If globalisation had a soundtrack, this record would – and, I suspect, self-consciously – be it. “Aja”, pronounced “Asia”, features a cast of 60 musicians; surely, though I haven’t checked, among them some of the late-70s finest (not counting the Dans themselves, of course). If I were to hear this album without knowing who it was, I figure I’d have a 1000-1 shot at guessing Steely “Reelin’ in the years” Dan first time. What I would have said, and did, was “is this where vaporwave came from then?” Turns out yes; Aja is a preeminent example of “yacht rock” (buoyant west coast AOR primed for taking out the marina and into the crystalline waters); the stuff later sampled by Saint Pepsi, Luxury Elite, Floral Shoppe. It’s the sort of smooth audio postmodernism that presages the entire 80s: a pastiche of styles – curated, elevated – that, had he been given better taste in pop, Patrick Bateman would’ve swung an axe to. And, yes, four decades later, from yacht rock comes Vaporwave, a genre that for me satirises and romanticises the emergence of global corporate capitalism equally (tapping into/enjoying the same cultural preoccupation as Vice City, San Junipero etc. too). Vaporwave is a hauntology fixated on what might have been (fully automated luxury capitalism) made in a time that isn’t (techno-oligarchies in the ear of 1% leaders). Yet this record, so substantial and beautifully produced, is all flesh and blood. So much so that one wonders if there’s a clue as to where it all went wrong here … or, at least, pause to reflect on wether that kind of wish fulfilment is the subconscious aspiration at the heart of all our revisionist attempts to resurrect the spirit of the proto-global coffeehouse. “Deacon Blues” is a standout track for me, but the whole album draws you in and in and in. Love, love, love.

Still can’t forgive Billy Corgan his voice or lyrics, but a wondrous album all the same.

At first - harder work than I’d hope from a classic album. Perhaps I’ve not the patience, as it’s sounding pedestrian (and perhaps even indulgent). As the record warms up, I begin to hear the artists who must owe Patti and incredible debt: Pat Benatar, Kate Bush, Kathleen Hanna. By the time “Free Money” is done I’m several shades more optimistic about the record.

A lot more American Songbook than I’d have guessed. Hadn’t noticed how similar the end of Maggie May is to “Losing My Religion”. “Mandolin Wind” is a song that transforms at the halfway mark, from dull to wonderful. In a way that serves as metonym - an album that’s half pretty dull, and half absolutely wonderful.

Wonderful record. Hadn’t realised that it was so ignored initially. “…Walter” a standout track for me.

Night Swimming <3

I sit in the global coffeehouse, second hand smoke atop first. Frasier Crane sends me a drink. I resolve to later memorialise him as a neon statue.

Challenging on many levels, and none of them particularly good. Today, I read an article about policy wording for assisted suicide - and found it more interesting than this record.

Ba wi wi wewww, ba wa wa wewwww. Is it possible to listen to this album and not find another layer to love about it? A taste I am grateful for having taken the time to acquire.

Eat the rich! For all the damage that privatisation has done to the U.K. – and continues to do; how lucky am I to have been directly engaging with a deep historical legacy every time I lost three hours to getting back to Brighton from London? – the upside is that in 1986/87 there was plenty of subject matter for socially-conscious pop to contend with. “It’s a sin” is the standout track – and with thanks to the Russel T Davies drama, contains lyrical ideas that still feel as vital and pressing as they must have in the 80s – but bops like “What have I done to deserve this?” (featuring Dusty, of course) and “I want to wake up” are brilliant deeper cuts. The former of which puts me in mind of Jermaine Stewart’s “We don’t have to take our clothes off…”, a hit from the year previous – though “WHIDTDT” was maybe composed even earlier; Dusty took a while to reply apparently. (Side note: I wonder how many influential one-hit wonders are forgotten in a list like this? Feels unlikely that we’ll see Jermaine Stewart, King, etc.) So deeply of its time while so completely timeless, “Actually” is sophisticated pop made by brilliant people. Simple as that.

Full to the brim with afrofuturistic big bops, massive ideas and winning collaborations. Some brilliant pop songs and lovely melodies. Not really my scene, but I love the audacity of it and so appreciate the talent.

