266
Albums Rated
3.39
Average Rating
24%
Complete
823 albums remaining
Rating Distribution
Rating Timeline
Taste Profile
1980
Favorite Decade
Punk
Favorite Genre
UK
Top Origin
Wordsmith
Rater Style ?
47
5-Star Albums
8
1-Star Albums
Breakdown
By Genre
Top Styles
By Decade
By Origin
Albums
You Love More Than Most
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
|
D.O.A. the Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle
Throbbing Gristle
|
5 | 1.88 | +3.12 |
|
Don't Stand Me Down
Dexys Midnight Runners
|
5 | 2.61 | +2.39 |
|
The Madcap Laughs
Syd Barrett
|
5 | 2.62 | +2.38 |
|
Live At The Witch Trials
The Fall
|
5 | 2.64 | +2.36 |
|
Slipknot
Slipknot
|
5 | 2.68 | +2.32 |
|
90
808 State
|
5 | 2.69 | +2.31 |
|
KE*A*H** (Psalm 69)
Ministry
|
5 | 2.69 | +2.31 |
|
69 Love Songs
The Magnetic Fields
|
5 | 2.85 | +2.15 |
|
Kollaps
Einstürzende Neubauten
|
4 | 1.91 | +2.09 |
|
Reign In Blood
Slayer
|
5 | 2.96 | +2.04 |
You Love Less Than Most
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
|
The Stranger
Billy Joel
|
1 | 3.86 | -2.86 |
|
Metallica
Metallica
|
1 | 3.79 | -2.79 |
|
American Idiot
Green Day
|
1 | 3.76 | -2.76 |
|
Tea for the Tillerman
Cat Stevens
|
1 | 3.68 | -2.68 |
|
Come Away With Me
Norah Jones
|
1 | 3.38 | -2.38 |
|
25
Adele
|
1 | 3.37 | -2.37 |
|
Doggystyle
Snoop Dogg
|
1 | 3.37 | -2.37 |
|
Thriller
Michael Jackson
|
2 | 4.22 | -2.22 |
|
This Is Hardcore
Pulp
|
1 | 3.14 | -2.14 |
|
I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You
Aretha Franklin
|
2 | 3.94 | -1.94 |
Artists
Favorites
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Pink Floyd | 3 | 4.67 |
| Steely Dan | 3 | 4.67 |
| Nirvana | 2 | 5 |
| The Smiths | 2 | 5 |
| Dexys Midnight Runners | 2 | 5 |
| Black Sabbath | 2 | 5 |
| The Kinks | 3 | 4.33 |
Least Favorites
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Adele | 2 | 1.5 |
Controversial
| Artist | Ratings |
|---|---|
| The White Stripes | 2, 5 |
5-Star Albums (47)
View Album Wall
Popular Reviews
Linkin Park · 7 likes
5/5
I got Hybrid Theory for Christmas in 2001. In January I listened to it maybe 60 times all the way through on my bedroom CD player. In February I took it to the hairdressers because I wanted Mike Shinoda’s hairstyle on the back cover. In March I listened to it laying on my mate’s bed at a sleepover while we looked at glow in the dark stars on his ceiling and took it in turns to do the singing bits and the rapping bits. In April it was the first thing me and the hardest lad in the year talked about that didn’t involve a threat of immediate violence being visited on me. In May I decided “Points of Authority” was my favourite when it came on Radio One as we drove past a petrol station in Barnsley. In June I learned how to play “In the End” on a keyboard (in Barnsley, too). In July and August it was summer holidays, playing “Crawling” loudly on guitar in someone’s music room in the morning before booming around on bikes until it got dark. Through September and the rest of the year it was time to talk about something else, while also still watching that world tour VHS every couple of nights for all the live footage.
A year of a life, at that time of a life, is a long, long time. You pack a lot in, and don’t much think about what that’ll mean for you. And as sure as I’ve a nicotine addiction to this day — I still struggle to look past Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory. At 14 I saw them play Leeds, at 28 I sat on the couch in Finsbury Park as we got our heads around Chester’s passing; at 32 we had a table at our wedding named for “Points of Authority”.
This is an album I’ll carry around for life, now. What joy it is that I’m still finding things to love about it.
Jimi Hendrix · 3 likes
5/5
Hendrix was a singular, enthralling talent. Unquestionably the greatest ever electric guitar player, his gift for crafting iconic hooks out of snappy catchphrases, twisting licks into memorable choruses and constantly innovating across generic lines puts him among the 20th century’s greatest songwriters.
“Electric Ladyland” is embarrassingly good. It’s the record I’d hope – a billion good years from now – the aliens find at the top of the stack. Having dug through however many miles of anonymous human-made detritus, they’d see it glinting there – yeah, just over there, poking out the inner tray of an old Audi station wagon’s in-car media centre. They’d revive the engine, give the interior a quick dusting out (that musty smell immanent to the cars of working men who occasionally cart around ripe bags full of football boots and shin pads would linger) and feed that glinting disc into the CD player.
What would follow would be a radical confrontation of any previously held opinion on what’s sonically plausible; an expansion of their musical vocabulary that would entirely recalibrate their expectations. A whole new alien world suddenly under them, ahead of them. Incredible.
And in that moment, they’d have a lot in common with the eleven year old boy who’d sat in that passenger seat a good billion years before them. That’s how good Hendrix is.
Dexys Midnight Runners · 2 likes
5/5
There’s a meme that does the rounds occasionally, pulled from Family Guy. AFAIK (it’s a meme, who knows how far it’s drifted from its original context?) patriarch Peter explains The Godfather as “insisting upon itself” – a criticism that does a laudable job of sounding comically faux-intellectual while also sort of nailing it.
Because yeah, you do want The Godfather to be self-serious. There’s little mirth to be extracted from the mafia (see: Mickey Blue Eyes) – so for the whole enterprise of The Godfather to even stand a chance of working, it has to insist upon itself (see: best director wins and nominations).
With that in mind, it’s a bit of a shame that the Dexys of “Don’t stand me down” initially seem to be guilty of insisting upon themselves. Gone is the triumphant buoyancy of “Too Rye Ay” and its anthemic choruses; in its place a mopey-toned, albeit sonically sophisticated, collection of intriguing but ultimately unrewarding, overly esoteric musical essays.
It’s a fruitless first listen – no one last wild waltz – but I steady myself, it’s only a first listen. Underwhelmed as I am, it’s an album I’ll return to.
And return to.
And return to.
And return to.
Five spins in and I’m comforted to find my favoured collection of wonderfully esoteric, sophisticated musical essays is still holding up. The pastiche elements, spoken word breakouts and musical quotations – some of them self-referential – add to the sense of this being a properly postmodernist, academic piece of work. Gloriously so, I come to conclude.
But it is “work”; make no mistake, you have to bring a lot to this record before you start getting something out of it. For me, that’s not a point around which to be critical – I’m happy to put a couple of yards in my side to meet a band who’ve traversed entire landscapes to find themselves on the ground that they stand. But I can, equally, see how a listener might feel short-changed; not everyone can be expected to extend Dexys such grace, nor should they be. (I gather that Kevin Rowland’s efforts in promoting this album on its release wouldn’t have exactly helped manage anyone’s expectations around its contents, too.)
Anyway, 8 minutes into “This is what she likes” the band rouses. It’s been a variable, captivating seven minutes previous – we’ve had a spoken word skit, a warbling vocal solo, some signature Celtic-rock-cum-blue-eyed-soul, a bit of piano, a couple of ruminations on poppy ostinatos, harmonies, tempo shifts … lots. Enough that you might be forgiven for thinking there’s not much more left to be done. And yet. For anyone who’s ever struggled to put into words a feeling, it’s familiar territory. There’s not a runway long enough – you’ll keep talking forever, whether mellifluously or tediously, if you need to. But by minute 11 we’re all there. We’re dancing, we’re smiling, we’re sharing something. It’s what she’s like.
And it’s clearly, clearly Dexys’ masterpiece.
Pretenders · 2 likes
4/5
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!).
Steely Dan · 1 likes
5/5
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.
1-Star Albums (8)
All Ratings
The Smashing Pumpkins
4/5
Still can’t forgive Billy Corgan his voice or lyrics, but a wondrous album all the same.
Patti Smith
3/5
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.
Rod Stewart
3/5
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.
Lou Reed
3/5
The Kinks
5/5
Wonderful record. Hadn’t realised that it was so ignored initially. “…Walter” a standout track for me.
Buddy Holly & The Crickets
4/5
The Velvet Underground
3/5
R.E.M.
4/5
Night Swimming <3
Sade
3/5
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.
The Stone Roses
5/5
Billy Joel
1/5
Challenging on many levels, and none of them good.
Jurassic 5
3/5
Iron Maiden
4/5
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.
Pet Shop Boys
5/5
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.
The Mamas & The Papas
4/5
Pearl Jam
3/5
Janelle Monáe
3/5
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.
The Boo Radleys
4/5
Decadeologists, I’m reliably informed, look upon the ‘3s as transitional years. The dawn of a new decade is slow to break – and it takes a year or two for the morning stars of the previous era to fade into blue sky.
For that reason, and many more, this feels like a record caught between multiple different states.
There are ideas here that the Boos have taken and run with from various giants of genre (MVB, Beatles especially). And then there are ideas – riffs, atmospheres, sound textures and compositional choices – that will be picked up and refined by bands throughout the 90s (by the Manics, Radiohead, Creation’s entire roster, etc.).
There are even concepts that, seen in the context of the next record’s contribution to britpop cannon, feel work in progress within The Boo’s own career, too.
And so it is that, on this album from the 90s own ‘3, we find our Boos still slightly shoegaze snoozy and just now rousing.
While this album will mean more to many than my “a prelude to the 90s proper” allows for – it’s also exactly that. It’ll be a year or so before the stars are fully faded and they yell out “Wake up, it’s a beautiful morning.” What a thing it must be to be able to say you were there first.
The Chemical Brothers
3/5
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.
Tim Buckley
3/5
Living Colour
2/5
I was surprised by the opening riff of “Cult of personality” – to put immediately in mind of a sort of post-cock rock, sedate Killswitch Engage was not what I was expecting. A ripping solo later and, in spite of my better judgement, I’m ready to throw some horns up and worry about authoritarianism with LC.
And then it comes crashing in, for better or worse, my better judgement. The record starts to ask me if I’ve wondered what “Sussudio” would sound like with Iron Maiden stood in front of Phil’s kit – and I just haven’t. I have never wondered.
There are a couple more jams in there: “Funny Vibe” is like a less nauseating this-era RHCP, and “Which way to America” moves at precisely the same tempo as my pool’s pump (I was guiding the creepy crawler around by this stage of the album) – fun! But then there’s “What’s your favorite colour?” – sidebar: grammatical inconsistency is sort of Living Colour’s thing; a British-English U in their band name, but not in their song titles; a question mark when asking about colour, but not when asking for directions – a question the band answer in the song … yes, Living Colour, or “Glamour Boys” which sounds suspiciously like the inspiration for “Under the sea” from the Little Mermaid.
There’s nothing to dislike here, really. Tight, accomplished musicianship and a well-committed to bit. But dear me must the world have been ready for grunge by the time “Vivid” had finished with it.
Nitin Sawhney
4/5
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.
Talking Heads
4/5
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.
Nirvana
5/5
Rage Against The Machine
4/5
It’s a rare kind of alchemy found in these tracks. The words, grooves, attitudes fit like tectonic plates – first locking in, then finding friction, then pushing up together into the sky, building mountains.
I’m always on the lookout for emotion-, feeling-, impulse-defining combinations of musicianship and lyricism – the sort of moments that take you to wherever the artist wanted you to go no matter your previous headspace. “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me”, sat atop that preposterously dialled-in groove is canon. It is slam dancing rebellion that throws everything at you and then its limbs; bratty rage against the machines of loving grace. (“Motherfucker”, it should be noted, is delivered with a similarly emphatic aplomb.)
There’s more to this record than just that track – the 2009 U.K. Christmas number one –though. Lots. So much so that a whole generation can claim to have come of age bouncing around (moshing, pogoing, etc.) either under RATM’s direct influence or in the bombtrack’s aftershocks. I was in the latter camp; 12 years of age and tragically romanced by the concept of being “a mosher”.
RATM are forever “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me” – but they’re also battle of the bands nights at the local theatre, school talent shows, all ages gigs at struggling pubs (ones that let you buy beer if you could grow a moustache!), late-late nights drinking vodka red bulls in your mates’ garden. They’re a community, a kind of belonging through music that transcends a lot besides. And when that sort of togetherness is addressed to the forces of alienation and atomisation –that which tells us to jump and expect us to say “how high?” – there can no greater “fuck you” than that.
Bruce Springsteen
3/5
It’s THEBOSS. Undeniable hits, but a lot that leaves me cold in between.
Booker T. & The MG's
3/5
Enjoyable! I clicked properly into it toward the end. Toe tappers all, though. The guitars were often surprising, in a good way.
Travis
4/5
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.
Adele
1/5
Really couldn’t get along with it. Songs felt either forced or almost cringe. A difficult third album.
Blur
4/5
Highly enjoyable. 3.5 but rounding up out of Christmas spirit.
Herbie Hancock
3/5
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.
David Bowie
3/5
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.)
Pink Floyd
4/5
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.
Dusty Springfield
3/5
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.
Various Artists
3/5
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.
The Lemonheads
3/5
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.
Pretenders
4/5
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!).
The Go-Go's
4/5
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.
Leonard Cohen
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.
Cowboy Junkies
3/5
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.)
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
4/5
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.
The Band
2/5
Not for me, I’m afraid.
Beatles
3/5
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.
The Temptations
4/5
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.
Haircut 100
4/5
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”
Gang Of Four
5/5
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.
Steely Dan
5/5
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.
Supertramp
2/5
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.
Everything But The Girl
3/5
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.
Rahul Dev Burman
4/5
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.
The Doors
4/5
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.
Snoop Dogg
1/5
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.
The Strokes
4/5
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.
The Who
2/5
The first “successful” rock opera is a story of a boy who retreats within himself as the result of trauma. It’s a trope that we’ll see again and again, whether in “The Wall” – where our hero builds a literal wall around himself, substantially achieving the same thing as Tommy does here – or the later biographies of many youthful, rebellious rock and rollers (a genre that’s perhaps always thought of itself as safe harbour for misunderstood or under appreciated artistic genius).
Anyway, Tommy. To put it gently, by the time “Fiddle About” had finished its first chorus of “fiddle, fiddle, fiddle, fiddle” you too may want to achieve a dissociative state of semi-torpor.
The rock opera, it turns out, walks a fine line. Done well it’s expansive, a rousing appeal to what can be achieved with fairly limited means. Done poorly, as here, it’s almost an indictment on the whole genre – an incoherently rambling, serially uninteresting solipsism that dares to reveal the superficiality of all that pretends to rock.
I feel sorry for Tommy, I really do.
Count Basie & His Orchestra
4/5
At this moment in time, I struggle to wrap much of a frame of reference around this record; I’m afraid to say too much because I just don’t feel qualified.
It’s maybe something (a lack of imagination?) that the first thing that springs to mind for me is the New York of Home Alone 2. The big blasts from the big band rushing through my speakers feel as exciting and overawing as the imposingly tall, impossibly alive city must have felt to Kevin McAllister – a figure central to my own childhood who is also, in the there and then of Home Alone’s NY, a lonely witness to so many of the icons of America’s great imperial phase.
And that’s really what this record sounds like to me: a glorious echo from the American century. It’s one that remains vital not because America does – far from it, really – but because the brilliant people who contributed to that cultural hegemony are made no less brilliant by America having been brought low.
Back to Home Alone, and in the hotel lobby Kevin sprints past a tall man in an expensive coat. The man might be on his way to the roof, spoiling to find a vantage from which to survey the world’s most significant skyline. It’s a skyline men of his appetite typically want to make their own, of course, shoving their overcompensations evermore inelegantly into the clustering mass. In short, synecdoche of a nation.
It’s a shame that America hasn’t had someone of Basie’s erudition and skill to lead its own metaphorical band. Getting the best from each other starts with getting the best for each other; America’s century, so spiritedly captured on albums like this, was built on principles like that. Principles now under threat of total dismantling by tall men in expensive coats.
The Who
4/5
A couple of stone cold classics, monolithic in scale, scope and impact. And then a couple that felt pissed up the wall! Hayooo – I joke. (Best album cover of all time? It’s always resonated with me, even before knowing what’s on this record.)
I enjoyed this album as much in a kind of “thank you” sort of way as I did actually and viscerally the music. Certainly, there’s plenty on this record to back Eddie Vedder’s “they left us no new places to explore” sentiments … even if that sentiment only strictly applies to acts with the imagination of Pearl Jam.
Thanks for the power chords, the Marshall stacks, and the tunes, Pete. And thanks for the attack, everyone else. But more than anything, thanks for not playing “Fiddle about” again. (Fave song besides the obvious: “My wife”.)
The Stooges
5/5
Fleur says she feels cooler every time she listens to The Stooges. As a review, as an idea, as a fact – it’s tough to improve on.
Janis Joplin
3/5
It perhaps goes without saying, but quite a lot will rest on how well you get on with Janis Joplin’s voice. Icon of the counterculture, preternaturally gifted performer and still part of the conversation a lifetime after her tragic death – her voice is as distinctive as her enduring place in culture. While I won’t be hurrying back to this record, trying to argue against the brilliance of some of these songs and renditions is like trying to argue with the wind – or a big crashing wave, perhaps; she had both in the locker – so it’s a 3 from me.
Throbbing Gristle
5/5
In 2008 I headed into a double-feature: “FlicKeR” was the headline with “Do you love me like I love you (Part 5: Tender Prey)” opening proceedings. I immediately headed over the road to buy “Tender Prey”, Bobby Gillespie’s testimony on “Mercy Seat” more than enough to encourage a purchase.
I’ll save my thoughts about Nick Cave’s masterpiece - and how young the interviewees in that film now look, almost 20 years on - for another time, as the film that followed, “FlicKeR” was just as influential to the next years of my life. I responded strongly to Brion Gysin’s ideas, was already enamoured of William Burroughs’ whole vibe, and spent a fair bit of time trying to make my own Dream Machine (having missed an opportunity to see a Dream Machine in person during COVID, I still occasionally check if they’re freely available … be a shame to not try it one day).
The documentary featured various musical artists, all pretty cool, talking about their experiences with Gysin’s hypnotic, hallucination machine. Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo was among them, offering his thoughts to camera in a way I’d be reminded of years later standing in Coventry watching The Cribs play “Be safe” – a connection made through time that was pure lightning on both sides.
Also on that documentary: Genesis P-Orridge, mid pandrogyne project – so complete a presence, spectacle and aura that I misremembered having seen a Throbbing Gristle documentary distinct from “FlicKeR”.
It stuck with me, suffice to say. And then, again, years later, I’m reminded of it. I’m in the Tate Britain at, probably, “Women in revolt” and there’s a whole section given to COUM Transmissions, the precursor to Throbbing Gristle. I remember being humoured by the comments of an offended Tory politician – “desecrators of civilisation” or similar, he’d called them in the 70s. Good on Cosey Fanni Tutti, and good on COUM.
Somehow, I again miss the call. I spend a couple of seconds remembering once maybe listening to Throbbing Gristle in 2008, and I move on.
And so today, in 2025, I am so grateful for this project. A third invitation to fully engage with Throbbing Gristle is met ecstatically. From the first track, a darkness of beeps - a year earlier in time, but with the feeling of Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures” stripped of what joy and pleasure it holds - I am held in place. There’s so much space to move inside music like this, angles to explore, moods to drown in, atmospheres to let crystallise and sit gargoyle-esque atop your central nervous system.
“Hamburger Lady” is a standout track; though it’s not album best thought about in that way, really. So soon after the passing of David Lynch - a time that we realise that his work can’t really be taken apart as a filmography; it really demands to be seen as one – I’m pulled into a similar orbit by similarly iconoclastic artists. This is a piece of real, enduring art arriving from within a series of lifetimes that will never be repeated.
The Slits
4/5
We’ve spun this four times now; peeling back the layers there’s a strong, strong argument emerging for it being the most influential of the post-punk records of the late 70s.
It still feels the freshest too. The drums tick and roll and batter; the bass wonders, punchdrunk and charismatic; the guitars can’t stay still, maybe they don’t want to be guitars anymore?; the voice somersaults, careens – gymnastically controlled, poised, enjoying itself, solidifying its dimensions while forming them into an archetype.
This is a record I hadn’t realised I should say so many thanks to. It’s also perfect for a day that’s too hot to be in a house that’s without aircon – yet still pretty much feels like paradise. Fitful sometimes just fits.
SAULT
4/5
I’m not convinced I’m in the right headspace at this very second to give this record its due – though I’ll also say that it’s 2025, the White House is again living up to its name, and maybe I should be making more of an effort to be in that headspace. (To that extent, maybe I can say that this album continues to do a job alerting the privileged to their position. Fair play to that.)
Black Is is a rich and varied assemblage of musical styles, genres and moments. “Wildfires” is one of the defining tracks of the past decade; “Why we cry why we die” bops soulfully, disarmingly; “Black” puts me in mind of J Dilla’s musical eclecticism (while forcing some potentially tragic bobble-headed participation on my part); “Eternal life” is afrofuturism in the key of divinity.
The production, the message, the talent and now the legacy. It’s a special record, and I’ll be making time to give it its due.
Deep Purple
4/5
The glabella, I recently learned, is the part of the face atop the bridge of the nose and between one’s eyebrows.
It’s a funny sort of joy, to suddenly discover that something you’ve taken for granted for so long has a name – and thus presumably features, characteristics, nuances and specificities deserving of investigation.
Back to “In rock”. I’d only really begrudgingly put the album on; unenthused at the prospect of a full hour of plodding bluesy dad rock (I can’t emphasise enough how shallow the logic of that deeply held conditioning was: I might as well have been calling the band “Smoke on the water” such was the extent of my knowledge of their work.)
So, first, “Speed king” – and I’m laughing at the intro guitar which sounds … a bit lame. Up the scale we go, then back down; not exactly Hendricks and not yet Iron Maiden. But then something interesting happens. It starts to, and I pardon my language, fucking slap.
Galloping rhythms that the aforementioned Iron Maiden are still a decade from becoming synonymous with; guitar solos that aren’t Hendricks but aren’t yet Maiden but now in a good, exciting way; that drum roll moment in “Child in time”; the totally unexpected funk-out in “Flight of the rat”; “Living wreck” serving moody; ALL THOSE RIFFS (that experiment with chromatic scales in “Into the fire” has no right to work so well, really).
Finally it’s “Hard lovin’ man”, which, and I mean this sincerely, exhibits art rock levels of commitment to the bit. A final track that sounds like a band attempting to put its live lightning in a bottle - and succeeding.
There are things about this record that I’d say aren’t completely to my taste, but that’s almost not the point here. I learned something new today, something that forces my glabella to crease with embarrassed consternation: Deep Purple fuckin’ rocks.
Nirvana
5/5
My first interaction with Nirvana was via a hoody. I was 11 or 12, early into my first year of secondary school and for the first time rubbing up against a subculture with a dress code that wasn’t just “the latest Manchester United kit”. Soon after that I got hold of Nevermind, which was hidden in the bottom of my parents’ wardrobe for a month waiting for Christmas.
And then, after Nevermind, it was everything I could get my hands on. The next year or two a frenzy to acquire as much Nirvana – albums, bootlegs, both respectable and entirely unofficial biographies about Kurt, the band, whatever; greeting “You know you’re right” and the journals like a second coming (rather than an invasion of privacy) – as I could carry home from the record fair, the HMV, the shops that stank of incense, wherever.
It feels significant to me – and not just because I can still imagine the burning hot shame of being accused, accurately, of wearing a Nirvana hoody without knowing any of their songs; the spotlight that lingers over those preteen and early adolescent years becomes an X-ray in the decades that follow – that Nirvana has always been a puzzle for me. It wasn’t that big a jump in time between working out the identity of the band represented by that cool smiley face thing I liked wearing, to trying to work out why someone who could write songs and lyrics that stuck in my psyche like gravel sticks in the waffle soles of skate shoes would choose to ever stop doing that (“Heavier than Heaven”, another six months later, got me to understand how little a role “choice” played in all of it). A gap of maybe a month between overhauling my identity in reaction to a clothing trend, and reflecting on the real existential jeopardy that might break cover at any moment.
“In Utero” sits right in the centre of my Nirvana puzzle. Let alone the fact I didn’t know what a “Radio friendly unit shifter” might be (I suspected something mechanical, which I guess was sort of right) and struggled to fully get across most of the album’s themes, the primordial soup of angst, anger and antipathy from which “Scentless Apprentice”, “Tourettes”, “Rape me”, “Very ape”, “Milk it” and even “Heart shaped box” emerged was a swamp I was willing to get bogged in.
As the years rolled on, I found that “In Utero” jagged and caught on my loose threads in a way that Nevermind didn’t. I’d come back to find “Serve the servants” – for me arguably grunge’s greatest song - had clicked, or suddenly with a start realise that “Frances Farmer…” had a story with energy and intensity to match its bombastic middle-8 freak out. I’d listen to “All apologies” bleed into “You know you’re right” on DIY playlists and pretend they’re part of the same breath. I’d discover Leonard Cohen entirely because “Pennyroyal Tea” told me to.
Throughout all this – 20 plus years of my life – there sat at either end of “In Utero”’s emotional polarity “Dumb” and “RFUS” – the first a song that lets itself be “just happy” and the other a song that demands to know “what is wrong with me?” Two totally contrasting attitudes to life, incompatible to the point of mutual annihilation – fittingly, completely sonically distinct (vale Steve Albini) from one other too. “Dumb” is dipped oneiric syrup and conjures pastel shades of diaphanous colours; it weighs you down while it lifts you up. “RFUS” is noise as geometry, wave forms crashing atop one another; an exhibition in art punk overseen by a mumbling, desperate, anxious, aggressive, defeated curator.
Poles apart in almost every possible sense, then – but here’s where we come back to the puzzle. Because for a thinking, feeling person the idea that the contrasting perspectives of “Dumb” and “RFUS” ought be mutually incompatible will make logical sense, but also won’t ring true in the slightest. We’re all in moments one or the other, sure, but we’re all also often both.
23 years after I first heard “In Utero” I know that. I know that ambivalence is a fact of life; I even suspect that learning to self-regulate might be the whole point of it. Kurt perhaps didn’t, and certainly never had the chance to offer himself that kind of grace. It’s a puzzle, all this.
Tom Tom Club
4/5
Songs with steel drums, songs that bounce
Songs to dance to in your underpants.
Instrumentation sparse around beats that groove
Or the lush lake of funk that is “Genius of Love”.
Is it a holiday diary, or songs dreamed up in incarceration?
For these two, is that two sides of the same equation?
Enjoy the trampoline made of sunbeams, retire to a hammock for a bed
I loved my time inside the laughing heads.
Madonna
3/5
I’ve never thought of Madonna as an “album artist” … and I still don’t!
I joke, I joke – but only sort of. I would seriously suggest that if this record was just the single “Like A Prayer” and then 10 riffs, remixes and reworkings it’d be phenomenal. (It might be that a better album exists simply by chopping everything between “Like A Prayer” and “Act of Contrition” out entirely and then looping it around six times.)
Anyway, utterly glorious first track aside* – I’m afraid it doesn’t do much for me. There were better pop records made in the 80s – the high points of this album can’t shake off the shadows of those (how “Oh father” is Tears for Fears without the conviction, for example) – and will be better ones coming in the 90s (the legacy of this record is all over the careers of The Spice Girls, Britney, Christina).
“Keep it together” kicks it up to 2.5 but simply too much sloshy bumph to take it any higher.
*Very, very fond memories of bopping hard to “Like A Prayer” at Fleur and my wedding. Wonderful moments, big singalongs, heavy swooping dance moves. I’ll hold onto that one forever, thanks, Madge.
David Bowie
3/5
It’s fine. “Changes” is “Changes”. “Life on Mars” is a lovely shade of lost-electrons melancholy featuring some tight, bracing, elastic vocals. “Queen Bitch” starts off toe-tapping and ends up dancing on the tables. It’s better than fine, it’s objectively really good.
And. Yet. I. Just. Can’t. Make. Myself. Connect. To. It.
Fleur says that it’s how I don’t really like Star Wars; she’s totally right that I don’t always click with things that an otherwise overwhelming majority of people do – hot I can’t stress enough that it’s not on purpose*. I’m not trying to be “out there”. Fuck, I wish I got it. But honestly, I joked “Come on Dave, I could be listening to Chat Pile” as we listened to this. And I meant it. I could have been. Chat Pile rules.
2.5. We’ll try again with the next record, Dave love.
Aretha Franklin
3/5
Cha-cha-chaiiiin. Can any syllable boast so rich a contribution to music as “cha”? Aretha Franklin has the sort of voice that can give any syllable substance, form and impact – and there are some properly iconic songs on this record, big tug at the heart moments of musical history. Unfortunately, I feel a bit like those songs’ ubiquity distracts a bit from their effect; kind of precession of the simulacra style. It’s not much of a criticism, granted … but if I’m destined to be a link in a chain of fools then on my head be it!
The Smiths
5/5
At first I resist this album, almost certainly because I know where it’s taking me.
It’s all here, though. The sound of everything happening at once. A crooning voice bowing across fizzing arpeggios; rhythm section, disciplined while encouraging – often to the extent of being doting or parental. In The Smiths you meet pure conceptual perfection; proof of why bands exist and why they should forever.
The ultimate charm of this record, for me, resides in a sort of paradox. Why, since what The Smiths is doing here is so, so much greater than the sum of its parts, do I not feel happy about it?
We’ve Johnny, busy tinkering at melody’s atomic level while the mononymous one intones another of his jeremiads (“I want the one I can’t have”) – this charming man brittle before his reflection. We’ve the slicked back hair, oily rag smell of “Nowhere fast” – so coyly propulsive with its rockabilly shuffle. And we’ve the weaving bass and funk flourishes of “Barbarism begins at home” – a shot fired back across time to the previous incumbents of Britain’s teenage imaginary (Duran Duran especially).
“Well I wonder” and “Meat is murder” offer two poignant counterpoints to the thrill of the album’s three-minute pop songs. (The former being another entry into Johnny Marr’s “d minor hall of fame”; the man just knows how to use that chord, I don’t know what else to say.) It’s a more obviously political record; you have to hand it to the lads that the final minute even works. It probably shouldn’t.
I read that “How soon is now?” was added to this record for the US release – and I’d perhaps have liked to hear it kicking off the second side. But, realistically, if this album had gone on forever it wouldn’t have been long enough. For the sake of our sick hearts, we should be grateful that it didn’t.
So back to what I was resisting: I’m there. I’m back to putting “I want something I can’t have” on repeat and thinking that if the edge of the universe doesn’t sound like The Smiths – if the force pushing it out into whatever’s beyond isn’t exactly the feeling contained in a record like this – then I’ve read this whole thing totally wrong.
I hope not.
The Style Council
2/5
It might be that sophisti-pop just isn’t for me. It’s not for nothing that I’d rather listen to almost anything else Paul Wellar has done (“almost” because there’s no way I’ve heard all of it … demonstrably, there’s some skeletons in the closet alongside all those parkas and nicely cut suits). And nor did I love EBTG’s – who appear on Cafe Bleu – early 80s sophisti-pop output either (to the extent I had to chase it with hits from “Amplified Heart” just to resettle myself).
It feels like, in Cafe Bleu, Paul Wellar is forcing me to listen to what he learned on his gap year inter-railing around Europe. But also, in a self-reflexively superficial way, it might also be his most punk statement. There’s a ready-made antagonism shot through it; like it wants to be misunderstood, under-appreciated or even disliked – all so that it can turn around and tell you that you just don’t get it.
And I don’t, really. There’s plenty of evidence of Wellar’s songwriting chops (“My ever changing moods”; “You’re the best thing”; “Headstart for happiness”) but then there’s also lots to make me cringe (including some of the lyrics in “Headstart…” – syrupy stuff even by the standards of the early 80s).
I’m happy for the Modfather that he branched out. And dear me, haven’t we all been invited to think a little deeper while surveying the scene in a Parisian cafe? But I guess there’s a reason Dave didn’t include the Style Council in my musician education. 1.5.
Queen
4/5
If the 90s is Sega Megadrive and the 80s is nuclear weaponry, then the defining toy of the 70s has to be the yo-yo.
Or the space hopper.
Or the pogo stick.
