Top 10 Local Albums of 2016

I'm a Long Island guy who grew up in Queens. I used to do a radio show highlighting "local" music (Local Insomniac Music), and a couple of public access TV shows (The Jill Morrison Show and LIMC-TV) as well.

When I talk local music, I try to keep a fairly loose definition of the word "local". For the purposes of picking a Top 10 Local Albums list, here's what I consider "local": 1. Long Island, for sure; 2. The 5 boroughs of NY (especially Brooklyn, where a lot of Long Island bands have run off to) 3. Sometimes Jersey or a little ways upstate, if the mood takes me. (I'm not giving away money or anything, so I kind of get to make up the rules as I go along). Also, if a band or artist spent a decent amount of time living on and playing on Long Island, they get to qualify, even if they've moved to another area of the country.

As for format of what constitutes an "album" I'm going by the same rules I used on my The Top 10 Albums of 2016 list --there  has to be a hard (CD copy) of the album, and it has to full-length; No EPs. allowed.

Because there's no suspense about the top slot (since we already know that Bayside took the top slot on the national list), I'm going to print this list from top to bottom. I'm thinking that next year, for the sake of suspense, I should print the local list first, but we'll see.

Top 10 Local Albums of 2016

1. Bayside - Vacancy

Anyone who has followed my mad ramblings over the years won't be surprised that this one made my Number One album of the year slot. Until such time as Paramore returns to top form (which may never happen, given the bad feelings between Hayley Williams and Josh Farro), Bayside is my favorite band of the modern rock era. Their albums usually make my Top 10, and it's not even the first time they've taken the Number One slot (they first did it back in 2008 with their excellent Shudder album). For my money, Anthony Raneri is one of the best vocalists and best songwriters out there today. This one makes Number One on the strength of  a solid album throughout, led by two particularly strong numbers, the album's lead-off song "Two Letters", a song about working out a complicated ongoing relationship with your ex (even though he doesn't like to use that term), and "Mary" which an upbeat song that seems to be a tribute to a deceased friend/fan. While "Two Letters" is a song very much in the usual Bayside style, Mary is a more danceable number in kind of a classic rock style (I'm thinking Springsteen/Joel/Mellancamp here). Anyway, for me, this is Bayside's strongest album in awhile, and that's saying something.


2. Taking Back Sunday - Tidal Wave

I almost feel bad for Taking Back Sunday, because in terms of my taste, they always seem to play the role of Alydar to Bayside's Affirmed. Seems like the two bands always release albums in the same year, and I always like the Bayside one better. But that's not a knock on TBS -- this is an excellent album, and there's even a bit of a change of sounds for them. The excellent title track, which is my favorite song on the album, almost sounds like a Clash song. I saw some speculation as to whether this would be their last album together, but I hope it isn't. They haven't put out a bad album yet.


3. School of Seven Bells - SVIIB

This is a New York City indiepop/shoegaze band that I learned about for the first time this year through the Sputnik Music website. The first track on the album "Ablaze" is a total winner. Unfortunately, the future of the group is in doubt because one of the three band members left the band a few years ago, and another one passed away this year, so for right now, the only band member left is vocalist/guitarist Alejandra Deheza.


4. Ingrid Michaelson - It Doesn't Have to Make Sense

Always good to see New York folkie/pop artist Ingrid Michaelson back on the list. For me, this is her strongest album since 2008's Be OK. She mixes her sound up a little on this one, with the playful, funky "Celebrate", "Hell No" wherein she seems to be chanelling Taylor Swift (which I wouldn't like to see as a long-term strategy, but for one song it's kind of cool), and the beautiful and poignant tribute to her mother, "I Remember Her".


5. Jeff Rosenstock - Worry.

This is Rosenstock's second year in a row on the list, following upon last year's We Cool?, with his manic brand of folk punk. My favorite number here is "Festival Song", but "I Did Something Weird Last Night" is also pretty great. In fact, the whole album is consistently good.


6. Regina Spektor - Remember Us to Life

This is another artist I only learned about this year from Sputnik, New York City anti-folk queen Regina Spector. The back of the album drags a little for me, but the front is amazing, especially the Kate Bush-esque Small Bills.


7. Nine Days - Snapshots

Good to see these guys back and making new music. Snapshots has the very recognizable Nine Days sound, which is pretty terrific. A lot of songs here about aging, family, etc. My favorites are the track that leads off the album, "Obsolete", and the title track. Welcome back, boys.


