Music

A Deluge Of Music From Transatlantic

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Prog supergroup Transatlantic (Mike Portnoy, Neal Morse, Pete Trewavas, and Roine Stolt) are releasing their fifth album next month, and it is an unprecedented project. Fans have a choice of not one, but TWO versions of the new album, entitled The Absolute Universe – a two-disc edition and a single-disc one, or a huge 5-LP, 3-CD, Blu-Ray boxset that includes both. In case you’re assuming the single-disc album is merely an edited, shorter version of the two-disc one, let me set you straight: these are two different albums that share some of the same musical themes and a few songs.

Let’s start with the single-disc version, The Breath of Life. The most obvious comparison is to Transatlantic’s third album, The Whirlwind, because TBOL is also one long song divided into sections. I think it is superior to The Whirlwind due to a greater variety of melodies and musical styles. The band has never sounded tighter, either. Portnoy’s drum work is phenomenal, particularly on the King Crimsonesque Owl Howl. All the members take lead vocals for various sections, and they all contribute music compositions. Trewavas’ Solitude is an especially nice passage, while Morse adds his unerring musical magic throughout the album.

Something I find fascinating is Morse’s statement in the liner notes that “everyone writes their own lyrics to their sections and we don’t usually discuss what it’s all about. Sometimes we’re writing about different things in different sections, but somehow it all works together in the end.” That four different personalities can combine to create as cohesive a work as The Absolute Universe is nothing short of miraculous.

Portnoy has stated that The Absolute Universe is a concept album, and that it touches on the events of 2020. For example, Morse’s lyrics

Where were you when everyone/Crashed and burned and fell/Into the silence of the sun/With nothing to be done

refers to his sense of God abandoning the world at the height of the pandemic.

Likewise, the lines

Where were all the seats preferred/And all the wise men winding up/The wisest of all words/And God’s love like dinner served/But now we wonder at the warning

is about lockdowns prohibiting gatherings and other social interaction.

TBOL ends on a high note with the exhilarating The Greatest Story Never Ends which segues into the spectacular finale of Love Made A Way, which is an acknowledgment that God actually has been present throughout all the tribulations of 2020. Musically, this song is one of the finest Transatlantic has ever recorded.

After listening several times to The Breath Of Life, I turned my attention to the double-disc Forevermore expecting to hear longer versions of the songs. Nope! This is a separate album from TBOL that happens to share a few musical sections. As good as TBOL is, Forevermore is even better. I can’t put my finger on exactly why I prefer it, except that it strikes me as more energetic and the songs that are unique to it are simply wonderful.

For example, if I only had TBOL, I would miss hearing Heart Like A Whirlwind, The Darkness In The Light, the delightfully poppy Rainbow Sky, and Stolt’s magnificent The World We Used To Know. Those are all essential Transatlantic songs now, and I would be much poorer for not having heard them.

So what’s my recommendation? Fans of Transatlantic will want to get both albums. True fanatics will splurge for the box set, which includes both versions on CD and vinyl, as well as a BluRay documentary of the making of The Absolute Universe. If I had to choose just one, I would pick Forevermore without hesitation. The good news is, you can’t really go wrong – it’s ALL great music, no matter what you go for. 

You can pre-order The Absolute Universe at nealmorse.com.

Update: I neglected to mention that the BluRay also has a 5.1 mix of the album, and you can purchase it separately. For those fans with surround sound systems, that is probably the best deal!

Republic of Letters

The room in which you die

One thing I found interesting while travelling throughout Europe was the various occasions on which I would behold the room in which a notable person had died or, at least, a reproduction of it.

Nowadays, it is so common for people to die in hospitals but just imagine if you died in your own room and then it became a tourist attraction for centuries to come…

Read more.

Republic of Letters

Can Conservatism and LIbertarianism still Fuse?

