724
Albums Rated
3.37
Average Rating
66%
Complete
365 albums remaining
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1960s
Favorite Decade
Psychedelic-rock
Favorite Genre
UK
Top Origin
Wordsmith
Rater Style ?
122
5-Star Albums
15
1-Star Albums
Taste Analysis
Genre Preferences
Ratings by genre
Origin Preferences
Ratings by country
Rating Style
You Love More Than Most
Albums you rated higher than global average
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kollaps | 5 | 1.9 | +3.1 |
| The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter | 5 | 2.15 | +2.85 |
| Sulk | 5 | 2.36 | +2.64 |
| Timeless | 5 | 2.53 | +2.47 |
| Don't Stand Me Down | 5 | 2.61 | +2.39 |
| Cut | 5 | 2.71 | +2.29 |
| Atomizer | 5 | 2.72 | +2.28 |
| Isn't Anything | 5 | 2.75 | +2.25 |
| Tago Mago | 5 | 2.79 | +2.21 |
| Scott 4 | 5 | 2.8 | +2.2 |
You Love Less Than Most
Albums you rated lower than global average
| Album | You | Global | Diff |
|---|---|---|---|
| In Rainbows | 1 | 3.84 | -2.84 |
| Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness | 1 | 3.68 | -2.68 |
| Moving Pictures | 1 | 3.58 | -2.58 |
| Blood Sugar Sex Magik | 1 | 3.5 | -2.5 |
| Neon Bible | 1 | 3.35 | -2.35 |
| Wish You Were Here | 2 | 4.3 | -2.3 |
| Emergency On Planet Earth | 1 | 3.27 | -2.27 |
| Ritual De Lo Habitual | 1 | 3.19 | -2.19 |
| Nothing's Shocking | 1 | 3.17 | -2.17 |
| Highly Evolved | 1 | 3.03 | -2.03 |
Artist Analysis
Favorite Artists
Artists with 2+ albums
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Bob Dylan | 6 | 4.83 |
| David Bowie | 8 | 4.5 |
| The Velvet Underground | 3 | 5 |
| The Stooges | 3 | 5 |
| Beatles | 5 | 4.4 |
| Sonic Youth | 5 | 4.4 |
| The Smiths | 3 | 4.67 |
| Joni Mitchell | 3 | 4.67 |
| Led Zeppelin | 3 | 4.67 |
| Marvin Gaye | 3 | 4.67 |
| My Bloody Valentine | 3 | 4.67 |
| Public Enemy | 3 | 4.67 |
| PJ Harvey | 3 | 4.67 |
| Neil Young & Crazy Horse | 2 | 5 |
| Dexys Midnight Runners | 2 | 5 |
| Pavement | 2 | 5 |
| AC/DC | 2 | 5 |
| Fleetwood Mac | 2 | 5 |
| Can | 2 | 5 |
| The Kinks | 4 | 4.25 |
| Leonard Cohen | 4 | 4.25 |
| The Rolling Stones | 6 | 4 |
| Stevie Wonder | 3 | 4.33 |
| Roxy Music | 3 | 4.33 |
Least Favorite Artists
Artists with 2+ albums
| Artist | Albums | Average |
|---|---|---|
| Ryan Adams | 2 | 1 |
| Jane's Addiction | 2 | 1 |
| Arcade Fire | 3 | 1.67 |
| Red Hot Chili Peppers | 2 | 1.5 |
| Radiohead | 4 | 2 |
Controversial Artists
Artists you rate inconsistently
| Artist | Ratings |
|---|---|
| Michael Jackson | 5, 5, 2 |
| Brian Eno | 3, 5, 2, 5 |
5-Star Albums (122)
View Album Wall
Popular Reviews
Dexys Midnight Runners
5/5
From the reviews I read on this site, I understand there are two other Dexys albums on here, almost certainly SFTYSR and Too-Rye-Ay. This is the best of the three, and I love the other two. This is Rowland's "Tusk", the freak following the hit.
I have to rush off to see the Taylor Swift Eras film tonight, so I cannot write an essay about how Rowland absorbs Van Morrison, the Beach Boys, golden age rock n roll and Christ knows what else before surpassing them all, or how he - along with Marvin Gaye - is the master of the chaotic concept album, or his tremendous sense of humour (he doesn’t speak Italian, but he knows a man who does), or his possession of one of the most marvellously distinctive singing voices that yet stays true to his upbringing, or his unique mix of softness and machismo.
I can, however, apologise for insulting other reviewers in an early draft of this review. I am sorry that I referred to you as “ cloth-eared, verse-chorus-verse dingleberries”, or “the reason why most music is boring”, and I’m especially sorry to the chap who described this as “pub rock” for calling him “uniquely cretinous”. Forgive me. Hugs!
24 likes
Booker T. & The MG's
3/5
This is an enthusiastic “ok”. The title track throws thunderbolts down on everything around it, but the record is consistently pleasant. It just makes me wish they’d stretched to write more of their own compositions, rather than this bunch of covers that slide smoothly down amnesia alley. Gives me the feeling of walking into a sleazy bar in an old movie, which I like.
23 likes
Jefferson Airplane
3/5
If it’s written by a Slick, it does the trick. If it’s written by another, no need to bother.
18 likes
CHVRCHES
2/5
The pretentious spelling of the band's name immediately pisses me off. See runtime is over an hour, crack my knuckles. Two points knocked off and the music hasn't even begun.
The music isn't terrible, and at its best sounds a little like Robyn, just without the magic. Synths are usually urgent, the songs have velocity and the album is dynamic both within the tracks and their sequencing. Were this half its length, I could call this consistent, but as it is over an hour it is samey. My ear lobes were curling up with boredom by the halfway mark. 2.
15 likes
Korn
1/5
I made it through! Imagining they were singing “old Macdonald had a farm” on every song helped.
13 likes
1-Star Albums (15)
All Ratings
Slade
4/5
Slade: not just for Christmas. Wizards and cheese rolled down the hill - notes of prog and the West Country, Nobby's voice a rare regional delicacy, even at full yell
Arcade Fire
2/5
Arcade Fire, I piss out your candle of hope. Who gave the marching band a synthetic orchestra? This record failed to stick the first time around, and 19 years later it still lacks hook. Lots of soaring, lots of different sounds crammed into the packet, but almost monotone: twee. Too many parentheses in the song titles.
The Smiths
5/5
Dismissed this at first because I played it too quietly; the upfront vocals are not to my taste. Notably, the one song that jumped out on that go was "Barbarianism starts at home", when the vocals sod off for a while. At volume, fantastic, bass Entwhistling away, vocals make a bit more sense.
Bruce Springsteen
5/5
I am happy that we had been left this for the weekend. 20 years back I would not have had time for BS. Surprised by the density of guitar wail, which works for me.
Al Green
4/5
I need to listen to this a few more times. It sounds perfect, but like a lot of soul records of that era, it glides part me, leaving babyish tasting notes like "smooth", "incredible musicianship", and "quintessential", but I'm damned if I can remember most of the songs, even on third listen. I like it, the title track is outstanding, it just hasn't stuck with me yet, which may be more my problem. FOUR
Sly & The Family Stone
5/5
You can hear the stitches popping at the seams, this record's so full of ideas, hooks and the occasional sonic non-sequitur. This is a messy record and I love a good mess.
Korn
1/5
I made it through! Imagining they were singing “old Macdonald had a farm” on every song helped.
Boston
5/5
Didn’t know this would be one of the big boys!
Partway through the second song, which I like, I thought this album might suffer from the "Doolittle" problem of started with the best song, but by the middle of the third song - which I thought was the fourth due to its delightful intro, a Colosseum-style keyboard nerdout demanding a centaur on cosmic flute - I muttered, this record covers a lot of ground, and so far all of it is happy. And then onto some pleasing chug.
Sex is there, but not scuzzy; more that of teenage premature ejaculators, polite and thankful afterwards. Seeing that most of the music is played by one guy, without looking up more about him I've decided he's a proto-Malkmus. Where's his "Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain"? You're going to tell me the rest of the records are awful.
Elliott Smith
2/5
Not for me. Some nostalgia to the turn of the century for this, but ES’s well-polished mutterings never touched me.
Jeff Beck
3/5
I like this uneven record; I can hear they had fun making it. Beck’s Bolero has the comic origin myth that Jimmy Page made it to pause Beck’s whinging about the Yardbirds. The version of Shapes… is great, though not better than the original. My ears glaze over interminable blues noodles, but there’s usually some zany noise or guitar ejaculation to draw me back in, albeit briefly. Hi Lo Silver Lining is a fine drunk novelty song.
It’s no Roger The Engineer, but what is?
Jacques Brel
3/5
Hard not to be swept away by the tremendous momentum. Now show to fidget with mood and tempo, and the snatches I understand are nice. I think I get it.
Queen
3/5
They have got their big joyful sound minted here, and the record’s never less than entertaining, but there are maybe only 2-3 eternal foot-lifters here, KQ included.
Eagles
2/5
I know the Eagles are meant to be evil, but had somehow never got round to listening to their main record. Greatly disappointed by the lack of the diabolic. Instead, I found patchy, occasionally enjoyable pastiche. Some poor Neil Young vocal impressions early on offset by the strange transition in "...Fast Lane" from ZZ Top to, christ, I don't know what, disco synth? The lyrics didn't linger, apart a mention of "shadows coming to stay", with or without Cliff Richard not mentioned, which would have had material impact on their already respectable coke bill.
Later, I looked up the lyrics. Dear crike they’re awful.
Nina Simone
4/5
Abyssal, fantastic. Four Women and the title track jump out immediately. All the songs have this spotlight effect on you and her, transfixing you like you're being subjected to the most dramatic monologues. The band is sensitive, knows its place, set dressing. All songs at least good due to incredible delivery, and at least four bangers.
Blondie
4/5
This was a delightful surprise: I completely failed to appreciate this record when I listened to it years ago, dismissing everything apart from the famous songs as filler. It’s all very good or great.
Miriam Makeba
3/5
I liked this and am completely ill-equipped to tackle, linguistically or musically. Her voice and what she does to it is beautiful.
Nitin Sawhney
2/5
This is frictionless music, and I am the wrong audience for it. However, it is interestingly dissonant: laudable, urgent politics to a songtrack that would go well with a swim-up bar on an infinity pool.
"Homelands" has some urgency in the middle, though it drags back to the record's slow, comforting default zone. The record has dynamics, but nothing snags. I was gagging for the Yellow Swans before the halfway point. Or Sly and the Family Stone. Or the Didjits. I bet the Didjits are not on this list. Honestly, listen to "Hey Judester.
Arrrgghhh this album seems to never end! "Anthem Without Nation", leave me alone!
Turbonegro
1/5
Let me check my notes… “if you want to rock, you gotta roll”, Wikipedia page says they “attack political correctness” and went blackface in early shows to “challenge the audience”. Musically, this means “rendezvous with anus”. Lead guitarist invoicing by the note. Chords strung into a forgettable rush… party band for the alt right… “Are you ready (for some darkness)” why the parentheses and which idiot thought this song needed an outro, all of these songs are too long… ah shit someone found the cowbells in the studio’s percussion larder…
For the second day in a row I think of the Didjits, who made the patently offensive fun.
Crap.
James Brown
4/5
This is smashing. Glimpses of the future, deconstructed stuff, are in the fun interstitial pieces; it's almost avant-garde, though it always is about charging the audience up. The audience feels close.
Talking Heads
2/5
This smoothly glided in and out of my years leaving now residue aside from “Psycho Killer”, which bangs. A clear concept well executed, I admire this record without it moving me: my loss.
Missy Elliott
3/5
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this, as I’d wrongly assumed this would have any individuality polished out, as heard in much of what I’ve heard of that period’s pop-hop. But this has a lot of character, quirk, and sonic weirdness: it’s coherent
Beatles
5/5
Beep beep, beep beep, ja!
I went through this waiting for the inevitable weak track. There are none. I’m no Beatles maven, but I think this is their finest record.
It also sounds fantastic, clear, each element sitting in its own space, quietly astonishing in the lack of sonic congestion despite all that’s going on. It somehow sounds both rich and minimalist. And some of the guitar sounds are seriously raunchy, though never ostentatiously so. Such a happy opening cowbell spree! A close listen is rewarded here.
The Fall
3/5
I reckon with twenty minutes lopped off this would be fearsome. Always listenable, sometimes great, often just fine. Strangely stronger on the second side, slightly exhausting - I couldn’t listen to it twice today.
Booker T. & The MG's
3/5
This is an enthusiastic “ok”. The title track throws thunderbolts down on everything around it, but the record is consistently pleasant. It just makes me wish they’d stretched to write more of their own compositions, rather than this bunch of covers that slide smoothly down amnesia alley. Gives me the feeling of walking into a sleazy bar in an old movie, which I like.
Janelle Monáe
3/5
Alert! Prög!
Handclaps please me. Disco pleases me. Afrofuturism can be ace.Janelle Monãe can turn an enunciation on a dime - she’s sharp. But a few tracks in I was wondering if this was all nice concept, clever production, no tunes. The prog curse: pulsing cerebellum, tin ears. However, “Cold War” did the trick for me. “Tightrope” also has a decent hook, and speeds us up, and throws in the cockiest use of brass I’ve heard in a while.
It’s a fun record. Not much lingers on first listen, but it’s never less than diverting.
Fela Kuti
3/5
I like endless, directionless, bouncy improvisation, so this is for me. Ginger Baker’s fogged form on the front is a curio from the days when supergroups stalked the earth. He fits in, to his credit.
Le Tigre
3/5
Snotty playground vocals usually grate with me, but strong hooks, filthy murk, and the otherwise general heaviness of the mix work well with it. I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would. Peter Hook’s bass ghost dominates many of the best songs.
Lorde
4/5
I like this album quite a lot, already owning and playing it when mood demands. I love her voice, fierce and smoky. Best song is the first one. It’s a conversational album, quirky song structures, closer to Brel than ABBA, with the right amount of flourish - the post-punk guitar part at the end of “The Louvre” a lovely example of this.
The Rolling Stones
3/5
My perception of this album changed in ways I still haven’t fathomed when I discovered much of it was recorded in Nice, Côte d’Arsetrim.
The record is too long. It’s ok, I just don’t like Bobby Gillespie drooling over my shoulder. Not that many standouts for the duration, most tracks would benefit from an accompanying Scorcese montage to augment the hallelujah coke fiend blathering. Going through the record, the first song that always halts me, regardless of mood, is “Let it Loose”, 14 tracks in.
Aerosmith
2/5
Opens with a bracing whallop. “Love in an elevator” is great. Most of the rest didn’t touch me, and “Janie’a got a gun” annoyed me. Listening to it through tinny phone speakers probably didn’t flatter it, but not much had me want to go back with headphones. Actually, I’d also go back for the “voodoo on this town” song, as that sounded like it might be endearingly stupid.
The Flaming Lips
3/5
One that I’d missed, though ‘Race for the Prize’ is correctly unavoidable. Heard mostly on a rental car stereo on the way to drop off said Toyota Yaris hybrid back at Curries Motors, last three songs on headphones walking through Waltham Abbey. Sunny morning , appropriately. Curries wouldn’t refund the replacement tire I had put on after a blow out on the A41, but I was expecting that so was not too disappointed. First time I’ve changed a car tire, one more point in the dad column. Listened to the last two songs while eating fish cake and chips from a Greek chippy in Waltham Cross - I knew they were Greek from the inclusion of souvlaki and “Greek side dishes” on the menu in a sort of faux-ancient Greek lettering in contrast to the bog standard font of the rest of the menu.
Context can be important sometimes, Simon.
Yeah, I like this, would happily ask it out for dinner to get better acquainted, maybe over flirtinis, who knows? The drums stood out for me on first listen - in places, a very effective “there’s a loud and flashy drummer living next door” effect, just enough remove to prevent them from being overpowering, but acting as rowdy interlopers to the dreamy, orchestral stuff in the front. Beautiful to listen to, but little lingered in my consciousness on first two go rounds, as if hooks are too crude for such a crafted object. The delicate vocals cleave closer to twee than I usually tolerate, but work for what surrounds them - the voice very occasionally breaks a little, which I like. It’s a mood piece on the first couple of listens.
Bob Dylan
5/5
When “Mr Tambourine Man” started, I thought, hey, they’re playing this cover pretty straight and then I remembered. Same happened with “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”.
A classic I never got round to. Of the records from the list I’ve heard so far, maybe only this and ‘Rubber Soul’ have that spookiness peculiar to the best recordings: immersed, the old is new, with the sensation of witnessing something entirely novel coming into being. Not my usual stuff, but obviously brilliant. I’ll get myself a copy.
Cheap Trick
5/5
Easy one for me: a fab five. Immediately felt happy when I saw this cover appear on the screen.
I am ashamed that before I knew them, I gave them short shrift at a music festival. Someone I don’t know stayed and wrote something one of the best pieces of forum writing I’ve read about them:
http://www.premierrockforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=879&p=56759
“…As I heard more and more songs in the concert I thought about how the band Cheap Trick had played big stadiums and had girls screaming at them and been very famous and probably had lots of drugs and other things like that but now they were here playing to some people who didn't know them or really care about them like I didn't know them and some of the people watching probably wanted to see The Fall instead. But they did not get sad and instead they played like they did not want to be anywhere else or be doing anything else in the whole world”
Simon, this IS the Greatest Hits. And I’m reviewing the deluxe 2 CD full gig, not the short version linked on the page. Even the otherwise throwaway “Can’t Hold On” has enough conviction in the chorus to elevate my puny fist up in the air. And the best is as powerful as pop and rock can be x
The Velvet Underground
5/5
Admit mild weariness on seeing I was to listen to this again; how many times can I play and still enjoy it? But it sounds as live as it ever has. Still perfect, “European Son” included. Piano still hammers like a cheerful Tommy gun. Electric viola still simulates a jet engine. Guitars still aggressively exotic, Nico still atonally brilliant, Reed still a man knowing he’s singing something entirely new into being.
Joni Mitchell
5/5
I love this record though find it hard work: I stop to listen to it, as I can’t have it on in the background.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
4/5
This immediately grabbed me with unexpected cacophony and whallop: That’s how you begin an album, nerds!
Drums sound great, making my head do a Wilko Johnson dance. The Boss brought to mind, another midlife discovery with a gift for narrative, anthem and soaring.
Surprised by how much I like Costello’s voice. The garage band guitar sometimes verges on no wave chaos, which is magnificent, as if the songs are barely able to hold together.
The record is well paced, rockers, laments, introspective bits all feel like they’re in the right place on this first lesson.
Yeah, I’ll get this. I think this is a record I’ll find more to like on further goes.
Gary Numan
3/5
I admire this record for being consistent to a very particular vision, and reaching an apogee in "Cars", which is eternal. None of the rest grabbed me, sounding like recipe experiments for the classic single, though I enjoyed the clean and charged romantic mood of the record, and think "Engineers" is a beautiful closer. 2 would be cheap, though I only liked maybe three songs wholeheartedly. Spotify crapped out as it reached the end, leaving me with the message "Couldn't find "gary numan"". I'll leave it at that.
Orbital
3/5
“Snivilisation”, a title with Gen X reek: easy cynicism, a cheap pun, comfortable edginess. Slowly, the kids are beginning to hate us as much as the Boomers…
Dated title apart, this is alright. Better heard on headphones if not in a club, my favourite parts creep around the ears, just a little off-kilter. The sarcastic corporate samples are largely tiresome, reminders of well-worn 90’s cynicism. The best clichéd 90’s sample source will always be “Robocop”, or “Scarface” if you’re listening to the Wu Tang Clan.
Unlikely to seek out again, but wouldn’t complain if someone put it on. Two point seven. Was three, but ending the record with two ten minutes-plus tracks is a contemptible move.
Beastie Boys
4/5
Still great, still their pinnacle. Listening to it all the way through for the first time in a long while, I’m a little surprised by the relative low earworm density, but I don’t think this matters. One of the ultimate vibe albums? And the earworms are truly, truly catchy. Shadrach probably my favourite.
Paul Weller
2/5
Aggressively bland, this is what Clapton was clawing for in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, to be foiled by his religious blues Puritanism. Weller storms past, embracing the fuzz, the wah wah, the other psychedelic trimmings - one song is called “Moon On Your Pyjamas” (and jizz on my feet?) - and manages to make it all boring and just the right side of melodically forgettable. The two short interstitial instrumentals are wonderful in both their polish and disposability.
I listened to half of this driving to Curries Motors in Waltham Cross to drop off another hybrid Toyota Yaris, this time the sport SUV model. The caressing beige vibes were apt to a daring crawl on and off the M25.
The temptation to upgrade this to three stars is strong, as the craftmanship in this record is impeccable. Everything in balance, bright and warm, you can hear the tubes and brushes. The vinyl strings. The sax taps. Great love went into this record. “In the back seat of my head, some place I can’t remember where…”
The record suffered when I switched to headphones, as I could make out more of the lyrics, which sound like the wordplay one makes when improvising a lullaby to a baby after all words have been forgotten due to exhaustion.
“Magic carpet ride … chase dreams across my fields… in the shadow of the sun… shoopy shoopy hot cross bun… please go to sleep my sweet…”
On the way home, I went outside Tottenham Hale station to grab family provisions. There was a tall young man in a purple suit busking with twangy electric guitar, some distortion, some flange, closed eyes, and a stream of indecipherable emotion, “why, sky, pie…” You are His Son, I thought.
Nick Drake
3/5
Parts suggest that this record inspired thousands of background songs for emotive moments popular TV dramas, “Gray’s Anatomy”’s weepiest moments, and this is unfair. But the songs have their strange, awkward bits, and the morbid strings - on “River Man” - for example, are too engaging to sit in the background. Never heard this before, approached it warily, and was grabbed almost immediately.
His words and intonation are circumspect. Having begun by blaming him for soap music, I now accuse him of providing the vocal template for “Spiderland”.
The recording is great, everything clear, uncluttered, and close, played to head across pillow.
A lot of it is fiddlier than I usually would tolerate, similar to “Astral Weeks”. The folk-jazz experiments of the period have an earnestness that slightly repels me, despite my admiring the intentions and elegance, and feeling nostalgic for these few years of emotive experimentation that I learned secondhand through childhood. Hippy teachers and children’s programmes, man.
I like this, but drifted away after the first couple of tracks. Will listen to again. For now, a cagey, perhaps unjust three stars.
Radiohead
2/5
This album is dense with songs that the true faithful close their eyes and and sing along to.
The stuff that used to annoy me doesn’t annoy me so much nowadays. The lyrics are still a mash of abstract platitudes, but they work as dumb, anthemic refrains. Irony, often falling to sarcasm, slapped on with paint-roller, both in words and mock heroic guitar - “My Iron Lung” is archetypical, with a guitar that switches between sneer and sonic “blah blah blah”. Their sarcasm might be sarcastic, a put on. Recursive affectation! Slightly annoying! But the instruments sound nice, if busy.
Two.
Afrika Bambaataa
3/5
This is charming, exuberant, and shows an infectious wonder around the novelty of these sounds and structure. But I don’t think I’d go out of my way to listen to the whole record again.
“Who You Funkin’ With” is my standout track.
Rush
1/5
Today’s record was “Moving Pictures”, so I’ve broken my Rush-virginity. Unfortunately, this means I’ve regained my actual virginity. One star!
Manic Street Preachers
3/5
I was unfair to the band back when this came out: they’ve some strong tunes with the different bits in the right places, literate lyrics, and can soar with the best. And I’ve a lot more time for Bradfield’s voice. I found it a little monotonous in tone and tempo on the first listen, but I’ve felt more generous to it on second and third goes. Still not sure, but a record with this many strong songs can’t be bad. A provisional three.
Siouxsie And The Banshees
2/5
File under important, but not for me. This has influenced a lot of music I like, and the guitar work is sometimes outstanding, but little hooked me and I felt like I was being sonically hectored.
Billy Joel
2/5
This is an affable album, but little had me wanting to linger or return.
4/5
This is great. Another bit of history I’d heard of but never heard. Some less compelling tracks in there, but the overall effect is tremendous. ‘Desolation Row’ is hypnotic. And the switch to the band in the second half is fab.
The harmonica playing really grabbed me! The drone at the end of ‘She Belongs to Me’ might’ve earned a nod from John Cale.
Whatever version I listened to over Spotify jump-cut over the “Judas!” exchange.
Amy Winehouse
2/5
I don’t like the production, which is dull to near soporific, but her voice and lyrics are occasionally fantastic, and distinctive: unmistakeable hers. But the music made me drift off.
The Rolling Stones
5/5
The opener catapults this to the royal leagues. I was pleasantly surprised that my earlier impression of a record heavy with filler was wrong (I ought to return to ‘Exile…’); only ‘Love in Vain’ has little for me, five of the songs I love, and the rest is pretty to very good.
The Brian Jones bye-bye, he’s here like Banquo’s ghost with bongos.
Fairport Convention
3/5
I respect and like a lot of this, but the meeting of folk and rock is an uneasy one. Reminds me of the coffee house trip hop covers of rock classics prevalent at the turn of the century. The best parts sound like the Velvets or Jefferson Airplane, while the overly folky embellishments have the air of a bugler at a historical reenactment taking a crafty vape. Look, if Kevin Rowland is not singing, it’s very hard for a fiddle player to please me on record without exiting to the sound of gunshot. Sandy Denny’s voice is exquisite, but feels constrained by the form.
Of course, turns out I have four FC albums in my library. Three; two would be miserly.
Frankie Goes To Hollywood
4/5
The singles are great and the covers are fun. Bit long? I was never bored.
The Rolling Stones
4/5
The algorithm has brought this not longer after ‘Let it Bleed’ and ‘Bring it all back home’, and has me thinking about what makes a record dated, like this one, and near-contemporaries, like the other two, not. It’s the difference between being planted into a past moment by a work, where it feels live, and looking back at that moment - it’s the distance. Forgive me; this doesn’t explain why I think ‘Aftermath’ is a relic, whereas ‘Let it bleed’ is resurrection on tape (sorry Ian Brown).
Might be a materialist matter: this record contains novelty techniques that few would use now: stereo flourishes that do little other than call attention to themselves, dulcimer faux-baroque, recorded-in-an-oil-drum echoes, and unrelenting misogyny. The fuzz-bass on ‘Under My Thumb’ is brilliant, though!
Still a great album. And once I start concentrating on Watts’ drumming, it’s happy trance time!
The Last Shadow Puppets
3/5
It’s ok, but nothing stuck after two listens. 2.5 rounded
3/5
The album Oasis’s popularity crested, and critics went “ooo, cocaine” before concluding “too much cocaine” on the next album. I quite like seven songs on this, which is a decent haul, but bloat is real.
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
4/5
This was stuck to my CD player when it came out, apparently at the start of my second year in university, though I could swear it was in the first. JSBE had played one of the best rock shows I’d ever been to at UMIST two years before, making me snarling loyal to the band. I enjoyed this record, but would’ve played it a lot even had I not. After listening the shit out of it for a few months, or maybe the year, I moved on to other records, and have played it rarely since - this was the last JSBE record I bought in the week of release.
Almost 30 years on, I still like it, and find myself predicting the riffs, textures and garagey-guitar sounds just before they reach my ears. I remember Simon Reynolds comparing the relationship of JSBE and The Jesus Lizard to the great rock bands of the 70s/60s as akin to that of Tarantino to Peckinpah - this post-modern art can look nice, but where's the flair, the excitement of the new, the innovation? A contemporary issue of Melody Maker drew a line from Shellac to Lenny Kravitz via JSBE. Both arguments troubled me as much as they entertained me. But the experience of hearing this post-modern artefact from the mid-90's is a happy one: what I feared might be schtick is a work of love towards the components: big, buzzing hooks, queasy melodic runs, hypnotic blue repetition, and gigantic drumming. I've just bought the deluxe version.
The instruments sound great: Russell Simins one of the most fun drummers I've ever seen, and the record is a potpourri of thick and warm guitar growl and wobble. Spencer's rambling is unironically silly, and the yelps are those of an intelligent man trying to have fun. Awkward, irritating to many - clear from most of the other reviews here - loveable to me.
Hard to speak of tunes around this record, as its more a collection of riffs and textures, a murky party record that has me move my shoulders up and down as I type, which is about as extreme as my dancing has been of late.
I’ve a lovely memory of my dad poking his head into my bedroom as I was putting this on, and wincing in retreat to the opening scream of “Skunk”.
Four, and not just out of sentiment. I am happy that I played it twice because I wanted to, rather than out of duty... To the Effort!
Aretha Franklin
3/5
Aretha Franklin’s voice is unmistakable, true to her, or the singing character she adopted, and no recording featuring her voice can be less than listenable.
Voice aside, much of this record is unremarkable. Most of the ballads blur in subject matter, sound and feel. Stand by your willy.
There are standouts: “Save Me”’s opening distorted guitar made my ears twitch out of ballad-induced torpor. The circular riff reminds me that Krautrock came as much from dance music as it did from the Velvets. Next comes “A Change is Gonna Come”, which feels ironic as it is another slow ballad, though one of the better ones, waltzing hi-hats elevating it.
“Respect” automatically raises any ranking a notch. Got to give a little. Least a three.
Elvis Costello
3/5
He covers a lot of bases in this first stab of the donkey. Pretty good! Doesn’t hang around. On this first couple of listens, only the opening track and “Less Than Zero” jumped out. The rest sounded amiable, like sitting next to a mildly drunk John Cusack. Don’t like it as much as ‘Blood and Chocolate’.
David Bowie
5/5
Yeah, by the end of the second track I’d decided this is probably one of the greats. Were I less uptight, I’d use that corny rolling-eyes emoji alongside the admission I’d never heard this before. Rockist teenager decided Bowie isn’t for him, takes near thirty years to start listening beyond the hipster Berlin-era albums, ouch.
The title song, built around a spannered piano improv on four note bass line, is just my kind of jam. Love it.
He’s one of the few English-singing artists who has taken in that Brel-like chanson mode, singing narrative, and still make the songs hook, rather than chatter.
‘Panic in Detroit’ is fantastic. Surprised by how Stooges-esque the guitars sound - the teenage rockist in me approves.
Didn’t spend as much time with this over the weekend as it warrants, but easily five stars.
Little Simz
3/5
This is an angry, aggressive album with vivid, nighttime production, bumblebee bass hooks and alien sounds in abundance. Lyrically, Little Simz leans heavily on cliché, and sprays profanity more liberally than Tarantino. The concrete detail in her song a is powerful.
Jorge Ben Jor
4/5
This hit the spot! Opens and closes with bangers, has a fair few between. I’m largely unschooled in Brazilian psychedelic rock, and would like to more about the sounds than Wikipedia will tell me, for example which did Wham pinch? Bookmarking this.
Listened to this three times, probably would’ve listened to this more had I not been pushed down a King Crimson wormhole by companions.
Cocteau Twins
3/5
A harrowing outburst of baby vomit restricted my time with the Cocteaux to a listen and a half on my crappy phone speakers, enough for me to start liking them, but not enough to dispel the snide, one-line review I came up with over the first song and a half, which I’ll get to. I’d bounced off them a couple of times for a perceived thinness of sound, a samey, echoey thrum. But this has songs, hooks, climaxes, and some heartfelt melodies. I should listen to it again. My bad review follows.
The correct answer to this question is “Björk”.
(Sorry.)
Joan Armatrading
4/5
Thought this ponderous at first, utterly convinced by the second listen. Had never knowingly listened to Armatrading, a couple of songs in something in her voice and the record-feel expecting the "lover woo-hoo" song, and sure enough "Love and Affection" comes on like a magic trick. Her voice is surprisingly curt, often percussive; forgive me, I haven't quite worked out what's so distinctive about it that had me recognise it from a song I hadn't heard in decades. (I don't listen to much radio.)
The lyrics are introspective, spiralling into themselves, and for a while I felt the record lacked memorable refrains, before I realised it was doing something else.
The band sound is astonishingly good; no finer-recorded album has hit this list during our march through. Need to listen to it more, but might be a juggernaut.
The Doors
3/5
This is alright. Sometimes silly, sometimes rocking, The Doors are as hated as often as loved amongst friends. I won't seek this out, but wouldn't switch it off if it came on. Amused by the mix of the faux-visionary and the horny, best exemplified early on by 'Waiting for the Sun' being followed by 'You Make Me Real' (horny).
The Temptations
3/5
“Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” leaves the rest of this otherwise pleasant album in the dust. Really tense, dubbed out and eerie: haunted funk. Not much else stood out over an admittedly domestic-volume listen, the rest more mood than event.
Talking Heads
4/5
Enjoyed this a damn sight more than the debut. Mood and the fact that today I played this from decent speakers would've played a part, but the songs are better, there's a flow to the record, and it's a lot less stiff. David Byrne sounds more interesting, and the band's killing it. Am surprised, as the debut near-convinced me they weren't for me.
Pearl Jam
3/5
Hahahaha PJ were the enemy! But my brother was fond of them, and was learning to play guitar at the time, so both this record and my brother’s wrangling of the riffs have nostalgic pull on me.
Interestingly, for a band named after jizz, their first album has been celebrated as a subtle yet successful concept album on “code for shit” - see the track listing: :”Even flow”, “Black”, “Oceans”, “Deep”, and “Release” sing to the act. “Once”, “Alive”, “Why Go”, “Porch”, “Garden”, and “Jeremy” address the emotional and physical context. When I was told this, my animosity towards PJ melted. “Once. Upon a time. I could control myself.” Knowing what we know now, how can this fail to move the listener?
Thirty years removed, I can enjoy some of these tunes. Tails off, and would’ve been better had the title been the correct count. Eddie Vedder seems like a nice bloke, and the grunge politics of PJ being the conservative choice while Nirvana were the revolutionaries seems daft now, though I’m sure my altered opinion will be tested when the Smashing Pumpkins bloviate into our trek.
Three!
The Associates
5/5
The machine chucked an unfamiliar multitude at me today: this record is really very good, and I wish I had more time to listen to it. It's sui generis, and I'm scrambling for references to anchor it - at times, it reminded me of early Sonic Youth, This Heat, Kraftwerk, and acid house, but it's really its own thing. The vocals grated at first, but on the second listen they seemed appropriate, a choice based on the material and what Mackenzie had available to him. Really tempted to give it five stars, though I've barely made it through twice.
The Doors
3/5
Hey, I’ve *watched* ‘Apocalypse Now Redux* and will *willingly* watch it again!
Bit grumpy RNG has given us a consecutive weekend doses of the Doors, and almost defaulted this to 2 over an impatient first listen, but skipping through this a second time, I realised most of the songs I thought sucked have their charms. The vocalist’s horny shamanistic pretensions are present, yet they work with the setting, and the band is never less than listenable.
I picked up a couple of sonic puns:
‘“This is the End…” DUM DUM DUM!’
And the Alabama whisky bar song being a cabaret-worthy oompa-oompa rollick.
Not crap, a perhaps mean 3 here. Writing this on Friday, going back to the Associates record to see if I like it as much a day later.
Derek & The Dominos
3/5
Goes on too long.
First concert I went to was Clapton in the Albert Hall, as my dad is a fan back from the Yardbirds’s day. I might’ve only been 10, and was impressed as I was meant to be, but I remember feeling impatient for the big riffs, which seemed rare. My favourite song was “Sunshine of Your Love”, and I probably wondered why he didn’t play more of stuff that sounded like that, rather than the plod plod woo-hoo-yeah material that I let my legs dangle back and forth to. Later, the album “Journeyman” came out, which my dad got on tape, and I remember him rushing into a bedroom we kids had congregated in to play a segment of the song “No Alibis”, specifically a two second segment of a solo, which he happily described as classic Clapton. Even then, I felt this was poignant. Two seconds out of a 57 minute album!
On heroin addiction, William Burroughs wrote that the addict could spend a whole day staring at the corner of his shoe. He might have added “or inconclusively guitar solo to “Key To The Highway”.
Everything is clear and glints, all the many elements painstakingly balanced against each other. The back and forth between guitarists is evident, even if the subject of the conversation is mundane. How many of these songs are about nicking George’s wife?
“Layla etc” is “No Alibi”’s dad, a shiny artifact that’s more soft than rock, but the rock that’s there is worth a linger if you like truck stops. But it is so long that a second listen through almost took me to the office sick bay for a lie-down during “Tell the Truth”. It has been a long year. (I ended up just sitting on the couch outside it, writing some of this review.)
“Layla” is often said to be Clapton’s best song, but the riff is Duane Allman’s invention and the piano part is, allegedly, Rita Coolidge’s, pinched by her abusive drummer boyfriend Jim Gordon (he’d later murder his mum and spend most of his life in jail before his death this year). What I am getting to is that back then Clapton still had some good compositional taste!
Far too long. Just now, I took out a headphone bud with an audible gasp of Jesus Christ.
I am giving this 3, as it is an archetype, the platonic ideal of a kind of music that I find irredeemably lame, but with which I am sentimentally entangled. Having not heard it in decades, the intro to their cover of “Little Wing” stilled me. I prefer it to the original. Super epic. Followed by the dishwater blues of “It’s too late”.
Can’t believe I’ve listened to this twice today.
Am betting my partner in this endeavour will remedy this review with two lines and a score perhaps half that number. What was that song you taught me back in labs? “My old man said be an Arsenal fan…”
GZA
4/5
I am very fond this album, my favourite alongside ‘Only Built 4 Cuban Linz’ of this rich period of Wu Tang-affiliated records. It’s the tauter of the two albums though, similar to its siblings, it still would’ve benefited from a couple of songs dropped.
Still get shivers with the opening of ‘4th Chamber’. That wiggly squeal diving into the fuzz bass is still one of the heaviest snatches of music I know.
The cheesy dialogue samples have an unironic, Lynchian quality, excerpts from a cheaply dubbed version of the “Lone Wolf and Cub” series, adapted from an incredible, intense, bloody and deeply melodramatic manga, to which the wooden delivery adds a haunted mannequin quality, right for this pulpy, shamanic-beat action-horror anthology record. I’m tired, having trouble getting my head round this record I’ve known for almost thirty years, and I’m going to mutter a strangled “hauntology” and move on.
They were (are?) loopy AF, but the nutty religious sci-fi proselytising is concentrated in the last track, which at least has a fun acronym, Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.
Some of the lines are shivved into my skull:
“Picture bloodbaths in elevator shafts”
…
“Tommy ain’t my motherfucking boy”
Yet how often do I listen to this now? Enjoyed my first run through, got distracted through my second, possibly suffering whiplash from this following “Layla blah blah blah”.
Deerhunter
3/5
This belongs to the "whole lot of guitars and whining" genre coined by Summer from The O.C., and I'm ok with that. But there's not much that calls me back - there's prettiness, songs with many bits to them, that post-rock marker, and uncluttered sound where even the fuzz sounds clean - and I think, I suppose I could listen to this more. The song with the sax almost made me enthusiastic. All very tasteful, competent and tepid. 3.
Franz Ferdinand
3/5
This is an exuberant record where most instruments swing, and some song stories are vivid, moving at a clip, little time to be bored. I shunned this when it came out due to my weird prejudices, but think this is fine. This is a light, cake. <looks at my comrade’s review…> …or maybe, I was right all along?!
Dire Straits
4/5
Those three dangerous words: I have this. Both in my digital library and my surviving brain memory, as the tape was stuck in my parents’ car for a billion years when I was around 10.
‘Money for Nothing’ is a song I’ve been fascinated with since I heard it, probably when it came out. The exciting opening climaxing Sting, which even then I knew was some sort of joke, was the first fixation, the song-long guitar solo the enduring one. A majestic experimental musician of my acquaintance labelled the guitar sound “brown tone” which, while not complimentary, fits.
As a teen in Newcastle, Mark Knopfler worked as an intern at the Newcastle Evening Chronicle where this notoriously grumpy old man also worked. The grumpy old man was modernist poet Basil Bunting, at that time neglected and impoverished, probably finished in his own mind, though his revival with his masterpiece “Briggflatts” was only two years away. Knopfler recently made a song about him and their shared time in the office, and the lyrics appeal strongly to my sentiments. The music, not so much. Not enough brown tone. Still:
‘Bury all joy/ Put the poems in sacks/ And bury me here with the hacks.’
Which is to say, I like Knopfler. And you should read ‘Briggflatts’, and listen to Bunting read it (there’re videos on YouTube).
‘Your Latest Trick’ is the most MOR object that I will ever cherish. Sociologists favourite it, as it is the accepted marker of the cresting of MOR sax.
MOR: making good MOR is incredibly hard. Have you ever tried drawing a long, straight line freehand?
‘Why Worry?’ is trite AF, but the descending little synth motif still puts eerie on me, especially with accompanying Knopfnoodling. Musicologists favourite this one as the high water mark of cheesy synth, after which the instrument moved on to the Channel 5 soft porn industry and never looked back.
Knopfler is basically Clapton if Clapton wasn’t a… but let’s not embed a list in a list.
‘Ride Across A River’ hahahah did you write this after watching ‘Crocodile Dundee’? Oh shit, that sax…
That’s what happens: the songs start off sounding like the cheesiest ‘80s makeout crap, and then they do something that spoils it all by infesting my brain via strange bait. Was that an eBow I heard there?
See, ‘The Man’s Too Strong’, fingerpick strum yawn fingerpick strum yawn, hey why is my pulse slightly elevated? “BAM BWAMM, bong BAHBONG!”
‘One World’ is maybe the only plain herb track on this. Still listen to it on all playthroughs, as I need respite from the constant weird ambushes.
Closing with the title song reeks of pretensions that bubble through an ambitious album: experimental, daring MOR, the latest synths, the latest digital, and songs that confidentially skip and straddle genre, all tied together by that voice, one of the boldest celebrations of regional identity that went platinum. What about that second side, mostly about war? And what about the fact that there are no sides because this was the record that sold CDs as the forever format? Before they started rotting and people noticed the mastering was shit.
Returning as an adult to ‘MFN’ and the war songs, I I like the stories, and the hint of fatalistic Nordic saga in them. Knopfler’s mocked vocal dourness has an ancient and mighty North East English lineage.
When I started, I found it hard to bring myself to listen to this, and had to listen to ‘Bang Your Head’ by Gravediggaz to fortify myself after hearing the intro to ‘Walk of Life’.
I’m not going to write about ‘Walk of Life’.
O God, not another 3!
Only joking: fuck you, FOUR! Take that, melts!
Bob Marley & The Wailers
2/5
This is sadly not the long-hoped-for revelation: most reggae bores me, feels lacking until the heavy dub effects and weirdness are pasted on top. The first track showed promise, which I now realise was because my rockist ears had picked up the overdub of Wayne Perkins guitar, transported from a different, funkier scene.
This is not a bad record, just not for me right now. Perhaps never for me.
Silver Jews
3/5
‘Bright Flight’ contains story-led, well-crafted pieces of pessimistic whimsy that never stole all my attention over a couple of plays, despite some Jack-in-the-box imagery - ‘my horse’s legs look like brown shotguns’ is a clip from one of the more psychotic Loony Tunes skits. The crafty lyrics take precedence over the music, and that’s not enough for me, at least not today. The flat and dry, academic delivery might be the crucial part that doesn’t reach me - ‘Time will break the world’ has what should be a great chorus, but it arrives like a lecture hall recitation of Orwell’s rules for writing.
There are some fantastic lines in here, though. ‘…because the dead don’t improve.’
Billy Bragg
2/5
I gave this one and a half-arsed listens dawdling between sadness and doldrums. The experience was summed up when without thinking I told my one-year old, “shall we turn the boring record off?” I like the man, but the music does nothing for me, and his proclamatory lyrics leave little space for mystery or humour. Listening to his optimistic throating of socialist axioms depressed me; we know how this story is going to go.
My heart says three, my head says two. Sorry Billy x
Eric Clapton
3/5
I shot the heroin: how I became the best paid busker in the business.
You hear it in his voice. I was going to write that Clapton sings with a transatlantic accent, but it’s weirder than that, more like he’s doing an impression of what he believes an American singer sounds like, but nervously, not wanting to offend, like a busker.
‘Motherless children’ is a strong opener!
‘Lord give me strength’ to listen all the way through this track. No-one’s made that joke before.
‘Get Ready’ is startlingly ok, a smoky, funky throwaway that hooks. There’s a single-note tease of heavy, distorted guitar at the end that is almost a troll: Clapton could rock, but he chooses not to. He’s mellow now.
