Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion HiFi & HT Chat Re: Recommended Music

Bach - Goldberg Variations - Glenn Gould 1981 recording remastered.

wonderful.

W

Black Tambourin - Complete Recordings
tasty like psychocandy!


Odd Nosdam - Level Live Wires
5/5 stars.

Flaming Tunes
Glitchy and often stunning.

Examples in tasty Lo-Fi:

Wu LyF - Go Tell Fire to the Mountain

How to Dress Well - Love Remains

Cass McCombs - Wit's End

I think that it is impossible to make a successful recommendation in an art field without knowing in depth the recommenders� taste. I have purchased a few CDs on HH�er recommendations which did not get ripped to my system and were given away. Nevertheless, it is enjoyable to see what other HH�ers are listening to. I enjoy this thread when taken lightly.

To either prove or disprove my point let me make a few recommendations...

I am not a classical fan but I enjoy a reasonable mix in my collection as long as it is a bit more lively classical. I am also a piano fan. And I love to test my M gear with the greatest challenge � the piano. Accordingly I recommend all of Gabriela Montero. But if you add in the mix that I enjoy straight up jazz, I really enjoy Gabriela�s improvisations on classical. Disc 2 of Gabriela Montero Plays Chopin, Falla, Ginestera, etc., or even better her Baroque Album, track 6.

Or on a tangent, to combine my appreciation for Gabriela on the piano with my appreciation for the lively Latin music, her Solatino works wonders for me.

My favourite genre is soft rock. And to generalize I appreciate female vocals. So I have all the Katie Melua albums. But if you add the piano solo on My Aphrodisiac is You on the Call off the Search album you get sizzle. Although the studio effects are a bit much on her last album The House, she sizzles and I think it is her best album.

If you are a classical buff and are not of the set that thinks the trumpet bastardizes otherwise pure (and in my opinion often boring) classical, then Alison Balsom � Italian Concertos is bright, airy and cheery classical.

I think this will prove my theory that arm's lenght recommendations in music are impossible, but it is fun to share one's preferences.

Aloha,

Here you go! This plays extremely well on a Meridian system But you'll need some musical taste and an open mind to get it as in everything or anything or something:

Review from www.Pitchfork.com


WU LYF are for the children. Thus far, World Unite Lucifer Youth Foundation have taken equal inspiration from A Clockwork Orange and fellow Mancunians Happy Mondays to play out that adolescent fantasy of having every bird-flip rewarded by authority figures they're meant to offend. The British rags will help you fill in the rest, but here are a few talking points: getting a cold call from Michel Gondry only to ignore it; charging desperate A&R's 50 pounds for a demo; telling the UK press to [censored] off, only to have them respond with statements like, "they're reinventing the wheel." Their web presence is so cryptic, they make Dead Air Space look like Lil B's Twitter feed. The band's incomprehensible frontman, Ellery Roberts, is an experiment in rock vocal abstraction, and yet sold-out crowds sing along to every proto-linguistic grunt. But the centerpiece of Go Tell Fire to the Mountain-- a stunning lockstep of drum rolls, tart guitar chords, and a maddening chant for raising beers and clenched fists-- makes it clear: This is life-affirming music, repulsed by hype and cynicism. The name of the song? "We Bros".

The first word of the title is the important thing: Go Tell Fire celebrates togetherness. Approach the record with no context whatsoever, and it's fairly trad indie rock for crescendo junkies that could be laid over just about anything-- a stirring football highlight, your morning commute-- for instant widescreen effect. Dissatisfied with the sound they were getting in traditional studios, WU LYF self-produced in an abandoned church, which could once again be sniffed at as another publicity stunt. But they needed every bit of open airspace to capture their sound in full, and the building itself acts as an active participant. Silvery, melodic guitar lines are given extra dimension with decay and release, and a pipe organ draws lengthy sustain. And man, what it does for the percussion: the term "crash cymbal" has rarely sounded so literal, and a critical mass of reverb pushes the kick drum's natural tone to its limit on "Dirt" and "14 Crowns For Me & Your Friends".

