#altrockchick

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Milton Nascimento & Lô Borges - Classic Music Review - Clube Da Esquina

Milton Nascimento & Lô Borges – Classic Music Review – Clube Da Esquina

Disclaimers Galore Clube da Esquina is a Brazilian double album with 21 songs. One of those songs is in Spanish; the other twenty are in Portuguese. I do not speak or read Portuguese, which severely limits my ability to provide readers with lyrical interpretations. Even if I were fluent in Brazilian Portuguese, my interpretations could still be way off. Clube da Esquina was recorded in 1972,…

[rudyscuriocabinet]

[Music] Annette Peacock – X-Dreams – Classic Music Review — c I would love to live in a world where Annette Peacock was honored and celebrated as one of the greatest artists of our time.

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Nick Drake - Classic Music Review - Way to Blue (Part 1 of 2)

Nick Drake – Classic Music Review – Way to Blue (Part 1 of 2)

Part One of Two One of the most insightful comments in the documentary Nick Drake: Under Review came from Ralph McTell near the end of the film when the various participants weighed in on Nick Drake’s startling rise to fame a quarter-century after his death at the age of twenty-six. “Unfortunately, the world wasn’t ready for you, Nick, at that time. It seems to be now and I hope it’s not just the…

[50thirdand3rd]

Elvis Presley - Classic Music Review - Elvis

Elvis Presley – Classic Music Review – Elvis

Like many inhabitants of this blue orb stuck at home with no particular place to go, we’ve been binging on TV series and movies. This represented a major lifestyle change for us because in the good ol’ pre-pandemic era we rarely watched television and had access to only one streaming platform: Amazon Prime, French Edition. When the second wave hit after last summer’s false ray of hope, we…

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Phil Ochs - Classic Music Review - All the News that's Fit to Sing

Phil Ochs – Classic Music Review – All the News that’s Fit to Sing

Hello! Welcome to this tour through Phil Ochs’ debut album! It’s nice to see you all looking so chipper this morning! Because I’ll be serving as your trusty tour guide, I should tell you a teensy weensy bit about my qualifications! I have had the privilege of leading tours through three Phil Ochs albums: I Ain’t Marching Anymore, Pleasures of the Harbor and Rehearsals for Retirement. I was…

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Nick Drake - Classic Music Review - Way to Blue (Part Two)

Nick Drake – Classic Music Review – Way to Blue (Part Two)

Part Two of Two Another possible factor behind Nick Drake’s stunning journey from obscurity to fame has to do with differences in generational attitudes concerning mental health. I found it curious that Nick had been completely ignored by his fellow Baby Boomers and enthusiastically resurrected by Gen Xers and Millenials. A passage I found on Nick’s Wikipedia page summarizing the critical opinion…

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Sleater-Kinney - Classic Music Review - Call the Doctor

Sleater-Kinney – Classic Music Review – Call the Doctor

The bad news: During my research of Call the Doctor I encountered several reviews written by men that I found quite annoying and two in particular that I found absolutely infuriating. The best news: I can blame my fury on my father! Suck it up, Dad! The story begins long, long ago in the midst of the Nixon-Ford recession in a small flat bordering the Mission District and Noe Valley, where my…

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The Jam - Classic Music Review - Sound Affects

The Jam – Classic Music Review – Sound Affects

In a brazen display of multi-generational marketing, Paul Weller described Sound Affects as “a mixture between Revolver and Michael Jackson’s Off The Wall.” Valerie Siebert of The Quietus and I disagree: As a matter of fact – and speaking strictly musically and not negatively – it’s arguably the least soulful Paul Weller record there is. Setting Sons would likely be up for the title if it weren’t…

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Phil Ochs - Classic Music Review - Phil Ochs in Concert

Phil Ochs – Classic Music Review – Phil Ochs in Concert

ARC: Hello. I’d like to return this record. CLERK: What’s the problem? ARC: False and misleading advertising. I’ve been hoodwinked! CLERK: I don’t understand. ARC: (points to the album cover) See? Right there. It says “Phil Ochs in Concert.” It even shows a photograph of someone who looks like the back of Phil Ochs playing in an auditorium. CLERK: And? ARC: It’s all a grand deception! They taped…

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Ben E. King - Classic Music Review - The Very Best of Ben E. King

Ben E. King – Classic Music Review – The Very Best of Ben E. King

Ben E. King was born Benjamin Earl Nelson in Henderson, North Carolina, on September 28, 1938, to two very smart parents. Little Ben didn’t spend much of his life in his home state; his family was part of the Great Migration of the postwar period, abandoning the world of Jim Crow for Harlem when Ben was only nine. The move was serendipitous indeed—in addition to providing plenty of opportunities…

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The Grateful Dead - Classic Music Review - American Beauty

The Grateful Dead – Classic Music Review – American Beauty

We’ll set the stage for this review with two quotes. First, let’s hear from Jerry Reed: When you’re hot, you’re hot. American Beauty was released a mere five months after Workingman’s Dead, in large part due to a collective songwriting hot streak. Of course, Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia led the way in that area, but Hunter also collaborated with Phil Lesh and Bob Weir on two equally superb…

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Albert King - Classic Music Review - King of the Blues Guitar

Albert King – Classic Music Review – King of the Blues Guitar

Look. I’m a shitty guitar player and I know it. I have two guitars: one acoustic and one electric. I suck at both. You may wonder why I have two instruments that serve to remind me of my incompetence every time I pick them up. I bought an electric guitar so I could make noise. All you need to create soul-satisfying noise with even the shittiest electric guitar is a distortion pedal, a crummy…

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Ramblin' Jack Elliott - Classic Music Review - Young Brigham

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott – Classic Music Review – Young Brigham

Horatio Alger got nothin’ on Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. In a far more interesting take on personal transformation than the old rags-to-riches schtick, we begin our tale with a Jewish kid from Brooklyn named Elliot (one t) Charles Adnopoz, born to a doctor who wanted his son to follow his father’s footsteps and become a surgeon. Dad made the fatal error of taking young Elliot to a traveling rodeo show…

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Denim - Classic Music Review - Denim on Ice

Denim – Classic Music Review – Denim on Ice

When I posted my review of Sleeper’s album Smart a couple of months ago, several of my American readers commented that they’d never heard of that particular Britpop band. That’s completely understandable. The Internet was not ubiquitous in 1995 and there was no effort to promote Sleeper in the States. For Americans, Britpop pretty much began and ended with Oasis—Suede, Blur and Pulp were little…

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Bob Dylan - Classic Music Review - The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan – Classic Music Review – The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan

Regular readers may remember that at this time last year both Dad and I had taken a rain check on Major League Baseball because it was depressing to watch anything of American origin with the country going down the fascist-racist path.

The George Floyd protests gave my dear father hope that the American people had finally come to their senses and that real change was in the air. Concurrently with…

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The Beach Boys - Classic Music Review - Surf's Up

The Beach Boys – Classic Music Review – Surf’s Up

Within months of releasing “one of the greatest masterpieces in rock music” to worldwide acclaim, the Beach Boys entered a four-year period of hyper-bad karma where nearly everything that could go wrong went wrong.

That’s one perspective on the post-“Good Vibrations” era. The other view is that the Beach Boys did some of their finest work during an exceptionally difficult period but the only…