HENRY COW "Western Culture"
Celluloid, 1979
Henry Cow was an amazing, eclectic, complex, forward-thinking band from the 60's-70's who was mainly known for starting the "rock in opposition" movement and for having a young Fred Frith amongst its ranks. Their sound is very difficult to describe, but I'll try anyway: "almost inhumanly complex epic avant-progressive meets avant-jazz". Some people prefer to describe it as "avant-classical music played with rock instruments". Yeah. Probably some of the most exhaustive 36 minutes of music you will ever hear (and I mean this in the best possible way), you have to really listen to each song over and over to appreciate the layers of depth here. While you'll likely immediately appreciate the weird meters and bizarre song structures, you need patience in order to notice all the beautiful melodic themes running underneath the complexity. But don't let that scare you off: This is actually extremely easy listening. Unlike past Cow albums, there are no vocals at all here, letting the amazing music be the spotlight.. also, on past album, Cow occassionally dabbled in improvised music; however, this entire album was composed, and the songs were actually written to be too difficult for any of the members to play, though they eventually were able to play them after hundreds of hours of practice. Essential listening for anyone into music that nearly 30 years later is still aheads of its time.