The star rating system takes into account that these are "Acquisitions Of The Year". Therefore * represents 50-60%, ** is 60-70%, *** is 70-80%, **** is 80-90% and ***** is 90-99.9% (we're talking Pet Sounds or Forever Changes here). The retail price, actual price paid, packaging etc. are not relevant to the rating
Oasis
The Masterplan (66.30)*** P 1994-1998, P 2000
Few would argue that the most essential Oasis albums are the first two,
Definitely Maybe from August 1994 and (What's The Story) Morning Glory from
October 1995, when they were young and mad for it, and Noel Gallagher had a
pocket book seemingly stuffed to capacity with classic songs. So prolific was he
that the singles from that brief period contained a further 20 new songs on the
B-sides most of which were the equal of those on the albums, some arguably
superior.
With the exception of their debut single, Supersonic, none of these had been
released in America, hence the idea of compiling the best of the B-sides onto an album
for their benefit. The track listing was apparently chosen by fans on the
Internet with some influence from Noel Gallagher, and two of his justly
favourite compositions, Underneath The Sky and The Masterplan, make it onto the
album alongside obvious musts like Acquiesce and Fade Away. All date from 1994
and 1995 apart from two 1997 recordings that appear on singles extracted from Be
Here Now.
The biggest omission is the non-album single Whatever, perhaps excluded on
the grounds that it was not a B-side. Step Out (the B-side of Don't Look Back In
Anger), removed from Morning Glory for legal reasons due to its similarity to
Stevie Wonder's Uptight, misses out again, as does the anthemic Round Are Way.
However, rockers like Headshrinker and the Bacharach-inspired Going Nowhere
easily earn their places in the company of the likes of the acoustic ballad Talk
Tonight and the more recent (though written in 1990) Going Nowhere.
Completists should note that the "live" I Am The Walrus (recorded at a soundcheck
in Gleneagles, with overdubbed audience effects lifted from a bootleg Faces
album) fades at 6.24, whereas on the Cigarettes And Alcohol EP it is
complete at 8.14. Listen Up has been shorn of 18 seconds from its guitar solo,
and Half A World Away, now known to the nation as the theme of The Royle Family,
inexplicably fades out just a couple of seconds short of its natural end as
heard on the Whatever EP.
However, on the strength of these supposedly second division songs, perhaps
there are actually three essential Oasis albums
(review filed 6 January 2003)
Sinéad O'Connor
So Far... The Best Of Sinéad O'Connor (74.30)***
P 1987-1995, P 1997
This useful round-up of the most commercially successful period in the career of
Sinéad O'Connor of course kicks off with the memorably wonderful Nothing
Compares 2 U and concentrates mainly on the hit singles, but in their album
versions. Owners of the albums that these selections come from will find little
that they don't already have, the only exceptions being a shorter Thank You For
Hearing Me (at 4.34 presumably a vinyl single edit) and Empire, a Bomb The Bass
track on which she guests with Benjamin Zephaniah.
Key album tracks such as the vengeful Last Day Of Our Acquaintance, I Am
Stretched On Your Grave and Fire On Babylon are also included, though had the
collection been a little more adventurous it would have been nice to see some of
the hard to find experimental early singles such as I Want Your (Hands On Me)
with MC Lyte, or the notorious Jump In The River duet with Karen Finley. As it
is, this collection mostly serves the more casual listener who does not expect
to soon buy any of her albums.
(review filed 2 October 2006)
Sinéad O'Connor
Sean-Nos Nua (65.16)***
P 2002
Sinéad O'Connor's first couple of albums were magnificent ground-breaking stuff
which still sound great today. After that, her successes were more sporadic as
she searched for a focus for her vocal talent and identity, often sounding
hesitant and constrained. This is her best album in many years, singing with
renewed confidence on a collection of purely traditional
Irish songs that she clearly loves, such as Peggy Gordon, Lord Franklin, The Moorlough Shore and The
Parting Glass, with a sympathetic cluster of excellent
musicians ranging from Donal Lunny and Sharon Shannon to the dub On-U Sounds of
Skip MacDonald (Little Axe) and Adrian Sherwood
(indexed 8 July 2003)
Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band (65.34)*** R
1968-1971, P 1997
November 9th 1966 was quite an auspicious day for John Lennon, and for the rest
of the world in some small way, because when walked into London's Indica Gallery
he met Yoko Ono. The lives of both were forever altered by the other, perhaps
more so for Lennon as Yoko introduced him to the avant-garde art world from a
perspective that was wholly new to him, and a world beyond Beatledom.