When the forces of American progressivism emerged in the 1880s and 1890s, those who would one day be labeled as conservatives, classical liberals, and libertarians found themselves quite ill-prepared for the intellectual and political onslaught.  Perhaps the best analyst at the time progressivism emerged, somewhat surprisingly, was E.L. Godkin, the venerable founder of THE NATION.

It was the rights of man which engaged the attention of the political thinkers of the eighteenth century.  The world had suffered so much misery from the results of dynastic ambitions and jealousies, the masses of mankind were everywhere so burdened by the exactions of the superior classes, as to bring about a universal revulsion against the principle of authority.  Government, it was plainly seen, had become the vehicles of oppression; and the methods by which it could be subordinated to the needs of individual development, and could be made to foster liberty rather than to suppress it, were the favorite study of the most enlightened philosophers.  In opposition to the theory of divine right, whether of kings or demagogues, the doctrine of natural rights was set up.  Humanity was exalted above human institutions, man was held superior to the State, and universal brotherhood supplanted the ideals of national power and glory. [Godkin, “The Eclipse of Liberalism,” NATION (August 9, 1900).]

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, Godkin lamented that most Americans found the Declaration of Independence an embarrassment, and the restraints of the Constitution antiquated.  “We hear no more of natural rights, but of inferior races,” he feared.  The great Anglo-Welsh historian, Christopher Dawson, had made a similar point, but it far more poetically jarring terms.  “When the century began, Jefferson was president of the United States, and George III was still King of England.  When it ended Lenin already was planning the Russian Revolution.”

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Republic of Letters

“Who are we, really, as Americans?”

Law enforcement officers scuffle with supporters of President Donald Trump attempting to breach security barriers at the U.S. Capitol in Washington Jan. 6, 2021, during a protest against Congress certifying the 2020 presidential election. (CNS photo/Jim Urquhart, Reuters)

That’s the question I take up in my new editorial at Catholic World Report:

Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), made the following remark as part of a longer statement about the violence in the United States Capitol: “I join people of good will in condemning the violence today at the United States Capitol. This is not who we are as Americans.”

With all due respect: who are we, really, as Americans?

Are we the Americans who demonstrate peacefully against injustices, real or perceived? Or the Americans who riot and vandalize cities such as Portland, Oregon—just 90 minutes up the road from where I live—for weeks and months on end?

Are we the Americans who tire of technocrats and experts issuing constant decrees about “pauses” and “freezes”? Or the Americans who shame and attack those who think such measures (and the virtue-signaling religion of perpetual mask wearers) should be questioned with facts and reason?

Are we the Americans who think Donald J. Trump is the savior of America, the last great hope for Christianity and freedom? Or are we the Americans who think Trump is the new Hitler and a racist demon whose tweets and hair should be condemned to everlasting (but clean-burning) fires?

Or are we the Americans who think both sides are short-circuiting zombies who cannot see the forest of reality for the trees of ideology?

Read the entire editorial at CWR.

Republic of Letters

OUR HYPOCRISY IN NOT TALKING ABOUT DEATH

A friend of mine shared this evocative quotation with me spoken by the protagonist in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward:

“Come on, tell us, what are you most afraid of in the world now? Of dying! What are you most afraid of talking about? Of death! And what do we call that? Hypocrisy!”

It may take reading those lines over a few of times in order to be startled by them.

At first glance, there seems to be no contradiction between being terribly afraid of something AND not talking about it.

But then there is an indictment, a rebuke – this is “Hypocrisy!”

Why?

To read the rest, visit DyingToMeetYou.ca

Republic of Letters

ALSO, rEMEMBERING 1990 IN mUSIC

I’m the new guy at Spirit of Cecilia. In my first post, I wrote about my conflicted relationship with Prog. If I’m not a Prog guy, I should explain what I am. I’m a Vulgar Boatmen guy. Brad’s post on 1990 reminded me that I discovered The Boatmen in 1990 also. Here’s how it happened.

