Journey in Progress
Discovering music one album at a time
391
Albums Rated
2.59
Avg Rating
33
5-Star Albums
36%
Complete
698 albums remaining
Rating Speed
4.2
Per Week
657
Days Active
Reviews
388
Written
99%
Review Rate
vs Global
-0.69
Avg Diff
2.59
Avg Rating
Rating Distribution
How you rate albums
Rating Timeline
Average rating over time
Ratings by Decade
Which era do you prefer?
Activity by Day
When do you listen?
Taste Profile
1960s
Favorite Decade
Punk
Favorite Genre
US
Top Origin
Harsh
Rater Style
70
1-Star Albums
5-Star Albums (33)
View Album Wall
Taste Analysis
Genre Preferences
Ratings by genre
Origin Preferences
Ratings by country
Rating Style
You Love More Than Most
Albums you rated higher than global average
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wild Gift | 5 | 3 | +2 |
| Exile In Guyville | 5 | 3.02 | +1.98 |
| Maxinquaye | 5 | 3.04 | +1.96 |
| Forever Changes | 5 | 3.23 | +1.77 |
| Every Picture Tells A Story | 5 | 3.24 | +1.76 |
You Love Less Than Most
Albums you rated lower than global average
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Black Sabbath | 1 | 3.83 | -2.83 |
| Vol. 4 | 1 | 3.75 | -2.75 |
| Master Of Puppets | 1 | 3.73 | -2.73 |
| Grace | 1 | 3.71 | -2.71 |
| Californication | 1 | 3.71 | -2.71 |
Artist Analysis
Favorite Artists
Artists with 2+ albums and high weighted score
| Artist | Albums | Avg | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bob Dylan | 4 | 4.5 | 3.86 |
| The Who | 2 | 5 | 3.8 |
| The Rolling Stones | 3 | 4.33 | 3.67 |
Least Favorite Artists
Artists with 2+ albums and low weighted score
| Artist | Albums | Avg | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Black Sabbath | 3 | 1.33 | 2.17 |
| Metallica | 3 | 1.33 | 2.17 |
| Cocteau Twins | 2 | 1 | 2.2 |
| The The | 2 | 1 | 2.2 |
| Nick Drake | 2 | 1 | 2.2 |
| Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds | 2 | 1.5 | 2.4 |
| Portishead | 2 | 1.5 | 2.4 |
Popular Reviews
Ella Fitzgerald
1/5
This is some kind of protest vote, and for a few reasons. 1) By all means, slap a 5/5 on your review, but know this: I see you. I know it sounds high-brow and classical and you feel helpless in its presence. "Aw gee, I mean... shit... it's so prestigious." I get it. But I also see you. Grow a spine. 2) Where are the other compilations in this book? Why have I got to listen to Little Richard and James Brown and Buddy Holly studio albums, and pretend they're representative of the best those acts could produce, when I could be listening to far superior comps? I don't accept this as the exception. 3) It's over three hours. That's only allowable for 'Star Time'.
59 likes
Beatles
3/5
She said: "Revolver is the best Beatles album. It doesn't overwhelmingly rock, roll or pop because its strategy is to transport the listener to the until-then uninhabited space between all three via melodic aggressiveness and sonic inventiveness." I said: "Who put all those thoughts in your head? It's got Yellow Submarine, for Christ's sake. And that strategy meant they took their eye off the ball lyrically and out popped Good Day Sunshine and Doctor Robert. (Let's just ignore the Harrison lyrics)." She said: "No, no, no, you're wrong. What sounds like filler or a lack of cohesion is the embodiment of the main theme: alienation. Listen again to how many of the songs take a side-on approach to loneliness and people talking past each other. As standalone songs, they're crystal clear, but together they jar. That's deliberate." I said: "Even though you know what you know, you're wrong." She said: "Then how come you're using one of their songs as a framing device for your review?" I said: "..."
55 likes
DJ Shadow
5/5
Questions of ownership. Whose property is that drum beat, this organ, that voice? Of authorship. If I use your art for my art, do I become its creator? If not, does that tune belong to the guitar maker or the composer? Of permanence. If placing that snippet next to this one, or looping it, or giving it a beat, changes its original meaning, does art ever have a final form? A man in a room filled with vinyl, exploring every groove in minute detail, sinking deeper into his musical fever dream, the answers always a fingertip away, if he'd just.....
42 likes
Deee-Lite
3/5
A Scooby Doo episode in which Fred, Velma and Daphne follow a trail of day-glo, pheremones and good beats, only to find it's led them to each other and their coming of age in the post-disco era. They then Scooby Screw each other with reckless abandon and dance their way through the emotions they don't yet understand, gabbing on the way home about the power of love and the groove in their hearts. Zoo-zoo-wah, indeed!
31 likes
Mike Oldfield
2/5
"Thanks for the recording, Mike. Great tune. Love those bells! We can really do something with them... Oh sure, the whistles are cute, too... Uh-huh, and the guitar at 14 minutes... Yep, the jig at the end was, er, also amusing... Nice stuff. Sure. I'm just saying that as far as quote unquote songs, it's obvious those first four minutes do the heavy lifting, so we should run with those. Maybe work in a few of the other bits. That'll shave off a cool forty-four minutes or so. Then we'll be sitting pre... Sorry, say that again... Oh. Really? All of it?... I see... Uh-huh... I see... Mike, that's *very* long. I'm not sure peope will be able to tolerate it once the main bit is over so early... Mike?... Mike?... Shit."
31 likes
1-Star Albums (70)
All Ratings
The Kinks
4/5
Got it already. Will relisten later. Already my favourite Kinks album.
David Crosby
1/5
White men with weak voices who huddle in the "Let's jam to the blues" bit of the rock spectrum have to work harder for my attention. David Crosby (not the same as Bill Cosby it turns out - I had to check) comes across so up his own arse that he either doesn't know or doesn't care, which is probably why so many of his moany vespers disappear before taking on a recognisable form. Song With No Words sounds like self-parody (though the coda's all right) and What Are Their Names sounds like a half-baked intro to a longer song which is due to start at 4:14 but finishes there instead. My question isn't can he play (answer: yes) but why is he playing? Verdict: I could have died without hearing this album.
Beatles
4/5
After tearing Paul to shreds as a vocalist in the preceding years, this is the one where John shows himself equally superior as a songwriter. Norweigian Wood, Girl and In My Life are a magnificent triumvirate that work through John's complex feelings towards women: confusion, anger, bitterness, devotion. When he brings the muscular second guitar in to punctuate the third verse of Girl, it's because he knows that's the one the tips it into masterpiece. Something similar happens with the sped-up piano on In My Life. So, those three are untouchable genius. What Goes On is... not. Pretty abominable really. George's mumbo jumbo is passable, though Think For Yourself, while the better of the two, is more grating lyrically. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that John wrote The Word as a George parody, especially given its sequencing. Drive My Care and Michelle are two of Paul's more nuanced and therefore best songs. Overall, it's great but not without mediocre moments. Verdict: I could not die without having heard this album.
LCD Soundsystem
1/5
Over an hour of unflappably midtempo disco rock - occasionally stimulating, other times embarrassing - over which James Murphy grouses that 'I've got nothing to say', 'I can't get out of bed', 'Keep your thoughts to yourself' and 'I've been misunderstood', his bland voice pushed forward just enough that it doesn't get lost in the dirge-thump. There are smarter lyrics in here than the ones I've quoted, but these represent the main case statement: that the band intends to make a virtue out of having nothing much to say.
Black Sabbath
1/5
More grooves and toons than I expected but mostly riffs, riffs, riffs, riffs, riffs, riffs, riffs. Not bad in theory but in practise led to me zoning out, making this background music with pretensions. Some humour, musically speaking. How much Ozzy's voices adds to the mix is up for debate. Not so the lyrics. They're dumb as all hell.
I'm being stingy with the rating. I feel I've got to protect that second star.
Q-Tip
2/5
Still one of the sexiest voices in rap along with... hm... Heems? That requires further study. Anyway, while this is a leeeetle too smooth and low key for me, especially considering the heights he hit before and after, it has enough bounce to keep the dangers of easy listening at bay. And I appreciate that he always raps with a point plus one to prove.
Little Richard
3/5
I'm no afficianado but having had a little exposure to Little Richard previously and some knowledge of this era of pop I expect neither this or any other studio album represents him at his very best. He predated the era of studio album as apotheosis so it's a bit disappointing to see pre-60s artists entered into this list in this way. Suggests history is being skewed to bring it in line with what came later. Still, when you hear this you can't fail to be struck by what a firecracker he must have been - and still is, even if his incendiary screaming, relentless pounding and 100 mph tempos no longer shock you into running out of the record store clutching your pearls and heading straight for confession. There's a direct line running from his pit of the belly yowls to Nirvana choruses that are just variations of "Yeah" and Migos' electrifying ad libs.
The B-52's
4/5
Punk, disco, surf, pop junk and cold war paranoia - no wonder they're talking nonsense. Except they're not. The whacked-out vocal affectation, pseudo-classical flourishes and bonkers lyrics give alienation a voice, sure, but more importantly a beat. That rhythms is all that's keeping these crazy kids' feet on the floor.
Metallica
1/5
A very busy weekend which meant I didn't get around to listening to this and, frankly, I'm relieved. I did my time with this and other Metallica albums in my teenage years. I don't need to go back there.
Frank Ocean
3/5
A misnomer. There isn't one Channle Orange; there are dozens, and Frank flicks between them like it's way past midnight and he can't drag himself to bed. Leans into loungey suave a little too hard, but nowhere near enough to undermine his incredible vision or storytelling gifts.
The Velvet Underground
4/5
To my mind, Lou Reed's gift as a lyricist is for literalness and plainspeak poetry. So I was surprised when I listened to this for the millionth time and realised I'd always assumed this was the one where he's more gnomic. Probably because of the album's avant-garde edges. Not so. When he says, "And I feel like I just don't know" on Heroin, he means it.
What he does know is what's down back alleys, under ground and after dark. The music is just as filthy. The inclusion of gentile European tradition signifying Nico by Warhol (more likely director than producer) is a masterstroke, both elevating all this American vulgarity with her presence but also upending and debasing what she signifies.
Queen
3/5
Probably a 2.5. Rounded up because it's opened these mouldy cabbage ears to Queen as album-worthy. I'd say I hadn't considered that possibility before because they're victims of an enduringly popular greatest hits collection excpet no band with these sales can be called a victim. Find a better word and let me know. Killer Queen is still my favourite of all their songs, Bring Back That Leroy Brown is a hoot and the "Don't look back" but in Flick of the Wrist (about wanking, I hope) gets me pumped every time. Prog - pfft. This is just good ol' gay as fuck rock 'n' roll!
James Brown
3/5
1) All music since James Brown is a failed attempt to match his rhythm. Discuss. 2) Please explain why more albums should have seprate tracks for instrumental bridges. 3) Somewhere in these 31 minutes is the formula for Al Green's music. Please represent this as a mathematical equation, showing your workings. 4) James Brown never released a particularly good studio album, but is still responsible for much of the best music of the 20th century. Did he know something we don't?
Iron Maiden
1/5
This one time - for a dare - I knelt down next to the exhaust on a powerful sports car while the driver stepped on the accelerator and generated maximum revs. It was very loud. However, aside from being distressed by the volume I wouldn't say if it was pleasant or unpleasant as there was no discernible variation in the noise. It just bore through me.
Willie Nelson
4/5
Big music done charmingly small, which suits Nelson's down-to-earth vocals. It's just as easy to not hear the delicate strings, bells, harmonica and various other percussion. Not because they're not strong or good enough, but because like most natural things you take them for granted first before becoming fully conscious of their beauty and complexity.
Buena Vista Social Club
2/5
Blended harmonies, sugary melodies, complementary percussion, buttery voices. A pleasing medley it'd be churlish to pretend isn't, well, pleasing. So I happily tolerated it and would be unlikely to object if I ever heard it again even though ultimately polite musicianship doesn't lift, cleanse or scratch my soul and music that tends too agreeable makes me a tad dis. If that sounds contrarian I guess that's because, to an extent, that's how I like my music - with contradictions and contradistinctions. To put it in a less assholish way: I tuned out a lot That seems to be part of the design here, which I don't get. That's like opting to get your hair stroked when you could get your butthole eaten ;) Okay, now I am being churlish. It was very pleasant.
Sufjan Stevens
3/5
Did it allay my suspicions that he's a poser whose experiments with fey grandeur via cutsie-pie rhymes and honeyed vocals don't liberate him from the thrall of easy listening? Yeah, pretty much. That stuff is sorta there but with less pretention, more whimsy and, most of all, melodies that are too full-bodied to ignore. In truth, I heard this as two stars but have bumped it to three as I could see that happening with repeat listens.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
1/5
A fun-sucker whose big ideas - as suggested by the title and horrifying run time of this one - are limited to the morbidly dramatic and lyrically mirthless. I didn't find a single line to grab on to. Occasionally the looming morbidity is effective - thuds reverberating in a tomb - but most of the time it feels like a 6-part documentary delivered entirley to camera by a single sad presenter. Docked a point for taking up so much of my life.
Sparks
3/5
Blondie crudites and only on the raw end because I don't think the full new wave repertoire of whizz bangs was available at the time. On this evidence they played a big part in creating them. Glam, camp and archly European in the sense that it made me want to throw on some make up and goose step around the house in a tutu. Like the rest of new wave (though I only have a basic understanding) the formula is that that everything can be a hook.
Jane's Addiction
1/5
Remember when Wayne Campbell said to Cassandra Wong after watching Crucial Taunt play for the first time, "You guys really wail"? That bonehead sentiment sums up the scope of the vision here. Each song is constructed around the myth of the transportive rawk solo, either side of which the band emit attentuated squeaks, flail lamely with all the other parts of making a song, leaning on art poses like the excruciating freeform bit halfway through Then She Did... when they run out of steam. Sadly for them, when they arrive at the climax they so desperately seek it's only ever a sad dribble in the hand and a drip or two on the tummy. A very irritating listen.
The Boo Radleys
1/5
I thought the first song had kicked things off nicely with some winsome harmonies and key changes and a swaggering riff, but then I blinked and it was track 7. The rest of the album was lost in the same "Whoops, too much water in my watercolours" vein. One more for the list of bands 60s nostalgia has to answer for.
The Pretty Things
1/5
"Through dark forrrests of my myyyind" sings Phil May on I See You, attempting to enter a higher plane via excruciating vocal affect. Truly bottom of the barrel stuff and another flabbergasting inclusion on the list. I feel like I'm being deliberately tested.
The Pogues
4/5
Wouldn't be surprised if this was made 'Thanks to a grant from the Irish in Britain Heritage Fund', so well does it document the horrors visited on the Irish by our multiply disgraced nation. As for historicity, I imagine some is fact and some is myth and jolly good too because history can't be understood without both. At the same time, McGowan and his troop make you feel the spirital effects of all this turbulence. It's pretty obvious how this is done lyrically. These are fabulous stories bleeding with colour. But it's the inclusion and ocassional reworking of traditional songs among the originals that elevates this to heritage status. Capping it all off with Waltzing Matilda -- about similar awfulness in Australia -- is a masterstroke that makes the album universal. What struck me anew this time were the sparing and gentle arrangements, which belie my assumption that this is mostly punk and puckish fare.
The Chemical Brothers
2/5
A soft focus laser (like the green ones in clubs that pan around) trained squarely on your pleasure zones that hits (tickles?) the spot more often than not. Agreeable by design, which isn't an issue here because the Brothers' dedication to making techno enjoyable for a wider audience means an appreciation of pop song form and healthy servings of beats. I tip my hat to them for their public service.
Pavement
4/5
Like Steely Dan looking in a cracked mirror, Pavement provide a wry slant on... things... too oblique to pin down but suggestive enough to catch a whiff. But whereas the Dan's semi-sarcasm comes across (to me) in their technical virtuosity, these guys prefer loosening all the bolts in their machine and incorporating the rattle to Becker/Fagen's precision engineering. The stop-start nature of the singsong screech-thud-sludge combos here, in tandem with Malkmus' head-just-above-water vocals, are all you need to tell something's gone off in the fridge even if lines like "fruit-covered nails" and "Zurich is stained and it's not my fault" don't tell you exactly what. Harking back further than Steely Dan, to my ears Pavement's patient zero is the Velvet Underground's Murder Mystery. One of these songs even bears a remarkable simiarity to it--just don't ask me which one. Like all Pavement albums, S+E is an ouroboros that leaves me blissfully dislocated from start to finish.
Gene Clark
1/5
Maybe artists were less ridiculed back then for covering on the nose material, but that Dylan cover of Tears of Rage halfway through thiss one reminds me of Westlife's Barry Mannilow cover in 2003 - erroneou for being both the best and worst choice. Yes Gene, the song suits you because it's what you're entire sound is cadged from. No Gene, you shouldn't cover it because it mostly highlights your limitations in comparison. Started well, though, and ended even better when he just kinda stopped the song, put down his instruments and called it a day. Love that. No surprise about any of this as I generally find The Byrds unconvincing even when I like them, so one member's solo plight for authentic folksiness was unlikely to score well in my book.
Traffic
2/5
A techincally competent and well-adjusted blend of post-psych jamming and blues with enough levity to keep the scourge of sincerity-via-roots-music at bay. In the context of this book, yet another one scoring high for inoffenive listenability and low for musical evisceration, spiritual edification, intellectual expansiveness or any other good form of "challenging".
Bob Dylan
5/5
Perhaps because I was looking forward to it all day, or it’s been a while since I last listened, or what I look for from Dylan has changed, or I’ve changed, or I’ve never ‘got it’ before, but in the ten years and many listens since I first spun Blood on the Tracks this is the first time it’s sounded like a 5. And I don’t doubt that change for a second. I’d rather luxuriate in the delicious tangibility of growing with an album – surely one of music listening’s greatest and mysterious pleasures. So, what am I hearing differently? First, Dylan’s writing, which is equal to (no higher praise) Hank Williams in the way he uses the hook – often just one line: “shelter from the storm”, “a simple twist of fate”, “tangled up in blue”, “the Jack of hearts” – like a recurring dream or deadly obsession that pulls him back no matter how far he strays. Second, melodies and arrangements that are somehow both gentle and played with a muscular, sometimes even virulent, intensity and exactness, hoarily putting me in mind of a master painter – let’s say Turner out of laziness, though that’s probably a good comparison for delicacy qua intensity. And last, something extraordinary about the limitations of what he’s saying, or rather feeling. By which I mean that (to paraphrase something I read recently on the interwebs) these songs are about romance not love and, however gorgeously complex, are confined to one man’s limited and very solipsistic experience of those romance. Somehow, the narrower parameters improve the overall effect. Don’t ask me how. I’ll only say, “That’s art.”
Thundercat
1/5
Even Kendrick can't save this version of originality as indecisiveness from sounding like call centre holding music, though credit the band for completing the bad phone audio effect with an abundance of too trebly synths.
Cocteau Twins
1/5
The mystery of the lost great Cocteau Twins album: What was it on the other side of the recording studio glass that so distracted them when they made this, and what would they have produced if they'd been paying attention? We may never know. I will never care.
Beastie Boys
4/5
Nestled on my shelf between the Beach Boys and Beatles the Beasties serve up somatic pleasures as intense as anything by either of those groups. Not only do they apply the art of sampling in a rap setting as gleefully and adoringly as the existing non-rap apotheosis in 1989 (Double Dee & Steinski - DJ Shadow still to come) they sublimate themselves into the music as rappers to put it front and centre. Aside from an occasional "I was making records when you were sucking your mother's dick" and "Homeboy throw in the towel/Your girl got dicked by Ricky Powell" they dial back the lyrical happy-slaps and bear down on nonsense raps that lack a clear beg, mid 'n' end because their main function is rhythm not storytelling--propulsive forward motion via constantly evolving narrative. All highly conceptual, so shout out to the album's packaging, which eschews track titles and presents the lyrics in an unpunctuated block on one side of the liner notes and an extensive panoramic of a New York street with not a B Boy in sight on the reverse. Except wait, is that one of them ogling the camera on panel three? Or is it just a random? All of which is to say their mission--accepted and completed--is to melt into a wall of sound whose main purpose is to make you shake your rump-ahhh. Now shake away.
James Taylor
2/5
Craving authenticity, Taylor slathers these songs with as much honey as he can get his hands on. Seems to have worked, as he's treated like an angel by many. Occasionally he sounds like one -- even less frequently these songs have a kick -- but the rest of the time he comes off like exactly the kind of dork who'd approve this album title and cover. He was never going to offer the nutritional value of John Prine or Gram Parsons -- I guess fast food salesman is a decent second place.
Björk
2/5
Fairly significant problems with tempo and a too-frequent langourous drift that fails to deepen mood the longer it goes undermine the themes of empowerment and big time sensuality. But I was pleasantly surprised by the sense of wholeness and frequently tickled by witty musical punctuation drawn from an ambitious range of instruments. So while I don't doubt her intelligence concerning human behaviour, I'm less convinced by her ability to turn it into music that fully engages me in between the puctuation. Makes sense that it's on the list though. No quibbles from me.
Faith No More
2/5
Listened on Friday, reviewed on Monday, forgot a lot in between. What I do recall is that the end of Falling to Pieces contains the entire blueprint for Korn's sound, this was at its best when they slowed down and tended towards arena rock, and they only took themselves too seriously (not a good look when you're doing awkward 80s raps) half the time. Two stars for the fun 50%.
The Smiths
2/5
In my life I haven't so much as knowingly listened to a Smiths song, let alone an album--a blind spot I've long been keen to eliminate. So this was an exciting task. But also a bittersweet one, as I knew I would be forced to adjudicate on that grey area between not only the album's objective quality and my subjective enjoyment of it but the band's. One listen of one album is no way to do that. And yet there I was yesterday evening, a pawn in this cruel game, my hand forced to commit crimes against music I'd never dreamt of. Reservations and objections aside, I diligently discharged my duty. Here is my meagre judgement: It Was Quite Good. Morrisey's affectedly self-absorbed vocals dancing widdershins around Marr's dexterous guitar lines, ostensibly independent of each other but really in some kind of synch, is immediately arresting. As is the rhythm, is more energetic than I expected. Less so Morrisey's fey digressions and whimpers--clearly there's lots to hear but not much stood out (ON ONE SINGLE SOLITARY SOLE LISTEN, I HASTEN TO ADD). This unusual combination evidently coheres, yet I'm going to be conservative (though fascist may be more appropriate here) because a) my interest was piqued only in short bursts, and b) from this evidence of the band's talent, plus one or two things I’ve heard elsewhere, I suspect they made much better albums than this. And I want to reserve my extra stars for those should they pop up and prove my suspicions correct. And if I start too high--giving this a 3, for example--and then like the next one more, I'll be compelled to give it a 4. But what if I don't think the next one’s a 4? More of a 3. But it’s only by listening to the second album that I realise I've overrated the first. I'll be ensnared in a cycle of overrating The Smiths, which seems both unfair on me and them. Life is hard. And yes, meat is indeed murder.
