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What's blasting in your headphones?

Some Pete Townshend today.

This is technically his last solo record, released in 1993. At the time, released only on CD, it had the structure of a radio play, with dialogue from 3 characters in between and often over top of the music, telling the story of an aging rocker, a harsh and conniving music critic and a Machiavellian manager. The dialogue interrupting the songs always made the album a bit of a challenging listen, hard to just sit back and enjoy as music. I believe at the time there was a Japanese only release of just the music, but I never saw it.

Townshend has recently released his catalog in half-speed mastered vinyl, and I was so happy to see he included the music only version of this record! Divorced from the radio play structure, the album reveals some real hidden gems. It’s maybe not quite on parr with his best records, but for me at least, that’s an extremely high bar…so this being really good in places is good enough for me!IMG_9773.jpeg
 

Here is some really, really different music. Hard to call it just... electronic. Unkle had been producing Hip hop beats and experimenting a bit prior, but this album is foreign to that old life. It's got cinematic and heavy sci fi elements that are hard to explain unless you listen to it.

It sounds like the soundtrack to lost film about an android or unemotional human going rogue and discovering emotions and (re)learning the human experience
 
This will be blasting from my speakers just as soon as I get my receiver back from a little servicing. This a birthday gift I received yesterday from my sweetheart - the 50th anniversary vinyl edition of The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway! I am a bit of a prog rock nerd…so this album - Peter Gabriel’s last with the band - is nirvana for me. It includes a full live performance of the album from the ‘75 tour, as well as an apparently incredible Dolby ATMOS mix of album..which i do not have the gear to access at this point (although it may end up driving me down that audio road….)
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Peter Gabriel’s i/o this morning. After not releasing an album of new music in…20 years?…Gabriel dropped this record at the end of 2023. It’s a funny time in music where older artists are all lumped together as “legacy” acts - people who fill stadiums with fans who just wanna hear “the old hits”…and lots of people in those audiences don’t wanna hear new songs from, say, The Rolling Stones or Journey or whoever else. The mainstream is not that interested in a person Gabriel’s age making new music - and while I understand that trend (lots of great artists make subpar art later in their career), it’s a shame at times. This album easily sits with Peter Gabriel III or So as among his best work. A pretty great accomplishment in his 70s!

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