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The First 100 Records That Popped Into My Head With Capsule Reviews Pt. 2: 11-20

11: Dionne Warwick – Just Being Myself (1973)

The usually tasteful lounge pop and Bacharach interpretations of Warwick take a left turn here. There’s no Bacharach on here, all the songs come from Motown geniuses Holland/Dozier/Holland. There’s a crack soul band behind her. And she proves she could belt on the same level as the Martha Reeves’s and Diana Ross’s of the world. While she’d shown her soul chops earlier on the aptly titled Soulful (1969) (check out the incredible version of “You’re All I Need to Get By” on that one) this is her with the benefit of experience, at the top of her game. This album has unfortunately been sampled more than it’s been listened to. Or maybe that’s fortunate since you can come to it fresh. It’s uneven like any other Warwick album, but “You’re Gonna Need Me”, “I Think You Need Love” and the title track are slow burn gold.

12: Mellow Candle – Swaddling Songs (1972)

Don’t hear much about this one much. Unlike much UK folk rock of the time, they could do the rock just as well as the folk. The harmony arrangements are inventive and psychedelic. Mellow Candle can be mellow in a moody way at times. The overall vibe is very witchy. Cover almost has a Moebius feel. Songs are all the length they need to be. I go back to this one a lot. Not available on a lot of streaming services, there’s a decent playlist of the whole album on the Youtube. Good luck finding a physical copy of this.

13 – Digable Planets – Blowout Comb (1994)

Even with the absurd number of hip hop gems that dropped in 1994 this album stands out. The production is not the DJ Premier/Pete Rock style soul samples that dominated the east coast at that time. The closest thing is maybe De La Soul – Buhloone Mindstate but approached with the ambitious scope of prog rock. The rapping is distinctive and concerned with subjects that weren’t very common at the time. Doodlebug might be my favorite female MC of all time (sorry Lauryn Hill). Both MCs are outspoken Marxists but it never seems confrontational. The grooves are infectious and complex enough to seem closer to actual jazz than just your run of the mill rap that happened to be sampling jazz records.
15: De La Soul – Buhloone Mindstate (1993)

Prince Paul’s masterpiece and unfortunately his last album with the group. The Native Tongues collective was falling apart and that weariness shows through here in places though it wouldn’t fully spill out into the rhymes until De La’s next album Stakes Is High. “Ego Trippin Pt. 2” is a vicious takedown of the gangstas of excess that were ascendant at the time (and the music video is hilarious). “I Am I Be” has the epic pop feel of a “Good Vibrations” but with much better lyrics. This is the last hurrah of their vision for hippie rap. Depending on the day of the week, I would consider either this or Stakes Is High to be the group’s greatest statement. There aren’t a lot of guest spots but Shortie No Mass contributes a few excellent verses and I wish we’d heard more from her after this besides her excellent single “Like This/U Like My Style”.

16: Sandy Bull – Demolition Derby (1972)

Takes the acoustic guitar improvisation style pioneered by Basho, Fahey, and a younger Sandy Bull and puts a handlebar mustache on it. This is some spaced out swamp rock. Bull isn’t a loose player but knows where to leave space. More relaxed and funky than most solo guitar records of this era. Altered enough, you might even start dancing. Patti Smith likes it. I like it. You should like it too.

17: Robert Ashley – Perfect Lives (1980)

I wrote a 15 page paper on this in college and probably could have gone longer. I’ll try to keep this short. Ashley combines opera, television, boogie woogie, metaphysics and John Cage into an epic statement laying out an idiosyncratic but wise view of the world. What is the place of sound? What is the difference between tourettes and speaking in tongues? What is the self and how does it change over the plane of time? Was “Blue” Gene Tyranny the greatest improvisational piano player of all time? All this and more on the next episode of Perfect Lives.

18: Mike O’Neill & Devon Sproule – Colours (2013)

Really nice low key indie pop. Excellent vocal harmonies and song writing with hooks galore. The vibe is more middle-aged but in a good way. Sproule’s voice is in top form here. “Walking In the Folly” should have been a huge hit. While both have had solo careers, I would definitely get excited for a sequel. Many lyrical quotables. The Madvillain of indie pop.

Check out “You Can’t Help It” and “Talk To You” first.

19: The Innocence Mission – Glow (1995)

One of the high points of 90s soft rock. Karen Peris takes lyrical influence from Emily Dickinson, a pretty unusual influence in the music world. The production and guitar tones are on point. “Bright As Yellow” makes rather delicate sounds seem enormous. “Happy, The End” is a menacing side A closer with a great instrumental coda. Catchy melodies everywhere that feel earned. One of few albums I own multiple copies of.

20. The Bats – Daddy’s Highway (1987)

Jangly melodic pop with harmonies from New Zealand. This one has some very subtley odd production-sort of like fellow NZers The Clean, they figure out how to make acoustic guitars come across as being punk. The songwriting is top notch. The sound is firmly planted in the 80s jangle scene but it holds up.

Sibylle Baier – Colour Green (1973; 2006)

Driving home one evening, I recalled it had been about a month and a half since I’d stumbled across Sibylle Baier’s lost 1970s gem Colour Green. I listened with earphones that first time. But now, in the velvet darkness of the car, with barely another vehicle on the road, it was time to explore how Colour Green could transform space.