8. Amanda Jayne - Strike a Match

This is a Long Island acoustic artist with a cool, under produced DIY album. Her best track by far is the excellent "One" (for which she also has a very clever and funny video). I found about her in the weirdest way -- a friend of hers was running for my local schoolboard, and he had a link on his Facebook page. I'm glad I researched him, and that I followed the link.


9. Miles to Dayton - Forces Unknown

These guys have been making excellent music in the americana genre for years now, and it's not the first time they've made my list. My favorite track here is an upbeat number called "You Are".


10. They Might Be Giants - Phone Power

An album of songs from their Dial-a-Song service, with tracks about armageddon, murderous Lovecraftian monsters from another dimension and time traveling assassins. I particularly love "Trouble Awful Devil Evil", wherein the singer  blissfully descends into Hell for thousand of years, unaware of the apocalypse taking place around him.


Thanks again to anyone who took the time to read this list. I should have the Top Songs of 2016 list posted withing the next few days.

Top 10 Albums of 2016

I'm still actually finalizing my Top 20 Songs list, but I figured why not go ahead and publish this one.

Here are the rules for what is eligible: It has to be a full-length album of at least 7 songs (unless you've got one or more epic-length songs). No EPs. It also has to be all by one artist -- no compilations. And although I know one of these days I'll have to change this (maybe next year? I don't know, more artists every year are only putting out cost-saving digital copies of their albums, especially independent artists, so we'll see), but I'm still old school, so for now, at least, I have to have a physical copy of the album on CD. I won't count it if I can only get a digital version.

In 2016, I listened to 75+ albums to put together this list. I tried to include a variety of genres, but my tastes are what they are -- I like classical, but no classical albums were included. I don't much like pure hip-hop or jazz, although I did listen to one jazz album this year, but I just don't enjoy/understand those genres. (Some of the rock was a little hip-hop tinged, though, e.g. Twenty One Pilots). I listened to a couple of metal albums this year, and they were OK, but they didn't make this list.  I didn't include any straight country, although some of the artists I listened to produced country-tinged rock. But this year, none of them made the list either. And of course, it's all based on my taste. It's all about what I liked, and what I thought was good.

So from 10th through first, here's my list:

Top 10 Albums of 2016:

10.  Phantogram - Three

Phantogram is a male/female duo from upstate, NY. They almost made the Top 10 list in 2014 for their Voices album. The music is kind of electro-rock. The best song on here is one called "Run Run Blood": "Hey wolf, there's lions in here/There's lions in here, there's lions in here".


9.  The Jezabels - Synthia

This is a band I learned about on the Sputnik Music site. They're a female-fronted indie rock band from Australia. They mix it up pretty well in terms of the styles and speeds of their songs, making the album a pretty satisfying listen. I'm not 100% sure, but their song "My Love Is My Disease" is in contention for my Top 20 Songs list. It's right on the brink, so I'm not sure if it will make it or not.


8. The Mowgli's - Where'd Your Weekend Go?

This is the second year in a row this band made my Top 10 Albums list, so you know they're doing something I like. These guys are alt rockers from Los Angeles, and their music is a throwback to the days of hippy rock like Jefferson Airplane, mixed with pop rock harmonies reminiscent of The Cowsills. They've mostly got an upbeat, happy vibe, although the lyrics on some of the songs this time around are a little darker. For example, the best song on this one is a track called "Alone Sometimes", which about sitting home alone and getting drunk on Johnny Walker after the end of a toxic relationship. Good times, good times.


7.  Night Riots - Love Gloom

These guys made my Top 20 Songs list last year with their song "Break" from the Howl EP.  They're an alt rock band from the Central Coast of California, and they sound to be heavily influenced by The Killers, with maybe a little bit of Vampire Weekend thrown in. My favorite number on this one is a song that takes a shot at big-headed celebrities and rock stars called "Nothing Personal": "I'll be the king, you'll be the filth I was away/Nothing personal, personal, personal."


6. Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool

I have to admit, I haven't been a big fan of this band in the past. I always liked the song "Creep" from their Pablo Honey album, but nothing else I heard by them ever grabbed me until now. But these guys are so worshiped on the Sputnik site that I felt this was the year to give them another chance, and I'm glad I did. I'm kind of on the borderline with their vocalist, Thom Yorke (which may be what put me off them for so long), but the music here is complex and beautiful, to the point that I'm thinking that maybe these guys are the truest heirs to Pink Floyd that I've heard yet. So now I'm going to have to go back through their discography and give them another listen. Anyway, this album is a total winner.


5. Garbage - Strange Little Birds

I've always been an admirer of this band, but at first, this album left me a little flat -- I felt like there were more sounds and snippets here than actual songs. However, this is one of those albums that really grew on me with repeated listens, and while I don't like it quite as much as 2012's Not Your Kind of People, it's still a pretty damn good album. "Empty" is my favorite track here, which was deservedly released as the album's single. And as fans of the short-lived TV show already know, Shirley Manson is still the best Terminator ever.


4. Tegan and Sara - Love You to Death

This album has been criticized as sounding pretty much exactly like their last album, 2013's Heartthrob, and the band is definitely guilty as charged. But that album made my Top 10 of the Year list, and this one does too. What can I say, these Canadian twin sisters know how to make catchy alternapop songs, and I'm not tired of it. "Boyfriend" was the first single from the album, and it's also the album's strongest track. Go, Canada, go!


3.  Against the Current - In Our Bones

I'm so proud of these guys! This is an alternapop band from Poughkeepsie, NY, fronted by a tiny little girl with a big voice, Chrissy Costanza. I thought their Gravity EP from last year showed a lot of potential, but a lot of bands never take that next step. This one did. This is an album full of manic 20-something energy, driven by a pair of youth anthems, "Young & Relentless" and "Running With the Wild Things". Alternative Press called this album "pop rock perfection", and I'd have to agree.


2. Andy Black - The Shadow Side

For most of the year, I thought this was going to be my #1, and that would have been fine. Andy Black is actually Andy Biersack, the lead singer of Black Veil Brides. Unfortunately, I think this album has fallen a little bit into a crack commercially -- it's not rocky enough for Black Veil Bride fans, and alternative pop fans who would be its most natural audience just haven't discovered it. Too bad, because this album is a winner from beginning to end. My favorite track is "Stay Alive" (which features Matt Skiba of Alkaline Trio/Blink-182 fame), but there are a number of treats here, including the single "We Don't Have to Dance" and the song "Ribcage": ("Nothing in the cage of my ribcage/Got no heart to break, like it that way"). Black has long been one of my favorite vocalists, and I really like the direction he went in on this album.


1. Bayside - Vacancy

Anyone who has followed my mad ramblings over the years won't be surprised that this one made my Number One album of the year slot. Until such time as Paramore returns to top form (which may never happen, given the bad feelings between Hayley Williams and Josh Farro), Bayside is my favorite band of the modern rock era. Their albums usually make my Top 10, and it's not even the first time they've taken the Number One slot (they first did it back in 2008 with their excellent Shudder album). For my money, Anthony Raneri is one of the best vocalists and best songwriters out there today. This one makes Number One on the strength of  a solid album throughout, led by two particularly strong numbers, the album's lead-off song "Two Letters", a song about working out a complicated ongoing relationship with your ex (even though he doesn't like to use that term), and "Mary" which an upbeat song that seems to be a tribute to a deceased friend/fan. While "Two Letters" is a song very much in the usual Bayside style, Mary is a more danceable number in kind of a classic rock style (I'm thinking Springsteen/Joel/Mellancamp here). Anyway, for me, this is Bayside's strongest album in awhile, and that's saying something.


So that does it for my Top 10 Albums of 2016. I'll be posting my Top 10 Local Albums in a day or so, but notice we have some drama here -- unlike last year, I only had one local artist (Bayside) on my Top 20 Album list, so there will be plenty of new blood on the Local Albums list.

Review of Tangerine Dream's "Firestarter"

I posted this review earlier this morning on the Sputnik Music website.

Review Summary: This instrumental soundtrack album by Tangerine Dream does a much better job of telling the story of Stephen King's novel than the film for which it was created.

Firestarter began as a novel by the prolific horror and science fiction writer Stephen King. It tells the story of Andy McGee and his preadolescent daughter Charlene "Charlie" McGee, as they attempt to escape the clutches of both a sinister government agency known as The Shop and the deranged government hitman Rainbird who works for it. 

