Inspired Home May June 2019

Previous Grapefruit genre anthologies have shown how the various strands of British psychedelia developed tangentially in subsequent years: I’m A Freak Baby observed how the blues-based, harder-edged element of the genre gradually morphed into hard rock/proto-metal, Dust On The Nettles examined the countercultural psychedelic folk movement, while Come Join My Orchestra looked at the post-“Penny Lane” baroque pop sound. Our latest attempt to document the British psychedelic scene’s subsequent family tree, Lullabies For Catatonics charts the journey without maps that was fearlessly undertaken in the late Sixties and early Seventies by the more cerebral elements of the underground, inspired by everyone from Bartok, Bach and The Beatles to Dada, Dali and the Pop Art movement. Suddenly pop music was no longer restricted to moon-in-June lyrics and traditional song structures. Instead, it embraced the abstract, the discordant and the surreal as pop became rock, and rock became Art.

Marvin Gaye - You're the Man (2019) {Motown B0030051-02}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 454 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 165 Mb | Cover | 5% repair rar
© 1972, 2019 Tamla / Motown / Universal | B0030051-02
R&B / Soul / Smooth Soul / Quiet Storm

Upon its release in 2019, You're the Man was billed as a "lost" album – an album intended to appear between Marvin Gaye's 1971 masterwork What's Going On and 1973's Let's Get It On. The story isn't quite so simple. Even though Motown slated a release for an album, there's no real indication that You're the Man was ever close to completion, and this compilation – available as a double LP or digitally – doesn't make a convincing case that it was. Part of the problem may be that the material comprising the second half of the 2019 release is a grab bag of session material containing two Christmas songs; a jam with Bohannon where Gaye talks to the listener through the song called "Checking Out (Double Clutch)"; and three new mixes by Salaam Remi, a producer who earned Grammy nominations for his work on the Fugees' 1996 album, The Score, and Amy Winehouse's 2007 record, Back to Black.

Iiro Rantala is a jazz chameleon who loves to appear in many guises. The Finnish pianist invariably springs a surprise with the concepts for his albums, particularly those of his solo piano projects. For "My Finnish Calendar", he has turned a new page: this is improvised music but with an extra-musical narrative: from a very personal and Finnish point of view, he has set to music the passing of a complete year in his home country, and he has done it with his typical mixture of melodic inventiveness, melancholy and humour. His well-known technical finesse and mastery, acquired over the years, have been applied here with an unerring instinct for bringing the essential to the fore.

Paul Cargnello describes his new album, Promises, as his most personal release yet. Inspired by the death of his father-in-law, as well as three recently-deceased music giants, it was three years in the making. “In 2016, David Bowie, Prince and Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest died,” Cargnello said. “I thought back to how important those three figures were to me at 13 or 14, but I had never let those influences into my music. I was always trying to be (The Clash’s) Joe Strummer.”Infused with funky basslines, wah-wah guitars, ’80s synths and the odd glam-rock nod, the song set also includes dips into dub reggae and head-bobbing hip-hop. Cargnello recorded everything in his home studio, playing all instruments himself, and invited a varied roster of local rappers and reggae vocalists to contribute.

In an age seemingly built to overwhelm, the concepts of directness and clear intention are being lost. Exhausting maximalist concepts have become the norm in many of the arts. It can be refreshing to hear music that has purpose and clarity. That is what Guillermo Klein and Los Guachos hope to provide on their new, suite-like recording, Cristal.

One of the towering figures of 20th century's music, Alabama-born pianist and organist Herman "Sun Ra" Blount (1914) became the cosmic musician par excellence. Despite dressing in extraterrestrial costumes (but inspired by the pharaohs of ancient Egypt) and despite living inside a self-crafted sci-fi mythology (he always maintained that he was from Saturn, and no biographer conclusively proved his birth date) and despite littering his music with lyrics inspired to a self-penned spiritual philosophy (he never engaged in sexual relationships apparently because he considered himself an angel), Sun Ra created one of the most original styles of music thanks to a chronic disrespect for both established dogmas and trendy movements.

Disco may have been a dirty word as the 70's came to a close but during the 80's its influence on much of this selection helped create some of the greatest dance music recorded. As a poet and philsopher once said, 'Lets Groove Tonight'…..