The Best Killer Tyre Movie You'll Ever See! Dept. - Rubber

 

I was going to post this as an April Fool's gag, but didn't think of it until just now. It's showing at th' Foamerama®, and all youse bums gots to do is feel around for the link with your crabby old fingers!

 

If you think you've seen this, you probably haven't. 

 

 

 

Pink Floyd Dept. - Special 18th Anniversary Deluxe Edition Of 40th Anniversary Deluxe Edition!

Yes, pop music enthusiasts, it was eighteen years ago today [literally not - Ed.] that Pink Floyd released their Fortieth Anniversary Deluxe Edition of their iconic first album The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn! To celebrate a momentous marketing opportunity the band is re-releasing this iconic box set of just about everything you already have, remastered exactly as it was last time, housed in a sumptuous cardboard display container that will give you deep consumer satisfaction to file on your special limited edition Pink Floyd Collectors' Shelf™ (available separately)!

To save you the irksome nuisance of remembering what you're looking for while you're searching for it, here's a word-for-word replay of the hi-toned screed what I already wrote about this fine, fine album:

Hard now to appreciate just how wildly experimental and startling that first Pink Floyd album was. It's either patronised as charming but hopelessly dated, or revered as the kaleidoscopic flowering of a madcap minstrel's cracked genius (an aSyd album). That's two blind grabs at the elephant in a dark room.

Pan, yesterday

Start with the title: it's not on the front cover, it's not the name of a song, nor is it referenced in a lyric. It's a quote from The Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahame, one of the handful of children's classics adopted by the hippies as holy texts. The Piper is Pan, the horned goat-god, bestial, wildly sexual. Pagan. We're not talking Disney here, kiddies.

"This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,' whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. 'Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!"

Meeting Pan is the culmination of the trip back to nature, to the source of magic, to the gates of dawn, or the Doors Of Perception - Heaven And Hell, the Magic Theatre. All this buried in the title to a pop album? Not for everybody - if you knew, you knew. Certainly it was deemed too arcane for the American market - Tower just stripped it right out.

In a radical break from EMI art department policy, the cover shot was lensed [oh very good - Ed.] by fashion photographer Vic Singh, using a prism given to him by George Harrison. No stylists, no special effects other than the lens, and the band in their work clothes - a kaleidoscopic moment captured forever. Today, it seems like just another generic psychedelic cover, but back then it was saturated with aSyd intensity.

The music, for a start, owes nothing to The Beatles, who are widely credited with the invention of the 'sixties. Mostly composed by Barrett, it was a revolutionary clash of fairytale whimsy and cosmic soundscapes, much of it instrumental. Not instrumental as in surf music or The Shadows or Rn'B or jazz or anything else current at the time. Indescribably far out and mind-blowing, it was music of the spheres teetering on the brink of collapse but always underpinned by structure and order, prefiguring Kraut Rock. It's what you might expect when three formalist architectural students get inspired by a whirling dervish shaman. Nick Mason's drumming is supernaturally right, at once powerful and retrained, a tribal metronomic. Roger Waters' bass has that freakbeat power and pulse. Rick Wright is feeling his way, but never hits a wrong note, adding color and depth. Barrett's guitar is a psychedelic pscythe, a slashing blade. And his lyrics are frequently sublime:

Lime and limpid green, a second scene
A fight between the blue you once knew.
Floating down, the sound resounds
Around the icy waters underground.
Jupiter and Saturn, Oberon, Miranda and Titania.
Neptune, Titan, stars can frighten ...

 

 

The freeload, @ an entirely unnecessary 320, includes all the art, with a reproduction of Syd's weird little book [cover at the top of this piece, sample spread below - Ed.] which is really worth having.

 

Internet Slop Dept. - Photo Libraries: AI Before There Was AI

Image copyright Foam-O-Graph© for the Artificial Ignorance Corporation®

 

Big ruckus right now about AI reducing your internest to visual mush. But photolibraries have been doing this for a looong time. Megabuck agencies like Getty Images, Shutterstock, and Alamy have been massaging our responses through print and digital media without much street level pitchfork brandishing for decades. Big corporations have their own stock of library shots, carefully guarded for their own use and "expressing their unique core values". The difference between a photolibrary shot and something conjured up in seconds from an AI prompt isn't that obvious, and getting more blurred all the time. Which is more dishonest?

"We literally get paid for this shit? I'm literally dying here!"

 

"Ever get the feeling we're like, stuck in some virtual reality corporate hell? Just me, then."

