The Smashing Pumpkins were, without qualification, the worst band to defecate from the 90s US alternative scene. That is not hyperbole; if anything, it's diminishing how appalling they were regardless of time, location or genre. Of course, the blame piles onto one man: Billy Corgan, the worst frontman in rock, alive or dead or not even conceived. The vast majority of gametes nestling in your testes has a far stronger claim for musical significance. So why is Billy Corgan so bad? Let's get the purest, most straightforward reason out the way: he can't sing. Indeed, he sounds like someone deliberately attempting to sing bad. Specifically, he sounds like Cartman from South Park, who was meant to sound as cacophonous as possible. Do you want to hear Cartman sing one proto-emo dirge, let alone nearly thirty? When I say Corgan is a bad singer, I don't mean he's unpolished and inexact; I mean that he is painful to the ears. Our dogs refused to be in the same room when I played this. Coupled to Corgan's inability to sing is his inability to write lyrics that don't collapse into risibility. There is not one word on this album to take seriously. Take the lines (preferably out back to be shot): Emptiness is loneliness, and loneliness is cleanliness And cleanliness is godliness, and God is empty, just like me It would be polite not to guffaw, but not guffawing would be dishonest. Or how about the rubbish-yet-bizarrely-popular 1979? I bet you thought it was a wistful, bittersweet recollection of carefree youth. Nope. Here's the chorus: That we don't even care to shake these zipper blues And we don't know just where our bones will rest To dust I guess forgotten and absorbed Into the earth below Now children, do you think adding a bit about rotting corpses to a limp song automatically grants it gravitas? (By the by, Billy Corgan was 12 in 1979. He wasn't out partying and fingering girls, he was still throwing tantrums when his mum said it was bath night. The only song more ridiculous in this regard is Summer of 69, as Bryan Adams was 10 in 1969, and there's no way Bryan Adams was so cool that he started his first band and lost his virginity aged 10. And yes, I am directly calling Billy Corgan a pale imitation of Bryan Adams). Of course, Billy Corgan would say he means every word, that these words are his heart, his truth. Anyone with an iota of sense would retort that he was talking bollocks. (And let's not forget he's now into vaccine denial and 9/11 conspiracies, so I feel no compunction in calling his a massive wanker). The ingredients for the shit sandwich are assembled. We have a singularly uncharismatic and grating singer, screeching out the most lamentable high school doggerel, all backed by your standard substandard post-Nirvana alt-rock pop-punk-by-numbers that littered the US in 1995. So what's the next logical step? Why, it's to make a TWO HOUR concept album (a concept which is never clear and in any case gets jettisoned about three songs in). One song would be insufferable; 28 of the fuckers just bludgeon the listener into a depressed numbness. With some lengthy, challenging albums, such as Trout Mask Replica or Metal Machine Music, one feels satisfied with oneself for having listened all the way through. This album is twice as long as Metal Machine Music, but there's no sense of accomplishment in listening to this, because there's no reward. Even passing a particularly stubborn log brings relief, but this is only like being stranded in a rainstorm. You don't get inivgorated, you just get cold and wet. Also, the title is crap. Mellon Collie? Is that a pun? I really don't get it. You shouldn't get this either.

What killed Britpop? The most common answer, Oasis' Be Here Now, has some merit: although in no way the turkey of legend, its hubristic, cocainistic bloat is obvious. Now, Oasis were the best, most important Britpop band, so a relatively weak album from them had to corrode the genre's reputation. But, of course, this is far too simplistic. Now you may not wish to admit it, but Blur were nowhere near as good as Oasis, and part of Britpop's collapse was due to them finally being rumbled. And, of course, the glut of charmless no-mark bands like Menswear, Kula Shaker and Blouse was ultimately the method of execution, a death by a thousand cuts. Also, the culture that blossomed around Britpop swiftly turned bathetic, all dodgy sideburns, four warm cans of Stella and Gail Porter flashing her spiders' legs. Finally, the fashion just inevitably changed, opening a flank for Radiohead to seize all the critical cachet with their own not-aged-too-well darling OK Computer. And then we have this, the follow-up to Pulp's era-totemic Different Class. Jarvis Cocker had founded Pulp as a teen in the late 70s and had stayed firmly lower-league for over ten years, but with Different Class, Pulp and especially Jarvis became stratospherically famous. With this, our Jarvis found that the success and the attendant women, charlie and notoriety he'd lusted after for so long didn't elate him, it emptied him. So, our Jarvis' next album developed a cynical, self-loathing edge. And that's the sticking point of this album: it doesn't want to be liked. It feels alienated by the whole world, so it seeks to alienate the whole world. This does not make the album bad; there are several good songs on it, especially the sordid, engrossing title track. But there is the occasional duffer (the almost parodic dance-infused Party Hard causes the listener to recoil), and more seriously, the whole atmosphere of the album is slightly yet wilfully hostile, as if the album just wants to be left alone. A note on the title track. One of our Jarv's fave songwriting tactics is to write a masturbation fantasy, usually but in no way exclusively in a romantic manner. Do You Remember The First Time, I contend, is written from the point of view of a lesbian wishing to resume an experimental fooling-around with a straight friend who is nowadays in a heterosexual relationship. Disco 2000 is a paean to tugging yourself off over the memory of the girl you had a crush on at school. But with This is Hardcore, the romance, the desire to connect with someone both emotionally and physically, is absent, and the song is just about wanking over porn. What development better indicates the album's coldness, compared to our Jarv's earlier work? This album is oft called not so much a cocaine album, but rather a cocaine-hangover album. Cocaine albums, such as Be Here Now, have a grim reputation for disaffecting self-indulgence, and this album still pushes the listener away, if for the perhaps nobler reason of disaffecting self-disgust. So what was Pulp's contribution to the death of Britpop? The smartest, wittiest (and perviest) band to flourish with Britpop came to hate it, and deliberately released an album that cut their own throat.

The disco backlash was uniquely American. In Europe, people didn't torch their copies of Saturday Night Fever, but instead used disco as fertiliser for a crop of pioneering genres, from post-punk to Italo. Now, as much as commentators, with reason, point to prejudices against disco's black and gay subcultures as fuelling the backlash, it's not as if Europe lacked for such bigotries. What I say has been looked over is American exoticism as seen with the European gaze: what passes for everyday to Americans may either baffle or fascinate we Europeans. Many Americans damned disco as brainless, but many Europeans saw fierce innovation in these calls to dance. Yes, there were plenty of UK critics dismissing disco, and yes, some Americans did similar to Europe in devising new music inspired by disco, such as Chicago house, but they do not disprove the general trend of this specific American exceptionalism. And just remember: Nile Rodgers has not only had the last laugh, but he hasn't stopped laughing since 1983. Anyway, onto Risqué. One fault of Risqué is one of its great strengths: the opener, Good Times. Good Times, for several reasons, has rightfully become one of the most iconic 70s tracks (and here I'll mention its perhaps even more momentous half-sibling Rapper's Delight). The majesty of Good Times lies, of course, in Bernard Edwards' serpentine bassline, not that Nile Rodgers' guitar isn't fully up to snuff. But when you start an album with such a totem, the rest risks sounding diminished by default. To test this, I just tried listening to the album except for Good Times, and the magic of the other songs burst out. I had originally considered the strings on the rest of the album to sound too syrupy for the modern eardrum, but played independently, they sounded so warm and silky. Also, the latter half of the album revolves around themes of heartache, illicit love and betrayal, marking this out as substantially darker and richer than the fluff the name "disco" implies to some. So do we have the paradoxical result of the whole being less than the sum of its parts? Or one skyscraper of a song stealing all the other songs' sunlight? Or is it that Good Times is immediate in bestowing its rewards, whereas the other songs require more contemplation? Not the first, but I can agree to ther last two. The sheer quality of the songwriting, performances and production push this into the 5-star category, but the listener should heed the caveat that the best is the enemy of the good, and the best is Good Times.

Ah, to be thirteen. To start wearing Lynx obsessively and masturbate for whole weekends at a time. And, of course, to own one's first Iron Maiden album. But then, at 15 you feel your first breast and try pot for the first time, so Iron Maiden loses its lustre. Of course, if neither happens, one unfortunately gets stuck on Iron Maiden and metal for the rest of one's days, and such a limited scape is no basis for a life's music. So yeah, I had cassettes of Iron Maiden, Killers, Piece of Mind and The Number of the Beast aged 13. But at 14, I got into The Doors and rediscovered my childhood love of punk, so Iron Maiden felt embarrassing in their juvenile appeal. So, I had real trepidation when Iron Maiden popped up. And I liked it. Juvenile appeal still appeals, and one occasionally yearns for Satanism, sci-fi references and songs about women with big boobies. Of course, one's diet shouldn't consist solely of ice ceam and Monster Munch, and too much Iron Maiden can be bad for one's appetite. Remember kids: if you find yourself falling asleep on the sofa at 4am clutching a three-quarters-empty bottle of Strongbow while the tenth episode that night of Red Dwarf blares from the telly, you've had a bit too much Iron Maiden.

A hard album to assess. The album has a real sweep to it, a sense of ideas being mustered, and a evident passion. So why am I not responding to this as warmly as I should? Maybe it's the middle. Like your mum aged 22, there's palpable sag in the middle. It could be me: I was at uni when this came out, and the hype of the New York rock revival never persuaded me, despite the constant claims of Sonics/Gang of Four/New Order parentage. Possibly it's my aversion to record-collection rock, and I'm not impressed by a rehash of Bizarre Love Triangle. But ultimately the Yeah Yeah Yeahs just aren't enough. You want more. Listening to them, you want them to be a little more melodic, a little more emotional, a little more abrasive, a little more arctic, a little more erotic, a little more bombastic, a little more detached, a little more serene, a little more urban, a little more experimental and a little more fun. You have here a decent band, sure, and that's fine, but a decent band is not a great band, and even though I want to root for them now, I find I can't outright.

My first day at this, and quite an intimidating entry. The music was perfectly fine, but surely this is not meant to be enjoyed as an album per se, but rather sampled occasionally?

Loved the first seven tracks, but found it less likeable from Idiots Rule onwards. Nevertheless, I would recommend.

I adoe garage rock, and this is a wondrous slab of it. Exactly what you want of a Saturday night. Simple, unpretentious, clearsighted, slamming rock 'n' roll.

The issue with this album is how well-behaved it all is. It's really hard to find faults with the playing, but it's that Formica quality which ultimately makes it impossible to love. Why listen to a pastiche of Exile on Main Street and Grievous Angel when you can listen to Exile on Main Street and Grievous Angel? By the end I was screaming for the Stooges or something with a bit of blood to it. Now, this is not a bad album. But that's the problem. It's so well-mannered, it doesn't take any real risks, and as such there's nothing to root for. If it's your bag, that's fine, we won't fall out, but surely you recognise on occasion that this feels programmed rather than written?

Obviously, the musicianship is faultless, and thankfully the professionalism here is part of the band's passion for an eclectic range of music. Yet one would like a more organic tracklisting; the division of the LP into electric and acoustic sides makes the album feel like slightly artificial, as if driven by guile as much as creativity. Also, and you may disagree, the cumulation and ordering of the acoustic tracks causes the last two tracks, Bron-Yr-Aur Stomp and Hats off to (Roy) Harper, to sound a little peculiar, like experiments that don't completely come off. Nevertheless, there's more than enough meat here.

A curious beast, with emphasis on the word "beast". The most popular songs associated with it (Paint It Black, Under My Thumb, Mother's Little Helper), are all in my Rolling Stones top 10, and I adore Out of Time, even though I prefer the Gary Filmore version (seriously, I completely adore Gary Filmore's take on it). And yes, I appreciate the dark paths the Stones explored here: all the snottier to sound, an admirable trait. Prosaically, I just think there's a touch too much filler for this to be a full 5-starrer. I'm practically nitpicking, there's obviously excellent stuff here, but if you go dirty, you'll have fun but you'll probably end up with nits.

What a wondeful album. My acquaintance with Leonard Cohen had been slight (and I've no desire to hear any version of Hallelujah ever again), so tonight was my first real dip into his work. My, what a work! His control of language impresses most; is there a misplaced word, an unrefined phrase on the album? I couldn't find one. Nor could I fault the atmosphere of each song. The wistful and bittersweet fits exactly next to the panicked and chilling. Superb.

I feel a little strange reviewing this, as it comes off the back of listening to Led Zeppelin III and the Rolling Stones' Athermath, both of which I gave four stars. Now, the star system is not fit for purpose, and I guess for that reason I have to add a qualifier (I loathe needing to clarify what's cock-obvious). Anyway, I found this superior to the two albums I just mentioned: lean, fierce, dumb in the right way, organic, and above all rocking. But I've given 5 stars to 3 out of eight so far (this, along with The Sonics' Here Are The Sonics and Leonard Cohen's Songs from Leonard Cohen) , so am I diminishing the ratings system, or did I just have a fortunate streak? I supppose the albums in this exercise have the reputations of classics.

Although this is CCR's second album, it still feels tentative, in both a positive and cavillous reading. The songs suggest a desire to stretch (witness the forays into swamp rock), but one gets a sense of caution, of an unwillingness to tread too far or to flat-out holler. Of course, CCR would achieve that with later songs and albums. However, this album feels slightly hesitant: for instance, the two jams, though fine, aren't bombastic enough to properly engross. This album is great fun, and shows CCR heading in the right direction, but it's not the most essential of their work. Compare it to the Rolling Stones' Aftermath: good stuff, but you should really stick around for what happens next.

Frankly, and indeed somewhat purposefully, this album is a clear oddity. A work where the bombast is the point, where everything is XXXL and then further expanded, the only parallel that springs to mind is Born to Run, which is comparatively modest. But does it work? An album of histrionics and declared emotional extremes harking back to the teenage experience, I ultimately found such a pose too much of an affectation to embrace. Of course, the paradox here is that the affectation was obviously meant sincerely, that Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf authentically loved the sentiments of this album. But I do not share that stance, and this attempt to make the ultimate rock 'n roll album doesn't fully escape self-parody. (Speaking of which, didn't rock 'n roll start off stripped-down and straightforward? How do you get from That's All Right Mama to Paradise by the Dashboard Light?) In fairness, there are of course occasions for such grandiosity, and I shan't object if someone puts a track of this album on the jukebox, but I wouldn't do it myself.

There is a perfect, 5-star album within this. One wants to vaunt the ambition, talent and bravery of such a vast work, but it is just too vast. The effect is one of eating a whole box of chocolates: every morsel is delicious, but you are left exhausted and a little nauseated. That criticism feels a little harsh: every song on the album is fine, and taken individually they'd be a treat. However, taken together they clamour for attention, drowning out each other. Prolificacy can be a virtue, but it easily degenrates into self-indulgence, and one should always remember that precision is just as virtuous.

I have been in a permanent yawn for half an hour. I have never felt my face so weary. Now, most occasions of boredom lead to frustration, not physical tiredness. I am perversely impressed at how soporific this album is. It's all just one song, and quite a boring song at that. So, we have one boring song raised by an order of magnitude. An album consisting of pure halal filler. You know how pop stars are supposedly able to sing people out of comas? Dire Straits can play people into them. Punk happened for so many reasons.

A warm, embracable album, quite odd from such a politicised disc. Indeed, the juztaposition between the bitterness of the lyrics and the smoothness of the music works rather well. I was not persuaded, however, by the song Jesus: is religion really the most reliable panacea? It didn't really work on What's Going On, and it doesn't really work on this. Also, perhaps a little too short? Curtis Mayfield already had a fistful of classic albums, so he could afford himself a little space to experiment and indulge. Still, a solid album by a true great.

Firstly, it must be said that her voice is astounding. An extraordinarily emotive performer, equally adept at doleful ballads and exuberant, joyful numbers. This album has such great stuff. However, the Harry Belafonte-style songs sound a little dated to my ears. But they are tolerable, and there is true gold elsewhere on this album. Beforehand, I knew nothing about Miriam Makeba, and this was a most impressive introduction.

I had an epiphany last year, listening to Every Picture Tells a Story for the first time: Rob Stewart was actually great, and EPTAS is a masterclass. So, I'm delighted that A Nod... is The Faces in exactly the same groove as EPTAS. What I wanted was more of the same, and it seems The Faces were in accord. Of course, saying one album sounds like another doesn't really say anything much. So, this album is a laid-back, rocking, laddish, boozy, bluesy, rogueish yet softhearted paean to both the raucous Saturday night and the dog-rough Sunday morning. Just don't think of The Stereophonics and you'll love it all.

I had quite some trepidation in reviewing this. I'm not averse to jazz at all, yet I worry that I may lack the musicianship to appreciate this album fully. Or rather, I perhaps don't have the philosophy to appreciate it fully, if one excuses ihe pretension. Now, there are tracks on this I loved (Li'l Darlin' in particular), but I found myself overwhelmed a little by the big band aesthetic (to get pretentious again). I wished one track were a little different to leaven it slightly. Is that my fault? Am I being too harsh on myself?

I love punk, by which I mean the 70s' variant, not Green Day and their ilk. In fact, the music I was weaned on was punk; my brother is 15 years older than me, so I got all his old punk LPs in the 90s. Anyway, depite that, I have never liked the song Teenage Kicks; I found it mawkish and overplayed. It still never really appealed even after I realised it was about wanking. Nevertheless, I lsitened to listen without prejudice and I loved it! The Undertones were really a great adolescent band, and this album showed a slight addition of postpunk jerkiness. Above all, this album is fun, unalloyed joy. What else do you want?

According to legend, Elton John didn't originally need glasses. He took to wearing a pair to emulate Buddy Holly, but this caused his eyes to adjust, thus making them a necessity. Just thought I'd start with that. I haven't had an opinion on Elton John previously. I've never had any inclination to sit down and listen to any of his albums; my favourite music seemed to have little overlap with his music. Of course, Elton John has been bloody everywhere for all my life. I begrudge him that status only in that nobody should be bloody everywhere. So this album was oddly one I'd never heard which I'd assumed I already knew, clearly a mistake on my part. I tried to listen without preconception, and I think I did, and as an album it doesn't really work. The most obvious flaw is that Side B just meanders around, not really striking the listener. The songs, mostly 4+ minutes, can't really be called filler, so are they just a bit dull? So, we have a clearly toploaded album. How does the rest favour? I found the lyrics a touch overcooked, but curious enough to have some charm. Is the music emotional, mawkish, or insincere? I don't know. Maybe it's subjective. It may not be my bag, but I can understand other people going for it.

Beforehand, I did not see the point of the Eurythmics. Firstly, ridiculous and pretentious name that invites unintentional spelling mistakes, so I wasn't inclined to take them that seriously. Secondly, Sweet Dreams is massively overplayed, seemingly bolted on to every documentary about Thatcher, even though it doesn't really go anywhere. Still, I rather like synthpop; indeed, I love Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, Soft Cell and New Order. So I tried to have an open mind, seriously. The first side, I didn't hate. I know, faint praise. I felt the songs were slightly overstretched, but were tolerable, pleasant enough. I still don't get the affection for Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) (by the by, that is a genuinely annoying use of parentheses after the title: Annie Lennox clearly says "these", especially since it rhymes with "seas" in the song). But when Jennifer came on, I found myself genuinely liking it: a sinister, minimalist, impressionistic murder ballad. So I began hoping that the second half would continue in this unsettling trend: synthpop has always been an excellent vehicle for the macabre. Nope, the next song This is the House is horrible! It's really, comically bad! An unwitting self-parody that's also the lamest attempt of a Bowie impersonator attempting funk, with added sound effects. This is outrageous! This is contagious! This was released as a single! Then, on the next song, Somebody Told Me, Annie Lennox THREATENS TO RAP. She doesn't, but she really indulges the hip-hop inflections in the chorus. With that, you can really taste your anus at the back of your tongue. The last song is a meandering and really dull bit of real dullness, conning itself that an epic closer is reducible only to length. So, can I condemn an album for three weak tracks at the end? Yes, I can. Imagine a chef offers to prepare you a meal. The first half consists of a passable, slightly stodgy stew. You feel a little bloated, not too impressed, but not inclined to complain. Then, they offer a delicate lemon and honey sorbet as a palate cleanser, and they get the sharp and sweet balance exactly right. But at the end, the chef clambers onto the table, lowers his strides and does a massive, stinky poo right onto your plate. What would you remember, the stew or the poo?

No, I'm not going to pretend that I like this album. The music sounds like the vaguely jazzy background musak ITV played when broadcasting a loop of Teletext pages at 4:30 AM. But this album is still quite the curiosity, as I found plenty to laugh at. Take the song Walking In Your Footsteps: it contains the couplet "Hey Mr. dinsaur/ You really couldn't ask for more". It's hard to treat that lyric portentously, yet it's in a song musing on the extinction of the dinosaurs and fearing for humanity's fate under the shadow of the nuclear weapon. Is Sting being whimsical, sardonic, bitter, absurd, or is he just unintentionally undercutting his message with a weak lyric? I don't suspect Sting of having much of a sense of humour, unless you count Old Rainforest-Breath's ads for Jaguar. Or how about the song Mother, the only one written and sung by Andy Summers? It's just bloody odd. It's like a early-60s' Halloween novelty record, and Andy sings like he's forgotten his much-needed lithium. Mind, that's probably my favourite track: at least it's having fun in its derangement. So, the best track on the album is only interesting by virtue of its madness. That doesn't augur well for the rest of the album, does it? Simultaneously pretentious and artless, The Police? More like The Poo-lice.

The album is essentially a proof-of-concept, sketches for their later work. What we have is an establishment of The Blue Nile's aesthetic: meticulous, melancholy and songs given space to breathe. However, one can also criticise the mildly haywire arrangements. Also, one can find The Blue Nile generally overproduced and a touch too cold to love. I have spent the evening listening to this and their follow-up, 1989's Hats. Hats is obviously the better album, and I am puzzled as to why it wasn't the book's choice for their Blue Nile album. That said, two Blue Nile albums are a bit too much for one evening. I can grasp the appeal, but I can't concur that The Blue Nile are one of the great forgotten groups of the 1980s.

A solid, warm album of great songwriting detail. Now, I have only heard the album once, and with such an album, where the subtleties are the point, I believe one listen probably isn't sufficient for a full assessment and appreciation. As such, my current take is tentative and provisional. I may in future consider this a 5-starrer, but I may equally retain it at 4 stars.

This album has the strengths and weaknesses of a debut by a clearly talented and idiosyncratic artist. We have such a lush and engrossing sound, led by an utterly sensuous and beguiling voice, simultaneously titilllating and menacing: a dip into a lustrous black. However, sometimes the record takes the aesthetic too far, and stumbles into mild self-parody. The circus music of Oompah Radar (wow, some people find clowns sinister!) and the occasional stabs at surrealist lyrics (gosh, dream imagery!) don't fully work. All this is to be expected: with such a unique artistic vision, Alison Goldfrapp is comparable to Kate Bush, in that her muse leads her to either to the misguided or the inspired. However, like Kate Bush, Goldfrapp has the sheer flair and savvy to transcend her whimsies on her best work, such as on her two subsequent albums. Felt Mountain is a great introduction to her work, but "introduction" is the operative word.

I want to give this five stars. My right hand is desperate to click on the mouse to give it five stars. I run through the highpoints of the album continually, yearning to give it five stars. I recall how mesmerized I was by the third quarter, how warm and blissful and singular and vast and searching the record is, and I want with all clarity and desire to give it five stars. And I can't. The issue emerged in the fourth track, Run, where they make a rather blunt allusion to the Velvet Underground's Run Run Run. This distracted more than anything, and threw me from the music. Was I listening to genuine sentiment, or rather a demonstration that the band owned a cool record collection? Is that even a problem? I don't know. I can still hear the beating of a heart within this album, but it's muffled by a leather jacket the album insisted its mum got it in order to impress the girl albums.

I had never heard of Gillian Welch before thi sprang up in my playlist. My appreciation for country, Americana, bluegras and such is a little limited, due to both a lack of knowledge and a wariness based on prominence of the genres' more embarrassing examples. So, I hope you understand that I began playing this album with open-mindedness, but with a dash of trepidation. Within a minute the album had struck me with a haymaker, mocking me for my hesitancy. This album is not only brilliant, it's obviously, mathematically brilliant. I try not to use hyperbole, but I am struggling to describe this album without resorting to such. Both unadorned and luxurious, this is the result of exquisite care taken with both art and craft. If you don't appreciate this faultless yet human treasure, then you should have a good long talk with yourelf.

This is proving to be the hardest album I've found to review so far, not because I'm confused by my opinion of it, but because I don't know whether to consider it accidentally exploitative. Bruef summary: Roger Waters and Nick Mason forms the Architectural Abdabs at art college (a standard incubator for artsy British bands), Syd Barrett joins and changes the name to Pink Floyd after two blues musicians he loved, they achieve their first success with Piper at the Gates of Dawn, tragically Syd suffers from serious mental health issues and cannot continue with the band, Syd records two solo albums, Syd quits music and lives reclusively until his death in 2006. I was not prepared for how grim the experience of listening to this album would be. Yes, by inclination Syd Barrett was a whimsical songwriter with an obviously far better sense of humour than Roger Waters, and on the surface this album showcases that to the point of incoherence, but this album isn't just a mess, although it is an absolute casserole of an album. The first side is okay, exercises in Barrett's warm eccentricity, but not spectacular. Sadly, the last few tracks degenerate into essentially studio outtakes, revealing an ugliness to the whole exercise. It felt slightly sordid listening to this album. It didn't feel like the demonstration of a lost genius; it felt like a ramshackle using of a talented but troubled man. This is not to say that a work by someone with significant mental health issues is by its nature compromised either aesthetically or morally. Barrett's contemporaries Brian Wilson and Nick Drake both made excellent albums whilst struggling with debilitating mental illness. But one can wish an album show its creator a little more dignity. So, I can't recommend. I have to give this one star, but please understand it's a highly qualified one star in no way reflective of Syd Barrett's talent.

The Smashing Pumpkins were, without qualification, the worst band to defecate from the 90s US alternative scene. That is not hyperbole; if anything, it's diminishing how appalling they were regardless of time, location or genre. Of course, the blame piles onto one man: Billy Corgan, the worst frontman in rock, alive or dead or not even conceived. The vast majority of gametes nestling in your testes has a far stronger claim for musical significance. So why is Billy Corgan so bad? Let's get the purest, most straightforward reason out the way: he can't sing. Indeed, he sounds like someone deliberately attempting to sing bad. Specifically, he sounds like Cartman from South Park, who was meant to sound as cacophonous as possible. Do you want to hear Cartman sing one proto-emo dirge, let alone nearly thirty? When I say Corgan is a bad singer, I don't mean he's unpolished and inexact; I mean that he is painful to the ears. Our dogs refused to be in the same room when I played this. Coupled to Corgan's inability to sing is his inability to write lyrics that don't collapse into risibility. There is not one word on this album to take seriously. Take the lines (preferably out back to be shot): Emptiness is loneliness, and loneliness is cleanliness And cleanliness is godliness, and God is empty, just like me It would be polite not to guffaw, but not guffawing would be dishonest. Or how about the rubbish-yet-bizarrely-popular 1979? I bet you thought it was a wistful, bittersweet recollection of carefree youth. Nope. Here's the chorus: That we don't even care to shake these zipper blues And we don't know just where our bones will rest To dust I guess forgotten and absorbed Into the earth below Now children, do you think adding a bit about rotting corpses to a limp song automatically grants it gravitas? (By the by, Billy Corgan was 12 in 1979. He wasn't out partying and fingering girls, he was still throwing tantrums when his mum said it was bath night. The only song more ridiculous in this regard is Summer of 69, as Bryan Adams was 10 in 1969, and there's no way Bryan Adams was so cool that he started his first band and lost his virginity aged 10. And yes, I am directly calling Billy Corgan a pale imitation of Bryan Adams). Of course, Billy Corgan would say he means every word, that these words are his heart, his truth. Anyone with an iota of sense would retort that he was talking bollocks. (And let's not forget he's now into vaccine denial and 9/11 conspiracies, so I feel no compunction in calling his a massive wanker). The ingredients for the shit sandwich are assembled. We have a singularly uncharismatic and grating singer, screeching out the most lamentable high school doggerel, all backed by your standard substandard post-Nirvana alt-rock pop-punk-by-numbers that littered the US in 1995. So what's the next logical step? Why, it's to make a TWO HOUR concept album (a concept which is never clear and in any case gets jettisoned about three songs in). One song would be insufferable; 28 of the fuckers just bludgeon the listener into a depressed numbness. With some lengthy, challenging albums, such as Trout Mask Replica or Metal Machine Music, one feels satisfied with oneself for having listened all the way through. This album is twice as long as Metal Machine Music, but there's no sense of accomplishment in listening to this, because there's no reward. Even passing a particularly stubborn log brings relief, but this is only like being stranded in a rainstorm. You don't get inivgorated, you just get cold and wet. Also, the title is crap. Mellon Collie? Is that a pun? I really don't get it. You shouldn't get this either.

An album born from ambition and technical prowess, but the unfortunate result is an album that's impossible to love. Let me elaborate. I came here knowing nothing about Animal Collective (after university I travelled the world for a decade, so when this came out I had no real desire to strain myself with maintaining a working knowledge of contemporary American indie trends), so this was my first experience of the group. Afterwards, I feel no internal clamour to make Animal Collective part of my life. Firstly, their aesthetic is wilfully garish and saccharine, but a conscious use of the garish and saccharine, whether sincere or ironic, is still garish and saccharine, and it will annoy those who have a distaste for the garish and saccharine, just as metal's aggressiveness and indelicacy alienates plenty of people. Secondly, I mentioned at the start that the album is ambitious, which is of course a highly loaded term. For instance, the choral singing constantly used on the album is a clear nod to the Beach Boys, but such an homage reveals irresolution as much as taste: are they complimenting the Beach Boys, or are they grasping for the trendiest ideas? I honestly can't tell you. Developing this Beach Boys comparison further, I don't think the melodies on this album are that memorable. Yes, I know there's also an unmelodic, glitchy rave aspect to this, but I think the desired result was to be a synthesis, not the actual unsatisfying compromise. This lack of memorable melody is what deflates the album, and I can't help feeling that the album was conceived as an exercise in cleverness rather than heart. For such a supposedly outgoing, emotive, happy band, I heard the faint clang of calculation in the background. Finally, on Guys' Eyes, one of the noises sounds like a fart. There are moments that appeal, and I accept that further listenings may increase my fondness for this, but I don't know if I want to devote any more of my life to Animal Collective. I'll give it three stars for effort (like I said, ambition has positive aspects, as well as negative ones), but that is partly bcause I want to be generous.

The debate is whether to award this four or five stars. Yes, that requires explanation. Here, we have a double album, or perhaps more accurately two albums in one package. The first, Abattoir Blues, despite the Grand Guignol name, is a full-blooded rock 'n roll, bluesy stomp of a record. The first album also benefits from an uncommon quality in rock: it's got a sense of humour. The opener Get Ready For Love raucously juxtaposes Christian expression with rockstar strutting. Hiding All Away has the very chucklesome verse: You searched through all my poets From Sappho through to Auden I saw the book fall from your hands As you slowly died of boredom The worst fault you could say about the first album is that there are touches of filler (Nature Boy, the first single, didn't really raise my skirt), but that smacks of nitpicking. The second album, The Lyre of Orpheus, is a softer, more delicate work, with more acoustic numbers, but of equally high quality as the first. Whereas the first invigorates, the second beguiles. Indeed, the second's stock consists of sincere, sometimes plaintive, sometimes jaunty love songs (the video to Breathless has Nick Cave dancing with cartoon toy rabbits). And again, the nitpick is over the occasional track being somewhat fillersome. So what does this mean in the final summary? Are these albums to be assessed as two great albums in a twofer? Two great single works that don't really fuse together? A quintessential case of a double album missing true greatness by a cat's pube just out of its overlong nature? Fuck it, I'll be generous. Five stars it is. (And yes, the star system for rating anything is moronic, especially stars).

For some reason I can't fully grasp, I have avoided listening to OK Computer ever since it came out 24 years ago. I suppose I could attribute it to hype aversion, that an album acclaimed so immediately must reflect journalists seeking unanimity for than anything. Therefore, in 1997 I bought The Prodigy's The Fat of the Land, mainly because everyone in school had also bought it. And yes, I did dismiss the critics as sheeplike whilst aping the behavior of everyone at the comp. So, has OK Computer aged well? (As to whether Fat of the Land has aged well, what do you expect from an album that quotes Goering's guns not butter speech?) One can detect the odd wrinkle and stretchmark. Firstly, the student politics of the album incite cringes rather than riots. I like to think that I am now of an age where I have a more considered view of the political landscape, and if you wish to criticise the IMF, I'd prefer your criticisms to be substantive and constructive. Still, one part of growing up is that you don't derive your politics from albums, so I can't slam Radiohead too much on that front. So what about the rest? Well, the music is fine, great in places, but I still rankle slightly at the constant need to allude to other music. I can't be the only one who doesn't want their albums reduced to a Where's Wally checklist, "Oh, just spotted Magazine, and that's Can, and that's Bitches Brew, and I think there's Edgard Varèse..." Sure, Radiohead are by no means the worst offenders from this era (Spiritualized and Primal Scream, obviously), but however much they wish to tip the titfer to their influences, it can detract as it can distract. This seems harsher than I intend it to be. OK Computer is a fine album, cohesive and biting. But the iciness can leave one cold, especially on the tips of one's ears. In short, OK Computer is... OK. I feel really pleased with myself for that last bit.

This was one of the first albums I ever bought, when I was eleven. I genuinely loved Alright when it came out, though I preferred Lenny. Indeed, I even had a pair of rudimentary sideburns aged 11 (though in fairness I've somehow always had a pair of Sidney Sideboards ever since I was about 8; I didn't spurt into puberty especially prematurely, I just always had sideburns). Now, I have no problem with me loving this album as kid, but how would I respond to it as a 30something? Very warmly, it turned out. We have here an amiable, sincere yet playful and funloving record. It's an adolescent record (indeed, children liked Supergrass), but thankfully focuses on the carefree happiness of your first spliff and your first caress of a bosom, rather than 28 tracks about self-harming and hanging round cemeteries. To add a note on the album's eclecticism, I Should Coco has a intriguing number of different styles. Yes, these styles aren't jarringly different from each other, forming part of the standard canon of British indie rock (Beatles, Kinks, Who, Clash, Jam, Smiths, Stone Roses etc.), but Supergrass' embrace of them feels organic, as if they actually just like those bands, rather than out of a need to brag about their record collection (looking at you Spiritualized, Primal Scream and Radiohead). It's a pleasing, natural variance that doesn't reek of showiness. Basically, not a duff track, and that's great enough.

Fun fact: the official newspaper of the Vatican once named this the second greatest album ever, after the Beatles' Revolver. So, what did the Papal hacks see in the debut album of a former drug-hound gun-nut jailbird who once gave his seed to a lesbian couple? Well, there's some obvious greatness here, and it's an album that aims high and mostly lands (yes, you heard the distant rumble of a qualifier). One of the more sophisticated hippy folk works, the playing is at once intricate and unforced, each piece allowed to grow at its own pace. Indeed, the feel is of a languid jam where enough has been smoked that the walls have turned green (among the notables appearing are Jerry Garcia, Neil Young, Graham Nash, Joni Mitchell and Jefferson Airplane). That said, there are touches of melancholy to tracks like Laughing and Cowboy Movie, which of course adds to the richness of this album. As for that qualifier? Well, Song with No Words (Tree with No Leaves) is a song with no words, and skates right to the edge of self-parody. An album like this does take risks, and it's in the nature of risks that they may not fully or even parly succeed. So, I choose to hesitate over giving it five stars, but I fully understand those who bow towards this. Also, some of the last few albums I received (e.g., OK Computer and the execrable Mellon Collie...) possessed no sense of humour whatsoever, and were significantly worse off for such pomposity. Hell, it's nice when an album is capable of a chuckle.

A Yes album, even The Yes Album, doesn't feel like a Yes album unless Rik Wakeman and Roger Dean is involved. Now, that's piffle. This is clearly a Yes album, it sounds exactly like Yes, the songs are firmly in the Yes scool of lyricism and thematics, and whereas Roger has become inseparable from Yes, Rick Wakeman's been in and out of them more often than the crew of HMS Queen Elizabeth with your mum. Now, I am not a Yes fan, I subscribe to the standard that Yes were bloated and bizarrely inane, despite the grandiosity of their lyrical and musical conceits. I understand that the fans consider Starship Trooper one of their monuments, and I acknowledge that the last movement of it has a proper driving frug. And that occasional frug is the best of Yes. However, between each instance of frug there's about 15 minutes of quite boring, quite charmless noodling. But how would a band like Yes grasp the aesthetic of less being more? They're Yes, not the Ramones.

How does one assess an album by an act as idiosyncratic as Sparks? simple: you listen to Kimono My House, and you conclude that it's great. Job done. Kimono My House is the album that brought the brothers Mael to stardom, and placed them within the glam pantheon. Wonderfully, Sparks has never stopped, and indeed they're enjoying a deserved second flush of critical and commercial success. So how does the album that propelled them to fame affect the listener today? Sparks have one of the most well-developed sense of humour of any band (one aspect of this 1001 album exercise is that it made me realise how important it is for a band to have a sense of humour about them, rather than disappear up their own fundament mewling about how tortured they supposedly are). One must surely delight at the smutty erudition of the lines: You mentioned kant and I was shocked You know, where I come from, none of the girls have such foul tongues The album is festooned with such zingers. The music itself is highly stylised, baroque even, but that's authentically Sparks: Ron and Russell are educated, wry chaps steeped in the history of songwriting, so primitivism would just be an ill-fitting garb for Sparks. Be thankful that Sparks pursue such a singular muse, and that the made a singularly great album as this.

Woowee, jazz-funk! An album of straight-up 70s jazz-funk, evoking a 70s urban atmosphere of hustlers, punks, pimps and junkies. And so, it's an album firmly stuck in 1979, all economic malaises and Iranian hostage crises. So, the album and the genre itself has dated not all too cheerily. But can one listen to it with clean ears? Yes, of course, and there's stuff to enjoy, definitely. The title track has especially borne the years well. And despite my qualms over its antiquated sound, I rather like the sleazy, grimy aesthetic that this record proffers. But I cannot deny that in some parts it drags and occasionally falls into, yes, elevator music. So, the good parts are good, and the not-so-good parts are not so good. I think I deserve a prize for such a no-nonsense assessment.

The Massive Attack albums I have owned are Blue Lines and Mezzanine. Personally, I prefer the exquisite bleakness of Mezzanine to Blue Lines too-cool-for-skool eclecticism, but both are rather fine albums. So, I was not unprepared for Protection. And, as someone who has enjoyed plenty of Massive Attack in the past, it's slightly disappointing. Don't misunderstand me, the music is of Massive Attack's high standard, but that's the problem. It feels safe, tentative. You hope for the band to evolve, for the album to take far more risks, but they seem to have been stymied by the success of Blue Lines, and as such we have a classic example of second album syndrome. I acknowledge that I sound overly negative, but that's because I know the group did better before and after. With this album, I wish they'd been more daring, and used less protection (thank you and goodnight!).

A hard album to assess. The album has a real sweep to it, a sense of ideas being mustered, and a evident passion. So why am I not responding to this as warmly as I should? Maybe it's the middle. Like your mum aged 22, there's palpable sag in the middle. It could be me: I was at uni when this came out, and the hype of the New York rock revival never persuaded me, despite the constant claims of Sonics/Gang of Four/New Order parentage. Possibly it's my aversion to record-collection rock, and I'm not impressed by a rehash of Bizarre Love Triangle. But ultimately the Yeah Yeah Yeahs just aren't enough. You want more. Listening to them, you want them to be a little more melodic, a little more emotional, a little more abrasive, a little more arctic, a little more erotic, a little more bombastic, a little more detached, a little more serene, a little more urban, a little more experimental and a little more fun. You have here a decent band, sure, and that's fine, but a decent band is not a great band, and even though I want to root for them now, I find I can't outright.

Jimi Hendrix is glaringly the greatest, most charismatic, most talented artist of the 60s, and here we have his debut. In truth, this is not so much structured as an album but rather as an assemblage of Hendrix songs, showcasing what voodoo mojo geetar freakoutery he could do. But what a showcase! Virtually every moment and every aspect stuns the listener. Since everyone knows Hendrix's guitar virtuosity (he was quite good, apparently), I shall instead talk about his voice. Hendrix himself was rather disparaging about his voice, and was very self-conscious about it. To every other listener, Hendrix's dismay is baffling. His voice is somehow warm and seductive yet simultaneously masculine and fiery. Another aspect perhaps overlooked, though to a lesser extent, is the range of styles Hendrix adopts and mutates into his own; the rock, ballad, blues, raga, soul, R&B and psychedelia displayed here all bend towards Hendrix's star, a process sustained in his later albums. Hendrix had talents far beyond the guitar, and this album is proof. Why aren't you listening to this now?

BBC Two: The Album. Joking aside, Another Green World ingeniously manages to be bold and uncompromising and also pleasant and accessible. Perhaps Eno's most celebrated solo album, Another Green World is often seen as a transitional work between his first two, more overtly art-rock albums and the ambient work of his subsequent string of albums. In retrospect, Another Green World successfully marries the two mindsets, with the textured approach enhancing the melodies, rather than allowing them to drift. A curious point, made by plenty including Eno himself: Eno is not a tortured artist. His muse is not begat from struggle, indignation nor despair. Rather, his is the work of a sane, well-adjusted man who experiments because he finds it personally and creatively rewarding. In a sense, you could say his music is led by the head rather than the heart, but he does have a good head. Phil Collins drums on this.

Reviewing this album poses some quandaries, quandaries that are par for albums of similar themes and aspirations. What is the boundary between ambition and self-indulgence? How can one depict politically and ethnically charged disunity without falling into either morbidity, exploitation or platitude? When does nuance collapse into contradiction? How does one make an entertaining album about serious concerns wthout getting out of one's depth? Tragically, I don't think Lamar resolves those questions, and though the album is theoretically fascinating, it does not overcome its quite significant flaws. Take the scope and the eclecticism. Prima facie, its survey of jazz, soul, funk, pop and hip-hop should impress both intellectually and artistically, and occasionally it does, but it also quite often just becomes a demonstration of guile rather than inspiration, or cleverness rather than craft. I don't doubt that sampling Fela Kuti was meant as a sincere homage, but the impression is also that of a box being ticked. This aspect, that of the bet being hedged, reveals itself more obviously in the lyrics. Lamar refers to dark personal issues, such as depression, survivor's guilt and thought of suicide, but this is undercut by the comedic number For Free?, which admittedly features highly deft wordplay, but still revolves around a rather unpleasant female stereotype, which also undercuts the album's tirades against negative stereotypes. The result isn't so much variegated and kaleidoscopic as confused, leaving the listener desiring a bit more discernment. The end track of the album, Mortal Man, offers a microcosm of the album, showing both its peaks and nadirs. It shows the album's yearning for an overarching take on one man's hope and fears regarding racial harmony, but it's overlong, pretentious and rather schmaltzy in its triteness. It's based on Lamar's visit to Nelson Mandela's prison cell, yet it concludes with a constructed interview between Lamar and Tupac, where he brags about his wealth and explains the butterfly metaphor in painfully pompous and unnecessary depth. Again, I believe the intentions were honest, but it ends up cluttered and self-inconsistent. There is great stuff to be found on here, but one never loses the sense that the fantastic 40-minute album carvable from this 80-minute one would be much more satisfying and potent. (Actually, while I'm here, I'd like to take a star off my review of Ceelo Green... is the Soul Machine. It has similar faults to To Pimp a Butterfly, but To Pimp a Butterfly is a more interesting album.)

I've always resisted listening to the Pixies. I've remarked on my review of OK Computer that I postponed listening to it for over 20 years, and I guess I developed a similar cringe towards a band so similarly heralded by critics. Also, I've never liked Where is my Mind?; its ubiquity as an alt-rock anthem didn't ease my stomach one bit. So, my actual knowledge of the Pixies was essentially goose egg. And I was an idiot. A proper kegs-on-head silly Billy. It annoyingly turns out that Surfer Rosa is a genuinely great album, and the praise it has received over the last three decades is fully warranted. One thing nobody told me was that Surfer Rosa is rather fun, and indeed rather funny. Considering the eulogising this album generates, I was expecting something portentious, not a lean, good-humoured plate of post-punk irreverence. Also, as much as I have grimaced at the constant employment of Where is my Mind? by directors seeking a bit of Gen X cred, the song really makes sense and blossoms when played as part of the album. I am very pleased to have been wrong. Also, there are boobies on the cover. Just think you should know.

I listened to this album. I liked parts of it. Then I went on with my day and didn't think about it at all. Faint praise, I know. And I don't think I can muster that much passion to go through this album's okayness. There are striking moments; Streets of Your Town has one line that really startles. But this is essentially your standard gangly indie guitar with some clever lyrics, and you yearn for more instances of lyrical sharpness. You'll have no regrets listening to this, but you'll find little that'll make you fight for the Go-Betweens. Mind, if you pin your colours to the Go-Betweens' mast, I doubt you'd carry much weight in a fight anyway.

Honestly, I did not have high expectations going into this album. I have never understood the fuss over Metallica, who are just a metal band. I have always imagined that Metallica would resuly if you were to devise the most generic metal band of all. So, I've never had any interest in exploring Metallica. And this album is... a standard metal album. That's it. It's not noticably bad nor noticably good. It is the most average metal album conceivable. Boilerplate, passable, run-of-the-mill, middle-of-the-road metal. They should have nicknamed this the Grey Album. Well, there are some points worthy of comment. Firstly, Enter Sandman is a very silly song. Call me a purist, but I don't think a metal song should have a chorus that ends, "We're off to Never-Neverland." Is that meant to be terrifying? Was he threatening to take his kids to Michael Jackson's ranch? Still, the lyrics originally referred to cot death, so I think we should be thankful for what we got. Secondly, the album occasionally alludes to other pieces of music, the odd snippet of melody, that sort of thing. Sampling Morricone's Ecstasy of Gold on The Unforgiven is acceptable. Opening a song with West Side Story's America steers the album into self-parody. So, the only time the album avoids being average is when it's risible. Finally, the effect of the album's style is counterproductive. The heaviness of the album isn't unsettling or invigorating; it's blank and quite deadening. The songs are overlong and the lyrics are insipid, so the listener is just bored. They should have nicknamed this the Grey Album.

I fell asleep. Proper, serious, full 8-hours no-stirring hibernation. Maybe I was just tired. But I still struggle with U2 for one major reasons and several others of varying import. Yes, Bono is self-righteous and insufferable, but is that just one variation of the rock star complex, a complex I don't mind in, say, Jim Morrison or Dave Lee Roth? Yes, using Christian imagery to describe romantic scenarios is a centuries-old cliché, but so what? It does seem sincerely meant. Yes, One and Mysterious Ways have lost all impact they may have had, but can you blame the songs just because they were enormously overplayed, and shouldn't you try and listen with fresh ears? However, the major problem is that Achtung Baby is dull. Dull in conception, dull in execution, dull in presentation. I understand Achtung Baby is vaunted heavily (admittedly by an always-fawning press), but that just poses the further question: for whom is this album? (Yes, I decided to be exacting there.) The supposed innovations (including dance rhythms, for instance), were already old-hat by 1991 (weren't they contemporaries of New Order?; it doesn't help that their dance incorporations are really safe). If the listener doesn't appreciate the sentiment behind the bigger songs of the album, the whole just becomes an hour of quite samey, quite unengaging, quite dull music. The playing is competent, but that just adds to the sense that this album is product, not art. Oh, one innovation worth noting: U2 attempted a more jovial, irony-infused stance on this album. But in retrospect, it doesn't really come across. U2 embracing irony seems more an exercise in guile rather than a conceptual leap. It's not so much a change in direction as a Tory MP donning a baseball cap for a photo op at Alton Towers. Refreshing sleep, though.

Dinosaur Jr. were considered innovative because they fused hardcore punk noise onslaughts with hard rock staples of guitar solos and the sort. But this leads to two queries: does this leave them unsatisfying two groups rather than contenting one, and was this development that wholesome? Frankly, I'm currently not in a position to answer just yet. Give me time to explore Dinosaur Jr. more. However, I can tell you this album slightly suffers from the attempt to placate the straightforward rockers and indie kids. Yes, individual moments and tracks shine, but the sum is hesitant rather than inclusive. As proof, consider that the best, most alive song on the album is Don't, the most outré and punky. I wish they had focused on their strengths. A decent album, but aggrieved at the hinted potential for more.

It's great fun. That's all the summary you need. Getting into a little more depth, here we have a live album showcasing a band about to break through (in America; Japan caught onto the Cheap Trick gambit early on), and here we have a band relishing a moment of glory they'd assumed was fleeting. Also, the best of these songs are essentially indestructible, so we have a warm, melodic, upbeat band enjoying playing warm, melodic, upbeat rock. The middle sags slightly, presumably the time when you went to the bar or for a piss, but otherwise this album is pretty irresistible.

Whereas Jane's Addiction's first studio album, Nothing's Shocking, had a very strong first half let down by a weak second half, Ritual de lo Habitual has the inverse problem: a great second half hampered by a lacklustre first half. Okay, that may be a little too venomous; the first half has some charm. But, it's also quite oikish and irritating, like a 14-year-old after three cans of lager. Partly this is due to the music: funk metal has aged horrendously, and it wasn't too pretty at the time.But funk metal has another aspect that worsens it further: it believes that it is the coolest music conceivable (seriously, Extreme of all groups thought they were the great arbiters of taste with Get the Funk Out). As such the first half only appeals if you're still a virgin. But the second half goes some way to redeeming the album. The obnoxiousness dissipates and the songs gain more heft as they get longer. Still, I ultimately prefer Nothing's Shocking, and I can't call this album essential.

What we have here is a continuation, or perhaps less generously an appendix, to Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). We have the same methodology (hah!), the same kung-fu samples, a slightly lighter atmosphere and a slightly more technologically swanky approach to production. But the connections to Enter the Wu-Tang aren't just obvious, but declared; one of the tracks is a remix of Method Man, one of the standouts from Enter the Wu-Tang. To be clear, Enter the Wu-Tang is one of the great albums of the nineties, so where stands this: a noble sequel, a development of an established aesthetic, an exercise in caution or a placeholder? Well, Method Man and Rza are too talented for the last two, and Tical is in no way a bad album. It's just that you wish for more of a distinction from the earlier album. I'll still give it four stars, but that's in part goodwill.

