Welcome to BlogRoddus. This is my Blog dedicated to Music, Tramping and any other things that tickle my fancy. Thank you for visiting my Blog and I hope that you enjoy your time here.
Album of the Week
Southern Front - ST, Failsafe Records 1984
A great lucky find this week, the self titled and only album by the 1980's Christchurch band Southern Front.
Released on Failsafe Records in 1984. I had a copy back then but it went when I sold my LP's back in the late 90's. I always had fond memories of this record and had been on the lookout for a CD copy for many years. A reissue was never forthcoming until 2013, but I didn't know and so kept looking for the original vinyl, without much success, even though I didn't have a turntable at the time. So strangely enough now that I do have a turntable again, I'm just having a quick look through the bins at my local second hand vinyl emporium, when I should have been somewhere else doing something more constructive, like working, and low and behold there right at the back of a bin where it shouldn't have been was the long lost LP in person.
The sales person was full of tidbits regarding the LP as he had known some of the band members back in the day and had helped them insert the records into their covers before distribution to the local record shops, he said some times they wrote little cryptic comments on the inside cover, although mine just has a name, probably of a former owner.
The band had formed from the ashes of a couple of local punk bands and had moved their sound in a more post punk direction as so many did after exhausting the limitations of punk. Listening to this album nearly 20 years after the last I heard it, I find it has aged very well and sounds just as good as I remember. Blasting it again tonight I am impressed how well recorded and mastered it is, good separation and clear sounding.
The music is mostly up tempo, the Failsafe website mentions Killing Joke as a reference, although I would apply that more to another seminal Christchurch Band, The Gordons, but there is definitely some early U2 sounding Guitar effects and a good but of early Cure would be another clue. I guess on the surface this sounds just like a thousand other post punk bands of the time and any of these songs would feel right at home on any compilation of obscure local music of the time, but familiarity breeds respect and admiration for the strength of this music, well for me anyway. Rating 4.5/5.
Here is what has been massaging (and sometimes pummeling) my ears this week.
In no particular order, but kinda in the order I listened to them.
The Horace Silver Quintet - The Cape Verdean Blues, Blur Note ST 82240 (1965/2015 LP)
Rosanne Cash - The River and the Thread, Blue Note (2015 CD)
Don Cherry - Complete Communion, Blue Note ST 84226 (1965/2015 LP)
Vas Deferens Organization – Mutant Sounds Radio (09.11.15) Podcast http://dublab.com/
Counting The Beat Radio Show 19/9/2015 - Waiheke Radio/Chris Walker - Sound Cloud
Southern Front - Southern Front, Failsafe Records SAFE004 (1984 LP)
Various Artists - Crammed Global Soundclash 1980-1989, Crammed Discs CRAM100 (2003 3CD)
Various Artists - Class Of 81, Mutant Sounds Blog, MP3 Download
Various Artists - Never Trash A Pretty Face, Mutant Sounds Blog MP3 Download
Vangelis - Albedo 0.39, RCA (1976 LP)
Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense, EMI (1984 LP)
Hawkwind - Warrior On The Edge Of Time, United Artists (1975 LP)
Andre Jaume & Michel Redolfi-Hardscore-France-1980 Mutant Sounds Blog MP3 Download
Brad Laner - Micro-awakenings, Mutant Sounds Blog MP3 Download
Spring is here and I haven't been tramping since early May. As usual, time and weather have been against me as well as lack of motivation to do the hard yards involved in struggling up hills. Harley sent several emails tempting me out over the winter and I finally succumbed to his invitations. Looking at Broken Hill on Topo maps, it looked innocuous enough for an easyish trip to ease myself back into tramping for the season.
Broken Hill is a stand alone lump just south of Purple Hill and Lake Pearson and east of Mt Wall and Mt Cockayne in the Cragiburn Ranges and reaches the lofty height of 1486M.
Four of us set off along the four wheel drive track on a cool and partly cloudy day. This track was designated The Narnia Track in reference to the movie that was filmed in these parts several years ago. After a couple of kilometers we branched off on another road not shown on my topo map but visible on Google earth, which took us into the area where we could access the part of the hill we wanted to climb. This track took us through the burnt out wilding pine forest that had been hit by a large fire a couple of years back and had an interesting beauty of it's own but wouldn't have looked out of place in some Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Movie. We leave the track and wend our way through the burnt trees heading for a low saddle from which to access the ridge we wish to ascend. Part way up the ridge to the point 1355 we stop to regroup and have first lunch, there is a light but quite cold South East wind keeping us cool and well wrapped up. The tops are pretty easy travel and mostly flat with the occasional rock scramble as we attained Broken Hill itself and enjoyed the views and took the obligatory photos.The route down involves continuing along the South West ridge before dropping off through an easy bush bash through very open beech forest and linking to another farm track below, although we kinda missed our connection at first. Finally it's a longish slog along the farm road back to the car through a thick forest of wilding pines. Anyway, this trip ended up a little longer than I thought it would as we ended up walking 17.9KM and climbing overall 1185M in 7 hours 21 minutes. I coped pretty well considering.