David Bowie
2/5
At his best, Bowie's formidable talent for hooks and especially bridges can defibrillate songs back to life following the frequently enjoyable detours his eccentric vocals take them on in the verses. But Heroes ain't his best--that includes the title track, which has an exulted status I've never understood--and I'm not sure even his best hook work could rescues the flat-on-its-ass teutonic ambience attempted in the second half. A lot of time on scenery and not enough on plot.
Eminem
4/5
’97 Bonnie & Clyde isn’t the weakest song here, but it does represent the main drawback: that Eminem hasn’t yet found his register for stories that exorcise his (and 50% of the world’s) violent misogyny. That came once he was a global cause celebre and had the genius to make the Public Eye the prism at the centre of his nakedly honest, frighteningly violent real-or-fantasy bizzare-o-world. But I digress. If ’97 Bonnie and Clyde leaves room for growth and If I Had and Rock Bottom are the residue of previous attempts at gritty East Coast rap, that leaves My Name Is, Role Model, My Fault, Cum On Everybody, Just/Still Don’t Give a Fuck, As the World Turns, I’m Shady and Bad Meets Evil (plus a handful more) as the most outrageously cartoonish, wickedly funny and violently deranged version of Eminem we’d ever get. While it was still possible for him to be this detached, going to the far reaches of his imagination is as refreshing for me as it was cathartic for him. And the images that stand out are the same ones that burnt into my brain when I was a teenager lying on my bed playing Pokémon Blue and spinning this on repeat. Eminem slapping Garth Brooks out of his limestone shirt, standing next to the Loch Ness monster at Kid Rock’s next concert, as an extra-terrestrial running over pedestrians while they’re screaming at him “Let’s just be friends”, wearing a bulletproof vest and shooting himself in the head, having full blown aids and a sore throat, activating his gadget dick, supporting abortion, putting his guinea pig in the microwave, dressing like Les Nessman, putting air in a bag and charging people to breathe, murdering the alphabet. I could just say it’s all in good fun and shouldn’t be taken seriously, but double guessing his sincerity is half the fun. More importantly, it’d mean ignoring that he announces himself with a PSA followed by the immortal “Hi kids”. For all his not giving a fuck, he always wanted his music to be a dialectic. Take it seriously.
Deep Purple
2/5
Problem isn't the excessively silly solos and virtuoso prog. Those are the fun bits. But they're also only the trimmings. The rest of the bird--rhythm, melody, gestalt--is alarmingly absent. And whether a song is 12:02 or 02:12 you can't paper over that. However... However, however, however... At least these dorks don't try that stuff and fail miserably. (Yes, I'm being an apologist). They just ignore it completely and bear down on what they can do. In a way, that's better. I guess. I mean, probably not. But I've said it now. Anyway, it means we get unbelievable songs like Smoke On The Water (by which I mean it's unbelievable that such a great riff can be part of such an indifferent song) so it can't be all bad. Except it can. Probably is. But I liked it enough anyway.
Common
2/5
I used to think of Common as the noughties rap Dementor, sucking the joy out of whatever song he popped up on, sounding like another rapper's dad come to the the studio to balance the bragging and naughtiness. I appreciate him more now, though I was kind of right. He is dad-ish--temperate, reasonable, calm--but not overbearing. Worst of all to bratty kids, he's genuinely open and empathetic towards people who aren't the same as him, i.e. he never pretends the street life his raps explicate was his own, just wants to understand and communicate it. So not a rap Dementor but a do gooder doing good for anyone not dumb enough to not want good done to them. Plus he's got poetry (more than that last sentence) and some pacified Kanye beats to boot.
Bruce Springsteen
1/5
Springsteen's success is based on schlocking his ass off and miraculously not failing--half the time. This is not the good half. The music is so excessively bombastic it's bland and the lyrics so general they mean nothing. The man has four or five albums that should be on this list. Picking a bad one deserves extra punishment.
Portishead
1/5
Has some significance as the soundtrack to a romance of mine many moons ago that died on its ass, but that doesn't make me any more disposed to accept the dreaminess they peddle so insistently as anything more than a cloak for emotional inarticulacy they find too expedient to grow beyond and lethargy they're too comfortable disguising with bursts of what appears to be energy but only because they build to it from a near stationary starting point.
Jethro Tull
2/5
Came away with the impression that any groovability was a happy accident, that these silly sods were more interested in playing silly buggers with studio gewgaws, prog "innovations" (I've yet you hear a prog album where the trickery amounts to more than blue balling the listener) and getting jiggy on the flute. But jigginess cannot be ignored. Musically, they score almost half the time. The problem is mostly the lyrics (Balzac via Pete Townsend's operatic tendencies?) and the vocals (some bloke who came third place in his Fagin audition?) I imagine Tull and their fans really want you to listen, insist their are layers to the music and words, but I only found it tolerable by not paying attention.
Miles Davis
5/5
A masterpiece of creativity; not just the act (all albums do that, I suppose) but the feeling, the process, the thrill. Tune in and tag along as Miles & co head to destinations unknown, laying their tracks as they go, their reach just far enough ahead of their grasp that they don't fall off. Not that the journey feels precipitous, heading for the end of an unfinished bridge, oncmoing train, or slathering mouth of a recently landed outer-space monster. And that's because of THE crucial detail: we're following Miles, who's following his nose, which is the nose of a genius. So unless you're a genius (unlikely, no offense) you ain't felt nothin' like this before.
John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers
1/5
Clapton's one of those artists I keep at arm's length unless he does something too good to ignore. This barely touches my fingernails when I haven't cut them for months. Soulless, hooksless, pointless. The worst kind of formalism.
The Blue Nile
1/5
If their aim was to keep their artistic identity anonymous for the duration, this is a masterpiece.
Waylon Jennings
1/5
As if Hank Williams, Lefty Fritzell, George Jones, Merle Haggard etc never laid the path for being tough and vulnerable, muscular and sweet, Wailing Jennings sidles in with his dick dangling freely out of his zipper, orders shots for the whole bar and lays down some utterly useless guy music.
Fun Lovin' Criminals
1/5
Hard to imagine why Huey Morgan thought this bonged-out drudgery could be called fun lovin. Criminal, sure. They do their best to nestle awkwardly in an honourable tradition of stealing freely from their forebears; in this case the Beasties, Tarantino (I guess) and (don't ask me why anyone would want to do this) Red Hot Chilli Peppers. But in the same way that buying a Barcelona shirt with Messi on the back doesn't mean your first touch no longer stinks, Cosplaying as your favourite bands doesn't mean your music is any good. It really, really, really isn't.
Bonnie Raitt
2/5
A comedown from the other Bonnie Raitt albums I've heard, but they're all terrific so a tough standard to meet. What works so well on those is how woven together the vocals and music are--giving the impression of songs that evolve organically--and how deftly she toes the lines of sentimentality and joyfulness, never in danger of misstepping because her voice is nothing if not convincing. I figure those two effects must be mutually reinforcing because here the interaction between vocals and music is replaced by a reliance on steady pop-friendly backing tracks, with the result that her voice, surely as good as ever, doesn't fluff my pillows in the same way. That damages the convincing factor, meaning that the sentimental ones sometimes slip into schlock and the joyful ones into forced cheer.
Elvis Costello
2/5
Mean man with oodles of talent rings out the dregs of it in what I guess is actually his mid-career seeing as he still putting out records. Results are music that's as ugly as some of the things he's said on the first half and occasionally exquisite on the second (London's Brillaint Parade, My Science Fiction Twin).
Paul Revere & The Raiders
3/5
"Paul, Revere, Jack and John Raider, thanks for coming to see me. Sit down and I'll cut to the chase. We got your demo, liked it and want you to cut a record. Something in the modern day vernacular that sounds like you made it burning the midnight oil. Something that sounds both a part of and apart from the current generation. You dig? That's what our research says gets the kids off these days. They want to rebel but they also want to be their parents. Don't ask me, I don't understand. My daughter's doing all sorts of... but never mind that. Keep the yowls, we like them, but add more bottom. You know, drama, atmosphere, both ends burning. And don't take it easy on the girls either. Name them, call them out - 'Little girl' this, 'What'cha doin' girl?' that. But don't actually name them. Keep it general. Don't take this the wrong way, but you guys aren't the strongest when it comes to specifics. Leave that to [redacted]. Speaking of which, we picked out a few records for you to listen to, just for a bit of inspiration. One each by [names redacted]. You got it? Good. Now bring me a hit!"
Guided By Voices
1/5
Cashing in the first of the three cop out cards I've dealt myself because I listened to my first GBV album at Christmas and it was dreadful. And because their fan base seems to be comprised only of people I don't like.
Queen
4/5
To start, these songs sounded like fragmented misfires with no concept to cohere around. But wha'd'ya know? Another listen and the concatenation started to appear. My mistake was looking for thematic links when--duh!-- they're all stylistic. Which style is... well... basically it's prog--pseudo-classical ideas (virtuoso instrumentalism and long songs broken into movements) fused with thrashing guitars and stomping drums--but not as I know it. In other words, it's good (sorry not sorry Jethro, Purple, Floyd, et al.). And it's good because (didn't I say this about Sheer Heart Attack too?) at the and time as being silly as fuck and gay as hell it's also serious as the dickens. That trio might not be brand new in popular music but where else can you find it in prog? Some have tried, most have failed. These chaps pulled it off. I'm not sure it's ever something that *needed* to be pulled off. But in practice I don't care. While it's on it seems absolutely vital.
The Velvet Underground
5/5
During a heroin zonk-out on their previous album, Lou says, “and I know that I just don’t know”. He probably says it a few times. Heroin is like that. Here, considerably less heroin’d, and aided by melodies and vocals so affectless they’re almost childlike (just joking—you ever heard a kid make music? it’s shit) he shows us in exquisite detail just how much he doesn’t know. “What do you think I'd see if I could walk away from me?" “Between thought and expression, lies a lifetime.” “Here comes two of you. Which one will you choose?” “That's the difference between wrong and right. But Billy said, ‘Both those words are dead.’” They’re the questions, thoughts and feelings the great unwashed have every day. They just can’t put them in such a way that they retain their allusive, liminal quality, yet feel entirely accessible. Happily, Lou shows us he can brain-fart, too. The whole of Murder Mystery, for example, or the one where he says, “I wore my teeth in my hands, so I could mess the hair of the night.” Sure you did, pal. Elsewhere, After Hours may be the most unassumingly beautiful song ever recorded.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
2/5
On first blush I feel more fondly towards this than other landfill indie trendsetters of the early noughties like The Strokes, probably because it has more Sleater-Kinney, PJ Harvey and Kathleen Hannah in. Scale without pomposity is a plus too. Basslessness isn't.
Iron Butterfly
1/5
Landfill Psychedelica. The 1968 equivalent of The Fratellis/Chelsea Dagger, The Zutons/Valerie or The Kooks/Naive. A 2/5 at best song, an album and then... poof... they're gone.
Prince
3/5
His mission is transcendence, and as a what-you-see-is-what-you-get performance he succeeds. Everything is oversized, virtuoso. No drum beat is permitted unless it's the biggest, baddest motherfucker of them all. No emotion expressed if not in extremis. It coheres too, mostly around the concept of ALBUM AS EVENT. Or maybe ARTIST AS EVENT. And on that level I enjoy the shit out of it in the same way I enjoy a fireworks show. Turn up, happily gawp for however long it lasts, retire home. EVENT over. As for the aftertaste, I'm not so sure.
Donald Fagen
4/5
May induce a face-palming epidemic among first-timers in the present day. I get that. It incorporates most of the "oh, that's so 80s" sounds received wisdom says we should avoid: a faux fur bed of cool swing, shamelessly smoothed-out jazz, criminally toothsome hooks, synthesisers, conga(!) But I say this face-palmers: seriously, are those bad things? Especially when they accompany satire so arch you can walk under it without noticing (consider Fagen's sincerity on the opener - "The future looks bright" - or how the line "Ruby Baby, how I want you / Like a ghost I'm gonna haunt you" flips that one into an artlessly creepy song that ends oddly with a super fun coda and fake jazz-club applause). And technical virtuosity that's not only impressive for what it does (like play every modulation known to man) but how accessibly it does it. And the crystalline rhythms that playfully evolve from start to finish without letting a speck of dust settle. And stories about lonely disc jockeys, using your dad's nuclear bunker as a sex den and being ominously stuck in Cuba in guessing). And also remember that received wisdom calls Meatloaf a camp hack but Springsteen a butch genius, immortalises Radiohead and Pink Floyd and celebrates everything that's "oh, so 80s" about Prince.
Hanoi Rocks
2/5
Cute Finnish New York Dolls impresarios. Their English is as good as Johansen's but their joi de vivre duller, identity crises absent and wildness overwhelmed by too much attention on 'the look' and too little on gay abandon. Tooting Bec Wreck is a passable Stranded in the Jungle imitation though. Let's hope we get In Too Much Too Soon next so we can see how this shit's really done.
Caetano Veloso
3/5
Three days since I listened to this and too much has happened for me to say anything other than it was fun and nothing like the Landfill Psychedelia album art suggested. That's all I've got.
Boards of Canada
1/5
Halfway through and I think I've got the hang of this now. Palliative care music for former ravers. I don't need to listen to all eighteen tracks.
Ute Lemper
1/5
Strangely reminiscent of peri peri.
New Order
3/5
Like all New Order, this sounds primitive, primordial, like music in its most essential form. An effect achieved through chuka-chuka-chuka rhythms, paint-stripped vocals, repetitiveness bordering on ritualistic and every element being treated with equal regard (i.e. no hero worship of the guitar or singer). Weird thing is, their primitivism isn't compromised by the fact they're working with modern sounds and styles, synthesising disco with post-punk, ggbd with programmed sounds. When a sound from outside their usual palette comes in - say, the Spanish guitar on Dream Attack - it stands in beautiful relief to the hewed stone of the rest of the music, like an ornate vase in the middle of stone henge. As Sumner says at the start of that song, "Nothing in this world / Can touch the music that I heard / When I woke up this morning." Too early to say if they've managed to recreate that music here but the signs are good.
The Fall
3/5
Post-punk poets? Post-poetry punks? Punk-poet posties? If you're gonna make approximately 5 squillion albums in your band's lifetime, looseness has to be some kind of categorical imperative. That's certainly true of this mob, in which case something as restricting as genre is for the birds. But poetry in music isn't just about diddling words. It's about tone and feel too. And seeing as looseness as categorical imperative borders on "all art is useless" and some kind of poet said that, we may have our answer after all: all of the above.
The White Stripes
2/5
Off this evidence The White Stripes were more concept than conceptualisers, so aside from a couple of killer tracks (Seven Nation Army, obvs, but also Black Math, in which Jack plays the guitar like a washboard and a cheese grater) these are mostly genial but part-formed blues-rock etudes. In other words, too much jam in this donut.
Turbonegro
1/5
The riffs are an empty promise, the irony (as suggested by the band name) is notable only by its absense, and there's not even a whiff of groove. I'm guessing they really liked the Ramones. Me too. But (didn't I say this about Fun Lovin Criminals?) that doesn't mean if I make sandwich-board songs with provocative names they'll come out anything like Blitzkrieg Bop. Especially if, like these flat earthers, I totally eschew hooks.
William Orbit
1/5
So then, mood music. Not often my thing, especially this version, which dumbly apes what they think 'peaceful' sounds like without realising that isn't enough to make people feel at peace. Broad brush approaches only creates greater distance from the listener. As with lyrics, specificity is what allows them to grab hold of the song, clamber in and find their own way to those feelings. These sounds are so washed out with generalisations that there's no chance of that.
Suede
3/5
A la The Smiths, Suede apply Dyadic Primacy, the borderline post-punk guitar shapes in constant discussion with Brett Anderson's playfully fey vocals (so playful in fact, that he pushes his whine to the point of annoying before pulling it back to vulnerable) about the main topics here: sexuality and sensuality. The lyrics probably have something to add but one listen isn't enough to pick any out - and anyway, what's going on musically says more than enough. That guitar/voice conversation front and centre means the afterglow atmosphere can work its magic in the background rather than losing everything in its haze.
The Pogues
2/5
A shift towards songs that can be danced to, sung anthemically or otherwise accessed instantly. A bigger sound, brassy and jubilantly rhythmic, that's as pleasing as it's designed to be but which out of necessity, carelessness or something else sacrifices the detailed, Dickensian, grand mythical effect of Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. No disputing these are good stories, but they're vehicles for inducing a pleasurable kind of ribaldry rather than carefully-crafted stories of ribaldry that transport the listener into their tumultuous scenes.
Marvin Gaye
3/5
In the past, me and Marv have not got along (barring a very obvious song or two) but this may have turned the tables. Maybe it's the bit of knowledge I have about the album's creation myth*, maybe it's just that it's beautifully lazy in the kind of way that makes it sound like Gaye's guard is really down. Either way, I boogied.
*As I understand it, Gaye was getting divorced and his wife was due a lot of future album royalties, so he set out to make the worst album he could, preparing next to nothing, in the hope the album would flop. However, when he got into the studio he couldn't stop himself making great music. Moral of the story no one needed: by and large, great musicians are A-holes.
Bad Brains
2/5
Schizophrenic riffs, tunes and vocals to start, which I took for a distraction technique, i.e. they don't really have a sound. Then I noticed both the tempo and the changeability hadn't let up by track 4 and realised that is sound. Liked it a lot better at that point. But then it turned to borderline metal sludge in the second half. So I'll hedge.
Barry Adamson
1/5
It's pleasant. It's unchallenging. It's not even one of the 2,002 albums you must listen to before you die.
Lauryn Hill
2/5
With all the skits (so many of them) it reminded me of a social realist film using real, improvising actors. But one where the director has got too wrapped up in "the magic" once it comes to editing and refuses to cut whole swathes flab. So there are good moments - terrific beats, great rapping - balanced by utterly forgettable or painful moments. As far as social realism goes, yeah okay, that's life. But it's not always entertaining and I strongly doubt it's intentional.
Supertramp
1/5
A comprehensive lesson that no matter how many pro forma riffs, piano tinklings and horns you squash together, they're still pro forma. But a lesson no one needed.
John Coltrane
3/5
A one-time contender for my favourite jazz album, I've cooled on this over the last couple of years. Not that I think it's anything resembling bad. Frequently funky, surprising and exciting, the closest I can get to laying my finger on the root of my reservations is that those qualities are rarely co-present and that seems like part of the design, which also seems to be deliberately challenging and as a result stops me from getting transported the way Coltrane is. Except when he chants "A love supreme". Despite its simplicity--probably because of it--that always hits me as the most transcendent moment.
The Lemonheads
1/5
They're Pavement if Pavement didn't want to live the high-stakes art life and retired to the suburbs, strumming polite tunes in the unborn baby's room-cum-study, dolefully reflecting on what could have been. Basically, the Jason Bateman character in Juno.
Metallica
2/5
Look, James Hetfield is a singularly silly man. In fact, Metallica are a singularly silly band. They'd possibly be a good one if they wore their silliness more proudly. Hell, if they wore it at all. But I was weaned on metal so I can tolerate the fundamental dumbness here (that muscly rage is the answer) so long as it's accompanied by shreddy breakdowns like the one that starts at 4:30 in One and carries on until next year, or the glorious combination of brutalised guitar and drums at the start of Harvester of Sorrow. Of the albums we've had so far, this is the one that delineates the directness of the path from Prog to Metal most clearly. Really, the differences between this and Made in Japan are negligible. So well done Metallica, you kept me chuckling, but nowhere near as much as Maddy singing along from the other room to deliberately misheard lyrics. Pride of place comes from the title track: "Pin your plimpsoles to your rear". Go on, listen again and find it.
k.d. lang
2/5
A go big or go home effort that's swelling - nay, engorged - with wistful orchestration. Occasionally the melodies are strong enough to carry that weight. The Mind of Love sounds timeless before its 3:48 are up, swooning like a Joan Fontaine character, Miss Chatelaine goes full throwback with its accordion, and the muscular Spanish-guitar-I-think on Still Thrives This Love (silly title) brilliantly complements Lang's voice, which always holds up. But too often the writing, melodies or both don't, and collapse under the weight of their decoration. A shame, because there's so much promise here.
Santana
2/5
Really good at recreational drugs, very good at guitar, pretty good at polyrhythmic rock, only okay at turning it into songs.
Liz Phair
5/5
Has sexual politics ever been better? More tuneful? More truthful? Smarter? When I'm listening to this, I'm inclined to say no. Especially now I've just learnt Phair wrote the whole thing as a track-by-track response to Exile On Main Street. It's also the birthplace of today's voguish Bedroom Rock sound (Japanese Breakfast, Soccer Mommy, Beabadoobee, to name a few from the last year). But somewhere along the line things got sadder, less melodic, less funny. What you get from Phair that you don't get from the new crop are the seemingly infitine personality facets. Here, Liz is a real cunt in Spring and your blowjob queen. She's tested by the male-dominated music industry to see how far she'll bend. She wants to be fuck you till your dick turns blue, jumps when you circle the cherry, and wants to be mesmerizing too. She also gets away with what the girls call murder, is done with the fuck and run game she's been playing since she was 12, and wants a boyfriend. But then again, the boys are just heroes "in a long line of heroes, looking for something attractive to save". And if you don't believe one person can be that complex, there are 18 songs on this thing. And if you don't believe one person can be that complex and prolfic AND consistent, marvel at how she's still able to pull a hook like Stratford-On-Guy out the bag at track 17. Just marvel.
Tom Waits
3/5
Heard through the blue funk which has descended on every blue blooded Englishman and, I expect, all in their charge across the waves patrolled by those in service to the glory of crown and country since the crippling disappointment of the Euros 2020 final, this was a tonic. Capturing the spirit of jug bands - assembling new achievements from the scraps of whatever is lying around - and celebrating the once-fallen as heroes, it offers glints of hope glimmering at the end of dark alleys. Perhaps there is a way out. Perhaps it isn't interminable. And not just for the rogues and waifs here. I am talking also, of course, about our fallen heroes Bukayo, Kalvin, Kyle, the Harrys, et al. As for Waits' hoarse bark - 'tis surely the noise issuing forth from every true Three Lions fan's throat this week, after hours - nay, days - nay, weeks - of singing Three Lions, Sweet Caroline, and bellowing their support for our freedom-fighting soldiers of the football field. A real touch of class from Waits to record this tribute to the England team merely a day after their defeat.
