Joy of a Toy - Kevin Ayers

Joy Of A Toy (Kevin Ayers, 1969)

1. Joy Of A Toy Continued - 2:54
2. Town Feeling - 4:51
3. The Clarietta Rag - 3:21
4. Girl On A Swing - 2:49
5. Song For Insane Times - 4:00
6. Stop This Train (Again Doing It) - 6:05
7. Eleanor's Cake (Which Ate Her) - 2:53
8. The Lady Rachel - 5:17
9. Oleh Oleh Bandu Bandong - 5:35
10. All This Crazy Gift Of Time - 3:57
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11. Religious Experience (Singing a Song in the Morning), Take 9 - 4:46
12. The Lady Rachel (Extended Mix) - 6:42
13. Soon Soon Soon - 3:23
14. Religious Experience (Singing a Song in the Morning), Take 103 - 2:50
15. The Lady Rachel (Single Version) - 4:51
16. Singing a Song in the Morning - 2:52

A whimsical avant-pop concoction, Joy Of A Toy finds Kevin Ayers's considerable songwriting talent in full flower.  Eclectic and eccentric, the album includes music hall songs, jazz-tinged psychedelia, minimalist experiments, folk epics, marching band parades, and dreamy lullabies.

Hints of Ayers's musical personality can be heard on the first Soft Machine album, but he really bursts out here.  The jaunty "Clarietta Rag" is miles away from the uber-hip Soft Machine, as is the delicate "Eleanor's Cake" with its tender piano swells, calming flute, and close vocal harmonies. There are a few connections: "Stop This Train (Again Doing It)" merges the repetitive minimalism of Soft Machine's "We Did It Again" with a Dylanesque allegory (plus a fantastic organ solo from Soft Machine's Mike Ratledge).  "Song For Insane Times", which features all of Soft Machine as the backing band, is classic Canterbury prog, complete with clever lyrics, jazzy instrumentation, and a fun 13/8 riff. David Bedford's lush, romantic orchestrations elevate "Town Feeling" and the title instrumental, while evoking mild disturbance and unease during "The Lady Rachel" and "Oleh Oleh Bandu Bandong" (based on a Malay folk song). The acoustic-guitar-with-harmonica closer "All This Crazy Gift Of Time" owes a lot to Bob Dylan again, but in a much more melodic mode.

My favorite song comes from the bonus tracks.  "Religious Experience (Singing a Song in the Morning)" is the song that got me into Ayers.  A simple pop song with jangly guitars, bouncy bass, fun drums, and feel-good vocal harmonies, it just repeats the same four vocal lines over and over, with instrumental breaks to punctuate the mantra.  He takes a very limiting musical idea and infuses it with joy. It's truly representative of the album as a whole.  You probably won't find much revolutionary or impressive here, just a bunch of people enjoying music.

Arbitrary rating:  4 out of 5 whimsical avant-pop concoctions

Momentum - Neal Morse

Momentum (Neal Morse, 2012)

1. Momentum - 6:26
2. Thoughts Part 5 - 7:51
3. Smoke And Mirrors - 4:38
4. Weathering Sky - 4:16
5. Freak - 4:31
6. World Without End - 33:39
     i. Introduction
     ii. Never Pass Away
     iii. Losing Your Soul
     iv. The Mystery
     v. Some Kind of Yesterday
     vi. Never Pass Away (Reprise)

Neal Morse's seventh progressive rock solo album is one of his most enjoyable opuses. Morse merges his melodic pop songcraft with virtuoso performances, ambitious arrangements, and progressive quirkiness.

First, huge props need to go to the rhythm section. Drummer extraordinaire Mike Portnoy and fantastic bassist Randy George really drive these songs, particularly the song cycle "World Without End".  Masters of mood and texture, yet monster performers, these two employ their muscular chops to excellent effect throughout.  On this solid foundation, Morse's keyboard and guitar work shine.  Several guest musicians contribute lead guitar, saxophone, violin, and clarinet. And of course, many different people provide sunny vocal harmonies.

