About a week ago I was unable to resist the pull that Television’s routinely dismissed sophomore album Adventure exerted on me from the shelves of Hot Wax. Even though I had recently come home with a 50+ haul at The Inner Sleeve’s all you can carry sale and had sworn to lay low in terms of dropping more money on records the appeal of Tom Verlaine and company’s guitar theatrics was too strong. Sure Adventure is widely considered a disappointment in the wake of the band’s debut Marquee Moon but Marquee Moon is damn perfect so of course Adventure would appear the lesser in comparison.
Adventure is about to get some much deserved attention though with the release of L’Aventure a song-by-song covering of the album by Los Angeles musicians such as Foreign Born The Henry Clay People and Local Natives. The album was put together by Aquarium Drunkard and acts as a sequel of sorts to Ram on L.A. a similar L.A.-based cover of Paul McCartney’s cult classic Ram . L’Aventure is available to download for free though small donations are also being accepted all of which will go to the Silverlake Conservatory of Music.
In other excellent L.A. blog related news Passion of the Weiss has restarted their Summer Jamz series with Sun Raw’s Super Disco Rappin’ Megamix . The mix offers a smorgasborg of early early rap singles from The Sugarhill Gang The Funky 4 and two Grandmasters not named Flash. Describing the mix blog head Jeff Weiss says:
“ I wanted to remember why I fell in love with Hip-Hop in the first place. The funk the energy the RAPPING. You might ask how I planned to do this with a bunch of singles nearly 20 years older than the stuff I grew up on; the answer is that everything I love about Hip-Hop music is directly or indirectly linked to the energy on these early records. ”
