Traffic - On The Road


Phone charger reacquired, here we go.

First let's take a moment to appreciate the sheer giddy joy i feel when looking at the cover of Traffic's live album On The Road. It's beautiful. Next, let's appreciate that it has 4 tracks. Yep that's it, four extended live jams  that critics weren't thrilled about the first time around in shorter studio form.

Some history on Traffic is probably in order. Steve Winwood formed Traffic as a psych Rock band, jammed with Hendrix a lot, then randomly quit to form Blind Faith with Eric Clapton. When that was over, he went back to his friends and they had a second go at Traffic, now expanding into Jazz Rock territory. That's why critics don't like this album. Critics hate it when you do whatever you feel like without their permission. Oh, sure, the playing is great, but who has an attention span longer than 3 minutes? Not us, Traffic sucks now.

Bugger that, this is fantastic. I simply can't understand the mentality that listening to people actually MAKE music is a bad thing. This is great. It reminds me of Santana, just not quite so flashy. Oh, yeah, critics hated Santana too. That was a big theme in the 60s and early 70s, you're not allowed to like great bands succeeding on their own merits, stealing that hard earned revenue from our benevolent corporate pop overlords. Remember, this is Island Records (originally from Jamaica, but relocated to the UK) merely paying Capitol to manufacture it in the US so they didn't have to export it. Now it's all a nasty bowl of porridge under UMG, but back then they were ligitimately competing.

Oh yeah, great stuff. Not gonna lie, i'd rather listen to Winwood than Clapton most any day of the week.

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