Because the album doesn't have an overarching concept, the music has plenty of room to breathe.  I'll probably have to turn in my proggie card for this, but I particularly like the three short songs.  "Smoke and Mirrors" is a beautiful acoustic guitar ballad with a stately violin break; "Weathering Sky"'s pulsing wah-meets-didgeridoo guitar drone drives a melodic rocker; and the string-drenched pop of "Freak" is just plain catchy.  These short songs make a quick impact and provide a nice break between the more ambitious numbers.

Those ambitious numbers are certainly worth the time, though. The opening title track is trademark Morse -- a driving major key rock song that practically begs for hand-claps, with bouncy verses, big choruses, a jaw-dropping instrumental break, and The Big Finish, all packed into a tidy six and a half minutes. "Thoughts Part 5" continues the "Thoughts" series from Neal's days in Spock's Beard. With quirky arrangements, madrigal singing, and a sardonic, self-deprecating vocal from a guy who let his mind wander in the middle of a conversation, it fits right in.

"World Without End" examines the fleeting nature of this life and the promise of a life to come. Told from the perspective of a person who abandons their faith to pursue their own path, it paints a picture of the empty lure of the world and the hope of God's redeeming love. The music twists and turns with the story, yet the flow is very natural, and the individual songs function as movements of a greater whole. The entire musical journey makes for one of Morse's better long-form compositions.

Arbitrary rating: 4 out of 5 wah-meets-didgeridoo guitar drones

Glass Harp

Glass Harp (1970)

1. Can You See Me? - 6:26
2. Children's Fantasy - 4:12
3. Changes (In The Heart of My Own True Love) - 5:55
4. Village Queen - 4:00
5. Black Horse - 2:51
6. Southbound - 3:54
7. Whatever Life Demands - 6:29
8. Look in the Sky - 8:13
9. Garden - 4:19
10. On Our Own - 2:37

The debut album by the band that launched Phil Keaggy, Glass Harp showcases a band that is ambitious, eclectic, and undeniably talented.  Though uneven, their songs succeed more often than not.

A high level of production is evident throughout. Several songs include orchestrations, and there are additional uncredited instrumentalists here and there, like the unknown Hammond organ player on "Children's Fantasy". Adventurous and downright progressive song structures crop up in several instances, like the dramatic "Changes", which includes an excellent flute solo from bassist Dan Pecchio and a free-time guitar cadenza from Phil Keaggy. In the stately, atmospheric opener "Can You See Me?", Keaggy's vocals blaze about as brightly as his guitar work, and the anthemic "Look in the Sky" includes a few different movements while making room for exploratory jamming. Other successful but less progressive rockers include "Whatever Life Demands", "Children's Fantasy", and "Garden", where the band's Beatlesque harmonies comes to the fore.

The ballads "Black Horse", "Southbound", and "On Our Own" are solid and enjoyable, but not as compelling as the other songs.  The only misstep for me is "Village Queen", an attempt at some sort of humorous honky-tonk boogie.  The guitar work is still pretty decent, but the character of the song just doesn't fit with everything else, and the lyrics aren't witty enough to justify it. On the whole, though, this album has more good songs than you can shake a stick at, and the level of musicianship alone is worth checking out.

Arbitrary rating: 4 out of 5 blazing vocals

Roxana - Daniel Defoe

Roxana: The Fortunate Mistress (Defoe, 1724)

Defoe's final novel might be his best, yet it is his most frustrating. Often lumped together with Moll Flanders, I found Roxana to be an entirely different book. Nowhere else does Defoe's uneasy tension between worldly success and moral justice take such a striking center stage, and nowhere else does his subtle realist artistry find a better showcase.

Roxana starts life as a beloved daughter of a wealthy family -- the polar opposite of Moll Flanders, the abandoned child of a convicted felon.  As a young, beautiful girl, Roxana makes her fatal mistake by marrying, in her words, "a fool".  Her handsome yet vapid husband squanders all their wealth and then abandons her and their five children. Thrust suddenly into desperate circumstances, Roxana tricks her husband's relatives into taking the children and then prepares to eek out an existence through whatever work she can get, which isn't much. The horror of poverty leads her into the life of a kept woman, mistress to rich merchants, noblemen, even royalty at one point, which she turns into vast personal wealth. Finally "settling down" in her fifties and marrying for the trifecta of love, money, and social status, her happiness is jeopardized by her efforts to atone for her past.

