Raul Porchetto, from 1972 to 1980 (Metegol), 6 albums

Once in a while you come across an artist that absolutely knocks you off your feet (Stevie Wonder) and this time it's this Argentinian who made a long series of albums going far into the 90s but back in the midst of the glorious seventies, produced one after another progressive-stuffed opuses of incredible songwriting, super-emotional as is always the case with latin music.  Very similar in fact to the much better known Luis Spinetta.  There's tons and tons of progressive music here, trust me.  Have a look at the discography first, and read the brief bio.  (Incidentally, the LDPD holds, the albums after and including Television (1981) are really commercial pap.)

Note the interesting bio on wiki:

Raul Porchetto (born November 15, 1949) is an Argentine musician and songwriter.  Porchetto emerged into the Acoustic movement of Argentine rock during the early 1970s releasing his debut record in 1972 following the subgenre's popular rise in the wake of the Acusticazo.  By the mid 70s he would become a member of the first and extremely ephemeral supergroup of Argentine rock, PorSuiGieco, with León Gieco, Charly García, and Nito Mestre.

For the remainder of the 1970s Porchetto released an average of one LP a year. In 1980 his sixth album Metegol featured a very innovative type of uptown-suave sounding rock, yet remaining accessible and unpretentious when listened to. Metegol sent Porchetto's career to the top of Argentine rock. The album even beat out Serú Girán's third release Bicicleta, in a yearly rock survey by newspaper Clarín and when that group was the most popular act in Argentine rock. In a similar style Porchetto released Televisión in 1981.

Mirroring the early 80s trend towards the much more light and direct rock music of the New Democracy Sound, Raul Porchetto came out with his next two album releases. 1983's Reina Madre became one of the best selling rock albums until that time. He became the best attended solo act in concerts during the first half of the 80s. His most recognized hit is 1986's "Bailando en las veredas".

But Porchetto grew tired of the Rock Star rat race. That along with his eagerness to pursue more experimental and ambitious music led his later releases following Reina Madre to be departures from his earlier sound, and more inaccessible to casual fans (one of his late 80s albums even include actual choruses singing evangelical themes). Thus they did not sell nearly as well, and by the late 1980s Porchetto had cut ties with major record labels and went indie. He has continued to come out with albums until the present day; his latest release is Dragones y Planetas (2010). During his career Raúl Porchetto earned 10 gold, two platinum and one double platinum records, becoming one of the best selling artists of all time in Argentina.

I'll just pull a couple of the most progressive songs from the 6-album set I've included so you get an idea of what I'm talking about.

The oddly-named song and oddly-chorded song called Bao Babs is from his 1976 ST album:





The atmospheric closer to (perhaps the masterpiece) Chico Cosmico, 1977, is I.C. Ciento Triente y Tres.  Be sure to listen all the way through to the end, because the last minute or so is sure to shock you completely:





Rastros de Polvo Azul, from 1978's Volando de Vida:





This is the song that literally made me fall off my chair.  A relatively ordinary electric piano opening with that odd violin or whatever buzzing in the background leads into a nice electric guitar riff followed by a chorus singing the same riff.  After about a minute and a half though, Raul starts singing a verse which is totally at odds with the preceding, not to mention, the melody, if such it may be called, is totally unlike anything ever heard in rock music before, sounding more like electric guitar solos set to music.  At the 2-minute mark, the song once again totally changes in direction with synth-strings and a slower beat leading into a kind of symphonic bridge section.  Really, a miracle in progressive songwriting, and as I said unlike anything else I've ever heard in a lifetime spent listening to this kind of stuff.  It's hard to believe.

I also am reluctant to rate these works individually, except to say that the first from 1972 definitely is a bit immature and less interesting, and the 1980 Metegol is also as one might expect much more commercial and less proggy.  But the four in the middle are simply astonishing.  Endlessly, endlessly interesting, enjoyable, full of sudden, inventive, unique ideas.

And a very good-looking guy too, as you can see from a more recent photo:

VA - Pop Jazz International from 1978, GDR

A real long lost treasure here, especially for the second side's track which fills up the whole side by a no-name, no-LP, group called Fusion with their performance of Metamorphoses.  That band was fronted by a keyboardist by the name of Wolfgang Fiedler who made a marvellous more contemporary jazz album later in the 80s called Unit, info here.  The set is rounded out with a big band number to start which is totally generic throwaway, a Jazz Q composition by Kratochvil which appeared on one of their albums in the seventies, the familiar Eberhard Weber Yellow Fields, and the side-long.  I can only sample the second track, the Jazz Q:





Enjoy side b....

Back to Eberhard Schoener with the long-lost Complicated Ladies (1982)

From the all girls orchestra we move on, or grow up, to complicated ladies.

It's quite astonishing that something so good should be so lost, and I've said that so many times before already.

