Review - Terry Scott Taylor - LITTLE, big

Not my favorite Terry Scott Taylor album. I don't think I've listened to it once since this review in 2002. Mayhaps I'll give it one more try but my recollection is that there just isn't a lot of sparkle.

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LITTLE, big, the latest solo offering by the prolific Terry Scott Taylor, is possibly his most personal project yet with the subject of each song being someone personally close to him, each viewed through the lens of the "everyday." While seemingly mundane, Taylor reveals his brilliance by being able to give the listener a gentle glimpse into the extraordinary that lies just behind the ordinary that we often take for granted.

As on his first two solo projects (including the timeless Knowledge & Innocence, which should be required listening for anyone who has lost a loved one to the icy hands of death), Taylor has collaborated with Rob Watson. Thanks to Watson's loving attention and studio wizardry, the six songs on this E.P. have an intimate yet orchestral sound, in many ways similar to the Beach Boys classic Pet Sounds, an album which Taylor holds as one of his favorites.

The title track comes the closest to capturing the Beatles feel of Knowledge & Innocence, loaded as it is with keyboards (Watson's main instrument), ethereal background vocals, thundering timpani, and orchestral spots of color. The lyrics set the theme for the album with lines like, "Goin' home to my little house / To my little wife and not so little kids / There inside my little world / Is the love I feel / So big." Flute, oboe and the occasional orchestral string flourish adorn the relaxed "Molly Is A Metaphor" where Taylor, with acoustic guitar in tow, uses the family cat to examine eternal love. The Beach Boys influence is extremely apparent in "Lovely Lilly Lou", a catchy tune built around a staccato piano melody and heaped with mounds of sounds like sleigh bells, wood blocks, timpani, a variety of organic keyboard sounds, and a bridge replete with a 1930s feel and honky-tonk piano. "Oh, Sweet Companion" is a song for Taylor's wife and although I'm sure she enjoyed it, it's a simplistic tune that seems out of place on this disc. Likewise, "Rob's And Carolee's" is full of inside jokes that were surely enjoyed by the title characters but the melody seems a bit forced and saccharine to my ears despite the lush orchestration. The final track, "Mama's In The Desert, Daddy's In The Sky", is classic Terry Scott Taylor. With acoustic guitar, strings, operatic female vocals and a melancholy melody, Taylor sings of his mother, "She's gone to talk to Daddy / And lay some flowers on his grave/ She says she knows Dad isn't there but / It helps her to get by." Both sorrowful and encouraging, the song brings this album of quaint and peaceful pop to a satisfying close. Available at www.danielamos.com. This review first appeared in WhatzUp, November 2002.

Review - Daniel Amos - Mr. Buechner's Dream

It's been eleven years since a proper Daniel Amos album. Since then there has been a Swirling Eddies, some Lost Dogs, and quite a few knock-off fan club Terry Taylor releases. However all that is going to change thanks to Kickstarter. Yeah, baby... a new DA album some time next year! And, uh, is mp3.com still around?

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The general consensus among the inner circle of the musical cabal is that Daniel Amos, or DA, is the most criminally overlooked yet influential band in history. Twenty-five years into their fertile existence, DA has released their White Album, a double album containing thirty-three songs. A rarity among double albums, there's not a weak song in the bunch and I'm as stunned as you are skeptical. In stark contrast to the shambling skeletons of The Rolling Stones and other bands well past their prime, these songs are startlingly fresh and vibrant, the fun and enthusiasm of the recording experience evident throughout. Like all of their albums, these songs grow on you with each listen until you wonder how you ever lived without them. Musically DA isn't reinventing any musical forms. Instead they borrow a premise from influences Elvis Costello and They Might Be Giants: take twenty or so smart, catchy three minute songs- a mixture of ballads, driving rock, and everything in between- machine gun them at the listener and you can't stop listening for days. Similarly you won't find constant shredding and grandstanding among the members but rather ingenious reinventions of the standard forms handled by musicians who work together to serve the song. Ever curious to hear what kind of convoluted guitar part a bona fide NASA scientist would create? Look no further- Greg Flesch is your man. Lyrically, Terry Taylor, the nucleus of the group, poses questions concerning the tensions between faith and doubt, probing the meaning and humor of what it is to be human. To keep your attention through one hundred minutes of music, there is a plethora of musical timbers - trumpets, trombones, mellotrons, organs, pianos, sax, accordion and mandolin, just to name a few. There's also an unending array of guitar sounds, disturbing bass rumblings, and judicious use of noise- an amazing, exhilarating, unpredictable ride!