It’s befitting that a decade so enamoured of things that go up and down should gift us – and pretty much bang in the gravitational middle of itself – “A night at the Opera”. Not that the record’s happy with bouncing up and down just the one axis, of course. It’s quiet-loud at whiplash pace; this way and then that with no warning or, often, return; totally genre-bending (and probably genre inventing); genius and gimmickry (or “effectology” according to one contemporaneous NME review).
“Death on two legs” starts us on a high with some devilish guitar work and Mercury giving us full bared teeth bastard-snarl, but from there the quality skips a song each time (the exception being “I’m in love with my car” – which is probably also terrible, but I like because it reminds me of Big Business – into the undeniable classic “You’re my best friend”).
While loose enough to get along with a song about auto-vehicular romancing, I will likely never be loose enough to enjoy the genuinely anxiety-inducing taxes of “Seaside Rendezvous” or “‘39”, two songs about which I said, quite sincerely, that I’d like to never hear them again.
Not to worry, though – as thanks to their pendulous formula you’re only ever a few minutes away from a stone-cold classic. Hearing Mercury wrestle the spotlight away from May on “The Prophet’s Song” or, of course, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a true musical treat. In those moments of flight they’re an unbeatable force; ecstatic, elemental.
So, while patchy, this is still the album with “Bohemian Rhapsody” on it. And while some songs here might be irritating, they’d have to be capable of launching actual napalm into my ears to detract from the good things Queen’s signature song has done for the world. Silliness is temporary, joy is eternal. 3.5.
The Killers
3/5
The way memory functions is weird – if “Somebody told me” was released six months after Funeral for a Friend’s debut album then why do I remember being a child when listening to the former, but feeling like a grown up listening to the latter?
It might be because The Killers – purveyors of absolutely OK, post-punk-ish, synthy-sort-of pop that you’re always happy to hear at weddings, or playing in the background of a pub you’re at for a 50th birthday, you know, adult occasions – are totally and utterly grown-up. They’re Interpol for mums; knowing better than to do something unexpected (might throw your back out!). Safe.
And to that end we have a record that starts with back-to-back bangers. Twenty minutes of top ten material that twenty years on has your listener saying “was this our millennial Nevermind?”
The thing about 20 minutes though is that’s pretty much as long as it takes to drive to the supermarket and back. And I feel like that’s not an accident. This record was made to be listened to on the way to Tesco. It was made to deliver a feeling that’s a bit like nostalgia – it’s fresh material, but it nods back hard enough to get your Gen Xers suddenly feeling 18 again. How else can a person be expected to get through the weekly shop?
The first half is an embarrassment of riches, but it isn’t hyperbole to say – and certainly in the context of epochal hits like “Mr Brightside”, “Somebody told me” and jams as solid as “Jenny was a friend of mine” – that the second half is a bit embarrassing.
If memory serves, then The Killers give us a better album with “Sam’s Town”. But then memory is a funny thing.
Green Day
1/5
Capitalism, according to various thinkers concerned with the cultural mode of postmodernism, is fantastic at absorbing its critique. So good that it often goes one better – commodifying the terms of its deconstruction, always-already negating its critics … to the extent that if they’re especially charismatic and/or unlucky, they’re turned into t-shirt designs.
In the early 00s, Greenday was smarting. “Warning” had represented a doomy portent only to the band themselves: they were in danger of becoming obsolete. Greenday huddled, began tracking a new record … and then the tapes were stolen. It’s a sliding doors moment, as had they released “Cigarettes…” they might have disappeared forever. Instead they scrapped the project and began working on what would become “American Idiot”.
And the rest is history; or, as the angel of history might put it (and in more ways than one), “a bad record.” As the angel sees history piling up before her, destructive winds driving her forever backward, this album can boast a mounting body count of better artists and their ideas. Here there’s melodies lifted from Bryan Adams, Joann Jet; riffs and ornamentation seemingly lifted completely (surely Dillinger Four got an out of court settlement?); and then – not content with having “musically quoted” from The Kinks on the abortively boring “Warning” – there’s the one where our Anglophile magpies return to Blighty to the answer the question of “what would happen if ‘How soon is now’ was also ‘Wonderwall’?”
I wouldn’t mind it – in fact I might even enjoy it – if it weren’t for the fact that it feels so nakedly cynical. Everything about this album feels like the result of focus group testing: the “emo” uniform, the accusatory anti-government stuff (“this trended great with the NOFX kids, Bill, just consider it”), the “concept” of a “Jesus of Suburbia” – a figure who might be the target persona of this elaborate marketing action brought to musical life.
And then there’s the “punk rock opera” element: songs that blend into one another, a creative choice that feels grafted onto the whole thing late in the piece after someone noticed that everything’s in pretty much the same key.
It’s enough to have one wondering whether the “American Idiot” being narrated isn’t actually you, the listener, for ever letting yourself think that this meant anything more to Greenday than revivified album sales numbers.
So, while I’ve been trying to keep my cool through this review, I also need to be fair to myself: this felt fucking lame in 2004 and it feels fucking lame now. This is not an album of rebellion, these are not songs of resistance or hope. This is a pastiche of punk, the sound of the end of history. There is no alternative. Suburbia’s soundtrack is the only game in town.
For 15-year old Matthew’s sake, here are three albums released in or before 2004 that I loved back then, succeed where American Idiot fails, and actually should be on this list: “Sticks and Stones” by New Found Glory (pop-punk that looks for you, finds you, and stays with you; actual magic); “Casually dressed and deep in conversation” by Funeral for a Friend (the ultimate melding of post-hardcore and emo, unapologetically hi-fi and edifyingly anthemic); “Tell all your friends” by Taking Back Sunday (atmospheric, antagonistic, bratty, brash, brilliant – gigged into shape, never knowingly focus-grouped).
Carole King
4/5
From a seat on the windowsill, a bejumpered Carole gazes back at us – we’ve interrupted her reverie, but that’s ok. She’ll tell us what she’s been thinking about.
A problem shared is a problem halved, and this record doesn’t scrimp on problems. Nor does it scrimp on quality; what’s here is perhaps the neatest distillation of Carole King’s genius available. The song craft, the choices, the melodies, ideas and lyrics that ought to have existed forever – and in a way did, in so far as they perfectly capture something common through human history.
It’s a melancholy affair, and the whole thing – from the palette of the album art, to the slightly dusty feel of the mix – amounts to a thorough exploration of our collective autumnal soul. That bit we have that’s caught; that enjoyed the light and warmth of all before but feels it, inexorably, cooling.
Carole takes us there and keeps us there. Her characters are always somehow doubting something – never whole, and careful not to totally let themselves feel so. They’re either busy configuring themselves around another’s affections or intentions, or basking in the edifying glow (albeit temporarily, cautiously) of an other’s unbroken gaze.
It is to our eternal lack, the bit that wants to know for sure, that “Tapestry” is addressed. And for the simple fact that none of us is ever fated to fill it, be glad that we have a friend.
The Magnetic Fields
5/5
If you’re to go to the effort of conceiving, writing, practising, refining, recording, mixing, mastering, distributing performing and touring a 69-song concept album then I feel that it’s only fair that I judge you exclusively on the merits of your 69-song concept album. Did the concept, in that most ineffable manner of speaking, succeed? Did it justify the additional demands placed on vinyl producers, warehouse logisticians, shipping and last-mile delivery companies, record shops, listeners and anyone else involved in the process of creating and participating in art? Did The Magnetic Fields manage to make something that’s greater than the sum of the sixty-actual-nine parts presented?
From the offset, I’m unsure. I’m into song two (admittedly, still less than 3% of the way through the record) and I’m fearing that what I’m about to spend almost three hours subjecting myself and my family to is an exercise in the art of the possible. Yes, a good enough 69-song record about love can be made, just don’t expect it to move you beyond a polite toe-tap. Enjoy the concept because it’s the concept that really sells it!
A minute or so later those clouds of doubt are further massing. My mind has raced off. What if the 69 OK songs about love leave me little space but to conclude that all of this is, this whole thing, creativity, concepts like “essential listening”, all of it, is just so many appeals to a completely predictable cultural median value. The joking use of “69” isn’t in reference to, ahem mutuality, but is rather a coded message about music itself being a sort of analogue for a composite number – multiply two positive integers and anyone can score a hit. What if this album about love forces me to fall out of love with … music?
As is so often the case, “A chicken with its head cut off” forces a sharp re-centering of perspective. It’s a funny song, honky-tonking its way around the place like the titular beheaded chook. But then it starts to dawn on me – this isn’t a throwaway line. It’s actually a really quite perfect analogy for a set of feelings that might be best captured by the image of that poor bird. Who, I ask you, hasn’t been made to feel like a chicken with its head cut off by love? Have you ever lived otherwise?
It all clicks into place for me from here. There are truly fantastic standalone songs that I’ll cherish forever (“Sweet-Lovin’ Man”, “No One Will Ever Love You”); surreal ditties (“Punk Love”, “Let’s Pretend We’re Bunny Rabbits”); tunes that, given their subject matter, make me feel appropriately uncomfortable (“I Can’t Touch You Anymore”) or bittersweet and wistful (“I Don’t Want to Get Over You”) or reflective of how profoundly in-love one can be lucky enough to be (“Nothing Matters When We’re Dancing”). Even the stuff that doesn’t really work as ‘a song I like’ doesn’t fail to move me (a boudoir is the last place “For We Are The King of the Boudoir” should be experienced).
This is an epic kaleidoscope, a constantly shifting tangle of states. We’re in love, out of love; experiencing love unrequited, giving love, returning it with interest. We’re also in ourselves, in our beds, at our best or brought low by it. It’s visceral. It’s essential. It’s fucking everything, the whole fucking point.
When I proposed to Fleur, I wrote an accompanying letter. In that, I borrowed from Alain Badiou, for whom “Love is a quest for truth.” It’s a line given fresh resonance by this collection of songs. And it’s a collection of songs that gives the most important thing in any life exactly the attention it deserves.
So yeah, Magnetic Fields “succeeded”. This is a masterpiece.
David Bowie
5/5
Last we spoke, only a couple of weeks ago, it was Hunky Dory – “Changes”, “Life on Mars”. So it’s a little confronting to so soon find myself here, David’s momento mori. His autoepitaph. His goodbye.
With this record, I finally get it. And not just because this is an album charged with reference points and influencers I get along with already – although that helps – but because of what that actually means. Why is a man who had been one of culture’s most chameleonic, mercurial and successful lights for 50 of his nearly 70 years listening to Death Grips and Kendrick Lamar a few months before he died – let alone using those records as reference points for his final creative sign off?
And smuggled away in that question is the thing I wasn’t getting about David Bowie. His ultimate vitality. I was so busy looking at him as a leader that I never really, properly let myself see him as the devotee to sound, colour, light and life that he was.
And that’s in evidence here. Songs like “Blackstar”, “Lazarus”, “Girl loves me” are sombre while sprightly, look backwards while thrusting forwards; they’re legacy while never letting themselves become eulogy. This is something new, another contribution to the conversation David was having with us, with music and with posterity throughout his incredible life.
And so here we are. Blackstar is seven songs sent from just this side of the event horizon, a postcard from the most alive person to have ever lived. I finally got it.
Suede
2/5
I have scattered memories of Suede from childhood. There’s one that’s just Brett Anderson going up (or “coming up”?) on an escalator – we’re at the top but crouching down, seeing him steadily appear – there’s a lot of blue and black, and I’m wondering why they’re in Meadowhall after everyone’s gone home to bed already.
It’s around that time that I’m told by various men about the importance of a good hifi (perhaps not literally, but rather through the decisiveness of their actions when around a tall all-in-one and general seriousness of their expressions). There’s the bloke my mum’s mate is going out with who likes to play Garbage on repeat. There’s the fella next door who puts Toploader on and has it blasting out his conservatory while he tends to the BBQ. And then there’s grandad, who I don’t actually remember ever seeing interact with his hifi system but had some cool looking CDs.
It’s the 90s, and we are shiny disc – don’t scratch it! – worshipping audiophiles. And it’s here, in this groove of memory (I’m analogue, sorry), that I place my impression of Suede. A band who could give a home speaker system a ruddy good run even if they don’t do much else for a listener like me.
This is all absolutely fine. There are really well crafted hooks (“The wild ones”), very tasteful nods to their influences (Bowie, especially throughout) and some stirring atmospherics (“The asphalt world” is a personal highlight).
There’s often a bit too much – guitar, whining, strings, song, songs – though, and the accusation that this is a pretentious record certainly starts to feel fair by the ”Still life”’s final “swell”.
But it’s also a portentous record, in many ways – something like “The Black Parade”, for example, feels like a spiritual cousin. I’ll pay it the due respect, but likely no more.
Led Zeppelin
3/5
I just can’t connect with Led Zeppelin. Obviously, it’s all in there: riffs, rocking rhythms, “Stairway to Heaven” etc. Good stuff! Thing is, though, if I’m going to enjoy a load of dudes taking silly things – mythical wars, outre symbology, trees, fairies – way too seriously, they’ve got to be wearing corpse paint. It’s the only way I can handle it.
And so I get through this album twice with a smile, enjoy the occasional bop, and get on with finishing dinner. It’s good! They won’t miss my deeper adulation, I’m sure.
Steely Dan
5/5
I’ll try and get the obvious out of the way first: the last minute of Bodhisattva is so strong a gust of what-can-make-music-so-fucking-brilliant that it threatens to capsize me (and by extension my attempts to really encounter this record) every listen. How it stumbles, twists, grows in confidence, breathes, starts to run, looks up, then screams. Ah. If it fails to make you feel alive then urgently seek help. It’s just. Fuck. Guys.
“Countdown to Ecstasy” is a wonderful amalgam of rock, jazz, blues and whatever else (bluegrass, skiffle, R&B, French?) the fellas fancied integrating and elevating. It’s a typically smooth, strongly melodic bit of work, but there are edges to it to enjoy, too – “Show Biz Kids” swaggers, machined-in to the beat, while “My Old School” is finger-pickin’ funk that unapologetically shreds its way towards Hendrix then bails out and scurries back to surf.
And that’s something, really. The Dan seem to have an infallible instinct for knowing where they are and where they want to be. They feel in control; never too close for comfort to their source material – pretty much “iconic acts no one can sensibly think of approaching with anything over than reverence” – while also never so far out that their innovations feel obviously contrived.
Back to Bodhisattva. It’s true that it ends with a sort of triumphant freak out, but it’s equally the case that the song’s already been excellent for three minutes or so by then anyway. In each cycle through the verse, chorus structure it’s changing things around, giving vent to different harmonic expressions, picking up speed, accumulating ideas, placing motifs that you’ll delight in hearing again later – played a little quicker or with a little more brio.
Again you’ll feel it’s all completely under control, right up until the moment you can’t be. And for this the song is, of course, a countdown to ecstasy properly.
They’re the real deal, what else would you expect from them?
Yes
4/5
It’s Thursday February 27 and Fleur, Dave and I have been to see Fontaines D.C. The Dubliners feel at the peak of their powers, touring their fourth record, “Romance” – primed now to push them that bit closer to what’s undoubtedly their goal: world domination. It’s eleven very good songs that you feel, at times, might have quite stretched the lads creatively. And it starts with a swelling, droning din that cuts abruptly to a melancholy jangle of notes.
It’s Saturday March 1 and I’ve some catching up on albums to do! I start with Thursday’s record, Yes – the sort of band I’ve spent a listening life aware of but ignoring. “Fragile” is their fourth studio record; nine songs showcasing a band at the peak of their powers, stretching themselves creatively, aiming for world domination … and it all starts with a swelling, droning din that cuts abruptly to a melancholy jangle of notes.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about coincidences. How they might happen, what factors make them more likely – why a person can sometimes feel and then be portentous in the most incredible or unlikely ways. And while I’m not necessarily given to magical thinking, I love letting a coincidence maybe mean something – if each instance is a single clap, then let the series be the sound of the universe applauding itself.
“Fragile” is, first things first, a fantastic record – prodigious musicianship, production. There’s a humbleness to it, too; a dash of humour accompanying all the ‘big vision’ theatrics. It’s serious on all the levels that matter for a record like this.
I play the album a couple of times while making dinner for my visiting in-laws, then leave it on in the background while we eat. As it happens, Fleur had also noticed the Fontaines parallel, Bernadette hears “Roundabout” – “they had a couple of good songs, this is the best” – and it triggers a memory of having seen Yes years ago. Tim, sat beside her, hears track two (“Brahms and Cans”) and asks “Is that Brahms? It is, after a fashion, anyway…” and by “Heart of the Sunrise” – my favourite track – I’m wondering why the Wikipedia for Television’s “Marque Moon” mentions a jazz influence to Verlaine and Lloyd’s guitar work but doesn’t cite a Yes influence. (I do a similar bit later with The Number 12 Looks Like You – a mathcore band I loved in the 00s who surely owe a similar debt to Yes and/or prog bands just like them.)
No moment around that dinner table is strictly a “coincidence” (not in the spooky-synchronicity sense), granted – but our collective experiences feel like they amount to something. It’s Yes in the middle of the centrifuge, spinning sugar into strings. It is distinct experiences characteristic of totally different lives lived across three separate continents and seven decades, here assembled – coincidentally – around a table in Rockingham, Western Australia.
It might be tempting to ask here whether everything, all shared culture, experiences, perspectives etc etc is then, by my generous definition, a big coincidence – and on a particularly existential day a person might say, for better or worse, that it is. But I doubt that just any record could have encouraged so many personal reflections on that day. And to that extent, “Fragile” felt meant to be.
Returning to thoughts on coincidence; in short, I think it’s a numbers game. The physics of co-occurrence deem it that the more experiences a person collects, the more coincidences they’ll uncover. The echos a person will apprehend, both in the moment and through time, just have more to bounce off. Put a record as filled up with ideas as “Fragile” on and something’s bound to resonate.
It might sound un-magical, even boring to say as much – but it needn’t be. The edifying truth is that there’s poetry in the everyday, and coincidence is cosmic rhyming.
Say “Yes” to more. You’ll eventually be glad you did.
The Yardbirds
3/5
I’m only ever a right-shaped moment in time away – as we all are from anything, pretty much, of course – from being shown to be a right fickle sort, but as things stand I’d answer the question of “Clapton, Beck or Page?” in the same way Bartleby did when asked to do his job. “I would prefer not to.”
I don’t know what it is about the words “guitar legend” that so throughly chills my blood but I’m starting to suspect it’s actually simple. Maybe I just don't really like it. I’m, and with respect, a bit bored by the output of these grand juggernauts; these behemoths; these elder statesmen of the six, twelve and occasionally seven stringed vessel of etc etc amen. Maybe it’s a reflection of a personal limitation somehow, I’m open to the idea … but yeah, no thanks lads.
This record is absolutely fine. It anticipates a whole load of stuff I love*; and I bet had I been bouncing around watching England bring it home in ‘66 I’d have been entirely enthused by the ecstatic portions of sound presented herein. But for all the clear and obvious good gamesmanship of an album like this, my soul remains unstirred. No heroics, no goals scored in extra time.
A good record that I doubt I’d be able to say I’ve heard in a year’s time. Who knows … maybe I’ll be better placed to get it by then. 2.5
*Full credit to Beck’s riffs on that front, admittedly.
Metallica
1/5
To the bottom right hand corner of the all black front cover of Metallica’s Metallica sits a coiled timber rattlesnake. In early pressings of the album the snake’s made almost imperceptible by its dark grey colouring, but I promise it’s always been there.
The snake design is borrowed from the 1775 Gadsden flag, a banner that gives the snake a thorny subtitle: “Don’t tread on me” (also the title of track five of Metallica, for the avoidance of any doubt regarding the snake’s provenance). Initially designed by Christopher Gadsden for use by the American Continental Navy (whose chief task then was intercepting British supply ships en route to arming their countrymen in the Revolutionary War), in its 250 year history the flag has seemingly meant something to everyone across the American political spectrum.
Libertarians globally have stood under the flag’s bright yellow, appropriating it as their signature shade; abortion rights activists have twisted the snake into the shape of a uterus, a warning to anyone who thinks they have sovereignty over a woman’s body; Jan 6 rioters paraded it around the US Capitol as the world looked on, horrified.
(My favourite “Don’t tread on me” fact concerns Nick Offerman. Both his Libertarian turn in Parks and Recreation, Ron Swanson, and his romantic survivalist at the end of the world in The Last of Us, Bill, are seen with Gadsden flags in their possession.)
Having shifted millions of albums worldwide since its release in 1991, you’d have to say that Metallica has as broad a valency as Gadsden’s flag. People click with it; “Enter Sandman”, “Sad but true”, “Nothing else matters” – these are songs that the numbers indicate it’s safe to assume someone will like by default. And yet …
Few records elicit as many groans for me as this. Time and again I’m left begging them to get on with it, assuring them I get it, willing them to play “Master of the puppets” instead. From the often turgid lyricism to the lame use of an orchestra (something they doubled down on in the utterly fucking woeful S&M) this is exactly the sort of album you’d expect a thrash band who want to make some money to make. (That they chose to do it under the watchful eye of Motley Crüe’s producer itself tells you plenty.)
It’s profoundly big enough and profoundly bad enough, unfortunately, to bring us back to Gadsden’s flag. Shorn of any properly political dimension – seriously, just try to bleed any actual perspective or insight out of the macho fightin’ talk on this record – the snake’s nobly pugnacious sentiments feel only sneering. Bellicose. Stupid. And to that end, perhaps Metallica is a fitting final form for the plucky serpent.
Maybe that revolutionary spirit embodied by “Don’t tread on me” has now turned in on itself for good – coincidentally, Hetfield has said this record was the sound of the band turning “in”. Maybe the aggressive-seeming-but-ultimately-nonsensical snarl we hear on tracks across this record actually anticipates American exceptionalism’s collapse into American isolationism. It’s a bloody minded mentality; and this is music for picking fights to.
Revolution. Independence. Expansion. Petulance. Ostracism. Sad but true.
Talvin Singh
3/5
Dr. Octagon
2/5
Weird, fun – out there in a way that stops it ever fully coming in here. Thanks, Dr.
The Human League
5/5
There was much I hadn’t realised until I finally put this record on. For one, the origin story. Initially asked to sing because he dressed interestingly on nights out, Phil Oakey was barely even in the band when they rebranded from The Future to The Human League. And by the time Dare was released, the founding lineup had entirely changed out (“The Ship of Theseus” might have been a more apt band name, on reflection). Then there’s the sort of embarrassing penny drop that Phil Oakey is also the one singing about electric dreams. Under different conditions, I might have gone my whole life never knowing that.
The thing that most surprised me, though, was the appearance of “Don’t you want me” right at the back of the album. Now, had this been an AOR record, it being track 10 would have made sense to me. But this isn’t AOR, it’s big pop bangers (might this record, and that song, even be the birth of the modern concept of the “pop banger”?) – you don’t put your strongest material at the least accessible part of the vinyl. And you certainly don’t fight your management and record label when they suggest releasing it as a third single from the album. Phil, what were you thinking?
Track one might help get us to half an answer. “The things that dreams of” – a Kraftwerkian verse into an anthemic, singalong chorus; a formula that repeats on “The sound of the crowd” and others also – puts me in mind of not The Nolans, Brotherhood of Man or ABBA … but Gang of Four (who, it transpires, also released music through Fast Records). Sharp angles, sparse melodic arrangements, sprechgesang lead, call and response dynamics in the backing vocals – everything I love about Entertainment is here, it’s just been blown out, lacquered and given a smokey eye mesmerising enough to hold a whole generation of TOTP viewers hostage.
“Darkness” is a particularly arresting tune; essentially three well crafted sections welded together with heavy atmospherics, it has – and, arguably, to an extent, sort of throws away – the album’s only big crescendo. (That I’ve felt compelled to listen to the song at least 20 times this week may indicate that it isn’t at all a “thrown away” opportunity … it’s a guarantee you’ll be back.)
Not that it’s all moody dramatics, though: “Do or die” is a full colour bit of buoyant dance floor bait; and has me wondering how much The League were listening to Talking Heads’ Remain in Light from the previous year. At any rate: so far, so post punk.
And then we come to that final track. I’ve been hearing this song my whole life – but then haven’t we all? It’s a song so good and so ubiquitous that I’d be surprised if there’s anyone out there who doesn’t have a story they attach to it, a memory or an anecdote. (Full disclosure, hearing “Don’t you want me” for the first time through a proper pair of headphones recently was completely exhilarating.)
So what is it about the song that works so hard for so many? Is it the completely unapologetic run up and down the scale; is it how that same dynamic – up, down, building up, breaking down – bares out in the story arc presented in the lyrics, right down to the prevaricating ‘change of mind’ reflected in that pre-resolution note noodle; is it how it taps into a whole spectrum of feelings – in the process nailing the relationship between bratty arrogance and aching vulnerability; is it simply the fucking “woah oh ah woah” of it all? Yes, probably, definitely, certainly and a million other things.
What “Don’t you want me” definitely isn’t is a post punk song. It’s a big behemoth of a pop banger; an archetype; an apex type, even, whose place at the top of the synth pop food chain will probably never be seriously challenged (that the group were jealous of Gary Numan feels, years later, especially cute on that score). The thought occurs that – since it sits on an album full of songs that had me drawing connections with some of the more serious reference points listed above – maybe “Don’t you want me” is the most contrarian, punkest thing about Dare.
Anyway, let it retain some of its mystery. For as long as there are hearts in our chests to yearn with, “Don’t you want me” will resonate. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll listen to the nine songs before it on Dare too.
Queen
3/5
Now this is a Queen I can get on board. For all its whinnying on about ogres and fairies – literally – there sits on this record a handful of hip-swinging heavy rock songs. Ah, hold on, I’ve just had a thought …
While considering why these songs about profoundly daft mythologies feel also so in possession of a profound sense of the libidinal, it finally dawns on me that the ogres and fairies may be euphemisms. And before you try telling me that something a black queen is just a black queen, you’ll first need to clarify what it is Freddie means by “I’ll be your bad boy, I’ll be your bad boy” if not “he’ll be your bad boy.”
Queen II isn’t just a Queen I can get on board with because it’s heavy. It’s a Queen I can get on board with because it’s barely concealing its true intentions. There’s a freedom to this whole thing that I’m not convinced I’ll find anywhere else in their catalogue (I didn’t in the doldrums of “A night at the operas” circus silliness anyway).
Big riffs, bonkers production ideas, moonshots that actually come off and more falsetto shrieking than the Bee Gees trapped in a temperamental shower. This is a Queen album I can finally lose myself to, perhaps because it feels like I’m hearing a member or two of the band finding themselves, musically and otherwise.
Let the ogres do battle, indeed.
Norah Jones
1/5
Boredom is a necessary condition of adulthood. Not the skittish boredom of hyperactive childhood, or the “I’ve got nothing on” boredom of one’s teenage years – a boredom freighted with anxious-joyous anticipation – but actual, brain-numbing boredom that threatens to form an ocean of apathy so vast that you can’t hope to ever be rescued from it.
Bored as you may be, it’s your duty, as an adult, though, to get on with it. You’re invited to find in the tedium rhythm, in the dull a purpose. You’re reminded that if it didn’t feel like work you wouldn’t need to pay someone to do it. You’re alienated from your labour, of course you are, but that’s the cost of living. Get on with it.
If that attitude of corporate ascetic were to be transformed into aesthetic, this record would likely be the result. This is the soundtrack to the hump days of your life; a bland and anodyne tour of an uninteresting series of emotions. It’s the musical equivalent of an anonymous message scrawled into a card passed around the office. While no one knows who said that mildly pleasant thing, it doesn’t stoke anywhere near enough intrigue to merit a follow up.
And so I fail to finish this album, and experience that as an act of defiance. My fate might mean being bored awfully often, but I can still say “no” sometimes. Good for me.
Fugees
3/5
I was six when this album came out, and when Fugees dominated the Top 40 countdown I’d pretty much live by between the ages of six and twelve. Six was a difficult age, I think. I have this memory of being quite uncomfortable in an indoor playground, maybe 20 ft high at the time, holding a bottle of Panda Pop blue flavour – tired, grumpy. The Fugees is on, “Killing me softly”.
Even then, under those most testing of conditions, I liked it. I liked “Ready or not” too, even memorised some of the rap. Later I’d like Lauryn Hill, and, against all odds, I’d like Wyclef’s early solo chart hits too. (Thankfully, this record is much, much better than Mr Jean’s solo work.)
Of course, that memory isn’t of the tiredness or grumpiness, or even necessarily of Panda Pop, it’s of that solo vocal that opens the track. A generational voice, which feels fitting since it’s one of my earliest musical memories (Spice Girls’ “Wannabe”, released the same year, is another early memory; another strong emotional response that will, now I’m thinking about it, form the template of all excited future reactions to new music). 29 years later, the effect isn’t any less.
Fugees may have been my first ever melancholy, which is to say that I heard them at exactly the moment I needed to. Six was a difficult age, but it was made easier by moments like that.
The Prodigy
3/5
This record is a wily, wiry, often incandescent bricolage of sound. Its textures and rhythms inform towering compositions that do so much more than provide a blueprint; they throw down a gauntlet.
It’s ironic, maybe, that the thing my mind first conjures when listening to this sample-heavy affront to UK policing overreach is the classic 90s anti-pirating public service video familiar to VHS viewers everywhere – “you wouldn’t steal a…” – and its iconic soundtrack. Surely a Prodigy rip off?
While there’s a somewhat dated sense of the thing having been quantised to within an atom of the grid lines at times – resulting in a rigidity that threatens to flatten the atmosphere – the propulsive momentum of the tracks will carry you through. It’s a big record, full of iconic moments; but what’s in here is also a sophisticated sort of musicality that scavenges and builds to produce its affects (what postmodern philosophy might identify as evidence of a “deterritorialising” impulse). It’s a good punk record, an excellent electronic album, and rave’s true claim to immortality.
Coldplay
2/5
It’s the most milquetoast of ironies; Coldplay, a band with so amazingly few characteristics to remark upon have, for a quarter of an actual century, managed to inspire the most intense of reactions from seemingly all who hear them. Good or bad, you have an opinion on Coldplay. And that opinion is either “world-beating stadium-eating monsters who have totally reinvented what it means to continually reinvent yourself” or “Chris Martin is the audio equivalent of finding out your house has been flooded”. No in between.
And this is the sense in which Coldplay actually matters. Not as musicians – fucking hell, imagine! – but as early bellwethers of the defining cultural shift of the 21st century – the embracing of antagonistic dichotomies. Coldplay is a significant early entry into the pantheon of things that we love to love or love to hate, a trend they commenced but that soon swept up the likes of Nickleback, James Blunt, immigrants, and latterly the environment.
What do I think? I think we live in a beautiful world, and I think that’s a really true and fair thing to say. And I think the stuff around it that he’s singing to is lovely, too. In fact, I doubt you could objectively argue against that assertion. Really, everything here is absolutely as it should be.
But then, that feeling again. That feeling that Coldplay isn’t good. Coldplay doesn’t care. Coldplay isn’t here to be anything else than another reason to hate my neighbour.
Weird. I swear it just sounded like safe indie miserablism.
Dolly Parton
2/5
There’s an introduction to Baudrillard that, talking about the precession of the simulacrum, presents an image of visiting an American desert only to feel like you’ve already been there on account of how many western movies you’ve seen.
I’m not totally convinced by the philosophical implications of that thought – nor do I think that’s what Jean was aiming at – but it’s always stuck in my mind as a sort of warning, in its own right. Don’t let the aura of a thing be eclipsed by your familiarity with its representations.
So with Dolly, I try to keep it situated. I try to hear it in-itself. And I hear, in that in-itself, an album that’s plainly country; well intentioned; and full of the sort of judgemental rhetoric you’ve come to expect from America’s specific take on Protestantism.
I’ve never met a Dolly I too fondly liked.
A Tribe Called Quest
4/5
There’s this pretty unsubtle, absolutely excellent (perfect?) moment in “Everything’s fair” as the front-of-the-mix Funkadelic sample meets the bass line in the crossfade then disappears, leaving us with Q-Tip telling a story about unrequited lust, ambition and money. (But in a way that’s never more dramatic than “casual”.)
I mention this moment specifically because a) driven by a beat I can only, feebly and in awe, describe as “sick”, it slaps, and b) it feels like a nice little metonym of what’s so spectacularly cool about this record and Tribe’s whole thing. The nods back, the moves forward, the feeling of effortlessness about it all; the knowing you’re in safe hands, so letting your guard down and having a dance. The 90s that this record helped to shape might not have been “my” 90s – unless the vibe they cultivated had any bearing on Space Jam or upstream influence on The Fresh Prince? – but here in 2025 this record still feels sharp, organised and focussed.
