Pros: Lovely baritone singing, creative atmospherics, unified flow, good will.
Cons: Concept is a bit odd.
The Bottom Line: The space program, in any real sense, died before I was born. But I miss it, because I read and hear all the wonder and hope it was good for.
voxpoptart's Full Review: Vostok 6 by Kurt Swinghammer
In case your wallet is as easily maneuvered as mine is, I'll start by telling you, in full, the information needed to persuade me to acquire Kurt Swinghammer's solo debut. Kurt has worked with the Rheostatics, Ani DiFranco, and Sarah Slean, and Vostok 6 is an hour-long concept album about Valentina Tareshkova, the first woman in space. "This the single geekiest idea, in any artistic medium, that I have ever heard of", I decided, and immediately sent for a copy.
Post-listening information: well, Kurt swears he hasn't listened to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon since it was new. I believe him. Pink Floyd weren't influenced by Pink Floyd at all, and _they_ managed to sound more like Pink Floyd than any band ever, so why shouldn't someone else hit on some related ideas by accident? Not the whole insanity'n'decay stuff, the sound. I'm lukewarm towards Dark Side, to be honest; "Money" is a great, off-rhythmed, cynical pop song followed by a niftily inappropriate twelve-bar blues workout, and the rest is.... I dunno, I don't get it, really. Perhaps I'd feel comfier, since I like Vostok 6 a lot, comparing it to Radiohead's Kid A, or Jon Anderson's Olias of Sunhillow, or even to the TransGlobal Underground if they had any message to the world beyond "dance!". But in terms of consumer helpfulosity, I'd be ducking the obvious.
Vostok 6 starts out, at "6-16-63" (the satellite's launch date), with trumpet fanfare and an evolving drone. "I could do that", I think, listening to it; it's like the evolving drones I liked to create on my Yamaha, playing around with synthesizer voice patches as if I had a clue what I was doing, and occasionally hitting inspiration by accident. I have also proven, by more deliberate effort, that I can't sustain inspiration for more than two minutes that way. Perhaps that's because I didn't think to reinvent the quasi-heartbeat chase music from Floyd's "Rabbit Run" as a transition. But for Swinghammer, it's sensible, as it continues to pulse under slow, ringing acoustic guitar that could be compared fairly to David Gilmour (though if you've heard Swinghammer's own guitar work on Ani's "To the Teeth" and "Soft Shoulder", that's even closer).
"Blue", the first song, is also the Floydest, as Kurt's deep, pleasant voice -- like a more hesitant, less prefab Neil Diamond -- enunciates lyrics about "blue atmosphere disappears with the sun going down, to reveal a million gems... a velvet night of stars, each a different sun with different worlds". Synthesizers shimmer, motherships waft by, theremins burble Etch-a-sketch melodies, and Kurt's guitar rings through chord shifts as if he were trying to compress "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" into four minutes. No wonder he's telling a story from 1963.
Though Vostok 6's story is far from unaware -- it recognizes the launch's context in a macho nation-vs-nation posturing race, and it is also Kurt's theory that Americans found the triumphal orbit of a Russian woman to be as threatening for the "woman" as for the "Russian" -- the schedule of the album, as I hear it, is mainly for wonder. This is Foundation Trilogy, not Snow Crash. And you know, it's the Foundation Trilogy, epic tales of a galaxy-spanning empire of a quadrillion people and a dozen millenia's experience, that got me into science fiction. I was eleven, yeah; but no one should ever lose the ability to be eleven once in a while. So.
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"Of A Dream", the next song, is led into with equal pauseless electronic momentum. It's the last time I need to reference Floyd: Gilmourian acoustic guitar over, apparently, superintelligent rabble-roused plumbing and a rapidly shaken pop bottle. Those noises lead into the absurd and wonderful "MC Squared", which was going to be _my_ rap alias, dang it! It salutes "the prog-rockers of '74", and sounds like Rush trying to rap in "Roll The Bones", only through busy noise-gating of the voice and a cascading array of "this is a synthesizer, dig?"-type synthesizer sounds. This turns into "the First": more slow guitar treatments ("To the Teeth", plugged and via wind tunnel) and a crooning that slips into perfect Frank Sinatra devotion.
"Vostok 6" is introduced after an actual pause of a half-second. Launch noises (more subway than shuttle, that I can tell) kickstart a bizarre electro-funk. A robot sings "get your kicks on Vostok 6", but through a vocoder, not using its real voice. Airy female robots sing "Valentina" like a hymn, and rigid 8th-note bass thumps ground a delirium-tremens synth melody. "White Russians" strips down to a simple 7/4 dance beat, and Kurt sings like a Frank Sinatra single being mistakenly played at only 33 rpm while the silky female vocals support him in Vegas glory.
Until they start sounding more like snake-dancers; none of my descriptions hold for more than a couple of minutes on Vostok 6, which is one of its strengths, along with the fact that every transition is smooth. By several stages (organ, a brief hint of what does not turn out to be country, a noise which probably isn't your ceiling fan razzing you), we reach the end of part one. The opening fanfare is commericialized into TV-news music, the rhythm hints at samba, and the channel changes in the background a few times.
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Other tricks worth a mention: "Cold War" is absolutely modern, respectable, paranoid, arty Beats Per Minute electronica. "Dark", which introduces itself with the high-pitched Morse-code squeals of old TV newsrooms, has Swinghammer's deepest, most aching voice over the seesawing synth-noise background style of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" and guitar licks worthy of Ennio Morricone (or Portishead). "Falling Star", perhaps the prettiest song in its Bacharachian ballad-ness, is in 7/4 again, with both harmonica and echoed high-note overtones like a rusted swingset.
"Retro Rocket" devolves into techno worldbeat music, with exotic, Eastern, repetitive girl vocals and the burblings of the Muppet Show's "Vend-a-Face" sketches; even when you catch the quiet, buried squalling of a tortured cat, you can be sure it's a Pakistani cat well-trained in qawwali music. "Valentina" often sounds like a hymn recorded over cell-phone. "Seagull", narrated by Mia Sheard in an admirable library reading-lady audition (I'd hire her), could be the Doors' "the End" retooled as an inspirational bedtime story.
"Dawn" ends the album on a single 6-minute drone -- which isn't Guiness-worthy. Nine Inch Nails' Downward Spiral and Carla Bley's Escalator Over the Hill, both great albums, end with longer drones. But on Vostok I don't turn the album off soon after the drone begins. It's a complex drone, made from guitar parts of all the preceding tracks, but it still _seems_ like I could make "Dawn", or an equivalent, myself, once I get my keyboard back; if I worked long and thoughtfully enough. A small but real part of Vostok's sense of wonder, I think, is that like the aerospace technology of 40 years ago, it doesn't seem that out-of-reach to accomplish. It sounds amazing because it is designed by talented people who care about what they're doing, and have one leader's guiding vision.
Saluting an astronaut who orbits the earth at a cost of several billion dollars, of other people's money, and then comes back is, in the cosmic scheme of things, every bit as pointless as being one. But God certainly didn't give us intelligence for duty reasons, that we could solve real problems; indeed, very few of our problems predate that intelligence or would exist without it. It must surely be our efforts to master absurd, ambitious, gloriously silly goals, then, that made it worthwhile for Him to design so many of us.
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