Christgau's Consumer Guide Grade List: A+

I didn’t like Young Americans when I first heard it, which was the Ryko reissue. I didn’t dislike it, I just felt neutral towards it, so I ended up selling it. Some years later, I bought the Parlophone reissue, and now I love it. I dunno how much of that is due to the mastering, or how much is due to how my feelings about it have changed over the intervening years, but I find it thrilling in a way I definitely didn’t before.

(Also, the Ryko CD was hilariously packaged in a CD holder/display unit, coupled with a “bonus” CD of “Fame” remixes, which were all essentially worthless.)

so many damn rhythm guitars recorded!

"Fascination," my favorite album track, is essentially transformed.

Cool, I'll try it, thanks! A strange gap for me, but yknow 70s and here came all the young dudes, flooding the news, and I was ballin' on a budget (though I did manage to buy or hear everything else from that era, mostly for better, sometimes for worse)

Every other Bowie album from that era, I mean.

Looked for Parlophone version on Amazon, seeing customer reviews of several editions all together: Are you referring to, say, the 2016 remaster, also associated w Rhino? If so, favorable comments on that.

I should look at discogs, but the ads have been crashing my old computer lately.

2016 yeah

The 2016 Parlophone remasters were distributed by Rhino in the U.S., but yeah, same mastering.

The new 2016 remaster is also the best digital mastering of Young Americans because the Rykodisc CD accidentally used alternate mixes for half of the tracks. Rykodisc used what they thought was the best-sounding tape without realizing the mix was actually different. (The songs with the original mixes were sourced from a production copy. It's possible the original master tape for Young Americans has been lost since the '70s or '80s, unless they found them for the new remaster - I was under the impression they hadn't.)

Very cool, thanks, guys.

OMG, yall are right! Just listened: Phlly Soul as proto-alt.r&b, Bowie and Vandross and other voices swimming in the bass, in the buttermilk, developmental and accomplished. Ancestry of BlackStar, even.

Really some peak work of Vandross, seems like, though I'm far from expert. Anybody heard his 70s (60s?) band Luther?

Judge for yourself how much of Vandross' composition Bowie used:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Plr5r-RmFp4

Oho, never heard him do anything like that before, can imagine Nicky Siano spinning it at The Gallery (hopefully there's more on the album, and this is the radio edit, developing to a peak, sticking around just long enough to make sure it's registered, then "Get up" and gone).
Maybe Young Americans got mixed reviews because it didn't sound like the 2016 mix? Wild details:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Americans#cite_note-CG81-49

Just to clarity, the 2016 reissue is a new mastering, not a new mix. In fact, it's the original mix that was used on the original LP as well as most CD releases.

The only exception is the Rykodisc CD which used alternate mixes on some (but not all) tracks.

FWIW, mastering is just the process of cutting the final mixdown on to a vinyl record or "encoding" it for digital release. At minimum it's just transferring to the relevant medium (and in the case of vinyl, making sure it can play back properly since it's much more complicated to do). But mastering can also entail a lot of aesthetic choices (or destructive revisionist choices, sadly) like EQ, additional compression, and other processing. Mixing is kind of like editing in a movie, and mastering is kind of like the color correction and finishing you need to do when creating the DCP or film prints.

