Day 0988 - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Kanye West "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" (2010)

Kanye shut himself away following a few high profile bits of bad publicity, including his decision to crash the stage during the Video Music Awards to interrupt Taylor Swift as she went to accept an award for best music video.   West cited overwork and stress on his erratic behaviour, though it has since become clear that he has some reasonably serious, legitimate mental health issues.

This album is almost an insight into what is going on in his head, a huge busy mix of sounds tinged with paranoia, narcissism and brilliance.   I've always taken a passing interest in Kanye's music, yet weirdly (given its renown) I've never checked this one out.   It is actually a brilliant album.  Varied, unconventional, and fairly honest.

The first few tracks move between a vaguely churchy/gospel feel, which kind of signposted where Kanye was going to go next, and the synth-and-beat sound his previous album "808s and Heartbreak".    "Devil in a New Dress" displays a bit of old-school Kanye with the pitch-shifted soul vocal backing track, but from there there are big pulsing beats that brings the later West track "Black Skinhead" to mind.   Pitch-dropped vocals provide a vaguely nightmarish, unhinged sound.

The album is a solid block of music, with far less of the skits and interludes that usually populate hip-hop albums (including previous West outings).   Kanye had assembled teams of producers and performers and more or less lived in the studio, having 3 different studios going at once so he could work on whichever track he felt inspired to attack that day.  He also ran his ideas past his collaborators on a regular basis to refine and change the tracks.   Q-Tip described the approach as 'music by committee', but that Kanye was able to use parts of everyone's input while still doing his own thing.

Day 0415 - Van Halen

Van Halen "Van Halen" (1978)

This album is the business!  I listened to it a year or two ago out of curiosity (everyone knows the name Van Halen) and was wowed by the raw energy and relative musical inventiveness - within the rock idiom.  The sudden burst of doowop vocals gave me a pleasant surprise back then, and again now. Eddie Van Halen is a guitar legend, even if 'Eruption' didn't prove it (it does), he kills on every other track with his riffs and lead breaks.

Apparently the band had been scooped up by Kiss' Gene Simmons who, seeing their potential, put them to work writing demos for both themselves and for Kiss.  He even tried to recruit Eddie VH for his band!

Van Halen could easily be accused of helping to start the whole 80s hair-metal thing, but as is often the case with the progenitors of various styles, they're so much better than much of the rest of it.
 

Day 0381 - One World

John Martyn "One World" (1977)

 
Martyn was by this time burnt out on the music industry.  A hippy folkster who'd lived several of these years in a druggy haze.  Martyn took some time out to chill out and clean up in Jamaica with producer Lee 'Scratch' Perry.

Martyn came back kicking, with this album that meshes his folk background with some modern instrumentation and interesting techniques (some songs were recorded outside at night with additional microphones set up at a distance to capture the ambience). "Big Muff" despite being the name of one of the more popular guitar fuzz pedals, is a beautifully atmospheric and melodic track.