Kenny Drew - Undercurrent, Blur Note ST 84059 (1960/2014 LP)
Sonny Rollins - A night at the Village Vanguard, Blue Note 1581 (1957/2014 LP)
Hank Mobley - Soul Station, Blue Note ST 84031 (1960/2014 LP)
The Teardrop Explodes - Kilimanjaro, Mercury 6359 035 (1980 LP)
Sun Ra - Other Strange Roads, Roaratorio, roar33 (1965/2014 LP)
Joe Henderson - State of the Tenor, Live at the Village Vanguard Vol 1, Blur Note (1985/2014 LP)
Elvin Jones - The Ultimate Alvin Jones, Blue Note BST 84305 (1968/2014 LP)
The Horace Silver Quintet - The Cape Verdean Blues, Blur Note ST 82240 (1965/2015 LP)
Various Artists - Blue Break Beats, Blue Note (1992 CD)
Deuter - Terra Magica (1997 TIDAL Streaming)
Wayne Shorter - Adams Apple,. Blue Note BST 84232 (1966/2015 LP)
The Ornette Coleman Trio - At The Golden Circle, Stockholm Vol 1, Blue Note ST 84224 (1965/2014 LP)
Led Zeppelin - Presence, Swan Song/Atlantic (1976/2015, reissue LP)
Evan Johns And The H Bombs - Rollin' Through The Night ,Alternative Tentacles virus47cd (1993 CD)
Rosanne Cash - The River and the Thread, Blue Note (2015 CD)
It's been a busy week music wise, a large shipment of Blue Note Records arrived in my mail box and my amp came back from the repair shop after one of the tubes faulted, also the turntable is back after I broke the needle on it recently. Thank god for insurance.
Now that I'm getting back into collecting Vinyl records again, my wallet is taking a pretty hard hit but the results have been pretty impressive. There is, at present, a bit of a vinyl revival going on, with plenty of reissues getting the deluxe 180g vinyl treatment with original sleeves and many new releases being available on record as well as CD. Even The Warehouse(our Walmart) is now selling new vinyl. There is still a lot of second hand records around the scene and that is where I will probably be concentrating my collecting. There are a lot of obscure records out there that have still not been reissued on CD and it is great fun trawling through the record bins at my local shop and finding some obscure records that I couldn't find on CD. As some will notice, I posted a couple of videos on the blog recently about some of the recent records I have bought and I did this in response to another blogger I know who has been making these sorts of video for some time now and uploading them to YouTube as part of a Vinyl Community. A large group of record collectors and vinyl junkies share about their vast collections. Some really interesting records get shown on these videos.
So now that I have had a high end turntable for a couple of months I can turn my attention to the age old question" Does vinyl sound better than CD?" and the resounding answer is....Ummm.
It's a pretty subjective area and subject to all sorts of variables. The quality of the vinyl pressed, the mastering, the original production, the gear you listen to it on and your state of mind and personal beliefs all influence the answer to that question. CDs are fabulous with their zero background noise and their sonic clarity as well as their size and convenience of use. I have some fantastic sounding CDs that are almost jaw dropping in their sonic qualities, especially played on some really good gear. I guess one of the biggest draw backs of CD is the amount of compression that apparently goes into the music to get the higher volumes that most popular music seems to need these days and so due to the limitations of the amount of data that can be stored on the CD, the increased volumes that they are produced at is apparently done so at the cost of sonic clarity and I can certainly point out some great CDs that I struggle to listen too nowadays due to the poor quality of the production.
Vinyl on the other hand suffers from scratches and surface noise that are impossible to avoid. Granted, on most clean records when the music gets going the background noise is not noticeable but on the quieter musical parts even a brand new record straight out of the sleeve had noise that crackles or hisses along behind the music. Sonically speaking for clarity, the CD will always win, but again original production has an influence on that. In saying that though, listening to records through my current VPI turntable and Valve amp, there have been some jaw dropping moments coming from my small record collection, especially from those early 70's ECM records, which just blow everything else out of the water, even the Blue Notes. The other thing I am finding about vinyl is the listening experience is more involving or addictive even and I am finding my self playing more records than CDs at present, but that also may be because of the newness of it all(again). At the end of the day, listening to music on record is a different experience than listening on CD. Is it better? Sometimes, but it is cool. I do suspect for a lot of vinyl collectors, nostalgia plays a big part of the puzzle and I am experiencing a bit of that as well but now I'm hooked.
The hot album this week is the debut record of Jane, a West German progressive rock band that released this gem on the Brain label back in 72. Classic Krautrock which has a floydian vibe and a singer that sounds like an amateur Robert Wyatt, which is all ok sounding but what really impressed me was the great guitar solos which push this record into great listening territory. A wonderful find and was quite lucky to fins this pretty clean LP in my local record outlet. Rating 4/5.
