Teaser (Tommy Bolin, 1975)

For a long time this album was impossible to find, probably tied up in legal limbo. Thankfully it is now readily available, though in a somewhat over-bloated "ultimate" edition that triples the running time. Since I acquired this through "alternative" means about five years ago, all I have is the original album which for now is satisfying enough that I'm not losing any sleep over not having the outtakes.

Teaser is the first of only two proper solo albums by Tommy Bolin. Whereas the other, Private Eyes, is credited to the "Tommy Bolin Band" and sports a consistent lineup and sound, this one is all over the map, with different personnel (not all credited in the liner notes*) and styles on each track. About half of the songs were previously workshopped elsewhere, either by Tommy's rock/fusion project, Energy, or in live "Tommy Bolin and Friends" shows. This is also one of the last recordings to feature substantial jazz personnel on a number of the tracks (Jan Hammer, David Sanborn), as Tommy was moving steadily away from the fusion scene by the mid-1970's, evidenced by his move from supporting various jazz artists to more established rock bands.

* - Glenn Hughes completists should take note that he sings the final verse of "Dreamer", a song with a long history through the band Energy. Since this album was virtually overshadowed by the near-simultaneous release of Come Taste the Band, Glenn goes uncredited here, yet another disservice to what should have been a much more successful album financially.

Tattooed Millionaire (Bruce Dickinson, 1990)

Tattooed Millionaire is probably Bruce's strangest solo album, primarily in the sense that it is so straightforward and a product of its time. His first three solo albums were largely attempts to distance himself from the Iron Maiden sound, which had largely crystallized by the late-1980's into a readily identifiable, unmistakable style. And of those three, this was the only album released while Bruce was still a part of that group.

In some ways, 1990 was the last year of the 1980's as far as the sounds of the time are concerned. The following year marked the opening waves of the "Seattle sound" that both muddied and de-synthed the stereotypical 1980's sound. So, not surprisingly, Bruce sounds quite 80's on a lot of the tracks here, particularly the title track (actually a rant against Nikki Sixx of all people). Other tracks however work very well in any year, particularly "Son of a Gun" and "Gypsy Road". Janick Gers, who would join Iron Maiden immediately following this album, co-wrote just about all the songs with Bruce and plays remarkably tight on most tracks, defying his "wild" reputation in Iron Maiden.

This was some of the earliest metal/hard rock I ever listened to. Some of the tracks were included on a mix tape made by a friend to convince me that metal was worth listening to (ah, how the times have changed).

A followup to this album was planned but jettisoned when Bruce crossed paths with producer/guitarist Roy Z and changed direction with sophomore release Balls to Picasso, an excellent album that established Bruce as a credible alternative to an increasingly weary Iron Maiden. For those who wish to hear some of "what could have been", check out the second disc of Bruce's "best of album" which collected a few of these oddballs, including what should have been the big hit of the album, "Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter", which was nicked by Iron Maiden and turned into a #1 single for them! (at least Steve Harris was nice enough to let Bruce keep the sole writing credit)

Evolution of a Nation (Daniel Berkowitz & Karen Clay, 2011)

Undoubtedly the most academic book I've read (and probably will read) all year, and for that reason fell a bit short of my expectations. The central premise of the book is fascinating but the quantitative reasoning was far beyond my education. One needs a fairly advanced grasp of statistical mathematics to appreciate the tables presented in the book, though with careful attention to the narrative, the graphs are useful in illustrating the evidence and findings presented.

Basically stated, the authors make a very compelling case that initial legal and geographical conditions (e.g. rainfall, distance to water) have an impact on legislative competitiveness in a given state. Hopefully the findings can be incorporated into future works for wider audiences.

Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus (Charles Mingus, 1964)

The music of Charles Mingus is rightfully held in high regard by the jazz community of listeners and performers, but full appreciation requires attention and focus. Four albums in and I still can't fully wrap my brains around even his more accessible albums. This one marked the end of a particularly fruitful period in Mingus's career and one can hear contributions (some more explicit than others) from prior albums like Mingus Ah Um and The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. It's not as complicated as the latter, but more ornate than the former, and usually falls just short of those two if one is forced to rank their preferences.

This is actually a fairly recent acquisition for me, so I'm still absorbing it. However, having spent time with some of his earlier albums, I can safely say it is relatively accessible, but I cannot recommend it as background music (perish the thought!).

