To follow that brilliant move, eMusic came up with a drastic redesign a couple months back that made the site unusable for several days, and made some features barely usable for weeks. Fixes aren’t going to be finished for at least another month. Browsing the site has become much more difficult, so my daily runthrough of new downloads has come to an end. I did that every day for years. New releases show up in physical stores on Mondays in the UK and Tuesdays in North America, but you could never be sure which day a particular label’s new releases would show up on eMusic, so I checked regularly. Now it’s just too much of a pain.
The two main things keeping me tied to eMusic are inertia and S.T. Holdings. And electronic, ambient, and experimental music labels in general. Most of the major dubstep labels are there, mainly through S.T. Holdings, and there’s still enough good and interesting music related to dubstep to follow (though the ways in which dubstep is impinging on the mainstream — Skrillex, Nero, Korn, etc — are fodder for another, more casually dismissive discussion).

A part of me, though, still hopes that the site will become user-friendly again, and that some labels will return, and I’ll be excited about eMusic again.

Various artists: Scientist Launches Dubstep Into Outer Space
Shackleton: Fabric 55
Florence and the Machine: Between Two Lungs
James Blake: James Blake
Buzzcocks: Love Bites
Wire: Red Barked Tree
The Streets: Computers and Blues
Killing Joke: Absolute Dissent
Various artists: Mosaic Volume One
Various artists: Adventures in Dubstep and Beyond
Kid Cudi: Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr Rager
Various artists: FabricLive 56 Pearson Sound/Ramadanman
John Foxx and the Maths: Interplay
Various artists: Dubstep Allstars Vol 07 Mixed by Chef and Ramadanman
Ladytron: Best of 00-10
FaltyDL: You Stand Uncertain
Stereolab: Not Music
Kate Bush: King of the Mountain CD single
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings: 100 Days, 100 Nights
Jesu: Heart Ache/Dethroned
Jesu: Ascension
Raphael Saadiq: Stone Rollin’
Kate Bush: Director’s Cut Collector’s Edition
Scuba: Triangulation + Interpretations
Kode9 and the Spaceape: Black Sun
Fucked Up: David Comes to Life
Various artists: Hessle Audio Presents 116 and Rising
Various artists: Invasion of the Mysteron Killer Sounds
John Foxx, Harold Budd, Ruben Garcia: Translucence/Drift Music/Nighthawks
John Foxx and Theo Travis: Torn Sunset
Zomby: Dedication
Clubroot: Clubroot
Clubroot: II MMX
Johnny Bueno: The Heart’s Blood
Various artists: Rinse 14: Mixed by Youngsta
Ladytron: Gravity the Seducer
Various artists: Dubstep Allstars Vol 08 Mixed by Distance
The Jesus and Mary Chain: Darklands
Dälek: Untitled
The Jesus and Mary Chain: Automatic
Florence and the Machine: Ceremonials
M83: Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
Joker: The Vision
Chris Isaak: Beyond the Sun
John Foxx and the Maths: The Shape of Things
Magazine: No Thyself
Drake: Take Care
Various artists: DJ Kicks: Scuba
The Jesus and Mary Chain: Psycho Candy
Kate Bush: 50 Words for Snow

I’ll have some actual commentary later.

Comments on some of these to come later.

2562: Fever
A Winged Victory for the Sullen: A Winged Victory for the Sullen
Aidan Baker: Liminoid | Lifeforms
Anika: Anika
Babe Rainbow: Shaved EP
Balam Acab: Wander/Wonder
Blue Daisy: The Sunday Gift
BoB: EPIC Every Play is Crucial mixtape
Brendan Perry: Ark
Burial: Street Halo EP
Charles Bradley: No Time for Dreaming
Chatelaine: Take a Line for a Walk
David Sylvian: Died in the Wool
Deaf Center: Live Moscow
Deaf Center: Owl Splinters
Delphine Seyrig and Steven Brown: De Doute et de Grace
Desolate: The Invisible Insurrection
Dum Dum Girls: Only in Dreams
Effi Briest: Rhizomes
Egyptrixx: Bible Eyes
Ekoplekz: Intrusive Incidentalz Vol 1
Emika: Emika
Eraldo Bernocchi, Harold Budd, and Robin Guthrie: Winter Garden
Fennesz Sakamoto: Cendre
Floating Points: Shadows
Fripp & Eno: Olympia, Paris, France May 28, 1975
Gazelle Twin: The Entire City
Ghostpoet: Peanut Butter Blues and Melancholy Jam
Gillian and Stephen: Swing
Hannah Peel: The Broken Wave
Harold Budd: In the Mist
His Name Is Alive: Emergency LP
His Name Is Alive: The Eclipse
His Name Is Alive: When the Stars Refuse to Shine
Hollie Cook: Hollie Cook
Holy Other: With U EP
Hong Kong in the 60s: My Fantoms
Hyetal: Broadcast
IconAclass: For the Ones
Ikue Mori and Juliana Barwick: FRKWYS Volume 6
Instra:mental: Resolution 653
Ivy: All Hours
J*Davey: New Designer Drug
Jacaszek: Pentral
Jesu: Infinity
Johann Johannsson: The Miners’ Hymns
Joker: The Vision Instrumentals
Juliana Barwick: The Magic Place
King Midas Sound: Without You
Kryptic Minds: Can’t Sleep
Kuedo: Severant
Kyle Bobby Dunn: Ways of Meaning
Ladytron: Best of Remixes
Laurel Halo: Antenna EP
Laurel Halo: Hour Logic EP
Laurel Halo: King Felix EP
Leyland kirby: Eager to Tear Apart the Stars
Leyland Kirby: Intrigue and Stuff Volume 1
Leyland Kirby: Intrigue and Stuff Volume 2
Leyland Kirby: Intrigue and Stuff Volume 3
Leyland Kirby: Lost Moments, Errors and Accidents 001
Leyland Kirby: Sadly the future is no longer what it was (limited edition)
Lupe Fiasco: Friend of the People I Fight Evil mixtape
LV and Joshua Idehen: Routes
Martyn: Ghost People
Mater Suspiria Vision: Seduction of the Armageddon Witches EP
Milyoo: Archeology
Moebius Plank Neumeier: Zero Set
Mogwai: Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will
Mount Kimbie: Carbonated EP
Muhsinah: Gone
Nadja: Belles Betes
Pale Sketcher: Seventh Heaven EP
Peter Hook and the Light: 1102-2011 EP
Pinch and Shackleton: Pinch and Shackleton
Pointed Sticks: Three Lefts Make a Right
Pursuit Grooves: Frantically Hopeful
Raveonettes: Raven in the Grave
Robert Fripp and Theo Travis: 2009/05/21
Robin Guthrie and Harold Budd: Bordeaux
Robin Guthrie: Emeralds
Roly Porter: Aftertime
Rustie: Glass Swords
Scala: Beauty Nowhere
Seefeel: Succor
Seeland: Tomorrow Today
Sepalcure: Sepalcure
Serafina Steer: Change is Good, Change is Good
Shabazz Palaces: Black Up
Silkie: City Limits Volume 2
Smoke Fairies: Through Low Light and Trees
Sonic Youth: Simon Werner a Disparu
Subeena: 23
Sully: Carrier
Swarms: Old Raves End
Terius Nash: 1977
Terror Danjah: Undeniable
The Caretaker: an empty bliss beyond this world
The Caretaker: Persistent Repetition of Phrases
The Streets: Cyberspace and Reds mixtape
The Weeknd: House of Balloons
The Weeknd: Thursday
Thurston Moore: Solo Acoustic Volume Five – 12 String Meditations For Jack Rose
Tokimonsta: Creature Dreams EP
Tori Amos: Night of Hunters
Ulrich Schnauss and Jonas Munk: Ulrich Schnauss and Jonas Munk
Various artists: Back and 4th: A Hotflush Compilation
Various artists: Deadverse Recordings: TakeOver
Various artists: Deep Medi Releases Volume 3
Various artists: It’s All in the Brochure
Various artists: Pop Ambient 2007
Various artists: SMM: Context
Various artists: Unclassified
Veronica Falls: Veronica Falls
Vondelpark: NYC Stuff and NYC Bags EP
Vondelpark: Sauna EP
VVV: Across the Sea
White Ring: Black Earth That Made Me
Zola Jesus: Stridulum EP

