The powers that be at ReR must have decided that their club members needed a little holidy goody a few days in advance of the 25th, and I got two albums today that I’d been heavily anticipating since I saw that they were in the pipeline:
- A 2 disc set combining Skeleton Crew’s two albums (Learn to talk and The country of blinds) and a bunch of unreleased stuff.
- A re-release of Massacre’s Killing time album with six extra tracks.
Skeleton Crew and Massacre were both key bands for Fred Frith during his time in NYC in the late 70’s and early 80’s, and I really love Fred’s stuff. To make it even cooler, Tom Cora was the other half (or third, depending on the configuration) of Skeleton Crew, and Tom was also truly amazing, so how can you lose? There’s an excellent Skeleton Crew track (“Zach’s flag”) on the brilliant Tom Cora tribute set (Hallelujah, Anyway: Remembering Tom Cora), and an excellent Skeleton Crew track (“Sparrow song”) and an equally fine Massacre track (“Legs”) on Step across the border, which is still my favorite overview of his work that I’ve heard. Based on those tracks I’ve been very keen to hear more from both bands, and now I can (and am!).
I’ve only been through them once, but there’s definitely lots of winning stuff there. Massacre is loud and crazy (they were often described as punk jazz, which I think says a lot), and Skeleton Crew just has so many ideas crammed into their (fairly short) songs that I’m going to be digging in that stuff for quite a while!
Here’s hoping I have lots of time to listen to music over the holidays, as the size and shape of more than a few packages under the tree suggests several more round, reflective, shiney music things in my near future!
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