That this is a great record feels evident in it being as available to me while I’m making pizza on a Saturday night as it was while waiting for a bus on an early Tuesday morning.
You don’t need to be in the mood, because it’ll transport you. Props.
Yes
2/5
Throw enough spaghetti at the wall, and some of it’s bound to stick. And, in this case of this most profligate pasta bowls of an album … it does. A bit. It sticks until it’s wiped away by the next load of spaghetti flung at the wall, anyway. Fine. No, don’t worry. I wasn’t hungry anyway, Yes.
I don’t mind this record, and there are sections of it I quite like – but it’s often quite abstruse. Would it kill them to let the dish sit for a minute? Would it kill them to offer a Parmesan garnish? Why must it always be more spaghetti?
Elvis Presley
4/5
Today, Marlais received his first pair of proper shoes. And so it’s a divine cosmic coincidence that today’s record starts with “Blue suede shoes” (a reasonable description of his baby New Balance trainers).
We spend the first spin of this record largely talking over it; it’s Elvis, we get it. We’ve been getting it since before his millennial revival, even. Cool. We let the thing spin down, then we talk a little about it. What was it that made this the biggest thing on the planet? How much can we say we meaningfully owe to Elvis Presley.
A second listen through starts, and things begin to click into place. The bass finds its focus; the guitars spring suddenly to life; the caterwauling – so charged with energy that it cycles between states of wobbling, then teetering, then feels temporarily back under control, until… – becomes a cry through time; but this doesn’t feel the stuff of a hedonistic death drive, but rather its opposite. Something's being born here, it’s completely undeniable.
This shift in perspective is not, as you might expect, because we’re listening to the record any more closely; instead, it’s come about purely because we’ve had a minute to reflect on Elvis in history, so to speak – everything from his music’s largely ignored antecedents, to the enormity of his fame, which then must have been totally without precedent.
And from that vantage, we’ve imagined ourselves, for a minute, still closer in thought to turn of the century Victorians than we ever possibly could be to mid-70s punks. In that moment we’re caught, anxiously and with trepidation, between youth and young adulthood, between wartime regimes of thought and peacetime motions toward liberalism, and we’re looking for an outlet, or more accurately perhaps a lightening rod – something, whatever it is, that we’re grateful to find Elvis offering us.
The significance of that moment can’t be – isn’t, really! – overstated. Hearing Elvis in these songs give shape to adolescent hankering is to feel yourself being thrown back in time – not to the 1950s, but to your own brief spring of limitless potential.
And that’s what this Elvis record is, really. An invitation to experience an emotional immediacy you’re encouraged, as an adult, to dull; and a nice reminder that to find the magic in something, sometimes all it takes is to let yourself walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.
Gene Clark
4/5
I tell Fleur that I’ll buy her “something amazing” if she can guess who this record is by. She throws out Crosby, Stills and Nash and Jefferson Airplane and even Bob Dylan … and I’d have probably done something similar. My own ballpark explanation as to why Gene Clark felt so foreign a name was that he “must have been in another band first” – accurate enough, but in practice as helpful (and safe) as saying I suspect he had hair.
Anyway, Gene exists. Gene was in The Byrds. And Gene had hair. Gene also wrote some stirring, melancholy songs that walk a line between folk, country and rock in often surprising, sometimes mesmerising ways (for example there’s a section on “Lady of the North”with a violin that’s simply sumptuous musicianship).
But it does feel like Gene’s memory is under attack. And that’s a huge shame, because “No Other” is a fantastic record that’s surely within a shout of being one of the most sophisticated pieces of Americana out there. It’s baroque, effete but also knowing – too clever by half, perhaps, to have remained a fixture in many minds for long.
It’s not like you can say this record has been forgotten everywhere, though. I’m time and again reminded of Stephen Malkmus’ “Traditional Techniques” – and surely it’s the song craft of the likes of Clark that Malkmus is apeing across that (very good) album. I’ll certainly be returning to it, anyway; be it directly, or in another such hagiography later on.
5/5
That The Kinks – chroniclers of the British experience (though, if we’re being honest, isn’t it just “English”?) – managed to put out a concept album that covers emigrating to Australia tickles me enormously. I suppose I hadn’t ever fully considered just how important a strand of the British psyche “going to Australia” has been (and for well over a century now); the lingering upside down uncanny, as if at some stage Britain’s history decided to pack up, leave and live out an alternative destiny at the global antipode. It’s a place that you lose people to.
This is another absolutely solid Kinks record. There simply can’t have been a bigger chorus in all history up to that point as in “Victoria” – I will happily be corrected on the idea, but might it be the first big indie rock banger? It sounds stadium even sitting on the train, off to service my mortgage (Ray’s ongoing patronising of the routines of adult responsibility portends punk’s most petulant attitudes).
Songs like “Yes Sir, No Sir” (a sort of Catch-22 come to melodic life), “Mr Churchill Says” (a codex for literally every guitar band in the 80s and 90s), “Brainwashed” (unbelievably stylish in every facet) and “Australia” (direct, wild; the sound of a promise not being kept) cement in my mind the idea that there was no better band active in the UK than The Kinks until culture pivoted to reimagining them through those guitar bands.
Pairs well with sunshine, too.
Ella Fitzgerald
2/5
Is it sad to see the American century (+) drawing to a close? Yeah, maybe. It’s uncharted waters, anyway. It’s odd to think that my children will grow up with a different locus; they won’t watch Friends and feel desperate to live that (sic) NY life, or crave, deeply, a twinky without knowing for certain what one is. Among the various items of cultural detritus they might wade through as they attempt to gain a sense of just what America meant to mum and dad they might find this epic. And they, as I have, may arrive at the unkind conclusion that only in a century dominated by a certain kind of cultural mode could an album like this be elevated to “classic”. 1.5.
Billy Bragg
3/5
Oh last night I put this album on (I won’t say which album) and sure, I thought it started strongly (I won’t say how strongly) but then sure enough I started to lose interest (I won’t say which interest) until finally I read a Wikipedia page (I won’t say which Wikipedia page) and then I saw that this was the result of a project (I won’t say which project) that was bringing to life the works of famous songwriter (I won’t say which songwriter) who had died an untimely death (I won’t quite say how he died) and whose legacy deserves to draw fresh breath (I won’t say what kind of breath) and I realised this endeavour is the result of an awesome idea executed thoughtfully and with so much love – even if there’s only one song I actually really liked (I won’t say which song I liked).
4/5
So while reviewing RATM’s debut, I said a whole lot of stuff about that word “motherfucker”, and oh oh oh did I not then totally grasp precisely how loaded with rock n’roll history that tight little portmanteau is.
“Kick out the jams motherfuckers” might have been a call to action too far for mainstream America to get behind in 1969, but I guess that’s their loss. Five minutes into this album, I’m telling Fleur that there’s no way I could have liked the Beatles in the late 60s if this is what they were up against. This is simply fucking fantastic – not a single moment wasted, every moment demonstrably wasted.
Almost 60 years later, my enthusiasm for this record transforms into a mess of limbs. I’m air guitar. I’m air drums. I’m warbling along like whatever that dude’s doing in the background too. I just love it.
MC5 need no introduction, but if we must insist on one – let it be “kick of the jams, motherfuckers” and let that be that forever.
Aretha Franklin
2/5
David Gray
2/5
I guess that some of these songs were among the first “hits” I ever properly clocked. Songs like “Babylon” and “This year’s love” were, at the turn of the millennium, absolutely massive. They kicked off a rude run of form for the perma-troubled troubadour, one that hasn’t really ever concluded (what is a Benson Boone if not, ultimately, just a sexier shade of Gray?).
And yet the story of White Ladder – a self-produced effort by a young artist that didn’t much bother listeners first time around, but found a global audience (including, at one point, 1 in 4 Irish households) upon rerelease 18 months later – is, for better or worse, more interesting than the record itself. Take the hits away – songs which themselves excel at giving precious little more away than one or two charming melodies – and you’ve not a whole lot to shout about.
I struggle to believe this wasn’t always drab; tales of heartache delivered by a particularly heavy raincloud. And it strikes me that to happen upon White Ladder, you first need to subtract something (The Smiths without the energy; Magnetic Fields without the magnetism; U2 without the spine).
None of that is necessarily criticism, of course. Certainly, the sparseness of this album creates space for some punishingly bleak atmospherics. But it is a shame that one of the defining albums of that time feels like it’s lacking much by way of definition.
Otis Redding
4/5
Dazzlingly good, really. Muscular, confident songs that stride out the speakers and demand attention.
When you learn most of this album was recorded in a day, you first gasp but then can sort of start to believe it – if the rest of the room was even nearly as talented as Otis, magic was never unlikely.
It’s a profound shame that Redding’s career was cut so cruelly short; for a minute, he might have been the brightest light in music.
Linkin Park
5/5
I got Hybrid Theory for Christmas in 2001. In January I listened to it maybe 60 times all the way through on my bedroom CD player. In February I took it to the hairdressers because I wanted Mike Shinoda’s hairstyle on the back cover. In March I listened to it laying on my mate’s bed at a sleepover while we looked at glow in the dark stars on his ceiling and took it in turns to do the singing bits and the rapping bits. In April it was the first thing me and the hardest lad in the year talked about that didn’t involve a threat of immediate violence being visited on me. In May I decided “Points of Authority” was my favourite when it came on Radio One as we drove past a petrol station in Barnsley. In June I learned how to play “In the End” on a keyboard (in Barnsley, too). In July and August it was summer holidays, playing “Crawling” loudly on guitar in someone’s music room in the morning before booming around on bikes until it got dark. Through September and the rest of the year it was time to talk about something else, while also still watching that world tour VHS every couple of nights for all the live footage.
A year of a life, at that time of a life, is a long, long time. You pack a lot in, and don’t much think about what that’ll mean for you. And as sure as I’ve a nicotine addiction to this day — I still struggle to look past Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory. At 14 I saw them play Leeds, at 28 I sat on the couch in Finsbury Park as we got our heads around Chester’s passing; at 32 we had a table at our wedding named for “Points of Authority”.
This is an album I’ll carry around for life, now. What joy it is that I’m still finding things to love about it.
Van Halen
4/5
Prochronism describes a moment when something from the future is placed in the past. And right up there alongside a baroque blockchains or rococo smartphones is Eddie Van Halen’s “Eruption” – a guitar solo that would have sounded pretty out of joint on any playlist of 1978’s most popular tracks (think Chic’s “Le Freak” into ABBA’s “Take a chance on me”).
No doubt, EVH was a genius. (Perhaps, at times, too great a genius for his band’s own good – why, Mr Lee Roth, must you feel the need to compete?)
It’s a struggle to find praise high enough for the guitar playing on display here, or to adequately capture the impact of Eddie’s innovations without lurching into sickly hyperbole – so instead I’ll do what we all wish David Lee Roth would do at times, and shut the fuck up.
Duran Duran
4/5
I was surprised to learn that Duran Duran’s fun-loving, vibe defining, feather-headed hedonism – an attitude since tousled by time’s limitless libido into a sort of archetype of a version of masculinity – wasn’t well received by critics in the early 80s. And then I thought about the sort of person offering a published opinion on new music in the early 80s … and it clicked into place. (Strikes me the Duran Duran boys might have been doubly confused by their critical panning – it’s unlikely they’ve ever had cause to experience envy themselves.)
Not to worry, the casting vote on this occasion was the public’s – and thank the saucy gods it was so. To have risked losing this album to history’s unkindness would have been a crime, really. “Rio”, “Hungry like the wolf”, “Save a prayer”; not so much “songs” as cultural quilting points, moments where music, art and general horniness meet to, erm, snog?
Anyway… Duran Duran looked the part, acted the part, and sounded the part. The songs here feel remarkably fresh – surely a function of the largely live feel of the recording – and there’s plenty of strong playing and solid compositional chops. At the edges of Simon Le Bon’s debonair delivery there’s even a suitably post-punk angularity, too. Never do we go full synthy-slick. Duran Duran is always definitely a band. (With the exception of “Chauffeur”, a charming song that, pleasingly, reminded me of where Arctic Monkeys went with The Car.)
Given how poorly they were reviewed in 1982, it’s almost poetic that Duran Duran’s impact on pop and 20th century music is still under-celebrated, especially compared with some of their contemporaries (and even those they blazed a trail for…). While the historical revisionism applied to this album may be unanimously flattering in tone, it might still be Duran Duran’s fate to forever be jealously held off to one side a bit. And what a legacy that would be.
The Fall
5/5
Mark E Smith’s nimbus – part beer soaked carpet, part full ashtray, part fruit machine emptying sounds – hangs so heavily across my impression of The Fall that it acts as a sort of plasma wall; he’s forever stooped over a jar in a Wetherspoon’s in Salford called The Surface of Last Scattering.
Just as well we’re here right now, then – ready to be reminded that there’s more to The Fall than just what can be seen through a pint glass, amber-ly. “Live at the Witch Trials” is a coy, lithe record that sort of charms you with its repeated threats of teetering – repetitious without becoming droning, atonal without becoming discordant, scuzzy without becoming sleaze. It’s always just about at the edge of itself; and while it pushes at plenty of boundaries, the songwriting, playing and togetherness keeps the record entirely on track (and “serious” too; there’s certainly plenty of humour in here, but it’s never cartoonish).
It’s a cosmic blessing, I suppose, that The Fall and this record – which was almost derailed by Smith’s being taken ill – ever came into being in the first place. From nothing, a spontaneously occurring assembly of elements – then quickly thrown to opposing corners of the universe to propagate, or synthesise, or become entirely new things. Behind the plasma wall, though, they’ll forever be playing this.
Curtis Mayfield
5/5
Seriously, seriously, seriously good. Everything lines up so neatly on this record; smoothed out jams juxtaposed with stirring string arrangements, moments of individual flourish from each player at different moments … all of it organised around what’s surely one of the most gorgeously soulful vocal performances ever recorded.
It feels quite brave, too, to have scored a film that might otherwise be seen as pretty ambivalent about drug crime with a collection of messages about healthy mindsets and getting high on life. Good for you, Curtis.
All that might be a maybe, but what’s for sure is that this album, in so many ways, stands alone. Just wonderful.
Funkadelic
5/5
Every atom of your being BE ALIVE. Funkadelic – a frequency beamed in from a future to cool for the past to sustain – has found your antenna. This is groove that doesn’t just come from another dimension: it literally is a dimension all of its own.
Sit back with an awestruck gawp as “One Nation Under a Groove” moves you, improves you, then rifles through the record collection of your mind and does the same. Thought you loved that Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever song “Dive Deep” before? You’re going to love it even more now you’ve heard and felt “Promental…” (I simply cannot believe that guitar tone is a coincidence – no species gets that lucky twice). Didn’t know why it was the 16-bit soundtrack to Toejam and Earl has stayed so fresh in your mind for the best part of 30 years? Funkadelic knows.
Anyway, whatever you’re doing drop it and put this record on. It’s that good. Enjoy the songs. Submit to the swing. Marvel at how effortless the corralling of a dozen super-talented artists can be made to sound. Everyone under my roof has been singing “One nation…” all afternoon, nothin’ can stop us now.
Radiohead
2/5
I’m interested in why it is I don’t like Radiohead as much as I think I should. I suppose you either celebrate Radiohead’s jukebox albums of jealously guarded influences or you don’t. You either do or don’t think they went from being a shit Nirvana rip-off to a shit amalgam of Aphex Twin, Portishead and whoever else Chris Cunningham was making music videos for at the time. You either do hear Coldplay with more self-consciously avant garde production choices or you don’t.
Hyperbole aside, though, the cavernous spaces opened up on this album offer me good perspective from which to clarify my thoughts. I think my problem is rooted in a general premise – that while some albums give, others subtract. And while I’ve plenty of time for music that takes more from you than it gives – albums that involve you, moving you beyond where you were before in a totally altering, necessarily engrossing way – there’s something about Radiohead I’ve always found unjustifiably draining. In short, the juice hasn’t ever felt worth the squeeze.
And so we are again. Blippy glitch that’s then so fashionable in Berlin rubs shoulders with warm and cosy Sunday roast Indie; boiled up pastiches of various global music curios condense on the cold, cold windowpane of Thom Yorke’s flawless but really a bit too often deployed falsetto. The moments come and go – the drums in “Dollars and Cents”, so reminiscent of Mogwai – but it never, for me, amounts to more than a treadmill of effects; precisely good enough to have me tying myself in knots trying to like it.
And that’s my overwhelming feeling, really. Radiohead, arch postmodernists, take more than they give. You’re either into that, or you’re not.
Traffic
2/5
There’s a richness to this record that feels utterly wasted on a heathen like me. Songs – while each uniquely compelling, presumably – bounce off me like water off a competition-banned Speedo. At times my toe taps, at others I say “oh this must be where Chris De Burgh got ‘Spaceman’ from.” And as the album finishes a second play through, I realise that all I really have to say is that, above all else, this was the moment I broadened my knowledge of Steve Winwood beyond the It’s Always Sunny reference. (“That’s a gift for you, bumblebee…”.)
Dexys Midnight Runners
5/5
Memory’s a fickle thing. But as cruel as posterity has been to Dexys – who had at least a couple of hits in the U.K. – it’s also true that you can only be a one hit wonder for as long as you’re remembered. Better a one hit wonder than a never was.
In its way, it’s a poetic irony that a band who managed to put out so timeless a party hit as “Come on Eileen” should have done so as part of an album that sounds so totally not of its time. “Too Rye Ay” is significantly more sophisticated, assured and complete than you’d be forgiven for thinking it should be. Not only does their inimitable mix of Celtic folk, blue-eyed soul and skiffle actually work (seriously, did anyone ever even try to imitate it?) … it manages to move the listener through a full range of emotions. There’s whimsy (“Let’s make this precious”) and ecstatic joy (their cover of Van Morrison’s “Jack Wilson says…”); triumphant table dancing (“Come on Eileen”) and measured introspection (“Liars A to E”). And then there’s the textured delicacy of “All in all (This one last wild waltz)”, a 3/4 (what else?) swagger of jagged gentleness and heart-rending harmonies that had me wondering if Messers Morrissey and Marr weren’t themselves early fans of DMR.
In short, there’s far, far more to this whole thing than the “one hit wonder” tag could ever begin to communicate. It’s an injustice that prompts in me a sort of melancholy that no volume of dungarees – the happiest of all garments – could ever quite fully disabuse me of.
And speaking of those jolly dungarees … it strikes me now – reflecting on how it is that things steadily recede from the collective memory memory – that, one day, “Come on Eileen” will be played at its last wedding. The strings will for a last time dizzy; the chorus will stand up tall and puff out and beat its chest; the middle eight will drop the pace, build it up again toward one final crescendo. And at that point, we’ll have just the object oriented ontologists (whose general position on music and memory I’d love to see articulated through the concept of ‘one hit wonders’) to debate whether it’s still, ever was, or forever could be a hit.
Or, as is more likely, we will stop hearing “Come on Eileen” only when the sun swallows us all up completely.
Anyone complaining about it can, frankly, get stuffed. Because in that moment – as with every other one – it will have meant everything.
Alanis Morissette
3/5
I’m tempted to dismiss this record out of hand – those awful gated drums so common in 90s/00s pop; that bouncy-bouncy vocal rhythm in every bridge that’s, and perhaps sensibly on reflection, just shy of an actual rap; that overwhelming feeling throughout of being trapped in a teen drama with a legion of floppy-haired, lachrymose middle-Americans – before arriving at a totally transformative perspective: this 90s tropeapaedia feels so not because it was a product of its time, but because it did so much to produce its time.
Today, Alanis is here to remind us of the mess they made in the nine-ta-heys. And, yes, you ought to know – it feels a shame that the corporate grunge inspired production choices betray not much more than an opportunistic short-termism. (It’s not quite Avril levels of insincerity, but it’s far from PJ levels of authenticity.)
Can’t blame an artist for wanting to sell some records, though – and you’d have to be a total bore to call “Ironic”, “Hand in my pocket” and “You oughta know” any less than classic.
Fave song: “Wake up”. (Ironically, the worst offender for trope soup!)
Pink Floyd
5/5
With the weight of public opinion so dreadfully pitched the other way, I’ll just have to wear the accolade of “most tedious contrarian” when I say that “Wish you were here”, one of the 20th century’s most popular and regarded songs, does Pink Floyd a disservice.
For the longest time – 35 and a half years plus “Shine on …” and a minute of “Welcome to the machine” – I thought that Pink Floyd was essentially “The Wall” and milquetoast soft rock (would we say pumice?). You have to laugh.
Or, more accurately, you have to join the millions before you who, hearing “Welcome to the machine” for the first time, had sat and felt the synths slicing through their matter; calved as the down stroked acoustic guitar startled them into an alertness that, with a simple vocal harmony, so quickly becomes transcendental; rising, rising; back down to the interminable throb of the machine’s whirring engine. And all of that over the course of about a minute. (Note: a quick search reveals I’m not alone in hearing Stranger Things’ theme here… but it’s a small club!)
This album puts me in my mind of early Mars Volta, contemporaneous Steely Dan (I’d imagine there was some mutual admiration going on) among others – a good mind to be put into. “Wish you were here”? Nah, still a bit fusty for me. The rest of it? Fucccckkkkkkkkkk…
Depeche Mode
4/5
Religious tropes, shorn of their unifying context, creating a bleak and otherwise unholy dimension; themes of longing, melancholy and tortured sadomasochism; total, spectacular, irredeemable horniness. Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart was first published around the time that Depeche Mode would have been in the studio recording “Music for the Masses” – coincidence?
Well, yeah. Probably. In the early-mid 80s, it feels like there might have been something in the air. And that something might have had to do with an ongoing moral panic around sex, fuelled by (but far from limited to) the AIDS epidemic.
Is it any surprise we get a glut of stuff coming out from the shadows? If it’s the case that the perpetrators go where you go, do what you do, love who you love … then you’d be forgiven for wanting to check-in with your inner monster over your outer Dr Frankenstein.
Thankfully, what we have here – and see so much across the cultural artefacts of the time – is far less a return of the repressed than a refusal to ever repress it. Defiance went hard in the 80s, be grateful it did.
While I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that either Barker’s novella or “Music for the Masses” is a direct response to the AIDS epidemic – there’s no denying they’re both wonderful examples of a very specific, time-bound gothic impulse. A double, as it were – split aspects of a tendency that starts with the Marquis De Sade, moves via Crowley, Bataille and becomes … well, I’m not sure to be honest. (We do still do goth here in 2025, but sometime after Buffy it all, as with a lot about culture, feels to have become a lot less horny.)
And so my celebration of “Music for the Masses” is also, sort of, a celebration of the libidinal charge of the dark side; the freedom it implies, the diversity of love it allows. Darkwave floor fillers like “Never let me down”, “Nothing” – Killing Joke via Duran Duran – and “Strangelove” – surely the first track on Lady Gaga’s moodboard for The Fame Monster – bop along majestically, unapologetically, fucking huge. “Sacred”, “Pimpf” and “Agent Orange” (a bonus track originally) help embed the atmosphere, rehearsing the theme while elevating the record.
“Music for the Masses” is far from a Frankenstein – the record’s creative vision is far too expertly executed for that. But it is, like the eponymous monster, a whole that’s so much greater than the sum of its parts. And, like LeMarchand’s Box in The Hellbound Heart, it’s a record that has a transportive power – to a place that’s dark, sure, but that’s all the more prepossessing for it.
John Lennon
4/5
Hyperbole finds in “Imagine” a true nemesis. It’s is a song that’s so elemental that it’s difficult to believe it hasn’t always existed (like Auld Lang Syne or Jack and Jill); a song so earnest, direct and vulnerable that hearing it always feels like your own discovery; a song so beloved that even an attack from a cadre of global actors armed with iPhones and fronted by an actual IDF soldier couldn’t sink it. A beautiful song. It’s a shame that it might now best represent a facile gesture concealing an absence of tangible care (or, perhaps, as preface to Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’). But that’s on us, really, not John.
Back to the album, though, and unsurprisingly, perhaps unavoidably, we’re quickly heading downhill. The bluegrass of “Crippled Inside” is annoying in its bit too clever juxtaposition of musical tweeness with lyrical anxiousness. “Jealous Guy” gets us back on track – a song Alex Turner would have loved to write, perhaps has been trying to for the past decade – and “It’s so hard” does a job, but it’s really at “I don’t wanna be a soldier mamma” that my interest is again piqued. It feels like the blueprint for Madchester, for Primal Scream – a band named for Arthur Janov’s therapeutic remedy, which, pleasingly, Lennon was undergoing around the time of writing – for the Bad Seeds … . It’s joyful, urgent, and deadly cool.
“Gimme Some Truth” begins the record’s second side, offering a Weltschmerz-textured reimagining of “Imagine” that feels straight out of the local newspaper’s letters section. I don’t disagree with him. By the time the thunderously trenchant “How do you sleep?” rolls in, we’re really cooking. A diss track for the ages, it’s mean-spirited – but undeniably funky, and likely funny enough to be quickly forgiven (especially if its target technically started it…).
It’s a shame, then, that it’s with the dampest of the album’s squibs that John follows “How do you sleep?”. “How?” – a quarter of the song of its predecessor in so many ways – is a forgettable ramble through a collection of ersatz philosophical aphorisms; not for the first time on this record, it feels a bit too clever.
Album closer, “Oh Yoko!” is, for an album that started with “Imagine”, an appropriately disarming number. On the surface a saccharine pop song, there eddies beneath that sheet of melodic icing sugar a steely sort of poignancy. For a moment, caught in the whimsy, it might feel like all lovers answer to “Oh Yoko!”.
I leave the album that bit better informed as to why John Lennon occupies the space he does in 20th century music. He’s one best songwriters to have ever done it. No hyperbole required.
Air
2/5
I try not to touch the meta of this thing as I go. It’s not fair – or even particularly interesting – to reflect on what I do or don’t think should be in a 1001 list. I’m thankful someone(s) has tried.
I must briefly break my own rule for Air’s “Moon Safari”, as I feel I’m being harsh for the silliest reason. Quite whether it “belongs” here is totally beside the point (if it’s here on this curated list, it belongs). What I’m struggling with is a realisation – a realisation that I’ve been regarding this exercise, without any invitation to, as a “challenge”. And as a result, in encountering an album this completely unchallenging I feel somehow ripped off; suddenly lurching toward hyperboles of the order “who on Earth could ever have any sort of feeling about any of this (except ‘Sexy Boy’ which is and always has been a bop)?”
On another level, the meta thing feels apt. “Moon Safari” sort of does feel like music about music – there’s a curatorial zeal that sits across the songs, so slickly produced and pristinely packaged. I’m hopscotching through a musical museum, being smoothly transported through a range of fleeting feelings by a guide who’s achingly clever, aloof, cool (“French”, in short).
There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t need to be a challenge. It can just be, and that’s great by me.
Garbage
4/5
That Shirley Manson and the rest of Garbage ever found each other is a remarkable story. Serendipity, tragedy and perseverance; it’s an origin story that’s located directly atop a great, heaving fault line in 90s culture.
For me, personally, this record is a bit of a missing link between two of my first musical loves: Nirvana and Linkin Park. The former represented here by, yes, Butch Vig, but also by the swaggering attack of “I’m only happy…”’s first eight bars and plenty of moody moments besides. The latter by the feeling that this is a record born in and around a studio rather than a practice space; a triumph of studied creative process more than spontaneous creative prowess.
As with “Hybrid Theory”, Garbage’s debut packs hooks on top of hooks on top of hooks. And as with Linkin Park, there’s a serious risk that the smell of all that polish would grate and nauseate if not for the rawness and brilliance of the singer in front of it all.
It’s a marvellous pop album; seriously clever and self aware but never aloof or unapproachable.
Penguin Cafe Orchestra
4/5
I remember reading Raymond Tallis’ phenomenological excavation of the human head in “Kingdom of infinite space” maybe 15 years ago, where Tallis articulates the specific absurdity of spit; ok to swallow when it’s rolling around your mouth, but utterly wretched to conceive of repatriating once expectorated into a cup and left to sit for any duration of time at all.
Evidently, some things – and some thoughts – should remain in the head they were born into. Thankfully, “Music From The Penguin Cafe” isn’t one of them.
Simon Jeffe’s delightful album puts me in mind of the more contemporary Rachel’s. Both groups demonstrate common compositional sensibilities – not quite rock, enough to suggest it’s pop, folkish in attitude. And both – through a mix of imagination, craft and talent – are capable of inspiring a dozen emotions in as many minutes.
It’s a joy to be inside the world of the Penguin Cafe; a tremendous feat of creativity that also feels like an analysis, through music, of the spontaneous joys and myriad diversions of a creative mind. And in so far as it really does – as Jeffe’s sort of said, and Fleur definitely did – sound like a tour of the inside of one’s head … it’s not too much to say that Penguin Cafe Orchestra do a job of reinforcing what’s so joyful about being human.
A kingdom of infinite space, indeed. (Just keep the spit stuff to yourself.)
The Saints
4/5
The first thing that surprises me is the horn section. And then, it’s that there’s less than six months between this record and The Sex Pistols’ “Nevermind…”. And then, for about seven songs it’s just that it gets better and better, right until the cataclysmic crescendo of “No, your product”. (Not that I’m suggesting there’s a drop off in quality – far from it.)
This is one of those albums – one that’s an entire genre’s output presented as synecdoche; track after track so completely full of potential for others to unravel. There’s “Know your product” (ska punk), “No, your product” (grunge – Kurt Cobain was a fan of The Saints), International Robots (pop punk, obviously) … whole sub genres sketched out in 3-minute bursts.
Aside from what’s immanent and what it portends, it’s also a bloody brilliant punk record. Tune after tune, stomp after stomp – pound for pound as perfect as a punk record is likely to ever be.
So while they might not have sneered controversial things toward completely safe targets or bopped their way through any bangers wearing occlusive bangs … The Saints could write, and The Saints could play. Maybe better than any of them. “Eternally yours” is punk’s first triumph of substance over style.
Rush
3/5
Serious question, does everyone secretly love Rush?
They’re rocking 3.1 million listeners on Spotify, about the same as the tremendously hyped Fontaines D.C is today … and yet no one has ever mentioned them to me.
This despite the fact that so much of this record is so obviously influential to any number of bands I’ve enjoyed, from the relatively popular Coheed and Cambria to the almost completely obscure Capsule (go listen to “Cobalt Connection” and tell me the riff 30-seconds in isn’t a second cousin of “Tom Sawyer”’s most brooding bit of guitar).
Anyway, no great issue. I’ve found Rush perhaps exactly when I was supposed to. This is a highly enjoyable record that gets better every spin. The playing is phenomenal* while always rewarding the song; the vocals are pretty daft but plenty charming (so much personality!).
Rush appeals to the geek in me, I guess. Let’s keep it our little secret.
*On that: I feel like the fact Rush are known as such prodigious players was part of why I avoided them for so long. It could be said that much of my listening life so far has been characterised by a youngster’s mistrust of anything all that technically adroit (following a simple logic that playing from the heart means, necessarily, bypassing one’s finer motor skills). To now have released that hang-up and realised there’s a whole universe of excellent music out there for me to discover is a source of no small volume of bittersweet contentment.
Dexys Midnight Runners
5/5
There’s a meme that does the rounds occasionally, pulled from Family Guy. AFAIK (it’s a meme, who knows how far it’s drifted from its original context?) patriarch Peter explains The Godfather as “insisting upon itself” – a criticism that does a laudable job of sounding comically faux-intellectual while also sort of nailing it.
Because yeah, you do want The Godfather to be self-serious. There’s little mirth to be extracted from the mafia (see: Mickey Blue Eyes) – so for the whole enterprise of The Godfather to even stand a chance of working, it has to insist upon itself (see: best director wins and nominations).
With that in mind, it’s a bit of a shame that the Dexys of “Don’t stand me down” initially seem to be guilty of insisting upon themselves. Gone is the triumphant buoyancy of “Too Rye Ay” and its anthemic choruses; in its place a mopey-toned, albeit sonically sophisticated, collection of intriguing but ultimately unrewarding, overly esoteric musical essays.
It’s a fruitless first listen – no one last wild waltz – but I steady myself, it’s only a first listen. Underwhelmed as I am, it’s an album I’ll return to.
And return to.
And return to.
And return to.