I’m in, characters fizz over the membrane. There’s risk here, but no jeopardy: they might notice something’s different, can happen, they’re not total brats; but I’ll be in El Salvador - Dios, Unión, Libertad - by the time they’ve got a handle on the damage. I’m riding higher, every touch magnetic, the thrill in the code adrenaline-sugar-seduction. Underneath the beat of the taps in the deep dark humming between those bleeding pixel greens though, it’s her. Raven-haired, always somewhere else, her. But there’s no place in the interface for her, and she isn’t hiding. I keep looking all the same.

Wonderful, visionary work. Everything about this feels so neatly stitched together – a seamless patchwork of lovingly curated influences and perfectly executed ideas. To have harmonised so many disparate impulses – let alone to often breathtaking effect – is something, but to have made it feel so immanent (as in: necessary, essential, teleological) is another. There’s a blueprint for a better world inside here, I wish we lived in it.

Isn’t David clever! Lots of groove, fantastic guitar work and a stone cold classic song (universe level) too. I’m never sure if I like Talking Heads as much as I should, but not to worry: the album enjoys itself whether I’m sticking with it or not. Very good.

It’s THEBOSS. Undeniable hits, but a lot that leaves me cold in between.

Enjoyable! I clicked properly into it toward the end. Toe tappers all, though. The guitars were often surprising, in a good way.

Loved it. A time capsule, and “She’s so strange” was a fab surprise!

Toe-tapping, brilliant stuff. Love the guitars especially. Couple of healthy grooves too. I enjoy how organic it feels.

Really couldn’t get along with it. Songs felt either forced or almost cringe. A difficult third album.

Highly enjoyable. 3.5 but rounding up out of Christmas spirit.

Perfect by the pool, and encourages a deeper exploration into Herbie’s career. I’m not sure this music will ever be the mood for me … but it certainly helps contribute to one.

Today it’s the beginning of summer holidays, and we listened to this in the pool (along with PJ’s Ten). Funky! Reminder to check where it slots in with Parliament and Television, which this record feels poised between. I would listen to it again. I don’t feel like I’ve ever totally connected with Bowie, and this wasn’t the moment either. Let’s see what else is in store … (Dot liked it.)

I may return to this with a five. I might just do it. I’m not sure. It’s grown on me hugely over the past two days. My first meaningful engagement with a PF album and I suppose it came at just the right time. I was far more “up for it” once I’d read the Wikipedia and understood the concept. Musically, I hear the influence this has on some of my favourite albums (Tranquillity Base…) and many, many others besides. Compelling.

Full of iconic songs, this album is a total delight. (Whether or not some of those songs would have so successfully stood the test of time had they not been sung by Dusty… I suspect not.) The perfect soundtrack to Christmas morning in many ways – even the heartbreaks are sunny. I’m landing on four stars because the album itself didn’t have that artistic cohesion that I expect from a five star record (I’m sure that having had Pink Floyd recently has had an influence). Still, bangers.

A bit of fun! I recognise a couple of these as the canonical forms of the songs … and a couple that most certainly are not. It might have registered another half star had it been listened to on Christmas Day (t’was Boxing Day down here in Aus) but I dare say I’ll keep it in mind for next year. The wall of sound and Christmas make for great friends.

Is that you, Foos? I don’t have immediate access to a dorm so I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to totally understand this record, but I do remember being a teenager and suspect I’d have hated this if I was one in the 90s. Thankfully, I’m now in my mid 30s so don’t mind the outwardly anodyne just as long as it isn’t insultingly so. Which this isn’t. 3.5 because I like “Rudderless” and hear points of influence for lots of other bands I like.

Highly, highly enjoyable. The music is pitched – temporally, stylistically – between Television and Sonic Youth. Chrissie Hynde stands alone. A fantastic record (tragic about half the band, though!).

Perfect summertime record – I can imagine it was a total breath of fresh air in the early 80s. The punk influence is nicely weaved in (more than once I felt like I was listening to a slowed down Iron Maiden, oddly). Whole thing feels like a California lost to time. Lovely when paired with a palm tree. 3.5.