Days May Come and Days May Go (Deep Purple, 1975)

Though it's really intended for diehard fans like myself, Days May Come and Days May Go offers a fascinating glimpse into a band in transition. The listener is a veritable fly on the wall of a recording studio, witnessing the meeting of a venerable British rock band and a feisty new American guitarist, Tommy Bolin. It's a combination of jams and songs, two of which ("Owed to 'G'" and "Drifter") would appear on their only studio album together and another ("Dance to the Rock and Roll") that appears in bits during live performances.

The title is particularly apt, as it is a line from the song "Drifter" that didn't make it to the final version that appears on Come Taste the Band. Ultimately the band would part ways with the studio these tracks were recorded at and start anew in Europe. The Bolin era itself was very short, ending with the collapse of the entire band in 1976. Bolin himself died of a heroin overdose at age 25 in December of that year.

Zealot (Reza Aslan, 2013)

I recently finished Zealot and I have to say that Reza Aslan has yet to write a bad book. His first book, No god but God is an indispensable introduction to Islam. Zealot isn't a direct Christian parallel (mainly due to an overall higher familiarity in the United States), but rather an exploration of who Jesus of Nazareth was or may have been (a.k.a. "the historical Jesus"). Although general audiences are the targeted readership, Aslan's scholarship is impeccable (even our resident Old Testament scholar here at the seminary approves). The narrative is also clever. This isn't a straight-up retelling of the life of Jesus. In fact, the first section devotes all of a single paragraph to his birth, ministry, and death. This is done to advance the chronology to the time when the bulk of the scriptural material was written, following the destruction of the Second Temple in AD 70. Not to be missed is the third section, where the Church of Paul and the Church of James are compared and one really gets a sense of just how looming a figure Paul was not just in the earliest Church but also in the creation of the very scriptural canon that Christianity rests upon.

Nefertiti (Miles Davis, 1967)

Most of the jazz I've collected comes from "best" lists, since I still consider myself to be in a discerning phase of my interest in the music. This particular album, however, joined the collective much earlier than most of the stuff that appears here under the "jazz" tag. Like many a college student, I heard some essential Miles Davis (Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain) and then randomly reached out and got something else. While Nefertiti usually doesn't grace any "top jazz" lists, except maybe in the lower reaches of the top 200 or so, it is an interesting and important album in the Miles Davis discography.

Nefertiti was one of the last albums recorded by Davis using the classic quintet instrumentation that had defined bop and its ilk for the past 20 or so years. Although every member of the "second great quintet" would go on to record heavily in the fusion era (Davis, Herbie Hancock and Tony Williams in their own names, Wayne Shorter and Ron Carter within ensembles) they all play in "traditional" instrument roles. One key innovation, sort of a "road not taken" by Davis on future albums, was to flip the lead and rhythm sections on the tracks penned by Shorter: "Nefertiti", "Fall" and "Pinocchio". On these tracks, Hancock, Carter, and Williams get to improvise around a repeating riff by Davis and Shorter. The other tracks (written by Hancock and Williams) take a more standard approach, though Hancock acts more as a lead than a rhythm player.

The Coral (2002)

The Coral was one of those bands I discovered purely by accident. Back in my Borders day I was working on something in the back and some slacker coworker who liked to process magazines for six hours (it was a half hour job tops) was attempting to play every single free CD the store owned. This happened to be one of them. I didn't even let this coworker get the chance to add this freebie to his collection; I was all over it. Even though the Coral didn't make a cent off of me on this album, I would go on to purchase outright all but the last album (unavailable in the US, even after 4 years!), and also grab the two-disc "best of" set just to get at some unreleased material.

The Coral have a clear trajectory from their pirate/weird first album to fairly mainstream as they matured. It's hard to believe, but I think the whole band was under 20 years old when the debut album was recorded. Most of the nautical references and shanty-style music was pretty much gone by the release of the bizarro EP Nightfreak and the Sons of Becker, and fairly scant on the second album, Magic and Medicine, both of which were released very rapidly following this album. The Invisible Invasion, their third full-length outing marked the end of an era of quick and quirky releases; the band would only release two albums after it in the following ten years, neither of which exhibit much spontaneity, though sound nice and professional.