The cover of ‘I shot the sheriff’ is funny for a number of reasons, especially Clapton’s perception of the original as “hardcore reggae” and that the other guitarist had to convince him to play it, which I choose to believe was a prank. His busker voice on this is something else, and if my partner in this pilgrimage uses both "Racisthand" and "blackface" in his review, I *will* shout "BINGO!" regardless of my surroundings.
He’s on safe ground with the couple of blues covers, no surprises there. Made his busker bones in that racket.
‘Let it grow’ actually did surprise me: it’s a beguilingly simple yacht rock banger. The finale is enjoyably daft.
This is patchwork, odds and sods, proficient karaoke, but I enjoyed it more than I expected, and I’m intrigued that my two favourite tracks are Clapton’s originals. Put a loaded signature Fender Strat to my head and I’d choose this over Layleh. Was expecting a 2, got a 3.
Frank Sinatra
3/5
Very good, though I prefer his record with Jobim, a soft masterpiece. His phrasing is exquisite even to a grunge dirtbag like me, and the words he chose to apply himself to are some of the wittiest. A good few hits, a smattering of filler.
Red Hot Chili Peppers
2/5
The puerile lyrics and their wanky delivery made me feel even angrier when I was trying to find my work pass, convinced that it had been put on a container ship. Don’t fucking ask. Once I’d calmed down, I observed that this record is competently executed soft rock with annoying vocals and some tepidly adventurous instrument sounds and quasi-proggy song structures.
Isn’t it funny that Kiedis sometimes inserts nonsense just to balance a line with rhyme? Writing this as I hear a ‘bow wow wow’, but also remembering the ‘ding ding, dong dong, ding ding, dong dong, ding ding’ in the opening track that he sings suspiciously like the racist parodies of Hindi and Urdu that I remember from playgrounds of my childhood. I admire his streamlining of the time consuming process of writing!
And perhaps this shortcut is preferable to his writing: I’ve just looked up the lyrics to ‘Get On Top’. Thanks, Ass Killah Tony.
Overlong. Had this on while working, forgot I was listening to music rather than office noise, was surprised that it had not started on a second playthrough when I check the App. Don’t like it, but no 1.
The Vines
1/5
Highly bad. Been six days since I heard this and the memory has the sensational impact of a stale eggy fart.
Tom Waits
2/5
On first listen, I’m inching towards “this is bullshit”, especially with an early organ-blues lawyer guitar jam that had me looking angrily towards the door in case Mel Gibson staggered in with mullet and bigotry, but ‘Jersey Girl’ is a great song. ‘On the Nickel’ too, perhaps. Distrust of sentiment and nostalgia in art is inculcated in me, as is a demand that people be authentic to themselves, but I have decided this is nonsense and people can pretend to be whoever they want to be so long as they commit. Just not sure Waits commits enough, and the music itself is unremarkable, bringing to mind a sage’s words: “jazz is badz”.
Run-D.M.C.
4/5
A hard decision, as stripped of context these sound like schematics of future bangers. Relentless, heavy, stark electronics, the rapping is glorious, but confusingly slow to today’s ears. Enthralling, but not entirely enjoyable. Intelligent minds forging something truly unheard: raw, earnest, bravely awkward.
Iron Butterfly
3/5
Didn't get enough time with it, but I liked it, hippy drippings included. The main song is deservedly feted, one I knew without knowing I knew. Am exhausted, would like to listen to it on headphones, but shall sleep instead! x
CHVRCHES
2/5
The pretentious spelling of the band's name immediately pisses me off. See runtime is over an hour, crack my knuckles. Two points knocked off and the music hasn't even begun.
The music isn't terrible, and at its best sounds a little like Robyn, just without the magic. Synths are usually urgent, the songs have velocity and the album is dynamic both within the tracks and their sequencing. Were this half its length, I could call this consistent, but as it is over an hour it is samey. My ear lobes were curling up with boredom by the halfway mark. 2.
The Mamas & The Papas
3/5
Two songs for eternity, a handful of covers and some likeable period pieces. S, would you agree this is a “skip to the greatest hits” band?
Björk
3/5
Calling your debut solo album, ‘Debut’, cheek or laziness? At least it is understandable: you ever tried ordering a vespertine in a brasserie? The chef came out to tell me to fuck off.
Much is too twee for me, the irony paper thin - ‘Like Someone In Love’ is cack handed - and a lot of it is boring, Park Lane cocktail lounge music, but I like the hits more than I did back then. Massive Attack at their most violently beige are a fair comparison.
KISS
2/5
Passable tunes for babies recorded in a metal bin, some mid-tier guitar wail and cymbal-drowned percussion played in the kennel next door, but has Paul Stanley played “Great Expectations” to his daughter? Pukey!
Belle & Sebastian
4/5
This list makes me face my demons. B&S, how I’ve swerved around, fled and cowered from you without even knowing why. I suspect my fear was of what I perceived to be softness, which I grasped you rejoiced in. Weird isn’t it. That’s not a question.
This is very good and I haven’t had enough time with it. There’s a play between folk, rock, dissonance and storytelling that feels both fresh and archetype-making. Soft? ‘Me and the Major’ is not soft: it’s pretty bleak! Same for most of the rest.
Hard to judge greatness on a single playthrough, but that’s all I have. Going for a likely conservative 4.
Now back to playing “Two Nuns and a a Pack Mule” really loud!
A Tribe Called Quest
3/5
This is good, maybe great, but I’m just not in the mood for it, and may never be. I respect this record, and the lovely clean space between sounds, the atmosphere evocative of an Antonio film night-place, the carefully laid-out lyrics, the unusual structures, while wanting it to finish and to get on with a busy evening of staring at the wall. How do I score that?
The Temptations
3/5
None of the songs have much stick to them, the title track worthwhile as a period curiosity on drug discourse, but the tremendous musicianship pushes this above mediocrity. I ought to look up what else the session musicians have done.
Common
3/5
77 minutes? When I look up unfamiliar contestants on Spotify, the record length is all I look for. Pressed play and got ready to kick the shit out of this record, and finally roll out a long-brewing rant about the bloat of turn of the millennium hip hop albums. Unfortunately, the first track's so good and unusual, it quelled my rage and I started listening closely.
Sweetly placed afrobeat flourishes from the start made my nose twitch, and while the opener, 'Time Travelin' (A Tribute to Fela)', is a standout, it is not an outlier. The involvement of J Dilla makes sense when I look this up: the record has a wriggle to it.
It is overlong, though. I only had time to listen to it once. I may listen to it again.
Fishbone
2/5
After the uncontrollable shuddering subsided from reading Fishbone are a 'funk-rock and ska band', and I'd listened to three minutes of this record, I wondered if this might end up being the album I'd never listen through.
By the end, I still think it's crap, but admire it. It's cheerful. Were 'Boogie Nights' set a decade later, I imagine Jason Molina's character would be cheerfully shotgunning the blow to this on an expensive CD system.
And it's ambitious, true to itself, jumping all over the record store sections while maintaining internally consistent: the last three songs had me thinking of, in turn, George Clinton, the Butthole Surfers, and Extreme, while sounding only like Fishbone. I don't think any other band could sound like Fishbone.
(For a little while they also reminded me of the late, lamented Complete. Simon, listen to and watch this, then read the comments:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P07Di283vfw )
This is a respectful 2.
Hookworms
3/5
Last night, after listening to three songs, I decided that Microshift by Hookworms is nice and tolerably boring. This evening, the rest of the album lanced much of my contempt. I'm not in love with the record, but 'Opener' had a powerful effect on me, and the motorik-pulse soothed my scorn away. Sorry I haven't called, S, been a hell of a week x
Pulp
4/5
Amazingly, I never had this record until a year or two ago. I only knew the hits, which I liked a lot. And until today, I had not listened to the record closely.
I like the other songs. Yet I need more time. Ask me in a year if I want to upgrade this measly 4.
Guns N' Roses
4/5
This was the first album I bought on CD and I know it front to back, though I haven’t listened to it all the way through for the best part of 30 years. What’s changed?
I don’t remember noticing Izzy Stradlin’s fantastically louche rhythm guitar when I was a teenager. The misogyny was apparent to me even then, but I’m annoyed by it a lot more now. Some of the lyrics are smarter than I would’ve given credit for.
This is a strong set of songs, if you can put up with the hackneyed LA sleazebag posturing: going through the track listing, the only song I couldn’t remember from the title was “Anything Goes”, and playing that again I thought it a fun, minor rocker. By my count, there are 7-8 songs I’d put in their top tier, and the rest aren’t far behind the others.
Cartoonish fun, I have left this behind, but I cannot fault it for what it is.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
3/5
Third Costello album on our marathon, this has two songs I actually know! The obvious ones, obviously. Liked it, and noted I’ve picked up, perhaps by osmosis, my comrade’s inability to wholeheartedly embrace Costello’s records. Puzzled, as the songs are all at the very least fine. Maybe it’s his voice, which might be too much of a great thing: vocal similarity flattens the record. A couple of songs where he toned down the near-sarcastic delivery stood out.
Robert Wyatt
4/5
I was sceptical of this at first, monologues over sine waves, you're not getting me to scratch my chin, mate. But it opens up, and by the third song I was comparing it to This Heat and late Talk Talk, both of which I adore. It's introspective, maddened, instrumentally expansive, but feels very personal. Ran out of time for the second listen again. A cagey 4.
Emmylou Harris
3/5
I bought this on recommendation a few years ago and never got round to listening to it.
The sound of the record is exquisite and, to my ears, unusual: there’s so much going on, it often is a wall of sound, , but one where you can easily make out each individual element.
The songs are frequently beautiful, but oppressively tasteful. Harris’s voice is outstanding, perfect and distinctive, the experience of hearing her sing these covers is like watching an exceptional actor play a classic role. Lovely, but not haunting. Unfairly, Souled American’s handful of skeletal covers jump to mind as the victorious counter argument. After writing that I listened to their take on “Little Bessie, and let faint terror in.
I’m not asking for a Lo-fi slowcore Emmylou Harris album, but some grit and flaw would have lifted this record up.
S, this morning I saw a brown bear on the way to the nursery - O shouted “DAHG!”
Jimmy Smith
3/5
This is a seminal album in the evolution of a mode of keyboard music that I find pleasant, which earn it this piffling middle score. But love is not too much to ask for!
Si, have listened to “Desire” once, liked it quite a bit, especially the opener. Will listen to some more!
Miles Davis
5/5
Don't blame him! Jazz rock would’ve happened already. There is a lot less of the fuck-around in this than in what I haven’t been able to avoid of the aftermath. It has force and direction from a supermassive rhythm section, corralling the soloists and their splashing around. Menacing, at times, reminiscent of Morricone’s queasy giallo pieces. The coherent and clear placement of so many different improvising instruments at the same time is rich magic.
Never bored listening to this, frequently excited and enchanted. The song “Sex Swan” is my favourite, I think.
Mott The Hoople
3/5
This is fun, yet at first I feIt ought to enjoy it more. Unlike some of the best albums of the previous decade, it feels stuck in its time. But on first listen, it got strong as it went on. "Hymn for the Dudes" has a hefty swoon. "Violence" sounded daft, but "Ballad of Mott the Hoople" and "I'm a Cadillac/El Camino Dolo Ross" are moody and fabulous, the latter exquisite in its long stroll to the end. There's a sniff of Dylan to "I Wish I Was Your Mother', closing out.
The Hives
3/5
Guess what I came out in when I saw this was the record on the day of my youngest brother’s funeral?
Mixed them up with The Vines, but they’re not that bad. Opening track’s the famous one, and it’s pretty good - hook hooks, and plays around with structure and texture just enough to make it interesting, Pixies-worthy. How’s the rest?
Listenable, but little that snags memory. Recognised and enjoyed “Supply and Demand”. Garage rock is so swift and minimalist, that hooks, flourishes and refrains must catch fast, otherwise the songs sweep past traceless. “Mad Man” has a cute intro, enough to bite and note. “Here We Go Again”, has a strong axe-chop chord progression let down by a tepid chorus. After that track, only the closer, “The Hives Are Law, You Are Crime”, had me look down to check the song name, as it has a stomp and swish unheard elsewhere on the record, perhaps a factor of it being the only instrumental.
The record is just under 30 minutes, which is welcome.
Hole
2/5
The opening deceptively suggests someone involved in the band cares to write tunes with dynamics, riffs that linger, and choruses - it's a worthwhile tune. Tedium trails Love's drawl and wail, and I chafed at the slack in each song, each a minute more or less too long. Towards the end, I realised I'd made a listener error, and that this cruise-control, repetitive chord parade has purpose, the equivalent of a truck driver simulator or certain minimalist techno, where each song's sequence is repeated until we hypnotically mumble along.
Led Zeppelin
4/5
'Immigrant Song' is mischief, kicking off the record with a rocker as immortal as the one that opened the album before. What follows are some of the deceptively modest, almost-not-there songs of the band's career. Bold! I like it.
R.E.M.
3/5
Murmur has not helped me decide whether I find R.E.M. boring. I certainly find them boring some of the time, but ‘Radio Free Europe’ is exciting. Rest cheerfully slided past my ears without residue on first listen.
Then I listened to this in OUR NEW CAR and they made more sense. The passion one stood out in particular. Is this car music? I still have trouble remembering most of the record, but I felt happier when it came on automatically when I worked out how to start the engine again. Maybe the connection is boredom: driving is boring at its best, a good kind of boredom.
This is an important record, and I respect how they manage to pin down a distinctive aesthetic straight out of the gate. Calling their first album "Murmur" is gloriously on the nose, vaulting past the introductory, peak and self-parody phases straight to the post-modern.
Feigned kindness has me refrain from repeating Chris Morris's cruel dark mirror description of Stipe, but I mention its existence in case it reminds S or anyone else here of it to bring a nasty smile.
Q-Tip
2/5
I was cold to this until I put on headphones I and began to enjoy the delicately laid instruments and samples, closer to Fleetwood Mac (Buckingham) than Public Enemy. My main problem remains: few of the songs stick to me, though Getting Up is a good tune. Slightly bored, I wanted to break my own rules and start skipping after the first minute of each song, as most felt predictable. You has some stick too, I suppose. This all slips easily down the earholes, and perhaps sticky tunes are deemed too disruptive for oyster-slurp passage. Same with what lyrics I caught: no imagery called out.
The Renaissance is a lazy title, isn't it? The Comeback, The My Big Art, The Look Ma I Do It All.
Alice In Chains
2/5
I was going to write about Grunge, Gen X and the insidious politics of apathy, but this record drained me of the, or any, inclination.
They could’ve disheartened me with less than a third of this record - it’s really potent!
Belle & Sebastian
3/5
A good record, but hasn't clawed into me like ..."Sinister"
Marvin Gaye
5/5
I hadn’t heard this uninterrupted for over 20 years, and am thankful for being given a weekend for this. Perhaps the only song cycle/concept album that I consider flawless. A student flatmate once complained that the record was samey, which I worried over, but now doesn’t bother me. Its consistency is a marvel.
The Rolling Stones
4/5
Better than ‘Aftermath’, maybe not as good as ‘Let it Bleed’. I think this is the fourth Rolling Stones album the machine has ladled out to us, and this time I started listening closer to the bluesier songs I’d let drift past and realised the weird irony they wrestled with over them, which makes them interesting to listen to. Some bona fide bangers earn this a 4.
Tito Puente
4/5
I cannot imagine a record doing what this record does, but better. Reminded me of loaded club scenes in modernist classics - again, thinking of Antonioni here. Four stars
Elton John
4/5
First listen was meh, liked this more and more in subsequent go rounds. All the songs have personality; I might argue with them, find them long-winded or daft ('Indian Sunset'), but they stick out, say their thing and don't pander.
The Byrds
2/5
Everybody’s favourite cover band, ey? Thoroughly ruined by auteur theory, I struggle to get over the Byrds’ paucity of originals, though I love “Eight Miles High”; you may not think me an idiot for that.
This album baits my prejudice out: while I appreciate what their transformation “Bells of Rhymney”, this sounds like standard plink plonk country rock to my untutored lugs, albeit with hippy vocals.
I’ve decided to be a jerk and just listen to this once, and let this mean opinion ossify. Simon, waiting for your refutation. Before listening to this I bought “The Gilded Palace of Sin” in anticipation of wanting to hear more Gram Parsons. Now I’m all ha ha the Byrds hired a slide guitarist and a plink plonk pianist to go country, and then had the piss kicked out of them at the Grand Ok Opry for being poseurs.
The Rolling Stones
3/5
I enjoyed the rave-up blues numbers, which I have a fondness for through my dad's love of the Yardbirds, but when "Tell Me" starts we can clearly hear something very new emerging.
The Velvet Underground
5/5
The machine has started the week kindly. I won't try to write something new about a record that's been dissected, scrutinised, extolled and rolled between many a sticky hand. My experience of listening to this today was marred by some randomizer I couldn't switch off in the car that kept jumbling the record, usually to play 'After Hours', one of the two songs on this record that I find a little irritating - the other is 'Murder Mystery' - though I'm glad they exist. The randomizer also threw 'Foggy Notion' at me, which is not on the record, but should have been, and is one of my favourite rockers in their repertoire, so irritated me in a different way. So I'm knocking one star off their six as punishment.
Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five
2/5
Scorpio and the Message are great, the rest is poor to mediocre. This is an important record, but I feel like they quite grasp what made them special.
Curtis Mayfield
3/5
This lulled me with its indulgent murk of exquisite sounds, but by the end I’d forgotten what had come before: it’s a mood piece with few hooks, a lapidarist’s perfectly useless object.
The Sugarcubes
2/5
Such an arc Life's Too Good by The Sugarcubes took me on: I started it with headache and pessimism, felt hope flower after a minute of promising post-punk gestures, followed by about 30 minutes of distraction and more headache to go with the realisation that this is an aimless, pointless record. More importantly, it is not fun.
Pretenders
4/5
Like 'Parallel Lines', which we listened to an age ago, this record pleased me by having a lot less filler than I remembered from a dismissive first listen. Brass in Pocket has its own sacred mound, but the entire album is strong, pared back just enough to make the fluorishes jump out, and Hynde's word and delivery deserve a lot more time than I've given them this weekend.
Gorillaz
2/5
A dabblers compilation of dub murk and uncommitted guests that has interesting sounds circling void: this has a lackadaisical, fix it in the studio character wrapped in Jamie Hewlett’s cheeky pop art, which never betrays any underlying purpose, manifesto or feeling.
Blur
4/5
The machine threw us this right after the ‘Gorrilaz’ debut, whiplashing us from dilettante indulgence
This album is as frontloaded as ‘Atomizer’: the four track spree up to and including the title track is ear worm fever. The more modest songs are worthwhile, and all have some quirk to snag attention. The Kinks influence is well-known, but I was surprised by the spikier, post-punk modes, Wire especially. Also caught some Beefheart, woof.
Some albums are a chore, this one was a pleasure.
The Jesus And Mary Chain
3/5
This is another record that had inch thick dust on my hard drive, one that ricocheted off me thirty years ago: I was disappointed by the promised noise (how could this be compared to Sonic Youth?) and unimpressed by the tunes (sounds old so very old). I'm charmed now, especially by the opener, but something about its self-consciousness reins in my enthusiasm. To a Velvets' Candy, we add a Cindy; we hear a motorbike; we see a creepy Spector behind the desk. I know he was just a Ringo for hire, but perhaps the knowledge of what Bobby Gillespie was to become has tainted my appreciation of Psychocandy.
Deep Purple
3/5
I'd probably treasure an album that was solely Speed King's opening guitar dragon freakout iterated over an hour, though I suppose I already have that record in a few different forms - The Blue Humans 'Clear to Higher Time', maybe the closest. Perhaps back it up with some power electronics. There you go, my ideal unlistenable band!
This is fun, and I am sorry I only made time to listen to it once, as it sounds like the archetype-forge for Seventies hard rock, making it significant. Can't say the vocals do it for me, or the songs themselves, which bolt on too many zany digressions to up the note count, but the mood is authentic to what it is: completely dedicated to making this weird, serious and silly melodrama. I only knew 'Smoke on the Water' before this, so was expecting similar riffage, rather than the unrestrained guitar wail or the stoner choir on a bad night of 'Child in Time', or indeed titles like 'Child in Time'.
The digressions are admirably maddening - I'd happily have gone for a pint with 'Flight of the Rat', but instead it dragged me out to watch it down a pitcher of cloudy cider, suckle on a bottle of vodka, and finish the night chewing a bong while some bastard plays bongos next door. This wasn't what I asked for, but I'm not going to return it.
The guy who hired me for my first job in my career turned out to be a Deep Purple fan. I finally think I understand him now that I've heard this.
Simon & Garfunkel
2/5
The length of the Wikipedia summary for the album tells me something. This is a pretentious record sparse on attractions. The spoken word bit in the middle is funny, though.
Anyway, Paul Simon is a massive jerk. Kinder Simon: have you heard Steven Van Zandt's anecdote about getting that massive jerk removed from an anti-apartheid assassination hitlist?
Confess an unkillable fondness for "America" having heard it countless times in my parents' car for that year or two when they had the live Central Park tape on repeat. Ditto "A Hazy Shade of Winter". They could write genuinely unforgettable tunes. They have also inspired entertaining writing by people who hate them. My friend Lourens wrote: "Ugh. A campfire-proof Dire Straits."
And I'll leave the last word to the poet Brett Eugene Ralph:
"Garfunkel? As my old man used to say, "Art Garfunkel? That sounds like a dirty word." And so it is. Why listen to Simon & Garfunkel so long as Everly Brothers recordings are available? S & G are to the Everlys as Kingdom Come is to Zeppelin, as Pat Boone is to Little Richard, as Toby Keith is to David Allan Coe. The only vaguely listenable S & G song is "Hazy Shade of Winter"--the BANGLES version!"
The White Stripes
3/5
Someone must really like the WS, as this is the weakest of the three albums of theirs I’ve heard, and I’m not a fan of them generally. This is ok, entertaining enough. The one that sounds like a quiet song from “White Light/White Heat” was a nice surprise, though it went on too long, like this album.
I assume one of their more popular albums is on this list as well, so I’ll put more work in on my nascent theory about them being the Tim Burton of classic rock.
Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart
2/5
Duke, I smell the hippy salad. Are the Gipsy Kings on next? My contemporaneous contempt for the '90's tie-dye revival may have mellowed to indulgent fondness, but don't injure me with an album of the stuff. This is not atypical of the time in throwing revolutionary rhetoric onto an unadventurous soundtrack. Strobing a song with Arabic singing and psychedelic dub effects does not immediately make it interesting.
This record is rhythmically soporific, perhaps to let Wobble's shake his flashy bass at us, but the absence of hooks for most of playing time left me bored.
I just looked down to see what song had started playing to mention a standout exception, only to see that Spotify had moved onto Julian Cope.
The Band
3/5
I was not in the mood for this today, perhaps not for music at all, but given how parts of this still linger in my head, this is probably a good record, though I've a lingering suspicion of this sort of earthy, country-blues racket.
Marvin Gaye
4/5
I'll return to this, as I was grumpy while listening to the first few tracks before realising this album might be brilliant. What sounded at first like rote, well-recorded mid-seventies soul/funk murk resolves into a weird, sometimes uncomfortable but memorable lunatic mash of ideas - it never gets boring, and "A Funky Space Reincarnation" is glorious.
Jimi Hendrix
5/5
Hey, wait, which of the dozen different versions of this album are we meant to be listening to? Think I'm fine with the 17 tracks on my hard drive, a rare case of the bonus tracks being essential - Hey Joe and Purple Haze feature.
I expected to be torn over this. Many of these songs are foundational to me, my dad inculcating a love for the band, whom he'd seen in Chelmsford as a teenager. Recent dips into Hendrix's work have provided a patchy harvest; Electric Ladyland might be a more challenging assignment. But scanning the track listing, the first five tracks I didn't need to listen to again (though I did) to know they're incredible, and most of the rest is similar.
His guitar never gets dull, and he had the most beguiling singing voice of his contemporaries, a seductive conversational tone.
Misogyny is impossible to ignore, particularly after hearing the bonus track 51st Anniversary. To paraphrase Norm MacDonald, that Joe was a real jerk!
But Third Stone From The Sun! Feel like that’s a path that was never successfully followed, apart from by Right Said Fred, as pointed out by my dad, angry and tipsy one NYE when “ I’m Too Sexy” emerged on Capital Radio’s Listeners’ Best Songs Ever countdown, and my dad furiously sought out his original LP…
The Go-Go's
3/5
I like this, but I feel God wants me to enjoy it more. I’ve listened to it three times today! It’s fun! But I can’t remember any songs a few hours later, just Carlisle’s voice cutting through as of from another room, and defiantly thin guitars!
The Modern Lovers
5/5
Ha ha
Easy
Five stars
Next!
...
Jonathan Richman saw the Velvet Underground and thought what if I did this, but like me? Goofing "Sister Ray" into an exuberant "Roadrunner" was alchemical genius.
"Pablo Picasso" punched a loud laugh out of me with "...in his El Dorado" and a revelation that a thesis on narrative identity could be written about this song, and its envy of Picasso's ability to hit on women, the ending guitar solo poised between sleaze and sexual frustration.
Si, did JR do anything else worth listening to? Or are you with Hiooy Johnny? <shocked emoji>
Bill Callahan
3/5
Another Bill Calahan/Smog record that I swerve past, saluting it, lingering over parts, but not falling in love. That might happen one day. This is at least a good record, could be a great one, but a suspicious part of me doesn't trust it completely, the theatricality, the seductive podcaster monologue enunciations. Which is absurd: so much that I love revels in artificiality and exaggeration. I hope to return to this one day, for now a rueful 3.
Marvin Gaye
5/5
What's getting on, S?
The spree of MG's What's Going On, Here My Dear, and Let's Get It On has convinced me he was the master of the concept album, a mode I'd thought cursed. He matches form with function perfectly, and it all starts with how he uses his voice. Sonically, this is consistent to the point of repetition, but as the record is only 35 minutes long it becomes this perfect expression of his sentiment.
Led Zeppelin
5/5
I think this was the first LZ album I hear, around the same time I got into Black Sabbath. Immediately knew it was special. Undimmed.
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
5/5
One I own that I expected to give a solid four, remembering a few filler tracks. Nope, only Sail Away feels minor, but it’s a nice palette cleanser before the distortion comes.
Both “Hey Heys” I knew were immortal, and Powderfinger only increases in its power over me as I age. The more nonsensical tracks surprised me today: Young’s lyrical naivety would usually bring from me a carafe of boiling scorn, yet he has this magic trick of wormholing through cringe into a zone of sly bizarreness where he’s imagining sharing a bed with Pocahontas that’s to be cheerfully crashed by Marlon Brandon. Maybe he’s just an incredible verbal acrobat on the hippy salad?
The guitar sounds on side two are like the Alps, and I now realise that Welfare Mothers and Sedan Delivery are not joke songs, but gonzo classics. The woozy change of gears on Sedan Delivery is marvellously queasy.
Michael Jackson
5/5
I've been saved from delivering the thesis that Bad deserves by having our shipment of possessions arrive this morning after three months in transit, surrounding us with a brown cardboard box apocalypse.
This is a very good album and I am surprised by how much of it is familiar, because I don't think I ever listened to it in its entirety. Brain bullets:
- even the weaker songs such as Just Good Friends have hooks that make them worth returning to
- Quincy Jones' production is exemplary, a perfect exhibit of a style that was once anathema to me. When I was an angry youth, I contributed a documentary on Steve Albini's music to a student radio station, and my noisy joy was edited generously by a student who admitted a passion for smooth production, mentioning QJ. I nodded and then got him to cue up 'Steak and Black Onions' by Rapeman. Somewhere between rueful and glee is how I feel about this
- I saw Moonwalker in the cinema when it came out with a classmate called Michael Robinson. I remember being nonplussed by how weird it was, and by the giant robot Michael that did not make sense. Though maybe that was a dream
Was tempted to knock a point off to bring a halt to this spree of unnaturally high scores, but I've extolled more flawed records than this
Bruce Springsteen
3/5
BITUSA has two standouts for me: title song and Dancing in the Dark. Not sure what to make of the rest, apart from I'm On Fire, which isn't far behind. I've had this record for a couple of years and usually skip through the rest, repelled by the high budget Shakin' Stevens vibe (I prefer my nostalgia middle budget). It's a bit much. Listening to the rest today, they're mostly fine, but I can understand why tB prefers Nebraska.
Oasis
3/5
Hated them, loved them, largely indifferent to them now. This is their best record. Heard this through other people's speakers far too many times now, but skipping through the opening of each track I count only Digby's Diner as filler, which no doubt someone would retort that it is the mystical key to their magical cabinet.
…yet after a track and a half I felt too bored to continue.
Green Day
2/5
I admire Dookie and its seamless segues, the ceaseless hooks, the guitars that sound punk yet tirelessly happy, and the emotional consistency: Green Day could craft a song about the fall of Fallujah and it would still sound like Dookie. It would work too, like Free Nelson Mandela.
My wife loves this record, and I frequently noted subtle shifts and fluorishes. The cover is super cute.
A “kicking an affectionate puppy in the face” two stars out of five.
Joy Division
5/5
Flawless can be as boring as a diamond in a vault or as overwhelming as a Frank Auerbach landscape, and Joy Division’s debut is dead on the latter.
While I respect how distinctive and groundbreaking Hannett’s production was, I prefer most of these songs on the posthumous official bootleg, “Les Bains Douches”, most especially Curtis’s coruscating Insight.
The Mothers Of Invention
2/5
Reflex review: hate this stuff, ‘kin Boomers!
Review in kind: at least the Sultans of Ping had Where’s Me Jumper.
Comic records I like: Locust Abortion Technician by the Butthole Surfers (though the sexual assault song is revolting), Dante’s Disneyland Inferno by the Sun City Girls, the few Rutles tracks I’ve caught, maybe Meet James Ensor by They Might Be Giants (biased as I associate it with the incredible Chris Morris/Peter Baynham Radio 1 show), a smattering of Bonzo Dog tracks I’ve had shoved into my ears. All of these have something unusual, some new shapes and intentions of their own, other than a wish to point to something else and yell “ha ha”. These records have skin in the game.
Most comic records suck, are childish and petty, and this is no exception. Leaves me sad that time and talent went into making music for self-identifying smartarses.
Apart from Trouble Every Day, which I think is good and not an over engineered sneer. There are worthy parts on most of the songs, infuriatingly.
Slint
5/5
Took me about a year of monthly visits to Piccadilly Records in Manchester to finally snag this CD, and was initially disappointed that they didn’t sound like Sonic Youth. I can’t remember whether it was during the third or fourth listen in a row when I fell in love with it, and over that summer it became my favourite album. (Displacing Daydream Nation, arf.)
Traffic
3/5
This record made sense in the car, though after almost two listens I cannot remember details (second listen halted by a slightly dirgy song getting voted down in our commie collective). This sort of proto-prog, pre-Layla, earnest rock does have some mileage with me.
Keith Jarrett
3/5
1. At last I get to listen to the full length Barry Norman theme.
2. This is the music played in Mel Gibson’s retirement home.
3. This album was better when they had Jarrett’s original song titles: “Sharon at the Rodeo”, “Miles Cut Yr Hair”, “Where’s My Currywürst, Vera?”, and “Tony, Get The Wheels!”
This is obviously a powerful performance in its idiom, a record beloved by many, and a demonstration of what a virtuoso can do under what were apparently crappy circumstances. This is not something that was my jam today, but ended up being decent company for the hour before we went our separate ways.
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
4/5
Deja Vu tuned in perfectly with this rainy Sunday evening, which surprised me, as I came here to bury CSNY. Their harmonies have made my ears itch, most irritatingly on Through My Sails, which manages to mar the otherwise perfect Zuma right at the death. The harmonies are here too, almost immediately with Carry On, but the music around it, moody, dense and put together with what feels like obsessive meticulousness, lit me up.
Started laughing when Almost Cut My Hair started, accepted I liked it by its end. Was scrubbing the dining room floor when Our House came on and was transported to a happy memories from hearing it close to forty years ago in the family car - perhaps trite to many, but immensely moving in my current circumstances.
Must be a great album if a couple of decent NY songs are alright inclusions rather than standouts?
Am writing this after a first listen. Will score it after a second or third tomorrow, making this a sort of anti-cliffhanger (only the writer remains in suspense at any point).
Monday update: my score reflects cowardice. David, I fear I did cut my hair.
Confidential to Simon: I must acknowledge your “Amazon Music is the home to angry Canadians” comment, which I returned to when remembering Joni’s track x
Miles Davis
3/5
This is a conversation in a language I don’t know, but it sounds pretty chirpy, and I let it play three times. I tend to prefer jazz stuff that’s less on the rails.
My Bloody Valentine
4/5
Christ, this is ten years old already?! I was quite excited about it at the time, but now all that sticks is the jungle song and this exquisite burst of feedback on the second track, a squall that’s up there with the one that opens the second guitar solo in the live version of ‘What Goes On’ on the Peel Slowly box set, an electronic creak so delightful that it automatically makes the entire record worthwhile.
How does Kevin Shields write such instantly forgettable song titles? It’s a genuine gift that he honed over the course of MBV’s career - Isn’t Anything actually has quite a few memorable titles, Loveless less so, though Only Shallow, Loomer and Soon have some stick, but m b v smashes it, with only wonder 2 still lingering in memory. I’m sure Kevin’s trolling us with the “2” there…
I shall listen to the album now.
It’s further move towards mood and timbre works, though there are tunes here. Second track (only tomorrow, had to look it up) does a nifty trick in using a stuttering guitar effect to compose the main motif, a wet dream for psychedelic gear heads - nice one, Kevlar! The delightful feedback squall is around 1:56, if anyone wants to look it up…
MBV attracts obsessives, who radiated a field of rumour and random facts around them such that if you read the UK music press in the 90s you’d absorb stuff from, even as a casual MBV-liker. What’s nice about this album is that it came out utterly unannounced maybe a decade after most had stopped caring about this myth of an album, no fanfare, and sounded exactly like them, and even had a jungle track throwing back to that week or so when quite a few people got excited for a week when they heard MBV had a jungle-album oven-ready in 1996 or so. Heck, I was excited.
It’s a pretty good album! I doubt I’ll listen to it more than once every few years, but I’d say the same about Loveless.
Aside: two of my favourite tracks by Kevin Shields are the result of him dicking around with other bands’s work to create chaos - his mbvarkestra remix of Primal Scream’s “If they move, kill ‘em” and Mogwai’s “Fear Satan”. I wish he’d display more freedom with his own band’s work, MBV free jazz.
The Darkness
3/5
This is legit hair rock made by enthusiasts that is content to be nothing beyond what inspired it. The Darkness’s music doesn’t excite me, but it’s fun, well-made, and I applaud them for digging in their spurs and making passionate love to their hobby-horse.
It’s not their fault that I keep expecting to hear Brasseye’s “Playground Bang Around”.
Otis Redding
3/5
Otis's entry, which I read as my usual preliminary, summoned a "not another" on the death-in-place-crash text, and a medium wander through the "Musicians killed in aviation accidents or incidents" page, a bitty memorial to the unhealthy relationship between tour-ravaged artists and often-blitzed WW2-era pilots and their budget air bangers, with some outliers - did you know John Denver was killed by his inability to switch fuel tanks in his weird canard, which was a kit plane designed by the guy who made SpaceShipOne, which started Richard Branson's dalliance with commercial space flight? As well as blunt force trauma.
This is a fine album haunted by different, sometimes better versions of its songs: Respect, Wonderful World, and Satisfaction, probably some others. I read that it was recorded at a rattle, and it has the efficient air of a record blasted out to juice some cash, mostly covers with a trio of originals, including Respect. Listened to it maybe four times, appreciated his voice and the incredible band, but it didn't cohere for me.
Parliament
4/5
Mothership Connection forces me to examine what it is to be locked in a groove. This is a party record that has guests nervously looking at each other as they dance, each wondering if they're still on the same song, and if that song is ever going to stop. There's a lot of laughter, a tremendous bowl of punch, and gallons of helium going around, but there's this hovering fear that these garrulous hosts have locked the front door, and you can't help but notice that the chairs have been taken away, and new hosts keep entering from hidden entrances, usually with a bizarre keyboard or brass instrument.
That it manages to contain seven endless songs in just over 40 minutes is sorcery, or induced hallucination.
Colossal rhythms and hypnotic melodic repetition disguise the fact that much, maybe most of each track's tracks are populated by odd voices and instruments music worthy of a residency at your local chin-stroking freak jazz parlour.
When the voices sing yeah yeah yeah, they give me the feeling they're telling us they're not listening to whatever we have to say. Yeah yeah yeah, not leaving this groove, mate.
This review may have been influenced by my watching our newly toddling do repeated circuits of our home's ground floor for most of the first runtime. Simon, I can send you the video.
I'm exhausted - goodnight!
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
3/5
After four listens, I am convinced that I am definitively on the fence on the Bad Seeds. The arrangements are graceful and well-mannered, and Cave’s gentrified Revelations for drunkard hams occasionally prise open my old ear flaps. But I cannot truly love carnival, it seems.
David Bowie
4/5
Not sure if this is up with Bowie’s greats, but each of three playthroughs moved me, and I love the atmosphere of this record, circumstances of its making perhaps playing into that. The skittish drums, the sax-playing that calls back to when it was used as an instrument of manic intensity with the Stooges, and Bowie wringing his ghostliest dregs out of his voice are my first notes on what makes this special.
I’m reminded of his Berlin records, as this is largely mood music with some exquisite song-songs in between. This was the record that made me realise - belatedly, of course - that his authenticity was in his theatricality, which he maintained to his death, and is still bold.
I am excited to see what Simon thinks!
Wilco
3/5
My first impression is that Wilco and this album are nice, by which I mean pleasantly mediocre. This streamed right through my ear buds, my brain, and out the other sides leaving tasteful traces of the Stones, background music in popular youth dramas, and ephemeral maudlin insights.
When they rock out, they are adroit with the mother push and pull, and I have an enduring fondness for the 'Burn to Shine' performance of the later "Muzzle of Bees".
Skipper, I managed one and a half listens, I gave what I could...
2 would be unfair, 4 would be dishonest, so...
Ramones
5/5
This is a scarily perfect record. I can't listen to the Ramones very often because this stripped-back, minimalist pop overwhelms me after a while - two swift playbacks had me seeking a quiet room to let their ironically juvenile robotic declarations and their driving rhythm section - everything, apart from Joey's voice - seep out of my brain.
Tears For Fears
4/5
TFF, were you progs out of joint? Just a little bit? You mind if I respond in kind?
Had my second listen had been on the whispering domestic speakers of the first rather than headphones, I would’ve dismissed this with Simon’s “go to the Greatest Hits” instruction, but a closer listen unveils a well-balanced, nicely-lit structure, with gentles wafts of charcoal, designer hash and hot tarmac, held up by two mighty singles, tapering to a moody spot at the back for the devotees.
I’ve spent the last two hours preparing for our first Canadian Thanksgiving, and I think the Turkey fumes and heat have infused into my bone-house.
The lyrics are abstract, but not pretentious, which is a hard combination to achieve, and in part due to the musical context: the urgency in the songs alternates between being martial, foreboding, or introspective, avoiding monotony, and the words come off as code between lovers and comrades. Now all is clear: Tears for Fears were the secret Bath Resistance.
Quicksilver Messenger Service
3/5
Who spiked my LSD with retrospective adulation?
I had a good time with this. Brings to mind Paul Butterfield’s Blues Band - this is a compliment. Those were the days: you could amble onstage dragging curly leads, thwack off over a couple of Bo Diddley covers for an hour, and then sixty years later have some faded Gen-X’er be compelled to write about your vintage jizz as it is now classic jizz that you must listen to before you die.
Sounded even better on second listen and only didn’t make it to a four because the last song annoyed me.
Reading the Wikipedia page on this album is confusing fun; reading QMS’s Wikipedia page is confusing poignancy - you can tell they were legit from the premature deaths with tints of bitterness, ey.
Kings of Leon
2/5
This transports me back to the embrace of the passenger seat in my friend D’s old BMW, his decisive right foot, and the enveloping thump of his speakers drowning out the desperate sounds from the car’s trunk as we cut through the North Circular. Salad days, I can still smell the arterial smog.
Returning to this record and its forgettable title, I realise this period was marked by rock bands being integrated by producers into a glossy, trip hop-style synthetic aesthetic that favoured few. The famous, silly fiery sex song, the immediately succeeding Use Somebody and a handful of sections aside, this record does not move me - the tunes are not strong enough to hold up the poppy production, which mutes the pleasures the band's rock might otherwise have brought. Had I the time and inclination to listen to music I don't like, I could plot a line from NIN to KoL. I have not heard a record that happily sits in the midpoint of glorious synth and hairy rock. The drums are upfront and fall like a big dead fish thrown onto a slab. Guitar feedback can sound savage or, more rarely, haunting, even bittersweet; here it’s a precision-engineered component inserted with the badge “here’s rock”.
A rock song sung by a man that begins with "Oh, she's only seventeen" needs to follow up with deft writing to avoid sounding creepy, which doesn't happen here.
Perhaps I just miss that old BMW's sound-system, now distant.
Mekons
3/5
I have failed this record. Its charm, wit and inventiveness is clear, but the songs brushed politely past me. Give it another ten years, if I remember I’ll try Fear and Whiskey again. (Great title.)
Sonic Youth
5/5
Daydream Nation melted my 16-year old brain and fused itself to my taste: I cannot review this fairly. Five stars, there you go.
.
The songs that stand tall to me are few: Teenage Riot, The Sprawl, Providence (love a good interstitial), Rain King and Hyperstation. That’s not a bad haul, but low for one of the big boys. I know every squeak and flinch on this record, but mostly as part of a continuum: I had to play the start of Candle to remember which part of the record the title labelled. More than any other record I love, I know this as an assemblage rather than a discrete sequence of songs. I think it's something to do with the abundance of unique, fleeting peculiar guitar and amp sounds - haunted electronics.
The Sprawl is my favourite due to the long, especially ghostly outro, a gorgeous motif repeated to disintegration. Returning to it for the first time in a few years was tremendously moving.
This was the first SY LP I heard, so I didn't realise how glossy it was compared to the earlier classics. After I'd spent a while memorising it (could have been just a month!), I sought out others, starting with Sister, I think, and was taken aback by how freakish those records sounded. Bad Moon Rising, EVOL and Sister are flying saucers; Daydream Nation is a manmade spaceplane painted by Chesley Bones.
This is a bittersweet album, as it marked their move to Geffen, and I don’t think any of their later records are as great as this and the three that preceded it. But they are all laudably different.
.
I've seen Sonic Youth around five times; Shellac are the only band I've seen more of. Curiously, the songs they played never decided how much I enjoyed a gig. My favourite performance was mostly songs from Washing Machine, which never snagged me (Diamond Sea apart), and they were incredible. Ten years later, I saw what was close to a greatest hits playlist at the Shepherd Bush Empire and they were lacklustre, the only detail I remember being when I pointed out Bruce Gilbert from Wire to my youngest brother, and my brother went up and got his autograph. I miss my youngest brother.
U2
4/5
I was old enough to realise this was a big deal when it came out: I'd been reading the papers for a while, and the whole Berlin/ Trabant/ multimedia/ ooo-look-William-Burroughs schtick was eye-catching and exciting, particularly as I was ignorant of the influences they were raiding/co-opting, though even then the ladles of irony felt excessive, suggestive of gull-catchers or, worse, a band not entirely confident of its material. I think that I somehow never managed to listen to the entire record, though "The Fly" and "Mysterious Ways" amused me, the dumb irony notwithstanding. A couple of years later, the inkies showed me the many lurid and glorious shades of vitriol, which they poured generously onto U2.
This is a fun record, and the modish production has aged well, though a few Madchester-esque drum inflections feel forced. On the other hand, the trash can-clatter on Zoo Station felt spot on, and the flow of the first three songs pleased me on both play throughs today.
Bono does his thing and it's alright. Don't expect modernist poetry from him, but the loud and flashy framing suits his eschewal of subtlety and suggestion. U2 are rare, perhaps unique as a blockbuster, heroic band born of the late Cold War, when the heavy late '70s and early '80s dread of nuclear annihilation fell on a grey, miserable cross-Atlantic political atmosphere, the Troubles bringing death every week. Explicitly making a record in and about post-reunification Berlin, with Brian Eno was the most on-the-nose act U2 could've done, and like a typical Berlin Wall mural it works as proudly noisy pop art. None of the songs are bad, and there are at least five outright bangers - am including The Fly and Mysterious Ways here, despite "The Soup Dragons" passing my lips involuntarily as I write this.