But underneath all that bouncing room echo, you hear a band trying to live up to its own hype, unglamorously woodshedding until every arrangement was tight as hell. It's danceable in the same way older Modest Mouse is-- a sweet spot that feels more limber than rock and too jittery to congeal into a groove like funk, but always in the service of some sort of physicality. Even the ballads rarely feel settled: The opening piano chords of "Concrete Gold" echo around a kick drum beat, before a call-and-response chorus that evokes the melodicism of D.C. hardcore.

So while musically it connects the divergent anthem-fashioning of Explosions in the Sky or Wolf Parade, Roberts' vocals evade just about any facile comparison. Attempts to classify it have ranged from Captain Beefheart to a variety of feral animals or malfunctioning household appliances, all making the same point, more or less: this is a trial by fire. He's screaming "I love you forever!" on the first track ("L Y F") while revealing an alternate translation for their band name, yet in the urgency of Roberts' voice, you can see the matted fur and gnarled teeth of an endearingly ugly stray that you're still hesitant to love back (see also: his performance on the aptly titled military funeral march "Such a Sad Puppy Dog").

And yet, similar to the way J�nsi applied the rhythms and phonetics of Hopelandic to convey an immutable, beatific divinity, Roberts lives within WU LYF's musical viscera as a vocal embodiment of animal instinct, projecting from the primitive part of the brain that can sense danger and react before it even acknowledges the source. You can occasionally make out his marching orders on "Cave Song" and "Dirt", but Roberts and WU LYF match up spasm for spasm to make their point clear: keep your head on a swivel, move. Do something. WU LYF bark out the title of "Spitting Blood" repeatedly over heraldic organ, and it's an evocative image leaving its completion up to the listener. On the chorus, Ellerby and crew yell "we are so happy! Happy to see...," the intelligibility fittingly cutting off right there. After all, what is the phrase Go Tell Fire to the Mountain besides an open-ended call to arms?

Closer "Heavy Pop" might be the only time WU LYF actively and clearly suggest what they're getting at (indeed, a dispatch on the band's mailing list describes the album as "10 tracks of true heavy pop"). But Go Tell Fire rarely scans as "pop music," and at times, it's content to give into pure texture and drift. Rather, this "heavy pop" translates to me as populism of real heft. More artistically rewarding records have been made this year, but when I think about WU LYF in the manner of Iceage or Odd Future as musicians that have made me genuinely excited about their potential impact on listeners, the same things that make them seem juvenile-- the artistic and personal volatility, the semblance of a roving gang more than a band, the invitation to indulge in your most disturbing impulses and yet feel morally superior to an ill-defined majority-- are the same things that feel totally galvanizing. And it's easy to imagine Go Tell Fire to the Mountain giving disaffected listeners the promise of an entry to something beyond themselves in a way that James Blake or Bon Iver can't. Maybe you've grown past that sort of thing, but what about a record of exhilarating expanse and passion that sounds like indie rock and yet feels way bigger? Well, Go Tell Fire to the Mountain is that too.

� Ian Cohen, June 23, 2011

Here's another one that plays well and you don't even need to google or search or do anything but read and maybe even listen:

From www.Pitchfork.com


Brooklyn's indie scene can feel like a series of bands each trying to be hipper than the next, but thankfully nobody told Pete Silberman. In the dog days of 2009's deadbeat summer, the Antlers frontman emerged from his bedroom with his third LP, Hospice. On it, he unfashionably embraced hackles-raising choruses and concept-album ambition, and he pushed the button on emotional nuclear options: abortion, cancer, death, all that fun stuff. Now a trio, the Antlers have claimed the influence of "electronic music" for Burst Apart, a typical omen for a typically "difficult follow-up album." But while Burst Apart sheds the PR-bait bio and Arcade Fire aspirations that made its predecessor a word-of-mouth success, it's still tethered to a magnanimity and expressive clarity that makes it almost every bit as devastating.

