Music
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(I hope this will be as close as we come to missing a week of this series. I don't have time to write anything much this week, and there's nothing else in the hopper, so this is going to consist in large part of quotes from reviewers.) If you like classical music at all, you…
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I don’t understand why so many people seem to think the 1980s were a bad period for music. To my taste it’s as good as any other decade, possibly better than, for instance, the one that followed it. I never did understand all the fuss about grunge. Ultravox’s Vienna was recorded in February of 1980…
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Classical recordings just don't fit into the performer-plus-album-title format. Bach's name rightly should be first here, but I put the performers first because this is about their specific recording of the St. Matthew Passion. Every year for the past four or five I've planned to listen to the St. Matthew Passion during Holy Week. I…
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It is not often that music on the radio stops me in my tracks. I remember it happening when I was seven or eight years old, with Thin Lizzy’s “Whiskey in the Jar”, and twenty years after that, with “’t Smidje” from Laïs, the debut album of the trio Laïs – three young women in…
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The excitement of the week in Christian circles seems to be Rod Dreher's new book, The Benedict Option. If you haven't heard about it, its subtitle is A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, and the Benedict of the title is St. Benedict. Here's a bit from the publisher's blurb that gives you a pretty good…
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Although I’m only a mild fan of John Michael Talbot’s music, there are three of his albums that I place very high on my list of favorites. Two of them, The Painter and No Longer Strangers, were made with his brother Terry. The Painter was the first music I had ever heard of JMT. When…
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What’s not to like about a band made up of three guitarists, bass, drums, a singer who doesn’t sing, and a classically-trained interpretive dancer? Bristol, England’s Blue Aeroplanes had put out several well-received independent albums in the 1980’s but it was their 1990 major label debut Swagger that gained them their first large hearing. I…
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Time is short and here’s the damn thing about it You’re gonna die, gonna die for sure And you can learn to live with love or without it But there ain’t no cure The lyrics above are from the title track to John Hiatt’s very excellent 1988 release Slow Turning. I feel like some of…
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This is not going to be an elaborate and insightful review of this album or Atkins. What can be said? He is the consummate musician, an amazing and versatile guitarist. He doesn’t pretend to be relevant or important or socially significant or insightful. He simply entertains by producing dazzling guitar. And, unlike, say, Les Paul,…
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There was a moment in the mid-1960s when the irreverent new sensibility of English pop music met traditional culture on friendly terms: detached and maybe a little critical, but affectionate. You can hear it in some of the Beatles’ work—“Penny Lane,” for instance. In some of The Who’s songs. In Small Faces’ Ogdens’ Nut Gone…
Light On Dark Water 