This is a good U2 record! If you hate U2, you'll still hate it! But I had fun. And they all sound like they had fun, particularly The Edge.
Now the thrill of seeing whether my shoes get splattered by the vomit of disdain if Simon has emptied the bucket over the Bonoboys…
Lana Del Rey
2/5
This washed past me in a drear, and I think ‘NFR’ is a smashing record (thanks Si). Chemtrails over the Country Club is a cleverly evocative title and I don’t doubt there’s some similarly wrought words within (groan-baiting millennial nostalgia reference to Kings of Leon and White Stripes at the start aside), but I’m a lyrics-optional listener: the music has to invite me in, unless the words are exceptionally good or bad. After three background plays, my alt-title of this is “Misery: Selfie”. Or “Get Off My Lawn, Heidegger!”
Later: I skimmed the Wikipedia and see there’s a Joni M cover in the mix, which makes sense as there was a moment when I wondered if LDR was impersonating JM. Am not going back to check if it was indeed that track, tho - I shall pretend that it wasn’t.
Dagmar Krause
4/5
The friction in resorting to Youtube to listen to Tank Battles: the Songs of Hanns Eisler is not as delicious as hoped, and accidentally switching halfway between English and German versions banjaxed me, but this record has impressed me: it’s an icy, slightly boozy flash of 20th century modernism that forces home the brutal clatter, aggressiveness and sardonicism of many of the movements and manifestos, a fit to the century's dizzying rush of social change, technological progress and broadcast horror. Appropriate testament to Eisler, who appears to have had a heartbreaking life of exile piled on betrayal piled on exile.
I see that Dagmar Krause's voice is divisive - are the opinions split between "she's pretty great" to "she's a genius"? Her enunciations punch, tickle, keen and beguile, even when I have no idea what she's singing about.
This is music as cinema - it demands attention, so I may never return to it - this busy life we have! But I am grateful for being brought to this record.
Time for a coffee Brecht.
Laura Nyro
3/5
A hangover would make this torture. I tried hard with this record, and it fizzed around the cerebrum as I puzzled out how I can like this record only at a distance no less than a kilometre. Laura Nyro knew the notes and wanted us to hear all of them, damn the expense, no decibels spared. There are some good, maybe exquisite songs here and I can’t get to them past the beautiful artillery barrages. The words, parcelled by someone with a passion for the baroque, sound like they might be conversational, confessional and fascinating, and they are lost when shouted across an exquisitely decorated brasserie. Une chanteuse-lance flammes.
Something I read persuaded me to buy “New York Tendaberry” a medium while back, and I remember the same experience of being deflected by the force of delivery. I might enjoy this if the intensity was dropped from 11 to 6, if she stole Sinatra’s knack of turning songs into softly spoken monologues, or maybe if I had a few more years in me, maturing my sensibilities, or at least the ears a blissful degree.
It’s a sumptuous suite, full of trinkets to linger over, I just can’t get comfortable in it, and I don’t understand as I don’t have this problem with other blisteringly forceful singers. Will try again one day. Reckon Tendaberry will be somewhere on this list, ey?
The Cars
4/5
I'm grateful I had more time with The Cars, as it bored me when I first heard it, listening from the wrong angle, expecting quick pop pleasures rather than the colder, more considered art rock artefacts this record lays out, more Television than Blondie, some Cheap Trick low in the mix. I no longer regret buying this two or three years ago.
The crisp, clear, almost minimalist recording works well, apart from the vocals, which make me feel like the band are leaning into my ear during the harmonies. A grudging "I guess this shouldn't be a two so I'll inch it up to three" has become a solid 4. I went into this only liking the singles, and now prefer the other songs, with their faint, offal-like whiffs of prog.
Dusty Springfield
4/5
Pure singers on this list are susceptible to my stubborn prejudice that paints them as karaoke rather than interpreters - the singer-songwriter indoctrination in me is deep. Dusty Springfield's meticulous, intelligent and virtuoso delivery is a remedy: she's besotted with every word. I'm not sure I need the tunes: she could vocalise in a Beckettian void and still mesmerise.
This is a good contrast to the Laura Nyro album I cowered under last week, relentlessly belted out. At the two minute mark of "Twenty-Four Hours From Tulsa", Springfield does something to the word "and" that briefly cracks the world open. A close listen reveals moments like this on many, maybe most of these songs. I'd read that she sometimes practiced singing a single word over and over again, and I can hear it despite my blithe ignorance of the vocalist's art. She can make "love you" sound newly minted, meant.
Sometimes, her voice presses you softly against a pillow, muffles the pistol shot. Sometimes when she hits the loud notes, it's at a distance - the volume is because she really wants her voice to reach you, not to overwhelm you. Sometimes she just sounds like she's having the best time of anyone's life.
The tunes suffer from over-familiarity, and I don't believe this is my prejudice piping up: the famous songs all have arguably more well-known versions that intrude. This record needs a close listen. It doesn't work for me in the background, becomes a pleasant soul impression, rather than a tumult of inflection, enunciation and flow.
Ryan Adams
1/5
The 90 minutes of Gold by Ryan Adams would benefit from silence. Ideally 90 minutes of it. Even the ostensibly quiet songs on this record have this overproduced busyness, never allowing a drop of silence to accentuate the space between two beats, never giving elements room to be whole. There’s always an organ, a muffled rhythm guitar, or a semi-distant string quartet fussing in the background.
This is apart from the beginning of that terrible Sylvia Plath song, which would benefit from bringing in Kevin Shields and his fifty guitars for an upfront wall-of-sound treatment to push the song deep, deep into the bayou.
Of course, after a minute, the bare piano backing has to be joined by some strings. It was sounding lonely there!
For this self-avowedly American record, a splendidly American word fits best: phony. Original ideas are sparse, just this slapped-on faux-Americana, tiresome mopey songs to a nameless girl, or a parade of nameless girls, and eyes-closed busker’s vocal affectations that magnify the triteness of the lines. It’s a box-ticking exercise in homage - here’s a fast-spoken song about New York, here’s a song with “Blues” in the title, look, a song about a street, a song about a bar, oh! 20 songs about a girl or girls. He can write a tune, but it will always look like Boris Karloff, and no make-up will hide the stitches, and he’s still waiting for that lightning bolt to bring that fucking thing to life.
(Unlike the otherwise comparable Primal Scream, whose lightning bolt was Andy Weatherall.)
Confession: I enjoyed Nobody Girl’s modicum of Coors lite rock until I realised it was longer than Fool’s Gold.
From Wikipedia“”New York, New York" became a notable MTV and VH1 favorite following the September 11 attacks.” The chicken and the egg argument went dark.
I dislike this record and can only stave off resentment for my 90 minutes with it by being mean, as I hate bearing a grudge. One star!
What a dickwash of a cover fronts this album.
Isaac Hayes
3/5
Before going any further, I salute Charles Pitt for ruling the wah-wah with a precision that puts alongside demi-machine Jaki Liebezeit - imagine that band! - and who led me on a short digression to The Isley Brother's It's Your Thing, where he plays one of those riffs that you could listen to for hours.
I bought this album more than twenty years ago, and never had much time for it, title track aside. It's gorgeous as pure soundtrack, too much so: it's decorative, mise-en-scene, and therefore faintly anonymous - there's a style, personality, but barely any voice, melodies and riffs designed for ambience rather than focus. Cafe Regio's is a relaxing type I wouldn't mind spending an afternoon in a bar with. The near 20-minute Do Your Thing is the standout oddity, and might be close to the Can-collaboration I imagined earlier: I like it a lot, though I cannot remember any particular moments from it as I type this. Anonymity strikes again.
This is the second double-album in a row that we've been dealt, and I note that this passes a lot quicker and easier than Ryan Adams' grand statement of nothing.
Dexys Midnight Runners
5/5
From the reviews I read on this site, I understand there are two other Dexys albums on here, almost certainly SFTYSR and Too-Rye-Ay. This is the best of the three, and I love the other two. This is Rowland's "Tusk", the freak following the hit.
I have to rush off to see the Taylor Swift Eras film tonight, so I cannot write an essay about how Rowland absorbs Van Morrison, the Beach Boys, golden age rock n roll and Christ knows what else before surpassing them all, or how he - along with Marvin Gaye - is the master of the chaotic concept album, or his tremendous sense of humour (he doesn’t speak Italian, but he knows a man who does), or his possession of one of the most marvellously distinctive singing voices that yet stays true to his upbringing, or his unique mix of softness and machismo.
I can, however, apologise for insulting other reviewers in an early draft of this review. I am sorry that I referred to you as “ cloth-eared, verse-chorus-verse dingleberries”, or “the reason why most music is boring”, and I’m especially sorry to the chap who described this as “pub rock” for calling him “uniquely cretinous”. Forgive me. Hugs!
Sex Pistols
3/5
Busy weekend leading to an epigrammatic review.
Holidays, God, Anarchy, Pretty and EMI are bangers, one or two of the others not far behind. The brutally cynical tone might be the barrier to my enjoying this record, of which I’ve had a copy for most of my adulthood.
The record comes from a place of hurt, most obviously in Lydon’s delivery. I think he’s brilliant, but I cannot enjoy this, not now, as his words are bleakly hopeless
This is a studio artifact: it’s rawness is produced, multitracked, muscular and extremely clear.
Lydia Lunch dismissed the Sex Pistols as speeded up Chuck Berry, which is correct while slighting both parties. Steve Jones’s exuberant guitar playing (bass as well as lead) is Hogarthian.
Tracy Chapman
3/5
Fast Car is brilliant, and a masterclass in telling a simple story with economy and impact. The two other singles are great, though dots in the rear view. Across the Lines is a song I’ve been fond of since a friend used to sing it to us back at university, only slightly badly. Behind the Wall is powerful. The second half of the record is fine, but after a couple of listens I can recall little apart wincing at a couple of very late-80s production choices.
Massive Attack
4/5
Unfinished Sympathy was a revelation to this 14 year old rockist and made me realise beauty did not need guitars. The track is an outlier, a bolt of pop lightning in an otherwise murkier, more dubbed out creature, heavy on atmosphere, tunes optional, though still memorable. There's only one song I'd seek by itself, but I've been happy having this roll on over the day, which distinguishes it from what followed: no epochal record's influence is entirely benign. Too important to warrant anything under 4.
k.d. lang
2/5
Constant Craving is a smoothie, the rest beige'd me out and I failed to reach the end of a second playthrough.
Pavement
5/5
This afternoon I read a line by Penelope Fitzgerald, describing one of her tragicomic protagonists, that feels right for a vital and deliberate attribute of this record: “Her reach exceeded her grasp”. These songs are perfect collapses, their loftiness richer for how their exquisite compositions trip over into a gorgeous, noisy heap, disarming me - life is serious, but it is also absurd, and we should laugh.
This was almost the first record I bought on release that I love without reservation, pipped the year before by Rid of Me. My brother Will and I went to see them in Manchester when they toured this album, and they were glorious. Such fun.
Simon, I leave the floor to you, mon ami.
The Police
4/5
Simon, you warned me: The Police were pretty good. Sting cringe more than offset by really rather interesting instrumental work around a solid set of songs, lots of offbeat syncopation, strange echo and entwining riffs. Deathwish was the song that overcame my prejudice.
Neil Young
5/5
After The Gold Rush is a quintessential Neil Young manoeuvre, parsing a never-to-be-filmed script from his 60s-fried neighbour Dean Stockwell to badge a bunch of songs he had already, inspire a couple of god-puncher new ones, and knock them all together into a perfect undulation of ballad, rocker, folk lament and whimsy, irrefutable evidence that Young is a lot more clear-eyed and calculating in record arrangement than his "we just banged this out in a weekend" demeanour might suggest. He had an absolute armada of treasure galleons over the '70s, and from both what he put out then and what has come out recently, he was wily in how he rationed it.
More of a journey than a trip, duke. Very amused to read that he has trouble singing some of these lines as they are now gibberish to him too. Such magnificent gibberish, though!
Paul Simon
4/5
Along with Brothers In Arms, Roger The Engineer, and some unknown 10cc compilation, Graceland was stamped deep through my ears into my young brain, likely mostly on the roads between Carshalton and Great Baddow on visits to my dad's parents, and I return to this with a mix of nostalgia and suspicion. I remember the video with Paul Simon and Chevy Chase in white yuppy suits.
I've noted before that Paul Simon is a prat, and I wish I had a picture of Steven Van Zandt's face when Simon asked him, hey, isn't Nelson Mandela a communist, that's what Kissinger told me, but this record is so special that no amount of apartheid-swerving or shady plagiarism muttering can spoil it, or prevent a grudging acknowledgment that Simon has an incredible ear, and was able to make a strong suite of pop songs from elements that hadn't been combined before.
Post-Carshalton, there was one other time this album played a part in my life: leaving Memphis on a road trip, looking forward to joining my partner on this odyssey a couple of days later, my friend Howard asked me to confirm we were on Elvis Presley Boulevard, which I did, and he told me to put on his mix CD, "Track 3, now!" and Graceland came on, which was where we were going next: a euphoric moment.
Good going, plonkerman! Can you try to do this with Japanese noise rock next? Thx!
The Cure
2/5
A Forest and a couple of other songs caught me, but the rest is too thin and grey. Has anyone written an essay on thin-sounding guitars in post-punk, the good and not-so-good?
Stephen Stills
4/5
Stephen Stills' Stephen Stills hung out with me on my drives to and from my first day of work on this continent, amiably addled company on the way in, something of a guardian angel through the scary rainstorm coming home. Just a very easy album to get on with, hang-out yacht rock. The tunes are laid back, as are the jams - long enough to get absorbed in, short enough to swerve tedium. It's more a vehicle for eyes-closed emotional vibes than for melodies. Earnest, sincere and hopeful, this is music I would once have despised, mistaking doomed idealism for complacency.
What the heck is the percussion doing on the opening Bucks Fizz song? Whatever it is, I like it! ‘Love the One You’re With’, I can imagine Clapton hiding behind his heroin beard when Stills was playing that back to him. This list always leads me back to Clapton, my Anti-Mecca.
And Neil Young, my hairy Vatican. With one eye to Si's review, this is not as good as 'After the Gold Rush', but better than Young's songs on 'Deja Vu'.
On that subject, this record has inspired an idea to reenact the making of Robert Altman’s “The Big Sleep”, with Stephen Stills as Philip Marlowe/Elliott Gould, Graham Nash as gangster Marty Augustine, David Crosby as Sterling Hayden/Roger Wade/Hemingway, Rita Coolidge as Eileen, John Lennon and Yoko Ono as Robert Altman, and special guest star Eric Clapton as Terry Lennox, whom will be shot by Stills at the climax. Neil Young will play the naked hippy girls living across from Stills. As too many of the cast are already dead, this will have to be a written exercise. The twist ending is a final shot of Crosby/Hayden rising back out of the night sea, eyes black, described in Hemingway barks.
Radiohead
2/5
Which of the list's Radioheys is this, Sleepy, Happy, Dopey, Bashful, Berkshire or Dave?
There’s always at least one song I like on these albums, There There in this case. The rest is a bric a brac of gourmet elements shotgunned against a white gallery wall beside explanatory text autogenerated by a bored curator, secretly playing artfuck bullshit bingo.
I like the soundtrack work of Greenwood’s I’ve heard, and having somehow seen them twice for free I must report that they were fun when I bothered to watch. Plus, from a chat with members of their long-time road crew when I couldn’t be bothered to watch, they sound like nice people.
Simon, advance trigger warning: other RH records on this list may push me above 2 - please don’t shun me!
Portishead
5/5
Their second album is better, but this is the one that seemed to haunt everywhere for a while in the mid-90's, and distinguished its aesthetic so strikingly that it felt almost its own cliché on arrival. These songs manage to be delicate and juggernaut at the same time.
They knew what to do with this aesthetic: the songs are strong. The only song on the album that drops below the bar is It's A Fire. Analogue production, digital quality control!
I am startled by how far Glory Box's popularity on Spotify outstrips the rest of the album. The guitar riff is stunning, channeling Cream-era Clapton after a few pints of brandy.
I remember Tricky moaning about how Dummy was basically his song Aftermath, and that was it. I both hear what he's saying - Aftermath is stellar - and think he's very, very wrong. The aesthetics are different, and whereas Tricky went for linear, minimalist stretches which flaunted his digital lifts, Portishead were more obviously analogue, defacing their vinyls and using weirdo, UFO instrumentation, and had time for more formal song structures - robots versus cyborgs.
Returning to this album, I rate it above Massive Attack's efforts, and think it might be the zenith of that Bristolian spree. Will wait for Maxinquaye to appear on the list, as I haven't heard that in decades.
Scott Walker
5/5
As one of those Gen X freaks who got into Scott Walker through his stark work from Tilt onwards, this is both new to me and eerily familiar. I've probably heard some of this on Julian Cope's "Fire Escape in the Sky" compilation, but also through those who followed.
I doubt this would've meant much to me back when I first heard Walker. I'm reminded of a comment Julian Barnes made about opera not making sense until the listener has been through some of the harder moments of life, and right now I feel the same about Scott 4: it's epic framing and enormous delivery - but what else could he do with that voice? - could seem absurd, but have become sublime. I'll get this and listen to it more.
The Beau Brummels
2/5
This is very silly, as well as typically didactic for the era. These damn hallucinauts, telling me what to do! I’m glad it exists and I’m glad to have listened to it. I shall now thank The Beau Brummels for their incessant stoned advice and their story about a wolf of velvet fortune, acknowledge without condoning their slander of the people of Kentucky, and walk away from the campfire with a two in my pocket.
Wilco
2/5
My dad’s response when I asked him what he thought of R.E.M. is apt here:
“They have good arrangements.”
Beatles
5/5
This was the first Beatles album I listened to, and the density of outstanding songs on this still drops my trap. Rubber Soul appeals to me more as I love the band sound, Abbey Road because it feels richer and sadder, but this might be their greatest achievement.
Willie Nelson
3/5
Feeling poorly, I almost missed writing this.
When I saw this was a covers album, I was disappointed. What I’ve heard of Nelson has been either intriguing or great (Phases and Stages is a record I will return to one day); I wanted to hear his songs, not his versions of others.
I enjoyed this more than I expected: the boundary between outlaw and whisky blur lounge singer suddenly seems tenuous.
Queens of the Stone Age
3/5
Solid rock, the songs with incessant Sabbathy grinding grabbed me, sandy aftertaste. Not sure I’d return to.
Giant Sand
3/5
I have another Giant Sand album, Glum, and like this one I enjoyed listening to it, but remember nothing apart from a thrilling volume-leaping blast of noise on the opening track.
Last week, I unfairly maligned Wilco's Foxtrot Onion, which has some similarities to this, and now I recognise a genre, likely named, of deep-voiced indie rock with tastefully rough edges, strategic servings of loud distortion, muttering, and song shapes that are comfortable, Neil Young-sy, Alex Chilton-y - I caught the Dusted In Memphis reference - but don't hook deep. “Don’t Love Me For My Big Muff.” Will Oldham and Bill Callahan are on the border of this, though their lyrical extravagance and weakness for tunes does make them vaguewave dilettantes.
Not bad, and I might like it more if I got through a second listen, but apathy overcame curiosity. Trois.
Scritti Politti
4/5
This may be brilliant, yet despite listening to it more times than I cared to count today, I need more time to understand if it is!
Three songs already pierce: The Word Girl, Absolute and Wood Beez.
Am reminded of Kraftwerk in that the striking presentation appears to be entirely at the service of an intimate worldview, like Scritti Politti could not say what they are saying any other way. That this is clearly the product of modish studios pumped to their most modish is, incredibly, irrelevant: it’s like the studio form was waiting for the perfect content, and that content turned out to be Scritti Politti.
Common
2/5
Be is polished, worthy and so frictionless I slid right off it.
R.E.M.
3/5
This is the R.E.M. album I own, bought years back to try to shift my dial from apathy and academic admiration on them, which failed then and today. I suspect the big ‘90s records, when they come to us, may boot me out of this.
These songs are fine, well-wrought and personal, just not on my frequency, Kenneth.
Circle Jerks
3/5
Hardcore's a punch on the nose: simple messages understood immediately, so why come back? But I listened to Group Sex five times today - over an hour! - and I am listening to it now as I write this, which surprises me, as I suppose this means I like it.
The cartoon nihilism is slapped on thick:
“I don’t want to live to 34/I don’t to die in a nuclear war!”
“Where’s the gun?/Here’s my head!”
I'm just about old enough to have a faint memory of how glum a vibe was 1980 - nuclear dread, economic depression, terrorism and war on the news, fascism home and abroad. Like now, but at least we have iPhones - I just drafted some hardcore song content! Which is to say, the on-the-nose sardonicism, the aggressive drums-bass-guitar, and the swift passage from one bad topic to another feel appropriate. Where's the 2023 hardcore revival?
Musically, it manages to vary stuff up, playing a sharp intro-then-leap game, and the track listing offers a triumphant retort to my own pre-assumption that I'd find the album repetitive.
It's certainly catchy, both the instrument sounds and the vocal rhythm and content: during a work call just now, I was distracted by imaginary buzzsaw guitars and had the urge, fortunately resisted, to sing "I just want to/eat my own shit"; inspirational.
Circle Jerks join Minor Threat and Void on my tiny list of hardcore bands I like. Void are my favourite, as they managed to be simultaneously fast, heavy and have a guitar sound like an out of control dragon.
The Beta Band
3/5
Hot Shots II has crystallised impressions I had about turn of the century indie rock trends into notions.
Rock-electronica-hip-hop fusion mostly pasted generic sounds over mediocre songs, bands reaching for ‘Revolver’ and making ‘The Birdie Song’. This is somewhere in the middle of the pack. The underlying songs are decent and distinct, the production is mildly distracting novelty.
Turn-of-the-century ethereal wistfulness is here, a trend I never noticed and now feel nostalgia for on return: the post-9/11 horror show slapped away this strand of dreamy, sad pop. Mercury Rev’s Deserters Songs is a highlight that Simon and I shared, and a similar sort of sonically expansive, lyrically contemplative music here comes through squinted ears.
The song’s themselves are well-crafted with stick and structures that caught me off-guard without losing me.
The title’s clever-stupid humour displays a then-modish, self-deprecating-but-fuck-you-not-really attitude that I don’t miss.
I like this more than I expected to, a piece of a period that I don’t mind revisiting.
Frank Zappa
2/5
Zappa’s Hot Rats were not bad company today, though after a first listen only enormous indifference stopped me from finding something else to play. Beefheart’s intro to one of Z’s long jams was my highlight, and I’m sure that the rest would go well with attendance at some school sports event; here I hope Simon can advise me. Until the happy day my scion rolls up to beat his schoolmates up at ice hockey or interpretative dance or somesuch, I shall not listen to this again. A lot of skill to admire here, all at the service of lecturing me with notes.
Moby
4/5
Robocop is a zombie hero movie disguised as a cyborg Jesus parable, and so on Play the dead rescue Moby and help him master giant wow crescendoes. Could do with a quarter hour amputated, but still bangs. I don't think anyone has ever done this trick quite as well as Moby.
Johnny Cash
3/5
More a curated novelty barnstormer than the weightier San Quentin album, this is fun and Cash’s voice imbues drama into even the daftest of notions. Cracking band behind him, one pretty mean misogynist song-line, and a lot of songs about being and dying in jail.
Beatles
5/5
Today Abbey Road may tip over Rubber Soul as The Beatles album that sounds the best to these gnarled ears, but I came to this album with an agenda, which was to write, without lying, reasons why McCartney's paean to tool-assisted femicide, Maxwell's Silver Hammer, should not be fired into the sun, and I've failed, utterly, as even its catchiness is a black mark, a radioactivity that needs burial in a barrel in concrete lest it ever leak out.
But this album's great! And what an opening pair! And She's So Heavy is so heavy!
They went out well.
Arcade Fire
2/5
The first couple of tracks are better than anything on their debut, though still instrumentally overburdened, but by the halfway mark the Arcade Fire had ground me down with their relentless pretentiousness. This is paper mache melodrama filmed in IMAX, no varnish spared. This time I do recognise a knack for hooks and stomps to go with empty climaxes, the lead songwriter’s speciality I have read.
Lyrically, I close-listened to the last few tracks, and the paucity of concrete nouns outside vague, unanchored, oft-cliched analogy (“every corner of the earth”) is a giveaway: they’ve little to say, just the mundane usual, pumped-up with cheap obscurity.
Simon, you may ask for an example of expensive obscurity: Bowie, if I’m being peaceable, but as it’s my birthday I’m throwing Scott Walker at you with a moronic giggle x
The Clash
4/5
Never heard the whole album before today, having absorbed a puritan disdain for the Clash, too eager to please, hopping on fads (punk, new wave, reggae), posers and poseurs. Now I think these objections are tenuous or immaterial. This is a mess of an album, but has a clutch of splendid songs, and was a happy presence to have around. Writing a day after a diatribe against The Arcade Fire and their weak, airy lyrics, I must add that while the Clash can be purposely vague, they smash out concrete images that linger, and their sloganeering has more ambiguity than I would've expected.
Paul McCartney and Wings
4/5
Band on the Run is another haunting from childhood, almost entirely from the first two tracks and the cover, which was double-stitched into the old image library by its surreal chiaroscuro comedy, though I did not know the participants, assuming Christopher Lee, Michael Parkinson et al were band members, Coburn the drummer, and holy hippy cabbage, he's stoned right down to the last hair of that massive moustache, five stars for that image alone.
Returning, I loved the title song and Jet, which are filed away with that cover as fond pre-teen paraphernalia, and expected the rest out would fall way below the mark, as evidently either my parents never deigned to play beyond Jet, or the album was otherwise forgettable; so most of the rest getting reflex nods and foot wiggles is like getting a free meal with a glass of something decent.
The synth parts are rad, and most of the songs have structures that keep me on the toes, without progging into tedium, and it has heft at times - any whiff of music hall is blitzed with guitars, the aforementioned whacked out synth, and the odd visiting horn. If I ever meet it, I will insist on buying a drink for the guitar riff on Let Me Roll It, which is up there with the opening double-salvo.
I reckon this is the 200th record Simon and I have heard on this run, enough to be confident of a trend: I'm consistently loving 70's this sort of yacht rocky, smooth AOR.
Heck, apparently even Lennon rated this.
Harry Nilsson
4/5
Harry Nilsson can remind me of Laura Nero, which is not how I expected to start this, and the reasons haven't quite unblurred, but they might include a Broadway of aroma around the large piano, the relentlessly cheerful horns, his immense lungs - which he does use more selectively that Nyro - and an imagined "ta da!" I hear at the end of half the songs, which I otherwise like quite a bit. Just that Broadway is not my swing.
The peaks here are stunning: Jump Into The Fire, with its propulsion and Herbie Flowers' amazing rubber bass, has been a playlist stalwart since I heard it you-know-where, Without You is one of the few pure virtuoso belters that I can love, and Coconut, once just novelty, makes me wonder about different sorts of repetition and iteration in songs, from mindless mantras, through hymn-like variation to this ultimate form, which is of hypnotic, subversive insinuation, slinging off its disguise as a joke to reveal what is actually voodoo. Nilsson was a Satanist, wasn't he? Good man, that'll knock back on the point I knocked off for "the river's far too deep without you" in the mockingly saccharine final track.
Tim Buckley
4/5
This is a lovely record, a bath of relaxed jazz guitar, vibes, cheerful strumming and Buckley sounding somehow both casual and sublime. I’m in the mood for this today; some days, he’s too angelic for me, but I may play Dream Letter later as a chaser.
An of-its-time content warning is merited for the witchy gipsy woman song, but I suppose his fantasising about Romani is kinder than Enid Blyton’s. As my Uncle Feroz pointed out when he snatched a Famous Five book out of my eight-year-old hands, man she was racist as heck.
AC/DC
5/5
No great band lacks discipline by my reckoning, not so much on the business side, but in how they control their sound, and AC/DC are paragons here, with Malcolm Young the general. I don't have the ears or knowledge to understand what exactly they do to sound like no others, but I can hear it.
Hugh Masekela
3/5
This is comfortable, familiar and long, like an amiable work Christmas party conversation that, despite similar will on both sides, neither of you can bring to stop, though you are really very tired and just want a slice of cold pizza and to go home.
Metallica
2/5
In Holland, I saw an array of bronzed supine beach bodies lift dumbbells in synch to Enter Sandman, the trainer at climax instructing “Enter night… exit light…keep it slow... SUPERSLOWWW” in a Dutch accent as heavy as the riff. Wildest moment of a stag weekend in Amsterdam, so thanks for that, Metallica.
Lyrically, James Hetfield minus Noel Gallagher equals Thom Yorke, so to those who deny that Metal is the conduit of the real, living Devil I say: you are fools. I wonder if James Hatfield writes down his lyrics. If he does, does he read them?
I’m familiar enough with the Metallica genre to state that this is strong Metallica. The songs are short for Metallica, but long for normal mortals, so: Misery!
Took me a weekend to get through this, though I’m sure I thought it was fine back when it and I were shiny. Nowadays, I cannot abide chores. Two.
Bob Dylan
5/5
First time on this, but I'm a civilised man, I can tell a masterpiece, pick up the presence of other greats behind the man, and again over this run have challenged my murmuring prejudice that Dylan's all about mystic words rather than music.
Today I feel that Dylan's songs are mostly set in a sort of medieval Hell; there's a grotesquerie to his images, a laconic callousness to his conversational declarations about love and other big things, and a sarcasm to how he deploys the instruments, whether cheerful or sad. I like this, and I like how his harmonica interrupts bands like a UFO swooping in over a highway.
The Specials
3/5
I liked this more than I expected, scattershot in a beguiling way. The often volcanic rockabilly guitar surprised me, and while some of lyrics are dated mansplaining, they are interesting, unusual (to me) dated mansplaining - the character and the conceits in the singer’s mode of address hold the attention.
The vocals are also pleasingly fey when Hall lets his guard down.
Frank Sinatra
4/5
I have this album and am a fan of its vibe, which opens up after dark: Sinatra’s choices around material and delivery for this purpose are exceptional.
I love the formality of his phrasing, and the secret comfort in the lovelorn morose, a bearable sadness that softens by proximity the harder, crueler tragedies of life, a salve for existential dread.
First time in a while I wish I had a whisky to hand. Deep in a Dream is the best song about smoking.
Dr. Dre
4/5
This is the first good hip hop album I’ve heard on this list, and scandalously a new one to me. The opulent minimalism of the music is a sorcerer's creation, and the lyrical bombast has panache as well as bare offensiveness. More varied than the sound-image of West Coast hip hop I held, the synth squeak and whine is still a defining element, but the record has wallop, fuzz and a surprising quantity of space for the sounds to float in.
Talking Heads
3/5
Once in a Lifetime always thrills me; the rest fusses past. The torrent of words and instruments, full of excitement, do not excite me much of the time. Three TH albums in, I respect them and am usually left tepid. This got a little stickier on the second and third plays, reminding me of the Fall, who have a similar effect on me: impressed by the density of ideas, unconvinced by the structure beneath them.
Various Artists
4/5
Our host’s neat trick in saving this for Christmas Day has been a welcome one, sticking our household and maybe yours, Si, in this cheerful, compressed Groundhog Day. I don’t have the stomach to unpick Spector’s depredations, which would anyway do a disservice to those who actually played and sang these songs. This is a blast of cheer, and I’m surprised it lasted the day here, testament to its honing for mid-distance listening at varying levels of festive exhaustion.
David Bowie
5/5
This has been on my drive for years, never listened to closely until today, everything other than the title song an intriguing mash filed under should-give-a-proper-go.
Thank you, list: “Heroes” is outstanding, its instrumental pieces I’d vaguely assumed to be mere mood as rich and thought-out as the song-songs, its futurism tantalising - alien, hopeful, and exploratory, marks from an era when technology pointed at the sky rather than our eyeballs.
The Cure
4/5
An indulgently long record that ray-gunned my misconception of The Cure as well-made novelty pop: this is submarine chamber music, chilly in mood, obscure in intent, but irresistible with its thick layers of synth, bass and guitar distortion, R Smith’s vocals reaching up from under.
During my formative years much scorn was directed at The Cure and any man who dabbled with eyeliner, Cobain aside, and I drank it in. My unease admitting to this prejudice has been softened by my wife’s reaction on seeing a photo of The Cure on the hotel TV screen, on which I finished this playthrough:
“Oh what nice make-up you’re wearing. Are you 15? Oh no, my mistake, you’re 60. Hahaha. Get a grip!”
She was born a year or so before this came out. O goths, one day a generation will come that will love you.
Yes
2/5
A benefit of beaming these records onto a hotel television is my wife’s opinion on the music and Spotify band photos:
“This is “get a grip” as well. Go to the gym. Get a haircut. Go for a run. Go see a dentist. This is not music I could like.”
When the band show a flash of groove - like the start of South Side of the Sky - they immediately fidget out of it and thwart fun: they’re awful at flirting, and can only flirt, and were I not under an obligation I would not have stayed beyond hors d’œuvres. Fragile has the constituent components of a passable ZZ Top EP, an alright Sweet LP, a sub-par Shellac letter to friends, and a moderately successful Gypsy Kings single, but tragically they are Yes.
Yes
2/5
This album shows plenty of promise, and I hope we get to hear later albums which ought to fulfill… hahaha only joking, the machine and its evil sense of humour gave us Fragile the day before, and while I dislike this less, the problems are the same.
Grooves ruined by fidgeting. No memorable songs because they need hooks and probably repetition and that’s boring. The ghost choir singing. Elves, probably.
Paging Trevor Horn for some help here.
Lynyrd Skynyrd
3/5
This is a pivotal album in a genre I don’t care for, too coiffed to rock, too Stones-fixated to be yacht rock.
That aside, Firebird is pretty good!
Simon, I do owe them for one of the nerdiest heckles I’ve noted, as related by an acquaintance: the Chicago rock band The Butcher Shop Quartet played a storming cover of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”. A beat after the finale, someone shouted “FIREBIRD!”
Sonic Youth
3/5
My feelings have been mixed on Goo since I first got into SY, a year or two after this came out. I shunned it and Dirty for being shiny and on a major label, an opinion I cribbed from Melody Maker, but Dirty Boots was the first SY song I heard, and I still love it; live versions accompanying the single sold me completely on the band.
This does not have the weird majesty of its predecessors, but has a fair haul of good songs, and a classic in DB. Cinderella’s Big Score, Mote and Kool Thing are also favourites from that period.
Returning to Goo, there’s a strong nostalgic pull to the sleek, bendy guitar howl they were into then, which still thrills me; they were a revelation, the first time I realised guitars didn’t have to follow the late-60’s blues rock templates to sound cool.
A good record, but I prefer the contemporaneous Live In Irvine recording, which can be grabbed from the band’s generous Bandcamp page.
Louis Prima
4/5
The Wildest! sent me into a reverie about the peculiar power held by recordings of party music made by and for the now-dead. This has the hoodlum energy of “Rumble” and would sit easily in a film like “Touch of Evil”, exuberant, suggestive, made for dancing, built from old structures, old instruments, edgy material in the day: the biker gang would move to this, Mexican Heston certainly not. Reckon Fatsuit Welles would side with the kids on this one. I think I’ll join him.
(Most of those kids are gone now.)
Pixies
4/5
Surfer Rosa’s rawness and playfulness makes it my fondest Pixies record, but Doolittle may have the better tracklist. I wish it didn’t sound so civilised, but maybe this is like Bunuel’s dinner party characters: black tie, ancient silverware and bloodlusty surrealism.
I’d forgotten how brilliant Black Francis’s lyrics and delivery are; he’s a master of fascinating, imaginative and comic obscurity, a contrast to the more typical half-arsed obscurity we encounter with more pretentious members of this list. The numerology section of Monkey is both hilarious and mad.
Big Brother & The Holding Company
4/5
Janis Joplin’s vocal cords might have mothered Axl Rose’s.
Years ago, during my loud "never trust a hippy" phase my dad, not a man in whom I've noted more than an atom of hippy, told me that actually, they did some great stuff, and I shouldn't be so dogmatic. Without disaggregating the whole bursting of restrictive social norms and segregation that they contributed, I'll tip my hat to my dad for the necessary corrective.
The sort of disorganised, bold and restless spirit I associate with the movement is present in this record. This list has resurrected my fondness for messy '60's blue-rock recordings, off-the-cuff albums with a bunch of covers thrown in to make up the numbers, production carefree and murky, audience sounds dubbed in, echoes thrown into odd places, and a sense of wanting to capture a moment before moving on, who cares if it isn't perfect, the next one will be better, though the next one often never came. The bass sometimes is off hidden in some corner of a club, stoned and noisily planning some sort of revolutionary arts happening to a bunch of comrades, probably outnumbered by FBI spies, the guitar sometimes is just inappropriately blitzed out in a way that you'd never hear on a contemporary record, they've raided the party, swept the canapés into a bin bag, and have blazed off down the canyon.
Anyway, pretty good. Now I'd probably add a star to each of those Doors albums that were thrown at us early in the run.
The Who
4/5
Having trouble getting my head round this, so I’ll fling fragments out instead.
Seeing The Who play Live Aid on tv was my first formative rock experience, followed by watching a long-lost vhs documentary about them. I also saw them live playing what I’ve learned was a travesty, but this pre-teen’s face was slayed.
This is the only record of theirs I like a lot. Albini said something along the lines that they are unique in being a great band that put out mostly crap; this performance underlined that. I would not voluntarily listen to many, maybe most of their originals on this record, but I happily blasted the whole thing at volume today.
Suspect it’s something to do with Entwhistle and his deranged, almost drunk meandering. An acquaintance once described The Who as inverting the usual rhythm/lead divide: here, the drums and bass go all over the place, while Townshend holds the songs together.
The Who are a weird band. The sleazy songs aren’t pleasant, but they are interesting, a very middle-class English mode of creepiness that Townshend seemed to revel in.
Keith Moon’s cymbals irritated my brain for the first song and a half until I managed to mentally dial them down.
Their great songs are among the best rock ever made, and the brutal panache of the band carries the rest. How else could I bear to listen to more than a minute of rock opera?
Animal Collective
3/5
This record is intelligent, well-executed, and after two or three playthroughs has left barely a biscuit crumb in my head. Applying electronic oddness to baroque, Brel, Piaf or Walker-type chanteur pieces is a neat idea, albeit one Bowie perhaps perfected earlier. This washed passed me on repeat so politely that I had to concentrate to notice individual songs.
Maybe the songs aren’t strong enough, but I think this is more a problem of vibes: the singing and melodies belong to a noughties trend towards whimsy and songs that hover in the background with ordering-a-café-latte vocals. For a contrast, go back a couple of decades and see how those young geeks in Slint used their frail voices to dramatic effect.
Michael Jackson
5/5
There are some duff tracks on this, though the willy-fencing with Macca is entertaining on one of them, but this is one of the greats. The production is great, striking while always subservient to the singer: Jones built a perfect setting for Jackson.
The Bees
2/5
Our second noughties latte-lounge album of the week, a reggae-fan’s one this time, playing in the corner, staring at its feet; go get me an espresso, and grab yourself a 2 while you're at it!
I imagine this is the LP that the “pretty annoying” guy in Limmy’s sketch would have on vinyl.
This record has some sharp glints, Sunshine followed by A Minha Menina making my ears wiggle before the dozy vibes returned and did their somnolent magic. The instrument sounds are frequently divine. Yet most of it doesn’t so much waste my time as evade it.
Metallica
3/5
Finding this on my hard drive was a small pleasure: a slice of my adolescence before Big Black and Sonic Youth seduced me got caught on my sleeve. I quite enjoyed this! Apart from the first two and the last song, most of these had long left my memory, which was unsurprising as I was a half-hearted metalhead.
Master of Puppets commits to its daftness, its countless passages and riff-shifts, and I salute that while realising I may never listen to this again.
Simon, I look forward to the “Battery’ that you will undoubtedly deliver to them with this!
Thin Lizzy
4/5
This is of a type peculiar to the seventies, the studio-enhanced live album, and I wonder whether this will confuse the angry sorts who rant whenever a live album rocks up on this list. They'll be furious anyway, I suppose, which is a shame, as this is a formidable set of sets, with volcanic guitar and even drum solos that genuinely melt my old visage, a rare occurrence nowadays. This has slumbered on my drive for over a decade, mostly or totally unlistened, so I am thankful; I can imagine putting this on over a long drive.
There's no small measure of Van Morrison in these songs, which surprises me, and not all of it is Lynott's voice and call-outs. A hard-edged soulfulness, particularly in the ballads, is present in both.
Not on this record is Spirit Slips Away, which is the only Thin Lizzy song I’ve heard that’s sublime. Listen to that!
Joni Mitchell
4/5
Another neglected purchase on my hard drive, I may have skimmed off the opening, Broadway-esque piano chords, not in the mood. Silly me, this is very good, and I'm finding it hard to sum up why. Am tired and a blizzard arrives tomorrow, and I imagine this record would be good, conversational company for it. The instrumentation is superficially super normal and actually deeply weird.
Free Man in Paris's Paris is a little Emily in Paris; it is still a good song.
Pink Floyd
2/5
The opening/closing track is necessarily too long, and my pulse cranked up in anticipation of the four-note motif; I hadn't realised I care. The rest is earnest doodling that passes between the ears with barely a tickle, apart from the hint of air raid siren in a keyboard part near the end of Welcome to the Machine that has me thinking about how most of the British artists on this list were parented by a war-traumatised generation. Most fellow Gen-X'ers I know have at least one set of brutally depressed grandparents who scarred one or both of their parents. Poor Boomers, ey?
Gilmore's guitar is one of the final evolutionary forms of the white Brit blues movement, flawless and so non-stick I just slide off. The keyboards make me think of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, all sleek and alienatingly modish, beamed from somewhere far above - which I like. The title song disappointed me, partly because I realised I conflated the melody with that of the Phil Collins song with all the rain on him, which also made me realise I'm riddled with that ghastly song. The LP cover is trashy pop art. That's all I have.
I am certain that Piper and Dark Side are both on this list, and predict that I will be unmoved by the former, and shall fall into a generous nostalgic reverie around the latter.
John Grant
3/5
Notes of Elliott Smith, were my scornful tasting notes over the first couple of tracks, deciding early this was typical noughties beigewave. Beneath the aggressively soothing wrapping, the lyrics are sometimes pungent and imaginative; the songs swing along cheerfully, nothing revolutionary, nothing that my life calls out to, but I’ve let this play four times over the day.
Creedence Clearwater Revival
4/5
Putting my serious ears on for what I know is meant to be a classic, what caught me was the way J Fogerty’s vocals form little riffs that play off the guitars, rather than lay simply on top of them, and that the space they leave for their sounds is exceptionally rare for a four piece. The songs have a spiky, pugilistic motion to them: this is a song, you got a problem with that pal?
Charles Mingus
5/5
This brings to mind a remark - maybe from Kevin Shields? - that psychedelia should work on the body as well as the mind, and I follow the song titles as choreographer directions, track one for a single dancer, track 2 for two, so on, though I stumble when I try to match these descriptions with what the musicians are doing. It was incontrovertibly clear to them: even when the music’s bursting at the seams, it’s in formation. The saunters and gallops are tremendous, with louche preambles suggesting they’re ultimately fornicating to pieces, which is pleasing.
Also brought to mind are comminplace filmic comparisons, tolerated 30 years later by Portishead - soundtracks for unmade films. Tracks lack the repetition of and return to motif of song, closer to sound-image making, the wilder parts anticipating Morricone’s freakiest tracks. The stealth-surrealists at the Walt Disney Corporation could have illustrated this with a film that would’ve gone down equally well in vernissages and smut theatres.
A friend’s eldest child is called Mingus. They’re both very cool.
2Pac
2/5
The opening burst of morbidity, the I’ll-die-in-a-hail-of-bullets-(no-big-deal) spree, arrests attention with its clever play against the luscious production, dark chuckle material for grimmer types with hindsight. After that, pretty sounds, forgettable tunes, nothing hooked me.
The title track’s delivery of “Kill kill kill, murder murder murder” is nifty and funny. I won’t linger over why this is the one line that’s stuck to my lips as I drive to the nursery pick-up.