Sly & The Family Stone
4/5
You can picture Sylvester Stewart leaning back, head on the pillow of his own fro, finger connecting with James Brown's 'The Creation of Adam' style. Truly, he was touched by the divine during his period of artistic fecundity (roughly 69-73) got underway here. The music he produced was so unspeakably great that were I a musician looking for motivation it would kill my aspirations on the spot. I mean, Stand! wasn't even his best album, yet 62.5% of it would show up on any all-time best list. Those songs would reappear on Greatest Hits a year later. That was my glorious entry point to Sly, followed by the mindbending There's a Riot... and ineffable Fresh. But I've always steered clear of Stand! after reading a warning against it. Well, I thought I'd read one. I realise now I must have dreamt it. It's obvious after listening to this that no one could possibly have written it for real.
Lorde
2/5
I'm pretty well-versed in Antonoff-produced joints now. Currently, the man is so prolific, and his musical personality so prominent, that you can pretty much extract an Antonoff criteria from his best work over the last year alone (evermore, Gaslighter, Chemtrails Over the Country Club). Winsomeness will be king, there'll be a marked preference for mincing the same meat on each song rather trying a new cut and risking a mistake, the tone will be vaguely sombre as a rule in order to heighten the effect once the step-change choruses kick in, and you can expect an unusual instrumental touch pretty much every other track. Most important, on a GOOD Antonoff album there will be between four and six bangers. Melodrama meets all these criteria except for - you guessed it - the last one. Dang, almost.
T. Rex
2/5
Mysticism and pop can be a perfectly fine combination. Sometimes a perfect one. But it can quickly turn turgid if the artist gets dumb about transcendence being antithetical to pop. Suddenly, they think tempo, vibrancy, structure and precision are the enemy. Weird, huh? I mean, two years previous to The Slider, Moondance proved for a whole album that there's little more spiritually elevating than perfect songform. Not that Bolan doesn't get it right some of the time here. Metal Guru and Telegram Sam for example. Some more than fleeting moments elsewhere. But then he reveals himself as the easily distracted type, quick to get his head turned by all the 60s psychedelia signified by that silly hat. If he was alive today, he'd be a shortsighted England fan, riding the wave of the Euros success one second, crying for change (probably in the shape of Jude Belligham or Jack Grealish) the next. Haranguing Southgate, the pop maestro, for exercising too much control, for trying to be too perfect, for not *letting loose*. Taking risks. Running free. All of which must leave Southgate, folder brimming with meticulously orchestrated scores tucked under his arm, utterly perplexed.
Beastie Boys
3/5
Fraid to say I spilt all my juice for today trying to write a comprehensible critique of Bo Burnham: Inside, so all of I've got to say about this is it's funny, bouncy and suprising enough to justify its 50 minutes.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
2/5
You really think this laurel canyon roots folk is the shit. I get it. Truly, I do. Now how about we try something else?
Buddy Holly & The Crickets
3/5
The ones you know (Oh Boy!, Not Fade Away, Maybe Baby, It's Too Late, That'll Be The Day) are straight fire, though not a raging one. Just a few isolated fires, actually. Perfectly controlled and never threatening to spread. In other words, Holly wasn't a purveyor of the type of excess the 60s myth tells us his brand of R'n'R turned into (but probably didn't). He was a formalist, a model railway builder, a de rigger songsmith. When he was great--which wasn't all the time, as the duller numbers here testify to--he crafted rockers where every strum, hum and warble was in service to a rhythm that never muscles through like Chuck Berry or skitters tilt-a-whirl like Little Richard but doesn't need to. Tiny paintbrush and glue gun in hand in hand, Holly crafted space for everything to breathe, creating the effect of songs more compulsive and propulsive than they really are. And effect is all. The apotheosis is when everything but the drums and Holly's voice drop out in the fourth chorus of That'll Be the Day. It goes "When. You (boom). Make (boom). Me (boom). Cry (boom)-y (boom)." At that moment, you can literally hear early-Beatles John Lennon take the baton from him. Except not really - that's preposterous.
Tom Waits
2/5
Waits pulls off as his rambler in the corner concept brilliantly as far sonic textures and plausible performance goes. The audience banter, the desultory storytelling, the 'Oh yeah, I'm supposed to actually be playing this instrument' moments, the recording quality. It's a great atmosphere. But atmosphere is only half the egg--for arguement's sake, let's say the yolk. You've still got to bind it together, and at points this is so loose you can feel the yellow goo dripping down your arm and on to the floor (does this egg metaphor even work?) Basically, the weighting is wrong and however much I love the clever phrase-making, vocabularly showboating and cute aesthetics, those things are never gonna balance it. You simply don't feel compelled to hear enougg of these songs again, a bad sign for any album but especially one with so many. Worth saying that while the songs might not lure you back in, this does deepen the longer it goes on. I guess that's atmosphere for you.
Ministry
3/5
Here’s what I know about Ministry: Chester Bennington of Linkin Park honed his vocal stylings as a teen by singing along to Ministry until he sounded like them. That piece of possible-knowledge is interesting, but nowhere near as interesting as listening to Ministry, whose don't give a fuck about nuthin attitude is a tonic in these polarising times. Hell yeah Jerry Lee Lewis was the devil, Jesus was an architect previous to his career as a prophet, and once you've discovered that and find yourself in love with the world, all you can do is ding-a-ding-dang your dang-a-long-ling-long. Agnostic in every sense: to religion, politics, genre. And unlike the other metallic sludge we've had so far, this bops like the billy-o, is genuinely funny, and isn't saturated with misogyny or dumb machismo.
Portishead
2/5
I won't deny that they're damn good at their metier, curio samples and instrumental filigrees. But I will argue that there's such a thing as too much joyless warbling over tranquillised beats, and this is it.
Weather Report
2/5
Real goofball stuff. At least that's what I thought to start. Just a bunch of jazz dorks dorking around with squiggly synths, tumbling horns and Jackson 5 pastiches. "I've just got to this party," I said to myself. "But if that's the vibe I'll tell ya now I ain't leavin' till it's over." But then it lost some of its surprise factor and settled all too comfortably into "atmosphere". I stuck it out with little to no grousing but with my booty unscorched by the hot jazz coals I'd been angling for I kicked it at 10.45pm. C'est la vie. A night that promises a lot but delivers half of it is nothing to sniff at.
John Grant
4/5
How to lift a relentlessly solemn romantic ballad? How about "Baby, you're where dreams go to die / And I regret the day your lovely carcass caught my eye." Sumptuous padded drums and baroque piano runs also help. Okay, so I'm just describing the gorgeous Where the Dreams Go To Die. Outside of that, Grant proves himself a songwriting ten-ringer again and again, serving up brilliance from the higher echelons of the Fulcrum in the order of chrous conceits that cycle through the names of different famous actress to describe how he feels (Sigourney Weaver), lyrics so prosaic they turn poetic (Queen of Denmark), some kind of Scissor Sisters pastiche (Chicken Bones), birthright circus-clowning (Silver Platter Club), I'm-so-good-at-this-I-can-say-anything home truths (Jc Hates Faggots), and nihilist satire (That's the Good News). He doesn't kid like Stephen Merrit, rock like Lou, or dance like Tennant-Lowe, but he finds a space between all three. To finish, here's one of the many magnificent runs from the kiss off title track. This review is already too long, but then again, so is the album. And as Grant shows us, if you got it, flaunt it. "It was this 'us and them' shit that did me in / You tell me that my life is based upon a lie / I casually mention that I pissed in your coffee / I hope you know that all I want from you is sex / To be with someone that looks smashing in athletic wear."
Kate Bush
2/5
After keeping its head above water for so long I kept thinking this had started to sink. But nearly (nearly) every time, it kept those little arms and legs paddling. The Big Sky chorus was kinda bland, I thought, but then realised the chorus was the whole song, and that it had become its own coda less than halfway through, opening the door for some spectacular drums at 1:31. Mother Stands For Comfort sounded like it couldn't figure out what to do with itself, until some imperceptible moment when not figuring out what to do with itself became its purpose. "Those strings are nowhere near enough to keep my ears awake," I said at the start of Cloudbursting. Only then it stole a march on me, celebrating its victory (and rewarding my patience) with the bass and chanting at the end. When Bush repeated the same trick for Under Ice, I concluded it was all part of the design. I still think she's limited, but now I'm satisfied that if she doesn't have the chops to pull off all her ideas, she's at least able to communicate the scale at which she's dreaming. Not only that, she works with her limitations to make it sound like she's exceeding them. I can get behind that.
Public Enemy
5/5
As ever, there's nary a milisecond of respite, but the relentlessness comes from a life-giving and life-affiriming variety rather than single-speed tempo. There are skits, sound effects, smooth moments, funny as fuck moments, soulful songs, rebel-rousing songs. But it's non-stop because they aren't neatly parcelled like that. From the first beat you never know when you'll be thrown in a different direction. Sometimes the skits stands alone, sometimes a breakbeat interrupts a skit, sometimes the song interrupts a sample, somtimes a sample becomes a song. The permutations are endless. And for all Chuck's verbal artillery and bombastic oratory, nothing assays the necessary resourcefulness of militancy as that. Use every last scrap of what you can lay your hands on to fight your cause. It's an ethos that imbues everything from the explosive found-art approach of the production to Flava Flav's diatribes. It's a constant and unpredictable clash of ideas. In a word, dialectics. Hence why the simpletons phoning in on Incidient At 66.6 FM can only respond to PE's multifarious ideas by reducing them to "They're bad because they have guns on stage". But even that track subverts expctations, giving the ignormai a coolly propellent and pleasant bedding track whose levity not only ridicules the callers but shows how casually acceptable it is to air such views. Something similar goes down on Pollwannacraka, where Chuck fully embraces the preacher quality of his voice. Likewise, the "black man, white women, black baby..." sample that starts at 00:53 of the title track and doubles down on creepiness because the speaker is so convinced of their rightness. Finally, shouts to when Chuck fluffs his line "Ain't how that God planned it" on the title track. It makes the music sound more than ever like a demonstration, where even the more powerful orator can trip over their words.
Ride
2/5
Specialising in a shimmering kind of relentless noise which doesn't break for choruses, verses, solos, anything. Lax tunings, lots of cymbals, recorded to create the effect of being heard through two woolly hats and a balaclava. Most recent modern example of the style (though not the production values) is Seek Shelter by Iceage, except the atmosphere here is more light sea spray than impending cloud of volcanic ash. Biggest problem are those vocals, though. Conspicuous by their absence (or as good as).
Mike Oldfield
2/5
"Thanks for the recording, Mike. Great tune. Love those bells! We can really do something with them... Oh sure, the whistles are cute, too... Uh-huh, and the guitar at 14 minutes... Yep, the jig at the end was, er, also amusing... Nice stuff. Sure. I'm just saying that as far as quote unquote songs, it's obvious those first four minutes do the heavy lifting, so we should run with those. Maybe work in a few of the other bits. That'll shave off a cool forty-four minutes or so. Then we'll be sitting pre... Sorry, say that again... Oh. Really? All of it?... I see... Uh-huh... I see... Mike, that's *very* long. I'm not sure peope will be able to tolerate it once the main bit is over so early... Mike?... Mike?... Shit."
Green Day
2/5
This possibly suffered from the fact that the pop-infused punk revival wasn't a movement as much as a (very appreciated) attempt to keep a previous movement alive. Sounded vital at the time, no doubt, but now that time has passed I mostly see it as shadow play. It definitely suffered from me being flat out of juice yesterday. If I listened with a few more spoons in my drawer, I might feel differently, as I still found the non-stop momentum enjoyable, Armstrong's nasal whine weirdly winning, the drum fills energising, and the smart-dumb lyrics dumb-smart. Basically, don't pay attention to my rating.
Ananda Shankar
2/5
One for the scliolists. Vaguely entertaining, mostly when it settles on a single idea and bashes away at it for three or four minutes. Less so on the covers that add nothing and take away plenty. But I suppose for whichever marketing bod short on ideas it was who proposed this crossover, that was the main selling point. Could have had some traction in 1970, but why the dickens is it still being mentioned 50 years later?
Eminem
5/5
i) Words, harmless and powerful
ii) The Stan—Kim paradox
iii) Heavy metal rap
iv) Don’t forget the jokes
v) PHSE
i) Consider the line, “If this chick was my own mother / I’d still fuck her with no rubber / And cum inside her and have a son and a new brother at the same time / And just say that it ain't mine”. It’s spill your popcorn, last round of ‘Would you rather’, criminally taboo toilet humour. Every teenager in the year 2000 or 2020 gets its dual offensiveness and senselessness. Eminem is faking you out. The people in the line—J-Lo, Eminem, his mum—are real, but the scenario is so detached it’s cartoonish. So far, so Slim Shady LP. But what if it became less detached? What if he said the Columbine shooters got their trench coats and weaponry from his house? Or worse, that given the chance he’d copy them? That’s a very real and raw scenario, not to mention one in which Eminem was implicated as a cultural influence. And yet both our 13 and 33-year-old selves know that just saying those things doesn’t make them true. Then consider the political climate in 2000—and not just the president getting his dick sucked. I’m talking about the ongoing fallout from the failure of the Bretton Woods arrangement. Clinton coming into office promising Big Government/tighter regulation then realising that not even he can control the bankers. Realising all he’s got left to convince people that can is his words. Cue the age of spin. I did not inhale. I did not have sexual relations with that woman. Etc. The age of controlling the story, controlling the headline, controlling the truth. In this context, Eminem saying he’d commit Columbine, or have a child with his mum, becomes as “real” as what you’re asked to believe on a daily basis.
ii) After ‘Kill You’, ‘Stan’ is almost an apology. Breathtakingly brutal, honest, and empathic. It’s a three-dimensional portrait of not-Eminem--the guy he could be if he hadn’t made it, if he didn’t have a way of containing the Slim Shady in all of us. After ‘Stan’, almost anything is tolerable, impregnated mums included. After ‘Stan’, you understand Slim, understand the Stan-Sim lineage. So you chuckle at the jokes, abide the fag-baiting, bite your lip in faux-disapproval at the rabble-rousing. And then, when you’re almost at the end, he gives you ‘Kim’. And it ruins everything. He employs all the same devices that made you empathise with Stan—relentlessly linear first-person narrative, direct address, multiple characters, and so much diegetic sound it’s as much radio play as song—and uses them to not only shock you beyond anything that’s come before, but to betray your trust in his humanity, his sanity, his redemption. What’s so brilliant is not only that ‘Stan’ and ‘Kim’ are both Marshall Mathers songs (that is, if you go in for attributing each Eminem song to one of his three personas) but that the Marshall who kills Kim is basically Stan, the guy he made you empathise with earlier. But now there’s no distance, no epistolary framing device to make the murder seem journalistic. It’s just you and a woman-hating murderer. This is the bit that interests me most. Why are we okay with what was essentially the same story in ‘Stan’, but so appalled by it in ‘Kim’?
iii) If I was writing the 2000s update to Chuck Eddy’s ‘500 Greatest Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe’, I’d be tempted to include MMLP. A quick comparison with Stankonia (same year of release) tells me that Outkast’s album is probably speedier and louder. But metal’s also about spirit, and MMLP has a heart full of revenge. It also has barkier rapping, actual screaming, and uses its somewhat basic beats like riffs. While it may lack guitars (except on ‘Kim’, the most metallic of all its songs), it’s still clearly built on the blueprint of Licensed to Ill.
iv) “If I ever gave a fuck, I'd shave my nuts / Tuck my dick in between my legs and cluck.”
v) I learnt more from ‘Drug Ballad’ and ‘Kids’ than I ever did in PHSE. The former is a too-rarely mentioned Eminem masterpiece (“What’s a little spinal fluid between you and a friend?”), the latter the most scandalising of all his provocations: a genuine PSA. The verse about Zack, with his back "like the McDonald's arches", his shoulders "hunched up like he's practicin' yoga", and his friends "laughing at basically nothing except maybe wasting their money" will always haunt me.
The Allman Brothers Band
2/5
Not as onanistic as the worst blues wanks of the era but still guilty of viewing solo length as equivalent to generosity of feeling, which is something the blue masters they respectfully cover had in abundance. This is all pretense, guard, posture. When Elmore James strikes a cord it sounds like the truest thing you ever heard. These guys have to shroud theirs in fuzz, or turn the songs into arena rockers, to disguise the attenuated feelings beneath.
David Bowie
2/5
Five hours at Ventnor Botanic Gardens. Would happily do it all again. Steely Dan provided the soundtrack - Countdown to Ecstasy.
Tom Waits
3/5
Third Waits album of this gig, taking my total up to five. Might not be my favourite overall but on first blush contains his most eviscerating vocals. Sounds like he's singing half these songs after being shanked in the guts, his voice forcing its way through the blood rising in his throat. Pretty gruesome, and perfect for his grotesques, as is the lost and found instrumentation. He probably did stuff just as weird before this, but true to his reputation (with me) of getting better in his mid to late career, he's found a way to assemble his spare parts into a functioning vehicle rather than a rattling heap. Hence Bone Machine, not Heap of Bones.
Paul Weller
1/5
Had a gorgeous time at Osborne House on Wednesday. Real V&A vibes for some absolutely obvious as fuck reasons. Bumped It Takes A Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back in the car. I imagine I couldn't have picked an album further from this one.
The Byrds
2/5
This is when I finally got over to the west side of "the island". My kinda territory. Freshwater, Totland Bay, Tennyson Down, Headon Warren. Sumptuous. Drove along the famed Military Road and gobbled up the sights. Rocked Modern Vampires of the City and Sgt. Peppers in the car. Distant cousins in the way they make excessive studio clowning signify. The Byrds can only dream.
Metallica
1/5
Mammoth journey home so listened to a glut of great music. Sour, Parrallel Lines, Nevermind, Marshall Mathers LP II, 1992 Deluxe. Put them all together and maybe they're as long as this Metallica slog.
The Stooges
2/5
Half proto-punk and half Jamie Vardy, by which I mean straggly, keyed up, a little dirty, a little naughty, and ugly as hell. Bowie mixing it into brittle thinness is a virtue. The full and bassy Iggy mix feels wrong. But like many Bowie albums, it's fun for the ideas most of the time and the execution only half the time. Better Iggy/Stooges albums exist.
OutKast
3/5
3000 has one of the sexiest rap voices, so it's funny how little it features on his sexy album. I figure he knows his singing doesn't compare, which is why his super sexy talking voice gets a good run out. Funny also how the most lauded side of this double is the least well-realised. But if The Love Below can yield multi-gazillion sales while featuring endurance tests like Vibrate and MF Doomish scratch tracks like A Day in the Life... I won't vociferate about the superiority of Speakerboxxx too much. Weirder, funnier and more focused, Big Boi thrives by plunging himself into a white hot talent pool of collaborators, challenging them to stretch the sonic possibilities of Housequake. Result is in an electric bounce so ebulliently synthetic it's positively alien. After checking the credits, one reason 3000's side doesn't sustain as well as Big Boi's triumph of collective creativity might have something to do with insularity - his is the only name listed.
Grizzly Bear
2/5
A welcome challenge, having always avoided Grizzly Bear because being sick is funny but it's important not to overdo it. Turns out this isn't the assault on my digestive tract I feared; just a competent--nay, *perfectly* competent--Laurel Canyon folk-rock revival. Don't get me wrong, it's cutesy-poo all right--Dory is gross, and please spare yourself the horror of never being able to unsee their Spotify profile photos--but its eminent hummability, harmonic tricksiness and did I mention competence is undeniable.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
3/5
On This Year's Model his paranoia was a dazzle of primarily romantic barbs and hexes, deliberately flirting with nastiness, which makes this Zevonian fixation on geopolitics a refreshing change. He's a phrase maker above all, so it's longer on rhetoric than ideas, but that's fine with me when his word slinging is this good - "a breath you took too late... a death that's worse than fate", "it's no laughing party / when you've been on the murder mile", "you tease and you flirt / and you shine all the buttons on your green shirt", "somewhere in the Quisling Clinic / there's a shorthand typist taking seconds over minutes", "two little Hitlers will fight out until one little Hitler does the other one's will" - and his rhythmic smarts this sharp. And then amidst all the political wordplay, "He wants as no one can / he wants to know the names of / all those he's better than" comes across like an accidental nugget of self-knowledge. Bet that describes Elvis to a T.
Rod Stewart
5/5
As working-class rockers go, this is the British equivalent of prime Bruce, and I'm in two minds about which I prefer, pulled in one direction by the anthemic pomp and literary chops of Springsteen, and in another by the Britishness of Stewart's act. And act being the operative word here, because the spiritual birthplace of Stewart's persona and style is the British Legion or Working Man's Club. I can picture his less talented brethren standing up in front of my nan this weekend, giving it some welly while she makes short work of her Bacardi and black. He even sounds like half the audience, throat racked from smoking. These roots also bear out in the meanings he extracts from his lyrics (whether his own or others'): simple, everyday truths to live by, even if their provenance is grander (Dylan, say, or Amazing Grace). “I couldn't quote you no Dickens, Shelley or Keats / Cause it's all been said before” he sings on the opener, just as my mum’s Auntie Jo might, before also telling you “Make the best out of the bad, just laugh it off”, or “we all need a reason to believe”, or “every picture tells a story”, or “hard times are only the other side of good times”. As for the chief quality of working class music, the one that gets the local greasers down to the disco to dance themselves into puddles of sweat on the floor, he’s a master. I’m talking, of course, about rhythm. The Big Beat. Even the gentler songs provide a kick up the ass. This alchemy might sound simple when divided into its constituent parts but it’s magic when all bubbling together, especially as Stewart’s really an epicure in disguise – just check out the mandolin, celeste, violin and other embellishments.
Bill Evans Trio
3/5
I realised something masterful was afoot when I noticed these dainties weren't only sighing and swaying but giggling and winking at me too.
The Fall
3/5
For a while I was waiting for traditinal songcraft to emerge from the assembled disorder of these boldly struck notes. But after spending a few moments considering the title Industrial Estate, I reckon cascading riffs, tumbling drums and vocals on the point of jumping up and running out of the room are better when only loosely connected. To borrow a phrase from Chuck Eddy, call it soundcraft.
Ryan Adams
2/5
Because you know.
Steve Winwood
1/5
Is this what people think they're hearing when they listen to Steely Dan and don't like it? They're wrong. It's not this. This is this. And it's bad. Maybe I'm allowing the try-hard that permeates every bit of it to colour my judgement, and it'd sound more winning if I got past that, but first blush is all I got.
