Shakey Mo

Album #1: Chairmen of the Board - Skin I'm In (1974)
The Chairmen's final LP is a lost gem that's light years away from their previous smooth r&b crooning. Arranged by Jeffrey Bowen, who, from what I can tell, is the common link between Parliament-Funkadelic, Sly & the Family Stone, and several projects that drew on members of both bands to provide backing material for other artists (including the Temptations' LPs "Wings of Love" and "A Song For You"). I am not sure who all from P-Funk shows up on this record, apart from Bill "Bass" Nelson and Bernie Worrell, whose contributions are both readily identifiable. I am also unclear as to how the trilogy that closes side A (Life and Death in G &A Pt 1/White Rose (Freedom Flower)/Life and Death Pt 2) and is credited to Sly Stone made it from Sly's hands into those of P-Funk and the Chairmen of the Board, but I would guess that Bowen was involved. George and Sly both being absent here, this album is proof that the lesser-known guys in both the Family Stone and P-Funk were capable of some seriously amazing and hard-hitting stuff. I love this record.

Album #2: James Brown - The Payback (1973)
The rejected soundtrack for the blaxploitation film Hell Up in Harlem (because it wasn't "being James Brown enough" o_0). I consider this the apex of James Brown's studio LP output. Prior to the early 70s the majority of James Brown's LPs are an incoherent mess, slapped together affairs often taken from different sessions with entirely different bands, with no consideration given to consistency of tone or content, but nevertheless containing tons of amazing material. But around about 1970, Brown began something of a melodramatic 180, and proceeded to issue a series of "concept" records that were built around specific themes, complete with interludes, monologues, and long, seemingly endless grooves. The Payback is the best of these by a wide margin - even the two ballads are good - and the band (under the direction of Fred Wesley) was on fire throughout. Everybody knows the opening track and can quote favorite lines ("I don't know karate/but I know ka-razy!") but the real standout here to me is the final song, "Mind Power", which synthesizes everything that was ever great about James Brown into a delirious, hypnotic, zen-buddhist-by-way-of-the-Deep-South meditation on the nature of consciousness and reality.

Album #3: Dr. John - Desitively Bonaroo (1974)
The lesser known "sequel" to his huge hit "In the Right Place" album and using pretty much the same exact formula and band, except that this time around I think the songs are actually better. No funk thread would be complete without acknowledging the contributions of New Orleans and specifically the axis of the Meters/Allen Toussaint, who provide most of the tunes and backing here, perfectly complimented by Dr. John's bizarro croak-n-drawl. This is pretty far from the way out sonics of "Dr. John the Night Tripper", but it marks the end of his "golden age" transition from psych-swamp-blues guru to Rolling Stones-confidante to party-funk frontman. After this his music gradually became more and more alternately conservative and jazzy, as he came to be a kind of standard-bearer for preserving New Orleans' musical heritage.

Hip Hop Thread:
Hi dere welcome to Planet Rock, this is the real hip-hop (listening club.)

Week 1 picks: a hoy hoy

Album #1: Nas - Illmatic (1994)
Album #2: The Lootpack - The Lost Tapes (2004)

Classical Thread:
~THE KIND WE KEEP THINKING WILL TURN INTO A TUNE~ ILM CLASSICAL MUSIC LISTENING CLUB!

Week 1 picks: Turangalila

Album #1: Olivier Messiaen / Quartet for the End of Time (1940-1941)

Recommended recording:
CD Deutsche Grammophon: Gil Shaham, violin / Paul Meyer, clarinet / Jian Wang, violoncello / Myung-Whun Chung, piano

The most ethereally beautiful music of the twentieth century was first heard on a brutally cold January night in 1941, at the Stalag VIIIA prisoner-of-war camp, in Görlitz, Germany. The composer was Olivier Messiaen, the work “Quartet for the End of Time.” Messiaen wrote most of it after being captured as a French soldier during the German invasion of 1940. The première took place in an unheated space in Barrack 27. A fellow-inmate drew up a program in Art Nouveau style, to which an official stamp was affixed: “Stalag VIIIA 49 geprüft [approved].” Sitting in the front row—and shivering along with the prisoners—were the German officers of the camp. The title does not exaggerate the ambitions of the piece. An inscription in the score supplies a catastrophic image from the Book of Revelation: “In homage to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who lifts his hand toward heaven, saying, ‘There shall be time no longer.’” It is, however, the gentlest apocalypse imaginable. The “seven trumpets” and other signs of doom aren’t roaring sound-masses, as in Berlioz’s Requiem or Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony, but fiercely elegant dances, whose rhythms swing along in intricate patterns without ever obeying a regular beat. In the midst of these Second Coming jam sessions are episodes of transfixing serenity—in particular, two “Louanges,” or songs of praise. Each has a drawn-out string melody over pulsing piano chords; each builds toward a luminous climax and then vanishes into silence. The first is marked “infinitely slow”; the second, “tender, ecstatic.” Beyond that, words fail. (via Alex Ross)

