Pete King's music for The Last of the Secret Agents? is the 806th Soundtrack of the Week.
The second side starts off with "Last Stop Paris", which surprisingly
isn't the standard accordion-driven "French" music but a cool,
jazzy tune in 7/4 (with a little bit of 6/4,too) with the strings delivering a pleasantly serpentine
melody assisted by bongos and horns.
"Paris Street" is a lovely waltz with the strings once again providing
a lush and gorgrous setting. A second Steve Rossi vocal number follows, "Don Jose, Olé!", which is
very Spanish-oriented in its lyrics but otherwise a bossa nova. At just under a minute "The Kiss" can't be too lingering but it's
a rich, romantic string texture in the Mancini vein. Gentle, late-night swing with laidback guitar, piano, vibes, muted horns,
etc., again something that would fit right into a
Peter Gunn episode, comes next in "Baby May". But then the fuzz guitars come back with the same rock organ combo
for "The Big Ball"! There's saxophone, guitar and organ soloing and its
a classic "shake". "The Treasure" is another 50-second cue, but this is a pensive, cloudy,
suspenseful mood, a good balance to all the swingin' good times that
have suffused the record so far. I had high hopes for the next track, "Zorba A Go Go", but it's
not very go-go, more or less a standard "Greek" tune with
Greek or Greek-sounding plucked instruments. It's similar to "Belly Dance". The album ends on a strong note, however, with "Of Mace and Men" combining
some Peter Gunn theme menace with Bond score-style horn writing.
2023 November 24 • Friday
Light in the Attic has just put out this great Nancy Sinatra
collection, Keep Walkin': Singles, Demos & Rarities 1965–1978.
The head of the Gutbrain Records Acquisitions Department procured the
CD version, now out of stock at the label, instead of one
of the three different colored vinyl releases.
There was also, apparently, an 8-Track option, now also out of
stock at the label. This did throw the Acquisitions Department
people for a loop at first.
The rebuttal to this admittedly negative line of thought was that surely a Nancy Sinatra 8-track, newly pressed in freakin' 2023, should be the incentive to do something about it.
The president of the record label personally had to go down to the Acquisitions Department and demand to know, "What about videotapes? Are we going to get back into VCRs?"
8-tracks aren't in the budget. For now.
But this is an excellent collection and almost all the songs were new to me. Even if I'd heard them before ("Tony Rome", "Ain't No Sunshine"), I hadn't heard these recordings of them. The one exception is probably "The Last of the Secret Agents".
In the Like Father, Like Daughter department it's worth noting that Frank Sinatra was not pleased by "My Way", specifically it's valedictorian lyrics, and as a result you can hear some aggrieved snarling in his vocal performance, not realizing, reasonably enough, how huge the song would be and how famous for him specifically.
Nancy Sinatra has a similarly pissed off moment in "100 Years", although instead of resentment it's more of an assertion of agency and determination and resistance: "I'm not giving in / To a smile or a grin / On a face (ha) / I might never see again".
Almost every song has some rewarding gift for the listener.
The liner notes are also great, featuring an insightful and delightful interview with Ms.Sinatra herself, as well as with indispensable musical collaborator Don Randi.
The vinyl is still available here.
2023 November 22 • Wednesday
Another Matt Berry album! But
Simplicity is a little different from what's come before.
This is library music, which makes it soundtrack-adjacent when it isn't
actually just soundtrack music. Library music has been having quite a run
lately, as more people discover how cool a lot of it was. Berry knows a lot about it and this isn't just a tribute to library music,
this actually is an album of library music on a famous
library music label, KPM. The single, "Top Brass", landed at Gutbrain Headquarters several weeks
ago and I liked it okay but had been expecting more. The more that I was expecting is here on the full album, though! There are eleven tracks (though two of them are "Top Brass")
and they're all really groovy and just very colorful and dynamic. It's certainly easy to imagine these being dropped into any number of
productions. Anything with a party scene! What I think you should do is buy it here.
2023 November 20 • Monday
Nelson Riddle's Rough Cut score is the 805th Soundtrack of the Week.
Then there are sultry, string-heavy takes on "Mood Indigo" and "I've Got It Bad and
That Ain't Good".
"String Quartet" is perhaps source music, "classical" sounding
string quartet music that's an impressive imitation. The first hald of "Deadly Weapon/Tennis Match" is an intriguing and swaying
piece for the ensemble while the second half is more like a marching band on
a football field kind of thing. "Sentimental News" plays around a bit with "Sophisticated Lady" while "Osthofen"
has a martial snare drum and determined-sounding lines from the horns and
"Dutch Treat" is a waltz time exercise for guitar, violin and bass. We haven't had a tango yet but guess what you hear in "Tango"? It sounds
a bit like Jerry Goldsmith's Our Man Flint theme. The next cue, "Rough Cut", is one of the best, with slinky,
jazzy, funky grooves and gestures combined just right. Then another Ellington, "Prelude to a Kiss", followed by the suspense and
tension of "Antwerp Arab/Camouflage". Some serious mission in progress music comes next in "One More Thing",
which has a great drum part and a Mission: Impossible feel.
