My office has just relocated to very near Soho and I've been taking advantage of this by exploring the music shops nearby. There's a few well known ones, notably Sister Ray but also some smaller, mainly dance oriented record shops. I particularly like BM records. I looked in Sister Ray today and I was impressed with the range of tunes but to be honest the prices they were asking was a bit steep for a lot of stuff. It's all well and good them tarting up an album by marking it as 'rare' but I wouldn't say CDs are collectable in the same way as records are and the quality of some of the CD cases weren't great. I'm doing the shop a disservice here because it's the music that's important after all. I bought the following albums:
Felice Brothers - Celebration, Florida
Steve Mason and Dennis Bovell - Ghosts Outside
Holy Other - With U (this is an EP)
Interpol - Interpol
Mazzy Star - She Hangs Brightly
Rodney P - The Future
The last 3 albums were filling gaps in my collection. Christ knows why I never got round to buying Interpol's album last year. I should have got that at the time. I've always loved Hope Sandoval's voice and this Mazzy Star album is the only one I don't have. I'm glad I've got the set now. The Rodney P album was a completely random purchase. It was sitting there in the downbeat section, it looked quite groovy so I bought it. Time will tell if it's any good but I've got a very good success rate from random buys so I'm not going to stop even if this is a dud.
The Holy Ghost EP is going to be a grower, I can tell. My newly-12 year old son described it as the opposite of minimal techno - kind of maximal. I know what he means as it has a lot of layers to it. I need to grow into this little number, I think.
Now onto the last two. The new Felice Brothers album - Celebration, Florida is quite simply excellent in every way. They go from strength to strength and cover so many bases with this long player. There's some old fashioned country and even a bit of yodelling, there's a sub-dancey 'I Feel Love' soundalike, there's everything. Buy it - you won't be disappointed.
I wish someone would upload the 'Dallas' track but this, the opening song ' Fire at the Pageant' is a lovely backup.
The other album is a Dennis Bovell dub remix of Steve Mason's Boys Outside album that the ex-Beta Band lead singer released last year. I think I mentioned it a few weeks back actually. It's co-produced by Richard X who also did the Foxbase Beta album a year or two back. I really wouldn't have thought that the deeply personal and haunting Boys Outside would have been a contender for a dub remix but bloody hell, this absolutely hits the spot.
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