Roxy Music
3/5
Used to think this was the worst Roxy album, sagging under the dumb bloat of Bogus Man and infantilism of Every Dream Home. While those two are still on the wrong side of prog, they're actually closer in quality to the rest of the songs than I remembered, which ocassionally reach very good but mostly coast around just-good. I get the sense Roxy sublimated their fun qualities to whatever they were trying to achieve here. Sadly, that means Ferry's voice isn't as bonkers as on the debut, Eno's weirdo effects play second fiddle to stolid rhythms, and the lyrics veer into absurdist settimentality just a few times, mostly on Beauty Queen, e.g. "Deep in the night / Flying very strange cargo / Our soul-ships pass by / Solo trips to the stars... in the sky". Maybe this should be a two, but I gave that to Tubular Bells which, to be honest, was totally whack and definitely much worse than this. So I'm gonna go three and get back to protecting my two stars from here on out.
The Go-Go's
3/5
A crisp packet floating like gossamer in a gentle Spring breeze, but filmed with a faded neon filter and replayed at x3 speed. Yum.
Laibach
1/5
Ironic fascism but questionable how much irony.
Black Sabbath
2/5
I don't expect anything I have to say is fresh, partly because this is well-trodden ground and partly because there's not much to talk about. That's not as negative as it sounds, just recognition that one of Sabbath's main virtues is recapitualating proof of concept that rock music can be chunked and stacked into songs like cheese cubes on a toothpick. I really like that bit of their music. They're very good at it. Riffs atops drum rolls atop looming bass atop screeching vocals. If they weren't, I wouldn't recognise so many of these (Kanye borrows the Iron Man riff for Hell of a Life, huh?) without ever having heard the album. My issues are (I warned you this wouldn't be original) that while all they want to do is rock (so far so good) they don't have much to rock around. A robin, a jailhouse, a clock--music is stuffed to the gunnels with things around which one can orbit. They've supposedly got weirdness, paranoia, satanism or whatever. But do they? Because despite their image, there's nothing especially evocative or atmospheric going on here. They could just as easily be singing about the best time to zest an orange (once it's hardened, I'm told, as that means the juice has moved from the innards to the outards) without causing much dissonance. Of course, ideas aren't a requirement in great music. I can listen to Franco Luamba or James Brown all day without giving too many shits about what they're saying. But that brings us to my other issue, which is that those guys have got rhythm, groove, funk and soul that's ass-bustingly transcendent, while Sabbath only have their cheese on a stick, and that can only get you so far.
The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy
3/5
Started out hearing this as an adorable Public Enemy impression minus the Basquiat explosiveness, but it quickly impressed its own qualities, starting with the lyrics. "The only cola that I support would be a universal Cost Of Living Allowance", "Not a single TV station showed dissension / Or made mention of the censorship of information", "The kids don't get diplomas / They get used for gunboat diplomacy" probably aren't the best here, just the ones I wrote down. Once I saw them typed out, the differences from PE started to emerge. Chuck D is the militant orator, proselytising mid-battle and on the hoof, but Michael Franti raps like he's in a lecture theatre, reading verbatim from his painstakingly written notes. After that, the music starting to signify: contemplative, repetitive but soothing, carefully organised to sound like the antithesis of the stupefying and haphazard media misinformation that's got Franti so pissed. Chief among the musical gifts here is Music and Politics. A totally surprising all-timer (on firsall-timer jazz rap that can hang with the best of its type. Scored big for The Winter of the Long Hot Summer too. Never hurts when the 7 minute track is one of the best.
Jeff Buckley
1/5
Much better musically than I previously appreciated. Every song grabbed my attention and quite a few held it. The title tune is flat-out good, folding back on itself with convincing urgency. Last Goodbye rises and falls at unexpected times, if not in unexpected ways. The climaxes and dramatic shifts throughout are traceable (first time I’ve realised that I value the traceability of a song’s progress), the riffs exciting, the melodies haunting. It all adds up to a defined sound it'd be disingenuous to deny. And that really is a good rendition of Hallelujah. Contrary to my previous comments, he does pay attention to getting the song over, withdrawing vocally to give an equal share of the stage to the lyrics and the accompaniment. He earns that wail at the end, too. Yet by the end of the album, I was tense and worn out. What I’ve boiled that down to is this: 50 minutes in the company of a narcissist is unpleasant. That narcissism is partly a lyrical problem, but mostly it’s spiritual. Maximum drama all the time, with himself at the centre of that drama, is, to my ears, emotional immaturity at its wort. It’s not only allowed but indulged—fetishised even—which is how he ends up insisting the couch, her “simple city dress”, the egg he just boiled, or the particular brand of kettle he uses is 'So real'. To Jeff, his experience is the most important experience of all because it happened to him. I can roll with self-mythology all day, but self-idolatry is where I draw the line. While Grace can be exciting and even beautiful, its core is ugly.
DJ Shadow
5/5
Questions of ownership. Whose property is that drum beat, this organ, that voice? Of authorship. If I use your art for my art, do I become its creator? If not, does that tune belong to the guitar maker or the composer? Of permanence. If placing that snippet next to this one, or looping it, or giving it a beat, changes its original meaning, does art ever have a final form? A man in a room filled with vinyl, exploring every groove in minute detail, sinking deeper into his musical fever dream, the answers always a fingertip away, if he'd just.....
Terence Trent D'Arby
3/5
I get the sense much of this is directly addressed to black people--"dance little sister", "get up off that rockin' chair grandma", "pray for me", "don't give up your birthright"--a feeling reinforced by the way hooks emerge from D'Arby's heartfelt well-wishing. Not as pop device but as a way of unifying people through repetition focussing mental and spiritual faculties. [Something here about the oral tradition]. Just as the drums traverse the spectrum from filler match to main event, his voice traverses the spectrum from rough to honeyed so that, in a way, it feels like he's not only speaking to his audience but for them--in *their* voices. There are a few overstretches and misfires, but his spiritual generosity is catching, so I'll go high.
Korn
1/5
What appealed to this 14 year-old, hidden beneath his Korn hoodie on the bus to school? Where to start? How about: "I cannot every love another cunt / You trick ass slut / Look twice and you'll get fucked"? Truthfully, no. I didn't hate girls, didn't actively enjoy them being brutalised in the music I liked. I even skipped Kim back then, not yet able to parse its brilliance. I knew Korn (probably, hopefully) didn't mean it. But 50% of their appeal for me was simply that they said things my parents wouldn't approve of. You know that adolescent itch, the one that has to be scratched. So from a personal point of view, this garbage is defensible. And so too from an artistic one... in theory. Flirting with danger and taboo is an important function of art. There are too many great examples to name. This just happens to be a shit one. So why did I latch on to Korn's danger dance and not the good ones? Simply, partly they did it with no subtlety and I was almost as dumb, partly the other 50% of their appeal: dick bick energy riffs, creepy gimmicks, occassional breakbeats, basslines that spend most of the time building up to a letdown--I mean breakdown--and, of course, Davies' spastic yip-yapping. But those two elements, 100% of the appeal to me, are only 50% of KoRn's sound. The rest is characterised by emotionally-stunted morons who've chosen the hinterland between self-pity and self-aggrandisement because they don't have the... I don't know what... to grow up. Teenagers get a bad rep for being intolerant, so fair play to me for putting up with that side of a crappy bargain for so long.
Love
5/5
Because it evokes the feeling of both sleeping and waking, this is at once pacific and troubling. Assuming Lee & co. are the sleepers, their dream is (surprise!) the 60's. But so too is their nightmare. Because (second surprise!) the 60's weren't all good. Not that they're making value judgements. They treat the scattered remains of the 60's with equal regard, only interested in reassembling them so that only the most intense moments remain. True to dream logic, not everything makes sense until it does: "The snot has caked against my pants / It has turned into crystal" only, well, crystallises when you consider it against "When you've given all you had / And everything still turns out bad" or "Sitting on a hillside / Watching all the people die / I'll feel much better on the other side". Musically, it's even more beguiling, following the grammar of dreams--which is to say, what grammar? Just as that slow-motion chase becomes that sex scene turns into this memory from childhood that never happened, here mellifluous melodies follow swelling strings follow puckish guitars follow rousing mariachi trumpets follow... with not a musical conjunction in sight.
AC/DC
3/5
Proof that Black Sabbath served a purpose. This mob learnt from their shortcomings, at least. Too serious? Um, they're wearing school uniform. Failure to deliver on their image? Not possible, the songs are literally *about* rocking very hard. Bypassed lyrics on the highway to riffs? Nope. This is pure poetry: "Back in the back / Of a Cadillac / Number one with a bullet, I'm a power pack / Yes, I'm in a bang / With a gang / They've got to catch me if they want me to hang." Too basic? I mean, the aim is to wipe their grubby heinies in your sour moosh and that's exactly what they do. In short, I had a blast because I was getting ready for a wedding and wanted to get pumped up. This did the trick. Is it a three? It was then so it is now.
Air
2/5
Oh, it sounds like this?! Saw this album dozens of times as a kid without ever hearing it. Expected it to sound like proto-Landfill Indie but it actually sounds like a coma patient waking up. Because it renders 60's positivity with a 90's futurism whose grasp almost exceeds its reach, that patient could be any number of dead, buried and long-forgotten bands. And because the silly-spooky voices and cute piano figures are imbued with a wry whimsy, I'm guessing the band find their venture both fun and funny. I do too, without ever being totally roused out of my hospital bed. Also has the MASSIVE benefit of featuring THAT song from 10 Things I Hate About You, which I probably watched as many times as I saw this album cover in HMV.
A Tribe Called Quest
3/5
If part of Q-Tip's strategy was ensuring I slapped a juicy rating on this, he couldn't have done much more than ending Description of a Fool and the album with a Sly & the Family Stone sample. Of course, I didn't figure into his strategy one (Diogo) jot(a). As with all the groups in the tentative Natives Tongues collective, the target audience here is other black people, who Tip & co. want to join them in a celebration of all things pan-African. As ever, I'm humbled to be allowed to the party--especially one whose DJ has Luck of Lucien, El Segundo, Bonita Applebum and Can I Kick It on the decks. To my ears, this doesn't groove to rhythms as Afrocentric as you'd assume from ATCQ's image, but therein in lies my ignorance. Celebrating your African roots ain't about aping Youssou N'Dour, Fela Kuti or Tabu Ley Rochereau. The very Americanness of ATCQ's sound is a reminder of how deeply American music has been shaped by people of African descent, and how disgracefully that's been overlooked and overwritten. Slapping the Ghanaian colours on this puts it front and centre, where it should be.
Eagles
2/5
Instructive listening for a Warren Zevon fan. I now understand how much of his 70's output was an Eagles piss-take. But that's just another instance of the anti-Eagles sentiment I've been surrounded by forever. From the Dude's antipathy in The Big Lebowski to Zevon's jokes to Elizabeth Nelson's article in The Ringer earlier this year (so good!), the message has been loud and frequent: This Is A Not Good Band. Yet always with the not-at-all-confusing rider: Except They Kind Of Are. Now I've taken the plunge, consider me still confused. I mean, they're exceptional players. Dependably harmonic and pretty much faultless in all things song construction. They rip through solos like a crisp lettuce leaf, even rhyme well every so often. And it all happens within a synthesised country-rock aesthetic so polished you could go blind looking at it. But you might also go dumb listening to it, because even though there's more than a little to enjoy (have you heard the title track, by the way--although what is that accent he's doing?!) the emotional girding is always big dick bathos. Whatever they have to say (mostly gripes about women and some laurel canyon mysticism mixed with LA grit) it's all couched in self-pity--none of it self-reflective or self-critical. Twas ever thus with dudes who love their instruments as extensions of their egos.
Primal Scream
1/5
If my imaginary 14 year-old son had made this at school, of course I'd listen, though I'd have fleeting thoughts of giving up after Come Together, especially as the wee lad would have crashed on the sofa by that point anyway, but fatherly duty would compel me to see it through to the end, and I'd finish feeling pretty impressed. Pretty proud of young Todd, too. Context is everything.
Queen
1/5
If you insist on creating albums like the blueprints for a large civil engineering project, your fussiness is gonna bleed through--and fussiness is boring, however histrionic you are. With that ogre guarding the gates to this supposed castle of pleasures, I couldn't even begin hearing the dorkiness on offer, but I'm guessing it was very dorky. Get over yourselves, lads, and shake it loose.
Daft Punk
1/5
Maybe it shouldn't surprise me that dance music at the start of the 21st century was made in its politically austere and depersonalised image. Though this accrues credibility for turning up in art-house fancy dress, it's still 120 BPM as defensive posture, bodily pleasure as algorithm. Of course, the robot costumes mean such crticism can always be spun as part of the act. To that, I say spin is also so 21st century. So there. And even if that's true, such smart-arsery doesn't bring the bodily pleasures any closer to existence--at least not when listening at home.
Beatles
3/5
She said: "Revolver is the best Beatles album. It doesn't overwhelmingly rock, roll or pop because its strategy is to transport the listener to the until-then uninhabited space between all three via melodic aggressiveness and sonic inventiveness." I said: "Who put all those thoughts in your head? It's got Yellow Submarine, for Christ's sake. And that strategy meant they took their eye off the ball lyrically and out popped Good Day Sunshine and Doctor Robert. (Let's just ignore the Harrison lyrics)." She said: "No, no, no, you're wrong. What sounds like filler or a lack of cohesion is the embodiment of the main theme: alienation. Listen again to how many of the songs take a side-on approach to loneliness and people talking past each other. As standalone songs, they're crystal clear, but together they jar. That's deliberate." I said: "Even though you know what you know, you're wrong." She said: "Then how come you're using one of their songs as a framing device for your review?" I said: "..."
Deee-Lite
3/5
A Scooby Doo episode in which Fred, Velma and Daphne follow a trail of day-glo, pheremones and good beats, only to find it's led them to each other and their coming of age in the post-disco era. They then Scooby Screw each other with reckless abandon and dance their way through the emotions they don't yet understand, gabbing on the way home about the power of love and the groove in their hearts. Zoo-zoo-wah, indeed!
The Rolling Stones
5/5
In which the Stones return to their 60's peak, take another look at the summit, then surpass it the only way a torn and frayed band knows how: by jumping head-first down the other side and dragging us with them. What else is the audio murk but dust and grit in the microphones? Why is Jagger garbling his words but he's got a gob full of rocks? In its ass-backwards way, Exile may pivot on its two most attenuated songs: I Just Want To See His Face--a barely decipherable religious plaint that sounds like a discarded 78 from four decades earlier--is a potash of manufactured and organic matter--Jagger's Black America vocals, the gospel backing, and washboard rhythms--and Sweet Black Angel-- an undercover protest song for the imprisoned Angela Davis. Also sung in Jagger's morally ambiguous Deep South imitation and containing the N word, its potentially offensive features are in fact a complex comment on the retrograde treatment of Black people filtered through a century of Black music. In other words, Exile is rich beyond belief, feeding and fed by the entire tradition of popular music. Its treasures may never be unearthed or understood. But like the very best art, the joy is in experiencing it, not interpreting it.
Ray Charles
3/5
Knocked me for a doozy the first time so I went back for round two, when it didn't pack the same punch. It's in the same mode as the fabulous Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, but unlike that one it doesn't have as cute a concept to tuck the edges in other than the big band side A/ivory tickling side B split. Mostly, that highlights how much more Charles adds to these standards with soulful tinkling. Even though he's an incredible arranger, the big band treatment a) is more typical for these songs, and b) drowns out his primary grift, which is his generosity of spirit. The evidence is Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying and Come Rain or Come Shine (side B). They're the nailed-on A pluses; gorgeous examples of his genius for climbing up and down the scales so tenderly and subtly that you don't realise he's put a lump in your throat and a butterfly in your tummy until you try to swallow.
Bob Dylan
4/5
This was my second Dylan album but the first I felt I’d doped out. Of course it was—I was 19 when I heard it, Dylan 23 when he made it. Like your garden variety young man, he’s preoccupied with truth and power. Like your garden variety song writing genius, he transforms his preoccupations into phrases, aphorisms and gags that shine a light on society, politics, romance, received wisdom and his mind-blowing talent. It’s an exhilarating game of cat and mouse, Dylan sometimes following the musicality of the previous word to complete his line (“the motorcycle black Madonna two wheeled gypsy queen”; “I was the editor of a famous etiquette book”), sometimes cramming the words in to make his point (“Human gods aim for their mark / Make everything from toy guns that spark / To flesh-coloured Christs that glow in the dark / […] not much is really sacred”). To generalise more than I can defend, rock ‘n’ roll side A takes on power, folk-poetry side B examines truth. R’n’R is all about staking your claim to exist, questioning authority, being misunderstood. There’s plenty of that on Subterranean, Maggie’s Farm and 115th Dream: “They asked me for some collateral and I pulled down my pants”; “Don’t follow leaders / Watch the parkin’ meters”; “She’s a hypnotist collector / You are a walking antique”; “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more”; “I said, ‘You know they refused Jesus, too’ / He said, ‘You’re not Him’”. When it comes to rating this, I’m splitting hairs between a 4 and 5. I’ll go low because this sounds like Dylan figuring out his next move. As a result, a couple of these lean towards sketches. I’m also being a little unfair by considering the quality of what came next, which is even better. Maybe I wouldn’t be so harsh with someone else but, you know, it’s Dylan; he’ll get more 5’s from me than maybe anyone else. Delighted to hear this again. I send my praises to the gods of art that one person was able to give us so many indelible phrases, explosions of intellect, and unforgettable tunes. Go on, give it a 5. I’m only gonna shake your hand if you do.
Erykah Badu
4/5
If I was currently undertaking the task of compiling my 101 favourite albums of all time--inspired by, for example, a commitment to listen to, rate and review 1,001 albums from The Canon--I can imagine Mama's Gun would be a conundrum. Should I include it? There's so much to like. It has the intangible quality of making you want to restart the album as soon as it's over; not because it's a hooked-filled sugar rush, but because Badu's sound is tantalising, a tease, there then not then there again. But for that reason, is there *enough* of it to occupy a whole spot on my list? (I'm speaking, of course, hypothetically. Merely riffing on an idea that just popped into my head.) When she says, "you won't be naming no buildings after me", it's not just because she's a black woman (okay, it's mostly that), but because any Badu building would only be structurally sound half the time. Her buildings, like her songs, would be beguilingly simple feats of engineering, held up with the barest of resources. Then they'd turn to jelly and, er, uh-oh. To decide, I'd need to listen to it two or three times. I might even get an extra opportunity through my extensive (imaginary, you understand) canonical appraisal. But even after that, I imagine I still won't have settled--just like Mama's Gun.
Joy Division
2/5
Joy Division are the scenic route I choose not to take on the road to New Order. I've no problem with depressing, off-kilter deconstructed punk dance, but I can't find a way into Curtis' gothic vocals or the tawdry rhythms.
Queens of the Stone Age
1/5
Too serious to make a virtue of their dumbness, too dumb to conceive of seriousness as anything other than vocal lassitude and fuzzy guitars. More proof that whoever wrote this book used spin the bottle to choose albums from the 90's.
The Avalanches
3/5
Looped rhythms provide the soundtrack to a meditative disco in your mind, bleeps and blops poke the hard ridge at the back of your head, and maybe-familiar samples keep you guessing. In other words, it's a balancing act got right most of the time, the latter two elements keeping the tyranny of easy listening at bay. This also gave me pause to reflect that I was able to get a bead on this album because the 1001 listening exercise has exposed me to more albums of this type than I'd normally listen to, i.e. Chemical Brothers, Air and Daft. Praise be.
Belle & Sebastian
3/5
The relentlessly prosaic lyrics border on the ridiculous. The mellifluous vocals border on the ridiculous. The band's obsession with melody borders on the ridiculous. The sum total of this ridiculousness? The sublime. If you want to figure out how, remember that pop music thrives off excess. This is just a different type of excess than we're used to.
A frankly silly production team. Sometimes Eno, Lillywhite and Lanois are on the same damn song. Does it add much? A few instrumental curios to the quiter ones, like the backwards strings on Kite or the underwater guitar on Grace, maybe. But I'm not sure U2 needed anything adding. Perhaps all the hot shot producers did was tell them to strip back, go simple, go pop. Not what you'd expect from "we're gonna need a bigger stadium" show-offs, but it worked. When Bono sings like an asshole (which isn't actually that often) you get the feeling it's because he cares about the material rather than the ticket sales. The best songs are still the anthems, the best anthem is still Elevation, and the best line on Elevation is still: "A mole, digging in a hole / Digging up my soul, now / Going down, excavation". Utter gibberish.
Tricky
5/5
Unlike the commercially-calculated depressiveness that took the place of personality for his shallow sadsack contemporaries Thom Yorke and Beth Gibbons, Adrian Thaws put the funk in blue funk. His beats are as diverse as they are dark, assaying sewer system gloop, industrial clank, and the cold steel of prison bars and cocked triggers to create a sonic landscape less attractive but just as complexly organic as the bucolic scenes you and I would rather spend our time skipping through. So complex, in fact, that he needs a whole other voice from a whole other gender to describe it in full. And thank god it does. Because if any light's getting into this underworld, it's getting in with Maxine Quaye.
Saint Etienne
2/5
Bread pudding as croquembouche.
The Who
5/5
The apotheosis of talent show rock (songs where all the band’s gifts are on display), nothing here is less than masterful. But what shines brightest is how consistently brilliant their final acts are. Baba O’Reilly’s gypsy coda is as great as its famous opening. Daltrey’s gravelly commitment to “When my fist clenches, crack it open” and “Put ya fingers down my throat” in Behind Blue Eyes’ finale is what tips it into all-time great. Won’t Get Fooled Again somehow finds a way to level-up at the end even though the whole song’s essentially the album’s final act. Even the lesser numbers pack a big finish: Bargain’s drum battering, My Wife’s creeping horn charts, Going Mobile’s squiggly synths. The sleeper is Getting in Tune, which re-routes its concept with each verse. First one’s about making music, second one’s about loneliness, third one’s about getting yourself right, fourth one’s about finding connection. Then they all get blitzed together. Something like that, anyway. When the material isn’t strong enough to fully embody, the McCartneyish try hard in Daltrey’s voice can be irritating; but when it is strong—which is most of the time here—it brings out the character actor in him and he puts the songs over like a motherfucker.