Defoe doesn't seem to know what to do with Roxana.  He obviously admires her practicality, worldly wisdom, ambition, and economic savvy, because he turns everything she does into gold. Unlike Moll, whose luck fluctuates at the drop of a hat, Roxana really doesn't suffer many setbacks after her initial abandonment. She is, indeed, "The Fortunate Mistress". Though she admonishes throughout that her case is extraordinary, it's tough not to see the narrative as an approval of her choices, rather than a cautionary tale.

Yet Defoe's realism includes several subtle (and some shocking) incidents that reveal Roxana's own internal discord.  She rejects honorable proposals and even corrupts her maid's chastity to reinforce her own picture of herself as a lost woman. Even in her happiest times, she upbraids herself, and when she is in a position to help her grown children, she does it clandestinely, ashamed to let her children know how she got her money. This shame results in some of the tensest scenes in literature, and ultimately in a horrible tragedy that is referenced but never reached:  the book just ends abruptly, almost as if Roxana/Defoe could not continue the narration.

That bizarre ending is what makes the book frustrating.  I can't help but wish Defoe had brought the book to a real conclusion, but it seems he just couldn't figure out how to do it. Yet he provides enough information for us to piece things together. If this had been written in the early 1900s, I can't help but think it would have fit right in with the literary experiments of the Moderns like Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner.  Not something you would expect from one of the earliest examples of the novel.

Arbitrary rating: 4 out of 5 vapid husbands

A Journal of the Plague Year - Daniel Defoe

A Journal of the Plague Year (Defoe, 1722)

Forget about The Stand -- Defoe's account of the bubonic plague in London is frightening and true. Though not an eyewitness account, since Defoe would have been five years old at the time, it is still largely based on fact, and perhaps to some degree on the diary of one of Defoe's uncles, who actually was in London during the plague.  Defoe's sweeping journalistic picture of a city in crisis is both haunting and mesmerizing.

Told from the point of view of a London merchant, the book is a collection of sketches, facts, documents, and statistics that vividly paint the scene of desolation and despair. Locked and abandoned houses, doomed families, manic displays in the streets, pseudo-religious hysteria, mass burial grounds, persevering physicians, stoic public servants, desperate escapees, and the nightly rounds of the dead cart all paint a chilling picture of a suffering city.

In a particularly moving scene, the narrator walks about the abandoned docks of the Thames and meets a boatman whose wife and children have been infected. We see the man leave food and money on a dock, and watch hopelessly as his wife and oldest son crawl out of his house to get it after he is a safe distance away. Banished from his family, his heart is broken at their plight, and he is unable to come near them, but at the same time he refuses to abandon them. We never learn what happens to them, but it is a picture of steadfast love in the midst of tragedy.

With stark and methodical realism, Defoe tries to portray as much of the turbulent time as he can, and he does a very good job.  This is a book that will get you thinking.

Arbitrary rating: 4 out of 5 desperate escapees

Captain Singleton - Daniel Defoe

The Life, Adventures, and Pyracies of the Famous Captain Singleton (Defoe, 1720)

Like its predecessor Robinson Crusoe, Defoe's Captain Singleton is about survival in an exotic land. But widening his scope, Defoe takes his narrator across Africa and through all the major oceans, rather than trapping him on an island. He also introduces a moral conflict of interest that he would explore through the rest of his fiction.

The main character, a lawless youth who joins a mutiny and is marooned with the other plotters on Madagascar, turns out to be clever and resourceful as the men try to survive in a strange land and get back to Europe. Together they trek across Africa to the Gold Coast, braving jungles, deserts, wild animals, and those infamous natives. Like his predecessor Crusoe, Singleton acquires a man Friday, this time in the person of an African prince who, after the Europeans cure him of his gunshot wounds, pledges allegiance and takes along about 40 of his subjects on the transcontinental hike to serve the white masters. At the end of their risky adventure, they pan huge amounts of gold from the west African rivers and go home rich.

