band of the week: Love

there seems to be a fair amount of musical discussions in our little corner of blogland of late- trying to find new avenues of musical styles. there nothing quite like those first few weeks when you hear something new and you just play it over and over again and you want to ask everybody whether they have heard them. or alternatively you want to keep them all to yourself so they are yours alone. well after reading jonny's last post and looking the pandora website that deirdre suggested (quite a cool little site by the way) i thought i would throw my own musically flavoured tuppence in. enter the band of the week post. i think i have pestered enough people with strange bands now (yes i mean Gorky's Zygotic Mynci- hey i even got some of you to the gigs) that i should share some more for, what it's worth.

so first off- LOVE. this band means ireland and digging to me. both my trotskyist 60 year old housemate Stu and my hippy at heart mate gary were really into them while i was working over there a couple of years back. Stu had actually worn out 3 or 4 copies of Four Sail on vinyl and cd by this time and was thrilled when i found it for sale (no pun intended) in tower records on grafton street. the next weekend he went and bought 4 copies of the cd for his future listening pleasure. the opener to four sail, a song called August was his favourite song of all time. and he had quite a large music collection to draw from (although he did maintain that all good music stopped being made around 1975).

so yeah Love. they had their height in the late 60's and early 70's. all really centres around the genius that is arthur lee. love were pretty much the first multi racial rock group that were really big in america. they are still going in some form today but only in a very diluted version. some of them had troubles with drugs, arthur lee spent some time in prison in the 90's ( i think on a 3 strikes thing) so not really worth seeing now unless it's love with arthur lee.

so why should you listen to them. man there's just something about the songs that take you away. i don't know if it's the pace, the guitars or the capturing lyrics. i find myself hanging on each word, caught up in it all. that pandora thing describes their sound as

"electric rock instrumentation, mild rythmic snycopation, mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation, major key tonality and a prominant flute part"

does that cover it, i don't now. it's definately of that summer of love psycheldelia thing but with rock, folk, and even showtunes added in. you might be listening to a hippyish upbeat song before in takes a left turn into something much darker.

anyway to end this love fest i'll tell you my favourite stuff. the most famous album is Forever changes which is consistently cited by critics as one of the outstanding albums in the history of rock music . look at this for a song title maybe the people would be the times or between clark and hilldale. great song . also a house is not a motel and the red telephone. then the album four sail. possibly takes a little longer to get into but definately rewarding . check out august as stu would recommend and robert montgomery.

next week......hmm i'll have to think amybe pavement or somethng like that . oh flaming lips have their new album out about now- at war with the mystics. the first proper followup to yoshimi battles the pink robots. now there's a tip.