First of all, we all know the artist and I was stunned earlier by the quality of Time Square and it's concept-like apparent dedication to some unknown woman.  I could say the same about this album, which is sung by Israeli artist Esther Ofarim. On the discogs page for this record, which is here, some wonderful random German reviewer made a kind of metaphorical homage to the whole without ever making specific comments about the genre or the substance of the music, quite unscientifically poetically:

[to manus-von-alles], I agree with your comment or review from 2010/12/12. I'll try it my words. The LP "Complicated Ladies" is a "strange brew". A blue cover, blue lyrics, melancholic songs wonderfully interpreted by Esther Ofarim, and electronically accompanied (or dominated ?) by Eberhard Schoener. But, it is not a blues record [obviously!! -editor], because Esther is not like Etta James or Beth Hart and Schoener is more an academic electronic painter ("Klangmaler" or "Klangtupfer") than a deep-rooted blues musician. The spotting of sounds in the song "Ballerina" is an example for this. What's my impression after comparing three songs (Call the circus, Du, Radio On) of the LP with their counterparts published in YouTube ? The LP-versions are in the direction of electronic sound-studio experiments whereas the YouTube versions are more smooth, intimate and easier to digest. Reading Schoener's german notes on the inner sleeve you get to know that the production of the LP took 18 months. That's a long time "bang". Furthermore, in his notes Schoener gives some hints about the production process. In the beginning he had the famous voice and some mysterious nontraditional lyrics. Esther should be the interpreter. But melodies were missing. Schoener could fill this gap with experimental electronic "paintings". The result is a very idealistic interpretation of modern song material embedded in electronic patterns of sounds.

The actual information content is probably nil, but as an impressionistic review for, let's say, the old Rolling Stone Magazine, the really old Rolling Stone Magazine, I guess it works, because it sounds like so many useless reviews I read in my childhood that wound up disappointing me bitterly when I later found the music had nothing to do with what was so energetically said, as if the reviewer was more enamoured with their own words than the actual reviewed music (cf. the old mutantsounds blog).  I think I can sum it up better by saying it's art rock, like let's say Roxy Music or Kate Bush is generally considered art rock, but with European chamber music or classical music and electronic influences, plus here and there touches of jazz, but not much.  There are also, on the other hand, very radio-friendly commercial songs which as usual I call throwaway even though the record companies considered those the complete opposite, the radio gems (e.g., Radio On).  We can't really call this progressive because the odd chord changes, the dissonances, the interesting arrangements, the weird sounds and bizarre melodies, all those usual appurtenances are missing.

Consider first of all the ST song, which is so beautifully written and features some really marvellous lyrics, presumably originally a poem set to music (credited to this writer):





The gorgeous acoustic piano accompaniment is by Schoener, obviously, and note those ingenious chords he uses to transition after the verse and chorus.

A track called Einmal Nur features that same lovely piano with some very atmospheric synthesizer and electric guitar decorations in keeping with the art rock genre:





Again, there is no complicated songwriting here, but the result is quite interesting and goes far beyond the usual radio staple.

Marc Huard and the All Girl Orchestra in Themes and Melodies, "say it with your heart"

I would have liked to see an image of this so-called all girl orchestra, preferably somewhat lacking in clothing, to verify if the advertisement is true or just a dumb gimmick, but nothing shows up on the back leading me to the latter disappointing conclusion.

Easy listening played by orchestra (like, duh) by this artist who has appeared before in connection with the Noel Chotem arrangements LPs.  There is a wide variety of themes and melodies but they boil down to the generic chord changes and sounds that are a feature of this particular genre, which never really attempted to break into progressive territory except when fusion or jazz artists approached it from their own side of the dancehall, I think for example of Joachim Kuhn on Cinemascope's great closer Black Tears.  The ending to that song with its astonishing pianistic cataracts leads into a totally easy listening passage with the high-pitched string section and almost standard chord changes but thanks to the immense creativity of Joachim, soars far beyond anything from the traditional elevator muzak playlist, youtube link here.  Anyways, that piece has nothing to do with today's entry.  On this album, there is the very delicate and lovely song called Mystic Land:





Which reminds me a bit of the great Alan Hawkshaw's most brilliant phase in the mid-seventies, when he made his Road Forward album with Strangelands, Mystic Voyage, etc.  I can't believe I never made a post dedicated purely to Alan Hawkshaw so far.  I guess in a way he's just too brilliant to touch.  When I mentioned to my wife how Hawkshaw is without much controversy the greatest library composer, and that there are still Hawkshaws missing, her answer was, "are they all Elvis impersonators?"  Oh the joy of marriage.

A rare VA Italian library from 1974, Astrofisica (Il Cielo)

In the midst of containment, lockdowns, quarantines, isolations, cancellations and coronascares, let's try to remember the glory of Italian library albums and their blissful beneficence like the touch of a great and tender sainted pope from albums along the lines of Gianni Marchetti, Oscar Rocchi, Marco Persichetti, A.R. Luciani, and of course OST composer Ennio Morricone, the inimitable one.  And let's feel happy for those Italians who were so unhappy with us tourists in the past and now are lucky enough to have all their beautiful cities to themselves: Venice or Milan or anywhere else they despise the millions of tourists who prop up their economies.  Of course we will all be in the same position as them, and the poor people of Wuhan, China, very soon...  Unfortunately the music here is quite abstract and concrete, along the lines of that library that everyone constantly asks me to reupload from years ago, I don't even remember its name.  Note the composers involved in the database, here.
Telescopi, a composition by Bozzalla:





An expensive rarity that really, to my ears, doesn't deserve to be.

And finally everybody remember the following:

Please don't panic.
More importantly, please don't be calm.
At this time the risk for the domestic dog species is considered to be low.
Continue with daily life as before.
Pretend nothing has changed.
We will continue to closely monitor the situation and update things because they are changing dramatically every day.
We have vomited up everything, out of an abundance of caution.
Do not buy, use, sell, or put on any kind of mask whether surgical, N95, or cat-whiskered, unless you are about to die in the next few seconds.
Please, do not hoard toilet paper.  You can use your hands. And it will be of no use to you anyways when you are on a respirator in ICU drowning in infectious fluids filling your gasping, dying lungs, suffocating on a dumb bat virus.

Viral videos, you youtubers?
Viral lives...