1980s

Eli Reviews: Candles – Heatwave (1980)

This one is an absolute banger. Peak disco, though really on the verge of post-disco. Heatwave is Rod Temperton’s band, the architect (next to Quincy Jones) of Michael Jackson’s sound and success on Off The Wall and Thriller. I can remember my brain lighting up like a disco ball when I first heard ‘Boogie Nights’ by Heatwave, with its impeccable vocal and rhythm arrangements and deep, jazzy groove. The groove change at “dance with the boogie (get down)” will always live in my head, esp. as I used to be in a 70s show, positioned at the keyboard behind a dance troupe for this number.

I also remember hearing Michael Jackson’s ‘Rock With You’ for the first time, as a teenager who had just been exposed to some of his other big hits. This one just did it different for me. Again, the jazzy chord changes, perfectionist arrangements and the deep groove made it stand out.

So this record has all of that and I just don’t get bored during it – it’s peak disco, verging on post-disco. By the latter is meant pushing into 80s studio techniques of additional drum machines, digital synthesizers and the growing mentality of the whole recording studio being an instrument. I’m amazed throughout how hard the kick drum has been ‘pushed’: EQ’d and compressed to get the high end – the click of the beater – so forward in the mix. On iPhone speakers the kick stands out like a modern recording. Like most disco the lyrics are mostly about dancing and partying, but it’s delivered with jazzy pedal chords on ‘Gangsters of the Groove’, contrapuntal vocals on ‘Jitterbuggin”, and violently and unusually groovy kick/bass patterns like on ‘Turn Around’.

They’re all good tracks, musically well put together, even if the songs are at the service of the grooves. The arrangements keep lesser songs interesting, with fluttering flutes appearing when I was tuning out of ‘Dreamin’ You’ and making me a smile a little. The biggest happy surprise was ‘Goin’ Crazy’, which has the classic Temperton trick of the outro being the funkiest part of the song (see MJ’s ‘Thriller’ and ‘The Lady In My Life’). The song hits, with the drums very forward and the 80s heavily reverbed hand claps marking the era the song is in, but it really blew my mind when it seemed like the tune was ready to fade out and then got ridiculously funky. After a little string break, there’s absolute groove magic. Check it out

, , , , , , ,

Eli Reviews: Go Insane – Lindsey Buckingham (1985)

Lindsey Buckingham has a new album coming out. I saw a track by him and old flame Stevie Nicks on a new singles list and thought there must have been a mistake but it’s true: a shelved duo album of theirs (Buckingham Nicks) from 1973 is dropping soon. Buckingham seems to have really transformed and grown throughout his time with Fleetwood Mac so I can’t really imagine what it will be like. I enjoyed a few of his post-Fleetwood Mac albums on my album a day run last year. I also got the impression that he is a really weird guy.

He produces some wild stuff, with weird voices that he puts on, repeated lyric fragments that don’t have any appreciable meaning, lots of breathing. A lot of later Fleetwood stuff is like this – “Big Love” for instance – and he really shows himself as something of a studio genius. Probably he’s more publicly defined by his wild vocals and great and unique guitar playing, but it was his commitment and nous that completed the Mac’s “later albums “Tango In The Night”.

The worst of his stuff has this rather harsh frequency preference and a glut of odd choices, with sort of mindless and endless repetition. I’m listening to “I Must Go” as I write this and feeling I will join him in going insane. Perhaps that’s the desired effect, and surely sampling and editing using 1985 technology must have been crazy-making. I can’t imagine – sampling is so streamlined now and I still get headaches with it in Logic Pro X sometimes. Buckingham was something of a futurist. He was one of the proto-bedroom producers. He did everything himself on the record, programming/playing drum machines for the beats and playing and singing everything else.

The title track is pretty cool, and ‘Slow Dancing’ too. There’s cool stuff in the last three tracks too but everything finds its summit in ‘Play In The Rain’ and ‘Play In The Rain – Continued’. They are incredible tracks. The sampling sequence at 0:33 of the first part is something so hip hop and so filmic, it’s really a piece of genius, as is the rest of the two tracks. Sampling gets a bad rap still from some sections of music fandom, who hear the garbage of fully sampling the hooks of great songs and doing nothing but rapping on top of them. There’s so much to be done with using recorded music as an instrument in itself. I have an album in the works and a beat-making persona both very bent towards sampling and creating with and from that.

