Category: Music

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Released 51 Years Ago Today

Damn, I feel old.

Carpenters: Horizon (1974)

What struck me most about this album back in the day was the audio quality. I don’t know what magic the recording engineers used, but Karen’s voice was crystal clear, front and center. It was as if she was on stage right in front of you, and it seemed you could hear every instrument used in the arrangements.

Their take on “Please Mr. Postman” remains one of my favorites.

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Released 17 Years Ago Today

Grace Jones: Hurricane (2008)

My jury’s still out on this one, nearly twenty years on. It was just so different from her earlier work, and coming after such a long hiatus, it certainly wasn’t what I (or anyone else, for that matter) was expecting. Still, I have a copy in my library, because…well…Grace.

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A Gift From A Friend

I wasted no time loading them all onto my favorite format

The Hot Tracks 15th Anniversary Collection.

Lots of great tracks here, but some of the remixes are absolute train wrecks. Even the friend who sent me these admitted as much. I transferred tham all onto MiniDisc but have yet to make it all the way through the collection.

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Released 49 Years Ago Today

Elton John: Blue Moves (1976)

Like many others, when  Blue Moves first came out, and for many years later, I had a love/hate relationship with this album. The sound was so different from all of Elton’s previous work, and yet still so fresh. It also annoyed me no end back in the day that all four sides of the album wouldn’t fit on a standard 90 minute cassette tape, requiring that you buy a notoriously thin and prone to breakage and entanglement-in-the-player 120-minute cassette.

Now, of course, I think this collection is brilliant.

Favorite tracks: One Horse Town, Boogie Pilgrim, Crazy Water, Shoulder Holster, Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word, If There’s a God in Heaven (What’s He Waiting For?), and Bite Your Lip (Get Up and Dance).

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IMHO, One Of Their Best

I had no idea that Very existed in this particular format (the solid orange, Lego-like jewel case) until a few weeks ago (or if it did at one time, it’s long gone from memory). When it originally came into my life in 1993, I picked up the two disc set, Very/Relentless after hearing the Relentless portion at The Playground. Even that release was unusual, in that the discs were in cardboard sleeves inside a flexible, clear, embossed fold-out case. Very/Relentless was one of my most beloved discs and was actually the second CD I replaced (the first being Kraftwerk’s Minimum/Maximum) after I started rebuilding my collection a few years ago.

This particular copy of Very has issues. There are a couple of scratches on the disc, and the jewel case is missing all the splines that hold the disc in place, but what do you want for $8? Fortunately I found another copy for the same price last night that’s described as “near-mint” and is on its way. This copy will go in the trade/sell pile for my next trip to Book●Off.

So much for not posting as much, eh?

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Grail

I ran across this 2-disc set back in 2002 when I was housesitting for some friends. I asked if I could make a copy and they said go for it. At the time I was a noob at disc ripping and let’s just say the results were…disappointing. These friends moved to Seattle shortly after all this happened so I wasn’t able to borrow the discs again to try for a better copy.

And it’s not like these Euphoria discs were cheap. I would’ve sought out my own copy if it weren’t for the fact they were going for $40 at the time and that simply wasn’t in my budget.

I eventually copied everything to iTunes and stopped obsessing over the fact that I’d cut off the last two tracks on each disc because they wouldn’t fit on the  74-minute blanks I’d used for the original rip.

Fast forward 23 years. I wanted this music on Minidisc because it’s my favorite of all the Euphoria series I’ve heard, but of course the only source I had was my original rip transferred to iTunes. I was able to transfer them, but then realized that there was a small gap between each song on these continual-mix CDs. Aargh!

So I decided it was time to bite the bullet and shell out whatever was needed to get original copies that could be transferred—gapless—to MD. Discogs again came to the rescue and I received this pristine copy from the UK today.

One not-totally-unexpected fallout of having the orange mental patient in the White House is that I’m seeing more and more sellers on Discogs marking their items as “Unavailable in the United States.” There were several offerings of Ibiza Euphoria listed, but this was the only one that shipped to the US—and was reasonably priced.

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Back When She First Appeared On The Scene…

Adamusic – Abracadabra Of The Opera (2025)

…in the early 2000s, viewing her through a boomer lens, I initially dismissed Lady G as a wannabe Madonna/Grace Jones poseur. Over the years, however, I have come to appreciate her more and more and now I view her as her generation’s Madonna/Grace Jones. Not only has her music improved exponentially, but so has her theatricality. There will never be another Madonna or Grace, but she’s definitely leaving her mark for this generation and I have no doubt she will be held in the same reverence as my generation’s icons.

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