Helena Vondráčková: 1978 - Paprsky

A very unfortunate choice of cover photo reminding me of my tourette-like tic-ridden elder son who can't stop touching his face and nose as my hear his mother yelling at him to keep his hands off his head... nothing to do with the beauty of this vocal jazz album from the former Czechoslovakia...
A beautiful woman though as you will see from the link below.


A particularly fine piece, B2's makova kraska






Don't be deterred by side a, this album has kind of a Jekyll and Hyde thing going, like my aforementioned son, who is sometimes an angel, sometimes a hyperactive demon.  Side b is the more interesting and progressive side.

She has a large discography with a lot of cover songs that we have no interest in whatsoever.

Traitement Spécial [year unknown ?1985] [lossless and mp3]

More funky French fusion.  Some really nice spicy progressive touches and sudden abrupt or angular Cubist-like hammerings of dissonance with wrenching guitar riffs, reminding me of the classics like Concept or Abus Dangereux or Germans Das Pferd and Kjol.  Notice the composer is the bassist, Mineau, and thankfully (god bless him) the bass solos are kept to the absolute minimum bearable here.  Predictably, some of this material was recycled on an April Orchestra release, viz., number 46.


INFORMATION:

Credits:
Bass Guitar [Fretless], Producer, Mixed By – Thierry Mineau
Drums, Co-producer – Serge Viviani
Engineer, Mixed By – Philippe Mercier
Guitar – Jean-Michel Huré (tracks: A2, A3, B1, B2)
Guitar, Co-producer – Jean-Pierre Taieb* (tracks: A1, A4, B3, B4)
Keyboards – Pierre Luc Vallet
Koto, Engineer [Assistant], Mixed By – Kiet

Recorded at studio Prisme, Lausanne.


A particularly pleasing entry by Mineau called Vasco:





I hate to spoil the fun but there is a cover version of a Sting composition (When The World Is Running Down) to close out the record which horrifically I admit reminds me of early eighties David Sanborn.  Anybody out there remember that particular felonious mastermind of TV fuzak who used to torture us real music fans into neon submission back then?

Runeson [Nils-Åke Runeson] from Sweden 1974 [lossless + mp3]

Another one of those lost rock albums that really deserves to be better known, particularly among those involved in perpetrating the same endless paroleless crimes of replaying Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, the Beatles and myriad one-hit wonders on satellite radio ad nauseam,  I can guarantee that the songs written here are not in any way as a whole inferior to an album by for example Jackson Browne or David Bowie or any other famous artist from the seventies.

With a powerful hook you could hang an angular comet or cometlander off, the song "I'm not a poet (like Edgar Allen Poe)" is just absolute rock bliss, but notice in particular the use of the mellotron-flute in the second stanza:





Complete information here.

How, how is it possible this record is unknown everywhere else in the world but on these crappy little blogs like here?  Utter artistic injustice.

Charles Fox with Olivia Newton-John and The Other Side of the Mountain, OST 1975 [download available, unfortunately]

When I was a child I had a crush on Olivia Newton-John, the ex-brit Australian with the absolutely angelic voice who became a massive sensation in the seventies, partly thanks to the movie "Grease" and then a lesser karaoke sensation later in the 90s.  I remember well this movie too, because it was so sentimental and the music so ethereally gorgeous, it was hugely popular when I was a kid, due to its tearjerker story of a crippled skier who must rebuild her life, fall in love again of course, and then face the death of her fiance in another accident (sorry for the spoiler there folks).

Anyways with the exception of the title track, which should have been a huge radio hit, the music here is typical symphonic orchestral soundtrack, though still enjoyable for those who have a taste for this seventies fare.  Here's the song I'm referring to:




These albums always puzzled me, even when I was a kid and dug them out of the local library for free, why did people put up with so much orchestral filler when each soundtrack only really had one or two good songs on them?  I guess in those days there was more patience for this kind of material.  Annoyingly, the same song is repeated at beginning and end without any difference.  I guess that's why this record was rescued and bought from the dumpster dustbin slag heap of oblivion.  For a few dollars.

The last line was the best part of the movie:

"How lucky I am to have known someone, something, that saying goodbye is so damned awful."

VA incl. Wolfgang Dauner, Association P.S., Volker Kriegel, etc. - Stop my Brain, from 1973 [no download sorry]

WOW what an amazing cover painting, again, which is the reason I wanted to feature this release...

Musically there is very little of interest here, Dauner plays an almost ridiculous version of John Lennon's inimitable "A Day in the Life" at least, John's part of that track, not Paul's middle passage, minus the psychedelics that would have made it a little bit more of interest.  Volker Kriegel is kind of phoning in his performance here with some lesser tracks that really don't do this majestically inventive guitarist any justice.  Same for Association P.C.'s Frau Theussien which appeared on one of the studio albums of course.  Dave Pike, George Duke, and Larry Coryell similarly.