Now for some detail. "Staggering Gods" is a stunning auditory, psychedelic treat mixing backwards guitars and symphonic strings with a driving beat, creating a 60s version of ELO. "A Little Grace" is a raw, blistering melodic garage band rocker while "Rice Paper Wings" opens innocently enough with acoustic guitar and bells before being commandeered by a mysterious melody and a monster bass line. Tim Chandler is unequivocally the most creative bassist on the planet, teetering precariously on the edge of insanity, and yet his lunatic creations never seem out of place. Making distortion their slave, "Small Great Things" is a noisy, boisterous, seething whopper of a song followed quickly by "She's A Hard Drink" which is full of drunken, Dixieland horns and lyrics such as "She's a bad dream / Like an Adam's apple on a beauty queen." "Fingertips" is a mad cacophony of distortion held tenuously to reality by an inescapable melody, dissolving effortlessly into a legato piano at the end in a startling contrast to the previous chaos. Drummer Ed McTaggart lays down some complex rhythms on the gritty stomper "Easy For You" which contains yet another mind-bogglingly inventive guitar solo. But not every song is an over-the-top adventure in good rock music - just my favorites. Fully half of the songs fall into the hard modern rock genre, but the rest are soft rock, mellow disco, alterna-folk, and some that just defy description. The only thing better than two discs for the price of one (at www.danielamos.com) are the NINE free songs at mp3.com, and the only thing better than that are the songs themselves. You've been depriving yourself too long- join the secret society and discover this amazing collection of songs and their enigmatic creators.

This review first appeared in WhatzUp, September 2001.

Review - Daniel Amos - Horrendous Disc

It's been TWELVE YEARS since this album was re-released? Talk about "your long year"! It took 22 years to get this album rereleased and it's been over half that since then. Sorry to belabor the point but golly...

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Think back, way back, to 1978. At that time, cutting edge in the contemporary Christian music scene was doing something more than just a live recording of a solo artist. Studio albums with lots of tracking and layering were rare. And every song had "Jesus" in the lyrics. Enter the band Daniel Amos, a band whose last album broke many of the rules set forth by the industry. They then recorded Horrendous Disc, a collection of country meets rock meets alternative songs that would push the envelope even further. And remember, this was 1978, before alternative was not accepted in the mainstream and especially not in the narrow contemporary Christian culture. Because of problems with management and the proposed album cover depicting, among other things, a couple kissing on the hood of a car (GASP), the release of this album was delayed almost three years. Even after three years on the shelf, upon release it was cutting edge! Nearly twenty years later, this historic album has been released for the first time on compact disc.

The sound of the album switches dramatically from song to song. "Hound of Heaven" is absolutely haunting alterna-rock with its echo drenched guitar solos and chilling piano fills. "Sky King" combines the soft country feel and harmonies of the Eagles with an Abbey Road-era Beatles in a song looking forward to Christ's return told with intelligent, heartfelt, non-cliched lyrics. As this was the era before synthesizers, an abundance of real strings fill this song with a great sound! The title track again picks up this theme in story form as a heavily layered mini rock opera. My personal favorite is "Man In The Moon", a mixture of piano, detuned guitar a la Queen, and a I-Am-The-Walrus-meets-Glass-Onion pounding rhythm that drives the song in unpredictable directions from start to finish. For good measure they threw in "Near Sighted Girl with Approaching Tidal Wave", a humorous slow punk grind vs. Beach Boys song that foreshadowed a later DA offshoot band, The Swirling Eddies.

For an album that is over twenty years old, the songs are amazingly fresh with only one song feeling truly dated. The melodies and harmonies are as inventive today and they were in 1978 and the lyrics speak intelligently and without condescension of the Christian faith. A definite must-have for fans of this narrowly defined genre or those who like creative, intelligent music with great melodies and lush harmonies. Check this one out before another twenty years go by! This article first appeared in WhatzUp, April 2000.

