Every so often (OK, fairly regularly) I pull out a record with a name that seems vaguely familiar only to realize that I am way out of my depth. Peter Hammill has a long, storied, and critically acclaimed career that is pretty much the reason they invented things like Wikipedia and Allmusic.com. I mean, you could spend days going down various Peter Hammill rabbit-holes on the Internet. You could take a master's level course on Peter Hammill - maybe people already do, I wouldn't be surprised. Not only did he co-found the much-lauded British prog band Van der Graaf Generator, which has released thirteen studio albums and several live albums between 1969 and now (and which I don't know nearly enough about), but he has a rich and varied solo career as well. In fact, the guy just released his thirty-second solo album at the end of 2014, and that's not counting live albums, such as this gem we have right here.
I feel like I should spend the next few months listening to only Peter Hammill-affiliated music and then come back and write a proper blog post, but I've already begun this, so we'll have to call it good and, as the KCMU staff of 1985 wisely did, leave the rest to Jonathan - who, it must be said, composed the first hand-written album cover review with a footnote I have seen in my years writing these posts.
"Jonathan should really comment on this, not I. All I have to say is the man's got brains in his head.""2 disks. Both great."
"Actually I shouldn't comment cos this man can do no wrong in my eyes. a totally unique, undilluted (?two L's?) [nope, just the one] visionary... some of this stuff might be a bit 'prog-rock'[1] for some but there is no doubting the cathartic qualities of his material. That's soul to you. Try 'Stranger still,' The Future Now,' 'Sign' & the epic, if you have the time: 'Flight.'"1: 'Sitting Targets' for example."
The KCMU reaction to this 1990 album by New York punks Alice Donut is, as often happens in college-radio-land, quite varied, from "their best yet" to "a step back." For what it's worth, the historical record, as far as my quick survey has revealed, seems to lean toward the opinion that Mule, the ba…
Sometimes, even when you're an ever-so-independently-minded DJ at a fancy college radio station in the '80s, you just want some AC/DC. I like to think that whoever brought this little gem - the band's first live album, and the sixth album they released between 1975 and 1978 - into the station grinn…
