FM - Black Noise


B: Sandra's turn, 3 to pick from, who next? 

S: alright, you're doing such a good job of leading the witness, i'll play along and choose FM. 

B: you're too kind, feast your eyes upon Black Noise. 

S: Ew, what is that? Is that an arm coming out of his stomach? Is that supposed to be water or ice? Oh gawd, what's going on in the lower left hand corner? It's giving me the trypophobes. 

E: it looks like one of those weird Vaporwave videos, but clearly this is from like the dawn of computer graphics. 

B: no argument from me. Alls i can do is sweeten the deal. The back proudly proclaims this a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation production, and there's an electric violin/glockenspiel player named Nash the Slash. With titles like Phasors on Stun, Dialing for Dharma, and Slaughter in Robot Village, I'm going all in and calling this spacy proggy weird electronic studio experimentation, somewhere in here there's an alternate dimension contender for the Dr. Who theme, possibly giving Mike Oldfield a run for his money. I of course could be wrong, but the two albums left are so obviously going to be awesome that i can afford to lose this round. 

Printed lyrics on the inner sleeve? Nice. What have we got? Blast off into space. More space. Everybody fleeing this planet for another one, but we'll all die long before our children's childeren's children get there (Moody Blues reference? I think that's an affirmative). Ready or not, make it so. 

Oh yeah, this is stellar. It's actually much less weird than i expected. Super melodic and straight up peppy. Much more Argent/Camel/Ponty than EL&P or Kansas, and nowhere near as sleepy as Moody Blues or Yes or Genesis. There's a heaping tablespoon of Disco in the recipe, but it by no means throws off the dish. It even squeaked into Rolling Stone's Top 50 Prog albums. Don't let the cover scare you away, this is fantastic.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The 4 Seasons - The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette

Image
This might be my longest  album review ever. But i swear a couple times, so it's worth the read ;) How could i possibly mention Jefferson Airplane, The 4 Seasons, and Frank Zappa in the same context? Zappa said "this is rediculous" and a few years later The 4 Seasons said "you know what, Frank is right. This IS ridiculous." To which Jefferson Airplane said, "Oh. Ok. Got it." The real question is: which one is the most transgressive? Zappa said stop fighting, you look like idiots. Jefferson Airplane said i guess if love and community is a bad thing, then sure we're criminals and we'd be happy to move out into the fields and live peaceful lives without your garbage, let us go already. The 4 Seasons said hold my champagne for a moment. In 1969, The 4 Seasons released the single most ironic, acidic, extravagant, and downright befuddling album ever created, The Genuine Imitation Life Gazette. Zappa was accused of writing "shitty doo-w
Read more

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

Pat Benatar - Seven The Hard Way

Image
I don't know about you, but i love Pat Benatar. Yes, that's also her debut album with the single most underrated song in the universe (My Clone Sleeps Alone) in the background, but that's just a generic non-self-titled debut album. We're jumping ahead to her 6th album, Seven The Hard Way, because that, ladies and gentle germs, is how you kalaidescope a concept. Not one, not two, not three, but 4 protien-packed layers to this metaphor. You don't really need to know the overly complicated rules of Craps to know that A) it's gambling, B) "the hard way" refers to rolling doubles, so good luck rolling two 3.5s, and C) you're going to lose, one way or another. It's a joke, but more importantly, it's Pat Benatar and the roll out is Sex As A Weapon, so the innuendo is not intended to be subtle. Wait wait wait, that's only 3, Bottle, where's 4? You're right, last but not least, side B opens with Seven Rooms of Gloom, a Holland-Dozier-Hol
Read more