Ah, to be thirteen. To start wearing Lynx obsessively and masturbate for whole weekends at a time. And, of course, to own one's first Iron Maiden album. But then, at 15 you feel your first breast and try pot for the first time, so Iron Maiden loses its lustre. Of course, if neither happens, one unfortunately gets stuck on Iron Maiden and metal for the rest of one's days, and such a limited scape is no basis for a life's music. So yeah, I had cassettes of Iron Maiden, Killers, Piece of Mind and The Number of the Beast aged 13. But at 14, I got into The Doors and rediscovered my childhood love of punk, so Iron Maiden felt embarrassing in their juvenile appeal. So, I had real trepidation when Iron Maiden popped up. And I liked it. Juvenile appeal still appeals, and one occasionally yearns for Satanism, sci-fi references and songs about women with big boobies. Of course, one's diet shouldn't consist solely of ice ceam and Monster Munch, and too much Iron Maiden can be bad for one's appetite. Remember kids: if you find yourself falling asleep on the sofa at 4am clutching a three-quarters-empty bottle of Strongbow while the tenth episode that night of Red Dwarf blares from the telly, you've had a bit too much Iron Maiden.

I had to take some time with this one. Yes, I'm inviting that dread phrase "rewards repeated listenings." But this is not an album that generates an adrenalin rush. It is an album that requires a more patient approach. The warmth of the album took me two playthrough to get. But when it did, it hit me like a heatwave. Likewise, the playfulness and the intricacy. I shall hold off on giving it the full five stars, but it's definitely at least a high 4, and I reserve the right to amend that in the future. Speaking of which, as I have now rated 50 albums, I'll do a bit of a tidy-up and give revised opinions on certain albums. Ella Fitzgerald - The Gershwin Songbook: raised from 3 stars to 4 (the very first album I received, and a terrible choice for a first album, being three hours and such. I can accept I was unfair due to algorithmic misfortune.) Led Zeppelin - Led Zeppelin III: dropped from 4 stars to 3 (the second half really doesn't work, though the first half rocks like a bastard.) Cee Lo Green - Cee Lo Green... Is The Soul Machine: dropped from 4 stars to 3 (To Pimp a Butterfly is a better, more interesting album, and that merits a three. Also, I'm so tired of the gangster posturing. You're meant to be a soul singer, not a drug mule or whatnot.) Dire Straits - Dire Straits: raised from 1 star to 2 (I wanted to give it a kicking, and I still do, but it can't be compared to something genuinely abysmal like Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.) Elton John - Madman Across The Water: raised from 2 stars to 3 (I admit Elton John isn't my bag, but I can appreciate why some people go for it. Also, the album has the same faults as Led Zep III, and I gave that three stars).

The first thing to strike the contemporary listener is how antiquated the album sounds. I mean this neither as condemnation nor praise, but just observation. It sounds exactly how a major hip-hop act would sound in 1986. So, with that qualifier, the album is still rather fun. The shared duties and alternations between the lads still delights. Easily a 4-starrer. However, there isn't quite a sense of flow between the songs. Raising Hell feels more like a collection of songs than a cohesive album. This is not a flaw per se, but I can't declare it a masterpiece.

A great live album, nothing more nor less than that. Of course, this is not at all a bad thing to be. The standout track is the 11-minute Lost Someone, which not only manages to predict several soul developments of the 60s (it has shades of Papa Was a Rolling Stone), but anticipates funk and even elements of hip-hop. The minor tracks are, well, minor, but in no way sound unpleasant. In fact, the whole album is a treat.

No, it gives me no pleasure to say this album doesn't work. It gives me no pleasure, indeed. The Who Sell Out is a concept album which purports to be a radio broadcast, with adverts appearing between the songs. Is that a wry look at the commercialisation of music, or just a conceit that doesn't really say that much? Ultimately, the latter. The Who doing a fake ad for baked beans just comes off as silly. Separating the jingles and the concept from the album, the songs do not hold up especially well. The Who simply weren't built for light, melodic pop, and their attempts are just featureless pastiches. Occasionally, The Who do flaut their heft, and the possibility of a rockier, heavier, more cogent album emerges. But that just depresses further, as the listener wonders what could have been. A deviceful misstep.

I have avoided listening to Tupac, not for ideological or snobbish reasons, but because I didn't like his big hits. Hit Em Up is genuinely unpleasant to listen to; it just sounds ugly to brag about sleeping with another man's wife, and Tupac makes it as childish as possible. And Changes features the worst sample in the history of music. Why sample such an obviously bad song? Don't talk about the lyrics, as you don't care. You hate the song for such a hateful piano shittening. That said, RZA merging James Brown and Tupac for Django Unchained was masterful, and my only criticism was that he never managed to stick in Robert Johnson at the same time. But how do I feel about a Tupac album with more thought applied? Well, initially rather warmly. He evinces a desire to explore serious, occasionally dark, occasionally bleak themes. Thinking further, this album is often fascinating, yet often unengaging. To compare it to a later album that this influenced, to the extent that it featured a fictional interview between Kendrick Lamar and Tupac, Me Against The World is a more coherent album than To Pimp A Butterfly. I don't doubt the sincerity of Tupac's concerns with thug life, as it were. But Lamar displays far more linguistic fireworks than Tupac, and one problem with Me Against The World is that Tupac sounds so straightforward. Yes, he has flow, but you want more developed imagery, more ambitious rhetoric. I'm trying to recall a metaphor from the album, but I can't. You get the impression of an artist capable of more depth, an artist of promise, but not quite fulfilling it yet. A second listening may bump this up to four stars, and a compilation of Tupac's best songs (not most successful) may well be a 5-starrer, but this sits at a comfortable 3 right now.

So, the greatest, most visionary, most talented, most virtuosic, most charismatic musician of the sixies releases a second album. And of course it's wonderful. What did you expect? That Hendrix would make bad songs? In his pomp, he simply didn't have the capacity to offer substandard material. The Noel Redding song is a duffer, but in no way does it, or can it, diminish from the sheer wizardry of Hendrix, The album starts with a radio interview asking if Hendrix descended from a UFO. That's as good an explanation as any. And I have Electric Ladyland to come. What delights will come. I was listening to this on Spotify, and the album was interrupted by an ad for the 20th anniversary of a Travis album. What a fucking pollutant.

Preconceptions are a terrible thing. I first heard this album last year, having had no interest in Rod Stewart for most of my life. He just seemed one of those performers from a distant era and of little relevance nowadays. Then I discovered that this album is quite rated, so I gave it a spin. And I was totally blown away. It turns out old Rod's a excellent interpretor of songs, capable of delivering real warmth and sentiment. Now, Rod was still in Faces at the time, and Every Picture Tells A Story is compabale to the excellent A Nod Is As Good..., but Every Picture Tells A Story just manages to pip its half-brother by the sheer weight of the songs. In particular, (I Know) I'm Losing You is surely one of the best covers of a Motown song out there. An unalloyed delight.

Now, I adore 70s punk and post-punk. I consider them together to be the greatest genre of music. However, I'd never sought to listen to X before, for no reason other than I've always been more compelled towards UK acts of the period. I decided to set the evening aside to listen to both this and their earlier Los Angeles, and I found a rather pleasant straddling of punk and new wave, with Wild Gift the more embraceable. I'd have to say it lacks the knockout blow of a 5-starrer, but it's plenty rocking and sardonic, and there are worse ways of spending an evening.

Bowie was the greatest album artist of the 1970s, a period noted for great album artists (Stevie Wonder, Neil Young, The Clash, Led Zeppelin, Kraftwerk...), and Hunky Dory was his first album where he organically combined his varied artistic passions. In the credits, Bowie is credited as "The Actor" (though his films may make you think otherwise). As such, the listener senses a multiplicity to this album, that of numerous roles being adopted. Since this was Bowie's lifelong creative persona, and since this is the first album where he fully expounds on this iridescent philosophy. Indeed, the opening Changes serves as a manifesto. However, don't believe that this album, for all its theatricality, lacks tenderness and heart. The piano-led melodies are at turns bombastic and fragile, and the whole record demonstrates that Bowie settling into the role of Bowie was in pursuit of his muse. Indispensable, and yes, hunky dory.

My history with Radiohead has been slightly iffy. Previously, I had only listened to one Radiohead album, OK Computer, which I only bothered with because it popped up on this playlist. I found the student politics and the record collection rock of OK Computer had dated pretty grimly, so I had little expectation that Kid A would be a genuinely excellent album. Yes, it's one of those turns-out-I-was-misguided reviews. I don't wish to spend my time comparing Kid A to OK Computer: I am not that interested in OK Computer. But I will say that lyrically Kid A is less obnoxious than earlier Radiohead efforts, as Thom Yorke spends less time declaring that he is saying something important. Indeed, the vocals oft seem tonal rather than expositionary, there to add aural texture rather than offload pronouncements. Indeed, although this sounds rather tautological, Kid A is very much sound-driven, as in side 2 of Low or Eno's ambient work. Oddly, I found it remarkably hospitable: the drive to explore noise is clearly far more endearing than sloganeering about one's carbon footprint. A revelation.

Why are all these RnB albums so long? Well, there's a clear reason: Songs in the Key of Life. But why that album? Well, it's really good. Yet a further question: why draw from the same well constantly? Now that I have a harder time explaining. Admittedly, RnB has never really been my jam. I really don't feel myself prudish, but I have never considered that that what soul music needed was a dosage of crassness. Now, I recognise that as just a lazy prejudice, so I welcomed the opportunity to have my options guided by this challenge. Frank Ocean has been the best so far, but I still have a few qualms. Firstly, why the length? Remember the mantra: long and thin goes too far in; short and thick does the trick. Sweet Life and Super Rich Kids are essentially the same song, so why have both? Theere's no bad track, but the length diminishes more than it expands. Secondly, some of the lyrical conceits don't quite land. The centrepiece, Pyramids, has Cleopatra journeying to the present and becoming a stripper. I am struggling to grasp the point being made. Or take Forrest Gump, and wonder at how it casts Forrest Gump as well fuckable. One wishes for a shade more quality control. Do not misunderstand me, this is a good album (whereas Ceelo Green... Is The Soul Machine is diminishing with each new album). But the listener need not fret that much if they decide to skip it.

No album is more 1989. It's frozen in a block of 100% pure 1989. It's produced by George H.W. Bush on the deck of the Exxon Valdez. So yes, it's all dated to buggery, but that is not that bad in itself; listening to this has some of the joys of archaeology. However, it's also very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very repetitititititititititititive. All the house beats sound exactly the same. All the raps sound the same, with the sole theme that of Queen Latifah being a good rapper. That makes one good song, but this is meant to be a bloody album. A second listen proves more appealing than the first, but it's still one fine song done 12 times. Yes, one fine song done 12 times. Indeed, one fine song done 12 times. Truly, one fine song done 12 times. In frankness, one fine song done...

Record collection rock: the dance remix. That's the annoying thing: the album is obviously great. It's clever, it's groovy, it rocks out, it's amusing, it's urbane. But it just tries one erg too hard to demonstrate that it's too cool for school. Imagine a posh kid bringing in a 100 quid skateboard to show off to his classmates, then tumbling off and breaking his front teeth on a kerbstone the first time he tries a grind. LCD Soundsystem don't embarrass themselves so (as I said, the album is great), but they always seem at risk of injuring themselves in their desire to impress. I suppose I could argue that, like a Tarantino film referencing Godard, part of the fun is clocking the allusions to Kraftwerk and Suicide and New Order and Pink Floyd and such and such, but that neglects the fact that at his worst, such trainspottery tendencies by Tarantino grate rather than amuse due to the perceived lack of a real emotional core. Really, I want to give this album 5 stars, but I hesitate at the sense of a brag over ownership of a mint-condition vinyl copy of Station to Station.

That's one ugly cover. Anyway, polished to the point where you can't embrace it, Can't Buy A Thrill sounds exactly like what it is: a Steely Dan album. A album where the overriding commandment is "Make it smooth," that mantra unfortunately makes the album impossible to love unironically. A lot of the instrumentation has dated despicably, reminding one oddly of Kokomo. But the issue isn't one of age; I suspect many found this grim listening at the time. Rather, what we have is a clearly talented group of musicians making music as a demonstration of their cleverness, instead of in any way engaging the human heart. That said, the odd track has charms; Midnite Cruiser is a perfectly fine bit of 70s classic rock, and Brooklyn is a warm country-twinged number that, shock horror, connects to the listener. Indeed, the album does become more gripping towards the end, when they resist the impulse to dull jazzy noodling, but even that appeal has limitations. A three-starrer, and that's thanks to my generous nature, and the album better be bloody grateful.

Our first foray into the Big 4 of Thrash was Metallica's Black Album, which I found mediocre and quite inane. Yes, I know, complaining about metal lacking profundity isn't the most original of criticisms, or even much of a criticism in itself, but it was an album with little to say for itself. Which brings us to Metallica's main rival, Megadeth. Formed by Dave Mustaine after he got kicked out of Metallica, he sought revenge by playing heavier and faster. With Peace Sells, Mustaine purportedly brings a punk-inflected political consciousness to his lyrics. You realise how daft that last sentence sounds, right? Are we really to include this in the great tradition of protest music? Does the title track stand alongside A Change Is Gonna Come? Hell, I'm not even asking that the album be dismissed for hollow affectation; I'm pointing out that one perhaps should not treat the political musings of Dave Mustaine too momentously. Musically, it's one of those codifiers of a genre that, well, has been imitated so often that the original potency has been quite diluted. This is not to say it's bad; I prefer Megadeth to Metallica, and happily see this as a healthy three-starrer, but no more than that. I suppose I'd characterise the album as good, yet ultimately unpersuasive. This album doesn't reveal a band to obsess over, to stock up on the back catalogue and doodle the logo on your pencil case. It's an okay metal band. By the by, Dave Mustaine's spent the last decade on Alex Jones' show, saying Obama wasn't born in America and that several school shootings were staged. Do you still want to maintain he has insightful and considered takes on the body politic?

So, the New York garage rock/punk/post-punk revival, eh? I was 18 at the time, and as big as the movement was, it didn't appeal to me on the whole, despite my love of garage rock, punk and post-punk. This was partly an aversion to hype, partly that I found certain bands flat (I'm rather curious how I'd find The Strokes nowadays), and partly a nascent disdain for what I have come to recognise as record-collection rock (I don't believe I'm the first to use that; I think it owes its coinage to the music writer Simon Reynolds, but theft is pretty much the easiest crime to justify materially). I have previously reviewed The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' subsequent album It's Blitz, and found it acceptable enough, but also safe, timid and frustrating in its refusal to move from the middle. To this album's credit, it at least heads somewhere. But it also underscores my main issue with record-collection rock; often the album are corkers, but also redundant. Why listen to a band heavyhandedly alluding to PiL and The Germs when one can, you know, just listen to PiL and The Germs? This is an issue the album battles with, not wholly successfully. We see a significant variation of styles delivered in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' manner, but not every attempt works, and the album is quite uneven (does anyone need their foray in dub No No No? Not really not really not really. Also, note that post-punk groups had been tackling dub in a less contrived manner over 20 years earlier). The album improves as one gets towards the end. I can accept that many people really embrace Maps, and I've no inclination to disabuse people of that, even if it personally doesn't quite hit my G-spot. The closers Y Control and Modern Romance are probably my favourites, and the hidden track is fun as well. So a bottom-loaded album. But the main reason the last few tracks surpass the first half significantly is that Karen O drops the obnoxious wackiness and sings like a being with a human heart. Does that mean the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' central conceit, Karen O's stance as frontwoman, was misconceived at conception? Not quite, but ultimately, what we have is a talented band not quite sure what direction to pursue, so they try as many as possible somewhat cursorily. This is a better failing than It's Blitz' lack of any direction, but it's still a criticism.

Is it me, or does this sound really quaint? Metal has that bizarre quality nowadays: the mainstream has acclimatised to the genre enough that the casual listener may well find this safe, twee and pedestrian. I may have started that paragraph sarkily, but with thought I realised it's exactly right. Sepultura, and by extension death metal as a whole, occupies such a sonically conservative cul-de-sac that it feels cosy and reassuring to people who like this music and nothing but tedious to those who don't. Me, I guess I find it rather boring, but I believe that the aspects I found soporific would comfort and tranquilise a fan, and that's fine. Just don't pretend it's hard. It hasn't been hard since 1993 at the very latest. Also, is the cover meant to be a scary monster? I think I stopped drawing such beasts aged 10.

I find jazz a mite tricky to write about, an issue I suspect I share with many. How do you dissect it entertainingly without either splatterings of empty words conveying the square root of sod all or acres of minutiae about unorthodox time signatures and tonal clusters that also convey the square root of sod all? Can you just write "it sounds nice" or "it sounds bad"? Anyway, this sounds nice. By "nice" I mean bold, intricate, formidable and singular. Of course, with such an experimental piece as this, the listener is required to be open-minded, but that also implies that it's rather your fault if you don't get this. I'm happy with that conclusion.

Embarrassing moment of second-guessing myself with this. I initially listened to this, perfectly enjoying it, but with the critical intention of determining whether this monolith of rock warranted the full 5 stars, an intention that slightly drained the sheer pleasure. This is not the mindset to approach this album, or any AC/DC album. Yes, I know, that's obvious. So, I applied some common sense. I went out and did enough physical labour to require a fistful of Deep Heat (I dug graves for two dogs), got some beers in and just rocked out (if any band justifies the employment of the phrase "rock out", it's surely AC/DC). And to nobody's surprise I loved every note, every clear, direct, unpretentious note. Akin to a perfectly cooked steak, the exact amount of taste and blood.

An odd duck, in a very specific way. Now, My Bloody Valentine subsequently became both extolled and notorious for Kevin Shields' protracted, exacting production methods, which of course gave us the mesmeric Loveless. Isn't Anything offers several hints of the direction MBV would take, but rather than seeing the album as just a precursor, can we examine the album as its own entity? Well, plenty of the ingredients of a great album are assembled. It's unique, heartfelt and often exquisite. However, Isn't Anything just lacks that tiny but essential bit of spice. It has 12 very fine songs, but not an unalloyed masterwork. You'll enjoy the album considerably while it plays, but you won't think about it the next day. Slightly depressing that I couldn't avoid qualifiers, but a mere blemish away from greatness still prevents greatness.

2002, my first year at university. Oddly, I don't recall this album being played that much. Don't misunderstand me, In My Place, God Put a Smile on Your Face, The Scientist and Clocks (tracks 2, 3, 4 and 5 on the album, a warning sign?) were as ubiquitous as oxygen (they still are), but I hadn't sought to listen to the album. I accept that was partly prejudice against the hype, partly a sneer at Chris Martin's Bonoesque, narcissistic proselytism for somewhat ill-defined causes, partly a distanced yet justifiable disregard over their lyrical shortcomings. But whilst listening to this, I realised that I had really quite missed the point. I had ignored that Coldplay have a straightforward mission: vague, slightly sad yet very much hopeful singalong anthems for wimpy indie kids. As someone with touches of wimpy indie kid, I immediately got the appeal of the album when I actually bothered to tune in. It's a very easy album to embrace. Yes, that's because it's overtly populist in its ambitions, but that's not an a priori failing. It really just means the melodies are likeable. As for the lyrics, I had overlooked an obvious point about Coldplay: as a group following on from Oasis, the definitive British band of the 90s, they had graduated from the Noel Gallagher school of lyrics providing mood rather than meaning. Yes, we're not talking Dylan, but that's not the point of this. Would you prefer the Beatles if Keith Moon replaced Ringo? The album is fairly long, and threatens to stay until it begins to stink, but it avoids that mainly because, despite the singles all coming from the front, the later tracks are clearly not filler. More negatively, after a while there is the sense of inspirational-mix-for-a-5k, but what did you expect from Coldplay? Sexy boudoir numbers? A soundtrack to a drag race, whether cars or transvestites? Sidelong noodlings attempting to replicate the aura of Venus? If you accept this album on its own terms, you'll enjoy it so much more.

It has taken me a few days to write a review of this. That is partially procrastination, but there was also a desire to let the album sit for a day or two. This is an album of quite some density. I would have also said of some uniqueness, but the post-punk/goth/indie roots of this are unmistakable. In that regard, it does the job rather finely. Often the album charms in its quirkiness, but of course that word warns of the possiblity for irritation. For me, it avoided that, but I would not battle someone who found it properly flossed their punani. Along with that, I think it just narrowly misses the knock-out blow tthat would make it a full 5-starrer. Maybe another listen would bump it up, but maybe not. Still, great fun.

Given the rather embarrassing cover and the vintage of 1989, I lessened my expectations of this album, even though I have loved plenty of John Lee Hooker joints. And the grimness of the 80s production on the opening track made my gums recede, sounding exactly like a shifty, leisure-suited band in an especially dingy bar playing Midnight at the Oasis. So why did John Lee Hooker lose his creative bearings on this album? Well, the first seven tracks are all collaborative, but they lack any sense of creative tension or exploration, an absence spotlit by the mouldy production. Maybe it's reverence towards John, causing the performances to seem mannerist and artificial. However, the last three tracks are solo efforts, and we finally hear the old Hooker magic. Seriously, the last three tracks rescue the album from embarrassment and belatedly demonstrate John Lee Hooker's majesty as an artist. So, the mean of the album is very much average, but the best tracks are touched by the hand of God and nobody else.

To 5-star or not to 5-star: aye, that's the dilemma. I suppose I need to evacuate some sputum of criticism before I praise. The forays into blues perpetrate a minor incident of white-rocker-trying-to-sing-blues-without-suficient-force-or-authenticity, but in this case it's in no way an unforgivable offence. And thankfully so, because a lot of the album works like a bastard. The initiated will detect a similar vibe to the Doors' first album; two of the main differences is that this lacks the occasional European vibe the Doors generates, and also that Jim Morrison was one of the greatest white blues-hollerers. Of course, the all-American nature of Electric Music for the Mind and Body is hardly a reason to lambaste the album, and it's pleasantly eclectic within its parochialism. Aside from nascent psychedelic rock we have the aforementioned blues, but also pop touches, straight-up rock, some country twangs and mild Dylanesque wit. That said, the album reaches its apex towards the end, where it gets properly psychedelic; LSD explorations are the reason you listen to this. And I was prepared to give it five stars, but a final listen has demonstrated that the album doesn't cohere enough, that the poppiest number is somewhat weak, and by bringing up the Doors' first album, I raised a beast that the album cannot hope to vanquish. 4-and-a-half stars. That, my friends, is hesitancy captured by the graphical representation of luminous celestial entities.

I am struggling to work out the point of this album. I accept that the musicians involved are talented, in the sense that they can play their instruments properly. But to what end? I've reached out to a mate who's more into this, and I think I have concluded that I hear this as the curdling of jazz fusion. I don't find it fun, nor interesting, nor that exploratory. Yes, I can understand that maybe (and I think it's questionable) that I'm judging from hindsight. But large parts are insufferable, large parts are boring, several are both, and the occasional glint of quality, where the talent actually finds a handhold, only reminds me that I'd've preferred a much different direction. Maybe I'd be more generous in a different state of mind, but I'm wondering what state I'd be in. Actually, I'll relent. I can accept that I wrote the preceding paragraph while grumpy. I subsequently relistened, and while I still don't really like it, it's not an overturned bus of an album. It's just from the iffy end of fusion jazz. God, this reviewing malarkey's trickier than it seems.

A decent album. Not great, not egregious, just the exact, forensic point of okayness. I have never warmed to Take on Me. Overwhelmingly overplayed and slightly gimmicky, I always preferred The Sun Always Shines on TV (and honestly, I've never bothered paying attention to a-ha before). However, as the opener, I will acknowledge more of a charm than I have previously recognised, but not enough to persuade me to like it fully. The other singles are better, often quite melancholy, and one has to relish Morten Harket's lyrical idiosyncrasies (who doesn't marvel at "Please don't ask me to defend/ The shameful lowlands/ Of the way I'm drifting/ Gloomily through time"?). But, and this is with all the goodwill in the world musterable for this album, I can't really call it an essential listen. There's fair filler and, although it's enjoyable to spend an hour with these fetching Norwegians, I'm not going to build a shrine to them.

Reading a few other reviews, a few people have compared this to Barenaked Ladies. Steady on, chaps and chapesses. Them's fighting words round our way. Also, they don't! I have no idea why they'd make that comparison. More reasonably, plenty have noted that this sounds like a heavier REM, mainly because it does. But is that a good thing? I mean, six albums into Hüsker Dü's career (to do umlauts, hold Alt Gr and press 2, then the letter you want umlauted: that's Uncle Stylo's tip of the day), and they've managed to sound like college rock? That seems closer to settling than progressing. Also, why is this a double album? I can't say it gains anything by being supersized, and turns an okay album into an okay album that's twice as long. Now, of course there are highlights and good songs, and there's no fluorescent duds on this, but why would anyone hold this to their heart? Competent but ultimately unlovable. Barenaked Ladies' One Week contains the lyric "Chickity China / The Chinese chicken / You have a drumstick / and your brain stops tickin'". Is it me, or is that a wee bit racist?

Ah, to muse on what could have been. First thing to note is the cover: where is the parental advisory sticker? No need for one. For you see, what we have here is a less famous entry in daisy age rap, a short-lived tendency in hip-hop circa 1990 when rappers adopted a gentler, more playful, more positive stance. Of course, pop rap has been a perennial since Rapper's Delight, and daisy age led directly to the positive hip-hop of Arrested Development, but then it all died a death, buried under the juggernaut of gangsta rap. And I think everyone can nowadays agree that this was a real shame. Plenty of angsta rap has really not aged well (you know what, kids? People might get a bit sniffy if you express misogynistic and homophobic sentiments), and more generally, people would like a softer, more thoughtful take on hip-hop, which this album is. And from the off, the album delights. This is an immensely charming album, the flow charismatic as only old-skool hip-hop couplets can be. It's genuinely pleasant to hear a rap contain the lines: Stay out the dark and you'll find that you'll be strong Believe in yourself and nothin' will go wrong There's room out there for those who want some Because everybody's got a little light, under the sun. Even the tracks about the ladies are about good-natured flirting rather than objectification, and Black Woman outright praises, well, black women, directly saying that, along with love and protection, black women deserve respect, a most appealing concept. Also, the music itself impresses in its funky diversity, ranging from bebop to doowop to 80s squelchy synths. There are nits to pick. The album is a little too long, and I didn't really appreciate the message of In Dayz 2 Come, but I'm all prepared to overlook those because the album is such a joy regardless. I came away wishing that this had taken off, rather than The Chronic, a conclusion with which I suspect many would concur. Sometimes the best doesn't win. C'est la vie.

Fuck the Red Hot Chili Peppers. There you are, the Gang of Four, making one of the truly great deconstructions of the rock album with Entertainment!, and a bunch of conceited blowhards with no heart strip your angular, provocative funk-punk for parts and use it solely to score smack and ass, and as a horrific bonus begat Crazy Town. So yes, this album is a standout masterpiece of post-punk, a genre admittedly littered with standout masterpieces. With this, we have one of the most overtly political albums of the period, a late-Marxist synthesis of Brecht, Gramsci, Marcuse (the "repackaged sex keeps your interest" refrain summarises his later philosophy in five words) and Situationism. This radicalism extends to the music, where the instrumentation is egalitarian, with the consequence being to boost the bass (thus making it as funky as all fuck) and streamline the guitar (making it as sharp as all fuck). To appreciate this fully, it helps if you know what commodity fetishism and false consciousness mean, but if you just dance as jerkily as possible to this, you should love this. You should love this anyway. The allied group Delta 5's Marxist-flavoured Mind Your Own Business were recently used to advertise Apple, and as I already mentioned, the awful RHCPs nicked the Go4's innovations and hawked them in a meaningless, bastardised manner. This is an example of not only Marcuse's despair that capitalism subsumes everything, but Baudrillard's jest of how all this is just the free interplay of signs. By the by, I am not a Marxist.

Not much to say about this. It's an outdated album from a genre that no longer exists. It doesn't sound bad, and you'll find stuff to like, but you will, perhaps unfortunately, see this as a curio. That said, I was utterly won over by You Didn't Have to Be So Nice, a sweet, sincere little duet between Astrud and her six-year-old son. I've played it to the mothers of young children in my intimate circle, and they agree it's lovely. Actually, that's the issue. That's the song that has real heart to it. The rest feels like generic album fodder, pleasant but forgettable. That may be unfair reasoning, but three stars seems exactly fair.

Let's get the obvious out the way first: this is just too damn long, a common flaw in Todd Rundgren albums. One wishes that he could suppress his brobdingnagian tendencies and just focus on producing one great slab of vinyl rather than two middlers packaged together. However, that's hardly the only flaw present. That feels harsh, and it's not as if the album sounds bad, but the first three sides merge into a bog-standard 70s powerpop/AOR rock that neither offends nor inspires. So paradoxically, we have an overtly ambitious record that tries to play as safe as possible. However, side 4 markedly improves things, being rockier, more awake, and quite a bit funnier. As such, side 4 raises this to a 3-starrer, but that's all it can do.

I wished to write this with as little hyperbole as possible, but this is one of the greatest albums ever made, quite possibly the greatest debut album ever made and an utterly mesmering, utterly unique work of art. Indeed, when I listen to Joy Division, they convince me that they are the greatest band of all. I acknowledge that not everyone appreciates their beautiful bleakness, but I also acknowledge that those people are fools. Still, hyperbole would lead to charges of reckless writing without sufficient content, so let's try for a more objective analysis. The first thing to strike the listener is the depth of the sound, a sound both colossal and intimate, conspiratorial even. Significant dues for this go to the difficult, eccentric genius producer Martin Hannett; for instance, he recorded each element of the drum kit on its own, so each sound wouldn't have the other drums bleeding into them (curiously, much of Joy Division initially disliked the faster-but-slower measured intensity Hannett's production brought, feeling it didn't represent the adrenaline-charged, uncompromising ferocity of their live performances; they have since accepted the Unknown Pleasures sound, reasoning correctly that it still sounds urgent and magnificent). However, it was the band that made this unprecedented music: bass-driven without being funky, heavy without being metal, recognisably rock (there's even a guitar solo on Shadowplay) yet somehow appearing to have evolved on a different planet to rock, Unknown Pleasures sounds newborn yet fully-formed, displaying an astonishing amount of craftsmanship for four boys aged barely 20. And we finally get to the singer, the perversely winsome Ian Curtis, who was (and I apologise for the hyperbole yet again) one of the most affecting, most powerful singer-songwriters ever to gaze into the abyss. I don't find it valuable to look at a work of art through the prism of the creator's biography: do you think George Orwell must have known a load of talking communist pigs? So I don't care to dwell on the heartrending end of Ian Curtis' life. Instead, I will query why Ian Curtis is seen as a figure in the tradition of romanticism. Ian Curtis' work is more modernist, in its focus on horrific extremes (just look at the name), its rejection of traditional forms, its ultra-expressionist tenor and its refusal to draw a pat conclusion (yes, I know there's significant overlap between romanticism and modernism, but I still assert that the Joy Division ratio was far more modernist than romanticist). Less Byron, more Bataille. Astonishingly, their next album would be even better, but that's a tale for another day.

What killed Britpop? The most common answer, Oasis' Be Here Now, has some merit: although in no way the turkey of legend, its hubristic, cocainistic bloat is obvious. Now, Oasis were the best, most important Britpop band, so a relatively weak album from them had to corrode the genre's reputation. But, of course, this is far too simplistic. Now you may not wish to admit it, but Blur were nowhere near as good as Oasis, and part of Britpop's collapse was due to them finally being rumbled. And, of course, the glut of charmless no-mark bands like Menswear, Kula Shaker and Blouse was ultimately the method of execution, a death by a thousand cuts. Also, the culture that blossomed around Britpop swiftly turned bathetic, all dodgy sideburns, four warm cans of Stella and Gail Porter flashing her spiders' legs. Finally, the fashion just inevitably changed, opening a flank for Radiohead to seize all the critical cachet with their own not-aged-too-well darling OK Computer. And then we have this, the follow-up to Pulp's era-totemic Different Class. Jarvis Cocker had founded Pulp as a teen in the late 70s and had stayed firmly lower-league for over ten years, but with Different Class, Pulp and especially Jarvis became stratospherically famous. With this, our Jarvis found that the success and the attendant women, charlie and notoriety he'd lusted after for so long didn't elate him, it emptied him. So, our Jarvis' next album developed a cynical, self-loathing edge. And that's the sticking point of this album: it doesn't want to be liked. It feels alienated by the whole world, so it seeks to alienate the whole world. This does not make the album bad; there are several good songs on it, especially the sordid, engrossing title track. But there is the occasional duffer (the almost parodic dance-infused Party Hard causes the listener to recoil), and more seriously, the whole atmosphere of the album is slightly yet wilfully hostile, as if the album just wants to be left alone. A note on the title track. One of our Jarv's fave songwriting tactics is to write a masturbation fantasy, usually but in no way exclusively in a romantic manner. Do You Remember The First Time, I contend, is written from the point of view of a lesbian wishing to resume an experimental fooling-around with a straight friend who is nowadays in a heterosexual relationship. Disco 2000 is a paean to tugging yourself off over the memory of the girl you had a crush on at school. But with This is Hardcore, the romance, the desire to connect with someone both emotionally and physically, is absent, and the song is just about wanking over porn. What development better indicates the album's coldness, compared to our Jarv's earlier work? This album is oft called not so much a cocaine album, but rather a cocaine-hangover album. Cocaine albums, such as Be Here Now, have a grim reputation for disaffecting self-indulgence, and this album still pushes the listener away, if for the perhaps nobler reason of disaffecting self-disgust. So what was Pulp's contribution to the death of Britpop? The smartest, wittiest (and perviest) band to flourish with Britpop came to hate it, and deliberately released an album that cut their own throat.

Before this record, I had never heard the name quiet storm, the genre to which this album apparently belongs (I knew about the genre, just not the name). The brief potted history of quiet storm goes: in the 70s, with African-American audiences for soul music growing older, along with more and more African-Americans entering the middle class, suburbia and college, there emerged a market for a form of soul music more apposite for this upwardly-mobile demographic. That is, they sought an easy, Vaseline-smooth, uncontroversial soul music as a pleasant background sound to lovemaking. Taking its name from a radio show, which in turn took its name from a rather lovely Smokey Robinson number, quiet storm proved insanely lucrative throughout the 80s, yet it has never shaken the reputation of artificiality, of using the tools of soul to create product rather than soul. I have never been fond of that overproduced, anaemic style which became the dominant form of mainstream soul in the 80s. Partially it is the sense that this is soul for the Reagan era, of Reagan-approved soul. Many of the greats of 60s and 70s soul (Jame Brown, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, etc.) often had a civil-rights-era political dimension to their music, but 80s soul largely abstracted itself from that aspect. But that is not the issue here. Simply, all heart has been sapped from the music. The production has aged as well as Jacko’s legacy, and that smooth soul plus smooth jazz leaves the listener with nothing to hold on. Tragically, Anita Baker is an obviously talented singer, who happened to come to prominence after the golden age of soul. Individual moments strike the listener, but it requires the listener to sift. I accept that part of the 1001 exercise is to cover a gamut of Anglo-American popular music, but that does mean it occasionally throws up prominent albums from iffy genres. In American Psycho, the protagonist Patrick Bateman devotes a chapter to his appreciation of Whitney Houston (who does not have an album on this list, by the by), just after describing a sexually sadistic murder. He characterises Whitney as the greatest jazz singer of her generation, and tells the reader of the dignity and sincerity inherent to her debut album. Of course, this is meant satirically. We recognise that we are meant to mock Patrick for his abysmal taste and his facile justifications (which seem cribbed from music critics, indicating Patrick’s obsession with conforming), with the implicit message that Whitney’s music, and by extension quiet storm, is largely a cold, barren wasteland. Anita Baker had the misfortune to sow her seed on that wasteland. That said, in the wake of Whitney’s death, there has been more of an appreciation of her abilities as a singer, but not to the extent that it has prompted a critical reassessment of her 80s work. And yes, I know it is unusual to spend so much time talking about Whitney Houston in an Anita Baker review, but it underscores my point: sometimes genres should just be left to rot. Or are we all clamouring for the return of the teen death ballad?

It’s an absolute mess! A stamping-together of numerous 70s trends, the resultant album just confuses and irritates. Is it mild glam pop? A Bonzo Dog Doo-Dahesque stab at absurdist comedy? A smooth country-infused rocker? An experimental proggy casting where the songs are suites with multiple movements? Parody? Self-parody? It’s all these things at different points. But does it work? God, no. Over the course of these reviews, I have realised that a sense of humour can elevate an album, but the most painful of spectacles is comedy that doesn’t work. This album continually tries to joke around, presumably claiming inspiration from the Beatles’ kookier stuff, but itself inspires only an embarrassed downward glance from the listener. Also, and it must be said, it’s overtly racist at points. As for the music, very occasionally you hear a snippet of a slightly interesting idea, but nothing is sustained, and all they do is swerve wildly to a completely unconnected style ten seconds later, leaving nothing for the listener to chew upon. This isn’t eclecticism, it’s senselessness. I was prepared to give this 2 stars, but a relisten proved this to be far more annoying and unpleasant than I was crediting it. Beforehand, I wasn’t ill-disposed to 10cc. Their singles were quite fun, and although I’m not persuaded that I’m Not In Love is a masterpiece, I understand why some people adore it. But this record demonstrates that, unless later albums actually show coherence, they only have worth as a singles band (which is not a bad thing to be). Also, there’s a typo on the cover: instead of Sheet Music, it should say Shit Music.

Okay, a fantastic album by one of the most talented acts of the 90s. I have previously said that the dominance of gangsta rap help back hip-hop, yet here we have the greatest gangsta rap of them all. Now, it's interesting to compare this to Tupac's All Eyez on me. With that, there was the constant sense of a punch being pulled, of someone playing at being a thug, and playing at being a poet, and fallaciously assuming that the logic would make him a thug poet. With Enter the Wu-Tang, we have proper thug poets. We have such uncompromising music and such uncompromising lyricism, and both beguile. One will love the dark laughter. If people tolerated gangsta rap as it gave the promise of an eventual wonderful act, this is that promise being fulfilled. The mysticism is piffle, but that's in no way a dealbreaker: it's nice to have an east-coast hardcore rap outfit culturally appropriating kung-fu movie lore.

I had been procrastinating my review of this, because the Sex Pistols were the most important band to my life, and I think I became very wary that explaining my veneration of the Pistols would slightly dispel the magic. I feel I should add some biography. My brother was 14 years older than me, and when he was a teenager, punk was already long dead. But, as an angry teen, he'd built up a vinyl collection of the Pistols and the Clash. Then one of my sisters, 7 years older than me, began seeing an Iron Maiden fan around 1993 while she was into Nirvana, so they dug out my brother's old albums. Initially, when one of my other sisters, 4 years older than me, played Anarchy in the UK once (odd, as she has never been into punk or rock, preferring smarter pop), I tried to be a snotty, bratty younger brother and dismiss it, but I became fascinated. So, my earlier-mentioned sister began playing the Sex Pistols for me, along with Guns N Roses and Nirvana (despite Kurt's rhetoric, every Nirvana fan was also a GnR fan). I now recognise the Sex Pistols as the first artistic experience I ever had in my life, aged 8 in 1992. And yes, that does mean I was a cooler 8-year-old than you. Looking back, much of my subsequent aesthetic mindset was determined by Never Mind the Bollocks. I discovered and fell in love with dada aged 15, clocking that it was WW1 punk. Most of the music I adore is music I can connect to the Sex Pistols (aside from the Stooges, Ramones, Clash and Joy Division, I would name my beloved blues, rock n roll, outlaw country, garage rock, Krautrock, glam, and indie as punk-adjacent, along with plenty of others). Much of my favourite writing has a punk sneer delivered with two fingers. Hell, despite the punk aesthetic being so watered-down that the anarchy symbol is a corporate stand-by, women with dyed, spiky hair and Doc Martens stir something in me few women do. But why was I hesitant? Are the Sex Pistols like an eclipse: as astonishing a spectacle as they are, you shouldn't look upon them with naked eyes? Nope. I was second-guessing myself again. The Sex Pistols are the greatest, most important band of all, and Never Mind the Bollocks is the greatest, most important album of all. The title makes the point: compared to the Pistols, much else is just bollocks. The album is ultimately a monument to two youths: Steve Jones and John Lydon. Steve Jones, a teenage petty criminal who was just starting off on the career of professional criminal (already a housebreaker and football hooligan, even he accepts that without the Pistols he was destined for prison), agrees with his mate Paul Cook to join a band founded by Wally Nightingale called Swankers, with Jones on vocal. Badgering Malcolm McLaren for management, they also recruit his stockboy Glen Matlock as bassist. Though a charismatic thug and womaniser, Jones is not a great frontman, and McLaren convinces him to take up the guitar and ditch Wally (what an apt name). The group, now firmly cemented as Jones' band, stages auditions for a new lead singer, and a teenage oddball with green hair and yellow teeth (hence the nominer Johnny Rotten) mimes to the wonderful Alice Cooper track I'm Eighteen, securing his place in the band. Remarkably, that football hooligan turned out to have an instinctive, almost unconscious grasp of the most powerful power chords, and that oddball happened to have a decent brain, making that unaligned pair briefly the greatest living songwriters, in that they simply made the best songs. Of course it couldn't be sustained; nobody could be that wonderful for too long, and the collapse of the Pistols is one of the most wretched in music history. But they made the greatest album of all, an album that served as a compass for good music: everything worthwhile can be found if you follow the path directed by Never Mind the Bollocks. My ultimate question: what do I have to say to that 8-year-old boy who would jump around the front room to God Save The Queen after mass? You were right. Fucking hell, you were right. John Lennon is a wanker. Got any glue?

Like nearly all record-collection rock, White Blood Cells is simultaneously corking fun and hugely frustrating. It also manages to demonstrate that most conspicuous of paradoxes: in its attempts to sound as authentic as possible, it serves principally to sound inauthentic. That opening may suggest that I view White Blood Cells and the White Stripes harshly. Please let me assure you that is not the case. The album is a 4-starrer and much of it is obviously great. The White Stripes were very much the diamonds of the garage rock revival, and their best songs (Fell in Love with a Girl, Seven Nation Army, yes, their most famous ones) were the best songs of that movement. Jack White has proven that he can consistently bash out a riff to rank alongside those of Tony Iommi or Angus Young. But I can't deny that I felt slightly weary listening to the album. Here's the issue, as I see it: the White Stripes don't so much declare their influences as advertise them. This is not bizarre in itself. These influences, a melding of Son House and Loretta Lynn and the Sonics and the Stooges, are extremely common; indeed, those represented genres each form a rich, deep seam of American music. Again, this is not an oddity. However, the White Stripes have clung to their predecessors so firmly that the listener wonders if the White Stripes could release a song that wasn't beholden to Muddy Waters or the 13th Floor Elevators. Isn't rock n roll meant to be about disrespecting your elders? There is an Italian concept called sprezzatura. Stemming from the late Renaissance work on civilised behaviour The Book of the Courtier, sprezzatura can be defined as studied carelessness, the projection of nonchalance in order to hide effort and make skilful acts appear easy (sprezzatura is most famously employed within fashion, where the wearer will make deliberate mistakes in their garb to show that they don't give a damn; Gianni Agnelli, the owner of Fiat, was perhaps the 20th century's greatest practitioner of sartorial sprezzatura, with the wearing of his watch over his shirt cuff becoming his signature flourish). That's what's missing from this album: insouciance. When the White Stripes bragged about recording the album in 4 days in order to sound unpolished, you couldn't help sense Jack White nerdily showing us his workings.

I resisted listening to Bruce Springsteen for years. I had long suspected that I would eventually become a fan, but I came to believe it to be the final step away from youth and into middle age. The day I turned 35, I went out and bought vinyl copies of Born To Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town and Nebraska. Oddly enough, a dear friend also fell for the Boss aged around 35, having been given tickets to a gig and swept away in the joy felt by both the Boss and the audience. It would appear that Springsteen is nowadays both the condolence a man gives himself when he gets his first grey hair and the reassurance he gives himself that he isn't impotent just yet. But anyway, Born To Run was Springsteen's breakthrough after his first two (fine) albums sank commercially, an all-or-nothing, budget-breaking last chance that thankfully paid off. And a colossal attempt such as this warrants a colossal sound, with Springsteen fulfilling his ambition of cutting a record that sounded like Roy Orbison singing Bob Dylan, produced by Phil Spector. The album seeks to, and manages to, resurrect Spector's Wall of Sound aesthetic, basking in utter bombast. However, the album establishes the now-defining Springsteen message of the emptiness of dreams, of how a life spent pursuing a fantasy is only likely to end abjectly. Of course, the album is astute enough to realise the power of reverie; just listen to the title track. But though he and Wendy may be born to run, the album ruefully considers that they have to run somewhere, that the real world is always there. Also, the photo on the cover, of Springsteen chummily leaning on Clarence Clemons, is one of the most charming, uplifting images in rock. By the by, I have not had a grey hair yet, and my penis still works.

A rather uncomfy listen. I have listened to some Zappa albums in my time, but not this, and I was expecting a flawed work, even if it turned out to be great. However, the cringeworthy aspects overshadowed the interesting parts, and I can't say I enjoyed it, especially since I found it more callous that humorous. This was the first album by the Mothers of Invention, and also one of the first double albums (Dylan's Blonde on Blonde came out a week earlier); it was also a pioneer of the concept album, a term that has subsequently gathered substantial baggage. The concept was apparently Zappa's satirical take on American pop and the incipient hippy movement, but that summons a perennial demon of Zappa's oeuvre: he's not that funny. Comedy tends to date easily, quickly and poorly, and that's even with the most celebrated comedians: blacking up was a lot more mainstream in the post-war period than you might surmise. With Zappa's humour, the standard adjective employed is "sophomoric"; it's a clever man saying "bum", convincing himself that the spectacle of a clever man saying "bum" is so radical ("Bugger me, I thought he was going to recite The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, not say bum!") that it must be both mind-expanding and hilarious, whilst pretending not to hear the coughs of a visibly embarrassed audience. Likewise, the satire of the album just fails. It's just a series of songs that are lacklustre versions of the genres they are meant to be mocking ("Say, do you know what would be clever? A doo-wop song about rejecting a ex-lover! Nobody else would ever have that idea!"). And if the message is that The Mothers of Invention are somehow better than what they are parodying, then I'll choose the side of the parodied: their songs sound better, and Zappa comes across as a peevish killjoy. Even in his musique concrete tracks, which one can assume is the part which most excites Zappa, he spoils it by, yes, adding some of his comedy. Has anyone ever chuckled at the name Suzy Cheesecake? I understand that the comical aspect to Zappa is only one part of a multifaceted, prolific career, and that Zappa fans often agree that his comic material is his most tiresome. So maybe a different Zappa album will entrap me, but I found this to be Zappa at his most obnoxious. Another curious point is how dated the production sounds. The contemporary ear would most likely find it muddy and distant. Now, this is obviously not as off-putting as Uncle Frank telling a joke about two nuns in the bath, but it indicates that the main appeal of this album is archaeological; as an artefact of a certain 60s tendency, it's interesting, but as a work in its own right, it's just rather annoying.

Firstly, to explain the title: it stems from an Aleister Crowley poem about 69ing, and let's be honest, is of no great profundity. The band were often just dicking about, and with that stance of dicking about is how best to approach this album. Ministry are usually classed as industrial metal (leaning more towards metal), two terms which scare off plenty of the weaker-bowelled. That said, they also bore off plenty who find both industrial and metal infantile and predictable. As for me, this album represents one of the better combinations of both, where the industrial harshness actually boosts the fun of metal. Specifically, this album is at its best when it reminds one of Motörhead, when it embraces the hard, fast, rough, loose rock n roll Lemmy championed. Occasionally the album gets ponderous, when they forget they're meant to be fribbling about and instead try to play as if the indecipherable lyrics meant something. But none of those instances really taint the album, and the discerning listener should cheerily ignore those parts. It will not at all persuade anyone ill-disposed to metal, but that's no reason for anyone to get upset.

Landfill indie is a pejorative term used by music critics to describe the glut of rocking indie tracks that bloated the UK in the latter years of the noughties. Now, UK indie has always had a much greater supply than demand since the early 80s, and a deep old dive into the more obscure of UK indie from any period in the last 40 years will turn up the odd pearl, along with the occasional used syringe. But the late noughties seemed especially plagued with middle-class quartets sporting shaggy hair and warm cans of lager, delivering moshable riffs that were constrained so as not to be too insensitive. Think "music leading to the ad break of The Inbetweeners" and you're exactly where landfill indie attained its cultural apex. My contention is that the foundation stone of this particular style of landfill indie is Radiohead's The Bends. Yes, you can point to the guitar-centric arrogance of The Stone Roses and Oasis, or the off-kilter kitchen-sink observations of The Smiths and Blur, or the wasted refinement of Suede and Pulp, and they are all key building blocks. But the sonic template for what became noughties mainstream indie originated in The Bends. Consider these facts. The first riff every landfill indie band learnt was Street Spirit (God, I grew sick of hearing that dribble continuously for hours in mates' bedrooms). If you plonked Just in the 2008 charts, you'd think it was just (hah!) a standard, slightly harsh, slightly cynical bit of landfill indie that landfill indie bands would release just to dodge the monotony of songs about their desire to explore a trustafarian's internal plumbing. Radiohead had become the most critically feted rock band by the year 2000, thus becoming the icon for your ambitious indie bands; Oasis had blown it, Coldplay were too liked-by-your-parents, Damon Albarn decided to be much more interesting with Gorillaz, and much other indie of the time was, well, heading for the landfill. Almost by default, Radiohead were the indie band to emulate. However, Radiohead didn't want to be the most heralded indie band; they were pursuing their own experiments, occasionally to great results. So, the landfill indie of the noughties touched on Radiohead's most accessible album as inspiration: The Bends. So is The Bends diminished by lesser bands seizing its aesthetic? Well, is Nevermind diminished by Puddle of Mudd? Personally, I recognise Radiohead has done great stuff, but not as much as is claimed, and in any case I just (did it again!) don't love Radiohead. Too much intellectualisation, too much calculation. Not that the intellect is something to snub, and this is a fine 4-starrer, but it's just (thank you and goodnight!) a smidge hard to detect the heart beating underneath the cleverness. I'll leave you with a game. Listen to the opening guitars on any song, and imagine it's by the Stereophonics. It fits perfectly, n'est-ce pas?

My history with this album has been extensive. This album directly reminds me of several of the most important women in my life, both past and continuing. Of course, it's a truism to say that Nick Drake is a potent female aphrodisiac, but it's better for both parties that teenage boys try to impress girls with this album than with attempting to neck a pint of vodka then spewing in their hair. And yes, it is an astonishing work. The legend of Nick Drake has him as one of the great tragic figures in music, a little (6'3") lost boy of exquisite fingerwork and calm, yet desolate imagery, but this album proves that his music is stupefying and hypnotic on its own, without needing to conjure Nick Drake's melancholy end. That said, despite the wistfulness of, say, The Thoughts of Mary Jane, Five Leaves Left has an undercurrent of anguish throughout, together begetting a wonderful bittersweetness. For my money, this is the strongest of his three albums, a warm, reflective and rather diverse collection as beautiful, intricate and delicate as a cobweb. Now, I have recently reviewed Unknown Pleasures and Never Mind The Bollocks, and have declared each of those perhaps the greatest debut album of all. I'm going to be greedy and put Five Leaves Left in the same category.