The Monks
3/5
This isn't the first time I've been Monked, though I couldn't find them on my hard drive. My opinion’s unchanged: they're a crucial band with this monumental record that is not, song by song, satisfying to listen to, sitting in a hinterland between tune and headcase rock. Some of my favourite records are decisively tuneless - 'Clear to Higher Time' by the Blue Humans, Fushitsusha's double live - and are completely satisfying. This doesn't hook me, doesn't melt my brain, but it is fascinating: tremendous chug, characterful sound. I feel the same about the Silver Apples.
The Pharcyde
4/5
This is a cheerful, funny record, reminding me of George Clinton in its emphasis of musical playfulness over formal elegance. The sounds are warm, bouncy, surprisingly unserious in their jazziness. This is the first hip hop album I've heard on this list that has made me smile, and I'm sorry that I never got round to it back in the day.
The absence of menace, attempted or delivered, is distinctive: sex and violence are invariably comic.
It's often offensive, but seemingly without malice. “Oh shit” makes me wistful for a time when transphobia was a carefree pastime. I'm joking while also being absolutely serious.
Sufjan Stevens
3/5
The jury's in two minds, sitting on the fence, smoking a cigarillo, all done up like a Michelangelo pastiche by Wed Anderson. First listen made me the most boring person in the world according to my former English teacher, as only boring people get bored and this bored me to smithereens. I was in the wrong mood.
All but the mildest suggestion of jauntiness in music's can provoke the inner snarler, and this is liberally sprinkled with the dicey stuff, vacuum-sealed in po-mo, another of my triggers. This is clearly clever, eloquent, crafted with distinctive instrumentation fitted to song-shapes that might've been set down on ancient papyrus by Pythagoras or maybe McCartney, but I don't have the time or energy to work out what he's singing about, what the through-line is, and mentally file over an hour's worth of pop chamber music. It's probably good?
Michael Jackson
2/5
Today I only listened to this and the PC Engine soundtrack to "Double Dragon II: The Revenge"; listen to the latter. Off The Wall plunges after the first two tracks, which themselves are pretty fab. I'll mumble "rote late-disco" and get back to the Double Dragon II OST.
2/5
In the late noughts I knew a guy who loved soft, smooth, relaxing electronica, and made a decent living as a DJ playing this stuff in posh hotels, often on Park Lane in London. Five of us went to see him play in the Dorchester one night, a small bar, and we soon realised that apart from an embarrassed couple next to us, the rest of the patrons were either well-kempt, elderly foreign businessmen or expensively and scantily dressed escorts. A lot of pricey scent was in the air. I remember in particular one white-haired gent, impeccably groomed, silently haughty while he listened to his companion talk to her friend. His companion rubbed her backside onto his front as she talked to her friend, the man impassive and aloof. Writing this, I wonder if he’s still alive, and I wonder if this album was playing.
Bob Dylan
5/5
My acknowledgement of the force of Dylan’s oeuvre started from grudging at the outset of this project, passed through grovelling, and has reached the “of course” stage. H61R seems effortless, sounds like it was recorded in my head, lacks the freakiness of Blonde on Blonde, but has the most pulse-accelerating opening with Like A Rolling Stone.
I’ll repeat with some variation an earlier thought: his best word-images don’t make rational sense, but act on a deeper, more emotional and primal level, dreamy or nightmarish depending on his mood. Apt that Ezra Pound makes a guest appearance at the end, as his intimidating maze of references and images is comparable, as is Basil Bunting’s commentary on Pound’s Cantos:
“There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don't make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l'on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?
There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!“
Pere Ubu
3/5
I hear a lot of fantastic later bands in this record, and the best parts have this sublime controlled hysteria to them, but I have owned this record for over ten years and never feel like putting it on. A great three out of five record!
T. Rex
4/5
Another foggy square of the map charted, and happily: my grunge-punk orientation robbed me of T. Rex as a teenager, and I probably would've benefited from this marriage of romanticism, cosmic chug and faintly emetic lasciviousness. The songs are somewhere on the line between rather good and brilliant.
Bolan manages to sound both young and very old, which serves a deathless mystic persona well; I don’t know which came first. His guitar playing is a clever swerve from “sad man is sad because girl” to “we’re all going to die, but you can’t stop my horn” - Brit blues, but with poppers swapped for constipation. (Those who would present the R Stones as counter-argument should take note of what heroin does for the bowel movement.)
The elegiac quality draws me more than the horny chug: Cosmic Dancer halted me within its first few seconds, banjaxed, brain switched to a vague but strong feeling of loss. Don’t think I’d heard it before, either. Strangely, I think of Peckinpah’s use of “Knocking of Heaven’s Door” in "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid", and has me imagining a similar pairing with Nic Roeg.
Bolan grew up round the corner from where I've spent most of my grown-up life, which I never knew until this weekend. Nice.
Prince
4/5
Arrived at this drafting sharp words about the cruise-liner play length, leaving it wondering if Prince listened to much Can and if I prefer "Automatic" to "Sister Ray". I had a lot of fun with this. Opening with two bangers is deceptive, the sleight of hand being that their extended instrumental iterations are representative of the rest, rather than the impeccable tunes themselves. The weakest parts are when drum machine and synth ape rock bands; fortunately, most of the record embraces the beep, the whoosh, the clean flatness of the sounds, and the space in between.
The comedy erotic language is delightful, and I've gained a rich insight into the sense of humour of one of our project's voyeurs, as Prince is one of his favourites (Simon, betting you can deduce who).
Crosby, Stills & Nash
3/5
When the last Boomer on this critics' list rages into that good night, half of the 1,001 will quietly drop off with them, and this will be one of the leavers. But is that fair?
This has some great songs (Wooden Ships slides and rocks, You Don’t Have To Cry is a classic of the dead genre of pedagogic goodbyes, Long Time Gone is panther-like yacht rock), a bunch of middling ones, and a creepy one in Guinnevere (I hated it so much on first listen that I tip-toed up to it on subsequent play throughs, worried that it’d bite). More fundamentally, I don’t know what to do with all the harmonies.
CSN advance on me like a tripled hippy terminator, earnest and la la la, the threat of a syrupy “milady” keeping me on edge. The harmonies don’t repel me as they once did, but they sound doubled, with a doll-like creepiness - “I’ve heard enough,” my wife declared in the car earlier. And these harmonies are why this band exist.
When they turn down the harmonies, let them loosen up, they can be pleasant, extra oomph in the choruses. I wish they’d let them get ragged.
I don’t need to hear Marrakech Express again, but it’s cute novelty, albeit one drummed by roots rock’s favourite murderer, Jim Gordon. The opener dares me to hate it, so by the end I’m its pet. I prefer Déjà Vu, and that’s not down to the added Y, fnar fnar.
Maxwell
2/5
Dance slow choo-choo train back and forth
Frictionless, depthless and lubricative
Cut to soft-focus pecs and boobs
Makes me want to slumber
Tim Buckley
2/5
I like Buckley, particularly on Dream Letter, and I found this a chore, weighed down by plastered-on psychedelic tics, perhaps the influence of the producer, Jerry Yester, the carnival, errant knight and wandering minstrel tropes especially irritating me.
As an aside, I remember admiring Yester’s record with Judy Henske, Farewell Aldebaran, and wonder if that would now similarly irritate me. Looking him up, I’m disheartened to see Yester was convicted of child porn possession a few years ago; which brings me back to the creepy carnival sounds on this record. Queasy.
DJ Shadow
4/5
When this came out I avoided it for lost ideological reasons that would’ve been fed by the era’s wash of tepid trip-hop. Big beats, soft beats, dead beats, sugar beats, ubiquitous in every other stoner’s college latte lounge, utterly vile. A couple of years on, Simon and I attended an UNKLE set for free, and had a lovely conversation, only mentioning the music when I asked if the gig had started and was told Lavelle sans Shadow had been playing for half an hour. Thank goodness we had seats and each other’s sparkling company, otherwise blood would’ve been glugged by the goblet.
26 years later, I like this! Thoughtful splashes of big drums Pollock’d with drama and intent, the best tracks reminiscent of Morricone and Carpenter soundtracks. I also belong to the same vintage cycle club as the The Herbaliser. What was the prime of your youth like?
Dolly Parton
4/5
Nashville was a system that could, given the right artist and intent, produce artifacts that manage to sound both modest and flawless decades down the line. This is one of them. The personnel listing takes up a phone screen of space, but they seamlessly swap and flow from track to track, all framing Parton as she briskly catalogues a panoply of emotional states and incident.
This isn’t my vibe today, but if offered a perfectly-weighted galette, I’m not going to sniff and say nah mate, I only eat trifle on Mondays. No-one cares a good cock about Trifle Monday, Simon.
Rage Against The Machine
2/5
Dance like you have a big shit in your baggy pants. The earnestness and “I’d prefer not to tidy my bedroom” sentiments don’t grate on me as they did when this came out, though I hear the germ of a lot of awful music that followed. The band do their thing well, panache in the burp burp bass and Morello’s switching between hard rock riff and fancy squiggly sounds, the drums admirably minimalist at times.
The album doesn’t have many tunes. After the opener and the sweary one, the next time I checked to see what song was playing was three songs later, Bullet in the Head, the other famous single. The rest is serviceable, bops and races along winsomely, but rely on B-side Sabbath riffs that lack doom or hook.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
4/5
This album of devotional songs has an effect that might stray from intention, as this heathen heard a psychedelic record in a space of its own; the closest I’ve heard to it is the Boredoms majestic Vision Creation Newsun. Cathedrals can awe non-believers as well as the devour.
LCD Soundsystem
3/5
This is the archetype of what everything seemed to sound like when retired from listening to popular alternative music and retreated to a bar to grow a beard instead. This isn’t bad, just pick n mix industrial-emo-garage-danceable bullet points on a mid-noughts A&R dude’s bullshit bingo card.
Stevie Wonder
4/5
Much of this is unsurpassable. Superstition sits next to Sweet Jane in having a riff that I can conceive continuing forever.
There’s schmaltz on here, by my own measure, where the music is not great enough to sublimate lyrical sentimentality. Lookin’ For Another Pure Love is schmaltz; I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever) is majestic.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
4/5
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are another band swallowed by my blithe decision in my early twenties that I was too old for new music, as I’d heard it all before. Why YYY when I have The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Sonic Youth, The Cramps*, MC5, The Pretenders, The Breeders, who do they think they are?
They are their own creature and I’m pleased to have moved past the hors de combat mode of spotting antecedents with my arms crossed. The early rockers are marked by distinctive post-punk shrill guitar stabs and some clever lines shrieked and drawled; the better songs are in the second half, which might be their preferred mode, the strident tracks the gateway. Maps is a keeper, Modern Romance too - sleigh bells!
*I’ve never listened to The Cramps. I just think I know what they sound like from bands I like.
Herbie Hancock
4/5
Deceptively casual, nonchalantly great, yet two listens felt enough for the day.
Super Furry Animals
3/5
These cushions are opulent and I love the profile, but will I be comfortable on this couch? It’s more of a chaise longue.
I had to listen to this with a lot of distractions, and only once, so this is more a sketch than a review: some smashing parts, brainy song structures, a sumptuous, playful production, but nowhere to rest my arm, and the playing length gave me pins and needles.
Drive-By Truckers
3/5
The title “Southern Rock Opera” suggests a novelty record, the length suggests obnoxiousness, while what lyrics I caught suggest a whisky-rock liker’s Bildungsroman; an uneasy mix that needs banging riffs and a lot of soaring to work. The record’s pleasant to have in the background, the guitar sounds are there, but the songs and riffs don’t stick, apart from maybe Life In The Factory and Let There Be Rock. Is that a goat I hear? “Meh meh meh…”
Bumping up to three because “Angels and Fuselage” is a title redolent of a lost JG Ballard novel set in the Nevada desert, “Shut Up and Get On The Plane” made me laugh, and because I enjoyed the album enough to listen to it exactly twice. This means any other rock operas on this list defaults to 1, apart from “Tommy”, which will be DNF.
Never make me visit the Lynrd Skyrnd Wikipedia page again.
Queen
3/5
This is a top-tier 3/5 album, always fun, the preponderance of oddball song-shapes almost incidental to the record’s pleasures, the vocal and guitar fireworking, the pointed daftness, and the hugeness of the production. This contains maybe two and a half very good songs (and one and a half are BR), but I’m not sure that matters.
Creedence Clearwater Revival
4/5
There’s a purity to CCR that I once mistook for simplicity. Listening today, I heard Can, early 90s Neil Young, Velvet Underground bootlegs, and the B-52s, from what I could immediately put a name to.
Ministry
2/5
Ministry are a stinky band and this is a stinky record. Not in itself a bad thing, their lack of hygiene, but I counted only a couple of worthwhile rockers. The Butthole Surfers made one record that did the best parts of this better, and with a less dreary aesthetic.
I bet Ministry like Giger’s art. Giger sucks!
MC Solaar
3/5
This is so frictionless that when I realised I lost where I’d got to during my playthrough, I had to return to near the start out of fear of missing a track: it passed through one ear and out the other like a teeny tiny laser beam, glistening, pretty, and forgotten. I did like how his raps sound, my limited French comprehension catching a tired trope or two.
I am glad I sent myself back to the front half, as playthrough 1.75 proved kinder, a closer listen revealing a delicacy to the structures and sampling that I’d missed, and more diversity than I’d detected.
Peter Gabriel
3/5
I like this album while not enjoying much of it. Its opener is hostile, and most of the rest comes across as well-constructed notes to a therapist - us, presumably. However, No Self Control is post-punk big hair rock, which is magical, and Games Without Frontiers and Biko are lovely. Both made a huge impression on me when I was small, and I’m grateful to have been brought back to them.
Dire Straits
3/5
I’d heard this before, but this time round only Waterline, Water of Love and Sultans were familiar, which makes sense as they’re the keepers. The rest washes past comfortably: they were a tight little band at this stage, and I have a thing for Knopfler’s voice, which makes me a common sort of fetishist. Dylan looms in several of the tracks, no bad thing in itself, but not flattering to the band either. Knopfler had not yet embraced his brown tone nor that flavour of Nordic fatalism I sniff out in BIA. I’ll mention once more that as a kid he shared an office with Basil Bunting - isn’t that something?
MGMT
2/5
MGMT are quite good at an aesthetic that I disliked and that seemed ubiquitous during the late aughts. They’ve at least one good tune, which is not enough to bring me back.
Jeru The Damaja
3/5
Unheard this gets a bonus star for being a ‘90’s hip hop album that’s under 40 minutes, a unicorn on this list.
Jeru the Damaja was someone I never reached, though I intended to: he was championed by the great Neil Kulkarni (RIP), and part of the noisy, wired lineage that includes Public Enemy, Show & AG and the Wu-Tang Clan, which was the only hip-hop I enjoyed back then - I love the heaviness, the nerviness. Yet I’d never knowingly sought out any of DJ Premier’s production work, including this. This unfamiliar record tests whether my enjoyment of this murky sub-genre rests on nostalgia.
This has wallop and disquiet that I treasure in the records I love of the ilk, while the rapping is stalwart - he sounds straightforward, to the point, boasts and insults casually matter-of-fact. It’s a dry style, not afraid of cliche to get a point across efficiently, and I like it in the main, though it fails horribly on Da Bichez, which is half-hearted and half-baked misogynist commentary on misogyny.
Involuntarily falling asleep when settling our kid to bed means I’ve only listened to this fully once, perhaps not enough. No outright bangers identified themselves to me over this playthrough, but I liked the vibes
The shape-throwing on his Spotify video is beguiling, completely weird. After watching a few minutes over a spread of songs, I surmise these are interpretative dance loops bespoke to each song that he’s made decades later.
I hope Simon has written something about the cover!
Calexico
2/5
The formality and tastefulness of this strand of indie rock that makes me pull the sheets over my face. This is Dances With Wolves; give me The Wild Bunch.
John Lennon
5/5
Clarity, space, and measured rawness make this one of the best sounding record I’ve heard recently. Where he howls and the guitars fuzz up, the stage is cleared: their punch is unadorned, no fuss and busyness in the way, which surprises me given the presence of Spector.
I am indebted to my partner on this trek for introducing me to this record a little while ago - it has stewed over the intervening months, and returning to it, the greatness is even more obvious. Simon, as you said, the final repetitions of Mother are astonishing.
I expected to be annoyed by a record so clearly derived from therapy, but there’s a stark, clear-eyed directness to Lennon that weaves past the pitfalls of triteness and insularity. God is pain’s metre, Lennon has stopped believing in what he maybe once did, but now he has his life with Ono - simple progression, but the force is in the declaration. Refreshing.to hear “the dream is over” as triumphant cry.
All the songs have stick: again, clarity, simplicity and elegance are principles followed.
Cheers, Cookie!
Jurassic 5
2/5
Very little alternative hip hop on this list has raised my pulse. This is another album I’ll forget about by tomorrow. Pours down the lugs easily, no hooks, refrains or peculiarities to arrest the journey out of my brain’s fundament.
The xx
3/5
When I refreshed this page to see xx, it received a couple of black eyes for the band name and the album title, on paper a minimalist post-punk flex - with notes of Malevich from the cover art à la mode - but only marginally less gauche than Elon Musk’s branding. The Ex did your name better. So did Kiss.
Another black eye after reading that they dismissed their keyboardist in shady circumstances evoked Argus after a pub brawl. But the record’s smart, distinctive, a record collector’s record perhaps, but it has heart and song-shapes that linger, and a dive bar smokiness that distinguishes it from the fragments of post-punk revival that I remember from their contemporaries. (Simon, consider this a probable spoiler for whenever Interpol inevitably skulk into our day.)
Baby vomit - actual baby vomit - left me with only one playthrough, so I can’t say if these impressions will endure, but this was a pleasant surprise.
Merle Haggard
4/5
Trying to shake off “The Blue Brothers”’s précis of country music as a hostile bar eternally alternating ”Stand by your man” and “Rawhide”, I read up on Haggard and remembered that the genre is a modern movement, born of 20th century capitalism and technology, John Dilinger as much as John Wayne, and that it is profoundly odd, as well as occasionally moving. Merle Haggard hits these markers, and the sequencing of this record is a simple pleasure itself, undulating, speeding up and slowing down as he lays down a series of images and regrets that have stick. Skid Row managed to get my two year old singing “Welllll!” within a single listen, which by itself made me grateful for this record. Nifty guitar work’s throughout, which I only noticed when I started listening out for it.
Metallica
2/5
An especially memorable Bukowski passage describes how, to evict pubic lice, he applied a ferocious ointment to his genitals and endured a hellish hour of burning as he kept it on for twice the prescribed duration, gritting his teeth, listening to soothing music, reciting poetry in his head until he could finally bear the agony no longer and threw himself in a cold bath to rinse the ointment and murdered bugs from his livid red undercarriage.
Maybe I’m mixing up cause and effect here, but does this mean that listening to Symphony & Metallica will rid oneself of crabs?
Prince
3/5
I have this album and like it without ever listening to it carefully, bouncing off the surface happily. Sign and Look are absolute stunners, mind.
Deep Purple
3/5
An artifact from when frontmen aspired to be Jesus, guitarists charged by the note, and every other hard rock song ended verses with an ejaculatory “ta-dah!” or “duh-dum!”, sometimes followed by a gallop, this is a good time provided you don’t mind it lasting the length of a Deep Purple concert.
The distorted organ blast - arf - at the start of Lazy is tremendous, though it peters off into a jazzy emptiness - arf, arf again.
The Doors
3/5
I’ve deliberately not read up on Riders on the Storm, which I have always enjoyed, as I prefer to believe that the thunder and rains sounds on top of it we’re devised by a drunkenly belligerent Morrison yelling I want a fuckin storm on this assholes and just wrecking the studio until they were put in. Meeker artists like Hendrix or The Beatles might’ve resorted to some inventive instrumental sound or pattern to reference the subject matter, but such timid subterfuge was not happening on Jim’s watch.
This is theThe Doors album that I think is pretty good.
Duran Duran
5/5
My first time close-listening to Duran Duran on headphones was a joy. This record is excitement distilled, bound by a beast of a bass player. One I expect to return to often.
Simon, this isn’t the album with the familiar laughter, is it?
Paul Simon
3/5
Is this your album of the day?
Yes. It’s alright.
It’s boring. You have my permission to use that as your review.
To my wife’s harsh verdict, I’d add that it’s beautifully crafted in places, with some clever flourishes. Over a period of my childhood, I have heard Me and Julio enough times to have assimilated it into my musical ID.
Fleetwood Mac
5/5
While this album is a life tenant in my skull, I’m not sure I had ever listened to it all the way through in one go as I did today, which was magic, twice. To the library of panegyrics, I’ll just add that today I noticed how Buckingham’s solo at the end of Go Your Own Way, with its economy of notes insistent through repetition, is a blazing row put to metre, right through to the final, growling, had-too-many-angry-whiskies muttering at the end. A poetic intelligence is running the frets.
Fugees
3/5
This was ubiquitous early on at university, and I remember bitterly preferring the similarly popular Pulp Fiction soundtrack.
Coming back to this was enjoyable, and I can hear why the hits hit. Most curiously, it sounds sort of half-baked to me, thrown off, hits aside a bunch of skits and cassette demos polished with that immaculate nighttime, slightly dub sound the record sits in.
Funkadelic
4/5
Having owned it for years, my mind still can’t encompass this record, but anything with such patently, deliberately weird decisions in production, instrumentation, rhythm and profanity is worth another visit to.
The Triffids
4/5
We can breathe easy, Simon: this was a happy playthrough, and I will go round a few more times when I’m not having the sort of day I’m having now.
It’s all very romantic, isn’t it? Sings its intentions straight of the gate, grand gestures set-off with cute, clever little fluorishes, music that has you listening carefully one moment, singing along full gas the next.
Blinder by the Hour swept me around the ballroom before I was pulled into the disconcerting outro, strings off and ominous: you’ve had your fantasy, now hear love going wrong.
The macabre content and singing of Jerdacuttup Man brought a too-easy comparison to Nick Cave; the conceit appealed to me, my ambivalence to Cave notwithstanding.
Simon & Garfunkel
4/5
S&G are despised by many for the sentimentality, the bold lunge towards the middlebrow, and for Paul Simon being a bit of a prat. These criticisms all seem fair to me, and this album still triggered several flashes of weeping for me today. There’s a degree of nostalgia there from hearing much of this in the car as a child, but Simon’s hooks and feints have some innate power that has me wanting to bawl.
Maybe a couple of placeholders on this, but the hits smash me.
Nico
4/5
A record of rich songs by multiple songwriters, elevated into the Nico genre by Nico, this is almost ruined by the overdubbed strings and flute, probably administered by a guy dressed like he’s in an extra in an am-dram production of Robin Hood, smeared all over otherwise sparse and delicate performances, but ultimately that voice and the quietly gorgeous guitar and organ work around it win out. It Was A Pleasure Then is predictably my favourite, a Velvets-direction I wish had been explored further. Still, that one song is sorcery.
Fleetwood Mac
5/5
This is a record you could spend a lot of time in: riches sequenced into a lopsided, mesmerising flow that has me thinking of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain - the out-and-out bangers are surrounded by slow burners and curiosities. Sisters of the Moon
The Offspring
2/5
This music garners the slightest of shrugs from me, but their faithful cover of the Didjits' "Killboy Powerhead" has given the great Midwest rockers an income for life, to which I raise my beret. Otherwise, to my ignorant ears this is all “you like chicken, I like bread, yeah ya-yeah-yeah yeah-yeah yeah”.
Pet Shop Boys
5/5
PSB were a guilty pleasure overheard that I refused to recognise back when I believed synthesisers weren’t real instruments and guitars had to be everywhere.
The music is well poised, economical without being sparse, the dramatic moments popping; lyrics are calculatedly ambiguous, yet sharp as heck, and it turns out I have a thing for Tennant’s voice. This is thrilling music, the singles bringing a chill but more unexpectedly the rest having heft, purpose and hooks. They invented their own universe, something they share with the rest of the best here.
Old me was a foolish child - looks like he has lots of companions here!
Van Halen
3/5
A noun that Todd Trainer attached to Melt-Banana works for Van Halen: fireworks. With little exception (maybe just Ain’t Talkin’ About Love), songs are an afterthought, mostly stitched-together prêt-à-porter hard rock riffs overlaid with multi-tracked “wheeeee-I’m-on-a-rollercoaster” vocals. It’s all about guitar spectacle, and that’s fun. I’m glad it exists, I like Bill and Ted and, unlike Melt-Banana, I probably won’t listen to this again.
Doves
2/5
My lazy take is that this is Madchester beigewave with a touch of glitch and a dollop of Radiohead.
Let’s not be lazy: this is music to play in Park Lane hotel bars for rich old men and their escorts as they hopscotch lines of MDMA and cocaine.
Muddy Waters
3/5
Imagining this record in its original context didn’t happen for me: I’ve heard these moves copied across too many antecedents, which is understandable as it’s a perfect example of what it is. My inability to raise anything specific to this record is a measure of the extent that what made it fresh became wallpaper to my musical childhood.
Bob Dylan
5/5
How did he sound so old so young? I can understand why he walked a little back from the political content, as it’s so powerful that I imagine he had a lot of people trying to commission him for more, and outrage never runs dry.
I enjoyed this a lot, and was surprised by how stirring the raw acoustic delivery was for me, as I’d only gone through the electric albums previously. The non-sequiturs work for me- “good car to drive/after a war” - presented as afterthoughts
George Michael
4/5
Only got through this once due to being Ill as heck, but this cyberpop was edging into the top tier for a while until a late record slump into jazz pulled it down; even then, Michael’s vocal charisma carries it. Will return to.
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band
3/5
The depravity ambushed me. I see Next described as precedent to AC/DC, The Birthday Party, even punk itself, but I’m reminded most of Jerry Sadowitz, another Glaswegian, and his theatre of hatred and debasement. SAHB dialled up the leer, and I don’t like it, which is likely a deliberate effect: there’s a seed of Marquis De Sade goes to Blackpool here.
The music is often great. The motorik pulse of The Faith Healer stood out for me. I have to tip my hat to them for finding what must surely be the most horrific Brel song to cover too. This is a nasty listen, and I think I see the purpose behind it, which I can admire while edging back from the content.
A note to those who decry the smuttiness as some sort of appalling failure of taste: it’s not, it’s deliberate, and you’re meant to feel uneasy.
Digital Underground
4/5
This is one of the better 90’s hip hop records on this list, a relief given it lasts 65 minutes. The rhythms seem faster, funkier than most contemporaries here, while the raps are pleasantly old school, slow and cheerful. The content is often nonsense, but knowingly so.
Sex Packets’s content is also largely about itself: rappers rapping that what they’re doing on this record is what they’re doing on this record, and that it’s better than the rest: the 90’s hip-hop curse of recursion. This background makes the mini-concept album at the end a gift, though it’s ultimately just a sci-fi variation of some of the horny stuff that came earlier.
U2
4/5
This was one of the clutch of first CDs I ever listened to back in my early teens. Sticky Fingers - avert your eyes, Simon - August by Eric Clapton, maybe some 80’s Tina Turner, and a forgotten few others were in this bunch of exciting shiny discs heard on my dad’s big headphones. I was disappointed when I listened to this, as I only recognised the two big hits, and didn’t think the rest rocked.
Three and a half decades on: this rocks.
Listening to New Year’s Day brought a mini-epiphany: the guitar-hero blah-blah about The Edge has a kernel of choppy, post-punk, precision-strike truth to it.
Second micro-revelation: Adam Clayton’s baselines do a lot of the heavy-lifting on the tunes.
Some middling tunes could’ve been dropped for a leaner record, but I chomped through this without break.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
2/5
The Yeah Yeah Yeahs” take garage rock and post-punk, streamline it, install air conditioning, and leave it odourless. I found this fine, but it slid off my plate. The last song is an exception: that caught me out.
“I wanna go and *SHIT* in your pants” was a lyric I spontaneously improvised in the car, immediately hoping my two-year old wouldn’t record and repeat.
Wu-Tang Clan
5/5
62 minutes might be three songs too long, but 36 Chambers was near-religion in my crevice of Cheshire in the mid-90s. I preferred some of the records that followed, but the scrappy, too-loud, raw and heavy qualities that the collective left behind with this stand out, along with the profanity, the sampler’s ear for minimalist earworms, and the violent surrealism of the lyrics delivered by some of my favourite voices in the genre.
The songs are distinct, the album sequenced to bring out clashes, quite unlike the relatively polite wash of samey hip-hop this list mostly celebrates: the first half of the album flips mood, tempo and voice between every track. Even the skits feel more considered in their placement.
This is a bleak, loud and oblique masterpiece, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, often brutal. It’s better than I remembered, and
Haircut 100
3/5
Our project’s manifesto is we-love-the-fey, so Haircut 100 default to the top echelons due to mood, instrumentation, titles, vocals, Smash Hits-prominence, and band name. This contains at least two bangers and a mob of tracks so light and vague they’d dissolve into the ether were they not lashed to the mast by a tropical salad of busy, fast and high chukka-chukka guitar, brass, wind and a bouncy rhythm section. Some of my favourite albums are tuneless, blistering noise barrages, or layers of ambient buzz, drone and echo; a pop album where vibe is privileged over earworm has some appeal to me. The bangers are brill.
The “ ring ring ring” of Love Plus One took me back to childhood and overwhelmed me.
The Icarus Line
2/5
This is adjacent to music I quite like - Hot Snakes and Bitch Magnet examples in mind - but remain ambivalent about as a concept. This kind of twisty, angular, declarative rock mostly eschews tunes while staying clear of pure timbre, freeform wanderings, so needs killer riffs and dynamics to work for me. My conception of the form is of records composed almost entirely of the instrumental, interstitial/linking bits of Led Zep records. Maybe some Black Sab intros and outros are in the mix too, or ZZ Top if you’re Shellac. Thé riffs and dynamics on this are just workmanlike, while the record is far too long and the singing starts sounding more yap-yap-yap than manifesto-making as it goes on: the creepiness of the final repeated lines feel like an inevitability.
The songs containing Suicide-esque synth pulses pleased my ears, but are more like postures of allegiance than musical decisions.
Television
5/5
I know this record so well, and have read so much about it, review feels redundant, so I’ll leave three passing observations.
1. The clean, lapidary and chiming sound of the playing camouflages the fact that it really swings. My two-year old went ape over the first minute of the title track.
2. I used to disregard the second half, probably due to the vulnerable tone after the brasher first half; of course, now I might prefer it.
3. If, like I did, you think this is the only Television record worth checking out, here’s some happy news: Adventure and the self-titled are great records, and the live “The Blow-Up” is sorcery, especially “Little Johnny Jewel”.
Electric Light Orchestra
2/5
This was a double disappointment as when the name and cover turned up, as my perma-daze simultaneously translated this into Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds soundtrack - which may be terrible, but I haven’t heard since I loved it as a pre-teen - and OMD, of whom I’ve heard enough to know I want to hear much more when I can be bothered to.
Listened to this at work, started it with my first coffee of the day, finished it three more coffees later with a blazing caffeine hangover. Work wasn’t hard, sun’s been shining, I have had relatively fine sleep, so I can only blame this record, which confounds me by being both lovable and tedious.
I understand the Beatles’ debt, but they are a frictionless version, too cuddly, slightly pantomime, and don’t have enough choruses with bite.
Here’s a tip: I gave up a second playthrough to listen to Miles Davis’s “A Tribute to Jack Johnson”, which shreds. Maybe listen to that instead.
Slipknot
2/5
Slipknot surprised me: the aesthetic and music repel me, but I’m impressed by how fleet-footed and varied it is. Dynamics, theatricality, and nuances of mood: there’s clear intelligence behind this. I think it’s awful, but well done!
Cocteau Twins
3/5
I have begun to appreciate.the Cocteau Twins diaphanous electric folk, and once again I didn’t have the time to get deep into the mindset.
Magazine
4/5
Post-punk photo-supergroup in pulverising prog-pop blast debut shock. Heard five of these on the best-of compilation I own, which is testament to its strength. The heroic guitars, the synth stepping between futuristic whoosh and a Kraftwerk-adjacent classical European sensibility, and the rousing, declarative vocals of Devoto are an immensely stirring combination. The Light Pours Out Of Me is a permanent member of my get-pumped song stash.
I was introduced to this by a dear former boss referencing a single, and being surprised that I did not get the reference. Thanks, Noel! Glad we’re not being shot from both sides any more!
OutKast
4/5
A soft wail let out when this came up. I bought it on release, was put off by its length and the realisation that “Hey Ya!” was an outlier, and never thought of it again before it hit our page on Thursday.
Sgt Pepper and Fear of a Black Planet are separated by the same number of years that have passed since Speakerboxxx/The Love Below dropped, but I still mentally file this under “contemporary”.
“Hey Ya!” is an outlier, but one surrounded by outliers, and while I could only afford a single playthrough, I’m convinced of its abundant diversity and coherence. That the two solo albums cohere surprised me: a strain of rubbery, synthetic funk and surrealism binds them.
Both halves are too long, maybe part of the point: this is excess about excess, and often a lot of fun. The old chapeau’s aloft for its ambition and, like the previous week’s Haircut 100 LP, bold vibes carry this beyond its low yield of bangers.
I might listen to this again one day. Perhaps after I get round to reading “À la recherche du temps perdu”.
Steely Dan
2/5
Bumbling into a fur-upholstered cocktail party full of manicured types wearing nothing but gold medallions, manicures and animal masks: what a start to the week! This is very smooth and I am totally happy if this is your kind of gig. I can’t hear the tunes for all the smoothness.
Venom
3/5
The opening 15 seconds of electronic hiss are enticing. The joke was going to be that rest of the album doesn’t fulfil that early promise, but it was foiled by the record’s smeary pleasures: it has the wiggly riffage of Motörhead, the blistering chord sequences of Minor Threat, and the murk calls ahead to Portal. Sometimes crude, usually interesting, this is pretty good.
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
3/5
This made me wonder how tastes change, and whether such a super nerdy call to play air organ could ever be hip again. I had fun with this, though it felt like the volume knob had been possessed by malign spirits at times. Fried keyboard blasts particularly pleased me.
System Of A Down
3/5
Jello Biafra's son, grounded upstairs for not doing his chores because he's just discovered existentialism, sings in ten different inventive ways that he will not tidy up his bedroom to his only friend, his dog, which is why half the vocals sounds like "woof woof woof".
This is fun, though not my flavour of angry.
The Beach Boys
5/5
Emetic warning, particularly for Simon: this may the only record I’ve sobbed to with another. Fill that brown paper bag!
Hadn’t listened to this in a long time, and got through it twice during a hellish drive into and out of the city, and it held up for me. The combination of heavy sentimentality, nostalgia, singing in harmony and a warehouse of strings drives many to hatred, but I fundamentally think this is a sad, lost little record made in good faith by an inspired eccentric. It’s creepy and I don’t mind.
Considered dropping a star, then remembered how lovely Brian Wilson was to a friend who hosted him in an HMV, answering a ton of questions that others had channeled to my friend. He even answered:
“Anyway, since you're willing to offend him, ask him what it was like to be so fat and fucked up that he couldn't get out of bed and had to have his maid/nurse jerk him off because he couldn't.”
“A) it was great. it saved me from having to lie on my arm for 15 minutes.”
Willie Nelson
5/5
This is witchcraft: Nelson selects some other artists' songs, including a couple of famous ones, tops them up with four or five of his own, runs his matter-of-fact patter through them, and this 30-odd minute amalgamation becomes myth, and utterly his own.
Klaxons
2/5
Klaxons were not shy in splashing some of Gen X’s favourite literary references into their titles - along with other weirdoes of the vintage, my tail wags at Burroughs and Ballard - and their pick ’n’ mix post-punk is similarly modish, with the thick, overly busy production of the period leaving no space to savour. Made out one song in the mix, then realised it was a cover.
They were pipped to first place in the UK album charts by Norah Jones. I don’t know Simon, it’s no Pet Sounds.
Gillian Welch
3/5
This sounds pretty, but as I learned earlier that Steve Albini died last night this record has passed by as attractive noise. Am very sad and defaulting this to three.
The Cardigans
3/5
This might be a novelty record with a single hit, but the novelty is mostly charming, smart and catchy. Its leanings to muzak are a tad too arch for me, but there’s more craft and chorus here than I was expecting.
Count Basie & His Orchestra
3/5
More concentration than I possess is needed to lift me away from the noir cinema association this brings me, but it's a fine example of this sort of formation flying. I kept thinking of scenes from Touch of Evil, among others.
5/5
Only got to listen to this once today, which feels like a crime. Starman jumps out by having many parts to it and each part being great enough to be the basis of a fantastic song by itself, yet all cohering. The rest ranged from intriguing to exquisite. I need to listen to this again; prefer what came right after, but its class declares itself.
Led Zeppelin
5/5
There are very few double albums that make me smile when they come up here: this is one, and also my favourite LZ album. Funky, diverse and weird, it’s all over the place like their hair, and is similarly majestic.
Suzanne Vega
3/5
The lyrics are so odd: obvious, simple vocabulary, lots of basic nouns (love, king, Princess, bar, soldier, wall), little concrete, but assembled such that it confused me, which I decided I liked after two gos. The vocal themselves have a ticklish rhythm to them, and Marlene on the Wall has hook and tempo mostly missing from the rest, though the last song was fun. Weird, unlikely to return to, but glad to have paid attention.
Bob Marley & The Wailers
3/5
I'm still staring at the cover. At first I thought the font was cheap, but it has gradually melted into a totem, or some Lovecraftian script. Rastafari is not in hock to Cthulhu, but the religious text of this album made me uneasy: what did they want us to take away from these words about fated suffering, Jah, "they" who "crucified Jesus Christ", religious war, heathen up against walls, exodus, and trumpets?
Most reggae doesn't do much for me: it can be a lazy minimalism that often leaves no song to hang from, space unfilled, and it takes the otherworldly blasts of dub to pull me in; much of the first side is like this, though the rhythm section entices, particularly that hopping bass.
Exodus is a juggernaut, Old Testament ritual chant set up against disintegrating guitar notes and this insistent, bullying bass riff, and a whole lot of dub roaming around. I'm surprised by how much I like it, having heard it in the background maybe a hundred times without caring. It's ominous and shifting, and that suits the subject matter.
Jamming, Three Little Birds, and One Love are impossible-to-forget nonsense; Waiting In Vain is the most soulful track on the record.
Marley had a distinctive voice; listening to him now, I hear the imitators, who without fail fail. It's a good voice, even if the words are a murk of mystic obfuscation.
I enjoyed this more than I expected to.
The Smiths
5/5
The opener is still my joint-favourite The Smiths song alongside their other sonic outlier, How Soon Is Now. The idiotic, arch rhyme of Frankly Mr Shankly camouflages it as potentially the album’s weak link, but with all its nasty cleverness, the title line is a taunt to the audience as much to the addressee. Andy Rourke dominates throughout; he’s up there with Entwistle in elevating the force of a pop band with a prowling bottom end.
I have one other observation. Most of the time, Morrissey’s addressing someone else, usually critically, often cruelly. The antipathy isn’t remarkable: it’s a common tool in surviving social life. But his refusal or perhaps inability to consider another’s perspective interests me. He is bitingly incisive with his observations, but appears to lack any empathy or acknowledgement of an inner life of his characters, who might as well be dolls or cut-outs in his solipsistic universe. I fear Morrissey and would never want to be trapped in a mine or Andean place crash site with him, as in a survival situation, I am sure he would see me as food and lap meat from my fingers.
David Bowie
5/5
First half is marvellous, second half is sublime. Alongside the classic Kraftwerk run, this is one of the strongest statements of and for post-war European culture, pop or otherwise.
Pink Floyd
2/5
This record’s sonic components, apart from the era-typical spooky-ghost singing, tickle my happy place, but the songs themselves usually annoy me. Lucifer Sam starts with mighty, deep twangy guitar before deciding it wants to be a song about heck knows what, just I don’t like it. Interstellar Overdrive is an exception, because it starts with a decent riff before the band just opens throttle, and there’a no drivel, no la la la. Barrett could smash that guitar good! Don’t like his songs though!
The flippant review is: go to Skip Spence’s “Oar”.
The Incredible String Band
5/5
This deserves more time than I’ve given it today, as it has churned up and answered confused feelings I have about British folk: at core, I love it, but I often find it confusing - do these count as tunes or sing-song stories? - and embarrassing - never trust a hippy, and so forth.
By the time The Minotaur’s Song finished, its content and delivery close to those of a deranged Shellac track, I realised this is a great work. The instrumental embellishments, the strident eclecticism seem thought-out and pointing towards a universal folk-epic form rather than, say, poor Kula Shaker. That Celtic strain of epic storytelling drives the words, rhythms and incidental sounds. Love it. Feel sheepish towards the freak-music friend who dumped all the ISS albums on me over 15 years ago, and to whom I lied when I said I’d check them out immediately. Sorry, Tom C!
Laibach
3/5
Well-constructed, clearly in good faith, but industrial is not my jam: the rhythm is too redolent of a man trying to cross a road discretely after catastrophically filling his trousers. Expect it sounds better in a bierkeller.
Marty Robbins
2/5
This cowboy novelty record has one good/maybe great song in “El Paso”, surrounded by infantile fantasy.
Cyndi Lauper
3/5
This is a happy record to hang out with, and an example of pick ‘n’ mix A&R-driven track listings working pretty well. Time After Time slays.
Scott Walker
4/5
The borrowed line “whenever rain appears/it’s really angel tears” should be a mawkish splat, but Walker lets it pass like the regretful afterthought of a minor god. He had something, a certain laconic intensity that is both exciting and fatalistic.
I knew a handful of songs from this from compilation - Julian Cope’s most likely, and those hit me harder today than they did ten or twenty years back when I first heard them. The preponderance of covers, especially the heavy lean on Brel, suggests was just thrown out, a sketch on the run, which I like; the rich arrangements are camouflage (and there are some interesting BBC arrangers contributing to this, worth following up) - the dude was shooting on the move.
The Youngbloods
4/5
Elephant Mountain is a title that belongs to the era, but the faddish psychedelic gestures feel more dutiful than desired, and the roots rock, jazzy vibes, and an odd, shockingly Broadway feel to one or two of the later tracks make this a truly weird record, and a fun one to spend a journey with. The longer instrumentals make me sad that the form was lost to fashion, which is another way for me to say I adore East-West by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.
Pavement
5/5
If you live with music, you’ll have records that have the power to transport you back to your taste’s formation. This is one of mine: I’d already got into Sonic Youth and Big Black by the time I’d heard S&E, but I remember thinking that Pavement were my band, a new band, the right age to be contemporary to me rather than foundational.
Today I listened to this once and was happy to find I can hum and sing almost every part on it, despite not having heard it for maybe over a decade. Despite Mark E Smith’s protestations, they always were a tunes-first band. I proved this by whistling Chesley’s Little Wrists, maybe the most cacophonous track on the album.
4/5
And on the first day Bono said, Eno, make me sound like God.
I wrote that on Friday, and on Sunday night I can’t remember where I was going for that. This is a very good record, front-loaded but never less than bold.
Neil Young
4/5
Scorned this due to its popularity when I was at university, but it’s weirder than I thought back then. Maid is too absurd to be truly offensive and has a baroque melodrama that is bewildering. Alabama and Word have some delicious, crunchy guitar that a treat after all that hippy acoustic strum, the former sounding like it was recorded in a barn, which I like.
Snoop Dogg
4/5
This was fun enough to cut through a rotten cold. Lyrics are funny and horrible; the music is exquisite, rolling dunes of funk, squeak and cute, near-subliminal fragments of melody and noise.
Buena Vista Social Club
5/5
Back when it came out, this was everywhere but in my ears somehow, and it’s lovely. The instruments sound like they’re within hand’s reach, set into intricate patterns - there’s a formality to this that enthrals. Everything has its turn and place, and you don’t need to understand the order to admire it. Sounds like these dudes played together for decades, which they probably did.
Suede
3/5
There's a winsome video of Bernard Butler demonstrating and describing the riff to "Animal Nitrate", which sounds champion as it crunches out of a Vox amp, more powerful than what came out on the record, which sounds both overly busy and thoroughly leashed. The band was almost polished out of the picture, sounding like half-acquainted session musicians backing Brett Anderson’s well-honed histrionics to the directions “Bolan, Bowie” felt-tip’d on his Oxfam blouse.