My friend Marc’s freshman dorm room was a half a flight of stairs from the front door. If he was around, his door would be open and there would be music playing. You couldn’t come or go from our dorm without hearing what he was listening to.

During the first week of school, he was playing Robbie Robertson’s first solo album, so I stopped in, introduced myself, and we became friends for life. The other musically obsessed guys in the dorm did the same. We congregated in Marc’s room to listen to music because it was it was centrally located, and he had the best stereo system – a Denon receiver with Polk speakers. You could really hear if the snare was recorded properly.

It was there that I heard for the first time, The Blake Babies, The Connells, Dump Truck, The Pixies, The Waterboys, John Hiatt, pre-Money for Nothing Dire Straits, Husker Du, Johnny Clegg, Camper Van Beethoven, and Toad the Wet Sprocket. To name a few, and that was just the first semester.

I loved The Band and used the guest list at The Last Waltz as my music education syllabus. When my family went to the mall, they’d let me hang out in the book store where I’d look through the books and take notes. This was before the internet. Luckily in the late 1980s, albums were starting to be reissued on CD, so I was able to buy the albums that I was reading about.

The rest of our music obsessed group, Drew, Joe, and Tim, had a similar self-directed musical educations. We would listen and talk for hours about what was good and what didn’t make the grade. At the end of the first semester, we knew what was good.

Early in our second semester in 1990, the first New Route sampler came out. The first song was “I’m Over You” by The Silos. The second was “Nothing Compares to U” by Sinead O’Connor. We flipped out over both. O’Connor broke quickly and we were soon hearing her played over the intercom in the cafeteria…a very, very, bad sign. The Silos from the first snare hit of “I’m Over You” fulfilled all that we were longing for. And then Drew borrowed a copy of their album Cuba from our college’s radio station and it was even better! There was an early thaw in the Scranton winter and all was good.

Over spring break, Marc’s brother Bill gave him a tape of the album You and Your Sister by The Vulgar Boatmen. I remember he gathered us together with some urgency to hear this new band – another band that Walter Salas-Humara from The Silos was involved with. I was either late to the session or the first song “Mary Jane” didn’t grab me, but when I heard the second, “You and Your Sister,” that was it. I had to get a guitar, I had to learn to play it, and I had to form a band. It was not an option. I had listened to music my whole life to prepare me for that moment.

I remember the term we used to describe the sound was “basic.” Not a crowning vocabulary moment for a bunch of liberal arts students. I think what we recognized in our hours and hours and hours of listening is that The Boatmen had stripped away all the non-essentials, the posturing, the over production, the politics, everything that stood between the listener and the song. It was simply beautiful. Thirty years later, it still sounds beautiful.

Mark Sullivan is the guitarist in The Deep Roots.

History, Philosophy, Politics

Socrates on Doing Wrong

From The Crito:

Soc. Are we to say that we are never intentionally to do wrong, or that in one way we ought and in another way we ought not to do wrong, or is doing wrong always evil and dishonorable, as I was just now saying, and as has been already acknowledged by us? Are all our former admissions which were made within a few days to be thrown away? And have we, at our age, been earnestly discoursing with one another all our life long only to discover that we are no better than children? Or are we to rest assured, in spite of the opinion of the many, and in spite of consequences whether better or worse, of the truth of what was then said, that injustice is always an evil and dishonor to him who acts unjustly? Shall we affirm that?

Cr. Yes.

Soc. Then we must do no wrong?

Cr. Certainly not.

Soc. Nor when injured injure in return, as the many imagine; for we must injure no one at all?

Cr. Clearly not.

Soc. Again, Crito, may we do evil?

Cr. Surely not, Socrates.

Soc. And what of doing evil in return for evil, which is the morality of the many-is that just or not?

Cr. Not just.

Soc. For doing evil to another is the same as injuring him?

Cr. Very true.