Lead single "Parentheses" didn't do much to show their hand; it's pretty misleading out of context. Sounding like a higher-BPM "Climbing Up the Walls", the knockabout electronic percussion and tweaked piano ripples rightfully marked some connection to the post-OK Computer, pre-Kid A application of Mo' Wax and Warp textures to alt-rock song structures. But the aggression in Silberman's falsetto and the gnarly guitar distortion are revealed as total outliers, and Burst Apart can actually be seen as Hospice turned inside out: Where before, long swathes of calm white noise linked emotive outcries, Burst Apart moves patiently through luxurious downtempo tones belying some serious romantic disturbance.

Those well-versed in dream journal interpretation could gather that from the mere title of "Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out" (a common symbolic manifestation of sexual frustration). After all, Burst Apart does open with "I Don't Want Love", a heartbreaking wallow in a numbing hangover from a singer who previously seemed doomed to feel too much. Its glistening melody at least helps it scan as pop, but "Parentheses" and "Every Night" feel cut from the same cloth as the Walkmen's "The Rat", holding onto sanity with white knuckles, sexual congress seen as mutually assured destruction.

Aside from those, Burst Apart's atmosphere is nocturnal and desolate. Foreboding death-crawl "No Widows" fears for vehicular disaster; brief flickers of light are allowed full exposure on the gorgeous, incantatory centerpiece "Rolled Together", whose brushed drum work and silvery guitars could be heard as a studiously completed homework assignment on Agaetis Byrjun. Meanwhile, the tender, nearly beatless balladry of "Hounds" and "Corsicana" are wholly the Antlers' own and painfully pretty to behold-- however depressive Silberman's lyrics, one can simply revel in the zero-gravity synth and vocal moans and feel some sort of uplift.

Shame that it makes Burst Apart's missteps all too egregious. This isn't the sort of record that calls for a show-stopping power ballad, but we get one anyway with "Putting the Dog to Sleep", where needlessly histrionic vocals and an overwrought doo-wop progression come off more like last call karaoke than a fitting closer. If nothing else, "Putting the Dog to Sleep" helps point toward the Antlers successfully making Burst Apart more about their growth as a band than a gripping backstory-- for all of Hospice's raw power, it didn't leave much to the imagination, and it either hit you right in the gut or not at all. The Antlers won't hold your hand through Burst Apart, which will inevitably make it more of a grower, but stick around-- it's all the more affecting for how it allows you to pick your own stumbling, lonely path.

� Ian Cohen, May 12, 2011

A note to all.

Let�s have some common sense here!

This thread is not about posting a long list of albums or tracks without comment neither is it about cutting and pasting someone else�s review. What most members expect here is a recommendation or two and some comments from the author of the post as to why they recommend it. If there is a 3rd party review online somewhere great however it is probably better just to include a UBB link to it.

I hope this clarifies the spirit of what this (and the movie) thread is about.

So please no more long lists without comments and no more 500 word 3rd party reviews.

Regards,
Carl (forum administrator)

Hi Kal,

I understand more than you realise what you were trying to say � so here goes, however, if you are not aware of the music you must listen and I would very much appreciate your thoughts... or anyone else who is luckly enough to have heard it...

On a climbing trip to the English Lake District (cancelled due to the weather), I drove home listening to BBC Radio 4. It was a Sunday morning and Desert Island Discs was on. A track played � in those days if one missed anything one had to phone the BBC for the track info, which I did.

Le Myystere des Voix Bucsares is the CD track 10: Pritouritze Planinata

Why do I like it or more to the point why have I recommended it: because it moves me - by an embarrassing amount...

Thanks. Yes, I know that and I agree.

Kal

Hi Shaun,

Ordered, thank you.

Aloha,

I hope you like it Dolf � it is different!

Shaun

From time to time I get a craving to hear the wail of a rock guitar with a touch of sax and soul.
WARREN HAYNES' latest "MAN IN MOTION" did not disappoint. It arrived yesterday and hit the spot.

Gary