Album #2: Alfred Schnittke / Piano Quintet (1972-1976)
Recommended recording:
CD Naxos 8.554728: Mark Lubotsky & Dimity Hall (violin), Theodore Kuchar & Irini Morozova (viola), Alexander Ivashkin & Julian Smiles(cello), Irina Schnittke (piano)

"Alfred Schnittke's Piano Quintet is a dark and heavy planet. Even in the midst of his bewilderingly prolific output, this extremely personal work commands a massive gravity; it seems to orient, arrange, and set in motion so many of Schnittke's works, before and after. If one wants to find the founding trauma for such a consistently agonizing body of artistic work, it can be found in the Piano Quintet. This centrality may owe much to the quintet's function: conceived as a memorial to the composer's mother, who died of a stroke in September 1972, here's a composition whose substance was drawn from a real event, powerfully tangible and irrevocable. This kind of reality had not been Schnittke's basis for previous works. His Symphony No. 1 (1972) and other contemporaneous works are brazenly extroverted stylistic carnivals, full of fantasy, denunciation, and dark humor, and are largely artistic statements on art or cultural critiques on culture itself. In this light, the Piano Quintet was a radical departure into an entirely personal sphere. This shift caused the composer tremendous difficulty. After finishing the first movement very quickly, Schnittke was blocked, "unable to continue because I had to take what I wrote from an imaginary space defined in terms of sound and put it into the psychological space as defined by life, where excruciating pain seems almost unserious, and one must fight for the right to use dissonance, consonance, and assonance." Hence the Piano Quintet was shelved, and Schnittke did not resume work on it for almost four years. When he did pick up the work again, his musical temperament had changed, becoming more distilled, tauter, and more unabashedly morbid. Schnittke had perfected a personal sound, a dense, claustrophobic web of chromatic clusters. This signatory sound, rich yet obscure, serves as the backdrop for much of his succeeding work, and is seamlessly crafted into this work. The second movement is a wraith-like slow waltz on the name of B-A-C-H (H in German notation is B, B is B flat). The waltz is the only "polystylistic" concession in the piece, and throughout the movement consistently descends back into torturous clusters."

Jazz Thread:
http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?action=showall&boardid=41&threadid=79981

Week 1 picks: Tannenbaum Schmidt
Album #1: Duke Ellington & John Coltrane (1962)
Album #2: Miles Davies - Birth Of The Cool (1957)
Album #3: Ben Neill - Triptycal

Week 2 picks: Herman G. Heuname
Album #1 Pharoah Sanders - Karma (1969)
Pharoah Sanders' third album as a leader is the one that defines him as a musician to the present day. After the death of Coltrane, while there were many seeking to make a spiritual music that encompassed his ideas and yearnings while moving forward, no one came up with the goods until Sanders on this 1969 date. There are only two tracks on Karma, the 32-plus minute "The Creator Has a Master Plan" and the five-and-a-half-minute "Colours." The band is one of Sanders' finest, and features vocalist Leon Thomas, drummer Billy Hart, Julius Watkins, James Spaulding, a pre-funk Lonnie Liston Smith, Richard Davis, Reggie Workman on bass, and Nathaniel Bettis on percussion. "Creator" begins with a quote from "A Love Supreme," with a nod to Coltrane's continuing influence on Sanders. But something else emerges here as well: Sanders' own deep commitment to lyricism and his now inherent knowledge of Eastern breathing and modal techniques. His ability to use the ostinato became not a way of holding a tune in place while people soloed, but a manner of pushing it irrepressibly forward. Keeping his range limited (for the first eight minutes anyway), Sanders explores all the colors around the key figures, gradually building the dynamics as the band comps the two-chord theme behind with varying degrees of timbral invention. When Thomas enters at nine minutes, the track begins to open. His yodel frees up the theme and the rhythm section to invent around him. At 18 minutes it explodes, rushing into a silence that is profound as it is noisy in its approach. Sanders is playing microphonics and blowing to the heavens and Thomas is screaming. They are leaving the material world entirely. When they arrive at the next plane, free of modal and interval constraints, a new kind of lyricism emerges, one not dependent on time but rhythm, and Thomas and Sanders are but two improvisers in a sound universe of world rhythm and dimension. There is nothing to describe the exhilaration that is felt when this tune ends, except that "Colours," with Ron Carter joining Workman on the bass, was the only track that could follow it. You cannot believe it until you hear it.