Photolibraries, ever keen to make a buck, are now offering their own AI images, to save us the backbreaking work of "creating" one by typing a command into an online AI image generator.

It's not just corporate communications; stock library shots (photography, illustration, and occasionally video clips) appear regularly in news articles and op-ed pieces, correctly credited. Mostly.

It's all illustration, not documentation. Even the starkly realistic photojournalism of Weegee ["Joy Of Living", left - Ed.] was created through his own technique, his own point of view, his own artistic interpretation of reality.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A contemporary rendering of Lincoln's assassination met with nobody's accusations of artificiality:

Credited to "our special artist illegible"

 

What I'm saying is, only Foam-O-Graph© shows reality unaltered, unfiltered, as it is. Trust Foam-O-Graph© to show the truth!

 

 

Wotta Revoltin' Development This Is Dept. - Wish You Were Here

 

Dem shoits is kinda cute, don'cha t'ink?

By Dark Side, only shadows of what made Pink Floyd so damn fantastic (Syd Barrett, mainly) remained, hidden behind the corporate studio sheen that won them the lucrative middle management market. The formally structured mindset of the architecture school had designed a product to be welcomed into every suburban household, flattering them with its progressive moods and provocative lyrics. Money! Who needs it, right? I mean, apart from the High Street hi-fi in the Scandinavian-style suburban lounge and the stereo system in the company car gleaming in the drive, what is it good for?

The Floyd's new grey suit and breath-mint audience was primed for its follow-up, which, in the natural order of things, had to be even better, right? This idea of artistic progression was so ingrained in the market by then that albums were bought without consideration, without even hearing. It's the New Floyd, man! I'm going to settle back in my World O' Leather© recliner with a glass of chilled Chardonnay and, like, trip out!

By '75 the band was creatively bankrupt, in inverse proportion to their bank account, already swollen by the corporate sponsorship of a French drinks company [left - Ed.] They would later drop all pretense of being anything other than an ugly bunch of fucking capitalists by openly embracing Volkswagen branded sponsorship [below - Ed.]. Making this album was an obligation, a chore, a two-year pain in the arse. They admitted as much, decades later, but their gullible fanbase mistook this grinding tar pit sludge as artistic credibility. This was a serious work of art! An adult album grappling with adult issues, like, er, the grasping capitalists in the music business. And, er, dead friends? The band's hypocrisy was nowhere more blatant than in the heartfelt memorial eulogies to Syd Barrett, inconveniently still alive. Even those Pink Floyd fans who knew who he was spent no turntable time with freaky druggie Syd, but they respected the respect the band gave him, because, you know, sadness. Life's fucking sad, innit?

It was the first Floyd album I didn't automatically snatch from the rack. I'd already offloaded my copy of Dark Side (with the vacuous poster and stickers) with no regrets, and I was baffled by the critical plaudits given its follow-up. What a joyless, miserable, horrible piece of shit. And they would get - incredibly - worse. Duke of Despair Roger Waters led the willing fans deeper into his wrist-to-forehead agonisings about mental illness and, er, war an' shit. War's sad, innit? 

This post fuelled by righteous anger - or as much as I can still muster - at the twats who turned the counterculture into a cash cow, and lost everything.

 

Play Some New! Dept. - Field Music

While we wait for me to get the courage up to finish curating the 30mins. Avant Garde audio initiative, here's another swell whimsical interlude, incorporating as it does one or two of the signature traits of th' Isle O' Foam™ what have endeared it to millions [Enis and Agina Millions, Mule Pucky, TX - Ed.], to lighten your step and put a sparkle in your eye as you go about your touchingly futile quotidian tasks!

"Hey Gwampy! Play some new!" is a cry not often heard on th' IoF©, as it is a place mercifully shunned by the Youngs, but as a cervix to Genwhogivesafucks, today's Freeload™ drags us kicking and screaming into the Now Sounds of Today! Yes, friends, this unfeasibly magnificent Long Playing LP record album comes fresh outta 2016, and is made by people under seventy! Zeitgeistesque, dude-bro!

Here's why it tickles me furry fun buttons:

🎶 Chewns!

🎶 Lyrics you can hear, worth listening to!

🎶 Variety! Just like a real pop record!

🎶 Arrangeminks! No pandemic lo-fi shit here!

🎶 Up-beat! No meditations on loss and isolation!

🎶 Likeable vox!

🎶 Cover that reminds me pleasantly of Soft Machine Third!