Sometimes though it's just fun to get back to the first album. You'll never hear the band more rambunctious than on a song like "Skeleton Key", featuring an unexpected coda at the end. Songs like "Dreaming of You" and "Goodbye" sound good anytime, and (at least in the case of the former) got picked up for soundtracks around the time. Finally, I dig the clever use of horns, particularly on "Dreaming of You" and "Wildfire", something that would not occur on any of the future albums. Certainly, this is a contender of top form for my own personal "best album you've never heard" competition. Go stream it and decide for yourself!

A Fierce Discontent (Michael McGerr, 2003)

It's easy when reading American history to get clustered around antebellum/Civil War books and World War II/postwar literature, so it's always a treat to read something covering the surprisingly turbulent era between the Civil War and the first World War. McGerr isn't quite as dramatic storyteller as David McCullough or Doris Kearns Goodwin, but he brings some interesting theories to the table about how the progressive movement contributed both widely accepted reform as well as ill-advised societal changes. For example we generally like government entities like the FDA and the National Park Service, but ideas like Prohibition and segregation ultimately didn't sit too well with future America. McGerr illustrates progressivism as a struggle against the individualism, fueled by a growing middle class growing increasingly concerned about the misguided ways of the "upper tenth" (in reality the "less than 1%") and the working classes. Finally McGerr studies how future programs such as the Great Society and Reagan Revolution were relatively "disappointing" (for good or ill) on how much they delivered on their promises relative to the Progressive Era.

One extra note: there are two excellent pictures worth looking at in the book. One is J.P. Morgan taking a swat at a paparazzo (when the notion of celebrity was starting to bloom) and the other is a horrified, exhausted Woodrow Wilson, staring directly at the end of an era.

(linked images courtesy of the Library of Congress via Ancient Faces and Corbis Images respectively, presented here in thumbnail for no commercial purpose)

Cocaine Blues (Wayne Kramer & the Pink Fairies, 1978)

I can't speak from experience, but I'm sure there is a certain rush of emotions one feels upon release from prison and for Wayne Kramer, he's feeling GOOD! (James Brown inflection intended here.)

As the 1970's wore on, seemingly different groups of around 1970 were finding common cause. Wayne Kramer's band, the MC5, fizzled early on, sending its members in all directions. Hawkwind spawned Motorhead, which in turn attracted a later member (Larry Wallis) of the Pink Fairies into its ranks, which isn't all that strange as that band had moved toward a more stripped-down heavier sound. For what it's worth, in addition to brief stints with the Pink Fairies and Motorhead, Wallis also played a few gigs with UFO which went nowhere. For a guy that was all over the place it seemed to make sense that by 1978 he would find common cause with newly-released Wayne Kramer. As just about anything associated with the MC5 would end up being extremely combustive, this pairing didn't last particularly long. In fact there's not a whole lot of data on this particular live recording, which has been heartily augmented with pre-drug bust Wayne Kramer solo material of varying quality. According to some on-the-fly research I just did, Kramer's career was largely a series of short-lived collaborations with various rock notables, this is when he was in the music biz, which was shaky during the 1980's.

This release is highly unofficial in a number of ways. Incidentally, it would be until 1991 that Wayne Kramer would release a proper solo album.

The Psychopath Test (Jon Ronson, 2011)

I'm enjoying the novelty of reaching the halfway point of my reading goal well before mid-year (this post is coming much later than the book completion date!). This book had been on my list a long time. In fact, two years ago there was a comment on Goodreads asking me what I thought of the book. So it was a long time coming.

Jon Ronson, through his three books, is a master of the "stranger than fiction" subcategory of non-fiction. I read Them: Adventures with Extremists a number of years ago and recall marveling at how Ronson was able to insert himself among such strange and explosive events and personalities. Perhaps because I was scarred (and scared) by the negative reviews of the movie, I never tackled The Men Who Stare At Goats, but when I heard he was tackling the whacked out world of sociopaths, I thought "sign me up!" The book starts out simply enough, with a mysterious book being delivered completely unsolicited to various people that, frankly, doesn't make any sense at all. From his curiosity over what type of person would do this, he ends up meeting folks like the "sane" man locked up in the UK's most notorious asylum, a twisted Haitian terrorist, a ruthless businessman, and, even more eye-opening, the people who attempted to "cure" and "identify" these sociopaths, including Bob Hare, the creator of the Psychopath Test. All the while, lurking in the back of his mind, Ronson wonders if world leaders need to be at least a little bit sociopathic to be the people that they are.