Best I can do to illustrate is to plant one of my early experiments here, ‘The Thought’. The problem I’m having creatively at the moment is of who to release this music under. When it gets more experimental than Ship Life I wonder if another different persona is in order, with ‘The Thought’ possibly to be re-released under this new name…regardless, I recorded my friend and cabinmate, John Salzano, take a few solos over my track – itself comprised of samples of myself – and then I atomized his playing, moving phrases around, repeating phrases as hooks, effecting them, and then orchestrating them into something that’s not just playing and overdubs, but the almost meta-experience of playing a recording like an instrument.

Anyway, we all owe a huge debt to artists like Lindsey Buckingham, Kate Bush, Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel for being such wonders with this technology when it was clunky and difficult.

, , , , ,

Leave a Reply

Eli Reviews: Robson Jorge e Lincoln Olivetti – Robson Jorge and Lincoln Olivetti (1982)

This one of the smackingest albums I think I’ve ever heard. Spotify sucks for musical artists, but it does amazing things for music listeners. Of course the former is always also the latter so it puts us in a funny position – anyway, I wouldn’t have discovered this record without Spotify’s algorithm.

It’s funky, jazzy and from the 70s/80s (which Spotify know is my favorite lane at the moment). It hits from the first track with a cool synth arpeggiator into a very fat bass, crazy jazzy vocals, and then the tightest horns outside of Earth, Wind and Fire. “Jorgea Corisco” basically indicates what this record is about: smart, funky and virtuosic music. There’s only a little of what I’d think was Brazilian outside of the short “Raton” and the full samba on”Zé Piolho” near the end and actually most of the tracks have more in common to my ear with smooth jazz. If smooth jazz didn’t so often sit lazily on the unchallenging. This record really pumps – the mix is amazing, full of texture and excitement.

The wordless vocals add a lot to the sound of the record – very soulful – but it’s mostly an instrumental record by two super-producers from Brazil. Every moment is full of ear candy but not over-crammed. The compositions are wonderful. “No Bom Sentido” is a lovely tune that still grooves hard. “Aleluia” must have been an instant classic, with impossibly tight horns and a happy-go-lucky chorus. “Pret-À-Porter” is one of my favorites, with it’s very cool cyclic progression and some sort of key change that I’m definitely required now to go transcribe. Great management of orchestration throughout – these guys are monster producers.

“Squash” is another super-groover that immediately gets my head and butt bouncing. There’s a really cool “drop” on the one of the main phrase of the head (main melody) which feels so good. These guys were so happy to just sing wordless melodies on here and I love it. There’s a crazy fast triplet run in the middle I feel might be an Everest to transcribe and so many great counter melodies to keep the song interesting throughout.

“Eva” is one of these old tunes that sound like a deliberately retro modern tune for some reason; I’m sure it’s been very popular with DJ’s ever since, sort of like Roy Ayers has been. It’s so dreamy and jazzy, with a these cool guitar bends at the end of each phrase that give me a unexpected pleasure. As I’m on a funky buzz the more traditional-Brazilian-type tunes on here don’t excite me so much but there’s more than enough heavy grooves as it is, with Fà Sustenido” and “Ginga” really bouncing hard. Speaking of Earth, Wind and Fire, the groove on “Ginga” reminds me a bit of “In the Stone”. I’m sure EW&F would have lost their minds for this record.

, , , , , ,

Leave a Reply

Eli Reviews: Lyle Mays – Lyle Mays (1986)

I had possibly a spiritual experience listening to this album in a pool one night, on my iPhone speaker. Surely an improper means to listen to art but that’s good the mix and music are that I could be as absorbed as I was.

This falls in with my 80s EM/FM-related obsession as my jazz background found it’s way more into Quixote than it did Ship Life, for some reason. The digital synth tones on this record marry so well with Mays’ piano language, and though I liked the intro track “Highland Aire”, it was “Teiko” that transported me. The reverbs used are so cosmic sounding, and with the unusual combination of world musics and sparkly synth and soprano sax, it reminded me of one bit from the anime Cowboy Bepop.

