John Coltrane – Ballads
John Coltrane is a legend—understatement doesn’t really enter the conversation when talking about someone whose imprint on popular music as we know it is as large as is. I use “popular” in a broad sense here, because we’re discussing jazz, after all. Coltrane’s body of work tends to be overshadowed by some pretty heavy duty releases: Giant Steps, A Love Supreme, and so on. My personal favorite is Africa/Brass, which is a 10 out of 10 masterpiece that somehow still gets overlooked, but it’s hard to blame anyone when the man’s got so many stone cold classics and that’s still only a small chunk of the eye-popping number of records he made in his short lifetime. (And he did make arguably at least one “pop” record, his collaboration with vocalist Johnny Hartman.)
Ballads is, as a result, a minor John Coltrane album. I don’t mean it’s a bad John Coltrane album, just that it’s low-key, made for enjoyment rather than innovation. And honestly, that’s why I love it. A lot of Coltrane’s music is pretty accessible to my ears—Wynton Marsalis said something about how audiences don’t want to hear Giant Steps because it’s “math” (that kind of read to me like an indictment of the audience, but your mileage may vary). But Ballads is the opposite. It’s easy to like because these songs are pretty chill, not imposing or overbearing. They’re lovely to listen to on a chilly night with a cocktail and the lights low.
Or in tonight’s case, on a warm night with the window is open because the A/C is on the fritz. Still sounds sublime. This is the last record from my recent batch of pickups at Records and Relics. This doesn’t matter to you, but remember, the whole point of this blog is that I remember when and where I was when I bought all my records. Doesn’t mean they all have interesting stories beyond “I just moved and it was weird!” But hey, there’s a lot of records to go and a lot more living in my life to do.
Rating: 9.1
Sound Quality: Great
Lungfish – Talking Songs for Walking
I’m not sure if it’s living closer to Baltimore that did it, but 2021 was the year that I got serious about Lungfish. (For the record, it’s a little over a three-hour drive to Baltimore from Richmond.) I’m not sure exactly what the impetus was, but I started listening to a bunch of Lungfish albums on whatever streaming service I was using at the time (I mostly use Apple Music but in pandemic times I was doing more Spotify listening for a while—that ended when I unsubscribed because of being broke, among other things.) I’m pretty sure I still have several Lungfish records in my Discogs wantlist, which I’ll probably buy eventually. Who knows!
Obviously you start here, though. This is the band’s debut album, released via Dischord in 1992, and ostensibly in the same sphere as early Fugazi and Shudder to Think, which makes sense given that Baltimore is a stone’s throw from Washington, D.C. (STT later relocated to New York, but that’s neither here nor there.) And they basically do one thing, more or less over and over: The band repeating abrasive punk riffs while vocalist Daniel Higgs does his mystical soothsayer thing. That wildly oversimplifies the matter, but that’s what they do in a nutshell, and it rules. It’s hypnotic as much as it is noisy and raw, and they always kind of fit into their own unique category, despite more or less being a “post-hardcore” band.
This is the album with “Friend to Friend in the Endtime” on it, which you could call their “hit,” if you wanted to. It was even covered by Joan Jett, who lived in Baltimore for a time. Weird bit of trivia you didn’t know you needed, but there you go. Hm, yeah, definitely need more Lungfish.
Rating: 9.2
Sound Quality: Great
Ænigmatum – Deconsecrate
From time to time I’ll have a post on here that’s basically not too much beyond “hey, this is a killer death metal record, I dunno!” And that’s what we have here with this Ænigmatum record. A pickup at Vinyl Conflict, one of the best record shops in Richmond, maybe a few weeks after arriving in Richmond, it’s a record I’d written about for my monthly metal column on Treble and liked enough to get myself a physical copy. Deconsecrate is a fantastic record, an instrumentally dazzling record in a technical sense but without the usual baggage that comes with “tech-death”, i.e. there’s a looseness and focus on melody, not too much in the way of absurd soloing—just, like, enough soloing. It’s a killer death metal record, I dunno! If you like riffs and fretless bass, check it out. Plus it’s a 20 Buck Spin release, and they can basically do no wrong. (Some people disagree, but they are the ones who are doing wrong.)
Rating: 9.0
Sound Quality: Great
1000 Times Jeff 
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