Album #2: Bobby Hutcherson - Components (1965)
Perhaps the single album that best sums up Bobby Hutcherson's early musical personality, Components is appropriately split into two very distinct halves. The first features four Hutcherson originals in a melodic but still advanced hard bop style, while the latter half has four free-leaning avant-garde pieces by drummer Joe Chambers. Hutcherson allots himself more solo space than on Dialogue, but that's no knock on the excellent supporting cast, which includes Herbie Hancock on piano, James Spaulding on alto sax and flute, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, and Ron Carter on bass. It's just more Hutcherson's date, and he helps unite the disparate halves with a cool-toned control that's apparent regardless of whether the material is way outside or more conventionally swinging. In the latter case, Hutcherson's originals are fairly diverse, encompassing rhythmically complex hard bop (the title track), pensive balladry ("Tranquillity," which features a lovely solo by Hancock), down-and-dirty swing ("West 22nd Street Theme"), and the gaily innocent "Little B's Poem," which went on to become one of Hutcherson's signature tunes and contains some lyrical flute work from Spaulding. The Chambers pieces tend to be deliberate explorations that emphasize texture and group interaction in the manner of Dialogue, except that there's even more freedom in terms of both structure and tonal center. (The exception is the brief but beautiful closing number, "Pastoral," an accurate title if ever there was one.) Components illustrated that Hutcherson was not only the most adventurous vibes player on the scene, but that he was also capable of playing more straightforward music with intelligence and feeling.

Album #3: Lonnie Liston Smith & the Cosmic Echoes - Expansions (1974)
When Lonnie Liston Smith left the Miles Davis band in 1974 for a solo career, he was, like so many of his fellow alumni, embarking on a musical odyssey. For a committed fusioneer, he had no idea at the time that he was about to enter an abyss that it would take him the better part of two decades to return from. Looking back upon his catalog from the period, this is the only record that stands out — not only from his own work, but also from every sense of the word: It is fully a jazz album, and a completely funky soul-jazz disc as well. Of the seven compositions here, six are by Smith, and the lone cover is of the Horace Silver classic, "Peace." The lineup includes bassist Cecil McBee, soprano saxophonist David Hubbard, tenor saxophonist Donald Smith (who doubles on flute), drummer Art Gore, and percussionists Lawrence k*ll*an, Michael Carvin, and Leopoldo. Smith plays both piano and electric keyboards and keeps his compositions on the jazzy side — breezy, open, and full of groove playing that occasionally falls over to the funk side of the fence. It's obvious, on this album at least, that Smith was not completely comfortable with Miles' reliance on hard rock in his own mix. Summery and loose in feel, airy and free with its in-the-cut beats and stellar piano fills, Expansions prefigures a number of the "smooth jazz" greats here, without the studio slickness and turgid lack of imagination. The disc opens with the title track, with one of two vocals on the LP by Donald Smith (the other is the Silver tune). It's typical "peace and love and we've got to work together" stuff from the mid-'70s, but it's rendered soulfully and deeply without artifice. "Desert Nights" takes a loose Detroit jazz piano groove and layers flute and percussion over the top, making it irresistibly sensual and silky. It's fleshed out to the bursting point with Smith's piano; he plays a lush solo for the bridge and fills it to the brim with luxuriant tones from the middle register. "Summer Days" and "Voodoo Woman" are where the electric keyboards make their first appearance, but only as instruments capable of carrying the groove to the melody quickly, unobtrusively, and with a slinky grace that is infectious. The mixed bag/light-handed approach suits Smith so well here that it's a wonder he tried to hammer home the funk and disco on later releases so relentlessly. The music on Expansions is timeless soul-jazz, perfect in every era. Of all the fusion records of this type released in the mid-'70s, Expansions provided smoother jazzers and electronica's sampling wizards with more material that Smith could ever have anticipated.

Prog Thread:
This is the PROG ROCK Listening Club - Week One - (Yes, Soft Machine and Camel!)

Week 1 picks: Viceroy

Album #1: Yes - Close to the Edge
Album #2: Soft Machine - Third
Album #3: Camel - Moonmadness

R&B Thread:
ILX R&B LISTENING CLUB week one: Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway, Luther Vandross, Amerie

Week 1 picks: The Rev

Album #1: Roberta Flack & Donny Hathaway
Album #2: Luther Vandross - Never Too Much
Album #3: Amerie - Because I Love It

Currently missing: Country, "Global", Electronic/Dance, Gospel, Indie Rock...