My Top 10 Albums of the 90s: (2) Urban Hymns - The Verve

[This is the ninth in a series of ten posts. The list'll be revealed as entries are written.]

Having already dissolved once following the 1995 release of the tortured masterpiece A Northern Soul (after years of record-shattering ecstasy consumption and arguments between guitar wizard Nick McCabe and electric frontman Richard Ashcroft), the Verve and added guitarist Simon Tong decided to try again in 1997. Unlikelier still than the reformation was the immediate, worldwide success the band was to become, riding on the coattails of its signature song, "Bitter Sweet Symphony." Famously, the band would ultimately derive little benefit from the track, as courts ruled that the sample around which it had been built - not the lead violin riff, but the orchestral backing part, taken from a symphonic recording of the Rolling Stones' "The Last Time" - had been used more than the publishers' permission had allowed for. Yet the song and the album on which it appeared would finally herald the arrival of the group which the Verve's back catalog had always suggested they could be. Musically, Urban Hymns was in every sense a progression from their previous work: the song structures were tighter, the instrumental work (particularly McCabe's guitar and Peter Salisbury's thunderous drumming) more muscular, and the ballad-with-strings formula finally perfected, not only on "Bitter Sweet Symphony," but also on a pair of equally stunning singles, "The Drugs Don't Work" and "Lucky Man." However, the most momentous change came in Ashcroft, as the sweeping lyrical tendencies he'd nurtured since the birth of the band appeared fully matured and in miraculous harmony with the shaman-like charisma he was known to exhibit on stage. So where his whispered assurances ("You've got to tie yourself to the mast, my friend/And the storm will end") and frenzied barks ("This is a big fuck you") would elsewhere seem incongruous, they here feel of a piece and actually reinforce one another. The result is an album that plays like a soundtrack to life itself, encompassing its lows and its highs; its pain and its beauty; its merciless gut-punches and its ethereal moments of redemption. Following another acrimonious breakup Ashcroft would pursue a solo career sadly marked primarily by a descent from prophecy to platitudes, and indeed, no music from members of the Verve would subsequently come near recapturing the magic (2007's solid reunion album Forth notwithstanding). However, Urban Hymns will forever demonstrate the group operating at the peak of its ambition and inspiration – with truly remarkable results.

VHS of the Month: "The Magnificent Ambersons"

[VHS of the Month covers movies only - or best - commercially available on VHS.]

Following Citizen Kane - a movie whose lavish acclaim has mostly been applied in retrospect, and whose controversy and unprofitability in 1941 destroyed its creator's career - Orson Welles directed 10 films whose production and distribution reflected Hollywood's distrust in him. The saddest casualty of this neglect was Kane's immediate successor, an adaptation of Booth Tarkington's familial saga The Magnificent Ambersons. As originally made, the film was nearly 2½ hours long; however, after a few unenthusiastic screenings it was slashed by studio executives at RKO while Welles was directing a wartime documentary in South America. The resulting film runs a full hour shorter and features a happier ending to the story than Welles had intended. To make matters worse, the excised footage was burned by RKO (possibly to prevent Welles from tampering), thus dashing any chance of future reconstruction.

Yet the film that remains, like so many of the under-financed projects Welles would undertake in his later career, is nonetheless a remarkable piece of work. The deep focus and dramatic camera technique which had been so shocking in Kane were, if anything, even more fluid and confident in Ambersons, and Welles' inimitable touch leaves its mark on every scene (even the end credits are memorable!). The film presents Tarkington's story - which chronicles the decline and collapse of a Southern family after years of unchallenged prominence in its community - in suitably sweeping fashion, and contrasts the decline of the Ambersons with the rise of the automobile in a particularly moving fashion. Ambersons also features great performances from Kane/Mercury Theater holdovers Joseph Cotten and Agnes Moorehead, the latter of whom in particular is every bit as impressive as the spinster Fanny as she was in her extremely brief role as Charlie Kane's mother. Like far too much of Welles' filmography, factors including estate disputes have kept Ambersons from ever having been released on DVD; in fact, the most recent VHS was a Turner Classic Movies release in 1996 that was essentially the version they'd show on TV (including the TCM intro segment). Even chopped up and hard-to-find, though, Ambersons is still simply one of the best movies made by perhaps the greatest of all American directors.

