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Showing posts from February, 2019

Record Rant 002: The Beatles by The Beatles (or how we should treat the Beatles final years with Abbey Road and Let It Be)

I received the super deluxe edition of the Beatles White Album on both vinyl and the 7 CD edition from parents for Christmas. I immediately opened it up and put in the new mix to hear what Giles Martin and his team did to the album and then went onto the out-takes and alternate versions of tunes I had over listened to between the ages of 8 and 15. I was supremely interested in the outtakes, since this was something new of and from the Beatles since last year’s Sgt. Pepper re-release and it looks like this is going to be an annual thing in my lifetime. Since Anthology in 1995 and I discovered them at the age of 5 at a parent’s friends house, Apple and those in charge of the Beatles catalog have almost put something new out each year. There’s so much Beatle content from the actual music to DVDs, documentaries, and books that anything subsequently new is always welcomed by me. The two discs of previous unheard outtakes and alternates was what I was most interested in. Since the Sgt. Pe

Record Rant 001: Animals by Pink Floyd (or Why I have never bought the Wall on CD)

Released in 1977, Animals is the bastard album-of-a-child of the golden period of Pink Floyd. Squashed between the mega radio hit of 'Wish You Were Here' and it's eponymous record, and the massively successful multimedia album (that's what it is) The Wall, it is regarded as a 'bridge' album. So how come this is this my favorite PF record? Probably a combination of it's ability in their discography, lack of overplay tat has harmed Dark Side of the Moon, 'Wish You Were Here', the Wall and stoners being fans of the band. It totally get th estoner thing, but in hindsight, there are concepts in all of PF's music, from the Barrett-led incarnation to Gilmour-led incarnation and everything in-between, way beyond a stoner's attention span. Essentially PF are a jam blues band informed by classical music, studio experimentation and overarching concepts. Animals is the first record that borrows ideas from another source, Gorge Orwell's other class