Frank Gutch Jr: Nothing But Notes…..

 

I have been so overwhelmed with videos and new releases this week that I’ve decided to hit you all with nothing but Notes.  Videos you might want to see, news (mostly about new releases), and thoughts.  I am taking a week to get away by myself to hopefully get caught up.  Tons of reviews to write and notes to arrange.  I will be back on  track next week.  In the meantime, if you don’t have the time to look this over now, save the link and do it when you have a few seconds.  No sense in forcing it now when you could actually enjoy it at a later time.  There are some cool things here.  I know.  I screened them myself.

Frank Gutch Jr: 2014 – A Look Back…..

One hell of a year for music.  Not so much for musicians— at least the musicians no longer with us.  Hard to balance a year like that, pluses and minuses popping up like ads from a virus, canceling one another out or piling one on top of the other ad infinitum until the system collapses from the weight.  We all felt the weight whether we all know it or not.  So many musicians now on the other side but, lucky for us, so many new musicians taking their places.  Jesus.  My head spins.

Frank Gutch Jr: Help! I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Reach My Turntable! featuring Jubal Lee Young, Anna Maria Rosales, Caitlin Canty and a Cast Of Thousands! oh, and notes too…..

Indiana Jones has nothing on me.  That big rolling ball chasing him?  That’s nothing compared to the mountain of carnivorous beasts chasing me in my dreams every night, each vying for that elusive review I promised what seems months ago.  It is the music reviewers equivalent to no pants in the schoolroom, the albums fighting one another to get to me, to rip flesh from bone, to make me pay for what they see as vinyl manslaughter— vinylslaughter, if you will— an offense so terrible as to consign innocent artists and albums to a certain death, so vile as to blast dreams to smithereens, so ghastly as to be— well— ghastly.

Frank Gutch Jr: 2013— A Look at the Best, plus Notes You Can Take To the Bank…..

After ending this last year cranking out two long columns about musicians we lost, I feel the need to counterbalance.  While I know that death is a part of life (indeed, life = death according to the laws of nature), it was not all that much fun to dig through the past year searching for musicians recently passed.  It was, in fact, a bit of a downer.  Reliving the news that I knew was not half as bad as discovering the news I had missed.  All too many musicians I admire tripped off this mortal coil without so much as a thank you, Frank, it’s been fun, and I was more than a little unsettled with each discovery.  But the past is the past, whether we like it or not, and it was not all bad.