Tell Me When It's Over

Only one band associated with the Paisley Underground managed to have a really big career for a while, and that only after becoming a more straightforward pop rock band. They’re barely mentioned in this book. Only one band evolved out of the scene with their individuality intact and managed to make it to the charts for one classic single, and that song isn’t mentioned in this book. Chances are that if you’ve never heard the phrase “paisley underground” you’ve still heard of the Bangles, and you’ve probably heard Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You.” And that may be it.

But if “paisley underground” takes you back to a bunch of albums by a handful of 1980s LA groups who didn’t sound a lot alike but drew on psychedelic and ’60s influences in different ways, you’re the audience for this book. The Dream Syndicate, Rain Parade, Green On Red, the Long Ryders, the Three O’Clock, True West, Wednesday Week, and the Clay Allison/Going Home/Opal/Mazzy Star family tree are all explored in a series of magazine articles from the 1980s and early 1990s with new introductions for each band. The book, edited by Clive Jones, is a 289-page trade paperback published in the UK by Rainfall Books and available through their website.

The bands were lumped into a collective scene because they knew each other and members often moved from one band to another, or collaborated on side projects. The sound varied, sometimes from album to album in a single band’s career. Some of it’s hard psychedelic rock, some is glossy pop, some of it is a clear precursor to the alt.country scene that would kick off years later (without the gimmicky elements present in some of the cowpunk bands). Back then I liked the Dream Syndicate, the Bangles, the Three O’Clock, and the Rainy Day project, a single album featuring members of Rain Parade, the Dream Syndicate, the Bangles, the Three O’Clock, and probably others I’ve forgotten doing covers of songs by Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Big Star, the Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix, et al.

But did I like the book? Yeah. It’s a bit disjointed, being largely snapshots of moments in history, but I learned a lot of things I never knew in the pre-web ’80s, when I couldn’t easily expect to find magazines like Bucketfull of Brains and The Bob. And, as any book about music should do, it’s had me listening to a lot of records I haven’t listened to in far too long (Opal’s Early Recordings is playing right now). I revisited some of the albums I downloaded off eMusic in more recent years but never got into, too many years removed from those days, and discovered that I do need to listen to this stuff more regularly.

When you consider that you can have pretty much all the essential music from this scene in fewer than two dozen albums, you’re looking at a small scene, one not likely to generate a lot of books. But if you loved and remember that music, or want to discover something that left a few traces on pop culture despite being mostly underground, this book is worth a look. And how can you not love that cover art, with its paisley take on the Velvet Underground’s Loaded?

John Foxx: In Mysterious Ways

A bit of background: In the late 1970s, Roxy Music recreated itself as a smooth, glossy, pop band with little of the invention and creativity of its early albums. Flesh + Blood, for instance, was expensively produced, commercial dance pop. For a lot of fans — including myself, sometimes — it feels too conventional and commercial to rank as one of their classics.And yet… I wouldn’t want to lose songs like “Oh Yeah,” “Over You,” or “Same Old Scene.”

A little more background: in the mid-’80s, a lot of the bands that were playing synth-heavy, arty new wave/postpunk music a few years earlier moved away from their roots, shooting for either pure pop appeal or some kind of rockist authenticity, adding more conventional instruments to their sound and, often, moving away from oblique or abstract lyrics to U2-style anthems. Ultravox started in that direction on Lament and lost all traces of their ealier sound(s) on U-VOX; the Simple Minds went bombastic on Sparkle in the Rain and AOR on Once Upon a Time; OMD became a catchy pop band; the Human League and Depeche Mode experimented with guitars; Gary Numan tried to get funky… maybe it was the result of feeling that they’d done what they could with their original styles and wanting to expand their horizons; maybe it was the way synthesizers became a big part of mainstream ’80s rock and pop and were no longer a futuristic, cutting edge sound.

It’s in that context that John Foxx’s fourth solo album appeared. His first, Metamatic, was almost all synthesized; The Garden was something of a return to his Ultravox sound and (it seemed to me, at least) someone taking the idea of “new romantic” as more than a fashion statement; The Golden Section continued in that direction with the addition of some Beatles/psychedelia influences. He was, in his own way, making a move similar to many of his peers by using more guitars.