I’ve been reading a lot about and by Steve Albini since he died, and this record reminds me of a cutting piece he wrote on how the British music industry once revolved around scenes and stars, that “with a slick manager and some connections, a career could be arranged, in the manner one lands an entry position at Barclays” - bands crowned by press release before a note’s out, and he declared Oasis as the apotheosis of this tendency. I’d argue Suede were the archetype. I remember the “YANKS OUT” cover of Melody Maker, and being annoyed and amused at the idea that they were being stifled by mucky grunge kids an ocean and continent away - imagine being oppressed by Lou Barlow! The hype was off-putting, and I ignored them for a couple of decades. A shame, as they appear to be good people.
This has some strong songs, though returning to it at this distance shows the joins between modish influences; I enjoyed the parts that sound like The Verve of “A Storm In Heaven”, but also feel embarrassed for them. This is confectionary more than meal, and I wonder what might have been had they spent more time playing together rather than rushing to stardom. But that wasn’t the model.
I’ll give Dog Man Star another go.
Jeff Buckley
4/5
The track-listing’s dusting of coffee-shop standards betrays doubt over the originals’ power to carry a debut. This was unwarranted: Buckley’s songs are confident, written to the force of his voice, with enough personal kinks to easily overpower the period flinches - a dab of shoegaze here, and whoosh of Pearl Jam there are more seasoning than meal. The arrangements and structures are intelligent and never bore me, unusual for an album where track lengths average around five minutes.
Singer-songwriters were in my massive blind spot as grunge kid, so I missed this when it was current, and drank it mostly outdoors on an early summer afternoon, welcome mild booziness and cool. I wouldn’t have liked it back then, like it a good amount now.
Black Sabbath
4/5
For the perfection of pure, heavy riffing, go to Sleep's "Dopesmoker"; for the Platonic heavy, insane guitar noise, listen to Big Black's two LPs. But for the primordial sludge of inspiration and dead ends that minted this kind of slow, distorted rock, smoke this and the preceding two Black Sab records. Most of the songs are three quarters brilliant, with awkward instrumental passages shoved in that suggest the band were glancing at prog contemporaries. When I was a teenager, I dumped Black Sabbath as soon as I got into Sonic Youth et al; there's something stubbornly naff about them. I'm now at an age where I find that charming. The inward groan when "Changes" hit my ears for the first time in three decades was displaced by a mesmeric trance. "I'm going through chaaaaanges...."
The Roots
2/5
A heap of fine craft, thought, good faith and intention leaves me wishing for something with anything near the edge of Public Enemy's :"Elvis was a hero to most/ I said Elvis was a hero to most/ He never meant shit to me/...Motherfuck him and John Wayne".
Amiri Baraka made me listen: his poem blazes out of the throng, but I'd be happier listening to it without the music. The Cobain/Burroughs "The "Priest" They Called Him" came to mind as the right approach - instrument counterpoint to the reading, rather than background.
Most alternative hip-hop on this list is a chore; this is no exception.
Bill Evans Trio
3/5
My jazz preferences sit in the seething demented and transcendental ecstatic sectors (late Coltrane goes down well), so this is just too plain nice to live long with me. But it is rather nice.
Cat Stevens
4/5
Started this record on the way to drop the kid off at daycare, toying with a joke around Cat Stevens singing “where do the children play”; ended it half a day later driving back with the kid listening to “Father and Son” wondering what portion of my eyes’ moistness I could ascribe to hayfever. One of our group’s silent members loves Cat Stevens and will shake his head for my finding the man’s records too earnest for my taste, taking me back to misty recollections of weird, late 70’s children’s’ tv optimism, but the sheer commitment, the smart production, and the ear worms put him up there regardless of my never-trust-a-hippy reflexes.
Red Hot Chili Peppers
1/5
40 seconds from the end, I Could Have Lied has a loud, confusingly Beefheartian guitar solo that mangles what is designed to be a sensitive ballad: this is the only piece of this record that gave me pleasure.
What a way to spend Father’s Day. I would’ve listened to the bonus Hendrix covers, but I was busy threading barbed wire in and around my urethra. How revolting is Anthony Kiedis !
The Strokes
4/5
This record is calculated ennui and curated New York guitar rock sounds bound together by more hooks and artful feints than I gave it credit for when it arrived, dismissing it as cynical homage. It is, but cynicism comes with regret and romanticism, and I swear they cornered the market that year in wistful chord changes and references to looking back - even their most riotous song calls to “Last Night”. 24 years after 1977’s “no future” comes “is this it?” and almost the same stretch later - Christ - I find myself closer to the latter than the former. Accidentally elegiac?
Cornershop
3/5
The Velvets-chug of Good to be on the Road caught me; the rest is not unpleasant, one of the better takes of the oafish rock-hip hop fusion whatevs that consumed the time, possibly because Cornership started weird, and kept enough weirdness to stay interesting. Much of this bumbled over me, rarely beckoning my ear. I even missed Allen Ginsberg, until he said “big hard cock”, and even then I immediately tuned back out, not realising it was him. Sorry, Allen! Candyman has stick, though.
Final thought: currently the most popular review of this album makes a crack about covering British food with “borrowed Indian flavours”. Cornershop’s main dude is British Asian, from Wolverhampton, and I’m curious as to what kinds of music you’d prefer him to dabble in. Bit of Elgar, perhaps, or music hall? Maybe get some Morris dancing in the mix? You complete nimrod!
Tim Buckley
3/5
Forgive a spoiler for the second season of the Sopranos: in his final moments, the character Big Puss simulates cunnilingus to his friends, soon to be his murderers. A moving scene. Greetings From L.A.’s main revelation is that this performance is a discrete homage to Tim Buckley’s lascivious scat on the song “Devil Eyes”, soon after the words “do the monkey rub”.
This is representative of the album’s schoolboy horny, dick-windmilling vibe. Too ridiculous to offend, worth it for the sheer wtf and the band’s bounce and grit.
Hong Kong Bar has been added to my playlist of 70’s burn-out freak blues tracks.
Happy Mondays
4/5
This is a dissolute old acquaintance. I it has more hooks and more variety in pacing than I remembered. A live version of WFL I heard years ago is still my favourite work of theirs.
A scary amount of time also I saw Bez DJ at the Exit Festival in Novi Sad. Actually, there was a dude next to him who seemed to be doing all the DJ-ing while Bez kept up something that could be called patter. I think I saw the actual DJ swat Bez’s hands away from a button or knob one time he tried to touch something. A fun set! My highlight was when he tried to rouse the crowd.
“Yo Bosnia!”
The crowd booed.
“Yo Serbia!”
The crowd cheered.
Lou Reed
4/5
Having never listened to "Transformer" before, this was a peculiar one for me as I'd heard most of the songs either in their earlier VU forms, or as the playlist-beloved bangers Vicious, Perfect Day, and Walk on the Wild Side. Taking those for granted left me with the rest: overall, solid, only New York Telephone Conversation and Goodnight Ladies failing for me. Hearing this in the context of the list, Perfect Day now sounds to me like Reed's go at a Brel song, a creditable one.
Haven't decided whether Make Up is lovely or annoying - it has more than a brush of a show tunes side to Reed that rivals Macca's music hall tendencies, which I find mostly horrible.
I had a double-take when I recognised Bowie's backing vocals. How many records can boast that?
This is a great album and a flawed one.
Sarah Vaughan
3/5
This is a classy specimen of music that I will enjoy in a bar, but will never take home with me. The off-the-peg nature of the songs plays on my mind, though I know good artists make others’ work their own.
The drumming is softly exquisite.
N.E.R.D
3/5
This is a well-curated selection of hooks, rhythm patterns, guitar bite and clever shifts that didn’t produce an earworm for me over a playthrough. During the first song, I joked to myself that N.E.R.D. remind me of my beloved Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, but without the snarl or Method-madness. This joke stuck, with a dollop of Beck added. Yet I’m not sure it delivers any tunes, just lots of good segments. It’s a wine-tasting menu rather than a meal; good fun, but leaves you hungry and queasy if you overindulge.
Lyrics are often yuck, but I laughed when I heard Pharrell Williams stage-whisper “chocolate flower”.
Beach House
2/5
“Soporific” needn’t be derogatory; my kid dozed to sounds like this when he was a baby. Laying into the music would be like kicking a sleeping puppy, and besides my leg’s nodded off. Let’s rest a somnolent 2, and pull the sheets over our heads, and communally wet our beds.
2/5
The black hole is Radiohead, and this record has passed the event horizon. On the other side sits God and Stephen Hawking. God’s hand stretches forth, rummages, and pulls out a latte. He hands it to Hawking. I wanted an espresso, not this beige shit, says Hawking.
Kendrick Lamar
3/5
This impressed me, but didn't move me. It puts a striking variety of sounds into a coherent package, and has a strong wobble, but I caught neither earworms nor rockers
It’s clearly intelligent and sounds like it wants to be behind a glass case in an art gallery rather than on the radio. I admire this modernity, yet I want more. As a friend put it, To Pimp A Butterfly feels machine-tooled.
David Bowie
5/5
Listening to Bowie’s great albums in random order and at random intervals is tremendous fun to this first time listener. So far, they’re all such complete, almost hermetic objects that thoughts of his career progression flutter off before they barely begin to form in my head. To me, this sounds like he lands on an idea, a form, embodies it utterly, and moves on. His melodic and lyric knack is constant, but at the service of whatever he has alighted on.
Station to Station is a majestic title. Contents are laid back, almost bar room ballad at times, but sheathed in this clean, futurist swoosh psychedelia. TVC15 is my favourite on this listen, though the cheeky quote of Good Morning Little Schoolgirl made me uneasy given the teenage fans Bowie allegedly slept with.
Of course, I returned to Stay after writing that, and maybe that’s my favourite: streamlining funk, it seems to casually invent a decadent strand of eighties pop.
De La Soul
3/5
Too long for its frugal sprinkling of strong tunes, it’s kept aloft by the charm of the style it mints. I’ve owned this for years, but never could concentrate long enough to hear the whole record. Overall glad I just did.
Barry Adamson
2/5
I respect Adamson - especially for Magazine - and admire the craft in this, and understand how this might work well as a film soundtrack. The words I caught are funny and entertaining; Jarvis Cocker’s opening turn is a grabber.
Those elements aside, this left no more impression on me than passing air.
Buck Owens
4/5
The alternation between happy and sad songs is suitably unsubtle, and I initially flinched at the mythical, shiny country archetype, but the beautiful guitar work and the compact snappiness of the songs pleased me, and the Chuck Berry cover is apt: I like to think this was an overt flag that the style took much from rock n roll - black music, put bluntly.
Amy Winehouse
2/5
The well-known songs - Rehab, Back to Black, a couple whose names I never learned - have kept their hooks in my memory, proof of Winehouse’s chops as this is of the aimless movement of movements that mark its era, artists that called back to greats with pantomime. In trying to sound both old and modern, the production has the chintzy artificiality of a badly retouched photo, Vanilla Ice pasted into the Yalta Conference. Back to the Future did it better.
Amy Winehouse was smart and witty with a jet plane voice that can still ambush with lines that shiv. Early on she appeared on a kid’s show play-acting in a butchers: “I always wanted to work with meat!” I immediately liked her, though not the music. She was treated disgracefully in ways that were obvious at the time and this record heralds trauma with a vuvuzela.
4/5
As usual, I start an unfamiliar The Kinks excited and ready to rave, and I end it wondering what has eluded me. I enjoyed this, the opening is a banger and Australia’s outright is godly, yet I’m still not in love. There’ll surely be more opportunities in this list: I’ll try again.
Joanna Newsom
3/5
I’ve had this remarkable album for almost two decades and I still don’t know what to do with it. Too intense to stay in the background, over a close listen it demands a commitment to its convolutions that I’m unwilling to give. It’s loaded with imagery and analogy that I’m too knackered to decipher, and while it sounds gorgeous and close (requiscat, Albini) and its intricate movements are dynamic, for anything to linger I’d have to march through it… well, I haven’t marched through it enough times yet.
I like this record, but “it’s complicated”.
The Stooges
5/5
This has never been the Stooges record I’ve reached for, so fierce is my love for the debut and Funhouse, yet all of these tunes present themselves in my deep memory. I’ve underrated this, a sublime version of an Aerosmith album.
Eminem
2/5
The cruelty is here to titillate rather than disquiet, domestic violence for jollies. Shame, as this is often funny, replete with bold and bright hooks and textures, and Eminem’s voice moves like an F1 car at Monaco.
Kendrick Lamar
3/5
My second Kendrick Lamar LP after To Pimp A Butterfly, and I like this one more. The production is as immaculate and confident; the content less ambitious and maybe the better for it. Still shows a preference for cleverness over tunes that scrapes against the pop superstructure. Asks a lot of a listener and pays back, but doesn’t follow through on the bravura opening.
Depeche Mode
3/5
This is a sulky thing, much of the time, putting on mum’s cocktail dress to sing sad songs before a full-length mirror, which may bring pride as well as solace.
The influences reach back past Kraftwerk to a Teutonic romanticism, which can be breathtaking and monotonous at the same time. The songs live in this brooding ambivalence that had me longing for some sort of resolution - a soaring climax, a scream, a hummable chorus, or even just a fat, loud power chord. But the record’s compositional logic would deem that inelegant.
“Nothing” promises a noir thrill ride with its menacing opening, but the John Carpenter-style synth riff ends up being back drop for pretty, abstract sound poses - I expected “Assault on Precinct 13” and received an Ingmar Bergman scene instead.
I liked this more the second time through. The vocals and lyrics are still sway too much in front of the mirror for me.
Kanye West
4/5
Listening to Yeezus was an extraordinary rendition to a Bosch landscape remade as a Looney Tunes cartoon, but run through a distortion pedal.
I hadn’t knowingly heard West’s work apart from the video with Will Oldham and Zack G, and I know enough about him to have readied the sick bucket over this record, but from the first sound this took me. The sex lyrics are always puerile, but many lines - including the dumb ones - will stay with me. This almost made me fall off my bike:
“I am a God
So hurry up with my damn massage
In a French-ass restaurant
Hurry up with my damn croissants”
He’s said some horrible things and is a jerk. But he isn’t well, and parts of this might support that. Will Oldham, a decent fellow, recently recommended an early Kanye record, adding “I will not engage, in this post, with the horrors of mental illness.”
Blood, Sweat & Tears
2/5
Broadway jazz rock is not my bag, but I hope it enriches others here.
The chunk of “Sunshine of Your Love” indicates how big a deal that riff was to that generation - Hendrix kept throwing it into sets, Skip Spence savaged it for his terrifying outro to “War On Peace”, and I’m pretty sure most guitarists coming after that generation learned that riff first. There’s also the amazing funk cover. Requiscat Jack Bruce.
The Mars Volta
2/5
Mars Volta are a band that for the last two decades I’ve blithely assumed to be terrible without giving them a chance, so I’ll strap myself to the mast and order the cabin boy to press play.
…sorry, the waves of raving voice and proficient axe-worked lulled me. Is that a Flea I hear at the low end?
This has a lot of dynamics and agitation that bring to mind post-hardcore botherers - Drive Like Jesu, say - but what I hear is not catchy. Cabin boy, listen: I’ve frolicked to enough freak music, free jazz, noise rock to fill a week of hedonistic abstract dance, and let me tell you repetition is not essential for catchiness. Want me to hum the opening to “Clear to Higher Time” by the Blue Humans to you? Wet my lips with rum, Seaman Staines, and bend your ear.
Memorable music doesn’t need repetition: there are blasts of random guitar feedback, drum fills, extravagant sweeps of synth and lone yells that I count among my favourite sound moments. I did not find that here.
Radiohead
3/5
Hard to write fairly with my teammate cracking his knuckles and carving pentagrams into his half of our desk; I’ll try. This album is a sterling encapsulation of why Generation X - my generation - will shortly replace the Boomers as the most loathed demographic in the richer bits of the world. It’s a sumptuous, decadent, no-expense-spared monument to self-pitying apathy. When I’m honest, I count “Airbag”’s riff as one of the most exciting openings to any rock record of the decade, before it moves on to arch self-sabotage and soaring solipsism.
“Paranoid Android” is a memorably annoying song with an ‘80’s teenager’s idea of a clever title. The loud part would be fantastic if it wasn’t so focussed on drawing attention to its own ridiculousness - why mock having fun when you can actually have fun? The song is representative of the whole.
Thom Yorke is a tremendously successful clunker lyricist, the load-bearer of Radiohead’s reputation for pretentiousness. Adherents call his lyrics cryptic as if this alone was praise, but there’s no mystery, nothing to hover over, just sad vibes in a stream of unanchored concrete nouns, sulky statements, and unhappy declarations that are too timid to call out anything or anyone specific.
Exquisite parts abound; I enjoy how Greenwood plays guitar, and his knack for stitching together disparate passages into a heaving, turbulent whole may never have been better demonstrated. The production is gigantic, which means we hear an assemblage rather than a band. The producer Godrich went on to work with Pavement on my least favourite of their records, which invites a comparison: whereas Pavement’s irony - in words and music - has a wistful, loving motive, Radiohead’s it at the service of a grandiose strop.
This is still the most enjoyable of their records. Onto you, Simon: make ‘em cry,
The Stone Roses
5/5
This is too great to fluke: I’ve heard demo versions of these songs that have made me flinch - they worked hard to reach this sparkling, weightless collection. The record’s retro in the same fashion as a Chesley Bonestell space station painting: a silver rocket weaving gliding past Saturn’s rings. They never matched this, but had they the octane to build on “Fool’s Gold” the result might’ve been even better.
2/5
The one playthrough I’ve allowed myself confused me. This has the aroma of inspired personal statement and is weird, reminding me of theme tunes from 90’s British TV shows, or The Beatles, but a The Beatles as interpreted by a stranger in a pub coming up to one and saying hey, listen to these new The Beatles tracks I’ve just written. And he sings them to you, in front of everyone. And you can’t move.
Tom Tom Club
3/5
Twenty one years ago we went on a road trip through the Deep South. Each of us made a mixtape and the songs I remember most from that trip were “Crime in the City” (Neil Young, Howard’s choice, the song that made me realise I like NY), “The Mercy Seat” (Johnny Cash covering Cave, Simon’s choice), “Love Spreads” (the Stone Roses, my choice as I thought it would be funny to bring a Manc version of Southern Rock), and “Genius of Love” (Dinah’s choice, maybe my favourite).
I bought this album when I got back and was disappointed. The first two tracks are great, the rest underwhelmed me. I’m pleased to discover today that the rest is better than I remember: throwaway, but happy. This isn’t a great album, but it’s lovelier than many better ones here.
Black Flag
3/5
These workmanlike rockers are elevated by Ginn’s skronky guitar, which sometimes sounds like Ornette Coleman. Rollins is an excellent barker; I had fun with this.
Sade
2/5
This is more a fragrance than a record. A delightful fragrance, but thin on tunes that would sit comfortably outside the end credits of a London-set made-for-VHS gangster movie in the eighties.
Simon, no prizes for guessing which of our project’s silent partners is a fan of this album.
David Bowie
4/5
Not all of this works for me, but most does, and those songs are great. The closer, The Bewlay Brothers, has just hit me like some weird force.
The Allman Brothers Band
2/5
I bought this years ago on the recommendation of a close family member who thinks it's fire. Having the same childhood grounding in blue rock, I can understand why and enjoy this as wallpaper, but the long hair on the cover belies the band's deadening formality: members dutifully queue up for their exhibitions before stepping gracefully aside, everything tasteful and in place, listen it's the organist's turn, the crowd cheers and my ears droop.
Pretty moments intrude - the last 90 seconds of "You Don't Love Me" - but otherwise this is faithful to its aspiration to be all about musicians chatting to each other in accepted modes; it's a little like a circle of Star Trek nerds quoting their favourite Star Trek quotes to each other in character. Heartfelt and of limited interest to this audience.
There is a place for lounge jam, but I live in no lounge and like salt with my bread.
CHIC
2/5
“Le Freak” is timeless, but what of the rest?
The opener’s alright. The hinterland between soul, disco and yacht rock has “Savoir Faire” as its capital: some immense vocal effort, or maybe a Kraftwerk power unit would raise it up; the guitar solo is a butterfly where an afterburner is needed.
“Happy Man” is as interesting as the experience of someone telling you they’re a happy man could be.
“I Want Your Love” is inarguably fab and makes me realise how most of the preceding songs missed Alfa Anderson’s vocals, which rule without effort, and redeem the long instrumental outro when they drop back in. She can’t redeem the mawkishness of “At Last I’m Free”, though, quite a yawn. “Sometimes You Win” is better, but not by much.
The closer is an extended piece of nothing.
My review references a CD generously donated by Kevin Rowland. I am grateful this record is on this list, as I doubt the other gift, “The Very Best Of The Blow Monkeys”, will come up.
The Wikipedia wormhole this sent me on was fun. Simon, are The Power Station any good?
Everything But The Girl
2/5
This week’s main theme has been flawed records with strong female vocalists. Everything But The Girl present the beigewave entry, maybe on a par with Sade, but not as good as Chic. There’s a better fey record hiding in here, I reckon.
I’ll save my lecture about the gentrification of jungle’s breakbeat innovations for an album I know is coming up, but leave here my prototype conclusion on that record: this takes one of the most energetic forms of the nineties and turns it into jogging music.
Including remixes of tracks already on the album seems weak - “maybe you’ll like this version” - and at a stretch I’d say maybe Neil Young’s bookending “Tonight’s the Night” versions could count as exceptions. The different versions of “Wrong” and “Walking Wounded” on here are not.
Run-D.M.C.
2/5
Important and ferocious fun at its best, which is “Tricky”, "Walk this Way" and the opener "Peter Piper", the rest part-validates the contemporary philistine's labelling of this as novelty music: behind the then-bold eruptions of mechanised horns and vinyl scratching there's not much to hang onto.
Eagles
3/5
Approaching Eagles’ “Eagles” for the first time as an informed Gen X’er presents an unscalable wall of antecedent verdict: I’ve seen the Big Lebowski; they’re the joke with the unavoidable long song. When “Take it Easy” choruses, I snap “complacent fools!” When “Witchy Woman” starts, I read the title, giggle and perform my undignified, middle-aged-man witchy woman dance. The third song is scorned just for its call to “chug all night”. Such pukey polish. Such a menu of cliches in the track listing. How smoothly this poison pours into the ears.
This is all involuntary. They did not hide what they were - “easy” features in two song titles.
I listened to this out loud in my in-laws apartment, which was a clarifying context. My father-in-law, a man who likes little post-1945 music papart from John Cage, had a good time being ironic with me: “très intelligent” and so on. “Earlybird” was a hit, particularly when my wife entered and liked it. Her dad and I preferred the experimental intro.: “ ils sont intellectuels. My two-year old demanded sight ofthe phone screen. We all had a good time.
This is better than anything Radiohead has ever done.
The Zutons
2/5
“Who Killed the Zutons” is an amiable record with thoughtful, esoteric arrangements: much goes on, but the record isn’t busy. This relaxed, bazaar vibe carries over to the songwriting, which is thought-out and tuneful yet feels barely there. A glass of lemonade and its gone.
Nice guys, I believe; I may have met one of them years back.
UB40
5/5
This may stick with me; I believe their claim to have rehearsed this album for around a year: it’s the leanest dub album I’ve heard. I’m also surprised by how heavy a dub album it is: so far, I haven’t found anything close on this list. The undersea wooziness is in place, as is the bass’s hypnotic dancing around a point, melodies skidding above and out, and there’s an intricacy to how all the different parts work together.
I’d heard but never listened to “Food For Thought” before: massive, right from “Ivory Madonna”, and it encapsulates the record’s overall feel: discontented and melancholic. The psychedelic lurches of the echoes and spaces here indicate dislocation rather than bliss. My usual obliviousness to lyrical content - especially when it’s political, like here - is bypassed by this inherent uneasiness.
The keyboard stabs on “King” are unearthly. “Burden of Shame” leans towards the weirder corners of surf rock, obviously in some of the theremin-like wobbles, but also in how it races towards the end. During “Madam Medusa” I started paying for attention to the percussion, especially the tip-toeing cymbals, and forgot where I was for a while - party music for the deep night.
Also, the cover is brilliant. A friend had warned me UB40 would surprise me. I waited for a misstep, but it’s a tight hour.
Public Enemy
5/5
No album embodies its politics more effectively. Its perspective is indelibly stamped on my skull since my teens. I hadn’t returned to it for a couple of decades: too long, too strident, an intensity that is more exhausting than invigorating. But its demands reward. It’s a university of noise that tapes ears and eyes wide open. The slamming shut of the sample copyright free-for-all soon after means we won’t see its like again. Flawed, oft-questionable, difficult to get through, but you don’t hang “Guernica” on a living room wall. So fast, so dense. “:..and John Wayne.”
Kanye West
3/5
This didn’t jolt me like “Yeezus”, but it’s still bizarre, bold and word-nimble enough to rise above West’s nastiness. Tip: the un-pixelated cover should be seen.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
3/5
Nick Cave’s music serves his words, which are well-assembled, but don’t stir me. The theatricality, the occasional archaism, and the storyteller mode might be too flat for me: I’m unconvinced, though I respect his conviction. The music’s fun, just lacking hook in their function as set-dressing.
This may also be the reason that the only PJ Harvey albums I love are her first two, the rock band ones; there are strong similarities, though she has more tunes and a better voice.
I prefer “Abbatoir Blues” of the two records, perhaps because I perceive more of the anarchy of James Johnston’s former band, Gallon Drunk.
Leonard Cohen
4/5
Ring assigned “Songs of Love and Hate” the day after a Nick Cave double album is a useful accident that has still failed to resolve into a conclusion: I can tell this is great, but the greatness is bouncing off a sun and booze-thickened skull tonight. “Joan of Arc” is playing a cheerful curse as I write this, so I can’t score this lower than 4. Also, “Avalanche”’s opening guitar rush is perfect for the title.
Queen
3/5
This meandering silliness is fun because it is full of Queen’s heaviness, Brian May wailing, crunching, chewing the scenery with Mercury, while bass and drums stomp and swagger. Didn’t know any of these tunes aside from the closer, and enjoyed this as a heavy Queen vibes repast, garnished with orc piffle.
I wrote most of the above only halfway through the album, sure that it would apply to the rest. And so it proved: a comfy time was had.
Jerry Lee Lewis
3/5
1. This is a two-gear, headlong exhibition of a style that was his: this rush cannot be mistaken for anyone else, regardless of whose songs he’s covering. He rocked fast and uniquely.
2.
The Didjits: “ Then we went over to Jerry's house
Everybody did a little bit of acid
We watched him kill one of his wives
We didn't care because we were so high”
Isaac Hayes
4/5
Three out of four songs are covers in the sense that “Ulysses” covers Homer: the originals provided scaffolding to large, intricate structures that take you to places distant from the base song. There’s improvisation here, but this isn’t a jam album. It’s too orchestrated; I listened to this twice over a flight and the premeditation became clear.
“By The Time I Get To Phoenix” simulates a singer’s preamble to a live audience that morphs into a story, bass, drums and organ in a soft loop until the song breaks out eight and a half minutes in. This built mild atmosphere when I wasn’t listening closely, impatience when I was; oddly, I thought of Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop”, which has a different vibe, different intentions, but makes you listen due to its repetition, not despite it - tense, going places - Phoenix is not far enough; and Vega’s voice, not comparable to Hayes, carries more conviction than Hayes’ here, as magisterial and rich as Hayes is. However, the last five minutes os “…Phoenix” redeems the song, rising into ecstatic abandon as the narrator loses himself.
Fleet Foxes
2/5
“They placed their guitar amplifiers in Native American tipis for aesthetics”, wrote the Wikipedia contributor, maybe a PR person, ticking off the “lackadaisical cultural appropriation” box in my “I-SPY: Hipster Roots Music” spotters’ guide. A decade or so back, deep in mid-gentrification East London, you couldn’t toss a carefree Molotov without immolating some tender Tarquin in a flat cap torturing a banjo and an oversized mic borrowed from Grandpapa, and while this album sorely lacks banjo, it completely captures that vibe of stealing nostalgia from bones in coffins. Throwing Brueghel’s “Netherlandish Proverbs” onto the cover for its “really weird stuff” is super-functioning hipsterdom, and teasing the listener with an opening song that is actually quite exciting before diving into monotonous, intricate, tuneless harmonising is exactly what their fans deserved. May your tipi burn bright, long and noiselessly.
Madness
3/5
The confidence of “Our House” is immediate and convincing: next to the rest of this amiable album, this declares itself the hit. The rest is fine, thoughtful and not without hummables, but don’t demand my attention. “New Delhi” brings the cringe.
Elliott Smith
3/5
I have this, probably because I loved "Good Will Hunting" when it came out. In an inversion of this list’s usual preference, this record has decent tunes undermined by a monotonous vibes.
Hey Simon, our ninth album on this odyssey was one of Smith's! To celebrate this, I shall misquote your half of our review:
"Get it together dude, you're dead but who cares?"
Mylo
2/5
Softy irony in the title, I listened to much of this in Walmart while on an evening emergency shopping expedition, finding it comforting and cute. I’m unlikely to return. Dance music albums are near oxymorons; they can get stranded outside a club.
Thelonious Monk
5/5
Jazz, outside the dance material, is conversation to me, with a bit of cinema thrown in, and this is fine swap of discourse, content with sticking to form rather than exploding it. I’m a dilettante, but I still know Rollins and Roach, and I hear how tight and free this is. Suffers from opening with the best track, not a complaint.
The Police
3/5
Les Flics were the biggest band on the planet when I was very little, and this astonishes me as now they seen faintly obscure, at the prog-edge of post punk, their hits far-off. Which is to say, we are near-guaranteed a heavy The IPolice revival shortly.
During the third track, another clever fragment, I expected a streamlined pop song to follow; instead, we have the cartoonishly ghastly “Mother”. This is funny! This is one the lightest big hitters for hits I’ve heard; there are weird excursions into synth rush, world music, folded-up sketches like “Mrs Gradenko”, and the band are snappy and sleek throughout. I really don’t know how to rate this.
Napalm Death
3/5
The two sides are remarkably consistent given the drummer is the only constant member, yet he does drive the show. I love many ugly records, but they need to have charisma or flourish, which this purposely eschews: grindcore is grimy and smelly, though there’s joy in this, glee too. I admire this record and probably won’t listen to it again. The toddler liked this, perhaps because I referred to it “as poo poo music”. When we had Taylor Swift on in the car later, he protested and asked for poo poo music.
Super Furry Animals
3/5
Highly likeable, all round vibe of being fun to be in the pub with, but none of the tunes stick.
T. Rex
5/5
This is a rich album, low-key brilliant and heavy. Opener aside, none of the songs called themselves out as hits over the single play-through my day afforded me; they feel too cool for that, have stick but don’t pander, a hangover record. I drank it up. The feints towards LED Zeppelin threaten to eclipse the originals, “Chariot Choogle” coming off as a Dadaist “Kashmir”.
The Kinks
5/5
I’ve been pecking at this album every few years for the last twenty, aware of its importance while struggling to obtain purchase, reminded of successors that slapped on their nostalgia for Davies’s real nostalgia, creating a simulacrum of nostalgia, a double-fake of a world that preceded these faux-nostalgists - have you ever been to a carnival? have you heard music hall in a music hall? do you think that rations are something that Solid Snake picks up to recoup HP? - which proved the avant garde of Brexit and the pints of Spitfires and blue passports in their train.
And after writing that, I stopped, wondered what I’d say besides “Blur” if someone asked me to name one of these bands. And I quite like some Blur.
I blame the power of this album’s nostalgia, which is portable and can be passed around. Pick it up and you feel it, regardless of the century you were born in.
On return, every hook reveals to have been embedded deep: this is almighty, and also pleasingly sinister, often seedy, which it should be. What finally persuaded me over this listen is the tiny repetitive interstitial guitar riff that pedals “…Walter” along its last few seconds. They’re a accoutrement that makes the song, driving, sleazy and anxious at the same time. They’re so memorable that I was sure they played throughout the entire song, shocking me just now when I went back and found they only come in at the death, two up-down repetitions and then done.
“Monica”’s throwaway calypso is my favourite, at least this evening.
Jefferson Airplane
3/5
If it’s written by a Slick, it does the trick. If it’s written by another, no need to bother.
ABBA
4/5
Love the singles, “Arrival” and at least half of “Happy Hawaii”. Had I the time, I’d talk to Simon’s excellent comment re inverse snobbery and ABBA, which made me felt looked at. To be clear, I think they are a good few tiers above Ace of Bass, but I hear the europop awkwardness outside the singles. I think they built their own world.
The Cure
2/5
Ponderous, plodding, repetitive, yet for some reason this didn’t seduce me! I like the elements, though I tired of hearing Robert sing from the vast hall next door, and the drums began to sound too flat, tired.
Christina Aguilera
2/5
This exercise presents the odd revelation, such as this: despite my being mostly a “vocals optional”* kind of listener, there are certain singers who bring involuntary quivers to my ears and knees, and Christina Aguilera turns out to be one of them.
This is not a good album: the first half is passable, but lacks the bangers of its predecessor; the second half is an unfortunate descendent of Madonna’s “Hankie Pankie” period. Yet Cortina’s charisma and sheer belt kept me interested. I had fun until the faux-jazz smothered it. She’s one of the few pop singers of her generation I could pick out in a blind lineup.
The loudly saucy lyrics also kept my spirits up. I’m guessing some might turn their noses up at the wobbly mix of emancipatory vibes and “I’m diiirtyy” provocations, but life’s too short to have your cock and not eat it.
Simon, this reminded me that I only put two pop songs on my playlist for our 2003 Deep South trip and that “Beautiful” was one of them. Can you remember the other?
*Steve Albini
Beatles
3/5
The rich, attentive quality of this recording almost kills the set’s cacophony. The songs are caught between the clattering rush I imagine their Hamburg shows were and whatever it was that they were about to become. Love the deep, twanging guitars, impatient to get past the covers, I’m interested in this half-formed thing.
Sam Cooke
5/5
Sam Cooke’s a reputation I’d associate with greatness, but no particular songs. He’s got a special sizzle to his voice, I thought as this started. Hey, I know this song. This one too. And this one. Is this a set of covers?
I look it up.
Ah.
He’s one of those progenitor types. This record gives a good impression of what it must have been like to hear classics as they’re minted.
Crowded House
4/5
This took three listens to stick; “Fall At Your Feet” and “Weather With You” drew immediate nostalgic swoon, the rest slighter on first touch. A couple of listens later I think this is a triumph from the Antipodean School of Fey. I nervously await Simon’s verdict for the true measure of its feyness.
LL Cool J
3/5
I think it was this version of "Jingling Baby" that a friend put on a beloved mixtape he gave me when we were teens, and a nostalgic joy hit me when it came on here, as I hadn't heard it in over a decade; I never knew it was LL Cool J, though I knew his name. Such swerve, the samples career and race. Much of this album is like that, though it is 20 minutes too long.
The Magnetic Fields
3/5
Once my apoplexy settled, I began listening and realised that I would have a much better time appreciating this as a work of conceptual art rather than something so gauche as a triple album of adult nursery songs. White Cubing it made the record decent company for two long commute rides and the spreadsheet I’m finishing while I write this. 69LS wears its beret even in the title, which has the right vibe of self-conscious smugness and defensive self-deprecation; while the song-elements of the work are not to my taste, their arrangement is intelligent, these components distinguishing themselves sufficiently to intrude on my consciousness with various novelties, like an electronic seagull riff or the faux jazz part or gentle verbal smart arsery. My notes coalesce around “Christian Marclay remakes “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” from a thousand outtakes of John Candy talking, preceded by a title card reading “You are the Steve Martin”.”
Simon, I couldn’t resist reading your tirade before writing. What did the family think of this experiment?
Garbage
2/5
I forgot to write this review last night, which tells us something. I associate Garbage with a mini-movement of bands that took the beigest elements of trip-hope - the beigest genre- and slapped them on watered down grunge or shoegaze (Sneaker Pimps for the former, Curve for the latter), and bored me. A couple of ok singles, I guess, and a wash of beige.
Jungle Brothers
4/5
Another band known but unheard until today, the purposeful awkwardness, the harshness of sample transitions, and surprising air of menace offset the idealism and hop of the record. Prepared for the usual overlong hour, I was impressed with the variety and, on a couple of occasions, the banging dance rhythms that had me on my toes in the kitchen this afternoon, a rare experience for me and this list.
Only one listen, so not sure if this has a claim to the pantheon. Close if not.
Sonic Youth
5/5
“What an album” was my involuntary remark when this appeared on my screen. This confused me when I first heard it, as I’d heard mostly live recordings of Sonic Youth, which I loved for their first race car-jet engine squeals and whooshes; this is slower, weirder, less direct, now all reasons why this is one of my favourites. “Daydream Nation” is probably an inch higher in my affections, but I could make an argument that this has a better set of songs.
For anyone wanting to hear the jet plane, fast rock band versions of these songs, there’s a live recording called “Hold that Tiger” from this time, a set in Chicago introduced by you-know-who, and it’s an absolute blast, a band at their peak”. Available on Bandcamp, I see.
The Specials
4/5
This had the playful wobbliness of great dub, frequently surprising toylike sounds, and the sort of inventiveness that comes off as utterly free while born of hard experimentation. There’s a sour, sometimes nasty tang to the lyrics, which is era-appropriate, as is the Latin American burst on Holiday Fortnight.
Basement Jaxx
2/5
Music for negotiating premium sex contracts in a Mayfair club is a genre I’ve never followed, but I can respect the craft and hope that this bought some people happiness.
Def Leppard
4/5
“Hysteria” was tipped to me by a trusted nerd as fireworks, but I didn't expect to play it four times over a busy weekend. Their song structures still elude me - is it as simple as having passable riffs doubled with slightly-too-high soccer terrace chants, broken up by dueling solos and peculiarly placed pauses and instrumental lurches? Simon, is this my prog?
Def Leppard were a laughable proposition at every stage of my early sink into music, too ridiculous and preened when I was experimenting with metal, even more ridiculous and obviously corporate whorish when I was gorging on grunge and pre-grunge, and not even a consideration when I moved into what my wife calls “boiler music” (“This sounds like a boiler”). Apart from the hair, my lasting impression of them before this weekend came from Rick Allen's guest-appearance on the popular British children’s program, “The Sooty Show”, which made me think he’s a nice dude, one unusually natural when jamming with a band of glove puppets.
The band’s name is a successfully more-stupid homage to that of Led Zeppelin’s.
My research indicates that many of this record’s participants were often drunk, heavily drunk, during this important time of their lives, though perhaps not so drunk in the studio, which has me wonder how this affected the songs. There is a boozy optimism to this record, and most of the lyrics work very well if you imagine slurring them off your face: the chorus of “Animal” cries to be grunted and bellowed. Lyrics have the mystical quality of an insistent pub lush, an unspoken “you all know what I mean” hanging at the end of each line. The music has mood swings - sweeping choruses trip into stomping marches, impressionistic instrumentals jump-cut to air-horn versification - and the general sense of not always being aware of where to go next, usually resolving with an impassioned football-chant chorus or a guitar rockslide.
Played at super-low volume, the shrillness of the drums pierce unpleasantly, but maybe they need this to stab through layers and layers of absurdist guitar. These guitars are a joy with their many whooshing, dramatic sounds; like a hairspray Sonic Youth! I am also reminded of peak Ted Nugent, but without the paedophilia, which I hope we can agree is a plus.
Gil Scott-Heron
4/5
“The Bottle” runs away with this LP - that bumble-bee bassline alone unmoored my eyeballs - but this is a sweet record. The quietness of “Song for Bobby Smith” stuck close to me.
Heron’s voice doesn’t bang it out with his contemporaries in the song forms he’s playing with here, but I like its matter-of-factness, his talking the melodies - he plays to his strengths even here.
The record’s atypical for Gil Scott Heron, more tuneful, jazzier, less rap, less fierce, and deserved more than today’a inattentive playthrough and the later, urgent skip across for better grasp. “Winter in America” is a terrific title. Brian Jackson’s work is sometimes luminous, bell-like in its resonance; cheerfully Broadway elsewhere. But are the songs strong enough to make this a great?
One listen was not enough to convince. Skipping through again, I hear much that is exquisite, I don’t think I can bear rating this a three a day after giving Def Leopard a four, and “Rivers of My Fathers” might pay back its duration, so to conclude….
Randy Newman
3/5
The winsome rubberiness of Newman's voice called me back, so dispelling the suspicion of kitsch and corn I held over the songs. Deceptively easy, they have splinters and the odd refrain I found myself singing back.
Throbbing Gristle
4/5
Pointedly ugly music can be sublime in combination with the right elements: it can overwhelm, it can frighten, it can rock. “D.O.A” sometimes does each of these, but overall feels more like documentary to me, a personal rendering to what it felt like to live in the arse-end of Britain’s industrial-social decay. As such, often it is ugly-ugly.
I’d never got round to this record before as I’d assumed it would be a admirably miserable listen, so I’m relieved there’s much of what makes their successors great in this, though it is frequently too on-the-nose for my taste.
Rounding up to a 4 as a lot of the discourse here is “this is not art/it’s just random noise”, which is so basic the basic riposte is demanded: you couldn’t make this if you tried, lame-o!
Grant Lee Buffalo
2/5
Unfair, maybe, but I lump GLB into a big pail of grunge-Americana slop that were never far over the nineties, a bunch that sang as if they were passing a heavy load, some distortion but not many tunes: Afghan Wigs, Buffalo Tom, Giant Sand, Screaming Trees, you know the lot, their commercial apex probably the execrable Ryan Adams, or Pearl Jam at not much of a stretch. There were some interesting off-shoots - I keep meaning to spend more time with Thin White Rope's howling guitars, for example - but not many tunes I can remember.
The rockier stuff at the end of "Fuzzy" has definite pulse, but I doubt another five run throughs will reveal any tunes, and having your face on the album cover is rarely a good look.
The Thrills
3/5
Noughties “The…” bands appear here like a goal with posts moved to corner flags, the keeper kicked in the balls. Seeing this pop up, I was ready to put another notch in my cricket bat. But I couldn’t do it, those big wide eyes looking up at me. This falls beyond the point where simple naivety transforms into fantasy, and I found its helpless cheer sweet.
Morrissey
3/5
Is the art beholden to the artist, or can it jettison the maker’s flaws?
The songs do their part, never surprising, but carrying his romantic sting with confidence, and they don’t hang around. The impression of watching a poison-pen writer dance to themselves from behind a one-way mirror is present. Keep yourselves buttoned; he knows we’re here.
The sound is apt: big, dense, surging, regal, with the notes of antiquarianism he wielded in The Smiths - pub chat and siren sounds in Spring-Heeled Jack, not to mention the title itself - the purposefully old beside the modern, out-and-out grandeur never far. Reading the notes, I see Boz Boorer and Alain Whyte deserve more prominence than the blanket “Morrissey” branding allows.
Generally, I keep personal life out of these reviews, but context can creep in. As recent arrivals in this country, we’re trying to fit in and be worthy citizens, so in that spirit went on a march today to help safeguard our new home. As we chanted at a cruise ship and burned stuff (libraries with foreign books, a burrito stall, Mazdas), the delicate melodies of Stephen Morrissey synched to our rowdier nativist cries… Immigrants go home, immigrants go home, I heard him sing as smoke curled wistfully over downtown Vancouver.
Ananda Shankar
2/5
“Sagar” has force, otherwise an unremarkable mix with a couple of unflattering covers, the whole veering too often close to muzak, and not the interesting kind.
Beck
3/5
”Sea Changes” has a good title and a shushing, lullaby swing to it that grew on me over a day without ever sticking. There are some gorgeous chord changes, though none without some nagging sense of familiarity, Beck’s magpie nature never fully sublimated into free invention.
It’s very tasteful: Beck curates a fine selection of influences. “Paper Tiger” was moving me more than I could rationalise until I realised it’s an adroit lift of Jean-Claude Vannier‘s sorcery on “Hiistoire de Melody Nelson”.
Much of this record’s emotional weight may be carried by the mumbled lyrics. The mumbling is easy on the ear, but no line snagged, just conveying Sad Beck is Sad.