Thanks. Seems like this 2016 master might possibly have been an influence on the new Bowie trib Modern Love, which also has me imagining a 90s Red Hot + Bowie, with cosmopolitan R&B voices x synths gliding through each other--and, right after hearing this remastered original, was esp. struck by the way Khruangbin's cover of "Right" stands on its own (unlike several fairly meh tracks before it).
Contributors seek to bring out the Bo's soul, funk, jazz and gospel traits---this last in the nay-saying, yet "Get me to the church on time" of the title track so gospel not gospel?!
Mostly they go for less-obvious, and often less-well sung originals, a or the major exception on both counts being We Are KING's "Space Oddity," with fun production, but the cool voices keep a lid on excitement, as his herky-jerky fervency def didn't.
Modern jazz development of "Heroes" (centered around also cool but affecting singing of Michael Taveres) is the damndest thing/honors the original (this would be yer Hal Willner 90s track)(Not jazz but also w appropriate and decided difference from orig.:Léa Sen's "Golden Years."
Since I'm in this deep, Ill say that my favorite playlist from this, because cohesively eerie and intense and mobile, is:
2.Sound and Vision – Helado Negro 03:21
7.Right – Khruangbin 05:08
10.Move On – L’Rain 04:00
14.Golden Years – Léa Sen 02:56
15.Fantastic Voyage – Meshell Ndegeocello 03:58
17.Heroes – Matthew Tavares 08:41
Also like these, which can work interspersed with those:
8.Silly Boy Blue – Nia Andrews 02:37
9.Chant of the Ever Circling Skeletal Family – Foxtrott 03:11
11.Modern Love – Jonah Mutono 03:19
12.Where Are We Now – Bullion 03:31
13.Tnght – Eddie Chacon, John Carroll Kirby 03:35
https://bbemusic.bandcamp.com/album/modern-love
Also RIYL Moses Boyd's jazzoid Dark Matter, which suggest some shadings of early Massive Attack and Soul II Soul and maybe Bowie-Eno

I liked this line in his Lou Reed (covers) CG review today: "Equally impressive is the lyricism of such varied female admirers as June Tabor, Rachel Sweet, Tracey Thorn, and Susanna Hoffs all singing as if Nico has never crossed their minds."

FWIW, Christgau now says he's downgraded Marshall Crenshaw's Field Day to a solid A, but suggests he'd add two Beatles albums, writing "How could I not nominate the two I put on my Rolling Stone list: Sgt. Pepper and The Beatles’ Second Album, the latter of which most Beatles scholars don’t believe counts [because it's a Capitol/US reconfiguration of a UK release] if they even acknowledge it exists?"

Fab! My own fave rave US Beatles cobble---in late 70s, used to play it at parties between Bollocks and B-52s debut:

Beatles VI includes two tracks featuring searing John Lennon vocals, recorded specifically for the North American market:[5] "Bad Boy" and "Dizzy Miss Lizzy", both covers of Larry Williams songs, and both recorded on Williams' birthday (10 May 1965), marking perhaps the only time that the Beatles recorded material especially for North America. "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" was part of the set of their 1965 US concerts and was soon included on the British release of the Help! album, but "Bad Boy" was not released in the United Kingdom or anywhere else in the world until 1966, when it appeared on the compilation A Collection of Beatles Oldies. These two songs, along with "Act Naturally" the following month, were the last cover songs recorded and released by the Beatles until "Maggie Mae" appeared on the Let It Be album in 1970.

Beatles VI also included:

the remaining six tracks from Beatles for Sale (i.e., those left off Beatles '65, although 2 such songs had been released on a single in February 1965)
"Yes It Is", the B-side to the single "Ticket to Ride". This is a "duophonic" stereo remix from the original mono track, with additional echo and reverb.
two other tracks from the forthcoming UK release of Help!: "You Like Me Too Much" and "Tell Me What You See"
As on Beatles for Sale, the "Kansas City"/"Hey-Hey-Hey-Hey!" medley was originally listed only as "Kansas City". After attorneys for Venice Music notified Capitol of its error, the record label was soon corrected, although the album cover never was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatles_VI

Note wiki links to reviews; it did not always go officially unappreciated.

Guitar Paradise of East Africa [1991, Earthworks]

Amazingly found an ancient blog post on this album from January 31, 2007 that also included a download link:
http://whatsinmyipod.blogspot.com/2007/01/guitar-paradise-of-east-africa-kenya.html

And one of the compilers ("Dave") caught wind and posted this comment 1 year and 8 months later:
"Thank you for daring to post this. As one of the compilers of this release it does my heart good to see that others enjoy this music as much as we did, sitting in dark rooms for months arguing which are the essential tracks to include. Viva Earthworks!"

Links were refreshed in 2014 - the "uloz" one still works.

I think I have that on cd.