[UPDATE: Spurred exclusively by my recent mention of the film, Warner Brothers has announced a pending DVD release of Ambersons - unadorned, but remastered and on DVD nonetheless. Coincidentally, the release also coincides with the BluRay release of Citizen Kane and the 70th anniversary of that landmark.  -5/20/11]

Out of Print Gems: Pink Floyd - "Embryo"

A previous post discussed the 8-track exclusive release of a Pink Floyd song from the band's 1977 album Animals. In 1983, as Columbia was releasing The Final Cut (Pink Floyd's last album as a 4-membered group), the band's former label, Capitol Records, put out a compilation called Works to try to cash in on the buzz. Predictably, the album was nothing more than a cash-in composed of seemingly random tracks culled from the pre-Wish You Were Here material that Capitol still owned the rights to. The only major changes made to the first 9 tracks on the 10 song album was the addition of Dark Side sound effects to the beginning of "One of These Days" and a vague remix of "Brain Damage" and "Eclipse" made by flattening the quadraphonic mix of those two songs down to stereo. As contemporary advertising demonstrates (see above), Capitol seemed to understand beforehand that Works wouldn't offer any reason to Pink Floyd fans to waste their money, so they included "Embryo," a track recorded in 1968 that until then had only been available on a sampler put out by Capitol subsidiary Harvest Records known as Picnic: A Breath of Fresh Air.

Why the track was never released otherwise is a mystery. Though it conflicts with the "solo songs" aesthetic of the studio album that composed half of 1969's Ummagumma, it's as good as or better than any of those tracks; it also would have been perfectly at home on the excellent rarities compilation Capitol had already released, Relics. Whatever the case, the song itself is a much-truncated version of one of the band's setlist staples for much of the early 70s. It's typical of Roger Waters' tracks of the period: quiet, accompanied by gongs and swirling organs, and featuring an understated vocal (by David Gilmour) with some squeaky, manipulated vocal sounds thrown in for good measure. You can hear the song below or download it here.

Out of Print Gems: The Flowerpot Men - "Beat City"

The soundtrack to John Hughes' classic Ferris Bueller's Day Off is nearly as iconic as the film itself: Yello's "Oh Yeah" as leitmotif; Ferris' ebullient "performances" of "Danke Schoen" and "Twist and Shout" during a massive parade through downtown Chicago; and Dream Academy's hypnotic instrumental cover of the Smith's "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" helping Cameron mind meld with a pointillated child in Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte are but a few of the greatest musical moments in the movie. What's ironic is that perhaps the greatest motion picture soundtrack of the 1980s was never released, due to Hughes' concern that the eclectic mix of music offered in the movie wouldn't appeal to anyone as an album.

Prior to the advent of the internet, this meant that many of the songs were nearly impossible to find in any format. The only exception Hughes made was a limited release - 100,000 copies - of a 7" single featuring two songs from the movie that he owned the rights to, a "labor of love" that cost $30 apiece to produce. The A-side, "Beat City," is one of the more memorable songs of the movie, synced up to the high-octane escape in the 1961 Ferarri GT California. It pefectly captures the undescribable elation that comes with freedom from responsibilities, and it's easy to see why Hughes wanted it to be purchasable somewhere. The only other release of the song by the short-lived outfit Flowerpot Men came on a live EP called the Janice Long Session - it's unclear whether this is the same version heard in the movie, or whether the circulating track came from an otherwise forgotten studio session. The "soundtrack" version can be heard below and interested parties can download it here.

The Universal Sigh

In discussing the forthcoming special "newspaper" edition of the recent Radiohead album King of Limbs, longtime visual collaborator Stanley Donwood mentioned that, "[w]hat I like about newspaper is its ephemeral nature, I like the way the paper goes yellow and brittle when you leave it out in the sunlight. I wanted to do this thing like a really annoying Sunday paper, you know when you buy the paper and all this crap falls out? I wanted to do something really annoying with all these crappy bits of floppy, glossy paper." Evidently, the aesthetic was inspired by a sense of the band's music "not coming to a halt - it was almost like this was kind of a report on its current status."

In keeping with the motif, Radiohead produced a limited run of "newspapers" distributed free around the world to promote the physical release of the new album last Tuesday. Because of the limited number of locations at which the paper was distributed, it soon leaked online through a variety of out-of-the-way sources. Overall, it contains what fans would expect: stray lyrics and song titles, rambling passages echoing Thom Yorke's everpresent "Fitter Happier" outlook on life, and some cool artwork (including one woodcut-like forest scene that resembles a better-rendered cousin of the tracing paper cover to "These Are My Twisted Words"). It also contains short stories by British authors Jay Griffiths and Robert Macfarlane, and interestingly, by Donwood, who previously had usually kept his contributions strictly visual. Interested parties can download the PDF here.