[Originally posted August 2013]

Sweetest Mantra

The Isley Brothers sing on this album the sweetest of sweet soul music, Ronald Isley’s falsetto at the heart of all vocals, solo and in harmony. The title song is as beautiful as any beautiful soul sound can be, here at the smooth and soft prettiness point of that pretty spectrum – handclaps providing what funk there is, especially as it rises within the closing chorus that repeats the title. This of course has been set up by the gorgeous Prelude that begins the album, the melodrama of piano strains and crashing symbols beneath the thumping drums with Ronald’s plaintive plea for a harvest for the world, a harvest for the people, gather all together, a harvest for the children.

But if you want some funk, you’ve got it with third People of Today, oh yeah yeah. And then fourth Who Loves You Better is psychedelicised into the mix with Ernie Isley’s signature guitar sound, wah-wahing in that beautiful tone he makes his own. Suitably funked, we are returned to the loved-up caress of fifth At Your Best [You Are Love] where Ronald’s vocal and Ernie’s guitar coalesce in the height of their honeyed sensuousness. This is as perfect as such soulful sonorousness can be, before next Let Me Down Easy usurps with its deeper groove of soft resonance as Ronald sings with a melancholy that soothes in its despair, but only in the loving paradox and mantra of anticipation, if ever you were to leave me.

tonight
the
slugs
have
The
Original
and
Genuine
for
swimming
in
in
the
bottom
half
of
cut
half-
pint
milk
carton
swimming
baths
of
runner
diversions
diverting
slime
trails
into
their
pools
of
pulling
pulled
like
drunks
drawn
to
dunk
their
chewing
into
its
stout
liquid
nullifications
and
leave
my
beans
alone

Seed is a seed is a seed is a seed.

~ Gertrude Seed

E: Let’s go

V: We can’t.

E: Why not?

V: We’re waiting for Trump to make sense

E: (despairingly). Ah!

You ease yourself
through the days
watching re-runs
of Gunsmoke,
Chester looping up
the long street and
calling out
Marshall Dillon?
Marshall Dillon?
trying to get his
attention and
the answer
before it is
too late.

It is clear. This is it.
This feature. This fashion.
Overly taught. Over-taught.
[That was echo and repetition and tautology and cleverclogsness. Also it.]
But this is really it. This caesura.
Is it medial? Terminal!

[Originally posted in May 2011, the first in this list, and out of sequence here, as are all in this re-posting]

A Tear and a Smile is the Dublin duo’s second album, released in 1972, and is a folk gem, full of Irish lilt in the singing and fine guitar pluck and strum. The self-penned songs are gentle, earnest offerings – melodic, occasional harmony and simply sweet lyrically – and this album is indelibly mixed into the tiedye of my growing up at the time.

Before forming in Dublin, Leo O’Kelly came from Carlow and Sonny Condell from Newtownmountkennedy. Though their next album and later releases included more electrification, this is pure acoustic folk.

Wonderful songs are

Down Day
The Same Thing Happened
So Freely
Hemisphere
Lady Ocean
Goodbye My Love
Two White Horses

That’s 7 of the 10 and I am nitpicking the great from the good.

This post is the first in my new venture to account for my top 50 albums. I have no idea if I can confine myself to such a number but that’s the challenge and discipline. Once I have accounted for the 50, I will then rank them. That’ll be interesting.

Then it’s the next 50…..

And I’m not the first nor the last to start this kind of paradoxically perpetual task.

Awesome
male parent,
so the card half-says,
parental
legal
social,
though not in these words
moreover;

nor the
Institute of Fatherhood.

Connoisseur of
dad dressing, the
biology of epigenetics:

fathers don’t
mother
and are more
than money,
not on the cards
either.

Dad’s don’t always
do things with
apostrophes.

fathers are mothers
mothers are fathers

though maybe not at
http://www.prick’ssportinggoods.com
for razors
guns
hunting gear
old roll of the dice

And yellow dads,
though that might be
mellow,

no apostrophe,

dads make mistakes too.

And DadMusic
always the favourites.

Our secular trinity
still postulates difference,
and data-driven ideas
still fool themselves.

My small baseball gloves
were always for my hands
anyway.

On this day
it’s many things

noting the apostrophe.

I am grinding my teeth
at night
in those deep dreams,
chewing on the days
and days and all
I have shouted
at them.

I feel it in the morning
at breakfast,
in those deep silences
and the not knowing
and the continuing
sense of
pain.