Years earlier, as a college student in need of money, Andy was part of a college experiment secretly run by The Shop. He and other students were given a drug called Lot 6. All of the other volunteers had horrible reactions to the chemical, except for Andy and an attractive young woman named Vicky Tomlinson. Somehow, Andy and Vicky connected telepathically, which seemed to protect them from the more toxic effects of Lot 6, but the result of the experiment was that each developed certain powers -- Vicky developed a slight telekinetic ability, while Andy gained a power he refers to as the "push", which allows him to force someone to do what he tells them, but causes him migraines and tiny brain hemhorrages every time he uses it. A decade later, Andy and Vicky have married and produced a daughter named Charlie who struggles to suppress a pyrokinetic ability that flares up when she becomes upset -- she is the "firestarter" of the book's title. At the beginning of the novel, Vicky has already been murdered by Shop agents who want to take Charlie into their lab for experimentation, and Andy and Charlie are on the run.

The book is a decent King novel; it's not one of his best, but it has its pleasures. Chief among them are the three strong characters at the center of the story -- Andy, who grieves for his wife, and struggles to keep his daughter safe; Rainbird, a Native American war veteran and killer-for-hire, who wants Charlie for his own demented purposes; and young Charlie herself, who evolves from a frightened child at the beginning of the book to a force to be reckoned with by its end. Unfortunately, the film is a mess, due mostly to a combination of shoddy writing and the poor casting of Drew Barrymore, fresh off of her role in the movie E.T., who was just too young to play Charlie effectively. The one bright spot in the film, however, is the hypnotic soundtrack written and performed by the German synthesizer band Tangerine Dream.

I don't remember anymore if this was my first exposure to Tangerine Dream. I suspect I might have already been familiar with them from the dark soundtrack album of the William Friedkin film Sorcerer. Regardless, after seeing Firestarter, I was blown away by the beauty and power of their music.

At the time of this album, Tangerine Dream had been in existence for 14 years, with 21 albums including four previous soundtracks, to their credit. The band's roster for Firestarter consisted of founding member Edgar Froese, Christopher Franke, who was a member of Tangerine Dream from 1971-1987, and Johannes Schmoelling, who was with the group from 1979-1985. So by the time of this album's release, this particular lineup had been in place for 5 years already, and their experience working together shows.

Emotionally, this album tells the story of Firestarter in a way that the film doesn't come close to. The music is all instrumental. The first track on the album, "Crystal Voice", is the movie's main theme. It starts simply, with the first synthesizer slowly playing 4 notes in 4/4 time, each of the notes held for a full measure. This is the spine of the song, around which the other keyboards and synthesizers gradually coil their own music. The track is mesmerizing -- sad and beautiful at the same time. This theme presents itself in different forms, fast and slow, throughout the rest of the album.

Different songs present different parts of the story of the film (although interestingly enough, having just watched the movie again before writing this review, the filmmaker doesn't seem to always use the various songs in the actual parts of the film for which they were intended). "Testlab" is a dreamy, somewhat psychedelic number that represents the connection that Andy and Vicky make with one another after they are injected with Lot 6. In the movie, we see a flashback of them as they clasp hands and begin to hear each other's thoughts. The music is full of wonder, helping you to feel what they feel as they make this mystical connection, understanding one another on a deeper level than most human beings are ever able to experience. Through their confusion, we can actually hear them fall in love.

Several of the tracks such as "The Run" and "Escaping Point" are tense numbers, as Rainbird and the Shop agents repeatedly chase down and corner Andy and Charlie, only to be foiled, first by Andy's pushes, and then by Charlie's increasingly powerful pyrotechnics, until they are captured at last at Chimney Rock Lake.

The highlight of the album is a song titled "Charly the Kid". It begins with a repeat of swirling synthesizer music taken from the movie's main theme, but the sound is a little faster here, and warmer. It is the song that most represents Charlie -- we feel her essential goodness, even as The Shop tries to weaponize her powers and turn her into a monster. We also feel her uniqueness -- Charlie is a very special little girl. The music has a sense of the fantastic about it. In the film, it's used for the parts of the story where Charlie is at her happiest, such as when she and her father manage to temporarily shake The Shop's agents for a brief respite at her grandfather's lakefront cabin.

