Here's what I said about my thoughts on The Muffins from the Open City review: "For my tastes, The Muffins are an entirely frustrating band. Their best work IMO is the archival material pre-1978, which is heavily influenced by the Canterbury movement, and is mostly represented on the fantastic Chronometers CD that came out some 17 years after the fact. The Muffins proper debut, Manna/Mirage, is an album of contrasts mixing lucidly composed, highly melodic, jazz rock tracks - with some of the most annoying tuneless/structureless improvisations ever put to vinyl. In effect, The Muffins moved from Soft Machine II to Henry Cow's In Praise of Learning."
Like with Def Leppard's High 'N' Dry, I had no intention of buying this again. See ownership section as to how this came about. Whatever the case, time for a fresh evaluation. It was about a decade ago I sold off the CD and declared I was done with Manna/Mirage. But I've never heard it on vinyl. Even though the CD sounds way better, I for whatever reason found myself enjoying this more on the umpteenth reevaluation. Nothing has really changed in my mind though - the Canterbury sections are great, the tuneless improvisations are irritating. But there's just a lot more of the former than the latter, and I'm not sure why I'm realizing that more now than prior. The Muffins are not the most swinging Canterbury group, and they tend to be a bit stilted in their overall performance. But there's a lot of great here too. I heard enough this time to hold onto it. For now.
Ownership: LP: 1978 Random Radar. Single sleeve. Purchased from a local store (2022). The odd thing here is this store had it for over a year. It was priced fairly, definitely under online retail. Had I been interested in the record, I would have paid their original price. But I wasn't, and it was too much to "invest in". Eventually they gave up - no one in Colorado Springs wants this record apparently - and slashed it 50%. Well now it's a steal. I'll just resell it then for a hefty margin. Oops, guess I'm keeping it after all... BTW, this copy is close to mint and it's still quite noisy. Not the best pressing.
6//09; 8/21/22
No comments:
Post a Comment