The book reads very quickly and I highly recommend it to those who like their nonfiction done strange, as well as those interested in the quirks of Scientology, because, guess what, the scientologists are featured here, though in more of a "supporting" role.

Led Zeppelin III (1970)

Garf! Between my trip to New Orleans and fighting this stupid head cold (swamp fever??) I brought back from the Big Easy (compounded with a stomach bug), I've been a little behind here. Don't worry though. Each day a new album is being spawned, but it may not get an immediate write-up. Don't be surprised to see a little more brevity that usual here!

So, Led Zeppelin III? I've heard this album described as the one where the band "goes folk rock", but the band really doesn't get all that pastoral except on a few tracks, even though their Bron-Yr-Aur surroundings were designed to illicit that feel. After all, the wax had barely cooled on Led Zeppelin II when this album was born, so it's not really a huge break or change in direction. In fact most of the first side isn't a huge stretch of the imagination with the usual power ("Immigrant Song") and blues numbers ("Since I've Been Loving You"). It's really in the side two material where the argument can be effectively made that they were out to explore new territory. The acoustic/folk stuff would always remain an element of the rest of the catalog, but understandably anyone in 1970 who started off with "Gallows Pole" may have been wondering what happened. My own personal journey to this album was a bit labored and I think this was one of the last albums I acquired.

A couple posts back I mused about my misunderstanding of the song "Gemini Dream". Well, there is no shortage of mondegreens (misheard lyrics) for "Immigrant Song". Check out this link to an extensive list. I didn't see among these my own interpretations: "I want to go where there's a West End show" or "I want to go where there's a rest and shower." And to think Robert Plant's delivery would only get MORE garbled by mid-decade!

Blazing Arrow (Blackalicious, 2002)

Sometimes it's just downright weird how things end up in my music library. During my extremely brief stint at a community college radio station (with a heavy emphasis on "community") I was exposed to all sorts of wacked-out music. The weirder, more underground the music was, the better as far as the music programmers were concerned. My late-night radio show had to play at least 33% from the "current" shelf, meaning that there was absolutely no escaping this music. A lot of it was pretty crappy stuff, even though I'd listen to it any day over something like the Backstreet Boys (that was my NEXT radio gig, one that had very little influence on anything you will see here). Hip-hop was invariably in the mix, but definitely not the hits of the day like Snoop Dogg or Coolio. Instead, we played stuff like Blackalicious.

Since I remembered Blackalicious from their first album (circa 1998), I decided to take a chance on their second album, being freely distributed as a promotion from the new major label. Since getting these promos was more of a free-for-all, I would often grab stuff before others could and then "sit" on it for awhile, so I didn't give Blazing Arrow a real listening until much later. While I'm not converted by any means, I have a great deal of respect for the work of Gift of Gab and Chief Xcel. The lyrics are intelligent and the album is designed to be a complete listening experience. These are definitely qualities I like in hip-hop, as far too often what leaks out of the radio is the complete opposite.

Long Distance Voyager (The Moody Blues, 1981)

There's a pretty firm wedge among Moodies fans between those who favor the "Core 7" albums from 1967 to 1972 and those who like the "Reunion" era, stretching casually from 1978 to the present day. Except for some parts of Octave from 1978, it feels like two completely different bands and compilations that attempt to chronicle the entire sweep in the scope of a single disc usually fall far short of comprehensive. The crux of the matter falls on Justin Hayward, who was simply 1/5 of the band in their first era, but grew to utterly dominate from the 1980's onward. I like Justin Hayward just fine, so the reunion stuff doesn't bother me, even though my preference is toward the more imaginative Core 7 period. Some people however realllllly like Justin, to the point of near-embarrassment, and they serve as the core fan base of most of the band's post-1978 output. They are the ones seemingly unbothered by the hyper-synthetic albums of the late 1980's and the near-disappearance of Ray Thomas. Neither of these developments really sat well with me, but thankfully they are not an issue on what is probably their finest reunion-era album, Long Distance Voyager.