Yeah, I do too. Bought it because of xgau's review, and liked it, but seemed more low-key than what I was hoping for, not paradise of guitarrr celebration.

from January 19 Christgau substack email:

You haven’t reviewed an Elvis Costello album since 1991 and haven’t A-listed one since 1986. Is there any hope that he will ever release an album up to your standards again? — Adam S. Fenton, Menifee, California

By “review” you seem to mean a full paragraph as opposed to an Honorable Mention sentence/clause. But Honorable Mentions are reviews by me. They represent at least three to five listens, often more while less is very unusual. Sometimes the writing is dashed off—if something succinct comes to me I thank the prose gods and go with it. Usually, however, I put real time into the first draft and go over it many times. In addition, at the bottom of my Costello page you’ll find a full-length review of his Roots show and collab written for MSN in 2013. Have played the new one once. Thought it began strong. Will return at my own pace.

In terms of the Universal era, he skipped When I Was Cruel altogether but besides the positive Roots show review he gave *** (the "highest" honorable mention) to Painted from Memory, The Delivery Man and The River in Reverse. Sounds about right though I'd probably do 'choice cuts' for the latter - some of the originals are gems, but as fine as the covers may be, I'd rather play the better known vintage recordings by Lee Dorsey et al.

(Also IIRC honorable mentions are all B+'s, or would have been pre-honorable mention, which is kind of weird but that's what he said in a recent podcast interview.)

Straying from the thread topic here, but I can't let a mention of Painted from Memory pass without repping for its sibling, The Sweetest Punch, with Bill Frisell arranging the former's songs for and fronting a truly fantastic band. A beloved album in my home.

He's got two good songs, one brushed by chamber-y strings, the other by a bridge that leads me back though his album with Bacharach, briefly, though overall the setting of this one comes off kinda Motown---they both also end up fitting pretty well into Johnny Cash--Forever Words (Expanded Edition), the 2021 re-re-issue, which finally got to 34 tracks, sailing along. It's an army of artists responding to JC's previously unset lyrics, poems, even a sample of his comments on some of that, with the words coming through clearly enough on Costello's (and all other) ventures, seeming like some directions he might have gone in or come back to if he'd lived longer. Costello does 'em his way, but okay by (non-stan) me.

some directions that Cash might have etc.

Two good new songs

Christgau top albums of 2021 list is up

how'd Wussy do?

https://robertchristgau.substack.com/p/deans-list-2021?r=khofd&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

lol Neil Young

So although preliminary listening and research persuades me that Rolling Stone had reason to put Puerto Rican pop phenom Rauw Alejandro’s Vice Versa high on its list, there’s no way he’ll ever be Olivia Rodrigo or even Harry Styles for me unless he starts singing in English (as he probably will, to exactly what effect is another matter). And while there’s no denying that Toronto’s Tamara Lindeman showcases actual songs on Pitchfork’s seventh-ranked Weather Station album Ignorance, their smug gentility reminds me all too vividly of Joan Baez putting me off lo these many decades ago. Which isn’t even to mention the impressionistic musical poesy of Pitchfork’s second-place L’Rain, or the huzzahs that greeted my old fave Jazmine Sullivan when she compensated for her songwriting drought by inviting women to contribute spoken-word accounts of their sexual travails and got album-of-the-year plaudits from Pitchfork for the dodge

Correct about Sullivan, RONG about the Weather Station.

Figures: he's always had a blind spot about Baez's better albums, and, closer to Lindeman's sound, early Joni as well. Haven't gotten into L'Rain's album, though will listen more; she's effective on the xpost Bowie trib, Modern Love.

I remember noticing a couple years back that Firesign Theatre was the first act to whom he'd awarded two A+ grades, and a friend rightly said, "how like Christgau of you to notice"

sexual travails: manages to be a lofty shit even "just" en passant; that's some A Movable Feast-level shit, class out the ass!

Something Scott Woods created, a tribute to some of Christgau's A+ albums. I'm one of the readers, fumbling my way through his Attica review--also Kevin Bozelka and a couple of others.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIIfvvDzI2w