KZUM Backtrack: Best of 2018

By Alek “Jerome” Nyberg
Captain Blackfrog’s Bedtime Xenophilia (Tuesday, midnight-2 a.m.)

Disclaimer: This is not and should not be seen as a list of the most culturally relevant music of these times. It seems nowadays, the most lauded and forward thinking music tends to be in the fields of rap/hip-hop, neo-soul, and some strange indie/noise/lo-fi hybrid. The charms of rap have at this point eluded me (working on it), the slickness and showboating of neo-soul make my kidneys bleed, and while indie/noise/lo-fi is sonically interesting, the sturm and drang of millennial angst that the lyrics often consist of wears thin after awhile. If my statements are incorrect, please prove me wrong. Regardless, here is a list of my five favorite albums released this year, from my small, very, very individualized musical world, not in any particular order.

Bob Drake– L’Isola Dei Lupi
This album is the sound of a man at work in his own, isolated world, which just so happens to be the case (Bob played and engineered the whole album essentially on his own).  Creating a name for himself in the American Avant-rock scene in the 80’s and 90’s, Bob has since created an idiosyncratic solo career that has slowly crept from experimental beginnings towards the wild art pop of his past couple albums. Shreds of transcendent melody are interrupted by detuned banjos, cheap keyboards, wild key changes, terrifying noise breakdowns, and power pop choruses. The lyrics on this album are essentially devoid of any emotional impact, largely consisting of descriptions of architectural features containing anthropomorphic animals, but you’ve got to be heartless to not feel anything through his passionate delivery. Like Eno’s early pop albums, this is the sound of a man with a boundless imagination throwing ideas at a wall, and making sure they stick.  Does it always work? No. But this album is always interesting and has so much individuality and personality to it, I can’t help but call it one of my favorite things I’ve heard all year.

Toby Driver– They Are the Shield
The prolific Toby Driver of Kayo Dot and Maudlin of the Well “fame” delivered another solo album this year in the sci-fi singer-songwriter genre that he’s been obsessed with for the past several years, and it’s probably his best solo album yet. The atmosphere on this album remains largely the same throughout, consisting of warm synth pads, chamber strings, wiry guitar lines, jittery, minimalist drumming, and the spectral voice of Driver himself. It’s the perfect soundtrack to a Blade Runner sequel that doesn’t exist. There appears to be a concept in this album, with lyrics referring to missing girls, bombs, and futuristic cities, but for how obfuscated and obscure these lyrics are, I could not tell you if that’s actually the case. Not that it matters, if there is a story, my enjoyment of the album is completely independent of it. This album is all about the musical atmosphere. Do you want an album to work out to or to get you pumped for a long day ahead? This isn’t it. This is peaceful, reflective, and perfect for a long night drive or a late night listening session with a good nightcap in hand. If you are unaware of the works of Toby Driver, this is a great place to hop in.

Magma– Marquee 1974
It’s Magma, it’s going to be on this list. This is an archival recording from the legendary London concert back in 1974 by the lineup that many fans consider to be the greatest in the long history of the band. Unlike the proper engineering and mixing of the other live releases from this lineup, this recording seems to be a room recording, allowing many (including myself) to hear the absolute power of this lineup for the first time. Without having to tone down their instruments for a studio setting so as not to destroy the microphones, the players are allowed to let loose, and the resulting sound is MASSIVE. The bass tone on this album is absolutely terrifying, it sounds like a jet engine T-Rex that learned how to sing. Music wise, it’s a classic setlist from a classic period, 3 25-35 minute spiritual jazz-space-rock-opera epics interspersed with smaller pieces and showcases, and as a fan, you can’t ask for more. Two caveats though: for one, it is a room recording from 1974. For how old it is, the sound is surprisingly clear, but when things really get kicking, the quality can get a bit muddy. Secondly, if you don’t know anything about the band, this is not an entry point, this is one for the already established fan, if you’re not a fan, I suggest listening to the Retrospektiw i-ii album (I want you to be a fan). Regardless, this is some trance inducing, eye opening stuff.

