Mar 01 2023
Slayed?
Slade
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
4
Mar 02 2023
Funeral
Arcade Fire
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.
2
Mar 03 2023
Meat Is Murder
The Smiths
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.
5
Mar 06 2023
Darkness on the Edge of Town
Bruce Springsteen
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.
5
Mar 07 2023
Let's Stay Together
Al Green
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
4
Mar 08 2023
Stand!
Sly & The Family Stone
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.
5
Mar 09 2023
Follow The Leader
Korn
I made it through! Imagining they were singing âold Macdonald had a farmâ on every song helped.
1
Mar 10 2023
Boston
Boston
Didnât 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.
5
Mar 13 2023
Figure 8
Elliott Smith
Not for me. Some nostalgia to the turn of the century for this, but ESâs well-polished mutterings never touched me.
2
Mar 14 2023
Truth
Jeff Beck
I like this uneven record; I can hear they had fun making it. Beckâs Bolero has the comic origin myth that Jimmy Page made it to pause Beckâs whinging about the Yardbirds. The version of Shapes⊠is great, though not better than the original. My ears glaze over interminable blues noodles, but thereâs usually some zany noise or guitar ejaculation to draw me back in, albeit briefly. Hi Lo Silver Lining is a fine drunk novelty song.
Itâs no Roger The Engineer, but what is?
3
Mar 15 2023
Olympia 64
Jacques Brel
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.
3
Mar 16 2023
Sheer Heart Attack
Queen
They have got their big joyful sound minted here, and the recordâs never less than entertaining, but there are maybe only 2-3 eternal foot-lifters here, KQ included.
3
Mar 17 2023
Hotel California
Eagles
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 theyâre awful.
2
Mar 20 2023
Wild Is The Wind
Nina Simone
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.
4
Mar 21 2023
Parallel Lines
Blondie
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. Itâs all very good or great.
4
Mar 22 2023
Miriam Makeba
Miriam Makeba
I liked this and am completely ill-equipped to tackle, linguistically or musically. Her voice and what she does to it is beautiful.
3
Mar 23 2023
Beyond Skin
Nitin Sawhney
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!
2
Mar 24 2023
Apocalypse Dudes
Turbonegro
Let me check my notes⊠âif you want to rock, you gotta rollâ, Wikipedia page says they âattack political correctnessâ and went blackface in early shows to âchallenge the audienceâ. Musically, this means ârendezvous with anusâ. Lead guitarist invoicing by the note. Chords strung into a forgettable rush⊠party band for the alt right⊠âAre you ready (for some darkness)â 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 studioâs percussion larderâŠ
For the second day in a row I think of the Didjits, who made the patently offensive fun.
Crap.
1
Mar 27 2023
James Brown Live At The Apollo
James Brown
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.
4
Mar 28 2023
Talking Heads 77
Talking Heads
This smoothly glided in and out of my years leaving now residue aside from âPsycho Killerâ, which bangs. A clear concept well executed, I admire this record without it moving me: my loss.
2
Mar 29 2023
Supa Dupa Fly
Missy Elliott
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this, as Iâd wrongly assumed this would have any individuality polished out, as heard in much of what Iâve heard of that periodâs pop-hop. But this has a lot of character, quirk, and sonic weirdness: itâs coherent
3
Mar 30 2023
Rubber Soul
Beatles
Beep beep, beep beep, ja!
I went through this waiting for the inevitable weak track. There are none. Iâm 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 thatâs 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.
5
Mar 31 2023
This Nationâs Saving Grace
The Fall
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 couldnât listen to it twice today.
3
Apr 03 2023
Green Onions
Booker T. & The MG's
This is an enthusiastic âokâ. The title track throws thunderbolts down on everything around it, but the record is consistently pleasant. It just makes me wish theyâd 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.
3
Apr 04 2023
The ArchAndroid
Janelle MonĂĄe
Alert! Prög!
Handclaps please me. Disco pleases me. Afrofuturism can be ace.Janelle MonĂŁe can turn an enunciation on a dime - sheâs 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, âCold Warâ did the trick for me. âTightropeâ also has a decent hook, and speeds us up, and throws in the cockiest use of brass Iâve heard in a while.
Itâs a fun record. Not much lingers on first listen, but itâs never less than diverting.
3
Apr 05 2023
Live!
Fela Kuti
I like endless, directionless, bouncy improvisation, so this is for me. Ginger Bakerâs fogged form on the front is a curio from the days when supergroups stalked the earth. He fits in, to his credit.
3
Apr 06 2023
Le Tigre
Le Tigre
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 Hookâs bass ghost dominates many of the best songs.
3
Apr 07 2023
Melodrama
Lorde
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. Itâs 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 âThe Louvreâ a lovely example of this.
4
Apr 10 2023
Exile On Main Street
The Rolling Stones
My perception of this album changed in ways I still havenât fathomed when I discovered much of it was recorded in Nice, CĂŽte dâArsetrim.
The record is too long. Itâs ok, I just donât 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 âLet it Looseâ, 14 tracks in.
3
Apr 11 2023
Pump
Aerosmith
Opens with a bracing whallop. âLove in an elevatorâ is great. Most of the rest didnât touch me, and âJanieâa got a gunâ annoyed me. Listening to it through tinny phone speakers probably didnât flatter it, but not much had me want to go back with headphones. Actually, Iâd also go back for the âvoodoo on this townâ song, as that sounded like it might be endearingly stupid.
2
Apr 12 2023
The Soft Bulletin
The Flaming Lips
One that Iâd missed, though âRace for the Prizeâ 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 wouldnât 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 Iâve 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 âGreek side dishesâ 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 âthereâs a loud and flashy drummer living next doorâ 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. Itâs a mood piece on the first couple of listens.
3
Apr 13 2023
Bringing It All Back Home
Bob Dylan
When âMr Tambourine Manâ started, I thought, hey, theyâre playing this cover pretty straight and then I remembered. Same happened with âItâs All Over Now, Baby Blueâ.
A classic I never got round to. Of the records from the list Iâve heard so far, maybe only this and âRubber Soulâ 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. Iâll get myself a copy.
5
Apr 14 2023
At Budokan
Cheap Trick
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 donât know stayed and wrote something one of the best pieces of forum writing Iâve read about them:
http://www.premierrockforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=879&p=56759
ââŠAs 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 worldâ
Simon, this IS the Greatest Hits. And Iâm reviewing the deluxe 2 CD full gig, not the short version linked on the page. Even the otherwise throwaway âCanât Hold Onâ 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
5
Apr 17 2023
The Velvet Underground & Nico
The Velvet Underground
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, âEuropean Sonâ 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 heâs singing something entirely new into being.
5
Apr 18 2023
Blue
Joni Mitchell
I love this record though find it hard work: I stop to listen to it, as I canât have it on in the background.
5
Apr 19 2023
Blood And Chocolate
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
This immediately grabbed me with unexpected cacophony and whallop: Thatâs 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 Costelloâs 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 theyâre in the right place on this first lesson.
Yeah, Iâll get this. I think this is a record Iâll find more to like on further goes.
4
Apr 20 2023
The Pleasure Principle
Gary Numan
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.
3
Apr 21 2023
Snivilisation
Orbital
âSnivilisationâ, 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 BoomersâŠ
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 90âs cynicism. The best clichĂ©d 90âs sample source will always be âRobocopâ, or âScarfaceâ if youâre listening to the Wu Tang Clan.
Unlikely to seek out again, but wouldnât 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.
3
Apr 24 2023
Paul's Boutique
Beastie Boys
Still great, still their pinnacle. Listening to it all the way through for the first time in a long while, Iâm a little surprised by the relative low earworm density, but I donât think this matters. One of the ultimate vibe albums? And the earworms are truly, truly catchy. Shadrach probably my favourite.
4
Apr 25 2023
Wild Wood
Paul Weller
Aggressively bland, this is what Clapton was clawing for in the â80âs and â90âs, 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 âMoon On Your Pyjamasâ (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. âIn the back seat of my head, some place I canât remember whereâŠâ
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.
âMagic carpet ride ⊠chase dreams across my fields⊠in the shadow of the sun⊠shoopy shoopy hot cross bun⊠please go to sleep my sweetâŠâ
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, âwhy, sky, pieâŠâ You are His Son, I thought.
2
Apr 26 2023
Five Leaves Left
Nick Drake
Parts suggest that this record inspired thousands of background songs for emotive moments popular TV dramas, âGrayâs Anatomyââs weepiest moments, and this is unfair. But the songs have their strange, awkward bits, and the morbid strings - on âRiver Manâ - 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 âSpiderlandâ.
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 âAstral Weeksâ. 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 childrenâs 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.
3
Apr 27 2023
The Bends
Radiohead
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 doesnât 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 - âMy Iron Lungâ is archetypical, with a guitar that switches between sneer and sonic âblah blah blahâ. Their sarcasm might be sarcastic, a put on. Recursive affectation! Slightly annoying! But the instruments sound nice, if busy.
Two.
2
Apr 28 2023
Planet Rock: The Album
Afrika Bambaataa
This is charming, exuberant, and shows an infectious wonder around the novelty of these sounds and structure. But I donât think Iâd go out of my way to listen to the whole record again.
âWho You Funkinâ Withâ is my standout track.
3
May 01 2023
Moving Pictures
Rush
Todayâs record was âMoving Picturesâ, so Iâve broken my Rush-virginity. Unfortunately, this means Iâve regained my actual virginity. One star!
1
May 02 2023
Everything Must Go
Manic Street Preachers
I was unfair to the band back when this came out: theyâve some strong tunes with the different bits in the right places, literate lyrics, and can soar with the best. And Iâve a lot more time for Bradfieldâs voice. I found it a little monotonous in tone and tempo on the first listen, but Iâve felt more generous to it on second and third goes. Still not sure, but a record with this many strong songs canât be bad. A provisional three.
3
May 03 2023
The Scream
Siouxsie And The Banshees
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.
2
May 04 2023
The Stranger
Billy Joel
This is an affable album, but little had me wanting to linger or return.
2
May 05 2023
Live 1966 (The Royal Albert Hall Concert)
Bob Dylan
This is great. Another bit of history Iâd heard of but never heard. Some less compelling tracks in there, but the overall effect is tremendous. âDesolation Rowâ 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 âShe Belongs to Meâ mightâve earned a nod from John Cale.
Whatever version I listened to over Spotify jump-cut over the âJudas!â exchange.
4
May 08 2023
Frank
Amy Winehouse
I donât 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.
2
May 09 2023
Let It Bleed
The Rolling Stones
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 âExileâŠâ); only âLove in Vainâ has little for me, five of the songs I love, and the rest is pretty to very good.
The Brian Jones bye-bye, heâs here like Banquoâs ghost with bongos.
5
May 10 2023
Liege And Lief
Fairport Convention
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, itâs very hard for a fiddle player to please me on record without exiting to the sound of gunshot. Sandy Dennyâs 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.
3
May 11 2023
Welcome To The Pleasuredome
Frankie Goes To Hollywood
The singles are great and the covers are fun. Bit long? I was never bored.
4
May 12 2023
Aftermath
The Rolling Stones
The algorithm has brought this not longer after âLet it Bleedâ and âBring it all back homeâ, and has me thinking about what makes a record dated, like this one, and near-contemporaries, like the other two, not. Itâs the difference between being planted into a past moment by a work, where it feels live, and looking back at that moment - itâs the distance. Forgive me; this doesnât explain why I think âAftermathâ is a relic, whereas âLet it bleedâ 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 âUnder My Thumbâ is brilliant, though!
Still a great album. And once I start concentrating on Wattsâ drumming, itâs happy trance time!
4
May 15 2023
The Age Of The Understatement
The Last Shadow Puppets
Itâs ok, but nothing stuck after two listens. 2.5 rounded
3
May 16 2023
(What's The Story) Morning Glory
Oasis
The album Oasisâs popularity crested, and critics went âooo, cocaineâ before concluding âtoo much cocaineâ on the next album. I quite like seven songs on this, which is a decent haul, but bloat is real.
3
May 17 2023
Now I Got Worry
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
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 Iâd ever been to at UMIST two years before, making me snarling loyal to the band. I enjoyed this record, but wouldâve 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.
Iâve 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 âSkunkâ.
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!
4
May 18 2023
I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You
Aretha Franklin
Aretha Franklinâs 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: âSave Meââs 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 âA Change is Gonna Comeâ, which feels ironic as it is another slow ballad, though one of the better ones, waltzing hi-hats elevating it.
âRespectâ automatically raises any ranking a notch. Got to give a little. Least a three.