First we take Manhattan … THEN WE TAKE BERLIN! Great fun introducing Fleur to that song (I was very pleased with myself for having remembered the track was on this record specifically), but barring a couple of grooves this wasn’t a great record for me. Still, enjoyable enough. 2.75.

Not at all what I’d expected from a band called “Cowboy Junkies” – I hope I never find out why they’re called that, but why are they called that? With one exception (“200 more miles” – a beautiful song that I’ll be revisiting for sure) there wasn’t much here that stuck with me. I guess that’s fine; the album created a pleasant enough atmosphere, and the gentle rumble of the tracks left plenty of space for reflection besides (some inspiration here for Malkmus’s traditional techniques?). I won’t be rushing back to it, but if ever I need an album to prove that restraint can be a genre in itself … here it’ll be. (Really cool that it was recorded around a single mic, and explains the SUDDEN guitar licks somewhat.)

An absent possessive apostrophe on the cover notwithstanding – YES. This is such a great record. “The Beat”; “Lipstick Vogue”; “Big Tears” (and the ones I’ve heard before) … it’s just tune after tune. Musically it feels so in conversation with its influences – punk, reggae, Beatles – while also, somehow, knowingly portentous (is all of pop punk contained in that first song?); perhaps easier to just say ‘a musician who loves music’. The best part of 50 years after it was released, it still sounds so fresh and immediate.

Not for me, I’m afraid.

My eyes glaze over halfway in … but the fiercest numbers are front loaded, and, dare I say, portend awesome things to come. I can’t help but feel like better bands were out doing more interesting things in 1963 – but maybe this record needed to be made so they’d never again be so bloody twee. A 3 by the Beetles standards, so unfair in many ways. But I’m willing to say it: it’s only OK.

Absolutely brilliant. That first three mins of PWARS is 1) what the 70s sounds like in my imagination, and 2) surely lifted by Daniel Striped Tiger for “Slalom”. This record has awoken in me a desire to go deeper on The Tempts and their biography.

Where were they getting all these bass lines from? I’m fond of a few new wave and new wave adjacent groups (Duran Duran, WHAM!, Spandau Ballet, TFF) but hadn’t listened to the Haircuts before – my error. A sprightly, sunshiny record that has most in common with Duran Duran (though contains much less in the way of lascivious undertones – I can’t imagine DD calling a song “Baked Beans”). At times the looser jam feel creates an atmosphere reminiscent of Orange Juice’s jangly navel gazing (“Surprise Me Again”, for example). It’s a shame they only lasted the one album. Highlights: “Love Plus One”; “Lemon Fire Brigade”

I first listened to this album in 2007, or thereabouts – some time in my own “art school” phase (doing cultural studies at uni, as good as the late naughties could offer me really). Alongside Wire’s Pink Flag, this record made an immediate impression, and has stayed on rotation since. (I must have listened to “Return the gift” 1000 times since then.) I tend to use these reviews drawing parallels or trying to chart the provenance of ideas; not that it matters necessarily where something came from or who used the idea next, it’s just fun. In this instance, suffice it to say this record must have inspired 90% of the music I hold dearest in some way or another. For me personally this album inspired something a bit different – a feeling I can’t entirely put words to, but maybe “community” is closest. I’m a happier person for knowing something as exciting as this album exists. I knew I’d get what I asked for.

If globalisation had a soundtrack, this record would – and, I suspect, self-consciously – be it. “Aja”, pronounced “Asia”, features a cast of 60 musicians; surely, though I haven’t checked, among them some of the late-70s finest (not counting the Dans themselves, of course). If I were to hear this album without knowing who it was, I figure I’d have a 1000-1 shot at guessing Steely “Reelin’ in the years” Dan first time. What I would have said, and did, was “is this where vaporwave came from then?” Turns out yes; Aja is a preeminent example of “yacht rock” (buoyant west coast AOR primed for taking out the marina and into the crystalline waters); the stuff later sampled by Saint Pepsi, Luxury Elite, Floral Shoppe. It’s the sort of smooth audio postmodernism that presages the entire 80s: a pastiche of styles – curated, elevated – that, had he been given better taste in pop, Patrick Bateman would’ve swung an axe to. And, yes, four decades later, from yacht rock comes Vaporwave, a genre that for me satirises and romanticises the emergence of global corporate capitalism equally (tapping into/enjoying the same cultural preoccupation as Vice City, San Junipero etc. too). Vaporwave is a hauntology fixated on what might have been (fully automated luxury capitalism) made in a time that isn’t (techno-oligarchies in the ear of 1% leaders). Yet this record, so substantial and beautifully produced, is all flesh and blood. So much so that one wonders if there’s a clue as to where it all went wrong here … or, at least, pause to reflect on wether that kind of wish fulfilment is the subconscious aspiration at the heart of all our revisionist attempts to resurrect the spirit of the proto-global coffeehouse. “Deacon Blues” is a standout track for me, but the whole album draws you in and in and in. Love, love, love.