But In Mysterious Ways caught Foxx fans flatfooted. Though he’d had some chart success in the UK before, it had been a matter of the time being right for someone doing what he was doing. In Mysterious Ways, by comparison, felt like the work of someone consciously changing his style in an attempt at getting more mainstream success. It has more conventional big ’80s production, female backing vocals that are at times over the top, and the love song lyrics are a long way from the Ballardian feel of Metamatic. Essentially, it’s Foxx’s version of Roxy’s Flesh + Blood, or Bowie’s Let’s Dance, the big pop move. Except that Foxx’s didn’t work. The fans weren’t crazy about it and no new audience materialized.

For years I thought of In Mysterious Ways as sort of the equivalent to his former band’s U-VOX: the moment where it all went wrong. Ultravox broke up after U-VOX, and Foxx didn’t release any new albums for more than a decade after In Mysterious Ways. But here’s the thing: I can’t listen to U-VOX, but I really enjoy In Mysterious Ways. Foxx’s big dramatic love songs, even through the glossy production, feel real. He sounds genuinely happy and in love. Where his vocals on Metamatic were generally cool and controlled, he’s unrestrainedly emotional here.

In 2008, In Mysterious Ways was reissued as a double CD set with a number of previously unreleased tracks. Some strike me as not just commercial but uninspired; the bonus disc isn’t going to strike many as a lost masterpiece. But there’s one interesting change: one of the original album tracks, the pounding and overblown “This Side of Paradise,” was replaced by the nearly acoustic ballad “Spin Away.” Its production doesn’t quite match the rest of the album, but the feel is appropriate. One thing I hadn’t consciously noticed before: “This Side of Paradise” sounds very much like it was intentionally modeled on Simple Minds’ Sparkle in the Rain, with its big damn overproduction by Steve Lillywhite. Worked better for Simple Minds, though.

I was in a bit of a mood this afternoon and put this album on for the heck of it, and almost instantly I was smiling and feeling a lot better. That’s pretty damn good for an album that seemed like a disappointment 25 years ago.

Subhumans: Same Thoughts Different Day

Back in early 1982 I bought the album Incorrect Thoughts by the Subhumans, the punk band from Vancouver who’d formed a few years earlier (before the UK band with the same name). It was, by turns, savage and funny, a powerhouse of an album that was pure punk but undeniably rock as well. I’d heard of them a couple of years earlier; they were part of the same scene as Canadian punk rock legends D.O.A. I managed to find the Subhumans’ Death Was Too Kind EP in the next year or so, and several years later found a bootleg reissue of a single of theirs, and that was it for a long time. I never saw them live, though singer Brian “Wimpy Roy” Goble joined D.O.A. for a while, and he was with them the first time I saw them.

Anyway, unlike D.O.A., whose leader Joe Keithley (a.k.a. Joey Shithead) has soldiered on through countless lineups, the Subhumans seemed to disappear from view for a long time. And so did that first album of theirs. I occasionally looked for a digital version of it but all I found were mp3s of an unusually wrong version of the record: different tracklisting, extra songs, different mixes of the familiar songs. It just wasn’t right. Turns out an unscrupulous American label put out a version of the album, and despite its dubious legality, the band hasn’t had the money to take the label to court. (Other bands have been screwed over by the same label.)

So, when the Subhumans returned from their lengthy hiatus a few years ago, with a strong new album solidly in their classic style, interest in Incorrect Thoughts was revived. And the band decided to do what a few other artists have done: they rerecorded the songs, added a few previously unreleased/unrecorded songs, and gave it the title Same Thoughts Different Day. So how does it compare? Well, I won’t lie — I still love the original LP. But given a choice between the unauthorized release and this new version, it isn’t just fannish loyalty that makes me put the new CD out in front. It’s well recorded and well played, with as much passion and energy as ever. It kicks ass and it sounds great. Not bad for a band with three out of four members of the classic lineup, thirty years later.

And lo, it came to pass a week ago that I finally got to see the band play live. And damn, it was fun. There were a few of us old farts in our late 40s or above, and a lot of young punks in their 20s, maybe a few in between, and we all enjoyed it. It was a small club, should have been a bigger crowd, but the beer was good and the music was loud. Got some stuff by one of the local opening bands, too. Now to see who I can get to go see D.O.A. at the same club in a week or two…

Janelle Monae: The ArchAndroid and Kelis: Flesh Tone

It’s been a good year for genre-defying afrofuturist R&B singers. Or for music listeners intrigued by that sort of thing, anyway; I have no idea how well these albums are selling. At any rate, Janelle Monáe’s first full solo album and Kelis’s latest are two very different albums that both come from singers associated with R&B while really not having much to do with that at all. And they’ve both got science fictional lyrics, too.

I’m of the opinion that The ArchAndroid is the better of the two albums, because while Flesh Tone successfully reinvents Kelis as an electro/house dancefloor queen, The ArchAndroid is an epic work that takes on a dozen or more musical styles and genres and wins. If you heard it playing somewhere and weren’t listening closely you could easily think you were listening to someone flicking between different radio stations. There’s some retro soul/hiphop crossover moments, some alternative rock, a track going for an almost punk feel, an orchestral instrumental intro, psychedelia, a song that sounds like some kind of folky easy listening tune from 1970 before going triphop, another that sounds almost like something 1950s arranger Gordon Jenkins (who did some strings-heavy torch song albums for Sinatra) might have worked up, another that sounds like the kind of easy listening exotica that inspired a lot of Stereolab songs. But when you listen more attentively, it flows surprisingly well, no matter the changes in genre or in Monáe’s singing. If the album has a flaw it’s that it’s too long. But it doesn’t run out of ideas or resort to as much filler as other wildly ambitious and long albums like Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below. It’s more like some of Prince’s classic albums: fearless, experimental, genrehopping, and fun. (The SF concept involves androids in the far future; you can pay as much attention to that aspect of the album as you want, because it works fine with or without it.)

I’m not so sure what the concept is behind Kelis’s album, but it’s a striking contrast to Monáe’s. It’s inventive and fresh and enjoyable, but the musical focus is much more on dancefloor sounds, particularly house and electro. Not a style of music I’m intimately familiar with, but I can say that it reminds me at times of Madonna’s Confessions on a Dance Floor, only less obvious and less self-indulgent. It’s a much shorter album than Monáe’s, though, so the comparative stylistic unity doesn’t get to be too much. And though it’s dance music there are interesting interludes between tracks and some solid hooks that catch the attention of people who aren’t very likely to find themselves out clubbing. Like me, for example. I may not have as much to say about Flesh Tone as I did about The ArchAndroid, but there’s nothing wrong with an album that does a couple of things very well indeed.