I once heard it said (amid all of the Justin pantie-throwing squee) that Octave was a reunion album, whereas Long Distance Voyager was more properly described as a comeback album. That is an apt assessment. Octave was rent with many of the issues that led to the band's self-imposed mid-1970's hiatus, giving the entire album an unsteady feeling. The old formula of giving everyone a cut of the songwriting clearly wasn't working well, with Ray Thomas and Mike Pinder turning in particularly flimsy material. After an extended break (to allow for a handful of solo releases), the band returned minus Pinder to record this album. In his stead is 1970's synth-journeyman Patrick Moraz who lays a very heavy imprint on the "new" Moodies sound, though it's clear from the get-go that Justin Hayward is now the leader of the band, with an strong assist from John Lodge. (In fact, it's a matter of dispute as to whether Moraz was officially a member of the group. I say "yes". The rest of the band says "no".) Ray Thomas, whose flute playing is largely buried or absent in the mix, is confined to the last "suite" of songs, which actually suits him very well; "Veteran Cosmic Rocker" is one of his last great compositions. Graeme Edge's lumbering "22,000 Days" doesn't disappoint, although he is positioning himself as the man behind the scenes and the official "original" Moody Blue.

One final source of amusement is "Gemini Dream". I like this song, but it is riddled with mondegreens (misheard lyrics). For longer than I care to admit, I thought they were singing after the "make it work out" (not "naked workouts"!) section "kill each other tonight" (actually: "for each other tonight"). I tried to confirm that I wasn't the only person hearing this, but unfortunately I seem to be very much alone in this feeling. I guess I should consider it a minor miracle that I made it to adulthood.

Are You Experienced? (Jimi Hendrix, 1967)

For a long time, this album was a royal headache. Not because it was bad, or because it was too "metal" for 1967, but rather from a music biz perspective. As was the case with most artists in the 1960's, they produced excellent music while signing horrific contracts. Therefore, Hendrix was placed in unusual situations, like sharing a bill with the Monkees, working with a bass player who was actually a guitarist looking to develop his own career, and, years down the road, scores of different versions of his albums.

The three Jimi Hendrix Experience albums (this one, Axis: As Bold As Love, and Electric Ladyland) are universally accepted as Hendrix's three studio albums. After that it is a colossal mishmash of live recordings and outtakes that nobody can agree upon as "canon". Meanwhile, Are You Experienced, unlike its peers, was released a few different ways, resulting in various track being included or omitted from the release and well as tinkering with the track running order. Fortunately the "Experience Hendrix" project got down to fixing this problem and finally delivering a definitive version of the album, featured here. This album includes all the singles (e.g. "Stone Free") and tracks that frequently got dropped (e.g. "Highway Chile").

On another note, the Jimi Hendrix Experience is one of a growing number of "100% dead" bands. It's something the jazz scene has had to come to grips with over the past 20 years. With the passing of Mitch Mitchell, all members of the Experience (not counting Billy Cox, who joined in 1969 and appears on none of three albums) are rocking the great gig in the sky. When a band "dies" it passes into another form a memory, from those who witnessed it. Eventually the "witnesses" themselves will pass on, and the memory transforms once again. It will be interesting to see how perspectives on bands from the 1960's change as those who lived it pass on.

Batten Down the Hatches (Cheerleadr, 1998)

During my trip to New Orleans, the randomness was messing with me. When organized in artist order, John Abercrombie is at the top of the library list. So, should I be surprised that today's selection, Batten Down the Hatches by Cheerleadr, contains the first entry in my library when arranged by song title?


"A" is the opening track on what is essentially an EP, the second release by the band Cheerleadr from Boston. It's a hard rocking, fairly minimal track, and it is pretty clear these guys were heavily influenced by Nirvana. Now, there isn't anything wrong with that, but six years after the heyday of the new Rock and Roll Hall of Famers, it's almost retro to create music that sounds so eerily similar. There were a few other bands around this time trying to do the same thing, evidenced during my college radio stint, and they didn't achieve much lasting fame either.

The band changed drummers and released one additional album, Rock Album, and then they disappear from the record.

Timeless (John Abercrombie, 1975)

One of the funniest things about Timeless is that it is one of the very, very few jazz albums I could NOT find at one of my preferred public libraries. Now this isn't Kind of Blue, but even still, it was a bit of a surprise to find things like the Brad Mehldau's Art of the Trio, Volume 3 without any difficulty, but somehow this one slipped through the cracks. Needless to say, I had done pretty good financially so far, so a little "investment" wasn't such a bad thing.

