Magic Time

On the off chance you need a birthday or Christmas gift idea (they conveniently converge for me), the live recording from Van Morrison’s concert this week is a great one.  Prompted by the (incredbily slow) buildup of popularity, Morrison will be at the Hollywood Bowl the 7, 8 and 9 of November reprising the album live with the original players.

Astral Weeks is by far my favorite Morrison album; from the titular track, with its crisp autumn-like tension, to the full tumble of ‘Sweet Thing’ and the electrical swirls on ‘Ballerina’, Astral Weeks is also an album I rarely listen to broken apart into songs.  As Sean O’Hagan for The Guardian put it,

Astral Weeks is that rare thing in pop music, an album that lives up to its own legend. Its singularity lies, as Costello points out, in its vaulting ambition. It is neither folk nor jazz nor blues, though there are traces of all three in the music and in Morrison’s raw and emotionally charged singing. There are no solos save for the ethereal flute and soprano saxophone improvisations that are woven through the last, and shortest, song, ‘Slim Slow Slider’, the album’s elegaic coda. Throughout, there are interludes of breathtaking beauty when the music surges and subsides, rises and falls, around Morrison’s voice.

It may not be the best album ever made – even I admit a preferance for Morrison’s earlier take of ‘Madame George’ (released on the New York Sessions ‘67 album) – but every time I listen to it, it takes me to one of the most blissfully impressionistic places I can imagine.

Xxplosive

Asterisks, as Kurt Vonnegut suggested, might very well be more visually disturbing than the letters that conjoin as “a-s-s-h-o-l-e.” But our concern today is with what asterisks obscure, the choices they blot out, not what they themselves resemble. At first blush, it seems that Fucked Up’s unprintable name is doing its own excellent music a disservice. The pragmatist wonders: Does a band with this profane a name even hope to be successful?

Take The ‘A’ Train

Pitchfork reports the Brazilian Girls are set to release their third LP, entitled New York City, 5 August of this year, just three days after they rock Chicago at Lollapalooza.

As I was pretty disappointed with the last album, following the incredible Brazilian Girls in 2005, I hope this new release will be more innovative, and shy away from the rushed/crunchy/punk sound of Talk To La Bomb.  Sabina Sciubba is one foxy band leader, but, man, she wasn’t getting away with just her sass last time.  From the Pitchfork article, it seems the group have been getting some great outside help:

Due August 5 from Verve Forecast, the set features legendary Senegalese singer Baaba Maal on “Internacional”, plus jazz percussionist Kenny Wollesen and his Himalayas on a trio of tracks.