Deborah M. Withers: Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory

There’s been a boomlet in Kate Bush writing over the last few years. 33 1/3 has a book on The Dreaming in the works. Ron Moy’s Kate Bush and Hounds of Love appeared in 2007 (I missed it, but it’s on order). Rob Jovanovic’s solid and straightforward biography, called Kate Bush: The Biography, came out a few years ago, as did a second edition of a collector’s guide.

And just this year Deborah M. Withers published Adventures in Kate Bush and Theory.

Withers says she called the book that because she wanted to write a book about Kate Bush using various types of critical theory but she wanted it to be fun, too. Unlike some writers of pop culture criticism I can think of (like Enterprise Zones, a collection of essays on Star Trek) she pays a lot of attention to the actual subject instead of just stringing together a lot of quotes from Cixous, Deleuze, Guattari, etc. Her interpretations are guided as much by close reading of Kate Bush’s lyrics and listening to the performances (and watching videos) as by theory, and I’m actually learning interesting new things about a musician I’ve been listening to for over thirty years. Plus, as Withers points out, pretty much everything else about Kate Bush has been written by middle-aged straight white guys, so a book by a young lesbian is going to offer some new perspectives.

The book looks at several of Bush’s albums, following the progression of what Withers calls the Bushian Feminine Subject, looking more at the personas represented in Bush’s songs than Bush herself. The Kick Inside is about the human body, Lionheart about performance, camp, and artificiality (except when it’s about English nationalism, in the title song, though why that can’t be something of a performance in itself isn’t really addressed), Never For Ever about transition, and so on. It’s an approach that works pretty well.

The book sometimes moves a bit too quickly for its own good; if Withers is going to address the ways in which Bush moves from the English nationalism of “Lionheart” or the Orientalism of “Kashka from Baghdad” to the more relative anti-colonialism of The Dreaming, why not discuss “Pull Out the Pin,” which appears to be from the perspective of a Viet Cong guerilla?

The section on The Red Shoes has some good commentary on the album’s related video The Line, the Cross, and the Curve in the context of the fairy tale “The Red Shoes” and the Powell and Pressburger movie based on it. However, it has less discussion of the actual music on the album. That’s unfortunate, because with all its celebrity guest stars (Eric Clapton, Prince, Nigel Kennedy, etc) it seemed to be trying too hard to connect with the mainstream and sell more records. But that may not tie in neatly with Withers’s narrative of the Bushian Feminine Subject.

The Aerial section seems rather rushed, too, skipping the first disc entirely and again not really spending much time on the music.

Overall, though, this quirky mix of playfulness and critical theory is a surprisingly accessible read, and one with a fair number of interesting new insights. It’s more relevant (and much more current) than Fred Vermorel’s The Secret History of Kate Bush (& the Strange Art of Pop), for longtime fans who remember when that was almost the only book on Kate…

Brian Eno: Sonora Portraits

I just realized the other day that I’d forgotten about another Brian Eno book. Easy to do, considering this one gets filed with the CDs instead of the music books.

Sonora Portraits was apparently a series of book/CD sets produced by the Italian company Materiali Sonori, though the only other one I know of involved Hector Zazou, and I don’t have that one. What you get is a slipcase containing a slimline jewel box with a CD and a 96-page book the same size as the slimline.

I’ll get to the music shortly, but first, the book. Each page has two columns of text, the same material in Italian and English. There are four articles: “Sound Ambience: Erik Satie, John Cage, Brian Eno” by Claudio Chianura, “Una Conversazione con Brian Eno” by Arturo Stalteri, “Driving” by Fabio Martini, and “Ambient Music” by Adelio Fuse. Chianura’s piece is fairly short and puts Eno’s ambient music into the appropriate theoretical and historical context. Stalteri’s interview is also rather short, but surprisingly wide-ranging, covering specific Eno albums, Italian folk music, and UFOs. Martini provides a stream of consciousness piece with some thoughts about Eno’s music in various contexts. Fuse’s “Ambient Music” takes up half the book, going into more detail about Satie, Cage, and Eno, the ideas of ambient music, musique d’ameublement, and environmental sound. The book ends with a brief chronology of Eno’s life and work, and a selection of websites.

Overall, the book isn’t going to provide the kind of depth and detail that Eric Tamm’s does, but it certainly goes well beyond liner notes.

The CD is a rather odd mix, some relatively hard-to-find material (easier to find now than it was in 1999) and some much more accessible. There are three tracks identified as being from Eno’s work for Derek Jarman’s Glitterbug. The short ambient instrumental “Distant Hill”, the unfinished-sounding instrumental “Radiothesia III,” and the classical-gone-synth “Strawinsky” can only be found here or on the All Saints label compilation Future Perfect. Five tracks are from Music for Films III, reissued in 2005. There’s also a track each from Eno’s The Drop, Eno and Wobble’s Spinner, and Eno and John Cale’s Wrong Way Up, as well as a brief edit of the album-length “Neroli” (from the album of that name); even that edit is available elsewhere. The disc ends with seven minutes of Eno speaking, which is reproduced in the book as the beginning of the Stalteri/Eno interview.

So, not an essential bit of Eno; the book’s much shorter than some others you can get, and there are no exclusive music tracks. It’s an interesting collectible, if you’re a bit of an Eno completist, but I have rarely listened to the CD; not only is the material generally available on other CDs, but it’s not the best selection of Eno material, and it doesn’t all really fit together very well. As for the book, I read it when I bought the CD and basically forgot about it.

(In 2000, Materiali Sonori released Arturo Stalteri’s tribute album Cool August Moon: From the Music of Brian Eno. Instrumental and vocal Eno songs are recast as pretty, piano-led chamber pieces. A reviewer on Amazon called it a work of schmaltzification, which is pretty much on target. I may have listened to it all the way through once. At most. Fortunately, it was an inexpensive emusic download.)

David Sheppard: On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno

This is, as far as I know, the first proper biography of Brian Eno — original member of Roxy Music, collaborator with Robert Fripp and David Bowie, inventor of ambient music, producer of U2 and Coldplay, and so much more.  Fortunately, it’s a good book.