The effect proved both evocative and surprising: Baier’s songs seemed to fill the space as much as they revealed a gaping void as bottomless as her melancholy. As the tracks played, the quietness of my tiny Toyota seemed to swell beyond its tangible proportions. Baier’s soft, melancholic voice and guitar, reminiscent of Nick Drake, entranced me. Her songs transported me to the sepia-toned backdrops of her life: wintry domestic evenings, road trips to the shore, distant hillsides. I had spent some time away from the album, but now I was rediscovering each delicate note in a quiet, malleable environment, in which the songs could fully unfurl like crisp leaves slowly flattening between the pages of a book.

Baier’s compositions are cyclical. Refrains melt into verses. Songs bleed sadly into each other like watercolors running down paper. The fourteen pieces unravel as a singular composition, a long, winding exploration of the young woman’s life. Baier’s angelic vocals and acoustic technique navigate ghostly arpeggios and seamless key changes in a seesaw rhythm. The songs are intimate. Her lyrical style mimics the cyclical pattern of her sound; she releases each syllable in a rolling motion, some clauses spilling over their lines and reinforcing the song’s circular movement. This effect becomes particularly noticeable in “The End,” when she leaves the word end hanging, tacking on an extraneous vowel to round out the word and produce a lingering effect. Baier clings to the word’s finish with the same heartbroken hesitation that she conveys throughout the song, as she struggles to grasp the painful reality of a failed relationship. Even as she admits in the refrain: “It’s the end, friend of mine,” she holds fast to the notion that “life is short but love is old.” Within the circular rhythms of the notes, Baier swings, distraught, between grief and disbelief.

Many of Baier’s lyrics employ internal rhymes and repetition to maintain this pendular rhythm. In “I Lost Something in the Hills,” Baier reflects: “Oh what images return oh I yearn/ for the roots of the woods/ that origin of all my strong and strange moods.” For the first seven syllables, her voice carries the weight of deep-set nostalgia in a monotonous tone reminiscent of a medieval church choir hymn. Her rhythmic utterance of the words, coupled with the internal rhyming scheme, conveys a circular motion that transports the listener through the gloomy, atmospheric space to which she seeks return throughout the lines of the song. In “Softly,” markedly more buoyant but still reflective, Baier’s experiments with repetition and pendular rhythms become fully realized within the song’s reiterated refrain, sung in syncopation. She playfully swings between keys throughout the song in a jazz-esque dance.

This particular track, as well as the whimsical numbers “William” and “Wim,” evoke Nick Drake’s Pink Moon. Drake and Baier recorded remarkably similar albums in the early 1970s; Drake’s a skeletal, stripped-down sound that diverged from his earlier work, Baier’s a series of reel-to-reel tapes recorded from home over the course of three years. While their contemporaries produced music with full, often horn-heavy instrumentation, Drake and Baier composed acoustic songs that transcended their own cultural-historical context, achieving a sense of timelessness. In Baier’s case, the belated release of Colour Green in 2006 emphasizes the album’s enduring quality.

Baier delicately bends syllables and plucks threadbare melodies that paint the vivid motifs of Colour Green. The songs are a collection of melancholic snapshots, quotidian events colored by a sweeping existential sadness. Many of Baier’s lyrics are rooted in domestic scenes. A working woman slices bread for her children; glimpses of a wintry atmosphere, a “painful February mood,” emerge above the watery surface of the lyrics. A lover sitting in his “lazy chair” asks Baier “what sorrow you bear” as she sheds tears after a harrowing workday. Interspersed between the lines of domestic imagery are small anecdotes of Baier’s travels and revelations as a young woman. In “Remember the Day,” she speaks of a moment in her life when she hovered on the brink of suicide, “considering if one shouldn’t die or if one should,” contrasting this dark contemplation with a stark image of a midday sun. Suddenly, as she recalls mustering the will to “just buy some food,” the song’s rhythm shifts and gathers tempo. She recounts finding herself heading in an unexpected direction toward Genoa, Italy. “Did you ever drive in a moonstruck constitution/ and find to reach a seaport and down there is a solution/ you should if you could,” she tells the listener. By the shore, where “there simply was the water’s smell and remoteness,” she retrieves herself, reflected in the waves of the “old cold ocean.” The visual motifs of a wintry, domestic life and thematic iterations of loss, self-discovery and nostalgic reflection unravel in a cyclical fashion reinforced by her ghostly vocals and acoustic technique.

The most evocative imagery of the album appears in “Elliott.” Long, round phrases with oddly placed emphasis unfurl monotonously from her lips. The only pause in the refrain occurs after the first three words, creating the impression that Baier’s sentences possess little to no punctuation. “I grow old/ I shall wear the bottom of my trousers rolled says Elliott.” Her use of the present tense thrusts the listener into the midst of the subject’s sad contemplation. The song revels in the melancholy persistent throughout the entire album: “Gayly clad sadness is a radical quantity says Elliott/ sadness is a long brown ribbon says he/ sadness is beautiful.” The singular image of the ribbon, haunting and mesmerizing, mimics the greater aura of the album in a micro moment of self-reflexivity.

Baier’s poetic command of language and skillful rendering of atmosphere transports the listener through the strange and dark spaces of her life. Within haunting lines depicting the grayness of existence, she provides glimmers of revelation that enlighten and cast meaning. Colour Green unravels as a manifestation of nostalgia, timeless and heartbreaking, a testament to the spiritual fortitude of a woman perpetually “seeking for return.”


Guest post by Elizabeth Hopkins.

Elizabeth Hopkins is a writer, artist, and part-time anthropologist. In her free time she likes to take photographs, eat delicious food, and jam out to good tunes, among many other things. A graduate of Skidmore College, Elizabeth is a Program Coordinator at the Quebec-Labrador Foundation, where she works collaboratively to advance environmental conservation and stewardship.