It's immediately reprised, with the addition of some other instruments,
in the next track, "Jet Set". "Amsterdam or Antwerp" and "Amsterdam" then build up to a similar piece but with
different orchestrations giving them their own colors. These action cues culminate in the driving "Final Chase", followed by
"Don't Get Around Much Anymore". "Goodbyes" and "End Credits" revisit "Sophisticated Lady" and "Something for
Gil", more or less, before we get into various alternate cues and
a track of solo piano soure music.
2023 November 17 • Friday
And it's going to be a David Collier week here at Gutbrain
Headquarters with this other volume, new to our collection,
of Collier's newspaper work: Collier's Popular Press:
David Collier's 30 years on the Newsstand.
This is another great collection and a different one, since Collier usually
works in longer forms, if not whole books then at least whole pages
that are themselves part of a larger sequence. It was fascinating to discover that Collier could also turn out a daily,
single-panel strip, often autobiographical but also journalistic on occasion.
They range from slice-of-life observations to local politics and development. Winter
is a subject much discussed.
There's also a section of lovely drawings he did, not really comics but beautiful
sketches of landscapes and things of that nature.
Collier has quite an impressive body of work and is overdue for critical
study and appreciation!
2023 November 15 • Wednesday
Here's another absorbing David Collier book,
Topp: Promoter Gary Topp Brought Us the World.
This is another of Collier's trademark mixtures of autobiography and reportage,
with the focus this time on particular cultural developments
in 1970s and '80s Toronto, specifically punk rock and movies,
more specifically venues opened and operated by a man nanmed Gary Topp.
A young Collier himself worked for Topp and his memories are balanced
with the present day Collier querying Topp about the history
of his clubs and cinemas. Several years ago Clowes dropped a sort of manifesto in an issue of Eightball
after which his work took on a decidedly Nabokovian aspect. A painter named Krugg
probably signals this influence and perhaps the marshalling of all available
macro and micro details to serve an intensely powerful singular vision
is also thus inspired.
It wasn't all that long ago that if you wanted to see what a band was
like in concert you actually had to be there in front of them
while they were playing. Topp brought countless musical artists to Toronto, instigating
first encounters with an incredible variety of acts, perhaps
most notably the Canadian debut of The Ramones. As important and influential as he was, it seems likely that
very few people today would know about him if it weren't for
documentary work like Collier's invaluable book. Once again, I wish there were more books like this and I'm grateful
to have this one.
2023 November 13 • Monday
One of the first soundtrack recordings I ever bought—on cassette!—was Vladimir
Cosma's music for Diva. I should get it again as I don't have it anymore.
But Mr. Cosma is the composer of the 804th Soundtrack of the Week,
the score for a movie called Alexander.
Finally electric guitar and "shake" organ combo show up for "Rhythm in the Afternoon",
which is a cool number that makes a nice contrast to the main title while not
straying too far away from it. Cool guitar sound, as is to be expected.
"Lazy Alexander" is the main title again, on acoustic guitar, followed
by a string section version of the main title for "Flirtation in the Grass",
which itself is followed by kind of a blaring marching band version called
"Romance in the Afternoon" that ends as a cool lounge version. Speaking of lounge, "Piano Sweet Piano" is a subdued and swaying loungey tune
featuring vibes as well as, naturally, piano. The melody is very similar to
"What Kind of Fool Am I?". There's only one cue left and, believe it or not, it's the main title again,
except this time it's the end title and runs through several of the variations
already heardf.
2023 November 10 • Friday
Another comics event: a new Eddie Campbell, The Second Fake Death
of Eddie Campbell or The Second Fake Death
of Eddie Campbell by Eddie Campbell or The Second Fake Death
of Eddie Campbell by Eddie Campbell as Presented by Eddie Campbell.
Flip it over and you get a new edition of a previous book, The Fate of
the Artist, to which Second Fake Death is sort of a sequel. In the first book Eddie Campbell is missing, presumed dead, and
a meta-fictional investigation takes place among Campbell's
traipsing through different material and presentations, using photographs
and creating pastiches of old newspaper comic strips. The second book is similar, combining Campbell's familiar nine-panel pages
with art done on computers and offering readers a view into what
his life in Chicago was like during Covid lockdown. It's a stimulating balance between elements of comics' history and future.
It's very unusual and certainly different from anything else I see being
done in comics these days. Campbell is not only an expert scholar on
where comics have been, he's also one of the creators leading the medium
to its next exressions.
2023 November 08 • Wednesday
A new Daniel Clowes book is definitely an event and here it is:
Monica.