There are other books about Eno. Eric Tamm wrote a musicological take on Eno’s albums called Brian Eno: His Music and the Vertical Color of Sound (now available as a free download at Tamm’s website). Eno published a diary of a year in his life, A Year With Swollen Appendices. (The year in question was 1995.) The 33 1/3 series published Geeta Dayal’s book on Eno’s album Another Green World. This one, a biography of Eno the man, may explain why there are Eno fans in the first place.

Sheppard’s book is long and well-researched, drawing on published accounts as well as a variety of interviews with many of the people who’ve been a part of Eno’s world. The book covers Eno’s life from his childhood well into the 21st century. I was pleasantly surprised by some of Sheppard’s choices of interview subjects; I hadn’t realized, for example, how early people like John Foxx and Colin Newman had crossed paths with Eno. The book feels like it’s exhaustive, giving a lot of coverage to Eno’s time in Roxy Music but also mentioning more obscure activities, like his production work with the Urban Verbs, without ever being a dry recitation of facts. A lot of personalities come through in the book, and there are some surprises and some great anecdotes.

It’s not a case of unadulterated hero worship, either — a few people, perhaps most notably Gavin Bryars, occasionally pop up in the narrative to argue that Eno gets credit for things others did first, or that some of his projects really are just the work of a dilettante with no deep understanding of what he’s doing.

Overall, though, Sheppard does a good job of intelligently discussing Eno’s music in the context of its times, be it Roxy Music in the glam era or working with Bowie in the punk era, and he presents Eno as a fascinating and complex and certainly not perfect person. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable read.

(Beats the hell out of the Roxy Music book I struggled through a few years ago, Paul Stump’s Unknown Pleasures: A Cultural Biography of Roxy Music. There are three other Roxy Music books out there now. I’ll give another one a shot one of these days.)

Various artists: Steppas' Delight 2

I was in Toronto a month ago. I used to love going to the big record stores in Toronto — the Sam’s and A&A on Yonge, originally, and then the Tower Records down the street — because Ottawa didn’t really have anything that could compare for sheer size and selection. Well, Sam’s, A&A, and Tower are all gone, and the last major chain standing, HMV, has a big store where Sam’s used to be.

So I went into HMV, and it had a lot of stuff, but not much of what I was looking for. (I was hoping to find, among other things, Dubstep Allstars Volume 7, but settled for the second Steppas Delight compilation.)

Anyway, getting to the point at last: there was a security guard at the entrance. It seemed ironic — record stores are going out of business because some people are stealing music from the comfort of their own homes, and people are still shoplifting physical CDs?

Roxy Music: For Your Pleasure

So I’m reading On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno by David Sheppard, about which more shortly, and I’m in a section of the book dealing with Eno’s time in Roxy Music and it occurs to me that I haven’t listened to For Your Pleasure in some time.

So I do. And it’s as brilliant as ever. The manic pop thrills of “Do the Strand” and “Editions of You” (and the best ever sequence of sax/synth/guitar solos in the latter) are the instant gratification moments of the album, but there’s plenty of strangeness and drama to maintain the listener’s interest in the longer, more experimental songs.

I first heard this album back around the end of 1980, when I was 17 and a fan of new wave and David Bowie and the usual suspects and had picked up Roxy Music’s Greatest Hits and become utterly enthralled, even more than I expected (I knew a few of their later songs). So I went out and bought For Your Pleasure, the band’s second album, originally released in 1973. It was a long way from the suave and sophisticated image of Roxy Music in 1980. Some of it’s new wave years before new wave, like Neu! and a handful of others, but it’s also progressive rock. I was discovering Ultravox and the Stranglers around the same time, but I was also still listening to a bit of King Crimson, Pink Floyd, and even Yes then, too, and For Your Pleasure was the link between them.

The album kicks off with the fast and propulsive “Do the Strand,” which proposes “a danceable solution to teenage revolution.” This would fit well in any new wave playlist. The next two songs, “Beauty Queen” and “Strictly Confidential,” might be described as prog ballads, being atmospheric and quiet early on before allowing the full band to bring a bit of a racket for a climax. Then there’s another proto-new wave rocker, “Editions of You,” another stomper remembered by many for the aforementioned solos (the synth bit can still raise eyebrows). Side one ends with the eerie “In Every Dream Home A Heartache,” in which Bryan Ferry sings over ominous keyboard and guitar lines about the unhappiness in modern homes before addressing his inflatable sex doll in the tones of an obsessed lover. About three minutes in, the drums kick in and an almost Pink Floyd-like squall of guitar soloing and keyboards relieve the tension, before fading into a false ending and returning gradually with phased/distorted instruments before fading out again.

Side two starts off with the nine-minute long “The Bogus Man,” but its steady beat and keyboard pulses and guitar scratches, along with near random instrumental interjections and Ferry’s distorted vocals, maintains a groove that makes the nine minute duration hypnotic rather than excessive, not unlike some long krautrock tracks. “Grey Lagoons” starts out with Ferry crooning over piano, organ, and backing vocals, before drums and bass join in after the first couple of lines, and a brief guitar solo comes in where a chorus might be expected, then there’s another verse, the guitar returns, and the band speeds up into a rocking interlude with a sax solo, then the beat shifts a little and bass and a brash harmonica solo take the lead, before speeding up again for an extended guitar solo supported by a pounding piano line, then Ferry starts crooning again…. And the album closes with the title track, another atmospheric and hypnotic slow song.

This isn’t a terribly satisfying album for people who want straightforward song structures — there’s not a lot of verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus here. It is very satisfying, however, for listeners who want something adventurous and different. Unfortunately, Roxy Music’s second album is also their last with Brian Eno; without his experimental drive, Ferry would take the band in a more conventional direction. They did some great music without Eno but it wasn’t like the music they did with him.

Anyone whose idea of Roxy Music is restricted to songs like, say, “Dance Away,” “Over You,” “Avalon,” and “More Than This” will have no idea what this album sounds like. The young Ferry’s voice can be a bit of an acquired taste, with its almost random vibrato, and it can be mannered and affected at times. But For Year Pleasure rewards the effort it may take to get into it.

Various artists: Skull Disco Soundboy Punishments, purchased at Sounds Unlikely in June, 2007

I don’t know how long ago it happened, but Sounds Unlikely, an Ottawa record/CD store that opened in 2007 following the closing of the somewhat similarly oriented and much missed Organised Sound, went out of business.