Four years later the albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Yoko Ono/Plastic
Ono Band were simultaneously unleashed on Apple, the name of the label inspired
by Yoko Ono, each featuring matching photos of John and Yoko under a tree on the
front cover and a photograph of them as a child on the reverse. Both albums
explore the themes of basics, innocence and childhood. On the John Lennon album,
Yoko is credited with "wind".
John Lennon's first solo album after splitting from the Beatles obviously had an
inbuilt importance, and probably outsold the Yoko Ono album many thousands of
times over, but Yoko's was probably the more innovative and ahead of its time,
and still sounds heady, fresh and exciting today.
The album starts with the sound of a tape machine being turned on and the
sizzling rhythm section of Klaus Voormann and Ringo Starr begins, abetted by the
sounds of John Lennon's screaming guitar in a style far more liberated than on
any Beatle record. When Yoko comes in, screaming the title of the song,
"Why" (the only discernable fragment of lyric on the whole album), we
realize that Lennon's guitar has been cleverly mimicking and anticipating Yoko's
vocal, which has an awesome ferocity and intensity, and in that moment she
redefines the role of woman in music for generations to come. The following
track, appropriately, is Why Not. Some of this intensity no doubt derives from
the "primal therapy" of Arthur Janov that she and Lennon had
undertaken prior to these sessions.
The Plastic Ono Band accompany Yoko throughout
the album with a confidence and empathetic sure-footedness that carries the
listener along with them, embellished only by some evocative sound effects.
Ringo plays with a freedom and swing we had never heard from him before. The
sessions, at Abbey Road in October 1970, must have been something to behold and
one envies the four engineers who presided.
Two of the pieces, Why and Touch Me,
may be familiar to some American record buyers as they were also apparently to be found on
the B-sides of the Plastic Ono Band singles Mother and Power To The People.
The Plastic Ono Band do not appear on one track, which is a rehearsal for an
earlier free-jazz show at the Albert Hall on 29 February 1968. While the Beatles
were recording Lady Madonna at Abbey Road, Yoko Ono had returned to London to
perform her original composition at a concert with the innovator
Ornette Coleman at his invitation, and on the piece AOS they are assisted by legendary bassist
Charlie Haden, along with David Izenzon and Edward Blackwell. The piece
demonstrates that Yoko was part of a tradition of experimental, revolutionary
music before the Beatles explored any such ideas on the White Album. It was
because of her return to London that she and John Lennon were able to renew
their personal, musical and creative relationship, of which one of the first
results was the White Album's Revolution Number Nine.
It is a landmark album.
The three bonus tracks on this overdue CD edition are disappointing. Only the
unnecessary 44-second fragment "Something More Abstract" comes from
the Plastic Ono Band sessions, whilst the previously unreleased 7:30 version of
Open Your Box is a raw early version of the piece, probably recorded in
September 1969, before its final tempo and structure had been established. The
finished version that debuted on the Power To The People single in the UK, dates
from 1971 (confusingly, the same recording was re-titled Hirake for the album
Fly). The final improvisation, The South Wind, features John and Yoko at home in
New York, which puts it in a different time-frame, and more properly belongs on
an album like Life With The Lions. After 16 long, long minutes, we are grateful
that a telephone call brings the piece to a conclusion. Far more welcome would
have been the Plastic Ono Band B-sides Remember Love and Who Has Seen The Wind?
which have yet to make a CD appearance
(review filed 28 January 2005, revised 12 February 2005)
Yoko Ono
Ono Box (71.33/71.56/65.17/57.51/73.10/49.15)***R 1968-1985
his tastefully packaged and well-documented box set clocks in at a mammoth six CDs, which
may seem somewhat self-indulgent for an artist at best on the fringes of the mainstream.
However, its existence in the marketplace does not oblige anyone to purchase it.
If they were to, though, I imagine they would consider it a one-stop purchase, meeting all
their Yoko Ono needs, collecting all the albums and stray singles in one extensive package.
All the most commercially important tracks such as Walking On Thin Ice, Woman Is The Nigger
of The World and Open Your Box are here, along with a fair number of rarities such as
Japanese singles and unreleased album sessions and out-takes. Yoko Ono has supervised
remixes of a substantial number of the tracks, adding notes of explanation on each CD. Along
with printed lyrics and essays, a thorough discography has also been supplied, and from this
it can be seen that the tracks representing each album have been extensively revised, with
running times sometimes extended, as with O'Wind (Body Is The Scar Of Your Mind) or Woman
Power, sometimes severely shortened.
Paper Shoes and Midsummer New York both lose several minutes, for example, and Mind Train,
over 16 minutes long on the album Fly, is here shorter even than the single edit, at under
four minutes long.