There's a little eighties-style pop synth here, but nothing to make your balls retract. Also - some very intelligently written string quartet and horn section charts. The whole deal evokes, and I'm not kidding, shades of Steely Dan. As much as anything else. Look - just download the sucker - you'll love it. Because it's terrific. And because I want you, ya lazy-ass internet grifters, to enjoy it with the least possible effort, I made it easy for yez:

Freeloader Advisory: Two (2) more swell long-playing LP records by this exciting new combo have been added to th' Cornucopia of Profligate Largesse™! See comments!  Oboy!

Rick Moranis - Power Pop Pioneer!

While we wait for me to get the courage up to finish curating the 30mins. Avant Garde audio initiative, here's a swell whimsical interlude, incorporating as it does some of the signature traits of th' Isle O' Foam™ what have endeared it to millions [Enis and Agina Millions, Mule Pucky, TX - Ed.], to lighten your step and put a sparkle in your eye as you go about your touchingly futile quotidian tasks!

 

 

You'll know boyishly lovable Rick Moranis from starring roles in The Secret Sandwich Club and I'm In This Picture And I Don't Like It, but did you know he's founding father of musical sub-genre "power pop"? Rick "spilled the beans" during recent visit to th' IoF©, but also revealed missing episode of pop history in FoamExclusive™! We relaxed poolside as Kreemé served signature loogie-n'-tubwater smoothies!

FT3 Heyyy Rickster! Ricky-rick baby! Lookin' good! How the fuck old are you anyway?

RM Ha ha!

FT3 Ha ha! So tell us about this power pop deal?

RM It was back in that fabulous decade the 'nineties. No - wait - the 'eighties. The 'eighties were a fabulous time to be alive! Us kids were living the dream, supported financially by moms and dads who selflessly fought the Acid Wars to prepare their kids for the Age of Aquarius! We didn't need jobs, so most of us were in bands. Me and my buddy formed this band The Happy Forest [left - Ed.]. No - wait - that was the name of the album. The band was ...

 

 

 

Rick/Ric, yesterday

FT3 The Reverbs. And you changed your name to Ric Menck [left - Ed.].

RM [punches air] Rock n' roll! There was a bunch of bands. We changed names whenever we owed money! Ha ha!

FT3 Can you remember some of them?

RM Yeah! No.

FT3 Choo Choo Train?

RM You fucking kidding me? Are you serious?

FT3 And Velvet Crush?

RM What the fuck does that even mean? [shakes head] Crazy times! Hey - can you tell Kreemé I'm sorry about the beans?

 

Today's Freeload® includes The Reverbs, Choo Choo Train, and Velvet Crush. You need all these albums. If you gots 'em awready download again and donate to the homeless.

Sciencing Dept. - The Sound Of The Future

 

 

Global Digital Advertising Monetization Corporation Nexxen Needs Your Cash!

To purchase reproduction rights to this image in high definition, visit shutterstock©

 

Allmusic has an an interesting history. Founded in the nineties by music enthusiast and scholar Michael Erlewine, it quickly became the major internet music reference resource. Since then it's passed through a dizzying series of multi-multi-million dollar corporate buyouts (Erlewine trousered 3.5m on the way) and is currently owned by media conglomerate Nexxen, which specializes in digital advertising monetization. This banner has appeared at allmusic.com:

"Advertising is no longer able to cover our operating costs." This, from the company that specializes in digital advertising monetization. They employ - as far as I can make out - a couple hundred employees from their premises in San Francisco. I've used the allmusic site for many years, more frustrated than entertained or informed by their often boneheaded opinionating (people get paid for that shit), and indifferent to their marketing strategy of genre sub-categorizations and "mood indicators". For hard-core information I've always relied on wikipedia.

If you feel their pain, and want to make a contribution to a valuable internet resource, give your money to wikipedia.

This post made possible thru "free" internet access.

 

Kandy Klickbait's Favorite Lemon Twigs Album Isn't Really A Lemon Twigs Album! Dept.

Foam-O-Graph© features new 3D imaging technology! Note how album, hand "floats" over background!

Please welcome Kandy Klickbait, th' Isle O' Foam©'s new Pop Outreach Executive! Kandy will be presenting carefully curated new releases with you, the pop music enthusiast, in mind! Here's Kandy to get this whole krazy ball o' wax rock n' rollin'!

