Kerry Livgren - Seeds of Change

Told you i'd find Waldo, on a freshly reborn Kerry Livgren solo album, of all places. 

I told you the story about Kerry's fascination with the Urantia Book, and how it infiltrated Monolith, but during the tour for that album he had nightly debates with their opening band, and Jeff Pollard finally convinced him that The Bible was a more authentic chronicle of Jesus than that other book of space alien dream sermons, so Livgren's an Evangelical Christian now. Spoiler alert, there's two more Kansas albums in this run, and one of them is the last "with Livgren" album before he tornadoed himselves to Oz. No, i don't need to explain that joke, Skip. They get it. Get back to your actual work.

Where was i? Oh yeah, Seeds of Change. Ahem, excuse me waiter, but what's this baby doing in my diamond? 

The backstroke, sir. Shall i fetch you another?

No, no, we're cool. Wait. What's Diablo Dio doing here? 

Ah, a common misconception, sir. Though Mr. Ronnie James built a substantial career singing ABOUT Satan, he himself was not "a Satanist." It was in fact his vocal versatility with which tonight's guitslinger was enamored.

Oh, ok. Sure, we'll give it a try. Well. It's an unexpected flavor. There's some interesting things going on. This album needs some serious contextualization, for sure.

Musically speaking, this is fun. The Dio tracks are spectacular. The part that's hard to deal with is the "evangelical" part. You have to make a choice. Is this Kerry Livgren telling you about his honest experience of life and how accepting Christ solved so many of his own psychological crises and existential angst, or is this annoying, self-righteous, hard right proselytizing? 

How can you live when nothing's there?

Just fine, Kerry, 41 years and counting. Like i've told everyone a thousand times, there's no empty space in my soul. I'm Stuart m'f'in Smalley. I'm super happy if this is working for you, but i'm telling you man to man, face to face, it doesn't work for me. No negotiation. I can meet you halfway at Whiskey Seed, alcoholocally treating the pain isn't good at all. I'd be happy to compare and contrast my theory of complex causality, discuss the underlying metaphors, fully appreciate what it does for you, but Space Dad and Metatron aren't allowed at the Bottle of Beef Omni-Holiday Office Party. My brain, my rules. 

I couldn't listen to this thing all the time, it takes a lot of work to filter out the condescension inherent in this ideology, but as part of the story of Kerry Livgren, or even a playlist of the weird stuff Dio did, it's a completely enjoyable listen.

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

Eyrth - Meridian

Image
A terrible sadness accompanies the release of Meridian by Latvian Ambient Metal band EYRTH. Since their debut Fracture in early 2019 the band, and indeed the whole world has suffered a global pandemic, intense ideo-political turmoil, the death of friend and bandmate Igor Golovin, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  The war in Ukraine still wages on, even though we in the Western hemisphere seem to have largely forgotten. These are turbulent times, and Alex and Andrey are rightfully entering an extended break. We may not see or hear new music from them for a while, if ever, and that is completely understandable. The music they've created, however, is truly breathtaking. Self-described as "Uranium wreckage in audio," the music of Eyrth is every bit as hauntingly beautiful as it is brutally crushing. Close your eyes and you'll quickly find yourself in the achingly cold and desolate wasteland of human technological atrophy. Slow, ponderously heavy, at times rabidly ragi
Read more