A quinessential case of an exceptionally talented, middle-aged artist hitting 80s production styles in the same way a roast dinner hits the floor: you can salvage quite a tasty bit, but some will need to be thrown away, and you'll ultimately be left disappointed. The alum's strength is obvious: here are some of Leonard Cohen's best, sharpest lyrics, blades dipped in lemon juice. Oft wry, indeed comical, the whole album has a slightly sleazy overtone; one is much reminded of Serge Gainsbourg in its erotomanic cynicism, especially on Everybody Knows' bitter rationalization that everyone is in on life's big con. The album's end, Tower of Song, is Cohen's great apologia to the craft of songwriting, a monumental track that still holds the power to make listener shiver. However, the album has a critical flaw: the music (which seems rather an important flaw for an album to have). Cohen employs his synths and drum machines almost recklessly (and Jazz Police can be considered a fully reckless employment), and thus the album becomes stuck in such an archaic aesthetic that often the nod a top-notch couplet inspires is married to an involuntary wince at the Casio beat (and trust me, I'm not at all averse to synthpop). The best songs on this transcend that limitation, and maybe a more acceptive listener could relish the musical direction Cohen takes, but I found appreciating the greatness on this album required recognising a few caveats.

One great speciality of the British songwriter, one we Brits especially appreciate in our songwriters, is the teller of the uncomfortable truth. One can see shades of it in Mick Jagger, Roger Waters and Damon Albarn, rather more so in John Lennon and Shaun Ryder, and signally in Ray Davies, John Lydon and Jarvis Cocker. However, no British songwriter has embodied this archetype as eminently as Morrissey, the eccentric, catty, wilfully contrarian yodeller of 80s indie codifiers The Smiths. Indeed, pointing out (his version of) facts most would rather cold-shoulder became his songwriting raison d'être. Of course, this stance seems a dangerous one to hold; several of the figures mentioned have struggled with the consequences of an audience expecting a perpetual heckler shouting that he can see the emperor's knob, and I'd argue that this is a significant reason why Morrissey has pissed all over his reputational chips in recent time. But anyway, Meat is Murder, the second Smiths album, offers no extreme departures from the standard Smiths aesthetic. This is not a disparagement; the Smiths had a set palate of some variation (glam-tinged jangles, rockabilly stompers, histrionic wails of despair (their forte)), so they had no real need to go beyond it. Also, the Smiths were rather good at what they did, so we have a rather fine collection of songs. The songs themselves are split between the sardonic, the comic and the tormented; of course, the best song on the album, The Joke Isn't Funny Anymore, belongs in the last category. But note that the jokes on the album often work rather well: I'd like to drop my trousers to the queen Every sensible child will know what this means The poor and the needy Are selfish and greedy on her terms It made me laugh. However, I don't think I call give Meat is Murder five stars. Yes, it's because it just lacks that pinch of spice to complete the recipe. And yes, I should mention that the title track is the weakest on the record, but not for its vegetarian screed; the song is musically a experiment that doesn't really work. A noble misstep, but still a misstep. J.K. Rowling's favourite band is the Smiths.

The third of the big 4 of thrash metal I've had to review, and it suffers from the same problem that afflicts Metallica and Megadeth's recordings of the era: by codifying thrash, they made it staid and predictable. Now, that doesn't mean the music sounds bad per se; it just means that, in retrospect, it sounds unadventurous. In terms of the influences on display, I distinctly identified Iron Maiden, with certain shrieking guitar solos and lyrical themes. And let's concentrate on those intriuging lyrical themes. I Am The Law is a song about Judge Dredd. That's it. It gives an overview of the Judge Dredd conceit, and nowt else. I'm not sure how I'm meant to react to that. Is a plot synopsis a good basis for a song? Then comes Efilnukifesin (N.F.L.) (Nise fukin life backwards), an anti-drug song that, in its favour, does provide some grisly imagery, but also hits as sanctimonious. However, the most striking song on the album is Indians, part of that aw-bless tradation of metal songs based on the plight of Natives Americans. Of course, this tradition doesn't avoid stereotypes of the noble, stoic Indian, but Anthrax could have avoided screaming "Wardance!" at the bridge, and they definitely could have avoided moshing in a plains Indian headdress in the video. Now, accusing metal of being thick is to miss the pointsome what : it's meant to be coarse, direct and reptilian. But if you're going to be thick, it's probably best to avoid message songs. Yeah, I talked myself out of liking this album. Mind, I don't care that I did.

Hey chums, it's the latest case of personal-iniquity-shredding-a-musician's-reputation! I don't wish to talk about the current nastiness surrounding Dizzie Rascal. Not least, I favour death-of-the-author, and have no probs separating the work from the artist. Anyway, in 2003 Dizzie Rascal was carried everywhere on a sedan chair held aloft by slavering critics, becoming that rarity of a respected UK rapper and symbolising the transition from garage to grime. I had the album myself, but in honesty I can't say I played it too much beyond the singles. In 2022, perhaps I can manage a more studied take. Firstly, Fix Up Look Sharp is an indestructible song, properly manic and banging, with this great playground sense of kids sharing yo mamma jokes. And Boy In Da Corner is at its best when it exhibits a childlike charm, when he's bragging about his trainers. But, gangsta posturing was surely passé by 2003, or at least it should have been? It dilutes the album's appeal considerably. Another point is the attitude to women. When does a cynical stance become a noxious one? A few times it appears to accuse young women of ensnaring unthinking men (and their money) by calculated pregnancy, and the title of the song Jezebel is as shrill a warning siren as one may require. This is where immaturity festers into misogyny. In retrospect, the initial appeal of Dizzie Rascal was partly the shock of the new. Audiences had already concluded that garage wasn't especially tantalising, and any step from that felt like the right one. But the actual slab we have hear is overlong, inelegant and not sufficiently charismatic. Later albums are an improvement, but it's slightly baffling to contemporary ears how this became the critics' champion all those years ago.

Controversial opinion time: this is a fine album by a fine band, and definitely warrants 4 stars. Not 5, 4. 4 is a great rating for an album, and if you had a 4-star album, your nips should tingle with pride. But it's not a 5-star album, and definitely not in the top 10 best albums of all time in the history of the world... ever!. It's a solid, fun piece of work that delights, but it has some filler and doesn't overwhelm the listener sufficiently to raise it to the most exalted pantheon. Prove me wrong! I know the history, of how this was one of the first albums to push the idea of the studio as instrument, and that it punctuated the Fabs' transition from superior pop quartet to psychedelic Shackletons. But the presence of Tomorrow Never Knows does not negate that And Your Bird Can Sing is filler, in that it's a slightly boring, fairly innocuous three-minuter that, well, fills a quarter of an inch on vinyl. Now, such a statement might make me sound as if I wish to be harsh towards this album, and I genuinely don't. I can happily accept that there's some topmost work on this. But exactly why is this so venerated? I can't suss that out. While I'm here, can I ask if I'm perverse for preferring Yellow Submarine to Eleanor Rigby? The former is a cheery little bit of jest from our mate Ringo, detailing the band's happy adventures under the sea, which is exactly what I want from the Beatles. The latter is an okay, slightly stodgy cut of mild pretentiousness that feels too slight for the subject matter, which is what I don't want from the Beatles. Also, is Taxman that popular a sentiment in this day and age? Who wants to hear about millionaires whinging that they might have to give up a chunk of their money Everest in order to pay for a few schools and hospitals? Am I that out of sync with the rest of the world? Why has a Beatles album led me to question the nature of the human race? And remember kids: John Lennon is still a bit of a tosser.

Hollywood's contemporary model for the music biopic means we won't get a film of Sam Cooke's life in the foreseeable future. The current template emphasises the redemptive nature of their music, of musicians who battled their demons successfully and performed exquisite music that justifies all the torment they suffered (e.g., Ray, Walk the Line, Bohemian Rhapsody). With Sam Cooke, the outstanding pioneer of soul music, his unfortunate, sordid end precludes your standard music biopic. The only way it could happen is if it ends with a triumphant performance of A Change Is Gonna Come, and just puts a small note at the end saying he was shot through the heart by a hotel manager after an apparent drunken brawl with a prostitute. Still, I neither want nor need a Sam Cooke biopic, and I am rather glad that Sam Cooke won't be contorted through the Hollywood sausage process. Anyway, this album is wonderful for the extremely simple reason that Sam Cooke performs wonderful songs in a wonderful fashion. That's it. That's enough. I had earlier reviewed James Brown's coeval Live at the Apollo, to which I gave 4 stars. I stand by that rating; the album is great fun, if perhaps not quite a masterpiece. I have no such hesitancy with this. It's pure pleasure, pure joy. That it was shelved for two decades just bewilders the modern listener. The record label deemed it to be a bit too passionate and heartfelt for its initial release. Yes, the money men behind the label have always ruined everything with their valueless stupidity. Thankfully, you're now in a position to treat yourself by giving this a blast, so you should take advantage of that right now. Now! I mean it!

(Due to the nature of this album, I suppose I should add a content warning for language which some may find offensive. No offence is intended. By the by, am I the only one here offering such a courtesy?) God, I'm chary about reviewing this. I have previously suggested that the commercial success of gangsta rap proved ultimately detrimental to hip hop's artistic development, both in that it smothered other branches of the genre, and also it didn't have that much of interest to say. However, I recognise that maybe I'm arguing from a surface understanding of the music; I love other transgressive music like Throbbing Gristle and Slayer, so I might appreciate this particular style of bluenose-tweaking. Anyway, I had The Chronic aged 18, so I'm not coming into it virginally. But, one aspect that has made me uncomfortable with gangsta rap is, yes, the exploitation of negative stereotypes of a minority. Now, NWA were rather guilty of that themselves, but there was some leavening due to Ice Cube's undeniable intelligence. The Chronic, of course, does not have Ice Cube on it. And as such, it largely lacks any point to make. It's a repetitive series of depictions of racial violence, but it says nothing to make the listener ponder, except to wonder if this is unpleasantly comparable to a minstrel show. Are they just showing nasty caricatures of African-Americans for your entertainment? Take the song The Day the Niggaz Took Over. As a song, it purports to show narrratives of participants of the LA riots. But it conveys no message: it's just people saying they like to go looting. That would be criticisable enough, but the opening uses the word "apartheid". In 1992, apartheid was finally being dismantled, and even though he'd once committed sabotage against the regime, Nelson Mandela renounced violence. Did they not pick up on the cognitive dissonance? So what is good about The Chronic? Well, the production is fantastic: the squelchy synths and Funkadelic basslines still make white people bite their lower lip as they rock out. But it's in service to a charmless conceit. You know, the misogyny and homophobia aren't just massively offensive, they're not nice to listen to. Also, has there ever been a skit on a rap album that rises above the level of chore? But, the failure of The Chronic is due to none of this. Not the shallowness, not the coarseness, not even the bigotry. The album fails because it's boring. I realised that by track 10, the poetically titled Lyrical Gangbang, that I was really, really bored, that the album was just something on in the background. This should be no surprise; an hour of some men continually shouting out motherfucker for the sake of shouting out motherfucker doesn't appear prima facie to be the most enlightening use of your time. But it is surprising how tedious it gets. For all its supposed attitude, The Chronic is extremely ignorable. This is the sound of talented individuals wasting their time and yours solely because some idiots will always throw their money at people blowing raspberries and saying "bum".

My 100th review! And it's for a good album! Rather a nice coincidence. I only really got into Black Sabbath in my 30s; beforehand, I just unconsciously assumed that I didn't need to devote any time to listening to it. I guess I had become weary of metal in my twenties, not least because moshers seemed wilfully monocultural in their dismissal of all other genres. Still, by 35 I had repented and Black Sabbath became dear to my heart. So I am already well-disposed to this record. The opening, The imaginatively titled Black Sabbath, by Black Sabbath from the album Black Sabbath, is one of the great calling cards by a band; indeed, at the very least it makes the band's name clear. It also demonstrates the great originality of Black Sabbath, namely Tommy Iommi's riffs and Ozzy Osbourne's vocals. Famously, Tommy Iommi lost the tips from two fingers from an accident at the sheet metal factory where he worked (it was his last day and all). Making a virtue from necessity, Iommi almost unthinkingly developed a wholly new sound to accommodate his circumcised hand, fretting chords and detuning his guitar as these were easier on his poor fingers. The result was the heaviest noise yet conceived. As for Ozzy, "singer" is not the word. "Interpreter" is far more suitable. A troubled youth with a Beatles obsession (he avowedly idolises Macca), Ozzy's vocals shouldn't make sense (he has a Brummie accent for God's sake, objectively by far the worst accent across the whole of the United Kingdom), but it turned out he matched this dark, arcane music perfectly by dint of his instinctive ability to howl unearthily. Oddly, not many metal bands have sought to follow Ozzy's untutored vocal (lack of) technique, preferring singers that know how to show off their range. Punk was seemingly more sympathetic to the parable of Ozzy; it's not that far a distance from Ozzy Osbourne to John Lydon and Mark E. Smith. This is to punk's credit. Black Sabbath's debut album is not perfect. The best songs (Black Sabbath, N.I.B.) are visionary and enthralling, but the covers on the album, while not bad, are not essential; the closer and cover Warning in particular drags for 10 minutes. You're here to hear Black Sabbath be Black Sabbath, not an everyday blues-rock band. You want Satanic wails and anti-hippy gothic heft, not a Cream impersonation. In other words, four stars, with future albums promising 5. Anyway, with 100 album, allow me to take stock. The only album whose rating I'd change is Frank Ocean's Channel Orange, taken down from 4 stars to 3; imagining a time-travelling Cleopatra deciding to become a stripper just smack as silly sausage, not hypnagogic. I'm very chuffed with my choices for 5-starrers, and it's only Dire Straits' debut that I'd lift out of the 1-star oubliette (only to two stars; it's not a good album, but it's not a catastrophe like the others). The best discovery I have made is Gillian Welch's Time (The Revelator), the best album so far is between Never Mind the Bollocks and Unknown Pleasures, and the worst album by a distance of several parsecs is, of course, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. The biggest lesson I have learnt on this quixotic journey is that a decent, intelligently deployed sense of humour can elevate an album to the highest echelons, but nothing is more painful than bad comedy. Also, when are we going to get an edit function? I wince at every typo I have made.

Freaky Brazilian psychedelic pop jams, a genre which surely sounds one of the coolest on earth. The album itself is pretty cool, but am I enthusiastic for it? One question: does anyone really find it that freaky? Its unconventionality felt predictable. Maybe I'm inured to psychedlic oddness, but I wasn't remotely as startled as I had come to expect from reading accounts of this album. This isn't a failing per se (novelty isn't inherently better or worse than caution aesthetically), but I would suggest that either the psychedelights of this album have been superceded by later sonic experiments, or that critics have overstated this album's strangeness because it's all in foreign. This is not to disparage the album; it's worthy of your time, and you should find much to like on it. But I can't say it's seismic enough for a full 5 stars. A worthwhile curio.

A slightly frustrating album, in that it merits 4 stars rather than the 5 I had wished to give it. This is not the fault of the album, of course; it is the fault of me. Creedence Clearwater Revival were a brilliant band, and I had hoped to give one of their albums a 5-star salute. However, this isn't quite that album. I had earlier reviewed Bayou County and had given it 4, considering it skillful yet tentative, in that it seemed afraid to flat-out holler. Thankfully, that is not the case with Cosmo's factory. The problem is that the album lacks that vital spark needed to push it into the highest echelons. Like the Beatles, CCR were so prolific in such a short time, not every release of theirs demands veneration (shut up, you know I'm right). This album is not treading water at all, but maybe swimming too leisurely (I'm not a strong swimmer, so swimming metaphors might not quite be my forte.) The 1001 list, I contend, neglects to mention CCR's best album, Willy and the Poor Boys (at the very least, it contains their best song, Fortunate Son). And maybe I'm biased in wishing to give at least one CCR album the highest nod. Still, let's hope that Green River, the third CCR album on the list, knocks it into the back of the old onion bag, or else I'm going to be really gutted.

Come with me, my gentle friends, on a mystical voyage to a long-desolate land where I have no map, where one flinches at the fauna and flora (usually dragons soaring imperially through a purple sky and Moroccan hashish respectively), and where your dad informs you that the wandering minstrels starving in this once-verdant wasteland could properly play their instruments: welcome to the land of soft prog. Soft prog is the term I'm defining as distinct from hard prog. The differences are obvious. Hard prog bands are the ones who pushed prog to the sonic and lyrical extremes of nonsense (your Genesises, Yesses and ELPs), whereas your soft prog bands stayed closer to the standard of the 70s rock band, only stepping partially into the realm of sonic and lyrical nonsense. Supertramp are firmly in the latter category, here producing an album of 8 long songs with shared themes of loneliness and madness, rather than suites in three movements transcribing the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which they would not have actually read. Mind, Crime of the Century does aspire to the grandiosity of, say, Dark Side of the Moon or The Lamb Lies Down in Broadway, declaring solemnly that it's dealing with very serious themes. So it's Hegelianistically pretentious. Now, pretentiousness is not necessarily a failing in my book; I love plenty of bpost-punk bands who claimed inspiration from Wittgenstein and Dada. But I have never found the pretentiousness of prog bands to appeal; it's not much of a brag to say you've read Tolkien, a children's author. But never mind; the theme of isolation is not diminished simply because it's a common theme. But on my second listen today, a glaring, sizeable problem emerged: I couldn't tell any of the songs apart. It was as if all the songs sought to reflect the Platonic Supertramp song: 7 minutes long, histrionic bridges and a lyrical conceit that suggests a band swimming into currents they can't navigate safely (curiously, that also serves as the Platonic Tears for Fears song). Anyway, this homogenity made me conclude that Supertramp only had a smattering of smattering ideas for this album, and just continually recycled the fuckers. I can't say this album is a disaster; I think one or two of my mates would explain to me for 45 minutes precisely why this is a masterpiece, and this morn I was happy to be generous and give this 3. But that second listen just discouraged me. Having a tortured emotion may be an everyday currency in popular music, but I don't see the benefit of announcing your sadness so flamboyantly. I'm sure the cover inspired the cover to a Fighting Fantasy book. I just checked, and I think I'm right: no. 32, Slaves of the Abyss. That's not one of the sci-fi Fighting Fantasy books, though. Trick missed, methinks.

This review has taken a few days. I knew I liked it very much straight away, but there was some wavering, some irresolution on my part, and I couldn't grasp exactly why. I still feel twinges of uncertainty, but hopefully bashing out some words will clarify things. Fairport Convention are not really a group that has entered my orbit; this is not due to any preconception about folk, but just that every time I always found another act that stirred my curiosity more. Sorry Fairport Convention, but I'd rather check out Alice Cooper and Jacques Brel at this minute. Anyway, Richard Thompson left Fairport Convention and started his solo career, and then a duo with his new wife Linda (fun fact: Linda Thompson used to be Nick Drake's girlfriend). And I found Linda to be the standout, the main reason the album works so well. Please understand that this is not meant as a slight against Richard: his songwriting on this record, notable for its air of despair, continually impresses, as does his fretwork. But Linda's singing is what I truly adore about this album: just listen to how eerie and unnerving her voice is on the last, best track, The Great Valerio. But why have I paused? With most of the folk albums I love (e.g., Five Leaves Left or Jackson C. Frank's one album), I raised my skirt for them first time unquestioningly. With this, it has had to work a little to seduce me. Also, I wish it would last longer. There's not so much a sense of a journey across this album, but rather ten fine songs. When the end came, I was taken by surprise: was it already over? I wish I didn't have to be this critical; I would love to eulogise this, and there is real gold here. Perhaps more time with it would drive me to bump it up to the highest perch, but I already have about 900 more albums to sort out.

The fifteenth (out of currently 30) studio albums of Elvis Costello, and the sixth and most recent included in the 1001 Albums collection, Brutal Youth is almost Delphic in how incomprehensible it is for someone not already into Elvis Costello. Elvis Costello has never pinged on my radar, even though he came to prominence during an era I adore, late 70s punk, new wave and post-punk. Perhaps unfairly, I'd always just suspected Costello belonged with the new wave bandwagon-jumpers like Sting, stripping the music of its vitality and questing spirit in order to make marketable product. So, I never bothered with any of his albums; indeed, Brutal Youth is my first Costello album. And I don't know who this album is for. Would an Elvis Costello fan find handholds within this album? I was just left staring in rather bored confusion. I can't recall any of the lyrics, other than a chorus about even the clown knowing when to strike, which just seemed too undercooked and asinine an image to be in any way effective. The songs blend into each other, to the extent that I genuinely mixed up the first and second track. And at 15 songs, it begins to get pretty whiffy towards the end. Whiffy, but not putrid. It may be the case that I am too unfamiliar with Elvis Costello's works to appreciate the direction of this album, and with a firm knowledge of Costello's most feted albums, the rewards of this will become dazzling. But, it may also be the case that he's an overrated hack who latched on to others' innovations. A number of other possibilities may be true; maybe this is just a weak album by a capable songwriter. I can only report what I feel now. Elvis Costello produced the Specials' first album. I suppose that's a reason to hold out hope.

The difficult second album: a quick primer. One phenomenon critics are wont to diagnose is that of the difficult second album, of a lesser album following a sledgehammer of a debut. Critics are also swift to attribute this to the shift in gear a successful debut imposes: you have your whole life to write your first one, and one year for your second. And critics routinely admit a failing on their part: oft the second album isn't that bad, but they see it as diminished when stood against the first. Now, large parts of that earlier paragraph are bollocks. Some groups peak with their debut, of course, but some require time and succour to blossom fully: Second Coming may not have equalled The Stone Roses, but the Happy Mondays' first album, Squirrel and G Man 24 Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile White Out, proved the working prototype for the Mondays' future glories. Also, the first paragraph is a touch slanderous on critics; at least the critic knows the other albums. Anyway, Leonard Cohen's second album, Songs from a Room, is excellent, but not as good as his first. This makes it sound as if Songs from a Room perhaps lacks some of the majesty or the power of Songs of Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen's first album, when it doesn't. Nor is the songwriting a step down; Leonard Cohen was glaringly one of the great songwriters to emerge in the 60s, Bob Dylan's morose brother, the main dispute being who felt more breasts. I have since got drunk, and have concluded that this would be a five-star album in the hands of any other. Just because I incrementally prefer the first to the second doesn't mean this in any way disappoints in how it blends the sacred with the base, or how Bird on the Wire nods to Bukowski, or how The Story of Isaac answers Highway 61 Revisited by reminding us that God left Isaac tormented with the threat of murder. So, a five-star album. Perhaps not as immediately brilliant as the first, but I have persuaded myself. I feel rather mature.

I took a short break when this came up, mainly because I got a bit ill. Mind, I was also wondering what I wanted to say about this album. This album really did require several listens for me to comprehend my thoughts fully, but it turned out my opinion is not as effusive as the critical standard for Let It Be. This is not to slam the album. Much on the album to like, indeed love, and it's a firm 4-starrer. But US college rock has never seduced me. I can accept R.E.M. did a few worthwhile albums in the 80s, but I'm not going to cream my jeans over every song they produced then. And The Replacements have a similar fault to R.E.M.: they are just a bit too clever-clever, rather than just clever. The title, on its own, stands right on the boundary of inspired and smug. The wilfully puerile Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out and Gary's Got a Boner, likewise, straddle that boundary with a nut on each side. But these and others, in aggregate, make the album a tiny bit irritating. Also, ask yourself this: can you sincerely, hand on heart, give 5 stars to an album that gives a songwriting credit to Ted Nugent?

The payoff of diminished expectations, eh? As a British indie kid ca. 2000, The Jam were, like The Clash and The Kinks, part of my heritage; when my mates and I made mixtapes for the car in order to impress each other, a Jam track usually found its way onto our exacting compilations. However, The Style Council never got chosen; the only mate of ours who listened to The Style Council did so as an act of genuflection to his hero Paull Weller. This attitude, by my understanding, is pretty common across the UK: The Jam get praised as a key part of the British canon, and The Style Council get dismissed as a peculiarity by a iconic songwriter fleeing from his previous image. In any case, the sophisti-pop, 80s blue-eyed soul, jazzy instrumentals and (gulp) raps each seem, at first glance, a threat rather than an experiment. But ride me sideways, I rather like it. Paul Weller, giving his reasoning for this iconoclasm against The Jam's kinda thing, pointed out that the kids today in the mid-80s were grooving on down to soul, disco, R&B and other genres rooted in black music, so he and his new bandmate Mick Talbot might find exploring such music rewarding. The discerning listener may note that Mick Talbot was formerly the keyboardist for Dexy's Midnight Runners, the great soul champions of British new wave, so The Style Council were not going into these exotic genres that blindly. And Weller makes a decent enough fist of this more soulful style for Café Bleu to work. The album has 5(!) instrumentals, but neither their smoothness nor their jazziness grates. However, songs like The Paris Match (sung by Tracey Thorn of Everything But The Girl) have moments of real beauty, Strength of Your Nature possesses a fierce pulse, and the rap of A Gospel, remarkably, doesn't embarrass Weller nor the listener, a frankly miraculous turn of events when one contemplates the Wham! Rap and a thousand other sorry stabs at hip-hop by white singers. Now, I said I came into this album with slightly diminished expectations, allowing the album to surprise me with its high quality. So if you read this, I might unintentionally heighten your expectations, possibly leading to a sizeable disappointment. Maybe you should just ignore me.

Rock music criticism, for all its supposed involvement with such a debauched, rebellious industry, is overwhelmingly conservative and starchy, and brooks no deviation from the established diktats, demanding that tame, stuffy acts receive all the plaudits while the genuinely challenging and alive must get sidelined. Surely nobody seriously thinks that three Beatles albums belong in the top ten albums of all time? Or that U2 are somehow one of the mightiest living flag-bearers for rock 'n' roll (a mate of mine once sent me a series of links where contemporary reviewers had deemed each of U2's last 5 albums as "a return to form")? And then we have the infuriating case of the Happy Mondays, the greatest, most inventive, most iconic British group of the late 80s and early 90s, yet somehow certain critics blithely dismiss them as grubby also-rans to the Stone Roses, which leads to the patent absurdity of the Stone Roses receiving all the praise for fusing indie and dance with Fools Gold, despite the Mondays having done so earlier, more radically and better (Fools Gold doesn't really go anywhere, and its melody is oddly unmemorable for such a supposed anthem; at the same time, the Mondays were dazzling with the Madchester Rave On E.P.). One obvious reason why the critics did this: they felt they had to credit someone with such an innovation, but dance music was a wee bit tricky for them to comprehend, and anyway who wants to credit the Mondays, those slovenly thugs? No no, let's award the Roses, at least they didn't progress that far outside our ken. (For clarity's sake, I do like the Stone Roses, and will even assert that Second Coming is nowhere near as bad as its reputation suggests; well done critics, you managed to mess up there as well). So yes, it is clear to anyone with at least one partially functioning ear and an actual spine that the Mondays were not only the better band, but the ones who defined the epoch and the ones who belong more in the great rock pantheon. Kids, with that in mind, how good do you think Pills 'n' Thrills And Bellyaches is? With the fullness of time, everyone should be able to clock that PnTAB, along with much of the Mondays' back catalogue, set the agenda for much of the best British music of the 90s. Screamadelica's distillation of the E experience? The Mondays were first. Blur's sarky kitchen-sink vignettes? Grandbag's Funeral, take a bow. Jarvis Cocker's masturbation fantasies set to lyrics? Bob's Yer Uncle. Suede's flaneur sleaze? Who was ever sleazier than the Mondays? Oasis' magpie-like purloining of riffs of rock past? A technique itself purloined from the Mondays, the most brazen of thieves (literally: like their forefathers the Sex Pistols, they nicked all their instruments when starting out). The mainstreaming of dance music? Yes, other bands (significantly New Order) can claim more responsibility, but the superstar DJs of the 90s still owe quite a debt to the Mondays. It would make sense to call the Mondays the great codifiers of 90s British music, were they in any way interested in laws. Anyway, pointing out that PnTAB is influential is not the same as saying it's good, so I am fully tumescent with delight to preach to all you lost children that it's absurdly wonderful. Their previous album, the romantically titled Bummed, was also absurdly wonderful, but the two albums sound shockingly different from each other. Whereas Bummed is sordid and nebulous, PnTAB is sordid and sun-kissed, all acid house keyboards and crisp guitar melodies. PnTAB is also a textbook example of how to construct and order an album, without filler, with diversity of style yet unity of tone. How many other albums can make you dance like, well, Bez on one song, yet crack out the air guitar on the next, all the while making such a transition wholly organic? Along with this, the Mondays simply don't sound like any other band. The only bands to have come close are, as has been stated earlier, the bands who sought inspiration from these loony-tunes scallies. Your bog-standard insulated Radiohead fan will try to show disdain for the Mondays by saying they stole it all from Can and George Clinton, proving their foolishness by forgetting that the Mondays didn't care if they yoinked a melody or two, that the Mondays actually built skyscrapers on their thefts, and that the Mondays were so blisteringly original that even their pilfering couldn't detract from the fact that nothing on the planet resembled the Mondays at their peak, not even the multitude of bands that tried swiping a bit of the Mondays' shabby allure. Of course, I haven't mentioned the shiniest diamond on this jewel-bedecked album yet: Shaun Ryder's sheer magnficence as a lyricist. In my review of Meat is Murder, I spoke about the British songwriter's stance as the teller of uncomfortable truths. Shaun Ryder is an exemplar of that tradition, alongside Ray Davies, John Lydon and (quintessentially) Morrissey. Just take a look at the still-hilarious, still-biting opening couplet to album-opener Kinky Afro: Son, I'm 30 I only went with your mother 'cos she's dirty. The rest of the song, an inadequate father in utter self-pity pleading with his son to forgive him, but still too proud to apologise, with the son responding just as the father would have, understanding yet completely dismissive, remains one of the most astute character studies in all of rock (how many 90s indie songs repeat the trick of the singer explaining, "I get you, but fuck you anyway"?). Also note that, for all the hedonism the Mondays exhort, our Shaun's lyrics have not only thick strands of pessimism, but a worldly-wise stoicism. As the title says, pills 'n' thrills come with bellyaches. I have quoted one song. In fact, every song from the album can be quoted so, as demonstrations of Our Shaun's absolute lyrical expertise. Take Dennis and Lois: Honey, how's your breathing? If it stops for good, we'll be leaving. Or how about the chorus to God's Cop? God made it easy on me. That was intended to be a poke in the eye at the rabid, religiously zealous Chief Constable of Greater Manchester James Anderton, but it also serves as rather a nifty cocaine line (see what I did there?). Such pearlers cram, indeed constitute PnTAB. Shaun Ryder at his best is equal to Bob Dylan at his best, and Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches is easily one of the five greatest British albums ever recorded. However, there remains the question: why did the Mondays blow it? As hagiographic as I have been, I must be honest and admit their flaws. The Mondays' embrace of pleasure led them to unremitting sexism (the year after PnTAB, they guest-edited an issue of Penthouse). After Shaun made an unwise comment made whilst high (he joked about "selling my arse for 50p", which some tabloids reported as a confession that he had been a rentboy), the Mondays made homophobic remarks when challenged by an admittedly hostile journalist. As a liberal type, these blemishes make me wince, but I hope I don't sound dismissive to say that their youthful prejudices do not diminish them in my eyes; they are my favourite band (duh), and they have meant so much to me that I will eulogise them, especially as their failings, their humanity, are part of the reason their artistry is so embraceable. My father was a homophobe, but that doesn't mean I stopped loving him. Love is not blind, but it is forgiving. To suggest some perspective, I believe it's easier to pardon the Mondays' regrettable epithets than, say, N.W.A.'s witless, self-parodic anthems to murdering prostitutes. Aside from that serious ugliness, I should talk about their record label: the barmy indie totem of Factory Records. Tony Wilson, the Yeats-and Debord-quoting newsreader who helmed Factory, declared that Factory's greatest achievement was shepherding two truly great bands, Joy Division/New Order and the Happy Mondays. He was right. He was also right about the (literal) price such shepherding cost. The collapse of Factory Records has become one of the monumental legends of music. Factory was losing money due to the crushing debts of their revolutionary white elephant club, the Haçienda, and the only option the label saw was to get the Mondays to record a fourth album. However, our Shaun had become addicted to heroin, and their manager got the bright idea to record the album in Barbados, an island free of heroin. There was no heroin on Barbados, but it was festooned with crack, the least creative drug of all. All the money Factory sent over, the Mondays spent on crack. They then sold the record equipment for crack, then they sold the studio furniture, then they sold their clothes. Eventually, when Factory got the master tapes from Barbados, they discovered Shaun hadn't recorded any vocals. They quickly bandied him to a studio in Surrey to finish the album, and the resultant album, Yes Please!, proved a substantially weakened follow-up and a commercially and (somewhat justified) critically catastrophic release. Factory went into administration and the Mondays split in internecine hatred, their legacy tarnished by their own druggy stupidity. Unfathomably, our Shaun and Bez managed a successful comeback with their next group Black Grape, producing one classic album in It's Great When You're Straight... Yeah!, and one duffer in Stupid Stupid Stupid. Black Grape broke up, and Shaun assembled a bastardised, pub-karaoke version of the Mondays in one of the tawdriest, most depressing reformations in music history, with our Shaun playing the pathetic jester for the sole intention of paying off tax bills based on name recognition alone (is every detail microscopically right? No matter, I'm printing the legend). Taking this all together, this is why critics have bestowed the baggy, pilled-up glories on the Stone Roses, glories that rightfully belong to the Happy Mondays. Just because you're the best doesn't mean you win. But why should I care? Why should the Mondays care? Despite everything, despite all the ignominy they proffered and invited, they already proved themselves one of the greatest bands of all time, with two of the greatest albums of all time, and some of the greatest songs of all time. Neither they nor I need to worry about some Pitchfork-scrutinising wanker declaring them too coarse and visceral for their milquetoast sensibilities. Nietzsche once wrote that the belly is the one reason man does not take himself for a god. The Happy Mondays assert that the belly is exactly why a man can be a god. Bez' father was a policeman.

Is there a general term for the transition hip-hop made from 1988 to 1992, a period we can now recognise as rather tumultuous for the genre? During these years, we observed the rise (and occasional fall) of, among plenty others, Public Enemy, Ice-T, NWA, De La Soul, Cypress Hill, A Tribe Called Quest, MC Hammer, Arrested Development, Snoop Doggy Dogg and Will Smith, and my faithful friends, you know that several of those ultimately proved detrimental: just ask Chris Rock! (I'm already embarrassed to have made that joke, and that's while I'm typing it right now). Regardless of that, hip-hop was a significantly different entity at the start of 1993 than it was at the end of 1987; in 1987 America, a rapper was someone a sitcom grandmother would impersonate in a bum-moisteningly embarrassing routine about why her grandkids should never even look at marijuana, whereas in 1993 America the actress who played that granny would be calling the police twice a day over her fears at seeing a "rapper" in her neighbourhood. Now, I'm speeding over much relevant history and culture of those four years, but forgive me; you're smart, you can fill in the details yourself (actually, was there that much hip-hop about the end of the Cold War? Loads of rappers gave their takes on 9/11, to varying levels of taste). Gang Starr fit into the alternative hip-hop of the period, having a firm foot in really old-skool hip-hop with their beats and good-natured bravado, yet showing a greater sophistication than their predecessors, both musically and lyrically (the sample from the French electropop anthem E.V.A. is wonderful), and broadly, the album works. One aspect that stands out from this album is its clear intelligence. As much as it flaunts a cockiness, it always mitigates it with the sober realisation that arrogance, or indeed the desire to be arrogant, leads to many a fall, many a humiliation, and many a fuck-up. But I can't ignore the grumbles I have. The tracks feel rather samey, so quite a few tracks feel fillersome, meaning that the album feels far longer than it is. This lack of diversity also causes the listener to drift, generating the perverse conclusion that you think the rhymes might be interesting, but you're not interested enough to pay attention. The standout tracks (Step in the Arena, Who's Gonna Take the Weight?, Just to Get a Rep) are fantastic, and the album never sounds bad at all, but one wishes for a few more fireworks. Still, it does have the merit of thoughtfulness. Much hip-hop of the era had that quality, but much else didn't (much managed both simultaneously; Public Enemy and Ice Cube decided to fight racism with racism). An interesting artifact from an era of interesting artifacts, but this at least is interesting in itself, and not just historically interesting, unlike 2 Live Crew declaring their yearning for pussy or Vanilla Ice imploring ninjas to go, go, go.

I'm pleading the fifth! I don't know what to say about this at all. I don't know anything about son, the genre of traditional Cuban music of which this album caused an international revival, and I don't think my opinions would be that considered or that insightful. I guess I can say I prefer the second half to the first, with the slower, more melodic songs, and the music sounds good throughout, although since I know nothing about son, I found it occasionally like wallpaper. A hedged bet of 3 stars, dolely because of my own ignorance.

I have always loathed the song Imagine. This hatred, I understand, is very common. Both on its own and considered within cultural context, Imagine cheesegrates the sensibilities of anyone with a scraping of taste, reason or heart. It rhymes "one" with "one", just as a starter. The melody is basic past the point of banality (and it was used better on Jealous Guy, which in any case was performed better by Roxy Music: you really need Bryan Ferry for that blue, wistful saudade atmosphere, that's what he gets up in the morning for). A millionaire ensconced in his mansion asks us to "imagine no possessions"; presumably he imagined no possessions, as he could just buy whatever he wanted. One can defend its simplistic, naïve messaging as wilfully childlike and idealistic (in fairness, it does retort "You may say that I'm a dreamer"), but that just underscores its infantile, playground view of politics; also, as adults, aren't our political values meant to be taken from sources a bit more substantial than 3-minute hippy anthems? Yet the inherent irksomeness of Imagine has become exponentiated to an emetic degree by its overbearance in culture. Remember Gal Gadot and her celebrity pals trying to bring the world together in the early days of Covid by singing Imagine over their phones? I just tried putting it on Youtube, but I was genuinely too scared to hit play. Imagine is, of course, mountainously smug, but Gal et al. create a planet of smugness in 3 minutes, whereas that slowpoke God had to take a day to make the earth (although he did also make the heavens and light that day too, so he took a third of a day to make the earth, maybe?). That is one especially charmless sample from a smorgasbord of mortifying celebrity versions of Imagine. Want another? Cee-Lo Green's take on Imagine changes the most interesting line "and no religion too" to "and all religions too", managing the dubious achievement of making Imagine even more inane and unchallenging. About the only by-product of Imagine of any merit is when Oasis stole it for the beginning of Don't Look Back in Anger, which is still the best of beery singalongs at closing time. Still, I'm here to review an album, not one song, and the album is properly weird. It does have the apparent virtue of authenticity, of John Lennon making an honest John Lennon album, but an honest John Lennon album is not an album around which the cult of John Lennon was consecrated. Now, if you want John doing songs that sound like Beatles off-cuts, you have Crippled Inside's jaunty cynicism (George Harrison plays on 5 of the songs). Gimme Some Truth provides you with your fix of vinyl-thin political protest. If happy-clappy hippy sentimentality is your bag, man, then aside from Imagine you cool cats should dig Oh My Love, though I wonder if it's possible not to laugh at the lines "I see the wind / I see the trees". I'm So Hard is yer boilerplate bluesy rocker, and I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier Mama is yer standard jam that goes on just a tad too long. But if none of these styles really satisfy, the weaknesses of John Lennon's songwriting emerge like a magic-eye picture. In particular, much of his lyricism is unintentionally comical. "Oh Yoko, my love will turn you on" ends in perhaps the three worst words imaginable in that situation (seriously, do you want that image rattling around your head?). "How can I go forward when I don't know which way to turn?" only makes sense if John is driving a car. I Don't Wanna Be a Soldier Mama has its die/fly/cry/lie rhymes, making you wonder if John don't wanna be a launderer mama, he don't wanna dry, John don't wanna be a salesman mama, he don't wanna ply, John don't wanna be a psychic mama, he don't wanna scry... (make up your own, kids!) But the best song on the album also makes for the most uncomfortable listening (well, aside from the excruciating Imagine). How Do You Sleep? shows us the angry, resentful and vindictive John Lennon, his ire generated by and thrust at Paul McCartney. Brief backstory: with the fallout of the Beatles' break-up, the courts had gotten involved, and John made a few disparaging asides about his former bandmates in interviews. Macca then, on his album Ram, recorded Too Many People, which featured a few mild jabs at Lennon, then took out an ad parodying John and Yoko's bagism by showing Macca and Linda dressed as clowns (I would say Macca probably meant this as a joke, albeit perhaps a little unwise in the midst of the legal farrago). This caused Lennon to revert to his most splenetic in How Do You Sleep?, barraging Macca as a middling chancer bolstered by sycophants who will ditch him now the talent (i.e., John) has disappeared. The thing is, the song works: the wordplay is clever and intentionally funny ("The only thing you done was yesterday", "The sound you make is musak to my ears"), and Phil Spector's strings reinforce the groove of the Wurlitzer and slide guitar (George Harrison again). But the rancour John displays only unsettles the listener, like a glimpse of, well, an exceptionally bitter argument between a divorcing couple (Ringo visited the recording of this song and found it upsetting, believing justifiably that John had gone too far). As for its place on the album, it frankly demolishes all the peace-and-love affectations the rest of the album tries to volunteer, implying that John the ambassador of peace was hiding John the brute spoiling for a fight, and all it took for that metamorphosis to occur was a slight dig and three pints of bad cider. In summation, Imagine qualifies as the quintessential John Lennon record, but that is very much a backhanded compliment. It has all that's stimulating about John Lennon's music, and all that's tiresome. Whether you find Imagine inspiring or exasperating is your prerogative. Personally, I don't find John Lennon, or Imagine, that interesting. The songs tend to be just okay, with one notable atrocity, and the best song is unrepresentative of the album and itself a disconcerting listen. Much of the curiosity this album fosters is due to its historical circumstances: the break-up of the Beatles and the curdling of hippy utopianism. By the by, I write this in 2022. Since in recent times we have witnessed a worldwide resurgence of nationalism and religiosity, along with marked increases in inequality and the entrenchment of consumer capitalism ("imagine there's no smartphone / I wonder if you can"), doesn't that mean that the legacy of Imagine is illusory, and that the judgement of history is that John Lennon was a tosser?

Scottish indie is separated from both other British indie and other Scottish art by its whimsy, its gentility and its poppiness. Whereas indie from the rest of the British Isles dabbles with sweetness and light, it doesn't supress its tendencies to morosity and rock for long. And if Scottish literature has one distinctive theme, it's guilt, be it personal, communal or ancestral: from Macbeth quaking before the visage of a dagger (even though Shakespeare was English) through various justified sinners and Jekylls and Hydes, to Renton and his pals' quest for oblivion, the Scottish protagonist never ceases to loathe themselves for the crime of simply being alive and Scottish. Scottish indie, however, has embraced both warmth and humour, and frequently sought pointers from straight-up pop. Look at The Jesus and Mary Chain incorporating girl-group melodies within their wall of noise, the enshrining of jangly guitars with the Scottish C86 bands, Teenage Fanclub's championing of Big Star and the Beach Boys, Belle & Sebastian dismissing grunge with an effete handwave, and Franz Ferdinand declaring that they wanted to make music for girls to dance to. If you're looking for a group that established this Scottish lighthearted, openhearted ethos, the one that makes most sense is Orange Juice. Orange Juice were your standard art-school band formed in the wake of punk. However, they reacted against the perceived dourness and melancholy of many post-punk bands (making them post-post-punk?) whilst retaining the movement's heterogenity and intelligence. The provocative wannabe impresario Alan Horne founded Postcard Records as a vehicle for Orange Juice and (the much more angst-ridden) Josef K; the tagline for Postcard Records was "The Sound of Young Scotland", an affectionate distortion of Motown's "The Sound of Young America", and as clear an indicator as any of Orange Juice's embrace of effervescence. Also note that Orange Juice were one of the most clean-cut, well-behaved bands of the time, eschewing alcohol (hence the bandname) and most drugs (though sometimes partaking in the mod/punk staple of amphetamine, funnily enough). With this, their second album, the line-up had changed substantially, after leader Edwyn Collins left the original drummer and guitarist. (the next drummer, Zeke Manila, was Zimbabwean, and two of the songs are sung in Shona). With this new line-up, Orange Juice hurtled in an even poppier direction, overtly referencing the Four Tops and, in the common post-punk ambition, marrying the Buzzcocks with Chic. And I like it a lot. The title song not only gave us the definitive post-punk slogan, but also provided one of the wryest takes on unrequited desire in the indie canon. Edwyn Collins proves himself one of the great articulators of adolescent hesitancy, turning wimpiness into, if not quite an admirable trait, then a charming, completely human feature of the everyteen (it's only a shuffle from Edwyn's croon to Morrissey's yodelling). Wonderful moments stud the album, such as the innocent piano motif on Flesh of My Flesh, which is then taken up by the saxophone (yes, saxophone). That said, the album warrants those two dread phrases, "rewards repeated listenings" and "the whole is greater thann the sum of its parts". Initially, you may well find the deliberate smoothness ungripping, and certain songs may seem disposable. But if you find the aesthetic intriguing and perhaps a little racy in its own way, then some Orange Juice should slip down satisfyingly. Orange Juice, like so many Scottish indie bands, provide Scotland with its much-needed sunlight and vitamin C.

Deceitful cover ahoy! This ain't no psychedelic headfuck, no tripping on the radical zephyrs of the Mother-Creator's minddrive. Of course, this album fits chummily into the late 60s hippy climate, and one can gesture towards the album's occasional suggestions of dreamscapes, but it's not a journey into the beyond. Rather, it's a genteel, mildly quizzical but bittersweet slab of baroque pop. Think Village Green Preservation Society instead of Tomorrow Never Knows. Actually, focus on that bittersweetness. Odessey and Oracle (the typo was an honest mistake by the cover artist, which the band tried to sell as deliberate). The album seems to have been dipped in the joyful pain of irrecoverable nostalgia. Fully the first side does not deviate from depicting the grief at the loss of potential, of the blueness at remembering when one could have been a contender. The first song, Care of Cell 44, has the convict wondering if his partner still loves him, A Rose for Emily concerns a woman who shall stay unloved her whole life, Maybe After He's Gone deals with a deluded suitor trying to persuade himself that she'll return to him, etcetry etcetry. And all that I found very effective. The songs themselves are exquisite, almost flimsy in their delicacy. But these multifaceted studies are great for a supine wallow. The second half turns more spritely and more positive, with some exception. Changes continues the melancholy of side 1, and Butcher's Tale (Western Front 1914) is The Zombies' pacifist anthem, of a fear-ridden WW1 Tommy cursing the priest who encouraged him to enlist (set to an ironic church organ). But apart from those, side two is a lot more smoochy and romantic, ending with Time of the Season, that tribal hippy makeout perennial. You can guess that the second side coheres a little less than the first, but not that it alienates the listener at all; indeed, there will be plenty who prefer the songs about your current girlfriend to the ones about your ex. I was hesitant about awarding this 5 stars, but why not? One can ferret out flaws if one wants, but who wants to undertake such a miserable activity? I guess these five stars are partly akin to a Grade II listing, but I enjoy focusing on Odessey And Oracle's considerable charms much more than its scarce peccancies.

I don't like Nico's voice! At all! Right, with that gangly truth evacuated, I feel better, more capable of discussing this album cogently. The Velvet Underground and Nico has long held the critics' choice of coolest album ever, but to we professional contrarians that's a provocation; hasn't its coolness been diluted by the elevation of the Velvet Underground to the pantheon? And isn't Eno's declaration that the few who bought this album each formed their own band obsolete nowadays, considering this is now an entry-level music snob text? Funny thing: plenty of bands I adore cite the Velvet Underground as a major influence (Bowie, Roxy Music, Sex Pistols, Joy Division), but that's also true of plenty I find inadequate (U2, The Strokes, a thousand abject landfill indie bands each with the lame ambition of their debut album fusing this with Sgt. Pepper). Influence is not a virtue in itself, and humanity has quite the history of venerating the feeble. So, shearing away the tangles of its legacy, I can say that much of the album does hold up. Lou Reed's drug odes still sound exhilarating, and I'm a sucker for sleaze. The production is a tad muggy, but that's to the album's benefit: how would their songs of pushers and transvestites work if they sounded like Steely Dan? But whilst listening I found myself thinking of The Doors' debut, which was released two months before this. The Doors (the album) shares much with The Velvet Underground and Nico: the subject matter (drugs, fucking, mooning authority, nightmarescapes), freaky beatnik ropy poetry, the desire to experiment, to stretch rock beyond its still-inchoate borders. But The Doors (still the album) coheres much more satisfyingly than The Velvet Underground and Nico. The tracklist to The Doors (again the album) feels impeccably structured and it flows effortlessly. The Velvet Underground and Nico, by contrast, seems just an aggregation of songs. Fine songs, yes, but songs that don't cleave together that well. Also, The Doors (yet again the album, but also the band as well in this case) got to number 2 on the Billboard chart. The weird, disreputable and exploratory were already becoming mainstream by the time this was released. Surely The Velvet Underground and Nico's legacy involves some revisionism? But that's not the real problem. The impediment, as I said right at the start, is that the Nico-led songs sound crap because Nico can't sing. Andy Warhol insisted that the band feature his acolyte Nico, ignoring that she sang as well as an anus, and the band accepted her to keep the peace and perhaps get fellated. Nico was partially deaf and didn't know what key she was singing in. The result was, to be technical, pisspoor. Try listening to Femme Fatale, counting the words as she sings. With the twelfth word "break", the whole song aptly breaks as Nico strains for a key she has no hope of finding. Her songs aren't bad enough to ruin the album, but they feel more like chores than treats. One lazy contention about albums like this is that time has blunted their impact, that in 1967 this would have been as gobsmacking as a brachiosaurus. However, I don't think that's the case here: I believe I view The Doors (once more the album, and I think the band as well) as remarkable as 60s teens would have, whereas I view this is as more interesting on paper than in actuality. The Velvet Underground and Nico is a valiant and oft-successful first attempt, but it's hard to herald it as the grand paradigm-shifter of 60s rock.