John Lennon
4/5
After Plastic Ono Band's violent debeatling, the nation's favourite demagogue continues his primal scream-induced plainspeak. Try this on for rawness: "No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of Tricky Dicky is gonna Mother Hubbard, soft soap me with just a pocketful of hope." Or, "I was feeling insecure / You might not love me anymore". Lennon softens the edges with pop-friendly euphemisms, albeit acerbic ones, such as "You can wear a mask and paint your face / You can call yourself the human race," but most notably Spector's luscious wall of sound, which coats Lennon's salted caramel brittle with a litre of extra thick double-cream. Special mention to Oh Yoko!, which is almost a unassumingly beautiful as the Velvet's After Hours. Makes me think I'm in love with Mrs Lennon every time.
Cat Stevens
2/5
Less spaced-out than Donnovan, less insincere than James Taylor, Stevens is undeniably melodic, consistently rhythmic and surprisingly not annoying; everything I'd expected he wouldn't be. Given how insanely catchy the closer/title track is, I'm shocked it's only lasts a minute. But given his virility as a folk-pop peddler, leaving them wanting more is exactly the right thing to do.
Pulp
3/5
Cocker is Costello's heir but for the fact that he's not much of a melodist. Then again, I'm not sure he wants to be. Agitated, swatting-the-flies-buzzing-around-your-head, House-infused rhythms are what he's interested in—a wonderful match with his 'I'm only pretending to be polite' vocal affect and keep 'em guessing lyrical in/sincerity. It's my first time with Different Class, and I suspect not all these local disco beats will endure, but the ones he builds up to a cliff edge certainly will: Common People, I Spy, Disco 2000. So too the creepy Pencil Skirt, which he has the audacity to stick in the track two slot—exactly where Elvis would put it, I bet.
Blondie
5/5
What I took away from my most recent listen was irrepresible urgency. If you don't answer, she'll ring your phone right off the wall. To get ya, she'll follow your bus downtown (and spy you in the supermarket buying rat food?!). She'll "wait until morning [to] take tomorrow by the hand" because "today can last another million years". She wants you to make it, but if you do "will anything happen?" For these fatefully spirirted youngsters Something. Must. Always. Be. Happening. We're all dying to live, rushing straight ahead in our own parrallel lines. This catalsym of sexual, intellectual and emotional energy is the sound of those lines converging.
Aerosmith
4/5
According to Chuck Eddy, of all the metallic albums recorded between the dawn of the Miocene era and AD 1990, this is the fourth best. I won't quibble. It coats Stones licks and Skynyrd boogie in squeezed zit-juice with such sexed-up fervour that it generates teenage kicks as high as Chuck Berry's or early Beatles'. Makes you feel like the fate of the world hangs on your puny 15 year old dreams. After putting his audience and himself through the ringer on tracks 1-8, Steve Tyler gathers us all up in a sweaty, stinking (probably quite horny) hug. We saw him crying? Uh-uh, he saw us bawling our pubescent eyes out.
Wire
3/5
Deconstructing punk almost as soon as it's born is cool. Manufacturing said de-punk brand as ready made detritus is art school cool. Doing it all without melody or groove is high stakes. A few times here the payoff is exponential, a bunch more it's handsome, but a few too many you don't leave the bookies with much more than you walked in with.
Billy Bragg
4/5
Listened to this in a Travelodge at about 11pm after working since 9am. Not conducive to making much sense of what I heard (but at least it happened before I used the complimentary shampoo that somehow made my hair feel dirtier). Luckily, I know this one fairly well already. So, from memory... It's always a pleasant surprise to hear two artists I have little interest in outside of this collaboration liberated from the tyranny of their own material--so often the thing that holds decent musicians back. Bragg doesn't come across as such a try-hard punk and Wilco don't constipate themselves trying to force melodic brilliance because Guthrie's deceptively simple material carries all the weight for them. That's all I got.
Sleater-Kinney
4/5
Verlaine's guitar, Patti's yodel, Joey/Dee Dee/Tommy/Johnny's/'s pithiness, Thurston/Ranaldo/Gordon's turbulence. It's amazing when a band can wear their influences so proudly, yet still sound utterly unique. Every song is an anthem to be played while the world collapses, and during its reconstruction.
Steve Earle
3/5
Maybe not more than the sum of its cliches, but Earle rides the peak of the Springsteenism wave with such warmth and range that the sum is pretty decent on its own.
Elvis Presley
2/5
An Elvis relic rather than a rock 'n' roll one. And one that's only good enough. No more, no less.
Boston
2/5
Like movie franchises that recapitulate their templates until they're the only way their super fans can understand art, Boston engineer prog anthems so perfect they could win a Nobel Prize—except there's not much to them beyond technical wizardry. Just immaculate playing propping up a familiar hopeless romanticism. For the first half, the wispy, lispy, kind of wimpy vocals are so in thrall to the calculated catchiness of the songs that they temper the bombast enough to make it fun. So much so that I was set to give it a 3. But it’s amazing how quickly it got boring once the tunes thinned out just a little bit on the second side. P.S. I actually looked up where they were from!
Super Furry Animals
1/5
I'm down with vagueness, especially when it corresponds to ambiguity, but this type of unplaceable nostalgia is all artifice. It's a distancing act between perfomer and audience, form and meaning. It's a period piece made solely so the performers can raid the costume cupboard. It might be tolerable if they weren't so insist that "floaty" and "evocative" are the same thing.
Run-D.M.C.
3/5
An ode to the cow bell, which never fails to improve a song and here creates the impression that the boys are tap dancing around the beat. The only other punctuation is Jam Master Jay's guitarless rock beats and the boys' punched-out vocals.
The Prodigy
3/5
Blips, blops, snares, fireworks, drums, voices from beyond the veil, reverberations, passing UFOs, foghorns from ships 20 miless out at sea, drums, breaking glass, a carnival two streets over, looped organ music from a 40s horror flick, drums, drums, drums.
Michael Kiwanuka
2/5
Has all the Inflo hallmarks except the one where even the peaks have been smoothed out. I noticed few specifics but enough generalities to know a) it's not a hook-fest even though it's plenty varied, and b) it's not wallpaper music even though it's plenty soothing. That's interesting enough for me to hedge a 2.
Aphex Twin
3/5
A totally unexpected treat. I was expecting gloom and fug and got synapse-snapping electronics and good humour.
Dwight Yoakam
2/5
Purdy, bouncy and sentimental as funk; just how I like my country. Thematically, the intention still seems to be proof of virility through abundance of tears. Musically, the intention seems to be to break free of country radio--I don't think his heart's in it, though.
Television
5/5
No further proof needed of Marquee Moon's mind-altering inventinveness than the fact that a significant number of people seem to think it sounds like the Strokes. Come again?
Incredible Bongo Band
2/5
A decent knock knock joke. I chuckled, I smiled, I forgot it straight away.
Count Basie & His Orchestra
3/5
A rock'n'roll guy at heart, which is why he's blowing shit up on the cover and in the music.
Fatboy Slim
2/5
Apparently, John Terry was one of the co-writers on Rockafeller Skank. I plan on doing no further research to disabuse myself of the idea that this means the former Chelsea F.C. captain. While he had his ups and downs off the pitch, his career on it was first rate and remarkably consistent. Unlike this.
Beyoncé
4/5
Not every part of the Beyonce package is to my taste. She's too musical theatre at times, too breathy and others, and sometimes just too darn slow. But grandiosity is her metier, and this trades artlessly in the language of significance from front-to-back. She sends a lackey to fetch Drake and Frank Ocean, reduces them to the prupose she has in mind, then flicks them back out the door. She's one of just a few artists who can pull off such pomposity. Maybe the only one of the current era. What keeps her grounded--like down and diiiiiirty grounded--is sex! sex! sex! "I can't wait till you get home so you can turn that cherry out" is great. But it's the way she replicates foreplay and climax in the pop song structure that makes this soar. And Partition may be the most accurate musical interpretation of a shaking booty ever.
The Afghan Whigs
2/5
A meeting of conflict and lassitude, laziness and propulsion. Great in theory, and a handful of others have pulled it off. But not these well-intentioned chaps.
Janet Jackson
3/5
I like it when major artists figures their shit out in public, especially when they rationalise it with--like the title says--rhythm. Also, when they show the decency to just *feel* something about it ('Livin' In A World'). I don't expect Janet had much to add around homelessness or literacy, but if every time we opened our mouths we had to drop something groundbreaking, we'd all be fucked. Also, for an hour run time, it flies by.
Elton John
3/5
Irrepressibly tuneful and seriously silly, but why didn’t anyone tell me it’s so outrageously slow? Elton’s sure got some sand to make quote-unquote rock ‘n’ roll that takes so long to get dressed. But like a model stalking down the catwalk, he knows he looks great doing it. So why rush? Don’t--that’s the answer. And neither you nor I have a better one. Now I think about it, slow seems to be part of camp. Queen, Meatloaf, Prince, Springsteen—they’re all at it (the one of them that isn’t dead, anyway). And Elton doesn’t even fill space with overwrought production. Most of this is just him, the ivories, and guitar-bass-drums. I say "just him" even though most of this sounds like it's played to an imaginary audience, which I suppose is a paradox because that should create intimacy. But it doesn't Sure, you’re at the show. But you’re in the wings, peeking out from behind the curtains, looking at Elton’s back while he performs to his own audience—and you ain’t part of it. For reasons I can't explain, I liked that. From-me-to-you earnestness was pretty rife in the 70’s, so maybe this as a refreshing alternative has something to do with it.
Elvis Presley
2/5
He sure is, and--guess what--he's still not an album artist.
Dusty Springfield
5/5
Dusty's voice isn't just sexy, it's sex-positive, feeling its way around intimacy with warmth and tenderness. She's the Queen of the Afterglow. What transforms this from an album by a great singer to a great album full stop is how sympathetic the players are to her movements. They don't just watch her go deep into her feelings, they follow her down. Chief among them: Arif Mardin, whose swelling and lilting string and horn arrangements are the love interest to Dusty’s come-hither voice. The organic development of these songs--Dusty and the band built them from the ground up, rather than her just rocking up and following sheet music like she was used to--allows her to grow roots in the material, which is top-tier stuff from big-hitters including Bacharach, Newman, and Goffin/King. Whether reliving a sexual awakening with the preacher’s son, mollifying him/her with (I’m sure not just) breakfast in bed, bidding a rueful farewell, building her world upon a smile, or being driven mad by gossip heard through cheap walls, she fully inhabits her roles. These songs have an emotional life of their own, lived in and lived through by one of the most sensitive singers of all.
Gang Of Four
4/5
Four young dudes at the familiar graduate-first job juncture meet for a final pow-wow, alight on a formula for turning their tubthumping into danceable pub-funk, never have to get that first job after all.
Fairport Convention
2/5
Reynardine is a hell of a way to scare the listener off. Get past that and enjoy the folk impurism on offer. Thompson's guitar and Denny's drugged-out voice are too rock for chastity lullabies and keep the spectre of let's-go-back-to-purer-times idealism-cum-conservatism at bay.
Solange
2/5
Acoustic r'n'b with below average melodies, a welcome first appearance from Lil Wayne on any album on this list, some sporadically fabulous drums and bass, and interludes that don't just add gestalt but also the best arrangements on the album--which is a bit weird.
Cream
2/5
What a trip! A grooveless blues rock pissabout with mildly funny jokes. At least the half-arsed Dylan impression was funny, regardless of whether it was intended to be.
The Beach Boys
3/5
I was going to brush this off as an "Oh gee, we probably need a few more Beach Boys albums on the list" pick, but Brian Wilson's melodicism never deserts him, the boys don't try to make more out of material that's slight-by-design, and Help Me Rhonda buys a lot of good will. A great example of building an album around one terrific single, but probably not one of the 1001 best albums ever made.
Arcade Fire
3/5
Who or what is the funeral for? The youth? They do seem a mite hung-up about the world children are being born into. Or is it the death of the 'neighbourhood'--the slightly irritating conceit for four song titles? If it was me, I'd be lamenting the last three tracks, which are all 'slow builds'--the standard indie Polyfilla when a song isn't working. Despite the band's
best efforts, thoe songs expire lamely anyway. Let's assume they never figured out what their concept was and remember that, until 'Haiti' comes around, it doesn't matter. Win's vocals are absurd, falling somewhere between Bono, David Thomas and Gerard Way (did you know such a place existed?) I guess that makes him part universalist, part edge-of-nervous breakdown, and part actual breakdown. The band walks its own tightrope between lavish orchestration and thin, scratchy guitars. Those components shouldn't work but mostly do because this gazillion-piece (who clearly had stadium aspirations from the start, so "indie" my butt) knows how to rinse every last drop from a key change. The one in the Kettle chorus epitomises their whole sound. And they can write in a way that's general enough to seem relevant to everyone but specific enough to stay weird ("They say a watched pot won't ever boil / You can't raise a baby on motor oil" is a favourite). They're best when they work themselves up into a tizz. The strings at the end of Crown of Love are so hyper they could have been made specially for a football highlights package. But when these guys are peaking not even a seven-goal thriller would match the melodrama. Shame they got scared of their shadow after The Suburbs.
The The
1/5
Funk funkless, grooves grooveless, vocals occasionally amusing.
The Jam
2/5
Down In The Tube Station At Midnight's not only a fantastic finale but a useful reminder that most of the preceeding songs compare unfavourably. The big tumbling beat is there, as are Weller's sandpaper vocals and featherwight punk politics for city types--but the hooks, urgency or clarity to turn them into songs to remember are a rarity.
The Smiths
3/5
Reveals how much Smiths songs need a gimmick, not to mention a kick up the arse. The evidence is I Know It's Over, Never Had No One Ever and The Boy with the Thorn in His Side, which slump too comfortably into their favourite armchair. But everywhere else, they land on something unusual to give the elliptical storytelling, bummed-out vocals and chipper guitar the lift they need. That's a win for form. As for content, only time will tell if I can find any sort of emotional communion with Morrisey. For now, I'm happy to chuckle at his prickly phrasemaking.
5/5
In which critic’s darling Polly Jean evokes rather than describes new love darkened by a generalised dread that, if you want to take things too far, kind of adumbrates 9/11 the following year. Twenty years on, it’s a useful reminder of two truths. One, love always wins the day. Two, the West had been demonstrating its skills in geopolitical goat-fuckery for decades, and 9/11 wasn’t the bolt from the blue many like to pretend. Anyway, the album. Again and again, Harvey throws a rope around her unwieldy themes: “I’m immortal when I’m with you, but I want a pistol in my hand”; “Does it have to be a world full of dread? I want to chase you round the table and touch your head”; “I can’t believe the axis turns on suffering when you taste so good”; “This world all gone to war. All I need is you tonight.”; “I draw a line from your heart to mine. A line to keep us safe.” Her themes are distilled to bold and beautiful physical gestures, but they wouldn’t carry half as much heft without the sonics that are the album’s greatest achievement. It’s a sound you feel could sweep across an ocean. That’s no coincidence, as there are more than a few references here to Polly’s separation from her man. If I’m reading it right, he’s in London and she’s in New York (omg, omg, omg: 9/11). The surprisingly sparse arrangements match the economy of her writing, averaging (yep, I’ve done the sum) 4.3 instruments per track. Only the blissful ‘We Float’ gets a big-finish 12! Shit, Polly, quit flexin’. As always, it’s not about how much is there, it’s about what it does. And the standard guitar-bass-drums—sprinkled with harmonium, harpsichord, tambourine, maracas, electric piano, E. bow, bells, and djembe—are deeper than a full orchestra because you can feel the spaces between them. At the dawn of a century (oh god, what am I doing?) defined for many by the alienating effects of globalisation, evoking ’the spaces between’ is pretty damn clairvoyant. And so I thank Polly for reminding me of the lines you can draw across those spaces, from one heart to another. [Vomits]
Wild Beasts
1/5
This dreampop by Topman mannequins is as vapid as it comes. If these dorks have something to communicate, they don't come anywhere near communicating it with their affected shrieks and chants. I'm 182 albums in. This is possibly the worst yet.
The Flaming Lips
2/5
Whiny indie-pop skip-divers respectfully plunder pop history as far as their moderate talents allow. At their best, that's far enough for a couple of songs (The Spiderbite Song, for example) to get within kissing distance of the hem of Peter Stampfel's ragged gown.
Joan Armatrading
3/5
"One more time with feeling," said no one to Joan Armatrading, ever.
CHIC
3/5
Doing whatever it takes to keep the song going and loneliness at bay. Every so often their nemesis comes into view. Hearing them give it the slip is a thrill.
OutKast
5/5
Intro—by no means the most memorable skit on an album laden with great ones (Kim and Cookie just jumped straight to the top of my favourites list)—sums up a couple of Stankonia’s virtues. To start, “bounce”—from the depths of the earth’s core, to the farthest reaches of space, to the Cadillac rolling down the street blasting the hottest new sound. This is a fizzy, bubbly, gloopy, rubbery, soft-play Adventureland of bounce. Next, that’s a harmonium and backwards tabla you can hear. In other words, this is insanely ambitious. Like, 1999 ambitious, There's A Riot Going On ambitious, Blonde on Blonde ambitious. Whether or not Big Boi and Andre intended to change the face/interface of rap and pop, they did. For me, at least. After this, nothing was the same. Correction: after Ms Jackson, nothing was the same. That beat—featuring, ahoy! backwards congas—blew my natural mind. I can still feel my 12-year-old brain struggling to contain the rush of endorphins when that wrong-way-round k - k - ku - k, k - k - ku - k loop starts. (Can you believe this is the first time I’ve realised how perfect it is that a song about bittersweet regret uses a backwards beat. It's literally the sound of turning back time.) So how did pop and rap become inseparable after Ms. Jackson? The best way I can explain it isn't great, but it goes something like this: Outkast set themselves the Prince-ly goal of recording literally every idea they’d ever had, carved out a galactic-sized sonic space for their exploration, then covered so much ground in the process that once they were done no one could claim a new sound without it feeling like Outkast got there first. The breadth of their exploration also goes some way to explaining Stankonia’s curious amorality, which swings from the criminally retrograde (Snappin’ & Trappin’) to politically fired-up (B.O.B.) to socially conscious (Toilet Tisha, Humble Mumble) to sexually chivalrous (I’ll Call B4 I Cum) to borderline misogynistic (We Luve Deez Hoez) without reconciling the differences. Forget the big picture, that'll take care of itself. But back to that intro. What it doesn’t tell us is anything about Big Boi and Dre as rappers. Now, as much as I like Big Boi (and I think Speakerboxxx is to The Love Below what Plastic Ono Band is to McCartney), I become deaf to everything around me when I know a 3000 verse is coming. That only happens with three or four rappers. I don’t know what gives someone that power, but he has it. “You can plan a pretty picnic but you can’t predict the weather.” What other rapper could come up with that? What folksinger? Then there’s the “knee / pad […] be / sad […]" rhyme scheme, his verses on Xplosion and Gangster Shit that make the guests preceding him vanish into obsolescence, and “Speeches only reaches those who already know about it / This is how we go about it.” Perhaps I'm too influenced by Stakonia's turn-of-the-century release when I say I hear it as the final proof of hip hop as the most progressive and inventive music of the last 30+ years. But just consider the differences between this and Mama Said Knock You Out or Fear of a Black Planet. Ten years in real time, light years musically. Finally, having said too much about Ms Jackson, a word on B.O.B. First, it’s actually the better song. Second, most MCs would die trying to rap over that beat. And third, it could end at 2:35 and still be one of the greatest rap songs ever. But then the guitar solo starts, followed by the scratches and cuts. Then the beat changes. The guitar becomes a riff. Andre counts in the gospel choir—1, 2, 3—who regale us with a chorus—“Power music electric revival”—to usher in this (alleged) new age of music. And, just to underscore what talented motherfuckers they are, they finish it off with a squiggly P-Funk synth they absolutely didn’t need to include. Then again, they didn't need to include three-quarters of what's here. That's masterpieces for you. They succeed in spite of their irregularities. Maybe because of them.
Goldie
2/5
Drum and bass for outsiders like me. The pretty guitar loops and sound effects signify pop, while the female voices add emotional depth. But as the ambience sets in and the sense of time dissipates, it gets increasingly tedious, though never so specialist that it feels hostile.
The Modern Lovers
4/5
I loved Jonathan Richman's interviews in Todd Haynes' Velvet Underground documentary (what a sweet man) and I've only read raves about Joshua Clover's new book, 'Roadrunner'--all about the opener on this album--so I was thrilled when this came up. Roadrunner is great, driving its way around the rock 'n' roll ring road, and picking up a hitchiking Mathangi Arulpragasam on the way. Understandably, it'll take more than one listen for me to feel like it's worth writing a book about. Richman's drawl isn't exactly fetching, but it's so unaffected that it's impossible not to like. Like hero Lou, his songs appear to hinge on arty-cum-straightforward lyrics but are actually driven by his lead guitar. By the time it finishes, he's introduced you to a peculiar set of charaters inhabiting an unusual sonic world, all without appearing to do much heavy lifting. Special.
The The
1/5
Grooves as flat, hooks as ignorable, instrumentals as uninspiring, and weirdo vocals as amateurish as the last one. Only thing that's changed is I'm getting the sense he's a bit of a curmudgeon, which makes me even less favourable.
5/5
A Michelin starred restaurant can serve any old slop and, out of deference to the tastemakers, someone will say it's the best meal they've ever had. But can it be both?
Can
2/5
By turns, a lot of fun and an inoffensive drag. When they go full weird disco, the rhythm section is one of the best in prog. The drummer is suitably rigid. I picture him playing with straight arms., though I suppose that would make his tippy-tappy style harder to perform. Silly if not funny, which is good enough.
The White Stripes
3/5
Not quite avant garde traditionalism, but elevated for sure by its commitment to playing fast and loose with its own fidelity to the blues. Barely any of the songs feel like they've been conceived as songs, but all lined up they definitely sounds like they've been conceived as an album. So okay, maybe avant garde traditionalism after all.
Iggy Pop
3/5
Rough sleeper music. Tough and edgy because it could have its head kicked in any minute. Heard it not just as the collapse of the 60s dream but of the Bretton Woods agreement, which may be the same thing.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
2/5
On 'Fooled Again', Petty sounds like he's doing an impression of Keith Richards doing an impression of Mick Jagger. The rest of the album is similarly ersatz, or nostalgic, depending on how amenable you are to watered down r'n'r.
Stereo MC's
2/5
Staid and respectable. Lyrics a bit think piecey and therefore a bit irritating. Vocals nasal. Contemporary comparisons are Sault and Self Esteem--artists who send middlebrow critics into headstands because they act edgy while successfully courting a suburban listenership who can no longer hang with raucous irreverence. Get past the initial novelty and it smells suspiciously like zombie funk.
