Is that to commemorate the new Meghan Markle cooking show?

Jinnistan wrote:

Is that to commemorate the new Meghan Markle cooking show?

Even though John Sebastian is a dork, I love Lovin Spoonful.
 

Immediately on my short list of greatest hip-hop albums ever.

I'm still about 85% sure that this was the inspiration behind the Velvets' "Sister Ray".



 

I think I might bump Witch Trials up at least a couple, but of course I'm biased for the early stuff.


I'm certainly willing to welcome a renaissance of spiritual jazz, which seems to be the motive behind Andre' 3000's New Blue Sun last year.  Along those lines, but with obviously better chops, is a lovely new jazz album from Shabaka, Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace, which features a number of guest spots from some of the brighter lights of new jazz - Esperanza Spalding, Brandee Younger and Andre 3000 himself on one track.  But not this one.




 

Jinnistan wrote:

I think I might bump Witch Trials up at least a couple, but of course I'm biased for the early stuff.
 

It's the first one I ever got, back in highschool, and it's still a favorite even if I've put other seemingly less albums ahead of it. If anything, Witch Trials is the place which they launch off from. That is the root Fall sound, and it would end up being forty plus years of adding and subtracting to what it does. It's their Chuck Berry phase.

But that's also a bit of a curse when I find how they mess with their formula to be one of their most endearing qualities. There first five or six records are objectively their best. Their most accomplished. But being a White Album kinda guy over an Abbey Road kinda guy, a like sprawl, and later records do that better (even if it leads them to all sorts of dead ends, or half finished songs, or only half great songs).

So it's mostly an impossible discography for me to rank. There is very little range here, pretty much everything being in a 8/10 - 9.5/10 wheelhouse.

Except Middle Class Revolt. That's where it sags. That's where they buff up the polish and let their normally weird and furious inspiration dwindle into near normalcy (plus some absolutely hideous offerings....their Monks cover of Shut Up being possibly the worst offender of their entire career. Muddy, annoying and lifeless.



 

Fuck it, might as well do the whole side



 

Also in tune with the resurgence of spiritual jazz, this group, The Cosmic Tones Research Trio, who has also been promoted by Andre 3000, follows along with his New Blue Sun, an album I've grown to appreciate more as I see it less as jazz and more as a kind of Reich-ian minimalism, but obviously this is where such genre definitions fold into feeble fences.  This record (which is more of an EP, given its brevity) may be the best of the recent crop.