Favorite Albums - N & O
Nonsuch
by XTC
"Some folks pull this life like a weight
Drab and dragging dreams made of slate
Your heart is the big box of paints
And others, the canvas we're dealt
Your heart is the big box of paints
Just think how the old masters felt, they call...
Awaken you dreamers
Asleep at your desks
Parrots and lemurs
Populate your unconscious grotesques
Please let some out
Do it today
Don't let the loveless ones sell you
A world wrapped in grey"
5 star tracks: "Wrapped In Grey", "Books Are Burning"
4 star tracks: "Dear Madam Barnum", "Then She Appeared"
Ocean 8
by Ocean 8
Local band I went to see once with a guy I was dating. Gorgeously voiced lead singer.
5 star tracks: "Signs of Life"
4 star tracks: "Fireworks"
by The Moody Blues
A childhood favorite that still holds up and makes me feel at home.
5 star tracks: "Lazy Day"
4 star tracks: "Never Comes The Day", "Are You Sitting Comfortably"
Oranges & Lemons
by XTC
This always reminds me of the bookstore/coffeehouse I worked in when I first moved to San Jose. We had a giant heating/cooling duct that had been painted a sort of mauve color and I took to referring to it as the pink thing.
5 star tracks: "Across This Antheap", "Pink Thing"
4 star tracks: "Poor Skeleton Steps Out"
soundtrack to the film by David Motion & Jimmy Somerville
Fantastic film and some great music, especially for someone like me who actually likes some of those old musical styles. Ah, the pavanne is a lovely dance. Very beautiful and seductive.
5 star tracks: "Pavanne"
4 star tracks: "Coming", "The Poem", "A Change of Sex"
by The Swirling Eddies
Clever, sometimes ridiculous, but highly enjoyable pop rock and other sounds. Well worth liberating from whatever Christian Music filing ghetto its been walled off in. I'm an atheist and I love this album; then again I also like C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, so maybe I just like wit with some depth to it wherever I can find it.
Ever so glad my friend Father John Mabry turned me on to this, way back before he got his dog collar.
5 star tracks: "Hide The Beer, The Pastor's Here", "Elimination (The Band That Wont Go Away)"
4 star tracks: "Driving In England", "Urban Legends", "Mystery Babylon", "Arthur Fhardy's Yodeling Party", "Knee Jerk"
by The Police
"Roxanne" is on this album, but so overplayed in my lifetime - and particularly those critical radio-listening years - that I can only listen to it rarely and it teeters on the brink of dropping from 3 stars to 2. Not the song's fault, I suppose.
5 star tracks: "Hole In My Life", "Masoka Tanga"
4 star tracks: "So Lonely"
Honorable mention:
Oxygene by Jean Michel Jarre, with all tracks at 4 stars.