Bee Gees
2/5
i) This may have never happened if the Beatles had split up earlier--their late 60s/early 70s signature is discernible more than once, ii) I'd blame Paul but there's no escaping that Barry Gibb sounds a lot like John, especially on Greatest Man in the World and the title track (whose vocal line is mostly just a Day in the Life rip, right?), iii) Presumably, the album art and title are only significant in relation to the Gibb's aspiration to be misremembered and romanticised in the same way that British military history is--instead, this achievement belongs to ABBA.
Sade
2/5
If you did the lounge-y rhythms are dated you'd be half right. Bust them out now and they'd sound pretty rote, but that doesn't mean they aren't snazzy. The downer isn't the bongos, it's the description to boilerplate ratio, which (BS statistic coming up) is something like 3:7. More Sally, less Cherry Pie.
Various Artists
2/5
A trifle, sure, but a tasy one. Maybe a little too much cream.
Sex Pistols
5/5
Has given me thrills ever since my mum put it on in the car during my metal/Beatles phase and said, “I think you’ll like this.” Never a headbanger, I wondered what made the Pistols her exception. Probably the same thing that does it for me: the very real danger posed by ex-dole queue give-no-fuckers snarling through a litany of things they find contemptuous about society and spitting the things society finds contemptuous about them back in its face. Some of their assaults ring resoundingly true (Holiday in the Sun, God Save The Queen). Some of them are plain scary (Bodies, No Feelings). Everywhere, contradictions abound. None more so than in the figure of Johnny Rotten, who cuts through the noise with a spiteful clarity, taking care to make sure his words land because he knows how much they'll make you squirm. It's an unsettlingly committed performance, through which a fully (de)formed character emerges. More than just a frontman, he’s a leader, an icon, a hero. But wait, aren’t icons and heroes anathema to anarchists? Yep. Fortunately, the band has no interest in resolving these conflicts, opting to intensify them instead, which they do gloriously. Undoubtedly more shocking at the time, punk has been revived and remodelled so often since 1977 that to someone who first heard it 28 years after the fact, it simply sounds perfect.
Dolly Parton
3/5
The title track and Travelling Man are exceptional. Unsurprisingly, none of the tracks that follow match them. But they're all still good, pulchritudinous in a way that only someone with a voice and picking style this powerful can get away with. She virtually never belts. Doesn't have to. You can hear what she's capable of even in her faintest tremble. In a way, her vocal restraint is as gentle as her stories of Christian modesty. After all, towering above her audience and yodelling about the beauty of nature and her pauper's coat wouldn't sit quite right.
Dizzee Rascal
3/5
Remember reciting all of Fix Up, Look Sharp on the school field at lunch time? Me too.
Love
3/5
At once frightfully earnest and obtusely satirical, they aim for bonkers and hit their target right in the ghoulies. The quiddling lyrics, frenetic drumming, and puckish pipe-blowing play their part, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as successful--or listenable--if they weren't incorrigible melodists. That means there's always a firm point from which to depart from on one of their zigzags. They find the temptation to return irresistible, too, even if the melody has changed after they've returned from outer space. Also: One more for the small pile of albums where the stupidly long closer is rather good.
Rage Against The Machine
2/5
Taking their cues from Public Enemy and emboldening a generation of Jonathan Davis's and Fred Durst's, Rage intrigue me because from high school on I've met untold white guys who have no time for rap--or metal, for that matter--but revere this album. So they get marks for cultural legitimacy. But I won't get bogged down in comparisons, because Rage are their own beast. No one has ever sounded quite like them. Probably because, like so many bands, they fell together out of fragments. Break them into their constituent parts and it's not so pretty. You get a rapper who's only a couple of bars better than Bombfunk MCs, some severely limited funk, and bonehead metal riffs. But combined, they turn their failures into something unique. For one thing, each element takes pressure off the others. The dual attack guitars whirling and thrashing means De La Rocha doesn't have the room to rap well even if he could. He just has to go nuts and buzz around like a dervish, which he can do, semi-vomiting his lines. And that benefits the rhythm, which would be found out if it had to bear the weight of raps from Chuck D or (allowing for time travel) Kendrick Lamar. And that's about all I have to say. I enjoy bopping and jumping and head banging to this for a while, but it doesn't take long before I find myself wondering if they have any other tricks up their sleeve. History tells us that they did on Evil Empire, but then they got scared and went back to basics.
Michael Jackson
4/5
Various ballads and dance numbers addressed to anonymous women, but the real love affair is between Jackson and Quincy Jones. The comingling of their vocabulary of sighs, squeals, squeaks, grunts, groans, classical strings, fairydust synths and, of course, mesmeric drums is as essential to the music of the last 40 years as James Brown. Most ironic title: Don't Stop Til You Get Enough. There is no 'enough'.
The Monks
2/5
Anticipates Devo and other herky-jerk rockers by a decade or so. Their descedants were an improvement.
Talking Heads
4/5
After spending the previous three years being afraid of everything from the countryside and work to painting and music itself, David Byrne gets a goddamn grip and learns to let the days (and water, whatever that means) pass him by, tapping into a global groove that widens his outlook and softens his responses. If More Songs About Buildings and Food was the first Talking Heads album made with access to fresh air, this one is positively oceanic. Letters of thanks should be mailed to Brian Eno. His whacked-out guitar tunings are rock futurism built and demolished in the same instant. On Houses in Motion, he plays what can only be described as an elephant with its trunk up its arse. Throughout, he counsels Byrne (never a world beating songwriter) to pick his lyrics out of a hat, which elevates the pretty good ones to semi-parodic quite good ones (“Facts don't do what I want them to,” “Can’t stop, I might end up in hospital”), and leads to him stumbling on some genuinely great ones. Once In A Lifetime, obviously, but also the one about a kid who reads too many magazine and tries to change his face by sheer force of will. (Don't try it--doesn't work). While the one about Mojique doesn't hit the bull's eye, it does demonstrate just how far Byrne has stepped outside of himself. All the way into Africa.
Roxy Music
3/5
I was ready to write that no second side so spectacularly fails to fulfil the promise of its first, but then I, you know, listened to it again. Know what? Those last five songs are nowhere near as disappointing as I remembered. The Bob is silly but tolerable and Chance Meeting can go, but Would You Believe? Sea Breezes and Bitters End can stay. Sure, they're not as fabulously daft or mesmeric as the gay Dylan we get on side one, but they still belong to the cocktail party Ferry & co. construct out of their seventies dream of romantic liberation and industrial quantities of hair gel.
Paul Simon
5/5
Slippery and lithe, every song is brought to life with twarps, boings, the sound of Simon scratching his beard. He starts with heartfelt coffin-side counsel and follows that with his best song ever, in which the sound of a couple fucking in the next room sets the narrator off on a reverie about losing his virginity that starts with his birth, takes in the major points of his life, and finishes by cheekily thanking the Lord for his fingers (yes, I'm reading this salaciously). The motel room he's staying in never features again, but we never leave it. Elsewhere, he finds the perfect balance of high- and lowbrow literary chops on songs about addiction, burnout, political deception, industrial collapse, marriage collapse, and a gloriously silly story about absolutely nothing--just a framework on which to hang witty rhymes and elasticated rhythms.
MGMT
2/5
Ironic dance music I'll happily iron to even if it doesn't always make me want to dance.
Paul Simon
4/5
216 albums in, it's clear this book isn't going to introduce anyone to African music. So, instead of reviewing this very good album, here are some great African albums for those who like what Simon's collaborators bring to the party. Omona Wapi, Franco & Rochereau (1976); The Music In My Head, Various (1998); The Guitar Paradise of East Africa, Various (1991); The Indetructible Beat of Soweto, Various (1985); Egpyt, Youssou N'Dour (2004); Rough Guide to the Music of the Sahara, Various (2005); Specialist In All Styles, Orchesta Baobab (2002).
Buck Owens
3/5
If you applied nudge theory to a music shop and I was the target audience, you'd put cornball country wearing a semi-respectable suit at eye-level right before the checkout. In other words, I liked it. Not one of the 1,001 best albums ever, but an important artist from the non-album era, so worth including. And for that reason, I'm rating it high.
Curtis Mayfield
3/5
A plush pillow for the weary head of the ghetto's victims.
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
5/5
In which Neil reinvents himself as a punk (which doesn't take much beyond fuzz and volume--he's always been an irascible chap) while slipping in the most lyrical songs of his career. "Welfare mothers make better lovers" and "I searched out my companions / Who were lost in crystal canyons / When the aimless blade of science / Slashed the pearly gates" on the same album, with full commitment to the attitude of both? Masterpiece.
Oasis
1/5
Whether greedily chewing vowels like the filthy lucre they so desperately wanted, or trying to raise the dead with zombie rock poses, this may not be the worst thing ever, but it's veryyyyyyy faaaaaahhhhhh awaaaaaaaaayyyyyyy from the best.
Taylor Swift
3/5
In which Taylor does her best Eminem impression. Relative to her image, of course. Ssure, she's not writing in grawlix, but there are enough fucks and shits to invalidate her PG rating. Even more than "At dinner parties I call you out on your contrarian shit" 'Tis the damn season remodels her as a sophisticated dame in a whip-smart middlebrow movie. The plotting could use some work. no body, no crime is a fun genre exercise, but as conventional as they come. And I'm not sure "Good thing my daddy made me get a boating license at sixteen" and "I've cleaned enough houses to know how to clean a scene" checks out class-wise. But now I'm being picky. A lean and muscular workout that is arguably her best album by accident. And she's not just flashing her writerly talents here. She's staking her claim to being the most accomplished vocalist in Pop-Indie. Whatever the hell that is.
Hüsker Dü
2/5
Rock in a tin can. I should like it. I should love it, even. But I don't. Bob Mould's voice has a lot to do with it. It's too... well, not too anything. That's the problem.
Donovan
3/5
The fine art of taking the piss out of yourself while looking deadly serious.
David Bowie
2/5
The dense, smoky textures are wonderful, though the commitment to confounding expectations comes at a cost. That's not to say there aren't hooks, though. More than I'd remembered, actually.
Peter Tosh
3/5
Gorgeous and totally without fuss, fully-formed grooves unroll as if they've always existed and are just popping out to stretch their legs. Such is the gift of the magi-musician.
Blue Cheer
2/5
Proto whatever your preferred genre of noise mess is. These guys make filthy, sludgy, gloopy rock--and all while looking like Hanson! Now if only they had a little of the blonde brothers' gumminess, this would actually be as crazy as they're trying to sound.
Miles Davis
3/5
‘So What’ and ‘Freddie Freeloader' are truly momentous, the gateway to new aural worlds no matter how many times you've listened. Their engine is joy. You can hear it in Coltrane’s sax and Miles' trumpet as they crest and lilt. But most of all, it resides in those goddamn drums. Oh boy. They’re irrepressible. It'ss impossible not to tap your foot to them until your shin ache. They subside in 'Blue in Green'. Once that happens, somnabulance takes over and I find myself a little lost. It's still undoubtedly beautiful, but never as revelatory as that opening one-two.
Steely Dan
5/5
If this isn't perfect, then the definition of perfect needs updating.
The Black Crowes
2/5
I had no idea the sound recording in town halls could be so good. Who's responsible for capturing this 70's country-rock tribute act? Where was it recorded? Has anyone tracked down members of the audience to get their take on this historic moment? Surely these aren't originals. Not in 1990.
Cheap Trick
2/5
Without question, this vocal affect sounds beyond stupid in 2022. Not that many vocal affects today aren't beyond stupid, they just don't *sound* it yet. Crucial difference, that. How to describe said vocals? I dunno. Like Rod Stewart had sex with someone much less talented? Though that happened. Lots of times. And to my knowledge they didn't form Cheap Trick. Whatever. Vocals aside, they batter the drums good and proper, do the old up and down movement on the guitar nice and aggresive, finger the neck when they're feeling frisky, and keep things slick and quick. Except when they don't. Which is a mistake. Eight minutes and forty-six seconds is not territory this kind of band should step foot in. Fuck knows what they're yowling about. Probably abandonment. "Dad, where are you?" "Rod, why don't you love me?" Etc.
Fever Ray
3/5
Voices range from unborn babies to reanimated corpses. Maybe that sounds icky, but it's not. Somehow, it comes from a place of warmth and empathy. Just don't ask me how. The plink-plonk, drip-drop, tip-tap noises probably help. They kind of sound like computers being melted down, which these days is a very comforting image.
Grateful Dead
3/5
At first, I pegged this as disappointingly square, given that my one Grateful Dead album (the debut) is as loose as a pocketful of change and totally wild. But after a few songs the squareness started sounding tight, and tightness has merits of its own. They pick pretty and sing straightforward, the wooden rhythms still have forward motion, and from the lyrics I picked out there's something going on in every song. And then I checked the run times. Four 5+ minute songs? If they can keep shit sounding tight at those lengths, this can't be the downhill slide I feared.
The Rolling Stones
5/5
Already the most disingenuous band of the age, this is where the Stones outgrow any notion that their songs are about them, throw on the gaudiest costumes they can find, and take their heroic rock theatre to a grander stage than anyone else. Their world-beating revue features everyone from Satan to Bob Dylan to abdicatin' sweethearts to revolutionaries to perverts to Alan Sillitoe protagonists to everyday proles.
Bob Marley & The Wailers
5/5
"A hungry mouth is a hungry mouth"? "A hungry mouth is a hungry mob"? "A hungry mouth is a hungry mind"? I'm not sure which it is, if any, but I'm also not sure it matters. While Bob's full prophet mode, he could sing, "A hungry mouth is an orange as seen through binoculars made of jelly" and I'd think it was a message from heaven. So respect him for the "Bend down low, let me tell you what I know" humblebrag. Ain't no one stooping down to anyone else's level here except Bob. Anyway, this blew my mind in a way it hasn't before. The grooves are eternal and gorgeous. And it has that remarkable James Brown-ian quality of every instrument--be it string, wind, wood or brass--contributing to the rhythm. If you'd asked me yesterday what my got-to Marley is, I'd've told you 'Legend'. But that's a celebration of Bob-the-songwriter and cultural icon. This is really where I turn. To the proof of hope and salvation through unbreakable rhythmic unity. And I like how the songwriting credits are shared around.
The Stranglers
4/5
Well, hello. Please come in. The Stranglers are one of the few bands I haven't heard that I hold no prejudices about, so this was as welcome as some alone time in the shower. I can't say it defied my expectations, because I didn't have any, but I can say it was a total thrill. Lively, tumbledown, and so assured. The drummer ain't afraid to lash out, the guitar's got that shark bite quality, and the vocals are, um, strangled. Meaty stuff. An eight-minute medley in ninth place is ambitious by usual standards, but these lads are bold as brass, sticking extended instrumentals that pack a whallop into the two opening tracks. Having listened to 2021's Bright Green Field recently, the maladroit funk and dorky vocals on 'Peaches' sounds like a clear reference point for Squid. Same lyrical brand of disaffected nonsense, too. So far up my alley the street lights are a mere pinprick.
Ella Fitzgerald
1/5
This is some kind of protest vote, and for a few reasons. 1) By all means, slap a 5/5 on your review, but know this: I see you. I know it sounds high-brow and classical and you feel helpless in its presence. "Aw gee, I mean... shit... it's so prestigious." I get it. But I also see you. Grow a spine. 2) Where are the other compilations in this book? Why have I got to listen to Little Richard and James Brown and Buddy Holly studio albums, and pretend they're representative of the best those acts could produce, when I could be listening to far superior comps? I don't accept this as the exception. 3) It's over three hours. That's only allowable for 'Star Time'.
Buffalo Springfield
4/5
In which Neil Young can't help but demolish his bandmates, such is the majesty of his talent. Not that their songs are bad. 'A Child's Claim to Fame' and 'Hung Upside Down' are ambitious and whimsical, but in the shadow of Young's tracks they look decidedly comfortable--happy to sit in a safe space. 'Good Time Boy' is the only song as assaultive as Young's, but its ersatz Redding vibe--complete with The American Soul Train horn section--makes it look a little feeble in comparison. Young, meanwhile, pumps his guitar, wrings the neck of mystical lyricism, and pays homage to nothing and nobody. On 'Expecting to Fly', he slows down to stand god-like beside his peers, the strings and marching drums like a chorus of angels surrounding him. As ever, he sounds like he's singing out of the back of his head. As ever, it's eerily beautiful.
Black Sabbath
1/5
Gloriously heavy and inventive in its way, but they're still utter clods. As ever, a drag.
Pixies
4/5
There's a fine distinction between landfill [insert genre] bands, and bands that sort through everyone else's trash to make something new and, hopefully, exciting. The Pixies are that distinction.
Small Faces
2/5
Brings Thomas Frank's book title to mind: 'The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism'. Pleased to say the Small Faces chapter has a happy ending: these epigones didn't make it big with their mildly amusing twaddle.
Screaming Trees
2/5
Lanegran's voice sounded frankly appalling at the start, but by the end I was on board, or at least less irked. So give him that. Give the band their dues, too, as dreary murksters who know how to keep things sprightly. Or if not sprightly, at least varied. The Indian guitar work helps. And they can arrange their way through five minutes plus when they need to. But in truth, I only think this is keeping its head above water because one listen isn't enough for me to parse what I surmise from the turgid and sad sack music are turgid and sad sack lyrics.
Pixies
4/5
Funny without cracking jokes, serious without striking poses, curious without paying homage.
Machito
2/5
Like most albums that are an exercise in technical competence, it's fun, then it's trifling, then it's a little irritating, then it's over.
The Who
5/5
I’m rapidly learning that I’m a much bigger Who fan that I thought, and it’s not like my collection is insignificant. After Who’s Next, this sounded exhilarating in ways it never has before. So I say praise be to this little game for forcing me to listen harder. In brief, this album sounds like war. And not just 60’s war—war from the future and war from the past. The guitars in ‘Good’s Gone’ are laser warfare, the drums in ‘La La Lies’ a battle tattoo. Calamity, carnage, and violence runs deep and throughout. Daltrey rips his voice in two on ‘Please, Please, Please’, ‘My Generation’ ends with a near collapse. And ‘The Ox’ is pure metal, no? Virtuosic, fast, and noisy as hell. The drums are a constant pound, but everything else is wiry and erratic. Distortion, feedback—it’s all there. But none of this album is remotely murky or sludgy. The sound is clear as a bell, and the harmonies are often sweet if not soulful. As ever, The Who are thespians, and once Daltrey starts playing dress-up he comes alive, dragging his voice long and wide to match the frequency of the guitar in ‘Good’s Gone’, playing a wrongly accused man in ‘It’s Not True’. As for the title track, it’s hard to overstate its genius. The claps, the stuttering, the ffffff-uck you fake out. So pleased to listen to this afresh.
The Smiths
4/5
Every Smiths album is new to this boy, and this is the third one so far. It's also the best. A fuller, deeper sound, but without any signs of fussiness. Morrisey's persona takes on new dimensions and he and Marr approach the themes in ways they weren't able to on the Queen is Dead or Meat is Murder. It's funnier than those, too. He does a couple of voices on tracks two and three that made me splutter. He also seems less personally implicated in the stories, so even when you get something as mordant as, "I've come to wish you an unhappy birthday / 'Cause you're evil / And you lie / And if you should die / I may feel slightly sad / But I won't cry", it's delivered with a degree of detachment. More than that, I can't say on one listen. But that one listen gave me a tonne of joy, so I'm going big on the rating.
U2
2/5
As ever, they're impossible to suss out. If I could suss them out, I might say that's because they still hadn't sussed themselves out, hence this dense, syrupy, snoozey, dance (apparently) thing. Heavy-handed and clean as a whistle, yet utterly un-sussable. I can't suss it out. Can you? I can't. (Okay, I'm done here.)
The Go-Betweens
3/5
I always associate top-tier lyricists like Forster and McLennan with simple yet indelible melody, which, in my mind, is more akin to great prose than rhythm, which is more akin to, um, plot? I don't know, this is the first time I've really thought about it. Anyway, I first discovered the Go-Betweens on Friends of Rachel Worth and fell deeply in love. That album is exhibit A in the case of simple melodies vs my ears (this doesn't really work--why would I bring a case against melodies I love?--but whatever), and even though I knew their earlier work through the 90's best of (why are early GB's album so hard to find in CD?), I still wasn't prepared for the strength of the rhythms here. That's all I've got to say, really: I already knew they were great melodists and wrote 300 pages deep, but now I'm clearer on their rhythmic prowess. Oh, and they have those classic great writer voices. You know the kind. Kind of wobbly, strained, only a couple degrees from just talking. But you wouldn't want to hear the material sung in any other way.
Gorillaz
2/5
If Screamdelica had been better, it would have sounded like this, which is still only okay.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
2/5
A little less of a blind spot than he was before, which is something to be pleased about. I still find him too humourless, his voice unmoving, the lyrics slightly hackish, the melodies often flat. But boy, does he put in work. Everyone’s got a schtick, and Cave works fucking hard at his. That gets me through the many moments when the ignition doesn’t take. Often, those moments are when I’d expect it to. 'People Ain't No Good' and ‘Green Eyes’ should be my thing, but… just… aren’t. Never mind. At least I’m ready and waiting when he finds a spark. ‘Lime Tree Arbor’, ‘There is a Kingdom’ (probably because it borrows the tune from ‘Perfect Day’) and, most of all, ‘Idiot Prayer' get off the ground and give me the aerial views of Caveland I’ve been promised. When I’m up there, I like what I see. I just spent most of my time on the ground, waiting for the captain to say we’re ready for take-off.
John Martyn
3/5
Lacking the talent of Van Morrison (the most obvious comparison) or the Neville Brothers (perhaps the less obvious comparison, but still, this reminded me in places of Yellow Moon), Martyn works the same white blues territory as the former with similar love for its black roots--not just in soul but jazz, too. His voice is silly, no doubt, but malleable enough to attain the tender devotional quality he's reaching for. Some of the arrangments have a delicate muscularity. One of those is called 'Certain Surprise'. Another is called 'Dancing'. Yet another is called 'Big Muff'. I repeat: 'Big Muff'. I can't even.
Van Morrison
3/5
Wandering mystic isn't my favourite Van Morrison mode--and by wandering, I'm talking more about the tunes. Lyrically and thematically, he's always a nut, and I love that. Fundamentally, I just find the exuberance and repetitiveness of the pop song form (everything on Moondance, for example) more soulful and big-hearted than this quieter, more circuitous fare. However, Astral Weeks completes a trifecta from artists who work in this mode (the other two from John Martyn and Nick Drake), and while I don't love any of them, they've been a welcome reminder that I'm more receptive to the style than I thought. I have only one example of when Astral Weeks soars (by no means the only time it does, just the only one I wrote down). That's the strings on 'Sweet Thing'. In a pop song, they'd probably sound great, if not a little expected. But here, in the middle of a rambling song, they totally cold cock you. Not just the first time, but every time.
