{"id":9729,"date":"2010-07-27T12:53:29","date_gmt":"2010-07-27T16:53:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=9729"},"modified":"2010-07-27T12:53:29","modified_gmt":"2010-07-27T16:53:29","slug":"listening-to-9","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=9729","title":{"rendered":"Listening To..."},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li><b>Leon Redbone - Champagne Charlie<\/b>. This was his third record (1981), and like the two before it, it's a collection of ragtime, Dixieland, jazz, blues, country and standards from the early 20th century - all done in Redbone's trademark spare and laid-back style. It's not <i>quite<\/i> as fantastic as his first, \"On The Track\" - for that matter, neither is his second. But I think it's really just a matter of song selection - the performances here, and on \"Double Time\", are good - he just used all his best material on that first record.\n<p>Three Yen: &yen;&yen;&yen;<\/p>\n<li><b>Tokyo Police Club - Champ<\/b>. This one is a little more mellow than their previous releases. Keyboards do more of the driving, letting the guitars sit back a bit. But, it's still full of that quirky TPC charm: twitchy, jumpy, a little off-kilter, with smart lyrics and bristling all over with little hooks.\n<p>Three Yen: &yen;&yen;&yen;<\/p>\n<li><b>Robyn Hitchcock - Moss Elixir<\/b>. I played the hell out of this one when it came out, in 1996 - so much that I haven't wanted to hear it at all for the past 13 or 14 years. But, on a whim, I played it while making dinner the other night and was pretty much blown away. As it was playing, I was surprised that I remembered all the words and all the music, but was even more surprised that I'd forgotten how <i>good<\/i> the songs were. For this one, he replaced the busy, new-wavey, Egyptians with Deni Bonet's violin and some occasional horns, and that let the unusually-straightforward lyrics take center stage. There are a lot of stories here, and some of them sound very personal, tragic even (ex. \"<a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=JfcVxU4nQ3g\">The Speed Of Things<\/a>\"), but Hitchcock is still opaque and clever enough to stop his words from becoming maudlin. There are a couple of weak spots (ex. never much liked \"Filthy Bird\"), but all in all, it's a bright spot in the list of his often-spotty 90's albums.\n<p>Four Yen: &yen;&yen;&yen;&yen;\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Leon Redbone - Champagne Charlie. This was his third record (1981), and like the two before it, it's a collection of ragtime, Dixieland, jazz, blues, country and standards from the early 20th century - all done in Redbone's trademark spare and laid-back style. It's not quite as fantastic as his first, \"On The Track\" - [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-listening-to"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9729\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}