3
May 19 2023
My Aim Is True
Elvis Costello
He covers a lot of bases in this first stab of the donkey. Pretty good! Doesnât hang around. On this first couple of listens, only the opening track and âLess Than Zeroâ jumped out. The rest sounded amiable, like sitting next to a mildly drunk John Cusack. Donât like it as much as âBlood and Chocolateâ.
3
May 22 2023
Aladdin Sane
David Bowie
Yeah, by the end of the second track Iâd decided this is probably one of the greats. Were I less uptight, Iâd use that corny rolling-eyes emoji alongside the admission Iâd never heard this before. Rockist teenager decided Bowie isnât 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.
Heâs 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.
âPanic in Detroitâ is fantastic. Surprised by how Stooges-esque the guitars sound - the teenage rockist in me approves.
Didnât spend as much time with this over the weekend as it warrants, but easily five stars.
5
May 23 2023
GREY Area
Little Simz
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.
3
May 24 2023
Africa Brasil
Jorge Ben Jor
This hit the spot! Opens and closes with bangers, has a fair few between. Iâm 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 wouldâve listened to this more had I not been pushed down a King Crimson wormhole by companions.
4
May 25 2023
Heaven Or Las Vegas
Cocteau Twins
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 Iâll get to. Iâd 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 âBjörkâ.
(Sorry.)
3
May 26 2023
Joan Armatrading
Joan Armatrading
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.
4
May 29 2023
Morrison Hotel
The Doors
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).
3
May 30 2023
All Directions
The Temptations
âPapa Was a Rollinâ Stoneâ 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.
3
May 31 2023
More Songs About Buildings And Food
Talking Heads
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.
4
Jun 01 2023
Ten
Pearl Jam
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 brotherâs 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 âcode for shitâ - see the track listing: :âEven flowâ, âBlackâ, âOceansâ, âDeepâ, and âReleaseâ sing to the act. âOnceâ, âAliveâ, âWhy Goâ, âPorchâ, âGardenâ, and âJeremyâ address the emotional and physical context. When I was told this, my animosity towards PJ melted. âOnce. Upon a time. I could control myself.â 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 wouldâve 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 Iâm sure my altered opinion will be tested when the Smashing Pumpkins bloviate into our trek.
Three!
3
Jun 02 2023
Sulk
The Associates
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.
5
Jun 05 2023
The Doors
The Doors
Hey, Iâve *watched* âApocalypse 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 vocalistâs 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:
ââThis is the EndâŠâ DUM DUM DUM!â
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.
3
Jun 06 2023
Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs
Derek & The Dominos
Goes on too long.
First concert I went to was Clapton in the Albert Hall, as my dad is a fan back from the Yardbirdsâs day. I mightâve 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 âSunshine of Your Loveâ, and I probably wondered why he didnât 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 âJourneymanâ 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 âNo Alibisâ, 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 âor inconclusively guitar solo to âKey To The Highwayâ.
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 Georgeâs wife?
âLayla etcâ is âNo Alibiââs dad, a shiny artifact thatâs more soft than rock, but the rock thatâs 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 âTell the Truthâ. It has been a long year. (I ended up just sitting on the couch outside it, writing some of this review.)
âLaylaâ is often said to be Claptonâs best song, but the riff is Duane Allmanâs invention and the piano part is, allegedly, Rita Coolidgeâs, pinched by her abusive drummer boyfriend Jim Gordon (heâd 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 âLittle Wingâ stilled me. I prefer it to the original. Super epic. Followed by the dishwater blues of âItâs too lateâ.
Canât believe Iâve 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? âMy old man said be an Arsenal fanâŠâ
3
Jun 07 2023
Liquid Swords
GZA
I am very fond this album, my favourite alongside âOnly Built 4 Cuban Linzâ of this rich period of Wu Tang-affiliated records. Itâs the tauter of the two albums though, similar to its siblings, it still wouldâve benefited from a couple of songs dropped.
Still get shivers with the opening of â4th Chamberâ. 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 âLone Wolf and Cubâ 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. Iâm tired, having trouble getting my head round this record Iâve known for almost thirty years, and Iâm going to mutter a strangled âhauntologyâ 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:
âPicture bloodbaths in elevator shaftsâ
âŠ
âTommy ainât my motherfucking boyâ
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 âLayla blah blah blahâ.
4
Jun 08 2023
Halcyon Digest
Deerhunter
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.
3
Jun 09 2023
Franz Ferdinand
Franz Ferdinand
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 comradeâs reviewâŠ> âŠor maybe, I was right all along?!
3
Jun 12 2023
Brothers In Arms
Dire Straits
Those three dangerous words: I have this. Both in my digital library and my surviving brain memory, as the tape was stuck in my parentsâ car for a billion years when I was around 10.
âMoney for Nothingâ is a song Iâve 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 âbrown toneâ 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 âBriggflattsâ 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:
âBury all joy/ Put the poems in sacks/ And bury me here with the hacks.â
Which is to say, I like Knopfler. And you should read âBriggflattsâ, and listen to Bunting read it (thereâre videos on YouTube).
âYour Latest Trickâ 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?
âWhy Worry?â 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 wasnât a⊠but letâs not embed a list in a list.
âRide Across A Riverâ hahahah did you write this after watching âCrocodile Dundeeâ? Oh shit, that saxâŠ
Thatâs what happens: the songs start off sounding like the cheesiest â80s 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, âThe Manâs Too Strongâ, fingerpick strum yawn fingerpick strum yawn, hey why is my pulse slightly elevated? âBAM BWAMM, bong BAHBONG!â
âOne Worldâ 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 âMFNâ and the war songs, I I like the stories, and the hint of fatalistic Nordic saga in them. Knopflerâs 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 âBang Your Headâ by Gravediggaz to fortify myself after hearing the intro to âWalk of Lifeâ.
Iâm not going to write about âWalk of Lifeâ.
O God, not another 3!
Only joking: fuck you, FOUR! Take that, melts!
4
Jun 13 2023
Catch A Fire
Bob Marley & The Wailers
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.
2
Jun 14 2023
Bright Flight
Silver Jews
âBright Flightâ 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 - âmy horseâs legs look like brown shotgunsâ is a clip from one of the more psychotic Loony Tunes skits. The crafty lyrics take precedence over the music, and thatâs not enough for me, at least not today. The flat and dry, academic delivery might be the crucial part that doesnât reach me - âTime will break the worldâ has what should be a great chorus, but it arrives like a lecture hall recitation of Orwellâs rules for writing.
There are some fantastic lines in here, though. ââŠbecause the dead donât improve.â
3
Jun 15 2023
Talking With the Taxman About Poetry
Billy Bragg
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, âshall we turn the boring record off?â 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
2
Jun 16 2023
461 Ocean Boulevard
Eric Clapton
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 itâs weirder than that, more like heâs doing an impression of what he believes an American singer sounds like, but nervously, not wanting to offend, like a busker.
âMotherless childrenâ is a strong opener!
âLord give me strengthâ to listen all the way through this track. No-oneâs made that joke before.
âGet Readyâ is startlingly ok, a smoky, funky throwaway that hooks. Thereâs a single-note tease of heavy, distorted guitar at the end that is almost a troll: Clapton could rock, but he chooses not to. Heâs mellow now.
The cover of âI shot the sheriffâ is funny for a number of reasons, especially Claptonâs perception of the original as âhardcore reggaeâ 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.
Heâs on safe ground with the couple of blues covers, no surprises there. Made his busker bones in that racket.
âLet it growâ actually did surprise me: itâs 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 Iâm intrigued that my two favourite tracks are Claptonâs originals. Put a loaded signature Fender Strat to my head and Iâd choose this over Layleh. Was expecting a 2, got a 3.
3
Jun 19 2023
Songs For Swingin' Lovers!
Frank Sinatra
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.
3
Jun 20 2023
Californication
Red Hot Chili Peppers
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. Donât fucking ask. Once Iâd 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.
Isnât it funny that Kiedis sometimes inserts nonsense just to balance a line with rhyme? Writing this as I hear a âbow wow wowâ, but also remembering the âding ding, dong dong, ding ding, dong dong, ding dingâ 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: Iâve just looked up the lyrics to âGet On Topâ. 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. Donât like it, but no 1.
2
Jun 27 2023
Highly Evolved
The Vines
Highly bad. Been six days since I heard this and the memory has the sensational impact of a stale eggy fart.
1
Jun 28 2023
Heartattack And Vine
Tom Waits
On first listen, Iâm inching towards âthis is bullshitâ, 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 âJersey Girlâ is a great song. âOn the Nickelâ 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 sageâs words: âjazz is badzâ.
2
Jun 29 2023
Run-D.M.C.
Run-D.M.C.
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 todayâs ears. Enthralling, but not entirely enjoyable. Intelligent minds forging something truly unheard: raw, earnest, bravely awkward.
4
Jun 30 2023
In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida
Iron Butterfly
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
3
Jul 03 2023
The Bones Of What You Believe
CHVRCHES
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.
2
Jul 04 2023
If You Can Believe Your Eyes & Ears
The Mamas & The Papas
Two songs for eternity, a handful of covers and some likeable period pieces. S, would you agree this is a âskip to the greatest hitsâ band?
3
Jul 05 2023
Debut
Björk
Calling your debut solo album, âDebutâ, 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 - âLike Someone In Loveâ 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.
3
Jul 06 2023
Destroyer
KISS
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 âGreat Expectationsâ to his daughter? Pukey!
2
Jul 07 2023
If You're Feeling Sinister
Belle & Sebastian
This list makes me face my demons. B&S, how Iâve 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 isnât it. Thatâs not a question.
This is very good and I havenât had enough time with it. Thereâs a play between folk, rock, dissonance and storytelling that feels both fresh and archetype-making. Soft? âMe and the Majorâ is not soft: itâs pretty bleak! Same for most of the rest.
Hard to judge greatness on a single playthrough, but thatâs all I have. Going for a likely conservative 4.
Now back to playing âTwo Nuns and a a Pack Muleâ really loud!
4
Jul 10 2023
The Low End Theory
A Tribe Called Quest
This is good, maybe great, but Iâm 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?
3
Jul 11 2023
Cloud Nine
The Temptations
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.
3
Jul 12 2023
Like Water For Chocolate
Common
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.
3
Jul 13 2023
Truth And Soul
Fishbone
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.
2
Jul 14 2023
Microshift
Hookworms
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
3
Jul 17 2023
Different Class
Pulp
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.
4
Jul 18 2023
Appetite For Destruction
Guns N' Roses
This was the first album I bought on CD and I know it front to back, though I havenât listened to it all the way through for the best part of 30 years. Whatâs changed?
I donât remember noticing Izzy Stradlinâs fantastically louche rhythm guitar when I was a teenager. The misogyny was apparent to me even then, but Iâm annoyed by it a lot more now. Some of the lyrics are smarter than I wouldâve 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 couldnât remember from the title was âAnything Goesâ, and playing that again I thought it a fun, minor rocker. By my count, there are 7-8 songs Iâd put in their top tier, and the rest arenât far behind the others.
Cartoonish fun, I have left this behind, but I cannot fault it for what it is.
4
Jul 19 2023
Armed Forces
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
Third Costello album on our marathon, this has two songs I actually know! The obvious ones, obviously. Liked it, and noted Iâve picked up, perhaps by osmosis, my comradeâs inability to wholeheartedly embrace Costelloâs records. Puzzled, as the songs are all at the very least fine. Maybe itâs 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.
3
Jul 20 2023
Rock Bottom
Robert Wyatt
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.
4
Jul 21 2023
Pieces Of The Sky
Emmylou Harris
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: thereâs 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. Harrisâs 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 Americanâs handful of skeletal covers jump to mind as the victorious counter argument. After writing that I listened to their take on âLittle Bessie, and let faint terror in.
Iâm 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 âDAHG!â
3
Jul 24 2023
Back At The Chicken Shack
Jimmy Smith
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 âDesireâ once, liked it quite a bit, especially the opener. Will listen to some more!
3
Jul 25 2023
Bitches Brew
Miles Davis
Don't blame him! Jazz rock wouldâve happened already. There is a lot less of the fuck-around in this than in what I havenât 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 Morriconeâs 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 âSex Swanâ is my favourite, I think.
5
Jul 26 2023
Mott
Mott The Hoople
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.
3
Jul 27 2023
Your New Favourite Band
The Hives
Guess what I came out in when I saw this was the record on the day of my youngest brotherâs funeral?