Art, Music, Poetry

Tolkien, Wagner, Nationalism, and Modernity

“Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases”–J.R.R. Tolkien

[Originally delivered at an ISI Conference, “Modernists and Mist Dwellers,” on Friday, August 3, 2001.]

     When the Swedish translation of The Lord of the Rings appeared in 1961, its author was appalled.  Fluent in Swedish, J.R.R. Tolkien found no problems with the translation.  Indeed, Tolkien often considered the various Scandinavian languages as better mediums for his Middle-earth stories than English, as the medieval Norse and Icelandic myths had strongly influenced them.  His disgust, instead, came from the presumption found within the introduction to the Swedish edition.  The crime: translator Åke Ohlmark had compared Tolkien’s ring to Wagner’s ring.  “The Ring is in a certain way ‘der Niebelungen Ring,’” Ohlmark had written. Indignant, Tolkien complained to his publisher: “Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases.”  The translator’s commentary was simply “rubbish,” according to Tolkien.[i]

     Ohlmark was not the only critic to make the comparison.  A Canadian English professor, William Blissett, reviewing The Lord of the Rings for the prestigious South Atlantic Quarterly, found several parallels between the two legends but was unwilling to preclude “any direct Wagnerian influence.”[ii]  By the early 1960s, the comparison was becoming common.  In his last interview before his death, Tolkien’s closest friend C.S. Lewis claimed to have wanted to write a new prose version of Wagner’s Ring Opera.  Lewis feared, though, that “at the mention of the word Ring a lot of people might think it was something to do with Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings.’”[iii]  Since the first comparisons in the 1950s, many critics have used Wagner’s Ring against Tolkien.  One famous English poet referred to The Lord of the Rings as “A combination of Wagner and Winnie-the-Pooh.”[iv]

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Art, Music

Remembering 1990 in Music

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A few days ago, I felt absolutely snarky and thought, “why not write down exactly what I think of music from the 1980s.”  In some ways, I feel I have the right to do this in a manner I could never for any other decade. 

I was in seventh grade when a very disturbed fanboy tried to kill the fortieth president, and I was a first-semester senior in college when the Berlin Wall came down. 

Yes, I’m very much a man of the 1980s.  Reagan, Rush, Blade Runner. . . how I remember the 1980s.  I came of age in that rather incredible decade.

Life continued after 1989, however, though I wasn’t so sure at the time that it would.

1990 proved to be one of the most interesting years in my personal life when it came to career choices as well as to music. 

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Republic of Letters

MY FAVORITE 40 (20+20) ALBUMS OF 2020: Everything else!

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Last week I put forth my favorite 20 jazz albums of 2020. Here are my favorite 20 albums of everything else: rock, country, prog, and, yes, sacred music.

• “Companion” by Sainte Olympia: I’m biased here, as the singer, pianist, and songwriter here is my younger sister. Regardless, this is the anti-2020 album: contemplative, deceptively simply, deep, and rich with lyrical and melodic mystery. I’m both proud and moved by this release.

• “The Nashville Songbook” by Mandy Barnett: Now in her forties, Barnett’s magical voice has become even more magnificent over time. This lush and often hair-raising record reveals that Barnett is also a top tier interpreter of classic songs. Magical!

• “No One Sings Like You Anymore” by Chris Cornell: This was actually recorded in 2016, not long before his death. Cornell was multi-talented; what comes through here is, of course, that voice–but also a unique approach to interpreting songs, as all ten cuts are covers. ELO’s “Showdown” is a favorite.

•  “Italian Ice” by Nicole Atkins: Speaking of voices, this New Jersey native has one of the finest pop/rock voices around and her music is always compelling. Ranging from atmospheric to anthemic, edgy to heart-breaking, this is perhaps Atkins’ best album, which is saying something.

• “Rise Radiant” by Caligula’s Horse: The talented Aussie prog-rockers never disappoint, as the Jim Grey (singer) and Sam Vallen (lead guitarist)-led unit is dynamic, soulful, restless, and intense. And, as always, featuring perfect production. Hard but melodic prog at its best.

