INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - COCTEAU TWINS, TREASURE

I can't quite pinpoint when this music came into my life, but it must have been sometime in 1985 when I first became aware of Cocteau Twins, most likely their third full LP, Treasure (1984). For several years in the mid 1980s, Cocteau Twins were THEE go-to band for all your "come-down" needs. After a long night of freakin' & tweakin' on your favorite party favor, when your senses were getting fragile and you needed something soft and dreamy to drift back down to earth, there was really only one choice for that descent back into reality.

Cocteau Twins quickly became the flagship band for the 4AD label and helped to establish its aesthetic of luscious production values and elegant packaging. What the trio of Elizabeth Fraser, Robin Guthrie & Simon Raymonde brought together was the opposite of a "power trio". Softness and sweeping beauty were their hallmarks and no other band made me appreciate the potential of a good, spacey reverb like these folks.

Musically, backed by only restrained drum machine, Robin & Simon spun a web of shimmering guitars and soothing bass, a tapestry which seemed to fade off into infinity, gliding and glittering like angel wings. This aesthetic became hugely influential for me and many others as we all pounced on the wave of new digital reverb units which began flooding the music production gear market at the time. BIG echo and endless reverberation were a MUST for the burgeoning "dream pop" aficionados. But as vast and ethereal as this music was, there was a presence floating and flying atop it all which took something wonderful and alchemically transmuted it in to spun gold, the voice of Elizabeth Fraser.

Nothing was a better balm for a sensitive brain during a drug induced dawn than the voice of miss Fraser. Most of the time you didn't know what the fuck she was singing. It often just sounded like gibberish, but what magnificently beautiful gibberish it was! I didn't know at the time, but she, as it turned out, suffers from a great deal of social anxiety and this shyness became a key ingredient in creating her style on record. It was all turned inward, afraid to enunciate the words clearly. Instead, they became a phonetic code language, a symbolism of emotional triggers where the words faded from relevance and it was only the sound of that gorgeous, fragile voice leading you into that inner space of self reflection. It was a friendly, guiding hand as you came to terms with the world resolving back into itself while your head started to clear (and probably ache a bit).

Listening to this music, for me, brings back so many memories of facing a sunrise after a long strange trip and feeling like it's all going to be okay.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - LOU REED, METAL MACHINE MUSIC

Early in 1983, I was living in a house in Vancouver, sharing the main floor with some band mates. The property was managed by this odd older fellow who lived in another house a couple of doors down. All three houses in this row were owned by the same person and managed by this dude, who happened to be an avid record collector. He had a little garage in the back of our house which was stuffed from top to bottom with records. There were shelves lining the walls from floor to ceiling with all these LP's neatly stored inside. We got friendly enough with the guy that he eventually gave us the green light to have a dig and borrow any records we wanted to check out. This is where I first discovered Lou Reed's most iconoclastic release of his career, Metal Machine Music.

Released on the heels of one of Reed's most commercially successful periods in the early 1970s, 1975's double LP monolith of noise came screaming out of the gate to the immediate confusion of fans and critics. Assumed to be no more than a contractually obligated prank on his record label, whom Reed was about to terminate relations, few suspected Reed's earnestness in delivering this slab of apparent antisocial discord.

At the time of its release, the idea of "noise" music was virtually anathema within the commercial record buying markets. There may have been some obscure fine arts conceptual dalliances throughout the 20th century, but it was strictly academic stuff for students and art snobs. It was never dropped headlong into the midst of a mainstream record buying public.

Prior to unearthing the record in that garage, I'd only come across a few references to it in the music press and most of it was either dismissive with the occasional glancing comment indicating some form of reverence. I recall one review by Lester Bangs of another LP where he referenced MMM as a form of antidote for the horrible album he'd just reviewed. Given that, I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I dove into it. It didn't take long to discover the reality of the impenetrable wall of noise I would encounter.

I can't say I "enjoyed" listening to this album, but across those 4 sides of brain cell shattering treble piercing frequencies, something got lodged in my consciousness. Without any chemical augmentation, my brain chemistry changed. At the time, I couldn't put it into words or describe what process had occurred and I still don't really know how to give it a proper description, but I do know that the idea of "noise" and the concept of using it creatively was firmly lodged into my consciousness by this record. It also impressed a sense of personal determinism upon me in the manner in which Reed had put this product out there in accordance with nothing more than his own desires and with no concern for the judgements or reactions of anyone else.