Review - Imaginarium

Thanks to reposting this review I remembered about the game Boombots that I had yet to purchase. And thanks to Amazon and a recent raise I was just barely able to afford the $6.38 (including shipping) to have the game shipped. All the reviews agree that the game is humorous but not very fun. I CAN BARELY WAIT FOR THE NOT-FUN TO BEGIN!!!!

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If you are one who thinks John Denver is the peak of musical creativity, read no further. For the rest of us, what you are about to read will boggle your mind and challenge your sense of reality, but I swear on a stack of sausages that it is true. A few years back I reviewed an album called The Neverhood, an award winning collection of songs from the PC game by the same name. This was no ordinary video game music. Rather, it sounded like clay, malleable dixieland blue grass on steroids. This album sold out rather quickly and now goes for over $50 on eBay. The creative brain that brewed this concoction also created music for two subsequent games, Skullmonkeys and BoomBots. Now, for the first time since the birth of Jerry Springer, the music from all three of these games is available on two jam-packed discs for a mere $20 at www.danielamos.com . My earlier review of The Neverhood is available on the extensive WhatzUp's extensive CD Review web page so I'll not repeat the review here except to say that these psychedelic blues songs will soon have you singing along with "Homina Homina!"

The second CD of the set contains twenty-six Skullmonkey songs and five from Boombots. Taking the "monkey" theme into another dimension, many of these almost instrumentals have a strong jungle beat. But variety is key here. Out of the twenty-six songs, you get almost twenty-six different styles of music. Yessum, everything from alpine accordions in 3/4 time with yodeling to wigged out chipmunks to theremins to belly dancing shuffles to spastic ragtime to ... well, you get the idea. Lyrically, this album is much like the first with many nonsense non-sequitur ramblings and few actual "lyrics", though after a few listens, you'll know every grunt and incoherent utterance. "Elevated Structure of Terror" drove my brother Joel to literal tears with its mumbled, drunken lyrics amid Tim Chandlers amazingly inventive bass playing. And then there's "Psychedelic Boogie Child", the 70s disco song full of wahwah pedals, shag carpeting, and lava lamps. Speaking of bonus levels, the amazing bonus level song, imaginatively titled "Lil' Bonus Room", finds Uncle Terry urging the purchase of multiple games because "I get residuals for every game that's sold." Both CDs are headlong hurtles into reckless fun. In addition to their old man, both of my boys love these songs. No one is immune from the infectious insanity that, like a good Bugs Bunny cartoon, contains enough ear candy for the kids and yet has jokes that only adults will get.

This review first appeared in WhatzUp, January 2001.

Review - The Neverhood

What a wonderfully weird and inventive album! Thankfully they released it three times and it's probably paying for Terry's retirement. I suspect that this music is the reason behind the problems with KMG releasing the early 80s Daniel Amos albums, but that's just an edjumacated hunch. Also they just released Return To The Neverhood which you can get here.

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The folks at DreamWorks made a video game like no other, The Neverhood, a bizarre claymation world of strange characters and even stranger happenings. This world needed music as unique as it, and they turned to Terry Taylor. Few recognize his name, even though he has been sternum-deep in music for over twenty years. Regardless, he was up to the task and managed to create the most creative un-video game video game music ever made, so much so that it won some big award for Video Game music of the year. And now it's available to the consumer on an affordable, convenient compact disc.

The music on this CD is impossible to categorize. Drunken blues, psychedelic Dixieland, a jazz combo on powerful hallucinogens. It all fits. Taylor combines acoustic guitar, bass and drums with saxophones, clarinets, banjos and just about any other instrument lying around the studio to create a swirling miasma of plastic sound with an Elfmanesque sense of fun. The lyrics, what little is intelligible about them, are also sung in this same malleable fashion. "Everybody Way-O" is a drunken stumbling of blues. "Homina Homina" ends with wheezy, maniacal laughter that somehow fits perfectly with the music. Most songs are either instrumentals or incorporate nonsense syllables as the main lyrical component while a few attempt such lyrics as "I put 'em in my hat/And I eat 'em just like that/ I put 'em in my ears and in my shoes" from the song "Potatoes, Tomatoes, Gravy, and Peas." Everyone who has heard this CD falls in love with it. My three-year old son is completely fascinated by these strange, syncopated rantings and my wife, usually the first to call my music "weird", has even found herself singing "Dum da dum doi doi" now and then. If for some sad reason you can't find this CD locally, it is available on the neverhood.com web site. You will not be disappointed, but you might be confused.