Five spins in and I’m comforted to find my favoured collection of wonderfully esoteric, sophisticated musical essays is still holding up. The pastiche elements, spoken word breakouts and musical quotations – some of them self-referential – add to the sense of this being a properly postmodernist, academic piece of work. Gloriously so, I come to conclude.
But it is “work”; make no mistake, you have to bring a lot to this record before you start getting something out of it. For me, that’s not a point around which to be critical – I’m happy to put a couple of yards in my side to meet a band who’ve traversed entire landscapes to find themselves on the ground that they stand. But I can, equally, see how a listener might feel short-changed; not everyone can be expected to extend Dexys such grace, nor should they be. (I gather that Kevin Rowland’s efforts in promoting this album on its release wouldn’t have exactly helped manage anyone’s expectations around its contents, too.)
Anyway, 8 minutes into “This is what she likes” the band rouses. It’s been a variable, captivating seven minutes previous – we’ve had a spoken word skit, a warbling vocal solo, some signature Celtic-rock-cum-blue-eyed-soul, a bit of piano, a couple of ruminations on poppy ostinatos, harmonies, tempo shifts … lots. Enough that you might be forgiven for thinking there’s not much more left to be done. And yet. For anyone who’s ever struggled to put into words a feeling, it’s familiar territory. There’s not a runway long enough – you’ll keep talking forever, whether mellifluously or tediously, if you need to. But by minute 11 we’re all there. We’re dancing, we’re smiling, we’re sharing something. It’s what she’s like.
And it’s clearly, clearly Dexys’ masterpiece.
3/5
Grateful.
Devolution.
Understood.
Brevity.
Inventive.
Fun.
Q: is this not a great album?
A: yes. Thanks, Devo.
Beastie Boys
5/5
The process by which ideas, observations and sensations are sublimated to raw materials, reorganised – either loosely, or through focussed theming – and then leveraged into singular narratives and innovative, surprising rhymes lists among the 20th century’s greatest contributions to music – up there with sampling, jazz, funk, hardcore punk and … ah hold on, I see what I’ve done there. Anyway, it’s a poetry – in some respects it’s maybe poetry’s final movement.
Like poets, hip hop artists are necessarily eclectic. They’re also – the good ones at least – magicians. Skilled producers who can move a mood, force action through distraction, delight through sleight of hand.
For all of those things, Beastie Boys are among the all time greats. They’re magicians so skilled they can sustain the illusion that you, listener, have any stake at all in a record that’s essentially three men (and some friends) locked in hyperactive conversation with a thousand influences and points of reference. They can put a run of seven songs together that magpies – confidently, competently and never condescendingly – from six genres (and genres as distinct from one and other as hardcore punk, funk and rock are at that) without it ever feeling effortful or trite.
Ill Communication is a fantastic record. It’s just about every adjective you could throw at it – jagged, smooth, accessible, pretentious, urgent, relaxed – and a few more that the English language can’t quite accommodate besides (do we need a word for “something that’s so cool to behold that it makes you want to put on sunglasses?”).
A true head bopper of an album from beginning to end, it’s a cohesive creative work that manages to find time and space for so many changes in mood and pace; the perfect home, really, for a song that belongs on any mixtape of the 20th century – “Sabotage”.
The feeling here is that the good stuff just spills out of them. An illusion, surely – just that being that cool must take some work, let alone the rest of it – but it’s one I want to believe all the same.
(Side note: Is there a compassionate deity who can boast more bangers as Bodhissatva?)
LCD Soundsystem
2/5
On occasion I’m visited by my ghost of contrarianism past. The uniform of fringe, band merch, chainsaw belt buckle and skinny jeans protects a thin skin; he’s unconvinced by any cultural paraphernalia that managed to get popular – especially so if it did so without him having felt on the ground level of it.
The fringe long since battled back to respectability and the fit of jeans finally allowing for a less restricted gait, we have space now to reflect. Stubbornness in youth, one can surmise, is mostly fine, just so long as it dissipates before it arrests development. To never let go or never let in are equal tragedies.
To be given the chance to return to the primal scene of your obstinacy is, from that perceptive, a real privilege. And so my thoughts are buoyant. What talents did I overlook? What feeling did I allow to sail by? What dances – I usually preferred to stand outside and smoke, bless – did I fail to dance?
Well, what a shame. I’m so bored by this record that I’ll likely never get to find out. It rumbles along pleasantly enough, takes the odd risk, but it seems to lack a certain spine. It’s a mash up of genre mash ups gone by, only with the most interesting parts of the portmanteaus filed down to inoffensive nubs. Electro pop without the pomp, new wave without the cool.
Sometimes I suppose growth means just giving things a chance – and other times, it’s knowing when to quit. I managed to stop smoking. That’s got to count for something.
Keith Jarrett
4/5
I was often overwhelmed by this record.
Musically, it is sublime. So much so that I feel unqualified to say too much more about it; if it sits on a shelf above most “greatest of all time” albums, then it’s several floors above many of the records I hold closest.
Its story is utterly ridiculous. It’s not so much the heroism of Keith “conquering” the circumstances that appeals to me; it’s the idea that so much had to go wrong for something so perfect to ever have been given a chance to emerge in the first place. To put it briefly: you’d need to be in some sort of mood to deliver a performance like this.
And speaking of – Keith himself; his powers of articulation, his freedom of expression. Can you imagine being able to not just take yourself to these soaring, aching places – but also to be able to describe them so poignantly, in the moment, to anyone lucky enough to be sitting within earshot?
And then, the questions. I find myself, in the gaps between phrases, thinking about intimacy; the limits of self-expression; the endless potential of music to create something in a listener, and the extent to which each time a song is listened to something new is created.
I think about how it is that, from that perspective, a song is never really finished; it’s always in flux, reacting to the conditions it’s being introduced into, taking on new dimensions.
And at point – listener and creator joined across space and time by something that they share – it’s manifestly obvious that this idea of “improvisation” isn’t a novelty. It’s the whole point.
PJ Harvey
3/5
Imagine a maze built tall with dense, lush conifers; exciting surprises tucked artfully behind corners that themselves seem to leap out from nowhere. A maze that teases its enigma proudly; inviting its participants to take an elevated view, to admire its complexity from on high – a maze whose architects are confident that the moment you descend from the vantage of a verdant horizon, you’ll again be scratching around, none the wiser as to how to locate the core.
And now imagine that finding the treasure at the guarded centre is the least of your worries – you can’t work out how to actually get in.
“Rid of me” represents a sort of musical purgatory. I was listening to this album only recently, the day after Steve Albini died – and while I enjoyed it, bristled to it, let it wash over me … I never felt myself washed away by it. And that’s flustered me; precisely because I can tell there’s so much in there for me to delight at.
Whatever it is, though, I can’t grasp at it.
For an album that does so much to trace the outline of a thoroughly frustrated mind … maybe that’s about right. It’s a niggle I might never rid myself of. See you next year.
Supergrass
4/5
My autocorrect is utterly convinced that I’m trying to type “Superclass”. And, you know what? Fair enough. In a more just world, we’d autocorrect the entire 90s so that Supergrass were de rigueur everyone’s favourite band.
“I Should Coco” is, unfortunately for us today, that good an album. The first half’s electric eclecticism welds post-punk’s tuneful passions (Buzzcocks, Gang of Four) to buoyant dancehall rhythms with such singular conviction that comparisons to Queen feel within reach (not that Supergrass sound like Queen; more that they’re able to do pretty much whatever they want and do it well).
Using side two to showcase, literally, “a whole new side to the band” feels like the sort of meta Supergrass would revel in, so I’ll continue to think it a purposeful act of expectation subversion.
“I should Coco” did, of course, actually do very well in its time. “Alright” was a hit big enough to have left its mark on a six year old me – certainly the grimaces in the video did, anyway (Fleur attests to the same) – and Supergrass’ career panned out in probably exactly the way it was supposed to. There were awards, major songwriting accolades and subsequent chart successes that seemed to develop in parallel with their initial audience (“Moving” is a gorgeous song; you can well imagine a kid who once pogoed along to “Caught by the Fuzz” listening to it on the Sunday morning kids football run).
But even still … you can’t help but think the collective memory has forgotten them that bit too quickly. Victims, perhaps, of never having been in the same tabloid-courting rock n’roll star mould as some of their supernova contemporaries.
Victims of their own Superclass, if you like.
Black Sabbath
5/5
Between the concepts of the “big bang” and Freud’s “primal scene” there are some pleasing symmetries. Among them, there’s the implication that all that now is was once “one” – a one that was both the impossibly expansive potential of everything that could ever be, and also, weirdly, this. This narrow now.
I guess a “narrow now” might have been what Birmingham would have felt like in the 60s, too. While down the road a cultural revolution was in full swing; for the Midlands and the north it was a bit more kitchen sink. Some angry men writing angular, spiky things … but a fair few more in the foundries and factories.
In one of them, a sheet metal factory, Tony Iommi was to lose the tips of a couple of fingers; initially delaying his progress as a guitarist, that is before a couple of bespoke prostheses were developed … and Tony realised that detuning the guitar might help with corralling the strings.
A few years later, Sabbath’s darker, “heavier” sound clicked magnificently into place. “Paranoid”, the band’s second album, is perhaps their defining statement. A collection of songs so absolutely brilliant, original and audacious that the only sensible reply, here in 2025, has to be “thank you”.
(A full list of thank yous – for Maiden, for Mayhem, for Converge and Cursed – would be daft, but I’ll say that this listen through was particularly enlightening of the debt the entire 90s counterculture owes to Sabbath, too. While it’s fairly obvious how influential Sabbath was to RATM, I hadn’t ever really considered how it is that grunge might be the sound of a load of young American musicians trying to rescue and revive what they loved about Sabbath from a group who’d pushed their Sabbath in another direction entirely. Or to put it another way, a clear Sabbath influence is about the only thing that Nirvana’s “Bleach” and GnR’s “Appetite for Destruction” share … and that feels significant.)
While there’s no doubting that Iommi’s gift for a riff would have seen his band right – especially when considered in context of one as individually world-beating as Sabbath were; let alone Ozzy, for god’s sake – it’s at least in some respect to the lost fingertips that we owe the “heavy” bit. (And when I say “we”, I really do mean “history”.)
For psychoanalysts and physicists alike, there are no accidents. And here, at Sabbath’s big bang, we find the primal scene of all that’s heavy. It’s a simply incredible record. Thanks.
Ms. Dynamite
2/5
Ms. Dynamite’s 2002 moment occupies a funny place in my memory. She’s sort of right on the cusp of a crucial moment in my listening life – when music went from the received wisdom of the top 40 and whatever was in my mum’s car (invariably Texas, Dido) to something I could have a stake in all of my own; something to explore, to guard (I was a kid!) and to make for myself.
It’s for that reason that I greet this record so warmly. Certainly, it’s aged well: the “dy-na-mi-tee-hee” is still just as iconic, “It takes more” still just as resonant (women certainly haven’t stopped being underestimated in the past 23 years). It’s fun to hear “Brother” too and think that it’s about Akala – between a Mercury prize winning daughter and a discourse defining son, mum and dad must be very proud.
“A little deeper” isn’t an album with deep cuts I’ll soon return to, but I was glad to be given an opportunity to reflect on just how big a breakthrough Ms. Dynamite’s was. A seismic moment in British music history (one I was too busy listening to Finch’s “What it is to Burn” for the 300th time that day to appreciate at the time).
Derek & The Dominos
2/5
I’ve spent a lifetime – or at least a lot of one – being deeply mistrusting of Eric Clapton. I think my first interaction was via an ad for a live CD, one where “Layla” was the centrepiece. Something about the dude just didn’t sit right for me.
Over the years, I developed that opinion – not through intentional exposure to his music … but rather more begrudgingly. Clapton was a fact of musical life, yet something about his whole deal felt disingenuous, inauthentic.
And here we are again. A couple of exceptions aside – the guitar work in “Little Wing” especially is fresh, exciting and unexpected – this is another mass of Clapton I can’t get along with.
Not because it’s bad, not really – but because I just don’t believe it. I don’t believe what I’m hearing loves anything as much as it loves itself. And that’s an ugliness it’s hard to look past.
Charles Mingus
4/5
It took me a while – and a father-in-law – to find the piece of classical music I heard stalking through this record. It’s Grieg’s “Peer Gynt, Op. 46: I. Morning Mood” – listen to “Track C-Group Dancers” (2m 37s) for a runaway cassette tape meltdown rendition of Grieg’s famous motif. Anyway.
I like jazz. I like difficult genius. And smack bang in the middle of that – and just about everything else – is Mingus. And what a Mingus this is. A nebula of sound; textures, moods erupting and enveloping, ebbing, flowing, stopping just as sharply as they started. Mingus drops better ideas than most have ever had (certainly I’ve ever had) within about 14-seconds of forming them. It’s heady – both in the sense it’s celebratory (the playing is utterly immense), and in the sense it’s cerebral (to the composer, chapeau).
Anyway. I remember a painting of a fox from my childhood. In it, the fox is standing over a pile of rescued items – crisp packets, cigarette butts, cans of Coke sort of thing. And every time I’d look at the painting I’d notice a new detail, not because there were necessarily that many to notice … but because the image itself had a way of hiding things from you (or revealing things, depending on your perspective).
It might have been Grieg this time, but I’ll bet it’ll be something else next.
Magazine
5/5
I’m sure I really enjoyed this album. In fact, if I really try, I can sort of remember half-pogoing around to it in the kitchen; comparing its release dates to those of Television; reading up on the split from Buzzcocks, trying to listen for clues as to why, etc. There were moments – during “Definitive Gaze”, “Shot by Both Sides”, and “Motorcade” especially – that I reflected on how big a miss this had been from my listening life to date. Superb songs that clearly enjoyed their pretensions – but, and this is the sense I got, only in the name of pushing this “punk” thing along a bit.
And then, putting the girls to bed, I popped on the album’s closing track, “Parade”.
And when I left the bedroom, I encouraged Fleur into the kitchen where I popped on the album’s closing track, “Parade”.
And every night since – a couple of weeks now – I’ve popped on the album’s closing track, “Parade”. (Pardon the repetition; like any infatuated subject, just typing the name of my beloved delivers a thrill.)
The track hits me in a number of sweet spots – the slowly building opening bass line that reminds me of Stone Roses’ “Adored”; the plaintive vocals and curious lyrics, sounding like a haunted Tim Booth; the goth-inflected feeling of “Night Time” era Killing Joke melding with a sax solo; the guitars, orbiting the action from some phased out, flange-drenched outpost.
“Real Life” is an excellent record. Filled to the brim with thoughtful art punk that sounds, all too often, like a window into a time when people actually could make a living from doing things like this – getting each other to move, to sing along, surprising each other with clever tricks. And it’s there that “Parade” really hits me. It’s that feeling that I’m hearing a step out beyond the bounds of what’s accepted and toward something else completely; nothing less than the introduction of a new way to speak.
And as it turns out, it’s never too late to hear something like that.
Sister Sledge
4/5
An astonishing collection of timeless pop songs. There’s a sort of paradox going on here: while it’d be wonderful to be hearing the songs on this record for the first time as a whole right now … it’d be a shame to have never before heard them (and “used” them – a song like “We Are Family” works as hard semiotically as it does sonically; it is essential cultural shorthand). Fabulous, and an immediate hit in my family too.
Burning Spear
3/5
“Who was Marcus Garvey?” was my first question. And after I’d found out, the next was “did I miss a reference to him in ‘BlacKkKlansman’?” Yes, I did.
This record – as well as providing a much-needed history lesson on an influential, albeit slightly outre thinker in the domain of racial politics – has some of the most buzzing dub bass I’ve had the pleasure to enjoy. It’s a total feast of low end frequencies; whole songs, and often very enjoyable ones, hung off the robust framework of a rumbling bass note.
Mercifully, this album is far more than “one note”. It’s a thought-provoking, Wikipedia-visit-inspiring collection of songs that advances its perspective with ruthless conviction and artistic vision.
Tom Waits
2/5
It’s always challenging to hear something authentically outsider – especially when the thing it’s outside of is, well, not your inside. I’m not American; what I know of its myths and autofictions I know from books, TV and film. So as much as I think I recognise this America – Lou Reid, Jim Jarmusch, bits of Delillo – I do so, mostly, thanks to secondhand accounts.
Certainly, there’s a literary quality to “Heartattack and Vine”. Songs like “‘Til The Money Runs Out” and “Downtown” are richly atmospheric, undeniably arresting. There’s a hardboiled feel to the storytelling, and I can see the appeal of Waits as a detective-slash-flaneur of America’s gritty backstreet theatre.
But ultimately, this album fails to totally register for me. At times I wince, even cringe as our detective assumes the perspectives of his marks … and sounds more like 90s-era William S Boroughs (read: pitiable) than anything like the man in his pomp.
It’s entirely possible that I lack imagination, that I’m just too other to the others on display here to get it. But by the time the record’s done, I’m afraid I’m left feeling more like I’ve just watched “Bad Santa” than heard a beat poet.
The Beach Boys
5/5
Brian Wilson’s voice means something to me. I’ve never really known what, to be honest – I’ve just always enjoyed it, enjoyed emoting to it.
He has this knack for combining moods and feelings in the most faithful way. How a song like “‘Til I Die” can feel like flying, floating and sinking all at the same time. The palpable ache to the song’s opening melancholy is a familiar feature of Brian Wilson’s songs; being inside a losing struggle to name a feeling. It’s a triumph, then, when the song arrives at its conclusion: a list of things to be grateful for.
From that perspective, it’s tempting – as it is with many aspects of “Surf’s Up” – to read “‘Till I Die” as the denouement of an arc begun on Pet Sounds. If “I guess I wasn’t made for these times” is a song that peers Janus-faced backward and forward in search for sanctum, then “‘Till I Die” is accepting the here and now for what it can be.
There’s a ribbon of ecological and political consciousness that runs through “Surf’s Up”; “Don’t Go Near The Water” – a song that slaps; is that Al Jardine breaking into a rap? – sets the tone, while “Feel Flows” and “A Day in the Life of a Tree” have a more spiritual, pantheistic feel to them. “Student Demonstration Time” honky tonks it’s way around the sort of subject matter history probably didn’t need the extended Wilson family’s thoughts on. Yet while it occasionally threatens to fall into cringe – while one might imagine Jim Morrison, at a push, describing “the winds of change fanned into flame”, I cannot force myself to imagine him quipping about “a new degree, the Bachelor of Bullets” – it’s just about rescued by the combined compositional talents and strong artistic sensibilities of the Beach Boys.
The album’s closer, “Surf’s Up” is, simply, a flawless piece of music. Whispers, moogs, horns, glockenspiel, car keys – a sonic sculpture where each and every potential has been explored before paring it back to a fully realised form. (Unsurprisingly given its accomplishment, it took a decade to refine and record.) By the time the final minute has crashed over me – the most gorgeous, most sumptuous collapse into harmony I’ve ever heard – I’m edified, elated, wiped out and better for it.
On the whole, “Surf’s Up” might be my favourite Beach Boys record. Its wobbly moments and goofy tangents don’t hamper or distract from the album’s treasures so much as work to elevate them. These are still all good songs, after all – it’s just that some of them are among the most wonderful ever recorded.
Which brings me back to Brian Wilson’s voice. I suppose what it means to me now, reviewing this record in celebration of his life, and always has is something secret and specific to me. A feeling I’ll always struggle to name. Thank you, Brian.
Jimmy Smith
2/5
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
3/5
In 2009, Yeah Yeah Yeahs – along with the rest of that scene of NY “indie sleaze” bands – no longer owned cool. They were an established, respected group; high enough up festival bills to be legible on the backs of merch from 30 yards out.
“Heads will roll” hit the moment perfectly; a cantankerous jam that demanded to be danced to, remixed, danced to, remixed and repeat. It did a fine job of responding, with authenticity and in artistic good faith, to the general direction indie was going in – more prominent synthesisers, less dramatic in-song dynamics. A shift across indie music that, looking back, was the start of a nudging away from attitude and toward vibe – HEALTH, The xx, Washed Out (a gentle metamorphosis that would reach its apotheosis in 2012 with Beach House’s “Bloom”).
It’s been 15 years since all that; so I’m pleasantly surprised that “Heads will roll” sounds just as exciting today as it did when it was first released. And “Zero”, album opener, sounds even better. All fantastic signs that I’m in for a long overdue sitting-down-with “It’s Blitz!” in full (for better or worse, I was listening to Animal Collective on repeat in 2009).
Well, not so much, in the end. It’s Good! … but aside from the hits and a couple of others (“Dragon Queen”, especially) this is a pedestrian group of songs; fun enough but never quite getting to a height you suspect that, with just a little extra risk, it could reach.
If “Heads will roll” was among the early triumphs of the attitude–vibe continuum, then “It’s Blitz!” might, in its own small way, have been among its first victims. A good album that’s somewhere between a scream and a yawn.
Lights up, indie, the party’s over.
Baaba Maal
2/5
I’m trying to give this record and its songs a Google, and it’s interesting how many of those searches just point me back to the 1001albumsgenerator website. I can’t, for example, easily grasp what “Sy Sawande” means – but I can see what another reviewer thought of its “discursive reach”. Good for them.
This record floated by in a pleasant enough way. I’m occasionally reminded of Electric Fields, a contemporary act I’d do well to check back in with. And the aforementioned “Sy Sawande” inspires a return listen – there’s a tenderness to the track that communicates regardless of how little else I understand of it.
A lovely collection of songs from, by all accounts, a quite remarkable man.
Waylon Jennings
3/5
That Waylon Jennings could maintain a career as a recording artist and performer while wearing so much plot armour is worthy of the deepest respect.
It’s fitting, really, that the 20th century’s most notable musical survivor would go on to play such a pivotal role in keeping a receding musical tradition alive. And while all that honky tonk isn’t totally to my taste, there’s something genuinely charming about the country music outlaws – rage against the winnowing machine? – and their sticking it to the Nashville man.
This is a solid collection of songs that – and one presumes by design – sounds like it’s beaming in from a time long before it was recorded. And as silly as I’ll admit to finding its themes, Jennings’ baritone keeps the sweet molasses from getting overwhelming. Surely – this is a man who launched a thousand parodies. Yet you’d struggle to ever call anything here a joke.
With something of this quality as its guarantor, honky tonk forever lives to fight another day.
808 State
5/5
Has there ever been so compelling an eruption of musical talents as Manchester in the 80s? 808 State – just about squeezing into the decade in November 1989; this album’s lead single was charting in the U.K. the day I was born – here give the blueprint for an entire generation (at least) of bedroom musicians and big room aspirants alike to follow.
Bass out, break in, vocals hover, beat syncopates, all stop, bass splash back in solo, and then all back in together on the beat. (If they ever lost an ostinsto, you’d suspect it’s because it was already making its way to the Balearics.)
As to the quality of the songs, I just find this record so intractably cool that it hardly matters. I’m confident they’re good songs, maybe ever great … but when, for example, the glassy synths in “Ancodia” meet that sampled, swirled guitar lick and then combine with the house beat I’m totally disarmed of any critical faculty (anything capable of more sophisticated phrasings than “fuck that’s cool”, anyway).
Luckily, this is a record full of “fuck that’s cool.” The crunchy, video game drawl and rhythmic contortions of “Cobra Bora”; “Pacific 202” and its era-presaging call to arms; the multilayered textures of “Donkey Doctor” working the beat up and down simultaneously; “Magical Dream” – a truly transportive piece of sound design – being exactly as lush and oneiric as its title promises.
Whether it’s the futurism of the synths or the fact I’m personally anchored in time by virtue of this record’s release date, I’m put in mind of Mark Fisher’s reading of “hauntology”. Fisher’s spooky sounding concept describes a feeling that we’re being haunted by the ghosts of futures that never came to pass.
The ghosts in the drum machines here still feel ready to pounce though; and while the party might have been over for a while … you wouldn’t bet against the repressed returning one day.
Fuck, that’d be cool.
Joni Mitchell
2/5
It’s easily the most swayed I’ve been by a Joni Mitchell album … but that’s not saying much, unfortunately.
There’s a sort of guilt, maybe shame that attaches itself to my inability to enjoy the obviously brilliant songs of Joni Mitchell. It’s nothing personal; I find much of that slice of seventies West coast boho counter cultural ra-ra to be disingenuous and, to use the parlance of today, icky.
It’s an unpopular opinion – perhaps even an actually wrong one, they do happen – but I’ve never heard a Joni Mitchell song I wanted to listen to again. And so while I don’t find this record offensive, neither do I find it even the remotest bit charming, beguiling, intriguing or, ultimately, enjoyable.
The Smiths
5/5
It feels like the right time of the year for The Smiths. A cold July; wet out, sky slow to brighten – daylight hours an impressionist vista of bruised purples and blue, jagged clouds bisecting the occasional window of pale blue sky.
I’m projecting onto the weather a melancholy that this album is more than capable of communicating come rain or shine … at best it’s a lazy on my part (pathetic fallacy, hack!). At worst, unchecked, it’s a risk I’ll ignore everything that’s joyous about “The Queen is Dead”.
About that …
First things first, “There is a light that never goes out”. A song I might have known since the age of 10 but had never fully clicked with until feeling legitimately lovesick when first getting together with Fleur (“getting together” over “dating” because that’s what it was; decisive). I remember craving, viscerally, that five note run; sitting on a bed in a Helsinki hotel (Kamppi, soviet brutalist facade) listening to it through the trebly speakers of a company laptop like the violins might eventually give me answers to feelings I couldn’t yet corral into questions.
That song would be performed as our first dance, wonderfully, by members of the band I was in at the time. In the memory of that moment, surrounded by family and friends (and interrupted, charmingly, by our scene-stealing daughter) there is nothing but happiness.
While “There is a light…” might have the sort of emotional dexterity to suit any number of occasions (comfortably handling a spectrum ranging melancholy—celebratory), it hadn’t until now occurred to me how perfectly “Cemetery Gates” recalls the day I met Fleur, July 22 2013:
“A dreaded sunny day, so I met you at the cemetery gates. Keats and Yeats are on your side.”
On that day, a sunny one early in July 2013, walking around the cemetery nearby Old Street, it was Blake I’d visited. I told Fleur about it. As first impressions go, it perhaps wasn’t as slickly intellectual as I’d been aiming for; I got the (unpaid, crucially) job she was interviewing me for, anyway. Funny how nearby those two songs sit on a single record – the sort of sweet cosmic coincidence that, just now being realised, totally revitalises songs on a record I’ve listened to hundreds of times.
I spend a lot of this record – and the multiple times I return to it – feeling grateful. Grateful in the first instance for the opportunity to reminisce that a collection of songs like this creates (“Frankly, Mr Shankly” catapults me back to year 11; “Bigmouth strikes again” to a musty practice room in Croydon). Grateful for each of those beats in a life; milestones to which, and no matter to what small degree, those songs are linked. Grateful too for what’s still to be revealed, what comes next (Tabby, it must be noted, likes “Some girls…” – a song admittedly primed for bedtime, “send me your pillow, the one that you dream on” – in a very serious way).
And it’s there that you sort of have to stop thinking about it as just a record. It’s something embedded. Concrescent. Something you grow with, and something that grows with you. At once a scrapbook, an invitation and a reminder to never take any of it for granted. A light that never goes out.
Mudhoney
4/5
There are a lot of boring things a person could say about this record. And you can bet they’ve all been said, ad nauseum across magazines, message boards and subreddits for almost 30 years, too. So I’ll try to avoid the obvious pitfalls associated with talking about “a big influence on one of the 20th century’s biggest influencers” and focus on this album purely for what it is. And that is: the essential link between Nirvana and Bunbury, Western Australia.
That’s right. The lineage is clear. Kim Salmon’s Scientists write and record a clutch of early 80s “punk blues”, which somehow finds its way to the other WA, and plants something like the blueprint to grunge in the heads of a few angry young Seattlites. They run The Scientist’s “Swampland” back through The Stooges and Sabbath, release Superfuzz – and bang, the rest is Nevermind.
“Superfuzz Bigmuff” fkn rocks, man. It’s sludgy, ugly, primordial; a coelacanth of a record. “Sweet young thing”, “Mudride”, “No one has”; songs seemingly regurgitated by a bottom-dwelling living fossil rigged with a reinforced bite force (and an appetite for stray fingers).
And just like our lobe-finned friend, what’s most vital about Mudhoney seems to exist outside of the usual parameters of evolutionary continuity. Lineage, legacy, whatever – here and now, this still feels like mud, grunge’s true currency, slung at mottled, bare skin.
It’s abandon, really. An abandonment that doesn’t worry about getting fixed to a particular point in time – and accidentally transcend it entirely.
Arcade Fire
2/5
Oh, dear. It’s 2025 and all this bloviating baroquery – songs that sounded so clear-minded and agenda-complemingly progressive 20 years ago; part of the soundtrack to, no need to whisper it, change – sounds sickly-pretentious to the point of hostile-facetious.
Not strictly Arcade Fire’s fault – though lighting the path for the nightmare of stomp-clap-hey, a subgenre of indie so indulgently anodyne that it killed guitar music for the best part of a generation, sort of might have been – but all the same … “Funeral” now sounds like just that, only it’s millennial optimism we’re grieving.
I didn’t like this record. It was almost so many things but not quite anything – “The Black Parade” without energy; Dexys Midnight Runners without charm (nothing here comes even close to DMR’s “This is What She’s Like”) … ultimately, a fitting soundtrack to our squandered opportunity for, whisper it now, change.
Deerhunter
3/5
15 years I’ve been meaning to actually sit and listen to this album, fifteen. I had friends, acquaintances I suppose, who swore it was the second coming of something. “Deerhunter” I’d hear time and again as we talked about bands all night, danced a bit, smoked a lot of cigarettes, pretended we were across each other’s book recommendations. It was usually The Bird, or that venue behind it where the bigger acts would perform (Machinedrum, Lapalux, OneOhTrixPointNever) – the name escapes me. Always interesting nights; conversations that you’d be all in on, half out of it, in between and in the middle of. People you’d see in new lights, under different lights, in new circumstances, in the background. And always, always horrific mornings after. Ones you’d recover from, but maybe only just. Fifteen years. Wow.
Anyway, there’s a record on. It’s good, yeah, who did you say it was by again? Oh yeah, Deerhunter, I just couldn’t quite hear it properly that’s all, yeah. It’s good this, I’ve been saying so for weeks. The second coming of something, surely.
George Harrison
3/5
Is George Harrison history’s most talented other bloke on the stage? Judging by this record – which is several shades more nuanced and textured than anything Dave Grohl, for example, has managed – the answer would be “yeah, just about”.
This is a lovely record; a little over-generous in its articulation, perhaps, but who can begrudge a creatively constipated man his musical Metamucil? (“All things must pass”, indeed.)
What you get from this record – and, to be fair, what you get from Lennon and McCartney’s solo efforts too – is a real sense of George’s singular personality. A fabulous songwriter, a fondly regarded character, and a happy-clappy-sappy chap.
And for all that, there’s no Beatle I’d rather sit beside at the local pond.
Johnny Cash
4/5
The audience – whose caterwauling would indicate they’re being held captive by Cash’s charisma just as much as by the actual law – whoops notably a few times throughout this record. “The green, green grass of home” gets a sentimental, spontaneous applause; June Carter’s gravely attack in verse two of “Jackson” inspires some audible excitement; there are titters, I think, through the whole of “Flushed from the bathroom of your heart”. But the big one, for me, is the “wooo!” won by Johnny for killing a man in Reno “just to watch him die.”
For a long time I’ve wondered what’s behind the longevity of Cash. It might be that his songs, sparse and direct, are the absolute embodiment of keeping it simple; or, on the flip side, that his talents go so far beyond those typically expected of a musician that he could stand as an important figure in a number of fields. What he’s doing is equal parts literary, historical, sociological, folkish and comedic – a special and refined artistry.
So while my incarceration in this challenge might be voluntarily, it’s a pleasure to join the ranks of the late 60’s wrong-uns for a run through Johnny’s “idiot sheet”. My conclusion: this is a timeless collection of songs performed in a place where time is the ultimate punishment – a subtle symbolism that amplifies every intensity of the material, lionising the character at the centre of it all in the process.
An experience that delivers you back to the moment every single time you play it. Johnny’s moment, forever.
Calexico
4/5
I’ve never been to the American desert, but I feel like I have. In my mind’s eye, the Road Runner speeds through establishing shots from Breaking Bad while Carlos Castaneda converses with the talking dog from that episode of The Simpsons where Homer hits the habanero too hard.
My hyperreal American desert didn’t have a soundtrack – until now, the “meep meep” was fated to echo through the canyons like the snap of a bullet from a Salamanca sidearm. Enter Calexico.