It wasn't until years later that I finally got a CD copy of it and I don't listen to it often, but I do find it necessary to listen to at least once a year. The day Lou Reed died, it was the first recording of him that I had to listen to and I played it from start to finish. I don't find it a chore to listen to either. I find it is, as Bangs noted, a cleansing experience. It's like sandblasting all the gunk off your brain. It's a way to give your mind a bit of a reset. Reed's motives for creating the album have, since its release, become more understood as a tool for meditation rather than as a "fuck you" to any record label. It is, perhaps, the most fundamentally useful record he ever created in terms of practical application.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - YELLO, CLARO QE SI

The Residents were one of the first indie bands to create their own corporate infrastructure for producing their products. Between Ralph Records and The Cryptic Corporation, they set up a system for recording, pressing, promoting and distributing the most idiosyncratic collection of vinyl on the market at the time. Soon after I started buying Residents albums, it became apparent to me that Ralph had other artists on offer and one of my first forays into these side roads was the 1981 sophomore LP by Swiss experimental trio, Yello, Claro Que Si.

Though they are now known as a duo, their first LPs were done by a trio consisting of Boris Blank, Carlos Peron & Dieter Meier (Carlos left by 1983). I think my initial attraction to this album came directly from the cover art, depicting a couple of very stylized, mid-century modern looking robots. The retro-futurismo of it all triggered some sort of latent nostalgia switch, even though I was only 18 at the time the album came out. It also just looked like a fun record and it definitely delivered on that.

While I was maybe expecting a Residents clone at first, I should have given them more credit because Yello turned out to be something distinctly their own from the start. It was equally as weird and alien sounding in a lot of ways, but also more accessible with its "pop" sensibility than anything from the eyeball wearing four. One could imagine most of these songs on some alternate universe radio station, someplace where good taste was the driving factor instead of profits, perhaps.

One of the most striking aspects of Yello's music was Dieter's vocals. He was an odd presence for fronting a "pop" band, being mature looking even then and not at all like the sorts of fellows generally behind the mic. And his vocal range and character were unlike anything I'd ever heard before. He could put on all sorts of strange personas and incarnations. From raspy growls to silky baritones, he was a distinct presence on each composition.

Musically, the album introduced me to a lot of very state of the art electronics and offered up an extremely sophisticated production. It was the kind of punchy, crisp production which was to set that bar for electronic music. It still incorporated some traditional musical elements, but it all sounded very modern and the arrangements were unique and full of unexpected dynamics.

As slick as this was, I still wasn't expecting Yello to become as iconic as they did in the next few years, particularly with the Oh Yeah single becoming a staple in cinematic soundtracks in the latter half of the 1980s. But this album was my introduction to the group and remains my sentimental favorite.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - KISS, DESTROYER

I know they've become the poster boys for cultural capitalism and I suppose they always were, but I do have to still acknowledge their influence on my musical journey considering Kiss' 1976 LP, Destroyer, was the foundation stone of my record collection. Not that I didn't have a couple of records in my possession before this, but this was the first one I bought with my own money of my own volition. The few I had prior to this were childhood gifts of one sort or another and were mostly novelty records like Super Bloopers or Goofy Greats.

It was pretty hard not to be exposed to Kiss in 1975/1976 as they had become THEE teen band of the era thanks to their Alive double live album from 1975. My cousin had that album, which I thought was great. My record collection began after a somewhat tense negotiation with my parents to get a raise in the monthly allowance my brother and I were granted. It started as a mere pittance and barely enough to buy some candy and a pop or two. I was desperate to start buying records and you needed at least $7 for one of those back in those days. Dad was incensed that we wanted more money and put up a tough resistance towards any increase, but we finally managed to get an agreement to something like, I think, $20 a month, enough to buy 2 or 3 records at least. It was my first experience with collective bargaining.

With that in place, the next order of business was to put that hard won chore money down on some vinyl. Weirdly enough, my first choice was not this record, but the LP, More More More, by The Andrea True Connection. I just liked that song and went to Zellers to buy it and brought it home to give it a spin on my shit box record player. It was just one of those things that was a box with a turntable and speakers built into the back. Total garbage. So much so that the heavy thump of the disco beat was too much for it and, when I went to play the record, it just skipped all over the place. Infuriated by this skipping damn record, I figured it was defective and took it back the next day for an exchange. I wasn't going to take a chance on another copy of the disco record, so my backup choice was the Kiss album.

