A new weekly roundup of what the CL team is listening to right now.
Fantasy Black Channel (2008)
While Late of the Pier are synth-propelled, indie dance-rockers, the heavy blues riffage and arena rock bombast of Led Zeppelin sneak into songs like “Heartbeat” and “Bathroom Gurgle” amid the electronic beats and video game sounds. After all, how could you be from a place like Castle Donnington, UK, and not have trace amounts of heavy metal seep into your soul? Their debut album perverts conventional song-structure constantly, either merging or deconstructing one tune into the next, barely giving your ears a reprieve. It’s kind of a clusterfuck, but a whole lot of fun as well.
Recommended tracks: “Space & The Woods,” “Heartbeat,” “Bathroom Gurgle”
—Joel
The Best of the Alan Parsons Project (1983)
I blew them off because I always likened them to Steely Dan, another band with a suburban white guy name in its moniker and one I just can’t get into. But listening to this CD, I found songs that prompted a vague but sweet sense of nostalgia, songs that were somehow familiar and took me to that special Pink Floyd comfort zone of music listening, a deep space abyss of kaleidoscopic interstellar hydrogen clouds and nebulas of spiraling stars and luminescent gases. It’s music that’s a quintessential example of how psychedelic prog rock from the ‘70s should sound.
Recommended track: “Time,” which, like so many other songs with the same title, reflects on the fleeting nature of human existence.
This article appears in Feb 18-24, 2009.