Country music is the music genre that provides the most evidence towards Sturgeon's law. For those who don't know, the Sturgeon in question was the science-fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who once wrote a novella called Killdozer!, where the antagonist is a sentient, killer bulldozer. The (possibly apocryphal) tale goes that Sturgeon was conducting a Q&A at a science-fiction convention, and one participant asked him if science-fiction was really a legitimate field of literature, stating truthfully that 90% of science fiction was, well, crap. Sturgeon immediately shot back, "Ninety percent of everything is crap!" This is now known as Sturgeon's law. I dn't think it's too much of a revelation to anyone that a jumbo proportion of music released under the country banner is crap. This has affected even the most beloved and esteemed of country artists: you don't measure Johnny Cash's discography by the number of records, you measure it by the yardage it spans, and nobody that prolific could make every song a pearler. Indeed, Rick Rubin rejuvenated Johnny Cash's career by encouraging him not to just bash out albums like trainers, but to focus on polishing his work until the album shone like a diamond. Anyway, Buck Owens was similarly generative, producing 20 studio albums, two holiday albums, three live albums and six compilations in the 60s alone. Who has the energy to go through all of those? Are some of those albums corkers? Certainly. Are some of those reeking? Probably. Anyway, some people just don't like country music. They dislike the instrumentation, they dislike the perceived cornball sentiments, they dislike cowboy boots, they dislike the unfortunate cultural baggage some country has been saddled with, they dislike the unabashed forays into novelty records, they dislike the need to sift through crap in order to find the worthwhile nuggets. Thankfully, I've Got a Tiger By the Tail is replete with nuggets. It's a straightforward, unpretentious good time. Of course, it's country, so much of the album deals with melancholy and heartache, which is great in itself, but the listener will be grateful that the album is leavened by rock 'n' roll additives and a healthy splash of wit. It won't persuade anyone disinclined towards country, but let them be content in their missing-out. It can't quite raise my spirit enough to warrant the full 5 stars, but don't worry about that: it delights enough.

My cohorts, a quick check of my earlier reviews will reveal that I gave a shiny 5 stars to Nick Drake first album, Five Leaves Left. Here, we have poor Nick's second album, Bryter Layter. Out of the classic Nick Drake trilogy, Bryter Layter is the one I listened to the most infrequently. Don't misunderstand me, I didn't consider it in any way a bad album, but the outright prettiness of Five Leaves Later and the starkness of Pink Moon meant they were the ones that hypnotised me. So in my head, Bryter Layter became the slightly impoverished relative by default. This was of course imbecilic of me. Bryter Layter continues Nick Drake's faultless track record whilst remaining particular to itself. Bryter Layter is in no way a rehash of Five Leaves Left, but instead shows dear Nick developing his style by exploring new musical vistas. Now, Bryter Layter is not as musically eclectic as Five Leaves Left, but that is not to its detriment. To say that Bryter Layter is more coherent is not the right term, but its consonance definitely stands out as a progression from Five Leaves Later. Lyrically, we have still the gentle sadness laying foggily over the music. Bryter Layter does not evoke death as Five Leaves Left does, nor is it as raw as Pink Moon, so we have the paradox that the listener feels Bryter Layter to be Nick Drake's healthiest record, despite the album's loneliness and remorse. Also, note that several songs concern love, albeit love tinged with inexact regret. A more remarkable addition to sweet Nick's arsenal is humour. In One of These Things First, a paean to a lost love, he lists the choices he could have pursued, how he could have been a sailor or a cook. But then he muses that he could have been a signpost or a whistle. Since this is Nick Drake, the absurdity is understated, but it is still there. Finally, in perhaps the album's best song, Northern Sky, we have one of the rarest and most precious qualities in a Nick Drake song: hope. Is Bryter Layter an anomaly in the Nick Drake canon? No, that's far too strong a reading. But it does partially dispel the notion that all his work was written under the gaze of the black-eyed dog. A wonderful record that entices the listener to luxuriate in its nuances.

The most celebrated album ever? Pet Sounds has cemented itself to the top ten of countless lists concerning the greatest albums ever, although curiously it's absent from this site's top 15. Anyway, such a position should neither extol nor sully the album in the ears of the listener, as the predictability of such lists indicates how meaningless they are. For instance, Citizen Kane has its reservation at the toppermost of film polls, and the first-time viewer usually concludes that it's actually, properly, seriously good, but the same lists that hold Pet Sounds aloft usually have the ridiculous phenomenon of 4 Beatles albums in the top ten albums of all time (I have recently concluded that the Beatles were primarily a singles band, and none of their albums display the Fabs at their fabbest). Happily, Pet Sounds falls into the Citizen Kane category. This is not to say that I consider Pet Sounds the GOAT; I don't. But I can't deny this album's magnificence. The genesis of Pet Sounds has been exhaustively documented: the Beach Boys began as the means for the autocratic, abusive minor songwriter Murry Wilson to attain stardom vicariously through a singing troop comprising his sons and nephews. However, one of those sons was the sensitive musical prodigy Brian Wilson, who broke from Murry to craft a more personal, emotional pop music inspired more by Phil Spector's Wall of Sound than the goodtime surf-music stipulated by the formula Murry conceived (then championed by everyone's one-despised Beach Boy Mike Love). With the British Invasion, and specifically Rubber Soul, Brian Wilson felt an overriding, and ultimately unhealthy, ambition to surpass the Beatles' sonic achievements (with hindsight, is Rubber Soul actually that good? Isn't it just an average, acceptable collection of songs? But then, do I know more about music than Brian Wilson?) One oddity of Pet Sounds is that it was released in 1966, during a time when the hippy movement was becoming established. Indeed, nascent psychedelic rockers such as the Doors, Love and Jefferson Airplane took Rubber Soul as a thrown-down gauntlet to reconnoitre into the beyond. Pet Sounds has none of this, focusing on producing the most impeccable soundscape. Along with this, Pet Sounds doesn't seek to investigate the more R-rated themes that had begun to interest rock. Rather, Pet Sounds is adolescent, almost childlike in its innocence and honesty. The opener, Wouldn't It Be Nice, is an almost-chaste yearning for the fireworks of romance the young assume are permanent with true love (maturity bestows the not-always-welcome realisation that romance and love are far more complicated, but the desire for love so intense never leaves you regardless of age). I Know There's An Answer (inspired by Brian's first experience with LSD) manifests that teenage sense of having everything figured out and nothing figured out, of recognising the phonies and not knowing whether to hug them or run away with a deafmute girl (baseball cap-clad douchebag Mike Love objected that the song was immoral to his square sensibilities, then later sued Brian for a songwriting credit). I could go through almost every song dissecting its guileless charm, but let's change focus to the flow of the album. It starts off exuberantly, and the first half maintains this joy, yet side 2 is far bleaker, far more introspective and self-doubting. Of course, this is still firmly adolescent, and instead of souring the album elevates it, articulating the alienation and despair that period of one's life attends. The album ends with Caroline, No, a heartbreaking song about heartbreak and the end of love, and the ideal counterpoint to Wouldn't It Be Nice. This is not to say that Pet Sounds is in any way a concept album, but it has a remarkable thematic coherence, a coherence that justifies its status as a masterpiece. Pet Sounds probably isn't perfect. God Only Knows suffers from its ubiquity, which is hardly Brian Wilson's fault. But tweezering out the minor faults of Pet Sounds would be fussiness, not diagnosis. The most valid criticisms one can make of Pet Sounds are the name and cover. According to Brian's first memoir, the title stems from somehow-more-villainous-than-Charles-Manson Mike Love damning the album, saying, "Who's gonna hear this shit? The ears of a dog?" Mike Love denies saying this (and sued him), but are there any circumstances where you want to believe Mike Love?

2002, along with continuing the streak of every year of this millennium being utterly crap, saw the release of Original Pirate Material, the debut album by The Streets, a garage/hip-hop homegrown work by Mike Skinner, a talented emcee from Birmingham, who pretended to be Cockney to the bones. Now, I started university in 2002, and beforehand I spent some time in London, and I can tell you that Original Pirate Material was everywhere in the capital, for good reason. Original Pirate Material presented a recognisable portrait on contemporary youthful London life, both hedonistic yet somehow unsatisfied, loving the pub-club-spliff-takeaway treadmill yet wondering if life should be so shallow and focused on instant gratification. Mike Skinner proved a witty, incisive lyricist, a man steeped in that British tradition of the clever-beyond-his-class songwriter, and it demonstrated that UK hip-hop, oft a kicking-boy of British music, could foster an independent, worthwhile voice. This is not to say Original Pirate Material was perfect; many found The Streets grating and oafish with justifiable reasons. But I was not one of them, and I had moderately high expectations for what The Streets would achieve in the future, and A Grand Don't Come For Free could have cemented Mike Skinner as one the great British lyricists. I hated it. I found this album abysmal. It is the sound of a starving artist being offered a banquet, then pigging out and disgusting everyone by pouring custard onto a beef wellington and subsequently vomiting all down his front. Every decision made on this album proves to be exactly the wrong one, and I have no idea why this, instead of Original Pirate Material is on the list. Harsh, I know, but the deterioration from the first album to the second is palpable. For his second magnus opus, Mike Skinner deciding to make a concept album. That sound you just heard was you releasing the safety catch off your grandad's luger. So, a concept album about a poor young man who meets a girl, blows all his dosh on an ill-considered bet, gets drunk/stoned/pilled-up, loses the girl, then either sits in his flat resenting his bad run of luck, or finds a grand down the back of the TV (yes, that last part makes absolutely no sense). As a narrative, it sounds and is pretty banal. But the main issue with the story is that even though the chap goes through a series of common experiences, the listener doesn't empathise with him at all. He just seems such a twat. He goes through these experiences with little genuine reflection, almost like a philosophical zombie, an entity with no internal life whatsoever. The girl leaves him because she clocks that he is just a loser, an opinion with which the listener agrees. The albums second greatest weakness is that you just don't care about him. The biggest weakness? Mike Skinner's rapping. All his talent, all the lyrical flair on the first album has vamoosed. Try saying this couplet: I might ask my mates where they'll be drinking From the sofa giving them a ding Seriously, just say it. It feels awful in the mouth, because it is an incorrect use of metre. The entire album is constructed from similarly jackknifing lines, lines which invariably end in the worst rhyming couplets conceivable. Again, look at the cited example, which manages to be both lazy and laborious. And then Mike somehow succeeds in making it worse by STRESS-ING EV-ER-RY SYL-LAB BLE. Mike Skinner seems to be aiming not so much for Roots Manuva as Pam Ayres. A Grand Don't Come For Free is one of the most wince-inducing cases of second album syndrome I have heard. The biggest hit from this was Fit But You Know It, which was a huge song at the time. Fit But You Know It doesn't quite slot into the risible concept of the album, which can only be to its credit. But consider the song's half-life. Dapper Laughs was a comedy character by an already-forgotten estate agent-turned comedian, whose schtick was short skits on Vine depicting a wilfully crass lad (his catchphrase was "Proper moist!"). His routines consisted of 6-second bits where he would say, for instance, you shouldn't eat a banana next to a gay man, as he'd think you'd want to suck him off (ba-dum-tsh!). ITV2 (the number tells you it's crap in advance) gave him a short-lived TV show, where he tried to parody dating advice shows by granting his wit and wisdom to actual members of the public (such as shouting out "GET YOUR GASH OUT!" to show off your adventurous side). A few rape jokes down the line, his show got put out of our misery, and the comedian had to go on Newsnight and announce he was retiring the character. Anyway, the theme tune to Dapper Laugh's show was Fit But You Know It. That's what I now associate the song with: a pillock shouting at passing women to show him their boobs for proper bants.

Everyone's favourite cadaverous, golfing evangelical Republican makes his most famous album, the grand celebration of the teenage boy (strictly speaking, this is by the band Alice Cooper, led by Alice Cooper, who would later go solo under the name Alice Cooper). Although not a concept album, School's Out sticks its central theme out like a tongue. This theme is, of course, the unthinking delights of the male adolescent. This extends even to the artwork: the original sleeve came with four legs so the "desk" could stand up, the album opened like a proper desk, revealing depictions of a catapult, a pen knife, marbles and a comic book. Topping all this was a pair of paper knickers covering the vinyl itself, a girl's underwear being the greatest prize a boy's desk could hold. As such the music itself, though firmly hard rocking, actually comes across as oddly ingenuous. It's the music of a 13-year-old playing GTA, still feeling mildly guilty over his fifth wank of the day. The opener and title track, Alice's Cooper's most renowned song, has become the quintessential song about the end of the school year, which is a fantastic turn of events because it is a brilliant song. They pitch the song perfectly, sufficiently childish and mischievous without being obnoxious. However, the album beginning on such an apex may cause the rest of it to appear diminished to the listener. One leitmotif that occurs throughout the album is West Side Story, one of Alice Cooper's (the man, not the band) favourite films. Indeed, Gutter Cats Vs. The Jets lists Bernstein and Sondheim in the credits. The inclusion of these allusions is thematically fitting, what with those finger-snapping street toughs dancing into a rumble. But you may find that this pushes the album over the line from self-awareness to self-parody. Personally, I'm fond of dear Alice, so I'm happy for him to indulge his peccadilloes. The album rocks like a bastard, and has several aces (Public Animal #9 is a particular killer), but I can't quite muster five stars for it. Maybe the issue is structural: you start off with School's Out, you inevitably have to come down after that peak. Still, it's not as if you won't enjoy the descent. Michael Bay's favourite film is also West Side Story.

As a student, I once spent a summer working in a purgatorial tourist trap shop in a seaside town, selling dinghies and pornographic playing cards to apathetic tourists. The music the shop played was from a 5-cd compilation; the staff (mainly 16-yr-olds) had been prevented from putting on their own music after the boss walked in to the sound of Eminem rapping about raping his own mother. Anyway, the best songs on that CD were one of the few reasons I didn't open my own wrists whilst working there. These included I Am The Resurrection, Ghost Town, The Model and Sunshine Superman (the worst included Bette Davis Eyes: who would want Bette Davis' wonky eyes anyway? They looked like Ygor's from Young Frankenstein). So, I have quite some fondness for Donovan from the outset. That the Happy Mondays paid homage to him on Pills 'N Thrills and Bellyaches also works in his favour. But I had not sat down and properly listened to an album of his before. This was no purposful evasion; I just hadn't. I probably would have given this a bash at some juncture in the future, but other acts have piqued my curiosity more over the years: Gary Numan has seemed more overtly intriguing to me than this trippy folk-rock troubadour. Listening to this album inevitably conjures the image of you-know-who. Yes, him. This causes a doubt as to whether Donovan is truly worthwhile, or just a capable xeroxing in lieu of the real deal. I'd like to dispel that scepticism. Although of course he was an influence on Donovan, it's unfair and reductive to dismiss Donovan as mere karaoke, and also you'd be missing out. You see, it turns out Sunshine Superman is highly enjoyable. Part of this pleasure comes from his distinction to Dylan; contempt might not be in Donovan's bag, but Dylan can hardly manage Donovan's feyness. Indeed, one can discern how this influenced Marc Bolan, particularly in the lightness and clarity of Donovan's voice. However, the best songs on this album (Sunshine Superman, Season of the Witch, Bert's Blues, that sort) are, perhaps counterintuitively given Donovan's reputation, rather fierce rockers. The gentler, folksier numbers unfortunately tend to drag a touch, but not disqualifyingly so. As such, this album isn't perfect, but a great time should result anyway.

A maddening album to write about, as it manages to be exactly good enough to warrant 4 stars, and so it's almost impossible to get traction with your prose when discussing it. There are no faults on the album to a fault, and as such it just lacks that touch of character to make it a true classic. Moby Grape possess a reputation among two particular tribes of music snob. Firstly, they appeal to those who wish they were acid causalties in the Summer of Love, as they love the idea of peace and love and especially free love; that last category makes up about 99% of their yearning for the hippy ideal. Secondly, they appeal to your standard Pitchfork reader who will lecture you on how this album is better than Forever Changes, which is better than Fifth Dimension, which is better than Electric Music for the Mind and Body, which is better than Surrealistic Pillow, which is better than The Doors, despite them never having sat down and listened to any of those, all the while living in pitiful terror over the discovery that their favourite film is actually Frozen. So, the album accidentally suffers from the reputation of its advocates being mild cases of douchebag. But why this audience? Well, Moby Grape go down as one of the most legendary lost bands of the 60s, one of the most promising acts crippled by incompetent label bureaucrats, pernicious management, internecine tumults, personal catastrophes and perennial bad luck. Their debut album Moby Grape, therefore, has to be a masterwork to redeem the sorry tale of Moby Grape. And in truth, it's a very good album. It's a very good collection of very good songs. And that's it. My opinion of the album over time is something I find curious. Learning of this album's notoriety, I first tried it about ten years ago, and I was distinctly underwhelmed. It lacked the spark of several of those 60s Californian albums I listed earlier, a few of which I consider masterpieces. Over the last decade, I've given it a few more chances, and I have grown much more of an appreciation for it. But my first reaction, I believe, captured a sad but undeniable truth of this album: it's alright, not great. One can't find a flaw in the playing or the production, but one also can't find a riff or a holler that truly stirs up the blood. It's worth exactly 4 stars, which somehow feels heartbreaking. That said, one offshoot of Moby Grape really does warrant all the accolades: Oar, the sole solo album by deeply troubled bandmember Alexander "Skip" Spence. But that's a different album on the list.

Secretary rock! Music for secretaries. For those about to take a bubble bath with a glass of Chardonnay before retiring to bed with a Marian Keyes and a Rampant Rabbit, we salute you! Perhaps I should elaborate on what secretary rock denotes. Secretary rock is the genre of genteel singer-songwriters playing mild, offensively inoffensive acoustic numbers on either piano or guitar usually about the desire for love rather than love itself, primarily for a adult female audience pursuing an accessible, usually romantic, occasionally bittersweet and above-all tasteful slab of music to play in the evening; such women may well own copies of Nevermind and OK Computer, but they turned them off when Territorial Pissings and Fitter Happier came on, never to be played again. Remember Dido? Her No Angel (such a secretary rock title) is the paradigm of the secretary rock album. Of course, the term secretary rock comes with slightly unfortunate assumptions about the gender of its fans; that said, prog rock has the same issue inverted. Also, plenty of male acts purposefully make secretary rock: Michael Bublé, David Gray, Jack Johnson and John Jackson. But we should acknowledge that secretary rock is a genre primarily aimed at women. As a broad-shouldered, hairy-chested, hairy-toed sort of chap, secretary rock is not really the genre for me, in the same sense that boy bands aren't marketed towards your thirtysomething straight guy (although more thirtysomething straight guys have a secret fondness for Take That and N-Sync than you think). Tracy Chapman's debut album, Tracy Chapman, is one of the main progenitors of modern secretary rock: no dissonance, very weak eroticism, no vocal or instrumental gymnastics (secretaries may own a Mariah Carey album, but Mariah ain't secretary rock), slightly pompous, an exercise in bourgeois good taste. And there's the problem. It's so beige. It lacks any bite, to the extent that you wonder if it's still alive. Can't secretaries dream bigger? The aspirational cosiness of the album does a disservice to both the creator and the listener. A secretary's reach should exceed her grasp, or what's a Kate Bush for? Actually, I am overlooking the political currents running through the album. Or rather, I don't find much intrigue in them. I have said before that popular music is not where adults should derive their political opinions on, but the protest song is, at its best, one of the great traditions of popular music (how many political classical pieces can you recall? Beethoven's Third?). But Talkin' Bout a Revolution is utterly platitudinous and quite smug. What revolution is Tracy Chapman advocating? I suspect she just means better schools and hospitals (which is obviously not a bad thing to want, but it's hardly the Beveridge Report). For Cthulhu's sake, secretaries are surely cleverer than this? Tracy Chapman is surely cleverer than this? Both can do better. Both know they can do better. Both need to realise that lovemaking is not just the most intimate expression of love a person can experience with another, it's also the most fun a person can delight in with another. It's all lovely to cuddle a lover through the night, but it's even lovelier to explore the delights between the sleights of their thighs. Mr. Rampant Rabbit can hop off.

I have previously said that I find reviewing jazz deadening: I have neither the expertise nor the inclination to write about jazz in a considered manner. Also, who wants to read about jazz? Have you ever read a genuinely entertaining passage about uncommon time signatures? (Postscript: I sent this piece to a friend to read before it was uploaded, and she refused, saying she hated jazz and would decline to read a jazz review regardless of who wrote it or what it said. That, my associates, is vindication.) Still, I should seek to toughen myself up, and Herbie Hancock's Headhunters is properly labelled jazz-funk, so perhaps I could treat this as a bridge from one genre I'm comfortable writing about to one that makes me uneasy. But then, I remember the genre is jazz-funk. Quick primer on jazz-funk: in the late 60s jazz cats, most notably Miles Davis, start to take inspiration from hard rock, because everyone understandably wants to be Hendrix. Likewise, soul musicians also start to take inspiration from hard rock, because everybody understandably wants to be Hendrix, and thus devise funk. In the febrile conditions of the early 70s, both camps merge, begetting a form of jazz that's all about the bass and rather synth-driven. Now, among some of your clever-clog music journos, jazz-funk (a.k.a. fusion) retains somewhat of a high reputation due to its, well, fusion of jazz and funk. However, it's hard to think of a genre more widely despised than jazz-funk. Miles Davis' Bitches Brew has perennially battled Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica as the album most heralded by pseuds who secretly prefer Girls Aloud (e.g., my mate Rob), and just as many clever-clog journos decry jazz-funk as utterly fucking unlistenable. As for myself, I guess I'm a jazz-funk pragmatist. If it sounds good, it's good. If it sounds wank, it's wank. Miles Davis' On the Corner? Good. Weather Report's Heavy Weather? Wank. The opening to Headhunters is promising. The first track Chameleon starts with a stone groove. But you drift. Your attention takes a little walkabout, and without realising it you've somehow brought a cheesemaking kit on Amazon, all because your brain was looking for something to do whilst listening to jazz-funk. Now, none of that is meant to imply that Headhunters sounds bad: it doesn't. It sounds alright, but nothing more than that. And it drags. When one is arsed enough to concentrate, individual passages impress, but one inevitably loses focus and Headhunters just becomes something on in the background. Is that a mark of a good jazz album? Upon a second listen to this album, I am wholly unshifted in my jazz-funk pragmatism. I know that some will treasure this, and some will loathe it. I enjoy the possibly sanest position of deeming it okay. It sounds fair, but a bit dull. What a great virtue concision really is!

Something I have discovered about myself during this vinyl odyssey is that I have quite a fondness for what I consider the best country. Yes, that qualifier makes it almost tautological. But remember that even the most ardent country fans would recognise that a lot of country is banal, overproduced, saccharine, meatheaded or just a bit naff. Anyway, like plenty of people my age, I first began wondering if country had some charms I had, in my ignorance, cold-shouldered after the late renaissance of Johnny Cash (actually, with me it was more that my love of Elvis steered me towards the rest of the Million Dollar Quartet, but you know what I mean). After that, it was a short jaunt to Hank Williams and Merle Haggard (who I prefer to Johnny Cash, in my standard contrarian manner), but I had no drive to explore further than there. I'm British: country is never going to be seen as cool over here. But I just looked up my stats, and country currently sits as my 5th favourite genre, with a flattering average of 4. The best album the generator's introduced to me is Time (The Revelator) by Gillian Welch, an astonishing exploration of Americana's potential. Much of the classic rock I relish openly declares its debt to country. So, I guess I like country. So where does The Last of the True Believers sit? A comfortable 4. Genuinely sweet rather than diabetes-inducing, and although a touch slight, The Last of the True Believers proves delightful throughout if you like country. If you don't, I don't think you'll gain much out of this, and that's fine: it's hardly an offence to dislike a style of music. I should say this is afflicted with that common ailment of 4-star albums: it's more a collection of very good songs than a cohesive album. But is that a fault per se? Hendrix's Are You Experienced is pretty much just a bounding-together of individual tracks, and I still consider that a masterpiece. Mind, Are You Experienced is a collection of some of the greatest songs ever, not just ones that are very good.

Although I have owned two Aphex Twin albums in the past (his more raucous, jungle-inflected stuff), to be honest Aphex Twin is an artist I have found easier to admire than like unquestionly. The story of Aphex Twin fascinates, partly due to Richard D. James' gleeful mythomania. Among his claims include sleeping 2 hours a night, gaining musical inspiration from lucid dreaming, scratching sandpaper instead of records, owning a tank (apparently, he actually owns an armoured car), living in a bank vault, purchasing the Michael Faraday Memorial, playing gigs in people's living rooms, and being named after a stillborn older brother. One of these legends is that this album assembles tracks he had lain down since the age of 14 on his ZX Spectrum, hence the timeframe indicated on the title. But is the music as interesting as the lore? The adjectives Aphex Twin generates seem impressive to some: experimental, challenging, innovative, unique, uncompromising. To multitudes, those terms inspire despair rather than intrigue. It appears tailor-made to accompany an Adam Curtis montage or Chris Morris' more surreal excursions; again, that thought will cause some to weep. But I am a sturdier figure. I chew up supposedly formidable works as if they were made by Wrigleys. Over this week, I have listened to Selected Ambient Works 85-92 thrice, and yes, it conjures those dread phrases "rewards repeated listenings" and "on its own terms". On the first occasion, which was not part of the reviewing process, I was, like I suspect many others would be, a trifle bored. It's an hour of ambient electronic dance music ca. 1985-1992. It sounds like an hour of ambient electronic dance music ca. 1985-1992. It didn't sound unpleasant, but unengaging and meandering. So, I continued with my assumption that Aphex Twin was not that embraceable. The second time, after the generator presented it, I found it much more alluring. The ambient nature of the album clicked, and I thought myself foolish for my prior dismissal. The third time, whilst writing this, I focused more the textures of individual tracks, and I was oft reminded of a group I adore, PiL (just checked, and the album does sample PiL's Fodderstompf). Like PiL's early work, the iciness may lead even those who appreciate difficult music to have their misgivings, but I'm not one of them. So yes, I like Aphex Twin, and I like this album a lot. By the by, Fact magazine (no, I haven't heard of it either) named this as the greatest album of the 90s. Even though this is an excellent album, can you think of a more pretentious choice?

Can one judge a band for spawning a contemptible legacy? You know, if every band citing them as an influence turns out to be not just woeful, but hateful? Radiohead and landfill indie, or Nirvana and all those godawful mid-90s angsty alt-rock twats? One of the most acute examples of deleterous imitators threatening the original band's reputation is Faith No More. Practically a one-hit wonder in their home country of the States, they managed much more success in Europe and the Antipodes. Despite this, the lead singer Mike Patton has good (hah!) claim to be the godfather of an especially American genre, nu-metal. With The Real Thing's eclectic fusion of metal, funk, rap, and prog, Faith No More set up what would become the sorriest genre of music 10 years later. The line from Faith No More to Korn, Limp Bizkit and Papa Roach is an inch long with no deviations. Is The Real Thing to blame for the crimes of the future? Well, it's not as if it can't be judged for the crimes of its present. Funk metal and rap rock are hardly the most esteemed of genres for justified reasons: not only were the songs usually risible, they tried too hard to convince that they were the apotheosis of cool, making them the least cool music on the planet. Still, I was 6 when Epic was released as a single, and I remember thinking that the song and video, what with its rapping and its posturing and its special effects, was awesome and radical, a song worthy for the Bretts of the world. Thirty years on, I can't deny it still has an immature charm, even if the vision of Mike Patton frugging around like a numpty in Bermuda shorts invites a chuckle and not a whoop. It does remember to rock enough, and that's enough for it to work, if not quite excel. And you can extend that judgement to the rest of the album. It's a servicable rock album, diminished partially by showy gooning. Although Epic is the defining song of the album, I prefer the opener From Out of Nowhere, which is a fine, solid bit of 80s hard rock. The album peaks with its straightest rock numbers, yet chafes when they start slapping the bass and throwing gang signs. I should also mention that Mike's voice proves divisive; many will find it, like those of his nu-metal descendents, uninvitingly whiny. I empathise with that position, but I was able to forgive it. It's adolescent more than discordant. I acknowledge that I'm being generous, but there are far worse albums in the world. Every album claiming this album as inspiration, for instance.

(Content warning: this review includes a discussion of anti-Semitic statements.) A while ago, during a review of Gang Starr's Step in the Arena, I wondered if there was a term for the period in hip-hop from 1987 to 1992, which saw the genre both go mainstream and mutate into something almost unrecognisable. Well, Wikipedia designates this period as golden age hip-hop, which strikes me as a slightly lazy terming, but that's just a quibble. In any case, the most critically feted act from that period is surely Public Enemy. Explicly political, explicitly pugnacious, Public Enemy took both their philosophy and rhetoric not so much from the mainstream civil rights movement, but from the more hard-line Black Power movement, which within its membership has had elements espousing black nationalism, black self-determination and, at its most extreme end, black separatism and black supremacism. In my review of Tracy Chapman's first album, I questioned the depth of her political statements, as I found them essentially platitudinous, at their hearts just pleas for better public services. But what about the opposite case, when the act evinces a position that is radical to the point of outrage? For instance, the Clash would wear t-shirts bearing Brigade Rosse, an Italian commmunist terrorist group who were responsible for the murder of around 50 people. In retrospect, I think it's as plain as day that Joe Strummer was being a silly sausage, and the Clash's somewhat callow glorification of far-left rebellion has aged as well as communism. But Public Enemy, especially with the album Fear of a Black Planet, represents perhaps the platonic example of a major group vaunting immoderate politics and inviting justified indignation. Beforehand, Public Enemy had, with lyrics declaring Louis Farrakhan "a prophet", indicated that their stance was not as mainstream as, say, the condemnation of police brutality. But then Professor Griff, both Public Enemy's Minister of Information and their Bez, gave an interview to The Washington Times, where he declared that Jews were "responsible of the majority of wickedness in the world." This was not the first time he had expressed anti-Semitic views in an interview (also, he was openly homophobic in the same interview, and again this was not the first time he had berated an interviewer homophobically). Leader Chuck D dithered, initially firing Professor Griff then inviting him back. You should note an unsettling taste developing in your mouth. This album emerged in the aftershocks of all this. And this album has openly anti-Semitic and homophobic lyrics (I'll spare you, you can look them up yourselves). It also spouts long-disproven conspiracy theories and avows positions that, I suspect, most people will find nonsensical and rather unpleasant. This is not in any way to dilute the seriousness of racial issues in the States and beyond, but rather to hope for a more sober, considered take on important political issues. For all the righteous anger supposedly driving this album, the listener should take it as gimmicky, as a childish tack in lieu of intellectual sophistication. Also, the album's length and the lack of musical relent become wearying, and finishing the album degenerates to a chore. By the by, Public Enemy didn't stop there with the anti-Semitism. Their 1999 album There's a Poison Goin' On includes the song Swindler's Lust (again, I won't be quoting the lyrics), and soon after that Chuck D and Professor Griff formed a side project named Confrontation Camp. Who on earth is still championing Public Enemy? 4chan?

An album requiring the listener to meditate on it, Daydream Nation does have the courtesy to indicate that it takes time to appreciate it fully. Mind, does such effort compensate generously. Sonic Youth became the Brian Eno of US alternative rock, in that they occupied a role of in-house philosophers, figures whose experiments and theorising plotted much of the landscape for many who would follow. Rock had investigated dissonant, disjointed guitars before (to exhaustion and nausea with Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music), but it was Sonic Youth who summarised it into a template for your standard 90s alt-rock weasels. Sonic Youth were also one of the biggest proponents of a genreless approach to music that embraced the high, low and middlebrow, rejecting those labels as unconducive to a truly explorative love of music. Sonic Youth had no qualms mixing John Cage, Albert Ayler, Led Zeppelin, the Carpenters, Suicide, Minor Threat, Madonna and KRS-One. Now, like Eno, this seems more driven by intellectual rather than emotional concerns. However, like Eno, they had good heads, so criticising them for that seems slightly churlish, even though someone could legitimately say their intellectualism is why Sonic Youth gives off too much of a chill for them. Another consequence of this is that someone who claims Sonic Youth to be their favourite band is hopelessly pretentious. Still, Sonic Youth have been warranted critical faves since they developed their approach in the early 80s. With Daydream Nation, their most celebrated album, Sonic Youth managed to place simultaneously one foot in the vanguard and the other in the relative mainstream. So gnarled guitars and R.E.M. melodies, basically. Now, Daydream Nation partially suffers from the diluting effects of every Sonny-Jim subsequently pilfering their innovations (which, in fairness, Sonic Youth would acknowledge resulted partially from their own purloinments). This perversely is in scale with their increased ambition for this album; when you break through, you want to hear everywhere the noise you pioneered, especially when others copy you. A double album made for a bit more dosh than their previous records, Daydream Nation is quite the troughful to nosh through in one visit. So yes, once again it's our old pal "rewards repeated listenings". The initial hearing may prove samey, but later the nuances will chime through. That aspect underscores the delightful paradox of this album: whilst ostensibly an uncompromising, punk-infused hard rocker, the real delights are in the subtleties, the details. Now, as it's a double, the disinclined listener won't be arsed to devote the time to comprehend it, and even the well-disposed may feel their joints start to itch at the length. But if you want it to persuade you, you'll find its disparately fluttering eyelashes will make you buy it a drink or five.

A classy album, this one. It's so classy, you can use the cover model's pubes as dental floss. But yes, this is a sophisticated album intended for we sophisticated cats. The ideal circumstance for listening to this album is whilst sitting beside a roaring fireplace, reading Nabokov's Pale Fire, lazily swirling some Rémy Martin around the glass and being fellated by the woman on the front of that month's Vogue. Indeed, that's how Bryan Ferry ends his Wednesdays. I'm quite a fan of Roxy Music. I love them in a similar way to how I love the Happy Mondays. I love their inventiveness, their oddball discernment, their magpie ransacking of any and all music trends that took their fancy, their unabashed hedonism (which led to both Roxy and the Mondays putting underdressed lovelies on their album covers; neither group could remotely be called feminist). Also like the Mondays, Roxy moderately pissed on their reputational chips with later demerits, leading T-Rex/the Stone Roses to nab more than their fair share of glam/baggy kudos. But this is their first album, so let's save that story for the last Roxy album on the list (Country Life, if you're wondering). Roxy Music gestated in that classic incubator for smart British bands, the art college. In fact, Roxy Music may well qualify as the quintessential art college band. Bryan Ferry, the son of a Geordie miner, was magnetically drawn to the Fine Art department of Newcastle University (not technically an art college, but it's not as if he studied chemical engineering). Under the tutelage of Richard Hamilton (who designed the cover of the Beatles White Album), Ferry became devoted to living a life governed by elegance, taste and flair, seeking to unite his idols Marcel Duchamp, Humphrey Bogart and Otis Redding. Brian Eno, the son of an Essex postman, immersed himself in the then-nascent postmodern attitude of questioning every assumption that British art colleges had fostered. Wielding a post-structuralist arsenal of hypotheses and approaches, Eno sought to put art theory into music practice. (One oddity about Roxy Music is that, for all their assertions that they were creating a new aristocracy, along with Bryan Ferry's latter penchants for foxhunting and Eton, the band members' backgrounds were almost all firmly working-class. The ony posh one in the group was public-school-educated guitar ace Phil Manzanera, the son of a man who worked for a British airline and who might have been a spy working throughout Latin America). Roxy Music was Bryan's baby, but though he was unquestionably the leader (one constant source of resentment within the group was Bryan's insistence that he be credited with "words and music" on the album, meaning he'd get the bulk of the royalties), Bryan needed the rest of the group to construct his vision. Also, Brian had gallons of ideas of his own, and though Bryan and Brian would battle in part over who had the biggest avant-garde chops (also, Bryan got miffed at the remarkable quantity of ladies who bounced upon Brian), on the first two Roxy albums one can feel how synergistic Bryan and Brian were. These ideas, which can't be attributed solely to Bryan or to Brian, include a pop-art derived rejection of high-low culture boundaries. In the first track, Re-make/Re-model, has each band member play an excerpt from another piece of music: Graham Simpson, the soon-departing bassist plays the riff from Day Tripper, Andy Mackay, the saxophonist and oboist (and son of a London gas man) plays Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, etcetry etcetry. This was at a time when prog rock was trying to build its own high-low culture barrier, putting itself on the high side. This is surely a reason to love Roxy Music: they pointed out, musically and comically, that those prog popinjays were a phananx of wankers. If I had to single out a curious factor from this album, it would be its romanticism. Yes, it's a romanticism that's been dolled up with camp and irony, but it's still romanticism under the cosmetics. This is due to Bryan, not Brian. Whereas Brian would nick prodigiously from the past because the very idea of such theft interested him, Bryan truly venerated the matinee idols and soul singers of his youth, and he was clever enough to clock that he could be simultaneously arch and sincere. So, we get his paean to Bogart (2HB), his three-part vignette on love discovered, consummated and recalled (If There Is Something), and his doo-wop pastiche (Bitter Ends). That said, Bryan's romanticism (which occasionally veered into chauvinism) is only one facet of this great album, and I wish I'd said more about Andy and Phil (I don't know what the drummer Paul Thompson's dad did for a living). But there's so much to devour here, and I've wittered on enough already, so why not find out yourself? Play this album, it's dead classy.

I hadn't heard of Mike Ladd before receiving this album, and I guess I was slightly daunted by reviewing another hip-hop album after my severely negative reaction to Fear of a Black Planet earlier this week. Of course, hip-hop is a diverse genre, and it's immoral to judge someone for the iniquities of another. So, I postponed reviewing this for a few days in order to try and approach it open-mindedly. And I liked it, but I didn't love it. Mind, I get a few hints that this is a album not really seeking to be loved. From what I have gathered, Mike Ladd is a whale of an MC in the underground hip-hop brigade who happens to have been a lecturer on poetry at NYU. And I can't deny that this album is a dense, intricately constructed work. The album explicitly draws influence from Afrofuturism and, more broadly, science fiction. 1984, Blade Runner and the works of William Gibson all get allusions, and the bonkers Saturnian jazz leader Sun Ra casts an immense shadow over this album. As such, one can admire the grand scope and craft of Welcome to the Afterfuture, but one can also recognise that such a enterprise will leave some cold: some people just despise sci-fi as tedious piffle. Me, I can enjoy the occasional knee-trembler with, say, a Kubrick film or a JG Ballard novel, but I have no yearning to tackle any form of Dune. This album will appeal to some as much as it will appal others, and others like me will just consider it alright. I should point out as well that the album is rather low-key in its tone. This album isn't hook driven, nor especially virtuousic lyrically. The craft can't really be faulted, but it doesn't elate. I believe this is purposeful; the themes invite contemplation, not joy. This is an album best enjoyed alone, gone midnight. It's an album to admire, not adore. But the by, on the song The Animist, he talks about what his name would be if he were Jewish (Jared), Muslim (Ibrahim) and Catholic (Chris). The name Mike, which I assume is short for Michael, comes from the Old Testament, meaning it's a Jewish and latterly Christian name (and Michael is an archangel in Islam, though I don't know if Michael is a common name in Islamic cultures). Did he forget his own name?

I did it myself. I can't blame anyone else. I am the responsible party. I was sitting down, listening to this and rather enjoying it, but then, when the fourth song started, three words popped into my skull. Those three words absolutely torched the album, then salted the earth upon which the album stood so nothing could grow back. I gained no joy from those three words, but I can't deny that they're true. I really don't want to be mean to this album, and I apologise for any upset I cause, but if I tell you them, you'll realise I'm right and the album will be ruined. So, I'm going to give you every chance to back out. If you stop reading this and just listen to the album, you'll probably get quite a bit of pleasure from it. But when you hear those three words, there's no going back. I'm serious. You may very well be better off ignoring me and instead trying to spot the jazz and hip-hop inflections throughout the album. You may find Erykah Badu's earnestness charming in its lack of guile, and though you'd probably think the album overlong, such ambition may impress you. But with those three words, there's no doubt that you'll immediately recoil from the album and never wish to hear a note from it again. And I'm sorry. I didn't want to conjure those three words. But I did, and it's done, and I have to be honest, but you don't need to know. You can just continue in happy innocence, or you can continue reading. I'll give you some time to think. ... ... ... ... ... Here's another warning. Think about what you're doing by reading on. If you want to keep on finding sausages tasty, you don't see how they're made. ... ... ... ... ... One more chance. Next time I'll say the three words, and it'll be on your head. By going on, you accept your share of responsibility. Once again, I am sorry. ... ... ... ... ... Are you ready? ... ... ... ... ... "Jamiroquai with tits!"

Previously, I gave Dr. Dre's The Chronic 1 star, primarily for being boring. However, I have to give this, which The Chronic samples heavily, 5 stars. Mad, innit? Anyway, this is rather a tricky album to dissect, mainly because of its excellence. Pointing out the flaws in an album tends to be an easy task. Articulating why an album is good challenges far more. Now, of course George Clinton gives us a ready adjective for that purpose: it's funky. But what do you say beyond that? Well, one aspect bugs me mildly: it's a concept album. For the thankfully uninitiated, the concept album was a disastrous by-product of the more general formation of the album as an artform in itself. With the word "art" now part of their vocab, bands tried recording albums that told epic stories about orcs and aliens, jammed with leitmotifs and musique concrete experiments in order to underscore the profundity of the message, man. Now, the concept album is an almost wholly lamentable concept, and almost every attempt at a concept album irks the listener and degrades the artist. The concept behind any concept album would cause a teacher to humiliate a twelve-year-old if the poor mite submitted it in a creative writing project. Yes, it helps if albums are thematically coherent, but that does not mean attempting a sequel to the Silmarillion, it just means making sure the album flows smoothly. Mothership Connection is one of the vanishingly few concept albums that work, but what's the concept behind this album? Black people in UFOs. As an image, one can feel gladdened by the glorification, the humour and the afrofuturism. But is it enlightening? Not really. But that doesn't matter. The music is plenty enlightening enough on its own. Toasty and ingratiating, there really isn't a badly placed note on this album. It's perfectly acceptable to revel in Mothership Connection without bothering with the narrative. Just love it.

Regulars readers of my reviews (if they exist) may have noted my disdain for invocations of the spiritual. I hold no patience for any guru appealing to the realm of auras and pixies when defending their position. It doesn't bother me if someone holds such beliefs, but they can at least try to argue properly. Of course, that doesn't mean I can't appreciate art made under such a mindset; I cling to death of the author, so I don't need to pretend that an artist's philosophical position necessarily influences how I see their work. More relevantly, Bob Marley's music does not necessarily inspire me to learn about Bob Marley's spiritual views. However, this album has a few songs that are meant essentially as hymns, most notably One Love/People Get Ready (the second part is due to an acknowledged yoinking from Curtis Mayfield). The odd thing about that: One Love is played so often, its devotional nature has become, if not quite evaporated, then definitely diluted. And I'm content with that. I prefer the humanism of the song to its mystical elements. And this is a bizarre consequence of the album's songs being so ubiquitous: they become easier to like. Separated from the political and religious contexts by dint of prevalence, the uncomplicated benevolence of Exodus soars (yes, even though it's called Exodus). So, we have witnessed a shift from the central song of the album being the charged Exodus to the open-armed Jamming. A cynic may consider this dumbing-down, but I prefer a call-to-jam rather than a call-to-arms. Exdosu isn't perfect. Turn Your Lights Down Low gets really Steely Dan with its jarring smoothness and Bob Marley's perplexing adoption of the lounge-lizard seducer persona, but you'll forgive it. The album has too many strengths for that. The goodwill of this album might be a little bleary-eyed, but it's undeniable. Also, it has lots of fantastic songs.

Despite them inventing it, I have never considered Americans to have ever really understood punk, or the potential of punk. Except for the Stooges and a fistful of others, American punk bands have never seemed that interested in the aesthetic liberation punk has offered. The Ramones, for instance, arguably limited punk by establishing a mannerism of punk, whereas the Sex Pistols concocted a philosophy of punk that emboldened a thousand and one British weirdo acts to philosophise further and stretch the possibilities of what music could be, from ABC to XTC. Or we have Nirvana trying to put punk's experimentalism at the centre of the American mainstream, but only resulting in so many whining gits writing so many feeble grungy dirges about stubbing cigarettes out on their wrists. No scene demonstrates this blinkered American take on punk than hardcore. Rather than exploring what they could do, the hardcore formula of "rough punk, played fast and heavy" not only became the creed of American punk for a decade, it became the standard definition of US punk: I once read an American review of Never Mind the Bollocks that insisted it wasn't a punk album because the songs were too long. That's the sort of warped mindset we're dealing with here, kids. (By the by, this pitiful American reverence towards the supposed edicts of a genre extends far beyond punk. How many rhythm and blues acts, pop groups, jam-bands and rappers act as if avoiding deviation from their genre's standard makes them the true inheritors of the craft? And will they ever realise that nobody cares?) So I worry that perhaps I'm approaching this album with a mild prejudice, which is that whenever I listen to hardcore punk, I feel disappointed that they didn't follow the British example of rejecting every example, and instead they just played a bit of punk. This is not to say I dislike hardcore punk: I don't. But it occasionally feels like the teenagers lobotomised themselves. Anyway, Damaged. It's a good hardcore punk album. Some of the tracks are a bit humorous, to its credit. I don't see this as a crippling existential howl at all, I see it as a good hardcore punk album. There are hardcore albums I prefer (e.g., Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables), and ones I like less (e.g., Milo Goes to College). Is there much more to say than that? Maybe you could say phrases like, "Oh, but they added mini guitar solos to the repertoire of punk," but that just means you're a trainspotter. Actually, I'll run with that. If your favourite form of punk is hardcore, you're basically a trainspotter of punk, writing down the BPM in your notebook as you slamdance. The reason you're straight-edge is because you've a thermos of weak lemon drink made for you by your mum. This album gets a clear four, but giving it a 5 marks you as spotty and bronchial. Also, I was reading about Black Flag before writing this review. After this, they turned to the Grateful Dead for inspiration. As much I should cherish such growth beyond hardcore, I'm not exactly squealing with glee at Black Flag harking to the Grateful Dead. Is there any better point to illustrate that hardcore punk is punk for trainspotters?

Johnny Cash never actually served any prison time. He was arrested seven times, most curiously for picking flowers, but never received a sentence. Anyway, this is the second of his four prison albums, and it has a bit of a predicament, in that it follows At Folsom Prison, his first prison album. Now, At Folsom Prison is a towering, majesterial work, and one of the cornerstones of the Johnny Cash legend. At San Quentin necessarily comes across as a lesser album to its sibling, and despite its evident quality, doesn't quite satisfy. You may feel I'm being unfair prima facie, and that I should not judge this based on its more gloried predecessor. However, considered individually, At San Quentin still feels slightly slight. All the music is great, with Cash's biggies represented (I Walk the Line, A Boy Named Sue, Folsom Prison Blues), and the replayed San Quentin is a fantastic middle finger of a song. But it's a recording of a very good concert, not a masterpiece. You can't fault it, but you also can't exalt it. You just really enjoy it. Despite being recorded in San Quentin, most of the original prisoners' shoutings were not used for the final release, and the rabble's yells were rerecorded in London, with a bunch of Cockneys substituting for the inmates. That's your dear uncle's fact of the day.

It's fine. That is, the music is good, but ultimately left me cold. Indeed, I have struggled in writing this review solely because I don't have anything interesting to say about it whatsoever. This very sentence is a travail to write. Still, I shall endeavour to bring you insight. Manu Chao is a French-Spanish singer songwriter who, after the breakup of his group Mano Negra in the mid-90s, took a quest across Latin America to imbibe as much of the music as possible. To that end, he collected a multitude of pirated radio samples, which he then scattered throughout this album (hence the title). Along with this, he sought to continue his mongrelish, catholic eclecticism by merging as many genres as he could muster, with son, reggae, hip-hop and French pop being notable influences on the album, and also by singing in French, Spanish, English and Portuguese. So, the sentiments behind the album can't really be dissed, and the music isn't actually bad, but you unavoidably perceive the album's bizarre sameyness. You know how if you mix all the meats together, from rattlesnake to human, it all just ends up tasting of chicken? Clandestino has that resultant poultriness. Now, nobody will slam the taste of chicken, but who has chicken as their favourite meat? Manu Chao travelled the expanses of Central and South America and brought you back some chicken. You wouldn't complain, but could you hide your disappointment successfully? I once had a gourmet burger in South Korea with a French engineer who would always play Bongo Bong in the bar. He liked Bongo Bong because he found it funny and groovy, which is fair enough. Still, I didn't have a chicken burger, did I?

Has anyone else heard the rumour that Paul McCartney has had his roadies smuggle him bacon sandwiches since at least the mid-70s? Also, on Ebony and Ivory, he didn't complain about bashing a tune out on elephant tusk. I reckon that, if you were in a hot-dog-eating contest against Macca, he would demolish you due to the sheer glee and gusto he'd take in scarfing down tube after tube after tube of mashed-up pig. Anyway, Wings (sorry, Paul McCartney and Wings, a name designed to entice by promising a Beatle, yet also managing to annoy considerably by its blatancy) began when Macca decided he'd like to be in a band again, after his first two solo albums bombed with critics (they have since been resurrected as classics, as is the wont with heritage rock acts). With some justification, Wings (oops, Paul McCartney and Wings) have been accused of being a dressed-up Macca solo project, but does that matter, as long as the music is good? Well, Band on the Run has the same problem Macca's solo albums tend to have: it's often too sugary and self-consciously quirky to embrace unconditionally. Really, does anyone like Jet (yes, I know, Alan Partridge)? The saxophone blasts are just ridiculous, and the chants of "JET!" are too-obvious attempts to make a concert-friendly crowd singalong. Jet is the lowpoint of an unsatisfying first half, and I was feeling a smidge dejected, but thankfully side B has more interest, more bite. Macca's gift for melody figures more towards the end of the album, and the best song is the last one, Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Five (despite the wacky title). So, Band on the Run averages out as a three, just like John Lennon's Imagine. Mind, Jet isn't as bad as Imagine's title track, and Band on the Run isn't remotely rancorous, unlike Imagine's best, most uncomfortable song How Do You Sleep?. In the arms race raging between solo Lennon and solo McCartney (along with Paul McCartney and Wings) on my review page, Macca's currently edging out John. That could be because Lennon's a tosser.