Quickly spending his wealth on dissolute living in England, Singleton turns pirate and terrorizes the Caribbean, South America, the east African coast, and Indonesia. His piracy is largely an economic venture, rather than a violent outburst against society, due in no small part to the intervention of William the Quaker, a surgeon they "force" on board (though he is certainly willing) who always keeps their focus on easy monetary gain and away from unnecessary killing. The tension between William's obvious relish for ill-gotten gain and his underlying morality form the most interesting part of the book, and his sagacity preserves Singleton from many a misadventure and finally brings to him a reputable end.

Essentially two different books in one, Captain Singleton is disjointed and a bit unfocused.  It is certainly crammed full of incidents, and Defoe's interest in economy, realism, and travel find full vent in this tale. While Robinson Crusoe is morally straightforward, Captain Singleton begins the string of narratives where Defoe's fascination with mercantile success through sinful or criminal means conflicts with his (or perhaps just his readers') desire for moral justice. His finest works in this vein are Moll Flanders and Roxana, but Captain Singleton provides an early outline for the conflict.

Arbitrary rating:  3 out of 5 infamous natives

Ferdinand Count Fathom - Tobias Smollet

The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (Smollett, 1753)

Smollett's third novel already has a leg up on his first.  He doesn't pretend to hold up Ferdinand as a reputable protagonist; rather, he embraces the anti-hero mantle for his wily rake, and in the process he succeeds in crafting an interesting story, with a little bit more substance than Roderick Random.

Ferdinand is the child of an unknown German soldier and an English prostitute whose hobbies also include robbing battlefield corpses. He manages to insinuate himself into the good graces of a nobleman, who raises the orphan as his own child. A bright lad, but a manipulative soul, he soon dives into plots, intrigues, cons, and deceptions, trying to make a quick buck and steal meaningless pleasure. We follow his career of crime through Germany, Austria, France, and England, as he systematically bites every hand that ever fed him and even betrays his best friend. The vicissitudes of his fortune lead him into brutal poverty and final repentance, and shockingly, it's a quite believable repentance. I didn't think Smollett had it in him.

The subplot involving Ferdinand's duped friend and the beautiful Monimia is decent too, including an almost Gothic graveyard scene and an over-the-top plot twist. But Ferdinand's schemes are the most interesting part of the book.  Whether he is card-sharping, playing doctor, prosecuting romances (there really is no other verb to apply here), or dodging creditors, Ferdinand's antics are usually worth reading, and they provide a strong picture of the effects of vice and deception. Maybe I won't completely write off Smollett just yet.

Arbitrary rating:  3.5 out of 5 careers of crime

Roderick Random - Tobias Smollett

The Adventures of Roderick Random (Smollett, 1748)

Ever since I read Charles Dickens' David Copperfield, I've wanted to read Smollett. The young David talks about how he escaped into the worlds of Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphrey Clinker, and as a young reader taking his escape in David Copperfield, I took note.

Alas, Smollett left me underwhelmed.  Roderick Random is definitely a picaresque novel. It checks all the boxes: a bluff young hero who undergoes outrageous turns of fortune (there's a reason his last name is Random), a goofy sidekick who tries to make the bluff young hero look good, a host of colorful characters along the way, and a perfect woman waiting at the end of it all. But checking the boxes is about as deep as it goes.  It's a series of events, a little bit of humor, but not much reason to care.

The main problem is Roderick himself. An orphan mistreated by his grandfather and relatives, his major motivation throughout the book is revenge.  He doesn't really care about love, friendship, or even making money -- he just wants to get even. During his stint in the navy under a tyrannical captain, Roderick starts to eek some empathy out of the reader. Under the hardship of the ignorant captain, he matures imperceptibly as he bonds with his messmates in distress, but for the rest of the book, he knocks about with no one but himself in mind.  The happy ending is handed to him on a silver platter, and it's very hard to rejoice, especially when his final prosperity comes attended with several last swipes at the people who kept him down.  He's not really an anti-hero, but he's certainly not likable.

