Paul & the Tall Trees - So Long - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Paul & Tall Trees - Our Love In The Light [COMPACT DISCS] date 10/21/2016

Paul Schalda is a poet, perhaps a bit of a tortured soul, a hopeless romantic, and a guy from Staten Island. That last bit might not make sense to people who aren't from New York. Let's say that it puts the blue in his collar and sticks his feet to the ground. Paul's music seems to embody the unexpected overlap of The Band's Americana, Ian MacKaye's unhinged emotion, Otis Redding's raw soul, and the doo-wop melodies his father, Bill Schalda Sr. (a member of Brooklyn vocal group, The Montereys) raised him on. His sophomore album is produced by long time collaborator and old friend Tommy Brenneck and Big Crown's own Leon Michels. For the people who are already fans of Paul's debut Our Love In Light, the growth and maturity will be impossible to miss. So Long reads and feels like you snuck in his room and read his journal. Deeply personal and heartfelt, he takes on a variety of topics in the songs, the common thread being the vulnerability and passion he delivers them with. The opener InchAlthough We CryInch is perhaps a perfect example what makes Paul's music so unique. He finds a way to cut right to the bone, entirely emotional and simultaneously emotionless...Inch Although we cry, we are not meant to beInch. The title track InchThen We'll Wave (So Long)Inch puts Paul amongst the great storytellers of song; tension, misdirection, and irony all play a part in taking one of the most sung about topics in life; love, and putting a brand new twist on it. Paul spent some years out on the road playing guitar in The Extraordi- naires backing the late great Charles Bradley where they became close friends. During that time he penned a few songs for Charles, one of which he wound up recording himself. That song, InchBewareInch showcases another side of P&TTT's range, a gritty, driving, warning tune where the band has a chance to get funky. One thing you hear in Schalda's music, n

2018 . Massimo Vivona is one of the unsung veterans of Namlook's Fax catalog, and one of the least notorious. Most of his work in the 90s centered around the then-fashionable areas of hypnotic trance, and though ambient pieces occasionally cropped up on his Fax productions, he was known more for auguring intense beatstorms rather than becalming ambient monsoons. With this utterly captivating new long-player, Vivona's not only flipped his own model, he's upped the ante. Taking cues from the breathless arpeggiated fantasias of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, née the instigators of the well-defined 70s Berlin School, Vivona's mapped out his own well-articulated star maps and plotted a true interstellar pathway to the cosmos. With reams of velvety, pulsating sequencers, skeins of prog-epic Moog, and a whole host of otherworldly vintage synths taking flight like sleek, analog eagles, Vivona's managed to concoct a modern-day Teutonic masterpiece, broad in scope, limitless in outreach, kaleidoscopic and eventful in equal measure. This is the kind of aural galactica that many practice but few lift-off; it's a testament to Vivona's skills that he can so effectively marry decades of synthesizer workout with such a stark and contemporaneous feel. Beautiful, bodacious, and bold, like the grandeur of the 70s masters, this one is literally godlike.