I've always avowed a dislike of Pink Floyd. I love old-school punk, and I've followed the punk orthodoxy that Pink Floyd were the apotheosis of the conceited, flatulent bores that populated prog rock. My attitude since my student days has mellowed slightly, but only slightly. Nowadays I'm not going to act outraged if someone puts Money on the jukebox (though I still think it's cack). But the punk orthodoxy on Pink Floyd carried a qualifier: the enmity towards Pink Floyd should be directed towards the Roger Waters era. It's easy to comprehend why. Roger Waters is clearly one of the most pompous, humourless figures in all of rock. If you said "Knock knock" to Roger Waters, he would glare at you silently for a full minute, his snarl becoming more and more severe as the seconds passed, and then scream in your face that your "Knock knock" statement made you directly responsible for the death of a Palestinian child. But the punks tended to excuse Syd Barrett from the opprobrium. Syd's whimsy and tragic breakdown granted him a pass, to the extent that the Damned asked Syd to produce their second album Music for Pleasure; he couldn't be contacted what with being a recluse, so the Damned asked Pink Floyd's drummer Nick Mason instead (even Pink Floyd's drummer was whiny and melodramatic. The drummer. Chew on that for a while.). The ill-starred album bombed critically and commercially. This was to be expected. Previously, I reviewed Syd Barrett's first solo album, The Madcap Laughs. I gave it one star. It degenerated into studio outtakes by side B, making the whole album seem an ugly exploitation of an unwell man. So logically, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn must represent the full-bloomed talents of Syd. But on listening, I'm obliged to conclude that it doesn't really work. This is not to say PATGOD is bad, per se. Some of the tracks have that pleasing, trippy, rocking playfulness of reputation. But large parts have that most fatal of curses: dullness. The experimentalism of the album just comes across as exercises in cleverness rather than inquisitiveness, of Pink Floyd filling out an IQ test with cribbed answers. More personally, the childlike insinuations to fairy tales and Edward Lear don't appeal to me. The worst trend of our age is the dislodging of serious literature by Harry Potter fans too blinkered to bother with intricate prose, and I am similarly wary over late-60s groups trying to evoke a mythical arcadia where we dance around the meadows as a goat-hoofed pixie plays his flute to summon the fairies and render us all perpetually 12. So, PATGOD manages to be both far too ponderous and far too slight. I can just about recognise why others genuflect towards this, but I still see no reason to revise my antipathy for Pink Floyd. Also, I really don't know what to deduce about the legacy of Syd Barrett. Would his other solo album finally give me my chips? Maybe one day soon I'll listen to it, but not today. As for PATGOD, 2 stars seems a molecule too harsh, but it's one of the most generous threes I've given so far.

In both bands' prime, Oasis were clearly a thousand times better than Blur. Yes, Girls and Boys remains a great single, and one can find enough corkers in Blur's back catalogue to make a top-notch best-of compilation, but Oasis' laddish, proletarian grandeur made Blur vs. Oasis a fight between a poodle and a rottweiler. I still sigh with exasperation at the sight of Damon Albarn on that one-off show Britpop Now, singing Country House in tweed, plus fours and a deerstalker cap. But our Damon is a resourceful sort. After Blur and Oasis helped kill off Britpop with the catastrophic disappointments of albums The Great Escape and Be Here Now (and in retrospect, neither warranted the hostility brought down upon them, each just being somewhat weak follow-ups), Blur sought to change course with a darker, less jovial couple of albums (not too dark, mind you), while Oasis just carried on doing bog-standard Oasis songs to increasing irrelevance. Then, when Blur took a hiatus, Damon founded the group Gorillaz with the comic strip artist Jamie Hewlett. Gorillaz are a virtual band, partially intended as a riposte to the manufactured nature of boy bands. Also, a virtual band liberated our Damon, enabling him to explore genres unmarriageable to Blur's aesthetic, such as hip-hop, electronica and various cul-de-sacs of world music. Along with this, the strategy grew of Gorillaz being highly collaborative, this album alone featuring the rapper Del the Funky Homosapien, Ibrahim Ferrer of Buena Vista Social Club and members of Talking Heads. Yep, my compadres, we're talking a massive case of record-collection rock. And yep, this album has that deeply infuriating gripe affecting most record-collection rock: it's really good, but tries far too hard to be cool, resulting in a album that appears as geeky as a stamp collector. Geekiness is not a fault in itself, but this album's strand of geekiness is inimical to rock n roll, and surely the primary function of this album should be to rock n roll? On the best songs (particularly the singles), Gorillaz transcends this pretence, but the forays into dub and punk on Slow Country and, er, Punk induce nowt but awkward winces. Please understand that this is a very good album, and my criticisms are the honesty of fondness. But I would say the list made a mistake on opting for this instead of their second album Demon Days, to which I would have given the full five. Not least, Demon Days contains the single Dare, which managed the inconceivable by getting my beloved Shaun Ryder to number 1. Just for that, I forgave our Damon for everything that miffed me about Blur, and I would merrily kiss his left teste in gratitude.

An extremely easy summary to write. The best songs on The White Album (e.g., Back in the U.S.S.R., Happiness Is a Warm Gun) make the album a firm 4, whereas the worst songs on it (e.g., Wild Hairy Pie, Good Night) prevent it from being a 5. Job done. Okay, I suppose I better look under the bonnet. After Sgt. Pepper cemented them as the most feted longhairs on the planet, the Beatles fled to India to to learn Transcendal Meditation and to try and comprehend their extraordinary position on the world's stage. Ringo returned to Blighty within a fortnight, because he was craving a nice, juicy steak after all that curry malarkey. Macca stayed a bit longer, and John and George longer still. George especially became further entranced with Indian culture, and the stay at Rishikesh saw his blossoming as a capable songwriter. The group wrote songs voluminously whilst in India, but the recording sessions in London proved highly trying. Their recently formed business Apple Corps sapped the Fabs' cash amid a series of failed projects. Along with this, the bandmembers had grown more distinct from each other artistically, fragmenting their previously unified vision of the band's direction. Ringo left for a period, upset at all the bickering and his apparent peripheral status within the band. With egos and hostility percolating in the studio, the bandmembers rejected George Martin's suggestion that they edit the album into a spliffing single album of the best songs from the recording sessions, and so came to pass the Beatles' double album. Oh, and Yoko had begun hanging out around the studio. There's that familiar challenge concerning the White Album, over what 15 songs you'd choose for a single-record edition of the White Album. I suspect that everyone would choose pretty much the same songs. To restate that, the White Album meanders wildly in terms of quality, but a consensus over which tracks are good became established rather swiftly. As such, the supposed innovations of the White Album have faded so much that the contemporary listener struggles to see the invention. Yes, I know that may seem comparable to that dismissal of Hamlet as a ropey old plot strung along with the mouldiest of clichés, yet I think that I not only can defend that position, but also argue that the White Album wasn't that innovative anyway. Take Helter Skelter, for instance. The standard assessment of Helter Skelter is that it's the song that forges heavy metal with Macca's declaration that he wanted to write a song as loud and dirty as possble. I humbly suggest that this is piffle. Jimi Hendrix had released the much louder, much dirtier, much heavier, much better Purple Haze the previous year. But no, fanboys insist that credit must go to the Beatles just because of those murders. Or what about the claim that the White Album is the first postmodern record? Without getting too abstract, one definition of postmodernism that consistently works is that it's the stuff that came after modernism. By that definition, rock n roll itself is a postmodern construction. Or for a more rigorous candidate, you have David Bowie and his band adopting the personae of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars to record The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars, an album telling the fable of the rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. That's far closer in spirit to If on a winter's night a traveller. The White Album isn't postmodern just because the Fabs were too atomised to enact proper quality assurance. I recognise that I have only named two examples. I have written long enough already, and you don't need me cracking out the microscope to examine every instance of the White Album not being quite as novel as its reputation claims. Why not give it a go yourself? For starters. try tackling the role of pastiche on the album. And console yourself with the thought that innovation is not quite a virtue in itself: your bright idea of an onion milkshake will shock, but not because it's new. You can love the album even if it's not the Nikola Tesla of music. Anyway, in conclusion, just read the first paragraph again. I'm off for a kip.

Some groups can be expressed mathematically, as the summation of particular influences the group is more than happy to acknowledge. Beatles + Black Sabbath + Pixies = Nirvana. Orange Juice + Strokes = Franz Ferdinand. With today's band, it's Genesis + Queen + Jeff Buckley + Radiohead = Muse. I can't be the only one to feel trepidation upon seeing the first side of that equation. Each one of those acts has some fundamental aspect that may very well deter the uncommitted listener (yes, even Jeff Buckley). The result threatens to be simultaneously stuffy, affected, histrionic and cold. And the result is stuffy, affected, histrionic and cold. Muse were one of the late-90s British groups to reject Britpop, with its punky irreverence and kitchen-sink concerns, instead borrowing excessive virtuosity, conceit and tone from prog whilst leader Matt Bellamy insisted on singing every damn note in Jeff Buckley's falsetto. My fellow travellers on life's long journey, you should know by now that a rejection of punk will never win my favour. Also, Muse's resuscitation of prog does not feel inspired, but just the inevitable recycling of everything recyclable from the past. At some point, some band was going to try and bring back The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, and Muse thought it might as well be them. That paragraph didn't mention the other band, the band who has overshadowed Muse for their entire existence: Radiohead. In my review of The Bends, I discussed how The Bends accidentally invented the next decade's trend of landfill indie. Muse obviously nick plenty from Radiohead, but far more from OK Computer and Kid A. Now, I have no qualms whatsoever with such outright theft, as long as they do something with it. And to their credit, Muse do do something with their loot; unfortunately, they tend to do bad things. Black Holes and Revelations (yes, that title is wank) is the consequence of seizing upon one facet of a myriad of artists, then intensifying it to the exclusion of all other concerns. So, as stated before, Matt Bellamy's falsetto stems from Jeff Buckley's use of the falsetto. I've never been persuaded that Jeff Buckley is the greatest male singer of the 90s, but I understand that his falsetto broadened the dominant male range of the time, and was meant to extend how widely male singers could reach for. Just singing falsetto drastically misses that point, and incidentally is extremely annoying. Likewise, Muse steal Queen's theatricality, but forget to take along the camp fun Queen revelled in. The listener is put in the bizarre situation of hearing Muse attempt their own version of Peter Gabriel's Slipperman, all the while wishing that Muse would just get Phil Collins involved somewhere. And I've written before that OK Computer's student politics seem jejune nowadays, but where do Muse go with such concerns? Conspiracy theories and ancient aliens building the pyramids. The last parts would suggest that Muse have some sense of humour to lighten this broth, but this album is delivered with iron solemnity, as a deeply profound article. Even the deliberately comic bits (e.g., Knights of Cydonia) feel perfunctory when taken with the whole of the album, as if Muse just seek to avoid accusations of disappearing up their own fundament (and thus slip even further up the back passage). Okay, I admit I would have relented somewhat, in that Supermassive Black Hole has a decent, straightforward groove that redeems the album slightly, but then I took a walk. On that walk, I realised that Genesis + Queen + Jeff Buckley + Radiohead = Emo ELP. Emo ELP: Two words, five syllables, one unsalvageable album.

I don't speak Portuguese. My knowledge of Brazilian music is restricted to the Brazilian albums I've heard on this playlist. You can definitely find more insightful figures discussing this album than me. But the album does delight, and any hesitancy I have over it may be due to my ignorance. God, I sound sagacious. Anyway, from what I have gathered, Clube da Esquina is one of the standout works of música popular brasileira, a mid-60s amalgam of standard Brazilian genres (bossa nova, samba, that sort of thing) with the recently imported jazz and rock. This album embodies the eclecticism of MPB, an eclecticism which accounts for this being a double album: they had so much to include. This makes the listener worry that Clube Da Esquina may possess the basic double album faults of becoming sluggish or staying long enough to grow whiffy, but I would say it largely avoids such failings, proving itself a dense yet lucid and soulful artifact. I can't guarantee that every song will appeal, but the open-minded should find plenty to cheer. I pause over giving it five stars, solely because of my own inexperience with Brazilian music. This may deserve a firm five, but right now I am not the one to gauge that accurately. And one can envisage Quentin Tarantino using the the end of the song Um Girassol Da Cor De Seu Cabelo for a scene of an Indigenous woman splitting Andrew Jackson's skull repeatedly with a tomahawk; if such a scene occurs, the album will instantly fall beyond rescue as terminally uncool. By the by, this generator used to credit the album only to Milton Nascimento. Thanks to me pointing out his absence, the generator now lists Lo Borges as well. Just one of my little contributions to making the world a better place. (Actually, Clube da Esquina was the name of the collective that made the album, Nascimento and Borges being the specific members who received accreditation. And the D shouldn't be capitalised in the title. There's only so much I can do before I become annoying.)

If you want to witness one of the biggest disparities between a band's earlier image and a later one, why not try contrasting Japan's early single Adolescent Sex, a late, disco-tinted and quite derivative glam stomper with a bit of a dodgy title and a video which has the band done up like a big bunch of jessies, and their later single Ghosts, a sombre, bleak and minimalist cut of New Romantic synthpop which still has them done up like a big bunch of jessies, but a markedly different breed of jessie? So yes, Japan were quite the bandwagon-jumpers, but ones which curiously missed the biggest bandwagon of their experience: punk. Instead, they were still pushing glam in 1978, and their tracks from this period didn't manage much success in Britain, so they decided to hear what Bowie had been doing in Berlin, and thus we have the Japan we all know and, er, actually, let's just stick with "know". Japan fulfilled the standard qualifier of New Romanticism: along with Adam Ant and Soft Cell, they denied being New Romantics. Was New Romanticism any good? Despite all its preeminence in documentaries about Thatcher's Britain, I don't see that much acclaim gathering around the New Romantic bands. This is due in part to the short shelf-life of outré fashions: wearing a grunge-era lumberjack shirt won't invite any comment, but styling yourself as a constructivist pierrot will have meant you have received continual howitser-blasts of "WANKER!" from schoolkids and builders since 1982. Also, robot mime accompanying New Romantic music is the most terrifying spectacle conceivable: falling off a skyscraper whilst on fire and having dozens of spiders crawl into every orifice is nowhere near as scream-inducing or bowel-emptying as two actors behind on the mortgage in white masks raising their forearms 45 degrees to the tune of Fade to Grey. The album is acceptable for what it is. It feels rather generic for the time, heavy bass and synth leads, with lyrics of alienation and glamour. Other bands made worse with the same ingredients, but other bands made better. David Sylvian, the central figure to Japan, has a very particular phrasing, which may irritate as much as beguile, but on their best songs I get what he's doing. The best songs, by the by, tend to be the slower, colder numbers (Despair, The Other Side of Life). But to explain when it doesn't gel properly, I ask the reader to consider their cover of the Velvet Underground's All Tomorrow's Parties. The original version has never enticed me, purely because of Nico's godawful voice. She sounds like a lorry reversing. David Sylvian, by default, has a much better voice. But he ridiculously tries a suave delivery which doesn't fit the song at all. When I listen to Japan, I want effeminate, dispossessed futurism, not David Sylvian acting like a cybernetic Bryan Ferry (who himself has tried and failed to perform a louche, seductive All Tomorrow's Parties). I think it's the consensus that Quiet Life isn't Japan's most feted album. Their fifth, 1981's Tin Drum, had David Sylvian include more elements of East Asian music, and this experimentalism has led some critics to vaunt Tin Drum as a standout of post-punk, synthpop and new wave. I don't really agree. Tin Drum is more interesting than Quiet Life, but Japan never rose above being a mildly interesting diversion. And with a name like Japan, you'd expect then to be a bit more seismic.

I've done quite a bit of heavy petting to The Love Below. During my gap year, I spent my days exploring my then-girlfriend's internal plumbing. She was rather a fan of the Andre 3000 half of this, and as such she often put it on to accompany our fumblings. She objected when I played the Happy Mondays for the same purpose, and from thence the relationship was doomed. Speakerboxxx/The Love Below originated with Andre 3000 developing a few tracks for a solo project, pursuing a kaleidoscopic vision leagues away from yer traditional southern hip-hop album. When he contacted Big Boi about his masterplan, Big Boi then started pursuing his vision of a southern hip-hop album. The result of all this independence was this product, two albums nestling together in the same CD case. And they're okay. Several songs from both albums will always please, but the cumulative effect is exhausting and exasperating, not ravishing. The first issue is, obviously, length. Speakerboxxx stands at nearly an hour, and The Love Below gluts out at 80 minutes. Both albums are pimpled with tedious skits (10 of the gits!) that don't go anywhere and fail to entertain. Speakerboxxx also suffers that similar hip-hop album curse of dipping in the middle due to elephantiasis. But if Speakerboxxx has elephantiasis, The Love Below has brachiosauriasis. Andre 3000 channels his inner Prince in composing this, and unfortunately includes all of Prince's faults, principally those of self-indulgence and a complete lack of quality control. Sometimes, the music is inspired, and Andre 3000 successfully fulfils that role of the fill-time dreamer (I've always liked Roses' proverb that "real guys go for real, down-to-Mars girls"). But for every Hey Ya! and Roses, there are four songs of directionless synthy funk that sound rather like Steely Dan, and that comparison isn't complimentary. And I must surely speak for the majority when I say that the incorporation of the melody to My Favourite Things in anything remotely reminiscent of hip-hop should warrant at least 18 months hard labour. Why does that keep happening? So, a work intended to be of epic scope and ambition ends up two passable-but-bloated albums with just not enough great songs. Big Boi is a playa in a game that's not that interesting, and Andre 3000's spiritual quest has left him aspiring to be a manic pixie dream boy. Why couldn't she like the Mondays?

The disco backlash was uniquely American. In Europe, people didn't torch their copies of Saturday Night Fever, but instead used disco as fertiliser for a crop of pioneering genres, from post-punk to Italo. Now, as much as commentators, with reason, point to prejudices against disco's black and gay subcultures as fuelling the backlash, it's not as if Europe lacked for such bigotries. What I say has been looked over is American exoticism as seen with the European gaze: what passes for everyday to Americans may either baffle or fascinate we Europeans. Many Americans damned disco as brainless, but many Europeans saw fierce innovation in these calls to dance. Yes, there were plenty of UK critics dismissing disco, and yes, some Americans did similar to Europe in devising new music inspired by disco, such as Chicago house, but they do not disprove the general trend of this specific American exceptionalism. And just remember: Nile Rodgers has not only had the last laugh, but he hasn't stopped laughing since 1983. Anyway, onto Risqué. One fault of Risqué is one of its great strengths: the opener, Good Times. Good Times, for several reasons, has rightfully become one of the most iconic 70s tracks (and here I'll mention its perhaps even more momentous half-sibling Rapper's Delight). The majesty of Good Times lies, of course, in Bernard Edwards' serpentine bassline, not that Nile Rodgers' guitar isn't fully up to snuff. But when you start an album with such a totem, the rest risks sounding diminished by default. To test this, I just tried listening to the album except for Good Times, and the magic of the other songs burst out. I had originally considered the strings on the rest of the album to sound too syrupy for the modern eardrum, but played independently, they sounded so warm and silky. Also, the latter half of the album revolves around themes of heartache, illicit love and betrayal, marking this out as substantially darker and richer than the fluff the name "disco" implies to some. So do we have the paradoxical result of the whole being less than the sum of its parts? Or one skyscraper of a song stealing all the other songs' sunlight? Or is it that Good Times is immediate in bestowing its rewards, whereas the other songs require more contemplation? Not the first, but I can agree to ther last two. The sheer quality of the songwriting, performances and production push this into the 5-star category, but the listener should heed the caveat that the best is the enemy of the good, and the best is Good Times.

In The Meaning of Liff, a book by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, the authors take placenames from around the world and redefine them as words for things and events that don't have a word, but should. For instance, Shoeburyness, formerly an English village, gained the meaning "the vague uncomfortable feeling you get when sitting on a seat that is still warm from somebody else's bottom." Chicago now also refers to "the foul-smelling wind which precedes an underground railway train." The relevant one for today is Zeerust, a South African town and "the particular kind of datedness which afflicts things that were originally designed to look futuristic." Take the original Star Trek, where communicators only performed one task (unlike your phone), and a female uniform ended an inch below the knicker. Jean -Michel Jarre's Oxygène embodies the zeerust of 70s synth pioneer records, but this is not to its detriment. The public perception of Jean-Michel Jarre has always struck me as dissonant, but that could be the Anglo-American perception. Everyone aged 35 or over knows exactly who he is, but they would only be able to name one song (Oxygène Part 4, obviously). Owning this album would make you seem buffy, and any other album smacks of obsession. Yet he holds the world record for the most attended concert, a 1997 Moscow concert celebrating the 350th anniversary of the city, where over 3,500,000 attended: that's more than the populations of Estonia and Latvia combined. Three other concerts of his have previously held that record. So does Europe adore Jean-Michel Jarre? Dunno: I asked a Francophone friend, and he told me that whilst he has some kudos in France as a trailblazer, nobody would be able to tell you a track of his from the 80s or 90s. Anyway, back to the zeerust of Oxygène. The European synth pioneers who have attracted by far the most acclaim are the Germans: Kraftwerk, Neu!, Tangerine Dream, those chaps. The French, whilst not seen as inadequate in the field, have never attained anything like the veneration their synthy krautrock rivals command. But these synth pioneers, regardless of origin, all now sound affectionately quaint. By pursuing the future in their present, they would become anchored to their present, our past. Partly this is just the gamble you take on when you prognosticate so; much of New Romanticism's futurism hasn't bourne out in its favour. Partly this is a side-effect of influence: when others build on your innovations, they will inevitably progress beyond you. But whereas one might presume Oxygène has dated, I don't find that the case. Yes, it's evocative of a specific 70s era I never experienced, but that just adds to the charm. A 6-track, wholly electronic instrumental album by a French avant-garde composer becoming a worldwide smash? That sadly just doesn't happen anymore. Thanks, Adele! But is Oxygène actually good stripped of context? It wholly depends on how beautiful you find it. Eventually, I found it very beautiful indeed. Yes, it may take some time to appreciate this album fully, but by my third listen it had become a treat. I'm happy giving it 5 stars, but that just reflects my impression. If you consider it a bore and a chore, I won't argue to the contrary. See, we can all just get along!

My buddies, let's have a look at the state of secretary rock in 2021. For those who don't know, secretary rock is music made for secretaries: tasteful, acoustic, worthy, romantic, unerotic, shallow, dull. My review of Tracy Chapman's Tracy Chapman goes more into the definition, so look that up if you're curious. A glance at the influences section on Lana Del Rey's Wikipedia page should cause a wariness to build. Her stated tastes as all presentable, all predictable, all mainstream, nothing even fleetingly left-field: Billie Holliday, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Britney Spears, Eminem, Amy Winehouse. Only Courtney Love provokes a quizzical huh, and that's scarcely for the audacity of the choice. And that respectability represents one of the main faults of the album: it's scared to draw or even stir blood. At one point she proclaims to be "wild at heart," which leads the listener what her devilish streak is capable of. Making a coffee with milk that's on its use-by date? Writing the word butt in her diary (which definitely has a pony on the cover)? Sleeping until 9 a.m. on a Sunday? Her parents must be so disappointed. Another issue is the uniformity. Almost every song sounds identical, with the same plucked guitar, the same tapped piano, the same overprocessed voice (the vocal affectations may seriously aggravate). This ties in to the album's tastefulness: it refuses to gamble, so every song gravitates to the same humdrum model. Also, it's impossible not to notice how often the lyrics don't scan, with compressed lines and laboured metres. The second half almost redeems the album, where Lana takes a stroll towards Americana, and she finds one or two good songs (or in some cases, snippets of songs). But I can't decipher the grand message of this album. It seems to comprise a series of vignettes which don't convey anything deep and just describe everyday scenes in Lana's life. Is Lana so interesting that her meeting her friends for a beer deserves poetic commemoration? I'd say no.

The title track was when I lost all faith. It uses the keyboard melody from Circus of Death, the B-side to the Human League's first single, and a macabre Ballardian bit of gloomsynth. It's pretty much my fave Human League track, even if it sounds faintly silly sausage. And its inclusion here would be the worst instance of record-collection rock possessing an allusion instead of a soul, were it not for the very same song ending with the same drum pattern as Joy Division's New Dawn Fades. Musicianshipwise, it's hard to chastise the album. Philosophically, you should lace up your Doc Martens and aim for the face. This is an album that not only draws inspiration from post-punk, it draws music from post-punk. On my first listen, to my recollection, I spotted Suicide, Talking Heads, the Pop Group, Gang of Four, Kraftwerk, the forementioned Human League, Joy Division numerous times, New Order duh, and worst of all, in leader James Murphy's vocal stylings, Bono. I can feel some querying why I didn't spot This Heat or the Slits. This isn't a homage to post-punk, it's a betrayal. Post-punk didn't bow towards the Easter Island statues of the past, it asserted the shock of the new. It embraced contemporary trends, from dub to disco, and distorted them through its cracked prism. By offering an album crammed with nickings from post-punk bands, all LCD Soundsystem provide is a yawn of the obvious. Why should I listen to american dream when I can just listen to Metal Box? Indeed, the title american dream reveals the truism that America doesn't really get the challenge and exploration of post-punk, but just sees it as a trendy style with which to impress girls. And aptly, by such an argument, I outhipster LCD Soundsystem. (I didn't derive the next point by myself, but got it partially from a Washington Post article, yet it's too perfect to ignore; plagiarism seems fitting for an LCD Soundystem review). For all James Murphy's quoting of Ian Curtis and Brian Eno, there's one figure he most resembles. The appeal of James Murphy as a tastemaker is based on his middle-aged uncoolness, which was exactly the pitch of Huey Lewis. Going further, both make a selling point of their awareness and self-mockery of their wackness, and both market towards groups they would claim to disavow, yuppies and hipsters (members of both groups would disavow membership of those groups, uncoincidentally). Both act as if the present isn't happening, and that musical perfection was attained at least a decade prior. And that would be fine for both artists, but it leaves LCD Soundsystem open to this (and let's face it, I'm required to do this now): "You like LCD Soundsystem? Their early work was a little too techno for my taste. But when Sound of Silver came out in '07, I think they really came into their own, commercially and artistically. The whole album has a clear, crisp sound, and a new sheen of consummate professionalism that really gives the songs a big boost. He's been compared to Daft Punk, but I think James Murphy has a far more bitter, cynical sense of humor. In '17, James released this: american dream, their most accomplished album. I think their undisputed masterpiece is "tonite". A song so catchy, most people probably don't listen to the lyrics. But they should, because it's not just about the demands of conformity and the mutability of trends. It's also a personal statement about the band itself..."

I got this for my thirteenth birthday, because everybody in school had gotten it. After about a week, I was standing in the kitchen, holding the album in my left hand and and an orange in the other. I decided to give juggling a go, and threw the orange up in the air. I had forgotten I was holding the album when I reached out to catch my orange. The orange (quite a hard orange) neatly snapped the album in two. I had to tape a mate's copy that he himself had taped off my copy. Such adolescent idiocy is fitting for The Fat of the Land, a lit bottom burp of an album. This is an album that convinced itself that PS1-era Tomb Raider was a good game solely because of Lara Croft's pointy norks. The shiniest example of its immaturity actually occurs on the sleevenotes, where they quote Goering's guns-not-butter speech, simply because they thought it sounded cool. But the most notorious instance is Smack My Bitch Up, a tabloid-baiter of a title. Sampling a couplet from an Ultramagnetic MCs track (the rapper in question, Kool Keith, raps on The Fat of the Land's Diesel Power), by focusing on the phrase "smack my bitch up" the Prodigy giftwrapped a controversy for the tabloids, who got double-bubble from both the Prodigy's popularity and infamy. In response to the artificial furore, the video to smack My Bitch Up was a first-person view of someone drinking, doing cocaine, eating a kebab, groping women, fighting, using one of those smack heroin needles, stealing a car and bedding a stripper, and at the end it turns out, gasp!, it was a woman doing all that beastly naughtiness! I presume you've heard of GTA. I also presume that you know GTA is one of the most financially successful works in any medium. I also presume you know that the visceral impact of GTA has lessened to that of a flea in an oven glove (do you know the boundary they're crossing for the next installment? A female protagonist! Quick, I need a smelling salt suppository!). The outrage The Prodigy courted was always a joke, as they knew and as everybody who objected knew, along with everybody who didn't care. The Prodigy appeared mature when you were in school, the first year of uni at a push. Do you know what you happened to start listening to the first year at uni? Bob Dylan. Tell me what's more mature: The Fat of the Land or Blood on the Tracks? Still, I'm not one to discount the moments when I crave the teenage charms of slasher flicks and masturbating over ridiculously overimplanted bososms, so I can't damn The Fat of the Land. Hell, I firmly accept that Firestarter is one of the great UK number 1s (a while ago, I was in a pub, and it turned out the youth next to me by the bar was born after Firestarter topped the charts; that's as sobering as a grey pubic hair). But everyone who's held a job will tell you: The Fat of the Land is a slightly above average album that got horrendously overpraised by people hoping it'd usher in a new punk rock, blinding themselves to the fact that the album signified nothing but flash sound and furious beats. Liam Howlett, the one in The Prodigy who actually did all the bastard music, said the ultimate defence of Smack My Bitch Up and all the other controversies was that it was meant to be dumb, akin to preferring Flavor Flav to Chuck D. In fairness, I think that defence holds up. Still, it means that the music's dumb.

It's a decent album from the late 60s. Not great, not bad, but satisfactory. No song on it is a burning orphanage, but likewise no song on it is a field of ambrosia. Nothing stands out from this album, neither positively nor negatively. I'm flummoxed as to what to write about it. Guess I'll pad. The Youngbloods were an East Coast country rock band who, discontented with the New York scene, found California much more amenable to their sensibilities. By sensibilities, I mean utterly moderate rock: no freaky-deaky wah-wahs here, matey. Yes, sometimes the album slips into jazz on occasion, but always meagrely and tastefully. And yes, we've stumbled on the album's heroic flaw. The Wikipedia page says Rolling Stone called this album a bridge between the dregs of psychedelia and the emergent country rock. What they don't mention that this is a fairly weak bridge between fairly weak psychedelia and fairly weak country rock. Again, this is a good album, in a boiled-potatoes way, But where's the flavour, the razzmatazz? Where's the rock 'n' roll? These are the nice boys who'd never light a doobie or have a prostitute urinate into their mouths, and if they desire such a wipe-clean life, then that's their perogative and I hope they're content. But who becomes a fan of a band whose hairstyles were chosen by their mums?

I'm a republican, in terms of anti-monarchistic sensibilities and not Trumpian nutjobbery about George Soros putting microchips in vaccines so as to make everyone Mexican. As a poor, grubby British kid, I couldn't fathom the logic of such ridiculous privilege falling onto such inadequates, and if anything my contempt for the monarchy has strengthened, has become as rigid as bone. Somewhere right now, Prince Edward is sitting down, thinking he's inevitably better than you. With that thought, you're seething. As a 2000-era teenager into 70s punk, I didn't rate Queen either. Not to the same extent, but more a surly resentment at the overarching position Queen had across the airwaves: lazy sound editors plomping Don't Stop Me Now or We Are the Champions over footage of sport I cared naught about only reduced the band to the level of soundbite. I couldn't tell if it were possible to like Queen unironically, and I still can't. Can anyone really have Bohemian Rhapsody as their favourite song? Isn't it just buried under the baggage of a million impressions? Anyway, Bohemian Rhapsody is not on this. But what is on this? Some stuff of interest, some stuff not. Stone Cold Crazy successfully presages thrash metal, but any such premonition of thrash metal really would just be a curio. And it's that word "curio" that encapsulates my wariness for Queen. We have here an album comprised entirely of novelty songs, an odd result for such a bunch of noted brainboxes (that said, it is rather in keeping with Freddie's theatricality). Now, you may defend Queen as the Fortnum and Mason of novelty bands, but that's a highly loaded superlative, like tallest dwarf or most literate policeman. Yes, if you want a tribute band at a student ball, a Queen sort is clearly the best option, but who would kick back of an evening and unwind to this with a glass of claret? There are three Queen albums on the list, so I'll save some of my Queen musings for later. But if you want the worst example of a band soldiering on after the lead singer's death, it's not the Doors. After Freddie's passing, the rest of the band recruited Paul Rodgers as Freddie's replacement. It's akin to following Queen Elizabeth with Prince Andrew.

Why is it so long? That question shall be our guide for diagnosing the flaws not only in this album, but of 90s albums generally. The compact disc (remember those? they were also known as CDs, if that helps) can hold 74 minutes of music; apocryphally, the inventors decided on this length in order for a single disc to be able to hold Beethoven's 9th Symphony on one disc (this isn't true, but it's a pleasant lie). This empowered musicians with the ambition to extend the lengths of their albums, but signficantly increased the prevalence of filler, shivelling the impact of their albums by filling the fuckers with inessential crap. Well done CDs, you gave licence for the Sm*sh*ng P*mpk*ins to torch two hours of my life with their conceited arse-gravy. No genre suffered more from this technological grandiosity that hip-hop. For 90s rappers, you proved the scale of both your vision and your swagger by ballooning your album to its maximal size, not caring about the resultant pop. As a stance, this is in keeping with hip-hop's machismo, but it mainly begat homogenised tracks and godawful skits. Missy Elliott is of course a lady, so you'd hope for less self-aggrandisement and more delicacy (yes, I know that's a gender stereotype, but wishing for more femininity is hardly the most unforgivable of crimes). So it's a touch heartbreaking than Missy Elliott doesn't try to flip over the table, and instead produces a 90s hip-hop album. To its credit, there's an undercurrent of soul flowing into several tracks, and these are the womanish pearlers of the album. But there's also the swamp of undistinguished, indistinguishable songs about marijuana and how Missy is not someone to mess with. This makes the album less a treat than a march. Finishing an album out of obligation isn't that gladdening a sign. To illustrate further, the track Best Friends, a sweet duet with Aaliyah about, well, friendship, would have served as a great, rewarding coda. However, here it's just track 10 of 17. This glut leads to the paradox that it's difficult to appreciate Missy Elliott's rap skills because she spends so much time demonstrating her rap skills. It's no piece of cake to consume a whole Black Forest gateau in one sitting. Finally, I'd like to discuss the conspicuous samples on certain tracks. Ann Peebles' I Can't Stand the Rain? Fine. Musical Youth's Pass the Dutchie on the track Pass Da Blunt? A joke that doesn't come off (fun fact: Pass the Dutchie was partially taken from the reggae song Pass the Kouchie, kouchie being a hash pipe; since Musical Youth were a kid-friendly act consisting of kids, they changed the cannabis references to food references, with dutchie being patois for a Dutch oven). Jamiroquai's Morning Glory? You're extracting the urine and no mistake. Three stars for the good bits.

In 1998, George Michael came out of the closet after propositioning an undercover cop in a Beverly Hills public lavatory. His army of fans across the world were deeply shocked: they had no idea that, after all these years, George Michael was still in the closet. That indicates a bizarre fact about George Michael: his perception of his music seemed radically out of sync with the perceptions of both his fans and detractors. Throughout his time in Wham!, he oft claimed a political dimension to his and Andrew Ridgeley's songs, a political dimension that nobody in the world cared about whatsoever, liking Wham! as a fun pop duo making polystyrene pop hits for teenyboppers. All this is fine: it's for the best that you don't consider your political outlook in light of Wham Rap!. Anyway, George chafed at his inbalanced partnership with Andrew, leading to instances like Careless Whisper being a semi-detached release, credited to Wham! featuring George Michael. The inescapable split came in 1986, and Faith was the first album of George Michael's solo career. And then the George Michael paradox resurfaced: the newly liberated George Michael saw himself as a versatile, visionary 80s artist in the mould of Prince and Michael Jackson, whereas the rest of the world saw him as the bloke what was in Wham!, doing songs that they fully expected from the bloke what was in Wham!. Now remember, that's what his fans wanted, and it's not meant to be a slur. That said, it does show that George craved some form of credibility beyond the women in wine bars who had Wham! posters on their walls five years prior. So, in order to be fair to George, should we judge Faith on the level he set for himself? The album is clearly ambitious, starting with the Bo Diddley rhythm of Faith, and taking on soul, jazz, ballads, electrofunk and, with the CD version, dance. Now, eclecticism is not a virtue in and of itself, and the ecleticism of Faith strikes one as calculated. Specifically, it's calculated to sound like Prince. I have to be open with you lot, my brethren: I have no affection for Prince. Now is not the occasion to explain myself, but ask yourself this: in Little Red Corvette, not only does he slutshame the poor woman, he claims she carries round used condoms in her pocket. Who would walk around town with a used condom in their pocket, let alone more than one? Who would include such an incomprehensible detail in a song? But anyway, by default I prefer our George doing Prince than Prince doing Prince, but that is not much of an endorsement. However, it goes some way to explaining the paradox: our George didn't realise his ideas weren't especially original or profound, nor did he realise that nobody listened to him for originality or profundity, but because they found him fun. Take the title track: our George sought to make a rock 'n' roll pastiche and a declaration of independence after the breakup of Wham!. But he undercuts the latter with the opening lines, "Well, I guess it would be nice if I could touch your body/ I know not everybody has got a body like you", causing George's audience to treat it as a cheeky, sexy ditty. Yes, I can see that our George thought he should start the song with a lure for the listener, but he didn't clock that the listener just wanted the lure and not the declaration. Better George's roguish grin than his showy posturing. And our George didn't realise that this album was not a revolutionary artistic statement, but an acceptable bit of upscale 80s pop. This album isn't really for me, but it is for plenty of others. It wasn't aimed for them, but does that matter? Have some perspective, detective.

My first album from the bottom ten. An album with such a status naturally generates apprehension, a fear that one is due for an hour of the absolutely unlistenable. It also naturally generates some pre-emptive affection, some desire to look kindly upon the underdog. Me, I like to think I've a steely spine and resilient eardrums, so I'm not phased by an album purporting to be tricky. Laibach are a Slovenian group associated with the Neue Slowenische Kunst, a Slovenian art collective formed in 1980 in what was Yugoslavia during the Cold War. Tending towards industrial and neoclassical music, Laibach frequently employs authoritarian, mechanistic and militaristic themes and imagery. This in turn has led to accusations of bad taste and dodgy political sentiments (it's not at all hard to find Laibach wearing ersatz SS uniforms minus the swastikas). I would say that it's pretty clear that Laibach belong with the firm left rather than anything right-wing (they have occasionally used works by the anti-Nazi dadaist John Heartfield on their record sleeves). I shall also mention that Laibach, as part of NSK, has formed their own country without borders, and issues passports to whoever requests them; during the breakup of Yugoslavia, some people managed to use these unofficial passports to escape the region and the violence. Anyway, on to Opus Dei. From the off, one can detect a dadaist leaning in their choice of songs they choose to adapt: Opus' Live is Life and Queen's One Vision (in Geburt einer Nation). Live is Life, that persistently naff 80s package holiday anthem beloved by mulleted Teutons and lobster-red tourists, occurs twice on the album as a harsh marching anthem with collectivist, dominative lyrics, but both times it just comes off as a comical cover of Live is Life, akin to a thrash metal take on Baby One More Time. Likewise, Geburt einer Nation just seems a suitably camp metal version of One Vision, despite the implications of an unsympathetic lyrical reading of the Queen song (one may draw an unpleasant parallel between "one man, one soul, one mission" and "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer"). The rest of the album (or rather, the rest of the vinyl edition of the album, more on that later) maintains this humorous, theatrical air and, for all its purported harshness, can be easily treated as an elaborate gag. Thus, your appreciation of the album may depend on how funny you find it. Personally, whereas it's not quite that I found the joke wearing thin, I wasn't bent double, gasping for air through the spasmic laughter. The CD version of Opus Dei featured a bonus of 4 tracks from their soundtrack album Baptism, and that's what I came here for. Devoid of Opus Dei's attempted satire, the uncompromising stamp of the last four mesmerises, successfully demonstrating the morbid, noisome allure of the despotic and warlike. With the bonus material, it appears that Laibach remembered that if you're going to be an industrial band, you shouldn't be coy about it. So, three stars for the album in total, the full five for the last four.

Despite the supposed lethality of the rock 'n' roll lifestyle, the memorial album isn't really that common. Or rather, the great memorial album isn't really that common. Everyone can name the most obvious choice: AC/DC's Back in Black, the band's immensely raucous farewell to their lead singer and buddy Bon Scott. But apart from that, very few albums satisfy both qualities. Perhaps the only other major example is this, the indie Back in Black, the Manic Street Preachers' Everything Must Go. Richey Edwards was, along with the bassist Nicky Wire, the Manics' main lyricist; he was also credited as their rhythm guitarist, but his musical skills were rudimentary at best, his guitar left unplugged during most live shows. Richey was also a very troubled young man, prone to depression, self-harm, anorexia and alcoholism. With their previous album The Holy Bible, Richey unleashed his despondent vision, with themes of the Holocaust, murder, consumerism, radical left-wing politics and despair. The band, friends and family had already become seriously concerned with his behaviour when he disappeared on the 1st of February 1995. His car was found near the River Severn Bridge two weks later. It is not known what exactly happened to Richey Edwards; though several sightings have been reported since, none have been confirmed, and the most common assumption is that he jumped from the bridge. He would have been aged 27. He was officially presumed dead on the 23rd of November, 2008. The centrepiece of Everything Must Go is the title track, not A Design for Life, the Manics' most popular song. Everything Must Go is one of the two songs that directly addresses how the remaining Manics sought to cope with the loss of their friend and in-house ideologue. Whereas AC/DC salutes Bon Scott martially with Have a Drink on Me, Everything Must Go is an apologia to Richey, an admittance that the band can't retain his outlook with his departure, and instead has to explore whatever path emerges for them. The chorus is heartbreaking when you realise they're asking their friend to forgive them for no longer being the band he wanted them to be. As anyone who's lost someone will tell you, the guilt you feel for moving on is palpable. But the Manics choose not a sombre tone: they start with the Be My Baby drumbeat. Their commemoration of Richey celebrates his life, expressing their fear of the future, but realising that they have no choice but to keep on walking forward. The memory of Richey appears often throughout the album. Five of the 12 songs were co-written by him. The opener, Elvs Impersonator: Blackpool Pier (one of Richey's creations), mocks cheap, tawdry and pathetic nostalgia; in retrospect, this rejection of the past achieves a greater poignancy. More grimly, Kevin Carter, based on a South African photographer of the Rwandan genocide, concerns a figure who took his own life, and Small Black Flowers that Grow in the Sky explicitly references self-harm (Richey had penned both). But the tracks written after Richey's disappearance reveal a band handling their grief, not wallowing in it. A Design for Life stems far more from Nicky Wire's politics than Richey's: George Orwell and the welfare state rather than Herbert Marcuse and the Weathermen. The sound of the album exhibits a walloping shift from their previous album: string-laden and often bombastic, with little of The Holy Bible's post-punk abrasiveness. The final track, No Surface All Feeling, contains perhaps the album's ultimate message: What's the point in always looking back When all you see is more and more junk? I don't believe the question is wholly rhetorical. Rather, it's a band of friends sincerely asking themselves if reminiscence is worthwhile, given it can engender bitterness as much as consolation. For all their reputation as agit-prop sloganeers, Everything Must Go shows the Manics embracing nuance, of accepting that some of the most important questions might not even have answers. Although not strictly speaking a Britpop album (you'd never see the Manics parading a Union Jack), Everything Must Go is one of the most rewarding albums of British indie in the 90s. The critical consensus regarding the period of The Holy Bible and Everything Must Go is that the Manics never reached such heights again. With the most generous will in the world, one is forced to agree. Sure, you can find the occasional corker in the subsequent decades, but it's those two albums upon which the Manics' legacy stands.

I don't care. Four listens where I stayed awake, and once more when I was nodding off, and I can't think of anything engaging to write about this album. Once I was writing articles for an ESL textbook, and I received an assignment to bash out 500 words on the Canadian Tulip Festival. I struggled to stay alive writing it, I was that bored. There is no interesting fact about the Canadian Tulip Festival. The festival stemmed from when the Dutch royal family sent Canada a load of tulips after WW2. I don't care, and neither do you. The first festival was in 1953. I can't conceive of any person who would have interest in that detail. Over 300,000 tulips are displayed at the festival every year. That's over 300,000 cases of me not giving a toss. Alanis Morissette gave her first public performance aged 12 at the 1987 festival. A far more fascinating titbit about Alanis I once heard is that, apparently, she's not adverse to a bit of backdoor action.* Is the Canadian Tulip Festival a good tulip festival? I have no clue whatsoever; I don't know at all what constitutes a tulip festival of merit, except that it probably needs a lot of tulips (although could you have a tulip festival of just one tulip? What if it were a really, really big tulip, like the size of a Jeep or a Wetherspoons?). Is Aqualung a good concept album? I don't like the concept behind the concept album. One can make a thematically and atmospherically harmonious album without stapling on a narrative about a wheelchair-bound deafmute who starts a nuclear war via his ability to receive radio waves mentally, all to show everyone the folly of monetarism (that's the concept behind an actual album, Roger Waters' Radio K.A.O.S.). Oh wait, according to Jethro Tull it's not a concept album, it just shares many traits with those of concept albums. I would say that such inane pedantry would render the album mockworthy, but I can't because that would involve me caring one jot. What does anybody want me to say about this? The leader, Ian Anderson, made Jethro Tull stand out from the other prog groups by playing the flute. In terms of gimmicks, it's hardly Rick Wakeman wearing a full suit of armour or Stacia from Hawkwind dancing with her jubblies out, is it? Jethro Tull was named after the inventor of the seed drill. Can you think of a less interesting origin for a band name? I've sat here for 15 minutes trying, and one just isn't emerging. Oh, maybe this is interesting: the first two songs introduce two characters, Aqualung and Cross-Eyed Mary. Aqualung is a homeless man with a lung condition (hence the nickname Aqualung), who spends his days masturbating in playgrounds. Cross-Eyed Mary is a schoolgirl prostitute who Aqualung ogles through the schoolyard fence. And that's it from them. So, turns out it wasn't interesting after all. The theme of the second half of the album is a sardonic dismissal of organised religion. I'm an atheist, and to me that's akin to pointing out that water is useful when you're a bit thirsty, and if you're religious, you'd probably find it smug and uninsightful. This isn't a one-star album, and that's the problem: a disaster of Hindenbergian proportions would at least be a curiosity. This is a two-star album that is so dull it's not even intriguing in its tedium: it's just dull. *The author would like to make clear that they have no knowledge whatsoever pertaining to the proclivities of Ms. Morissette, and no inference or judgement on that matter should be made regarding the statement referring to Ms. Morissette in the preceding passage.

Bit of serendipity: earlier this week, I reviewed the Manic Street Preachers' Everything Must Go, which I said was one of the two truly great albums made in response to the death of a decisive member of the band. Indeed, I called it the indie Back in Black. Two days later, Back in Black roars onto my feed as if summoned. Of course, it behoves me to explain the painful tale behind Back in Black. AC/DC had achieved international success with their excellent 1979 album Highway to Hell, establishing them as standard-bearers for hard rock. As they planned their follow-up, their lead singer Bon Scott went off on a drinking binge with a friend, glugging back quadruple scotches. When Scott lost consciousness, a friend bundled Scott into the back of his Renault 5, expecting him to sleep off the booze. Opening his car to check on Scott, the friend found him unresponsive. Scott was rushed to hospital, but pronounced dead on arrival. The coroner ruled that Scott had choked on his own vomit, and "acute alcoholic poisoning" was listed as the cause of death. He was 33. The band, stricken with grief, considered disbanding, but family and friends persuaded them that Bon would have wishhed the band to continue. Holding auditions for a lead singer, they chose Brian Johnson, a Geordie from a band called Geordie. The first member of AC/DC to notice Brian was, oddly, Bon, who had praised Brian's singing to AC/DC's guitarist Angus Young. Focusing on their next album, the band decided to show their state of mourning by calling the album Back in Black. They had wanted the sleeve to just be solid black, but the record label insisted on the grey band symbol and album title. Back in Black would become, according to some measures, the second best-selling album of all time. Explaining why Back in Black is wonderful is like explaining why Some Like It Hot is wonderful: the answer is so nakedly evident, it feels foolish to elaborate. Some Like It Hot is just very funny, and Back in Black just rocks the fillings out your head. Sure, it's puerile, crass, unsubtle and unreconstructed, but to its credit it's puerile, crass, unsubtle and unreconstructed. It's meant to be immediate, fierce and hedonistic. Even the most criticisable aspect of the album, its apparent sexism, strikes me as far more voluptuary than misogynistic. Chuck Klosterman once wrote that future generations may conclude that AC/DC were the defining band of rock just because of the amount of songs they performed with "rock" in the title (this album has "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution"), and from our perspective that would be one of the best summaries of rock future generations could make. Being snotty about this album feels ridiculous, not least because no bodily fluid could ever faze this band. When I wrote my review of Everything Must Go, I found myself focusing on how the band dealt with Richey Edwards' disappearance, asking Richey to forgive them for moving on. With Back in Black, the band's means of processing their loss is markedly different. The band celebrates their fallen comrade-in-arms by making exactly the album he would have wanted to make. This is clearest and most notorious on Have a Drink on Me, a song about the joys of binge drinking. However, this refusal to compromise makes the song, and the album, a triumph, almost an act of heroism. When struck by tragedy, AC/DC refused to bow, and proved that they possessed that greatest of traits: they endured.

When does consistency become tedium? When does authenticity become dogmatism? When does a signature become an irritant? Can an album soar if it raises these questions in the listener? Is it a bad sign that I'm asking myself these questions? The Black Keys are Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney, a duo from glamorous Akron, Ohio, a city famous for Devo and its oatmeal. Usually lumped in with the garage rock revival of the 2000s, the Black Keys most resemble a non-quasi-incestuous White Stripes, basing their sound on the electric blues of Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf. Which leads to the most straightforward question: why not just listen to Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf? Do the Black Keys surpass the legendary electric bluesmen, or at least put some air between themselves and the legendary electric bluesmen? Of course they don't. That doesn't make the album bad, but as an ambition it's both lofty and meagre, that of emulating great artists because you have little faith in your own creative spleen. So yeah, record rollection rock. And, frustratingly, the Black Keys have a great song. More exactly and frustratingly, they have exactly one great song that they repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat and (I'll stop now). Always the same fuzz guitar, the same overamplified vocals, the same bitter love lyrics. These are the ingredients for one great song, not all 15 on an album. And I should point out what everyone knows: that one great song is Lonely Boy, which isn't on this album. I occasionally wonder what bands would have worked better as one-hit wonders, usually choosing Green Day with Basket Case. The Black Keys have usurped them as my go-to answer to that question. Of course this album is enjoyable in the moment, but it leaves you feeling so hollow, so unsatiated. It smacks heavily of that persistent American tendency where acts falsely assume that strict obedience towards a genre's tropes demonstrates loyalty and not a deficient imagination. Why just impersonate Hank Williams, Bo Diddley, the Ramones, Tupac or Britney? Their records haven't gone out of print. An inessential album, in the most fundamental sense of that word. Still, 3 stars because it sounds alright.