Koenjihyakkei– Dhorimvishka
I can’t remember a single detail from this album. Much like the Bob Drake album, there are so many ideas being thrown around, it’s hard to grasp exactly what’s happening at most points in time. However, unlike Mr. Drake’s album, the ideas thrown around here are more often than not quite otherworldly and to put it simply, strange. This is not a detriment in any way, but only a testament to the sheer amount of detail work that was put into this album. The band’s previous album came out in 2005, but this album shows no loss of spark or creativity, if anything this album is another stepping stone in the band’s career. Starting out in the early 90’s, Konejihyakkei was a part of the Japanese brutal prog/zeuhl scene (Google it) and as time’s gone on, their music has become more intricate and varied, and this album is easily their most wide reaching. I could not tell you which songs these sections appear on, but I remember hearing pseudo-lounge jazz guitars at one point, and a straight up rock riff at another part, which was quite surprising to hear coupled with the manic banshee screaming, fuzz bass, and stabbing clustered piano chords that saturate the album elsewhere. It’s probably going to take me another year or so to fully absorb this one, but repeat listenings have been the definition of “rewarding.” Essential for wild dance parties and alienating those you care about.

The Beach Boys– 1968 Archival Sets for “Friends” and “20/20”
That’s it. I hope some more good music comes out next year. That would be nice. Did you read this? Thanks if you did.Two albums, but whatever, they came out at the same time, accomplish the same thing, and I can’t pick one I like more.  First of all, for those of you who think there’s no reason to listen to The Beach Boys post-Pet Sounds, don’t talk to me. If you don’t understand what that last sentence means, please don’t talk to me. After the studio magic of Pet Sounds and SMiLE, the boys retreated to Brian’s home studio and began several years of producing an obscene amount of intimate and incredibly intricate pop songs, most of which were left on the cutting room floor only to surface on countless low quality bootlegs. This changed however with these two releases, both of which being an absolute treasure trove of these unreleased songs and demos in immaculate condition. A vast majority of these songs are unfortunately lacking vocals, but the boys are not only master vocalists, but master arrangers as well, boring is the last word I would use to describe these songs. Not to say there aren’t any vocals, there are plenty, and when they appear, they are revelatory. Songs like “Ol’ Man River,” “Been Way Too Long,” “Sail Plane Song,” and the several readings of Bacharach-David songs should have been released in the 60’s, they are absolutely incredible. The “Friends” set also manages to have a backing track to one of the lost SMiLE songs (Child is the Father of Man) tacked on at the end. It’s vocal-less, but this is the first full structure of this song that has been released, and for those who want a glimpse at Brian Wilson’s incredible arranging skills, this track is essential. If you are a casual fan, I would suggest listening to all of their albums from 1965 to 1973, and then listen to the songs mentioned above. I would not suggest listening to these whole sets unless you are a die hard fan and are slavishly devoted to anything touched by Brian Wilson (at least from the 60’s through the 70’s). Guess who is. These sets are beautiful.

By Mike Carlin
Group W Blues (Tuesday, 3-6 p.m.)

By Jack of Hearts
Sound + Vision (Wednesdays, 6-8 a.m.)

Time, Space, and The Beatles: The White Album at 50

Note: 2018 marked the 50th anniversary of the legendary album, which brought the release of a super deluxe edition as well as lots of press about the album’s influence a half-century later. 

There are those in this world whose first names become iconic, and “John,” “Paul,” “George,” and “Ringo” are four names whose cultural currency endures some 50 years after their heyday, especially with the reissues of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band last year and The Beatles this year to mark the 50th anniversary of each album.  As a volunteer DJ who reviews albums and concerts for KZUM, I have not felt the need to weigh in on anniversary editions previously, yet some of the press surrounding the reissue of The Beatles is revisionist in nature, contrary to received wisdom, and deserves scrutiny. If the Sgt. Pepper sessions found the Beatles continuing to flower as songwriters, then the sessions for The Beatles found John, Paul, and George coming into their own as songwriters, yet doing so in a contentious climate where each sought more time and space on the album.

Much of the common knowledge about the album (which listeners of a certain age know as the “White Album” because of its plain white cover) can be traced to the Beatles themselves, who have remarked upon the troubled recording sessions for the album in various interviews over the years (much of which can be read in The Beatles Anthology, or gleaned from The Beatles: Recording Sessions, most notably) while the current reconsideration owes much to producer Giles Martin (son of original Beatles’ producer George Martin) who states that the tapes to which he listened as he remixed album tracks and compiled rehearsals, rhythm tracks, and other takes for the super deluxe anniversary edition reveal a band in genial spirits (most of his recent commentary in  interviews and news articles can be searched easily online).

In considering these competing narratives, one finds that there is evidence for both positions, especially with the Beatles’ decision back then to record their rehearsals, which has yielded a trove of studio chat as well as aural evidence of the evolution of their songs during the sessions. But if we press closer, we find that all could not have been right during the recording of the album, which was reinforced for me once again by listening to the rhythm track of “Back in the USSR,” one of several tracks made available for streaming prior to the album’s reissue that I played on my show, Sound + Vision.