I went there fairly often for a while, not least because they were the only store I knew of where I might reasonably expect to find some dubstep albums. I figured I’d be spending a lot of time and money there.

And then I lost my job.

In the seven or eight months between my first visit to Sounds Unlikely and my last day at Telesat, I bought 14 albums there. In the two years since losing my job, only 10 albums. And I was surprised to see that the last thing I bought there, I got last July, because I know I’ve been there a few times since then — but I also know that I went a few times eager to buy something and found precious little that was new in the store. There were staff changes, and less of the kind of stuff I was interested in was showing up — the last dubstep CDs I bought there, I bought in August of 2008 — but there didn’t seem to be much else that was new. And I rarely saw other customers or the friendly, chatty staff who used to be there, and the myspace updates about new stock and in-store events stopped coming a long time ago, too.

I sometimes blame myself for buying mp3s from eMusic and CDs from online retailers, because we still need record stores for finding the things we didn’t know we needed. A record store’s sound system may introduce you to some of your favourite albums; a knowledgeable employee may let you know that if you like this, you should try that. Plus, hell, it’s good to get out of the house sometimes. But I can only do so much.

(Laura said you only bought two dozen CDs there in just over two years? In addition to all the other CDs you got everywhere else? Most people don’t buy that many CDs, period. And didn’t even when people did buy CDs.)

So, farewell to Sounds Unlikely,and thanks for letting me buy CDs by Cyrus (Random Trio), Ulrich Schnauss, Githead, Burial, Boxcutter, Pinch, Disrupt, These New Puritans, Grievous Angel, Wire, Dusk and Blackdown, and Cadence Weapon, and a lot of compilations, my final purchase being the Soul Jazz Records double CD Dancehall: The Rise of Jamaican Dancehall Culture.

In memory of Sounds Unlikely, End Hits, Organised Sound, Record Runner,  Spinables, Records on Wheels, Shake Records, and all the other places we’ve lost over the years. And good luck to Compact Music, Birdman Sound, CD Warehouse, and the rest that are still going. If I can get more financially secure, I’ll do my bit to make sure you are…

If names like the Diodes, the Viletones, and Teenage Head mean anything to you you’re probably intrigued. If they don’t, but you’re interested in Canadian music or punk rock, you should be intrigued. This book is nearly 400 pages of memories (and occasional contemporary reports) from dozens of people who were there at the time, including many — maybe most — of the surviving members of the bands discussed. There are a lot of photos, too.

(Note: you probably won’t find this one in your local bookstore, as only a few hundred copies have been printed. Order from Bongo Beat, the publisher, here.)

In addition to the key Toronto bands, including the aforementioned Viletones and Diodes and The Ugly, the Curse, and the B-Girls, Hamilton’s Teenage Head, Simply Saucer, and Forgotten Rebels and London (Ontario)’s Demics all get a look in as well. The rise and fall of the Crash ‘n’ Burn club, the rivalry between some of the bands, the Last Pogo, the realization of a scene coming into existence at the same time as the London (England) and New York scenes, the frustration of not having supportive media, record companies, and venues (unlike those other cities)… it’s all there.

Those not necessarily interested in the scene might find the book an interesting read anyway; there’s definitely an arc to the story, from the initial burst of creativity to the gradually increasing ugliness of it all and a lot of unhappy endings. The largely fake and harmless early violence of the scene is supplanted by real and ugly violence — from career criminals continuing to do break-and-enter robberies as their bands get popular, to street gangs hanging out at clubs starting vicious fights. And then heroin enters the scene and ruins a number of careers and lives.

Often, when reading books like this about scenes like this one, I wish I could have been there at the time. Not so much this time around. Maybe it’s the nature of the oral history, the story being told by its participants possibly leading to settling of scores, but a lot of the people in the book seem to be assholes or thugs.

Still, it’s a necessary chronicle of a historically significant moment — not just for Canadian music, but, many of the participants argue, for the development of Canada’s largest city. One of the problems with this scene is how poorly documented the music is. A decade ago, companies started releasing CDs compiling what was available from the Viletones, the Ugly, the Curse, and the B-Girls, and the first two Diodes albums were reissued, among others. But that’s maybe a dozen CDs from a scene with a lot of bands over several years. At least you can get a sense of what some of it was like from the DVD of The Last Pogo, discussed here a few posts back.

Personally, the only band in the book that I ever saw live was Teenage Head when they played in Halifax in 1981 — I had their classic Frantic City album and was excited that they were playing at my university, and I remember having a very good time. But a show on a university campus had to be a very different experience from many of the shows chronicled in the book, in seedy and dangerous places.

I’d love to see a similar book on the Vancouver scene — yeah, we have D.O.A.’s Joe Keithley’s book I, Shithead and Guilty of Everything by John Armstrong, a.k.a. the Modernettes’ Buck Cherry, but Treat Me Like Dirt is a monster of a book. The stories here could spark a dozen movies. More books like this on other scenes would be very welcome.

John Foxx: Metamatic

Thirty years ago I’d just really started to get into punk and new wave and electronic music. I really liked the music of Gary Numan, who combined all of the above, and I’d read interviews with him in which he mentioned Ultravox as an influence. But I couldn’t find their records anywhere.

Meanwhile, a friend at high school had discovered the UK music papers, which had a lot of news about all of this new music we were curious about. The first one I picked up was an issue of Record Mirror — not exactly the most respected of the bunch, I later learned, but it had articles on Kate Bush and the Clash, so it looked worth a shot.

And this was there:

It was a combined review of Japan’s Quiet Life and Foxx’s Metamatic, the first I knew of his solo career, and even though the review seems hopelessly vague about the sound of the record, I knew I had to have it.  That was 30 years ago. Which is why this post now. I’ve blathered a lot about Foxx here already, so I won’t go on about Metamatic, and what a brilliant and groundbreaking album it was, and how great it still sounds, and how the whole second disc of bonus material with the last reissue makes it worth buying again.

Funny thing… I eventually got into Japan, too, and bought Quiet Life. I love it, but the Roxy Music/disco/Moroder sound of it makes it seem more dated in a way than the relatively primitive synth sounds of Metamatic. They became timeless with Gentlemen Take Polaroids, I think.