• “La Vita Nuova” by Maria McKee: The former Lone Justice singer is now in her 50s and has made some major changes in her life, but the unreal voice and the stunning writing are still there. In fact, this is her best overall album since 1996’s “Life is Sweet”. Challenging and most rewarding. One of the very best of 2020.

• “The Women Who Raised Me” by Kandace Springs: The incredibly talented Nashville singer and keyboardist (she’s also a mechanic and visual artist) navigates the famous songs here with relaxed confidence and soulful, jazzy verve. Like fine wine. Impressive.

• “En Español” by The Mavericks: It’s entirely in Spanish, but the language barrier (for me, at least) disappears quickly as Raul Malo and Company bring an immediacy and intimacy that cannot be denied. The opening track “La Sitiera” grabs you from the first notes and the album never relents.

• “Nice ‘n’ Easy (2020 Mix)” by Frank Sinatra: Originally released in 1960, this #1 album captured Sinatra at the peak of his powers. The remaster brings a noticeable new clarity and definition, and highlights the many subtle aspects of a classic album. The 2020 release “Reprise Rarities” is also worth seeking out, although the material is not as consistently brilliant.

• “The Absence of Presence” by Kansas: My all-time favorite prog band does it again, following up 2016’s terrific “The Prelude Implicit” with another set of superbly crafted American prog. The longevity and quality of these Midwestern rockers continue to amaze.

• “Through Shaded Woods” by Lunatic Soul: A surprise for me, as the more electronica-oriented LS albums were enjoyable, but this driving, acoustic-based album is a revelation in urgency, mystery, and dusky beauty. Both lovely and a bit unsettling.

• “Color of Noize” by Derrick Hodge:  Pure aural jazz-soul-R&B-electronica candy–but with plenty of musical meat and potatoes. Incredible playing and superb production. This is why headphones were invented.

• “Keaggy, Blazier, & Lunn” (An American Garage Band)” by Phil Keaggy. This was recorded years ago by Keaggy and drummer Bobby Blazier in a jam session, with bass by Gary Lunn dubbed in later. Yet it sounds completely organic and warm, a sophisticated jam session by one of the most eclectic and tasteful guitarists of all time.

• “Monovision” by Ray Lamontagne: I do like some of Lamontagne’s more experimental albums (“Ouroboros”!), but this is the sweet spot for me: the gentle, backwoods vibe that marries Americana and folk with early 1970s Van Morrison. This is fine whisky in musical form.

• “Revisiting This Planet” by Kevin Max: I was never a big Larry Norman fan (his voice bugs me), but Max wins me over with this modern, punchy, and on-point rendering of several Norman songs. Max is true to the music, but also makes the songs his own. Great stuff.

• “Panther” by Pain of Salvation: Daniel Gildenlöw has gone through a lot in recent years (nearly dying in 2017) and so this is a welcome return to full-blown form for the Swedish musician and crew. This is a prog diamond: hard, clear, and multi-faceted, featuring one of the best rock singers out there.

• “Inescapable” by Godsticks: Previous albums were good, but a bit repetitious. Not so here. Vocalist and guitarist Darran Charles has expanded his range, the songwriting is equally expansive, and the band is tight. A deeply personal and powerful album.

• “Fireworker” by Gazpacho: Arguably the most remarkable prog album of year. Huge, intimate, byzantine, beautiful, and never predictable. Those who think prog is about long solos and wonkiness need to listen to this masterpiece. Spellbinding.

• “Terminal Velocity” by John Petrucci: Fantastic instrumental album from Dream Theater legend. Yes, he’s a technical wizard, but Petrucci’s mastery of mood and attitude is at the forefront here. And it’s fun without ever being silly or derivative.

• “Liturgy by Saint John Chrysostom” by Benedict Sheehan: Glorious, glorious, glorious. Enough said. Just listen.

Music, Books, Poetry, Film