I don't remember which day this was (at the moment I'm writing this retrospectively - I keep a list of what Shuffleman throws up, but I'm a few weeks behind at the moment), but I can only hope it wasn't an early start.
I like easing into my day, and great though it is, I think I would have had a hard time at 8.00 in the morning, faced with Meat Loaf - Hits Out Of Hell.
Hits... consists of roughly half of the epic 'Bat Out Of Hell', half of 'Dead Ringer', plus a couple of others from later albums. They're written, produced and partly performed by one man - Jim Steinman. Mr Steinman takes a similar view of production to Phil Spector : start with two of everything, turn them up to full volume and then start adding things.
Over the top is just a starting point.
With a couple of exceptions (Modern Girl and Razor's Edge are ok, but they'll never be classics), this album is packed full of the stuff of legend. Bat Out Of Hell, Dead Ringer For Love, Read 'Em And Weep and the baseball-as-sex metaphor that is Paradise By The Dashboard Light.
Assuming that this was sometime after 11.00am, then it would have been great, so gets:
DSP rating - 8
Next up, a bit of an unknown quantity.
Quite often, if I find a good album by a new (to me) artist, I'll go and track down some of their other stuff. And this was the case here. I can't remember what made me buy 'Your Little Secret', maybe a good magazine review, maybe heard it playing in shop, but I bought it. And it was great. So I picked up a couple of earlier albums by the same artist, which was how, courtesy of Mr Holmes, I came to be listening to 'Melissa Etheridge - Yes I Am'.
Whereas I'd played Your Little Secret to death, I'd never really got round to listening to the other two, so this was new(ish) to me.
And just goes to prove what great taste I've got!
It rocked! Ms Etheridge plays a solid, no-nonsense style of music, with a combination of balls-to-the-wall rockers and moody vignettes of small town life.
This is the sort of thing that makes Shuffleman work. I probably wouldn't have deliberately picked this one out of the rack before, but I certainly will now.
DSP rating - 7
Now. The aforementioned schadenfreude.
I don't know if you've ever seen the musical 'Avenue Q' (if you haven't I can highly recommend it, it's an adult 'Sesame St', and hilarious to boot - just leave the kids at home), but one of the songs in it is called 'Schadenfreude'. There's some dialogue, mid-song, that goes:
Oh. Schadenfreude, huh? What's that? Some kind of Nazi word?
Yup. It's German for 'happiness at the misfortune of others.'
Happiness at the misfortune of others. That is German!
Now I'm not saying that Matt's a Nazi. But he would have had a choice of five albums. And if I remember rightly, he checked with me to make sure that this was what he thought it was.
And it was.
Brass To The Fore is another one of those boxed sets, like the previously mentioned Irish Folk Collection, where I'd bought it for Hospital Radio so I could play the odd track.
42 songs and two and half hours...
It took a while to get through.
DSP rating - 3
No comments:
Post a Comment