KK: Hey, fam! Wassup! Heyyy! Today I'll be rapping about the latest drop from Brian D'Addario, who you'll know from that sick power-pop band The Lemon Twigs! So let's get into that right now! Remember to hit that like button down there and follow me for more fire drops! So without further ado I'm going to get right into this ill new album from Brian D'Addario who is as I'm sure you guys know is like one half of The Lemon Twigs right they're like brothers? Which is really cool! And this new album which we're going to listen to right now is by one of the brothers but the other one kind of features too so it's like a Lemon Twigs album who I'm sure I don't have to tell you guys is a fire pop band tha-

FT3: You're fired. 

 

Perfect Tens Dept. - Two Sevens Clash

If you've been following this Pulitzer-nod series, you'll be aware that elevation to this lofty musical élite is contingent upon the album having no demerits, faults, or lapses from artistic or professional perfection in any area. Yes, yes, *eyeroll emoji* yeah well it's all subjective innit one person's opinion is as good as another's innit *yawn emoji*. Bearing all this in mind the inclusion of Culture's benchmark album might seem to be a surprise, because the cover, at first glance, doesn't reach the Warner Brothers Art Department standards. And the cover has to be as great as the music to get a Perfect Ten (so no Pet Sounds, f'rinstance - harsh? Maybe, but I don't make the rules).

The cover, for all we know designed by a Dave at the Kingston printer's, makes a unique and immediate impact. I can only think of the inferior sleeve to Ry Cooder's Paradise And Lunch (ironically a product of the Warner Brothers Art Department) that looks remotely similar. The colours are straight from the process ink tins, the photograph is snapshot quality (that horizon! the cropping! the finger in the ear!), the sevens seem clipped from an ironmongery catalogue, the dash before the band name is bonkers ... it should be a graphic graveyard, but it works. The layout is inspired (even the Joe Gibbs logo and credit adds to the composition), with a dynamic use of space, light and shade, and proportion. No shit. Some eye is at work here. The sun-saturated vibe of Jamaica warms you up just looking at it. And - it's mysterious. Two sevens clashing? What the actual?

Joseph Hill, yesterday

From the sleevenotes, the songs wrote themselves. Nobody gets a composition credit, which makes you wonder, naively, what happened to the publishing money. Ri-ight. Culture was the vocal trio of Joseph Hill, Albert Walker, and (possibly) Roy Dayes, none of whom get a credit on the sleeve of any Joe Gibbs Jamaican release. Incredible, although a "written by - Culture" credit appears on a later Blue Moon release. Joe Hill, who sings lead, apparently wrote the songs, but if you know better, I'd like to know too, because they're original, unforgettable, and varied enough to be the work of a true melodic talent. The musical backing is supplied by the relaxed, un-showy perfection of a dream team of home-grown session players, and fueled by blissful clouds of home-grown.

This may have been the first true roots reggae album I heard. Bob Marley? Well, okay. euuhhh. But Culture packed an atmospheric punch that hit me in the heart, like stepping into tropical heat from an air-conditioned plane. This was the beat of lazy submarine depths, the shimmer of water under a limitless blue sky. The whole album was a trip outside a grey suburban life, authentic, unique, beautiful, its shining power undiminished over the years. For Culture, it was a peak they never quite reached again, but very few did.

 

 

Hi to Koen, who passed through my home town yesterday!

Thirty Minutes Dept. - With The Avant-Garde

Vaudeville funsters Joseph Beuys and Pina Bausch slapstick, yesterday. Copyright Foam-O-Graph© for Artificial Ignorance Corp.

 (This is work in progress, and I'd appreciate some thoughts before I wrap it up.)

Defining avant-garde is as tricky as defining art; a quick study of musicologist brow-furrowing on the subject leads to the conclusion that a precise or useful definition is impossible, due to the extreme variety of works that either claim to be or are cited as avant-garde.

The gimlet-eyed among you will have noted the subtitle to this collection: Volume I Challenging Societal Mores. It includes the type of music that most would agree is avant-garde; the difficult, antagonistic, atonal, dissonant, ugly, joyless, dreary, pretentious ... okay, you get the drift.

I've used as my template Justice Potter Stewart's view on pornography - essentially, I can't define it but I know it when I see it. Nobody is going to whistle this shit in the shower. Volume II, should I recover enough to curate it, will be music that doesn't stray too far from what the man in the street (who is me, woh-oh oh-oh-oh, I talk the way I wanna talk) might consider interesting at worst, enjoyable at best. To shoe-horn Debussy into Vol. I would be ridiculous, but he'll be in swell company for Vol. II.

I already have some of the usual suspects up against the wall for this, but if you have any suggestions, they will be treated with my usual patronising indifference. Please bear in mind that the closer they are to recognisable music, the further they are from the concept. This is one Thirty Minutes that nobody in his - or hey! her! - right mind, or even armchair, would sit through voluntarily.

