(ANALOGUE FLASHBACK BOOKS, 2016.)
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Reviewing reviews can be tricky,
As if the repeating of viewpoints can
In some way distract. And so charged
With the task, and with the need to distinguish,
I choose the form of a poem to draw attention
To detail and to in my own small way, interact.
The pamphlet is dense, as all chapbooks are
With opinion; appraisals of albums, and their affects,
Sharp and smooth. Gregg Fiddament’s
‘Absolutely She Cried’ strikes me most, being as it is
A prose-poem, capturing The Doors’ ‘Alive She Cried’,
With his needle scratching ‘a warped ouroboran groove.’
Roselle Angwin, stoned, remembers a distant Cambridge,
Listening to the Floyd she’s transported by ‘Echoes’
And ‘the motionless albatross in the air.’
Her recollection is brief but shot through with detail,
The privilege of the place breeds a conflict
Between what is elite and what’s shared.
John Gimblett’s ‘The First and the Last’ talks of Fripp
And all he’s accomplished. From Bowie to Blondie
And all the way back to KC. But its on the first Peter Gabriel
Tour that Robert is most praised and pictured, sitting
On the side of the stage, flagged by curtains ‘throwing out
magnificent music like the sun and it’s neutrinos, speckles..’
………………………………………that rise, bright and free.
Charlie Baylis writes of Rain dogs by Tom Waits,
In terms of World War two and the legacy it engendered.
He sees Waits as a phantom from a ‘muddy hole in that war.’
An album for the ‘urban dispossessed’ and
Their ‘heavenly drinking’ the dark world Tom waits
Leaves us is certainly worth waiting for.
Sandra Tappenden speaks of La Mystere Des Voix Bulgare
With aplomb, ‘a music belonging outdoors, to raw women’
And all of its ‘strident calling’ for the intimate
Realm of the heart. Her writing is rich, her immediacy clear
As she listens, transforming time in her ‘morning kitchen’
From so called normal encounters to those close to art.
Andrew Darlington Jefferson’s the old Airplane for us,
Democratising the cultists from LSD’s ancient reign.
Rupert Loydell evocatively Azimuths, as Norman Jope
Returns to Miles Davis. Clark Allison cleanses senses
By exploring Merzbow’s Tauromachine, risking pain.
From Dylan’s Basement tapes to an Abearareon campsite,
Bert Jansch’s Jack Orion sits next to the Convenience Kings.
Editor Loydell chooses well and the voices are both
Eloquent and instructive, as we align tastes as readers
To those writing for us, who in these gentle pages
Celebrates those who inspire
Through what they play, share and sing.
The weather is warm but still it cuts through us.
As it changes and weathers us we find music to alter
The soul and assist. The dog barks. The voice breaks,
Taking the heart along with it. These reviewers choose songs
That reveal the rain and warp within living
Is soon saved by singing and what it teaches us to resist.
David Erdos 24/10/16
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