I was only vaguely aware of Pat Metheny for the longest time, playing a few of his tunes in college and making note to follow up on his discography some day. I only ended up doing that last year and became aware of Lyle Mays and his beautiful piano language. I’m overdue to do some transcribing of his playing. He’s basically the piano version of Pat Metheny as far as I can tell, fluent and virtuosic in jazz vocab but with a passion for this more folk mode of playing (I believe I’d heard Metheny use that word this way) by which I mean things like double plagal cadences and sus 2 chords, diatonic scale runs and more triadic thinking.

The use of such big reverbs is kind of an 80s thing but for jazz, I feel like this could have been contentious. Solo piano track “Mirror of the Heart” has so much reverb on it that it almost become a second instrument on the recording. It’s beautiful. “Northern Lights” is another one that took me to the stars, with it’s held synth string note and repeated soft plucky synth motif, acoustic piano and double bass dancing around the digital elements.

This galactic combination of jazz and synthesizer was something I was reaching for with my own track “Per Aspera Ad Astra”. I’m still in awe of how much texture, power and width synthesizers can give a composer who doesn’t have access to a traditional orchestra.

“Slink” has an immaculate and very modern piano solo and “Invocation” has some beautiful synth in it but “Ascent” and “Close to Home” arrest me a lot more. The latter is such a gorgeous end to the record and might become my first Lyle Mays transcription.

, , ,

Leave a Reply

Eli Reviews: Friend Of A Friend – Homi & Jarvis (1983)

I started REALLY getting into 80s music around the time of the pandemic. If we were talking Hall & Oates, pre-2020 I would have said Abandoned Luncheonette (1973) was my desert island selection; since that weird time of isolation I was only about Ooh Yeah! (1988). During this time I was using almost all my waking hours to study music production and mixing online and basically, it seemed to me like the most authentic music I could record in my situation and at my technical level was synthesizer-based music, with retro electronic drum sounds and big reverbs and vocal effects to disguise what I feared would be amateurish recording and mixes. These instrument and effects all lived in my production software, as did I for most of this time.

I also became obsessed with the [dying] trends of synthwave and vaporwave, two different takes on 80s musical redux, mostly made by bedroom producers. These styles of music production emphasize and exaggerate different respective musical touchstones of 80s popular music: synthwave mostly being an edgy, pulsing instrumental image of driving in a neon night city, and vaporwave being a reverberant pastiche of RnB-inflected pop, as you would have heard in a mall.

(I really honed in on vaporwave in as EM/FM, on ‘Close Enough’.)

All that to say, these retrowave musics are usually exaggerations of these past tropes. What I love most about this album is that it’s almost more vaporwave than vaporwave. It’s full of sparkling keyboards (master arranger and GOAT sparkly-keyboardist Dave Grusin produced and played on this record – another reason to love it) funky, trebly basslines (courtesy of Marcus Miller) and a range of jazzy poppy tunes that would be yacht rock if they were produced differently.

“I’m In Love Again” is an iconic intro to the album. The arrangement is perfect, the chorus is super-catchy, there’s great jazzy chords pulling the ear along, a great solo section. But it’s really where it’s lacking that makes me love it: something in the mix or master stage has the record feeling like it’s almost amateurish or done on a budget, which is generally what vaporwave is designed to sound like. The vocals are less than perfect. I love it.

The writing credits bounce between the two singers and several other contributors. There’s precious little about this record on the internet and only a little on the two artists. Amanda Homi seems to have continued in an alternative sort of world music career. Her contribution “You Got Me Fallin'” hits me in all the spots, avoiding cheese with its purity and tasteful synth textures.

Even the weaker songs I find enjoyable for the depth of their arrangement details, credit to Grusin’s taste for harmony and groove. Lee Ritenour, David Sanborn and Harvey Mason Sr. also bring the goods – even Toots Thielemans makes an appearance, on ‘Some Hearts’. Cool key change in this one too.

, , , , , ,

Leave a Reply