No. 8 - Jessica Lea Mayfield - Sorry is Gone (ATO) - The SPEW countdown continues for the best of 2017.

Here we are, at No. 8. I first fell for this album on a drive home from Topeka on Stull road on a rather crisp, but sunny and lovely Saturday afternoon. I don't hate Topeka. Not at all. I don't live there either. They do have a Barnes & Noble, where you can buy magazines no longer available in dear old Lawrence.

But enough about that. Here's the review I wrote shortly after that invigorating drive. Sorry is Gone wore well as the year wore on. And I stand by my comments from this October review.

Enjoy!

https://spewrocks.blogspot.com/2017/10/jessica-lea-mayfields-unapologetic.html

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10. Alan Vega - It (Fader) ... SPEW'S Top 10 countdown.

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The Necks are from Australia. They are improvisors.

The new release by the Necks was reviewed recently in Pitchfork. 755 bloody words and other than some vague references to genre, mention of label mates, there’s one reference of a musical nature - to the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Sorta. The rest of it is a lot of bubble and squeak about cascades or echoes or some such shit. Pitchfork gives me gas. It’s a handy reference because they do review a lot of releases, but whatever critical paradigm they have is dominated and subverted by a lot of psycho-babble and allusion to extraneous nonsense. So, down to brass tacks. Whatever else the Necks may be, they are a jazz ensemble, a trio. Drummer Tony Buck, bassist Lloyd Swanton and keyboardist Chris Abrahams are Aussies who’ve performed together since the Eighties. I don’t pretend to know their entire history, but their last two recordings have been compelling sets of group improvisation. Recordings I discovered in part thanks to the British online jo...

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