If there is any redeeming quality here, the widely ranging breadth of the book provides a fairly convincing tableaux of run-of-the-mill humanity:  nothing special, no one particularly saintly, villainous, or conflicted, just a bunch of humans trying to get their kicks on life's bumpy highway.

Arbitrary rating:  3 out of 5 outrageous turns of fortune

A Sentimental Journey - Laurence Sterne

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (Sterne, 1768)

The only other novel by the author of the hilariously freewheeling Tristram Shandy, Sterne's Sentimental Journey is similarly light-hearted and humorous, albeit on a much smaller scale.

Of course, the plot is immaterial. The book starts and ends mid-sentence, and in the middle of those interrupted sentences, the narrator (the parson Yorick from Tristram Shandy, though really just a thin veil for Sterne) wanders around France -- he never even gets to Italy -- seeking intellectual attachments, finer feelings, and female regard. The hopeless romantic falls in love at the drop of a hat with random shopkeepers and lady's-maids, but it's a love that never takes itself too seriously, especially if it will interfere with a good anecdote or the purchase of a fine set of Shakespeare.

Essentially a slim volume of digressions, musings, sketches, and anecdotes, my only complaint is that it's too short.  After the bountiful feast of Tristram Shandy, the enjoyable Sentimental Journey isn't even dessert - it's a sample platter, with several delectable bites but not much to sink one's teeth into. That said, those bits are quite delicious.  Take this scene. After a good meal, Yorick waxes eloquent on the beauty of charity:  "When man is at peace with man, how much lighter than a feather is the heaviest of metals in his hand! he pulls out his purse, and holding it airily and uncompressed, looks round him, as if he sought for an object to share it with! ... I had scarce uttered the words, when a poor monk of the order of St. Francis came into the room to beg something for his convent... The moment I cast my eyes upon him, I was predetermined not to give him a single sous." The book is full of engaging, rambling stories that take comic and often ironic turns.  Continually undercutting, diverting, and rerouting his narrative, Sterne's art of the absurd is enchanting, and it is underpinned by genuine love and self-deprecating good-humor.

Arbitrary rating: 4 out of 5 random shopkeepers

Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings - Johnathan Swift

Gulliver's Travels and Other Writings (Swift, 1726)

Johnathan Swift's gift for satire outlives the timeliness of his subjects - though so often, his targets are intrinsic to human nature, and therefore never out of date. Enriched with razor wit and the passion of an Irishman, the works in this collection are a testament to the genius of Swift.

Of course, almost everyone knows something about Gulliver's Travels, Swift's most famous work. A sweeping portrayal of human folly, political shenanigans, and absurd ideas, there is much more going on here than whimsical storytelling. Through a series of unfortunate events, Gulliver discovers many faraway lands and exotic peoples: the tiny Lilliputians and the giant Brobdingnagians; the mathematical Laputans with their heads in the clouds; and the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent horses who herd the degenerate Yahoos, perhaps the most withering and misogynistic portrayal of humanity ever committed to paper. Indeed, the end of the book is intensely dark, with Gulliver rejecting his own family as "poor Yahoos" and living in despairing isolation. That, plus all the scatological humor in regards to tiny and giant people, and I'm not sure how this ever became known as a kid's book!

Also included are A Tale of a Tub, "The Battle of the Books", "The Mechanical Operation of the Soul", "An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity in England", "A Modest Proposal", "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift", and several other shorter works in prose and poetry. The Tale is one of the funniest things I've ever read.  A satire on modernist thought and "new learning", he skewers the wordy style of the writers of his day by expanding a 30-page allegory into almost 120 pages of introductions, prefaces, footnotes, and digressions. But fear not, it's hilarious from start to finish, due in no small part to Swift's ebullient wit.

I wish I could do justice to Swift's style and substance within this review, but it's hopeless.  All I can say is, read him.

Arbitrary rating: 4.5 out of 5 ebullient wits