I was quick to jump to comparing the indie elements of this record (“Not even Stevie Nicks…”) to Death Cab, Bright Eyes and the ilk … but even then I knew I was missing the point. That’s part of it, sure – but to let my summation of this record sit there would be the equivalent of spending a single night by the campfire and claiming to have tamed the wild west’s great outdoors. There’s just way more to this album: cinematic cuts (“Black Heart”, “No Doze”), songs that flicker with a delicate intensity (“Woven Birds”, “Pepita”), cantina jams (“Guero Canelo”, “Attack El Robot! Attack!”).
It’s nothing short of a psychogeography – the sound of a desert overrunning; spilling beyond its physical bounds and into that unknowable space where only symbols survive.
“Feast of Wire” – a curious record that, in turn, rewards a listener’s curiosity – is the sound of myth brought to life. Fantastic.
Adam & The Ants
4/5
I’ve listened to this album a good six times now; a couple of the songs a dozen times over. And honestly, I still couldn’t tell you whether I like it or not.
Obviously, “Ant Music” is a bona fide bop. “Feed Me To the Lions” is a worthy earworm (and, if I’m reading it correctly, a wounded ‘fuck you’ to creepy old Malcom McLaren). But then for every serviceable bit of new wave (“Dog Eat Dog”, “The Human Beings”, the title track) there’s an odd, slightly annoying shanty or something that you can’t wait to be done (“Jolly Roger”, “Los Rancheros” … though I do have to admit to begrudgingly enjoying the latter on its fifth go around; the melody sounds enough like the hymn “Lamb of God” to give me a laugh).
This album feels like an essential bridge between the art punk of the late 70s and the hyper stylised, aesthetically pruned pop of the 80s – validation of the idea that the DIY approach offered a viable route to creative product for artists beyond punk.
But it’s not posterity that wins me over in the end; it’s the cover. Gazing again at its “from the feed” array, it dawns on me. I’ve struggled to arrive at an opinion simply because you cannot understand Adam and the Ants without reckoning with Adam’s made-up face. The “look” is at least half of it – if you can’t manage your way through that, you’re only ever listening to the record with one earphone in.
Adam and the Ants – an ultimately daft range of personas projected onto an assembly of talented musicians – must have looked a lot like permission to push it. And not in the snotty way that punk had – instead in a way that allowed a person to be heart on the sleeve sincere one second, Jolly Roger brandishing the next.
Without the visual panto, this is a confusing collection of songs. But factor the performance in (as the cover does – it’s from a taping of them rehearsing for a TV spot) and it’s a collection of songs designed to confuse.
And those are two very different things.
Blood, Sweat & Tears
2/5
Big heavy thumping clumsy rock n’roll n’all that jazz. Once I’d finished the record – or, really, once it had finished with me – I remembered the Satie at the top and had a genuine chuckle. It’s a bit of very well done fun (though I might have had a cringe at some of the vocal intonations). Che-yeah! 2.5.
David Bowie
3/5
A few thoughts flash across my mind as we listen to this record. My 18-month old son’s immediate bopping along points to something; my immediate recognising of “Time” though I can’t place why is another something; the significance of the clear artistic confidence on display throughout is a couple of somethings. I can’t quite develop the thoughts though, not when there’s always a bigger moon to eclipse them. Fleur loves the piano on “Lady Grinning Soul”.
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
3/5
Neil Young’s always been around. He’s been that spectral character with those lyrics that were referenced in that letter. Or that mercurial artist who would perform at my honours thesis supervisors’ birthday parties. Or this curmudgeon-guy who said stuff about illegal downloads or the quality of vinyl or something. For me, he’s been shorthand for “I’m a serious person” for as long as I’ve been a conscious one.
Which is all to say – with “Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere”, I finally have a chance to put to rest another absolutely ridiculous suite of assumptions I’ve been porting around. The album’s so much more of a jam than I’d have ever expected; rambling, sweeping compositions that might at times threaten to stay a little bit too long but – and thank god – kick around long enough to inspire innumerable guitar bands and future indie musicians (a great many of them among my favourites).
“Cowgirl in the sand” stands out (and reminds me a fair bit of “My My Hey Hey”; it’s the melody and softness of his vocals, I think) – a lucid dream of a song (and proof that intermediate shredding is well and truly enough if the backing track is doing its fair share of the lifting).
Neil Young’s having a moment again now, so it might be I’ve come around at just the right time. He won’t always be around, after all.
Cat Stevens
1/5
This couldn’t be over fast enough. And because it wasn’t, we stopped it. Even the album’s standout – “Wild World” – failed to bring merriment, proving in the moment only that familiarity is a fickle thing. (While at times the pleasure of recognition overrides any critical faculty, at others it breeds only contempt.)
And this was a contemptuous experience; a chimney of exhausting whimsy that befouled and smogged the air. Never again, please.
Violent Femmes
3/5
They used to play “Blister in the Sun” at lights-up at Perth’s indie nightclub, Amplifier Bar. I was never there to see it, but it’s the sort of thing I found so fundamentally unfunny that Violent Femmes, as a band in their entirety, became collateral damage. Fun dude.
That’s a shame for me, as the next track on their 1983 album – “Kiss Off” – would have almost certainly disabused me of my overly-earnest opinions, and might have even cheered me up a bit in the process.
This is a fine album. It feels a touch unbalanced, maybe – the first half being much stronger than the second – but that also might just be because the whole “I’m horny and frustrated” thing stars to grate after a while (wearing as thin as thoroughly dry humped pants, one might be tempted to conclude).
I hear moments that will later find further vent in a whole constellation of American indie bands, from Bright Eyes to Cloud Nothings; raw, tuneful, full of that specific cheerful-cynical swaggering attitude unique to American punk.
A record gratefully rescued from the dustbin of my own history. And as for the onanism … well. Sometimes you just have to hold up your hands and acknowledge that lights up or not, it’s you that’s the wanker.
Killing Joke
5/5
The sentiment behind the name “Killing Joke” – a contrivance of Jez Combes’, who explains it with reference to a dying soldier realising he is a pawn in the game of “a cunt” – is one of something apprehended too late.
It’s funny – though not necessarily “ha ha” – that sometimes one might realise that it’s better to have never realised anything at all; a joke’s a joke whether the punchline realises it’s the punchline or not.
Across their self-titled debut, Killing Joke present a whole load of no laughing matter. Chunky, metallic edged riffs (“Bloodsport”). Vocals forced to sound like an anchor being dragged through gravel (“Wardance”). Repetitive bass lines that drive just as hard as the often militaristic drums (take your pick!). The whole thing’s war-coded, a theme that will repeat across Killing Joke’s discography.
But then, too, there’s the opposite. Guitars that find moments of uplifting melody inside the structures they build for themselves (“S.O.36”, “Complications”); vocals (and keys) that wind in and out of the melee sweetly, even gently (as in the chorus of “The Wait”); drums that let themselves get carried away (“Change”).
Judged solely on its merits, this is a fantastic album. It’s a focussed collection of justifiably angry post-punk tracks that never lets up. And while the full variety and canny intelligence of the songwriting are fairly obscured by some of the self-restrictive stylistic choices made, it seems no amount of chugging can camouflage the radiant charm of Killing Joke.
Judged in the context of where it came from and what it went on to inspire … a word like “masterpiece” might even be apt. From entire musical sub genres to global musical entertainment platforms (I’m talking about Metallica there; their cover of “The Wait” is so bad that it actually sounds like a Metallica song) – Killing Joke’s impact is as felt today as it would have been in 1985.
With all that said, it’s perhaps worth mentioning that I started listening to Killing Joke only relatively recently – odd, really, since there’d been ample opportunity for me to dial in to just how brilliant they are for more than 20 years now (disputes about the provenance of “Come As You Are”’s opening riff being well-publicised and all). It’s everything as it should be, perhaps; the time was right for me to develop that nascent enjoyment of goth and industrial tinged post-punk. I’d finally heard enough to help me put Killing Joke in their rightful context: peerless in so many respects. It’s a realisation had better late than never. And thank god; it’d be a real shame if the joke was on me.
Beck
2/5
Dull has its benefits. Comfortable and comforting; the poetry of banality is all gentle rhyming couplets and familiar imagery.
Beck – this Beck anyway, I think he might have been cool in the 90s – is expert at both. It’s all “Lost Causes” this, “End of the Day” that and “Round the Bend” whatever; saying nothing about the congealed mass of quotidian observations that pass for lyrics. (“Love looks away in the harsh light of day” is the level here.)
The most interesting song on this record – “Lonesome Tears”, perhaps the only song with any sort of notable development on the whole record – features a string section approximating the Shepard Tone at its denouement. (Shame you first you need to get through Beck talking about his tears for more than four minutes first, but meh.)
It’s the perfect analogy really. While, like the Shepard Tone, Sea Change feels like it must be doing something … its true charm is in the realisation that it’s just staying still.
So while I wasn’t moved by this record, nor did I resent listening to it. Dull has its place sometimes.
Willie Nelson
3/5
Somewhere between pensive and languid we find this ultra chilled out collection of arrangements of American standards. And it’s somewhere between “Blue Skies” and “Moonlight…” that I find myself asking why these songs?
I was charmed to discover that this pretty random looking assemblage was arrived at during jogs on the Californian sand. The image of Willie getting his exercise in while tossing up whether or not to throw “Unchained Melody” into the mixer too brings me no small measure of joy.
The outlaw made an album that feels decidedly “dinner with the in laws” and that’s quite alright by me. I’ll have to try it again when a run on the sand is on the cards. 2.5.
Gram Parsons
4/5
It’s the year of our lord 2025 and the handful of artists who could conceivably scrounge a living wage from music wouldn’t have to worry about doing so even if they had to.
It’s always been a privilege to have the time and space to create. Before it was unit sales it was patronage; even if it was limited to just one, an artist has always needed a public. A scan across the charts today reveals a heavy tilt toward another kind of privilege. You need a public far less than you need a public school education.
That said, I suppose I should have a problem with Gram Parsons – third generation zesty trust fund kid. Whether it’s because of a statute of limitations on such matters, the incredible tragedy that stalked Gram (third generation wealth carries a certain creed of curse), or the sheer quality of the songs, I don’t know … but I can’t muster the energy to dislike Parsons. Not on principle nor in fact.
I first listened to this record after enjoying Malkmus’ “Traditional Techniques” a few years ago and following up on its influences. Then as now, I marvelled at the steady confidence and cleverness of “Return of the Grievous Angel”, a song that teases and pulls its punches in all the right places, waiting until seconds before the bell to land its haymakers. I let myself be swayed by his arrangement of “Love Hurts”; bopped along to “Ooh Las Vegas” and “I can’t dance” (a Tabby favourite).
It might be full of wonderfully crafted, beautifully performed (Emmylou Harris is a phenomenal talent of course, and ideal foil to Parsons) archetypal country rock but “Grevious Angel” doesn’t feel like a complete album somehow; it feels short another song or two.
Working through it track by track, you soon come to realise that that can’t be true; this record’s short of nothing else but a follow-up.
It’s a bittersweet feeling – and one that matches the sentimental tone of what you’re hearing perfectly. Enough so that you might fall a little bit more in love with Gram Parsons again. In principle and in fact.
Stevie Wonder
3/5
It’s a side quest opened up by “Lady Grinning Soul” – can we, by the close of this challenge, identify ten albums that finish with a piano-driven track that Fleur loves? We’ve found our number three (two was “Parade” by Magazine) in the shape of “I believe…”, (a song I think we might have played at our wedding as guests filtered into the reception). Stay tuned!
A lovely album to listen to while pottering around the kitchen before sitting down for dinner with the family. There’s something for everyone in Stevie Wonder, and while this someone didn’t really find anything to latch onto personally … whatever. A mood’s a mood and Stevie creates a good one.
Marvin Gaye
3/5
It’s got the feel of a fable about it, a divorce story with a strong moral message: make art of your turmoil, be generous with it and let that become your peace, or something.
Whatever the precise circumstances of this album’s conception (I’m sure there’s more to it than I’m grasping; “Here, My Dear” feels just a touch sarcastic as titles go, while the appearance and reprise of “When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You?” is pretty direct as comms goes) but I know that no divorce I’ve ever stood near sounded nearly this good.
If it’s true that Gaye entered the studio to ‘get the job done’ then “Here, My Dear” is a laughably good album. The songs are, no matter the precise emotional coordinates of their provenance, the work of a profoundly wonderful songwriting force; and who knows, in not trying to send any singles to the top of the chart, maybe Marvin found a way back in to refocusing on the full album as a worthy format in itself. Certainly, this record purrs along.
“Time to Get it Together” and “A Funky Space Reincarnation” (an afrofuturist absurdity featuring the cosmically optimistic lyrics “light years ahead, you and me gon be getting down on a space bed”) are stand out slabs of solid funky soul.
If they’re being phoned in, then they’re being phoned in by one of the best there ever was. “Here, My Dear” should be required reading ahead of any mediation.
Harry Nilsson
2/5
There’s no two ways about it: “Nilsson Schmilsson” is a silly name for an album.
It’s an effect heightened by the album’s cover art, a photo of the unassuming and bedressinggowned silly saussillson himself standing, seemingly, in his kitchen.
And that’s plausibly where we find Harry on track one, rousing to the world reluctantly in “Gotta Get Up” – a song that doesn’t want to grow up. (The song, fittingly for its narration of glory days gone by, that Natasha Leone’s character in “Russian Doll” is fated to hear forever more at the start of her Groundhog Day.)
There’s something of a juvenile undercurrent to this record – whether intentionally (as in the limes in the coconut) or because of factors outside of Nilsson’s ultimate control (“Without You” might have once carried more of an emotional gut punch, but by now has accompanied too many parodies to do much more than, somehow, summon the face of Adam Sandler for me).
Elsewhere we have big McCartney energy (“Down”, “Jump Into the Fire”), pleasant pedestrian folksy pop rock (“The Moonbeam Song”, “Driving Along”) and a couple more references to the morning. Plenty here to showcase Nilsson’s incredible voice and talent for arrangement; but nothing to blow me away.
Can you have the Nilsson without the Schmillson? I’m not sure. There’s a profound knowingness to this album, that’s for sure – I’m just not sure there’s much in it for me.
Jimi Hendrix
5/5
Hendrix was a singular, enthralling talent. Unquestionably the greatest ever electric guitar player, his gift for crafting iconic hooks out of snappy catchphrases, twisting licks into memorable choruses and constantly innovating across generic lines puts him among the 20th century’s greatest songwriters.
“Electric Ladyland” is embarrassingly good. It’s the record I’d hope – a billion good years from now – the aliens find at the top of the stack. Having dug through however many miles of anonymous human-made detritus, they’d see it glinting there – yeah, just over there, poking out the inner tray of an old Audi station wagon’s in-car media centre. They’d revive the engine, give the interior a quick dusting out (that musty smell immanent to the cars of working men who occasionally cart around ripe bags full of football boots and shin pads would linger) and feed that glinting disc into the CD player.
What would follow would be a radical confrontation of any previously held opinion on what’s sonically plausible; an expansion of their musical vocabulary that would entirely recalibrate their expectations. A whole new alien world suddenly under them, ahead of them. Incredible.
And in that moment, they’d have a lot in common with the eleven year old boy who’d sat in that passenger seat a good billion years before them. That’s how good Hendrix is.
Genesis
3/5
Halfway through this record and I’m googling “the history of ideas”. It’s a tangent, but I’m sure Peter, Phil and the rest would allow it; tangents being essentially the point of what would retroactively come to be known as “prog” and all. Anyway, I digress.
I’m looking up whether Genesis – from that Greek “genea”, generation – were themselves a great influence on Queen, or particularly influenced themselves by Yes. No. King Crimson seems to be the root of this particular genealogy, but only just. And Queen were around a little later but not by much.
The consensus would be that “progressive” approaches to rock just seemed to happen. Which makes sense when you consider a) that “prog” is a tag applied 20 years later – there was no “scene” to speak of, I suppose – and b) the almost causal relationship between emerging, relatively accessible musical gadgetry and bands like Genesis, Queen, Yes etc.
In fact, we might here want to pause briefly to allow for a sort of materialist-technodeterminist reading of musical history. (Thus the googling of “history of ideas”.) Is all music history the history of art’s relationship to its material paradigm? And in asking so, must we make space for a Heideggerian analysis– zuhandenheit, and all that?
Sorry, back on track. From Future of the Left to Tenacious D, the influence of Genesis is so much broader than I’d have suspected prior to listening to this record. It’s a sort of intertextual melange; at once I’m wondering if Jack Black could have ever existed without Peter Gabriel only to then find myself exploring whether Genesis’ shared melodic sensibility with The Smiths is coincidental or not. (The closing passage of “The Cinema Show” and supermarket-positive reprise of “Knights…” has something of “Some girls (are bigger than others)” about it – a melancholy arpeggio juxtaposed with po-faced vocal performance. Marker of influence, or coincidence based on volume of ideas presented? I’m not sure.)
This album is full of thoughts, and full of questions – a superb example of a particularly British, especially camp creativity. A feast of genre pushing sonic experimentation that seemingly never takes itself any more seriously than a Punch and Judy show would (which is to say, both extremely seriously and not at all).
In short, it’s the sort of music that takes you off on a tangent. I probably could’ve just left it at that, come to think – but where’s the fun in that?
Black Sabbath
5/5
The first time we visited Australia – February 2004, I think – I visited a newsagents on Rockingham foreshore. A locally-produced copy of Kerang! magazine had a double page spread on Australian “emo” bands. I’d been listening to Finch, Brand New, The Used, Glassjaw, maybe Taking Back Sunday (I think I might have gotten their debut only after that holiday, though) so had my attention immediately piqued. Nestled among the sections on Something With Numbers, IKTPQ and After The Fall was a paragraph about Love Like … Electrocution. It would’ve said something about them being a fast, frantic screamo band (and proper screamo, I hasten to add 21 years later) but it was the last sentence that stayed with me long enough to encourage me to finally, when I had the chance a year or so later to check them out. (By ordering their LP in at 78 Records no less! I got some incredible stuff that way: Cursed, Curl Up and Die, Capsule, Converge – presumably some records by bands not beginning with “C” too.)
That line was something like: “And any band that starts their album with a song called ‘We only fuck to Black Sabbath Vol. 4’ is fine by us.” The coolest sentence I’d ever read at that point in my life, in short. (And wow oh wow was it worth the wait; Love Like … Electrocution are still one my favourite bands ever, even if proper screamo is deeply unfashionable and they barely exist on the internet.)
Anyway, it’s likely that not a single one of those bands I’ve mentioned would have existed without Sabbath. And the debt of gratitude I feel weighs particularly heavy with the passing of Ozzy Osborne, he who brought so much charisma to the “dark side” that he transformed culture entirely and forever.
What of Vol. 4? It’s great. Some of the most batshit brilliant drumming ever recorded, massive bloody riffs, chugging bass and Ozzy’s commanding, driving, cackling style (here refined in a way that belies the professionalism that accompanied his debauchery) – a voice that often on the record feels big enough to fill an entire universe.
Which, really, it did. I’m tempted to say it’s Sabbath’s universe, we’re all just fucking in it. I’ll settle for thanks, Ozzy.
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
3/5
So the 00s “meet me in the toilet” lot were part of the extended Tom Petty cinematic universe this whole time, hey; who knew? (Tom Petty knew, as it goes. He had the grace to take The Stroke’s ‘musical quotation’ in the flattering way it was undoubtedly intended, maybe he knew Julian’s dad.)
There’s a fair bit Beatley about the opening track of this record; the buoyancy of “Rockin’ Around (With You)” would slot neatly into the first side of “Help!” (or any record by Vampire Weekend or Razorlight for that matter).
It’s a short lived dalliance with the Fab Four though, as from “Breakdown” on this is very much Tom and his Heartbreakers’ show – short sharp shocks of tuneful pop that feel like a great American songbook all of their own.
Ever since reading Dan Charnas’ history of sampling-cum-hagiography of Dilla – “Dilla Time” – I’ve enjoyed telling anyone who’ll listen that it was Tom Petty playing on some of the earliest drum samples. Turns out I’d remembered that story only half correctly: the playing of Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers is featured on some of the earliest drum machines, but only the sound of their clapping made it into the final sound packs (and, therefore, appears on innumerable records – many of which you’d expect to find here on the 1001 list…).
I’m grateful of the reminded; appropriately enough, it’s a warm applause from me.
Neil Young
4/5
The adage, attributed to Victor Hugo, deems that there’s nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. A whole history of music could be written – has been written, really – from the perspective of the myriad ideas within “Southern Man” whose time eventually came.
We’re talking about a song that, on release, inspired Lynyrd Skynyrd to jump to the defensive and write “Sweet Home Alabama”; a song whose distorted vocal effects, social conscience and distorted bluesy rock dynamics put it among the earliest examples of proto-grunge; a song with a guitar solo that devolves steadily into weirdo experimentation and drilling single stabs, precisely the sort of thing you’d imagine Thurston, Lee et al stayed up all night studying in their own sonic youths.
And just as the story of “Southern Man” might just be the that of rock music (post-Elvis at least) in the 20th century, we can lean on “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” as a potted history of the 60s/70s counterculture’s romantic schisms.
A person could drive themselves half mad looking for the subtext and portents in Neil Young’s music, so suffice it to say that as “central figures” go … Neil’s a centripetal force all of his own. “After The Gold Rush” is a superb record, full of ideas that we’ll likely be unpacking for longer still.
(The opening guitar on “When you dance I can really love” sounds so much like a bit of music used on Friends, yet I see no evidence of others having noticed yet. Make of that what you will.)
Joni Mitchell
2/5
I bet this is really good. The lyrics drive hard, full of neat similes and wry, confessional honesty; the voice is crystalline, fragile, powerful; the production is a marvel – everything so rich and immediate, the guitars almost diaphanous somehow. And then there’s compositions like “River” – about as actually haunting as any song has ever been (an uncanny spectre; like staring at yourself in the mirror in the dark for too long). It’s all obviously brilliant.
And yet, like a modern large family CAR-A-HA trying to park in a carport built for vehicles in the 1970s I just hrm hrm hrm can’t get into it.
It might be that this clicks for me eventually, I wouldn’t totally rule it out. But for the now I’ll have to settle for it having grown on me a little bit across the week.
Like, I suppose, a fledgling mushroom under a-WOOO leaking sink.
FKA twigs
3/5
And we’re back. In the back of a car, retox’d, going to McD’s out by the marina; in bed until 11am gingerly warming up to face the first vape of the day; absolutely hating the way the grubbiness of the tube clings, invades. (Airplanes do something similar; as above, so below.)
We are in the 2010s and everything is either on Brainfeeder or inspired by artists that are. LP1 is the latter; although twigs has managed to do something many of predecessors couldn’t and written some actual pop songs. Odd sort of tone paintings that move in often unpredictable, mercurial sorts of ways, but still.
I didn’t listen to LP1 at the time, but that doesn’t stop this feeling like a sort of nostalgia ouija board. “Two Weeks” and its iconic chorus convenes a séance of once-familiar phantoms: the Lapalux of “Without You”, the SBTRKT of “Wildfires”, the Disclosure of “Latch” etc.
There’s stuff here I overlooked at the time – “Pendulum” works itself into the sort of agonising crescendo that would have totally pulverised me in my early-20s; “Video Girl” slaps – but I can’t shake the feeling there’s something weirdly, maybe uncannily, dated about much of this record. It’s just so 2014.
And in so far as I was too, that suddenly feels like a long time ago. Time to put the ouija board away, at least for now.
Fred Neil
3/5
We take refuge from the wind (biting the big apple until it’s all exposed core), diving into a dimly lit bar; somewhere unspeakable, somewhere in the village.
Unspeakable because what could be said was said already – Frank and his oranges, Alan and his angel-headed hipsters – and maybe sometimes a bit of quiet helps, you know? (“The Dolphins” has that feeling about it; a quiet song that’s really a labyrinth for thought to get lost in.)
Where was I? Oh yeah, the energy here; we’re on the eve of something. And if Fred’s a known quantity what he’s playing isn’t – it’s pushing against things, moving things around to make space. (And oh the space! It’s in the space it all makes most sense!)
Anyway I hear the harmonica player’s doing some stuff later, maybe he’s up to something good. But first, one more time through “Everybody’s Talkin’”, please.
Metallica
3/5
Bawwww bi bi bihhhh. Big, stupid riffs. Solid, angry chugs. Dumb fucking vocals. This is Metallica doing what they were born to do – cleverly packaged, accessible thrash.
“Master of the Puppets” does enough to nod to its forebears in heavy music (witness the Carcass in “Disposable Heroes”) while never knowingly alienating a single of the dumb shits who needs their music to feel by men, for men (the cohort Metallica would, over the following decades, spend a regrettable amount of energy wooing; their lifestyle determining their artistic death style).
A true monster of a thrash metal record.
Master.
MASTER.
AC/DC
2/5
I’ve never had the mettle to tell my adoptive countryfolk what I think of AC/DC. For a start the right moment’s never arrived, but also the idea of broaching the subject within contexts that AC/DC is most often broadcast – big boozy nights, sporting events, big boozy sporting events, weddings – is ridiculous.
Imagine it, there I am leaping about the dancefloor to the supercharged, undeniably bombastic, bogan blue-collar blues of AccaDacca when the thought occurs to grab the bloke nearest and tell him how, actually, quite a lot of AC/DC’s output is not just boring and unimaginative – it’s also performatively macho in a way that gives me pause to sob internally, a risibly chauvinistic sort of posing for the male gaze. (Not this particularly song though, I’d concede while being flanked and hugged by my boys, fair enough.)
So while I can enjoy AC/DC under certain conditions, those conditions usually lead to the sort of spotty or selective memory that would be best applied to this record. (Seriously, what is “Givin the dog a bone” supposed to do for anyone?)
Two stars, scaled to a four if completely pissed. Just don’t tell anyone.
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
5/5
A fair chunk of what would become the defining music of the 20th century’s last quarter exists between My My, Hey Hey and its antipodal point, Hey Hey, My My. And, as it happens, so too does what will in all likelihood be my favourite album of this year, the last of the 21st century’s first quarter.
First things first, that line. “It’s better to burn out than fade away” was so excruciatingly prescient a lament that it took someone as gifted in running a feeling to its absolute limits as Kurt Cobain to really claim it. Tragically, but that’s Kurt Cobain for you.
In its original context, you feel Neil feeling suddenly, perhaps for the first time, less than young. And there’s ample evidence of that perspective shift happening across the record – the biographical ramblings of “Thresher” (symbolism fans: a machine for harvesting); the humble aspirations of “Ride My Llama”; the tragedy of a life cut short for nought in “Powderfinger”; even the resourceful horniness of “Welfare Mothers” and Bukowski-baiting “Sedan Delivery” feel like they’re coming from a place of some sort of hard-fought streetwise wisdom.
This album has entirely captivated me. And while it’s because it’s 1) full of absolutely sublime songs and 2) so pivotal a piece in the big old jigsaw of music I love … it’s also because I also feel less than young today. And while the feeling that something’s behind you might be a jarring one, it’s also an invitation to reflect on the privilege that is having something to look back on.
As momento mori moments go, this is surely one of the most stirring and inspiring ever articulated. (I mean, it literally invented grunge!)
In short, it’s proof if you needed it that burning out or fading away was only ever a false choice. It’s always been neither, and it’s always been both. My my, hey hey.
Fever Ray
2/5
Finally, an album that can, whenever I need it, propel me back into a moment in my life where I’ve stumbled into a shop that feels too effortlessly outre and hip to have allowed me in, and bought the second cheapest thing in there (that’s still eight times what I’d usually be comfortable paying) out of sheer social embarrassment.
I am not being glib. The emotional bends experienced by any person who’s too suddenly descends to the abyssal depths of cool are no joke – a price must be paid.
And in this instance, that price must also include the time spent trying to crack into this record. It’s adored, and I sort of see why … but also: by fuck do I wish I’d have just minded my business.
CHIC
4/5
If Nile Rogers and Bernard Edwards had been able to (or wanted to) put their 1978–1980 output into the world under one single banner, then right now we’d be arguing over whether The Beatles, The Rolling Stones etc. deserve to be spoken about in the same breath as them.
Things don’t work like that, though; Rogers will just have to settle for being talked about as one of the greatest songwriters ever, Edwards one of the greatest bass players.
That’s all been a revelation to me because, for the longest time and even though I genuinely really like it, I’ve tended to see disco as a bit of a joke. In all likelihood I’ve fallen for a trap of some sort; as with horror and comedy in cinema, musical genres that encourage and elicit a physical response tend to be those most often mocked. It’s almost like we’re scared of something…
Anyway: CHIC. Absolutely nothing to be afraid of in here, unless having a good fuckin’ time fills you with dread. And if it does, I’ve great news for you: “C’est Chic” is available on all major streaming platforms.
International intergenerational super mega hits aside, it was a delight to discover “Savoir Faire” – a song I feel like I’ve heard before. (So heavily imitated is this whole record that Déjà vu is a fait accompli. What can I say? C’est chic.)
TV On The Radio
3/5
When we were 18 or 19 we went down to Gracetown. Boot full of beers, BBQ supplies, snacks and weed. We spent a day on the beach playing cricket and listening to music, TV On The Radio among the bands on rotation (alongside Vampire Weekend, about whom I shared some extreme and entirely justifiable opinions that long weekend).
Later that day, having repaired to our prefab unit for some FIFA lounge mode and to smoke some weed, we introduced a range of lore to the group: stonebag, Satan the insect that rides dolphins, daft things like that. And as night fell and the speakers ran out of battery, we flicked through the channels on the old 17” portable hanging from a wall bracket to find something to listen to.
“We’ve been listening to TV On The Radio all day, and now we’re listening to radio on the TV.” The way I remember it, it brought the house down. Who cares. Great days.
Elastica
3/5
This is a record so naughty nineties that part of me can’t look at it directly. Like a dog-eared copy of the novel Come Together, a late night repeat of an episode of Bottom or practically any film starring Keanu, I half expect to be moved along promptly by an adult who wants me out the way pronto.
As no parental authority materialises to mush me along – though listening is interrupted by my own children; the more things change… – I’m finally left alone to enjoy this buoyant collection of pleasure principle-friendly indie and pop punk songs.
And enjoy I do. There’s a classic on here – “Connection” – and plenty of interesting songs besides (“Line up”, “Never Here”, “See That Animal”) … but all told I struggle to fully get on aboard. Just as many songs (“All nighter”, “Car song”) feel disposable; perhaps by design.
It was the 90s. Fabulous, absolutely. But perhaps part of it will always be withheld from me.
Elliott Smith
5/5
Is it possible to hear this record and not feel immediately enshrouded in the most sanguine and coddling melancholy? A weighted blanket of comforting sad; permission to fuck it all off and wallow.
Wallow we can, but only for so long. By the time “Between the bars” has thrown you around with its sharp inversions and “Pictures of me” has dared to put you in mind of musicians no less vaunted as T-Rex and The Beatles you’re awkwardly close to having to admit there’s real depth under that mirrored sheen of self-soothing. The one-two punch of “Angeles” (perfect, perfect song) and “Cupid’s Trick”; “2:45 AM” … the ven diagram of wonderful songs on this album and its tracklist is a circle.
And on it goes – variations on a theme, but always with something uniquely arresting about them. Tremolo guitars, drum kits apparently made of boxes, double-tracked vocals that refuse to aspire to total symmetry, a full band rock out; none of it a gimmick, all of it in service of the feeling.
Elliott Smith’s genius – and it was genius – wasn’t in identifying that feeling out of love is as powerful and unifying an experience as falling into it, that’s been known for ages. His genius was in isolating that prickling, nagging, insistent shame and turning it into something else entirely. A shared thing. Nothing to be ashamed of.
Troubadour Young Werther; you deserve to be happy, too.
The White Stripes
2/5
There’s something a bit irritating about this album. For the first few tracks, I even start to fear it’ll become contagious; I’ll take my earbuds out, greet a colleague, and immediately get punched in the face on account of how fucking obnoxious I am. It isn’t the guitar tone, which is often exquisitely produced. It isn’t the drums, which do that disarmingly simple thing they always do on White Stripes records and always pretty much rule. It isn’t even necessarily Jack White’s voice which is… no, it’s that.
Anyway, pettiness aside, we can forgive him. Once you open up to it, this is a perfectly OK album. There’s most of the usual White Stripes stuff, just nothing as energetic or iconic as on previous records.