The studio chat that leads off take 5 of the song finds George jazzed enough by the session to sing the opening lines himself briefly then joke “Well, I’ve been wonderful on the last two takes,” to which Paul responds “Yes” immediately, before the band resumes playing, with George on guitar, Paul on drums, John on bass, and George Martin on piano. Notice a name missing here? As exhilarating as the rhythm track is—I prefer it to the final version, in fact, which they chose to speed up—Ringo’s absence cannot be reconciled very neatly with the narrative that Giles Martin has parleyed, dovetailing as it does with the disconnection or discord discussed by various Beatles in accounts that I have read over the years.

These sessions must have been edgier at times than they had been for previous albums, if John invites Yoko Ono to the sessions for inspiration and collaboration, reconfiguring the recording space and atmosphere from day one as he reasserts himself in the band; John led off the first day of the sessions for the album with “Revolution 1,” which climaxed in a 10-minute version complete with a chaotic, discordant second half that set an altogether new tone for the proceedings. (This second half, as you may surmise, was used later to form the basis of “Revolution 9”). John’s opening gambit trips up Paul’s previous dominance of their sessions, yet does not temper his perfectionism any, if the recording and rerecording of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” is any indication. George meanwhile asserts himself more with a little help from his friend Eric Clapton, in order to give songs like “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” the attention they deserved. Ringo splits for a spell amid this climate of contention for time and space on the album.

But from such disconnection or discord between the Beatles sprung rhythms and riffs and melodies and wordplay that remain beguiling to this day, with no need for a revisionist narrative to hype them. Paradoxical as it may sound, I think in trying to play together as a band again following their heavy use of the studio as an instrument on Sgt. Pepper they rediscovered their synergy, which generated its fair share of exuberance among them, as can be heard on the takes, rehearsals, and alternate versions that comprise discs 4 and 5 of the super deluxe edition, yet in that heady atmosphere they experimented freely, and in doing so John, Paul, and George, in particular, came into their own as individual songwriters.

The sense of experimentation that Paul encouraged for the Sgt. Pepper sessions, which turned upon the idea of the band pretending to be another band, became in my view the touchstone for further experimentation on the sessions for what would become The Beatles, as each of the primary songwriters followed their individual muses. They  embraced a wide range of genres in the process, and sometimes several styles associated with a genre, in the 30 songs that make up the album: the album leads off with the Chuck Berry cum Beach Boys rock ’n’ roll of “Back in the USSR,” followed by the psychedelic folk of “Dear Prudence” and “Wild Honey Pie” and the psychedelic rock of “Glass Onion,” the reggae lilt of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” the folk rock of “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” the melancholy blues-rock of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” and the postmodernist rock of “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” complete with pastiches of folk rock, hard rock, and doo-wop. (And that’s just the first side, for those of us who first heard the album on an LP.)

Such eclecticism must have inspired Rolling Stone founding editor Jann Wenner to dub the album “the history and synthesis of Western music” in his review of it, which impressed my teenage self considerably when I read his review in my high school library in the late 70s, and has stayed with me ever since. Later, when I was enrolled in a first-year composition course in college, I fancied myself a music journalist and wrote an essay about the break-up of the Beatles, incorporating the concept of an “oscillating universe” that I had learned recently in an astronomy class (it’s a theoretical model which posits that our universe is constantly expanding and contracting until its end, when it will contract back to what it was originally, a primordial fireball). I used the concept as a metaphor to describe the break-up, which looking back remains relevant today.

The Beatles can be understood as an oscillating universe, expanding the boundaries of pop music as they did for a time together, before contracting to what they were originally, four individuals with strong and very different personalities who could not remain together indefinitely, as I wrote all those years ago. And The Beatles marks the beginning of that contraction, I would add now, despite the charisma they generated between themselves. The contraction continued through the even more discordant Get Back/Let it Be sessions before moderating briefly during the Abbey Road sessions, allowing the band to revel in the dream one more time.

The Beatles remains the band’s most compelling album because of the singular voices and visions that emerged from those recording sessions, which in their fecundity, including as they did such songs as “Hey Jude,” “The Inner Light,” and “Across the Universe” as well as the album tracks, remain the decade’s most compelling recording sessions.

By Jon Kruse
The Metal Manifesto (Saturday, midnight-2 a.m.)

By Twyla Twang
HonkyTonk Heroes (Friday, 9-10:30 p.m.)