Use space below for your notes - use regular ballpoint or Sharpie:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

Perfect Tens Dept. - Once Upon A Dream (TL-DR)

If ever there was a neglected album from the sixties, it's Once Upon A Dream by The Rascals. Reasons? Why ask me? Oh, right ... well, I'm guessing the name change for one. No longer The Young Rascals, they wanted to be taken seriously for the talented musicians they were, but you have to wonder if their teen fanbase (whose tastes were so accurately catered to by the Summer of Love's Groovin') weren't falling off the band's learning curve by now. Band name changes - and there were a few similar at this time - never seem to work as well as you'd hope. Old fans feel left out, and potential new ones tend to be suspicious.

For two (please try to keep up, it's not like this is a Wall Street Journal op-ed fercrissakes, it's only a music blog piece that'll be over soon, making no measurable impact on the internet Richter scale), and secondly: there's the cover art.

It's sensationally good.

It's also deeply unsettling. Designed and created by the band's drummer, the unfeasibly talented Dino Danelli, it's the Hippie Death Mask. Take a considered hinge at the difficult-to-find high-res scan above [above - Ed.], shown here in the correct color balance, and yes, that is important. Everything is washed out, a whited sepulchre. Not monochrome (the lazy way out), nor bursting with lysergic color. Compare with the Monkees' Birds And Bees from the same year [left - Ed.], using the same technique but diametrically different in execution and effect.

 

The cover, Danelli says, is "an assemblage of objects and sculptures that represent our dreams individually and collectively as a group. For its construction, I have, instead of carving from stone, used an opposite method of building and adding to create many objects which altogether form an environment. The objects exist not as separate identities, but as symbolic carriers. The impulse and thought they transmit is its spirit, image, and meaning." 

His literate use of the term assemblage shows his familiarity with the work of fellow Noo Yawker Joseph Cornell, who pioneered Assemblage Art in the 'forties, such as like this here piece below [below- Ed.]:

So, what does Danelli include in his assemblage box?

- A barely-visible, upended Stars and Stripes.

- A broken toy machine gun.

- Artificial flowers.

- Faceless mannequin heads.

- Dead fucking birds, FFS.

- A headless child in a cage.

- A man with a suburban house for a head.

- A busted clock.

- Illegible hippie buttons.

Yikes, right? And everything is smeared with powdery, crematorial ash. There could hardly be a more literal or obvious metaphor for the times, and yet it's a safe bet that few saw how bleak it actually was. The only hopeful element, and the only human face, is the fat Chinese Buddha, managing to crack a smile in spite - or perhaps because - of it all.

Danelli made another similar assemblage [left - Ed.] for the back cover, just to drive the point home, leaving the groovy color band photographs for the gatefold. Creatively, it was an astonishingly brave statement.

For three (cast your mind back, BACK! to  the second paragraph! We're thinking about why the album doesn't rank as highly as, say, Sgt. Pepper), and thirdly: anything influenced by Sgt. Pepper means, by definition, it's a knock-off, an inferior and disregardable copy. In 1967, Cavaliere stated, "our new album, and I say this in a humble way, will be Sgt. Pepperish." His humility was misplaced. Just as Sgt. Pepper was the sum of its influences (there's little on it that qualifies as original), so is Once Upon A Dream. The Beatles' most important influence is not in the occasional production flourishes common in pop at the time, but the conceptual - the album as a unified work of art. When Pepper is referred to as a concept album, it is in this sense. The Young Rascals' previous albums had been mostly collections of singles, many of them already familiar hits by the time the album hit the streets. This was, from the ground up, an album conceived for the album age, and the Rascals upped the ante by producing the album and providing the sleeve art themselves.

There is none of the bleakness of the cover imagery in the music. It is as beautiful and uplifting and honest as they knew how to make it, and if that involves occasional leaps into melodic melodrama (My Hawaii, and the title track) that's something we have to get over. These are good Italian boys and sometimes they like to sing for their mothers and the old neighborhood. This is heart-on-the-sleeve stuff, nothing knowing or "ironic" here, thank god. The lyrics don't strain for cleverness or impact, and the rhymes tend to the predictable. The songs are varied, as pop albums should be, showing their roots in blue-eyed soul, street corner harmony, blues and Rn'B. The production is just jaw-dropping, absolute state of the art stereo studio mastery. Arif Mardin and Tom Dowd are on board, which is a guarantee of the finest recording quality, all organic, no computers, the magic of magnetic tape, virtuoso musicians (including several jazz luminaries) playing together, a universe or two away from the sterility of contemporary pop production.