"Confusion will be my epitaph." A central line of the album, I defy you to think of anything more succinctly pompous. The reference to death, the deliberate ambiguity, the fact that the band hasn't realised the lyric makes balls-all sense: this album wants to be taken seriously, but there is nothing whatsoever that makes the listener contemplate (fuck the standard claims that cannabis opens up this album; that's no better than saying the album sounds better when you're drunk). Is there a more pernicious album in the canon? This is the album that invented prog rock, after all. Prog rock, my dear sugarplums, is the worst music genre of all. Prog rock is a perversion of all of rock's wonders. The smuggest, most conceited genre, prog rock bands wilfully failed to clock that their music was completely empty, that for all their virtuosity and Tolkien references (a children's author, for fuck's sake!), they had nothing to say at all. Every Roger Waters era Pink Floyd album has no deep message other than, "it's grim up north". Do you need further proof than the title of Yes' Tales of Topographic Oceans? I'll give it to you: Tales of Topographic Oceans was supposedly based on a series of Hindu texts, yet when pressed, the band admitted that they'd never evn read them. Or how about literally any lyric from Emerson, Lake and Palmer (Greg Lake was the guitarist and vocalist on ITCOTCK, and recycled the line "Confusion with be my epitaph" for their cyborg armadillo concept album Tarkus (yes, cyborg armadillo))? By the by, if you rearrange ITCOTCK, you get TIT COCK. As far as I can gauge, TIT COCK doesn't have an overarching concept. That is, I can't discern a central theme, even though the men involved (and it is only men) may claim that the album outlined the gulf between man in the hypothetical state of nature and man in the hyperthetical modern world of concrete and electricity. Horrifically, as I typed that, I realised that some trainspotters will assert that as the authentic reading of TIT COCK. Do you not comprehend that you can read anything into any old cryptic claptrap? Did you think "I Talk to the Wind" was a sagacious insight of a guru at one with Arcadia? If you're talking, you're technically talking to the wind except if you're in space. Hitler giving his speeches at the Nuremberg Rally was talking to the wind. And that inprovised section of Moonchild (a title condensed to utter painfulness) isn't improvisation, it's just hitting instruments at random. All this would be tolerable if the album had a sense of fun, a sense of theatricality, a sense of camp. But no, this is a serious contrivance, a work purporting to reveal the depths of humanity. But this album lacks the gravity for me to truly hate it, but instead I dismiss it like a wasp landing on my forearm. To give a contrast, I went and listened to Joy Division's Closer, an album I take seriously. I felt my eyes moisten during the third track. TIT COCK only made me mock. It shouldn't be a scream on the cover, it should be a boo. 21st Century Schizoid Man is one of Tony Blair's favourite songs.

A tricksy album to discuss, in that it took me several days to write this. Exceptionally well-made, the cover itself tells us that discussed within are serious, emotive issues. Such an undertaking behoves that both the album and the listener adopt a suitably mature attitude, as frivolity easily could turn to offence. Largely, the album succeeds so. Yes, I proffer minor caveats, but not enough to upset anyone, I hope. The genesis of SAULT and this album are rather commentable on their own. SAULT are a black music collection, apparently based in Britain, who have never given a definitive list of band members, let alone performed live or released a video. Emerging in 2019 with the album 5, they would also publish the album 7 in the same year, then this album and Untitled (Rise) the next year. Untitled (Black Is) was released in June 2020, a month after the death of George Floyd at the knee of a police officer. George Floyd's death would sparks protests across not only America, but much of the world, and this album is a declared revolt against systematic racism, of which police brutality is just one symptom. As I said, this is an album to take seriously. The parenthesised title serves as the leitmotif of the album, especially during the spoken word sections, with lists declaring what black is. And here's a caveat: I recognise the intended positivity of these parts, but that didn't prevent me finding them a touch platitudinous. Obvious messages will seem obvious: me saying democracy is a good thing is clearly right, but hardly paradigm-shifting, despite the prevalence of dictatorships in our time. Another caveat: invoking God and religion never stirs me all righteous in protest works. Is religion that effective a mechanism of social improvement? Couldn't God just solve all this right now? Don't millions think God is on the side of that racist traitor Tr*mp? Appealing to Christianity didn't really work on What's Going On, doesn't really work here. (And yes, I believe I have failed in my ambition to avoid upsetting anyone). I think that's the end to the caveats. The most conspicuous aspect of this album is its production: it's dauntingly good, warm yet crisp, like a good roast potato. The second most conspicuous aspect is its kaleidoscopic eclecticism. Although this site classifies the album as soul and funk, the album respectfully passes through gospel, doo-wop, reggae, hip-hop, R&B, and even African polyrhythms. Thankfully, the album avoids the senselessness that occasionally arises when artists try so many genres so rapidly. But the album stands on the resonance of its message. In that regard, they've shown their workings (although when they sing the line "From Egypt to Libya", they forget that the two countries border one another, so it's not really continent-encompassing). It's worthwhile, indeed it's slightly humbling, to listen to the album whilst reading the lyrics. For all the album's focus on racial justice and equality, it's also a profoundly feminine album. With some exception, the voices of this album are exclusively female, and the album bombards with love, reassurance and optimism. For all its justified outrage, this is an album that wants to hug the world, and pleads with the world to justify its hug. An album with a wonderful heart, and one a damn sight nobler than Public Enemy's Fear of a Black Planet going all anti-Semitic, methinks.

There doesn't seem much point analysing this in 2022, prima facie. Its innovations have diffused so much into music since that it feels, if not quite archaic, then venerable to be generous, or aged to be mean. Ultimately, its status as a transitional work makes it both important and ever so slight. Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, Ray Charles' 18th album, found Charles taking a significant gamble. A rhythm and blues musician presenting a modified form of country music in early 1960s America carried the risk of bigots treating the album as a provocation. However, Charles succeeded in not only adding new instrumentation, orchestration and direction to country and folk standards, but continuing to develop the nascent genre of soul. But you would have noticed in the first paragraph some reluctance on my part to extol the album. Of course, there's great stuff on this. But the title hints at one of the reasons for my hesitancy: it's a collection of modern sounds, rather than a fully cohesive album. That's hardly the fault of the album or Ray Charles. It's the fault of my own expectations. We have passed through the album era, with its evolution of the album as a unified artwork, so when we look back at the earliest albums, they can seem akin to compilations. Should we seek to cleanse ourselves of these predispositions? Can we? I honestly don't know. I also said that the album was a transitional work, a work whose experiments helped determine the course several genres would take in the upcoming years. However, that carries with it the aspect that not every experiment works. Personally, I don't much favour the numbers drenched in strings and choral singers, finding them mawkish and very dated. I reckon quite a few current listeners would concur with me. This could again be my partialities, or it could be the simple consequence of time on a sixty-year-old album. I don't envisage myself warming to such syrup in the future, but maybe I shouldn't make such a blunt prediction. The critical tenor of this review is perhaps a gnat unfair, since I've spent two paragraphs explaining why I can't fully embrace the album. Be assured that there is much to savour. And one heavyweight point of the album is that music doesn't benefit from segregation, be it imposed or adopted. Here we have a luminous illustration of how rhythm and blues musicians took as much inspiration from country musicians as country musicians took from rhythm and blues musicians. Compare that to George Clinton digging hard rock, Detroit house tipping their caps to Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode, and the inexhaustible phalanxes of rappers praising Phil Collins as a genius. Wait, with that last example, have I demolished my own argument?

Remember the Millennium Prayer? 1999, celebrity Christian Sir Ciff Richard recorded a single where he sang the Lord's Prayer to the tune of Auld Lang Syne. His record company EMI declined to release it, at which point it became a cause célèbre among British Christians, with the single being released by an independent and shooting to No.1; Westlife beat it to the Christmas number one. Now, the Millennium Prayer is not a good song, no way José. But could it have worked? Is there a singer who could have produced a credible version of Our Father to Auld Lang Syne? I contend that only one man could have been up to the task: Shane MacGowan. Shane MacGowan is a public school educated turned oikish punk turned drunken Irish poet who somehow has made all those transformations seem natural. This may be due to the teeth: Shane MacGowan famously has the worst teeth in all of showbusiness. But those teeth seem the teeth of authenticity. A man with a smile so broken must be a man of experience, if not necessarily of wisdom. MacGowan formed the Pogues in 1982, seeking to fuse Irish folk music with the spirit of punk (the name is a contraction of "pogue mahone", a transliteration of the Irish Gaelic phrase for "kiss my arse". This happens to be their third LP, and very much a continuation of the Irish Celtic punk aesthetic, with emphasis on the Celt. By which it should be taken that your opinion may vary drastically. If you find Irish folk grating and charmless, then this will just prove an hour-long headache. The more accepting of you lot should find this quite the delight. I tend towards the latter: there's a lot of stuff that elated me, especially Shane's exceptionally shaggy storytelling. Exploring further, If I Should Fall from Grace with God contains the three most famous Pogues songs. Firstly, one has to mention Fairytale of New York, their Christmas duet with Kirsty MacColl. again, the divisiveness the Pogues' style of music comes into play: plenty would say Fairytale of New York is the greatest of all Christmas singles, whereas I also know plenty who'd say it's horrifically overrated and horrifically overplayed. As for me, the voice of sanity, I say it's alright, but the best Christmas single ever is clearly Slade's Merry Xmas Everybody. Secondly, Fiesta has the Pogues try a Spanish party song to quite some success, and it's been in loads of adverts, so you'd recognise it when you hear it. Indeed, the album has quite a Hispanic undercurrent. Everywhere has folk, I guess. But the most interesting song historically is Street of Sorrow/Birmingham Six. The first half, Streets of Sorrow, is a folk song by Pogues member Terry Woods concerning the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The second half, Birmingham Six, declares its support for the Birmingham Six and the Guilford Four, two groups of Irishmen who had been convicted in 1975 over terrorist bombings attributed to the IRA the previous year, and who had maintained their innocence, saying that the police had tortured confessions out of them. When the Pogues recorded the song, the British government had banned Sinn Fein and other loyalist groups from speaking on television and radio in the UK, leading to the absurdity of Gerry Adams and his ilk having their voices dubbed on the news as a means of circumventing the ban. When the Pogues sought to perform the song on TV, the authorities declared such an event unacceptable, due to the lyrics: There were six men in Birmingham In Guildford, there's four That were picked up and tortured And framed by the law And the filth got promotion But they're still doing time For being Irish in the wrong place And at the wrong time. The convictions for the Guilford Four and the Birmingham Six were overturned in 1989 and 1991 respectively. So remember that, for all the album's boozy bonhomie, rowdiness and sentimentality, it's oft more serious and more bitter than the advertised face suggests.

Dreams have become demoted. Throughout history, humanity has sought meaning in their somnolent imagery. Traditionally, people deciphered ambiguous prophecy in reverie, and psychoanalysis held that the more furtive secrets of the individual psyche revealed themselves during dreams. Nowadays, the scientific consensus believes that dreams mean nothing whatsoever, and they are just the result of random synapse firing during sleep. Your bowel movements say more about you than your dreams. But what about dream pop? For those outside the cognoscenti, dream pop is a style of indie that evolved in the eighties, which made melody-driven guitar pop smashed up with reverb, echo, distortion and whatever all the sliders on the mixing desk could do. This also tended to strip the singing of its diction, making the lyrics incomprehensible and the vocals just part of the music's multilayed texture. The resulting emphasis on exquisite, woozy noise made the music appear more emotive than intellectual, focusing on a blissful soundscape rather than lyrical didactics. Well, that's the standard critical line. Critics have raved about the transcendental nature of dream pop (and its sibling shoegaze), how it replaces meaning with ecstasy. Me, I feel some scepticism on my tongue. Dream pop's wilful indistinction usually produced tracks ("songs" doesn't seem the right term) that sounded pretty indistinct from each other. I know that is a partly intended effect, and that it facilitates the understanding of the album as a piece, but I care naught for intentions. It may be an unintended consequence that dream pop's homogenity could induce boredom, but it is still a real consequence. But anyway, the Cocteau Twins were a Scottish indie group that were one of the major pioneers of dream pop, especially with Elizabeth Fraser's indecipherable singing. This, their most celebrated album and the signature album of their label 4AD, exhibits the strengths and weaknesses of dream pop: it has moments of sublimity, but those moments are muted by dull passages that counterintuitively sound rather like the good bits but not as good. The album peaks halfway with the title track, but then gradually yet continuously slips further and further into languor as the album progresses. In their attempt to make the definitive Cocteau Twins' sound, they forgot to add other sounds, leaving their sound sounding less special and more superficial. The whole is less than the sum of its parts. For comparison, when writing the review I also listened to Treasure, the other Cocteau Twins album on the list. Though ther best seconds on Treasure are perhaps not as beautiful as the best seconds on Heaven or Las Vegas, it does have the benefit of divergent tracks. I'll deal with Elizabeth Fraser's voice when I get to reviewing that album. That alright with you?

With my last review, I found myself tackling dream pop via the Cocteau Twins' Heaven or Las Vegas. Now, who should turn up at the front door but the cousin of dream pop, noise pop? The distinction between the two isn't exact: both tend towards bubblegum melodies and walls of sound, with dream pop emphasising texture more and noise pop focusing on noise (funny that). So, more feedback and distortion, but both could open an Adam Curtis documentary on how the Biafran War directly led to TikTok. I expressed a mild guardedness for dream pop, as its style could slip into gimmickry with diminishing returns over the course of an album. Noise pop makes me similarly wary for similar reasons. It's nice to have a clear style, but a style is not a philosophy, and overexposure can reveal a scantiness to the substance. That said, I tend to prefer noise pop to dream pop: dreams are meaningless, noise is not. Darklands is the Jesus and Mary Chain's second album, and their second most acclaimed. Their debut album, Psychocandy, is now seen as one of the definitive albums of the eighties, especially in British indie circles. However, the two brothers behind the band, William and Jim Reid, had grown resentful of the rabid image the press had painted of them (the tabloids called them the new Sex Pistols due to the violence that tended to erupt at their gigs). Along with this, their drummer Bobby Gillespie left to pursue his own band Primal Scream, with the Jesus and Mary Chain employing a drum machine for this album. So, Darklands features much less of the guitar squeal of Psychocandy and, let me commit heresy, better-structured songs. I prefer the best songs on Darklands to the best songs on Psychocandy. You could argue that Psychocandy is meant to be treated as an album rather than a collection of songs, but I will point to my earlier criticism that an album of one noise can swiftly become wearying. Also, Darklands is less overtly record-collection rock, meaning you don't spend the entire album just ticking off references to the Velvet Underground (although you do spend some of it on that unimpressive activity). But anyway, whilst there are fantastic songs on Darklands, I wonder if it's momentous enough. Darklands is a fine album, but it just misses by a pubewidth in making me truly giddy. I don't feel my heart bursting when I listen to it, and that's surely the effect one desires. Maybe further listens will induce that full sense of bliss, but I have other things to do as well. Such as your mum.

Are there any award ceremonies that aren't an unloved farce? Will Smith slapping Chris Rock has been the only occasion when anyone has cared about the Oscars in at least 20 years. The most famous Nobel laureate for literature in recent times is Bob Dylan, and he couldn't be bothered to show up to collect it. And music awards are perhaps the most risible. Yes, we all cheered when Jarvis Cocker waved his arse in protest at Michael Jackson impersonating Christ at the Brits, but remember that the organisers thought Michael Jackson impersonating Christ was a good idea. The group that has won the most Grammies? U2, the most milquetoast, most conservative, least interesting, least deserving choice possible. And don't we all know these payola-provided ceremonies are solely to buttress the already eclipse-inducing egos of the tapeworms of the music industry, those who spend their working lives drafting contracts designed to leave the artists owing them money after they made the corporation enough dosh to buy Lithuania? I mention this because PJ Harvey has the apparent honour of being the only act to win the Mercury Prize twice. For those who don't know (nobody cares, as everyone knows), the Mercury Prize is an annual award to choose the best album from Britain and Ireland. In fairness, the Mercury Prize has managed some hits along with the misses: Screamadelica, Dummy, Different Class and the debuts of Suede, Franz Ferdinand and the Arctic Monkeys all seem solid in retrospect, but without looking up, can you name who won with the albums Elegant Slumming, A Little Deeper, Speech Therapy or An Awesome Wave? Indeed, the Mercury curse is the name given to the observed phenomenon that a Mercury Prize has sounded the death knell for plenty an act. Anyone remember the Klaxons? Anyone care? So we can't really infer the quality of PJ Harvey's work by way of her industry accolades. Mind, we can infer the quality of PJ Harvey's work by way of the exceptionally consistent quality of her albums. Yes, I have dithered for a bit, but just saying she's excellent doesn't really boost the word count, does it? Expanding the praise, PJ Harvey has real claim to be the best female singer-songwriter of the 90s. Dry, her debut album, has her kicking down the door, demanding with sheer talent that the world take notice. One can discern influences from blues, folk, punk and post-punk, but PJ Harvey clearly operates in her own genre, follows her own muse. This glorious independence rattles throughout the album, and it's an independence that she has never sacrificed. Anyway, note the year 1992. 1992 was also the year that grunge exploded. Sorry America, it was this album that properly sounded electrifying, punky, uncompromising, honest and raw. Bit more than Ugly Kid Joe, know what I mean?

There's a concept in video game analysis called ludonarrative dissonance. The term refers to the occasion where the mechanics of play conflict with the plot, themes or aesthetics of the story. So, for instance, Nathan Drake of the Uncharted series is portrayed storywise as a roguish, charismatic treasure hunter, but the game has the player directing Nathan Drake to murder literally hundreds of people. Although a few games use ludonarrative dissonance purposefully to discombobulate the player, most instances of ludonarrative dissonance are negative in effect, ripping the player out of their immersion as the discrepancy jars and the game stops making sense. The title track which opens The The's Infected has a similar issue, a musicolyrical dissonance, if you will. Infected has the band pursuing a markedly different path to their earlier (better) output, going full slick 80s: Grand Canyon-echoed drums, synthy horn blarps a-gogo and production aiming for perfection by hacking out all tissue in any way associated with the human heart. Yet the opening line, "Infect me with your love", is a cackhanded reference to the AIDS epidemic. The incongruity is palpaple. Yuppie wine bar rock is surely not the aptest genre to handle such a devastation? You don't get the Wiggles writing numbers in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, or Slayer's odes to holding hands with their teenage sweetheart, do you? So yeah, the album doesn't sit comfortably with itself. The record is intended to be an overtly political one, every word glossed with anti-Thatcherism, and the lyrics are suitably bitter and occasionally arresting. However, the music itself sounds wholly like aspirational fodder for the conspicuously consuming classes. After the opener, the division becomes less stark, but still the Phil Collinsity of the music cheapens the lyrical worth. This is not to say that the album fails per se, and I feel charitable enough towards it to say it just about deserves three stars, but it squeaked into that bracked. You can find quite a few bits deserving of your time, but often the medium negates the message. I don't know why a parody of the Aerosmith logo is on the cover. Maybe they don't like Aerosmith.

Quick, name a group where the drummer is the most important member. First, let's deal with some obvious choices. Keith Moon of the Who would crash bang wallop into plenty of people's minds when posed that question (although, even subtracting the years when they had separated, the Who has existed for for over twice as many years without Keith Moon than with him). John Bonham, the drunken blacksmith of Led Zeppelin, at least had the band disband when he carked it. Some may suggest Neil Peart, but that carries the proviso that Rush were a right load of yellowing wank. And if Rush are yellowing wank, then the Eagles with Don Henley are fluorescently yellow wank, a yellow that can take out your eyeballs. My dear quackers, the connoisseur's choice for the best decisive drummer in a band is Can's Jaki Liebezeit, the funkiest German who ever drew breath. Against sensible writing practice, I shall not discuss the deific rhythm of Jaki Liebezeit here, as it makes more sense to me that such a hagiography belongs in my review of Tago Mago, their freaky-deaky masterpiece where one cannot distinguish between Jaki and his drumkit. So instead, a quick explanation of Can. Can began in the late sixties when keyboardist and student of Karlheinz Stockhausen Irmin Schmidt returned to Cologne from New York, fascinated by the Velvet Underground and Sly and the Family Stone. Schmidt joined up with bassist and fellow Stockhausen alumnus Holger Czukay and Czukay's guitarist pupil Michael Karoli to forge a new, European take on rock, not blues-based but informed by the avant-garde and musique concrete the men had been weaned on. Add to the mixture a disaffected free jazz virtuoso drummer who had been developing a whole new philosophy of beat, and thence were born both Can and krautrock. Krautrock is the not-especially-PC term contemporary British champions gave for experimental German rock of the 1970s. The astute reader might wonder why we employed the term krautrock at all, since Britain also had its share of experimental rock bands, which we unified with the nominer progressive rock. I like to think that the distinction is important because the 70s German experimental rock bands were a billion times better than the 70s British experimental rock bands. The krautrock bands had no time for flatulent solos, dimwitted concept albums or overwhelmingly banal themes pilfered from Tolkien and Heinlein (if you dare compare Can to Pink Floyd, I will break your hands). Instead, they followed their cutting-edge classical forerunners in making genuinely expansive music that stepped beyond the templates of rock song structure into the realm of the infinitely possible. Although the separate krautrock groups each pursued markedly different paths, two broad styles emerged: the dreamy cosmic ambience of Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel, and the 4/4 motorik beat-driven hypnotic bliss of Can, Neu! and Kraftwerk. As much as I love the former, it's the latter that's clearly what you want to spend your pocket money on. There are two figures to Can I haven't mentioned yet: the singers. The first singer was Malcolm Mooney, an African-American beatnik poet who sadly suffered from mental health issues and had to return to New York after cutting their first released album, the excellent Monster Movie. Finding themselves singerless for an upcoming gig one evening, earlier that day Can spotted a Japanese busker called Damo Suzuki giving a performance art piece in the middle of the street and recruited him straight away. Fortunately Damo's beautiful gibberish (a fusion of English, German, Japanese and whatever sounds Damo thought would work, Damo asserted it was "the language of the Stone Age") complimented Can's trippy, pulsing funkiness perfectly, bcoming an essential component in Can's greatest albums. You know how certain bands possess a groove unique to themselves? Like how when Ray Manzarek's organ and Robby Krieger's guitar interlock in the best tracks of the Doors? Can constructed their best albums from their singular groove. Karoli's guitar gently yet determined soars, Damo's nonsensical, mellifluous vocalisms lie gossamer over the music, and His Holiness Jaki Liebezeit shows that the beat don't stop and that's a fact, Jack. "Constructed" is the apt verb: Can would jam for extended periods (16-hour sessions were common), and Schmidt would subsequently edit the recordings of these, cutting pieces from the tangle that the organism Can weaved. The best example of the Can groove on Future Days is on Bel Air, the 20-minute album finisher. Like pretty much every 20-minuter Can released, it's a real treat, even though the length might render the casual listener apprehensive: casual listener, try growing some balls and a pair of ears. This is in no way to dismiss the rest of the album: Future Days is an unrestricted corker. Can have two albums on the list (they really deserve to have at least 4), and whilst Future Days might not be quite as good as their other included album Tago Mago (in fairness, Tago Mago is a bit ONE OF THE GREATEST ALBUMS EVER MADE), Future Days still justifies, without qualification but with aplomb, its 5 stars. Just listen to the damn drums, man!

Whilst listening to this, Rage Against The Machine's debut album, I found myself reading a book investigating the literary efforts by 20th century dictators. So, whilst listening to Zach de la Rocha's furious epizeuxis of "All of which are American dreams!", the dreams being conformity, hypocrisy and brutality amongst others, I coincidentally read of Stalin's muted admiration for the efficiency of American industry. Aside from amusing me, the juxtaposition made me realise that I wasn't taking the message at all seriously, that I wasn't raging against the machine, I was chuckling at the self-righteousness. Don't take that dismissal as intransigence. Rage Against The Machine clearly rage about numerous important subjects, like police brutality and racism. But they don't handle every issue they raise with sufficient sobriety. Take inequality. Within political philosophy, a genuinely brief consideration of equality leads to various nuances. Plenty of conservatives would say they're some breed of egalitarian, in that they're anti-elite and wholly in favour of equality of opportunity, that everyone has the right to stay at the Ritz if they can afford it. I remember studying a paper at university by the philosopher Elizabeth S. Anderson entitled What is the Point of Equality?, where she criticises the notion of equality as a compensation for undeserved bad luck, and instead conceives of equality as a prophylatic against oppressive social relations. Would Rage Against The Machine be aware of even such a reductive elaboration of equality as I just gave? I'm guessing no. They're under no obligation to, but likewise I can still admonish them on those grounds. I suppose what I'm concluding is that Rage Against The Machine tend to left-wing platitude, in a similar way to the strains of right-wing country musician growling that if you don't like Confederate statues you can git out or the centrist popstar warbling that they believe children are the future. The indignation of the delivery doesn't compensate for the reality that this is music for 15-year-olds, and 15-year-olds don't have the vote. Indeed, the vehemence and savagery of the music only underscores the juvenility of the message. Just because it's passionate doesn't mean it's insightful. Actually, the admittedly corking Killing in the Name did become the anthem for a successful protest movement. The protest movement was to reclaim the UK Christmas number 1 away from the tyranny of Simon Cowell's talent shows. Victorious acts from The X Factor had attained the UK Christmas number 1 for four years in a row, with the show having the ambition of a fifth. Understand that this was an utterly repugnant state of affairs for everyone involved: the acts would have a solitary hit of a cover version then get tossed back into the local club circuits with all the dignity of a used condom, the music itself would be so trite and unadventurous that many forgot good Christmas singles could exist, and the ones who remembered the existence of good Christmas singles would just feel older, sadder and so much more tired. So, a Facebook group started campaigning to get Killing in the Name to the 2009 UK Christmas number 1. When cultural pollutant Simon Cowell called the campaign stupid and cynical (yes, he had the gall to criticise something as cynical), Killing in the Name flew to the top of the charts and all the children in the land danced a merry dance, chanting that fuck you, they wouldn't do what you told them. Regardless of your political stance, that's clearly cocklewarming.

Okay, a Jam album seemingly cut to my exact measurements. A group who always wore their influences like they were medals, Sound Affects has the Jam asking to be rewarded for quoting Gang of Four and and Wire. And I'm perfectly happy to give them such a nod, considering that this is rather fabbo. The Jam are probably the biggest British group to gain no traction whatsoever in the United States: two singles in the Billboard top 100, highest position 45 (in the UK, the generally agreed cut-off for a hit is number 40), whilst getting 4 UK number 1s. A similar tale unfurled in Europe; at best, the Jam were a one-hit wonder in a few territories with A Town Called Malice. Though disappointing, this is not surprising at all. The Jam were as singularly English as Morris dancing and a suicidal ignorance regarding the myriad benefits of the European Union. The Jam's aesthetic combined so many distinctly British aspects that other countries had no hope of comprehending them. They had the British moderate punk aspect, where they forwent battered leather jackets in favour of sharp suits whilst delivering charged, politicised lyrics. They had their origins in the pub rock circuit of the mid 70s, and a British pub is not akin to any other country's bar. Most of all, they had mod. Mod, for those outside of Albion, is a British subculture starting in the 60s, with some dapper youths of every subsequent generation still bearing the torch. Your common-or-garden mod is identifiable by a fondness for suits, scooters, speed and fairly raucous guitar rock à la the Who, Small Faces etcetry etcetry. Personally, I find the movement overestimated: why settle for the fairly raucous? Why be a mod when the name of their enemy, the rocker, is self-evidently cooler? And how can Quadrophenia be a swell movie if it stars Sting? Still, some mod groups were genuinely great, and the Jam were one of those groups, and I agree that the leader Paul Weller deserves his honorific of the Modfather. This album, though, exhibits a paradox. It's the Jam's best album, yet it's the least representative of their mod philosophy. Rather, from the opening note onwards, it's clearly the sound of the Jam latching onto the funky angularity and astere freshness of their post-punk contemporaries. My fellow guzzlers, you should know of me by now that such a sound is the sound I love the most, and thus by syllogism I love this album. Lyrically, Weller doesn't stray from his domain, and that's fine, pal: he knows what he's doing on his territory. But the real greatness of this album lies not in the semantic but the sonic: fierce, desperate and defiant. This in turn leads to the conclusion that the album's more conventional Jam songs, such as Start and Boy About Town, are the weakest tracks, but if such tight songs are the runts, then the album really has naught to worry about. Follow-up question: who are the artists where their most incongruous work is their best? I have a few mates who reckon Nirvana's best album is Unplugged in New York. Not to say that's the consensus, but it's definitely arguable.

I have occasionally diagnosed the misguided American tendency to follow a genre's tropes by rote, with deviancy from the standard seen as a betrayal. I mean, how many American bands over the years have offered their stab at Dust My Broom, only to reveal a version that's just another version of Dust My Broom, with no original ideas added as if they would profane a sacred article? Or if we consider the vastness rap has the potential to cover, why do so many rappers still restrict themselves to the cul-de-sac of gangsta rap? The American development of hardcore punk strikes me as a paradigm of this genre inflexibility. I talked about it during my review of Black Flag's Damaged, but it feels even more apposite to elaborate whilst reviewing Minor Threat. Let's look at how two countries' independent ripenings of punk servd as a natural experiment: the United States and the United Kingdom. In Blighty, the first wave of punk (Sex Pistols, Clash, Damned blah blah blah) led to no single response, but multitudes upon multitudes of bands each furrowing their own path. What exactly links Joy Division, the Slits, Orange Juice, ABC, the Specials, Sham 69, Crass, Gary Numan and Frankie Goes to Hollywood? Nothing at all, except that they were responding to the same provocations yelled by the 1977 bands. In America though, the inspiring new vistas mapped by the likes of the Stooges became bound, staid territories when American bands decided that punk just meant playing hard, fast and short. Yes, we have exceptions like Devo and the no wave bands, but most American punk sought to codify what became known as hardcore punk. Is it me, or is hardcore a pretty lame name for a genre? Surely it smacks of trying far too hard to sound hard, making it appear rather wussy? And if any hardcore band were wussy, it's obviously Minor Threat. Minor Threat were a group of Washington DC teenagers who became movers-and-shakers in that city's punk scene (sometimes written harDCore, aggravatingly). One of their first releases, the song Straight Edge, was a vow to eschew booze, drugs and promiscuity; this became the anthem for a subculture of abstinents called straight edge. It is this advertising of themselves, this sanctimoniousness, that makes straight edge practitioners insufferable. But it's not really the rejection of intoxicants that offends me, it's the sexual puritanism. Didn't the novel 1984 have a Junior Anti-Sex League? Why would you want to abolish the orgasm? This is not to say I don't appreciate some hardcore punk. Hardcore punk can exhilarate. But just as the body builds up a tolerance to narcotics when overindulged, the soul swiftly becomes blasé to hardcore punk when that's all the waiter suggests. So, the noise on Out of Step (another name that's a cock-obvious yet futile attempt to sound tough) is fine and you may well enjoy the 20 minutes; I did. But it's just one noise, and minute 4 sounds like minute 18. I can't really fathom why Minor Threat became relatively iconic. And the name is only half right: they're not a threat, but they are minor.

Firstly, very much in this album's favour, it slags off the Smashing Pumpkins, and my kiddiwinks, you should all have realised by now that the Smashing Pumkpins are perhaps the worst band of all. The saluteworthy lyrics run: Out on tour with The Smashing Pumpkins Nature kids I, they don't have no function I don't understand what they mean And I could really give a fuck Billy Corgan, walking evidence that some kids really shouldn't be told they're special, got so blubby over these lines that he had Pavement dropped from that year's Lollapalooza and claimed Pavement were jealous of his Cure-knock-off, high-school-D&D-Wicca, self-pitying, self-important tripe. Pavement were clearly the heroes of that situation, and Billy Corgan acting so characteristically just makes one mock him all the fiercer. But what about the album itself? It can't depend solely on the goodwill attained by striking a deserved target. And it's an okay album. It's decent, enjoyable, acceptable, fine. This is in part because on Crooked Rain Crooked Rain they largely, but not wholly, forgo aping the Fall, an impersonation that ruined their previous album Slanted and Enchanted (you know, Mark E. Smith was still going in 1994, and he kept at his singular coalface until he dropped in 2018, so what was the point in mimicking him?). Rather, the style employed on Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain lies steadfast within the American college rock Weltenshauung, all quirky hooks, tasteful use of fuzz guitar and mildly absurdist lyrics that purport to convey greater meaning by being meaningless. I've always felt a bit of a chilly wind from college rock, as it seems to focus more on being clever than good. Of course, cleverness and quality are in no way mutually exclusive, but likewise they are in no way mutually inclusive: cleverness too often leads to that vile enemy of art, good taste. Yeah, it's that tastefulness that prevents this from being a great album. It's a fun journey while it's ticking along, but for all the overt oddness dotted throughout the album, it comes across as ultimately conservative. Its weirdness is not the kind of weirdness that'd alienate a girl you'd brought back to your room who preferred Mariah Carey, and thus its weirdness sounds shallow and untrustworthy ("Yeah, I'm, like, interesting and uncompromising in my music, but I ain't scaring off the PUSS-AY!"). Still, a high three, along with a bonus star for pissing off Billy Corgan.

It's quite surprising which bands attract an almost militant following. You know, the fan who'll spend three hours barking in your ear about how their favourite band is better than sliced Jesus, with the monomania of a vegan describing abbatoir practices during Christmas dinner. One mate of mine regularly sent me links to B-sides of Europe throughout the late 2000s (yes, Final Countdown Europe). I've met Proclaimers fans who insist the Frankie Boyle lookalikes are as essential as the Clash or Lou Reed. Me, I have my obsession with the Happy Mondays, but that doesn't count because the Happy Mondays are genuinely one of the greatest bands of all. But the most widespread fanatics that take me by surprise are those of the Pet Shop Boys. Yes, there is the factor that the Pet Shop Boys have purposefully provided solace and joy to gay men with their music throughout their career, especially with regards to the AIDS crisis (the predominant gay elements of Very chime with the singer and lyricist Neil Tennant coming out publicly in 1994, which was hardly a paradigm-shifting revelation; Chris Lowe, the keyboardist, has never publicly discussed his sexuality, not that he has any obligation to). And apparently, the Pet Shop Boys are the most successful duo in UK music history (so says the 1999 Guinness Bok of Records, according to Wikipedia). But the fanboy acclaim that the Pet Shop Boys has always received has always slightly baffled me, and I have always known exactly why. The Pet Shop Boys are mannerist. Their art is the honing of an aesthetic that is divorced from the emotive and instead directed towards the knowing and disaffecting. More simply, their music is clever rather than moving. The only fault I find to their music is that it leaves my soul completely untouched. To me, the album Very demonstrates without flaw the coldness of the Pet Shop Boys. The music seems stuck in 1987, but seemingly by design; 1987 represents their "imperial phase", a term coined by Tennant to describe a band's critical and commerical peak. So we get lots of Hi-NRG bassless melodies in 1993, and the effect is reminiscent of a middle-aged uncle tagging along with you young kids as you head off to celebrate your A-levels. Yes, Uncle Neil, you had your glories during the industrial revolution, but now's the time for we slick hepcats. This aspect screams out during their ecstasy anthem I Wouldn't Normally do This Kind of Thing; the title tells you that they're generational tourists, but the Pet Shop Boys know that's the case. This is the alienating savviness of the Pet Shop Boys. I can understand, say, how cleverly they sing of the restraint of passion in To Speak is a Sin, but that cleverness dilutes any passion within the song to a rubbery acknowledgement, which you may say is the point, but I still feel little from it aside from friction. Expand that cleverness over an album, and my only sensation is lack of blood in my heart. Of course, the Pet Shop Boys are smart enough to explain every one of their artistic choices, and smart enough to counter every one of my criticisms about their intellectualizations. And I am smart enough to reply back cogently, and thus we are at the sticking point. As a result, Very gets 3 stars to end the stalemate. You might like it. I prefer Erasure.

Urgh. This is October 18th, 2022. I received this album on the generator on Sunday, October 2nd, 2022. I initially paused the generator because I wasn't that familiar with Kanye West's work, so I thought I should spare some time to acquaint myself with his ouevre and give him a more considered take. The next day, Kanye paraded around in a jumper saying WHITE LIVES MATTER. I immediately lost all enthusiasm for writing this review, and indeed just the basic capacity for trudge. He then followed it up with extremely ugly anti-Semitic posts on Instagram and Twitter. I'm not including every event over the last fortnight where Kanye proved himself both nasty and moronic, but the principal effect on me was to deter my review of Yeezus. Every time I tried to write this, I would just stare at the screen, not typing but constantly grimacing. I was worried this album would break me, and I'd quit the generator because Kanye West was an imbecilic cunt. Still, that which does not kill me blah blah blah (by the by, the context of that quote from Nietzsche always gets dropped: he actually says that military view of life is "That which does not kill me blah blah blah"). And I'm reviewing an album, not the person who made it, so perhaps I should swallow up my grievances and just assess the music. Apparently, this is Kanye's dark, challenging album, his raised middle digit to a world that just wants him to perform nice songs for people to dance to. But wehat nobody told me was how slight, how superficial and how meagre this album really is. The music, despite all the advertised influences of early 90s industrial metal (which was never that transgressive in actuality), is just a bit of electronica. It's acceptable, but it's hardly inspired. But that's not the fatal symptom of the album. The album's tubercular cough is (wait for it...) Kanye West, or more specifically the fact that the stances he expresses are incoherent, confused and, in summation, boring. Yes, one can point to his willingness to pick at the scab of affluent segregation in New Slaves (actually, is that especially resonant to the poor, that salesmen try to sell Kanye high-end goods?), but such outrage becomes distinctly undercut by lines like "Eatin' Asian pussy, all I need was sweet and sour sauce". Indeed, there's a vicious misogyny throughout this whole album, but there's none of the illicit thrill of saying the unsayable that, say, Eminem or Ice Cube were able to muster in their best work. It's just Kanye trying to sound like what he thinks a rapper should sound like. It's the sound of a limited man, of a wimpy schoolboy trying to impersonate the bigger boys in a doomed attempt to become popular. And it stings that a work this mediocre is what ruined my fortnight. Anyway, that's the album out the way. I hope Kanye will find it apposite if I review him as a person in the form of a poem. Kanye West is a cunt. A cunt is what he is. He possesses labia majora and he evolved to imbibe jizz. Once a month he menstruates. For his clitoris you may hunt. I know the term is ugly, but the cunt is just a cunt.

Apparently, only one other person who has written a review of this album on this site knows the source of the film samples that provide the album's vertebra. Yes, I know all of us can look it up on Wikipedia, or indeed just click the Wikipedia sample this site offers. But only one other person bothered to mention the actual bloody film, with a few suggesting "martial arts" (I just about agree, but not remotely the point of the original film) and occasionally "kung fu" (completely wrong: wrong country, wrong tradition, wrong plot, wrong aesthetic, wrong clothes, just utter wrongness from heel to brow). I am not a martial arts buff at all; martial arts movies leave me completely cold (it took me a decade to appreciate the now-obvious grandeur of Enter The Dragon, and no other martial arts movie has ever kept me till the end), I have no desire to learn martial arts (4 injuries a year, the average martial artist suffers), and the idea that martial arts teaches any form of profundity strikes me as just so much bullshit (will learning to kick well somehow teach you Gödel's incompleteness theorems?). But I love ultraviolent 70s Japanese samurai cinema. I love Zatoichi, I love Lady Snowblood, and above all I love Lone Wolf and Cub. Lone Wolf and Cub started as a long-running manga (I've never read it, as I have no interest in comic books of any form except for Viz, which I adore to my bones), which became a series of six films involving the Shogun's executioner Ogami Itto, whose prowess with the sword has proven the ultimate lock on power for the corrupt feudal system at play: nobody can challenge a system which has the deadliest man alive in its control. But his expertise stems not just from his finesse, but his cunning: Ogami has no qualm in tricking his fellow duellist to a beheading by shining a mirror in his eyes. A coup tries to cast Ogami as a traitor to the Shogun, thus seizing his position as executioner. Ogami's wife is murdered, and Ogami declares that he shall become a demon and wandering ronin until he has achieved his vengeance, and he racks up the body count befitting a demon. His son Daigogo is an infant at the time, and after delivering the test the album quotes, he takes his son along their chosen purgatorial path in a weapon-loaded baby cart (the films are also known as the Baby Cart series, and the kid amasses his share of corpses). Yes, the films have a touch of exploitation cinema in their indulgence of gore (people here have garden hoses instead of arteries). I can't deny my love of the Grand Guignol. But their real soulmate, like much samurai cinema, is the western. Kurosawa avowedly cribbed from Ford, and in turn Peckinpah avowedly cribbed from Kurosawa. Ogami Itto's tale has some resemblance to that of the platonic western, Shane (by the by, my absolute favourite film of all time): a wandering figure with skills and troubles and questionable morals, upon whom a kid becomes dependent. The Baby Cart films are smart and slyly political, and the ultraviolence, sometimes gleeful, sometimes despondent, sometimes stoic, is always a glorious spectacle. You know how Robocop is a genuine masterpiece? The Lone Wolf and Cub films are similarly sanguine classics. Shogun Assassin is a mutant of the original films. An American dubbed splicing of the first two Baby Cart films, with an added English voiceover from Daigoro, Shogun Assassin became a cult film in the west (and a video nasty in the UK), with Daigoro's voiceover occasionally seen as providing a greater depth to the source material. Kill Bill is practically a remake of Shogun Assassin, and indeed the Bride at one point watches Shogun Assassin with her four-year-old daughter. Personally, I don't wish to watch Shogun Assassin again. Who wants to watch a dubbed film? Also, I fell in love with the originals. Shogun Assassin has nothing to offer me. Anyway, those are the film quotes on Liquid Swords. I have been talking about Baby Cart for so long because there is almost nothing to say about this album, which is the tragedy. Having listened to a few Wu-Tang albums, I have with sadness to conclude that they all sound the same. The producer and mastermind RZA has exactly one style: the same musical austerity, the same lyrical prominence, the same and frankly tiresome east Asian film samples. It's a good sound, and I guess I enjoyed the album. But I can't recall a choice lyric from this. I can't recall any lyric from this. The Wu-Tang sound still hits the spine, but have all their albums just been variations on themes by George Clinton and the Shaw Brothers? I was expecting, hoping to laud this, but it's mainly generosity that's justifying these three stars. With Lone Wolf and Cub, stick with the originals. With the Wu, you can also just stick with the original 36 Chambers. Oh, and really don't bother with the bonus track B.I.B.L.E (Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth). Insane Clown Posse's Miracles claiming more street cred.

Is there a worse name for a genre than post-rock? The name carries a distinct whiff of pomposity, of rock being beneath it. I know the name post-punk has exactly the same lexical structure, but that at least harked to the contemporary state of affairs: punk had died and the bands inspired by punk sought to construct something new on the ashes. When the first bands got labelled post-rock (admittedly not by themselves, but by critics eager to prove their pretentiousness), rock wasn't on the mortuary slab: if we take the early 90s as when post-rock became codified, we have grunge shooting into alternative on one side of the Atlantic, Oasis proclaiming that they were rock 'n' roll stars, and metal had long been established as rock's hardy perennial. Still, rock has been pronounced dead for as long as rock as been alive (apparently, the rock critic Richard Meltzer declared rock dead in 1968), so perhaps I'm being too harsh on a legitimate ambition to move away from the limitations of the rock template. But even this smacks of reductionism. Rock has always been adaptive and audacious in its experiments and its thefts (the oft-called freakiest album in the canon is Trout Mask Replica, which is obviously an album that belongs within the classification of rock), so I don't buy the line that post-rock bands are aiming beyond rock. "Post-rock" is essentially a euphemism for "rock what's a bit weird". Not that that's a bad thing at all, but why gussy it up? Anyway, Tortoise are a Chicagoan collective ("band" seems to miss the point) that started when a few refugees from hardcore punk and alternative rock decided that they wanted to show everyone that they could really play their instruments. As such, their music claimed inspiration from electronica, dub, krautrock (uh-oh, that pesky work "rock"), ambient, progressive rock (that damned word again) and fucktons of jazz. This, their second album, took plaudits by the gallon in 1996's end-of-year assessments. And it's fine. It's fine. The music is good, engaging, smart. Writing about it beyond that seems to miss the point, or at least it would bore both me and you, my friendly chunkers. The main jab I have to make is that it doesn't truly elevate me. It doesn't send me to the paradisiac realms, unlike my most beloved albums. And bizarrely, I feel that's not quite its intended purpose. Millions Now Living Will Never Die feels like it just wants to be perfectly good, in the sense of having no bad notes whatsoever, and I guess it manages that. But that lack of abrasion makes it almost inhuman, like it's a computer program rather than a piece of music. Voltaire once wrote that the best is the enemy of the good. With Tortoise, the good is the enemy of the best. I want Tortoise to embrace the imperfection of humanity. I want Tortoise to come out of their shell (thanks for the applause, you've been a wonderful audience!).

I have this album on vinyl. I adore garage rock, and when I saw this in my local record shop, I bought it almost instinctively. I had known the band before, principally as the opening act on the epochal compilation Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968 (an assemblage of mid-60s garage rock, proto-punk and spiky psychedelia that I assert is the greatest compilation of them all). The song they open Nuggets with, I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night), is a fantastic rush of speedy trippiness and buzz guitar that had already been one of my most beloved songs for over 15 years when I bought the album I'm currently reviewing. I was even bedazzled when I unsheathed the record and saw that the vinyl was purple. And it broke my heart. I put on the album with all the goodwill musterable in the world. I wanted to love this album as much as I love masturbation, and the opening track, the aforementionedly godlike I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night), promised so much. Unfortunately, it promised too much. No song on the album approaches that lightning-flash of an opener, and the rest just muddles around, showing little of the inspired eccentricity or sheer drive that characterises the best of garage rock. Some tracks, namely the faster ones about chicks, prove entertaining, but the pseudo-Britfolk with added nursery rhymes of The King is in the Counting House makes one wish they'd been drafted for Vietnam before they recorded such tosh (see also: The Toonerville Trolley). A album plagued by a detracting unevenness, I'll give it three stars, essentially for the magnificence of the opener. One great song can salvage a pretty dreary album. The thing is, the Electric Prunes weren't a bad band. Not quite a great band, but definitely capable of decent work. Their second album, Underground, is a better, more consistent plate, albeit one lacking a song as explosive as I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night). If one is looking for the figure responsible for the Electric Prunes' lack of sustained form, it's justifiable to indict David Hassinger, the band's producer. To the band's chagrin, Hassinger brought in a pair of outside songwriters, Nancy Muntz and Annette Tucker, to write most of the songs for the first album. Even though the pair wrote the best song on the album, much of the material they gave the band proved a distinctly ill-measured fit. With the second album, Hassinger had become too busy to control the sessions like before, so the Electric Prunes got a chance to write songs they were comfortable playing, and the improvement is palpable. Maybe you should just let bands be bands. However, Underground was not the smash Reprise Records wanted, So the third album, Mass in F Minor, not only returned to the Hassinger approach, it took it to the then-barely charted realms of monstrous rock folly. Mass in F Minor is a concept album based on providing a rock setting of the Catholic Mass, complete with Latin and Greek lyrics, written and arranged by David Axelrod. Now, you and I know that this had to have been an extremely bad idea. We are both right. The band were not proficient enough to play Axelrod's arrangements, so much of Mass in F Minor came from session musicians. Recognising their mistake of somehow re-enacting the Monkees in reverse, the original lineup quit. Hassinger owned the name to the Electric Prunes though, and continued doling out material under that banner. The fourth Electric Prunes album, Release of an Oath, was another Axelrod concept album with Christian and Jewish liturgies set to rock music, with one lonely original Electric Prune on the record (is the idea of setting liturgies to rock music better or worse than setting the Mass so? I can't decide). Hassinger produced one more, especially tawdry Electric Prunes release that just threw a few random longhairs into a studio solely so they could shovel out yet more slop. There endeth the saga of the Electric Prunes. To be honest, it's not the most diverting story from the wonderful world of rock. One wishes their tale were happier, but saying that, one wishes boybands weren't so conned. That doesn't mean you actually want to listen to New Kids on the Block.

Right, we need to start with how dire the song Weather With You is. I have despised it since I was an ickle kid of seven, and my completely justified hatred of it has only become more polished, more steadfast and more toxic as the last three decades frittered past. This is not due to my own neuroses. Precocious scamp me, I correctly clocked in childhood that the song deserved a fierce and unrelenting shoeing. Aside from the music's crystalline dreariness, the central lyric is wholly risible. "Everywhere you go, you always take the weather with you." Wherever you are on the planet, there's always a bit of weather. You, reading this review right now: look at the air around you. What that air is doing is called "weather". Only astronauts are exempt. I was wondering if divers are similarly weatherless, but surely weather will affect the water they're in? I'd always assumed it was somehow a romantic song, that the serenaded girl brought sunshine wherever she stepped. Nope. It's meant to be halfway between a zen koan and a motivational poster quote. It succeeds, in that it combines the bullshit of the former with the bollocks of the latter. The rest of the song's lyrics are charmlessly pretentious (Caesar conquering the sky?), seeking to advertise their assumed parallelism with Bob Dylan, but not even managing Mark Knopfler. Also, the whole metaclaim the song makes, that this is quintessential dad rock, calumniates dads: dads can listen to much better rock than Weather With You, and dads do listen to much better rock. As for the rest of the album, the first track OH GOD THIS ALBUM IS FUCKING TERRIBLE ITS THE WORST ALBUM IVE HAD ON THE GENERATOR SINCE MELLON TWATTING COLLIE AND THE INFINITE BASTARD SADNESS HOW THE FUCK DID THIS ALBUM GET INCLUDED ON THE LIST I CANNOT UNDERSTAND HOW ANY PERSON COULD BEAR TO LISTEN TO THE WHOLE BELLENDING FORTY EIGHT MINUTES AND ELEVEN SECONDS OF AURAL GONORRHOEA THIS ALBUM DISSEMINATES THERE IS NOT EVEN A VAGUE GESTURE AT A PLEASANT QUALITY OR A REDEMPTIVE FEATURE THAT COULD PERMIT THE LISTENER A MOMENTARY LIFT FROM THEIR LUCIFEROUS HATRED OF THIS ALBUM AND WHAT CATALYSES THE HATRED THIS ALBUM ENGENDERS IS THE ALBUMS MONUMENTAL SMUGNESS ITS SO PLEASED WITH ITSELF FOR MAKING SUCH ASININE PAP TRUE STORY THIS I WAS UNABLE TO LISTEN TO ALL THE SONGS TOGETHER IN ONE SITTING I WAS SO REPULSED I HAD TO BREAK UP THE ATROCITY BY PLAYING MUCH BETTER SONGS AFTER EVERY TWO OR THREE TRACKS FIRSTLY I STARTED WITH CHARLIE FEATHERS CANT HARDLY STAND IT WHICH HAS THE SLIGHT MISFORTUNE OF BEING IN A TARANTINO MOVIE THUS ROBBING IT OF ITS COOLNESS BUT I STILL GET OFF ON THAT ROCKABILLY GROOVE THEN I WENT FOR DONOVANS ATLANTIS A CLASSIC BIT OF HIPPY NONSENSE FOR WHICH IVE ALWAYS HAD A REAL AFFECTION THEN MY INTERNET WENT DOWN FOR A BIT AND I WAS WELL CHUFFED BECAUSE I COULD POSTPONE LISTENING TO THE REST OF THIS JIZZSCAB AND THEN IT CAME BACK ON AND AFTER TWO SONGS I PUT ON LOOKIN FOR A KISS BY THE NEW YORK DOLLS THEYRE MORRISSEYS FAVOURITE BAND DONT YOU KNOW THEN AFTER THAT I CHOSE THE PASSIONS IM IN LOVE WITH A GERMAN FILM STAR A POST PUNK ONE HIT WONDER THATS WONDERFULLY ICY AND CORUSCATING AND I FINISHED WITH LL COOL JS MAMA SAID KNOCK YOU OUT BECAUSE I WANTED SOMETHING FUN AND STRAIGHTFORWARD AFTER HAVING DEALT WITH CROWDED HOUSE THE LITTLE SHIT CAKE BAKERS WHILST READING ABOUT THIS MUSICAL EQUIVALENT OF HAVING YOUR HAND REPEATEDLY SMASHED INTO A CAR DOOR I DISCOVERED THAT THE BANDS FIRST ATTEMPT AT THIS ALBUM WAS REJECTED BY THE RECORD LABEL HOW BAD MUST THAT HAVE BEEN WERE THEY LITERALLY JUST RECORDING PARTICULARLY CACOPHONOUS DIARRHOEA OR SOMETHING AFTER WITNESSING THE TRIAL OF ADOLF EICHMANN THE PHILOSOPHER HANNAH ARENDT CONCEIVED OF THE BANALITY OF EVIL WHERE SHE ARGUED THAT EICHMANNS CRIMES LIKE SO MANY CRIMES LACKED ANY SERIOUS IDEOLOGICAL MOTIVATION BUT WERE MAINLY DRIVEN BY AN UNTHINKING COMPLACENCY BOLSTERED BY CLICHED DEFENCES SO IF THIS MUSIC IS BANAL AND IT IS DOES THAT IMPLY ITS EVIL WELL FAINTLY YES THIS ALBUM EXEMPLIFIES THE BANALITY OF EVIL MUSIC LISTENING TO THIS ALBUM IS AKIN TO WITNESSING A LITTLE OLD LADY BEING MUGGED AND QUICKSTEPPING IT AWAY BECAUSE YOU DONT WANT TO GET INVOLVED CROWDED HOUSE MAY BE THE MOST GUILTY BUT WERE ALSO GUILTY WE COULD HAVE STOPPED THEM AND WE DIDNT AND WE WILL HAVE TO LIVE WITH THAT SQUEEZING OUR CONSCIENCES IN A VICE UNTIL THE DAY WE DIE I have to say, Woodface isn't really my kind of thing.