Mixed them up with The Vines, but theyâre not that bad. Opening trackâs the famous one, and itâs pretty good - hook hooks, and plays around with structure and texture just enough to make it interesting, Pixies-worthy. Howâs the rest?
Listenable, but little that snags memory. Recognised and enjoyed âSupply and Demandâ. Garage rock is so swift and minimalist, that hooks, flourishes and refrains must catch fast, otherwise the songs sweep past traceless. âMad Manâ has a cute intro, enough to bite and note. âHere We Go Againâ, has a strong axe-chop chord progression let down by a tepid chorus. After that track, only the closer, âThe Hives Are Law, You Are Crimeâ, 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.
3
Jul 28 2023
Celebrity Skin
Hole
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.
2
Jul 31 2023
Led Zeppelin III
Led Zeppelin
'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.
4
Aug 01 2023
Murmur
R.E.M.
Murmur has not helped me decide whether I find R.E.M. boring. I certainly find them boring some of the time, but âRadio Free Europeâ 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.
3
Aug 02 2023
The Renaissance
Q-Tip
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.
2
Aug 03 2023
Dirt
Alice In Chains
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 couldâve disheartened me with less than a third of this record - itâs really potent!
2
Aug 04 2023
Tigermilk
Belle & Sebastian
A good record, but hasn't clawed into me like ..."Sinister"
3
Aug 07 2023
What's Going On
Marvin Gaye
I hadnât 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 doesnât bother me. Its consistency is a marvel.
5
Aug 08 2023
Beggars Banquet
The Rolling Stones
Better than âAftermathâ, maybe not as good as âLet it Bleedâ. 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 Iâd 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.
4
Aug 09 2023
Dance Mania
Tito Puente
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
4
Aug 10 2023
Madman Across The Water
Elton John
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.
4
Aug 11 2023
Sweetheart Of The Rodeo
The Byrds
Everybodyâs favourite cover band, ey? Thoroughly ruined by auteur theory, I struggle to get over the Byrdsâ paucity of originals, though I love âEight Miles Highâ; you may not think me an idiot for that.
This album baits my prejudice out: while I appreciate what their transformation âBells of Rhymneyâ, this sounds like standard plink plonk country rock to my untutored lugs, albeit with hippy vocals.
Iâve 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 âThe Gilded Palace of Sinâ in anticipation of wanting to hear more Gram Parsons. Now Iâm 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.
2
Aug 14 2023
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones
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.
3
Aug 15 2023
The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground
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.
5
Aug 16 2023
The Message
Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five
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.
2
Aug 17 2023
There's No Place Like America Today
Curtis Mayfield
This lulled me with its indulgent murk of exquisite sounds, but by the end Iâd forgotten what had come before: itâs a mood piece with few hooks, a lapidaristâs perfectly useless object.
3
Aug 18 2023
Life's Too Good
The Sugarcubes
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.
2
Aug 21 2023
Pretenders
Pretenders
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.
4
Aug 22 2023
Gorillaz
Gorillaz
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 Hewlettâs cheeky pop art, which never betrays any underlying purpose, manifesto or feeling.
2
Aug 23 2023
Parklife
Blur
The machine threw us this right after the âGorrilazâ debut, whiplashing us from dilettante indulgence
This album is as frontloaded as âAtomizerâ: 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.
4
Aug 24 2023
Psychocandy
The Jesus And Mary Chain
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.
3
Aug 25 2023
Deep Purple In Rock
Deep Purple
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.
3
Aug 28 2023
Bookends
Simon & Garfunkel
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!"
2
Aug 29 2023
Get Behind Me Satan
The White Stripes
Someone must really like the WS, as this is the weakest of the three albums of theirs Iâve heard, and Iâm not a fan of them generally. This is ok, entertaining enough. The one that sounds like a quiet song from âWhite Light/White Heatâ 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 Iâll put more work in on my nascent theory about them being the Tim Burton of classic rock.
3
Aug 30 2023
Rising Above Bedlam
Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart
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.
2
Aug 31 2023
The Band
The Band
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.
3
Sep 01 2023
Here, My Dear
Marvin Gaye
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.
4
Sep 04 2023
Are You Experienced
Jimi Hendrix
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 thatâs 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 â Iâm Too Sexyâ emerged on Capital Radioâs Listenersâ Best Songs Ever countdown, and my dad furiously sought out his original LPâŠ
5
Sep 05 2023
Beauty And The Beat
The Go-Go's
I like this, but I feel God wants me to enjoy it more. Iâve listened to it three times today! Itâs fun! But I canât remember any songs a few hours later, just Carlisleâs voice cutting through as of from another room, and defiantly thin guitars!
3
Sep 06 2023
The Modern Lovers
The Modern Lovers
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>
5
Sep 07 2023
Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle
Bill Callahan
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.
3
Sep 08 2023
Let's Get It On
Marvin Gaye
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.
5
Sep 11 2023
Led Zeppelin II
Led Zeppelin
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.
5
Sep 12 2023
Rust Never Sleeps
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
One I own that I expected to give a solid four, remembering a few filler tracks. Nope, only Sail Away feels minor, but itâs a nice palette cleanser before the distortion comes.
Both âHey Heysâ I knew were immortal, and Powderfinger only increases in its power over me as I age. The more nonsensical tracks surprised me today: Youngâs 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 heâs imagining sharing a bed with Pocahontas thatâs to be cheerfully crashed by Marlon Brandon. Maybe heâs 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.
5
Sep 13 2023
Bad
Michael Jackson
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
5
Sep 14 2023
Born In The U.S.A.
Bruce Springsteen
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.
3
Sep 15 2023
Definitely Maybe
Oasis
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.
âŠyet after a track and a half I felt too bored to continue.
3
Sep 18 2023
Dookie
Green Day
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 âkicking an affectionate puppy in the faceâ two stars out of five.
2
Sep 19 2023
Unknown Pleasures
Joy Division
Flawless can be as boring as a diamond in a vault or as overwhelming as a Frank Auerbach landscape, and Joy Divisionâs debut is dead on the latter.
While I respect how distinctive and groundbreaking Hannettâs production was, I prefer most of these songs on the posthumous official bootleg, âLes Bains Douchesâ, most especially Curtisâs coruscating Insight.
5
Sep 20 2023
Freak Out!
The Mothers Of Invention
Reflex review: hate this stuff, âkin Boomers!
Review in kind: at least the Sultans of Ping had Whereâs Me Jumper.
Comic records I like: Locust Abortion Technician by the Butthole Surfers (though the sexual assault song is revolting), Danteâs Disneyland Inferno by the Sun City Girls, the few Rutles tracks Iâve 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 Iâve 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 âha haâ. 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.
2
Sep 21 2023
Spiderland
Slint
Took me about a year of monthly visits to Piccadilly Records in Manchester to finally snag this CD, and was initially disappointed that they didnât sound like Sonic Youth. I canât 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.)
5
Sep 22 2023
Traffic
Traffic
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.
3
Sep 25 2023
The Köln Concert
Keith Jarrett
1. At last I get to listen to the full length Barry Norman theme.
2. This is the music played in Mel Gibsonâs retirement home.
3. This album was better when they had Jarrettâs original song titles: âSharon at the Rodeoâ, âMiles Cut Yr Hairâ, âWhereâs My CurrywĂŒrst, Vera?â, and âTony, Get The Wheels!â
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.
3
Sep 26 2023
Deja Vu
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young
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 âAmazon Music is the home to angry Canadiansâ comment, which I returned to when remembering Joniâs track x
4
Sep 27 2023
Birth Of The Cool
Miles Davis
This is a conversation in a language I donât know, but it sounds pretty chirpy, and I let it play three times. I tend to prefer jazz stuff thatâs less on the rails.
3
Sep 28 2023
m b v
My Bloody Valentine
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 thatâs up there with the one that opens the second guitar solo in the live version of âWhat Goes Onâ 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? Itâs a genuine gift that he honed over the course of MBVâs career - Isnât 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. Iâm sure Kevinâs trolling us with the â2â thereâŠ
I shall listen to the album now.
Itâs 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 upâŠ
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 youâd absorb stuff from, even as a casual MBV-liker. Whatâs 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.
Itâs a pretty good album! I doubt Iâll listen to it more than once every few years, but Iâd say the same about Loveless.
Aside: two of my favourite tracks by Kevin Shields are the result of him dicking around with other bandsâs work to create chaos - his mbvarkestra remix of Primal Screamâs âIf they move, kill âemâ and Mogwaiâs âFear Satanâ. I wish heâd display more freedom with his own bandâs work, MBV free jazz.
4
Sep 29 2023
Permission to Land
The Darkness
This is legit hair rock made by enthusiasts that is content to be nothing beyond what inspired it. The Darknessâs music doesnât excite me, but itâs fun, well-made, and I applaud them for digging in their spurs and making passionate love to their hobby-horse.
Itâs not their fault that I keep expecting to hear Brasseyeâs âPlayground Bang Aroundâ.
3
Oct 02 2023
Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul
Otis Redding
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.
3
Oct 03 2023
Mothership Connection
Parliament
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!
4
Oct 04 2023
Henry's Dream
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
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 Caveâs gentrified Revelations for drunkard hams occasionally prise open my old ear flaps. But I cannot truly love carnival, it seems.
3
Oct 05 2023
Blackstar
David Bowie
Not sure if this is up with Bowieâs 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.
Iâm 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!
4
Oct 06 2023
Being There
Wilco
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...
3
Oct 09 2023
Ramones
Ramones
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.
5
Oct 10 2023
Songs From The Big Chair
Tears For Fears
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 wouldâve dismissed this with Simonâs âgo to the Greatest Hitsâ 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.
Iâve 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.
4
Oct 11 2023
Happy Trails
Quicksilver Messenger Service
Who spiked my LSD with retrospective adulation?
I had a good time with this. Brings to mind Paul Butterfieldâs 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-Xâer 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 didnât make it to a four because the last song annoyed me.
Reading the Wikipedia page on this album is confusing fun; reading QMSâs Wikipedia page is confusing poignancy - you can tell they were legit from the premature deaths with tints of bitterness, ey.
3
Oct 12 2023
Only By The Night
Kings of Leon
This transports me back to the embrace of the passenger seat in my friend Dâs old BMW, his decisive right foot, and the enveloping thump of his speakers drowning out the desperate sounds from the carâs 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 itâs a precision-engineered component inserted with the badge âhereâs rockâ.
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.
2
Oct 13 2023
Fear and Whiskey
Mekons
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 Iâll try Fear and Whiskey again. (Great title.)
3
Oct 16 2023
Daydream Nation
Sonic Youth
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. Thatâs 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 donât 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.
5
Oct 17 2023
Achtung Baby
U2
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 BonoboysâŠ
4
Oct 18 2023
Chemtrails Over The Country Club
Lana Del Rey
This washed past me in a drear, and I think âNFRâ is a smashing record (thanks Si). Chemtrails over the Country Club is a cleverly evocative title and I donât doubt thereâs some similarly wrought words within (groan-baiting millennial nostalgia reference to Kings of Leon and White Stripes at the start aside), but Iâm 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 âMisery: Selfieâ. Or âGet Off My Lawn, Heidegger!â
Later: I skimmed the Wikipedia and see thereâs 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 wasnât.
2
Oct 19 2023
Tank Battles
Dagmar Krause
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: itâs 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.
4
Oct 20 2023
Eli And The Thirteenth Confession
Laura Nyro
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 canât 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 âNew York Tendaberryâ 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 Sinatraâs 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.
Itâs a sumptuous suite, full of trinkets to linger over, I just canât get comfortable in it, and I donât understand as I donât have this problem with other blisteringly forceful singers. Will try again one day. Reckon Tendaberry will be somewhere on this list, ey?
3
Oct 23 2023
The Cars
The Cars
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.
4
Oct 24 2023
A Girl Called Dusty
Dusty Springfield
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.
4
Oct 25 2023
Gold
Ryan Adams
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. Thereâs 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 buskerâs vocal affectations that magnify the triteness of the lines. Itâs a box-ticking exercise in homage - hereâs a fast-spoken song about New York, hereâs a song with âBluesâ 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 heâs 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 Girlâs modicum of Coors lite rock until I realised it was longer than Foolâs Gold.
From WikipediaââNew York, New York" became a notable MTV and VH1 favorite following the September 11 attacks.â 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.
1
Oct 26 2023
Shaft
Isaac Hayes
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.
3
Oct 27 2023
Don't Stand Me Down
Dexys Midnight Runners
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 doesnât 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 â cloth-eared, verse-chorus-verse dingleberriesâ, or âthe reason why most music is boringâ, and Iâm especially sorry to the chap who described this as âpub rockâ for calling him âuniquely cretinousâ. Forgive me. Hugs!
