Steve Winwood


Robert Christgau says Steve Winwood, when left to his own devices, is vague. I mean it's Blue-Eyed Jazz Funk, why would you expect concise and direct prescience? Also, i think you'll notice, he's leaning against a tree, and James Hutchinson painted him less like a Florida landscape and more like a passing extra in the opening credits of a Cheers episode. 

I'll grant you it's not exciting, but i wasn't led to believe it would be. I was led to believe it would be an album from a guy leaning against a tree. The real question is "is that a crazy guy leaning against that tree, or is he just a normal guy taking a moment to think a little deeper, however meanderingly, than normal?" This turns out to not be particularly insane or disturbing, so seems fine to me. 

I say Jazz-Funk, and it is, but it's like the Soft Rock version of funky. Everything by Steve Winwood sounds like it's going to break out into Higher Love (or possibly Back In the Hard Life Again) at any moment. Granted, Chaka Khan is nowhere in sight back here in '77, and that's a bummer, but left to his own devices he has a highly refined and immediately identifiable sound. 

I guess what i'm saying is be prepared for 40 minutes of expecting the next song to be the original (not the Whitney Houston) version of Higher Love, but never achieving that catharsis. You'll have to go listen to it yourself to get it out of your system. Other than that the self-titled debut from Steve Winwood is quite lovely. Forgettable, but lovely.

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