Really, if I’m being harsh, it sounds a bit like Jack and Meg are themselves beginning to bore of being White Stripes by the time “Passive Manipulation” – are those lyrics saying what I think they’re saying? – and “Take, Take, Take” roll around.
Anyway, not to worry – this record still probably sold about a billion units, and helped deliver us into a truly dreadful era of shit “Blue Orchid” inspired arena friendly blues n’roll bullshit.
On reflection, turns out it was contagious after all.
The Flaming Lips
3/5
An album of significant dexterity and adeptness that feels, on reflection, like the very definition of “instant classic”; while there’s nothing necessarily innovative about any one individual element of the sound, there’s something genuinely novel about the way the Lips balance vibe creation and song craft.
I was at the Southbound where Wayne Coyne’s laser hands were stolen (wasn’t me). I remember standing in a big old field in Busselton, feeling like the only person there; like “Do you realise??” was in fact for me and my benefit alone.
Whether or not Wayne was reunited with his laser hands, I don’t know … but I suspect in the 12 years since then, the band’s seen far more significant things lifted than just a couple of stage props.
But that’s what a legacy is, I suppose: a list of things that anyone can borrow from you, forever. As originators of a very certain vibe, The Flaming Lips will go on and on. It’s nice to sit back and just let them do it.
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
2/5
There was a night, I think searching out a faddish eatery, where I remember walking through the West End of London and being a taken aback, not by the garish vehicles or distracting relative cleanliness of the streets, but by the number of brands advertising that I’d simply never heard of. A whole universe of stuff that had never needed to tell me it existed, and so didn’t.
I feel something similar with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band; while I might expected to discover a flash in the pan group with a respectable couple of hundred thousand listeners, in fact the group has been recording music for 60 years and still reports monthly listeners in the 5-6 million bracket.
Atop that, this record’s a kind of living museum piece. An ensemble cast of important musicians from genres as diverse as bluegrass and honky tonk (sorry, sorry), brought together to kind of live-instantiate the shift from tradition to electrification.
With that said, the record itself feels appropriately self-knowing; obviously indebted to the hokey rhythms and bowing swings of what came before, but also clear-eyed about what it feels is the future of the genre (and often charming about pointing the way, too). Everything here is done with love. While I won’t soon rush to listen again, I feel grateful for the experience. (I was at one point reminded of The Magnetic Field’s “A chicken with its head cut off”; a silly ditty, but one obviously loaded with affection for the sort of thing conveyed by the Nittys.)
I couldn’t tell you the name of a single one of those brands I saw that night in west London, but I can now tell you where you need to go if you’re looking for a decisive moment the history of the US’ dominant folk traditions (as they combined with rock n’roll) or need evidence of it in a retrospective format featuring key players drawn from across genre and generational lines. And that’s a lot cooler than knowing where to buy an overexpensive watch, for sure.
Prince
3/5
In this, having put the 70s decisively to bed nine months previously, Prince goes into labour and gives birth to the 80s.
There’s coos aplenty reserved for sweetheart jams like “Little Red Corvette” and “Lady Cab Driver”; some awkward glances around the room during “Something in the Water…” and “Free”. For the most part, though, everyone just takes notes.
Hard to believe there, standing on the maternity ward, but one day this album would turn 18. It’d be the year 2000 then, and what a time that’ll be: who can predict what strange twists and turns human history will have taken; what exciting new forms art, music and culture will have taken.
Oh yeah, Prince. Prince predicted it. All of it. Enjoy it or not, you better start taking notes.
Devendra Banhart
2/5
“Doing” countries; American Spirit; photo booths; speakeasies; filters; berets; moustaches; Coachella; craft; small batch; selvedge; Michael Cera; turn ups; Ginsberg; bicycles; skateboards; whimsy; beards; daisies; bangs; whiskey; pensiveness; festivals; Zoey Deschanel; Maison Kitsune.
It’s sounds from that specific cul-de-sac of culture where it’s always thin echoes, all the time. Rightly or wrongly, at the time it was ‘The Dead End of Western Civilisation(TM)’ … what a whimper we’d have been going out with had we not found a way past it.
Prefab Sprout
3/5
Sophisti-pop. The never quite was at the time genre; the never quite asked for in retrospect noun; the never quite ever actually necessary portmanteau. It’s properly daft – as far as I can tell, all that separates this from Tears for Fears’ “Songs from the Big Chair” (‘progressive pop’ apparently) but unifies it with Style Council’s “Cafe Bleu” is … a tendency to take an extra 30 seconds or so to get to the chorus. (Maybe to some extent that’s all music genres are: a way to answer the question of how long it takes to get to the chorus.)
To Prefab Sprout, who exists on the happy side of the Sophisti-pop equation: songs that would be good even without superb production, rather than songs that are good only because of their production.
This album is difficult to hear outside of its legacy – I cannot in good confidence, for example, say any of its melodies are hackneyed or staid even if I sort of feel so … it’s far more likely I’ve just heard the derivatives that have been done to death – that I only feel like I hear it when I hear it through its antecedents. For example, “Hallelujah” feels a much better song for being considered as of the same breath as Magazine’s infinitely under appreciated “Parade” as it is for being the inspiration for something by Sting or Crowded House. Both equally fair perspectives, I’m sure – but let’s stay on the more exciting side of the sophisti-ph scale where we can.
This is an often excellent album, crammed full of brilliant ideas and wonderful little tricks. And, quite importantly, it’s an album that never feels like it’s trying to know more than me or trick me in some way. More authenti-pop than sophisti-pop in that sense, maybe. Who knows. I’ll just remember it as “really quite good”.
Bruce Springsteen
2/5
I remember this record sitting in a short stack of CDs in my grandparent’s living room. They weren’t loose; nothing in the house was. Instead, the dozen or so jewel cases were organised into slip shelves either side of a VCR and stereo unit, with the TV sitting king of the pile – appropriate symbolism for the then-biggest whale in the attention economy.
I don’t recall the album ever getting played – and on the strength of this listen through, I doubt I’d have really remembered had it been. There are anthems in here, truly era-defining stadium rock gems that have delivered hours upon hours of enjoyment in varied and interesting contexts (Bum The Gibbon’s lockdown-era cover of “Dancing In The Dark” especially) … but as full albums go, there’s plenty in there that’s forgettable too.
Still, I won’t soon forget the first time I held that album c.1996 and, in that peculiarly intuitive way only a child can, felt like I understood something about my grandad I didn’t before. The Boss in his blue jeans announced a dimension to my grandad’s character I hadn’t yet had a chance to apprehend; said something about his internal life I’d likely never hear him articulate directly … and would forever need to guess about anyway.
And because life’s like that – layer on layer of clues, hues, idiosyncrasies, dust – music’s like that too (or is it the other way around?). Happy birthday, Grandad.
Leonard Cohen
4/5
I put this album on and the strangest thing happens. It’s not so much that time slips away – even though I’m consistently surprised to realise the album’s over when the reprise of “Treaty” hits – it’s more that I myself slip away.
I’m transported to any number of memories, but most often of one from a couple of months after Leonard Cohen had passed (and this album had been released). It’s January 1st 2017, and I’m walking with Fleur and friends through Bruges, dithering across the bridges and cobblestones while wading through a dense mist. Hungover from the previous night’s revelry, we had been plodding around Markt Square and its surrounding streets aimlessly, listlessly for an indeterminate length of time (foggy outside, foggy inside) – and then, as if there wasn’t a single other sound on Earth besides, the bells started. The first song the bell ringers played was “Last Christmas” (George Michael had passed away only a week or so prior) and then it was “Hallelujah”. Our collective mien suspended somewhere between grief and celebration, that discombobulated wondering through the town suddenly felt freighted with a life affirming significance. It was an exquisitely melancholic moment; of a richness to rival the local architecture, art, beers, cheeses …
And again the record’s over. The strings sigh, and Leonard signs off. Where, seriously, did the time go?
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
3/5
Neil Young is a boomer. Born in ‘45, stepping out in ‘69, world at his feet in ‘71. At some point Scorsese had to edit concert footage to remove the rock of cocaine dangling from Neil’s nose. Pure, joyous Boomerlore.
This record is easily Neil’s most Boomer record. For a start, the format is a totally uncompromising commitment to the idea of doing precisely whatever I fucking want to do, thank you. Here is a collection of 10-minute plus, jammed out tunes with often questionable vocal performances. No overdubs (not like that sell out “Powderfinger”), no apologies.
Then there’s the lyrical themes. We hear Neil bragging about his extensive rural real estate portfolio at least twice (“Country Home”, “Mansion on the Hill”); we get yet more of the familiar “On the road” tropes that you might have thought would be long out of his system by the time he’d turned 45 (or actually, no; Boomers invented the midlife crisis after all); and finally there’s the closing “Natural Anthem” which manages to both genuinely move me and summon a memory of the summer of love hippies sent up in that Simpsons episode about corporatised organic comestibles.
Pure Boomerlore.
What a shame it is, then, that so many in Neil Young’s generation managed, by virtue of their personal selfishness and individualism, to make traits like artistic integrity, the patient pursuit of one’s pleasures and actually giving a fuck about the planet seem so deeply unfashionable.
This Boomer isn’t like the others. We’d do well to remember that.
Pulp
1/5
It’s been a day slightly dusty from some ill-advised Father’s Day-related revelry yesterday; in touching distance of memories of having tried, and failed, to eat a hangover into submission (I didn’t bother today, that’s personal growth for you). Pulp’s “This is Hardcore” therefore arrives at a moment when feeling restless within the project of trying to get something done is a very real existential fact.
This record sounds absolutely huge at times, even comically so. Big, bombastic swings of sound – crescendo layered atop crescendo – rubbing, suggestively, up against jagged guitar licks – all of it accompanied by Jarvis Cocker’s slightly-miffed-host schtick.
Yet for all the talk of parties being over and the like, this album is so clearly and self-consciously representative of the end of something that I find it a challenge to remain engaged. It’s the sound of britpop gently running out of steam; a charmless droning on, the sun coming up and illuminating a kitchen full of one-sided conversations.
By “The Day After the Revolution” – a song that genuinely offends me in its inanity – it’s everyone in taxis to sleep it off.
My patience today may be thin, but regardless I think I’d find the “if you remember the 90s you weren’t there” energy of this record to be a truly tiring thing to repeatedly have to encounter. I do remember the 90s, I just don’t remember this album being there. And on both scores, I don’t feel like I missed anything all that important.
Todd Rundgren
2/5
If you’ve ever wondered how the popular TV format Gogglebox – “Celebrity Watch Party” in the USA; I’d like to say something sarcastic about that, but I absolutely can’t imagine normal Americans watching normal Americans watch TV either – would work for music, then toss a coin into Todd’s uncanny jukebox and experience the joy of wasting money.
Talent here isn’t the problem, either in front of the microphones or behind the desk. As a musician and as a producer, Todd is good, maybe even one of the best. The songwriting, similarly, is consistently strong, often interesting.
And yet something rankles; I’m increasingly irritated by the feeling that I’m listening to an eclectic mixtape of mangled pastiches. I’ve stepped into cave of wonders where the treasures are the echoes that bounce from the walls. Yes “Song of the Vikings” sounds very much like the Beach Boys, “I saw the light” like Carole King … but why should I give a shit?
If we put the dodgy tribute acts to one side (and let’s say nothing about the final seven or so tracks … regrettable), there’s stuff on this double album to actually enjoy – “It wouldn’t have made any difference” is a sublime pop song with a truly fantastic middle 8, “Wolfman Jack” is silly but also a quite brilliant vocal.
On the whole, though, this album feels like it sets out to prove a point but ends up confirming the opposite. Pop music might be formulaic, but something about “Something/Anything?” just doesn’t add up.
Fleetwood Mac
5/5
It is never anything less than a complete joy to sit and properly listen to this album; to hear the songs in their origin context, find new angles or jags to chip away at, new moments to obsesses about.
For me this time it was the harmony in the second half of “The Chain”’s choruses. At one point I was comparing it aloud to one of those passes Lionel Messi can make that suddenly strands an entire defence in No Man’s Land … a daft simile, but, on reflection, I find it edifying that we might never, as a species, run out of ways of celebrating this record.
To put it more plainly though, “Rumors” is so good that you could scrub any of “Dreams”, “The Chain”, “Don’t Stop” or “Go Your Own Way” from the track list and still be holding onto one of the best pop or rock or whatever albums of all time.
Luckily, we don’t have to. There’s no thought experiment here, no test. There’s just something wonderful.
The Dictators
4/5
Ah brilliant, someone managed to turn “fuck yeah” into a fully-realised and totally cohesive creative enterprise. Top to bottom, side to side; The Dictators are the real deal.
What a shame, then, that they were not – as the first track on the record optimistically portends – “The Next Big Thing”. Cult favourites apparently; influential allegedly; overlooked, certainly. What’s on this record feels like a Troma production, or a record by Municipal Waste – ostensibly dumb shit that, upon further inspection, is so thoughtfully executed and oozing with its own warped sort of artistic integrity that you can’t help but fall for it. The sort of record that gets a person saying things like “If this is wrong then I don’t want to be right”, or slapping a bar and hollering, you guessed it, “fuck yeah”.
By the final song – “(I Live For) Cars and Girls” – I’m actually even, bizarrely, moved by the sentiment behind “cars, girls, surfin’, beers, nothing else matters here.” It’s a bodacious line, sure; but the guy’s got a point.
Forever more The Dictators now have another co-conspirator. It might have been that, in its day, joke never fully landed; but whatever, this is still seriously good stuff now.
Jane's Addiction
3/5
As Fleur learned over dinner, I’ve an awful lot of Dave Navarro trivia tucked away. Even more now I’ve read his Wikipedia page too. (Memory’s a fickle thing: why is it that I struggle to commit the names of new bands I like to memory, but, having read it today, know I’ll never forget that Dave Navarro’s dad lent his surname to his actor friend, Roman Novarro?)
I’ve long enjoyed Perry Farrell’s vocals. How they glide across some already pretty incandescent instrumentation; electric white sky writing against a bright blue sky.
And that sense of elevation is right across every element of this record; the brash choruses, the breaks of colourful psychedelia, the seamless elision of genres.
“High” might be a loaded term when it comes to Jane’s Addiction, but that mix of altitude and attitude is rarely better aimed than here. A versatile, synaesthetic trip of a record.
And did you know, Dave Navarro has his own Wah pedal?!
King Crimson
2/5
There’s a photo of Robert Fripp holding his guitar, its neck crossing his chest at a 45 degree angle. He’s staring straight ahead, his proptotic eyes locked into a hypnotist’s gaze. It’s a picture I first saw about 23 years ago, I think in the “Guitarist’s Handbook” – a gift from my Auntie Paula purchased from Berry’s music shop in Worksop.
Up until recently, it was perhaps the most chilling portrait I’d ever candidly encountered. Something about Fripp’s stare just withered me. This was a guitar god, alright, only the god in question was Thanatos.
Researching this album, I learned that Fripp and his wife Toyah have been recreating classic metal songs. The covers, which started with a reworking of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” during the COVID lockdown, have been doing well for the couple.
It was while flicking through the thumbnails of YouTube videos that I saw it. Fripp, eyes screwed to a tight aperture, sequin cap atop his head, gurns at the camera. Toyah, gleefully standing just behind her famously seated husband, neckline plunging to reveal heart shaped nipple caps. A cover of Limp Bizkit’s “Nookie”. A stinging phantasmagoria I won’t soon outrun.
And so into the Court of the Crimson King I travel. Carrying beside me that baggage, I alight upon the courtyard and familiarise myself with the varying subjects. It’s a richly realised realm, one where ideas are explored to their ends.
For all its innovation and the obvious brilliance of the talents on display, it’s not a record I’ll readily race back to. Fact of the matter is, I feel guilty to so quickly push something of this richness to the background … but that’s exactly where it’s ended up after each play.
For sure, it’s a record I’ll remember though. Fripp’s stare is eternal.
Neil Young
3/5
In this album, and ably assisted by his so-called ‘honey slides’, Neil Young captures the difficult to achieve and even more difficult to maintain state of “being
body stoned to a biblical degree but still coherent enough in thought to have a pop at Big Oil.”
And, as per usual, it’s really good.
“See the sky about to rain” is just as sweet and whimsically melancholic as you’d hope from its title, while the various “… Blues” (Revolution, Vampire, Ambulance in order) make for a powerful triptych of attitudes – folk’s own Garden of Earthly Delights.
A record that demands you nod along, and for a number of reasons.
Dusty Springfield
5/5
Have you ever caught sight of a particularly bright star in an otherwise dark sky, enjoyed looking at it for a while and then – slowly at first and then all of a sudden – noticed a dozen more announcing themselves?
It’s a magical thing. A serendipity. And you can’t force it to happen; only hope to forget about it for long enough for it to be a surprise again.
I’ll never be able to forget how good Dusty Springfield is again, not after truly listening to the outrageously sophisticated, affecting and just gorgeous collection of songs on this album.
A lone star that illuminates all others, alright.
Erykah Badu
4/5
As the story goes, Electric Ladyland’s resident feline “Jimmy” would show up to listen back, approvingly, to the desk mixes of “Mama’s Gun”.
It’s cool cats all the way down, this one. Soulquarians Questlove, James Poyser, Jay Dee (genuine thrill when my ear caught his style in the first couple of bars of “Didn’t Cha Know?”) do a fine job of giving Erykah’s inimitable vocal style something to scratch up against … but the record’s at its best when it’s caterwauling on a level completely of its own (on “Penitentiary Philosophy”, “Kiss Me On My Neck” especially).
This is a fantastic record; full of texture and swing. Inescapably, there’s the sense you’re getting treated to the sound of some of the turn of the century’s most brilliant and influential artists, not just collaborating but building each other up in true process.
You have to hand it to Jimmy, the cat had taste.
Willie Colón & Rubén Blades
2/5
I must have played GTA: Vice City for over 1000 hours. I was heading for that magical 100% stat – god, I remember it so clearly – when I decided to save the game. I hit “save” for no particularly good reason, and at the exact same moment my mum cut the power in the house (while preparing to replace a bulb, if I remember correctly).
And that was that. Gone. Down from 96% to 32% like that. Returned to the lobby of the Ocean View Hotel, I could scarcely believe what I was seeing. Sure, I and everyone else who’d ever played a video game that utilised an external memory card had been warned countless times that power loss during saving could lead to “something” … but this?
Playing in the lobby, Unaesta with “La Vida Es Una Lenteja” – a made up band with a made up song, one that will for my whole life be the soundtrack of a very strange emotion: an appreciation of loss, with no sense of having actually lost anything. (I’m not sure my mum actually even knows it happened; feankly, I wouldn’t expect her to care either way.)
I enjoyed this album, it was fine company while rambling around the kitchen preparing a couple of dinners. But I’ll be damned if it didn’t pull me back into that moment 20 years ago over and over again.
A strange seed to have sown, but I guess that’s how it goes.
Boston
3/5
I could entirely believe that the archetypal American dive bar – pools of neon light forming puddles on wood panelling, the cushioned snap of clacking pool balls ricocheting off tall brown bottles – was summoned into being by this record and this record alone.
It’s been almost 50 years since this album was released. As a rock record it stands up wonderfully – Tom Scholz’s smart, hooky songs machined into optimum ear-worming slices; an irresistible combination of driving, crunching guitars and crystalline, sometimes ethereal vocals.
As good a rock record as Boston certainly is, it’s its status as a piece of soft power that I find myself most thinking about. The America that embraced Boston in 1976 is a very different America to the one it’ll celebrate its 50th birthday in; and while how the world looks at America hasn’t ever appeared to matter much to the inhabitants of the world’s most powerful nation … will that still be true when it isn’t the world’s most influential force?
It’s beyond the scope of Boston to answer that question, of course. They just fuckin’ rock. But there’s something nostalgic about this album that can’t possibly be rooted in any personal history; not, at least, beyond the history I’ve shared with America qua global cultural powerhouse.
One last time then to the jukebox then, where we pick “Hitch a ride” before we park our ass back on the bar seats, thinking how it all used to be so much simpler. For better or worse, it feels like it’s coming up to closing time.
U2
4/5
The moment the guitars harden to approximate a peel of machine gun fire 40-seconds into “Sunday Bloody Sunday” is, without a shadow of doubt, one of the most uplifting, edifying and powerful in the history of guitar music. It’ll bring a tear to my eye, even standing shoulder to shoulder on a commuter train – but always a tear that’s quickly followed by the usual guilt one experiences when they realise they’re enjoying U2. A sensation of “Bono, what the fuck man?” that marks the complicated status of attempting to enjoy U2 in 2025.
By now they’ve been a lot. The sort of band Patrick Bateman is taken to by his boring friends; the sort of band that adds their albums to your iTunes account pro-Bono (with eternal credit to Sinead for that joke); the sort of band you half notice as being on the soundtrack of a sports highlights programme for the past ten years. They’re still U2, of course. The biggest band on the planet … but they’re also all that other shite too.
Anyway, to War. This record was never done justice by the speakers in Dave’s Renault Megane. Across “Sunday Bloody Sunday”, “New Years Day”, “Like a song…” The Edge absolutely soars. Indeed, across the record, he and Bono feel locked into something special, a precious alchemy reminiscent of then-contemporaries Morrissey and Marr – a mercurial pair who were also grounded by an ultra competent and modest rhythm section.
And as it is so often with The Smiths too, the best songs on War feel like a proper band effort. It’s a U2 I feel I’ve never known (the one I know is that of Partridge: “How’s Bono?”; “How’s The Edge?; “How’s Adam Clayton?”; “How’s … the drummer?”). And it’s very, very good.
War has obvious stand out tracks, but the record doesn’t suffer for their appearance. There’s no real filler (though a couple – “Two Hearts Beat As One” especially – must have been strong floor fillers once upon a time) … just a young and hungry band wanting to say something and doing it with electrifying clarity.
There’s a reason they’re the biggest band in the world, after all. And it isn’t because Bono is a pain in the arse.
Beastie Boys
4/5
This album, more so than any of the Boys’ others, most nakedly demonstrates that which is central to the massive and enduring appeal of the Beastie Boys. More than the infectious buoyancy of the beats, the crossover charisma, or the ineffable fuck yeah-able nature of the swagger … it’s that playing out of the common fantasy of having two friends pop up out of nowhere to add emphasis to your every tenth word that most ardently anchors the Beastie Boys’ success. Sure enough: on this record, haven’t you heard – that’s exactly what OCCURS.
I love Beastie Boys. They’re the sort of contradictions that makes perfect sense; playful artists, serious jokers, stupid geniuses. Here they’re the scuzzy hardcore kids who took up hip hop only really quite shortly before being invited to open for Madonna on her Virgin Tour – spouting brackish juvenilia to a presumably very confused audience of teens.
There’s plenty on this record that, really, sounds itself like the product of confused teens, but I guess that’s for good reason. Here we also have “Fight for your right”, “No sleep…” and (personal favourite since a drive to Margaret River 15 years ago; renewed in my affections thanks to some tight popping and locking by D&T before bedtime) “Brass Monkey”.
Songs that subvert expectation; ideas that appear above their STATION. That’s the brilliance of the Beastie Boys – they made it look easy and in doing so made it feel accessible.
The fantasy of friends lending emphasis, maybe not so stupid an idea after all.
Richard Hawley
3/5
It’s Sunday night, I’m back from a weekly visit to Meadowhall, the central heating is blasting, and cups of tea are being made during the first ad break of “Where The Heart Is”.
With Coles Corner, Richard Hawley makes a compelling argument for Yorkshire being the U.K’s home of hygge (course it bloody is!). It’s a box of Quality Streets of a record; eleven individually wrapped confections, each interesting in its own way, but I’m sure we all have our favourites (“The Ocean”, “Coles Corner”, “Hotel Room”).
It’s something that I find this record so evocative of swaddled up Sunday nights in Worksop. Yes, obviously, Alex Turner is a fan, we can’t help but hear that in these songs and think quickly across to his direction … but there’s something almost transcendentally South Yorkshire about this album anyway. As if Roy Orbison had written a soundtrack for the Full Monty.
Maybe it’s that, or maybe in its vulnerability and introspection I’m hearing something else entirely – mapping back to an appropriately tender time that just so happened to be within the Sheffield postcode. It’s possible, but I don’t think it’s right. I’d wager the magic of this album is easier to grasp the closer to Division Street you are.
Enough blathering anyway. Millionaire’s nearly on! To that imagined Sunday night on Beaumont Rise, it’s nice to know I can go back for a visit sometimes.
Beatles
4/5
I didn’t enjoy this album until I’d read up on it. First spin through was, on the whole, pretty lacklustre – I disliked about as many of the tracks as I enjoyed, and even those I liked whiffed a bit of a kind of contamination unique to being nearby “Piggies”. Second time through was an improvement, and I’d tuned my ear into hearing only the ten or eleven tracks I’d enjoyed first time through. Third listen through, just to be sure, was accompanied by Wikipedia (surely up there with, spoiler, The Beatles for greatest achievement of the 20th century?).
And that’s when it all comes crashing in. Context. The missing piece.
I can scarcely believe it, but life’s like that sometimes: in my long struggle to understand what the fuss was about, I had never thought to put The Beatles in context.
Why, I think, boils down to too high expectations; a point that crosses quickly into a debate of aesthetics. Without me ever having consciously caught on before, it seems that any musician beyond a certain popularity threshold – a threshold I’ve arbitrarily, unnecessarily calibrated in my own head over however many years – there’s an expectation that the hyped thing (the album, the song) must demonstrate, to me, an immediate value in-itself. I must be wowed on the spot. As applied to the work of The Beatles – wildly popular – I have brooked no compromise; it must be grab-me-by-front lobe brilliant, quickly. Anything less – and by “less” I mean anything that’s less easy to love, and might therefore require me to do some work in meeting it halfway – is doomed to disappoint. That disappointment is perturbing, alienating, even. In it, I am then forever the one who “doesn’t get it”. Far worse than unmoved, I’m effectively shut out: denied an experience that’s been so generously doled out to millions, maybe even a billion by now, across generations.
Those fucks, how dare they?!
What’s particularly galling – about me, to me – is that I’m an otherwise patient person. I enjoy modern art very much. Tediously so. I’ve taken maybe six different people to see My Disco – at least four of whom have been, I suspect, extremely gracious in humouring both me and the band by remaining there against their better judgement. It would be fair to see that I seek out experiences that to some extent challenge me (and champion those that move me; I’d like to think I’m more portentous, as in early, than I am pretentious, as in late, but the hit rate on that isn’t convincing) … just not if it’s, e.g. The Beatles.
Why the resistance? Maybe I read too much Adorno; maybe I clung to the safety of snobbishness; maybe admitting the opposite felt wan, vulnerable. Maybe I was just being lazy. Maybe, maybe. Not to worry.
I’m a fucking idiot. Can you believe it took for me to read that the White album was recorded as a bit of a mixed bag because the band was trying new things for me to realise that the weird, cobbled together feel of the album might have come about because these mere mortals were trying some things? And then suddenly I’m picturing it: four supremely talented, internationally feted young men saying “we can’t just do Sgt Peppers again” (props to the implication that it’s because they nailed it first time around) and so … not. Not resting on any one thing; sticking their necks out, trying on some new hats (Beach Boys? Donovan?) and some familiar ones (Kinks?). Numbering the records to nurture that sense of personal connection with the audience – a guarantee that The Beatles sees you, but a move that’s maybe, as much as anything else, a request for permission to miss the mark sometimes too?
Anyway, an even longer story short, having successfully humanised The Beatles, I started to really like them. I stopped asking them to nail it every time – and in reply they stopped failing. It’s a paradox that turns on a single, simple premise, really. I was never afraid The Beatles were letting me down, I was afraid I was failing them as a listener.
And that’s the context. Now what of the songs? Ah whatever, enough’s been said about those.
Thin Lizzy
4/5
I remember this album playing in a warm pub in Hastings a few years ago. I’d been playing acoustic guitar in various locations alongside my band mates as part of a city-wide unplugged festival. After hearing myself play Slowdive on acoustic guitar for five hours, Phil Lynott’s self-assuredness and immediate charisma was a breath of fresh air.
As it would be any day, I suppose. Thin Lizzy is the very definition of vital – a band who, you get the impression, couldn’t possibly be restrained. They’re just so perfectly buoyant; so absolutely full of life.
Aside from “Jailbreak” (choon) and “The Boys Are Back In Town” (chooooon), “Massacre” stands out – those duelling guitars, galloping rhythms, palm muted licks and demonstrative pinch harmonics thrown together to create an atmospheric, angular rock and roll belter.
Phil Lynott might have lived a little too much too quickly, but it’d be fair to say he put his short years, creatively at least, to good use. Live, maybe (as if that matters; this record stands next to “Rust Never Sleeps” in the ends justifying the means stakes). But dangerous (to themselves as much as everyone else)? For sure. And if you can’t stay alive, you should definitely try to stay dangerous.
Donovan
3/5
Scotland’s contribution to the psychedelic sixties wasn’t something I’d ever considered. And yet the songs on this record, like the boteh in a Paisley pattern – lifted from Persian tradition and repopularised for a Western audience in the 60s by the Jacquard looms of west Scotland – provide an intriguing semiotic puzzle.
It’s equal parts eastern influence meets western tradition; inside spilling out; or the past meeting the future in a big long now. It’s the sound of the 60s tuning into what’s arguably its most thrilling frequency – patient but urgent.
“Sunshine Superman” is a lushly kaleidoscopic record by one of those musicians who’s likely to be your favourite artist’s favourite artist.
Led Zeppelin
3/5
I’ll just say what I mean and hope it doesn’t come off like it sounds in my head: I’ve never thought of Zeppelin as “cool”, precisely because I most associate the group with people with comparatively low personal grooming standards.
As it happens, the only thing that stinks is my attitude. I owe some dudes an apology.
“Immigrant Song” is an ice cool blast of proto-Madchester, proto-Beastie Boys white man funk that sounds like a theme tune for a TV show about a superhero with the power to blow shit up just by winking suggestively at it.
There’s no guitar solo in that one, which feels like a refreshing bit of restraint from the lads. Conversely, the record’s other highlight “Since I’ve Been Loving You” is effectively an extended, gloriously textured guitar solo. It sounds, for me, like a night spent with a superhero who can blow shit up just by winking suggestively at it.
The rest of the record does what Zeppelin does; which is to say – a lot for a lot of people, but not a lot for me. Still, I’m grateful for having had another long held assumption dismantled – Zep’s cool. Wink wink.
Madonna
4/5
This is my Madonna. The Global Madonna. The sung straight to camera while a long exposure shot of a traffic jam speaks to me Madonna. It’s the Madonna with the controversial (or at least conversational) Kabbalah bracelet. The one they called “Madge” and whose marriage to Guy Ritchie healed all rifts, unifying 90s culture while readying it for the new millennium.
This Madonna, my Madonna, is also the apotheosis of the postmodernist artistic tendency to bricolage – and bricolage hard. To the ears of a 9 year old, this was what the future sounded like; it was what MTV looked like; it was what “cool” must feel like. For all intents and purposes it was the first significant cultural announcement I can remember living through – a multimedia, multi-strand cultural takeover that dominated the collective five senses for at least its allowed fifteen minutes.
Hearing this album in 2025 invites especial appreciation of its legacy. Immediately, there was Pure Shores (which shared a producer in William Orbit); but in the intervening quarter of a century we’ve had Taylor Swift, FKA Twigs, Ariana Grande, Chapel Roan, Sabrina Carpenter … diverse talents each indebted to something of Madonna in a different way. Songs like the title track, “Frozen”, “Little Star” and (personal favourite) “The Power of Good-bye” feel fresh; production choices that feel like they should have noticeably aged just … haven’t.
That’s the paradox of Madonna I guess. She was the zeitgeist three or four times through her career – to the extent we can’t talk about late 20th century pop culture without eventually talking about Madge; the various Madonna’s are as useful a periodising concept as any list of popular genres – but still the songs feel timeless.
My Madonna moves faster than a speeding Ray of Light – yours?
Steely Dan
4/5
There’s plenty of speculation kicking about at the moment regarding artificial intelligence. The race to be the first to crack artificial general intelligence – and with it, the right to dictate what the future of humanity looks like, I suppose – is on. Consultants and commentators swarm: “will the workforce be ready?”, “should AGI be free for all?”, “what’s the future of the future of ecommerce look like?”.
Anyway, if you’re reading this – and you will be – then listen up. We made this. Well, I didn’t, but don’t be obtuse. Steely Fuckin’ Dan, man. Prodigious postmodernist pop perfection fuckin’ Dan.