There are various aural treats throughout the album, such as the hypnotic electronic percussive pattern that asserts itself during "Escaping Point", or some of the high-pitched twirling music laid over the under-theme of "Rainbird's Move". I don't pretend to be familiar with all of Tangerine Dream's work -- over the years, they have released over one hundred albums, and even after Edgar Froese's death in 2015, some version of the group continues to this day. However, of the work that I am familiar with, I can definitively say that Firestarter is my favorite Tangerine Dream album.

The Firestarter novel has a lot going for it, and one of these days someone is going to make a film version that does the book justice. (The 2002 two-part television sequel didn't come close to nailing it either). Luckily, this album is a great deal better than the movie it was created for.


Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Various 2016 Best Of Lists News

The lists, they are a' coming. It usually takes me until March to finish my Best Of lists for the previous year (I know, pathetic, right?) But this year, I've stepped up my game, at least a little.

At this point, I know what my Top 10 Albums of 2016 and my Top 10 Local Albums of 2016 are. I'm feverishly working on my Top 20 Songs of 2016 list. As soon as I've got that worked out, I'll start to publish. (It's currently down to 54 songs, and I'm listening to keep eliminating songs even as I type this).

I know, no one really cares, since my Mom is passed away (and to be honest, she wouldn't have given a rat's patootie either), but OCD being what it is, I still look forward to publishing my lists every year.

So that's it. I have no real news to tell you yet. The post title was just a shameless teaser. The only thing I will tell you is, unlike my many reviews, which I publish on Sputnik Music first and then copy them here, my lists will appear on this blog first before I post them on Sputnik (and there will be more details about each choice here).

I'll also have a few honorable mentions here that won't make it to Sputnik.

So that's it.

You guys can go. For now.

Review of Hey Violet's "I Can Feel It"

I posted this review to the Sputnik Music web site 2 days ago.

Review Summary: This is an EP full of tasty pop punk from this mostly-female Los Angeles band.

Hey Violet is one of those bands that grew out of the ashes of another band. In this case, their predecessor was Cherri Bomb, a 4-girl Los Angeles-based band made up of four young teens, Julia Pierce (lead vocals and lead guitar), Miranda Miller (rhythm guitar, keyboard and vocals), Rena Lovelis (bass and vocals), and Nia Lovelis (drums and vocals). They released one somewhat successful LP in 2012, opened for bands like Bush, Foo Fighters, Smashing Pumpkins and Staind, and played at several European festivals. Then Pierce left the band over artistic differences, the band moved Rena Lovelis to lead vocals, they hired guitarist Casey Moreta (the first male to join the band), and renamed themselves Hey Violet. 

I Can Feel It was the first recording they released as Hey Violet. It's a 5-song EP. In comparison to Cherri Bomb, the music here is less hard rock and more pop punk. Lovelis does a good job as lead vocalist -- Pierce's voice sounds more trained, but Lovelis' voice is just as inviting, and she's perfectly capable of belting it on the faster, harder numbers. More importantly, there's a joy to the music here that was missing on the Cherri Bomb LP. Hey Violet are the cover band for this month's issue of Alternative Press, and according to the corresponding story, the main issue between Pierce and the rest of her bandmates was that all but Pierce wanted to move in more of a pop direction. The music they're making here feels and sounds like the music of a band making the music they want to make.

The standout track on the EP is the last one, "You Don't Love Me Like You Should". It's the fastest song on the album, and the punkiest. Although the lyrics tell the tale of a love gone wrong, the music is driving and upbeat in a way that makes you smile and tap your feet, especially on the chorus, as the Lovelis sisters and Miller chirp "You better wake up soon and realize/Cause I feel misunderstood/You don't love me like you should/You don't love me like you should!" This one actually made my Top 20 Songs of 2015 list, both for its energy and its fun factor.

My second favorite track is "Can't Take Back the Bullet". This one is a mid-tempo number about regret after breaking off a relationship. It's another song with a strong chorus: "All bets off/Once the gun goes off/Cause you can't take back/Take back the bullet". The guitar riffs on this one are a little more classic rock than punk. The title track, "I Can Feel It", another driving rock number, is also a winner.

Since releasing I Can Feel It, Hey Violet hired a new bass player, Ian Shipp, and released a second EP, Brand New Moves, which moves them even further in the pop rock direction. 2017 will be a big year them, with their AP cover story and a new full-length album on the way. I'm hoping it will be a good one, but I'll keep enjoying their I Can Feel It EP either way.