5
Oct 30 2023
Never Mind The Bollocks, Hereâs The Sex Pistols
Sex Pistols
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 Iâve had a copy for most of my adulthood.
The record comes from a place of hurt, most obviously in Lydonâs delivery. I think heâs brilliant, but I cannot enjoy this, not now, as his words are bleakly hopeless
This is a studio artifact: itâs 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 Jonesâs exuberant guitar playing (bass as well as lead) is Hogarthian.
3
Oct 31 2023
Tracy Chapman
Tracy Chapman
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 Iâve 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.
3
Nov 01 2023
Blue Lines
Massive Attack
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.
4
Nov 02 2023
Ingenue
k.d. lang
Constant Craving is a smoothie, the rest beige'd me out and I failed to reach the end of a second playthrough.
2
Nov 03 2023
Crooked Rain Crooked Rain
Pavement
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: âHer reach exceeded her graspâ. 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.
5
Nov 06 2023
Reggatta De Blanc
The Police
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.
4
Nov 07 2023
After The Gold Rush
Neil Young
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!
5
Nov 08 2023
Graceland
Paul Simon
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!
4
Nov 09 2023
Seventeen Seconds
The Cure
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?
2
Nov 10 2023
Stephen Stills
Stephen Stills
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! âLove the One Youâre Withâ, 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 Altmanâs âThe Big Sleepâ, 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.
4
Nov 13 2023
Hail To the Thief
Radiohead
Which of the list's Radioheys is this, Sleepy, Happy, Dopey, Bashful, Berkshire or Dave?
Thereâs 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 Greenwoodâs Iâve 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 couldnât 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 donât shun me!
2
Nov 14 2023
Dummy
Portishead
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.
5
Nov 15 2023
Scott 4
Scott Walker
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.
5
Nov 16 2023
Triangle
The Beau Brummels
This is very silly, as well as typically didactic for the era. These damn hallucinauts, telling me what to do! Iâm glad it exists and Iâm 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.
2
Nov 17 2023
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Wilco
My dadâs response when I asked him what he thought of R.E.M. is apt here:
âThey have good arrangements.â
2
Nov 20 2023
Revolver
Beatles
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.
5
Nov 21 2023
Stardust
Willie Nelson
Feeling poorly, I almost missed writing this.
When I saw this was a covers album, I was disappointed. What Iâve 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.
3
Nov 22 2023
Queens of the Stone Age
Queens of the Stone Age
Solid rock, the songs with incessant Sabbathy grinding grabbed me, sandy aftertaste. Not sure Iâd return to.
3
Nov 23 2023
Chore of Enchantment
Giant Sand
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. âDonât Love Me For My Big Muff.â 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.
3
Nov 24 2023
Cupid & Psyche 85
Scritti Politti
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: itâs like the studio form was waiting for the perfect content, and that content turned out to be Scritti Politti.
4
Nov 27 2023
Be
Common
Be is polished, worthy and so frictionless I slid right off it.
2
Nov 28 2023
Green
R.E.M.
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 â90s 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.
3
Nov 29 2023
Group Sex
Circle Jerks
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:
âI donât want to live to 34/I donât to die in a nuclear war!â
âWhereâs the gun?/Hereâs my head!â
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.
3
Nov 30 2023
Hot Shots II
The Beta Band
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 âRevolverâ and making âThe Birdie Songâ. 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 Revâs 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 songâs themselves are well-crafted with stick and structures that caught me off-guard without losing me.
The titleâs clever-stupid humour displays a then-modish, self-deprecating-but-fuck-you-not-really attitude that I donât miss.
I like this more than I expected to, a piece of a period that I donât mind revisiting.
3
Dec 01 2023
Hot Rats
Frank Zappa
Zappaâs Hot Rats were not bad company today, though after a first listen only enormous indifference stopped me from finding something else to play. Beefheartâs intro to one of Zâs long jams was my highlight, and Iâm 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.
2
Dec 04 2023
Play
Moby
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.
4
Dec 05 2023
At Folsom Prison
Johnny Cash
More a curated novelty barnstormer than the weightier San Quentin album, this is fun and Cashâs 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.
3
Dec 06 2023
Abbey Road
Beatles
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.
5
Dec 07 2023
The Suburbs
Arcade Fire
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 songwriterâs 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 (âevery corner of the earthâ) is a giveaway: theyâve little to say, just the mundane usual, pumped-up with cheap obscurity.
Simon, you may ask for an example of expensive obscurity: Bowie, if Iâm being peaceable, but as itâs my birthday Iâm throwing Scott Walker at you with a moronic giggle x
2
Dec 08 2023
London Calling
The Clash
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.
4
Dec 11 2023
Band On The Run
Paul McCartney and Wings
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.
4
Dec 12 2023
Nilsson Schmilsson
Harry Nilsson
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.
4
Dec 13 2023
Happy Sad
Tim Buckley
This is a lovely record, a bath of relaxed jazz guitar, vibes, cheerful strumming and Buckley sounding somehow both casual and sublime. Iâm in the mood for this today; some days, heâs 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 Blytonâs. 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.
4
Dec 14 2023
Back In Black
AC/DC
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.
5
Dec 15 2023
Home Is Where The Music Is
Hugh Masekela
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.
3
Dec 18 2023
Metallica
Metallica
In Holland, I saw an array of bronzed supine beach bodies lift dumbbells in synch to Enter Sandman, the trainer at climax instructing âEnter night⊠exit lightâŠkeep it slow... SUPERSLOWWWâ 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?
Iâm 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 Iâm sure I thought it was fine back when it and I were shiny. Nowadays, I cannot abide chores. Two.
2
Dec 19 2023
Blonde On Blonde
Bob Dylan
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.
5
Dec 20 2023
The Specials
The Specials
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 singerâs mode of address hold the attention.
The vocals are also pleasingly fey when Hall lets his guard down.
3
Dec 21 2023
In The Wee Small Hours
Frank Sinatra
I have this album and am a fan of its vibe, which opens up after dark: Sinatraâs 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.
4
Dec 22 2023
The Chronic
Dr. Dre
This is the first good hip hop album Iâve 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.
4
Dec 25 2023
Remain In Light
Talking Heads
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.
3
Dec 26 2023
A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector
Various Artists
Our hostâs 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 donât have the stomach to unpick Spectorâs depredations, which would anyway do a disservice to those who actually played and sang these songs. This is a blast of cheer, and Iâm surprised it lasted the day here, testament to its honing for mid-distance listening at varying levels of festive exhaustion.
4
Dec 27 2023
Heroes
David Bowie
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: âHeroesâ is outstanding, its instrumental pieces Iâd 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.
5
Dec 28 2023
Disintegration
The Cure
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 Smithâs 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 wifeâs reaction on seeing a photo of The Cure on the hotel TV screen, on which I finished this playthrough:
âOh what nice make-up youâre wearing. Are you 15? Oh no, my mistake, youâre 60. Hahaha. Get a grip!â
She was born a year or so before this came out. O goths, one day a generation will come that will love you.
4
Dec 29 2023
Fragile
Yes
A benefit of beaming these records onto a hotel television is my wifeâs opinion on the music and Spotify band photos:
âThis is âget a gripâ as well. Go to the gym. Get a haircut. Go for a run. Go see a dentist. This is not music I could like.â
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: theyâre awful at flirting, and can only flirt, and were I not under an obligation I would not have stayed beyond hors dâĆuvres. 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.
2
Jan 01 2024
The Yes Album
Yes
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 thatâs boring. The ghost choir singing. Elves, probably.
Paging Trevor Horn for some help here.
2
Jan 02 2024
(Pronounced 'Leh-'Nérd 'Skin-'Nérd)
Lynyrd Skynyrd
This is a pivotal album in a genre I donât 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 Iâve noted, as related by an acquaintance: the Chicago rock band The Butcher Shop Quartet played a storming cover of Stravinskyâs âThe Rite of Springâ. A beat after the finale, someone shouted âFIREBIRD!â
3
Jan 03 2024
Goo
Sonic Youth
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. Cinderellaâs Big Score, Mote and Kool Thing are also favourites from that period.
Returning to Goo, thereâs 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 didnât have to follow the late-60âs blues rock templates to sound cool.
A good record, but I prefer the contemporaneous Live In Irvine recording, which can be grabbed from the bandâs generous Bandcamp page.
3
Jan 04 2024
The Wildest!
Louis Prima
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 âRumbleâ and would sit easily in a film like âTouch of Evilâ, 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 Iâll join him.
(Most of those kids are gone now.)
4
Jan 05 2024
Doolittle
Pixies
Surfer Rosaâs rawness and playfulness makes it my fondest Pixies record, but Doolittle may have the better tracklist. I wish it didnât sound so civilised, but maybe this is like Bunuelâs dinner party characters: black tie, ancient silverware and bloodlusty surrealism.
Iâd forgotten how brilliant Black Francisâs lyrics and delivery are; heâs 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.
4
Jan 08 2024
Cheap Thrills
Big Brother & The Holding Company
Janis Joplinâs vocal cords might have mothered Axl Roseâs.
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.
4
Jan 09 2024
Live At Leeds
The Who
Having trouble getting my head round this, so Iâll 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 Iâve learned was a travesty, but this pre-teenâs 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 itâs 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 arenât pleasant, but they are interesting, a very middle-class English mode of creepiness that Townshend seemed to revel in.
Keith Moonâs 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?
4
Jan 10 2024
Merriweather Post Pavilion
Animal Collective
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 arenât 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-cafĂ©-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.
3
Jan 11 2024
Thriller
Michael Jackson
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.
5
Jan 12 2024
Sunshine Hit Me
The Bees
Our second noughties latte-lounge album of the week, a reggae-fanâs 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 âpretty annoyingâ guy in Limmyâs 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 doesnât so much waste my time as evade it.
2
Jan 15 2024
Master Of Puppets
Metallica
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 âBatteryâ that you will undoubtedly deliver to them with this!
3
Jan 16 2024
Live And Dangerous
Thin Lizzy
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 Iâve heard thatâs sublime. Listen to that!
4
Jan 17 2024
Court And Spark
Joni Mitchell
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.
4
Jan 18 2024
Wish You Were Here
Pink Floyd
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.
2
Jan 19 2024
Queen Of Denmark
John Grant
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 Iâve let this play four times over the day.
3
Jan 22 2024
Green River
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Putting my serious ears on for what I know is meant to be a classic, what caught me was the way J Fogertyâs 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?
4
Jan 23 2024
The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady
Charles Mingus
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 musicâs bursting at the seams, itâs in formation. The saunters and gallops are tremendous, with louche preambles suggesting theyâre 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 Morriconeâs freakiest tracks. The stealth-surrealists at the Walt Disney Corporation could have illustrated this with a film that wouldâve gone down equally well in vernissages and smut theatres.
A friendâs eldest child is called Mingus. Theyâre both very cool.
5
Jan 24 2024
Me Against The World
2Pac
The opening burst of morbidity, the Iâll-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 trackâs delivery of âKill kill kill, murder murder murderâ is nifty and funny. I wonât linger over why this is the one line thatâs stuck to my lips as I drive to the nursery pick-up.
2
Jan 25 2024
Black Monk Time
The Monks
This isn't the first time I've been Monked, though I couldn't find them on my hard drive. My opinionâs 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.
3
Jan 26 2024
Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde
The Pharcyde
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. âOh shitâ makes me wistful for a time when transphobia was a carefree pastime. I'm joking while also being absolutely serious.
4
Jan 29 2024
Illinois
Sufjan Stevens
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?
3
Jan 30 2024
Off The Wall
Michael Jackson
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
Jan 31 2024
SĂŁo Paulo Confessions
Suba
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 heâs still alive, and I wonder if this album was playing.
2
Feb 01 2024
Highway 61 Revisited
Bob Dylan
My acknowledgement of the force of Dylanâs oeuvre started from grudging at the outset of this project, passed through grovelling, and has reached the âof courseâ 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.
Iâll repeat with some variation an earlier thought: his best word-images donât 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 Buntingâs commentary on Poundâs Cantos:
âThere 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!â
5
Feb 02 2024
The Modern Dance
Pere Ubu
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!
3
Feb 05 2024
Electric Warrior
T. Rex
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 donât know which came first. His guitar playing is a clever swerve from âsad man is sad because girlâ to âweâre all going to die, but you canât stop my hornâ - 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. Donât think Iâd heard it before, either. Strangely, I think of Peckinpahâs use of âKnocking of Heavenâs Doorâ 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.