John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers
4/5
Forget Clapton, doesn’t McVie look so young on the cover? This is one of my dad’s foundational albums, and though I’d never listened to it front to back, enough has been sucked deep that I can’t clearly judge it. Still, some fragments:
Like many albums here, it’s off-the-cuff, a snapshot the band probably thought they’d repeat and better, which gives it a liveliness almost unique to the period.
Clapton’s set in here like the band’s jewel and, maybe for the only time in his career, he sounds relaxed, almost conversational in his playing.
Macclesfield man Mayall had a soulful croon.
For an album that’s meant to have influenced many, it sounds surprisingly antiquated, an eccentric object made for purposes long left behind. This is a sort of timelessness.
Nice rhythm section: this swings.
There is a reasonable chance me or my partner in this exercise may have been let into a college by Hughie Flint, the band’s drummer. I can’t remember if I ever followed up on my dad’s exhortations to look him up.
I’ll leave the last word to my dad, who wrote this to me today:
“It stands still as the record that really opened my mind to music outside of the record charts, because then without Internet radio was the only vehicle outside of seeing live music or listening to records. TV was black and white. Gus Dudgeon was the engineer who listened to Clapton and how he wanted the guitar to be recorded. Have You Heard still stands up for me.”
Brian Eno
3/5
The middle vocal loops are too New Age to me, while the opener and closer are gorgeous. Having got into ambient music through friends a couple of decades ago, coming to this for the first time is peculiar; I was expecting something even more abstract or perhaps sublime, and my initial thought was that this is almost too tuneful to be ambient. 1/1 and 2/2 earn the stars.
New York Dolls
4/5
Some dunce gulled me into thinking this was a “haircuts first band”, so I’ve missed out on this pleasure for decades.
This belongs to a raunchy lineage of weirdos from Little Richard through MC5, the Stooges and maybe the best of the bunch, Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, who tragically almost entirely exist as bootlegs. This doesn’t have any out-and-out revelations, but no song is dull, and most are fascinating - “Frankenstein” seems to avoid chorusing or climaxing out of some perverted need rather than lack - and I’m often caught out by a voice or guitar or some unidentified crash jumping out of the mix. The lyrics are stand out, really rare for me on this list, mainly because they’re the right kind of stupid-deranged. “Subway Train” might be the best train song I’ve heard on this list yet.
I’ll be back here again. Yes, Simon, I do prefer this to “Exile…”, great call!
FKA twigs
2/5
The concept of this robotic smooch music and its reverberating post-punk hall of mirrors appeals to me, but the tracks feel like sketches sung rather than tunes, and the sound alone is not beguiling enough to carry an LP. At times I heard a resemblance to Kate Bush; other times I wondered if this was what listening to an Enya album without the hit(s) would be like.
Dizzee Rascal
3/5
This might be brilliant and on a day with less grind I might have enjoyed it more. The unruly rubber-banding around the beat of Dizzee Rascal’s voice and the bracingly harsh electronic bangs and booms rub against his character-driven stories, earning the applause. But I’m not sure in what moods I could drink this in happily; certainly not today’s. And maybe this is a little too long. Brilliant, probably.
Liz Phair
3/5
The dirge-like grunge voice dates this within a few seconds of play and I found the first few songs dull. The blow job-cunt lyrics provoke in the pointless manner beloved of my generation, and the de rigeur Prozac’d detachment in their delivery gets grey quick along with the wash of nondescript guitar on most of the tracks. Still, there are touches - the blast of harmonica on “Soap Star Joe”, the surprisingly cute guitar solo of “Mesmerizing” - that break monotony, and “Never Said” is a decent yell-along. The record has enough rockers here to make a strong 35 minutes.
Leonard Cohen
4/5
A pinch of monotony can be a spice, one of my conclusions as I slowly rotated from scepticism about this record’s polish and reserve to getting its cool and the force of tough words delivered drily. Reading a little about Cohen helped: I originally mistook the hard effort behind the deadpan facade as dilettante disinterest.
Jethro Tull
4/5
Hey Simon, let’s play “I have never”! Let me give you a head start: “I have never conflated Jethro Tull and Hawkwind for decades, maybe because I assumed Hawkwind had to involve flutes”. <Downs a flagon of jizzy English cider>
Devil’s teeth, prog! So many units to a song! Happily, most units rock. This is fun, and the lyrics have pungent imagery and vocal kick, offsetting the dangerously bucolic interludes. Martin Barre’s amp slays faces. “Hyme 43” sounds like a correct version of Southern Rock. No complaints here!
Can
5/5
At times “Future Days” drops its slight concessions to continuity and song to dissolve into sunny daubs and doodles, with only Liebezeit’s blissful, maddeningly tight percussion driving us on. A friend once described this as his perfect summer album and now I agree with him.
Elastica
3/5
One of the most memorable facial expressions I've seen that didn't involve sex or injury was displayed by a nice young Québécois when I played him Wire's "Three Girl Rhumba" after he told me Elastica were his favourite band. "But this changes everything!"
Am I allowed to say I prefer "Connection"? Directly quoting Wire bangers in the opening two songs is too on-the-nose, but I note in both instances the lifted parts aren’t made the main hooks. The argument for homage is stronger than that for straightforward plagiarism.
This is a better record than I remembered. There are songs with swerve and guitar work that often puts one off-balance - spiky stuff, to use a journo word. There are more good songs here than I gave credit for - “Waking Up” and “2:1” are a comely pair - but then again there is also “Indian Song”, which raises the grisly spectre of a post-punk Kula Shakur.
Will Simon retell his magnificent Elastica answering machine story? I am looking forward to him explaining exactly why I am a grotesquely ugly freak in lofting this up to a THREE.
Joni Mitchell
5/5
Glad I’ve finally listened to this properly; I need more time, as the lyrics have the density of poetry, and must settle. This is as close as I’ve heard in record to the Beat ideal, a series of glimpses and startling images combined for revelatory effect. Mitchell appears to have given Pastorious the record and just said, please bass all over this, and the result is glorious, gives the record the feel of rolling on waves or undulating tarmac.
Richard Thompson
5/5
"The Bright Lights Tonight" has been warm company over a weekend of heavy rain.
I know folk music through my dad, one of the many Brit-blues believers who jumped to folk during the schism when Led Zeppelin lead the charge to heavier, distorted grub. Folk has seeped into me, but I'm suspicious of its archaisms. What’s so great about the imagined past? What are they hiding? On the other hand, I saw John Renbourne play in a tiny community centre in Poynton and he casually slew faces and was fun with it.
There’s a playfulness on this album, a happy willingness to rock when fits, instruments duelling, sad songs followed by boogies, all held together by those two lead voices. The title track’s one of several bangers; I wish they had just one more to break up the bleak last two.
American Music Club
3/5
This is one of the better - and earlier - grunge-adjacent roots rock LPs I’ve heard, not far from REM, but with flurries of howling guitar that remind me of the pretty great Thin White Rope. This is not music I’d dine with, but I’m content to share a few minutes at the espresso bar.
The Replacements
4/5
“Unsatisfied” is a smashing song, the rest good, just not up there with it.
B.B. King
5/5
There’s joy in this, which I don’t hear often, especially not in what’s called the blues. The songs are mostly rhythmic containers for King’s Heaven’s trumpet of a voice, the melodies he makes with it, and his guitar chatter, which is the exact opposite of the solemn, respectful, dusty stuff that his fans made after. A couple of times his guitars makes a big “PARP”, or clears its throat, moves onto the next bit of chat. I had fun with this today.
Sigur Rós
4/5
Simon:
1. I have this, but probably made it never all the way through before today, due to its length.
2. Did you ever go to a majestically dingy club called The Foundry wedged between Great Eastern St and Old St? Some friends played strange and sometimes obnoxious music to other weirdos there in the early noughties, and among gruesome remixes of “The Lady in Red” and the “Eastenders” theme, a constant was the set ending with “Svefn-g-englar”, which is enchanting.
3. There are some sumptuous textures and melodies in here, and it builds a consistent sound-world for itself, which I like. However, there’s not enough grit in there to keep me from sliding off. The sixth song flashes a spot of Dave Brubeck before the wailing guitars and epic whispering return, and I’m extending my arms going no, no, bring back sexy Brubeck, which is a dangerous move when driving a car.
4. I saw Sigur Ros support Radiohead along with Beck, and I must report R Head were surprisingly fun while SigRo sounded lost and missable, while Beck as just dull. Don’t worry, I didn’t pay.
5. There’s something a little cute or twee to the vibe, the silliness of singing sometimes in a made-up language fitting, trading in darkness that is more Tim Burton than David Lynch.
6. A later album, “Kveikur", has a song called “Isjaki" that has an urgency absent here, and is my favourite track of theirs along with "Svefn-g-englar”.
7. Homework noted with thanks.
PJ Harvey
5/5
RoM is my favourite PJH LP, a knock out, a rocker, a total demon of a record. Grabbed this on release, already a noise-head going through an extended William Burroughs-phase, so I was an easy mark for this body-centric drama wrapped in the sound of a electric band pressed up against the ears.
“Warts and all” was a description that I read when it came out, which I take to refer to how you can hear picks scraping on string, that sense of all the instruments being very close. As others noted, the stark B&W body photos on the sleeve are of the piece.
The original CD was strangely quiet; a recent remaster appears to have fixed this while maintaining the acrobatic dynamics that entranced me back then.
Alanis Morissette
3/5
May the protagonists in her songs look back on this as fondly as I do now.
Sneered at it back then, now see it for what it is: a strong set of wailers with all the contemporary alt-rock bells and whistles, powered by a voice that seems to embody domestic discord, which is not a criticism.
Fun Lovin' Criminals
2/5
This is another record I scorned on principle back in the ‘90’s for reasons that matter less to me today: it’s modish, affected, and unafraid of cliché - featuring Tarantino samples on its biggest hit manages to hit all three. But is it fun?
A little, not much.
Beth Orton
2/5
High-quality beige wave is my after-one-minute review.
This passed through my evening with the apologetic air of a vicar’s fart, but it did awaken a lost craving: I time for some Butthole Siurfers.
Prefab Sprout
3/5
This has as many boring songs as good or great ones, but even the boring songs are interesting. I read that Paddy McAloon trained to be a priest, which fits his delivery: “Desire As”, one of the flat tracks, sounds like it is being read from a codex. Why is “Horsin’ Around” on this record? God knows.
Doves
2/5
Scene: an inn high up in the Pennines, grim-faced village folk drinking pints served in large Yorkshire puddings, staring at Doves on a small stage. Ham and eggs are everywhere. We confer at back.
Me: "They sound like Coldplay, but with the tunes surgically excised."
Simon: "You hate Coldplay."
The audience murmurs:
“Threw out baby and left bathwater.”
“Sounds soft.”
“Nowt always wrong with soft, Heathcliff.”
The ham and eggs start to stir, the pints in puddings too. Soon the air will be full of them. The band huddle; they play on.
The audience draw closer.
The night presses closer.
Pulp
4/5
“This Is Hardcore”’s sales pitch offers exhaustion: over an hour of post-Britpop malaise. What I found was a hang out, a place I happily spent much of a busy day in. Cocker’s heavily in hock to Bowie here, but his personality never completely disappears under the Dave-face, and the regret on display is of the decadent kind, which I always find more appealing. The diversity of sounds plays well to this theme, a woozily over-boozed box of liqueur chocolates. The band rock hard, which is not what I would usually turn to Pulp for, and while it has no absolute bangers, the songs have depth and I didn’t want to skip any of them on later playthroughs, though some could be shorter. Decadence is a pose against mortality.
Good luck to us all tomorrow x
Moby Grape
4/5
Crank this up, listen to what’s going on behind the vocals, and if you like guitars you will have a good time. The songs are mostly basic, houses for webs of fret runs, rhythm chug and filigree parts that are subliminal until you notice them and after a while are all you can focus on. I am surprised this works just as well on a ballad like 8:05 as it does on the rave ups that sit next to it. The singing does little for me, mostly, too many voices going lalala, though “Someday” is cute.
“Sitting by the Window” passes so fast it took me a few listens to realise how much is going on in there.
Reading up on them, Moby Grape were cursed by bad luck, an evil manager and mental illness. Skip Spence went on to make a freak masterpiece, “Oar”, before he stopped making music.
Coldcut
3/5
This lovingly-machined, possibly revolutionary, party music can, on the wrong sort of day - like now - have the secondary function of being a biting Dadaist taunt.
The Who
5/5
As I’ve written elsewhere, The Who formed my primal conception of rock when I was a kid, which has left me conflicted by their wild troughs and peaks. I love “Live at Leeds” despite the songs.
This album appears to be the one where they stashed most of their great tracks. Even the Ox’s “My Wife”, a mostly-nothing of the song, is elevated by a brilliant outro that makes me want to listen to the rest of the song again as just build-up to those few seconds at the end. The rest of the album is banger pressed to banger, no weakness.
The promise of “Tommy” groping its way towards us on this list still makes me shudder uncontrollably, mind.
The Damned
4/5
After the first playthrough, I thought I had the measure of this: charming, typical of the era, slip on the next one. The luxury of a weekend had me listen to it three more times: there’s more here, looking forward to post-punk and hardcore - the pretty piano of “Melody Lee” slams into the barre-chord blur that Minor Threat later colonised - looking back to the Stones and the Stooges. No-one told me Captain Sensible was a guitar ace. Not perfect, but it wasn’t trying to be.
Sebadoh
3/5
“Bubble & Scrape” is one of a few records here that I avoided on release, probably because I’d heard they were soft and back then all I wanted was hard. Yet it feels familiar and brings nostalgia; the sound’s an archetype, one I could place and probably attribute blind despite having never consciously listening to Sebadoh apart from the likely Peel spins.
I bet a far smaller percentage of Sebadoh’s bedwetter brigade vote Trump than do Green River fans, and I wish this more empathetic wing of Gen X had survived contact with the Millenium Bug and made it to the post-End of History.
It’s overlong, pretty passages matched by workmanlike grunge porridge, marker of a democratic attitude to letting every band member have their fair slice of the vinyl pizza. This is a peak 3/5 record and I’m glad it’s here.
Bob Weston of Shellac engineered this, a credit that fits: a sweet man recording a sweet record.
John Martyn
4/5
“What the fuck it this?” I noted with a frisson within a few seconds of putting this on last night. Yacht rock-jazz fusion left me baffled and unanchored: promising sensations!
A day in, I am still perplexed, but I do like this dolphin make-out music!
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
4/5
My awareness of Tom Petty is mostly from the most popular answer to the cruel question “who was the ugliest Traveling Wilbury?”
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ mission statement could well have been that evinced by Adhewood’s Nice Pete: “It will just be good music, played well by men.”
The choruses, apart from “American Girl”, are polite and colloquial rather than compulsive and rapturous - and this is not a criticism. I can’t explain why “Anything That’s Rock ‘n’ Roll” made me weep a little as I drove across Burrard St Bridge in the rain tonight, but it did.
This is music made for bars, American bars, played well by men, American men. Unisex in appeal, possibly sexless. Sometimes comfort is the most one is ready to accept from art.
Nice Pete is a serial killer, I must add.
Sisters Of Mercy
3/5
The foregrounding of the drum machine and heavy synth strops is confident and charismatic. Apart from the refrain of “This Corrosion”, the songs themselves didn’t seduce me.
Elvis Presley
4/5
The mores, beliefs and underpinning cultural iconography of the United States are particularly mysterious and prominent right now for unfortunate reasons, and because I’ve been given a rainy weekend to listen to “From Elvis in Memphis”, a record I’ve owned but never spent much time with in the 21 years since I visited Presley’s grave by his swimming pool, I’m gnawing at what exactly is this thing.
Bear with me here, Simon. Consensus deems “Suspicious Minds” part of this set, so we’re doing the bonus, deluxe, long black limousine version.
This is intentionally a juggernaut product, the star manoeuvred by competing parties into slamming out a set of bangers to a crack band for maximum audience. Where the man himself sits in this is unknowable, as by this point he was the nexus of a teeming mass of hucksters, producers, hangers-on, quacks, chefs, cutthroats, pilots, god botherers, writers and musicians, warring to bring out the King’s essence, his ideal form, and sales allege that they were successful.
How deliberate is the Gospel in his voice? He leans heavily into his church voice throughout, which gets weird when he gets sexy, and maybe that’s a hook. Apart from the Christianity, pop folklore is pumped through the subjects of the songs. The writers knew their stories, knew who they were writing for.
“Wearin’ the loved on look” warns against signs of happiness in a beloved.
“Only the strong will survive” tells you to listen to your mum and be ready to crush your lovers.
In “I’ll hold you in my heart” the physical intimacy turns his voice rubbery, his words to nonsense, his assertions becoming mockery.
Here comes God again on “True love travels on a gravel road” to declare that love, similar to happiness, is only valid through constant suffering.
The Chicago of “I’m the Ghetto” is a Southerner’s nightmare of the multiracial metropolises of the North, yet this is the liberal song.
“Suspicious Minds” is his best song and might be about paranoia, but he sings it as if he is singing about anything or nothing.
The bass tattoos itself on memory, the whole band is a blast. Crucifix in one hand, willy in the other, shotguns aimed high in salute, an enormous sandwich stuffed in face: this is America.
The National
2/5
Do you like greeting card poetry filtered through a bad head cold? If so, golly I have found the record for you!
This deals with dramatic build-ups and refrains, but is short on chorus or climax. Exquisite craft, dull material.
Grateful Dead
3/5
Pleasant and harmless, this record evokes the voice of my German friend Lars when I tried to sneak on the stereo some Neil Young - “Zuma” - at a party, and he called it out immediately: “what is this hippy shit?”
My instinct is to sacrifice this to my old friend Lazer, whom I haven’t seen in years, and likes to watch cars burn. Yet I managed to listen to this four times today, never stirred, but at ease. There’s a place for comfort.
New Order
3/5
I like New Order and occasionally am swept away by them. Their records are cool, elegant, and are unmistakably theirs. Yet the albums never hold my attention. I feel like it’s music for a lifestyle that is admirable from afar, but for which I would never find the right shoes to wear.
10cc
2/5
Inner Beavis and Butthead: “They call this “sheet music”? Hehe heheh heheh I guess they got that right.”
A “best of” 10cc tape did a lot of time in my dad’s car, so “The Wall Street Shuffle” and “Silly Love” default to the I’ll-never-be-a-child-again-o-god-innocence bucket. Those two songs are silly, but pretty cool. I listened to this album twice and conclude that the rest of the songs are silly, but not cool.
I just learned 10cc were from Stockport; maybe five years after my dad’s tape was retired, we moved to a village ten miles south of this post-industrial town which became a place for me to buy music. What were my first purchases from Our Price, Stockport? “Sister” by Sonic Youth and “Pigpile” by Big Black. Time is spaghetti thrown against the wall.
10cc produced at least one masterpiece, the eerie “I’m not in love”, a freak accidents where studio tinkering created something unlike anything else.
The Slits
5/5
“Cut” by The Slits has made a new category in my memory’s bombed-out music library, albums for which my primary pleasure is thinking about them rather than listening to them, though pleasures are found there too. Retrospectively I’m slotting last week’s “From Elvis in Memphis” into this category.
Listening to this, the thought that “Cut” is a multimedia experience condensed onto disc emerged and stuck. There’s so much going on here - dub, punk, scathing irony and Dadaist manifesto disguised as nursery rhyme - that it extends beyond the sound, exists as a conceptual work as well as a record, a gallery of ideas I am strolling through now while I wonder what to write next.
How about Ari Up’s sublimation of her paternal schlager roots? Her accent immediately did something funny to my brain; I’ve spent enough nights listening to freak music with nerds in Berlin to recognise that deep tendency to both mock and embrace the hard sentimental romanticism of schlager, the commitment to an awkward tune carried by pure feeling, language irrespective. Nico had it, so did Ariane Forster.
Are The Slits the only band to apply the Beefheartian approach of throwing different songs into one to dub?
The piano spree on “Love Und Romance” is maniacal.
The guitar work is spidery and has that wobbly, UFO-like motion of weirdo surf rock.
I need to hear more by Dennis Bovell; the effects and echo he puts around the band accentuates rather than overwhelms; he gets what they’re doing and enhances it.
Riot grrl didn’t take enough from this record; those bands honoured the sound as a duty rather than a signal to absorb whatever excited them the most.
This is serious and fun - I’d never listened to this assuming it wouldn’t carry catchy timbres or tunes, but both are abundant; this is a surprisingly polished work.
Can
5/5
“Tago Mago” crystallises everything that I have come to value in improvisation-derived music.
It’s full of parts that I could joyfully vocalise, weird looks bedamned.
It has a strong sense of a designing order: not just a piano shoved down the stairs, but a piano shoved down the stairs and painstakingly recorded, the tape cut up and reordered into ballet and maelstrom. There’s an order to the turmoil and an intelligence behind it; the wilder tracks follow a narrative, deranged though it may be. The end of “Peking O” means something, though I don’t need to know what that is.
Surprise and drama dictate the structure rather than the procession of dutiful turns at the helm of trad jazz or jam bands
Thematic consistency is maintained within each song - “Aumng” is not a pleasant listen, but it’s richly evocative, starting like a bad happening deep in one of Central Europe’s massive forests, processing through a gothic keep of mad scientists and the hum and beep of their machines, drum patterns like distant artillery, ending with the rhythm and squeal of a train going to Hell: this is their mythos of the Nazi era.
I only learned that this was recorded in a medieval castle after writing that last paragraph.
The schlocky horror accents are heavy on this record and it’s hard to avoid wondering if its coloured by the war - the seventies were a big decade for German kids freaking out their parents.
I’m pleased the list has made me return to this, as this is a record I’ve owned and respected for a while, but never close-listened to until today, apart from to the enormous “Halleluhwah”.
Thundercat
3/5
Yacht prog is a comfortable place to hang out in for a while. This is a pool of smooth with the homogeneity that implies. The peppering of humour is appealing, as is the consternation on Thundercat’s face in the superb cover photo.
Mariah Carey
2/5
Been a while since I’ve quoted my wife’s reactions here, so I’ll throw in a review-in-progress from the car: “This sounds like H&M music. Who would go to see this in concert?”
I would buy a reasonably-priced T-shirt to this album. Clearly a painstakingly-machined exemplar of its genre, I applaud Carey’s vocal aerobatics while finding the music vapid.
Donald Fagen
2/5
Can you imagine going to a dinner party hosted by Donald Fagen?
“ I remember a line of women all in white
The laughter and the steel bands at night”
“Christ Donald, we’ve heard this one before, move on munch munch munch glug glug.”
This is clearly exactly what it wants to be, a digitally-recorded Faberge egg, curiosity flat and toy-like in sound, curious but of debatable utility.
“Maxine” is music for rich people with horrific taste to make out to.
Meat Loaf
3/5
This has a Broadway naffness to it that’s hard to bypass, but its guts, heart and pyrotechnics guarantee its good faith, and it feels like the product of the bullied letting rip which knocks it into “probably should be here”.
Joe Ely
4/5
What happened here? Put this on early today, noted “plod plod plod country, v well”, put it back on this afternoon and then spent the next few hours sort of lightly mesmerised by it. Easy listening in a lovely sense of the term, this honey just glugged down by the old radars.
Adam & The Ants
4/5
Bolshy chanting; boisterous drum blatter and heroic post-punk guitar muscle make this a pop record that bangs its songs into memory while bypassing the usual tropes of the catchy tune. Had fun with this, may return.
Tricky
5/5
This weird, spooky record was a constant for a good few months of my late teens, long enough for every sound to become lodger. Yet I don’t think I’ve listened to it more than a handful of times since its year of release, and I doubt I’ve heard it in the last two decades. It’s a really lowkey-unsettling record.
I remember Tricky being a huge deal when this came out and promptly disappearing into a niche. Unlike his Bristol contemporaries, he barely nods to the comforts of pop or soul; he positioned his music as more akin to the Wu Tang Clan than to Massive Attack, and while this contains most of the markers of trip hop, it’s a continent away from the lounge muzak that term came to signify. Aggressive samples also call back to Public Enemy (the cover of “Black Steel” is outstanding) - it is not music to relax to.
This deeply, unnervingly sexual record is named after his dead mother.
Tricky complained loudly that Portishead’s “Dummy” was a straight extrapolation of “Aftermath”, which has some truth while a disservice to both: Tricky’s piece is more grotesque, less elegant; Portishead’s record is more ethereal, less bleak. There’s a gallows humour clear in the samples and circularity of “Aftermath”, it’s like watching your world fall apart from your armchair, glass in hand.
I’d forgotten that trip hop once held promise, was not always synonymous with expensive hotel bar mating music, that there was an avenue exploring a doomier, slower, sludgier version of hip hop.
This is a landmark that gives me funny feelings that I don’t care to spend much time with, like a film you watch only once that remains a reference for the rest of your life.
Tricky and Martina Topley-Bird have had a hard last decade; I hope they have a much better one to follow.
Sinead O'Connor
4/5
A lovely record as I’d half-expected. Hadn’t expected the post-punk toughness in places, or the range, which her voice holds together. The medieval, religious ambiance her voice creates is a great space for a super team of musicians to drop in flair and excitement. Marco Pirroni cameos here for the second time in a week!
Public Enemy
4/5
Working on the that permanent revolution is an illusion, “Apocalypse 91” is the point in Public Enemy’s I never got past as I’d read they had settled, that this was just another solid PE record.
It’s solid and I’m sold: it doesn’t have the star turns of FOABP, but it’s altogether a more clubbable record while also tougher: some of the loops on the first half are amongst their most juggernaut, and if it goes on too long they were far from alone in that habit over that decade.
The fuzzed-out “By the Time I Get to Arizona” sounds like Chuck D guesting on a stalwart New Kingdom track, except that it came out a year or two earlier than NK’s first LP. They were still trying new stuff.
Chuck D and Flavour Flav are the most recognisable vocal partnership I’ve heard, and I’m embarrassed it’s taken me this long to appreciate that.
The Saints
4/5
After parking, will I keep the car running to finish the song? “Memories Are Made of This” passes this test I’ve unconsciously developed, and it’s not even a standout on this record, a rare punk record that holds my attention throughout. It has swing, surprise, tunes, a brawny guitar played smart, and singing that I want to listen to.
Jane's Addiction
1/5
Simon, I think you’ll deduce the source of this description of Jane’s Addiction without needing any help:
\"I've never heard Rush, but that's exactly what I'd imagine Rush to sound like."
Perry Farrell’s voice is distinctive, probably a big influence on many later singers who also irritate my ears.
This has the dynamics of great hard rock, but not the melodies or riffs, and sounds thin, probably the result of modish production decisions that I will never bother to understand.
The cover art is impressively crap and fair to the lyrical content: this does what it says on the tin, tilting towards transgression but finding its nose in a puddle, delivering fiery instrumental work that goes nowhere, unless you count inspiring The Spin Doctors as achievement.
Robert Wyatt
4/5
Records like this feel like peering into someone’s peculiar, hermetic consciousness: I see everything and it is quite impenetrable. Wyatt’s corralled a host of crack musicians to make something utterly him, an exotic, tricked-out aquarium, exquisite and incomprehensible.
I perceive a core of Englishness to it: his voice has the eeriness of an amateur choir singer, the organ heave also evocative of childhood church visits; “The Duchess” sounds like a schoolyard sing-song from a nightmare; every track is queasily off-centre in a manner that I associate with British psychedelia. It’s very personal, disquieting yet compulsive, and I can’t help that wonder whether his paraplegia informs this out-of-step intimacy.
I might not return to this safari, but I salute it. Another analogy that comes to mind is the John Soane’s Museum where an unrepeatable collection of ancient architectural and art plunder stand in for the mad attic of the collector’s now-extinct mind.
Beyoncé
2/5
You could throw me onto the “where are the songs?” pile of middle-aged (mostly) white guys reviewing this, but I’m bothered by how obstinately obtuse this is: songs seem to contain half a dozen or so ideas stitched together, but not quite followed through on, just polished to a gleam, dressing to exquisitely-sung self-help advice columns, with the occasional rapper dropping in as guest commentator. The money drips off the production, it sounds spectacular. It is an expensive folly - the architectural kind - a bit of a chore, and extremely, confusingly successful.
Ali Farka Touré
3/5
The song openings often excite me, but the hypnotic grooves that almost every track falls into eventually loose my attention. The few times the rhythm fades out - does it ever stop? - a change-up is teased but never delivered. The songs are pretty and soulful, but not my kind of repetition.
Ferocious, ragged and live records by the Saharan bands Group Inerane, Group Doueh and Bombino slay this sort of desert roots rock and make this record sound gentrified, excessively polite.
This has the juice, just watered-down.
The Kinks
4/5
Another The Kinks record that has been in my library for ages, heard in the background, neglected until now. This has teeth and that lovely concreteness of Ray Davies’s lyrics.
This hasn’t stuck with me as hard as “Village Green”, but some of the shift-ups demand return. “Little Miss Queen of Darkness” deals out two cooly ominous instrumental freak-outs that make me want to drop it into a party to watch the reactions, and it’s out of the door in just over three minutes. I haven’t read any literature on the band, but I’d be amazed if no one’s spent a few paragraphs extolling how the bass-line of “Sunny Afternoon” is the perfect match of musical form and lyrical function.
A harpsichord on a pop record instantly dates it in a way I find distracting: there must be uses of the instrument that don’t come off as gimmick, but I can’t recall any.
The Adverts
4/5
Fast, tuneful, streamlined rock from a band that you could point to if someone asked you to recommend a straight-ahead punk record. I’d like more strangeness and ambush, but that’s me looking forward to post-punk. Cute to see this is one of the first albums with John Leckie in the producer’s chair.
I misheard “Bored Teenagers” as “Faulty Agents”, which ought to be used.
Elvis Presley
3/5
Pleasures extracted from this groomed karaoke:
Elvis’s voice, its elasticity and the songs like “I’m Counting On You” where he’s still working it out, trying a constipated whine that’s charming in its awkwardness
The fabulous guitar work, that shares Wilco Johnson’s knack of playing lead while carrying rhythm through very different one-note markers and runs
Speculation around what an Elvis song written by Elvis would have sounded like, a sparser “Surfin’ Bird” is my hopeful, unfulfillable bet
The almost-not-there nature of the rhythm section, relic of a time before guitars got thicker and louder
Its brevity
On the slow songs, especially “I Love You Because”, the chill from really feeling like you’re hearing a long-dead voice from the long-dead past
“Blue Moon - Take 9/M”, which may be my favourite version of its song for being so ghostly, throwing shade on another cover of an otherwise famous song, his hasty “Tutti Frutti”
Enjoying thinking about how contemporary audiences understood the plea for mutual masturbation underpinning “One-Sided Love Affair”
Travis
2/5
“The band are credited by the media for paving the way for bands such as Coldplay to achieve worldwide success throughout the 2000s, particularly with the success of The Man Who.”
Wikipedia damns. I remember no specifics of the grey wash that followed Radiohead, but I’m guessing there was a lot of critical bullying and it was all deserved.
This accomplished wishy-washyness reminds me of the adroitness of Taylor Swift in making the sentimental, humdrum ennui of the privileged fun through concrete detail and cattiness.
This is all “Dave is sad, O Dave is sad.”
The Cult
3/5
Another throwaway to listen to before I die, this time with the image of Rick Rubin rubbing his tummy as he faxes notes, “more Plant, dial up Young (Angus), lighten the Van (Halen, Eddie), park the cowbell?”
This is fun and the Cult were clearly a strong rock unit, but as we’re almost halfway through the list I fear we won’t have ZZ Top’s ‘70’s run, or much from the Groundhogs, sprees from bands who made and mastered this mode rather than made a straightforward call-back to it.
Astrud Gilberto
3/5
Each song puts forth a simple argument with economy, hence the delightful brevity throughout. Oba, what do you actually want, our love turns us into misty roses, and so on.
This has a happy light psychedelia and little touches that elevate it: the wobble at the end of “I Had The Craziest Dream” is subversively off-kilter. Delightful morsels on a rainy day.
Ryan Adams
1/5
Awfully dull, painfully tasteful, necro-Americana in pre-worn denim drinking decaffeinated country, this intrigues me with its success: did the turn-of-century zeitgeist really embrace such soporific material? Was this popularity a sublimated invitation to the ghastly horrors that followed the prematurely declared End of History?
This is my second - hopefully last - review of a Ryan Adams album and also only my second - perhaps last - mention here of the September 11 attacks which were, as aptly described by Norm MacDonald, a National Tragedy. As to Ryan Adama’ involvement, I have no proof.
My Bloody Valentine
5/5
Today’s decision wasn’t the rating - this is top tier - but whether I agree with my skipper’s assertion this is the best MBV album, better than “Loveless”.
This probably has the better songs; I appreciate “Lose My Breath” and its slippery, seductive regret in a way that I could not in my youth, and they’ve never rocked as hard as “Feed Me With Your Kiss”.
I probably prefer how “Loveless” sounds though, overfed and sparkly. It’s a draw, at least until “Loveless” inevitably turns up here.
Massive Attack
5/5
This was one of a handful of unavoidable records when flitting between college rooms in the mid-90s. I am entertained to realise that despite having the general colour and shape of the album cover in my deep memory, I only just noticed the blobby figure with the knife and fork smack bang centre; my brain had transformed the cover into a futuristic city plan.
This is an elegant record that I mistook for unadventurous back then. It sounds huge and thick with sound through a cool, deceptive minimalism, plink-plonk Casio beats placed besides moody piano and submarine sounds, strings that thrill rather than dress, and stark storytelling that I was too oblivious to listen to back then. Every part feels carefully thought-through and placed, dub echoes included.
Another listener error I made was mistaking the diversity of voices as evidence of dilettantism rather than the shifting, sprawling but focussed collectivism behind the work, and that the dub, Jamaican and other elements reflect the collective, and Bristol’s convoluted history behind them.
Tricky’s lines were lifted and shifted to “Maxinquaye” a year later, but it’s striking how much younger he sounds here. He clearly wanted what was in his head to be heard, and did the hard miles to make it.
I’ve taken a lot more from this today than I’d expected to.
Radiohead
1/5
I was making it through alright the passionless beats and expensive emanations with no destination, not even that bothered by the absence of the single good song their albums tend to have, when on the final stretch out of nowhere Yorke said “I don’t want to be your friend I want to be your lover”.
I almost filled my pants! Fuck out of my boudoir, creep!
Ride
4/5
“Nowhere” is tuneful but not catchy, sensitive but even-tempered, noisy but delicately so, music I avoided when young expecting to hate it, and probably would have, but it’s a picnic, bucolic in the Romantic way: if John Constable painted soundscapes, they’d feel like this. You can feel it in the granularity of the timbres, the eschewal of big, gestural riffs, and the graceful sweeps and swerves of chord sequences; diligence is behind these constructions, Olympian drumming back there once you start paying attention. They go hard and fast, tyres squealing, but never leave the road, a doggedness that I can now appreciate.
Blur
3/5
Giving a grump pile of drone and mutter that only just clears the line between “fuck you” and song the über-Blur title “Essex Dogs” is bellowed intent as well an indie nerd joke worthy of a Pavement B-side, which is also a marker, since this is the album where Coxon sublimated his Malkmus-crush. There are some fine songs here alongside the studiedly half-arsed, “M.O.R.” joining Nirvana’s “Radio Friendly Unit Shifter” in my very short mental playlist of good songs that cock a punky leg against their own tunefulness; “On Your Own” is a go-nowhere track that is perfect just-so; “Beetlebum” a poppier twin to Sonic Youth’s “Bull in the Heather” (I don’t know why, but that works for me); “Song 2” annoyingly effective in an anyone-could’ve-done-that sense; and “Strange News from Another Star” my surprise from this playthrough, as I thought I’d heard all of the good songs on this album, but I guess my mate Andy must’ve always kicked me out of his college room by the time his CD got to this one, probably because his girlfriend was arriving, or maybe I was talking about Slint or Shellac again.
Queen Latifah
2/5
“The Pros”’s dub lurch pinched me out complacency and makes me wish this record changed up more often; the style is mostly upbeat, keeps the toes flexing, but predictable. Once you’ve heard the first twenty seconds of the song, you’ll know how the rest will go. I like Queen Latifah’s voice and wish she sang about more than her rapping prowess.
Ozomatli
1/5
This could be made for bad film soundtracks, specifically for party scenes needing mild spicing up, nothing threatening, or perhaps a remake of “Weekend at Bernie’s”.
It’s terrible, but I did enjoy going down a Wikipedia wormhole about the Brat Pack after this prompted me to look up “Weekend at Bernie’s”.
Iron Maiden
3/5
The vaudevillian bangers I was expecting - “Prowler”, “Running Free” and “Charlotte the Harlot” - are toffee chunks in a doughy mass of earnest prog. But I like this record for this earnestness, and for the revelation that with roots in Leytonstone and Chingford they’re practically locals to my old manor - it’s homemade East London-Essex baroque.
But why does so much heavy metal sound so thin?
Jane's Addiction
1/5
This opens with “Stop”. If only.
Simon: I know you hate Thom Yorke’s voice, but surely Perry’s is more annoying?
The Streets
3/5
Strong, likeable narrative voice dominates this record. The music is fine, some choruses have real stick, but In not sure how compelling subsequent playthroughs would be once the story’s heard.
Rufus Wainwright
4/5
A record must have a killer edge to cut through the kind of ballsache of a day I’ve just had on one broken-up playthrough. This has heft behind the sparkle and I must return to it. Consider this 4/5 a placeholder.
Ramblin' Jack Elliott
3/5
I believe that if you listen closely enough, the
intentions of a record will become clear, regardless of genre or proficiency, but I don’t have the time to make out whether or not this is the mod-century equivalent of the hipster banjo squads that used to make me snarl in Clapton ten years back. At times I detected a certain underlying bleakness in Jack Elliott’s voice, but other times I heard an earnest act. I don’t mind dressing up, yet knowing he was a man from a well-off family playing music mostly written by much poorer, hard-living people, troubles me. He certainly put the miles in, embraced the act. Maybe I would feel better about this if these were mostly his songs, his inventions? While he’s posited as Dylan’s dad, a more interesting comparison is Will Oldham who also dresses up, then goes on one more step and writes and acts out his own materials.
Forget and forgive these midnight post- long day at the keyboard rambles (ha).
Elvis Presley
3/5
The third Elvis album to reach us here, I don’t have much of an angle on this, the King as cipher perhaps: slot in a card punched by a crack songwriter, out spools the Elvis interpretation. How much say did he have in his repertoire, in the choices made in these interpretations?
This is accomplished but doesn’t have the spellbinding power of whatever was the last one we had. I can’t shake the feeling I’m hearing each of these songs in a period gangster movie as ironic counterpoint to acts of violence.
k.d. lang
2/5
An inoffensive album of low-stakes country covers by singer-songwriter k.d. lang was not an encounter I’d anticipated, but I’ll take it for a Monday.
Björk
2/5
Björk makes weird records in good faith and I listen to her records in hope, but again I can find no entrance to this record, an irritating artifact.
Christine and the Queens
2/5
Ponderous angst and a general, unspecific dissatisfaction ground this record, perhaps a good fit for a generation being kicked in the liminals, but being too cool for catchy choruses pushes this well-machined pop into chore territory. Most sits in this awkward space of demanding focus while not offering enough to capture this close-listener. I’d rather just hear Paul Westerberg wail “look me in my eye/and tell me I’m satisfied” rather than this cold vague vibe.
The better parts remind me of good Japanese City Pop I’ve heard, exceptions to an otherwise austere mood.
Aerosmith
4/5
The toddler in the back of the car said “I like this music” and I’m surprised to agree. (He also said “woo!”; I’ll withhold my opinion here.) The big willy song is the only turd, the rest keeps the finger away from the skip button - some great, interesting guitar work and structures here, and the singing pre-dates Tyler’s sink into parody. When I last checked, “Rocks” was the cognoscenti’s “good Aerosmith album”, but I think this is better.
The Dandy Warhols
2/5
Expensive, competent and lacklustre, listenable but rarely engaging, and twenty minutes too long, this is music designed to be lifted in 20-second chunks for young-adult TV shows that makes me wonder about the motives of critics behind this list - an argument might be made to treat this as fashion history, but to include it for its quality would be deranged.
The passé-heroin song is their deserved hit, irritatingly effective and then-modish. Apart from that, the slower songs are marginally more appealing, which I had not expected. The final droning march has little going on though; one listen was sufficient.
Scissor Sisters
3/5
I’d assumed they were a novelty act, but this has some, snappy numbers, especially in the first half when they drop in a touch of Elton John amongst the then-de rigueur post punk and disco arrangements. Doesn’t hold together terrifically well, but I had more fun than I expected.
Kelela
2/5
Laudable tilts to futurist ghostliness with assemblages of broken beats and synth that could have been drawn up by an architect on a beer mat make this best heard in the background - the cool production showcases a beautiful voice reading our nondescript diary entries, no groove, little in the way of refrain - this is void with an impeccable setting. I wish I enjoyed it more.
John Cale
5/5
This has the kind of quality that’s inescapable: one swoons on contact.
Joan Baez
3/5
We are far removed from the context in which this set of dutiful, pretty and somewhat ordinary standards slayed faces. Her voice has force, though the loud parts feel like being next to a car doing donuts in a mall parking lot. “Dona Dona” sounds best to me.
M.I.A.
5/5
So far, almost halfway through, this is the most exciting hip hop I’ve heard on this list that’s unfamiliar to me - in 2007 I was too busy discovering Adorno’s “Minima Moralia”, Berlin, D.I.Y. noise and the luxuries of amorous turmoil to notice how great “Paper Planes” is, which is funny as I can pick up some of all of that on “Kala”, a record that’s inconsistent in the trad romance sense, determinedly capricious in what it loots - references to “Roadrunner”, “Blue Monday” and the Pixies feel like theft rather than worthy homage - and manifestos that M.I.A. tears up even as she spiels them, sex, war and capitalism snapping at the ears throughout, the rhythm patterns mock-militaristic, and the rare perfect measure of mockery in her delivery. “Art school”, I hear some muttered: I agree, but in the best, post-punk connotation. This hits what riot grrrl was reaching for, and I finally have a name to associate with a shift I perceived when South Asian sounds that mainstream media had treated at best as canned exotica, at worst as comedic prompts, started to be expressed loudly and fiercely as their own thing on radio and screen. New to this near twenty years later, I’m struck by how modern it sounds.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
2/5
The cabaret is in good faith, but the stories entertain without leaving much substance to reflect on, and the music exists purely as framing: listening to this, indeed most Cave I’ve heard, is usually like hearing a lurching avant garde musical production, but the theatrics lack the deep-felt sorrow of Brecht; for all the violence, the knife never twists.
I wonder about the purpose of the subject matter: it’s too comic to titillate, which is fine, but why set it to music?
CHIC
4/5
Sometimes a record will take a test that it compels me to invent as I listen to it, like here, when during the breakdown in “My Feet Keep Dancing” I realised that CHIC were near guaranteed to present more than three moments on this record at least as great as the stuff I’m already familiar with, which is only “Good Times”. Unusually, the verse-chorus-verse parts are just the mise-en-scene - it’s the interstitial bass sprints and the sudden, odd grooves that this excels and revels in.
My Bloody Valentine
5/5
You can imagine these tracks - chords, melodies and whatever unintelligibles are sung - working magic as power pop, folk or even krautrock, which was a thirty-year late revelation that came to me today while trying to listen to “Loveless” from a new angle. Instead, they are “Loveless”-songs, a one-album genre that not even the band’s sequel slotted into. Not so much a dead end as a comet or an eclipse. I knew I’d give it Hi-Score, but I didn’t think it’d ignite a more passionate love over the boringly dutiful one I’d hitherto carried.
Which is to say, the song “Hot Shot City” is particularly good.
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
2/5
Thing is, I’m no prog-liker but the agitated interpretative dance parts provoke the same part of me that enjoys prog-adjacent freaks like The Psychic Paramount and Rangda. Wonders never cease, what a world we live in, so on so forth. The lyrics are ripe for a kick in the face though. “How did He lose six million Jews?” suggests the Holocaust was an act of absent-mindedness.
Bon Jovi
3/5
Love in the back seat is a theme in at least two songs, so if Bon Jovi gives you a lift and you care for personal hygiene, insist on sitting in the front passenger seat.
A weekend of dropping in and out of this record has led to two comparisons: Tom Petty for the aimably retiring choruses (co-written hits aside) and Melt-Banana for the guitar squeal. Neither aspect is as strong, but I had a good time.