This review first appeared in WhatzUp, September 1998.

Review - Alice Cooper - Mascara and Monsters

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My first Alice Cooper album was the greatest hits cassette. It was a good introduction to the Alice Cooper band but, as I was to find out, it left out a lot of the creepy songs that would grow to be my favorites. A lot has happened with Alice since that 1974 release and the plentiful "greatest hits" albums that are released every year or so prove it. The most comprehensive was Rhino's 4-CD set The Life and Crimes of Alice Cooper with a book of liner notes and previously unreleased material. But an expensive collection like that is only for the die-hard Cooper fan (and since I haven't shelled out $55 yet, I'm not as die-hard as I used to be). But for those fans of Marilyn Manson wanting a little lesson in music history, there's the recent release Mascara and Monsters which contains every track from the Greatest Hits album plus ten more, mostly from his early solo period. True to the Greatest Hits format, a number of these tracks are the radio edits (among them are the castrated "Hello Hooray" and "Welcome to My Nightmare") and all of the tracks are those that were released on radio. So you gots yer "School's Out", yer "I'm Eighteen", and yer "No More Mr. Nice Guy." If nothing else, these early tracks will remind you how tight the original Alice Cooper band was, not to mention the killer bass lines. Later radio singles include the ballads "Only Women Bleed", "I Never Cry" and "You and Me", forever tainted in my memory as a duet with a transformed Miss Piggy. Two songs off the dark From The Inside are nice rarities as the CD is only available as an expensive import. Missing are any songs from his late 80s heavy metal period (hey, I thought they sounded pretty good back in '86) but they did manage to squeeze in the Alice-does-new-wave "Clones." The booklet contains a sentence or two about each song by Alice or a band member plus lots of photos, a couple of short essays, and a bloody veal cutlet. Be warned that because the material was culled from radio releases, the tracks are heavy on mascara and light on monsters. Fans of Alice Cooper will probably have most or all of these songs on CD but if your mom threw out those albums when you went to college, Mascara and Monsters is an excellent way to get some Alice back in your life.

This review first appeared in WhatzUp, May 2001.

Review - Moxy Früvous - Bargainville

A nice album but you can literally hear the smug look on their faces bleeding into the mix.

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For a bunch of Canadians, Moxy Früvous is sure interested in American politics. With Bargainville the fruvous charge after conservatives and consumerism with their usual tongue-through cheek humor, acoustic instruments and big harmonies. Unlike past albums, however, the instruments are mostly missing on this effort with many of the songs sung a cappella. In fact, comparisons to Rockappella are definitely in order.

The album opens with "River Valley", a sad song of longing for better, more ecologically-friendly days. "Stuck in the 90's" is a prime example of Moxy's political lyrics with lines such as "Clem had a daydream / Picked up the headline / His country was made up of singers / And no more right-wingers." Of course, this is all embedded in lush harmonies, light acoustic guitar, and a blues harp. Songs like "B.J. Don't Cry", with it's quirky lyrics of lost love and ultra-catchy melody sung in a funny voice give this band the moniker of the "Canadian They Might Be Giants", a label I don't believe they deserve. "Video Bargainville" is another great song with a Munsters guitar lick, old radio vocals, and accordion playing this creepy minor key song. But for me, the album goes quickly downhill after this. The remaining songs have very scant instrumentation (such as "The Lazy Boy", an ode to the world's most comfortable chair and it's inhabitants where only a single snare drum is included in the thick vocal mix) or none at all. I can enjoy a song or two sung a cappella but I'm big on variety. After four or five songs in a row where the same four voices are singing (although with some amazing, fun harmonies), my ear starts to go numb and it all begins to sound the same. But for fans of such music, I march on. There's "Morphee" which is sung in French (Canadian, remember?) and the zany brothers of the Andrew-sisters feel of "Darlington Darling", both without instruments, and the very fun take off on the Spiderman theme song from the kids cartoon. But since eleven of the fifteen songs have very sparse instrumentation and the rest are vocal-rich a cappella spectaculars, this isn't enough to save the album for me. Unless such vocal showboating is your cup-o-tea, there are better albums to discover this great band than Bargainville.

This review first appeared in WhatzUp, November 2000.