Rating: 4/5 stars

Review of Bess Rogers' "Travel Back"

I posted this review earlier tonight on the Sputnik Music website. I based a lot of it on a review of a live performance by Lelia Broussard and Bess Rogers that I wrote in 2009 which was published in Aural Fix.


I first met Bess Rogers in a small Long Island coffee shop where I used to go for live music. Rogers was a teenager at the time, and sometimes after whoever was playing that night would finish their show, she would noodle around on the guitar as things wound down. Eventually, she worked up the courage to book her own show, and played it on an unamplified acoustic guitar so that we all had to sit really close in order to hear her. 

Over the next few years, I'd see her name here and there advertised for shows by different acoustic venues in different parts of the Island. She put out a couple of EPs that I got my hands on, and sometimes I'd give her some airplay on a show I did on a local community radio station. Then in 2007, she put out a full-length album called Decisions Based on Information, and I was blown away by the growth that I heard. I started giving her more frequent airplay, and her CD came close to making my Top 10 Local Albums of the Year list for that year.

Eventually, Rogers moved to Brooklyn (along with many quality Long Island artists) and in 2009, she released a 6-song EP called Travel Back. Once again I was amazed to hear how much further she'd come as both a singer and a songwriter. Shortly thereafter, I caught her on TV as part of Ingrid Michaelson's band performing in the Live from the Artist's Den series, and I realized she'd been getting some great experience out on the road, both as an original artist and as a regular member of Michaelson's band. And while I was and still am an admirer of Michaelson, in some ways, I feel like Rogers' recorded work has been surpassing hers since the release of this EP.

All six songs on Travel Back are really good. The style falls somewhere in the indie rock/indie pop range, with some nice vocal harmonies sprinkled throughout. The album is smartly produced, especially for an independent release.

The standout is the title track, "Travel Back". It's an upbeat, toe-tapping number that makes excellent use of ukulele and features a peppy vo-do-de-o vocal style where certain words are stretched to an extra syllable or two (e.g. "you" becomes "You-oo"). And although it's a love-gone-wrong song, the chorus is so damned catchy it's impossible not to smile, as the singer declares "Even if I could travel back, travel back, travel back/With all the knowledge that I have/I would still be falling for you." The song is so good, I'm surprised that some better known artist with a bigger publicity machine hasn't covered it and turned it into a hit single.

Another song I really like is "Yellow Bird". This is a slow, gentle acoustic number that offers the most beautiful vocal harmonies on the album. Musically, there's nothing particularly innovative about this one, but it's so pretty that I don't care.

Over the last few years, in addition to her solo career, Rogers has participated in a number of side projects, including the electronic bands The Age of Rockets and The Robot Explosion, and the electric/acoustic band The Secret Someones. She also had a song selected for an ad campaign for Cheerios in 2013. Travel Back, however, was the first release where she really started fully showing her musical chops.

Review of Ian Anderson's "Walk Into Light"

I posted this review late last night/early this morning on the Sputnik Music website. The references to album ratings within the review refers to album ratings on Sputnik.

Review Summary: This album is an undiscovered gem from Ian Anderson's much-maligned synthesizer period.

Walk Into Light (1983) was Ian Anderson's first solo album. Although it was ignored by many Jethro Tull fans, and disparaged by many others, I consider it one of the hidden gems of Anderson's storied career.

Ian Anderson/Jethro Tull's synthesizer period was one of the least popular periods in the band's history for many fans. As the 1970s moved towards their conclusion, the musical landscape was undergoing an alteration away from guitar-driven and progressive rock towards a more simple synthpop sound. Anderson and Tull were just ending their Renaissance/English rustic period, which began with Songs From the Wood (1977) and continued through Heavy Horses (1978). Anderson could see the times were changing, and he was determined to keep up. Although Storm Watch (1978) is considered to be the third album in this folk trilogy, it was also the first record where he started incorporating synthesizer elements. Following this album, Anderson announced his plans to begin work on a solo album, at which point several members of Jethro Tull left the band. Although he retained the remaining Tull members, guitarist Martin Barre and bass player Dave Pegg, to work on his new project, he intended to create an album with a very different sound from that of Jethro Tull, one where the use of electronic music was prominent. Consequently, he hired Eddie Jobson to play synthesizers and electric violin, and rounded out his lineup with Mark Craney on drums. After much pressure from the record company, though, the resulting album, A (1980), was eventually released under the Jethro Tull moniker. 

