Friday, September 15, 2023

Remco Hendriks - Remco's Groove Lab

Two Posts in one month! I'm on a roll. When I published my last post, noting it was YouTube month I remembered Dutch bassist Remco Hendriks and my desire to put together and album's worth of tracks from his YouTube channel. There is a lot there so I focused on one playlist that features a live drummer, his videos are either solo or have a drum backing track, (some live and some canned?). I've mentioned before my preference for songs with vocals over instrumentals but sometimes exceptions must be made and Remco is worthy of that exception. Besides YouTube you can find Remco on iTunes, Spotify and elsewhere (links below) so go show him some love.

Remco describes his channel thusly "On this channel you can find one-take performances recorded on video. No edits, no talk, just good ol' funky music. All bass and all original compositions, hope you'll enjoy!". Watching him play is just as much fun as listening to him, maybe more. As a bassist myself, he and I share some things in common in style and technique but like Micheal Hedges for acoustic guitar, Remco takes things to a whole other level (I still can't slap with conviction). I should be so lucky to be able to do half the things he does. Enjoy.
 
Tracklist

01 Funk with Chords
02 Experimental Fretless Funk Rock 
03 Fingerstyle Funk
04 Fretless Funk
05 Funk Rock Fingerpicking
06 Freaky Funk Rock
07 OC-2 Octaver Dirty Bass
08 Thumb & Fingerstyle Funk Rock
09 Chill Funk
10 Funk Rock in 7/8
11 Shuffle Feel Funk
12 Fretless with Harmonics
13 6/8 Funk Slap
14 Dirty Fretless Rock Bass
15 Dirty Fretless Rock Bass #2
16 Experimental Funk Rock Slap Bass
17 Heavy Groove
18 Fretless Funk Jam

Reality Notes
 
I have been a subscriber of Remco's channel for some time now and I still haven't watched every video there. There are so many! Cutting the playlist down to a CD's worth wasn't easy. I started with the longest tracks and worked my way down from there. I kept them in the order they appear in the playlist.

The cover is a screenshot from one of the videos, cropped and slightly altered with added text and an image from one of his albums. Track titles were derived from the video titles which are more descriptions of style and technique with some redundant wording edited out.
 
Links

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Friday, September 8, 2023

Larkin Poe - Stripped

September on this blog has been YouTube month. I don't have enough projects to fill the month but I do have this. I discovered Larkin Poe through fellow blogger Paul who runs the Albums That Should Exist blog. At the time of this post he has put up 18 separate albums from this duo. The bulk of those are pandemic era home concerts and collections of covers from the bands Tip o' the Hat series (8 volumes so far) all sourced from their YouTube channel (thus making it appropriate for September). 
 
The band is made up of sisters Rebecca (lead guitar) and Megan Lovell (slide guitar) with a small backup band consisting of a bassist and drummer. But I really fell in love with Paul's collections of performances that feature just Rebecca and Megan. Paul calls these acoustic performances but the pedantic in me has issue with that because Megan's slide is always amplified and Rebecca is sometimes playing electric guitar as well but that's a minor quibble, the important thing is the music and both are A class musicians that help renew my faith in the idea that guitar based music is not dead.

I've had Paul's first comp of this band, which he titled "Acoustic 2014-2017", and have had it on my iPod and other mobile devices pretty much since he first posted it but lately that hasn't been enough. I based this compilation on that first album Paul posted, removed the covers and expanded it with songs from other collections Paul posted. He did such a fine job gathering and editing these albums I decided not to reinvent the wheel and use his work and my source, thanks Paul hope you don't mind. The albums I used are listed below. Enjoy.

Tracklist

01 Holy Ghost Fire
02 Back Down South
03 Don't
04 She's a Self Made Man
05 Bleach Blonde Bottle Blues
06 You Can Close Your Eyes
07 Blue Ridge Mountains
08 Look Away
09 Tears of Blue to Gold
10 Blunt
11 Cast 'Em Out
12 Elephant
13 Trouble in Mind
14 Keep Diggin'
15 Stubborn Love
16 Easy Street
17 Take What You Want
18 Come On in My Kitchen

Reality Notes

These girls love to play covers - and they do a fine job of it - but one of the things that the pandemic era of YouTube home concerts gave us is a glut of cover versions by so many artists that frankly I'm a bit burnt out by them so this comp is focused on the band's original material (as it should be, they're fine songwriters as well as musicians). There are still a couple covers, Come On in My Kitchen seems to be a band favorite and is featured on two of their albums making it one of their own and You Can Close Your Eyes is just too good to pass up. Being kind of an obscure song to me helps it to fit in. I tried to make sure that the rest were all originals or at least made appearances on their official albums.
 
There was some overlap in the source albums that duplicated a few songs so I chose the best sounding ones. The cover is a pic I found on a Google search and added the text and border. 

YouTube channel

Sources
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