Jefferson Starship - Blows Against the Empire (06/10/19)

Tonight we're listening to Blows Against the Empire. If you're at all familiar with the complicated Jefferson [flying ship] history, this is the first mention of "Starship" but not actually the official band. It's various combinations of Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, Santana, and Crosby, Stills, & Nash all playing Paul Kantner's concept album about stealing a spaceship and getting the hell off this jerk of a planet.

Lyrically it's a multi-layered autobiographical science fiction metaphor about the band breaking up, paul and grace having a baby, and 60s/70s u.s. politics. Musically, it's a free form psychedelic folk-rock extravaganza that quite frankly makes radiohead's ok computer sound like fan art (there's either some definite influence or magical coincidence going on is all i'm saying).

The mash up of folk, blues, and noise rock is pretty enjoyable in my book and there is some really nice instrumental noodling scattered throughout. It's not obnoxious or cheesy like Starship eventually became in the 80s. Definitely check it out if you've never heard it before.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL94gOvpr5yt2iBQIPIEzdz00fEg5sHsZG

Next

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to my blog, and my record collection.

This is a blog about my love of listening to albums. It started off as a nightly perusal of my dad's record collection (which sadly became mine) on my personal facebook page. Over the last two months it has become quite an enjoyable process of simply ranting about what i think is a real art form, the album. It needs a more permanent home. Some of my reviews are positive, some negative. They might not be what you expect from album reviews, but i hope you at least find them entertaining. For the most part i do very little research, and they tend to be train of thought reactions rather than calculated essays. If nothing else, know that i'm really listening to them and whether they are amazing or abysmal i want you to go listen to them too.  I'll start migrating the 60+ i've written so far over here in the next few days, and hopefully get to the point where i just start writing them here. I'd probably even take suggestions if you're just dying to know my tho
Read more

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult - Hit & Run Holiday

Image
I noticed today that the strange part of the world who actually knows about My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult has finally accepted that they are in fact "industrial disco." The history of Wax Trax and Chicago industrial music is a subject worthy of an entire library, but MLWTTK is my favorite band to emerge from those humble record store beginnings. They are an unpredictable band for sure, and i definitely don't like all of their albums, but Hit & Run Holiday is an album i think every human being on the planet should hear at least once. This album is simply impossible to describe, because it doesn't actually belong to a musical genre as we understand them. It's actually a movie. I know that sounds weird, but the band is actually a movie. My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult was the name of the movie they were trying to make, but composing the soundtrack led them so far afield that they just shrugged and kept going as a band instead. All of their albums come f
Read more

Live - Secret Samadhi

Image
Speaking of smorgasbords and ladies' bathrooms, here's Live's Secret Samadhi. The title at least implies that the album is a meditation on reality, but it's Ed Kowalczyk so i have to keep a dictionary close because i don't have a clue who/what he's referring to half the time. Sure i know that Lakini is the goddess of the Manipura (solar plexus/navel) Chakra, but what does washing her feet with water from the women's bathroom toilet actually mean? Jesco White is a mildly famous folk dancer/entertainer, but he's not dead so how could you lay flowers at his grave? "The followers of Aldous are spinning with their mescaline," Aldous Huxley obviously, but what does that have to do with the secondary thematic concept of intellectual propery? I can't even begin to dissect the convoluted metaphors of Ghost, and we're not even halfway through the album. That's why nobody has anything to say about this album, nobody actually knows what the hel
Read more