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This album has no business being any good. Neil didn’t want to make it: his manager dragged him kicking and screaming into the early-90s MTV Unplugged juggernaut. The concert went terribly: Neil was so unhappy with the first taping, on December 5th 1992 in NYC, that he paid out of pocket for a do-over in…

Nara Leao can do no wrong in my eyes. The run from her 1964 Elenco debut to her Sidney Miller-produced 1969 Coisas do Mundo is beyond perfect — inventive, experimental, whimsical, utterly sincere. More than anything else, her personality shines through her work. Morrissey once said, “Shyness is nice / And shyness will stop you…

John Cale is my favourite member of the Velvet Underground, and even though his 1970s solo work sounds almost nothing like his stuff with the VU, it comes from that same spirit of catchy chaos. Vintage Violence (1970), Fear (1974), Helen of Troy (1975), Slow Dazzle (1975)… they all have amazing moments. But Paris 1919…

Is there a more perfect moment in music than when, after some atmospheric scene-setting by Charlie Haden on bass and Billy Higgins on drums, Ornette and Don Cherry come in HORNS BLARING on the extreme right and left, blasting out the immortal riff to “Lonely Woman”? It is also a perfect hi-fi moment. Fond as…

I love girl groups and I love experimental pop — so obviously I love this record, which exists in that rarefied Venn diagram territory where the Ronettes overlap with The Velvet Underground. Sweet vocals and simple drum beats bathed in echo crash head-on into daring, droning, repetitive, and verseless song structures. The effect is vertiginous.…

This record is pure candy for me. I’m a huge fan of Quarteto Em Cy, whose four-part harmonies range from pep-rally to tear-jerker — and I’m a massive sucker for Sidney Miller, FOUR of whose songs QEC perform here, including the punning title track. QEC’s first two records were on Forma and both are awesome.…

Dismissed by music fans as a hifi test record… looked down upon for the same reason by fans of the Blue Nile’s masterpiece Hats… But make no mistake, this is a GREAT record, a high point of glossy 80s pop. And yes, it sounds incredible. The legend is that Glasgow hifi company Linn (makers of…

This is one of the records that hooked me when I was getting into jazz. It’s the album that taught me how much I love ballads: the serene, heartbreaking “Warm Canto,” the stately, sad intertwining horns on “Duquility.” It’s reflective, honest music that captures whole ranges of emotion without saying a word. The uptempo numbers…

Don’t you just love it when your favourite records also happen to sound incredible?? Since I first heard “Sugarcube” in grade 10, I’ve been a Yo La Tengo lifer, seeing them countless times and buying all their records as they came out. Although I LOVE their original tunes (as many future posts will no doubt…

Discovering this record for a huge deal for highschool-age me: it was the weird, and I liked it;  thus I was weird, and that was fine. The all-guns-blazing psychedelic strangeness of “Fractured” and “Every Holy Shroud” were what did it for me then. I still love them, but the delicate, shimmering uncanniness of “City Spirit”…