Everybody's doing their end-of-year lists. I thought about doing a year-in-review of the music world in general, but the only releases I can think of for 2008 without prompting are Portishead's third, Third, and Chinese Democracy (which I haven't heard anyway). Well, you'll be getting enough reviews of those everywhere else, but I thought I'd pick up on the idea of bands-back-from-the-dead to mention some old stuff I was listening to this year.
Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg: this is a bootleg of the initial mix of the Clash's Combat Rock, done by Mick Jones and intended as a double album (vinyl). I think the version I've heard was released twenty years later. There's a far better review of it than I'm going to write, over here. But in short, while Mick's mix was (sometimes still is) accused of self-indulgence, it actually goes to produce both a more stylistically consistent, and a more ambitious and experimental album - tracks like 'Sean Flynn' or 'Innoculated City' make a lot more sense on Rat Patrol than Combat Rock, both in themselves and in their original mixes.
That said, 'Know Your Rights' is more vital in its Combat Rock version, and the released version of 'Red Angel Dragnet' gets brownie points for including less of Kosmo Vinyl's fucking awful Robert de Niro impersonation. And don't all go running out to find a copy of Rat Patrol. It's a bootleg, and at least half of it has bootleg-quality sound, even when there's no excuse for it.
Let's go back to that link I gave: this site comes over as well curious for me - the guy / girl behind it (male? female? who knows? their name is Robin) has devoted it to The Clash and the Thompson Twins. Quite funny: the Clash were my favourite band as a teenager, knocking off the Twins, who'd held that position in my intermediate-school years. Possibly I'd have stayed interested in the Twins if I'd been able to hear their early post-punk Remain in Light-style stuff, but I couldn't find their first two albums for love or money while I was still interested.
Apparently they've both been remastered this year, along with the next three albums (those are the big ones), each of which come with bonus discs of the original b-sides and remixes. From memory some of the 12" single remixes made me cringe with embarrassment, but I really liked the remixes that came with the albums. Looks like a good reissue programme at any rate.
Ah, 80s remixes. I still rate Kate Bush's remixes for the Hounds of Love album. I know the current fashions are either for total reconstruction (the "art" option - think Aphex Twin) or slap-on-the-lastest-dancefloor-beat (the "popular" option - think Junior Vasquez), and either option have remixing labelled as "electronica", but I like Bush's approach: they were the same songs, reimagined, rather than new songs built out of the old material. Modest, but not pointless ('Running Up That Hill', for example: it sounds the same as the original, but it starts at the end and works through to somewhere else again).
As for whether remixes should turn out as electronica, I guess I just like this idea: if you're going to remix a jazz combo, why not make it still sound like a jazz combo, just a different jazz combo?
Electronica. Electronic music. Electro. I haven't listened to The Best of Electro Volume 1 in... a while. It came out 13 years ago, collecting tracks from the Street Sounds label's old Electro compilations from around 13 years before that. Stuff like 'Hip Hop Be Bop', 'Jam On It', 'Clear', 'One for the Treble', 'Egypt Egypt', 'Al Naafiysh (The Soul)'. Back in the day when funk discovered Kraftwerk (or vice versa maybe), back in the day when hip hop could do electronic without being "backpack", or the Clash could do hip hop.
(The Clash doing hip hop: at the bottom of the page is a clip of "The Adventure of Futura 2000", by the Clash and Futura 2000, the pioneer graffitti artist, who also hand-lettered the Combat Rock and This Is Big Audio Dynamite sleeves, then became cover artist for half the Mo Wax catalogue. Not a great rapper, however, but this track is still fun. Hell, it even samples the sound of a spraycan being shaken - it's a cliche now, but was this the first time?)
What the hell, a quick Portishead review. Yes, I liked this album. They've completely reinvented themselves so that while the record says "Hello, we are Portishead" very very firmly, they also sound nothing like either their imitators of ten years back, nor state-of-the-industry-2008 stuff. See? Exactly like every other review....
Happy New Year.
| (And now a little Youtube sampler of the stuff I just wrote about...) | ||
| The Clash, 'The Beautiful People Are Ugly Too' aka 'The Fulham Connection' | Pre-fame seven-piece Thompson Twins on the Old Grey Whistle Test | 'Egypt Egypt' by Egyptian Lover, to represent The Best of Electro vol 1 |
| The Clash / Futura 2000 collaboration, 'The Escapades of Futura 2000' | Portishead live on Jools Holland. Dig Geoff's funky pad. | Kate Bush's remix of 'Running Up That Hill' from 1985. |