4
Feb 06 2024
1999
Prince
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).
4
Feb 07 2024
Crosby, Stills & Nash
Crosby, Stills & Nash
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 Donât 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 itâd bite). More fundamentally, I donât 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 âmiladyâ keeping me on edge. The harmonies donât repel me as they once did, but they sound doubled, with a doll-like creepiness - âIâve heard enough,â 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 theyâd let them get ragged.
I donât need to hear Marrakech Express again, but itâs cute novelty, albeit one drummed by roots rockâs favourite murderer, Jim Gordon. The opener dares me to hate it, so by the end Iâm its pet. I prefer DĂ©jĂ Vu, and thatâs not down to the added Y, fnar fnar.
3
Feb 08 2024
Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite
Maxwell
Dance slow choo-choo train back and forth
Frictionless, depthless and lubricative
Cut to soft-focus pecs and boobs
Makes me want to slumber
2
Feb 09 2024
Goodbye And Hello
Tim Buckley
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 Yesterâs record with Judy Henske, Farewell Aldebaran, and wonder if that would now similarly irritate me. Looking him up, Iâm 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.
2
Feb 12 2024
Endtroducing.....
DJ Shadow
When this came out I avoided it for lost ideological reasons that wouldâve been fed by the eraâs wash of tepid trip-hop. Big beats, soft beats, dead beats, sugar beats, ubiquitous in every other stonerâs 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 otherâs sparkling company, otherwise blood wouldâve been glugged by the goblet.
26 years later, I like this! Thoughtful splashes of big drums Pollockâd 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?
4
Feb 13 2024
Coat Of Many Colors
Dolly Parton
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 isnât my vibe today, but if offered a perfectly-weighted galette, Iâm not going to sniff and say nah mate, I only eat trifle on Mondays. No-one cares a good cock about Trifle Monday, Simon.
4
Feb 14 2024
Rage Against The Machine
Rage Against The Machine
Dance like you have a big shit in your baggy pants. The earnestness and âIâd prefer not to tidy my bedroomâ sentiments donât 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 Morelloâs switching between hard rock riff and fancy squiggly sounds, the drums admirably minimalist at times.
The album doesnât 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.
2
Feb 15 2024
Devotional Songs
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
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 Iâve heard to it is the Boredoms majestic Vision Creation Newsun. Cathedrals can awe non-believers as well as the devour.
4
Feb 16 2024
Sound of Silver
LCD Soundsystem
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 isnât bad, just pick n mix industrial-emo-garage-danceable bullet points on a mid-noughts A&R dudeâs bullshit bingo card.
3
Feb 19 2024
Talking Book
Stevie Wonder
Much of this is unsurpassable. Superstition sits next to Sweet Jane in having a riff that I can conceive continuing forever.
Thereâs schmaltz on here, by my own measure, where the music is not great enough to sublimate lyrical sentimentality. Lookinâ For Another Pure Love is schmaltz; I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever) is majestic.
4
Feb 20 2024
Fever To Tell
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
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 Iâd 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 Iâm 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!
*Iâve never listened to The Cramps. I just think I know what they sound like from bands I like.
4
Feb 21 2024
Head Hunters
Herbie Hancock
Deceptively casual, nonchalantly great, yet two listens felt enough for the day.
4
Feb 22 2024
Rings Around The World
Super Furry Animals
These cushions are opulent and I love the profile, but will I be comfortable on this couch? Itâs 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.
3
Feb 23 2024
Southern Rock Opera
Drive-By Truckers
The title âSouthern Rock Operaâ suggests a novelty record, the length suggests obnoxiousness, while what lyrics I caught suggest a whisky-rock likerâs Bildungsroman; an uneasy mix that needs banging riffs and a lot of soaring to work. The recordâs pleasant to have in the background, the guitar sounds are there, but the songs and riffs donât stick, apart from maybe Life In The Factory and Let There Be Rock. Is that a goat I hear? âMeh meh mehâŠâ
Bumping up to three because âAngels and Fuselageâ is a title redolent of a lost JG Ballard novel set in the Nevada desert, âShut Up and Get On The Planeâ 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 âTommyâ, which will be DNF.
Never make me visit the Lynrd Skyrnd Wikipedia page again.
3
Feb 26 2024
A Night At The Opera
Queen
This is a top-tier 3/5 album, always fun, the preponderance of oddball song-shapes almost incidental to the recordâs 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 Iâm not sure that matters.
3
Feb 27 2024
Bayou Country
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Thereâs 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.
4
Feb 28 2024
KE*A*H** (Psalm 69)
Ministry
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 Gigerâs art. Giger sucks!
2
Feb 29 2024
Qui sÚme le vent récolte le tempo
MC Solaar
This is so frictionless that when I realised I lost where Iâd 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 Iâd missed, and more diversity than Iâd detected.
3
Mar 01 2024
Peter Gabriel 3
Peter Gabriel
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 Iâm grateful to have been brought back to them.
3
Mar 04 2024
Dire Straits
Dire Straits
Iâd heard this before, but this time round only Waterline, Water of Love and Sultans were familiar, which makes sense as theyâre the keepers. The rest washes past comfortably: they were a tight little band at this stage, and I have a thing for Knopflerâs 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. Iâll mention once more that as a kid he shared an office with Basil Bunting - isnât that something?
3
Mar 05 2024
Oracular Spectacular
MGMT
MGMT are quite good at an aesthetic that I disliked and that seemed ubiquitous during the late aughts. Theyâve at least one good tune, which is not enough to bring me back.
2
Mar 06 2024
The Sun Rises In The East
Jeru The Damaja
Unheard this gets a bonus star for being a â90âs hip hop album thatâs 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 Iâd never knowingly sought out any of DJ Premierâs 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. Itâs 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 Iâve 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 heâs made decades later.
I hope Simon has written something about the cover!
3
Mar 07 2024
Feast of Wire
Calexico
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.
2
Mar 08 2024
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
John Lennon
Clarity, space, and measured rawness make this one of the best sounding record Iâve 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 thereâs a stark, clear-eyed directness to Lennon that weaves past the pitfalls of triteness and insularity. God is painâs 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 âthe dream is overâ as triumphant cry.
All the songs have stick: again, clarity, simplicity and elegance are principles followed.
Cheers, Cookie!
5
Mar 11 2024
Power In Numbers
Jurassic 5
Very little alternative hip hop on this list has raised my pulse. This is another album Iâll forget about by tomorrow. Pours down the lugs easily, no hooks, refrains or peculiarities to arrest the journey out of my brainâs fundament.
2
Mar 12 2024
xx
The xx
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 Ă la mode - but only marginally less gauche than Elon Muskâs 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 recordâs smart, distinctive, a record collectorâs 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 canât say if these impressions will endure, but this was a pleasant surprise.
3
Mar 13 2024
Iâm a Lonesome Fugitive
Merle Haggard
Trying to shake off âThe Blue Brothersââs prĂ©cis of country music as a hostile bar eternally alternating âStand by your manâ and âRawhideâ, 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 âWelllll!â within a single listen, which by itself made me grateful for this record. Nifty guitar workâs throughout, which I only noticed when I started listening out for it.
4
Mar 14 2024
S&M
Metallica
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 Iâm mixing up cause and effect here, but does this mean that listening to Symphony & Metallica will rid oneself of crabs?
2
Mar 15 2024
Sign 'O' The Times
Prince
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.
3
Mar 18 2024
Made In Japan
Deep Purple
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 âta-dah!â or âduh-dum!â, sometimes followed by a gallop, this is a good time provided you donât 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.
3
Mar 19 2024
L.A. Woman
The Doors
Iâve 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 weâre 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 mightâve resorted to some inventive instrumental sound or pattern to reference the subject matter, but such timid subterfuge was not happening on Jimâs watch.
This is theThe Doors album that I think is pretty good.
3
Mar 20 2024
Rio
Duran Duran
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 isnât the album with the familiar laughter, is it?
5
Mar 21 2024
Paul Simon
Paul Simon
Is this your album of the day?
Yes. Itâs alright.
Itâs boring. You have my permission to use that as your review.
To my wifeâs harsh verdict, Iâd add that itâs 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.
3
Mar 22 2024
Rumours
Fleetwood Mac
While this album is a life tenant in my skull, Iâm 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, Iâll just add that today I noticed how Buckinghamâs 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.
5
Mar 25 2024
The Score
Fugees
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.
3
Mar 26 2024
Maggot Brain
Funkadelic
Having owned it for years, my mind still canât encompass this record, but anything with such patently, deliberately weird decisions in production, instrumentation, rhythm and profanity is worth another visit to.
4
Mar 27 2024
Calenture
The Triffids
We can breathe easy, Simon: this was a happy playthrough, and I will go round a few more times when Iâm not having the sort of day Iâm having now.
Itâs all very romantic, isnât 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: youâve 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.
4
Mar 28 2024
Bridge Over Troubled Water
Simon & Garfunkel
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. Thereâs a degree of nostalgia there from hearing much of this in the car as a child, but Simonâs 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.
4
Mar 29 2024
Chelsea Girl
Nico
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 heâs 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.
4
Apr 01 2024
Tusk
Fleetwood Mac
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
5
Apr 02 2024
Smash
The Offspring
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 âyou like chicken, I like bread, yeah ya-yeah-yeah yeah-yeah yeahâ.
2
Apr 03 2024
Actually
Pet Shop Boys
PSB were a guilty pleasure overheard that I refused to recognise back when I believed synthesisers werenât 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 Tennantâs 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!
5
Apr 04 2024
Van Halen
Van Halen
A noun that Todd Trainer attached to Melt-Banana works for Van Halen: fireworks. With little exception (maybe just Ainât Talkinâ About Love), songs are an afterthought, mostly stitched-together prĂȘt-Ă -porter hard rock riffs overlaid with multi-tracked âwheeeee-Iâm-on-a-rollercoasterâ vocals. Itâs all about guitar spectacle, and thatâs fun. Iâm glad it exists, I like Bill and Ted and, unlike Melt-Banana, I probably wonât listen to this again.
3
Apr 05 2024
Lost Souls
Doves
My lazy take is that this is Madchester beigewave with a touch of glitch and a dollop of Radiohead.
Letâs 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.
2
Apr 08 2024
At Newport 1960
Muddy Waters
Imagining this record in its original context didnât happen for me: Iâve heard these moves copied across too many antecedents, which is understandable as itâs 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.
3
Apr 09 2024
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan
How did he sound so old so young? I can understand why he walked a little back from the political content, as itâs 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 Iâd only gone through the electric albums previously. The non-sequiturs work for me- âgood car to drive/after a warâ - presented as afterthoughts
5
Apr 10 2024
Faith
George Michael
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, Michaelâs vocal charisma carries it. Will return to.
4
Apr 11 2024
Next
The Sensational Alex Harvey Band
The depravity ambushed me. I see Next described as precedent to AC/DC, The Birthday Party, even punk itself, but Iâm reminded most of Jerry Sadowitz, another Glaswegian, and his theatre of hatred and debasement. SAHB dialled up the leer, and I donât like it, which is likely a deliberate effect: thereâs 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: itâs not, itâs deliberate, and youâre meant to feel uneasy.
3
Apr 12 2024
Sex Packets
Digital Underground
This is one of the better 90âs 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 Packetsâs content is also largely about itself: rappers rapping that what theyâre doing on this record is what theyâre doing on this record, and that itâs better than the rest: the 90âs hip-hop curse of recursion. This background makes the mini-concept album at the end a gift, though itâs ultimately just a sci-fi variation of some of the horny stuff that came earlier.
4
Apr 15 2024
War
U2
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 80âs Tina Turner, and a forgotten few others were in this bunch of exciting shiny discs heard on my dadâs big headphones. I was disappointed when I listened to this, as I only recognised the two big hits, and didnât think the rest rocked.
Three and a half decades on: this rocks.
Listening to New Yearâs 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 Claytonâs baselines do a lot of the heavy-lifting on the tunes.
Some middling tunes couldâve been dropped for a leaner record, but I chomped through this without break.
4
Apr 16 2024
It's Blitz!
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
The Yeah Yeah Yeahsâ 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.
âI wanna go and *SHIT* in your pantsâ was a lyric I spontaneously improvised in the car, immediately hoping my two-year old wouldnât record and repeat.
2
Apr 17 2024
Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
Wu-Tang Clan
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 samplerâs 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. Itâs better than I remembered, and
5
Apr 18 2024
Pelican West
Haircut 100
Our projectâs 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 theyâd 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 â ring ring ringâ of Love Plus One took me back to childhood and overwhelmed me.