Some 27 album tracks have been dropped altogether, though her unreleased 1974 album A Story is included on the sixth disc. Plastic Ono Band B-sides Remember Love and
Who Has Seen The Wind? that have yet to make a CD appearance are not included though others
duplicated on albums are given space.
Over the six CDs we see Yoko gradually shifting from the avant-garde wordlessness of the
Plastic Ono Band period, to the more conventional song-based approach of 1980s albums that
all employed session musicians. The Plastic Ono Band served her extremely well
instrumentally and on a proto-funk piece like Open Your Box predated the work of innovators
like Betty Davis by several years.
The box set opens with a two-minute No Bed For Beatle John, extracted from Unfinished Music
No. 2 - Life With The Lions, recorded in November 1968 and the only piece on the entire box
set to predate the Plastic Ono Band. Even the free-form 1968 avant-garde piece AOS included
on the album Plastic Ono Band has been dropped, as if she did not exist musically before
meeting up with Beatle John. The fact that she did is acknowledged by Sonic Youth, one of
many outfits to admit to her influence, who recorded Yoko's Voice Piece For Soprano from
1961 on their album Goodbye Twentieth Century, and also Scream Piece on Sonic Youth 4. Other
artists who bear testimony to her pioneering feminist individuality include Bjork, the
Pizzicato Five, Kate Bush, Yo La Tengo and the B 52s. This box begins to explain why,
despite being maddeningly incomplete in some respects and perhaps too fulsome in
others.
(review filed 8 August 2006)
Roy Orbison
The Big O: The Original Singles Collection (68.21/70.39)**
P 1959-1976, P 1998
When I notice in the track list entries such as "Oh, Pretty Woman (Original
single version) (Mono)" and later "Oh, Pretty Woman (Stereo) ('Come
With Me' Lyric)", I feel that the compiler is exactly the kind of obsessive
completist I want to be responsible for anthologies such as this one.
There is a fairly simple concept behind this 1998 UK collection: all 24 of the
original Monument label singles, with the A-sides in chronological order on disc
1 and their B-sides on disc 2. A table in the booklet lists the highest chart
positions and dates of chart entry where relevant, and there are cover shots of some
of the record labels and sleeves.
It isn't as simple as that, of course, and when it all unravels the sleeve
information says
nothing. All is well for the first 14 tracks, with the corresponding B-sides in
order on the second disc, though track 14, Pretty Paper/Beautiful Dreamer, was a
US-only release (not mentioned in the liner notes).
Borne On The Wind and its B-side, What'd I Say, complicate matters slightly by
being released in the UK but not in the USA, but the notes cope with this. The
collection also supplies the original mono variant of another single, (Say)
You're My Girl, because it includes Roy Orbison saying
"Mercy!" at the end, as is right and proper, except that it appears to
have been transcribed from a well-worn vinyl single and has some distortion. All
the other A-sides are presented in stereo, and the single version of Oh, Pretty
Woman bizarrely bursts into stereo on the very final note. CD2 ends with a German-language single
comprising two of his hit songs.
In 1965, Roy Orbison was disappointed with the commercial failure of Goodnight,
and, blaming Monument Records, moved to MGM. Monument continued to release
singles, but these were old recordings, either previously unreleased, like (Say)
You're My Girl, Let The Good Times Roll and Sleepy Hollow, or album tracks like
Lana, House Without Windows and Summersong (the B-side of the belated UK
appearance of Pretty Paper, a Willie Nelson Christmas song which had been a
festive US hit the year before). As these did not chart, it
isn't possible to tell the year of origin from the CD, or that the A/B side parallels between the 2 CDs has gone awry for a
few tracks.
In 1976, having run out of hits with MGM and after a brief spell with Mercury,
Roy Orbison returned to Monument and recorded the LP Regeneration, from
which three singles were taken. All of the 6 tracks involved are included, but as none charted
there is no mention as to what they are, and no indication of a ten-year gap.
The problem is mostly not with the compilation,
which is more comprehensive than the notes would have you believe, but with
inadequate information.
Most of side one was very familiar and stands up well, apart from some
over-production and dated girlie choruses, but there were some pleasant
surprises on side 2, including The Actress, a ballad which surely should have
been an A-side, and a sturdy version of Mean Woman Blues.
Sound quality is good overall
but on my copy at least a handful of the tracks suffer from some extraneous noise
and distortion, notably on Crying, Falling and Candy Man. These faults are
absent from
the same tracks on the Definitive Collection CD, and rob this CD of a third star
(review filed 28 November 2003, updated 11 December 2003)