Now let’s pretend that “Wanted Dead Or Alive” is a Beckettian paean to clarity in existential state.
Public Enemy
5/5
intensity and cacophony mean back-to-back playthroughs daunt me, almost uniquely among bands I like. They play all channels - city traffic and din, indoor arguments, TV politicians, audience noise, radio, car stereos, the electronic noises of the street - simultaneously, and this city-in-box method is relentless, without pause. I find myself grasping at their strong voices to impose meaning on mad form. Surely no band has a better list of song titles: the track-listing reads like one of J.G. Ballard’s best contents pages.
I might like this one the best.
Faith No More
3/5
The dorkiness is dialled to 11 on this record that shouts the makers’ enthusiasms, a baggy utility trousers of an album with all sorts hanging off it on elastic cords, clumps of keys, a bottle opener, a cigarette lighter, maybe a Warhammer figurine, far too much crap, but the awkward look is its own. The keyboards are the Dude’s rug: they tie the album together. Maybe the only record tainted with funk metal that doesn’t act as an emetic on me. Who Dorks Wins.
Pixies
4/5
I first heard Pixies maybe a week or two after I first heard Pavement, swapping with a classmate cassette rips from CD of "Slanted & Enchanted" and "Surfer Rosa/Come On Pilgrim" plus "Trompe Le Monde", which I dug, especially the demented solo on "Vamos", but I preferred Pavement, as their guitars sounded closer to Sonic Youth, whom I already loved, and I could claim to be the first kid in school to have discovered them. A little later I bought "Doolittle", which I also liked, though not as much, and deliberately skipped "Bossanova" as the critics labelled this the weaker one, and I was taking every shortcut I could to building a convincing approximation of taste. So I come to "Bossanova" thirty years later with some hope that I can perform the ultimate validation of my critical development by claiming it's actually the best one, the classic spurned classic.
It isn't, but it's still good. The songs have less hook, though "Dig For Fire", "Velouria" and maybe a couple of others threaten to hang around my head later; the production seems both expensive and murky; it feels more like a tilt at a Morricone-soundtrack than a Pixies album; and I think that's pretty cool.
The Rolling Stones
5/5
A day ago I told Simon this is my favourite Stones album, as it was one of the first of my dad’s CDs that I gave a chunk of time to, which is all quite funny as I barely remember half of this, yet it’s all still a punch to the heavens. Unusually, I prefer the polished one next to its scruffier sibling, “Exile”. My dad states Mick Taylor was a key force behind their best, and I can’t disagree.
The Stooges
5/5
On Sonic Youth’s “Bad Moon Rising”, “I love her all the time” is preceded by a distorted cassette recording of “Not Right”, which even in that smashed, snipped form I recognised was heavy with doom, menace and poise, and was all I heard of this album for a little while (I started with “Funhouse” because Albini adored it).
I’ll cop to reading the Wikipedia summaries and despite having loved this album for decades, I’d never realised how last-minute, riff-thrown-together it is, half-songs slammed into improv. Yet every track’s a banger apart from “We Will Fall”, which should be a bore but I never skip, perhaps for Cale’s viola, as likely for the palette cleanser.
Minatory sex music, don’t dream of waking up being spooned by a Minotaur.
Christina Aguilera
3/5
I knew I’d bought this ages ago, but when my library contains only “Beautiful” and “Dirrty”; I’d dumped the rest during a late-noughties iPod memory shortage. Ominous.
As I’ve written elsewhere, Aguilera’s voice has this narcotic effect on me, an effect that seems so arbitrary - why not Whitney Houston or Celine Dion? - that it must be a decision that I’m unaware I ever took, a binding one. Even more weirdly, after spending a little time on her Wikipedia page followed by an algorithmic slug of recent news articles, I’ve concluded that I don’t understand what she looks like, what age she is on any given record over any given playthrough, and thus another layer of abstraction is added - she’s a disembodied voice with a collection of spectral associations that grip me from behind, familiar but unknowable: in short, lost time from my early to mid-20s when this album would’ve stalked me from store playlists and radios I passed, a three-year or so near-complete blank apart from one road trip across the Deep South in 2003 when “Beautiful” was on my mixtape and Simon sang to me, you are beautiful no matter what they say. And this is one of my few firm memories of the first four years of that decade, along with the contemporaneous deployment of the worst accent I’ve ever heard by our friend Howard on asking a couple of Louisiana fishermen where to find the Bayou alligator tour we’d booked, and out came Christopher Walken doing an impression of Stephen Hawking guest-starring in “The Dukes of Hazzard”, “so do Y’AWWWL know WHERE BOB’S swamp boat tour IS?”
The music’s compellingly all over the place. Aguilera’s like one of those mischievous spirits from a horror movie that come at you from different forms she’s possessed, both incongruous and scarily recognisable, and perhaps it’s from the best I managed only a single listen today, as otherwise she’d have my throat.
Roxy Music
5/5
This has lurked in my library for a couple of decades, never finding my right mood. Without looking anything up, I bet making this was a fractious experience, as it’s one of those records that sounds like it was a jolly cabaret, but there’s a clear tension between the components: fun to listen to, maybe hell to make. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone punched someone else face over “The Bogus Man”. My money’s on Eno’s fist and Ferry’s face.
I should’ve listened to this properly years ago: this has the eclecticism and dare of most great records of the early to mid-70s, and some of the instrumental parts are demented, even on the more Hobbitty tracks.
Peter Frampton
3/5
This is aggressively normal 70’s rock with two or three bangers and the guitar exhibitions demanded by that distant zeitgeist. I liked it fine and will add it to the list of records I can play if I ever have to host a swingers’ party for pensioners.
Kate Bush
4/5
Kate Bush's dad was my first doctor, have I mentioned that before? This was in Plumstead, a tough suburb southeast of London, popular with the National Front back then, my mother tells me. Dr Bush was a lovely doctor, she says, and his daughter was always referred to as "Auntie Kate" in our household. I find it hard not to default to five stars when her records come up here.
This is a grower: no earworms on first listen, on second it gets richer and stranger, which is generally how her records work. It has this strange artificiality that I associate with her songs, all the instruments clearly separated into their own place in a manner that seems to heighten this phantasmagoric effect she's goes for. Her voice charges through it all.
Public Image Ltd.
3/5
“Angry cat guitar” is how my son describes Levine’s guitar, and I hope he’d find funny this toddler’s foreshortening of this primeval, post-punk kernel. The album has more actual songs than I’d given it credit for - another owned for decades and mostly neglected - but only “Public Image” feels more notes for revolution.
Ground’s broken here; I salute the band and manifesto before making my way out.
Duke Ellington
4/5
My dad, a fan of this performance, says “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” is the one he returns to, the climax to Ellington’s popular story rather than his life, the gig where a chunk of the band don’t turn up to the first set, and the track written for the festival fails to rouse, only for the tenor saxophonist, blows a marathon into the wrong microphone, nearly incites a riot according to the papers, though this recordings indicates little more than a few encore demands and likely dancing. Reading the hype first, the solo almost disappoints, probably because I was expecting some sort of Coltrane-es que explosion rather than the fleet, chatty and upbeat hopping between notes that Gonsalves holds for six minutes, but once I accepted this is more an ocean liner than a power boat I had a good time, though maybe not as much as the blonde woman in a black dress that the accounts place unusual emphasis on.
The squeals at the end of “Festival Junction” sound like a tantrum, either at the band’s structure or the perception of its obsolescence, its dead economic model: we can blast too. There’s defiance as well as melancholy in celebrating a near-extinct form, a collective in their late middle-age demonstrating their mastery of banging out tunes as one; the songs were old by then, and you can hear the sweat flicking off the drums.
I’ll take my dad’s approach to this one.
The Louvin Brothers
3/5
A busy Tuesday at keyboard and computer screen leaves me lacking the imaginative power to unlock the appeal of this ghostly, slightly terrifying collection of ballads. But I know weird when I hear it.
Megadeth
3/5
The thrash carousel is spun with welcome economy here: garbage truck guitar distortion, fun growling stretches, cartoon takes on big themes, mildly tedious complexity, ballads soaked in self-pity, pleasingly uninhibited solos.
Thrash metal may be the easiest genre to spontaneously improvise idiotic lyrics to. Thinking about this record just now, I caught myself absentmindedly heavy-whispering “Achilllllleeeess… he cut off his dick!”
ZZ Top
4/5
ZZ Top were a top tier band and this is a gnarly album, but it’s really a Billy Gibbons solo experiment - and a superb one - than a band record. Packed with chunky riffs and delightful, expressive guitar sketches, this is a joyful, fun record. Doesn’t feel right to compare it to “Très Hombres” et al, as they’re entirely different set-ups.
Pink Floyd
4/5
The LP - the object itself - is very familiar to me from childhood, but I don’t think I ever heard the entire thing, maybe just track one from the second side and then either I wandered off or the record swapped after the money shot.
There are fewer songs than I expected - no criticism. The “you’ve got to hear it as a suite” crowd have a point: it’s a luxurious, pillowy, lie-down and drift-in listen, rich with minute baroque flourishes. Everything sounds clear and gorgeous.
The lyrics match Waters’ reputation for pretension, but are tolerable: the big themes are rubbed, but there’s enough concrete detail, slang and chewy narrative voice - samples thrown in, but mixed loud enough to matter - that it’s a hang-out with a group of overgrown students. Waters’ mournful stoner voice doesn’t quite overstay its welcome.
Makes me wonder what would’ve been had Can with unlimited time at Abbey Road and Alan Parsons.
Lenny Kravitz
2/5
Trite sentiments yelped to hi-fi busker blues, this is how a genre sounds when abandoned to interlopers in awe of its gestures but not its intent.
Maybe I’m cruel: good faith, craft and time have been poured into this set. “Mr Cab Driver” is a fine and bitterly funny song that makes me wish he wrote more about life beyond the soft rock tropes. This is the softest of rock for those who find the Stones or Hendrix or any of the other obvious ones just too intense, catchy and distracting.
The KLF
4/5
The White Room drags me back to its time and gives me a few jolts of joy: making irony truly fun is a rare feat.
Sheryl Crow
2/5
Were this shorter, I would listen to it again, but there’s only so much time I can spend in a bar scene from a 90s Bruckenheimer movie before I have to shake the polish from my ears. There’s some good material here - singles aside, “No One Said It Would Be Easy” has the soft rhythmic push of the quieter VU songs - but there’s too much of it.
Confidential to Simon:
1. No, I have not read the diverting "Bad Wisdom" - should I?
2. When the opening swirl of “All I Wanna Do” began I sang on reflex “All I wanna do is scratch my bum.” (I’ve got a feeling I’m not the only one.)
3. My conclusion from this album is that I should listen to “Exile in Guyville” again: same year, some similar circumstances, wildly different results.
Brian Wilson
3/5
“Surf’s Up” is a sparkling title that’s an odd fit to a song that’s shambling, hesitant and sluggish, not easy to remember in part or entirety. It’s carefully wrought and reaches for the deep parts while also sounding rushed, thrown together and unsure of itself - and this is how the album hits me as a whole.
I’m a “Pet Sounds”-liker, am glad this exists, but I prefer thinking about it to listening to it: “Smile” works as a sequence of distractions, but the challenge with presenting a pop album of songs built from many modules is that it needs several times as many tunes as a regular album to hold the ears. “Good Vibrations” is masterful, “Heroes and Villains” has kick, and the rest is a sometimes-intriguing mash, with the inevitable, detestable carnival music interval making a cameo to remind you what decade this comes from.
Leonard Cohen
4/5
Cohen’s letting us in on the joke in this one, and it’s a joy; his humour emerges clearer with the synth, drum machine, and the generously excessive backing vocals. First LC record I’ve found fun rather than duty, and “First We Take Manhattan” is a song I’m filing away for later.
Kraftwerk
5/5
These Kraftwerk records feel liked they’re tapped from a private little universe that’s utterly personal, romantic, and difficult to imagine in any other form, a music expressed in gestures with the simplicity and honesty of a vivid dream. Swooningly perfect.
Eels
4/5
The ennui, the ostentatious violent images, the touches of trip hop, the quiet-loud guitar eruptions, and the post-Cobain growl encapsulate what I wasn’t listening to and heard everywhere at the end of the last century. I had not expected to enjoy this so much: this is a strong and inventive set that makes me wonder how long Mr Eels had been tinkering with these tunes.
Kraftwerk
4/5
Being assigned two Kraftwerk albums in a week is a joy. Ideas are still being worked out here and aside from “Autobahn” experiments run without conclude. I like this, but the bangers to come show destination surpass journey. Still, such a happy record.
Elbow
2/5
I have no desire to analyse why this well-made, intelligent record does nothing for me, though I admire how it captures the damp, cold texture of a smudgy cloud falling from the other side of the Pennines.
Coldplay
2/5
Who can doubt this record’s effectiveness? Engineered to the nanometre, wind-tunnel tested for the sleekest form, words stripped of any friction, which is to say concrete meaning, anything to delay the instant digestion of big vague swishy feelings. It’s a giant, modern mall, muzak included, emptied all for oneself, apart from the meat-craving zombies.
Steve Winwood
4/5
This has been copy-pasted to my subconscious as a rare instance of an album staying on for most of the day, eternal repeat. The opener immediately made me happy as a hit from early childhood long-forgotten but immediately pleasing; the rest feels like an idealised middle-age soundtrack, which suits me. And he did the lot!
A note on the lyrics: yesterday I slagged off Chris Martin’s flimsy big vibes style, but while this shares Coldplay’s aversion to actual life detail, Winwood comes off more as a hippy friend trying to cheer you up rather than Bono.
The Young Rascals
3/5
This is pleasant, robust and refuses to stay in the centre of my attention for the length of a song. Good twang and croon, nonetheless.
Ice Cube
4/5
Hard and smooth all jumbled up, some vicious tunes and real kick. Wish I spent more time with it, but not as easy to listen to continuously as Steve Winwood.
Roxy Music
5/5
Cabaret for people who carry their underwear in their pockets on a night out, this forges hard left into a variety show populated by Grosz and compèred by Groucho Marx, the softer songs never relinquishing the arch wobbliness, the barnstormers swathed in sheets of Eno’s bonkers synth and wonky bursts of guitar and sax. This is another top-tier record I was too uptight for when I first heard it, though Bryan Ferry is still a prize berk.
Germs
4/5
Playing this fast and precisely is hard, which the stripped-down discourse around punk can camouflage. Much of this record is a band charting out what happens when you blast out chords without space to breathe in between, but there's some smart structures here and a sulphurous anthem in "Lexicon Devil". A close listen reveals clever guitar work, the little accents, fluorishes and timbre shifts, not too far off from the subtleties you can pick out in AC/DC when you concentrate on Malcom Young.
I wonder how many of us first heard Germs through the inclusion of "Lexicon Devil" on the punk rock station in Grand Theft Auto V, and I wonder what Crash would've made out of that, though I see it as Keith Morris slipping credit and cash to the family of a friend.
I usually find the bands who played alongside the hardcore scene more interesting, but this has stick, and is surprisingly compelling, let's listen to one more...
Air
3/5
Air live are thunderously loud, at least when I saw them, and I imagine this would be excitingly overwhelming at that volume. As a lounge experience, this is dramatic and stylish, but feels purposeless: I can’t perceive any emotional intention other than to feel something, anything big.
The Byrds
3/5
“McGuinn in particular felt that if the song was played on radio there was a possibility that extraterrestrials might intercept the broadcasts and make contact. However, in later years McGuinn realized that this would've been impossible since AM radio waves disperse too rapidly in space.” - Wikipedia
McGuinn went searching for little green men and found Jesus instead, I read later. Ah, the Sixties! Stupid like now, but with fewer Fascists!
For original songs, this has one banger, “8 Miles High”, which I’ll drag with me to my grave. Mostly, this is baroque delivery of overwrought message. I enjoy the Byrds more in the moment to moment, especially McGuin’s chirping, morse-code solos, which I’ve never heard elsewhere and wish had been built upon. Including a Nazim Hikmet poem about a victim of the Hiroshima bombing is somewhat wild, but maybe not groovy!
The Sonics
3/5
This is so defiantly stripped-back that the personality is almost lost in its minimalism, not helped by this being mostly covers rather than band material. “The Witch”, which is their own, has a sexy menace that I want more of.
Van Morrison
5/5
Flawless genesis of a one-man genre, this could play all day and I doubt I’d tire. Brings back strong memories of a Van nut friend at university and a lovely insider story I’ve heard involving a grumpy Morrison, an idiotic Donald Trump, a blameless lighting technician, and a tiny dressing room toilet.
Solomon Burke
3/5
These cover-saturated singer-showcase albums are a wrestle between A&R conservatism and the juice and individualism of the players. Burke’s throttle control is marvellous, a different voice for every task - he could whisper a yell or mutter a wail - and some of the instrumentation brings my ears to their feet, the spidery guitar on “Won’t You Give Him (One More Chance)” deserves credit that the notes don’t give them.
However, the songs themselves are unremarkable. A close listen to the makers has its rewards, but the content doesn’t excite me.
PJ Harvey
5/5
I can’t think of a better debut in that decade. I miss “PJ Harvey” the power trio, though I have a lot of love for what followed. I saw them in big old Manchester Academy a couple of years later perhaps on the “Rid of Me” tour and they were magic.
Lauryn Hill
4/5
My biggest surprise today was that this did not overstay its welcome despite needless length, that it has just the right amount of friction and hook to stay perpetually on, well-supplied with sharp moments that pull you closer for a moment before letting go. It’s a compellingly lazy listen.
I saw Lauryn Hill play a set at the 2007 Exit festival in Novi Sad, and I’ve jumbled the memories with those of the Beatie Boys the night before: both were ragged jam-band rambles, the only distinguishing features I recall being Hill’s enormous hat and my drunken friend Dan triggering a 200,000-person roar by shouting “Beachie Boys Woo Woo!” while we were waiting for the trio to arrive.
Yesterday, we listened to an outstanding debut that loosed a voice that still explores, still sets a standard that others can be marked against. Today we’ve a voice that felt like it was everywhere with everything for a while, but never returned in force. I’m not sure this record is a repeatable trick.
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
5/5
There are greater albums featuring Neil Young, and there are ones that I listen to more often, but none of them combine his most volcanic guitar-blast with such a consistent set of driving, glorious rock songs. Regardless of what some of the twerps here blather, many of the bands I see them lionising elsewhere recognised “Ragged Glory” as majesty at the time. Sonic Youth toured with the band, Nirvana and Dinosaur Jr idolised them, Albini approvingly called the record out as an example of age not dimming an artist, “this is his most fucked-up album yet” or somesuch.
The performance of “Fuckin’ Up” on “Weld” climaxes with one of the most ferocious, thematically bang-on guitar solos in existence. Also, the B-side to “Mansion on the Hill”, “Don’t Spook The Horse” may be better than anything on here, but this album is still a masterpiece.
This is arguably the best album to come out in Grunge’s environs and it was made by Boomers. Still, my generation has Elon Musk, so I guess we win!
I saw Neil Young and Crazy Horse play the O2 Dome a decade ago; the acoustics were terrible, the band were shambolic, the set full of moments when I thought things like “I think they ended that chorus too early” and “Molina sounds like he’s wandered into the wrong pitch-black hotel room”; Young at the end cheerfully apologised for their being a little crappy, “but that’s who we are”. They were transcendent!
Dexys Midnight Runners
5/5
Kevin Rowland builds up song from his voice out, picks his sounds, and we get this turbulent, ecstatic stream of confession, vow and manifesto - “those guitars are cruel and noisy”.
Todd Rundgren
4/5
This is annoying good, and I haven’t yet figured out the annoying part aside from the fairground music pieces, which are as atrocious as ever.
Ice Cube
4/5
Ice Cube and the Bomb Squad made a siege machine, blunt, unstoppable, indifferent towards material or feeling, uncaring in its blows, nasty or funny or plain sick or political. Conflating author with subject is hard to avoid here - cruelty played for laughs, misogyny and amuse bouche to homicide - but Chuck D’s framing of hip hop as Black CNN applies here. The overwhelming density of sound and idea reminds me of Tik-tok’s demented #corecore Tik-tok: it pulls so much material into the mix that it defeats understanding and outpaces irony.
Cypress Hill
4/5
To my teenage-years demographic (North West United Kingdom, mostly but not entirely white, middle-class faux-Mancunians, later prone to giving each other Wu-Tang Clan-style names like “Beany Fingers” - random example there), Cypress Hill acted as a hip-hop gateway to the perceived harder stuff, and I have a faint notion that once inducted we regarded them as light. I think it’s the hooks - playground chant-like, sticky, and more prevalent than on the average hit hip-hop album, the big-voice little-voice carousel that makes me think of Looney Tunes characters, and refrains that leave no doubt as to the subject matter. Listened back-to-back with a production by the Bomb Squad, the instrumentals sound almost minimalist, again playground-like. Though I’ve only ever borrowed this album as a teenager, I could remember almost half of the songs, and found myself muttering “born to get busy” as I trundled through Costco, now facing my dotage. Pretty good!
Curtis Mayfield
4/5
Paragon, perhaps flawless in making gilded, sumptuous music around hard lives related, this record makes me feel like I’m admiring it from the outside, peering into a glass display case.
Goldfrapp
2/5
This is a soothing sweet nothing to me.
Megadeth
2/5
This shed smells of body odour and is packed with moronic rants. Yet unforgivably, it’s soft.
Aretha Franklin
5/5
So much of this is canon, I find it easy to miss how much brilliance and labour went into the making.
Peter Tosh
3/5
This went well with a tired night working session, though this isn’t the revelation that would make me seek more reggae.
Leonard Cohen
5/5
Of the LC records we’ve heard so far, “I’m Your Man” is my favourite, but the debut most clearly sets out his specialities: the mythic presentation of the everyday lit up by striking imagery, the direct address, his voice pitched at a barroom dramatist’s laconicism, and a strong rhythm guitar propelling the machine along. The embellishments crackle: “So long, Marianne”’s accentuating drum rolls at close and the far off warbling below upfront whistling of “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye” make me want to listen to those songs again as I write.
King Crimson
5/5
Kingly?
This mournful, dramatic big synth and murmur of this took me back to memories of the folks playing the Moody Blues in the car: it carries the impression of huge brooding skies and romanticism that’s an unappreciated tradition in English art.
Dolly Parton
3/5
“The Blues Brothers” parody of this record’s audience is one of those lies that works because it contains enough truth: cheerful bottles showering the stage followed by tears in beers while the band alternates between the theme from “Rawhide” and “Stand By Your Man”, which might as well be on this covers album, which sounds heavenly while mostly sticking to tropes. The voices are divine, the instrumentation is respectful, perhaps apart from a strange dip into “80’s schmaltz on “Telling Me Lies”. But that song also contains one of those hard bright lyrical flashes that the genre does so well: “You don’t know what a man is/Until you have to please one”. “Hobo’s Meditation” lured out my inner commie: it’s a mighty song. As a whole, this is high-class confectionary.
G. Love & Special Sauce
2/5
Jizz Love is adorably awful, zeitgeist successfully captured!
What do you think, S Hugs?
And what are *you* sticking in the fridge?
Best,
M Ass
Brian Eno
5/5
Not sure I can think of another album that does this: distil pop and rock into a phantasmagoric collage that yet carries tunes that stir and evoke nostalgia for what you long wished for but never had.
This approach so easily could’ve made a half-arsed thing, but instead we have the divine. God - the good one - put his fingers on the multitrack.
Mudhoney
4/5
Murhoney’s deliberate goofiness belies a tight band loaded with clever, hook-filled songs badged with exaggerated fuzz and wobble. They’re a seriously fun live band. “Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge” might edge this on bangers, mind.
Hawkwind
3/5
These freaks had stamina and while enjoying this all the way through, imagining the light show and weed fog, I’m unsurprised Lemmy turned to the short form. Still it’s admirable, and more fun than listening to the Allman Bros strain of jam band.
Tortoise
4/5
This puzzled me on release, as did every other post-rock record I sought out back then because someone mentioned “Spiderland”. Yet it left a deep impression as this is all familiar three decades on, comforting and delightful. One of those records where everything sounds close, calling out from across the pillow. I appreciate it more, grateful to have been taken back to it.
Khaled
2/5
The album cover is splendid, the rest must be highly effective at weddings, but does not move me in the living room. It’s happy, unchallenging party music. His voice is great, mind.
Dirty Projectors
2/5
This is the sound of a Wes Anderson movie with all the fun bits edited out.
(Still gets a 2 for at least enjoying itself, Si.)
Sepultura
3/5
This is very good thrash metal that lives within the chosen genre’s boundaries: the limited range of low-end distortion, riffs with a playground rhyme’s simplicity, faux-scary growls, and a theatrical gloominess. But it plays well within, and scrapes against and undermines the tropes: it has a certain nasty rawness, bursts of glorious feedback, scat that I wouldn’t smear against a wall, and in “Jasco” and “Itsari” paired and rare examples of post-Zep metal folk excursion that tower. “Canyon Jam” could be on a weirder Sun City Girls album, which is both praise and damnation.
The vocals are mostly of the “rargh I just shit my pants/ rargh I just shit my pants/ rargh me too!” school, executed flawlessly. The toddler likes them: “monster music”.
Monotony may be unavoidable in this district
The Smashing Pumpkins
1/5
The widely marketed edginess of commercial grunge was privilege under paper-thin wrapping and two hours of The Smashing Pumpkins have finally given me the definitive archetype, a long grey yawn and whine that I’ve long-known but never had a name to put against.
Awful, the point earned by the hilarious little guitar squeals cancelled by Corgan’s hard-earned position as the most cringeworthy rock icon of what has now become the most cringeworthy generation: my own. Well done, Billy! Please stop!
Butthole Surfers
4/5
I have many room-clearing records, but this uniquely confuses and infuriates guests. A few freakoid bangers - “Human Cannonball” and “The O-Men” are my favourites - sit alongside the remorselessly offensive. The sadism of appending moos and sludgy anthemic guitar to a radio phone-in account of sexual assault is precursor to the morphing of 4Chan’s offensiveness into the general assault on rights and dignity that’s ravaging the States right now. I don’t blame the Buttholes. Occasionally the circus switches from spectacle to the specutaculur.
The Notorious B.I.G.
3/5
Eventually the brag, swagger and chatter gets exhausting, but the record sounds tasty and B.I.G. holds my attention even with the mundane, lascivious and humdrum-morbid life detail, more so than I remember Tupac’s broadly contemporaneous record did, though who knows how I’d feel tomorrow.
Many blunts are mentioned and I wonder about the title, “ready to die”, and how intoxicated was the average murderer and victim of the period, thinking about the poor guy himself, and a vision of murderers and victims carrying this constant blurriness into their experiences, whether there was any sharpening in the moment, and what kind of sharpening awaits me.
What can I say? It’s Monday.
The United States Of America
4/5
Charles Ives! A delight to find some pointedly obtuse and theory-heavy music here calling back to one of the first dudes to approximate the sound of a city falling down the stairs. To top it off, tunes and a beauty in “Love Song For The Dead Che”, blast it at your next inauguration!
Kanye West
3/5
He’s a chatty man, sunnier demeanour than of late. Almost justifies its length with a sweet shop of sound, but misses the delirium of his later stuff.
Sonic Youth
4/5
A fan of SY’s ‘80’s stuff, I mildly shunned this album, a common error. There’s a recording of them in Brixton from this time that absolutely slays; the few years when they were playing at being a warped, jet engined version of a big rock band were exhilarating and I miss this version of the band as keenly as the scruffy freaks of “Bad Moon Rising” and “Sister”. Second half wanes just a tad, but I think the record is strong all the way through to and including “Sugar Kane”, and rest blazes often.
Adele
2/5
I found this album hard to finish as I’d stop it for some reason - a meal, a cry for the kid’s playlist, a work call, boredom - and when I’d return I could never remember what song I was on, all indistinguishable in their inert vibe, so I’d conscientiously go back a title I knew I’d heard at least part of, usually “Set Fire to the Rain” because while the conceit’s stupid at least it’s memorable. “He Won’t Go” mocks me.
Commonplace sentiments expressed in mundane language, sung with elan, dressed in the clothes of the long dead, talent without imagination: it’s daytime soap opera, “she was only 21…”
A revelation came with the numbing litany of romantic dejection, the memory of a friend who used to mutter “don’t look at me! Don’t look at me!” back when we were going out. I knew it was comedy, but I never thought how until Adele’s genuine abjection reminded me of my friend’s comic and I suddenly realised that she was imitating Dennis Hopper in “Blue Velvet”, and retrospectively our relationship has rotated by a few risky degrees - o happy memory!
Little Richard
4/5
This feels like I’m being asked to review the laws of physics: the hits herein set some of pop’s rules, how can I challenge that? One imagines what the WW2 generation made of this fever dream of gibberish, raunch, yell and beat - tomorrow’s fun is today’s end of civilisation.
Creedence Clearwater Revival
4/5
The best songs lock into patterns that could comfortably entertain the back of your mind forever. Am reminded of Dr Feelgood today: both stripped-down, tight bands that used the blues form to accommodate their own peculiar rawness and guitar tangle that sounds simple and fun a probably a pig to imitate.
The Style Council
3/5
Their name is a hint: the style of this record may have been agreed through collective action before songs were conceived. I've been critical of Weller before, but this record confirms a tendency to redeem an album of mood-setting sketches with one or two songs that bang hard. I almost deafened myself in the car this morning turning up “You’re The Best Thing”.
Simply Red
2/5
Mick has a voice that would betray him in any police line-up, an ear for schmaltz that drills a wine bar into the brain, and majestic pink pancakes.
Portishead
4/5
A leap to obscure instrumentation and the abandonment of simpler, catchier song structures bring out what’s consistent about Portishead: the spooky, indecisive and menacing mood, its embodiment in Beth Gibbons’ pre-war ghost voice, the Spaghetti Western and jazz embroidery, and sonic choices that are deliberately anachronistic, dated in a forcefully unsettling manner. Theremin sounds too, I suppose.
The three year old is taken by “We Carry On”, repeating the mantra-like vocals without understanding.
As I treasure many of the sounds and genres being détourned here, this is leng.
Eurythmics
3/5
“Love is a stranger”, the title song and a couple of the moodier tracks are smashing. The rest is too cool and dramatically static for my taste, though magnificently tooled.
Terence Trent D'Arby
4/5
This has four shining singles that I have heard collectively probably a hundred times, but not at all in the last couple of decades, and I should’ve missed the guy. The rest works as solid examples of then-fashionable production techniques, sounds faxed-in from a distance, every edge rubbed off, many thin layers with space in between for copious echo. Soft keyboards, chiming shinies. Agreeable, overall. I like his sappy romanticism and wish it had carried into our toxic century.
Simon, I tend not to read your reviews before posting, but today I have and I am joining you in solidarity on “4”.
Nirvana
3/5
Too polite, though his voice is as strong as it ever was and the covers are generous to the originals, dutiful, stronger in this context than most of the originals. Falls short for me, but that has at least a little to do with my prejudices of the time lingering on: Nirvana were a band I liked, but I preferred their antecedents, the weirdos. I’ll save the reassessment for when the other two turn up.
Gene Clark
5/5
This is colossal, full-commitment American rock, the best of its kind and it feels like the end of “The Wild Bunch” with Clark’s hippy generation swapped in for the outlaws, out of time, values shredded, desperate, about to be cut to pieces. First time I heard this I was driving, not really listening when I was ambushed by a near tear-up as “Strength of Strings” forced its way to the front.
Ella Fitzgerald
4/5
As an album, this is far too long. As an artifact, an archival source, it may be essential. Only a few of the songs captured me in what was inevitably a distracted playthrough, but Fitzgerald’s delivery is consistently divine and the psychological insight of the material is revealing and comforting: the underlying social and existential anxiety, the sense of a disquieted era, calls to our own. It’s an uncanny artifact, as the songs were old, popular nostalgia when recorded, already out of time, sold as such.
Sepultura
2/5
The economy, precision and race car gear shifts merit applause, yet no single riff called out past the tropes, which do not entice me, the monotonously clean distortion, the growls, the absurd theatrical seriousness, the made-mud-in-my-trousers rhythms. “Roots” maybe shows they were getting bored of this prescribed palette, thankfully.
It is a genre that invites the listener to improvise lyrics - “stay off the llama farm!” - which is jolly.
PJ Harvey
4/5
Deft use of narrators and disruptive arrangements - that sax, that autoharp, those quotes of bugle and reggae - layer on irony and extend my patience towards the commonplaces thrown in e.g. “The Dark Places” makes me wonder what the song hides, rather than evoke “SECRETS” in a comic sans speech bubble.
I like how the record cries out “England” and “glory” and then doses the thing with heavy Commonwealth or - let’s be less polite - Colonial contributions: the references to imperial expeditions, Mick Harvey’s antipodean voice and the reggae.
I bought this when it came out and ignored it until today. A fine record.
The Dictators
3/5
I liked this: a goofier, more glam take on what the Ramones were to perfect, though the tunes don’t have that immortality.
The Soft Boys
5/5
Prog’s whimsy, the Byrds’ guitar chime, the clangor and glorious aggression of post-punk, earworm melodies, check check check, I think I have a bingo!
Never heard them before, wasn’t sure about the Stone Roses comparisons until “Queen of Eyes”, which is a two-minute prècis of the later band’s Olympian debut; and the song that comes after it is odder and even better.
Iggy Pop
5/5
Detroit-rocker and art-pop star skip punk and make a jerky, electronic post-punk record that serves intoxicating cabaret, chorus, creepiness and disorientation. Another one I’ve had for a while, but had never really put mind and ears to.
Ice T
3/5
Well-machined noise raised up by Ice T’s magisterial presence. No tracks stood out, but he’s sharp company, incisive about friends, enemies, fantasies and institutions.
The Velvet Underground
5/5
Pleased to report that I can enjoy this at lower volumes in my early dotage. Not as strong a suite as the debut, though that’s like saying it isn’t as bright as the sun. “The Gift” is a tidy instrumental behind a story that might not be worth the eight minutes. “Lady Godiva’s Operation” is exquisite as well as unsettling, “Here She Comes Now” has a tenderness that no spiteful murk could obscure, and “Sister Ray” is a thunderous brawl filmed by Robert Altman.
Tucker is almost made a Bez during “Sister Ray”: you can barely hear her, but you know she’s there. You can just about find Sterling Morrison, and his spiky picking has become my favourite part, clawing away at his quarrelling companions.
The Lemonheads
3/5
Another record that I shunned at the time, this is cake, light, welcome, doesn’t hang around or leave much of a trace. There’s a place for cake.
I can’t remember why I shunned the Lemonheads, or the extent to which I was influenced by whatever I read in Melody Maker, but Dando’s handsomeness may have had a part, perhaps the band’s lightness too, the inference of unseriousness, the casual cruelty of scene judgments, bracketing the earnest with accusations of dilettantism on one side and pretentiousness on the other. Heroin seemed the standard prescription.
The Smiths
4/5
Mostly playful fragments with a few decent tunes to hold it together. Morrissey’s spite tilts towards parody. Fun, some jewels among the toys.
Linkin Park
2/5
There are many worse ways to deal with anger than to yell to Linkin Park, and I’ve partaken in too many to bear counting. I now admire the earnestness rather than scoff at it. This is godawful, but likeable from this distance.
Björk
2/5
Three oblique analogies will serve.
Our friends Howard, Matt and Matt saw “Dancer in the Dark” with me on release, a very enjoyable time as the film infuriated the Matts to an audible extent, and they ranted beautifully afterwards, goaded by my mild praise.
An afternoon of improvised interpretative dance workshop in Paris for the love of a fiancée, harrowing for one unschooled in dance and primitive in French, left me with respect for the form and the relief of knowing I’d played my lifetime role in it.
A few months later, breaking up with me on the walk down from a weekend monasterial retreat (also for love, silent aside from prayers and Bible chat, French), my ex-fiancée asked me to stop using analogies as I tried to talk our way out of it.
The Isley Brothers
4/5
Laidback on the tunes with two out of the three bangers borrowed, but this is sumptuous and filthy with squelchy fuzz.
ABBA
4/5
The one true ABBA maven I know stabs his finger at this as their best, the ABBA record for the ABBA cognoscenti. It’s such a lurker. Listening to it carefully today I was surprised by how catchy most of it is, as I’ve owned it for years - to be in with the ABBA cognoscenti - and thought it off-kilter, creepy. It is, but the choruses and disco melancholy and yearning remains.
The sounds are all clean in the way that fake leather upholstery is easy to wipe after a swinger’s party, the aesthetic of randy people trying not to offend.
The communal sing-a-long wholesomeness of ABBA surely felt comfortingly dated when they were current and with this material is pleasingly queasy: Divorce, The Musical.
The intoxicating whiff of dodgy uncle that lingers around ABBA crests here. “Two For The Price Of One” would be seedy if it wasn’t deranged and earworm.
Traffic
3/5
Traffic are in borrowed clothes, but they’re lovingly derivative and the passion and core of tight playing in baggy structure took me through this record a few times today, as slight as it seems. The title song itself I’m ambivalent to; one day I’ll get to working out the mystery of British folk’s burst of popularity and subsequent fade-out. Winwood’s voice is a force of some sort.
The Everly Brothers
4/5
There’s a toughness here that surprised me, a certain callousness in the rotation of romantic scenarios, and a reminder that Lou Reed made his bones in knocking off similar: “Love Hurts” opens with a curt prediction of “Soster Ray”. One genuine revelation: I always thought “Cathy’s Clown” was a Beatles’ song and performance, which is an indecipherable judgment.
Apart from the opener, which deploys the transcendent obviousness of their pomp mode, this is a collage of U2-sounds, moods and moments, but without the punching tunes or the excitement, the songs crest before climax: this is a tired record. The rhyming couplets are boringly stupid rather than provocatively dumb. “Grace” is nicely soporific, I concede.
5/5
Does any song send it further than “All Of My Heart”?
This album is the answer to the question that was Britain in the early ‘80s: of its time in that it helped make it.
Richard Hawley
2/5
Worthy, amiable, dull.
The Beach Boys
4/5
The band that sang like a bunch of ghosts are now, mostly, ghosts. Though Mike Love will always be a ghoul.
There are a couple of great ones here, tricky arrangements housing sticky choruses and lyrics that stare at you unblinkingly from that wholesome white-picketed house’s bedroom window. Was David Lynch a fan?
Brian Wilson died yesterday, and I now turn to my comrade’s review; I’ve been looking forward all day to watching a friend kick a skeleton. No quarter to corpses, Simon!
Miles Davis
4/5
Davis hit the target on first go here; I’m glad he moved on, but this encapsulates and surpasses all kinds of smooth that decayed to lounge at speed. I’ll plug again his later, much rawer “A Tribute to Jack Johnson”.
Brian Eno
2/5
Eno and Byrne playing with a new toy is an academic interest. I understand why this is innovative, but have never found it an experience to linger over.
Jack White
2/5
All the right sounds, nothing to raise my pulse: Jack White’s heritage garage rock is closer to Clapton’s mid-period blues than The Stooges etc. One brighter moment is when he appears to be channeling Meatloaf, a revolution in context. He has a knack for riffs that are a note, pause or switch-up away from memorable. His rhyming couplets drive me nuts.
Django Django
4/5
Crack open the craft beer, let the Aperol Spritz flow, we’ve a current-millennium, Mercury Prize-nominated album that doesn’t sound like a winning round of London A&R bullshit bingo, that diarrhoea. This might be the only click-track proud, indie disco LP I’ve heard so far that lives comfortably within its cyborg, schoolboy choir Brit bric-a-brac cul-de-sac.
Ravi Shankar
3/5
I like it when he goes fast, but as pretty as this is, not a single motif stuck, and the teaching stuff sabotages any chance to drift in.
The Crusaders
3/5
Casually virtuosic easy-listening jazz snapped into bleak majesty by the melody, phrasing and force of Randy Crawford’s voice: “Street Life” is the masterpiece that brings us here, the following five a bubbly, forgettable afterparty.
3/5
Sardonic, danceable anxiety may be a good fit for the precariat, and I admire a chant of “blood blood blood” that verges on hysterical laughter, but irony must draw blood to move me. See Suicide and the Sun City Girls for sublime, occasionally hair-raising comparison. This doesn’t have the hooks to be pop, its other leaning, though it’s consistently adequate listening.
Simon, the string of adequate records continues...
Morrissey
2/5
I lean in to listen to Vini Reilly’s intricate, sensitive guitar work; Morrissey tosses teabags, sodden and cold, into my face.
Cream
4/5
Jack Bruce was an occasional titan; Ginger Baker was of a different species of giant, maybe cyclops. Clapton, I’ve written about elsewhere. Simon, while you were educating yourself with “Smash Hits”, I was being dosed with Cream’s BBC sessions and the already-cliched “Crossroads” solo too many times. “Sunshine Of Your Live” is the first riff I learned and it hits hard, tough and buccaneering, no surprise so many contemporaries referenced it.
So, some songs are very familiar, but it’s the also-rans, the off-compilation tracks that surprise me: they’re fun oddities, toylike throwaways of quick players tasting the latest fancies. They’re not great songs, but they’re stimulating.
“World of Pain” wears a cynical jauntiness I don’t hear any more, a mode I associate with Cream, a cynicism born of youth before one realises what real bleakness is - there’s hope here. The most consistent carrier of this callow cheek is Clapton’s guitar - I’ve come full circle and realised his digressions and flourishes are fun, zippy, and conversational.
After the guitarist gorged on heroin, booze, god and nativism, which eventually chipped the fun off him, remnants of this jauntiness remained, but none of the toughness or curiosity. No more fuzz, wah-wah, toys, and play.
My favourite out of the throwaways might be Baker’s “Blue Condition”, which is as cheerfully relaxed as peak Neil Young and Crazy Horse, disheveled in amp growl.
“We’re Going Wrong” is one of the better examples of the vanished sub-genre of droney, psychedelic laments - “We Will Fall” by The Stooges slouches to mind - which I don’t exactly miss, but the drums and bass unusually hold my attention - they let the guitarist drone, apt.
The instruments jab away at each other, but try not to sound like they’re trying too hard.
My dad used to sing “Mother’s Lament” to me until I cried and my mum told him to stop. She still mentions this, now and again.
Coldplay
2/5
Sometimes you just have to wet your bed and that’s ok.
After posting this, I’ll run a search to see how many other reviews write “Parashits”.
Sleater-Kinney
4/5
Muscular, spidery, bassless guitar duelling and smart, cocksure drumming make this the best riot grrrl-affiliated record I’ve heard, firmly of rock’s jet plane and leather jacket branch, spiked by banshee vocals that, unusually, throttle back and forth, keep coherent.
The Cramps
4/5
Tasty guitar sounds and swampy, surf fun: they influenced JSBE, whom I love, but I am still surprised by how well this holds up. Throwaway, but joyful.
Skunk Anansie
4/5
Starting with a casual shot at writing their own "Kashmir", gamely blasting out a handful of tracks that nod to The Jesus Lizard, and throwing down a few auditions for James Bond theme, this was much more fun than expected.
Dwight Yoakam
2/5
This doesn’t sound true, fatal in a genre where an illusion of authenticity is paramount.
The xx
3/5
A year or so after hearing their debut here, my 3/5 is a more sympathetic one: they offer immaculately packaged indecision and vagueness - songs don’t seem to chorus or conclude as pop songs ought to, lyrics are frustratingly imprecise, vibes rather than thought - that I believe is a deliberate sort. Maybe the depressing news that comes every day now has pushed me towards greater empathy for those not wanting to commit.
5/5
I bet all you “they can’t sing oh this is just noise” cats really like Radiohead. Five stars, volcanic soul, though Sonic’s Rendezvous Band took this lightning and sculpted it.
Supergrass
4/5
Fun and erudite guitar pop that I missed out on due to Britpop’s emetic discourse. Glimpses of other bands, never mimicry, more result of close listening and good taste. “Mansize Rooster” is outstanding in its shifts of mode. “She’s So Loose” has a vibe I can’t pin down - the title teases the crass, the delivery is moody and unknowable.
Red Snapper
2/5
This is music you listen to while waiting for something you actually want, dated by the false urgency that was fashionable in stoner lounges at the turn of the millennium.
Beatles
4/5
Fabulous album, though nowadays I just listen to the opening chord and skip the rest.
Fairport Convention
5/5
Has there ever been an artist who has come close to Dylan in having contemporaries blast off with covers of their songs? What made those songs so irresistible and so fit for metamorphosis?