3
Apr 19 2024
Penance Soiree
The Icarus Line
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 youâre Shellac. ThĂ© 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.
2
Apr 22 2024
Marquee Moon
Television
I know this record so well, and have read so much about it, review feels redundant, so Iâll 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, hereâs some happy news: Adventure and the self-titled are great records, and the live âThe Blow-Upâ is sorcery, especially âLittle Johnny Jewelâ.
5
Apr 23 2024
Out Of The Blue
Electric Light Orchestra
This was a double disappointment as when the name and cover turned up, as my perma-daze simultaneously translated this into Jeff Wayneâs War of the Worlds soundtrack - which may be terrible, but I havenât heard since I loved it as a pre-teen - and OMD, of whom Iâve 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 wasnât hard, sunâs 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 Beatlesâ debt, but they are a frictionless version, too cuddly, slightly pantomime, and donât have enough choruses with bite.
Hereâs a tip: I gave up a second playthrough to listen to Miles Davisâs âA Tribute to Jack Johnsonâ, which shreds. Maybe listen to that instead.
2
Apr 24 2024
Slipknot
Slipknot
Slipknot surprised me: the aesthetic and music repel me, but Iâm impressed by how fleet-footed and varied it is. Dynamics, theatricality, and nuances of mood: thereâs clear intelligence behind this. I think itâs awful, but well done!
2
Apr 25 2024
Treasure
Cocteau Twins
I have begun to appreciate.the Cocteau Twins diaphanous electric folk, and once again I didnât have the time to get deep into the mindset.
3
Apr 26 2024
Real Life
Magazine
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 weâre not being shot from both sides any more!
4
Apr 29 2024
Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
OutKast
A soft wail let out when this came up. I bought it on release, was put off by its length and the realisation that âHey Ya!â 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 âcontemporaryâ.
âHey Ya!â is an outlier, but one surrounded by outliers, and while I could only afford a single playthrough, Iâm 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 chapeauâs aloft for its ambition and, like the previous weekâs 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 âĂ la recherche du temps perduâ.
4
Apr 30 2024
Aja
Steely Dan
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 canât hear the tunes for all the smoothness.
2
May 01 2024
Black Metal
Venom
The opening 15 seconds of electronic hiss are enticing. The joke was going to be that rest of the album doesnât fulfil that early promise, but it was foiled by the recordâs 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.
3
May 02 2024
Pictures At An Exhibition
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
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.
3
May 03 2024
System Of A Down
System Of A Down
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.
3
May 06 2024
Pet Sounds
The Beach Boys
Emetic warning, particularly for Simon: this may the only record Iâve sobbed to with another. Fill that brown paper bag!
Hadnât 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. Itâs creepy and I donât 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:
âAnyway, 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.â
âA) it was great. it saved me from having to lie on my arm for 15 minutes.â
5
May 07 2024
Red Headed Stranger
Willie Nelson
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.
5
May 08 2024
Myths Of The Near Future
Klaxons
Klaxons were not shy in splashing some of Gen Xâs favourite literary references into their titles - along with other weirdoes of the vintage, my tail wags at Burroughs and Ballard - and their pick ânâ 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 donât know Simon, itâs no Pet Sounds.
2
May 09 2024
Time (The Revelator)
Gillian Welch
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.
3
May 10 2024
First Band On The Moon
The Cardigans
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 thereâs more craft and chorus here than I was expecting.
3
May 13 2024
The Atomic Mr Basie
Count Basie & His Orchestra
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.
3
May 14 2024
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
David Bowie
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.
5
May 15 2024
Physical Graffiti
Led Zeppelin
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, itâs all over the place like their hair, and is similarly majestic.
5
May 16 2024
Suzanne Vega
Suzanne Vega
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.
3
May 17 2024
Exodus
Bob Marley & The Wailers
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.
3
May 20 2024
The Queen Is Dead
The Smiths
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 albumâs 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; heâs 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, Morrisseyâs addressing someone else, usually critically, often cruelly. The antipathy isnât remarkable: itâs a common tool in surviving social life. But his refusal or perhaps inability to consider anotherâs 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.
5
May 21 2024
Low
David Bowie
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.
5
May 22 2024
The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn
Pink Floyd
This recordâs 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 donât like it. Interstellar Overdrive is an exception, because it starts with a decent riff before the band just opens throttle, and thereâa no drivel, no la la la. Barrett could smash that guitar good! Donât like his songs though!
The flippant review is: go to Skip Spenceâs âOarâ.
2
May 23 2024
The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter
The Incredible String Band
This deserves more time than Iâve 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 Minotaurâs 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 Iâd check them out immediately. Sorry, Tom C!
5
May 24 2024
Opus Dei
Laibach
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.
3
May 27 2024
Gunfighter Ballads And Trail Songs
Marty Robbins
This cowboy novelty record has one good/maybe great song in âEl Pasoâ, surrounded by infantile fantasy.
2
May 28 2024
She's So Unusual
Cyndi Lauper
This is a happy record to hang out with, and an example of pick ânâ mix A&R-driven track listings working pretty well. Time After Time slays.
3
May 29 2024
Scott 2
Scott Walker
The borrowed line âwhenever rain appears/itâs really angel tearsâ 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 Copeâs 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.
4
May 30 2024
Elephant Mountain
The Youngbloods
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.
4
May 31 2024
Slanted And Enchanted
Pavement
If you live with music, youâll have records that have the power to transport you back to your tasteâs formation. This is one of mine: Iâd already got into Sonic Youth and Big Black by the time Iâd 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 Smithâs protestations, they always were a tunes-first band. I proved this by whistling Chesleyâs Little Wrists, maybe the most cacophonous track on the album.
5
Jun 03 2024
The Joshua Tree
U2
And on the first day Bono said, Eno, make me sound like God.
I wrote that on Friday, and on Sunday night I canât remember where I was going for that. This is a very good record, front-loaded but never less than bold.
4
Jun 04 2024
Harvest
Neil Young
Scorned this due to its popularity when I was at university, but itâs 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.
4
Jun 05 2024
Doggystyle
Snoop Dogg
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.
4
Jun 06 2024
Buena Vista Social Club
Buena Vista Social Club
Back when it came out, this was everywhere but in my ears somehow, and itâs lovely. The instruments sound like theyâre within handâs reach, set into intricate patterns - thereâs a formality to this that enthrals. Everything has its turn and place, and you donât need to understand the order to admire it. Sounds like these dudes played together for decades, which they probably did.
5
Jun 07 2024
Suede
Suede
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 Andersonâs well-honed histrionics to the directions âBolan, Bowieâ felt-tipâd on his Oxfam blouse.
Iâve 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 âwith a slick manager and some connections, a career could be arranged, in the manner one lands an entry position at Barclaysâ - bands crowned by press release before a noteâs out, and he declared Oasis as the apotheosis of this tendency. Iâd argue Suede were the archetype. I remember the âYANKS OUTâ 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 âA Storm In Heavenâ, 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 wasnât the model.
Iâll give Dog Man Star another go.
3
Jun 10 2024
Grace
Jeff Buckley
The track-listingâs dusting of coffee-shop standards betrays doubt over the originalsâ power to carry a debut. This was unwarranted: Buckleyâs 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 wouldnât have liked it back then, like it a good amount now.
4
Jun 11 2024
Vol. 4
Black Sabbath
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...."
4
Jun 12 2024
Phrenology
The Roots
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.
2
Jun 13 2024
Sunday At The Village Vanguard
Bill Evans Trio
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.
3
Jun 14 2024
Tea for the Tillerman
Cat Stevens
Started this record on the way to drop the kid off at daycare, toying with a joke around Cat Stevens singing âwhere do the children playâ; ended it half a day later driving back with the kid listening to âFather and Sonâ wondering what portion of my eyesâ moistness I could ascribe to hayfever. One of our groupâs silent members loves Cat Stevens and will shake his head for my finding the manâs records too earnest for my taste, taking me back to misty recollections of weird, late 70âs childrenâsâ 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.
4
Jun 17 2024
Blood Sugar Sex Magik
Red Hot Chili Peppers
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 Fatherâs Day. I wouldâve listened to the bonus Hendrix covers, but I was busy threading barbed wire in and around my urethra. How revolting is Anthony Kiedis !
1
Jun 18 2024
Is This It
The Strokes
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 âLast Nightâ. 24 years after 1977âs âno futureâ comes âis this it?â and almost the same stretch later - Christ - I find myself closer to the latter than the former. Accidentally elegiac?
4
Jun 19 2024
When I Was Born For The 7th Time
Cornershop
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 âbig hard cockâ, 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 âborrowed Indian flavoursâ. Cornershopâs main dude is British Asian, from Wolverhampton, and Iâm curious as to what kinds of music youâd prefer him to dabble in. Bit of Elgar, perhaps, or music hall? Maybe get some Morris dancing in the mix? You complete nimrod!
3
Jun 20 2024
Greetings From L.A.
Tim Buckley
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.âs main revelation is that this performance is a discrete homage to Tim Buckleyâs lascivious scat on the song âDevil Eyesâ, soon after the words âdo the monkey rubâ.
This is representative of the albumâs schoolboy horny, dick-windmilling vibe. Too ridiculous to offend, worth it for the sheer wtf and the bandâs bounce and grit.
Hong Kong Bar has been added to my playlist of 70âs burn-out freak blues tracks.
3
Jun 21 2024
Pills 'n' Thrills And Bellyaches
Happy Mondays
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 Bezâs 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.
âYo Bosnia!â
The crowd booed.
âYo Serbia!â
The crowd cheered.
4
Jun 24 2024
Transformer
Lou Reed
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.
4
Jun 25 2024
At Mister Kelly's
Sarah Vaughan
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 othersâ work their own.
The drumming is softly exquisite.
3
Jun 26 2024
Fly Or Die
N.E.R.D
This is a well-curated selection of hooks, rhythm patterns, guitar bite and clever shifts that didnât 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 Iâm not sure it delivers any tunes, just lots of good segments. Itâs 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 âchocolate flowerâ.
3
Jun 27 2024
Teen Dream
Beach House
âSoporificâ neednât 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 legâs nodded off. Letâs rest a somnolent 2, and pull the sheets over our heads, and communally wet our beds.
2
Jun 28 2024
Black Holes and Revelations
Muse
The black hole is Radiohead, and this record has passed the event horizon. On the other side sits God and Stephen Hawking. Godâs hand stretches forth, rummages, and pulls out a latte. He hands it to Hawking. I wanted an espresso, not this beige shit, says Hawking.
2
Jul 01 2024
To Pimp A Butterfly
Kendrick Lamar
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
Itâs 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.
3
Jul 02 2024
Station To Station
David Bowie
Listening to Bowieâs great albums in random order and at random intervals is tremendous fun to this first time listener. So far, theyâre 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 thatâs my favourite: streamlining funk, it seems to casually invent a decadent strand of eighties pop.
5
Jul 03 2024
3 Feet High and Rising
De La Soul
Too long for its frugal sprinkling of strong tunes, itâs kept aloft by the charm of the style it mints. Iâve owned this for years, but never could concentrate long enough to hear the whole record. Overall glad I just did.
3
Jul 04 2024
Oedipus Schmoedipus
Barry Adamson
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 Cockerâs opening turn is a grabber.
Those elements aside, this left no more impression on me than passing air.
2
Jul 05 2024
Iâve Got a Tiger By the Tail
Buck Owens
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.
4
Jul 08 2024
Back To Black
Amy Winehouse
The well-known songs - Rehab, Back to Black, a couple whose names I never learned - have kept their hooks in my memory, proof of Winehouseâs 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 kidâs show play-acting in a butchers: âI always wanted to work with meat!â 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.
2
Jul 09 2024
Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)
The Kinks
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 Australiaâs outright is godly, yet Iâm still not in love. Thereâll surely be more opportunities in this list: Iâll try again.
4
Jul 10 2024
Ys
Joanna Newsom
Iâve had this remarkable album for almost two decades and I still donât 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 Iâm unwilling to give. Itâs loaded with imagery and analogy that Iâm too knackered to decipher, and while it sounds gorgeous and close (requiscat, Albini) and its intricate movements are dynamic, for anything to linger Iâd have to march through it⊠well, I havenât marched through it enough times yet.
I like this record, but âitâs complicatedâ.
3
Jul 11 2024
Raw Power
The Stooges
This has never been the Stooges record Iâve reached for, so fierce is my love for the debut and Funhouse, yet all of these tunes present themselves in my deep memory. Iâve underrated this, a sublime version of an Aerosmith album.