A standalone pop masterpiece, owing nothing to anybody outside the team of consummate professionals who made it, both of its time and timeless, an album for the ages, for right now, that reveals something new and wonderful on every play.

"Fuck lawyers! Their offices and cars may look gorgeous but inside they're full of shit and bones!"- Matthew NSFW 23-27

Thirty Minutes Dept.- Frat House Frug! Now With SPECIAL MESSAGE!

Your Host

SPECIAL MESSAGE!!!!

This post is sorely under-performing, doing much worse than Hey Life! Look At Me! It's probably something to do with presentation, because it's just as enjoyable, in a very similar way. So my Very Special Message to you is, download this sucker, because it'll give you a little boost for at least thirty minutes. Ignore all the nonsense below and SMACK THIS LINK:

https://workupload.com/file/bnVRRhe3n4K

Hi, teens! I'm Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau! You'll know me from my swingin' hits on the happening Deutsche Grammophongesellschaft label! My dear friend Mr. Throckmorton has asked me to pen introductory screed to his latest collection of groovin' party tunes! Let's go, daddy-o!

Louie Louie, ich muss los. Louie Louie, ich muss los. Feines kleines Mädchen, sie wartet auf mich. Ich erreiche das Schiff übers Meer. Ich segle ganz allein auf dem Schiff. Ich glaube nicht, dass ich es je nach Hause schaffe. Louie Louie, ich sagte, ich muss los. Louie Louie, ich muss los. Drei Nächte und Tage segelte ich übers Meer. Ich denke ständig an das Mädchen. Auf dem Schiff träume ich, sie sei dort. Ich rieche die Rose in ihrem Haar. Louie Louie, ich muss los. Nun, Louie Louie, ich muss los. Ich sehe den Jamaica Moon über mir. Es wird nicht lange dauern, ich sehe meine Liebe. Ich nehme sie in meine Arme und dann sage ich ihr, dass ich nie wieder gehen werde. Louie Louie, ich muss los. Louie Louie, ich muss los. Ich sagte, ich muss los. Ich sagte, ich muss los. Also, ich muss los.

This, I'm sure you'll agree, evinces an emotional rigor worthy of Goethe, whose Die Wahlverwandtschaften engages the same transient melancholy, partakes of the same weltanschauung!

(Will this do?) [It's better than your usual garbage, Farq - Ed.]

 

As a free FoamBonus®, here's D-D's latest long-playing LP album, available wherever boxes of shit albums are to be found under a pile of damp clothing!

 

Perfect Tens Dept. - The Inner Mounting Flame (TL-DR)

This, the latest in a series of under-performing and strangely futile posts about albums that have no imperfections whatsoever, attaining a timeless status of outstanding artistic accomplishment, is ... er ... I'm not sure where this sentence is going, so we might as well bring it to a shuddering halt right here and, with a fawnlike grace, step lightly into the next paragraph.

The Inner Mounting Flame looked the business from the get-go. That powerful image of a flame burning in darkness, the band at its core, was art directed by the great Ron Coro (we are truly not worthy - 572 credits at Discogs) and designed by Chris Poisson [Fr. fish ha ha - Ed.], who went on to design four more albums for McLaughlin. The composition is balanced by the elegant typography, which always gives me a frisson of delight, because that's the kind of nervously sensitive type guy I am.

The back cover [above - Ed.] did everything a back cover is supposed to do, giving you more to study and enjoy in a way that complements the front. The whole package exuded class, confidence, and professionalism. Beautiful. When a label spends this much time and skill packaging an album, you can reasonably expect their investment to be justified. I had no idea what the music was like, and I was, like, blown away. I'd never heard anything remotely this ferocious. And it was uncategorisable. Jazz-rock? You mean like Chicago, or Blood Sweat And Tears? Absolutely nope. Like Soft Machine? Colosseum? Bitches Brew? None of the above. What about prog, then? Those dizzying time signatures, the complexity ... prog sounded laughably club-footed in comparison. This was '71, astonishingly, and nothing quite like The Inner Mounting Flame had ever been heard before, unless you'd picked up Larry Coryell's Spaces from the previous year, which not many had. As excellent as it is, it couldn't prepare you for the massed sonic onslaught of the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

Calling it an orchestra seems right; it's not pompous or pretentious. These guys played at a level of virtuosity that produced a symphonic effect, from complex charts that allowed for little extended improvisation in the jazz sense; the uniqueness of the music had its roots in composition, themes like nobody else was writing, played at a speed that left thought behind. Time signatures came and went before you could tap a foot.

