Month: February 2021

ALBUM: ‘Especially for You’

MVC RATING: 4.5/$$$

What do you do when you cross Elvis Costello with a group of New Jersey rockers promising to blast everything to Smithereens Well that’s what you get: the Smithereens, who started with a bang with this album.

I’ll stipulate the entire debut is good music, good on the ears with British invasion la la choruses and wall of sound guitar chording. Sadly, they never again quite caught the wave that was 1986.

On this first album, ‘Blood and Roses’ and ‘Wall of Sleep are among the best examples of their style with guitarist and vocalist Pat DeNizio setting the tone literally with his voice.

I am going to do some counting over the next few days to see how close I am to my stated goal of 678, which was how many albums I had when I started MyVinylCountdown.com in 2016.

I was diagnosed in 2015, first with Parkinson’s Disease and then shortly thereafter: Lewy body dementia. A degenerative brain disease, Lewy is a killer. I vowed to stay alive long enough to review all of my records I have avidly been accumulating all my life. It’s been a while since I checked, and it was slowed down considerably during an especially difficult period in August, September and October.

So going in and out of reality kind of slowed me down. But now I amack urge folks new to this blog to check out the About Me button for more info.

So I will try to have a number soon. I will also have a piece on how I am holding my own against Lewy and will name one of the medications that has brought me back.

NOTE: I found a stash of ‘R’s” that I had overlooked, so I will intermittently mix R’s and the S’s together as I make my way to Z.

ALBUM: Can’t Buy a Thrill (1975); Gold (1982)

MVC RATING: 4.5/$$$$,$; 4.5/$$$$

NOTE: Turns out I did have another Steely Dan lurking in my growing: Gold, a very nice, concise best of compilation.

Could it be possible I only have one album of this band?

This is their debut album and certainly one of the best — but all of their albums are ‘one of the best.’ Amazing musicians and songwriters Steely Dan (namely Don Fagan and Walter Becker) incorporated jazz, rock and Latino sounds with engimatic lyrics into a fusion that maintained commercial appeal.

The songs ‘Reeling in the Years,’ Do it Again’ and ‘Dirty Work, were hits for the group off of this album. Add to that their later hits, ‘Rikki Don’t Lose that Number,’ ‘Hey Nineteen,’ ‘Bodhisattva,’ ‘Dr. Wu’ and ‘Kid Charlemagne,’ and so on, and so on. Pretty soon we have a pretty good soundtrack of the 1970s and 1980s. They enjoyed critical claim all the while selling 40 million albums.

I only can find this one album in my collection, I think I have more because I have a 90-minute mixtape of the group that my broken cassette machine will no longer allow me to play. One of my favorites off ‘Can’t Buy a Thrill.’

ALBUM: Water Under the Bridge

RATING: 3.5/$$

Dutch artist with high jazzy, lounge-y, Joni Michell sort of a thing here. The music is wispy and takes on the undercutting nature of ambient music. She sings beautifully. But I haven’t listened to the artist in more than 30 years so I can’t rate this too high or too low to be fair. Maybe if I got to know it better — but that is part of what I’m trying to do here. Get to know some hidden gems lurking in m y own collection. It appears Jane Fonda was moved by her: