Better than I remembered but too long and not as good as BtB.
Groovy, in a psychedelic Saturday night variety show kind of way.
I'm much more into 60s psychedelia these days but still struggle a little with Syd-era Floyd. That said, the teetering between lysergic enlightenment and mental illness is drawing me in today.
Not my favourite Neil but better than I remember.
Not my bag at all.
Better for not having Dickinson on it but the sexism was hard to stomach.
First listen, other than the singles. It was okay.
My wife: "Why are you listening to mediaeval music?"
Me: "It's that 1,001 albums thing."
[She rolls her eyes and walks off, shaking her head]
I approached this album with trepidation. Seeing it pop up on the generator was the equivalent of walking into your local and spotting the pub bore already sat on his favourite stool, dimple glass in hand, waiting to pounce on any unsuspecting saps with a thousand tedious tales and unwelcome opinions. As a teenager in the seventies, my knowledge of English folk-pop music consisted of not really liking All Around My Hat and vaguely knowing that Sandy Denny, the female voice on Led Zeppelin 4, was in some diddly diddly band that sounded like a business meeting. Even now it's not something I often make a bee line for, despite enjoying a bit of Unhalfbricking and Liege and Leif every now and then. So yes, I wasn't excited about this selection. And yet, some of it has been quite magical. Bert Jansch's guitar playing is spectacularly nimble at times and Danny Thompson's double bass playing is a jazz-tinged joy. It's all a bit Finger In The Ear At The Malt Shovels On Tuesday Folk Night (Hotpot Available!) at times but it does break out from its traditional folky heartland on enough occasions that you don't always feel like you're harvesting turnips in the rain in a Shropshire field in the 13th century. Though sometimes you do feel like that. Strangely, though, I know I will be playing this again. I must be getting old.
1,001 albums... "It's Blitz!" by Yeah Yeah Yeahs
This album took me by surprise in more than one way. First of all, it kicks the door open quite spectacularly with a swaggering, supremely confident opening track - something which made me immediately sit up and take notice. It's also much more dance-orientated (much as I hate that phrase) and keyboard heavy than I'd anticipated. In fact, it seems to - in some ways at least - sit in the very centre of a three-circle venn diagram labelled "pop," "rock" and "dance" in much the same way that New Order did at their best, not that the charismatic Karen O reminds you of Barney Sumner in any way at all. That said, my initial excitement did wane here and there and it's not quite the classic that the first song suggested it might be.
Like Daft Punk on coke. Great bass playing, though.
I suppose I should like Led Zepp... erm, I mean the White Stripes. I dig me some 60s garage rock and, although I never got into stuff like the Hives, I love Time Bomb High School and Too Much Guitar by Reigning Sound. In fact, I did actually buy a Zepp... erm, I mean White Stripes album once but I can't remember which one, which tells its own tale. Mojo and Uncut insisted that I should love them and the Guardian assured me that the Strokes were ersatz (they might have had a point there) and that Led Zepp.... erm, I mean the White Stripes were where it's at. Anyway, I did approach this album with the idea that I might actually like it but all good will evaporated pretty quickly. I mean, it's not their fault that 7 Nation Army became so ubiquitous so I'm happy to admit that it has an Instant Classic riff / bass line but then you just get lots of fucking around. Meg is singing right now, doing a Nancy Sinatra impression, valves humming at max volume in the background. They're analogue, you see. We've already had a Queen parody and an absolute annihilation of I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself (I can think of a few things, Jack). Now we're dipping into turn of the seventies Rod / Stones - which I actually love but there's a time and a place and it was the turn of the seventies. Oh, this one sounds like The White Stri...., erm, I mean Percy and Jimmy. Yes, with their reference points, I suppose I should really like them. But I really, really, really don't. Maybe side two will be better. It won't be though, will it? And give us that cricket bat back, you twat.
It's June 1967 and the Summer of Love is already underway. A twenty year old Tim Buckley has heard Sgt Pepper, released at the end of the previous month, and enters a studio in L.A. to record a psychedelic baroque folk masterpiece which will hit the streets before September is upon us, cementing his reputation as a prodigiously talented, adventurous, almost impossible to pigeonhole artist. Of course, given the time and setting of its recording, it has its fair share of whimsy and flight of fancy (I draw your attention to the lyrics of Knight Errant:
"O whither has my lady wandered?
I'll search until I know I've found her
When I catch my sudden maid
I'll deck her out in lace and jade
I will take her to her room
I will take her to her room
I love her upstairs
I love her downstairs
But I love my lady's chamber"
Oh Tim, you dirty fucker)
...but it also has moments that stop you in your tracks. It being 1967, there is the inevitable psychedelic imagery and, of course, a bit of a fairground waltz, but there is also the astonishingly beautiful (and beautifully, astonishingly played) Once I Was, Pleasant Street and Morning Glory, the last of which sends you into a blissful reverie as the album finishes. It left me wishing that I too was twenty years old and living in L.A. at the beginning of the Summer of Love. Yes, I would have liked that a lot.
I've got this on right now and my hopes that it will end before summer comes are fading fast. As I listen I've tried to put myself into a "rock fan's" shoes, thinking about what it is the they might like about it, to eek out as much "enjoyment" as I can. I suppose Cornell had a decent David Coverdale / Robert Plant holler if you like that sort of thing; it's a riffarama too, of course, though the guitar tone is often teeth-curlingly unpleasant; and it's dynamically arranged. I'm aware that this is seen as a classic of its genre and I've no doubt it has many fans on Now Playing but, screech and bray though old Chris might, it's been hard work for me. In its defence, it did become quite interesting when Head Down and then Black Hole Sun took a psychedelic detour - though the latter starts much better than it ends - but now it's back to identikit whinge-rock. Meanwhile, I'm considering stabbing a biro into my thigh.
I've laughed a lot at all the one star reviews.
There have been some great oblique paeans to heroin over the years (Golden Brown and There She Goes spring immediately to mind) but Another Girl, Another Planet is maybe the absolute best. I saw Peter Perrett live for the very first time only a few years ago and it gave me a warm glow to see that he'd not only survived his addictions but was also producing decent music in his bus pass years. Meanwhile, back in 1978, Perrett's New York nasal drawl belied his Camberwell roots and the Only Ones' blistering rockers aligned them with punk and new wave even though this is a real melting pot of an album with do-woopy and jazz-tinged flourishes and plenty of genuinely involving moments which sometimes bring Graham Parker and the Rumour to mind. I've never actually heard any of their other albums which is odd really because this one is enormously rewarding.
Never heard a 2pac album before. Better than I'd feared; not as good as I'd hoped.
Not quite as bad as I'd expected. The first track functions really well as a soundtrack to a modern action film. Went downhill pretty soon after that though. Also, it was interminable.
Fun album.
Joy Division / Interpol lite but enjoyable enough.
1,001 albums...
There was a time when I had little or no interest in post-British invasion garage rock but I really dig this stuff when I'm in the mood these days. I don't know a great deal about Paul Revere and the Raiders beyond the fact that they had plenty of hits in the USA in the mid- sixties and that they used to dress up in American revolution gear - something which no doubt gave them a bit of attention but affected their credibility long-term. Anyway, I enjoyed this album for the large part. The garage rock stuff is energetic and fun and there are more than hints of the Beach Boys in the mushier numbers. A keeper.
1,001 albums...
Back in the seventies, the gormless DJ-cum-presenter (who was far more interested in his - it was always a he back then - own fame than the art he pretended to like - that *we* liked) would bid his faux-cheery farewells towards the end of Top of the Pops then the credits would roll as one final song was played but then faded out way before its proper end. One week, when I was still to be a teenager, it was the turn of one of the most extraordinary things I'd ever heard. \"What is this shit?\" I might have wondered, had I not just been told by Bates or Travis or whoever it was that week, just like Charles Shaar Murray famously did - though he in disgust and disappointment rather than the breathless awe I felt. Don't you wonder sometimes?
I had a bit of a problem with David Bowie at the time - he looked completely different every time I set eyes on him. It used to really confuse me. Just before Low was released (around the time RCA were refusing to release it, so dismayed by it were they), he'd had his first UK number one with a song he'd recorded and released seven years earlier. In the video he didn't seem to be the same impossibly exotic and otherworldly being as on the covers of his albums. He was quite gawky and ordinary, in fact. Like everyone else but in my own little way, I didn't know who David Bowie was. And neither did he in 1976. Famously, he couldn't even really remember recording the stately Station to Station a few months earlier and so decamped to Europe in a bid to get off the Bolivian marching powder with his mate, Jim. Between them they somehow managed to channel their shared withdrawal psychosis to produce four seminal albums in less than twelve months, each with a slightly different flavour. Of the four, Low, with its artful split personality, its shattered fragments of paranoia-infused recovery and redemption and its icy dislocation, is the greatest. So ahead of its time that even the NME didn't get it - a brutally honest document of Britain's greatest star struggling to straighten himself out before he turned thirty.
(Decades later, my Polish wife would hear me playing Low and instantly recognise a fragment of a Silesian folk song that Magpie Dave had nicked from a record he'd bought in Wilsonplatz as he journeyed by train through Warsaw. It amuses me that calling his track \"Warszawa\" was a bit like sampling a colliery brass band and calling it \"London.\")
There are two types of people in the world: those who find Ian Gillan's high- pitched wailing in Child in Time completely thrilling and those who are horrified by it. I happen to be in the former camp and yet I'm not much of a Deep Purple fan (there is another way of splitting humanity into two clear groups: those who enjoy Smoke on the Water and normal people). It's all a bit silly really, though I must admit to enjoying a fair bit of it. Sort of.
Nice enough but not really my bag.
It's odd how T Rex almost sound like a parody at times of the very genre that they embody. Still, it's all glorious fun.
1,001 albums...
I have a troubled relationship with Sonic Youth's middle-class, no-wave rebellion. I did buy Goo at the time and played it an awful lot for a year or two but I've never quite bought into them like many others do. That said, Teenage Riot is a lot of fun even if it sounds a bit like an early New Order track and Kim Gordon, in particular, has some great moments on this album. Overall, even though it outstays its welcome, I enjoyed it a lot more today than I have in the past (I did buy it a long time ago but it's spent most of its life on the shelf). Might dig it out again soon. Then again, might not.
I bought this at the time and enjoyed it a great deal at the time. I rarely feel the urge to hear it these days but it's still a good album with plenty to offer if you're in the mood. One of those One Album Artists, though, at least in terms of commercial success in the UK.
Very much a part of my youth and the only The The that I play regularly these days. Uncertain Smile is impossibly nostalgic for me.
What can be said about this record that hasn't already been said? Lennon, in particular, is on fire throughout - reeling off a procession of songs that must have gladdened Cynthia's heart. Little did she know.
This album divides opinion enormously amongst my friends but, when I'm in the mood, I find it utterly amazing. Gigantic and transcendent and thrilling.
It's quite amazing how Macca and George Martin managed to marshal the band one last time even though the party was pretty much over and come up with something so sublime. Lennon had outshone McCartney on the White Album but Macca is the star here, not that Lennon and Harrison's contributions were in any way less than great, and even Ringo (with George's help) manages to come up with a jaded yet joyous Fabs nursery rhyme to rival Yellow Submarine. "We transformed the sixties now here's the seventies for you." And there they were, gone.