5
Jul 12 2024
The Marshall Mathers LP
Eminem
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 Eminemâs voice moves like an F1 car at Monaco.
2
Jul 15 2024
good kid, m.A.A.d city
Kendrick Lamar
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 doesnât follow through on the bravura opening.
3
Jul 16 2024
Music for the Masses
Depeche Mode
This is a sulky thing, much of the time, putting on mumâs 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 recordâs compositional logic would deem that inelegant.
âNothingâ 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 âAssault on Precinct 13â 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.
3
Jul 17 2024
Yeezus
Kanye West
Listening to Yeezus was an extraordinary rendition to a Bosch landscape remade as a Looney Tunes cartoon, but run through a distortion pedal.
I hadnât knowingly heard Westâs 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:
âI am a God
So hurry up with my damn massage
In a French-ass restaurant
Hurry up with my damn croissantsâ
Heâs said some horrible things and is a jerk. But he isnât well, and parts of this might support that. Will Oldham, a decent fellow, recently recommended an early Kanye record, adding âI will not engage, in this post, with the horrors of mental illness.â
4
Jul 18 2024
Blood, Sweat & Tears
Blood, Sweat & Tears
Broadway jazz rock is not my bag, but I hope it enriches others here.
The chunk of âSunshine of Your Loveâ 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 âWar On Peaceâ, and Iâm pretty sure most guitarists coming after that generation learned that riff first. Thereâs also the amazing funk cover. Requiscat Jack Bruce.
2
Jul 19 2024
Deloused in the Comatorium
The Mars Volta
Mars Volta are a band that for the last two decades Iâve blithely assumed to be terrible without giving them a chance, so Iâll strap myself to the mast and order the cabin boy to press play.
âŠsorry, 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: Iâve 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 âClear to Higher Timeâ by the Blue Humans to you? Wet my lips with rum, Seaman Staines, and bend your ear.
Memorable music doesnât 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.
2
Jul 22 2024
OK Computer
Radiohead
Hard to write fairly with my teammate cracking his knuckles and carving pentagrams into his half of our desk; Iâll 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. Itâs a sumptuous, decadent, no-expense-spared monument to self-pitying apathy. When Iâm honest, I count âAirbagââs 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.
âParanoid Androidâ is a memorably annoying song with an â80âs teenagerâs idea of a clever title. The loud part would be fantastic if it wasnât 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 Radioheadâs reputation for pretentiousness. Adherents call his lyrics cryptic as if this alone was praise, but thereâs 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 Pavementâs irony - in words and music - has a wistful, loving motive, Radioheadâs it at the service of a grandiose strop.
This is still the most enjoyable of their records. Onto you, Simon: make âem cry,
3
Jul 23 2024
The Stone Roses
The Stone Roses
This is too great to fluke: Iâve heard demo versions of these songs that have made me flinch - they worked hard to reach this sparkling, weightless collection. The recordâs retro in the same fashion as a Chesley Bonestell space station painting: a silver rocket weaving gliding past Saturnâs rings. They never matched this, but had they the octane to build on âFoolâs Goldâ the result mightâve been even better.
5
Jul 24 2024
Apple Venus Volume 1
XTC
The one playthrough Iâve allowed myself confused me. This has the aroma of inspired personal statement and is weird, reminding me of theme tunes from 90âs 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 Iâve just written. And he sings them to you, in front of everyone. And you canât move.
2
Jul 25 2024
Tom Tom Club
Tom Tom Club
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 âCrime in the Cityâ (Neil Young, Howardâs choice, the song that made me realise I like NY), âThe Mercy Seatâ (Johnny Cash covering Cave, Simonâs choice), âLove Spreadsâ (the Stone Roses, my choice as I thought it would be funny to bring a Manc version of Southern Rock), and âGenius of Loveâ (Dinahâs 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. Iâm pleased to discover today that the rest is better than I remember: throwaway, but happy. This isnât a great album, but itâs lovelier than many better ones here.
3
Jul 26 2024
Damaged
Black Flag
These workmanlike rockers are elevated by Ginnâs skronky guitar, which sometimes sounds like Ornette Coleman. Rollins is an excellent barker; I had fun with this.
3
Jul 29 2024
Diamond Life
Sade
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 projectâs silent partners is a fan of this album.
2
Jul 30 2024
Hunky Dory
David Bowie
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.
4
Jul 31 2024
At Fillmore East
The Allman Brothers Band
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.
2
Aug 01 2024
C'est Chic
CHIC
âLe Freakâ is timeless, but what of the rest?
The openerâs alright. The hinterland between soul, disco and yacht rock has âSavoir Faireâ 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.
âHappy Manâ is as interesting as the experience of someone telling you theyâre a happy man could be.
âI Want Your Loveâ is inarguably fab and makes me realise how most of the preceding songs missed Alfa Andersonâs vocals, which rule without effort, and redeem the long instrumental outro when they drop back in. She canât redeem the mawkishness of âAt Last Iâm Freeâ, though, quite a yawn. âSometimes You Winâ 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, âThe Very Best Of The Blow Monkeysâ, will come up.
The Wikipedia wormhole this sent me on was fun. Simon, are The Power Station any good?
2
Aug 02 2024
Walking Wounded
Everything But The Girl
This weekâs 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. Thereâs a better fey record hiding in here, I reckon.
Iâll save my lecture about the gentrification of jungleâs 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 - âmaybe youâll like this versionâ - and at a stretch Iâd say maybe Neil Youngâs bookending âTonightâs the Nightâ versions could count as exceptions. The different versions of âWrongâ and âWalking Woundedâ on here are not.
2
Aug 05 2024
Raising Hell
Run-D.M.C.
Important and ferocious fun at its best, which is âTrickyâ, "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.
2
Aug 06 2024
Eagles
Eagles
Approaching Eaglesâ âEaglesâ for the first time as an informed Gen Xâer presents an unscalable wall of antecedent verdict: Iâve seen the Big Lebowski; theyâre the joke with the unavoidable long song. When âTake it Easyâ choruses, I snap âcomplacent fools!â When âWitchy Womanâ 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 âchug all nightâ. 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 - âeasyâ 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: âtrĂšs intelligentâ and so on. âEarlybirdâ was a hit, particularly when my wife entered and liked it. Her dad and I preferred the experimental intro.: â 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.
3
Aug 07 2024
Who Killed...... The Zutons?
The Zutons
âWho Killed the Zutonsâ is an amiable record with thoughtful, esoteric arrangements: much goes on, but the record isnât 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.
2
Aug 08 2024
Signing Off
UB40
This may stick with me; I believe their claim to have rehearsed this album for around a year: itâs the leanest dub album Iâve heard. Iâm also surprised by how heavy a dub album it is: so far, I havenât found anything close on this list. The undersea wooziness is in place, as is the bassâs hypnotic dancing around a point, melodies skidding above and out, and thereâs an intricacy to how all the different parts work together.
Iâd heard but never listened to âFood For Thoughtâ before: massive, right from âIvory Madonnaâ, and it encapsulates the recordâs 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 itâs political, like here - is bypassed by this inherent uneasiness.
The keyboard stabs on âKingâ are unearthly. âBurden of Shameâ 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 âMadam Medusaâ 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 itâs a tight hour.
5
Aug 09 2024
Fear Of A Black Planet
Public Enemy
No album embodies its politics more effectively. Its perspective is indelibly stamped on my skull since my teens. I hadnât returned to it for a couple of decades: too long, too strident, an intensity that is more exhausting than invigorating. But its demands reward. Itâs 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 wonât see its like again. Flawed, oft-questionable, difficult to get through, but you donât hang âGuernicaâ on a living room wall. So fast, so dense. â:..and John Wayne.â
5
Aug 12 2024
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Kanye West
This didnât jolt me like âYeezusâ, but itâs still bizarre, bold and word-nimble enough to rise above Westâs nastiness. Tip: the un-pixelated cover should be seen.
3
Aug 13 2024
Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Nick Caveâs music serves his words, which are well-assembled, but donât stir me. The theatricality, the occasional archaism, and the storyteller mode might be too flat for me: Iâm unconvinced, though I respect his conviction. The musicâs 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 âAbbatoir Bluesâ of the two records, perhaps because I perceive more of the anarchy of James Johnstonâs former band, Gallon Drunk.
3
Aug 14 2024
Songs Of Love And Hate
Leonard Cohen
Ring assigned âSongs of Love and Hateâ 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. âJoan of Arcâ is playing a cheerful curse as I write this, so I canât score this lower than 4. Also, âAvalancheââs opening guitar rush is perfect for the title.
4
Aug 15 2024
Queen II
Queen
This meandering silliness is fun because it is full of Queenâs heaviness, Brian May wailing, crunching, chewing the scenery with Mercury, while bass and drums stomp and swagger. Didnât 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.
3
Aug 16 2024
Live At The Star Club, Hamburg
Jerry Lee Lewis
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 heâs covering. He rocked fast and uniquely.
2.
The Didjits: â 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 highâ
3
Aug 19 2024
Hot Buttered Soul
Isaac Hayes
Three out of four songs are covers in the sense that âUlyssesâ covers Homer: the originals provided scaffolding to large, intricate structures that take you to places distant from the base song. Thereâs improvisation here, but this isnât a jam album. Itâs too orchestrated; I listened to this twice over a flight and the premeditation became clear.
âBy The Time I Get To Phoenixâ simulates a singerâs 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 wasnât listening closely, impatience when I was; oddly, I thought of Suicideâs âFrankie Teardropâ, 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 Vegaâs voice, not comparable to Hayes, carries more conviction than Hayesâ here, as magisterial and rich as Hayes is. However, the last five minutes os ââŠPhoenixâ redeems the song, rising into ecstatic abandon as the narrator loses himself.
4
Aug 20 2024
Fleet Foxes
Fleet Foxes
âThey placed their guitar amplifiers in Native American tipis for aestheticsâ, wrote the Wikipedia contributor, maybe a PR person, ticking off the âlackadaisical cultural appropriationâ box in my âI-SPY: Hipster Roots Musicâ spottersâ guide. A decade or so back, deep in mid-gentrification East London, you couldnât 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 Brueghelâs âNetherlandish Proverbsâ onto the cover for its âreally weird stuffâ 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.
2
Aug 21 2024
The Rise & Fall
Madness
The confidence of âOur Houseâ 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 donât demand my attention. âNew Delhiâ brings the cringe.
3
Aug 22 2024
Either Or
Elliott Smith
I have this, probably because I loved "Good Will Hunting" when it came out. In an inversion of this listâs 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?"
3
Aug 23 2024
Destroy Rock & Roll
Mylo
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. Iâm unlikely to return. Dance music albums are near oxymorons; they can get stranded outside a club.
2
Aug 26 2024
Brilliant Corners
Thelonious Monk
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. Iâm 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.
5
Aug 27 2024
Synchronicity
The Police
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 âMotherâ. This is funny! This is one the lightest big hitters for hits Iâve heard; there are weird excursions into synth rush, world music, folded-up sketches like âMrs Gradenkoâ, and the band are snappy and sleek throughout. I really donât know how to rate this.
3
Aug 28 2024
Scum
Napalm Death
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 thereâs joy in this, glee too. I admire this record and probably wonât listen to it again. The toddler liked this, perhaps because I referred to it âas poo poo musicâ. When we had Taylor Swift on in the car later, he protested and asked for poo poo music.
3
Aug 29 2024
Fuzzy Logic
Super Furry Animals
Highly likeable, all round vibe of being fun to be in the pub with, but none of the tunes stick.
3
Aug 30 2024
The Slider
T. Rex
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 donât pander, a hangover record. I drank it up. The feints towards LED Zeppelin threaten to eclipse the originals, âChariot Choogleâ coming off as a Dadaist âKashmirâ.
5
Sep 02 2024
The Village Green Preservation Society
The Kinks
Iâve 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 Daviesâs 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 Iâd say besides âBlurâ if someone asked me to name one of these bands. And I quite like some Blur.
I blame the power of this albumâs 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 ââŠWalterâ along its last few seconds. Theyâre a accoutrement that makes the song, driving, sleazy and anxious at the same time. Theyâre 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.
âMonicaââs throwaway calypso is my favourite, at least this evening.
5
Sep 03 2024
Surrealistic Pillow
Jefferson Airplane
If itâs written by a Slick, it does the trick. If itâs written by another, no need to bother.
3
Sep 04 2024
Arrival
ABBA
Love the singles, âArrivalâ and at least half of âHappy Hawaiiâ. Had I the time, Iâd talk to Simonâs 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.
