30 Apr '09 - 19:43 That Was The News That Was
It's a somehow different orange sun that's setting tonight ...
16 Apr '09 - 19:23 Amazing Grace
Blimey. Soon the Police in Scotland will have lightsabers instead of batons ...
14 Apr '09 - 20:22 Let It Be Murder
Justice has been done. Finally, this criminal has been caught and convicted 39 years after he committed his inexcusable crime: the crime of Phil Spector producing/murdering the Beatles album Let It Be.
The Beatles album that never was. This overproduced earsore. Phil Spector, give my regards to Bubba.
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To Phil Spector, stinging slaps on both wrists.
He's rendered "The Long and Winding Road," for instance, virtually unlistenable with hideously cloying strings and a ridiculous choir that serve only to accentuate the listlessness of Paul's vocal and the song's potential for further mutilation at the hands of the countless schlock-mongers who will undoubtedly trip all over one another in their haste to cover it. A slightly lesser chapter in the ongoing story of McCartney as facile romanticist, it might have eventually begun to grow on one as unassumingly charming, had not Spector felt compelled to transform an apparently early take into an extravaganza of oppressive mush. Sure, he was just trying to help it along, but Spectorized it evokes nothing so much as deweyeyed little Mark Lester warbling his waif's heart out amidst the assembled Oliver orchestra and choir.
"I Me Mine," the waltz sections of which reminds one very definitely of something from one of The Al Jolson Story's more maudlin moments, almost benefits from such treatment—it would have been fully as hilarious as "Good Night," after all, had Spector obscured its raunchy guitar with the gooey strings he's so generously lavished on the rest of it. As he's left it, though, it, like "Winding Road," is funny enough to find cloying but not funny enough to enjoy laughing at.
Elsewhere, Spector compounds his mush fixation with an inability to choose the right take (it is said that nothing on the "official album" comes from the actual film sessions, mind you). Inexplicably dissatisfied with the single version of "Let It Be," for instance, he hunted up a take in which some jagged guitar and absurdly inappropriate percussion almost capsize the whole affair, decided that it might be real Class to orchestrally embellish the vocal, and thus dubbed in—yes!—brass. Here the effect isn't even humorous—Spector was apparently too intent on remembering how the horns went on "Hey Jude" to listen closely enough to this one to realize that they're about as appropriate here as piccoloes would have been on "Helter Skelter."
13 Apr '09 - 14:52 Some Things Never Change
The Amsterdam Central Station maybe a dump at the moment, but they're still here ...
04 Apr '09 - 14:46 Kut Radio
Voor echte kut-radio moet je in Texas zijn ...
03 Apr '09 - 21:43 Opsporing Verzocht
Minispace vraagt uw aandacht voor het volgende. Indien u zich afvraagt waarom de Nuon nu zometeen toch de energietarieven gaat verhogen; nu weet u het. Die rechtszaak wordt kostbaar. Er is overigens weer een vacature bij de Nuon.
