The timing of Here Come the Warm Jets could hardly have been more auspicious: besides the mounting friction within Roxy Music, the three main streams within rock & roll were teetering on the brink of artistic bankruptcy; Here Come the Warm Jets served eviction notices on them all. Blues-based guitar rock (cf. Led Zeppelin), progressive [...]
[Just a reminder: this is the fourth in a five-part series exploring the greatness that is Radiohead. If you haven't read the first three, skip down the page to Saturday, June 12, and work your way forward.] Four quick time-cue beeps sweep us into “Paranoid Android.” If the popular long-running BBC radio program has taught [...]
[The second of a three-part posting, republishing an essay that first appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education last September.--KD] Neil Young’s 1975 album Tonight’s the Night is the middle of three albums known as “the ditch trilogy,” made when Young drove himself into a deep, dark emotional ditch after the huge commercial success of [...]
So, no big wind-up this time. Track 7, “My Body Is a Cage.” Few—none?—have ever accused The Arcade Fire of being insufficiently portentous. “My Body Is a Cave,” in this respect, is vintage AF: the big church organ just gets bigger and bigger as the song moves inexorably on; if you like this kind of [...]
So, as promised, a more detailed response to a few representative tracks from Peter Gabriel’s new covers album, Scratch My Back. I prefaced my first post with a few lines from “Shock the Monkey”—Gabriel’s repeated imperative, “cover me.” He seems to have misunderstood his own instructions as “shroud me,” or perhaps “bury me.” The opening [...]
Cover me when I run Cover me through the fire . . . Cover me, darling please –Peter Gabriel, “Shock the Monkey” So, I should have listened to Paul. I was visiting him in Philadelphia last week, and when he picked me up at the train station, he had just turned off Peter Gabriel’s Scratch [...]