David Bowie
2/5
A great artist with less to show for it than he ought to have, he's never not experimenting. yet on the four Bowie albums that have come up so far, none of the experiments have worked spectacularly. Still, I'm pleased he gave them a shot.
Kraftwerk
2/5
The music of bureaucracy, capital, self-interest. It's up to you to decide just how oh-so-arch it is. Just enough for me, but I'll understand if you opt out. What saves them is their love of melody and repetition, which isn't in dispute, though it doesn't come in the usual shape and size. Given how little love is on offer here, I'll take whatever I can get.
Cyndi Lauper
4/5
Brazening a Prince cover and two huge statements in the first three songs, Lauper's pop instincts remain pretty much perfect the whole way through. The piquancy of her unusualness drops a little as she nabs the rhythm from 'Pressure Drop' for 'Witness', but she pulls it back with the uncontained sexuality of 'I'll Kiss You'. The highlight among so many highlights is 'She Bop'--the kind of unbridled pop nonsense that only comes around once in a blue moon. As significant a statement about the unknowability of what make pop pop as 'My Sharona' or 'Louie Louie'. It's probably about wanking. I hope it's about wanking.
Bruce Springsteen
3/5
Gamblers, recidivists, mass murderers, troublemakers, brand new used cars, and state troopers who took the job after rising wheat prices killed off their farm deferment. Taking his cue from Badlands, Bonnie and Clyde, and a bunch more movies that don't match his warmth and empathy, Springsteen carries these sketches as far as he can. Eventually, the melancholy and sparsity pulls them up. But what's there is sad, bountiful, and some kind of gift. He creates a hell of an atmosphere with the harmonica, too. Is he a good player? I've no idea. But I hardly think this is the place to go for technical perfection.
Madonna
2/5
Just look how quickly rich and gauzy becomes "deep" and "meaningful", the shorthand for which is--sigh--an Indian song. I note William Orbit is credited on that. It appears not even the best artists were immune to 90s ambient wank.
Patti Smith
5/5
A doom-scroll through Patti’s Twitter feed circa 1975, which tends gloomily apocalyptic—“Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” “Little sister, the sky is falling,” and “Down by the ocean it was so dismal” setting the tone. As a real-life poet, her storytelling and language prowess is audacious. Not that you should expect to follow what she’s saying in a strictly logical sense. Forget narrative lacuna, these songs abound with non-sequiturs and sense-defying leaps that you’ll either find tantalising or infuriating. She doubles down on her prophet come-on with a crystal ball-gazing delivery, slurring and ululating and intoning in a way that’s frankly obnoxious. And there’s the rub. For all the meaning-mongering, this is rock music. Punk music, to be exact. Therefore, feeling—not logic—is king. Thumb your nose, cock a snook, be a brat. Be a kid, for god's sake. And lest we forget, kids come in all shapes and sizes, including moody and tenebrous. But what really sticks it to the squares is that all the posturing is shored up by a sinewy, febrile groove, resplendent with sizzling hooks, electric boogie, and Lenny Kaye’s whip-smart guitar.
Jeff Beck
2/5
A bloodless cousin to the white man's blooze 'n' soul served up by more skilled contemporaries like, er, the Dead or Rod Stewart. Does himself no favours with a pretentious album title and cover that would make Bono blush.
Crowded House
1/5
Their enduring popularity is pretty inexplicable. Is it throwback to the 60s whimsy of Small Faces? Cause if so, someone should've told them Small Faces' forced whimsy was ingratiating. All I hear is commercial calculation, everything designed to prevent them being taken seriously--presumably because they also know their schtick doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
Black Flag
3/5
A real slobberknocker. Funny, hateful, even sad. Who doesn't feel a twinge of sympathy when Rollins garbles something like "… I'm confused, confused... don't wanna be confused... Don't even feel a thing, no... I don't wanna see...
But you can't make me long for your life and security"? I checked my book and, yep, Chuck Eddy approves. Though he notes they went rapidly downhill from here. Anyone listening to this with two ears and a brain could tell you that was the only place they were ever heading.
Kanye West
5/5
If you accept that an inflated sense of self-importance is a prerequisite for any rap/rock/pop/whatever star, then Kanye ultimately proved himself to be a decent bloke on his first two masterpieces through the generosity of his musical genius and his literary-comedic ability to conceptualise. That makes this—his third masterpiece—the odd one out. Despite the attempts of ‘Power’ or ‘Monster’, there’s nothing here to rival the social commentary of ‘We Don’t Care’, ‘All Falls Down’, ‘Heard ‘Em Say’ or ‘Gold Digger’. What you get instead is monstrously inward looking, an artist on the brink of being overrun by a megalomania previously under his control. To make up for the absence of brilliant storytelling—much harder to do when you’re mostly just bragging—he ups his rap game, throwing his name into the hat with legends (Raekwon) and legends-in-the making (Minaj). His lyrics are frequently brilliant: "And what's a Black Beatle anyway, a fuckin' roach? / I guess that's why they got me sitting in fuckin' coach”, “They say I was the abomination of Obama's nation / Well, that's a pretty bad way to start the conversation”, “Runaway slaves all on a chain gang / Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.” But however hard he works, he’ll never have a top-tier flow. And so, as ever, his saving grace is the music, which is a jaw-dropping and gag-worthy display of opulence—astonishing and appalling in equal measure. That internal tension is precisely the point. Kanye’s main theme has always been self-consciousness. In essence, that means calling out his own bullshit, and boy does he have a lot of it. He can’t resist decadence, but is repulsed by it. ‘Runaway’, for instance, is unutterably gorgeous despite overrunning by about five minutes, with Kanye plonking away at the same two piano keys and mumbling incomprehensibly through autotune. The Roald Dahl intro, Gil-Scott Heron outro, false finish to ‘Dark Fantasy’, Chris Rock diatribe on ‘Blame Game’—all excessive, yet all essential. But however many times he changes direction as he makes a break for paradise, then double-back and heads for damnation, he can’t escape those pounding drums. They’re soul-stirring and shit-scary. Way before the final track, where the African rhythms come to the foreground, they sound like they’re coming from the depths of the jungle. Bloody, visceral, and irrepressible, he can't outrun them. They're the beating of his heart of darkness.
Johnny Cash
3/5
Spartan in a deeply religious way, but not puritanical or ascetic. Just simply spiritual. When the arrangements can't pull the song through, Cash's gravity and grain does. When Cash can't pull the song through, the arrangements offer a hand. When neither pulls the song through, well, good thing they've chosen great songs.
Simon & Garfunkel
1/5
Twee, twaddly, pukishly tender. Paul ditching Art was as smart a move as Benjamin Braddock ditching Mrs Robinson. But it was even smarter when he ditched the librettos and started writing songs.
Echo And The Bunnymen
2/5
Nothing to write home about. Pretty amusing psychobabble by wannabe weirdos who don't mind sounding silly, which is just as well, but struggle to sound fun, which isn't.
The Fall
3/5
Surprisingly sprightly, cohesive, gauzy, even--dare I say it--pop. Truly a remarkable band. At times they sound like Go-Betweens by way of, well, The Fall. The rest of the time they just sound like The Fall, which can be said of pretty much no one else.
Sepultura
2/5
Creative within extraordinarily narrow parameters. When everything word has to be growled and every instrument beat to shit, there's only so much you can do. They do most of it really well, and it's still tired after track two.
Magazine
2/5
A psych revival in thrall to the post-punk Wire had pioneered, I can see why this might be seen a important. But I can also say that it isn't. For all the wonky vocals, violent changes of directions, and snooty artiness, the songs are often rudderless, not to mention hookless.
Fugees
3/5
The skits aren't de trop, but the raps can be hard work, and the aesthetic is B-team Wu-Tang.
Wu-Tang Clan
4/5
Aiming at once for total unity and individual identity, everyone and everything is vying for space. Two skits introduce ‘Method Man’, for heaven's sake. But even when they’re bickering (“Is he dead? What the fuck do you mean ‘Is he dead?’”) they hold each other up. Meth’s introduction of each member is lovingly done, and it speaks to the respect they have for each other’s skills that they leave the compèring to him. When someone interrupts his flow, they ask permission, before letting him back in for the punchline: “We form like Voltron and the GZA just happen to be the head.” Maybe on another album the skits would be de trop, but because RZA chops and slices the beat, samples and sequencing in equal measure, it just about fits together. Just about. The slightly jagged, off-kilter part of "just about" is where the magic happens. It’s often unclear if a skit is part of a song or a song part of a skit, whether they’re talking or rapping, if a song’s ended or started. It’s seductively menacing, especially as RZA’s fascination with the esoteric means his production is littered with whatsits—piano tinkles, talk of chess, sweet soul samples. They boing off the Clan’s collective rap style of eschewing smoothness and attacking the beat. In between the mysticism, torture fantasies, samurai flicks, street tales, and bravado, you get sight of the horrifying poverty they came from (listen to Ghostface’s ‘All That I Got Is You’ a few years later if you want a good cry) and understand why the Clan was essential for their survival.
ZZ Top
2/5
More than Sabbath, less than Lynryrd Skynyrd. Brawny, dumb and lots of fun.
Tori Amos
2/5
Like most prog, this has a tendency to get lost in a single-minded pursuit of virtuosic wizardry. And like some folk (even freak-folk), in the pursuit of the notion of purity. While I'm not averse to Amos's musical theatre tinklings or, say, the penultimate a capella number, I'm far more entertained when she conjoins her great voice and sense of drama with hooks, not to mention some provocative writing. E.g. "Just cause you can make me come doesn't make you Jesus," or "I can scream as loud as your last one, but I can't claim innocence." Oh look, a theme is emerging. Pardon my prurience.
Prince
3/5
The man is indefatigable. My penis was sore just from listening.
Fleet Foxes
1/5
The sweetie-poo folk revival was never to my taste. Too earnest and hookless, but worse than that it's preening and genteel. Pop music is the language of semiotics, and what this communicates is a disdain for the city, the market, vulgarity. All healthy in doses, but in this quantity I sense puritanism. That said, they're very good players, occasionally turn their talents to picking good tunes, and aren't preachy.
Leonard Cohen
3/5
The first time I've heard this for the astonishing work it is. I can't believe it's taken this long. Maybe I was on too much of a Cohen bender first time around, or I didn't have a wide broad enough frame of reference. In a way, it's Cohen at his most rock and roll. Spiritually and emotionally it's raw, aggressive, even violent. The guitar picking--which for all the world should sound delicate, even timid--is somehow muscular. It's got *ass*. As for the imagery: "That's a funeral in the mirror and it's stopping at your face."
Depeche Mode
3/5
Somewhere between New Order and Pet Shop Boys. Not as exciting, funny, or danceable as them, but roughly a hundred times better than I expected. Fey, melodramatic, and infectious.
Aerosmith
4/5
White boys rarely get this funky, so respect these horny greasers, whose sole purpose is to rivatalise your ass cheeks with the meanest boogie oogie woogie this side of the Stones. Just 35 minutes, but they're so tight--and every lick, riff, break and bridge so lean--that these songs feel like they last forever.
Steely Dan
4/5
Maybe their smoothest and therefore most perfect jazz-pop fusion. Maybe their most pop. Maybe their least jazz. Maybe the other way round. Maybe neither. It's impossible to say. Their career is one long "what is this?" moment. When things get impossibly smooth, they slip in a knotty something-or-other solo. When they get too abstruse, they break out a magical hook. Admittedly, some of those hooks are hardly transparent. "Can you show me Bodhisattva," say, or "She said, 'Oh no, Guadalajara won't do.'" But they're so perfectly harmonised, and so full of joy, that they sound like they make perfect sense.
The Rolling Stones
3/5
The first time they sounded like impressions of themselves. Licks and riffs made to measure and in all the expected places. At times, it's downright flat. 'Wild Horses' is a sentimental drag. Their 'Hey Jude'. 'Brown Sugar' is great music but not a great song. The subject is fine, it's the treatment--which has none of the mischievous, nuanced irony of 'Sweet Little Angel' or 'Downhome Girl'--that makes it offensive. Just a straightforward song about enjoying raping slaves. Ick. 'Can't You Hear Me Knocking' and 'Moonlight Miles are phenomenal--the former a gauntlet for anyone who thinks they can do this thing half as well as the Stones, the latter perfect in its slippery, uneasy beauty. 'Dead Flowers' comes close to those two--maybe the only song that recaptures the grotesque role-playing of Beggars Banquet. An album overrated for interfering the world-beating run from that one to Exile, but not even close to their level.
Beach House
2/5
Dreamy background music that works as foreground music, too--meaning that these are identifiably songs. Not catchy or moving songs, but songs nonetheless, which is more than most dream-slush peddlers manage.
Koffi Olomide
2/5
Loverman soukous, it has its uses.
Mariah Carey
1/5
Sorry Puff but you're wrong. This is one personality void that can't be filled by any amount of moneyed production. Such a stupid inclusion that I kind of feel sorry for Mariah.
Cee Lo Green
2/5
If I woke up to find out I could pass off a reasonable impression of Outkast, I'd probably make this album too. Especially if I could sing like this. And if I also had the same contacts in my Rolodex.
Eagles
2/5
Before they figured out how annoying they could be, they were less annoying. Who knew? This is somewhere between Buffalo Springfield and an empty biscuit tin.
Prince
5/5
In which Prince deploys his generational talent to such an extent that he makes somewhere between four and three-hundred albums in one, which is defined by two more features: the first, that most songs start as genre workout but finish as genre-defining; the second, that he plays everything, including rock god, funkmeister, a talking orgasm, silence, a besotted schoolboy, Jesus, oracle of the apocalypse, and John Lennon rewriting Norweigan Wood with Dorothy Parker in the lead role.
Ravi Shankar
1/5
Exactly what it says it is: a recording of a very good teacher and player teaching and playing well. Is that an album?
Pretenders
3/5
I've gotta listen to my soul here, and what it's telling me is not enough. This just doesn't give me that electric jolt in the guts often enough to rate it as highly as my brain says I should. But I'm too sensible of The Pretenders gifts, which are many, to get caught up listing their faults. Hynde's tough gal attitude is a thrill in itself, as is the derisive way the guitar lines get cast out. And the lyrics are oblique enough that I'm not entirely convinced she wants me to fuck off, even when she tells me to fuck off.
My Bloody Valentine
3/5
I would say the kicker to this modern art picture show of clouds drifting is how deceptively they take you somewhere tangibly different to where they started, but I'm a clod, so I doubt how deceptive the movement was solely dint of the fact that I noticed it. Whatever. It made me feel something decidedly untangible. Which is the point. Delicious.
The Stooges
2/5
Mucky, murky, half eaten relics of psych-cum-garage-cum-noise-cum-grunge-cum-what-may. I generally have an appreciation for edgy ambition, but I like it to be more rounded off than this.
Deep Purple
2/5
Imagine if Steely Dan couldn't write songs and could still play musical instruments very well but played them fast because... well... what else are you meant to do without songs?
Astor Piazzolla
1/5
My wife: "Someone's just doing the demo track on a keyboard."
5/5
Rendering riff splendour and solo heroics in a 50’s boogie captained by Billy Zoom’s surf guitar and D.J. Bonebrake’s rockabilly rhythms, L.A. bohemianism takes a running jump out of the top floor window of the party house where nobody knows the party rules and goes splat. Lead singers Exene Cervenka and John Doe (also on bass) had been married two years at this point. Safe to say, the circumstances weren’t ideal. “A hundred lives are shoved inside / Guests arrive to dump their mess” is no baseless punk brag. Neither is “Last night everything broke.” Temptation won’t give them a break. Nor will the fucked-up sexual politics inherited from the 60’s and 70’s. If you sympathise with Doe’s dilemmas (“she’s blonde” and, er, “she’s a white girl, but I’m living with a white girl”) spare a thought for Exene’s. She’s both “screaming Magdalene” and “Madonna on a mattress.” Doe’s voice is split to splinters. Torn and frayed. Fucked. And he uses it brilliantly, with a knack for tonsil-shredding histrionics that rivals David Johansen. As for Exene—she's something else entirely. Flat. Disembodied. Bloodless. Her vocals issue from a place so far beyond the veil I don't want to think about it. Her performance on ‘Some Other Time’ is rock paradise. A head-spinningly evocative lyric that promises some kind of revolution but its still completely unreckonable. All told, it's a grubby, intoxicating mess. The art life as delicious as it is ruinous. No, I don’t want to live it. But boy do I wanna hear about it. Inspirational bumper sticker: “Elvis sucked on doggy dicks.”
Guns N' Roses
2/5
They mix Aerosmith boogie with Sabbath sludge and AC/DC brattiness. Dumb (not a bad thing) and provocative (a good thing). Though the latter's only because Axl is such a convincingly jacked-up threat to women. And because so many of the tunes slap.
Dire Straits
2/5
Their Spoitfy profile says "self-consciously mature rock 'n' rollers," which may be the most singularly uninviting musical proposition I've ever read. Luckily, that's not all they are. Hooks, tunes, SFX--all catchy crassness they're not above. But there's no ignoring their midtempo sobriety, which is almost truculent in its insistence on poise. There's also no ignoring that this gets a hell of a lot less catchy on the second half, which is the bigger problem.
Alice In Chains
1/5
Competent aesthetic and guitaring. Imagery from beginner's guide to metal ("Down in a hole / Feeling so small / Losing my soul"!!!). 0% chance of catchiness. Borderline embarrassing vocals.
Skunk Anansie
2/5
After a decidedly thin and uninflammatory opener, these not-especially-radicals at least get more melodic. Enjoyable and occasionally surprising Garbage-lite, but too reliant on automatic gestures and a far cry from the spikiness I was expecting.
The Specials
3/5
Wanted to write "flat", have corrected it to "thin", and in doing do so have made appraising them a lot harder. The former epithet's invariably bad, but the latter's far more ambiguous. Their jauntiness is a dead cert, which in the long run is likely to make this a winner.
Penguin Cafe Orchestra
2/5
Not as many whacky curios as the 1981 self-titled album, and noticeably more controlled than that one, which sawed and whirred and plonked and buzzed with an organic unpredictability. Pleasant but not thrilling.
Hole
4/5
Thin and straggly power barfs of raw catharsis. Spilled bleach, sour milk and home truths all over the bathroom sink. Plus galvanic riffs, scratchy melodies, and one of the sweetest voices to ever scream "fuck you" in your face.
The Beach Boys
3/5
The kind of weird and soulful record you need to listen to hear once per annum to remind yourself the hippie dream wasn't always just another way to shill the consumer. Eccentric, blissful, goofy. And political as fuck.
Radiohead
2/5
In which the jangly tunings and wool-gathering lyricism of 90s indie are retrofitted to the studio gimcrackery and stadium heroics of U2 and injected with turn-of-the-century received fatalism. Is it commercially calculated? No doubt. Does it also aspire to art rock? Just as little doubt. Are the two compatible? You betcha. Do they pull it off? Commercially: er, duh. But an art rock masterpiece? Hm. ‘Fitter Happier’ might be as high-concept as they get. In which case, answer’s no. The aesthetic's there, but it's all tell-don’t-show and heavy-handed emotional manipulation. That's pretty much my biggest problem with Radiohead. You’re given no other option but to feel down. I suppose I blame Thom Yorke, who has the emotional range of a mood ring. In a lot of ways, he’s the sandbag stopping this hot air balloon from taking off—or from taking off higher than it does. Because there’s no doubting that much of what’s here is dense, layered, and precise, screened by a veneer of uncertainty. There are thrash-outs, bass ‘n’ guitar counterpoints, clattering drums, seismic reverberations, and exceptionally difficult acoustic/electric combos. They rarely miss a cue to move a song to the next act, either. All of which leaves me feeling the same way I have about for the last decade. Amazing musicians, big ideas, lame lyrics, lousy singer. Where's the lift? Why are they ina constant state of deflation? Why do so many people get a kick out of lethargy?
Circle Jerks
3/5
Forget lean, this is a single short-twitch muscle fibre. As an aesthetic and/or statement of purpose, 'shorter and faster than everyone else' won't distinguish them all that much, but their brio and animus might. As will their jkz, which are obvious and the better for it. Henry Rollins should have paid attention.
The Velvet Underground
3/5
Lou is a fucking clown and I love it. Like, have you heard his vocal on 'Lady Godiva's Operation'? Comically daft. Elsewhere, they do their ur-band thing, sullying previously unsullied corners of drone, monotone, and the poetic-prosaic. Their music refelcts an era that hasn't happened yet, but once it's been and gone, those reflections will prove to have been staggeringly astute.
Herbie Hancock
2/5
Limpid jazz with a pleasant bop and squiggle but none of the knotty, edge-of-the-universe stuff he managed under Miles' tutelage.
Manu Chao
3/5
Borrows freely from his global vagabond exploits, slipping between styles as fluidly as he does between songs. Never less than buoyant, even when he occasionally turns contemplative.
The Cure
1/5
It's possible I might enjoy the rudimentary New Orderliness of their rhythms, but there's no chance of that while they're so insistent on this pathetic forced despair. I've rarely taken against a vocalist so quickly.
The Byrds
3/5
At its best when the cosmic babble skewers the sweetie-pie folk babble, rather than the reverse. While they're incapable of having or being fun vocally, they're less inhibited sonically. By which I mean the horns on the opener sound a lot like farts.
Slayer
3/5
Harmless satanism, breakneck speed, and some kind of purity--by which, I think I mean that, thanks to Rick Rubin, the songs are short and focussed. The lyrics and vocals are beyond silly, and all the better for it. Tom Araya yells like he's had wet cement poured into his veins and is trying to get his words out before it dries. All of which makes the technical showboating genuinely exciting rather than the drag it usually is. Deliberately overrating this because I can.
Jorge Ben Jor
4/5
Starts every song at full throttle, then makes them go harder, through a combination of surprise breaks, ecstatic vocals, the push-pull of formless scatting and ultra precise tightness, and introductions of new rhythms and melodies that are like intriguing subplots.
ZZ Top
3/5
In which three bonobos tap into their jungle roots and lay down as much funk as they do dumbell boogie and metallic riffing. A minor triumph and, given the year of release, reminder to the overglammed, overemoting, honky, horndog arena rockers of the time that the basics are just groovy on their own, thank you very much.
Marianne Faithfull
3/5
60's female liberation calcified into snide, embittered, off-hand broadsides. She confidently rides disco-punk-and-even-ska rhythms that are itchy and agitated because it's not easy being a woman. Esepecially one who's putting everyone in the dock--herself, her cheating bastard boyfriend, and the cunt he had in their bed.