Back then, Kiss seemed like a dangerous band. Reading the letters to the fans on the inside gate-fold off the Alive album, Gene's letter came off real evil and demonic, so he was pretty cool for us kids. It all felt like something we should not be listening to. Putting on the Destroyer album, that sense was reinforced by songs like God of Thunder. For a 12-13 year old, just discovering the world of adult preoccupations, it was very alluring and definitely gave you some street-cred in the playground at junior high.

Of course, it wasn't long until I started to pick up on the commercialization going on with it and how it was getting more and more "kid friendly" as time went on. By the time Love Gun and the comic came out, my suspicions of the latent "uncoolness" of Kiss started to mount. Then that horrible movie, Kiss Meets the Phantom, hit the TV screen and it was game over for my interest in the band. There was also the emergence of the punk & new wave scenes starting in 1978 which soon knocked my attention completely off mainstream bands like Kiss and onto far more interesting paths. I should also say that Queen came along in 1977 and blew Kiss off the map in terms of style, versatility, talent and sophistication.

I should conclude, however, by saying that Kiss did, ultimately, leave a key impression which informed my own musical path going forward. If there's one thing I took away from them, it was the importance of showmanship! The idea that a band should put on a bit of a show if they're going to be on stage remained with me from then on. I never liked going on stage in street clothes. I never liked a lot of bands that did that either. I always appreciated a band who gave me something to look at while they were up there, whether it was in the staging, visuals or simply having personality and attitude enough to be interesting to watch. This, I have to put down to Kiss setting the standard in terms of offering some stagecraft while playing music.

REVIEW - CATCH-22 (HULU SERIES)

I just finished watching Hulu's recent adaptation of the Joseph Heller novel, Catch-22. I have never read the book and am only familiar with the 1970 film adaptation. Now, from what I've gathered after checking out a few reviews online after finishing the mini-series, I think your enjoyment of this is going to be heavily dependent on what you're familiar with. Fans of the book seem pretty universally harsh on both the film and this 2019 mini-series. However, without that background, I'm only comparing this to the film, which I saw on several occasions in my youth. Despite the critics, I'll also note that on both Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB, this series still gets very high average scores all round.

I've always liked the film and found that this six part TV adaptation worked even better for me in terms of fleshing out the story. If you're not too familiar with it, this is NOT a story about WWII, even though that is the setting. What it's really about is the incompetence of bureaucracies and the sociopathy of capitalistic systems, using the war as an allegorical device to explore these themes. It's a straddling of satire and trauma illustrating how these systems create irreconcilable personal conflicts when social structures are engineered such that expectations are untenable, where the goalposts of success are constantly being pushed further away, just out of reach. It shows how power and authority often end up in the hands of those least capable of coping with them, engendering sadism and cruelty as tools to protect those in authority from being exposed for the frauds that they are. It's a story which, while originally published in 1961, deals with themes that are strikingly relevant to the present day.

The issues, if you have any, may come with the degree to which the series is faithful to the book. Critics who are fans of the book complain that its message has been diluted or "dumbed down" for mainstream entertainment. That may well be true, but from my own subjective standpoint and judging it solely on how engaging I found it, I'd say it's rather an excellent series.

To begin with, the overall production values are top notch. It looks authentic and period accurate. The cinematography looks great and the action scenes are rendered very believably while avoiding gratuitous flamboyance and gore. The cast all worked very well for me and delivered what I found to be poignant and appropriately humorous characterizations, because this is driven by satire, wicked at its best.

Now, I may very well one day read the book and then look back on these interpretations as faint and feeble, but on their own, judged on their own merits, they still have something valid to say. Having the time delve into it over the course of six 45 minute episodes gives it a lot of room to breath and I found myself very much engrossed in the story and moved by both its highs and lows.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - MUSLIMGAUZE, BUDDHIST ON FIRE

Influence, in music, isn't always about the music itself. Sometimes, artists inspire influence for other reasons and get you to think about certain things a little differently or to look more closely at a particular subject. Being "political" doesn't always require writing protest songs with one's stances spelled out in the lyrics. Sometimes, artists can cleverly coax listeners to question things simply through a few careful signifiers.

