What are you listening to right now? Pt VI

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mianfei

Club Legend
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Carlton North
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Ripely Pine is a stunning debut: the range of textures is remarkable yet Aly Spaltro never falls into the trap of losing her tone and texture when she really rocks. No women has ever sounded so authentic in her harshest moments as Aly on Ripely Pine: the loudest moments are more heated passion than anger and the dynamics have not been rivalled since the likes of Lift Your Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven or Spiderland.
 

mianfei

Club Legend
Joined
May 10, 2009
Posts
1,278
Likes
239
Location
Carlton North
AFL Club
St Kilda
Vale Keith Emerson.

Dat 7 Sport intro.
Is that why Triple R was playing ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’ a few days ago? It’s rare that I touch the radio except for light “recreation” but I never expected to hear a commercial 1970s progressive band there. It just shows how restricted playlists are in Australia compared to Europe or North America – a reflection of virtually complete absence of demand for cutting-edge music in the family-oriented urban fringe suburbs, something which I can testify from living in Keilor Downs between the ages of eleven and nineteen. The song is actually titled ‘Land’ – ‘Horses’ being merely its subtitle.

The album is not, to my mind, as good as the Jack Douglas-produced Radio Ethiopia – I’ve always thought Horses sounds unnaturally trebly with little bass, and the song quality falls off at the ends from the masterful middle trio of ‘Birdland’, ‘Free Money’ and ‘Kimberley’. I will nonetheless give Joe S. Harrington’s 2001 overview of Horses for you:
Joe S. Harrington said:
17. Horses – Patti Smith (Arista, 1975):

Just as tempting to include album number two, Radio Ethiopia, a more lung-heavy stream of human spit, but this is the one that first sent shock waves through the short-hairs of the international authorities with great relish. Coming straight out of rock criticism, Patti had street-credibility to spare and since, when Horses was released, we were still about six months prior to PUNK actually happening (unless you count the first Dictators album) she was able to masquerade as an incredibly urban “singer/songwriter” and the LP actually ascended to #47 on the charts in the winter of 1975/1976, just about the same time another Jersey singer, Bruce Springsteen, was getting his mug plastered on the cover of both Time and Newsweek. Patti dug Bruce, Bruce dug Patti (as evidenced a couple years later by the duet, ‘Because the Night’). At that time they both came under the category of “new urban realists,” but anyone who heard Horses knew that a more subterranean element was at work here. Cale’s production was the first tip-off…this was the spawn of the Velvet Underground coming home to roost, and ‘Land,’ on the second side, was the best long song since ‘Sister Ray.’ The skittling guitar of lanky rock critic Lenny Kaye, the sombre piano of Sohl (already used to expert effect on the groundbreaking ‘**** Factory’ single) as well as Patti’s own phantasmagoric free-flight was proof of two things:
  1. They were not mere “rockers”
  2. They were not just “punk” dummies (à la the Ramones).
Because of this, she got branded as “art rock” in the first edition of the Rolling Stone History of Rock but she was art rock like the Velvets, openly embracing the more rough-hewn aspects of rock & roll (and of course it’s been that way ever since and yeah, SHE helped make it happen). Faddishness was in evidence on the reggae knock-off, ‘Redondo Beach,’ and her wrangling of ‘Gloria’ was perhaps the ALL-TIME re-invention of an already-done-to-death motif, as epic a transformation of a sixties war-horse as Hendrix’s ‘Hey Joe’ (or, for that matter, her ‘Hey Joe’…in her eyes nothing was sacred obviously). Her crusading efforts re the Rock itself shone like the sun, which is why, in the Mapplethorpe cover shot where Patti was snapping her suspenders before Siouxsee Sioux was out of her flares, she looks like a warrior getting ready to ride into town on a rented horse to do gun battle with the flabby hide of sheriff-elect Gilbert Doughty. Ride Sally, ride.
 
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