Skip to main content

Neil Young & Promise of the Real - Paradox (Original Music From the Film) (Reprise, 2018)

I haven't seen Paradox, Daryl Hannah's Western featuring Neil Young and Promise of the Real, and I don't intend to, but I thought the soundtrack might make for an okay listen. It's a total odds-n-sods collection. At 21 tracks it seems long at first glance but there's not much meat here. Six of the tracks are instrumental improvisations done in the style of Young's Dead Man soundtrack work, which is to say improvising based on remembered scenes of the film. These range from very short (13 seconds) to a few minutes. There's a spoken word intro, presumably pulled from the film, a Willie Nelson cover sung by his son (and also member of Promise of the Real) Lukas, and two of the album's live centerpieces and strongest tracks - a new version of Young's "Pocahontas", and a 10-minute jam spun off of the "Cowgirl in the Sand" riff. As far as originals go there's a couple of versions of "Diggin' in the Dirt" which is nice, and a stampeding instrumental called "Running to the Silver Eagle" which deserves more than what it gets here. The vibe of the album as a whole is a languid, laidback, slapdash affair - sounds like it's reflective of the film that spawned it. It's a minor entry in a discography that's dotted with them, but it's not a bad listen. Could be a good soundtrack to having a beer on the patio on a hot day, a laidback record for a laidback day.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Playboi Carti - Die Lit (AWGE/Interscope, 2018)

Playboi Carti has never really been on my radar too much, but then Pfork gave this one a rave review, and I figured I was sleeping...but man, this album didn't do anything for me. Barely any song made any kind of impact. The production is interesting at times but Carti himself gets lost in both that and the whole mass of features all over the album. Nothing gelled for me, so I guess for me I wasn't missing much after all. Oh well.

Ami Shavit - Neural Oscillations and Alpha Rhythms (Finders Keepers, r. 2018)

Another one I wasn't expecting much from but Finders Keepers always gets a fair shake, this turned out to be surprisingly legit. Influenced by Philip Glass and Tangerine Dream in the 70's, "Ami embarked on an experiment with what he coined Alpha Mood – a state in which the brain is working in relaxation and in which he used music as a means of helping induce his own meditative state". These aren't the droney, spacey, meditative synth pieces you'd expect - they're hypnotic in an active sense, very stimulating and dynamic. Seems not much is left of Shavit's recorded legacy but I'm glad I gave these a shot, very neat.

Sun Ra - The Cymbals/Symbols Sessions: New York City 1973 (Modern Harmonic, 2018)

This is a genuine "lost album" (unlike the Coltrane "ehhh kinda not really" lost album) recorded by Sun Ra and members of the Arkestra in 1973 for Impulse!. Seems the relationship between Ra and Impulse! soured quickly and a couple albums that were scheduled got shelved - Cymbals/Symbols and another one due for a reissue later this year called Crystal Spears. This one is an oddity in a discography of oddities - the Arkestra here is only an 8 piece and they perform mostly in smaller configurations like quartets throughout the album. Stalwart Marshall Allen is completely absent, and John Gilmore only plays on one piece. Strange. The first disc is the actual Cymbal/Symbols album remastered, and the second disc is from an unnamed tape recorded at the same sessions. Given we're looking at a smaller lineup without many mainstays, Cymbals/Symbols is a little flat. It opens with an awkward, stuttering "The World of the Invisible" and then torpedoes into the 1...