Other than seeing his name on a list, I didn't know a whole lot about Abercrombie. With maybe one exception, there was no "sideman" era before the release of this, his debut album. With fusionistas Jan Hammer (recently exiled from the Mahavishnu Orchestra) and Jack DeJohnette forming the other legs of the trio, one would expect an ample dose of classic 1970's fusion, and in places that is true. Elsewhere the music is much more understated (this is an ECM album after all). Abercrombie doesn't play as explosively as John McLaughlin, but he's not content to be strictly acoustic (Joe Pass) or ethereal as Pat Metheny. The leads are handled even-handedly between Abercrombie and Hammer, with DeJohnette gently holding the structure together. Although this wasn't a permanent arrangement, the three would work together intermittently in the ECM scene.

Leftism (Leftfield, 1995)

Your iPod never forgets, assuming it has 160 GB of storage. I went through a brief but intense interest in electronica (the term I'm using to cover the vast array of other terms also used). Back at the first bookstore I worked at, a co-worker furnished me with some of his favorite albums to start my education. Since this was well before the whole "I can just rip it" days, I didn't have the patience or time to make a copy, so I gave them a few listens at home and in my car and then returned them.

A few years later I was on the dating scene and met somebody that was really into the genre. Not wanted to appear like an idiot, I immediately sunk what little funds I had into actually buying the music so that we'd have some kind of reference point for our blossoming relationship. Well, after a few dates, that relationship was completely DOA (she cheated, then tried to make amends, concluding with our final date happening the same week and a much more interesting date with the woman whom I would ultimately marry). However, Leftfield and its ilk lived on to this day.

So what can I say about Leftfield? Eh, not much other than what you can read about on Wikipedia. It's hard to believe this album is nearly 20 years old. I mean, think about what 20-year-old music was in 1995. Anyway, one interesting thing I learned through the years was that the "foreign language" on the track "Afro-Left" was all made up. One other Leftfield track sneaked into my library, a track from their second album called "Afrika Shox" which was included on the Vanilla Sky soundtrack.

Sarah Vaughan With Clifford Brown (1954)

I'm in New Orleans all week (don't get too excited, it's for work), so everything is getting delayed this week, but I'm sure everything will be nice and caught up here by the weekend. Normally I like to listen to my hardest and fastest music on the flight (Attila, Billy Joel's old band is a favorite), so the randomness threw me for a loop with this album!

Some of the bestselling "jazz" albums of all time are by female vocalists. If I had a dollar for every time we played a Diana Krall song in the store when I worked for Borders, I wouldn't have needed to work there. Nor was I filled with any overwhelming need to collect heavily in this domain except for the designated standout recordings of which this belongs.

Although Vaughan was a few years into her solo career, this was only her fifth LP-length album, but that has more to do with the growing popularity of long-play records over singles. She would record fifty studio albums in her extensive career.

Meanwhile, Clifford Brown is keeping his hard bop inclinations tempered here. The following year they would be fully unleashed in his landmark collaborations with Max Roach. The year after that he would be dead at 26, short even by jazz standards, but car accidents tend not to discriminate between young and old when they happen.

Combustication (Medeski Martin & Wood, 1998)

Their last album featured here has barely cooled, yet we're getting another dose of MMW, this time a straight-up album, their debut for Blue Note from 1998. As mentioned before, the band was leaving their piano trio roots behind, and Mellotron, turntables (a la DJ Logic) and electric bass illustrate that on this album, which takes things a step further from 1996's Shack-man. Some the tracks will make your hair stand on end, particularly the DJ Logic stuff like "Sugar Craft", "Start-Stop", and "Church of Logic". I saw this firsthand when I would play this during evening shifts at the bookstore, which garnered customer reaction from "this is amazing" to the old woman who ran out of the store shouting "this is making me insane!" In the middle of all of this, there is still plenty of room to explore within the confines of the piano trio, as "Latin Shuffle" brilliantly illustrates in its first movement.

The Blue Note period was an ironic era for the band in that they were signed to a major jazz label and pushing the boundaries of the genre far more than they ever did for Gramavision. Even if Combustication seems straightforward enough, the remixed EP that followed the next year showed just how willing they were to push boundaries. Eventually they moved on to their own label, starting with a collaboration with John Scofield. A new album with Scofield, Juice, is due out later this year. If you don't count children's albums, live albums, experimental releases, or John Scofield, the last proper studio MMW album was End of the World Party (Just In Case), released 10 years ago!