1001 Albums Summary

The songs are still brilliant. It is easy to get caught up in Jimi's excellent guitar work but the other pieces of the band are just as great. There is a rawness to the guitar though that is so difficult to replicate that I once described as a imprecise precision. Jimi never misses a note and you get the feeling that he hits everything just as he wanted and yet there is a feeling of searching in the melody, like an artist sketching out a drawing. I once listened to someone play a Hendrix song and commented while they played well, that they played too well. Their cover was too clean and it lost the energy of the original. That is on no better display than on this album. The album contains some of my favourite Hendrix songs including The Wind Cries Mary and Are You Experienced. However, the songs do form a random collection of tracks and lack a sense of cohesion to tie them together which I think is a missed opportunity.

Every track on this album crackles with energy. This is clearly a band that honed their craft and spent countless hours playing together. Everyone is on point through songs that wind upwards of 10 minutes. The songs wind expertly from rootsy blues of Stormy Monday to the frentic uptempo rock of You Don't Love Me Anymore. Its hard not to get caught up in the energy that this band channels into every second. Its fun to hear the band react to the music and yell at the band between songs. Theres nothing not to love here. The dueling guitars, the manic drum sets, the pumping bass, and Gregg Allman's piano and lyrics tying it altogether. The album isn't perfect but its imperfections are often an artifact of the fact that it is a live album and help make it better.

This one I struggled with. It is a technically well done album but most of the tracks just dont land for me. Songs that hit a more folk rock tone like Woodstock are generally enjoyable but tracks like Helpless just don't work for me. That said the harmonies are wonderful and there is something about the percussion that I do generally quite like.

Reggae really isn't my thing but this might be some of the best I've heard. It's somewhat a shame that it is clear that there is a message that is so specific to the Jamaican context and black experience that I only begin to understand. There are surely those who get a lot more out of the content of the lyrics than I ever will. I will say that the lyrics have a haunting quality to them and yet a certain melancholy to some of the songs, not necessarily for what was but for what could have been. It is a beautiful but heavy album. There are movies that I have watched that I describe as great movies that I will never watch again, and I have finally found my musical equivalent. I'm glad to have listened to it but it is unlikely that I will seek it out again, but I am interested in exploring more of Burning Spear's discography though.