So what's it about? Beats me. It's ostensibly about a woman named Monica
trying to find out about her parents, particularly her mother, who was
a hippie dropout in the '60s. The path is not straightforward, however, and the story itself is told
on a few different levels. More observant readers than I noted how
different page colors in the book itself are a clue to the narrative's source. Monica herself is a classically unreliable narrator and Clowes has packed
his latest book with
more elisions, ellipses, obfuscations and misdirections than are found
in any of his other volumes. Several years ago Clowes dropped a sort of manifesto in an issue of Eightball
after which his work took on a decidedly Nabokovian aspect. A painter named Krugg
probably signals this influence and perhaps the marshalling of all available
macro and micro details to serve an intensely powerful singular vision
is also thus inspired. There are some devastatingly convincing character sketches as well as
a run through quite a few number of genres. The EC war comics jumped out
at me immediately, but for some of the others I had to rely on this interview with Clowes in the New Yorker
magazine.
While much of the story is doggedly realistic it does occasionally go off the rails
with a vengeance and it's not clear exactly what the reader is supposed to make
of it. There seems to be a very real, not imagined end of the world apocalypse horror
scenario but other scenes, like a haunted radio and some tenuously connected
horror and fantasy vignettes, are harder to connect to the larger story, at
least for me.
If I gave it a second, close reading, and then a third or even a fourth after
that, would I discover its secrets? Would the meaning become clear? It's possible but I confess to a certain pessimism. I'm worried that too much
might actually be hidden for a full understanding. Monica got off
to a slow start for me but I found myself drawn in and fully absorbed
soon enough to want more than unresolved ambiguity. If the ambiguity is ultimately and intentionally unable to be resolved,
well, that's fine—David Lynch has built an entire career on ambiguity
for its own sake—but I think Clowes could actually pull off something
greater. And maybe he's done just that in this book right here and I didn't see it.
I suppose I'll have to return to it at some point
in hopes of further discoveries.
2023 November 06 • Monday
Trunk Records continues to be one of the absolute best independent labels
out there and Jonny Trunk's weekly emails are always a pleasure to read.
For the 803rd Soundtrack of the Week we present the Trunk Records
LP release of Ron Geesin music for three films: Sunday Bloody Sunday,
Viv and Shapes in a Wilderness.
The first cue is "War of the Willow", an unusual-sounding electro pop
instrumental with the melody played on what sounds like synth steel drum
while piano and percussion and an electronic whistle create a background.
"Slo-Mo Bowl" is another synth, piano and percussion piece, this one a little slinky
and groovy and bringing in vibraphone as well. After that comes "Through Loud Bamboo", with stabbing bass notes played on
synth with percussion clouding around it and higher-pitched long electric
tones floating above. The music from Viv concludes with "Antiguan Stroll",
an off-kilter lullaby-ish song featuring guitar and vibes,
and then it's on to the six cues from Shapes in a Wilderness,
which are presented here as a mini-suite. The music features voices, organ and other weird sounds, perhaps some
music concrète. It would be appropriate for a horror movie
or avantgarde work, for sure.
2023 November 03 • Friday
Lars once remarked that if Freddie Wadling had been British
or American (or possibly even Irish or Canadian or Australian,
I might add), he would have been as well known as Iggy Pop. This is almost certainly true. And speaking of Iggy, here is this phenomenal new book,
The Stooges: The Truth Is in the Sound We Make.
It's a coffee table book, a limited edition, not cheap but totally worth it. I thought (hoped) it was something I could live without but a rave
review in Shindig! magazine changed my mind. No regrets,
it's amazing.
This is a full history of the Stooges with almost three hundred photographs.
It is absolutely worth your time and money if you care.
2023 November 01 • Wednesday
Freddie Wadling was a brilliant musician and artist who passed away
several years ago. He had struggles but he had at least one great
stroke of luck: he had Lars Sundestrand, also a great artist, as a close friend. I never met Freddie, but Lars is my close friend too, really
more like family, and Freddie and I have at least
that in common. I have always told everyone that Lars is a great artist also—even
though he probably wouldn't want me to say that. But you can see for yourself, as Lars has put together a book of
Freddie's art, and it is absolutely amazing.
Freddie Wadling's art speaks for itsel and has a wide range, from collage to comic
strip, fine-art painting to punk provocation. Please excuse these crude photos of the book…
"The devil came from canvas": not just a joke for Freddie, I think.
"Surrounded by a street inferno / I'm following the heart beat of the beast". The art speaks for itself but you will have to look at the book to
appreciate the work Lars did to put it together. In addition to photographs
of Freddie he has taken over the decades, there are several texts about Freddie,
from Lars, of course, but also from Robert Hurula and others for whom Wadling
was inspiring. We'll start Thanksgiving early this year, with gratitude for our best friends.
