Fixxing Glass

Random: A quick flick of the ipod wheel brought up The Fixx's Reach the Beach. Aside from a great album cover, Reach the Beach brought back a flood of nostalgia. In the early 80's tunes from this album permeated local pop radio; it inadvertantly became a soundtrack to many Jr. High moments. Political and thoughful lyrics sit over catchy, spacious guitar riffs that along with appropriatly light bass lines preserve the musical energy against synth washes and programmed loops. It has become very difficult to distinguish quality in old pop albums. It seems as though once a song reaches a certain critical mass of airplay, it acquires a cultural value beyond it's initial artistic integrity. Stand Or Fall, Saved By Zero, Less Cities, More Moving People, and Red Skies stand out, perhaps more as audible waypoints in history than as musical milestones. The steady droning of a drum machine, or drum machine-like rhythms squash half of my enthusiasm for this album; the incessant and unsubtle pounding wears a groove in my ears.
Selected: Philip Glass is unsurprising. Seeing his name in the composer slot, one can immediately picture the type of arpeggios, the changes in rhythm, and the voicing that will be forth coming. The first couple of Etudes, played on solo piano by Bruce Brubaker, fit the expectation perfectly. Interestingly the later etudes have some new spacing and rhythms that preserved my interest in Glass for one more disc. Having not heard William Duckworth before, I found his Time Curves to be a good companion for the Glass piece. Time Curves is slightly less repetitive, with shorter and more angular movements that would seem almost like piano exercises if they were any longer. Minimalist music requires virtuoso performers as the life of the music lies in the artist's managing of very subtle changes over the iterations of patterns. I didn't hear a lot of expression in Brubaker's playing here, although he felt more in touch with the Duckworth pieces that with the Glass.