Thursday, February 24, 2011

John Zorn- Naked City (1988)


I've had the same experiences listening to the relentlessly shifty and tense recordings of Zappa's "Over-Nite Sensation" and Al Di Meola's "Land of The Midnight Sun". It's so over the top and brilliant and complex, that your mind is left hanging only by a thread-- the rest has been blown to hell.

I've never heard anyone quite do it like John Zorn and his band on Naked City.

Every fucking second of this record (and there's 26 tracks of schizophrenic madness) portrays some different twist of avant-garde pleasures : hardcore, schmaltzy 80's jazz, fusion, blues, funk, punk, heavy as fuck, grindcore, country, you name it.

At points, the sound is so film noir, it could be a score. At other instances, like the middle eight tracks, the band manages to record some of the wildest and thrashiest and heaviest music I've ever heard. And it's all composed so tightly and carefully, I'm threatened to say it's the best music out there.

Dig this shit.

3 comments:

  1. Naked City:
    http://www.mediafire.com/?mjjmkkzmyty

    and this is an album he put covering the great film composer Ennio Morricone, called the Big Gundown:
    http://www.mediafire.com/?f9yt1tv4g094lh6

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  2. Nice Will, I have this great memory a couple years back when I visited Mizzou on college visits for the first time with my Dad, and we played Naked City all the way through near the point when we were approaching Colombia. Neither of us really knew much background on the album, but we were both just grinning like idiots and exchanging these giddy glances to each other the whole time. An incredibly unique and encompassing album.

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