I only know Supertramp from the hits, so went into this with an open mind. The first two songs inspire much more headbanging than I expected before hitting play; lots of big, chunky power chords in lockstep with the rhythm section. Eventually – and after third track “Hide In Your Shell” (a loud, quiet, loud banger) has all but thrown away the best chorus of the album by adding a theremin – the Pink Floyd via the Monkees schtick collapses in on itself; a high budget piece of regional theatre backed by an eccentric patron (not far from the truth, of course…) or the Dorking Community Players staging The Nightman Cometh.

I had no idea that EBTG were even active in the 80s, let alone churning out the hits. I say “hits”; most of this record is new to me – I’m giving it 3 stars rather than 2 simply because of the enduring brilliance of “I don’t want to talk about it” – and it’s mostly miss. Some real twee stuff, musically and lyrically, to the extent that when they do find a bit of edge (“Tears all over town”, or the lyric “a widow on a honeymoon” in “Shadow on a harvest moon”) it’s sorely appreciated. The drums, the sort so lively in, e.g. WHAM! or Tears for Fears, here drag and distract. The guitar licks don’t, but do need, to stop. Thank god for the richness of Tracey’s voice (as I’m sure Mr Watt c.1988 would agree). The second half of the record marks an improvement - more than a bit of The Smiths about songs like “Lonesome for a place I know – but the record never really recovers from the high heights it drops you from between tracks one and two.

One two CHA CHA CHA. This record got the girls up and dancing – Dorothy treated us with an enigmatic saunter around the room over dinner. A really brilliant record that, and without meaning to sound at all patronising, has touches to it that feel so modern as to be portentous. The title track, in particular, is an astonishing jam. Has a crispness, flow and energy that I’ve felt from Blaxsploitation cinema but never Bollywood (surely my error). Anyway, if J Dilla had it on “Donuts” it wouldn’t be at all surprising. Brilliant songs littered throughout. Bravo.

An album that grew on me as I listened, as much as because I was learning more about its context as I went than because it simply gets better and better (which it does). A stomach flu will prevent me saying much more – but this is an album that sounds like a goodbye. “Riders on the storm” is Universe-level.

It’s 2025. A time for the morally dexterous to make hash out of old beefs. The chameleonic, iconic Snoop finds time in his calendar to play for a pardon. A generous gesture; will it that history doesn’t look upon it as a kindness. There’s fun to be had rolling your shoulders to the big hits. An instrumental would be preferable.

There are at least two of the best songs of the 21st century on this album (“Last nite”, “Someday”) and plenty of honourable mentions (“Hard to explain”, “Trying your luck”). I’m not going to check the chronology – I don’t want the spoilers: I have “Meet me in the toilets” on my bookshelf, waiting to be read – but I have to imagine that this record influenced, in some way, everything I listened to growing up – whether because it wanted to be it, or wanted to be its opposite. And that’s not hyperbole. I remember seeing the grainy video to “Last nite” on GMTV, the becouched co-hosts portentously asking “is this the future of music?” and laughing at the front cover (funny that America was spared the joke) and feeling excited. And I remember being 11 or 12, walking down a rainy street in Retford after school, evening drawing in, hearing a school band trying out a cover (how straightforward songs like “Last Nite” were for kids to play being an overlooked but crucial factor in The Strokes’ then seemingly infinite scalability). I remember hearing that band bringing that song fully to life in their own way and thinking I could probably do that too. So I did.