When I bought this album as a 26 year old I was more than half convinced that guitar based pop was all but dead. The charts were filled (aside from the usual dross) with thinly-disguised, floor-filling paeans to hedonism and disco biscuits and any references to "love" we're usually code for getting twatted with a load of gurning strangers in a field just outside the M25. It didn't really work out that way, I suppose, which is probably for the best. Anyway, it's an absolute age since I've played this record and I'm surprised at how housey it is. Sure enough, as well as locating precisely where groove is, it also defines "love" as a neo-hippyish shared, no doubt chemically-induced, experience. I'd have had no problem with that back in the day but I find it slightly irritating and dated these days. I know, I know... I'm getting old. To be fair, I enjoyed it a lot more than I've let on so far. Aside from the housey piano riffs and hedonistic pseudo-philosophising, there's also plenty of playful and inventive use of break beats and samples and Lady Miss Kier radiates star quality - it's just that I'm not 26 any more and I don't care about this sort of music half as much as I used to.
The very eye of the very greatest of hurricanes. A book could be written about this album and probably has.
Good fun, actually. I'm sure there are other albums that need hearing more, though.
Remember when atomic shit was sexy and cool? Well, no, you probably don't, but in 1957 it was, especially in the US (probably less so in Japan). As somebody who bought Mingus Ah Um and Miles Davis's Blue Christmas at the age of 19, largely in an attempt to appear cool and mysterious to the girls at university, and as someone who has been to Ronnie Scott's several times, I feel supremely qualified to pronounce upon this album. It's great! Good humoured, light-hearted, glad to be alive (and not vaporised into nothingness by an apocalyptic nuclear blast), joyously played big band jazz. These cats can play! Boom. We hope you enjoyed your time on this planet.
Bookended by a slightly too smooth version of the Dan for me but with a delicious centre. They've done several better albums, though.
Wonderful!
Not in the City. I bought this at the time but never play it these days.
I hated this stuff in my youth. These days it's tolerable but I never reach for it.
Argh.
I'm not the biggest Declan fan, though there's plenty of stuff I love. This is second tier for me.
What's not to like? Though I prefer Radiator.
I've never fully got on with Pere Ubu's middle class anti-music though I really do love the last three tracks.
I remember how thrilling this album was when it first came out, just before I graduated from university. It seems to explode out of the blocks with The Headmaster Ritual and never lets up. Wonderful.
It's a decent album, I suppose, but its glorification is a mystery to me.
Lorde has, up to now, pretty much completely eluded me. She undoubtedly has a nice way with a one-liner and this is pretty good at what it is, it's just that what it is isn't really something I particularly enjoy all that much. I'm currently half way through and feeling a bit restless. To be fair, it ended quite strongly.
I'd have liked this in 1997 but I never bothered with it. Much of it made me feel anxious today. Too much clubbing in 1997.
1984. Blown away by When Doves Cry. Bought the 12". Went to see the film. Cheesy but entertaining. Bought the album. Played it to death. Parade is better though, in retrospect. What a talent.
Dreadful. I'd rather peel my own skin off with a broken bottle than have to sit through this again.
I have a complicated relationship with U2. I was a fan of their first two albums as a youngster but found War to be little more than ham-fisted chest-beating and anyway, you sort of had to take sides in those days between them and the Bunnymen and I knew which side I was firmly on. But then they released this - easily the best album of their career - and I was back on board for a few years. It tails off noticeably towards the end but the first two thirds is magnificent. And, really, what have the Bunnymen done that's truly great since 1987?
Pretty good but one of the 1,001???
Wow, never heard this before but loved it. A keeper.
My ex bought this album and played it quite a lot. One of the best things about our split was this record leaving the house forever.
Part of my youth.
I bought the 12" of Let's Stay Together in 1983 pretty much as soon as it came out in 1983, completely oblivious to the existence of the Al Green version in those days. Still love it but much of the rest of the album leaves me cold.
Part of my youth. Great tunes but the misogyny is hard to stomach these days.
A classic, of course, but I never really del the need to hear it these days.
Crammed full of joyous, catchy tunes. Impossible to dislike, surely?
They did several better but still seminal. Not that I play it much.
More than decent but of its time and I rarely play it these days.
Decent, but it's the next two which are stellar.
Top 3 Bowie.
Great songs but horrible, dry late 80s production.
One of the greatest records ever released. A game changer. R.I.P. Tom, you did yourself proud.