The Icarus Line
1/5
The chances that they pull themselves out of whatever hole they're in without some grippier tunes: low. The chances that they accidentally bury themselves under their own despairing noise muck: worryingly high. In need of a hook and a new outlook.
Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart
2/5
A pretty average experiment with a range of styles. Neither comfortable or showy, agile or clunky. All in all, pretty mild. But in a fun way?
Frank Sinatra
4/5
Incredible pipes matched by a jubilant band. Terrific wordplay, sung with an appreciative wink and smile. They don't make 'em like... etc
Billie Holiday
3/5
A treacly, deeply scarred voice. Her unique talent is for exercising complete control over it without letting that control preclude her from baring her soul.
The Cramps
2/5
Swamp monster music, primordial, gloopy, and rough as arseholes. They freak but don't get freaky enough.
Red Hot Chili Peppers
1/5
Kiedis is simply too embarrassing for this band to work. His affected drawl is a bore, his syrupy croon hopelessly pretty boy, his rapping unmentionable, the lyrics a vacuum. As for the funk they're lauded for, lumpen and predictable. Totally in love with themselves. Totally uninteresting.
Jurassic 5
2/5
Alternate title: Paint By Numbers
Leonard Cohen
5/5
A musician and vocalist before he's a poet and don't you forget it, so can your read-alongs and just listen to the damn music. More often than not, the tone of his voice and the eldritch figures he picks from his guitar are the subjects--the lyrics more like light cast to make them dance and flicker. Many have sacrificed themselves in vain at the altar of songpoetry, with Cohen their misbegotten godhead. If only they'd listened in the first place. RIP to them and RIP to Lenny.
Shuggie Otis
2/5
Too often smooth and ponderous, but admirable as a declaration of love for his heroes, who are also my heroes.
Billy Joel
2/5
Hell of an ear for a tune but the beat leaves a lot to be desired. As for his stories, simply not engaging, which has something to do with his treacly McCartney voice, and even more to do with hollowness plain and simple. Songs about nothing more than being songs.
Nitin Sawhney
1/5
Mood music for when you're in the mood to test the limits of boredom.
The Smashing Pumpkins
2/5
The band resists Corgan's best efforts to ruin their passable speed grunge until the penultimate track, which is a huge fucking pin in their balloon.
Hugh Masekela
3/5
Nothing quickens the pulse but then again it's not meant to. By the end you realise that what's seemed like exceptionally good background music has actually occupied the forefront of your mind for an hour and a quarter. Hell of a trick, that.
Janelle Monáe
2/5
Lots of ideas, many of them good, but neither the tunes or her voice have the strength the carry all the dicking around.
Adele
2/5
Like the depth of her feeling and voice but don't think either are served by the orotund phrasing and production
Roni Size
2/5
Jungle DJ has too much rhythm to trip himself up while finding his feet.
David Bowie
4/5
A manifesto for that most unmanifestable of things: unorthodoxy. Never helps to overstate the lyrics with Bowie, but certain ideas resound: "run to the shadows", "I'm trying to fit into your scheme of things", "this age of grand illusion". He's interminably travelling on the opener, wild as the wind on the closer. It's all gauche, all different, all repudiating the idea of normal. Title track starts with a coda, moves to the bridge, follows that with an intro, ends with a different song. The guitar solo at the end of TVC-15 may melt brains. Everything on Stay is gauche and two beats off. Throughout, the white freak funk combines Eno and Clinton.
King Crimson
1/5
'I Talk To The Wind' is right. This is farting around, plain and simple. They put in a lot of work in place of inspiration, but for what? A seven and a half minute opener with half a hook to show for it. And they don't get any closer than that in the subsequent 36 tedious as fuck minutes.
Depeche Mode
1/5
Their oppressive machine rhythms are funkless by design and well-matched by the colourless vocals. But that doesn't make the dour clunk-and-moan any more satisfying.
Chicago
1/5
Lifeless soul. Or funk. Or whatever. Any way up, it's ersatz shit.
Stevie Wonder
5/5
Mixing the wild playfulness of a crayola-wielding infant with cosmic level compositional chops and the oversized emotional sweep becoming of a generational figurehead, this is one of those rarest of things: a 70s masterpiece that doesn't have "I couldn't have happened without the 60s" written all over its face.
John Cale
2/5
If in doubt, do a period piece--except the period is so riddled with Cale's idiosyncracies and weirdo visions that it could double as the present (though probably not the future). For the first few songs, his drone floats in a misplaced yesteryear while the tunes exist in the here and the now, but on 'Macbeth', 'Paris 1919' and 'Graham Greene' they come barrelling onto the stage together for a twisted history of the bourgeoisie told in a hodge-podge of The Kinks' sorrowful quaintness and Nick Drake's John Donne poses.
R.E.M.
2/5
The first time I've heard them as an evolution of Americana, which is a perspective I can savour, even though it doesn't make me warm to them when they're being this slow and unfunky. A backfired flirtation with blandness.
Led Zeppelin
2/5
Too prone to jacking off in misbegotten shows of elegance or, yawn, classicism. They regain some ground with the riffs (though even they're not half as good as you expect) then take twenty steps back with Plant's vocals. The yowling isn't the problem--that's all good fun--it's how unsexy his voice is. When he says he's gonna give me every inch of his love, I can only shiver and reply "That's very generous of you, Robert, but why don't you keep it to yourself." And when he says the juices are running down his leg: ew, ew, ew.
Pavement
4/5
Implacably disaffected noise-mess by smarty-pants brats who work every angle--infectious melody, discord, suburban rebellion, the range life--but refuse to commit to any. Perhaps the only thing that speaks to the politics of their music louder than that mix is [screamed]: "NO LONG HAIR!"
Brian Eno
3/5
All of Eno is the template for Moby, but this one sticks out above the others. Sprung basslines, globetrotting rhythms, awkwardly cool whiteboy funk, and ambience that grows like spreading moss. Byrne adds a degree of nervousness that lets the wider world in, but his influence dies back on the second half.
Gary Numan
2/5
Whetehr it's corporate cynicism leavened by silly funk or silly funk leavened by corporate cynicism, the funk's the problem. Too slight, too weedy.
Al Green
3/5
Rhythms totally his own, soulfulness as intelligent as it comes. He's touched by god and passing it along to you. Savour the moment. (A little too long on the slow tempos to compete with his best work.)
The Crusaders
1/5
On here just because of the title track, presumably, and that's a drag. After that, it's all soft scoop funk and bedwetter soul. Really quite shit.
Moby Grape
3/5
Buried inside their lean, lickety split blues rock is a deep unease and knowingness about the collapse of the 60's dream. Plays out most often in the way they can never do anything straight edged.
(From what I remember this is probably a four but I couldn't be bothered to seek out the full version.)
Harry Nilsson
3/5
There are worse places to be stuck than between late Beatles and early Randy Newman.
Youssou N'Dour
3/5
World spanning vocals and grooves equally pacific, though not as astonishing as he'd create later on.
Charles Mingus
3/5
A whacko. No doubt there are some impenetrable corners and unassailable walls for simpletons like me, but they're far outnumbered by an eccentricity and playful abandon that's only obtuse if you choose to let it be.
Louis Prima
3/5
Barring Buona Sera, lands on the right side of forced cheer. Joyousness was abundant at the time. What gets this over is dynamism.
Joni Mitchell
4/5
I've never been able to shake a kind of block with Joni. It's a bit the way she extends notes, a bit her artsy chanteuse image, a bit the fact that I rarely follow her lyrics (probably related to point one). But I mostly like and often love her stuff. It just doesn't always come naturally. So this pop compromise is tailor made. Enough bubblegum in between the virtusic stuff for me to appreciate both in equal measure. Consequently, it's the silliest I've heard her, which counts for a lot.
Kraftwerk
2/5
Calm down chaps, this is almost melodic.
Bob Dylan
4/5
Working both sides of the veil with loosey goosey rhymes drawled through a mouth coated in rubber, and flanked by a band that whips around like a 240 volt cable gone wrong, this is a spectacular mess of barely contained chaos magic. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
Rocket From The Crypt
2/5
Competent snotty chanting and surprisingly early-00's for the release date. But it's basically obsolete by design.
Queen Latifah
3/5
Rhythm-wise matriarch raps. DJ Mark is steady on the decks, Latifah able to supplement his medium tempos with a full-bodied voice that's never going to make the beat speed up but at least doubles up on bounciness. Proudly female Afrocentrism with added buoyancy is a mix I find impossible to resist. And why would I even want to?
Wilco
2/5
Who'd've thought an early version of the Spotify playlist disguised as album would be from 96 and from an alt-country act. Yet here it is. Three formulas. Three times too long. And they're still at it in 2022.
Bobby Womack
2/5
Very busy energy which Womack matches with fidgety vocals. More disco here than you might suspect. Blues, too. Basically, he'll take rhythm from any place he can get it. But poesy? An overstretch.
The Sugarcubes
2/5
It's kind fo refreshing to hear Bjork without the overworked vocals that lead nowhere that characterise her solo work, only her standard phrasing is still only vaguely interesting. I'm pleased to say that while she's barely emotive, the rhythms are more than barely funky, and plenty playful. An exercise class in quirkiness rather than an elite level performance of it.
MC Solaar
1/5
I love plenty of non-Anglophone music, but my enjoyment of rap is so yoked to its verbal pleasures that this is, in the nicest way possible, very likely a waste of time. Especially when the only thing that's in a language I do understand is the third rate lounge rap beats.
The Verve
1/5
Zombie rock drivel from Glastolad lug nuts. Good for a pre-football match chant and a good racist head kicking (probably). Whatever era they think they're reviving doesn't exist except in the Sunday Mirror. I hate this.
The Flaming Lips
2/5
Whether their childlike grasp of what's a song and what's simply atmosphere is naturally occuring or carefully cultivated, it's mildly alluring even while it's a sticking point I'll never get past until they do.
The Byrds
2/5
Prettifying everything in sight, these sensitive souls never met a song they couldn't wrap their harmonies round but plenty they couldn't wrap their brains round.
Lambchop
1/5
Calling this alt-country is like calling Metallica alt-disco, which is no comment on the music, just the inanity of the genre designation. As for my comment on the music: too limp and too slight. There are definitely some nostalgic reflexes in here, but I'm not sure what era they're harking back to and I'm not sure Wagner is either.
Kacey Musgraves
1/5
Too much time rolling around in the satin sheet production, not enough time on the writing. When they aren't outright clunkers, they're pap. And when when they're not pap, the drippy aesthetic makes them sound like it.
Talking Heads
4/5
Couldn't fit a fag paper between this and Remain In Light and luckily I don't need to. My favourite between the two depends which mood I'm in, and this caught me in a favourable one. I love how lost Byrne sounds. Despite the boldness of his statements, he doesn't know how he wants to live, work, or love. He's merely figuring his shit out by trying on different looks. Having blast while he does it, too, if the dance-oriented grooves and Velvets-y scratched guitars are any indication. Plus his most bonkers vocals ever.
Nick Drake
1/5
Sometimes risk aversion can bite you on the ass. By stripping away anything offensive to his delicacy--like, er, strong beats or hooks--Drake’s gentle rhythms, which hold up from start to finish, take on an insistent prettiness. Throw in his bizarrely mannered vocals and nursery rhyme lyrics (not necessarily a bad thing) and it’s well-conceived as a whole. Unfortunately, I find insistent prettiness annoying. I wanted the strings and horns in ‘At the Chime of a City Clock’ to stop being so sheepish, and to tell John Cale that his harpsichord on ‘Fly’ was like too much exposition in a costume drama. Lots of scene-setting. Little action.
Stevie Wonder
2/5
Compositional greatness unmatched, but the delicate baroque palette means the songs simply don't jam, and that reduces his generational reach, which is when he's at his best. Very pretty though.
Elvis Presley
4/5
Lo! Rock and roll is born. Or at least done very well. Economy and attitude are the key ingredients, with Elvis requiring only half a rhythm (but mostly getting a whole one) to goof along to on the rockers. Requires next to nothing on the ballads. Face it, he'd have you peeling off your undies if he was doing this a capella.
Phenomenal. Loose, ragged, and imbued with the chaotic spirit and big heart of prestige rock and roll but shorn of any purist posturing. Stewart's voice has lived at least three lifetimes. Wood's guitar at least two. Doesn't unify into a kind of colelctive national anthem of the white working class like 'Every Picture Tells A Story' but doesn't try to either. Possibly improves Memphis from Chuck Berry's original, which should tell you all you need to know about how good this is.
Cornershop
4/5
Funky times are indeed here again, though reconditioned in that distinctly Britpop way that sounds like listening to vinyl through Craig David headphones in a bedroom covered in posters of 60's bands. But for once the nostalgia trip is reinvigorated with purpose. Or at least with personality, which is purpose enough. The playfulness between live and sampled music, and between verbal and non-verbal communication, brings the everyday oddball at the helm to life, even when he's only talking through his record collection.
Elton John
1/5
Either refined to the point of dullness or dulled to the point of refinement, this is a sluggish show of songwriting pomposity.
Bob Dylan
5/5
The genre is raggedy-ass beatnik blues rock, so progressive it’s being invented as it’s recorded. The only thing under full control is Dylan's voice. Outside that, the band careens around like a motorbike with a dodgy ticker, which is why everyone seems to think they’re playing lead. One second the drums are in charge, then the organ, then rhythm guitar, then someone hooks the harmonica up to the bike’s exhaust and gives it maximum revs. All while Dylan’s on stage with a stack of library books, ripping pages out at random and holding them up to a giant fan to send them flying over his audience at random. That's how we get Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting on the captain’s tower of a sinking Titanic. Jack the Ripper sitting at the head of the chamber of commerce. God pow-wowing with Abraham. It’s the ultimate high school reunion. Held together by glue that’s one part mystery and two parts the most voracious appetite for language in the history of recorded music, everything here is an outlaw song. ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and ‘Queen Jane Approximately’ are directed at fallen women. ‘It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry’ and ‘From a Buick 6’ are roundabout love songs. ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ is the king of map songs. In Dylan's version of that grand tradition, the dark side of the American psyche is delineated by one of the country’s artery roads, where MLK was assassinated, Elvis lived, and Bessie Smith had her fatal crash. The siren whistle marks America as a circus of horrors. The drunk-driver rhythm signifies how wild and unsteady the country’s foundations are. ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ trolls squares who try to force sense from nonsense. It’s eerie and unsettling, built on the shifting sands of a wild organ. And then there’s ‘Desolation Row’, where mystery and outlaw life come to a world-historic head. Against an improvised melody from guitarist Charlie McCoy that sounds like it's existed forever and shows no sign of stopping now, it’s thirteen-minutes of Dylan wrestling catch-as-catch-can with a crazy, unknowable world. Characters real and mythic are pitted against each other in an epic drama he wants no part of. He'd prefer to live on desolation row, the only place he feels there’s truth. That’s what this shakes down to—his aspiration to strip away everything so that he can reinvent himself again and again. To never be pinned down. If that means tearing up history, literature, language, and popular music in the process, so be it.
Mj Cole
2/5
Garage that's neither too dumb nor too smart, and more than hooky enough. Female voices add texture. Much of a muchnes but in the most pleasant way.
Randy Newman
4/5
An inventory of the dirtiest undies in the American laundry basket, arrayed with trenchant humour and rousing arrangements. It's satire that can be called neither scurrilous or mean, simply because it's true. The poor, the rich, the dumb, the educated, the celebrated, and the elected from both sides of the mason-dixon line are implicated in confecting a uniquely American brand of racial and social inequity and iniquity.
2/5
I've written and deleted the word "bloviated" at least five times. Thing is, despite each song being a short walk up a small hill stretched out to feel like an ironman challenge courtesy of those neverending synth lines, marching drums, and Bono's mouthful of cotton wool, these songs move at some kind of clip. Right, they spend longer in each section of the song than most artists would, but within their clearly defined aesthetic, they don't spend longer than they should. So I'm happy to call it a formal achievment, even if I found virtually nothing that made me want to come back.
Eels
1/5
Any other Beck fans making unconvincing knock-offs on this list I should be aware of? Would help me to know what's coming.
PJ Harvey
3/5
There's Bono in her voice. But where his mannerisms are pointed inwards, as an ingestion his own significance, Polly Jean's head in the other direction, projecting rounded vowels and hard consonants from deep in her diaphragm. For want of a better word, we'll call it expression. In addition, she's got the earnest lyrics to match, a drummer with a vengeance, a bassist with a connection to his ass, and guitar hero aspirations of her own to rival Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker.
Songhoy Blues
2/5
An early example of the safe bet desert blues a sizeable swathe of music crit publications still have an appetite for. Distinctly Saharan sans any especially peculiar instruments or tones, and, crucially, containing nothing to threaten sacred ideas of what constitutes rock and pop. Not knocking the group, just the framework for sticking them in the pantheon. This is nice. Try the Dakhla Sahara Session from Cheveu and Group Doueh from roughly the same time for a more incendiary and politically-charged example of the same kind of music.
Jefferson Airplane
2/5
In which Florence Welch hears Grace Slick on Somebody to Love and White Rabbit and her whole career flashes before her eyes.
Justice
2/5
Sans the inscrutability of Daft Punk or the self seriousness of (I think) Saint Etienne and Beach House but incorporating the hop-and-skip of Avalanches, it's pretty good album-oriented dance music.
David Bowie
3/5
Restoring the messy remains of classic rock with pop purpose lovingly swiped from Black sources, at its best this is a signpost for the road too infrequently travelled by proggers. At its worst, he proves susceptible to the same tendencies. In the middle, he pays tribute to Warhol and Dylan by name, but not to Lou Reed, even though Queen Bitch doesn't exist without the Velvets. Then again, two bouts of overt hero-worship is probably enough for one record. Freaks, kooks, and queers everywhere are addressed directly for maybe the first time ever. And how about those camped John Lennon vocals? Some of his best.
Nick Drake
1/5
The voice is dumbfounding. A hideously mannered sootsayer with nothing to say. The tunes are worse. The musical equivalent of a kitten playing with ball of wool.
Madonna
2/5
Taste-pandering schlock has its vices, its uses and it heroes. Here's an example of all three, with the former complexified if not always improved coming from someone who's most definitely the latter. Prince can stay, the ballads can end, the hits will last forever. If you walk away no more sure who she really is: you're not supposed to. If you walk away having been momentarily intensely interested in her performance of who she isn't: job done.
Nas
4/5
Destiny's Child
2/5
More sure of themselves than of their material, hence the frontloading. After the three hits, a pleasant ramble through vocal wham-bam more fleshed-out than the ideas.
N.W.A.
2/5
On 'Something Like That', Dre explains what it takes to be a good MC: "To create something funky that's original / You need to talk about the place to be / Who you are, what you got, or about a sucker MC." Which pretty much nails all of his group's shortcomings. For his part, the beats are far fresher than the raps.
Ozomatli
1/5
Elastica
3/5
Thick-skinned, spiky and sexy, plus a hit that serves as a template for The Strokes et al half a decade later.
Carole King
3/5
Would say the drawbacks are a general solemnity and the sparsity of the arrangements, except I can get showier uptempo renditions of similar or identical material elsewhere, so I wouldn't have this any other way. Complex. Brooding. Full-blooded. And gloriously ordinary. Which damn sure means it's every bit as beautiful as she feels.
Van Halen
2/5
Hard rock sans any threat of danger, sexiness, irreverence, politics, brains. Plus points: it's compact and they can play their instruments very fast, which are really the same thing.
Ladysmith Black Mambazo
3/5
Perfect, presumably. I don't know. An all-male gospel-leaning South African a capella group is a fairly esoteric thing. And yet it's universally accessible to anyone without intractable hostilities to "other sounds". Paul Simon increased their profile, of course, and well done to him. But don't stop at Graceland. The intricacies of their sonorities, grunts, supernal harmonies, and (apparanetly) danceable rhythms (don't try it in public, do try it at home) pack unearthly pleasures. Earthly ones, too.
Bruce Springsteen
5/5
Johnny Cash
4/5
Totally gripping. Surprisingly stirring. By the end every inch of that room, the inmates faces and their personalities is etched in your mind.
Cocteau Twins
1/5
Ooo-ooo-ooo, ahh-ahh-ahh, sigh-sigh-sigh.
TLC
2/5
Far more successful as an accomplished aeshetic than as a collection of outstanding songs. One outstanding song is better than none though. Plus a Prince cover. Plus Andre 3000.
Soundgarden
3/5
I was all ready to call this cruddy butt-rock. And it *is* butt-rock. But it isn't cruddy. It's heavy with pretension, yes. But it's also just plain heavy, though not in a thrashing guitar tornado kind of a way. In a, well, black hole kind of a way. Oppressive tone, foreboding feel, lugubriuous groove. And unlike most wailers, Chris Cornell sounds like he might actually have a soul. Hell, he may even be soulful. For what it's worth, I didn't want to turn it off once in 70 minutes. There's no way I can low-ball an album that does that.
The Zombies
2/5
Spiralling psychedelia. Leveaned by the same mix of delicacy and clarity Ray Davies made his metier and deflated by the airy gentrified vocals Donnovan made his. Unclear what any of these songs are aiming for.
Red Snapper
2/5
The path to heaven is paved with good intentions. So is the path to energetic but stodgy funk.
The Strokes
2/5
Think I'll stay on the fence a little longer. There's lots to like - from the ragged tunings to the bratty vocals to the "this'll do" attitude to hooks - but none of it grabs me and won't let go.
Manic Street Preachers
1/5
Wannabe rock stars who cover up their absence of star quality with guitar fuzz, unbalanced mixes, and more yelling than they know what to do with.
SAULT
2/5
Righteous and beatwise, you'd have to be musically stunted not to feel these grooves and politically stunted not to feel their message. But I have a hard time believing they'll ever get under my skin (and Ive tried) much less onto the dance floor. Side note: as Homeboy Sandman demonstrated twice on his magnificent "I Can't Sell These" mixtape, they make great beats for a rapper capable of turning them into songs.
Stevie Wonder
4/5
Sometimes excess comes from vanity, sometimes from generosity. This is emphatically the latter. Here, genteel delicacy; there, hot-blooded exhortation. Loopy and mesmeric ballads give way to motorik funk cede to visions off a musical future that in the decades to come will be verified by the sheer number of hip hop samples grabbed from this record. A preternaturally gifted composer and protean performer rolling out the full extent of his talent.
The Isley Brothers
3/5
Safe to say, "That Lady, Pts. 1 & 2" is some kind of preternatural phenomenon. It's also too short by at least four times. Back on earth, the Isley's bring the soup like a six-man butler in the buff party, and I'm happy to slurp it up.