Difficult Music

Few things make me more miserable than listening to myself "conduct" an interview with someone. Despite having weeks of lead time to work on a Morbid Angel story for Unrestrained! I've only just started because I couldn't bring myself to listen to the tape. I made it to the end of my session with Steve Tucker tonight. Now I have to brace myself to transcribe my dismal follow-up chat with Trey Azagthoth. I remember sucking really badly on that one. I've never been pleasantly surprised by an interview tape, either. This won't be fun.

I found a couple good things up the street at Neptoon this weekend:
AC/DC Flick of the Switch: Not the most stunning rarity ever, but it's an album I had a sudden need to hear. It's AC/DC at their most elemental, their leanest and meanest. Nothing rocks harder. Martin Popoff called it the "blinding furious peak of the Bryan Johnson era." The title track always cracks me up, with its ladder-climbing riff. What could be more perfect than that? I noticed that Stoke covers "This House is on Fire" sometimes. That Willingdon Black knows his AC/DC, and I always thought that was an interesting choice of cover. As kids I think we logged more hours listening to (and playing) AC/DC than anything else.

Gracious!: The band, the album. This is from 1970. Gracious toured with the Who in 1968 and put out a couple albums on Vertigo, I think. I'd been looking for this for a while, so I was very happy to find this on a nice Jap CD reissue--one of those mini-LP cover jobbies. Check out the picture in the gatefold! (I'd link to an image if I could find one.) The music itself is well out of order. The style is basically heavy early progressive that never sits still for very long. It reminds me of the progressive Italian bands who sprang up a few years later, having absorbed and warped the influence of their British forerunners. Gracious were warped from the start. I wonder if they toured with that harpsichord?