Following A, Jobson, who had never been an official band member, left Tull, and was replaced on keyboards by Peter-John Vettese for their next album, Broadsword and the Beast. Anderson must have liked what he heard from Vettese, because after Broadsword he invited Vettese to collaborate with him on his next project, the solo album that would become Walk Into Light.

I won't lie. Walk Into Light wasn't well received. In fact, by most people, it wasn't received at all. There was very little marketing done for the album, and I suspect that many Tull fans never even knew it existed (and some still don't). The evidence on this website is overwhelming -- while the lowest number of ratings for any of Jethro Tull's various studio albums is 69 for 1991's Catfish Rising, Walk Into Light has only been rated eight times. Even among Anderson's solo albums, this is the lowest number. However, while the album's average rating is currently only 2.4, when you look a little more closely, you see something interesting: Of the eight ratings (which is admittedly a small sample size), four people rated the album 1.5 or lower, but the other four all rated it 3.5 or higher. In other words, there is no middle ground -- people either hated the album, or they thought it was great. So either those who rated it low are missing something, or those of us who rated it high are delusional.

Time to talk about the music. (Finally, right?) What can I say, I think this is an excellent album. All of the music on it was both written and played by Anderson and Vettese -- there are no other credited musicians. There's not as much flute as there is on most Jethro Tull albums, or on Anderson's later solo work, and the drums are all electronic. There's not even all that much guitar. It's a keyboard and synthesizer dominated album, so much so that Anderson helps Vettese out by playing some of the keyboards himself.

Vettese's synthesizer sound is a little less sweeping than that of such '70s idols as Rick Wakeman, Keith Emerson or Patrick Moraz, but it's no less grand. At times, it's delightful -- the introduction to the album's opening number "Fly By Night" never fails to bring a smile to my face, and the sound he uses on the track "Trains" has the lighthearted feel of a '70s romantic comedy. At other times, the sound is vaguely menacing, as on tracks such as "Toad in the Hole" or "Black and White Television". Then there are times when the sound becomes out-and-out dark, as it is on "Different Germany". 

As for Anderson, he has a ball experimenting with electronic vocal effects, particularly on the title track "Walk Into Light". His trademark sense of humor is somewhat subdued on this album, although it comes through in certain songs like "Trains", where he and his daily traveling mates build their lives around commuter trains, eating, socializing with one another and even flirting with the ladies, to the point where they offer to chip in and pay an attractive woman's fare just because they want her to ride with them.

As the album progresses, however, his lyrics become more paranoid and pessimistic. By the song "Looking for Eden", Anderson is looking fondly back to simpler times because he's tired of living his life "in free-fall". By the next song, "User-Friendly", it becomes clear that he's using Vettese's modernistic (for the times) sounds to express his fears of the computer age. "Do we inhabit some micro-space, and interface through wires?" he asks, and concludes that his various electronic devices are bit by bit stealing his mind.

He saves his darkest fears for the album's last song "Different Germany", though. At a time when German reunification was beginning to be discussed as a possibility, Anderson, like many Europeans, wondered what this would bring. "History repeats somehow," he frets in this song, as he withers under the stares of "clean-cut boys all dressed as men/in sharpened uniform." Pretty somber stuff, although I get the impression that for Anderson, this is a typical day's musing, considering he ended the A album with a wistful farewell song to a world that was just ended by a nuclear holocaust.

After Walk Into Light, Anderson continued his flirtation with synthesizer music for one more Jethro Tull album, the poorly received Under Wraps, which was Vettese's last album as a member of the band (although he did add some keyboards to Tull's 1989 album Rock Island). I also liked Under Wraps better than did a lot of Tull fans, but that's a story for another review. I'd have to say, though, that for me, Walk Into Light was the best and most consistent album overall from Ian Anderson's synthesizer period. I listened to it repeatedly to prepare for this review, and I can honestly say I enjoyed it as much now as I did when it first came out. It's clearly not an album for everybody, but if you're a fan of both Ian Anderson and of synthesizer music, I'd suggest you give it a listen. You might find that you appreciate it as much as myself and those three other adoring Ian Anderson fans who rated it at 3.5 or higher.


Rating: 3.5/5 stars