The Nightingales, The Nightingales (12" EP)

Robert Lloyd and his crew continue under the Nightingales moniker, more than 30 years after they released their best-remembered album Pigs on Purpose.  After moving to a cleaner style in the late-80s, they've even returned to the post-punk aesthetic for which they're best remembered.  The 4 song EP The Nightingales, which preceded Pigs on Purpose by only months in 1982, follows a similar stylistic pattern.  The obvious influence here is the Gang of Four's classic Entertainment! LP, with bright, jagged guitars and syncopated drums in the foreground.  While many of the songs on Pigs on Purpose, like Entertainment!, cleanly reference rock song structure, The Nightingales feels a bit less focused and coherent.  Structural elements are harder to discern, as the songs seem to hop about more through time.  Lloyd's vocals, while retaining his references to crooning, tend to be buried somewhat in the background.  The recording of The Nightingales feels even more simple and primitive than Pigs on Purpose.  Where Pigs on Purpose had found a cover design style to match the contents, this EP employs a comedic newspaper reference with little relationship to the band's music.

Half Japanese, Horrible (12" EP)

Half Japanese's sprawling debut triple-LP box, 1980's 1/2 Gentlemen / Not Beasts, is often remembered as a canonical blast declaring the breadth of their vision and launching their careers.  The band's late-80s albums received glowing reviews on their release — they captured a more consistently song-like vision, with slightly better recording fidelity.  The records from in between, including 1982's humorously-titled Horrible, sometimes get lost in the shuffle, but they still sound great on repeated listen.  This era unsurprisingly documents the transition from a more diverse and chaotic band into one playing a more even set of rock-oriented songs.  The qualities that make Half Japanese magical remain.  Horrible features five very short songs with overt vocal melodies, which generally have a slight blues influence and a pronounced chaotic element.  They're followed by a longer and less-structured vamp, "Walk Through Walls".  The recording of the instruments is very lo-fi and primitive, but an effort was definitely made to bring Jad Fair's vocals to the foreground with clarity.  The Jad Fair painting looks great on the cover, but I'm not sure who chose the incongruous font or what they could have been thinking.

Lou Reed, Street Hassle (side A)

I've heard a memorable story about 1978's Street Hassle, of a friend who used to cry every time that she listened, because it can be such an emotionally moving album.  In a way it's surprising, because Street Hassle marks Lou Reed's most overt dalliance with the more austere avant-classical tradition that was clearly part of his milieu in New York.  Juxtaposing a simple, near-spoken vocal with an incredibly repetitive string part, the eleven-minute title track resembles Robert Ashley's work as much as Reed's.  Yet Reed draws from the emotional impact of rock music, in both his lyrics and his performance, to achieve an impact very different from the detachment of Ashley's narratives.  The stylistic departures of Street Hassle also allow for a radical reworking of the old Velvet Underground song "Real Good Time Together", long before the original was officially released on Another View.  In addition to employing the radical binaural experiments of Manfred Schunke, who had previously worked with Sand on Golem, Street Hassle finds nearly every sound recorded very differently from the standard rock vocabulary.  A notable example is the snare drum on "Dirt", which is more wash than impact.  While the cover design hints subtly at the radical content, it looks in many other ways like a typical Lou Reed record, with a slightly-odd portrait of him on the cover.

Cy Dune, No Recognize (12" EP)

It can feel clumsy to write about a record to which I made even a small contribution, and I recorded basic tracks for one song on 2013's No Recognize.  Cy Dune's Seth Olinsky, who also plays in Akron / Family and sometimes with Rhys Chatham, plays most of the parts on No Recognize, and his personality shines through it.  The simple, blues-based songs range from heavy and full-bore rockers to somewhat more spacious arrangements.  All of the songs employ blown-out and exaggerated sounds in their bright and present mixes, even in the more open parts of the EP.  The vocal melodies are consistently melodic and memorable, despite playing a background role to the propulsive music.  It's also impressive how much drive the guitar creates, through aggressive playing and distorted sounds — only "Move the Room" has a propulsive drum part to carry it.  The variety of material leads to No Recognize flowing slightly awkwardly between the songs, as it moves from dense to sparse and back over six short tracks.  The murky cover image of Olinsky emphasizes both his close involvement with the material and its smeary nature.

Jon Hassell, Earthquake Island (side A)

Jon Hassell is usually associated with his sparse, ambient records — he has made countless albums in this style, including high-profile collaborations with Brian Eno.  It's thus easy to forget that his second album,  1978's Earthquake Island, featured a large ensemble, playing more energetic and grooving music.  It employs bass guitar, layers of percussion, and even vocals (but not overt lyrics) to create a series of underlying rhythmic beds — each piece is then built on top of an underlying framework, which repeats for its duration.  Hassell's trumpet still floats above the grooves, along with floaty electronic textures.  While some of the players, like Badal Roy and Miroslav Vitous, have fusion-leaning backgrounds, Hassell's personality pulls them firmly into his more drone-centered approach.  Earthquake Island sounds a bit like an instrumental version of the Talking Heads' Fear of Music, with rhythms that hint at African influences coupled with rock and electronic ideas — while the two albums are roughly contemporaries, Fear of Music obviously received a lot more attention.  Unlike Fear of Music, which uses exaggerated studio techniques to draw attention to its modernity, Earthquake Island's mixes organically draw the listener into the performance.  The front cover painting employs Middle Eastern referents, and it's placed in a then-modern design framework — the combination serves the music nicely.

The Band, Rock of Ages (side C)

In 1972, the Band released the double-live album Rock of Ages.  While the Band's songwriting and performances are exceptional, Rock of Ages is best remembered for Allen Toussaint's horn charts, which appear on two thirds of the album.  He neatly interweaves a five-piece horn section, including jazz notables Howard Johnson and JD Parran, around the Band's performances.  The players seem to interweave effortlessly, with the horns tastefully augmenting the songs and playing.  The horns play a prominent role on the cover of "Don't Do it", which opens the album and was released as its memorable single.  Garth Hudson also gets a feature here, with his extended solo on "The Genetic Method".  Rock of Ages shows off the group's incredible ensemble playing, and their ability to execute it consistently in live concerts.  While the vocal harmonies are impressively strong, the lead vocals sometimes lack the narrative quality that makes the studio album performances so special — it's obviously difficult to sing with that level of thespian personality while playing.  The recordings lack the magical feeling of the first two Band albums that almost seem found — they sound instead more like a conventional concert recording.  The gold-leaf inlay on the cover and the triple-gatefold give the package a nice majesty, which the music obviously lives up to.

T. Rex, Electric Warrior (side A)

Canonical and iconic albums can sometimes be the hardest to write about, and everyone has listened countless times to 1971's Electric Warrior, so it's hard to add new perspective.  The biggest thing that surprised me, on this listen, was just how little drive and energy the performances really have.  The drums tend to lag slightly, and the snare sounds soft and friendly with little punch.  String arrangements on songs like "Tiny Dancer" add a lyrical sentimentality that blends into the background only because it sounds so familiar.  Marc Bolan's vocals are full of charisma and personality, but they also sound like he's whispering.  Sometimes Bolan's guitars bring attitude, and they can employ exaggerated distortion, but they're also often smeared into the canvas of a subtler and more spacious mix.  Even the Hipgnosis cover design is immediately recognizable, and adds to the album's canonical and almost unapproachable air — it also looks great, and emphasizes the attitude that's sometimes buried in the mixes.