Note how image balances layout, breaking up text

It wasn't just a showcase for McLaughlin, either. Billy Cobham's drums made an equal impact, with his signature tash tash cymbal sound and hailstorm delivery keeping up with McLaughlin's blistering flurries, beat for impossible beat. Jan Hammer, a man possessed, scattered wild squalls from his keyboards, seemingly incapable of playing anything uninteresting. Jerry Goodman I knew, of course, the Flock violinist on the cover of Fill Your Head With Rocks, but this line-up un-clipped his wings, and he flew as high as McLaughlin. And then there was a bass player who'd got John's number from a card at the Job Centre. Maybe a showy, virtuoso bass player would have been too much, and the band needed a solid, unimaginative grounding. Whatever, no-one was complaining, least of all Rick Laird, the luckiest guy on the planet.

So: not jazz, then, and not rock. Neither jazz-rock as we knew it, nor prog. I'm not sure if the term fusion existed in '71 (except for the Indo-Jazz thing, something else again, that McLaughlin came back to later) but it's the best attempt at definition, with its associations of exciting electro-chemical reaction. Working back through McLaughlin's œuvre [Fr. egg - Ed.], as many then did, everything seemed like preparation for this blinding explosion. My Goal's Beyond even featured Cobham and Goodman in an unplugged format which was sadly never repeated.

The Mahavishnus went on to record some impressive albums, but the impact had been made. Birds Of Fire delivered the expected, but Inner Mounting Flame had delivered the unexpected. The genie was out of the bottle, making room for the lightning, and music was never quite the same again.

 

This post homologated by The National Association of Daves of America (NADA).

Skydog Soul Dept.

Sleeve: IoF© Art Department Of Art Dept.

There's no shortage of Duane Allman compilations out there, but this is a little different for what it omits; none of the (over)familiar cuts from Clapton, Scaggs, Delaney & Bonnie, no Allmans or contiguous lineups. And although it's called Skydog Soul, there's enough blues happening here to blur the lines. Forty Skydog minutes to fly by!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks to  D. in California for starting this ball of wax rolling!

 

Re-Routing The River Dept.

The problem with box sets, apart from the expense, and the duplication of material you already have, and the frustrating omission of tracks that should be there dammit, is that they're just not very playable. You want to hear an album, you pull it off the shelf, cue it up, et voilá! But what do you want to hear from a box set? The outtakes? The live stuff? The alternate versions? The remastered-if-you-say-so original album? The strangely lifeless BBC sessions? The blurry DVD of a past-their-best concert? Or, god forbid, the fascinating demos giving a rare glimpse into the creative process and preferred by connoisseurs to the over-produced studio versions? Most of the box sets I ever bought stayed on the shelf. Comforting to own, sure! Yup! I now have it all! The complete archival material, right there! Beautifully packaged with unopened limited edition fridge magnets and Croc buttons! Gee ... I hope somebody comes by who understands how impressive my collection is ... one day, I'll leave it to a museum ... maybe they'll name a wing after me ...

Who are we kidding? We buy box sets because they make us feel good, not because we're going to spend a lot of time opening them up and prising out the discs and deciding what bits we want to listen to before we lose interest. Case in point: Springsteen's mammoth The Ties That Bind: The River Collection, which luckily came out years after I jettisoned all my physical media. But even as convenient, at-a-glance MP3 files, I wasn't spending any quality time with the music.

So using readily-available household materials and some items found under the sink, I curated the songs I wanted to hear more of - not the live recordings, thank you - into handy album-sized portions, and crayoned up some covers, and now I'm not intimidated by the sheer work involved in hearing these swell tunes. I put a lot of thought and judgement into sequencing the songs. Well, no, I didn't. The order of the tracks is exactly the same as presented in the box. It works well - the "new" albums all clock in at under forty minutes, and lead off with the title track. I didn't put too much thought into the covers, just like Bruce doesn't. Roulette uses a nice pic of the Asbury Park Casino (casino? roulette? oh, forget it), and Meet Me In The City shows, like, a city, duh. The Ties That Bind cynically recycles an outtake shot from Born To Run, or Darkness - just like Bruce did for the appalling cover to The River.

So there we have it. You'll find this a fun, fuss-free way to explore the great man's profligate fecundity during this incredibly rich and productive period! Or not! It's your trip, baby!

 

 

 

 

Can't think of anything to type here.