This is a fantastic performance, a band caught in effortless zenith: bickering dual guitars, drone, Denny piloting the craft, just glorious and containing a song of heroic sadness.
David Bowie
3/5
No deathless hits here to arrest attention, but 25 albums he might not have felt compelled: making something still diverting after such a stretch is remarkable, and this is a solid album of artist following his interests, enjoyable in way not far from the endless stream of post-hippy roots rock of the early seventies - you just put it on and let it latch onto a little part of you for an hour.
Sister Sledge
5/5
“Lost in Music” has an urgency that is utterly convincing: I turn up the volume, ready to march lockstep to whatever revolution it’s calling for, a statement of hedonism that evokes defenestration, riot, prisons pulled down to bricks and torched.
Four masterpiece singles in an eight-track album is a prodigious haul, and of the rest only “Somebody Loves Me” doesn’t work something on me. The details, the small flourishes are delicious.
Raekwon
5/5
This is the greatest Wu Tang album, a monument to and of the idiom, an encyclopaedia of their strengths and flaws. I was feverish when I first heard this, a state suitable for the delirium, excess, non-sequitur and exhaustion.
The RZA’s sorcery - his stated intention was to infest minds with his sounds - is present, along with the teetering skyscrapers of percussive words, the flashes of mad imagery, the exquisite rubbing against the raw. “Glaciers of Ice” is the best song.
The album would’ve ended more elegantly there. They don’t know when or how to stop. Those towers of words are filled with rambling conversation and grandiose nonsense. I engage it as I would some absurdist construction.
Yet I’m compelled to return to this addled masterpiece.
Paul McCartney
3/5
This is rather slight. I don’t mind that.
It’s an album full of the interstitial musical phrases that are typically embellishment, but here outnumber the songs - I might actually prefer them, the sound of a depressed man trying to have fun.
Baaba Maal
3/5
Fine, but this circular, insistent guitar weave reminds me of fiercer records by Doueh, Bombino and Inerane. This feels muted into the background.
Goldie
5/5
Listening to “Timeless” without a huge sound system gentrifies it. The lengthy, synth-heavy opening abets this defanging, palming the audience opera glasses. This is the most ambitious among its peers in serving two, possibly incongruent, experiences: dance with trouser-flapping amplification, or listen on headphones, extreme frequencies muted, chin in hand?
I bought it on release after reading a Melody Maker article comparing it to Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”. I hadn’t heard that either, so got it first: pretty good. “Timeless” mystified me, dauntingly long and alien, but seemingly sparse on the wallop I’d caught from what little jungle I’d heard on the radio. Listened to it compulsively for a few months, a little like how I read “Naked Lunch”, never to return until today. A few years later I strolled into a tiny club’s basement in Hackney where I found myself joining a few dozen grungy pixies in a cybernetic hoedown to piledriving jungle and realised the anarchic, raver utopia I’d expected.
Thirty years have made this comprehensible and strangely fiercer: the breakbeats and patterns are more aggressive than I’d remembered, and the wobbly, slippery helicopter-like runs are psychedelic, modern, regrettably lost to the era. The jazzier, softer tracks, incongruous back then, make sense; digital soul in the ‘90s was proudly omnivorous, Massive Attack most prominently. “Adrift” doesn’t stir me, “Sea of Tears” still confuses me with proffered daiquiris, but I’m glad for them. Goldie’s an interesting guy and he put it all out there on this record, his first thirty years as electric cataract. The fleet, sometimes duelling rhythms still hold futurist promise, tempo shifts and blurred drum stutter like twisting and drifting F-Zero race ships.
The last two remixes should’ve been dropped, though at least they’re brief. Expected a bore, this album has bubbled up out of deep memory a future-nostalgia for the optimistic thrill that came with this outpouring.
To those interested, the remastered “Black Secret Technology” by A Guy Called Gerald is an adjacent masterpiece.
Requiscat, Diane Charlemagne, “Timeless”’s main voice.
Wire
5/5
This album’s cover is Wire’s album manifesto, one of the first to marry aggressive noise and pop: scary earworms. I love the impressionist blobs of guitar (“Strange”’s opening is gold), the startling flips in content, the skipping from bloody drama to sped-up Kinks - “Pink Flag” to “The Commercial” - and the cheekiness. “Reuters” is a killer opening. What a band!
The Pogues
3/5
A grumpy day leaves unfair impressions: I’ve been unable to separate record from popular use as signifier of a cliched, anarchic spirit of Irishness in American pop culture, which is funny as most of the band were English. Listenable, forceful, stuffed with tropes I’m tired of today, but that’s not their fault.
Placeholder 3, hope for a happy revisit.
Black Sabbath
3/5
Sabbath’s cradle of the Brit blues scene is clearer on this record, but even on the modish improv track, Iommi’s proudly workmanlike, unfussy playing sets out different intentions. The ideas are all present, the opening to “The Wizard” is killer, and the title track and “N.I.B.” sit with their best. Uneven, but they’re a band I would’ve loved to have seen during this early spree.
Soul II Soul
2/5
Most of the components are here, but missing choruses and largely rigid dynamics have me hearing through it aside from the singles, one of which wasn’t on the original album in its best form. The vibe - including the title itself - capture the popular moment perfectly, but listening to this next to more exciting contemporaries - including a heck of a lot of city pop - does not flatter it.
Lou Reed
5/5
I’ve possessed “Berlin” for three decades, but had spent little time with it apart from the opener and “The Bed”, which has sadly gained pungency over the stretch.
Every song does its part in the exquisitely grim whole. How had I not picked up on “Oh Jim” before?
Underworld
4/5
While their songs are more readily painted than hummed, Underworld share with Kraftwerk a romantic futurism, building imaginary worlds that are epic, self-consistent, hermetic but enticing. Cracking song titles, dreamy contours, bold cover art.
R.E.M.
4/5
Commercial R.E.M. appears to be my preferred mode of the Mekon-headed collective, evocative, Stipe finding just the right level of obscurity to complement the polished clamour.
The B-52's
3/5
One of the greats that has never entirely held my attention: opener and the hit are diamond, the rest is always charming, crammed with diverting guitar work, but don’t sate; they’re not the full lobster.
Sonic Youth
5/5
“Bad Moon Rising” to “Daydream Nation” was Sonic Youth’s imperial phase, each album weird, different from the rest, and totemic. “EVOL” might have the strongest song in “Expressway to Yr. Skull” (Neil Young seems to think so). The beauty in these records lies in the way that they’re short, experimental stories - there’re the bangers, but I never skip the strange ones, which have a mesmeric quality. “In the Kingdom #19” has Ranaldo invents its own form, race car free jazz, but the band wasn’t hanging around, left it sui generis. I’ve memorised this record and its siblings.
Girls Against Boys
2/5
Carrying notes of trenchcoat-teenage tough guy, this doesn’t rock hard, carry strong melodies, or have an enlivening touch of otherness. The two-bass set-up earns a nod, though the execution is agitated porridge.
Roxy Music
3/5
“Nipple on the sleeve, sell records to Steves.”
Bryan Ferry has always sounded like an old man who has drilled countless dressing room peepholes, but this is the first of his records on which I noticed it.
Jolly fun, band bright, bold and blasting, but maybe being aware Eno’s not on the album, or what a colossal prat Ferry is, that makes this feel too safe, that the title is an aspiration rather than a dig, a friendly branding of decadence. The weaker songs are dull rather than curious.
Yet “Out of the Blue” is delirious, while “Casanova” kicks open the bedroom door wearing nothing other than a Prince Albert, call it a draw.
Aphex Twin
4/5
I’d never got round to Aphex Twin, respecting the name without checking him out aside from the triumphantly nasty “Come To Daddy”. This record sounds very familiar, possibly because I’ve heard it in the background at friends’ homes, certainly because it’s influential - familiar moods, easily emulated. The melodies set it apart - tunes galore, Simon Reynolds onto something in comparing this to Satie.
Fatboy Slim
3/5
“You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby”’s cover captures the era’s carelessly cruel zeitgeist perfectly; that Cook has tried and failed repeatedly over the decades to find and compensate the dude in the photo is also appropriate.
Playful, fun, infuriating once past each song’s first two minutes, the repetition of vocal samples crushing as in a nightmare that takes you back inside a playground circle of the worst kids, and they’re chanting mockery at you, right here, right now…
Banging if you’re drunk or a four-year old though.
Badly Drawn Boy
3/5
A rummage through a Mancunian attic, this could be sawed in half and made tight, but the anticlimactic, bric-a-brac baroque vibe seems deliberate, a large part of whatever charmed its audience back in the day. This dour, slightly wistful, big chorus-scorning kind of music was a movement, now I look back. Never bothered with him at the time, wistful to see he has faded since (like most), I found this good company with little to hang onto, though one song did barge its way to the front, and it feels right the title is “Pissing in the Wind”.
Beck
2/5
A studio artifact cataloguing the Beastie Boys’ idea of cool, buttressed by three or four hits, party music that was a chore when I saw them in a field. Not to worry, I didn’t pay.
The Auteurs
4/5
Modest, in that it sits at the back of the classroom knowing it’s smarter than everyone else, offering gnomic minor petty observations that grow as you linger in them. Only listened to this twice, found the songs had stuck despite eschews of obvious, big choruses. Nice.
Fiona Apple
3/5
Rather like seeing someone unexpectedly perform impeccable high kicks after two bottles of wine, this record surprised me with its lightly-unhinged Broadway vibes and vocals that transcend the mundane content with wit, refrains with friction, and the sensation of being yelled at across a pillow. Not always welcome, but it was today.
Peter Gabriel
4/5
“Don’t Give Up” does funny things to me - Kate Bush is very persuasive even without the massive nostalgia surge. “Sledgehammer” is slower than I remembered, still a face-slayer. “Big Time” is a good time, and the other singles stick. The rest felt innocuous on first listen, intriguing and deceptively catchy on second. Conceptual air of a therapy session conducted by fax during a mildly innocent cultural appropriation vacation.
3/5
This has bounce, hook, lovely chugging guitars, and sharp song, calling back to power pop and forward to the sardonic vibes of riot grrl, a fellow traveller, companionable, but just doesn’t lift me out of my seat.
A lot of punk leaves me this way, wondering what this baroness I sense in the delivery. It’s not the production: for some reason, this made me think of Sonic’s Rendezvous Band, who exist almost entirely as a bunch of scratchy bootlegs, but possess a volcanic soul that this lacks.
Marianne Faithfull
5/5
Listening blind I would conclude this was a cool, tight little band and perhaps dated them a couple of years later. Faithful’s backstory has a hook that could trap a lesser record into a trite comeback narrative - Rick Rubin has made this an industry - but the bite of the songs, kicked off by a pair of ambiguous, ominous stories, the gloomier chords predominant, the confident synth-drums-guitar motor, lowkey and smoky, and finally that voice and enunciation, carries this to the top tier, triumphantly European too.
Asides to Si:
1. Fab “WCH” cover, the rhythm of those lines are immortal, instantly recognisable.
2. Feel the Haines connection is more than the Baader-Meinhof reference: bitterness, chord choice, romanticism.
3 . Mudhoney’s cover of Sonic Youth’s “Halloween” sounds like a litigation-bait homage to “Why’d Ya Do It”. The original, strangely, not so much.
Johnny Cash
4/5
Moments of brilliance mingle with very good karaoke. As an ex-fiancé pointed out, the video to “Hurt” is awful.
Superstition suggests that my throwing passing shade at Rubin’s comeback industry only yesterday summoned this record, I have to point out that this is one of the fine ones.
Justin Timberlake
2/5
Trousersnake’s power is his persuasive use of the familiar second-person form: he is actually addressing me, it’s not my couch anymore, and he’s sidling up to me, “hey, why so close on my couch, baby girl”? I can’t feel my legs.
“Rock Your Body” is a fine song, the rest is costume for a make-out man-doll, largely assembled from the weakest sections of late-period Michael Jackson tracks.
Slayer
4/5
For a good couple of years I went to most gigs with Watkins who, usually but not always drunk, yelled “Slayer!” at some appropriately quiet juncture. He did this with Nina Nastasia at All Tomorrow’s Parties. Will Oldham too., the day before.
Now I have sound to go with symbol. First run through, pleasingly swift, the record feels more like a force, a totally successful transmission of a narrow style and a more vibe. Second time, I just focussed on the riffs, differentiating the songs - they’re honed for close-listening, for the observant headbanger, sharp, jagged, blink-length riffs.
Slayer belong a line of mighty bands, like Minor Threat, Void or Melt-Banana, that deal in micro-epics, coolly fast rock that’s meant to sweep you away unless you force yourself to zoom in those tiny details.
“Slayer!”
The Beta Band
2/5
Beta Band, beige band. Listening to this, I assumed they were part of a noughties wave of bands that had the same inconclusive, blokeish, needlessly complicated wallpaper music ethos, but a dash of research tells me that no, it was only the Beta Band, I just have the impression I heard them in the background everywhere for a while. A lot of work to sound workmanlike.
Killing Joke
4/5
New forms are being worked out in this,pulled together by some bold riffs, pace and the savagery of intellectuals. Never heard them before despite their being a big influence on my beloved Big Black: you can really hear this on “The Wait”.
4/5
The “Satisfaction” cover is a canny tutorial on how to listen to this charismatic, staccato squadron of bangers and curiosities.
The Afghan Whigs
3/5
When this was current, I never listened to it on the hunch it was on the soft rock end of the grunge spectrum. I was right, but missed its peculiarity: it is spiky and noisy, eschews comfortable, verse-chorus-verse for modular, obtuse structures closer to Drive Like Jehu than Pearl Jam, and has imaginative daubs of sound that keep the ear from wandering - the drone on “Now You Know” a good example.
All dressing to unattractive matter: sad grunge man has the sex but still has the sad, yet the fit of form to subject is honest.
Ghostface Killah
3/5
I’ve been brought down with man-flu so will keep this short: better than I’d expected, as I’d assumed the collective had run out of steam by the late ‘90s, but more an overlong showcase of modish producers than a cohesive record, and lacking the weirdness or banging choruses that Wu-Tang’s best stuff has.
The Clash
2/5
The opener is the catchiest song. “White Riot” never convinced me - it carries their cheeky chappy strain, mockney speaking to power that feels both inauthentic and lazily simplistic.
They are unbearably quaint.
Hole
4/5
Despite being a grunge kid, I missed one of the strongest pop albums of the era: “Live Through This” is cleverly sequenced, wears the distorted power chords, scratch and scream vocals and lyrical grot of the period with ease, and the songs has swing and punch. This might be their only good album, but it’s a a great one.
Green Day
3/5
Without irony I salute how Green Day took on daunting times. 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, neoconservatism and the sunset of Europe’s idealisation of North America, how to meet the zeitgeist?
“Nah-nah-NAH-nah-nahnah-nah-nahNAH!”
More than one attempt to remake “Tommy” follows, but thank god they surpass the original.
Chicago
3/5
“Free Form Guitar” gets five stars, rest is an aerobics video, apart from “I’m A Man” and “Liberation”, when the guitarist melts hippies.
Death In Vegas
4/5
The horde of late ‘90’s soundtrack bands fused the laziest tendencies of pub and club music, empty swish, swagger and bland big beat, no vision, right for the era. This record surprised me by warranting a second playthrough and might be the redeeming exception: instruments are given their own space to resonate and be observed rather than plastered on like my kid’s stickers on the media unit; the songs are well-shaped, and there’s a touch of Morricone in the more daring choices. The punch-in punch-out visiting vocalists are a distraction, mostly.
Hüsker Dü
5/5
How embarrassing and peculiar to have rejected “Warehouse…” as a teenager, deciding the critics were right and this was one of their weak ones, then return to it thirty years later and realise that I recognised all the songs and almost every one’s champion. The list-makers are Hüsker Dümmies for preferring this to two or three of the earlier ones (“Flip Your Wig” gets my vote), but this is still shockingly tremendous. Is it me or does Bob Mould solo even harder on Grant Hart’s songs? See also the sublime “Keep Hanging On”.
Big Black
5/5
This is a record that I inhaled so hard a voice in me will forever incant “me, Atomizer.” It’s panache comes from fulfilling a promise that heavy metal made that only Big Black, a punk band, satisfied: a raging, intoxicating sublime made into sound. It is also surprisingly tuneful.
This was made with three guitars and a drum machine, mammoth riffs, brilliant flow in song structure, and a scholarly, relentless curiousity into what electric guitars can sound like beyond the blues-country-rock tropes that came before. Albini’s trebly chaos and Riley’s distorted funk pulled me in; only later I recognised how Santiago Durango’s insolent big rock twang and song-tinkering held the weirdness together.
The first side’s packed. “Kerosene”’s the pinnacle, “Jordan, Minnesota”’s a rocket, “Big Money”’s a lost Stooges banger, and “Passing Complexion” flaunts a crazy, synth-like laser-trill I’ve never heard elsewhere. “Bad Houses” is moody, an amuse-bouche before the record’s second greatest song opens Side B. After “Fists of Love”’s exhibition of how much drama and variation one can wring from one riff, three short experiments follow: “Stinking Drunk” sets staccato, scratchy, mosquito-like picking against jet-engine power chords, a lovely anti-solo in the middle; “Bazooka Joe” has a hot rod’s profile, built to blast a straight line, a study in different timbres at full throttle; and “Strange Things”, the song everyone - especially the band - labels the weakest, yet it’s the track that comes closest to Naked Raygun’s goofy disco and is graced by one of the great Durango off-kilter grandiose guitar lines at the end - it’s Big Black’s disposable pop song. "We wanted to see how far we could go doing something really bad”, said Durango. They capped the record with a live recording of “Cables” as they thought it rocked, and were right.
I despair of adequately describing Durango’s work, mock-heroic, drunk-epic, enormous riffs played through a deafening Geiger Counter, ingenious, elegant, volcanic, sometimes plain nasty. Albini idolised him, claiming there was a sub-group of Chicago bands that subsisted purely on riffs Durango had thrown out. Seek out the live recording “The Sound of Impact” and listen to the first side; the bass is diminished, but the hum of Durango’s guitar is the most gigantic rock sound I’ll ever hear. Per Albini, he also possessed the sharpest ears for the band’s strengths, tuning structure and vetoing mistakes - putting Albini’s distinctive, arabesque intro to “Kerosene” was Durango’s idea, a killer one, foreshadowing the overwhelming chorus.
You have to have the sleeve notes for the full package. Nasty short stories with sensationalist narrators, caricatures with wit and venom, printed lower case white on a black background. The cover is perfect, though what they originally wanted, an illustration of Marvin the Martian zapping earth with his ray-gun, could have been even better.
The edgelord legacy deserves comment. It’s a machine for angry fantasies: all-consuming, incredible for charging narrow tranches of emotion and imagination, but exhausting, and it can stop you from listening or watching. When I was a kid, I wish I’d spent some time outside my head and these places, violent comic books included.
Two thirds of the band have died, the pioneering punk rock engineer Iain Burgess too, a cruel travesty. I hope Sant comes out of retirement as I’m sure he has a blinder of a record in him, but today feels like an extinction zone for titans. A line by Beckett comes to mind:
“Giacometti mort. George Devine mort. Oui, conduis-moi au Père Lachaise, en brûlant les feux rouges.”
Requiscat, Riley, Burgess, Albini.
AC/DC
5/5
Am watching Neil Young in mere minutes and can’t find the vocabulary to describe AC/DC; it’s like trying to argue a pub. An exemplary record that peaks on the first song, though I could make that argument for about half of the rest (the cheeky homage to Fleetwood Mac’s “Oh Well” on “Beating Around The Bush” delights me), it’s a sort of mastery, canon, really quite drunken.
Pantera
2/5
Pantera limited themselves to a couple of Lego bricks to build most of this album: walls of the same clipped distorted chords, Anselmo’s silly voice. A few other Legos are thrown in for colour - squealing notes, odd chords sustained for more than a half a second - but the palette is as limited as a hardcore punk band’s, and the blocky castles they make are unmemorable, monotonous and jail-like. Please can we have a baroque chateau tomorrow or a brutalist tower or minarets, it doesn’t have to be pretty, just enough to linger over.
Pet Shop Boys
4/5
This had me worried at first, very much like a New Order album, which is to say pleasantly, maddeningly inoffensive; opening with “Being Boring” either a dare or an admission. I’m not asking for GG Allin’s corpse to shit on my chest, but some bite’s welcome.
The bite’s there, along with melancholy, wit, spite, some sweetly understated melodies, and sparkly accents verging on the psychedelic - rave’s catholic range is an influence. This grew on me, subtle, eventually sumptuous.
Depeche Mode
4/5
Provisional 4 as this has thwack and a couple of immortal bangers, but I need more time with the quieter tracks to gauge depth. Liked a great deal.
The La's
2/5
The records that The La's emulate try to capture something vital of their moment with the technology available: they are modern and immediate. This record crams serviceable tunes into mum’s old miniskirt, anachronism as constipation.
Songhoy Blues
4/5
The forms and sounds are kin to rawer records by Groups Doueh, Inerane and Bombino, and I flinch at the connotations of “World Music Idol” with the involvement of Damon Albarn, but the result often shreds. Opener “Soubour” feels like the complete deal - those circular, mellifluous guitar patterns married to fancier equipment than I’m used to hearing them from.
Ray Charles
3/5
Today was not conducive to the kind of hard listening that could extract some underlying truth from the record beyond either the seductive historical context or the humdrum sensation of wondering which Nora Ephron movie might any given track accompany. Unfair,I know.
The Band
3/5
“The Weight” is an all-timer, the rest is a warm, enveloping bath of roots rock.
Pere Ubu
4/5
The comparison this has me reaching for is of riding old racing bikes, which I've done a bit. Less comfortable, awkward, oft-eccentric in construction, they jolt if you're used to lightweight, ergonomic, indexed and computer-designed machines, but after a while you tune in, your shoulders relax, and you fall under their aura. Beautiful, quirky and handmade, made to last. I had a similar experience with "Dub Housing" on the second run; on the first, I thought of the great records this influenced (Dead Rider's LPs are streamlined descendants), but it sounded like a museum piece. And then I reached down unconsciously for the first time, shifted gear, and it all became easy.
Randy Newman
3/5
With this, I’m a Martian scrutinising an exquisite vase: what is this, how does it work, is it used for procreation? But the title song’s bite is unmistakeable, and puts one of edge for the rest. Still confused, though intrigued.
Elis Regina
2/5
Maybe the presence of Lô Borges on the opener is what makes it so strong that it took a clutch of chintzy tracks before the euphoria wore off and I realised that Elis Regina’s kaleidoscopic sexiness is fronting a Cold War fondue party’s measure of cheesiness. Some strong moments are lost in the cauldron of fromage.
Internet sleuths advise this is a compilation album, evidence of ignorant sloppiness on the part of the list’s original compilers. If there’s an album just of Regina with Lô Borges, I’d listen to it.
Frank Sinatra
5/5
Such a lovely, soft, shush of a record, it made me see past the “My Way” cliche beloved of drunk posh men for whom it’s an assertion of privilege rather than an ambition. Sinatra has somehow brought himself, Jobim and a little orchestra to play to us across the pillow.
There’s a tender, worn masculinity here that’s a revelation to return to in this era of toxic shitbath manhood.
Carole King
5/5
During this nasty epoch, one of the most punk rock acts is to switch on and sing along to some unrelentingly soft rock about feelings. Bare your soul, spill your guts, strap in some knitwear and hold hands in defiance!
Iron Maiden
3/5
Overwrought prog done right, not my jam but lovable.
Fred Neil
5/5
Losers’ music, and that’s high compliment. Neil’s voice is unflashy, conversational, a little beaten, a little wistful. Hearing these originals and knowing some of the context feels like finding the source of the Nile. Even finishes with a proper rocker.
Julian Cope
3/5
This record is comfortable with its influences and is interesting in that it leans hard on noisy, cult predecessors - the Velvet Underground, most obviously, but with more time I’d pick others out - for songs that don’t lack edge, but are perhaps easier to hang out with, less intrusive: derivative.
These thoughts are half-formed: only time for one listen; not sure this needed to be a double album.
Arcade Fire
1/5
Arcade Fire plod around, a machine designed to extract emotion rather than convey. Today I was expensively hectored.
“Here you should feel big, here you should feel sad, hand me a sandwich, hand me a blow job.”
Erykah Badu
2/5
I would expect to overpay for my drinks and have an unexceptionally sad time in this bar. Stylish wallpaper, I grant.
Simon, I’m willing to stake money one of our absent project comrades is an owner-liker of this album. Will report back.
The Stooges
5/5
Iggy has made some great albums and this is the best one. Aside from the caustic palette cleanser at close, all songs smash it. "1970" and "TV Eye" are my picks, but it's close. “Loose”’s dizzying opening drop is ecstatic, a thrilling way to introduce a riff. The saxophone’s entrance on “1970” continues to swap my eyeballs around. The cover’s sulphurous yellows and oranges set the stage: this pours out of a volcano.
Almost exactly twenty years ago, 30 August 2005, I saw three quarters of this band (Mike Watt swapped in for Dave Alexander, who didn’t make it out of the first half of the ‘70s) with a friend; Andy texted me that afternoon - “it’s today!” We’d almost forgotten. Arrived in my suit, back row seated in the Hammersmith Apollo, dutiful not hyped. As soon as “Down On The Street” began the entire room stood as one and levitated for the rest of the set.
Fatboy Slim
3/5
Listened to this like a cloth-eared dunce from my iPhone’s little speaker and that felt right. I’m not a murderer of joy, N Cock has a grasp on fun, and I can live with this and its grand beats for a day. Trois.
David Gray
2/5
Three listens left me unstirred and mild. Lyrics are of the “does what it says on the tin” school.
Alice Cooper
2/5
The first song’s juvenile fun and I was expecting more of the same rather than this odd hodgepodge of show tunes and psychedelic blues offcuts. What is it like to really like this?
Dinosaur Jr.
5/5
I have to rush this, but Dinosaur Jr were one of the best bands to ride the crest of grunge and this is their strongest album, chunks of odd noise and ecstasy embedded throughout. Returning to it, my memory of it being “Sludgefeast” plus a bunch of other stuff proved wrong: the set is richer than the albums that followed (though I think “Where You Been” is ripe for reappraisal), and more relaxed in flipping between jangly fey sections and howling amplifiers.
The Flaming Lips
2/5
Along with their siblings Mercury Rev, I associate The Flaming Lips with a languorous strain of baroque psychedelia that mostly glides past me, apart from MR’s “Deserter’s Songs”, which is shared favourite with my copilot on this mission. This did not move me.
Rocket From The Crypt
2/5
I’ve seen Reis play live with the Hot Snakes and attest the man can tear it up on stage, and there’s some of that here. Yet the songs themselves, apart from “On A Rope”, don’t hold enough for me - passable riffs, a lot of spirit, a limited palette - it’s post-grunge gruel, something to mosh to if that’s your jam. I know many who swear by this, will close their eyes and sing, they know the words, they sweat and make fists, and who am I to begrudge whatever consolations comes one’s way in the post-prime.
Stevie Wonder
5/5
I did not have enough time to listen to this properly today, like forcing down an eight-course meal during lunch break, but quality is undeniable. I’m a tired old man muttering around the dark outskirts of a brilliant festival. Hope to return someday.
Roni Size
3/5
What are these “New Farms”?
We’re bullied by double-albums this week, and Size suffers from following Wonder. This has enough strong points to make a killer 45 minutes. Unfortunately, it sleepwalks past two hours and becomes wallpaper.
Like “Timeless”, “New Forms” is better served by room-filling sound systems, but gentrifies further, which repulsed me at the time. The stuff on the radio didn’t need big speakers to slap, and I didn’t get past the first few minutes of double-bass loungecore when this was current.
The main innovation I hear - unfairly - is the slotting-in of the double-bass to lounge this up. Hated it back then, soothed by it now; on “Trust Me” the double-bass notes take on a UFO-like quality. There will be other innovations, but I’ve missed them due to the music becoming wallpaper.
“Digital” is a definite exception, a banger. As is the very last song on the 2-CD collection, “Sounds Fresh - Edit”, which is dialled in, cymbals reshaped into sword duels. Those two plus the best parts of the rest would be a blinder.
Rounding this up to 3/5 as cloth-eared comments dominate the discourse.
The Pogues
4/5
Again I fail to give the Pogues the time they probably deserve, a sign that I’m dommed to admire them without conviction. They bring the fire, yet I can’t help hearing the cliches that trailed.
Fortunately, I have a cheat code in that I get to read comrade Simon’s review ahead of mine, telling me where to return and listen better (Shannon, especially). A placeholder 4 this time
Bob Dylan
5/5
I’ve had this for ages, maybe the first Dylan album I bought and tried to get into. It’s elusive, rich with obscure yet precise sentiments, the vibe of the music big and welcoming, therefore tricky. I don’t understand it, but I like it a lot.
Einstürzende Neubauten
5/5
If your mum was the Berlin Wall and your dad was Hitler, how would you please the masses?
Einstürzende Neubaten are loved by many bands I love, but I’ve never listened to them: while I liked the idea - bashing bits of metal, electric drills etc - I figured the concept would be more enjoyable than the music. I was wrong; they’re really fun! A fine example of minting a form and perfecting it on first try. The irony in titles “U-Haft-Muzak” is hammer-subtle, but feels like a mask for discovering delight in a new, playful din. It’s composed, sometimes dramatic, sometimes aggressive, occasionally silly, but always thought-out. There’s a mode of obsessiveness here that I associate with German music, dedication to an idea.
“Jet’m” frogmarches the demigod of sleaze under the Arc de Triomphe and I’d wager Gainsbourg savoured it. If it’s not a commentary on Fascism I’ll eat my jackboot.
Almost as enjoyable are the reviews on this site.
Banging!
The Sabres Of Paradise
4/5
Andy Weatherall once played the best set of dance music I’ve heard, funky, robotic, playful, endless, lost to time. This is something different, probably quite influential though I’m so removed from that scene I have little idea. Isn’t it funny that the digital medium generates so many powerful experiences that exist only for an evening?
There are some great moments here and ideas he’d go deeper into. I enjoy this while hearing better records and sets through it. A sentimental 4 - Requiscat, AW.
The Yardbirds
5/5
Si, do we have an unprecedented hat-trick of 3-point differences? Years back, we arrived halfway into the first round of a pub pop quiz, just the two of us versus groups of five or more, and we ended close runners-up. The only question we got right that you’d didn’t answer was on The Yardbirds. I cannot remember what it was, probably something about their guitarists.
This was on a tape my dad played in the family car for a few years and that somehow I assumed was a “best-of” compilation rather than the band’s only fully-realised studio album, belting through ideas, riffs, Beck’s licks of guitar distortion, now-forgotten tropes and in-jokes with the verve and hope that only exit kids could sustain. I love this album, novelty parts and all. My youngest brother used to demand “Hot House of Omagarshid” when he was a toddler in that Vauxhall Cavalier. Only today do I notice how much the buried guitar stunting slay. Five stars.
Relf was the quintessential London boy yelling the blues, and gets a lot of stick for not being a Plant, Daltrey or Jagger, probably from people who have forgotten or have never known what it’s like to aspire for an impossible authenticity and the glory that can be found in naivety. I’m fond of his long-dead voice, it comforts me.
Chris Dreja died a month ago. Requiscat, stalwart The Other Guitarist.
Norah Jones
2/5
Get your latte out of my face, I’ve been bored by professionals and this is nothing.
Wild Beasts
3/5
An early revelation in our project was “Sulk” by the Associates and this might be the first record that calls back to it. While not as rich or adventurous, it’s a welcome dose of the fey and androgynous. The falsetto has wound up a few here, and the prig who uses words like “métier” and “non-metrical” bafflingly claims this record is “ambiguously misogynist” - am guessing because there are occasional references to sex that are not of the “my darling” or “put my dick in it” schools, preferring the stickier, grimier vérité of university-age coupling. “Girls” might also provoke ultra-prudes.
This is polished and often predictable; ambition may have tamed the art student, and they lean too heavily on the perennially-modish chiming guitar, but there’re enough tasty nuggets of synth and chonk to hold interest. They run out of tunes, but few pop bands don’t.
The Byrds
3/5
Work adjacent to The Byrds - Gene Clark’s “No Other”, chunks of CSN(Y)’s output - has enriched me, as well as a few of their songs, their most famous by far their best, but the band’s albums have so far never blown me away. The harmonies date them fiercely, as do the all-you-can-eat buffet of sugared Dylan covers, and the über-hippy trappings of most of the rest. This is one of the better LP’s, maybe for Hillman’s contributions, maybe because they allow themselves only a single Dylan track. Instrumentally, the band’s a party, McGuinn’s ripe notes pop and fizz, the rhythm section a bright, snappy chorus. The songs are fine, but most pleasure comes from the playing, like McGuinn’s morse-code fuzz on “CTA-102”, another of his extraterrestrial paeans, and the commitment to their own gaucheness - Crosby’s seriousness makes companionable the muddled dirge of “Mind Gardens”.
An album of them just blazing and being a killer band would be heaven, a precursor to the best psychedelic Boredoms masterpieces: I dream of “Eight Miles High” the one-track LP. I wish the adequate songs would stop getting in the way. I haven’t heard “Turn, Turn, Turn” yet, maybe that’s the great one?
Judas Priest
3/5
“Breaking the Law” is one of those songs that justify a band’s existence, “Living After Midnight” is fun, and the rest growls past amiably enough, but the limited palette of British heavy metal is gruel-like.
Ray Price
4/5
The pedal steel eeriness sold me “Nightlife” immediately, tuning into a holiday stint in Hawaii: the title song has an otherworldliness that fits the subject, a boozy lens, regretful couplings, cheap drinks, neon, sensations warping and bending with steel string. Willie Nelson has a hand, but this vibe is a band effort. A busy day - remember, I’m on vacation - has allowed me only a single playthrough, and none of the rest has grabbed as much, though a semblance of that vibe runs through it. One to return to, yet another country concept album!
Iggy Pop
4/5
Two obvious bangers, but Iggy dialling up the rock tamed the adventurousness that preceded.
The Kinks
4/5
Change saturates “Something Else”: there’s this inbuilt nostalgia when they describe David Watts, or the clown and the silenced lions, the man forced to dump his job for the uncertainty of “Situation Vacant”, creeping into the song titles in the last stretch, season’s end, sunset; the chirpy rhythms feel like they look back to music hall, but with too much enthusiasm; the harpsichord is archaic on delivery; that sister’s charging around her domicile done up in her curlers, no longer jealous; and the dub-like bottom-end and fuzz of “Love Me ‘Til The Sun Shines” has this gleeful doominess to it, “ nice and smooth”. This record dates itself perfectly, transports me, redolent of “Blow-Up” despite sharing little apart from period and setting. Some slighter songs put it a notch below “Village Green”; still ace.
Marilyn Manson
1/5
There will be other rapists on this list, but I doubt any would have made a worse record than this.
Brian Eno
5/5
The Talking Heads vibe in the first third didn’t do much for me - I fear I’m a lost cause on TH, a forever blind spot - but the clamour of “King’s Leads Hat”, in which every instrument has something exciting to say, and the slower, spookier songs that followed are outstanding and mesh perfectly with an autumnal Monday.
Listening a second time, I realised “Backwater” is a triumphant banger. And the Talking Heads-esque songs are not bad.
I’ve given more flawed records 5…
Eno lived on a friend’s childhood street in West London and every Christmas, when the neighbourhood gathered to sing carols, Eno would install himself as the organiser and orchestrator of the performances, very cheerfully by my friend’s account.
3/5
12 minutes in, a refrain of “I get up, I get down” climaxes with a church organ dropping blazing mournfully and I’m amazed by authentically raw feeling. Then Yes repeat this a minute later, quartering the force, follow up with some UFO sounds and a trippy gallop that resolves into a concluding segment of hippy healing circle involving that now-cheesy refrain and I’m deflated and laughing at having been tricked.
Yes is Yes.
Boards of Canada
3/5
What would be forgettable lounge music is elevated by loving craft, a plea to the gentle, and a soft undertow of “please don’t hurt the bairn”.
Grizzly Bear
3/5
This is très joli but just give me a chorus that I’ll remember or - hate me, hate me - a killer riff.
A Fabergé egg album, almost all depth is in the arrangements, instrument choice and notions, I’d need to a pair of velvet trousers to enjoy it correctly.
Yet so so joli. After a while it starts to win me over.
50 Cent
2/5
This is a well-made commercial product that stirred me little more than call-wait muzak, though the kid loved P.I.M.P. and yelled at me when I tried to turn it off in the car.
50 Cent has hosted an unusual number of bullets for a non-corpse.
Steely Dan
4/5
Surprisingly great, a cosy, happy, tuneful time. The other SD/SD-adjacent records we’ve had so far have lived up to a reputation for favouring slickness over fun, but here even the tangible self-satisfaction is a laugh. The yacht rock more than jazz rock, better for it.
The White Stripes
4/5
A rich and loving exhibition of raw garage rock sounds set me up for a much more unhinged and less tuneful record; this is my excuse for never falling in love with The White Stripes, similar to how I like Nirvana but love The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. There’s also the uncanniness of playing homage to (mostly white, middle class) bands that were in turn paying homage to (mostly black, working class) artists. Pop is pilfering, but some lineages are uncomfortably naked to the ear.
This is an excellent record that I’m in tune with enough to enjoy, but not enough to feel close to.
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
2/5
“Beyond Belief” is a scorching start that set me up for disappointment as there’s maybe an EP’s duration of greatness here; Costello has a lot to say, but I don’t want to hear most of it. “Town Cryer” would be a good pun in a single line, but he makes the pun carry a song, which feels typical: thin stuff.
Neu!
5/5
Many mimicked the sound but never caught the strain of romanticism at Neu’s core. Contemporary Bowie comes close in ambience - something in the concrete, perhaps.
Tom Waits
4/5
This works best in its entirety and is proof that a schtick - here, the XXL blues growl, the marimba clatter and the ticker tape feed of street life tropes - can become brilliant with enough conviction and effort. Enjoyed this more than expected, though as much as something to think about as to listen to.
Always a jolt of happiness seeing Robert Quine cameo. Is this his only track with Keith Richards? Ribot shines.
The Fall
4/5
Polished Fall is fun, I enjoyed this, though a restive kid and busy day allowed me a measly single playthrough. “Im Going To Spain” particularly delighted me on this run.
Shack
3/5
Before listening to a note I’m wagering the reviews will be full of “another British band I don’t know” calls for more Pearl Jam or (Christ) Radiohead or whatever the hell you lame-oes like.
This is stalwart melodic, heads down guitar pop that I’ve somehow never heard despite it surpassing what I remember of the avalanche of dull, post-Oasis dadrock that had me fleeing radios for the second half of that decade. They sound profoundly unfashionable and completely devoted, which pushes them up in my book.
Buddy Holly & The Crickets
4/5
Strange how this sounds antique to me next to other records from the same period - Link Wray, John Lee Hooker, John Coltrane to pick three I love - yet the density of bangers is undeniable.
Missy Elliott
3/5
Musically, this is tasteful, beautifully engineered, sounds like the product of a committee, made from sounds that felt ubiquitous for a while, though I appreciate the parts that feel like they’ve been lifted from the 1980s - mostly old vocal samples - and the squelchy low end. But she’s cool, it’s all setting for her, likeable, thoughtful, deft, and with a voice that sticks. The music didn’t move me, but she’s good company.
Stevie Wonder
4/5
Wonder’s run has spoiled me: this is great, just not as great as some of its siblings.
Kacey Musgraves
4/5
Here’s more than a touch of Taylor Swift to these ear, but the opening pair hard-sold me with some excellent chord choices, shifts that rouse with surprise, and a line that starts in Tennessee before taking a hard left turn to Beijing. High quality MOR is good for a Monday.
Ray Charles
3/5
Not sure if I prefer the first half of big band cacophony or the second side’s moodiness, as they seemed to synch with my day. Charles’ delivery is powerful, but as usual on an album of covers I find myself wondering if there are better versions out there.
Pink Floyd
3/5
This gauges closely how much midlife crisis I’m willing to swallow if the side dishes are amazing. Too long, of course; pretentious, of course; “Comfortably Numb” sucked out embarrassed, spontaneous tears when it ambushed me in the car, of course.
Other than that, there’re the half dozen Bricks, and “Goodbye Blue Sky”, a childhood banger that I’d forgotten and felt a rush when I heard it again. Rest is an expensive mishmash, sometimes bad, usually diverting.
Arctic Monkeys
3/5
Arctic Monkeys don’t quite rock hard enough for me to like them as a rock band, and they don’t have the kind of melodies that please the pop part of my brain, which is a shame as they’re charismatic, distinctive, and I’m a fan of how the regional accent is up front and centre and the lyrical here-and-now of the everyday/everynight. I like their brevity. I’ve tried them before, I’ll probably try them again as there’s a lot of good here; there’s a sense of their finding a mode and getting stuck in it.
Nirvana
4/5
I was a grunge kid, but Sonic Youth was my way in, which meant I headed into the weirder, jagged hinterlands and while I always liked Nirvana, this had was an element of following the party: I’m not sure I ever loved them.
They were a great, walloping, tight and distinct band, managing to sound both woozy and relentless. There’s not a weak track on “Nevermind”, and I’m fond of the less-feted pairing of “Drain You” and “Lounge Act”, a match for the opening double.
The on-the-nose cynicism, “Polly”’s casual nastiness, and the “double everything” Vig-Litt production mark the time: as Pope John Paul II apocryphally said of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ”, “It is as it was.”
Orbital
4/5
Does this earnest strain of techno-futurism still live? Forgive me, I’m long out of touch.
This is a cracking set, fun and roomy - lots of space to enjoy each element in. “IMPACT (The Earth Is Burning)” stands out both for its lithe shifts and the title’s charmingly idealism; it’s fun listening to this a day after “Nevermind”, close in time, galaxies apart in intention. Nirvana’s sounds are nearer to my core, but my sentiment now prefers the Orbital Bro cyber-hippies. Proportionally, I reckon far fewer arseholes love Orbital than Nirvana.
The Dave Brubeck Quartet
5/5
Laidback loveliness around a blazing classic in “Take Five”. Simon, I bet we’ve known people for whom this was their contemporary pop; most if not all gone, we’ve that strange sensation of hearing something fall out of living memory.
Jamiroquai
1/5
Three crimes define this album: yelled banality; stolen forms with the risk boiled out; the absence of original tunes.
There’s one more crime, related to maybe their only instrumental innovation: Rolf Harris may have buried the didgeridoo, but Jamiroquai did the murdering.
Paul Simon
3/5
Hearse and Boners: Paul Simon almost made me crash my car with laughter with “allergies, melodies”; he nearly got me run over when his mellow mist lulled me in the mall parking lot. The man’s a menace, three stars.
Point deducted for his being a laughable jerk; point added for being so listenable while being so clearly a laughable jerk.
The Good, The Bad & The Queen
2/5
All-bran’s insouciance, which works on the better Blur albums, imp switching with ingenue, drapes this with apathy. The achievement here is to sound both passionately conceived and half-hearted. There are good ideas in here - sign me up for the title song’s pitch of Motorik London lore - and none feel finished. So many notebooks expended on so meagre a product; I feel the doubt, “I think this is enough?” when it really isn’t; I sympathise.
The Black Keys
2/5
I think I saw the Black Keys at the 100 Club a couple of decades or so ago and this album does nothing to dispel the impression I remember of their being competently derivative. Maybe I like the slower songs more? So what, sorry.
White Denim
3/5
Yesterday we had The Black Keys, today we’ve another throwback rock band of that vintage whom I saw once with a shrug. Happily surprised to find this is a richer listen, playful rather than derivative, pleasingly brisk for a band with a yen for jam and baroque. Still hipster fancy dress, not sure there’re any tunes here, but at this point I’ll take it.
Rod Stewart
4/5
An elder and wiser maven tipped me to this, which sits on my drive. Not quite top tier 70s buffet rock, but perhaps more comfortable for it: listening to it is a warm bath in “records sounded better then, didn’t they?”
The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy
3/5
The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy were a big deal for about five minutes just when I started reading Melody Maker, so I listened to them and moved on with the fickle, never to think of them until this popped up on my phone last night. At this distance, they seem to be Grunge-era spin on Public Enemy and as dated as that sounds. A nostalgic 3.