I remember hearing Muslimgauze's 1984 LP, Buddhist on Fire, probably late in 1985 when my room mate at the time bought the album. The cover, of course, was very provocative, showing the aftermath of a Tibetan monk's protest after self-immolation. Right there I was educated by the fact that I didn't even know about this practice at the time. The second clue was in the "band" name, Muslimgauze. Again, I assumed there was some religious significance, but I didn't know much about it at the time. At that point, I was only interested in the music and what I heard on the album was pretty interesting.

Muslimgauze began in the early 1980s as simply a guy with a drum machine. His first releases were stark and minimal with nothing more than rhythm. Created solely by a British fellow, Bryn Jones, his approach was fairly blocky and crude at first, but by the time of Buddhist On Fire, his 3rd LP, he'd started to evolve a certain flair and sophistication. There were only 5 longish tracks on the album, but their rhythmic insistence was mesmerizing and song titles like Soviet Occupied Territories, Turkish Falaka & Dissidents In Exile gave the proceedings a subversively militant aura. It was all enough that, within my music collecting circles, Muslimgauze LPs, whenever they'd show up in the shop, were immediately snapped up.

I wasn't always able to buy them myself, but I'd always manage to record them on cassette from my friends. As each one came around, we'd get familiarized with the various terms of revolution used in the middle eastern conflicts. Without preaching or proselytizing, these records began to expose the hypocrisy of the situation and the injustices being committed against these people. It was a strange process whereby the use of the terms and the images on the album covers became an invitation to empathize and investigate.

The odd thing is that Jones never traveled to the area, had no relation, racially, to the culture and did not even consider himself religious, let alone a "Muslim". Yet he spent nearly two decades, until his tragic, sudden death in 1999, spewing forth a deluge of releases promoting the cause of these people. If he'd become rich from this endeavor, it might have been tempting to accuse him of cultural appropriation, but this was not in any way "mainstream" music. He did very small runs of these records on little indie labels. But he was prolific. He released dozens of albums over the course of his career and left enough unreleased material in the vault to keep providing new content for another two decades since his passing.

Over the years, his works evolved from their primitive drum machine roots into richly intricate compositions in the late 1980s and early 1990s and then shifted into deliberately crude, yet fluid excursions into extremes of tribal downtempo dub, pushing distortion and bass frequencies to levels as radical as the politics which inspired his works. Today, the Muslimgauze catalogue spans some 200 or so releases with more miraculously surfacing each year. Sure, there's a good chunk that's a bit dubious in terms of it's quality, but there's a surprising amount which holds up and still sounds cutting edge. If it doesn't get your head bobbing, it should at least get it nodding in recognition that he's clued you into a real struggle which persists to this day.

INFLUENTIAL ALBUM - NANCY SINATRA, BOOTS

Since it's Mother's Day, I wanted to feature an album that reminds me of my mom. Hands down, this was my favorite LP in her respectable collection of vinyl. It was the coolest LP in the stack and has one of the best songs ever written on it. The album is worthwhile for that song alone. If they'd just repeated These Boots are Made for Walking 12 times on the record, it would still be an amazing album by any standard. When I moved out on my own, this was the first album I pilfered from mom's collection to add to my own.

Let's start by talking about that song. This was the one that made Nancy a star. Of course, she had a leg up, what with being the progeny of no less than the "chairman of the board", ol' blue eyes, Frank Sinatra. Her career was pretty well guaranteed in some ways. No one's gonna mess with Frankie's little princess, capisce? So she could've farted out garlic and pepperoni and radio stations would have played it for a bit, just to make Frank happy. And yeah, she wasn't a great voice. There wasn't a lot of range there, but she had something much more valuable than technical skills. She had presence and A.T.T.I.T.U.D.E!

Lee Hazlewood, the album's producer and the author of the song, had been planning on saving the song for his own album, but Nancy heard it and said is was wrong for a male vocalist. She thought it came off as abusive in the hands of a man, but she insisted she could give it the right read. Reluctantly, Lee conceded and they recorded the song. In her hands, it became a symbol of female empowerment. At a time when women were just starting to find their voice in pop culture, Nancy came out of the gate as this fierce little firecracker who wasn't going to take shit from anyone. When she intoned that she was gonna "walk all over you", it had better send chills down your spine because she meant business and carried it off with every word.

The rest of the album, while vastly overshadowed by its hit single, is no less loaded with great songs, many courtesy of Hazlewood. They may not reach the same heights as Boots, but that's only a relativity as on their own, they still tower above a lot of the pop music of the day. It's all music which has earned the term "timeless" and deserves to be heard for generations to come.