Day 0959 - Want Two

Rufus Wainwright “Want Two” (2004)

I have always enjoyed grandiosity and cinematic ‘scope’ in music, but Rufus Wainwright was almost too much for me in this respect!   I heard his album “Release the Stars” playing in a music store back when I was living in the UK and was instantly hooked.  If memory serves I picked up a copy that same day.  

While I loved Rufus’ mix of orchestra and choir with his melodic songcraft, I found that the album was actually so musically overwhelming that I couldn’t listen to "Release the Stars" more than once a week.  In the intervening years of course, I’ve gotten onto so many other albums/artists that it gets even less time.

From the opening track of “Want Two” (companion piece to Wainwright’s previous release “Want One”) I thought it might be more of the same, as Wainwright’s high, powerful voice vibrates over swirling string arrangements.  The next two tracks though pare things back nicely, with melodic tracks featuring interesting, yet relatively restrained arrangements.   “Peach Trees” in particular features lovely harmonised backing vocals that complement the song without overpowering it.

“The Art Teacher” tells a gentle tale of unrequited love for one’s educator.   “Gay Messiah” mixes country music (not always a genre known for its forward-thinking ideas on homosexuality) with a sort of gospel vibe.   The album ends on the lengthy but not overly ostentatious “Old Whore’s Diet”.

I’m hard-pushed to say how I’d rate this against “Release the Stars” but I could certainly see revisiting this more than once a week.

Day 0808 - Dust

Screaming Trees "Dust" (1996)

Screaming Trees and their dust-throated vocliast Mark Lanegan have always drifted in and out of my orbit.   I first heard the Screaming Tress through their brilliant song "Nearly lost you" from the soundtrack Cameron Crowe's grunge-centric film "Singles".   Even though I loved that song I didn't really think to check out any more of their music.

A few years later a friend was well into the Mark Lanegan band and I listened to a couple of their albums but left it at that again.   Then a few years later, I saw Lanegan perform with the band the Soulsavers and a friend who is very much a Lanegan afficiando helped me discover a lot more of his work (solo, with Belle & Sebastian's Isobel Campbell, with Duke Garwood, Gutter Twins, Twilight Singers...).   Basically, sometimes I'm a slow learner.

Anyway, back to "Dust".   The basic foundation of this album seems to be the Beatles' Revolver and Rubber Soul albums, it has that mix of hard rock with middle-eastern sounds and a wash of psychedelia.   I guess those sounds, mixed with a little more distortion and with Lanegan's gravelly voice somehow manages to sound rock hard, the album is too good to fob off as "just another grunge record".

Great songs with occasional touches of gospel backing vocals that seem to signpost what was to come as far as Lanegan's work with the Soulsavers goes.

Day 0797 - the Bends

Radiohead "The Bends" (1995) - got it

The heady days, before many Radiohead fans became insufferable snobs who crapped over the bands they perceived Radiohead to have influenced.  When Radiohead themselves were just "that band who sang Creep" with everyone waiting to see if they could follow up their 'hit'.

While the bleeps and bloops of "Kid A" are often pointed out as the big change in direction for Radiohead, arguably their first few albums all displayed fairly major stylistic shifts.   "The Bends" saw the band move away from their straight-ahead alt-rock to a more densely nuanced, melodically sophisticated sound, but still with more of a rock-guitar sound than follow-up "OK Computer" would have.

The band worked more collaboratively on songrwiting and arranging, instead of creating a wall of guitars, they played with arrangements that put together different parts for each of the three guitarists that worked together.  In some places the sound was still dense, like on single "Just" a bit of a favourite of mine, and something of a good middle point between their rock sound and their intelligent melodic directions.  Elsewhere, they stripped things back on songs like the acoustic, atmospheric "Bullet Proof... I wish I was" and album-closer "Street Spirit (Fade Out)".... damn, actually Radiohead always have the best album-closer tracks.

Most of the tracks start small and build their arrangements, as can be heard in songs like "Fake Plastic Trees", "My Iron Lung" and "Nice Dream".   

An argument could be made for this being the album where Radiohead really found their sound, with that more melodically sophisticated vein being mined; but you could also argue that Radiohead are another of those good bands who never quite fix on their sound and are constantly trying to forge new ground.