The current stereotype of the American small town serves as a handy illustration of the Hegelian dialectic (although the standard formulation of the Hegelian dialectic came from followers of Hegel rather than Hegel himself). Nice, clear introduction, that! For those without the foolishness to get philosophy degrees, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a 19th-century German philosopher noted for his obscurancy. Indeed, his obscurancy has led plenty to denounce him as a charlatan (and may well lead me to make some howlers in articulating his views), but he also proved a decisive influence on modern European philosophy. Anyway, focusing on one aspect of Hegelian thought, Hegel asserted that history followed a rational process of progress, a process that became formalised as the Hegelian dialectic. That is, a central thesis gets formed, and the opposite to that thesis, the antithesis, generates in reaction. The thesis and antithesis come into conflict, out of which emerges a synthesis, which retains the rational aspects of both the thesis and antithesis whilst rejecting the pair's irrational aspects. This synthesis in turn becomes the thesis in another round of the Hegelian dialectic. Everyone following? In honesty, it doesn't really matter if you're not. So, American small towns. In 1984, you get the movie Footloose, where wackjob preacher John Lithgow bans dancing and it's up to Kevin Bacon's nifty pins to boogie apart Lithgow's neighbourhood tyranny. So here, John Lithgow represents the thesis and Kevin Bacon the antithesis. I won't spoil it, but you can guess what the synthesis is. And Big Black's Atomizer, with its abrasive guitars and crass lyrical themes, is basically Kevin Bacon (Yes, I knew I had a point to all this!). Now, a lot of parpings has been whaffed out regarding the iniquities of the American small town, and how all the young people get so bored with their parents' genteel Christian fascism that they spend their time putting meth up each others' bottoms and nailing themselves to passing cars. I tend to find such depictions tawdry and rather dishonest: some teens do get mashed up on toad secretions, but most actually just graduate. Speaking of which, the central figure to Big Black, Steve Albini, got himself a degree in journalism before forming Big Black. Nowadays, Steve Albini has more renown as a recording engineer. The job title is significant: Albini refuses the tag of "producer", considering his role to record the act faithfully without contamination from his aesthetic sensibilities. Over 1500 acts have sought his ministrations, most famously Nirvana with In Utero. Of course, I can't speak about the totality of his work as an engineer, but I have loved much of the most prominent work he's engineered. The perceptive might have noticed that I have waffled on something chronic with scant mention of the album. That's because the album is insubstantial to the touch. It's an okay punk album cursed with rather a lack of spark, and yet more evidence to my argument that America never really understood the potential of punk. I do not concur at all with the notion that this is noise at its rawest. Each song sounds fine (not great) in isolation, but the frenzy dissipates as song follows song, and in the end you both feel both drowsy and unfilled. Along with this, the oh-so-adult nature of the lyrics often strikes one as a product of quite cheerless immaturity. That this immaturity was intentional, the punchline for a killing joke, is of no relevance whatsoever. You may consider a song about some teens setting themselves on fire for shits and giggles to be profound, but not me, I've read Hegel. And I've seen Footloose.

Before I've even listened to it, I should say Yankee Hotel Foxtrot doesn't have the main fault of Wilco's other entry on the list, Being There: it's shorter. Being There not only underwhelmed you with its bourgeois pastiches of Exile on Main St and Grievous Angel, it underwhelmed you with its bourgeois pastiches of Exile on Main St and Grievous Angel for about four hours. Anyway, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is Wilco's most acclaimed album, with bagfuls and bagfuls of plaudits from all the clever-clog critics. As far as I can determine, this praise results from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot possessing the widest range of Wilco's patented bourgeois pastiches. Oh wait, there are a few details about the recording that colour the picture more. Boardroom shenanigans led to the dismissal of Reprise Records' president and champion of Wilco, Howie Klein. When the new management concluded that Wilco were not listening to their suggestions for greater commerciality, they promptly decided not to release the album. So, Wilco left Reprise Records, signed to another label, had the album leaked online (remember Napster? I'm listening to this on Youtube), then released it to moderate commercial success and an almost lusty critical reception. That's not really the stuff of rock 'n' roll myth, is it, my fair badgers? "Band makes album unliked by one label, so takes it to another" doesn't quite evoke the same spirit as driving a Rolls Royce into a pool. And the album also lacks that rock 'n' roll spirit. It's smothered with guitarists showing off their chops, but only in service to the idea that what they're producing is technically part of the genre of rock. Is there anything here that'd make a highschooler and housewife flutter their eyelashes, or persuade a 14-year-old lad to keep on practicing his chords despite the pain in his fingers? Some of the album is good, but good in a way that is not especially engaging. Even the stabs at more experimental noises feel measured, strategised, well-mannered. As hinted at earlier, this is the consequence of Wilco's timeworn method of bourgeois pastiches. On Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the bandleader Jeff Tweedy (try and think of a less rock 'n' roll-sounding name, I'll give you ten minutes) extends the range of music to which he pays affectionate fealty by taking some ideas from Chicago post-rock bands, but doesn't stray too eccentrically. Do you think there was ever a suggestion that Wilco would allude to Metal Machine Music or our beloved Throbbing Gristle? As for the lyrics, I can't say anything. I think they might be alright, but I can't say for certain as not one word lodged permanently in my head: this is the mark of your standard bittersweet love song. Such songs are the Oscar bait of rock. A rock musician performing a bittersweet love song mirrors an actor playing a character with a disability. Should we be sniffy over these tactical artistic expressions aiming for the awards? If they don't really work, sure. So, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is better than Wilco's other releases, but is still hamstrung by Tweedy's fear of venturing beyond good taste. The last three tracks are the strongest on the album, but they're the strongest on what is, with generosity, at most a welterweight album, and the critical slavering seems a result of a desire for an album showing "authenticity" without regard to "actual engagement of the listener"

Is the influence of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band ultimately a pernicious one? How many contemporary peers of the Beatles failed when they tried adding strings (the Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesty's Request, despite all the attempts to defend it as a traduced classic, simply doesn't have songs that good, and that's one of the better examples)? The ambition the Beatles exhibited became directed towards the hordes of unwashed longhairs who decided that sidelength tracks, innumerable chord changes, lyrics about orcs and flutes represented music at its pinnacle, and thus we have the worst genre of all, prog. And then we get to the Sgt. Pepper movie. The Sgt. Pepper movie was not performed by the Beatles, but instead came out 11 years after the album, with barely any dialogue (with the cast just singing Beatles numbers and George Burns as Mr. Kite providing the narration), but with the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton as a band tracking down magical instruments stolen by the evil Aerosmith. If you wish to understand the tenor of the movie, just Youtube Steve Martin's take on Maxwell's Silver Hammer, then drop your head in shame. Before the movie was released, Robin Gibb gave this absolute pearler of a quote: "Kids today don't know the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper. And when those who do see our film and hear us doing it, that will be the version they relate to and remember. Unfortunately, the Beatles will be secondary. You see, there is no such thing as the Beatles. They don't exist as a band and never performed Sgt. Pepper live, in any case. When ours comes out, it will be, in effect, as if theirs never existed. When you heard the Beatles do Long Tall Sally or Roll Over Beethoven, did you care about Little Richard's or Chuck Berry's version?" Do kids today know that a film version of Sgt. Pepper was made? In any case, although it made some money, the film was rightfully eviscerated by the critics, and poor Peter Frampton had his career momentum halted by a sledgehammer. And he had real momentum. Frampton Comes Alive! went 8 times platinum in the States, and although his follow-up didn't do nearly as well, it still sold well enough to indicate he was established. Frampton Comes Alive!, a double album providing a sampling from each of his previous, middlingly successful albums, made Frampton the approachable yet respectable guitar hero both teenage boys and teenage girls could poster their walls with. One would finger his air guitar whilst drifting off in bed, and the other would finger her (sorry, I just cannot finish that sentence in a way that would maintain anyone's dignity). And it's a perfectly adequate 70s live rock double album. You will enjoy some parts. The double length has that standard double-length curse of diminishing the whole by homogenous parts. An individual song broadly sounds alright, if not spectacular to this particular ear, but becomes lessened in impact by having another song sounding right similar straight afterwards. There's a limit to the rice pudding you can eat, even if you add jam. A note on the singles. Nobody in the world likes Baby I Love Your Way. Is that title euphemistic? I really hope not. A mawkish, cackhanded signal that it's smooch o'clock, Baby I Love Your Way only manages to signal for teenage hormones to go into retreat and that one would be better off just pulling the hair of the girl you fancy. Show Me the Way is just a 70s rock song, not big, not small, just adequate. A 5-inch cock of a song. Obviously, the big kahuna is Do You Feel Like We Do, a 14-minuter where Frampton unleashes his great gimmick of the record, his talking guitar. Yes, that's a novelty, but the real heat of the song comes straight after that bridge, where the guitar and drums actually find a stone groove and deliver a worthy coda. I can appreciate why Frampton Comes Alive! stormed America in the 70s (Frampton never really came to anything here, in his native UK). However, I also appreciate why Frampton Comes Alive! has become mired with the reputation as a 70s curiosity. Frampton currently has a muscular wasting disease, meaning he has to spend two hours in the gym each day just to maintain muscle mass. This condition has also forced him to retire from playing, save very sporadic tribute concerts. I sincerely wish him well for the future. Finally, Jerry Lee Lewis has just died. Peter Frampton once served as a guitarist for Jerry on his 1973 album, The Session. A raised glass to the Killer. Age is a bastard. NoRadio, signing off.

(Content warning: discusses lyrics that employ offensive terms (not from Elbow's lyrics, obviously)) I have been bedridden for the past two (EDIT: three) weeks with a thoroughly mangled left foot, so I have paused this odyssey. Whilst watching a lot more telly than I normally do when not convalescing (humblebrag), I regularly got bombarded with an advert of Katy Perry selling a takeaway app (in the 90s, American celebrities never appeared on British ads, but made cringeworthy ads for Japanese TV, with the incorrect assumption that they would probably not migrate to the west; I don't know what it means for Harvey Keitel and Snoop Dogg nowadays to flog insurance companies and takeaways on British screens, but everyone knows Kevin Bacon's only in our ads because Bernie Madoff nicked all his dosh). In this ad, Katy Perry sings the ring-a-ding-dong refrain from Dr. Dre's Keep Their Heads Ringin'. I wouldn't complain, except the original has the lyric "When I flow, niggas know it's time to take a hike/'Cause I grab the mic and flip my tongue like a dyke". Aside from the homophobia, everyone knows Dre is a stilted, plodding and amateurish rapper who is much more content behind a mixing desk (his raps are also ghostwritten, but that doesn't make them bad; it's their bad writing that does that). The allusion to such coarseness was not what I wanted when I was in a fortnight of constant, sharp pain (EDIT: and add another week for luck). This is not due to prudishness on my part: I'll cheerily affirm that I've been wanking ten times a day just to pass the time. No, it was just a reminder of an ugliness I didn't appreciate. So, I hoped returning to the project with Elbow's Seldom Seen Kid would prove refreshing. Just by the album art, you can immediately tell that this is a completely wholesome bit of indie good taste, the acoustic equivalent of a morning jog followed by a breakfast of an apple, a banana and bran flakes in semi-skimmed milk. And like such a morning, I tried to convince myself that I was looking forward to this album. Yet just as I would fear a chilly downpour greeting me as I woke, something about the name Elbow gave me a minor yet distinct shudder. You see, Elbow have five letters in their name, and three of those letters are L, O and W. Couple that to tasteful, respectfully eclectic indie, and we are left wondering if Elbow are actually just Wilco faking British accents. My fellow invalids, I reviewed Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot two albums and two weeks (EDIT: bastard three weeks) ago, and it had Wilco's Old Faithful annoyance of being bourgeois pastiches of country rock done in exacting good taste, and thus being tolerable and utterly unlovable. And yes, The Seldom Seen Kid very occasionally veers into Wilco's turf. But thankfully, Elbow mainly show good good taste, unlike Wilco's bad good taste. Elbow are one of those British indie bands where everyone's heard the name, but nobody can place a song until someone points out what that song is. In Wilco's case, that song is on this album, One Day Like This, but we'll get to that later. Elbow arose in the aftermath of Britpop, and noticably display no indications that they have ever been influenced by the begetter of British indie, punk. Indeed, Elbow's leader Guy Garvey has been notorious for lauding prog, citing Gabriel-era Genesis, Talk Talk and Radiohead as prime inspirations (the astute reader will note the tastefulness of those choices, unlike, say, ELP or Jethro Tull). On The Seldom Seen Kid, which won the Mercury Prize for best British album in 2008, those specific bands don't receive direct shout-outs, but don't worry folks, there's plenty of record-collection rock here worth mining for allusions. For example, their other the-one-song-of-theirs-you've-heard, Grounds for Divorce, is their bluesy, Led Zeppy number, and it's quite good as a bluesy, Led Zeppy number. But that would just make Elbow the English Wilco, if a touch better. But somewhere in the middle of The Seldom Seen Kid, with the songs An Audience with the Pope and Weather to Fly, a bit of pixie dust falls onto the music and it soars, raising the listener with it. The album has this sense of both the epic and the understated which puts Elbow firmly above Wilco. This ascension peaks with One Day Like This, Elbow's Hey Jude, their stadium singalong. Happily, the song's ubiquity and potential for parody haven't really diminished it: the song feels like it possesses a reasonable grasp of its own absurdity and so one feels unabashed in joining in. And since I've been wanking ten times a day, and if it didn't come with the infernal foot agony, one day spent wanking strikes me as rather the noble aspiration as of late. As I said earlier, mild touches of Wilconess prevent this from attaining the full 5 stars. But there's definitely much to savour here, especially if you've been plagued by the wrong type of coarseness. NoRadio, signing off.

What a pain in the arse it was, getting this album to play in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (a nation which, thanks to Brexit, may only last 10 more years). It turns out the fucker was blocked over here, and I've had to use a sodding proxy in order to listen to it on Youtube. I know it's not the most arduous travail in the world, but it still felt like an especially sharp bit of grit in the Vaseline. Still, thanks for the peeps on the Reddit forum who helped me suss out what to do. Bebel Gilberto is a Brazilian bossa nova singer, born into bossa nova regality. Her father, João Gilberto, was one of the central architects of bossa nova, the man who clocked that samba didn't require intense performances when amplifiers were used, and added gentle, subtle harmonies and syncopations. You will have clocked that I am liberally quoting Wikipedia. I know nothing about samba, bossa nova, or whatever this genre is. I can only tell you what the album meant to me. And I'm pleading the fifth again. I don't speak Portuguese, so I can't comment on the lyrics. Are they the most heartrending evocations of saudade, or are they about her lack of opinion over corned beef sandwiches? Not a Scooby Doo. Musically, it sounds fine as inoffensive wallpaper, but the first five songs blended indistinguishably, and I couldn't tell you what identity this album had. With the sixth tract Alguem (an unnecessary mixture of albumen and glue), there's a drum machine involved, and it sounds like a bossa nova track with a drum machine. So Nice (Summer Samba), is a samba standard with English lyrics, and I found myself wondering if one can hear such standards with newness. Can you hear My Way without imagining the legions of bores convincing themselves that a drinking problem and a stained jacket (suit or leather) makes them rebels and iconic iconoclasts? The latter half is prima facie more interesting, in that Gilberto continues with more contemporary instrumentation. But what is this electronica in service to? That you can play bossa nova with a synthesizer? Is that a revelation worthy of whatever John wrote all that Biblical trippery? I suppose that's a mite churlish of me, but I was not astonished at any moment. Tanto Tempo sounds fine yet unremarkable, competent yet modest. An aficionado or aficionada of this music may have more to say, and may well rebuke me for missing so many of the album's facets and vistas, but I should only be honest in what I felt. It's an okay album. NoRadio, signing off.

I don't know my opinion of Led Zeppelin. Do I love them? Do I hate them? Not either of those two extremes, but I cannot work out where I sit between the poles. It may very well be the case that I like exactly half their songs and dislike the other half, with most congregating around the central meh axis and vanishingly few entering the territory of either adoration (I revel in the riff to Babe I'm Gonna Leave You) or contempt (I recoil at the riff to You Shook Me). In the past, I have tried to delude myself that I thought of Led Zeppelin more worshipfully that I actually did, since they were historical totems of rock; indeed, I gave Led Zep III 4 stars in this generator, when the folky nonsense spread over side 2 made it a definitive 3 and not a crumb beyond. But, in part thanks to this quest, I have realised that I'm not required to venerate Led Zep, just as I'm not required to crucify them. But calling them average seems to miss significant points. Surely a group with such mystique, such ambition and such notoriety, by sheer dint of such a legacy, could never be considered boilerplate? I can accept that point, but only somewhat. Yes, I can grasp the outré fascination of, say, the red snapper incident, but such bacchanalia also begat more pitiful anecdotes. I feel utterly miserable writing this, but John Bonham's alcoholism had left him incontinent aged 26, requiring the roadies to carry around a supply of adult nappies. Still, there's always the music. But as I said, large portions of the music leave me, if not quite cold, then indifferent. And with Physical Graffiti, we have Led Zep being their most Led Zep. Recorded after a sabbatical to allow John Paul Jones some R&R, Physical Graffiti emerged from numerous jam sessions that solidified into concrete songs. These songs took up more space than a single album allowed, so the group padded it out to a double with the help of previously disregarded material from earlier albums (is that ominous?). So, we have Led Zep going XXL and attempting all the genres they knew. Well, all the genres they felt most comfy adopting, or rather individual aspects of genres that didn't remotely jar with their established template. It all basically revolves around the Led Zep locus of heavy blues rock, only sometimes they add a bit of folk to their heavy blues rock, or they try a proggy heavy blues rock number, or they plant in some country licks to a song that's heavy blues rock. The result is that the promoted epicness of Physical Graffiti feels restricted, as if it's just an album consisting of one track and its remixes. Couple that identikit style to such corpulently long songs, and the effect on the listener isn't inspiration or ravishment, it's burnout. Of course, Physical Graffiti has a few cracking riffs, and those already persuaded by Led Zep should find this to be exactly what they want from Led Zep (friends of mine who are Led Zep fans proclaim this a masterpiece to me). But we Led Zep agnostics will find nothing to reverse either our lack of faith or our lack of disbelief. And we're allowed to hold such positions in liberal democracy. You lot should salute us moderates. We're the ones keeping National Zeppelism at bay. Also, is there any graffiti that isn't physical? Can you get metaphysical graffiti? Can you paint a big hairy cock and balls on a synthetic a priori concept? NoRadio, signing off.

On the Fugees' Ready or Not, Lauryn Hill delivers the couplet, "And while you imitating Al Capone/ I'll be Nina Simone and defecating on your microphone." Is that the most charming image to use, Lauryn Hill unleashing a length of dirty spine onto a verbal opponent's microphone, in emulation of Nina Simone? Is that a truly reverential gesture towards Nina Simone, whom I assume Lauryn Hill means to extol? This is in no way the only instance of later artists invoking their soulful forebears in arguably crass manners. Beyoncé may be the Queen Bey of a new soul movement, but I can't recall Aretha Franklin or Diana Ross wearing outfits that hinted that they'd had Brazilians, nor them releasing a book like Madonna's that proved they hadn't. This addition of sexiness (and occasionally sleaziness) to the female vocalist equation often subtracts from the delicacy and emotional power that the best female soulsters can produce. Sexual availability is in no way the same as sexual expertise (if you're so good at it, why are you devoting so much to advertising it?). I'm in no way prudish, but soon an aspirant RnB diva will use the word "pissflaps" in a romantic ballad, and I don't really see that as progress. So today we shall return to one of the pioneers of soul, the High Priestess, Nina Simone: prodigious, accomplished, difficult, uncompromising, dead. A just summary of her life and her artistry would be beyond the scope of this review, and in any case listing her most divalike behaviour strikes me as a rather tabloid exercise, so let's focus on this album. Wild is the Wind is an assemblage of tracks recorded from earlier sessions, and is thus essentially a showcase for Nina Simone's performances rather than a unified body of music. And as a showcase, it is frankly astonishing. For such showcases to work, the artist in question has to occupy a rarefied plane (Hendrix's Are You Experienced?, at its root a demonstration that he could play the guitar quite well, is a paradigm of this), and Nina Simone's plane is so lofty that only the birds can reach her. Wild is the Wind has Nina Simone displaying not only the depths of her passion, but the breadth of her command. Not one note, one sentiment is mishandled here. Wild is the Wind includes some fun, upbeat tracks (I Love Your Loving Ways is quite the R&B stomper), but it's the slow numbers that really pierce the heart: desolate, charged, forceful, crippling, and I was in tears by the end. As I said, Nina Simone was highly prolific, and I'm not an authority to say whether this is her best album. However, if she has a better album than this, then how great must that be? Anyway, this album is a masterpiece, and she didn't need to pose in a bikini for it, did she? NoRadio, signing off.

Cyndi Lauper’s sealed in the original plastic of 1983. Whereas the rest of us continued marching incessantly through the years, Cyndi Lauper managed to defeat time, ageing, entropy and fate, and remained forever herself in 1983. But this witchery came with a curse. Her feat left her permanently stranded in the year 1983. As we watched her through the decades, she would constantly scream that she was stuck in 1983 and that she had been driven mad by the constant last episodes of M*A*S*H and Eddie Murphy routines about homosexuals spreading AIDS. And we could do nothing. We all concluded that this was all of her own making, and her wailings about Return of the Jedi and the Strategic Defence Initiative would prove a fable grandparents would tell the youngsters to warn them that their wishes may go cunt-up in the implementation. So Cyndi Lauper hasn’t aged (did anyone ever tell her that it’s spelt Cindy? I’ll tidy that up for her from now on), and thus hasn’t aged well. A mate of mine, trying to refute me with a counterexample, sent me her 1992 song The World is Stone, and all it sounds of is 1983. It’s still the same obtrusive synths and that seemingly artificial sincerity that larded 80s inspirational films and their soundtracks (remember Carly Simon’s Let the River Run, from Working Girl? That sort of artificial sincerity). Listening to Cindy Lauper these days is a combination of archaeological dig and accidental memento mori. I don’t think it’s possible to hear She’s So Unusual without its 1983ness constantly smacking you about the chops, forcing you to contemplate the ceaseless passage of time and the eventual, ineluctable end of everything and all (except Cindy Lauper of course, she’s trapped in 1983 for at least three eternities). But anyway, just because Cindy Lauper is stuck in 1983 doesn’t mean that She’s So Unusual is bad, it just means it’s dated. And for what it is, one can say that the first half of She’s So Unusual generally works if you go for that sort of thing. But Cindy Lauper automatically alienates a good portion of the audience by the plain irritative nature of her voice. I could never stand Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, principally because of the Lauper squeaksome bellow. But Side A benefits from a good choice of songs (although I still don’t like the song, I’ve grown peaceful regarding Girls Just Want to Have Fun (She made another typo there: the days before spellchecker, eh?)). (Actually, while I’m here, I’d like to talk about fellow inept-speller Prince’s When You Were Mine, which Cindy covers. Now, for all the talk of Prince’s raunch, he writes about sex as if he’s never even actually got his tops, let alone his fingers. Case in point, consider the lyric, “I never was the kind to make a fuss/ When he was there sleeping between the two of us”. So he didn’t care when she was literally shagging a bloke next to him, when he’s trying to get some sleep because he’s busy discovering Sheila E in the morning? That doesn’t strike me as an authentic description of a relationship breaking down, and what Prince is doing is just bullshitting his mates in the playground that he’s been fucking this girl two towns over, you don’t know her, but he’s had this threesome with her and her fit lesbian sister, and he did her sister up the arse. Yeah Prince, chinny reckon.) The second side starts strongly, with She Bop further evidence that it’s impossible to write a bad song about masturbation. But there is the fundamental issue with Cindy Lauper: it’s not that She’s So Unusual, it’s that She’s So Annoying. I mentioned earlier how obnoxious her voice was, but this obnoxiousness was defining of Cindy Lauper. The nadir of this abrasiveness comes with the gag insert song He’s so Unusual, where Cindy does an impression of Betty Boop. Just typing that caused all hope to drain out of me. Further, Cindy speaking in silly voices as the coda to Kiss Kiss, the last song on the album, sours the whole experience, and it reminds you why Cindy became marooned in 1983. I haven’t mentioned Madonna yet. Part of the reason why Cindy cannot escape 1983 is that she became obsolete at her peak. Cindy’s schtick shared quite a few facets with that of Madonna’s, only the thrift-store urban rat aesthetic suited Madonna better, and Madonna had better songs. Who needed poor Cindy when you could get a sexier, sharper, less aggravating version for the same price? I’m not suggesting either ripped off the other, but most made the rational choice and ran off with Madge after their dalliance with Cindy left them wearied by all the affected kookiness. 3 stars, mainly because I’m a compassionate sod.

A conceptual piece as much as a recording of music, Duck Rock represents Malcolm McLaren's insistence that he was at least as much a creative drive as the bands he (mis)managed, and that the ideas behind the music were usually far more important than the music itself. So yes, very meta. I should explain a bit of history as to the genesis of this album, or, if you will, what Malcolm did after what Malcolm did next. The Sex Pistols' film, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, sought to present McLaren as the great Svengali not so much managing a band as forming a sculpture from living people, his campaign of cynical bad taste revealing the hypocrisy of the industries in which he traded. But before its release, John Lydon had quit the band onstage, sick of, amongst other things, the attempts at manipulation by the manager. Later, Steve Jones and Paul Cook had wised up to McLaren and walked out themselves, leaving Sid Vicious to his nihilistic death-spiral. With the Sex Pistols defunct and McLaren having lost control even of the aspects that were legitimately his, he retreated to his beloved Paris to score softcore pornography with African music. Whilst there, he developed two very dubious ideas. The first was to form a new band, but this time with people more easily manipulated. The second was to continue the aesthetic of shock and bad taste, but this time based on underage sex. To combine these two ideas in a really, really grim fashion, he founded the band Bow Wow Wow with a 14-year-old singer, Annabella Lwin (he was also managing Adam Ant around this time, and the rest of Bow Wow Wow came from former Ants). In McLaren's ambition, Bow Wow Wow were to represent both a bitten thumb against the gloom of PiL, Joy Division and their ilk, with a return to bubblegum pop infused with African polyrhythms (stick a pin in that for later), and also an overt statement that pop surreptitiously trafficked in imagery of sexualised children (think Britney Spears in the Baby One More Time video, an example McLaren would certainly have proposed himself). That is, McLaren saw himself as merely saying the quiet part loud. You may think, with real justification, that McLaren had already crossed several lines with this use of paedophilic conceits, but he stomped ever further onwards. At one point he ordered the band to take Lwin's virginity in order to make her more compliant (they did not), he had the band recreate Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe for an album cover, which involved Lwin stripping naked, and he talked about founding a magazine which would serve as a Playboy for children, to be called Playkids and later Chicken. Despite all this, Bow Wow Wow never quite became a succès de scandale like the Pistols, and so McLaren became bored of the group. Believing that Lwin was inadequate as a spokesperson for his schemes, he decided to forgo the chores of managing a band and make an album of his own. One point to note about McLaren's work is his skittishness, his tendency to fire out ideas continually without developing them further. This often resulted in half-baked takes mashed together, as McLaren would flit from pirate clothing to Appalachian square dancing. Duck Rock was originally conceived to exploit McLaren's grasshopper nature by incorporating the multitude of ideas that appealed to McLaren at that time, such as Cuban rhythms, Cajun, Soweto, scratching, hobo iconography, skipping, and Puccini (the working title was Folk Dances of the World). Crucially, McLaren enlisted the then-hottest producer in pop, Trevor Horn. On paper, the two men should have found each other detestable: McLaren saw the pop Horn specialised in as safe and passionless, whereas Horn had always thought Never Mind the Bollocks was all artifice, a studio creation by the producer with no authenticity whatsoever. However, both charmed each other and were genuinely engaged by each other's ideas and suggestions. McLaren and Horn wanted to travel the world recording, well, world music, but slim finances meant that they had to make do with just South Africa and (thankfully for the project, highly multicultural) New York. This focus (well, as much focus as you could say a project of this nature could have) begat the hip-hop/world music fusion we have here. What is McLaren's role in this album? A legitimate question. It's oft tricky to discern what McLaren's impact on a song is. McLaren was in no way a musician, and was so rhythmless that Trevor Horn resorted to beating out the rhythms on McLaren's chest as he sang. Indeed, a more accurate accreditation may well have Horn's name alongside McLaren on the cover. Horn found that McLaren's lack of expertise (or even competence) enabled Horn to indulge himself in seeing what the studio could do. In fact, the whole album can be considered an indulgence. McLaren's compulsive flicking between whatever ideas he fancied at that instant is indulgent. Attempting to weld together musical traditions of several cultures separated by continents is indulgent (also, there's a slight, sour resonance between McLaren's use of African music and how European scholars used to label African art as "primitive art"). Asserting that the music is the least important part to your record is indulgent. Believing that the youth of the world would turn your way when you click your fingers is indulgent. A critical person would say it's also delusional. But aside from that, Duck Rock, as much as it is a conceptual piece, is also a recording of music. And as that, separated from McLaren's artsy shenanigans, it's rather good. Remember that indulgence usually brings pleasure, if the occasional stomach-ache. The attempt to swipe music from all around the world does make the album feel vast and ardent. Employing then-nascent hip-hop techniques does feel visionary. Seeking a music beyond the battered stencils of rock and pop does feel laudible. Of course, the attempts to innovate in 1983 inevitably leads occasional moments to sound passé in 2022, so Duck Rock settles at 4 stars. Maybe 20 years down the line, the dissipation of time will make Duck Rock sound as alive as a teenager, but maybe not. I'm not Nate Silver, am I? NoRadio, signing off.

Techincally, the band were called Chicago Transit Authority at the time of this album's release, but when they became successful, the actual Chicago Transit Authority threatened to sue, so they changed their name to Chicago. To my knowledge, that's about the third most interesting fact about Chicago. The most interesting is also upsetting: their guitarist Terry Kath died accidentally at a party when he fired his gun at his head in order to prove that the gun wasn't loaded. It was. The second most interesting fact about Chicago is that most people only like one song by Chicago, 25 or 6 to 4. It is transparent why this is the case: the main riff has a decent enough frug (as it should, considering it's swiped from the similarly sticky-fingered Led Zeppelin's Babe I'm Gonna Leave You), and the brass provides real propulsion. After that, the seam of interesting Chicago facts appears to be mined dry. Is anyone shocked that Chicago are a bit dull? Anyone scrunching up their eyes in bafflement that Chicago don't inspire rock n' roll myths worthy to ring out through the halls of Valhalla? I don't believe I'm slandering anyone's favourite band when I assert Chicago's tedious nature, in both the senses that I'm not uttering falsehoods and that Chicago is nobody's favourite band. One can say that Chicago were, like many dull bands, too worthy, too conscious of their artistry to inspire adoration, and this is a sizeable factor, but the main reason they're unloved is just that they're a bit dull. This, their self-titled debut, exemplifies all that made Chicago a quintessential also-ran in the public's affection. With a debut double album, they aimed high, but ignored the merits of concision. And there's the first wrinkle: the songs are just too bloody long. If we count Prologue, Augst 29, 1968 and Someday (August 29, 1968) as one song, then only two songs out of an adjusted 11 clock in at below 5 minutes, which doesn't detract from the pre-existing condition of worthy dullness. Another consequence of this length is the second wrinkle: the songs meander capriciously, stepping with rapidity from the occasional good riff to a spot of godawful proggy organ diversion. The listener pines for a strong producer to edit out the wanky parts and just leave us with that pleasant frug for which Chicago did have the capacity. That's a central frustration of this album: quite often you'll hear a snippet that genuinely appeals, only Chicago then decide to chance their hand and start invoking their jazz influences or attempting a bit of an experiment. You just want the band to make a solid rocker, not articulate their Thelonious Monkish faith. That solid rocker is here somewhere amidst the horns and the drum solos, and my 3 stars is in part a memorial to what could have been if Chicago took themselves a little less seriously and managed to be a bit more fun. NoRadio, signing off.

The archaeopteryx of rock. Like how the paradigm-smashing fossil established the evolutionary connection between the dinosaurs and the birds, the New York Dolls are the missing link between so much of 70s rock. Along with the hard rock instrumentation, the most obvious strand to their DNA is glam: just look at the cover. But this is not the elegant, new aristocracy glam of Bowie and Roxy Music, but a base, trashy glam of crassness, crapulence and good bad taste. This trash glam had its cohorts in Jayne County and its progeny in the Cramps and, later, hair metal (Guns N Roses covered the Dolls' Human Being on "The Spaghetti Incident?"?. But combine that trash glam with short, fast, raucous and devilish music, and the resultant mutation is late 70s punk rock (Malcolm McLaren managed the New York Dolls for a short while, ludicrously trying to give the Dolls a communist image). This punk link has led many acts, particularly British ones, to cite the Dolls on the educational section of their CVs. Indeed, the New York Dolls are Morrissey's favourite band, and he once wrote a fan history of the group and got the surviving members to reunite at a festival he was curating. Yet the New York Dolls' bluesiness shows that the main forefathers of the Dolls were the Rolling Stones, and David Johansen's cockwalk is a straight lift from Mick Jagger's peacock strut. Extrapolating their influences further, plenty of the New York Dolls' oeuvre reveals an iron connection to 60s garage rock (the genre-defining garage rock compilation Nuggets came out in 1972). In any case, like the archaeopteryx, the New York Dolls also had a few feathers. Still. historical importance is not the same as quality. Amalgamating so many trends in rock may just mean you don't fully satisfy anyone. Now, I like the New York Dolls, both the band and the album, but I need to digest before I can judge whether I find them filling. Well, let's start squirting some enzymes onto this bad boy. Firstly, the titles are brilliant. Personality Crisis, Looking for a Kiss, Trash, Bad Girl, Pills: those are exactly the names of the songs you want from a band looking like this. You don't put on this record expecting a soundtrack to acupuncture at the spa, you want to hear this while you score (a line or a fuck) in the most mould-encrusted bathroom imaginable. So, on the first front, the New York Dolls win that battle. But the war, as I see it, shall be fought on two fronts: whether the music is good and whether the aesthetic is worthwhile. I know I'm being cautious in my assessment, because I love many of the songs on here, and I love the sleaze of the New York Dolls. I love the idea that the trash, the bums, the losers are the ones having the most fun, with their sucking dick to get some green to blow on Chinese rocks (and yes, I understand the reality is not quite so gleeful). Hell, I prefer the New York Dolls to the Ramones; it's safe, conservative even, to like the Ramones. You don't even need to listen to them, you can just buy the t-shirt. At least the New York Dolls aren't quite so corporate. With hindsight, it's evident that the New York Dolls could only produce at most two albums at their peak. Their stance was not conducive to a sustained career, they were too troubled, the limitations of their skills at the time would have meant their style would have quickly become formulaic. That said, they only produced two albums at their peak, so such counterfactuals are moot. And I'm just reviewing one album here, which happens to be their best. Why am I dancing around instead of praising this album efflusively? Well, the most signifcant flaw to this album is the production. The producer was Todd Rundgren, who by his own admission was not simpatico with the New York Dolls or the juvenile punk movement. As such, the occasional song feels a tad underpowered, but not enough to devalue the songs themselves. But the main reason for my dithering goes back to that list at the beginning of what the New York Dolls were. Yes, they were a crucial fusion of glam, punk, bluesy rock and hard rock, but they were not the best at any of those genres. They were not the best glam group, duh, that was Bowie, with Roxy Music the clear silver medallists. They weren't the best punk groups (the Sex Pistols, who also did trash better), nor even the best American punk group (the Stooges). The best Rolling Stones ripoffs were probably still the Rolling Stones. They were not the hardest rocking band in hard rock, which surely discounts them from the title of best hard rock band. They were not the best New York band (although the standard answer is the Velvet Underground, I'll go for the wondrous Suicide). They weren't the most sordid band of the time (Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, or is it technically Gary Glitter?). They weren't even the best band managed by Malcolm McLaren. You want some superlative to attach to the New York Dolls, but for any adjective you suggest, you can always think of a band who were just a little bit more. After all, does anyone have the archaeopteryx as their favourite dinosaur? Mine's the deinonychus. Still, brilliant album, so 5 stars for that. NoRadio, signing off.

In 1967, the French literary theorist Roland Barthes published an essay called La mort de l'auteur, known in English as Death of the Author, where he argued that the traditional view of the author's intentions and biography providing the definitive reading of the text was false, that the author's life and claimed purpose for the text were irrelevant to criticism, and that the multiplicity of interpretations a reader could derive should hold precedent (if an author does give their intention regarding a text, then all they are doing is proving their interpretation as a reader, which is prima facie no better or worse than any other reader). To illustrate this, consider the hypothetical of a monkey bashing away at a typewriter whose random stabs produce a variation on Hamlet where (spoiler) Hamlet survives. Should we take into account the monkey's mindset when it wrote this distorted masterwork? If you try and say yes to that, you're just being a dick. Anyway, Beth Orton. I could not place the name Beth Orton at all before I received this album for review. It turns out she had guest-sung on a few dance tracks, and that she had achieved some critical kudos during the late 90s with her fusion of folk and electronica, or folktronica if you will. Now, the idea of folktronica seems one of those ideas which for the first second seems clever but then suddenly becomes cringeworthy; funk metal is a more extreme example of this phenomenon. The reason folktronica becomes embarrassing so quickly is because of its advertised cleverness: "oh look," it says, "I'm such a smart merger of two disparate genres! I combine the lyricism and naturalness of folk with the starkness and prescience of electronica! I could very well be the music of the Moon!" Yes, in that it's as sterile and as lifeless as the Moon. Now this album doesn't feature that much electronica, with most tracks performed on acoustic instruments. If asked, I would say the album aims for the sound of Nick Drake's Bryter Layter, which is Nick Drake's warmest album. But that's where the issues of the album rise to the surface. You can remember Nick Drake's voice and songs. Beth Orton's voice, by no means bad, isn't distinctive enough make the songs memorable. I've listened to the fucker three times, and I could not tell you one lyric from it beyond the word "the", let alone any thematic conceits. Along with that, the songs themselves are not distinguishable from each other. So we get these folky sounds that drift along for an hour to no real goal. One review I saw on this site said the reviewer neither liked nor disliked it, but "just... experienced it". Which, if you think about it, results in this being an ambient album. It's an album to put on in the background, to become wallpaper or recirculated air. I don't suppose for a picosecond that this was intended as an ambient album, but as a sincere, updated folk album. Yet as I said at the beginning, the creator's intentions don't matter. What matter here are the work itself and the interpretation the listener gives it, and this listener considers it an ambient album. So how does it work as an ambient album? It's alright, I guess. Bit coffee-shoppy, bit predictable because of that, bit unengaging because of that predictability, bit disappointing because of that lack of engagement. You could say that distance from the listener is the intention of a ambient album, but I reply that you can ram your intentions up your fudgetunnel. noRadio, signing off.

Stevie is not short for Steven. It's short for Stevland. In 1971, Stevie Wonder turned 21. This occasion saw the expiration of his original contract with Motown. Having initially signed to Motown's Tamla label aged 11, Stevie Wonder was put on a five-year rolling contract with his royalties held in trust until he turned 21. During this period, Berry Gordy supervised the musical direction of Stevie Wonder's career (in fairness, Berry Gordy is hardly a bad choice for steering the musical ship). But following his 21st birthday, Stevie Wonder renegotiated a new contract with Motown, granting him significantly more royalties and much more artistic control. We now call this the start of Stevie Wonder's golden period (not that the previous era wasn't precious). Talking Book, the second album of this exalted age (and the 15th album the then-22-year-old had released), has Stevie moving further away from that Motown sound of his teenage years to a synthy, funky, more idiosyncratic style. That said, the soulfulness is still there; plenty of love jams on this slab. And that shall serve as a segue into discussing one of the main sticking points of Stevie: his occasional cheesiness. For such a revered artist with such a revered back catalogue, Stevie has seemed plagued by sharp dips into outright edam. Every Living for the City comes coupled with an I Just Called to Say I Love You. Partly this is contextual: Stevie Wonder's smoochy numbers remind one of tipsy, 40-something parents dancing cheek-to-cheek at wedding night dos, their teenage offspring sulking shamefacedly at the edges of the hall. Is it Stevie's fault that his songs prove so popular at such instances? Or that such instances ripple back through the past, contaminating Stevie's earlier love songs? Well, it's not as if Stevie Wonder's an idiot. We just reach the common-sense criticism that when Stevie Wonder explores his sentimental side, it sometimes becomes mildly embarrassing. But there's another aspect to this cheesiness such common sense downplays: Stevie's Steely-Danness. When Stevie Wonder began venturing beyond the purview of soul, he stumbled upon jazz and the Rhodes piano. That pairing was also discovered by Steely Dan, which strikes me as a far more fromagey association than Stevie Wonder appearing with Blue. Steely Dan are like that Sardinian cheese with the maggots inside that's technically illegal but still, for reasons beyond sense, has a thriving black market. Putting aside Steely Dan's interminable jazz noodling bollocks, you should always get ready to flee when a band sells itself on the clarity of its production. It's a sign that they've forgotten rock 'n' roll. So, with those lactates described, where does Talking Book stand? Delightfully, it transcends these, and Talking Book still shows Stevie Wonder at his apex. Talking Book's few slips into mawkishness and Steely Danness do not prevent Stevie Wonder from reaching top speed. Superstition remains blistering, a song where just the first ten seconds are enough to make your day. Big Brother manages a remarkable feat for politicised songs: it still sounds fresh and resonant today (a trait shared by several of Stevie Wonder's 70s political numbers). But what truly raises Talking Book to the pantheon is Stevie Wonder's humanism. Worldly yet optimistic, Talking Book expresses a basic faith in the potential of life and the potential for love and happiness. Perhaps that's the defining characteristic of Stevie Wonder's golden period: the joy of simply being alive. The Will in Will Smith isn't short for William. It's short for Willard. Yet in the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Geoffrey always referred to Will as "Master William". So his character in the Fresh Prince was named after him, yet also had a different name. Bit odd, that. NoRadio, signing off.

The most Nick Cave album Nick Cave has ever made. Every aspect, from the choice of guest stars to the copious use of "motherfucker" in his take on Stagger Lee, feels so Nick Cavernous it's almost parodic. As such, is this an album made for an audience of one, that one person being Nick Cave himself? 1996 saw Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds reach their summit, in terms of commercial success and critical cachet. In retrospect, it also saw Nick Cave transition from gothy cult artist to respected elder of rock. The conceit of this album exemplifies this change of status: long besotted with grisly subject matter and its visceral impact on the listener, Nick Cave gathered his Seeds and recorded an album of murder ballads, some covers but mainly from his own pen. The most famous song on this album proved a little left-field: Nick Cave got fellow antipodean and remarkably tenacious popstar/wank-fodder Kylie Minogue to duet on Where the Wild Roses Grow, a sombre countryish number with Cave as the killer in unhealthy love with his victim Kylie. Nick Cave doing an album of murder ballads is not so much predictable as the logical conclusion to his work, like Eric Clapton's album of Robert Johnson covers or Rod Stewart's series of the Great American Songbook. And like those two examples, Murder Ballads has the odour of a passion project that just happened to appeal to other people. Nick Cave just wanted to do an album of murder ballads, which incidentally is exactly what his fans wanted him to do. If you don't want to hear Nick Cave sing about slitting an unfaithful lover's throat, then you weren't listening to Nick Cave anyway, and there's no point in you listening to Nick Cave in the future. Now, I quite like Nick Cave. I accept that he's done excellent work. And on paper, this should be the ideal Nick Cave album for me. I'm warped enough to adore violent art, from Georges Bataille to Paul Verhoeven. For me, a film improves Everestally if there's a close-up of someone's head exploding (that spectacle is one of the oldest special effects in cinematic history, with one of Georges Méliès' shorts featuring an exploding head way back in 1901). And there is greatness on this album. The relish and obscenity Nick Cave brings to his take on Stagger Lee, a American folk song based on a 19th-century African-American pimp, is a true hoot. How can you not embrace a line like "I'd crawl over 50 good pussies just to get to one fat boy's asshole"? But there are minor slip-ups in the delivery. Tragically, the general excellence surrounding these flaws magnifies them, like Jet from Gladiators with a nasal carbuncle. Returning to the version of Stagger Lee, it ends with some very clunky lines that forget to use metre correctly. Have you ever accidentally headbutted your partner at the moment of climax? It's a bit like that. Such awkwardness doesn't happen often on the album, but it happens often enough to be awkward. Yet what really prevents this album from achieving greatness is the totality of murder ballads. I am criticising an album of murder ballads for just containing murder ballads. Yes, the duets with PJ Harvey and Kylie have their pleasures, but by track 7, The Kindness of Strangers, you begin to fidget and wish for some bubblegum. When I was wondering what the audience for this album was, I should have clarified that I was wondering what the audience was for the entirety of this album. If it could leave a gorehound like me wanting to hear Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes) halfway through, maybe the motive of a murder ballads album was better than the execution. That's murder for you. NoRadio, signing off.

Oh God, I don't want to review Dire Straits. I really don't. Do you ever feel out of sync with the world? When I started at uni in the early years of this century, I was aghast at the number of people (aged 18 to 22, let's not forget) who declared not just a fondness for but almost an idolisation of Dire Straits. I still can't explain it. Surely these are people who you'd expect to have placed significance on coolness? And before you object, just look at that album cover. Pastel pink font? Levitating guitar (although is it being held up by its neck?)? It aims to depict pure guitarness, but lands on the art of guitar as done by a recently divorced dad. So Dire Straits' fanbase baffles me enormously. Mayhap I'm just being prejudiced, and Dire Straits do have merits I choose to overlook. I can recall the specific instance when my antipathy for Dire Straits materialised (I had never liked the music as a kid, but I had never concentrated on Dire Straits either). I was watching TV at 2am during my teenage years, and a cheapo documentary on Mark Knopfler came on, which said his convoluted guitar playing represented a positive rejection of punkish amateurism. I just noticed the overwhelming taste of bile in my mouth. Mark Knopfler as the stalwart knight repelling the throngs of we snotty oiks? What a wanker. Nope, it's not prejudice, Dire Straits are terrible and their fans delude themselves solely because Mark Knopfler can play a guitar a bit. (I feel I should point out that Dire Straits refused to play Apartheid-era South Africa, and donated all their royalties from their South African sales to anti-Apartheid organisations. That should not be insulted. I feel I should also point out that when Dire Straits were inducted into the pointless and unfit-for-purpose Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the great luminary they got to induct them was John Illsley. Since you don't recognise the name, I'll tell you that he was the bassist for Dire Straits. The same year, Bon Jovi was inducted by Howard Stern. I'll leave you to decide which is more shameful.) The album Brothers in Arms is crap. Any discussion of Brothers in Arms should begin with that fact. If you haven't included that sentence in your review, you have failed. It's not difficult. It's a few seconds' worth of typing. A little more typing will produce the following, completely accurate list: it's really boring, it's really pompous, the songs go on far too long, the album goes on far too long, Mark Knopfler's voice never rises above a bad impression of Dylan, the guitar work is ostentatious without being engaging, the production showcases a villains' row of commonplace 80s production atrocities. But to explain the most sizeable flaw of Brothers in Arms, one needs to look at the essence of the album. It's lyrically-driven blues rock with intricate guitar work. There are a million billion such albums released every year, and none of them have been any cop since 1974. So Brothers in Arms is not only poor, it's a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, with some slick 80s gimmicks to mask the thievery. Now, I'm not one to chastise an artist for stealing, but Knopfler could have nicked something with a bit more vitality. Here's an idea, Mark: your fretwork could actually fit well as a rococo decoration over a motorik beat. Yes, you're still copying, but you'd be copying something we wouldn't expect you to copy, and that's some kind of originalty, I think. Still, if Dire Straits became more interesting, would they stop being Dire Straits? Well, a mate of mine pointed out that John Squire of the Stone Roses seems to have quite the similarity to Knopfler regarding guitartistry. It's not the case that guitar heroes became irredeemably lame; they just became handcuffed to irredeemably lame genres. You can weld together technical proficiency and aesthetic credibility, you know. But no matter the circumstances, I reckon Dire Straits would somehow always just have been crap. NoRadio, signing off.