So, time to get back to business as usual around here. I was looking for a job, and then I found a job, and heaven knows I didn’t have as much spare time as I was used to, which is why the paucity of posts lately. But I think things are getting back in balance. And if not, well, when the contract is up I may be really prolific here.

Hudson Mohawke: Butter

I used to buy a lot of CDs. Now I get a lot of music from eMusic and other online sources. But they don’t have everything, and they don’t cater to the collector side of me, or to the side of me that remembers to play something more often if there’s a physical copy lying around. So how many CDs have I bought this year? (I’m not counting the ones mounted on magazine covers.)

Raphael Saadiq: The Way I See It
John Foxx: My Lost City
Cadence Weapon: Afterparty Babies
D’Agostino/Foxx/Jansen: A Secret Life
Ultravox: Quartet
Yeah Yeah Yeahs: It’s Blitz!
John Foxx and Robin Guthrie: Mirrorball
Lupe Fiasco: Lupe Fiasco’s Food and Liquor
J Dilla: Donuts
Nadja: When I See the Sun Always Shines on TV
Various artists: Dancehall: The Rise of Jamaican Dancehall Culture
Various artists: Play Drill: Dugga Dugga Dugga
Editors: In This Light and On This Evening
Franz Ferdinand: Tonight
John Foxx and Louis Gordon: Shifting City
John Foxx and Louis Gordon: The Pleasures of Electricity
John Foxx: In the Glow
Leyland Kirby: Sadly, the Future Is No Longer What It Was
Hudson Mohawke: Butter

That’s nineteen so far. But a few of them are expanded reissues of albums I already owned.  How about last year? Leaving out magazine covermount CDs and audiobooks, in 2008 I bought 24 CDs, again with a few being expanded reissues. In 2007? 58. In 2006, 35. In 2005, 30.

Okay, so not as much of a decline as I thought; 2007 was an atypical year. I think being unemployed is enough to explain the difference. Part of the reason 2007 was atypical was dubstep: I got into it in a big way then.

I don’t have an ipod, though occasionally I use my cellphone as an mp3 player (it has a capacity of one gB, or about a dozen albums). I tend to listen to albums as albums, not random selections of tracks, and I still like CDs because they can be played in more places, although our next car may be able to handle mp3s. Still, the main selling point of mp3s is price and storage space. If I know I’m going to listen to them a lot, I’ll burn them to audio CD.

There will be more posted about some of these albums before too long…

Fucked Up: The Chemistry of Common Life

Fucked Up: The Chemistry of Common Life, Year of the Rat, Hidden World. They’re Canadian, they won a big award, and they’re an atypical hardcore band, so I was curious. I like the first one, haven’t listened to the others much yet. They’re definitely neither the kind of hardcore I listened to many years ago nor the annoying stuff the genre evolved into over the years. They’re doing something different.

Various artists: 5: Five Years of Hyperdub disc 1. I have pretty much everything on disc 2, which is a sampling of past releases on Hyperdub; disc 1 is all new material, showing the future of one of the most consistently interesting dubstep and post-dubstep labels. And the future looks bright, not constrained by the cliches that some dubstep has fallen prey to.

Close Lobsters: Forever Until Victory. Singles collection from the jangly late ’80s band who recorded the great Foxheads Stalk This Land, a missing link between the Soft Boys, the House of Love, and other great pre-shoegazer guitar bands.

Raveonettes: In and Out of Control. Latest from the Jesus and Mary Chain-influenced retro fuzzpop band, more melodic, less noisy this time around.

Kevin Drumm: Imperial Horizon, Imperial Distortion. Austerely minimalist ambient/drone.

Bad Lieutenant: Never Cry Another Tear. The full album by New Order minus Peter Hook, it’s another okay outing with some pretty good songs but nothing that’ll change your life.

2562: Unbalance. Second album of techno-fied dubstep. I think this one has a little more character than the first.

Annie: Don't Stop

Annie: Don’t Stop. More retro dance pop. Catchy and fun, with the occasional touch of melancholy.

Nurse With Wound: Salt Marie Celeste. Experimental ambient/drone/noise.

Robin Guthrie: Songs to Help My Children Sleep EP. More of the usual instrumental guitar bliss, quieter and more ambient than some of his other material.

Anuj Rastogi: Dark Matter EP. A Canadian mix of dubstep and Indian music, going deeper than some UK dubstep producers who just drop in random Indian samples.

Andrew Liles: The Dead Submariner. More dark ambience. Where its predecessor, The Dying Submariner, used processed piano sounds, this one uses guitar.

Plus the usual dubstep and electronic singles, this time around from Broken Note, Various Production, A Made Up Sound, Darkstar, Ital Tek, Sp:Mc, and Sully.

Unlike his four previous releases this year, his latest albums are expanded reissues of previously available material, remastered and in some cases remixed, and shuffling some material previously available on other releases.

In the Glow has the most previously unreleased material, in the form of live recordings from two 1983 concerts. There are no songs that haven’t been released in some form before, but many of these particular versions are new to CD. Nine songs appeared as the first disc in the 2002 double CD The Golden Section Tour/The Omnidelic Exotour, which is now out of print. There are 26 songs on this new release, though many appear twice. There are some differences in the performances, though, which makes the duplication worthwhile. For fans of Foxx’s most commercially successful era, this may be the album to get, as it’s a full band playing songs from The Garden and The Golden Section as well as Ultravox’s Systems of Romance. Sounds like the drummer is playing electronic drums on all the songs, and Foxx seems to be losing control of his voice a little towards the end of the first concert, but for anyone who wanted to know what a live Foxx concert sounded like back then, this is well worth getting. The sound quality, incidentally, is very good. Much better than the bootlegs that have been floating around for years.