 

Mother Theresa's Primal Scream Prayer Answered!

 

Mo' Tezza, yesterday. Foam-O-Graph© courtesy Artificial Ignorance Corp.

It seems incredible that someone as intimate with God as Mother Theresa should have her prayers ignored, but this was very much the case back in 1991 on the release of Primal Scream's award-winning Screamadelica. Mo' Tezza, as she's known on OnlyFans©, dropped by False Memory Foam Island© on a recent soul-seeking tour, recruiting young dead women for her Nunnery of Eternal Redemptive Pain in the ninth circle of hell, where she now resides.

She revealed the whole story for the first time for your Foam Exclusive™, chatting poolside whilst [grammar - Ed.] Kreemé served signature bin water and tomato mold smoothies.

MT Can I take that girl with me?  She's been bad and needs punishing.

FT3 Ha ha! So, tell us about your Screamadelica prayer.

MT Well, I wanted a kind of shorter version, with just the spacey, blissed-out tracks. My busy schedule blessing starving orphans made chillaxing with the entire album difficult. So I prayed to God for a mix of the Andrew Weatherall tracks without the Stones knock-offs.

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FT3 And he didn't answer?

MT The fucker never answered. Just sent me more starving orphans. I was like, gee, thanks, God! More starving orphans to bless! I never got the Dodge Ram Truck, either.

FT3 It was a test of faith, right? 

MT Yeah, right. Like He was showing his love for me by putting me through to voicemail every fucking time. Fuck that, and fuck Him. Have you seen where He put me for all eternity, to continue His good works? Everything's on fire! He sends Jesus down with some sandals, that's the thanks I get. Not even the right size.

FT3 Well, Mo' Tezza, I'm here to tell you that one prayer at least has been answered!

MT I get the Ram Truck?

FT3 Next best thing! An exclusive personalised FoamMix© of Screamadelica, just the good bits! And it's housed in a limited edition sleeve variant to add to its collectability!

MT (tearing up) Why, bless your wrinkled old sphincter! 

This post brought kicking and screaming into the world with BabyGrease©, now in economical quart tubs!

 

Better Than The Beatles? Dept. - Susanna Hoffs

Nothing encourages visits to Th' IoF© more than "Beatles" in a headline! Running a close second is an Art Study of Susanna Hoffs [above - Ed.], so I'm expecting to break an internet with this one! Why do I resort to such ignoble flim-flammery? Because if Mac Gayden's name was the hook for this piece, hardly anyone would bite. Mac's been on th' Isle© before, but he has a new album which I nearly missed, so that's a good reason for another FoamFeature© dedicated to his unique genius. Especially as the album's better than I expected (after the disappointmink of his previous, Nirvana Blues). The new one's called Come Along, and here's what it looks like:

 

Sweet cover, right? Already you're feeling good about it, and the music is well up to the expectations it sets, recognisably by the same guy who made that beautiful string of albums all those years ago. His signature guitar playing is all over it - and there's not that many players you can name after just a few notes. The songs are no embarrassment, a few are even gawjuss, and the whole thing hangs together as a proper core album. Yay!

Flashback fifty-two freakin' years to that lost first album, McGavock Gayden.

 

It really is lost, too - at least the tapes are, which is why it's never had a CD release, although Mac issued a CDR needledrop a while back. Produced by Bob Johnston in Nashville '73 and issued only in the UK [we're, like, WTF? - Ed.], you'd now pay up to a couple or three hunnerd bucks for a copy, which is probably more than the album made on release. Seriously. It disappeared from the shelves before it reached them. Unlike many impossible-to-hear "lost classics", McGavock Gayden is just that, a brilliant, exploratory, and beautiful piece of work that puts him in a different league to the denim-clad horde of singer-songwriters of the time. The Freeload™ contains a slightly crackly but entirely listenable needledrop @192, which is how I got it (where, I forget). Individual tracks are scattered across YewChewb, maybe at better quality, so if you want to assemble the entire album from there, good hunting and good luck! And if there's anyone out there with the keys to SoulSuck, you might want to check if they're clutching a better version to their ample bosom, and sneak out a copy for the common good. Please and thank you!

Freeload® contains everything he's released under his own name. Those who clicked for the Fabs and La Hoffs won't be disappointed. And if they are, fuck 'em.

This post funded in part by the Amalgamated Albuquerque, Azusa And Amarillo Armadillo, Aardvark, Anteater, Axolotl, And Albino Alpaca Appreciation Association (AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA). My thanks to "Tufty" Schnorblatz.