This weekend brings a new box of CDs to the car, and thus, a new edition of this particular series, in which I examine my somewhat questionable musical taste, as expressed via the great variety of compact discs I’ve accumulated over the course of my life. If anything, this little project of mine shows that I really shouldn’t judge anyone else’s musical taste…even if that taste involves front row seats to the Train-Maroon 5 tour (aka “lowestcommondenominatorpalooza”) currently circling the nation, luring in the nation’s supposedly hip soccer moms and pukka shell wearing frat boys to central locations for possibly nefarious purposes:

I’ve even included an extra review this time…bonus!

♦- Heart – Brigade: To repeat a common refrain from this series, I don’t necessarily remember buying this record; I suspect this one came into the collection via my lovely wife. In any case, this record is arguably the peak of the band’s 80s resurgence. For those who didn’t see the relevant “Behind the Music,” Heart started out in the 70s, and logged several big classic rock hits, but despite how badass “Barracuda” was, they were always sort of pigeonholed as a “girl act.” After floundering through the early 1980s, they hit big with a slicker, commercial rock sound and a stack of power ballads. This record includes a bunch of surprisingly good hard rock-ish tunes (“I Didn’t Want to Need You” and “Wild Child” are highlights), and features the huge hit “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You,” which always felt kind of skeevy to me, even as a teenager. Listening to it now, however, it comes off as more sinister, since it leaves open the interpretation that the song’s narrator was “in love…with another man!” before the song started, and the whole anonymous hotel tryst with the vagabond hitchhiker was totally premeditated by woman and her partner as a low-cost means to conceive via a 3rd party sperm donor because the spouse was shooting blanks. I have fun imagining another verse involving lawsuits, movie rights negotiations with Lifetime Television, and 24 hour coverage by Nancy Grace.

♦- Avril Lavigne – Live Acoustic: I picked this EP up off of the clearance rack at my local Target for a buck and change. That said, it’s really very good. Six tracks off of her early records, recorded live, apparently in a mall, just Avril and a guy playing acoustic guitar and doing some harmony vocals. Despite being recorded in a mall, and Avril’s popular reputation at being a totally disposable studio-crafted pop star, I have to say I’m impressed with the fact that this record got released; it’s pretty raw – no processing on the vocals beyond a little reverb on the PA. Putting it out there shows definite confidence. There are a couple of bum notes, but the little imperfections are what make the songs work; often better than their studio album counterparts. It doesn’t quite save “Sk8er Boi” from still being trite despite it’s catchiness, but “He Wasn’t” and “Take Me Away” both work better here than in their original versions.

♦- Barenaked Ladies – Rock Spectacle: This live record, recorded during the “Born on a Pirate Ship” tour, covers a lot of the highlights of the band’s first three studio records, but the real treasure here is that it manages to capture some of the feel of the band’s live shows, which are/were at least as much about comedic improvisation as much as really tight musicianship and performance. The record will never replace the experience of a live show, featuring long impromptu rap performances about whatever happened on the way to the venue that day and the flying mac and cheese (“don’t open the cheese pouch!”), but the record does include some of that (sadly, at the end as bonus tracks, which are often clipped off on modern CD players which can choke on the “enhanced CD” bonus videos wedged in as a ROM segment on the disc), as well as some great live versions of “Straw Hat and Dirty Old Hank,” “Jane,” “Brian Wilson,” and “What A Good Boy,” a mostly forgotten deep cut from Gordon that I’ve occasionally dusted off for open mic sets.

♦- Billy Thorpe – Children of the Sun…Revisisted: During my college summers, I spent way too much time in the back of a mobile kitchen cooking and slinging french fries to patrons at many of central Pennsylvania’s finest fireman’s carnivals and scholastic athletic competitions. One of the common threads across those summers was the constant presence of the local classic rock station playing in the background behind the drone of roiling fryers and wobbling exhaust fans. Amidst the soup of BTO, Aerosmith and Molly Hatchet, I’d occasionally hear the title track from this record, with it’s percussive guitar riff and soaring vocals about spaceships. It intrigued me enough to track it down. The whole package is a 1979 space opera concept record about benevolent aliens coming to rescue humanity from a dying earth in the early 1990s. Really. It’s weird, but in that strange 70s concept album way that you can’t help but appreciate. The title track, which is really the focus here, is seven minutes of impressive studio wizardry, with lots of great stereo panning effects, over-the-top guitar work, and plenty of Beatle-esque harmony. The rest of the record is padded out with some of Thorpe’s (who more or less quit pop music in the early 80s to start toy companies and score television shows, including ST:TNG) other work from the period, through 82’s East of Eden’s Gate, which is interesting, and still fits with the space opera concept the original record had going for it.

♦ – Tori Amos – Tales of a Librarian: This is essentially a greatest hits package put out by Atlantic after Tori left the label. It’s a pretty comprehensive collection, allegedy organized according to the Dewey Decimal System, and includes a nice cross-section of Tori’s output. I’ve always been a fan of her sound (I love the piano and ethereal, unearthly vocals) but I’ve never waded fully into Tori fandom, which can be voluminous,obsessive and a little intimidating. As such, never really heard the songs in their original contexts with any regularity – it’s been songs in isolation, and in the live setting (though we had to leave that show early, because an in utero @fairiedaughter was being particularly difficult to her mother that night). I really need to go back and start listening to the albums one of these days. Still, most of the significant tunes from the period are here: “Cornflake Girl,” “Crucify,” and “Silent All These Years,” which is probably my personal favorite, as well as the excellent but really depressing and uncomfortable composition, “Me and A Gun.” Come to think of it, “excellent but depressing and uncomfortable” kind of describes most of the Tori Amos catalog, but that’s part of why we love it so.