montana

Paul McCartney - Egypt Station
Solid album with some stand out tracks. A good repeated listen

Chocolate Watchband + Young Fresh Fellows @ Tractor Tavern Seattle Dec 2
Scott McCaughey's first YFF gig since his stroke last year. Good enough reason to take the trip. Kaz insisted she needed to see Chocolate Watchband after hearing me talk about them for the last 37 years. 51 since I last saw the proper Watchband. A couple of later line ups were name only. YFF tore the roof off. CWB were more than a recreation. Original drummer Gary A still hit them hard. New album they were previewing is also surprisingly good. A good time was had.

Beatles - Beatles reissue, remix
The remix sounds like the best new band album of the year. It's familiar, yet very different feel too. Gilding the lily, but just fine. It's the Escher Demos and session tracks that are the revelations. Well worth the price of admission. Detailed note in the hard cover book explain the session material. There is a 5.1 mix which I have no way to listen to. The BluRay also has the remix and the original mono mix in high def. Mono still kills.

Guided By Voices - Space Gun + Ogre’s Trumpet
Always hard to keep up with a band that manages two albums a year. Space Gun shows the current band are gonna keep cranking out great material. The live album, Ogre's Trumpet is easily the best live GbV album, yet. Recorded in 2017.

One definition of a convolution is “a twist”, and there are more of those in the history of Donovan’s Brain than Donald Trump’s Twitter stream.

Starting as a garage band in 1986 - playing Thunders and Stooges covers - the Brain has evolved into a shape-shifting, back woods psychedelic musical collective, with nine albums and 26 past or present members. “Convolutions” covers 1991-2017 and generously spans three discs. That’s 49 songs and a touch under four hours of music.

The only constant in the Donovan’s Brain story is Ron Sanchez, a musician, radio host, restauranteur and producer who relocated many years ago from the US West Coast to the bucolic and relatively remote location of Bozeman, Montana.