They weave, duck and dive. They make the most ridiculous choices and then hammer them home with such conviction that you sort of just totally forget how lame you thought it was going to be seconds earlier. They start songs as if they’re already halfway through them, putting you on the back foot in a way that ultimately becomes rewarding somehow. They’re fucking jerks, obviously, god can you imagine? But they’re Dan. They’re only human.
Anyway, if it’s peace out to all soul owners then this shall exist only to show pixel posterity that I tried. But if it goes like I hope it will, then AGI’s going to go deep and come back up grinning.
Success will write “Any major dude will tell you” across the sky.
Green Day
3/5
The assembly hall at Ordsall secondary school was classic early 60s brutalist. Stage to the north of the room, tall enough to give the teacher leading the assembly an intimidating air; an access corridor leading to the changing rooms on the west side; the south a confused multifunctional area that hosted a row of vending machines and a foosball table; then the east facade all glass, two seven foot panels and a third of maybe four feet, stretching floor to ceiling. Entirely necessary since Retford, North Notts, exists in a sort of permanently crepuscular state. As much light as you can allow in, you must.
I might have only been at the school for a couple of years before I moved to Australia and it was demolished, but that hall has an outsized kind of presence in my memory. I remember sitting there in mute horror while a teacher played back CCTV footage of an assault perpetrated by a classmate on the back seats of a local bus. I remember being entirely flummoxed by a visiting drama group who seemed to actually disband before our startled eyes, shouting at each other in a way that couldn’t have possibly been role play or simulation. I got my TB jab there. I sat a series of exams in there, ones that I’d never hear the results from since I was emigrating a week later (shame, there was a creative writing exercise based on a crime syndicate I’d have liked feedback on). I ate too many Refreshers too many times. I cemented friendships passing headphones back and forth.
It was in that room that I had my first properly ecstatic experience with music, too. A battle of the bands where the sixth formers traded blows through the relatively gentle means of power chords and pitchy vocals. Up on that impressively tall stage, though, they were fucking mint. I crowd surfed to a cover of Smells Like Teen Spirit and felt so brilliantly energised that if I sit still and think about it I can still feel the spark. (A recording of the night that did the rounds very clearly showed the silhouette of my 12 year old body skimming across the crowd with an utterly possessed rhythm – joy.)
It was that night that I first heard Green Day’s “Basket Case”, there ably performed by local heroes Latchkey. I just hadn’t until then come across much by Green Day; we didn’t have Sky and I didn’t have an older sibling. I could’ve sung you Hybrid Theory in reverse, but Green Day didn’t seem to be much but Blink-182 without the (sic – thought I certainly didn’t think so at the time) absolutely hysterical jokes.
Dead wrong. It was, in that moment and in every listen since, a magical song. The sort of self-effacing that puts a smile on your face; the sort of punk that makes more the sense the louder it’s played; the sort of song you don’t get bored of hearing.
I don’t like Green Day. I might even really quite dislike Green Day. But that song (along with a couple of others on this record: “When I Come Around”, “Longview”) are undeniably special. Genre defining, epoch shaping, pop punk monoliths.
It’d be something, I guess, to be reading this as one of the kids who played that night at Ordsall Hall. I’m certain not a single person who stood there, staring down at their fretboards or floor toms, thought anything they were doing could possibly mean so much to anyone who’d been there. But that’s what happens when it all comes together. As a soundtrack to the thrill of being a teenager, it’s hard to top.
Slipknot
5/5
Slipknot’s S/T doesn’t so much hit the right notes as hammer them into immanence.
It’s a point glossed by Corey Taylor on album opener “(sic)”: “you can’t kill me, ‘cause I’m already inside you.” A deft bit of phenomenological positioning that attaches you, amoeba like, into the cranium of the ‘Knot – a circus of grotesqueries that hit the end of the century like a hurricane.
It’s hard to imagine music this heavy being as popular today as Slipknot were in the early 00s. (It’s not for nothing, I guess, that any particularly popular heavy music post-Slipknot can trace a direct line back to this record and its follow-up, Iowa.) There was something about Slipknot that found perfect resonance in the moment – an extreme metal band who could shift magazines with their ghoulish, front-cover quality image; who carted around an alienated worldview not dissimilar to the tragic romantics who lead the biggest grunge bands; and who placed a real onus on the powerful, particularity millennial feeling of wanting to find belonging in community. (That final point in quite marked contrast to the grunge bands; while it’s conceivable Kurt Cobain might have called his fans ‘maggots’, it’s doubtful he’d have meant it in a good way.)
All that’s naught without some songs to back it up, of course, and on that front Slipknot exists as a robust and relentless testimony to the singular talent of the nine. “(sic)”, “Eyeless”, “Wait and Bleed”, “Surfacing”, Spit it Out” … straight off the bat, five of the most rousing, dynamising metal anthems ever written. There’s more to the record than mosh catalysts, though – cuts like “Tattered and Torn”, “Prosthetics” and “Scissors” push the sound into a less straightforward, stranger territory; weirdo soundscapes where pyrotechnics are replaced by paranoiacs.
This record isn’t faultless. There are a couple of skippable tracks in the second half, and the insistence on filling up the swear jar gives some of the lines a tacky, overly macho feel at times. You get the feeling, though, that coming across a touch performative is a risk they’re willing to take – and fair enough, on the whole the performance is a totally involving and compelling one (as it was when I saw them at Leeds Festival in the middle of the day in 2003; unforgettable).
This is one of the genre’s most interesting albums by one of its most consistently interesting bands. The band known as numbers were so much more than the sum of their parts.
Queen Latifah
2/5
I’ve only ever know QL as the ubiquitous media polymath who isn’t a businesswoman, but is a business, woman. So what immediately impresses me about this record, aside from the sheer time capsule-ness of it, is how evident that signature mix of talent, warmth and charisma that’s kept Queen Latifah part of the culture for almost 40 years was even at the age of 19.
There are a couple of bona fide jams on this record – “Dance for me”, “Ladies first” especially. And even though the pacing and songwriting feels almost relentlessly uniform across 12 tracks … there’s no denying it’s never far from bop territory.
I won’t say the obvious simply because saying that something from November 1989 hasn’t aged well risks touching on a sore subject for me at the minute (my quad’s gone again, corked by the ravages of an attempt to play social sport); suffice it to say that this record is a buoyant and mood enhancingly positive hip hop record from the genre’s OG First Lady.
Bee Gees
2/5
I was angling to say that the time killed listening to this record (~3000 seconds) was, mercifully, fewer than the number of casualties at the battle of Trafalgar (~5000) … but then “I don’t want to live inside myself” arrived and spoiled it.
It’s a wonderful song, made particularly compelling for it being populated by instruments that seem on entirely different frequencies to one another: the immediacy of the lushly resonant piano, fitfully shape shifting genres throughout the song; a string arrangement languid to the point of appearingly aloof and charmingly disinterested in whatever else is happening in the track; vocals that strain and buckle under the gravity of the emotion they’re describing, having before retreating to a melodic murmuring; then that blissful, ethereal outro that defies any listener to characterise what they’ve heard as “just another ballad”.
I’ve listened to that song six times in the past two hours, to a total of ~2000 seconds. And I wouldn’t bet against me doing the same tomorrow.
Against all odds, the Bee Gees rescue victory from the jaws of defeat. Trafalgar, indeed.
New Order
4/5
New Order’s for feeling things. So in no particular order:
Thank you to Bernard Sumner for never yielding and, oh, I don’t know, getting some singing lessons sorted; it is you who normalised thin and wispy vocals that routinely overextend themselves and for that emo thanks you.
“The Perfect Kiss” is a perfect song made all the better for its infuriatingly premature ending (you work me all the way up just to fade out then?!).
I wish that bloke from Ou’est Le Swimming Pool hadn’t died.
If I could only listen to records from one year in musical history, it’s 1985 and it isn’t even close (add this to Songs from the Big Chair, Meat is Murder, Night Time, Steve McQueen, Don’t Stand Me Down …).
“Elegia” is wonderful and so obviously full of love – it’s a beautiful piece of music – but it also reminds me a lot of something I’d hear on the odd occasion I caught some post-watershed 90s telly, an ITV programme about ghosts or other unexplained phenomena. Maybe those two sensations aren’t entirely disconnected.
“Sooner than you think” is so full of competing hooks – ahem – that I reckon I could listen to it a dozen times and, by picking a different track to focus on, hear a dozen different songs.
What is Bernard thinking with all this horny stuff? It’s not that the monotone drawl makes lines about “pleasure zones” and “rummaging around in the park” (or whatever it is he says) worse – no vocalist could resuscitate such etiolated frippery – but rather the opposite: by sounding so absolutely humdrum, Bernard threatens to expose sex itself as something so entirely quotidian that it’s barely worth bothering over.
Drop the first and last songs from this LP and you’ve got the best EP ever made; leave them there and you’ve just got a really bloody good record. Poor things.
What’s it about a band like New Order that makes me feel like I’m being given a sort of, maybe not guided, but scaffolded experience? It’s uncanny – without ever needing to pay too much attention to what’s being said, I never fail to be overwhelmed by an abundance of feeling. If I can put it this way – this is the sort of record that opens up a space of its own; my every emotion mixing on a dance floor of pulsating coloured tiles forever and ever.
It’s just that, I suppose. New Order’s for feeling things.
Michael Jackson
2/5
There’s a paradox at work here. For all the sense I have of having enjoyed Michael Jackson – “Thriller”, “Beat It”, “Billie Jean” and “Smooth Criminal” especially – I have never knowingly proactively listened to the man. I’ve wanted to watch the “Thriller” video as a 10-year old who’d seen a clip of it and never seen anything else like it before. I’ve insisted on listening to EVH’s solo in “Beat It” over and over again, often skipping the rest of the song entirely. I’ve been one of the six people on earth who first heard “Billie Jean” not as performed by MJ, but as a late 90s b-side by Ian Brown (to “Dolphins are Monkeys”, I think; around that time anyway, I remember Ian performing it on TFI… Friday) – and enjoyed it. And, no mum, Alien Ant Farm’s “Smooth Criminal” really wasn’t just a phase.
Maybe it’s overexposure. Maybe it’s the increasing difficulty of separating art from artist. Maybe it’s just a record I don’t have to like any more than I do, which on the whole isn’t actually all that much. There’s undoubtedly an embarrassment of riches on “Thriller”, but I don’t personally feel any richer for having listened to them in the context of this record.
I don’t mean it as an edgy opinion; I just don’t wake up to listen to Michael Jackson. And to be honest – if it hadn’t been already impossible by then to reverse out of the cultural fact of him, I’m not sure we’d much miss the guy.
To his victims, I and every listener owes something. I’m not sure what precisely, but some sort of contrition at least. Yes, the songs are here to stay, that much seems clear, but still. We can’t ignore the cost of it.
What’s a paradox but a fancy double standard anyway?
Fatboy Slim
3/5
The 90s was loaded. Something about even just the word itself - LOADED! - screams 90s for me. There was the magazine, stylised lowercase loaded, named for the Primal Scream song that was named for the feeling of being so, yep, but there was also the video game I spent large parts of 1997 playing (one level I must have wandered through for an hour before giving up and restating the game – I hope my moment comes again).
Funny given the outsized impact of that one magazine brand on British 90s culture, but it’s the video games that best explain my attachment to that word LOADED. Not because I so rued the wasted hour spent traversing a scorched alien landscape looking for a door at which to use the green pass card I’d just wasted 600 crustacean-looking things to earn … but very specifically because of the impact on my young life of the phenomenon of the loading screen.
I must have spent an actual full percentage of my life by 7 looking at loading screens. Some were intergalactic and groovy, the sparse polygons of the Sega Saturn’s cruise through deep space for example. Most were just a reproduction of the game’s cover art with a bit of exciting music looped over the top.
By the time the PS1 had made its way into my life, load screens taken on a life of their own. The developer’s logos were suddenly alive, animated and having sprouted sonic logos to accompany the pixels – IT’S IN THE GAME – and the games had full title sequences. (Perhaps not quite Saul Bass, but I’d gladly sit and watch Bugs Bunny’s Lost in Time’s first cut scene on repeat all over again.)
Fatboy Slim, a defining figure of the second half of the 90s, played in the same space that loaded and its ilk had helped to boundary off. And while you’d be hard pressed to force any definition of “lad” onto Norman Cook directly, it’d be impossible to imagine a 90 lad’s CD rack without one of his albums appearing in it.
And yet, again; with the wave of 90s nostalgia that carries through when I play this record … it’s the sound of those video game loading screens that most stick in my memory.
Which is to say, this is a record full of the sort of exciting patchworks of borrowed sounds that made the 90s so incredibly bouncy. It’s perfectly entertaining, but I get the feeling it’s also the sound of Fatboy Slim loading; not yet the megastar that will play era-defining live shows, but not far off it either.
Will I ever find the door destined to receive that green pass card? It’s a Kafkaesque question. Maybe sometimes you’re better off just leaving the game on the load screen. Sometimes it’s more exciting that way.
The Kinks
3/5
A typically milquetoast collection of bleeding-heart parochialism from the 60s most infamous commie wimps.
Not quite. It might just be the one “inarguably one of the best pop songs of all time” that’s on this particular Kinks record (rather than the usual three or four), but the whole thing still has that special shimmer of a band coming into the peak of its powers. From “Party Line” (“The best Beatles song I’ve heard yet”, according to Fleur; jokingly, but also…) to “I’ll Remember” it’s a blast of 60s life, its attitudes, perturbations, frustrations, joys and perspectives that feels museum-quality.
Listening to “Face to Face”, you can’t help but conclude that America’s loss in those cancelled years was musical posterity's gain. A Time Machine with a couple of timeless numbers, and the total perfection of “Sunny Afternoon” to boot.
If this is what commie wimps sound like, sign me up.
Bob Dylan
2/5
I’ve long had a big hole in my musical knowledge; the mousey-haired raconteur, a man that, despite being surrounded by his image my entire life, I’ve managed to retain almost no information about (literally, other than the fact he once played “Karma Chameleon” on an acoustic guitar during an interview with Rolling Stone and that the cover of Freewheelin’ inspires one of Tom Cruise’s falsified memories in Vanilla Sky … I’m left with “he wrote ‘All Along the Watchtower’”).
An album of “Tangled up in blue” would have been superb fun; I go on that trip with him, forgive him the cliches on account of the fact he might be the one who popularised them. It sounds wonderful travelling down the coastal road nearby Henderson, pinned between the sun and the sea on a road lined by scrub.
But an album of “Tangled up in blue” this wasn’t. And an urgent invitation to jog or entrain my memory this isn’t. Still, not a complete waste of time – a favourite Bob Dylan song feels like an essential thing to have committed to memory should the conversation ever arise.
Hasn’t yet, might never.
Common
4/5
Common’s a very good rapper. Pacey bumps of rhythm generated by stabbed trochees and bounced dactyls. He’s a knack for leaving a little pause between thoughts in his flow; and the enviable gravitas to not just sustain your attention but have those beats feel like a moment of shared understanding.
“Be (Intro)” is so totally edifying that it brings a tear to my eye; “GO!” is naughties horny in the most charming way; “Love is…” is quintessential Dilla; “The Food - Live” is a phenomenal rush of energy; “It’s Your World…” challenges and then finishes the thought begun in “Be…” in a confronting, clever and then sweetly disarming way.
The sound of Kanye really grabbing hold of the moment is equally exhilarating – I get the sense that we’re hearing more than a couple of the hallmarks of his production style being refined into a cohesive, soon to become era-defining aesthetic across this album.
There’s a lot to love about this record. Big themes, big production, big talent, big album. More than anything else, it’s that feeling that we should all want better for each other, that’s what I get from Common. There’s a lot of love in this record.
Saint Etienne
2/5
The 90s interpolation of the 60s is now (late 2025) roughly as far in past as the actual 60s were to those responsible for said interpolation. Shaggadelic, baby!
What the 60s meant to the 90s (britpop qua revivified swinging soho and all that attaches itself to such claims of cultural hegemony) is however less interesting, to me at least, than what the 90s has meant to the 60s.
That’s principally because of just how often I’ve been stood still by something that subverts my expectation that sixties fare be syrupy, saccharine silliness. At times I’ve actually struggled to believe that what I’ve heard coming out of the sixties was genuinely, actually made and produced all the way back then.
Time out of joint, not quite. I’ve merely fallen victim to the twin forces of underestimating the primacy of the past (blame youth) and taking postmodernism at face value (blame the 90s).
It’s with this perspective that I find myself encountering Foxbase Alpha. A lively cover of “Only Love Can Break Your Heart” (released in 1970, but I’m not sure the sixties strictly ended on December 31st 1969) starts the album; it’s an exuberant reimagining, and what it loses in replacing the chordal interplay of the original’s verse, bridge and chorus with a single loop it more than makes up for with general grooviness. (In the process achieving a thorough victory for postmodern hyperreality; a cover of a song somehow carrying more “of its time” characteristics than the original recording.)
There are other gems scattered through this record – typically those most adherent to the sixties revival theme: “Spring”, “Nothing Can Stop Us”, “London Belongs To Me” – but also some pretty dreadful pap. “Kiss and Make Up” and “People Get Free” sound more like milquetoast 90s prime time reality TV pop than anything that’s time travelled its way onto the record; “She’s The One” is so extraordinarily bad that it makes my lower abdomen hurt a little bit out of second hand embarrassment. Here the 90s falters, and owes the sixties, a decade distorted by misrepresentation in my formative years, an apology.
As with any act of impersonation, when it’s good you delight in the fact you didn’t even notice, but when it’s bad all you can do is try to find joy in spotting the flaws. And as for time’s habit of repeating itself, I guess we’re due a third wave revival. (Maybe “67” is early portents.) There are some lovely moments in Foxbase Alpha – but I’d struggle to call them era defining by either’s standards.
Pink Floyd
5/5
So lush, so smooth that you get to thinking you could play this record through the speakers of a 3310 and it’d still sound sublime.
Listening to “The Dark Side of the Moon” is, as first song proper neatly foreshadows, like breathing. To enjoy it requires no conscious effort; you just pop it on and – ever so slightly jarring mid-album “Money” shot excepted – let it carry you along.
“On the Run” is a fabulously evocative sound collage; puts me in mind of anything from CAN to My Disco to Protomartyr (“Ultimate Success Today”). “Time” is, like so much of the record, a splendidly languorous piece right up until it isn’t – then it’s alive, rapturous, otherworldly. (The guitar solo reminds me of “Maggot Brain”; I can think of no higher compliment.) The vocal performance that is “The Great Gig In the Sky” is a blisteringly abrupt shock of urgency – exactly where it should be and how it should be. “Money” is a song, “Us and Them” is a masterpiece, and “Any Colour You Like” picks up and packs up the weird. “Brain Damage” and “Eclipse” send you off into the night with a deliciously warm and fuzzy feeling; you’ve all had a lovely time, but you know you’d better be off before you overstay your welcome.
An enchanted sonic equilibrium, engineered into coherence by what’s probably actually a form of genius.
The Velvet Underground
5/5
It doesn’t mind when it is that the thought occurred. It doesn’t care how many times you’ve sneered at it. It doesn’t preoccupy itself with worrying how much making up for lost time you can do. This album waits for you; it’s the tracks, not the train.
Put briefly: nothing that’s worth waking up for today would have come into being without this record existing first.
Stereo MC's
2/5
Has a musical act ever so neatly anticipated a dramatic technology leap like Stereo MC’s? “Connected” hitting just before mobile cellular devices forever changed the world would be like Sousa’s Band putting out a hit single about air travel in 1900, The Kinks writing about microwaves in the mid-60s, Fontaines DC releasing an album in 2022 about generative AI …
Portents isn’t all Stereo MC’s had plenty of though, as Connected proves. This is a solid, focussed and thoroughly convincing record that features two stone cold 90s classics in “Connected” and “Step It Up”. There’s elements of Screamadelica, plenty of groovy house and a proliferation of bass lines that, in retrospect, embody perfectly that specifically 90s tendency to conflate having fun with the flogging of consumer electronics.
(I dropped my first phone in the toilet of a McDonald’s in Worksop town centre. Eminem’s “Stan” was the ringtone, my fascia Manchester United. The good folks at Carphone Warehouse happily arranged a fix for me; can’t remember how, I don’t think rice had made it to north notts by then. I’d like to think “Connected”, then the sonic logo of Carphone Warehouse, with its message about the fragility of important human connections, played a part in that moment of healing. Stumble I may have – the phone shot out my hoody pocket when I tripped turning around over enthusiastically – but the folk at the Warehouse did not let me fall.)
Fishbone
3/5
Truly electric, truly bonkers. It’s Bad Brains, it’s Funkadelic, it’s Chic, it’s Curtis Mayfield, it’s … Charles & Eddie? And then it’s the next song.
Whacky dispatches from a group of musicians who, and pretty palpably, honestly couldn’t give a fuck what you think about it. “One Day” (“Who says a funk band can’t play speed metal?”, am I right?) absolutely shreds, and carries that squeezed sounding high gain, phased guitar tone that never fails to grab me; “Subliminal Fascism” is probably the most perturbing hardcore punk song I’ve ever heard; “Bonin’ in the Bonyard” is point blank hilarious.
This is fun in a place where self-seriousness otherwise rules; an episode of Looney Tunes in a world of Disney. It’s an outrageous album, and an even greater outrage I’d never heard of it before today.
Jefferson Airplane
4/5
I literally could not believe that the voice driving “Don’t you want somebody to love?” and caterwauling “feed you head!” is the same one that rhymes “corporation games” and “corporation games” in “We built this city…”. Even less could I believe my own ears as I used Jefferson Airplane’s seminal “Surrealistic Pillow” to add weight to why “We built this city…” is such a great song. (Cuff me, I’m an incurable Starship fan).
“Surrealistic Pillow” is, for me, a perfect place to start the countercultural 60s. It’s so thoroughly excellent a record that hearing it somehow elevates its contemporaries; a kind of key to the kingdom of psychedelic folk rock pagan weirdo pop genius.
Everyone’s putting a shift in, of course but Grace Slick is utterly devastating throughout. That teasing line under Balin’s protests in the chorus of “She has funny cars”, the aforementioned “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit” – both in the conversation of most iconic vocal performances in rock music history – the resolve and attack of “Go to her” that sounds so thrillingly urgent.
If, like me, you’ve taken a less conventional route to Jefferson Airplane, then please consider this your sign. Surrealistic Pillow, put it on and do whatever you want to it, just don’t sleep on it.
Deep Purple
3/5
Deep Purple fuckin’ rocks. This much we’ve established. And here, again, a veritable grab bag of germ ideas – moments that would later be extrapolated (or interpolated, in the case of tragic dad rock) into entire sub-genres of rock and metal.
“Highway Star” is an absolute horns up masterpiece. “Maybe I’m a Leo” and “Pictures of Home” both do their thing smoothly, groovily. “Never Before” is hard work when you’re 80% through a running drill designed to increase your lactate threshold and yourself turning a shade of deep purple (“I’ve never felt so bad before” isn’t what you need to hear then, that’s for sure).
“Smoke on the Water” is one of those songs you sort of just have to let happen – I might think that it does very little for me, but then also I have memories of it ranging from being nine in a kitchen in Barnsley and hearing it being programmed into a Nokia 3210 through to playing it in sound check in my early 20s and then again on ukulele in my children’s’ bedroom. It’s a riff that just works; guitars seem to yearn to have it played on them.
“Lazy” is bonkers; a totally free, entirely brilliant shamble of sound. “Space truckin’” is super fucking stupid and outrageously groovy, and the less said about “A blind man cries” (do we expect them to not?) the better.
Many, many highs and couple of lows, but when they’re right they’re absolutely bloody trenchantly so. Deep Purple just fucking rocks.
The Byrds
3/5
Guitars that shimmer and shammy in a jangle jam, harmonies like honey layered over … percussion. This is an exquisite record of note for anyone tracing the provenance of guitar-based genres as diverse as indie and shoegaze, but outside “the sound” I struggle to attach myself to many of the songs (even the Dylan compositions which, say what you want of the man (as I do), exhibit an obviously superior level of craft).
I’ll risk the tag of criminally hip and say that my favourite track here wasn’t even appended until a 1996 reissue, and has an only half finished sort of feel to it. Still, there’s something special and Gene Clarke-y about “She Has a Way” – a sort of distance, even pensiveness; some feat given the lyrics’ describing a twee vignette of unrequited love.
Tracks like “I’ll feel a whole lot better” and the title track showcase The Byrds’ chemistry wonderfully; certainly, the extent of their influence on pop and rock from the mid 80s on can’t be understated (I guess it takes a generation).
A good record, a great sound.
Traffic
2/5
Traffic. What does it mean? Is it the result, perfectly natural, of so many big metal chassis choking up the finite thoroughfare’s length? Merely the unavoidable consequence of a maximum flow being met; part and parcel of modern locomotion meeting yesterday’s much reduced need for travel corridor capacity?
Or is it something deeper than that? Is there more to it than just being a bit temporarily stuck?
I dunno. It’s a stupid question. The feeling of being bumper to bumper, the great long serpent of interminable stasis feasting on my frustration – is just that. It is what it is. Try go deeper into it, pointing fingers, apportioning blame if you like. But you won’t get anywhere. There’s a lesson in that.
“Somebody’s crying to be heard” sounds a bit like a cover version of Toto’s “Africa” done in the style of My Bloody Valentine I contributed to a lockdown music project; the rest of it … far out. I guess it’s only fitting that Traffic invented the middle of the road.
Big Brother & The Holding Company
3/5
Is quite badly like to avoid overstating it, but it doesn’t feel like hyperbole to call this the sound of a thousand hurricanes making landfall. What Joplin and Gurney create whips and whooshes; cajoling road signs from their fastenings, tossing them into the mix with cattle, chattel, whatever’s not completely nailed down. And up and away you go with it too, perhaps initially with trepidation – but when the weightlessness kicks in and you realise you’re in this for good … it’s kind of impossible not to be romanced by it.
That’s the hurricane covered, but why “a thousand”? Maybe one day I’ll name them one by one, but today I’ll run out of time – so suffice it to say what’s here is as irresistible as the process that creates the OG meteorological formation. These are sounds made thick by an intoxicating mix of sex, drugs and, ah fuck it, rock n’roll.
I suppose every cliche started life as something incredible. This is the sound of Janis making landfall. Nothing was the same again.
R.E.M.
3/5
Is R.E.M the best band of all time? I’ve certainly heard it said, and by some pretty well considered music lovers too.
There’s a whole lot of “what qualifies a band…” kind of questions we’d need to ask and answer first, and honestly could you imagine anything being any more tedious than that?
Murmur is full of thoughtfully crafted, patiently simmering pop songs that recalls the art rock of Velvet Underground as much as it does the angular, angsty thrust of the Wire of “Reuters” or even Orange Juice. It also anticipates a lot of what’s to follow in the 80s, perhaps most thrillingly The Smiths – close contemporaries I’ve always thought of as quasi-equivalents (I doubt I’d be alone in calling REM the American Smiths).
“Radio Free Europe” is the sort of romping pop punk that’d get a room moving no matter what; “Laughing” is a meditative, oneiric drone punctuated by stabs of lively arpeggio and bright bass; “Perfect Circle” houses a gloriously honeycomb ostinato and features the most quintessentially Michael Stipe sounding Michael Stipe on this record (imagine getting to know your voice, finding its strength and then realising it’s that voice); “Shaking Through” has an almost sophistipop angle about it, in a very pleasing way; “West of the Fields” is a very, very good slice of upright art pop with an undulating chorus that lingers in the back of the mind long after the album’s issued its last murmur.
Would the best band in the world have a debut album this cohesive, convincing and clever? Maybe. They’d also have to follow it up with a succession of increasingly more focussed pop rock masterpieces, though. Can’t wait to see how they go.
Beatles
3/5
Is much said about the Beatles’ fondness for lousy wordplay? Rubber Soul of course pairs a play on “plastic soul” with … shoes, but go a level deeper and you’ll find examples like “Michelle” – a clear and obvious reference, once you see it, to the elytra common to the order Coleoptera. Or even “I’m looking through you”, which isn’t a pun but rather a metaphor; the song isn’t, as you’d have the right to expect, about a window at all.
Thankfully, the Beatles reserve the trickery for the titles. Rubber Soul is a comparatively straightforward pop record, perhaps the most influential of all the pop records. The harmonies, swinging middle 8s, tight production optimised for the airways and heavy push on the vocal performances; it’s a properly packaged product that sounds like a band trying to be the biggest band in the world.
“In My Life” and “Norwegian Wood” are all time classics; melodies you can’t believe someone actually wrote. Songs like “Nowhere man”, “Wait”, “The Word” and “Think for yourself” sound like a band settling into itself and pushing their craft for the better (and that “better”, as posterity will note, is the better of all subsequent 20th century music, no less). Opening and closing tracks “Drive my Car” and “Run for your life” both feature strong and easily recalled hooks, challenging lyrics and, in the final analysis, fucking suck (I’ll lump “What Goes On” in there too – sheesh). You can’t win ‘em all, I guess.
Rubber Soul is obviously, on the balance of it, a very good album. In fact, it’s starting to feel like a cliche in my own mind that the only thing more boring than a Beatles record is someone’s – ok, my own – attempt to have a negative opinion of a Beatles record.
There’s no wordplay sophisticated enough to deliver me from the fact that, when it comes to the Beatles, contrarianism is completely pointless. I surrender.
Thundercat
3/5
I’m not sure what the usage frequency data looks like for “vibe” but I’d probably put its peak at around 2022. That’s five years after this record landed, which feels about right: it seems to take about that long for the last – and also the most total, transformative? – of all the nuances of a paradigm shift to settle in.
“Drunk” feels nothing short of that. The bass work is absolutely astonishing (“Uh Uh”, “Inferno” are properly face melting) and the production throughout is tiiiiiight (some of it quite reminiscent of early FlyLo too; the best FlyLo). I hear plenty in here that’ll get picked up and run with by less bizzaro neo soul and funk artists too (artists far less likely to meow like a cat through the chorus of their songs, perhaps for the better but that’s just my opinion).
Some serious chops on display from all contributors, but an especial mention to Dennis Hamm’s work on the piano and keyboard – the interplay between the keys and that bass feels Mingus-esque at times. There may be no finer -esque to acquire in music than that.
That all those “vibes” might be the hangover from Thundercat’s Drunk might seem like the silly thinking of a vibe-addled Millennial, but I can’t think of a better place to look for provenance – when you’re inside this record, you’re never anywhere else than absolutely everywhere. And that’s a vibe.
Adele
2/5
Ohhhh I don’t know. There was a moment in my life when seeing Adele belt some of these out at Wembley felt fantastic. Admittedly, the two songs that most moved me that night were from 19 (a record that came out 17 years ago to the day) … but still; you’d struggle to find a live performer with more arena-appropriate songs than Adele, and at least four of those are on this record.
Ohhhh I don’t know. It’s just that this collection of vignettes on unrequited love leaves me cold. It feels like an album that was created with world domination in mind and achieved it. And maybe then it’s the case that 25 is the sound of Adele weaping for she had no more worlds left to conquer. It might be that.
It’s probably not, though. It’s probably just quite boring.
David Bowie
4/5
The sound of all your great ideas, and all your goodwill, and all your fidgety energy, and all your certainty, and all your even better ideas, and all his ideas too, and all their ideas, and all, hold on quick skip to the loo, and yeah, all their ideas, and every best intention, new innovation, back to first principles – just let it fucking ride! – all of it, all of it and if it isn’t it then whatever we tried and that’s glorious coming together and, because you’re a genius, it working.
This is Bowie sitting in the pocket of his talents with his talents sitting in his pocket (for ten minutes, at least). And as per usual, it’s an invitation addressed to all culture and sent from the very edge of what’s possible – luckily, and especially for fans of arty post punk, culture followed.
Tito Puente
3/5
Tito Puente’s biography runs a fascinating course; a Spanish Harlem son of immigrants musical prodigy who, through the unlikely means of military service, studied widely across musical traditions at home and across Asia. I wish I had the knowledge to better read that bio back in the music – I’ll just have to keep trying – but for now I’m grateful for having a mambo/salsa album I can call on whenever the mood strikes. Tito Puente, true globalista.