After these concerts, Foxx released one more album, In Mysterious Ways, and then disappeared from the public eye for over a decade. He returned in 1997 with Cathedral Oceans, an ambient album, and Shifting City, a collaboration with the relatively unknown Louis Gordon. Shifting City is a bit odd — it’s a guitar-free album, totally electronic, harking back to his Metamatic album, but some of the songs draw on the Beatles and psychedelic influences that were noticeable in his music circa The Golden Section. Songs like “Crash,” “Shadow Man,” and “Concrete, Bulletproof, Invisible” are somewhere between techno and industrial, but “Through My Sleeping,” though electronic, is unmistakably influenced by the Beatles’s psychedelic period. There are a couple of forgettable, underdeveloped slow tunes (“Forgotten Years” and “Everyone”), but overall, despite the slightly inconsistent tone of the album, it was a very welcome return. The reissue has been somewhat remixed and remastered, and the first disc has three bonus tracks, a demo version of “Shadow Man” and Subterranean Omnidelic Exotour versions of two Ultravox songs. The second disc of the Shifting City reissue is the second disc of the 2002 Golden Section Tour/Omnidelic Exotour mentioned above. That in itself was an expansion of two very limited edition releases called Subterranean Omnidelic Exotour, which I don’t have. They’re live-in-studio versions of songs played on tour by Foxx and Gordon, released in lieu of an actual live album. Some older songs sound a little thin and flat with only synths; some sound quite good, and some Shifting City songs have a more dynamic feel.

The Pleasures of Electricity was the second Foxx/Gordon album, originally released in 2001. It’s more stylistically consistent than Shifting City, hewing closer to Foxx’s 1980 Metamatic album and classic Kraftwerk. When I first heard it in 2001 I thought it was a bit samey and unoriginal, but over time it’s grown a lot in my estimation. This reissue is a bit odd, though. The first disc is the original album with four songs remixed. The second disc is the original album with those songs in their original form, plus two previously unreleased songs from the same recording sessions. There’s a lot of duplication here, but the album, the alternate mixes of those four songs, and the two bonus songs wouldn’t fit on one disc. This way, at least, fans who missed the original can have both versions of the album. And fans who have the original are already used to having a lot of duplication in our collections.

And speaking of duplication: two other Foxx CDs were reissued recently. Impossible and A New Kind of Man, released in 2008, were originally limited to a thousand copies each, but have been re-pressed due to popular demand. Impossible was largely rerecorded versions of songs from Foxx’s back catalogue, but it also included two new tracks. A New Kind of Man was a live recording from a 2007 tour in which Foxx played his 1980 Metamatic album and some related songs. The only change was that one song on Impossible was remixed; the remix was made available as a free mp3 download, so people who bought the limited edition wouldn’t have to buy the CD again. Very thoughtful and much appreciated, that was.

I’m going to guess that that’s it for John Foxx for 2009, but there’s always the chance something else may pop up. He has several albums in the works and has been talking with other people about starting new projects.The future may yet see collaborations with Leftfield’s Paul Daley, Benge, Vincent Gallo, Harold Budd (again), Robin Guthrie (again)….

After all, she gets compared to Kate Bush and Bjork, two adventurous women musicians with distinctive singing styles, and I like both of them. The news that she added full orchestral arrangements to her usual harp accompaniment also made this sound more interesting, more substantial somehow.

But I listen to this and all I can think of is some precocious five-year-old girl singing to herself, just rambling, sometimes following a hint of melody, sometimes just jumping up and down the scale, sometimes with a hint of rhythm, other times randomly speeding up or slowing down or singing more softly or getting abruptly louder. And sometimes she sings like a senile old lady with a cracked voice. And it’s hard to find any rhyme or reason to any of it.

There are moments when it’s possible to imagine what a less affected Joanna Newsom might sound like, when you can almost imagine her putting aside her bag of tricks and just singing. They don’t tend to last long, but they make me wish they did. Chances are she’d lose her current fans if she did, though; there’s a reason she’s sometimes categorized as freak folk, and the reason is that some people enjoy unnatural and contrived freakishness. (I heard a song by Devendra Banhart once. Life’s too short, but if life meant having to listen to Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom regularly, it’d be worth making it shorter still.)

The arrangements aren’t bad, anyway, in a children’s fairy tale movie soundtrack kind of way.

So, no, I still don’t get it. Every so often I give it another shot, but I don’t think that’s going to change.

Howard Shore: Crash

Howard Shore’s soundtrack for Crash, the David Cronenberg movie based on the J.G. Ballard novel, is of my favourite movie soundtracks ever, and one of very few that wouldn’t sound out of place played between albums by, say, Robert Fripp and Robin Guthrie.

The main instrument is electric guitar, but it’s not rock music at all. In many of the tracks, reverbed guitar is the only noticeable instrument. The fourth track begins with a woodwind, creating a more contemplative tone; the fifth features some strings and prepared piano as the music becomes more discordant. The ninth features ominous noise and percussion, sounding like isolationist ambient music, and the tenth primarily features strings, with the album expanding its musical palette beyond guitars as it progresses, but never leaving them behind. And, thanks in no small part to the opening titles theme, the guitars are what come to mind when I think of this soundtrack. It’s textured and experimental enough to suggest avant garde music or postrock, but it still has melodic motifs. It’s not aural wallpaper. And not only does it work in the context of the film and on CD, it worked wonderfully as a live performance, too.

In 1998, the National Arts Centre here in Ottawa held its second “Generations XYZ New Music Festival.” The first event was Crash: The Music of Howard Shore. Shore conducted a group of musicians in a newly arranged version of the music composed for the film. Following that, there was a discussion on scoring for movies, featuring both Shore and David Cronenberg, which lasted maybe 40 minutes. And then a showing of Crash.

The musicians included six electric guitar players, three harpists, and flute, oboe, clarinet, percussion, and keyboard. Quoting from Robert Markow’s notes in the program:

The concert suite… brings together approximately fifteen musical sequences from the film arranged in chronological order lasting about three-quarters of an hour. The ensemble consists of essentially three timbral groups: guitars and harps, percussion, and woodwinds. ‘The piece is about harps,’ says Shore, and the three harps do indeed constitute the focus of the score. The guitar writing is derived from the harp music, and in a sense the three harps function as a single unit, with the harps acting at times like bass guitars. (The two episodes in the film employing a fifty-piece string orchestra have been arranged for guitars for tonight’s performance.) The percussion consists of metal sculpture, tuned gongs, prepared piano, and miscellaneous everyday metal objects. Woodwinds… are used as solo voices.

The harps may be the focus, but in the music as played the guitars dominated. They were loud, but clear and precise. Quite enjoyable.

The Shore/Cronenberg discussion had some good moments, but the moderator asked a few too many silly questions, and eventually the discussion was derailed by an audience member who wanted to get into a discussion about Cronenberg’s philosophy.

The concert was supposed to be recorded for CBC Radio’s Two New Hours program, but it never aired. It’s a shame; I was hoping to tape it. I would have loved to supplement the soundtrack CD with this alternate version.