Some New Sounds I Bought

Zappa Plays Zappa

This one's a bonus CD that comes with a Double DVD of Dweezil Zappa leading his band through the sonic adventures of his old man Frank. I saw them over a year ago and it was a revelation to hear the songs played live and it didn't hurt to have Napolen Murphy Brock and Steve Vai playing on stage with them. My review of that show is here.

Since seeing them I'd seen the DVD set in various J&B hi-Fi shops I've been trundling into, priced at anywhere between $30.00 and $45.00. Having seen them live, and not wishing to let the memory totally fade, I decided to buy the thing only to discover there was a bonus audio disc. (Hooray!)

The songs are culled from their stage shows that have slightly different interpretations of the songs. The more standard takes are on the DVDs. They songs are played immaculately, and lovingly. IF there's one complaint I have, it's that they seem to go just a little too slowly. I've been listening to the 'You Can't Do That On Stage Anymore' Series on my iPod in the car for months now, and I'm used to hearing these numbers zip by with gusto and over-rehearsed casual abandon. It's no biggie, but you can hear on these recordings at least that Dweezil's band is still climbing the heights Frank's band found.

One more thing: Dweezil censors his old man's lyrics a lot. 'St. Alphonso's Pancake Breakfast' was missing the word cock in the line "He stumbled over his cock."

Not sure if Frank would have approved of that.

Sting Plays Reneaissance Stuff

It's a real drag to find the most pretentious impulses are the ones that get Sting a record from the immensely revered, all-conquering, Von-Karajan-inflected  Deutsche Grammophon label. The album I speak of is the 'Songs from the Labyrinth' where he sings the songs of John Dowland accompanied by Lute. I guess the curiosity got the better of me an I shelled out the bucks for this album. I might have been better buying the deluxe edition of 'The Who For Sale', but I thought, "no, buy something you wouldn't know the content thereof!"

I dunno.

Maybe I should stick with stuff I know I like at this stage of my life. Sting makes a fine job of huksing and crooning his way through this album to the accompaniment of a gorgeous sounding lute, but I just feel this is as phony a classical recording as my Beastie Bach, if not worse in as much as he just seems to make his delivery as straight as possible to put across the point that this is somehow a 'serious recording. I mean, it's a fine enough album but Deutsche Grammophon? Come off it Gordon!

To be blunt, I would have preferred if he played updated rock versions of these songs rather than this pseudo-historical, pseudo-intellectual quest for some kind of authenticity that fails because he's Sting. He should leave this stuff to people who do this stuff because they can't do anything else. He does rock, well. This is just perverse.

And I bought it like the sucker punter that I am. :(