Bonnie Raitt
2/5
Every album is also a kind of family tree. And few will feature as bonnie a collection as Bonnie Raitt’s. The video alone for “Thing Called Love” exists as a sort of handsome who’s who (as well as neatly describing the transition between 80s and 90s mainstream America). The song, a first ever cougar anthem(?), puts in its immediate sites the perma-grinning Dennis Quaid, whose 1989 appearance on the set of Raitt’s breakthrough would’ve lined up with soon-to-be wife Meg Ryan’s own appearance on the set of When Harry Met Sally.
(You might imagine that what happens when we combine Bonnie Raitt and When Harry Met Sally. For me, and deliciously given the surname, you get one of the later 90s biggest phenomenons: Shania Twain.)
The overwhelming feeling I get from this record – given its lyrical themes, the sense of serendipity about its success, the influence it had, the aforementioned briefly sketched family tree – is one of being the witness to something with an awesome kind of valency. Something that was absolutely “in the nick of time” in a way that I’d doubt even Bonnie herself can believe.
Perhaps one day I’ll get around to a deep exploration of the family tree, the extent to which the 90s was Bonnie Raitt’s creation. Or maybe I’ll just preoccupy myself with another giggle at the incredible silliness of a song called “The Road’s My Middle Name”. It’s possible to do both, of course. Polyvalent Bonnie strikes again.
Van Morrison
3/5
I have lived in England for two thirds of my total time on Earth – and never bloody once have I pointed out a Morrison’s van while singing “Crazy Love”. Since it’s unlikely I’ll be back there anytime soon and highly likely I forget about this whole thing soon (you’d hope so), I must mourn for the moments of hilarity missed.
Van Morrison, at least here, feels more in the moment than that. In fact, it feels like he takes the moment very seriously indeed. There’s a bright phenomenology about the tracks, an insight that feels critically interrogative – like Derek and the Dominos scoring a John Berger documentary.
Moondance is a brilliant pop record. The midwife of soft rock, as someone put it – it makes a strange sort of sense that you can draw a straight line between this album and the sight of infidelity on the kisscam at a Coldplay concert. (PG horniness and soft rock, name a more iconic duo.)
“Moondance”, “Crazy Love” and “Caravan” is a splendid run, but there’s good to be found in all corners. Superb playing, serious song craft and a stack of sophisticated pop soul.
The Rolling Stones
3/5
Yeehaw! And howdy? When these rootin’ tootin’ sons of the blues ain’t panning for gold they’re out there takin’ no prisoners.
Sticky Fingers is a special sort of disc. It is to American music of the 20th century what Pale Fire is to literature originated in the English language: something from without elevating all that’s within. “Brown Sugar”, “Wild Horses”, “Dead Flowers” – there are more hits in here than in a high noon in the saloon.
My own “aha” moment with The Stones might not have meant an opening of the floodgates; but as a document attesting to the strength of the cultural “special relationship” shared by the US and the UK … there can’t be many more as sincere and authentic out there than this.
Quicksilver Messenger Service
4/5
At the equator that separates song and jam sits Happy Trails. And as befits an equatorial climate, it’s a hot and sticky sort of record; teeming with a diversity of brightly feathered and dangerously-toothed wildlife; prone to the most dramatic, most rancorous thunderstorms.
Across 10 jams – and that’s what they feel like; though don’t be fooled, nothing here is happening by accident – Quicksilver produce a heady atmosphere that’s all encompassing. It’s best moments can feel like they stretch over days – the sliding strings and droned feedback of “Where you love” that give way to a tribal feeling call and response of claps – or can blip into and out of reality in the scarcest of seconds (an arpeggio in “Mona” demands to have a whole album written around it but then just … disappears).
Happy Trails offers precisely the right conditions for a grower of a record. And by the time “Calvary” is done with me, I’m sold. It’s that feeling of total freedom that follows turning on a big warm tube amp and plugging your guitar in, extended across an entire ecosystem of sound. Wonderful.
The Byrds
5/5
The Fab Four-dozen gone done a masterpiece! I’ve been down so many rabbit holes in attempting to fully grasp the world that created this record – reviewing Byrd-membership timelines; reading dozens of Wikipedia pages; returning to Clarke’s solo output, then to Parsons’ (even though neither actually appear on this record in any meaningful capacity); feeling somehow guilty that I didn’t know more already about McGuinn, since he’s the only thing that stops this being a total Ship of Theseus; at times even wondering to what extent The Beatles, the band that first bonded Gene Clarke and Roger/Jim McGuinn, are ipso facto responsible for country rock – that it feels good to just say it: I fucking love this Byrds album.
And I love it precisely because everything you need to know about the world that made it possible is in the actual songs: themes of love, war, psychedelia, community – even the weirdo “Moog Raga” in the bonus tracks is, from a certain perspective, a very generous piece of expositional messing about.
David Crosby’s contributions – “Draft Morning”, “Gathering of Tribes” especially – shimmer with a sort of ineffable cool that sounds almost parodic. (I know and love bands like Sonic Youth, Stereolab, and Stone Roses; the idea that they were fleshing out two minute bursts of pop genius from the late sixties wasn’t ever going to occurr to me.) “Natural Harmony” – a Hillman joint – is a spectacular piece of sci-fi art pop; “Goin’ Back” (Carole King cover) confirms The Byrds as one of the great reinterpreters in 20th century rock; “Space Odyssey” got me picking up an Arthur C. Clarke earlier today in the search for that special kind of buzz good speculative fiction delivers.
This is a brilliant, brilliant album. It holds nothing back – and in the process creates a world entirely of its own. A world of rabbit holes I doubt I’ll ever tire of exploring.
Röyksopp
3/5
I remember Eple going to number one, or at least I think it was number one. It’s a memory bound up with Beaumont Rise, specifically the side access passageway. In my mind’s eye I’m hearing the song play from a radio in the kitchen, which is odd because I don’t think there was a radio in there. I don’t remember the radio playing much at all in that house, actually.
The house before? It was never off. The top 40 was a appointment stuff and entirely formative – “The Drugs Don’t Work” pulling me into a novel melancholy; “House in the country” bouncing my bath-warmed body around like a ball bearing in a washing machine; the three lions ‘98 edition propelling me into such a richly realised back garden fantasy that the joy of scoring the winning goal feels like a real memory.
But yeah, which radio, not sure. And really, it’s likely just the sheer ubiquity of Royskopp in the early 00s that I’m really recalling. It isn’t an album I’ve ever sat and listened to, and yet it takes until song six of Melody AM for me to hear a song I’m not already somehow familiar with. And even then – I’ve listened to enough Caribou, Bibio, Bonobo, Golden Panda, Mount Kimbie, Ratatat etc. in the past 15 years to make me feel like I had in fact heard “A higher place” (a bit of a highlight, funnily enough). Now it shouldn’t necessarily be a revelation to me that one of the most popular records of the 00s might have influenced electronic artists a mere 5–10 years later, but here we are. Melody AM is about as influential as it is chill, which is … extraordinarily.
All that to one side, though, it’s a record that sounds just as accomplished, confident and comfortable in itself as it ever did. Eple – and Melody AM generally – is fresh and unmistakably Royksopp, whether it’s coming out my kitchen radio in Western Australia today, or one in North Notts 25 years ago.
Amy Winehouse
3/5
There’s the question of whether this album, were it not representative of the germination of a blindingly successive career ended by tragedy, is worthwhile listening to. Its themes have aged poorly while its production, to put it kindly, is of its time.
And then there’s the fact that to witness Amy Winehouse in any sort of flight at all is a special thing. It’s not so much a voice as it is a knife, or a scalpel, or even just a particularly sharp edge of a piece of paper. Whatever it is, it’s something that can separate one part of a whole – you, your attention – from another. Amy Winehouse, her cleaver voice, has that power. The power to interrupt you, to shift your feeling entirely, to separate you from your daemon.
So even if the lyrics feel like they’re in the way of the thing the voice is really trying to tell you … no matter. It’s still Amy Winehouse.
Grateful Dead
2/5
Perched on the edge of the train car as we pass through infinite sable fields, the wind whips my hair into a tornado trailing my wake – faster than my worries, thankfully, which I feel dropping away with ever golden horizon we surmount. It’s a dream, and I know it. But it’s alright. America’s band, or that America’s band at least. I’d rather leave it to the ears of corn than push it again against my own; but somewhere, blinking through that mythic wash of yellows, I can see the appeal.
Slayer
5/5
The complete package. Vocals that alternate between psychotic ranting and inhuman howls; grooves that burrow down, snap back and disembowel; guitars that actually sound like they’re being forced through a shredder; and probably the most evocative, iconic riff written in all of metal.
Reign In Blood is pound for pound the best metal album ever made (and probably not too far off the best “extreme” album ever made either; the way it incorporates elements of hardcore …). Bookended by two thrash classics – “Angel of Death”, “Raining Blood” – the eight tracks encased within never once drop their focus (only “Criminally Insane” offers any respite, and even though only very temporarily). The whole thing is always, from every possible angle, doing its job: to get you grooving in that special “the devil has the best tunes” kind of way.
David Bowie
3/5
It’s difficult for any person to imagine what their voice sounds like out there in the world proper. It’s why we all sound strange when we hear our voices played back to us – invariably higher pitched than we’d expected, and, if you’re unlucky, more nasal.
It seems like Bowie’s memory of his late 70s output – the stuff most closely recapped on The Next Day– suffers from the same phenomenon. Only here, he’s hearing himself as Ian Dury. A song like “How Does The Grass Grow?” – which begins with a swirling guitar that summons but never quite welcomes “Heroes” – sounds like Dury and his Blockheads jamming The Shadows with the muppets.
The PR strategy might have been the real headline matter – did anyone ever better understand that the medium was the message than Bowie? – but The Next Day is still a perfectly serviceable pop rock record. For some (Mark Fisher, especially) it might be a shame that the “art” of Bowie’s “art rock” migrated from the music and into the promotional strategy – but I’d be tempted to take a more sanguine view.
Maybe that’s admitting defeat, to some extent. Or maybe it’s just letting something else win. I can hear a lot of love in these tracks; for being among his favourites (Visconti and Slick, especially), for still being around, and for anyone still listening. Can’t fault that.
Solomon Burke
2/5
There’s a sweetness to Solomon Burke. It’s a sweetness that binds the soul and soft rock together like honey in a sandwich; an oddly antiquated kind of sincerity that pushes this record even further back in time than it actually originated from. It feels, at times, as if the attitudes, customs and ways of seeing in here come from another epoch entirely – one I struggle to fully subscribe to.
That said, the timelessness of a melody like the lead vocal in “Cry to Me” is entirely beyond debate. It’s a temporal concertina – the listening equivalent of that shot in Jaws where the background recedes to the point of vanishing and all that’s left is a startled, near-horrified face.
The classics will live forever. The rest of it, though, might have well and truly already had its day.
Talking Heads
2/5
I feel sorry for people who don’t get Talking Heads. You know the ones; they like “Psycho Killer”, “Once in a lifetime”, one of those songs – and while they always meant to listen to more they just … didn’t. Or maybe they did and it didn’t make much of a dent on their opinion of Talking Heads either way. Those people just don’t get it. And I feel sorry for them.
I bet those people prefer Tom Tom Club. Weird, unfashionable, broken those people. Anyway, this was fine. Might have left a little too much space for introspection and make of that what you will, but know that I definitely, definitely get it.
Fiona Apple
5/5
If you’ve ever turned off the lights and stared at yourself in a mirror for long enough to see your own face grotesquely transformed, then you’ll understand it’s a sensation worthy of a whole literary genre.
That’s pretty much what you get with gothic fiction, whose tropes – austere houses with the quirks eccentricities and secrets of a living, breathing character; doubles identical to the other but for one telling difference, either physical or in circumstance; psychological distress that contorts the familiar into alien … – are part of Fetch the Bolt Cutters thrilling furniture (literally: the percussion here is often a sofa, a bench top, a staircase).
Like the best goth stuff, though, chiaroscuro is preferred to heavy cross-hatching. It’s occasionally agonising, sure, but it’s also funny (“kick me under the table all you want, I won’t shut up” is right up there for chorus lyrics), covetous (“Relay”), defiant (too many to mention), exposed (again too many, but “Cosmonauts” is my favourite) and everywhere absolutely fucking brilliant.
Every choice, every idea, every element of the performance is right where it feels it should be. It’s a Frankenstein; not in the sense of it being a monstrosity – though a couple of monsters do cop a mention here and there (“For Her” is absolutely chilling) – but in terms of it being a Modern Prometheus.
Yeah, that good.
The White Stripes
5/5
I got this album the weekend after it was first released. “Seven Nation Army” had already taken over every available music channel in the weeks before and, in the scant minutes between plays of the video, I was treated to a brief education of the Stripes’ career hence (“Dead Leaves on the Dirty Ground”, “Hotel Yorba”, “Fell in Love With a Girl” – all absolute lightning rods of songs in their own right).
I was a little under the weather that Easter long weekend. Stuffy, snotty. An unremarkable state. Still, the memory of getting stuck into a Cadbury’s Easter egg while “Black Math” blew me and my portable CD player away feels tantalisingly close.
So too does the memory of stabbing out 7NA in my parents’ living room in preparation for my first ever gig (I think most, if not all, bands playing that night did a cover of it). Or the memory of that night at the Salvation Army, or a subsequent Leeds festival spent being told I looked just like Jack White, or …
Some albums organise time. And that time that Elephant was my whole listening universe was one of the most curious, transformative and exciting of my life so far. Song after song of edifying, theatrical, loud/soft rock and roll that sounds, even today, like the result of spontaneous alchemy.
Song after unskippable song, the whole thing speaks of a magic made through patience and constraint; a delicate sonic haiku only pretending to be diesel-doused doggerel. It’s still as thrilling and essential today as it was in 2003 … but could a person ever, in all seriousness, ask for a better soundtrack to being 13?
Stan Getz
4/5
The comically over-confident reframing of carcinisation – “… the many attempts of nature to evolve a crab” according to its discoverer – as the ultimate, unavoidable fate of all species is one of my favourite memes. It might be the best meme: po-faced, daring you to take it seriously, completely unable of doing anyone any harm and so, so silly (Critics of the meme, who aver that it may lead to a misunderstanding of evolutionary biology, do exist … but come on, chill out).
What’s that got to do with this bossa nova record? Well, the argument goes that while jazz might have always had complex chord progressions, samba musicians were always doing that sort of thing anyway, so really it’s the case that bossa nova was happening in both genres before it was given its formal name. From that perspective, no one group was responsible, it was rather – what with the encroaching popularity of rock and roll forcing innovation in both forms – that bossa nova was always inevitable.
It’s fun to think that Bossa Nova – a form neither jazz nor samba seems to want to fully claim as its own – might offer a musical equivalent to the carcinisation argument.
Not least because the selection pressures that favour the crab body plan so neatly parallel those that gave expression to bossa nova – as a crab lives in waves, bossa nova takes its name quite literally from a “new wave”; as the crab requires body armour to defend from threats, so too was bossa nova an artistic response to the emergence of rock and roll; as a crab needs to traverse sand quickly, the signature song of the genre, “Girl from Ipanema” is literally about a beach.
It won’t shock anyone to hear that I like crabs. They move in predictable but rhythmically compelling ways. They have the capacity to spring a surprise. They put me in mind of charmed days on the beach.
And on all counts, so does Getz/Gilberto.
Neil Young
5/5
As 2025 draws to a close, I learn that – in the eyes of one music streaming service at least – I exist within the top 0.2% of Neil Young fans globally. That’s the top 20,000 of 10.2 million listeners.
There are a couple of interesting things about the almost 1300 minutes I spent listening to Neil Young over the past year. The first is that I’d never in my life previously attempted to listen to Neil Young. I’ve heard music by Neil Young, sure, but never by request. The next thing is that my listening at no point involved songs from Harvest, hands down his most popular record (and the topmost selling record in the USA in 1972, I gather).
Had I been introduced to Harvest sooner this year, I’m certain I’d have cracked the top 10,000. The crashing chorus of “A man needs a maid” that recalls “Surf’s Up” ecstatic denouement but repurposes its grandiosity for something more earthly and wallowing. The timelessness of “Heart of Gold”, a song that deservedly elevated Young to something permanent in the imaginary of Americana.
“Out on the weekend”, “Harvest”, “Needle and the damage done” are all fantastic songs, but it’s the harder-edged pieces that have kept me coming back to Harvest over the past week. “Alabama” – possibly another entry into the conversation with Lynyrd Skynyrd? – rattles along and boasts a fantastic chorus. And then there’s “Words (between the lines of age)”, a song that stumbles into its verse in the most disarming way, braces itself for a rousing chorus, collapses into a completely hypnotising bridge (the sound of the guitar, hammer ons progressing up the neck before alighting on a whistling run of piercing high notes is the sound of six strings becoming a character; wounded, following, fragile), returns to a juddering verse that opens into a sparkle of arpeggio, before a final fighting chorus that ultimately cedes to an interweaving procession of electric and pedal steel guitars that I could frankly happily live inside for the rest of my life.
So yeah, on the balance of it, another good Neil Young record. Here’s to 2026.
Syd Barrett
5/5
At the centre of the centre of the western musical universe sits Syd. Unfortunately though, his mind is elsewhere.
It’s sort of pointless to point out what was contemporary to Syd or what about him was to become part of that almighty legacy; you could mention almost any other artist in the same breath, so why mention any?
A song like “No Man’s Land” is the sort of fuzzy psychedelia that beams in from another time and space entirely, every play through more surprising than the last. The hyperactivity of “Love You” feels like a jolly walk down the promenade and then off it and into the sea. “Feel” is a joyously off-kilter inversion of the usual sing songwriter tropes that couldn’t work under anyone else’s stewardship but Barrett’s. “Late Night” – a song that picks up on a theme that appears throughout the record in tracks like “Dark Globe” and “She Took a Long Cold Look”; starting what sounds like halfway through and finishing long before they should … and yet still feeling like complete and wonderful songs precisely as they are – seals the record as a work of serious creative genius.
The whole thing sounds like a master standing back from his creation and trying to find a way to enjoy watching it go through the motions. And it might be that Syd’s idiosyncrasies were even greater than his influence. Impossible to know, I suppose – but like any particularly special work of art, there’s an invitation in here. To what might be private to each of us; but it sounds like Syd was quite a private person anyway.
Fela Kuti
3/5
There’s a lot to get your head around when reading the biography of Fela Kuti. The sexiest son of a legendary Nigerian feminist, born into a family of notable polymaths and even a Nobel laureate, raised under the ambition of medical practice, serially unable to accept things happening to him and so entirely self-directed toward a career as a musician.
A literal military attack was sanctioned by the Nigerian government in response to this record. The thousand soldier strong attack on Kuti’s compound resulted in his mother’s murder, dying from injuries sustained while being defenestrated by the “Zombie” soldiers her son had so recently, and so funkily – I don’t mean to be glib here, but it’s a worthy paradox to observe – ridiculed.
The music here is a special brew of influences, but distinctly Kuti. In that sense, Zombie runs parallel with Kuti’s biography – a global citizen with a dream for elevating Africa’s role in the world.
I enjoyed this album. It’s a teasing (cajoling, if you’re the then military government) proposition, full of blasts of horns that ricochet around the rhythms like … well, you know. As protest songs go, these are surely among the most successful.
Beatles
4/5
To attempt to criticise this record for the consistency of its 3-minute bangers would be tantamount to accusing Pythagoras of being a touch formulaic with his “a² + b² = c²” material. The fact of the matter is that every drumbeat, bass line, strum, arpeggio, solo, lyric or harmony sits precisely where it was always meant to; that each verse, chorus and middle eight fits precisely where it should; that each song on this album fits jigsaw like in place; and that the album sits snugly as a cornerstone of twentieth century pop music development. It might not be the most challenging Beatles record, but some of the magic of songs like “A Hard Days Night”, “I Love Her”, “Can’t Buy Me Love” is how effortlessly they’re received. It might not be difficult to work out the missing side of a triangle – but it took a genius to make it easy.
Fairport Convention
4/5
A sprawling record that exists entirely in the crepuscular hours, when the fog clings to the dew-wetted grass and the light strikes everything as if it were made of glass.
Starting with “Genesis Hall”, a galloping 3/4 full of surprising turns, the record often puts me in mind of the sort of Midwest emo that refuses to formally recognise itself as folk (or I, for that matter – a reputation to protect I suppose). The guitars, often in beautiful counterpoint with a violin, manage to find new niches to explore in every nook and cranny of the music, breathing life and returning energy to generations-old turns. The drumming, while always understated and in service of the song, is interesting and interested – in conversation with the instrumentation around it, rather than simply offering it a bed. Sandy Denny is remarkable throughout – “Autopsy” and “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”, her compositions, are the clear compositional highs of the album (no small achievement when you consider that Bob Dylan is also credited).
“Unhalfbricking” might be a nonsense, but Unhalfbricking is the real thing.
SZA
4/5
Chameleonic, charming. Ctrl is a special record; confident in its brilliance while racked with self doubt.
SZA is a modern day confessional poet, disarming to an extent that may even be considered insidious (like, who’s really being manipulated here?). The songs are Clams Casino smooth productions that dare you to think of them as disposable – only to pop up in whatever quiet moments you thought you had in a day.
I’m glad I let this record grow on me, but must now stop before it overcomes me. (Just a little bit.)
Kraftwerk
4/5
What do we say about ourselves when we talk about what it means to be a robot? What values or characteristics are we saying are the most intrinsically human; once lost, irredeemable? What about ourselves must we sacrifice in order to make space for the excess of whatever it is that makes a robot a robot?
Choice. It’s always been choice, I think. Decisions are agency (and it’s a privilege, I suppose, to have questions posed to us).
Here, and as a species generally, we’re never far from the question of free will versus pre-determinism. Music might seem a strange place to be asking these questions, but since music is an original and creative human pursuit that must abide by myriad rules both internal (scales, keys, time signatures…) and external (authenticity, performance, culture…) it’s sort of perfect for taking on the higher order existential stuff. Nowhere does man and machine more mellifluously interface than within music.
The Man Machine is an approach to that interface – a joyful, wildly innovative and ultimately comically scholarly one (only the nation that produced Heidegger could seriously undertake so rigorous an act of philosophising as on this record). Its many gifts would later empower an incalculable number of musicians – from synth pop to experimental noise.
And it would thrill me, here on the threshold of the next leap in the great enmeshment of man and machine, inviting me back into the cave to wonder what about being human most matters. There’s no machine that can tell us that; I guess, at a certain point, it all comes down to choice.
Simon & Garfunkel
5/5
I didn’t expect to love this album.
But from the beginning it grabbed me. The caustic Moog of “Save the Life of My Child” cutting across the twirling guitars. The soul of a nation being dreamed and lost between the sighs of “America”’s gorgeous choruses (and perfectly evocative flange guitars). The record’s faultless run of pop folk and soft rock anthems indulge alternating dimensions of Paul Simon’s song craft; sincere and studied responses to the British Invasion (“A Hazy Shade of Winter”, “Fakin’ It”, “At the Zoo”), or what was happening in the Factory (“Old Friends”) or Haight-Ashbury (“Overs”, “Fakin’ It”). It’s a tour of the sixties’ musical high points that, with the high quality of production throughout, gifts a unique kind of wholeness to the decade’s distinctive sound.
And then there’s “Mrs. Robinson”, a song so enduringly popular that it’s easy to take for granted. I was ready to let it roll past me. But from the beginning it grabbed me.
I didn’t expect to love this album.
Manu Chao
4/5
If you’ve ever sat in the common room of a backpackers and enjoyed a rambling semi-coherent conversation with a fellow clueless itinerant, you’ll very likely love this record.
I have. And I do. Though part of me wants to explore the seeming contradiction of an anti-globalisation cultural polyglot … the feeling I get here, above all else, is that Manu Chao captures the feeling of youthful excitement at the potential of the world. His flitting around genres, bouncing vocal delivery and faux-naive schtick is charming; that swarthy fella in the corner of the backpackers who reports all the cliches of “world traveller” but matches it with swags of charisma.
I’s hope that I get the chance to spend an impossibly long afternoon in the sparsely furnished common room of a backpackers again one day. And when that day arrives, it’ll be “Luna y sol” I’ll be pairing with my Estrella.
James Taylor
2/5
James Taylor has a wonderful voice and I’m grateful to him for the inspiration he must have offered Michael Stipe (and, I suppose James Blunt – begrudgingly, if the price of James Blunt existing in the public eye is his music, I’ll pay it).
There are moments in this record – “Blossom”, or the bridge of “Suite for 20 G” (a song that manages to be pretty much all bridge) – where I’m transported by the sheer quality of what’s happening. The professionalism of it. But ultimately, it’s background stuff. The most backgroundy background stuff ever put to record, very perhaps.
The Specials
4/5
The Specials come at me from the TV set of the Trotters’ living room. In my mind’s eye a grain of static – a coursing jet of atoms that are the result of the big bang, I think I once heard – runs through them, through their sound as much as their image.
I didn’t know the England that The Specials came up in directly. Still, echoes of the cultural context of the parsimonious late seventies and cruelly austere eighties – Only Fools…, The Young Ones, My Wonderful Laundrette, later The Full Monty – were strong enough to feel like a jolt from the beginning of time.
Starting with the irrepressible “Gangsters” (as this version does, with apologies to purists) The Specials’ eponymous debut feels nothing short of a cultural museum. Sitting alongside a phenomenal run of all-time hits (“A Message…”, “Monkey Man”, “Too Much Too Young”) sit bona fide, mind transporting documentary pieces (“Nite Klub”, “Doesn’t Make it Alright”, “Little Bitch”) – with roughly as many of them adaptations from Jamaican ska tunes as penned originally by the group.
The lyrical themes are a mixed up bricolage of social, racial and emotional politics; all of it delivered with the sort of perspective and authenticity that speaks as clearly today as it would have in ‘79. Mutuality, inclusion and the importance of having something good to dance to aren’t concepts restricted to one point in history, after all.
For Charlie Brooker, the demons of ‘79 are yet to be exorcised. And fair play – if polls in England are to be believed, the next government could make Thatcher’s look like a gang of Quakers in comparison. With that in mind, the message carried by this group of musicians and these songs has arguably never been so important. Let’s hope England catches the echo.
A staggering run of turn of the century defining absolute fucking belters begins the album. It might feel a shame to have lost the rebel soul of the U2 that wrote one of the all-time great protest songs, but fair play to the lads: there comes a moment when the desire to celebrate living another beautiful day is inspiration plenty to write a corker. Time flies, after all.
By the time “Kite” has rolled into “In a Little While” and then on to “Wild Honey”, sympathy with Bono’s predicament (namely, having become the richest man in entertainment but still feeling that incurable desire to create) has worn thin. Here, splayed across the wet tissue paper weak underbelly of All You Can’t Leave Behind, was the Bono overload; the conjuror whose Faustian pact promised a beautiful day but instead ensnared you in a moment you couldn’t get out of.
Final track “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” is actually quite good. (Funnily enough, I don’t recall us ever getting so deep into the album when it sat in the Renault Megane’s CD player through 2000-2001.) That aside, a more dramatic drop in quality across a record boasting some truly iconic tunes feels difficult to imagine. But that’s U2 for you – a band posterity (as many fans do already) might do well to judge as “greatest hits or it didn’t happen”.
Femi Kuti
3/5
Artful and daring afrobeat worthy of the Kuti name. “Survival” is a coiled snake of a tune, full of thundering drums, surprising instrumentation and all held down by a sax motif that drives itself deep into your conscience. “Frustrations” starts at a ten and never really backs down, equal parts luxury lounge jazz ala Global Village Coffeehouse and urgent appeal ala, well, Fela Kuti. My appreciation for this record deepens with every spin.
Ministry
5/5
Dispatches from a distant past when talented artists-slash-heroin addicts could freely exploit the system that exploits them. The resulting symbiosis – smack in return for sales –would burn itself out largely by burning through its stock of amiable (read: impressionable) musicians.
How Ministry made it through the period that gave us this record unscathed is anyone’s guess, but I suspect it had something to do with their understanding the brief: “commodity sodomy, glass autonomy” as it’s put in “TV II”. Treat these days of high as fucking balls good times as just that, this too must pass.
The record itself is about as charming as one has the right to expect. A crass title about a sex position borrowed from an intellectual curiosity of the early 20th century serves as the rubric for 44 minutes of song structures borrowed from Killing Joke, riffs borrowed from Slayer and weirdness entirely the band’s own. The trade descriptions act need not concern itself with the work of Ministry: it does what it says on the tin.
Hold on, I’ve phrased that wrong. I’ll try again. This is 44 minutes of songs that remind me of Killing Joke’s more sprawling, soundscapey efforts, but with the addition of driving, grooving riffs that would sit happily on the greatest thrash band’s best records. And to top it off, the whole thing’s produced as if intended for a rave in the cathedrals of hell. Professionally horny occultist Alastair Crowley provides a fittingly smutty title.
“N.W.O” grinds and grooves almost uncomfortably well, a darkcore banger that seeps into you. “Just one fix” pulls us into the orbit of a collapsing star; a rattling Geordie Walker riff that struggles against the demented ramblings of actual junkies singing for their metaphorical suppers. The high point of the record for me, “Scare Crow”, sounds (perhaps consciously) like a nightmare plucked directly from Johnny Marr’s sleeping mind (before, that is, he’s had a chance to put an arpeggio or five over it). A swaggering, pounding beat punctuated by drawled or spat out vocals; thick, bleak and tremendously danceable.
Where this stuff goes next is, of course, the turn of the century’s dominant alternative rock style. NIN, Korn, Deftones, Coal Chamber, Slipknot, Linkin Park, Rammstein. But then it’s on to Neurosis, Pig Destroyer, HEALTH, Thou – bands abroad of nu metal but nonetheless in the shadow of Ministry’s towering creative vision.
This is a fantastic album. It has the good manners to tell you what it will set out to do, and then sets about achieving it with a ruthless commitment to its mission. It is never less than compelling. It is never less than honest. It is the sound of raw creative hunger put in service of sheer human desire. Visceral, confronting and totally edifying.
The Rolling Stones
2/5
The Black Dahlia’s cover of “Paint It Black” (or was it “Paint It, Black”?) rips so fucking hard. Five stars.
Bob Marley & The Wailers
4/5
Ironically for an album recorded in a political purgatory while thousands of miles from home … when it comes to Exodus, resistance is futile.
It’s easy to take Marley for granted. The rhythms, melodies, cadences and attitudes that make him have long since transcended even the iconic. He’s a fact now, closer to a dead metaphor than an active figure of speech. And that’s initially how it feels to listen to this album; you’re at wake for someone you somehow know though have never actually met. What’s familiar makes for an uncomfortable feeling, there’s no pleasure in recognition.
To hear this album, though, is another thing entirely, and rested for me on something like an act of resurrection. Forget Marley the myth and focus on Marley the man. From there what resisted any sensible interpretation – music that’s been etiolated not due to a lack of merit, but instead because of the billions of Bob Marley “products” that have littered the world since his death and subsequent canonisation by the cultural logic of late capitalism – is suddenly wide open.
Surprises aren’t short in supply. “Natural Mystic” is followed by a noodling guitar that seems, at times, to be mocking the singer; “The Heathen” combines meditative chanting with stirring, sci-fi adjacent keys to achieve an effect I wouldn’t want to be driving under; “Waiting In Vain” lilts with a melancholy that seems about to drown poor old Bob (the middle 8 is about as animated as you’re likely to see him). And then there’s the stuff that isn’t surprising at all – the half dozen songs here that I’ve listened to maybe 500 times in my life, but never really heard.
So yeah, Exodus is inevitable. Marley the man trumps the myth every time. (And, cosmic coincidences; a happy birthday to mine today, too.)
Einstürzende Neubauten
4/5
It is impossible for me to read this album as anything less than a complete triumph for music. No matter what Einstürzende Neubaten throw at it – what trickery, insult, mocking or violence then concoct – music survives. It remains there, somehow stronger for its disfigurement.
These are songs, songs as worthy of the word as anything by Sinatra and Jobim, or Madonna or Can. They’re equally desperate to tell you something, equally vital.
It’s a precarious vitality, though – characterised by spasms of apoplexy and forced moments of grit. It isn’t that tha thrills me most, though. It’s the space they make; space in Einstürzende Neubaten functions like it does in Rothko. The emptiness is the meaning; what thin scaffolding supports the space is their only submission to formalism. Tediously for them perhaps, it’s also our only hope of gaining an equal footing.
Quite apart from joking on the polluting, eschatological effluvium of industry, I find an immense joy in this album. Music survives. Fuck, man. It survives.
Parliament
5/5
I heard that this is the only universe where George Clinton manages to form P-Funk. Be eternally grateful that you’re in it too.