In terms of image, is there a more contradictory band? This is a band, and an album, that advertises itself on its authenticity. The White Stripes purposefully recorded Elephant using 1950s equipment. And as I mentioned in my review of their previous album White Blood Cells, the White Stripes seem almost frightened, in the manner of a teacher's pet, to go beyond their declared influences of blues, country, rock and punk. Yet what band has ever seemed more artificial? Them hawking themselves on their authenticity brings the postmodern conundrum of faking sincerity in a fake way, since they were sincere all along. There's the quirkiness of the Michel Gondry videos. We have the siblings-then-lovers-then-neither business which I don't think anyone sensible cared about. Their colour scheme of white, red and black (the colours of a swastika flag, coincidentally) reminds one of the sartorial rigmarole of glam. And don't pretend that recording on 50s equipment is in any way less an affectation as a declaration that no synthesisers were used on this album. But the White Stripes always had one shield against these intellectualised jabs: they have the songs to back up the pretence. The White Stripes have continually made fantastic songs. Seven Nation Army and The Hardest Button to Button are fantastic songs. They've made enough fantastic songs to produce a corker of a greatest hits. It's cock-obvious what their best songs are. Their best songs are the ones that rock the hardest. Elephant is the White Stripes album that rocks the hardest. So yes, this is the best White Stripes album. For all the pretence of their image (is anyone else vaguely reminded of new romanticism?), the White Stripes work best as a simple, dick-in-vag rock band. Which leads us to the aptest test: how does this work as an album alongside, for instance, Back in Black or Appetite for Destruction? Well, neither of those albums had any sense of irony (it's a mistake to assume those albums are stupid, though intelligent is in no way the word to use; I'd say they're streetwise). The White Stripes, as the convolutions of their image indicate, cannot operate without a sense of irony, As I was typing this, Jack White sang "it's a fact that I'm a seventh son". That, my leviathans, is a serendipitous moment that proved to me why I felt a significant inch of distance betwixt the White Stripes and me. When I reviewed White Blood Cells, I was dissuaded by a lack of nonchalance, by Jack White the rock geek and not the rock god. Listening to this, I clocked that this prissiness extended to their use of irony. Irony should be a wonderful tool that unleashes the imagination. The White Stripes's irony is workmanlike. It's the irony of a band that's too scared to be too ironic. They could do a top-notch cover of a classic synthpop track (let's say Soft Cell's Say Hello, Wave Goodbye), but they would simply be too frightened when it came time to record. Changing avenue, the lyrics to the White Stripes are, if you're looking deeply, bollocks. But that's hardly an uncommon occurrence in the best rock albums. For instance, Noel Gallagher has never denied his lyrics try to indicate a mood rather than a meaning (which means they're semantically bollocks). But with our Noel, we all knew that, because that was part of the deal of enjoying Oasis. They make you feel good rather than philosophise. The White Stripes' lyrics are equally tonal rather than meaningful, but does Jack White know that? Horrifically, I think he thinks that, due to his diligence, everything he writes must be meaningful somehow, even though he knows rock 'n' roll needs no intellectual justification. Combining those two points is what breaks my heart about the White Stripes. They got trapped in a postmodern web of authenticity twisted with artifice, and so their brilliant songs became stuck with that whiff of untrustworthiness. Irony is like a cheap toy: if you play with it carelessly, it'll break, and your mum won't buy you another. NoRadio, signing off.

Did anyone else experience this? When I was reading the Wikipedia entry for this band, I got about a third down and realised that no information about the band had entered my head whatsoever. This is in part due to their Wikipedia page delivering torrents of info nobody in the world cares about or will ever care about. Is there a conceivable reason anyone would want to know the dates of their various Saturday Night Live performances? This is an especial variant of tedium afflicting contemporary indie. The National suffer that condition which oft infects indie bands that aim for the superior market of the Pitchfork reviewer: by insisting that their music is their overriding concern, they don't provide enough personality to attract the standard listener. Oh, their music may be acceptable, but you notice a deficit in charm, or empathy, or flair, or wit, or even contempt. You just receive this batch of nondescript good taste, which paradoxically results in it appearing in as bad taste as Kanye West's latest theory. Do they have blood in their veins or just water? And yes, the music on High Violet is good, and in good taste. But it's the good taste of a beige and silver bedroom suite where you suspect that the interior designer would vomit in disgust if someone tried sleeping in it, or worse, fucking in it. The album started off fine. Terrible Love is a decent opener, even if the song doesn't achieve the potential the title suggests. But the album stays in exactly the same tenor throughout, and diminishing returns kick in by the second track. No song struck me, no lyric struck me, no melody struck me. It's a bitch to write about this, because you're trying to find details in wallpaper paste. When the end came round, with another promisingly titled number called Vanderlyle Crybaby Geeks, it was a few minutes after the song finished that I realised the album had ended. As a British music fan, my relationship with indie is convoluted and complex. This is completely normal. Ask any person in a similar position their opinion on Oasis, and you'll get spittle-infused terabytes of how Be Here Now is underrated, or how Oasis were the most overrated British group of the 90s, or how their brother attended their concert at Knebworth, or which of the two brothers has had the more rewarding solo career, or most likely you'll get a drunken yet sincere bellowing of Don't Look Back in Anger. What you won't get is a shrug. The National just gave me 45 minutes of raised shoulders and pursed lips. Hell, even this more tempered style of indie can elevate the soul: I gave 4 stars to Elbow not too long ago. But for The National to actually move people, I recommend more drastic treatment. Dr. NoRadio prescribes The National to blow coke up strippers' bumholes on stage, then deafen the first ten rows of the audience with a power chord so fierce that it'd make Thor Himself piss His breeches. Come back when you can rock like a bastard. NoRadio, signing off.

The guitar solo, despite its iconography within rock, is not inherently cool. I hear you protest, what about Hendrix, or Keith Richards, or Slash? Well, with each of those, I can meet you with three that will cause you to hesitate`visibly before ultimately declaring them uncool. In fact, here we go with 9 lead guitarists who aren't very cool, or aren't quite cool, or just aren't cool: Eric Clapton (dodgy politics, frequent soporific blues), Brian May (consider the next seven words: the rock musical We Will Rock You), Mark Knopfler (headband, anti-punk), John Frusciante (is there a group uncooler than the Red Hot Chili Peppers? Possibly within Christian metal, but even that's a toss-up), Dave Gilmour (I've a friend who'd fuck the young Gilmour, but I listened to The Wall this morn and it's a load of widdle), Pete Townshend (one of the founders of the rock opera genre, so thus a guilty forefather to We Will Rock You), Stevie Ray Vaughn (mainly for the innumerable pauchy American white boys who insist unfathomably that he was better than Hendrix), Prince (do you want to listen to one of the three-disc jazz-funk splatterings he'd wank out thrice a year? God no), and Robert Fripp (yeah, heavily inspired by Segovia, sadly inspired to invent prog fucking rock). So, my point infallibly proven, let's discuss Maggot Brain. Maggot Brain is, in the standard Funkadelic tradition, absolutely plastered with LSD. George Clinton's opening monologue, with its munching the Universe's mind maggots, tells us succinctly where he's coming from. And then we get to the solo. The title track is a 10 minute guitar solo by Eddie Hazel done in one take. As direction, George Clinton told Eddie to play as if his mother had just died, then to play as if she had come back to life. Now, Eddie Hazel and his solo are bang in the middle of cool territory, and Maggot Brain reveals a key aspect which separates the uncool, shrimpy-dicked guitar nerd who's never felt a lady's bumps and the searingly cool guitar hero with a foot-long wanger and a list of sexual conquests bested only by Genghis Khan. Hazel's guitar solo is adept but not flashy. Pretty much all the guitarists on Santa's uncool list seem to think that the quality of the guitar solo is proportionate to the speed of the scales played. Eddie Hazel's solo does not follow that philosophy. His fingerwork is as gorgeously langorous as often as it is hyperactively clustered. And as such, it in no way suffers from the major flaw of the uncool guitar solo: it doesn't feel like a barrage of empty, meaningless notes played fast. The sentiment to the track Maggot Brain feels genuine and spontaneous, and it's a real connoisseur's choice of guitar solo. But that leads to a familiar issue concerning the entire album: like Alice Cooper's Billion Dollar Babies and Chic's Risqué, the rest of the album may shrivel under the shadow of an overbearing opener. So, as I am fair, kindhearted and priapic, I shall now listen to the album except for the first track. See you in half an hour. Of course, the rest of the album features the rest of Funkadelic, and Funkadelic, for all their loony-toon wildness, were a band as tight as an Italian waiter's swimming trunks. And with delight, the other songs of the album boom when taken separately from the title track. You notice the humour of the album, oft immature but no less charming for that. You should also notice, if you're smart, how much of Maggot Brain belongs within hard rock as much as funk. Not only do we have the immensity of the title track's axemanship, many of the other tracks stuff us with blood-red riffs. George Clinton well dug the zeitgeist of hard rock, and so Maggot Brain is that fanastic mongrel of funk, soul, psychedelia and rock so hard you could hammer a nail in with it. NoRadio, signing off.

I have spoken before, during my review of Buck Evans' I've Got a Tiger by the Tail, about the kaleidoscope of reasons why an individual wouldn't like country. But why would an individual like country? Well, country is often simple, unpretentious fun. It fits both a rowdy honky-tonk Saturday night and a contemplative moment with a glass of bourbon. Its best singers have qualities rare in other genres: grit, directness and authority. Someone once told me that country is the only genre focused of expressing the listener's travails: when a country singer wails about being unable to make that month's rent, it is sung for the members of the audience who can't make that month's rent. And perhaps the greatest strength of country is the same as the greatest strength of soul: both genres are unsurpassed in making the listener feel a deeper sense of emotion. With soul, the emotion it conveys most profoundly is love; the emotion that country expresses with similar insight is, of course, heartache. Every cowboy sings a sad, sad song. Merle Haggard is my favourite country singer. I am in no way an expert on country, but I know enough to have a favourite singer, and that's Merle Haggard. Merle Haggard was one of the figures representing the most credible stance of country artists: the troubled, wandering bad boy constantly evading the law, not always successfully, and whose unsettled past provided their songs with authenticity and toughness. This is the tradition of Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and the outlaw country movement. Merle Haggard's drifter jailbird country was damn more authentic than most. An Okie from California, Haggard's teenage years can be summarised by the extensive rap sheet he managed. After a few periods of reform school, Haggard got inspired to pursue music, but poverty led him to attempt a robbery, which led him to attend San Quentin. He then changed direction and concentrated on becoming the most adept country songwriter there ever was. Oddly, his most famous song is the rather unrepresentative, conservative protest song Okie from Muskogee, which opens with the line "We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee"; in later years, Haggard would love himself some blazing up of a fatso JJ (I understand that's what the kids call it nowadays). I'm a Lonesome Fugitive is Merle Haggard's third album, and exemplifies the Bakersfield sound, which was a California-based anti-Nashville style of country that readily took lessons and rhythms from rock 'n' roll. So, I'm a Lonesome Fugitive has real pep, and If You Want to Be My Woman is a straight-up blues number. But it should be noted that, since it's a 1967 country album, the record serves more as a showcase of Merle Haggard's songs from early 1967 than as a coherent album interlaced with themes and leitmotifs. But like Are You Experienced and Wild is the Wind, I'm a Lonesome Fugitive is a really good showcase. We experience most of the standard rounds in Haggard's revolver: convict troubadour numbers, (I'm a Lonesome Fugitive), murder ballads (Life in Prison), paradigmatic love songs (All of Me Belongs to You), juke joint blues rockers (If You Want to Be My Woman), odes to drinking away one's problems (Drink Up and Be Somebody), odes to just drinking (My Rough and Rowdy Ways). Every song here is mighty fine, and every listen so far has just made them mighty finer. But one property of this album worth noting is that this is not an album for teenagers. The audience this album aims for is adult, even middle-aged. The album's humour is wry and drenched in rye. The sorrows of this album are adult concerns of penury and the losses of serious love, not adolescent infatuations. Even resorting to booze to ease a broken heart, while not necessarily a mature response, is by definition an adult one. So, this has set me to thinking if the snottiness against country stems from age. I can understand perfectly if a teenager has no inclination to seek out some Willie Nelson. How would that teenager feel once they hit 35? Does the predilection to country music depend on how close you are to your first prostate exam? NoRadio, signing off.

Do you know what people do for Christmas in Japan? They go to KFC. In the 1980s, KFC ran an advertising campaign in Japan, exhorting their customers to spend Christmas with a loved one at KFC. It proved phenomenally successful, to the extent that attending KFC on Christmas Day is now a bona fide Japanese tradition. People make reservations weeks in advance to get a table at KFC on Christmas Day. Also, as I recall, Japan is the only country where one can order beer at KFC. Now, I'm not above a KFC, no way. Indeed, out of the big fast food chains, KFC commands the most fondness from me. But as a Brit, the idea of visiting KFC on Christmas Day strikes me and plenty of others as hopelessly depressing, the practice of the loneliest men in the land. Also, the overt commercial nature of the Japanese Christmas KFC tradition surely runs counter to the western ideal of Christmas as an occasion to celebrate the things money can't buy (yes, we're all hypocrites in that regard, but that doesn't make us evil). So, I don't think I can understand emotionally how the Japanese view Christmas. So can I understand how the Americans view Christmas? Well, if I were to emigrate there, how I'd celebrate Christmas would automatically be some American form of Christmas, even if I retained all the trappings of a British Christmas: turkey and the complaints that it's not as nice as chicken, overheated rooms, at least one massive row, opening a can of lager before 10am (actually, I'm objectionably sober this year, what with my ruined feet). The story of America as a nation of immigrants means that the multiplicity of immigrant Christmas traditions, from German stollen to Italian panettone, all become possible additions to an American Christmas. Still, Americans have generated traditions of their own without recourse to the rest of the world's tired, poor and huddled masses yearning to breathe free. And this, Phil Spector's A Christmas Gift to You, is a uniquely American record with a uniquely American conception of Christmas. Well, that's my reasoning as to why this album left me completely ungripped. Any description of Phil Spector, who died at the beginning of this year, has to mention his murder of the actress Lana Clarkson in 2003. He was sentenced to 19 years to life in prison in 2009. Even before this tragedy, Phil Spector had a reputation as the most deranged producer in all of music, but he also had a reputation as one of the greatest producers in all of music. Known as the Dean of Teen, Phil Spector found fame and acclaim as the svengali behind numerous girl groups and songs, writing and producing classic tracks with his Wall of Sound method of multiple instrument layering to achieve as full a sound as possible. His talent as a producer led to many other cherished acts seeking either inspiration from him or just seeking him to produce. Brian Wilson admits to a lifelong Spector obsession that proved one of the key influences on Pet Sounds. Spector produced perhaps Tina Turner's finest moment, River Deep, Mountain High. The Beatles' last album, Let It Be, was produced by Spector, but nobody considers this the Fabs' finest album (in 2003 Macca released a version of Let It Be without all the strings Spector stapled on, but this fits perfectly into the curio box). John Lennon continued working with Spector on his solo albums, from his most celebrated to his most excoriated. The last major album Spector produced was End of the Century by the Ramones, long noted for their love of Spector's girl group singles. And throughout this time, Spector's behaviour was often fanatical, domineering and worrisome. Later in life diagnosed with bipolar disorder, Spector had serious problems with alcohol and suffered from paranoia, leading to a fixation on guns. Some figures, including Dee Dee Ramone, have accused Spector of pulling guns on them. Ronnie Spector, leader of the Ronettes and one-time wife to Spector, declared that Spector had been psychologically abusive, had kept her prisoner in his mansion and that she literally had to escape in order to leave the marriage. Several of his children also allege serious abuse on Spector's part. I have in no way covered all the details of Spector's iniquities, and nor do I want to. Now, it is perfectly possible for great art to be made by the monstrous. Separating the artist and the art is not only healthy, it's easy. We don't need to consider A Christmas Gift to You in light of Spector's crimes. But I do feel I personally have to consider it through the prism of how I perceive Christmas; it is a Christmas album, after all. The songs are very well-known, decorating so many American Christmas movies. And that's where I felt the album rode straight into the uncanny valley. These aren't my idea of cracking Christmas songs. The best Christmas song is Slade's Merry Xmas Everybody: it's great fun, it's not at all pompous, Slade sound as if they're genuinely enjoying themselves. Also, it's a definitive British Christmas song. It's a stellar example of that sadly lost practice of British bands mucking in and recording Christmas singles in order to entertain the nation. The main drive was enthusiasm and so the main result was glee. Yet this is an American Christmas album. Plenty of American acts have recorded Christmas albums. Plenty of Jewish American acts have recorded Christmas albums, continuing the custom inaugurated by Irving Berlin with White Christmas. But with this album and many other American Christmas albums, what I sense is not enthusiasm but slickness. When Spector used his Wall of Sound technique for love songs, the craft amplified the emotional impact. But these are songs about Santa and Frosty the Snowman. The songs are difficult to fault directly, but the Wall of Sound becomes routine, a procedure as fitting for a toothpaste jingle as for a declaration of love. And I find this bizarre, but I think Americans appreciate this aura of professionalism. It's a sign that you haven't been ripped off. Or maybe it's just not my Christmas. Perchance I were American, this would be as cosy and reassuring as a cup of pumpkin spice hot chocolate and a handgun. But I'm not, so this is essentially Japanese KFC. And remember: not everyone has it easy at Christmas. If you do find yourself feeling down at this time of year, you can always reach out and google "Phil Spector hair". NoRadio, signing off.

What can we say about Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band that hasn't been said before? Well, the cut-out of Marilyn Monroe was actually in colour, but before the layout was assembled the lads had a competition, where they would take turns to ejaculate onto the cut-out, maximum of three minutes from flop to pop, the winner being the one who lasted the most laps. By the time of the photoshoot, the Monroe cut-out was coated in so much Fab Four baby gravy that it appeared black and white. For the record, Ringo won the contest.* Unusual historical titbits aside, Sgt. Pepper is probably the most famous album of them all, and the most memetic. I've sat down with mates trying to name the various people on the cover, and I'm not an especial Beatles fan. The cover is also the accidental originator of many a supposed Paul-is-Dead hint (Paul has his back to the camera on the back cover, he's wearing a badge saying O.P.P., if you take the top half of the LONELY HEARTS writing on the bass drum, then reflect it, it spells I ONE X HE DIE (some people have simply lost touch with reality)). Regardless of its revolutionary reputation, Sgt. Pepper was a transitional work for the Beatles. Having recently decided to quit touring, the four lads took a three month break to follow their individual interests. George predictably went to India, Ringo just as predictably spent time with his family, John acted in the film How I Won the War, and Paul dropped acid for the first time (George and John having tried it previously). These solo pursuits fed ideas into what became Sgt. Pepper. George's love of Indian culture inspired Within You Without You (well, duh). John, being a bit of a tosser, had become more introverted and artsier, wishing to continue his psychedelic experimentation. Paul also wanted to try out those crazy new thoughts, man, and conceived of a fake band called Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which would allow the band to probe exciting, far-out genres, from avant-garde classical to music-hall. The result is a Beatles album. It has all the same strengths of a standard Beatles album and all the same weaknesses. And the honest soul will admit it rates at the standard honest Beatles rating: 4/5. There are genuinely great songs on here: that is true of pretty much every Beatles album. There's also some filler that mars the album: that is also true of pretty much every Beatles album. I know that sounds rather hedging, rather wishy-washy, but how radical do you expect an assessment of the Beatles to be? How radical? Isn't this supposed to be the album that blew the doors off the world? As a 30something man in the arse end of 2022, it may well be impossible for me to hear Sgt. Pepper as innovative. Sure, I can intellectually dig how new all this tape looping and reverb was at the time, but I have lived my whole life in a world where such techniques were commonplace and, in some instances, obsolete. However, other contemporary trailblazers have retained some inventive freshness, such as The Doors' The End or Trout Mask Replica, and in fairness to the Moptops, A Day in the Life has remained sparksome. But perhaps the Beatles were just too big for their brainwaves to stay their brainwaves, and their ideas would inevitably diffuse to become everyone's ideas. That may bring the advantage that I'm not being distracted by all the novelty and can thus assess the songs independently from the whoosh of the new. And it's a few great songs, a bit of filler. The great ones are the obvious ones (Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, A Day in the Life), the filler tends to be mildly dull rather than unpleasant (She's Leaving Home, Good Morning Good Morning). One can see how certain beret-wearers might find the whole music-hall, band-playing-a-band playfulness to be just irritating, but one also tends to feel that to be the attitude of a churl. However, it doesn't warrant five stars, much less the status as possibly the greatest album of them all. Just be content that it's rather good, and avoid every album attempting to be their band's take on Sgt. Pepper (Their Satanic Majesty's Request et. al.). Seriously, they're all crap without exception. *That might possibly not be true, but nobody's said it before, have they? NoRadio, signing off.

You can tell if you'll like Rain Dogs or detest it by a line that occurs in the first song Singapore. A wilfully eccentric sea shanty about a oddball crew of sailors, halfway through we get the detail, "The captain is a one-armed dwarf." How you react to that image gauges how positively you'll view the album. If you find it intriguing and macabre, Rain Dogs will reward you heavily. If it hits you as hackneyed and comicbookesque (not to mention borderline offensive), this album will have nothing to offer you. Both are perfectly valid responses, and right now I'm not sure exactly how I view this album, since I see the merit in both takes. Rain Dogs saw Tom Waits continue on the trajectory he began with Swordfishtrombones, where he had rejected his earlier piano-based approach and adopted more idiosyncratic instrumentation and songwriting informed by outsider musicians such as Harry Partch and Captain Beefheart. So we get a motley series of vignettes depicting New York's indigents, thugs, lovers, winos, creeps and dreamers, set to marimba and double bass and with Tom Waits delivering his lyrics with a highly corrupted howl. Curiously, what decides whether you'll appreciate this album or not is your attitude to theatricality. This is an album revelling in artifice, with the manner of a gobshite barfly spinning his yarn about how he scaled Kilimanjaro to win a night in bed with the Empress of Abyssinia, all in the hope you'll sling him a large scotch. Now, several scholars have noted that, whereas "poetic" and "balletic" are adjectives with wholly positive associations of beauty, elegance and grace, the similarly artistically derived "theatrical" comes with the negative baggage of artificiality, pomposity and histrionics. (I should point out that another of the standard barbs against the theatrical is its campness, with definite emphasis on the sexual connotations.) Now, all rock involves performance, obviously, so rock cannot shed the theatrical, at least not wholly. Yet another factor that has traditionally exemplified rock has been that antithesis to theatricality, authenticity. Only time has enabled the Monkees to be treated as a classic band, the years granting the Monkees the authenticity of history. Boybands are traditionally the most decried of acts, to the extent that defenders of them regularly claim the authenticity lies not in the bands themselves, but in the intemerate, untutored tastes of the teenage girl. (Whether authenticity is actually that valuable a concept is a discussion for another day, but I'll say in passing that I suspect it's not). And it's not as it Tom Waits doesn't understand the import of conveying authenticity. The gaslit strangeness is how the album sells its realness. Of course, such a tactic is oft the bait to yet another emperor's new clothes hustle. Yet the weirdness makes it a very straightforward album to assess, especially in the light of your own tastes. I like Tom Waits and I like Rain Dogs. It's fun, it's inventive, it's humorous and it's generally charming. There's the caveat that, even with a warm disposition to the album, you may easily find it sails well close to the boundary of exasperation, and perhaps fully into those dark waters. And if you have no tolerance for the determinedly kooky, don't bother with this. Fittingly for such a dramatic work, it has a specific audience, it knows it has a specific audience, and it seeks only to cater to that specific audience. You'll know during the first song whether you belong with that rather slim crowd. Me, I'm on the outskirts; I like it, but I can't say I love it. Good enough for 4 stars, but a second longer and it would have forfeited one. NoRadio, signing off (200th album! Woohoo!).

New year, same distorted feet. Anyway, indie is reputationally the home of the wimp. Are you an adolescent male bored by football, be it soccer or American football, and in possession of the upper body strength of Shirley Temple? Why not make your nest in the softest genre of all? Nobody will mock your underdeveloped chest and maintained-throughout-adolescence bedwetting in the all-accepting indie gang (well, they probably will still mock you, since people are arseholes, but you’ll find plenty to mock them back with, and they’ll be too soft to kick your head in anyway). That said and rather strangely, proper jocks, rugger buggers and other sporting males can be devoted fans of your Take Thats and your N-Syncs without inviting jeer. I guess being hard means you need seek no excuses, and you need develop no taste. However, there is a strand of indie that asserts its hardness. This is that peculiarly British strand of indie where pissed-up lads into footie also like coruscating guitar lines and lyrical cleverness/quirkiness. Descendants of punk and the rockier 60s bands (Who, Stones etcetry etcetry), bands like the Happy Mondays, Stone Roses and Oasis (all Manc) offered indie with a promise of a ruck. And if you want a reason why hard indie emanated in the UK and not the USA, it may well be the sporting differences between the two countries. The big 4 sports in America all stipulate exacting male body types: real big, real tall, presumably able to fill the whole toilet bowl in one sitting. Football, by which I irritatingly have to indicate that I mean soccer, has no specific body type. Maradona was a stocky 1.65 m, Pelé was a slighter 1.73 m, and Messi is exactly inbetween at 1.69 m. As such, football (soccer) lacks many of the physical determinants of more American sports. So, your shortarse teen into Blur may well still be on the school football B team, and from this unlikely union betwixt the football (soccer) fan and the indie fan springs hard indie. Your American teenage indie boy has no such avenue to escape the wedgies and develop some resilience, and contents himself with soft indie and the luxury of a mildly tortured emotion (but only mildly, for this is soft indie). Fleet Foxes could be the polar opposite to hard indie. This is indie at its very softest, indie with a Mohs scale rating of talc. At the time they released this, their debut album, they described themselves as “not much of a rock band.” No, they weren’t. They were the perfect example of American soft indie. And this unadulterated concentration, this Platonic form of soft indie reveals to us all the merits and shortcomings of soft indie. The most prominent and immediate aspect to the album that the listener notices is how central the harmonies are to it. This band loves their harmonies as much as they presumably love identifying with Holden Caulfield. And the idea of this technical intricacy should be impressive, and every listener can construct in their head the line of reasoning which concludes that they should find Fleet Foxes’ harmonies impressive. But the harmonies just won’t impress the listener, for one simple and vicious reason: no memorable melodies. I have listened to this album several times over this past week, and only now can I vaguely recall a snippet of a melody from it. And I’ve just put on a different band, and thus even that snippet has now fled my head. This lack of melodic strength, especially when contrasted with the all the harmony, almost feels like a cruelty, as if they’re teasing us with its absence in the manner of a kidnapper sending the family his victim’s little finger. Still, they do have all that harmony, and none of the album sounds bad at all. But it has that awful bugbear, a slavishness to good taste. Yes, with all that harmony, one recognises the band bowing down towards the Beach Boys and CSNY. Along with this, they have the good taste to borrow, not steal, from the most credible British folk (Nick Drake and Fairport Convention, rather than anything involving a bagpipe or forty verses about the death of the village’s fletching industry). The result is that nothing on the album has enough sharpness to lodge in the memory. I can’t tell you a single lyric, or hum you a single tune. By way of contrast, I just had a look at the bottom 20 albums, and could fair hum tunes from over half. I was inclined to give this three stars, but what will that teach us? That it’s acceptable to aim for just being acceptable? Next time, Fleet Foxes, give me more. Two stars, to make an example of you. And remember that, although your girlfriend may like your softness when, say, first meeting her parents, there are some areas where she will definitely prefer you hard. NoRadio, signing off.

The ambition of many during the COVID lockdowns of 2020, that the extended free time and solitude would allow them to pursue hitherto neglected creative hankerings, oft proved overambitious. It turned out most lost themselves in chain-wanking and opening the first can of the day at 10am rather than nailing down chapter 14 of their epoch-shattering debut novel. Pointing this out is not to judge people; basically, most people aren't Brian Eno. In 1975, a taxi struck Brian Eno in New York, leaving him bedridden for several weeks. To ease his convalescence, his friend Judy Nylon brought him a record of harp music, leaving Eno alone when it began to play. But Eno found that the volume had been set very low, and that one of the stereo channels wasn't working anyway. He also found that he lacked the energy to change the setup, forcing him to listen to this hushed harp music mingle with the outside rain. Our Brian being a clever bugger, he realised that this accidental restraint meant that he was listening to music in quite an innovative manner, as a background texture rather than as a attention-demanding spectacle, as an ambient feature. Well, maybe "innovative" is a slightly generous adjective. The use of music as ambience may well be as old as music. Just think of the coffee shop pianist performing gentle, genteel trills to accompany the clientele's chatter. Those oddball good-eggs Erik Satie and John Cage wrote Dadaist pranks such as Satie's Vexations and Cage's 4'33" which inspired later ambient musicians. Satie's Vexations, a posthumously discovered work first performed by John Cage and a group of assistants, consists of a simple piano motif repeated 840 times: Cage and his chums didn't realise that such a performance would take 18 hours. Cage's own 4'33" is a three movement piece for any length of time and for any combination of instruments, the sole directive being that the musicians cannot touch their instruments. In other words, silence. Because of this, the John Cage Trust has claimed to hold the copyright on silence, and in 2002 sued Mike Batt (who wrote Art Garfunkel's Bright Eyes and was the mastermind behind the Wombles' music career) after Batt included a minute of silence on one of his albums and tried to claim joint songwriting credit with Cage for his silence (they settled out of court). These, and many others (American minimalists, Krautrockers, the raga ambassadors et al.) all pioneered the aesthetic which would become known as ambient, and that clever chap Eno definitely knew gulping portions of these. With these precedents, and his own incapacitated experience, our Brian codified ambient music as we understand it today, first revealing his formulation in 1975's Discreet Music, and cementing the name with his series of four Ambient albums, of which Music For Airports was the first. Our Brian has always been a nervous flier, finding airports generators for anxiety and disquiet. Hence, his goal of creating a musical backdrop which would seek to calm and mollify, not overwhelm and distract. I am not a nervous flier, indeed I relish flying, and the anxieties that fray me at airports concern tiredness and missing the flight, not fear of plummeting. That is, I find airports boring places, usually attended in some state of exhaustion, a purgatorial sentence before the heavenly delights of the heavens. Mind, I'm not listening to this in an airport, but rather on the sofa in pyjama shorts and with an enfeebled foot. Which I suppose is a convoluted way of saying that the listener need not heed the artist's intentions. One can treat this album as a wholly ambient experience, a sonic equivalent of a fireplace, an element to comfort oneself while one reads a biography of Harold Wilson, completes a crossword or writes a review of Ambient 1/Music for Airports. Yet our Brian was also clever enough to add a vital ingredient to Ambient 1/Music for Airports, without which the entire album would be a mere curio: he remembered to make it beautiful. One can just shut one's eyes and focus on the album, wallowing in the textures. The lack of direction becomes the central strength, allowing the listener to lose themselves without fear of missing some aspect. A still yet sensual pool of an album, and one that invites thought as well as serenity. Thoughtfulness is our Brian's hallmark, you know. Not everyone will embrace Ambient 1/Music for Airports. The meandering, the impassivity, the seventiesness of the record will bore and irritate many. This is no indictment on either them or Eno. What everyone should observe is that a preference is not a philosophy, and a fondness or distaste for ambient music is no more profound than a fondness or distaste for tomatoes. NoRadio, signing off.

The appearance of Taylor Swift’s evermore (yes, it’s all lower-case) on the generator serves as a decent enough avenue for discussing that curious critical position of revisionism known as poptimism. Our story starts in the early 80s, with numerous bands serving as transitional acts between late post-punk and indie decrying the tyranny of the riff and the rockstar. The attitude they were denouncing received the name rockism, which referred to the prejudice that rock, what with its instrumentality and phallocentricity and claims to artistry and claims to authenticity, was inherently better than other forms of popular music. So, some of the softer musicians and critics began a campaign of lauding the higher-end of pop music and slating the wankier end of rock. For instance, the eighties saw critics strap onto metal a chainmail codpiece of tempered naffness, whilst Marc Almond and Jarvis Cocker spent the decade championing Serge Gainsbourg, Burt Bacharach and above all Scott Walker. The perceptive reader will have noticed that these acts were hardly trapped in the oubliette of the inescapably passé. The perceptive reader will also have noticed that these were, broadly, male listeners extolling male musicians. What about women? Pop music, as distinct from rock music, hip-hop, country and so forth, finds its main audience in women, and its most loyal, most fervent and most emblematic audience in teenage girls. And in the 90s some critics began flipping the idea of authenticity, long so crucial to the critical primacy of rock, by arguing that the teenage girl is the real guardian of authenticity: her tastes are not afflicted by the pursuits of credibility or coolness, and thus she makes her choices with the pure, sincere criteria of whether she just likes it, and whether she fancies one of the boyband members who really just dances at the back. This is the aesthetic of poptimism (note that the term “poptimism” began as a pejorative against these attitudes, which adherents brassily adopted). It values prominent melodies, it sees accessibility as a virtue, it paints in the emotional primary colours of love, heartache and occasionally lust, and it fancies one of the dancers. Madonna’s canniness made her a key harbinger of poptimism, but by the year 2000, the prominence given to the Britney and Christina rivalry (which, let us remember, didn’t end too cheerily) indicated how central and overt poptimism had become to music. Since then, we have all witnessed a stream of predominantly female artists who have wilfully chosen some clear form pop as a genre for the most earnest artistic expression: to name just the most famous, Beyoncé, Adele, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Rihanna, Ke$ha, Lorde and today’s artist, Taylor Swift. Oh, and Paris Hilton gave it a stab too. I can’t be the only one mightily suspicious of poptimism, can I? Is there a musical movement more loaded with contradictions, more loaded with baggage? Firstly, the emphasis on listenability is hardly a unique trait to poptimism. It’s not as if rock mainly sought to sound bad. Secondly, pop has no genetic immunity to awful, grating noises, as Cher Lloyd’s Swagger Jagger confirms (why was there that fashion of rhyming “swagger” with “Jagger” in terrible songs? Oh well, let’s be thankful he wasn’t called Mick Jugger or, heaven forfend, Mick Jigger). Thirdly, it’s rather the rash assumption to declare that teenage girls’ tastes lack artifice and one-upmanship (one-upteenagegirlship?). I suspect there was a whole arcane semiotics of social posturing regarding which member of Take That/N-Sync/One Direction you fancied (and for that matter, isn’t it shallow to favour an act just because you want to get off with one of the members? A teenage boy in 1998 wishing to masturbate over Britney Spears would just watch the video to ...Baby One More Time plank in hand, and not actually buy the sodding album). Fourthly, why isn’t the 9-year-old bratty younger brother’s disdain for pop just as honest and unaffected as his 14-year-old sister’s fondness for Westlife? And again, at least the 9-year-old’s contempt is driven by a distaste for the music, and not by a rival crush on Abz from 5ive. Fifthly, poptimism’s defenders seem desperate to deny the role irony plays in their appreciation. Are they genuinely that resolute in their insistence that there’s no element of kitsch involved? I’m not buying that for a second. And if you don’t value a particular instance of kitsch, it will only sound crap. Sixthly, although pop is of course not reserved exclusive for one demographic, it behoves one to acknowledge that record labels market pop towards a youthful, female audience. As a hairy man in my thirties, it shouldn’t astound anyone that the poptimistic buffet doesn’t have much I wish to stuff my face with. Seventhly, the poptimists’ rejection of rockism as tired, clichéd and arrogant didn’t foster a movement that was original and alive, but a movement that was, if anything, more tired, clichéd and arrogant. Is there a pop equivalent of Trout Mask Replica, or even Electric Ladyland? One yearns for these divas’ reaches to exceed their grasps, yet they appear stuck on the party anthem/sexy boudoir jam/sentimental ballad treadmill. Eighthly, the industry behind poptimism appears the cynical milking of cheap sentiments for naught but a quick buck that will, with scant exception, never actually enter the pocket of the poor fool singing the damned songs. I’m all for ignoring the circumstances of a song’s genesis, but I’m not so contrary that I deny learning of such exploitation sours the song. Ninthly, it can’t be healthy to consume only one genre, can it? Just as a child who only munches on Nik-Naks and Wham bars won’t reach 6 foot, an exclusively poptimist diet surely stunts your aesthetic growth. Tenthly and I hope finally, of course there’s always been good bubblegum pop, pop that sounds sweet and buoyant and alleviates the listener’s cares. However, there’s also always been much more bubblegum pop that’s tripe, that depresses the listener with its inanity and tattiness. Much of the good stuff that’s survived has only survived after decades of risk assessment, and actively seeking to produce such gems will also produce far more stinkers, simply due to the numbers and the nature of the process. Throw enough darts, and at some point you’ll hit the bull. That doesn’t make you Eric Bristow. In fairness, many of the alpha chicks of poptimism flirt with other genres, demonstrating (or at least trying to demonstrate) their range and versatility: Lady Gaga, for example, fused her poptimistic leanings with electroclash sleaze. Taylor Swift’s evermore is one of those crossbreed albums, where Taylor continues her exploration of folk and employs techniques lifted from contemporary American indie; Swift collaborated extensively with The National’s Aaron Dessner on evermore. Now, I recently reviewed some album by The National (I had to look up what it was: it was called High Violet, not that anyone cares). It was soporifically dull in the way that only albums made with exceptional good taste can be. And evermore is similarly boring for similar reasons. Taylor Swift is so keen to show you all the depth and sincerity of her craft, she neglects to include anything beyond that craft, and thus the listener merely shrugs at the record. Even on the occasion she says “fuck”, everyone clocks that this is a tasteful fuck, on the same level of a dramatically justified sex scene that doesn’t even show a nipple. You try beating off over that. While reviewing evermore, I gave a listen to 1989, Taylor Swift’s other album on the list. 1989 is firmly a poptimistic work, and I couldn’t stand it. It confirmed every one of my reasons for holding poptimism in disdain. So logically, I prefer evermore. But here’s the kicker: I could remember songs from 1989. I could remember melodies and lyrics from 1989, even if I didn’t want to. I can’t recall a sound from evermore, except for when Swift said fuck. Maybe some other souls can recite the entirety of evermore like a hafiza proving her piety by memorising the Quran. But I am not a religious man, and I don’t believe the rote learning of Taylor Swift will send me to paradise.

A quick anecdote to illustrate the nature of Van Halen. At their height, Van Halen made perhaps the most notorious request ever included on a rider: they insisted that the venue provide a bowl of M&Ms. That doesn’t sound so decadent, except that in a different section of the rider, they also stipulated that the brown M&Ms be removed from the bowl. This demand became an exemplar of the spoilt, immature behaviour indulged by the archetypal rockstar, but on this occasion Van Halen were the genuine wise guys. Riders not only contain the band’s demands for Hennessey and beef sandwiches, but also include the technical information for the band’s equipment, and thus contain important details pertaining to safety and performance. After one of their roadies was electrocuted and nearly died due to a particular venue’s lackadaisical adherence to the rider, Van Halen concocted the M&M proviso in order to give them a swift means of checking that the venue had fulfilled their requirements. If they saw no brown M&Ms, they could proceed with assurance that the technical aspects were fit to their needs. If they spied a brown M&M, they would demand that the venue double-check the equipment, and the band could also have recourse to cancel the gig for breach of contract if the situation became untenable. Along with this, Dave Lee Roth knew the value of such an extravagant legend, and happily let the press run with the story they wanted. The impression I get from that story is of a rather canny band who knew when to be dumb, because this is rock after all, not serialist opera. Along with this, we all know that they were a highly temperamental band, who somehow managed two of the most acrimonious break-ups in rock history: firstly, Dave Lee Roth quit after this album, ostensibly aggrieved at the direction the guitarist Eddie Van Halen wished to take the group, and secondly Diamond Dave’s replacement Sammy Hagar walked out/was fired (delete according to your sympathies) in 1996. Focusing on the first line-up (1984 is the last album from those particular dudes, after all), it’s pretty impossible to designate especial blame onto either Eddie or Diamond Dave, not least because neither man proved the world’s easiest collaborator (though they did prove they both had egos the size of Neptune). This break-up would prove a real tragedy though, because the classic incarnation of Van Halen FUCKING ROCKED. Explaining the greatness of Van Halen amounts to no effort: they were a fantastic hard rock band who, with Diamond Dave’s messianic showmanship, embraced all those wonderfully ridiculous elements of rock and, with Eddie’s virtuosic axehandling, showed they were no novelty, but a genuinely fierce band underneath that spandex. Yes, the music from their golden period is firmly anchored to the period from whence it came, the early 80s of Reagan, MTV and the death of John Lennon. But I say Van Halen avoid the standard pillorying thrown against other 80s rock of their era (who can recall a single song by Ratt? Who would want to?), by knowing how to balance the pomp of rock with the skills, thus falling into neither empty theatrics nor empty shredding. So onto 1984’s 1984, Van Halen’s sixth album. The opening reveals the tensions stewing in the band, as it starts with an Eddie instrumental (not unusual), but on keyboard (a bit unusual). Eddie, being musically ambitious, wanted to explore synths on 1984. Diamond Dave (yes, I’m calling him that throughout), concentrating on how he could sell it to the crowds, was apprehensive over Eddie’s new enthusiasms. The two egos compromised, allowing Eddie his precious keyboards within the context of a Van Halen hard rock album. Commercially, Diamond Dave’s fears proved unwarranted, as 1984 and the lead single Jump became the biggest hits of Van Halen’s career to that date. However, the synths on this album are basically restricted to the first two tracks and I’ll Wait. As a child, I was rather sniffy about Jump; it seemed to me the emblem of all that was tasteless and gauche about the 80s. I have softened towards it, but mainly because I softened towards Van Halen when I hit the age of 35. I suppose the curious conclusion is that I needed enough maturity to appreciate the immaturity of Van Halen. Anyway, Jump still remains as much an oddity as a song. One can see exactly what the song is trying to achieve, and it feels hard to say that it doesn’t succeed in its attempt. But is what it does worthwhile? I suppose so, even if it’ll never be anything close to my toppermost Van Halen Track. The other synthy song, I’ll Wait, is much more to my taste. With ever so slightly proggy keyboards, I’ll Wait gives us some John Carpenter vibes, and we all love us some early 80s John Carpenter vibes. But to be blunt, who buys a Van Halen album for the synths? They don’t spoil the album, but when you listen to Van Halen, you want Eddie playing all the notes in existence whilst Diamond Dave does the splits whilst hollering about singeing the minge of a 17-year-old blonde who only ever wears bikinis. And thankfully 1984 doesn’t scrimp on the Van Halen meat. Maybe 1984 isn’t Van Halen’s best album, but the hit-rate of the Diamond Dave era was shockingly high, and being third-or-fourth-best album among a crop of 5-star albums ain’t that mockworthy. Like everything from Van Halen’s golden period, 1984 has remained a treat. Panama and Hot for Teacher are two of Van Halen’s most raucous and therefore best singles, and the rest of the album delivers that trademark Van Halen hard sleaze. Hey, at least Diamond Dave, unlike a thousand 80s hard rock chancers, has actually seen a lady naked (and it was probably your mum). Rest in peace, Eddie. NoRadio, signing off.

Tragically, I’ve got to start this review by referencing the Nostalgia Critic. I didn’t want to, but I’ve got to be a fair ref. Anyway, once upon a time, before Channel Awesome shotgunned its reputation to pieces by gross mismanagement and the attendant mass realisation that, outside of one or two reviewers who’d already fucked off long ago (Todd in the Shadows is genuinely brilliant), the actual meat of the brand was banal and pisspoor, Doug Walker did an episode asking the question of whether, if some films can be so bad it’s good, can a film be so good that it’s bad. Well, it’s easy to answer that question in the affirmative regarding music: much music demanding technical expertise often alienates. Guitarists generally look down at shredders, and non-guitarists look down even more steeply. Jazz as a whole suffers especially from this virtuosic disaffection: even the people who like jazz fusion don’t really like jazz fusion. But empty virtuosity (as we traditionally define it) is not the element at play regarding Endtroducing…… Indeed, DJ Shadow didn’t play a single note on the album. Armed with a sampler, a turntable and a stack of vinyl from the reduced pile, DJ Shadow assembled the album Endtroducing….. from a multitude of samples ranging from Moroder to Metallica. So this experimental hip-hop album and exercise in testing the limits of turntablism is clearly a very cool record. But it may be the kind of coolness aspired for by someone who’s been to public school, if you follow (to explain to non-Britishers, public schools are the most established private schools in the UK, and yes, we Britishers all chafe at the irony there). Being able to afford whatever obscure import vinyl you think will open a random trustafarian’s legs because Daddy sells landmines under the table to the Saudi royal family does not make you cool, no matter what vinyl you purchase. Not that your public schoolboy won’t try to become cool: my God, how he’ll try. He’ll get a tape of that Wu-Tang album that only had one printing. He’ll get every artist mentioned on LCD Soundsystem’s Losing My Edge. Hell, he’ll get the phone number of LCD Soundsystem. And he’ll definitely get Endtroducing….., along with his own set of decks to practice his own scratching. And all this will make him as cool as a dung-brown nylon sock worn with a sandal. So this is my perhaps unfair issue with Endtroducing…..: it may have that problem afflicting several innovative albums of the 90s, in that the listener feels it just tried too hard to be innovative. You can detect a similar synaptic twinge whenever you play, say, Portishead’s Dummy or Beck’s Odelay. It sold itself partly on its innovation, but how can that be a factor two decades into the 21st century? With Dummy, Odelay and Endtroducing….. (I should explain that the title comes with 5 dots; should I deduct a point for that?), are they possibly so good, so slick and so visionary that the listener simply becomes bored with all the sparkle? Because Endtroducing does sound very good. It’s a clearly intelligent work that evokes that mid-90s aesthetic of Gen X blasé drift (end of history, man! Take a chill pill!). But does this lead to a paradox? Is this a focused, well-crafted work that only conveys that it is a focused, well crafted work? Is it an intelligent work which ultimately uses that intelligence to say nothing noteworthy? I’m asking these questions because I’m currently wondering what the answer is. I’m not sure. I’m marvelling at all the magical instances, yet I’m hesitating. Is that hesitation my fault? I suppose I’ve approached this album in in a critical mood (in the original, neutral reading of the word “critical”). Large portions of the album scream at me to award it 5 stars. I have no moral objection to awarding this 5 stars. But any sense of yearned-for coolness still has the potential to dissuade. Actually, there is a message. The 44-second track, Why Hip-Hop Sucks in ‘96, contains the line “It’s the money”. Would anyone disagree with that message? The grasping mindset of hip-hop has driven off so many who’d otherwise appreciate it less reservedly. Everyone (and that’s literally everyone who’d ever had to wonder how they’d sort out that month’s rent or tomorrow’s dinner) despised everything about bling bling, from the concept to the syllables. I’m not a socialist, but hearing of McDonald’s paying for a rapper to namedrop their brand just depresses (also, as a brag it doesn’t work; since when was McDonald’s aspirational?). So, with those three words, all my doubts regarding Endtroducing….. evaporated, and I just enjoyed the fuck out of it. Endtroducing….. can’t escape the stigma of being a cool album, but it manages to be a great album regardless. NoRadio, signing out.

The human brain cannot bear much revolution, it seems. Spin someone around too much and they lose the horizon and start to vomit. This intolerance for too much discord parallels a curious phenomenon in music: the socially liberal artist espousing a progressive message whilst never straying from the sonically conservative. The clearest examples stem from the 60s folk-rock hippies. These unwashed protesters would champion civil rights and feminist causes alongside decrials against the Vietnam War, all while plucking an acoustic guitar and insisting they were continuing the tradition of Pete Seeger and Hank Williams. This became calcified into the singer-songwriter glut of the early 70s, with the likes of James Taylor somehow being treated as oracles for the state of the world. Couple that to the lamentable American tendency to view rote copying of classic acts as legitimate homage, and the result is a decades-long presence of gently picked acoustic guitars accompanying platitudinous worries for the lot of the working American stiff. (Actually, during the 80s the politics got a little muted when all these folk singers secretly or not-so-secretly voted for Reagan.) Billy Bragg is not an American. He’s an ardently left-wing British folk singer who sprang to prominence in the wake of punk, and I suppose there’s a contention that his folk-indie protest songs are part of the post-punk diaspora, of musicians growing strange new crops after punk’s slash-and-burn. Still, it’s not that much of an innovation, being a left-wing folk singer during Thatcherism. In any case, Bragg has maintained the role of the politically committed troubadour for over 30 years, perhaps succumbing to that curse of his message being lost due to his becoming a British institution. But I feel that I should leave that discussion to the list’s one solo Bragg album, Talking with the Taxman About Poetry. Onto Mermaid Avenue. In 1995, Billy Bragg accepted an invitation from Woody Guthrie’s daughter Nora, who had witnessed Bragg play at a Woody Guthrie tribute concert in 1992, to record some of Woody Guthrie’s unrecorded lyrics. Since there were over a thousand such lyrics, an overwhelmed Bragg contacted Wilco to assist him through sifting among the morass, with the two acts collaborating on the resultant album. Now, I’ve reviewed Wilco’s other albums on the list (Being There and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, since you didn’t ask), and they alienated me due to their good behaviour. The music was so well-mannered that it seemed to lack any trace of personality. I could not fault the construction of the music, but none of it left any impression whatsoever. A well-made cardboard box, if you will. So, we have the lyrics of a revered left-wing American folk singer, performed by a left-wing British folk singer and an American alt-country band. I don’t think it’s tricky to guess how this album sounds. It sounds like a British folk and an American alt-country band reverently performed songs written by an American folk singer. The most curious element is that Billy Bragg sings in an American accent throughout. I guess Bragg’s nasal Essex drawl would just prove distracting to the standard American listener, who would be the main audience for this album. Now, Nora Guthrie gave Bragg and Wilco the commandment to resurrect these songs in a contemporary manner, which essentially results in them sounding like Wilco. This means Mermaid Avenue suffers from the main flaw that afflicts Wilco’s other albums: the lack of flaws leads to a lack of character, and this lack of character makes it rather dull. The song California Stars has its charms, I guess, and to call the album bad feels impolite. But it feels disengagingly safe. There’s no sense of risk, or challenge, or grit. Bragg and Wilco never stop genuflecting to question what Woody Guthrie would have done nowadays. I’m not sure that’s the legacy Woody Guthrie would have wanted. Another figure to emerge in the aftermath of British punk was an awkward Salfordian called Mark E. Smith. Mark E. Smith would co-found the post-punk group the Fall in 1976 after seeing the Sex Pistols play at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester (Joy Division, the Buzzcocks, Morrissey and, weirdly, Mick Hucknall also attended that gig). Smith would soon become the dictator of The Fall, notorious for sacking dozens of band members over the Fall’s 40-year history, for offences ranging from eating a salad to dancing to a song by the Clash. Politically, Mark E. Smith was vehemently anti-socialist (and vehemently anti-social) and he supported Brexit; one biographer characterised Smith as a working-class Tory with occasionally radical (and slightly eccentric) opinions. However, the Fall were never musically conservative, with a Fall album able to encompass electronica, country, krautrock, acid house, disco, reggae and punk, and Mark E. Smith’s fractured, cryptic poetry cementing it all as a work by the Fall. Mark E. Smith’s politics weren’t right-on, but the music he and his cohorts made was far more interesting and far more alive than anything Bragg or Wilco have ever managed. There’s no reason why the socially progressive can’t also be audibly radical. Aren’t they meant to be smashing the system? FOLK MUSICIANS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE EXCEPT YOUR ACOUSTIC GUITARS AND FORTY VERSES ABOUT THE DEATH OF THE MINING INDUSTRY! NoRadio, signing out.