4
Sep 05 2024
Pornography
The Cure
Ponderous, plodding, repetitive, yet for some reason this didnât 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.
2
Sep 06 2024
Back to Basics
Christina Aguilera
This exercise presents the odd revelation, such as this: despite my being mostly a âvocals optionalâ* 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 Madonnaâs âHankie Pankieâ period. Yet Cortinaâs charisma and sheer belt kept me interested. I had fun until the faux-jazz smothered it. Sheâs 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. Iâm guessing some might turn their noses up at the wobbly mix of emancipatory vibes and âIâm diiirtyyâ provocations, but lifeâs 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 âBeautifulâ was one of them. Can you remember the other?
*Steve Albini
2
Sep 09 2024
With The Beatles
Beatles
The rich, attentive quality of this recording almost kills the setâs 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, Iâm interested in this half-formed thing.
3
Sep 10 2024
Live At The Harlem Square Club
Sam Cooke
Sam Cookeâs a reputation Iâd associate with greatness, but no particular songs. Heâs 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.
Heâs one of those progenitor types. This record gives a good impression of what it must have been like to hear classics as theyâre minted.
5
Sep 11 2024
Woodface
Crowded House
This took three listens to stick; âFall At Your Feetâ and âWeather With Youâ 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 Simonâs verdict for the true measure of its feyness.
4
Sep 12 2024
Mama Said Knock You Out
LL Cool J
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.
3
Sep 13 2024
69 Love Songs
The Magnetic Fields
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 Iâm 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 âChristian Marclay remakes âPlanes, Trains and Automobilesâ from a thousand outtakes of John Candy talking, preceded by a title card reading âYou are the Steve Martinâ.â
Simon, I couldnât resist reading your tirade before writing. What did the family think of this experiment?
3
Sep 16 2024
Garbage
Garbage
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.
2
Sep 17 2024
Done By The Forces Of Nature
Jungle Brothers
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.
4
Sep 18 2024
Sister
Sonic Youth
âWhat an albumâ was my involuntary remark when this appeared on my screen. This confused me when I first heard it, as Iâd 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. âDaydream Nationâ 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, thereâs a live recording called âHold that Tigerâ from this time, a set in Chicago introduced by you-know-who, and itâs an absolute blast, a band at their peakâ. Available on Bandcamp, I see.
5
Sep 19 2024
More Specials
The Specials
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. Thereâs a sour, sometimes nasty tang to the lyrics, which is era-appropriate, as is the Latin American burst on Holiday Fortnight.
4
Sep 20 2024
Remedy
Basement Jaxx
Music for negotiating premium sex contracts in a Mayfair club is a genre Iâve never followed, but I can respect the craft and hope that this bought some people happiness.
2
Sep 23 2024
Hysteria
Def Leppard
âHysteriaâ 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 âboiler musicâ (âThis sounds like a boilerâ). Apart from the hair, my lasting impression of them before this weekend came from Rick Allen's guest-appearance on the popular British childrenâs program, âThe Sooty Showâ, which made me think heâs a nice dude, one unusually natural when jamming with a band of glove puppets.
The bandâs name is a successfully more-stupid homage to that of Led Zeppelinâs.
My research indicates that many of this recordâs 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 âAnimalâ cries to be grunted and bellowed. Lyrics have the mystical quality of an insistent pub lush, an unspoken âyou all know what I meanâ 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.
4
Sep 24 2024
Winter In America
Gil Scott-Heron
âThe Bottleâ runs away with this LP - that bumble-bee bassline alone unmoored my eyeballs - but this is a sweet record. The quietness of âSong for Bobby Smithâ stuck close to me.
Heronâs voice doesnât bang it out with his contemporaries in the song forms heâs playing with here, but I like its matter-of-factness, his talking the melodies - he plays to his strengths even here.
The recordâs atypical for Gil Scott Heron, more tuneful, jazzier, less rap, less fierce, and deserved more than todayâa inattentive playthrough and the later, urgent skip across for better grasp. âWinter in Americaâ is a terrific title. Brian Jacksonâs 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 donât think I can bear rating this a three a day after giving Def Leopard a four, and âRivers of My Fathersâ might pay back its duration, so to concludeâŠ.
4
Sep 25 2024
Good Old Boys
Randy Newman
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.
3
Sep 26 2024
D.O.A. the Third and Final Report of Throbbing Gristle
Throbbing Gristle
Pointedly ugly music can be sublime in combination with the right elements: it can overwhelm, it can frighten, it can rock. âD.O.Aâ 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 Britainâs industrial-social decay. As such, often it is ugly-ugly.
Iâd never got round to this record before as Iâd assumed it would be a admirably miserable listen, so Iâm relieved thereâs 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 âthis is not art/itâs just random noiseâ, which is so basic the basic riposte is demanded: you couldnât make this if you tried, lame-o!
4
Sep 27 2024
Fuzzy
Grant Lee Buffalo
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.
2
Sep 30 2024
So Much For The City
The Thrills
Noughties âTheâŠâ 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 couldnât 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.
3
Oct 01 2024
Vauxhall And I
Morrissey
Is the art beholden to the artist, or can it jettison the makerâs flaws?
The songs do their part, never surprising, but carrying his romantic sting with confidence, and they donât 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 weâre 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 âMorrisseyâ branding allows.
Generally, I keep personal life out of these reviews, but context can creep in. As recent arrivals in this country, weâre 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.
3
Oct 02 2024
Ananda Shankar
Ananda Shankar
âSagarâ 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.
2
Oct 03 2024
Sea Change
Beck
âSea Changesâ 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, Beckâs magpie nature never fully sublimated into free invention.
Itâs very tasteful: Beck curates a fine selection of influences. âPaper Tigerâ was moving me more than I could rationalise until I realised itâs an adroit lift of Jean-Claude Vannierâs sorcery on âHiistoire de Melody Nelsonâ.
Much of this recordâs 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.
3
Oct 04 2024
Bluesbreakers
John Mayall & The Bluesbreakers
Forget Clapton, doesnât McVie look so young on the cover? This is one of my dadâs foundational albums, and though Iâd never listened to it front to back, enough has been sucked deep that I canât clearly judge it. Still, some fragments:
Like many albums here, itâs off-the-cuff, a snapshot the band probably thought theyâd repeat and better, which gives it a liveliness almost unique to the period.
Claptonâs set in here like the bandâs 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 thatâs 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 bandâs drummer. I canât remember if I ever followed up on my dadâs exhortations to look him up.
Iâll leave the last word to my dad, who wrote this to me today:
âIt 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.â
4
Oct 07 2024
Ambient 1/Music For Airports
Brian Eno
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.
3
Oct 08 2024
New York Dolls
New York Dolls
Some dunce gulled me into thinking this was a âhaircuts first bandâ, so Iâve 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, Sonicâs Rendezvous Band, who tragically almost entirely exist as bootlegs. This doesnât have any out-and-out revelations, but no song is dull, and most are fascinating - âFrankensteinâ seems to avoid chorusing or climaxing out of some perverted need rather than lack - and Iâm 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 theyâre the right kind of stupid-deranged. âSubway Trainâ might be the best train song Iâve heard on this list yet.
Iâll be back here again. Yes, Simon, I do prefer this to âExileâŠâ, great call!
4
Oct 09 2024
LP1
FKA twigs
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.
2
Oct 10 2024
Boy In Da Corner
Dizzee Rascal
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 Rascalâs voice and the bracingly harsh electronic bangs and booms rub against his character-driven stories, earning the applause. But Iâm not sure in what moods I could drink this in happily; certainly not todayâs. And maybe this is a little too long. Brilliant, probably.
3
Oct 11 2024
Exile In Guyville
Liz Phair
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 Prozacâd 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 âSoap Star Joeâ, the surprisingly cute guitar solo of âMesmerizingâ - that break monotony, and âNever Saidâ is a decent yell-along. The record has enough rockers here to make a strong 35 minutes.
3
Oct 14 2024
Songs From A Room
Leonard Cohen
A pinch of monotony can be a spice, one of my conclusions as I slowly rotated from scepticism about this recordâs 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.
4
Oct 15 2024
Aqualung
Jethro Tull
Hey Simon, letâs play âI have neverâ! Let me give you a head start: âI have never conflated Jethro Tull and Hawkwind for decades, maybe because I assumed Hawkwind had to involve flutesâ. <Downs a flagon of jizzy English cider>
Devilâs 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 Barreâs amp slays faces. âHyme 43â sounds like a correct version of Southern Rock. No complaints here!
4
Oct 16 2024
Future Days
Can
At times âFuture Daysâ drops its slight concessions to continuity and song to dissolve into sunny daubs and doodles, with only Liebezeitâs blissful, maddeningly tight percussion driving us on. A friend once described this as his perfect summer album and now I agree with him.
5
Oct 17 2024
Elastica
Elastica
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 arenât 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 - âWaking Upâ and â2:1â are a comely pair - but then again there is also âIndian Songâ, 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.
3
Oct 18 2024
Hejira
Joni Mitchell
Glad Iâve 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 Iâve 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.
5
Oct 21 2024
I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight
Richard Thompson
"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. Whatâs 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.
Thereâs 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 trackâs one of several bangers; I wish they had just one more to break up the bleak last two.
5
Oct 22 2024
California
American Music Club
This is one of the better - and earlier - grunge-adjacent roots rock LPs Iâve 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 Iâd dine with, but Iâm content to share a few minutes at the espresso bar.
3
Oct 23 2024
Let It Be
The Replacements
âUnsatisfiedâ is a smashing song, the rest good, just not up there with it.
4
Oct 24 2024
Live At The Regal
B.B. King
Thereâs joy in this, which I donât hear often, especially not in whatâs called the blues. The songs are mostly rhythmic containers for Kingâs Heavenâs 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 âPARPâ, or clears its throat, moves onto the next bit of chat. I had fun with this today.
5
Oct 25 2024
ĂgĂŠtis Byrjun
Sigur RĂłs
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 âThe Lady in Redâ and the âEastendersâ theme, a constant was the set ending with âSvefn-g-englarâ, 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, thereâs 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 Iâm 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. Donât worry, I didnât pay.
5. Thereâs 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, âKveikur", has a song called âIsjaki" that has an urgency absent here, and is my favourite track of theirs along with "Svefn-g-englarâ.
7. Homework noted with thanks.
4
Oct 28 2024
Rid Of Me
PJ Harvey
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.
âWarts and allâ 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.
5
Oct 29 2024
Jagged Little Pill
Alanis Morissette
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.
3
Oct 30 2024
Come Find Yourself
Fun Lovin' Criminals
This is another record I scorned on principle back in the â90âs for reasons that matter less to me today: itâs modish, affected, and unafraid of clichĂ© - featuring Tarantino samples on its biggest hit manages to hit all three. But is it fun?
A little, not much.
2
Oct 31 2024
Central Reservation
Beth Orton
High-quality beige wave is my after-one-minute review.
This passed through my evening with the apologetic air of a vicarâs fart, but it did awaken a lost craving: I time for some Butthole Siurfers.
2
Nov 01 2024
Steve McQueen
Prefab Sprout
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: âDesire Asâ, one of the flat tracks, sounds like it is being read from a codex. Why is âHorsinâ Aroundâ on this record? God knows.
3
Nov 04 2024
The Last Broadcast
Doves
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:
âThrew out baby and left bathwater.â
âSounds soft.â
âNowt always wrong with soft, Heathcliff.â
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.
2
Nov 05 2024
This Is Hardcore
Pulp
âThis Is Hardcoreââs 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. Cockerâs 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 didnât 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
4
Nov 06 2024
Moby Grape
Moby Grape
Crank this up, listen to whatâs 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 âSomedayâ is cute.
âSitting by the Windowâ 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, âOarâ, before he stopped making music.
4
Nov 07 2024
What's That Noise?
Coldcut
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.
3
Nov 08 2024
Who's Next
The Who
As Iâve 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 âLive at Leedsâ despite the songs.
This album appears to be the one where they stashed most of their great tracks. Even the Oxâs âMy Wifeâ, 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 âTommyâ groping its way towards us on this list still makes me shudder uncontrollably, mind.
5
Nov 11 2024
Machine Gun Etiquette
The Damned
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: thereâs more here, looking forward to post-punk and hardcore - the pretty piano of âMelody Leeâ 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 wasnât trying to be.
4
Nov 12 2024
Bubble And Scrape
Sebadoh
âBubble & Scrapeâ is one of a few records here that I avoided on release, probably because Iâd heard they were soft and back then all I wanted was hard. Yet it feels familiar and brings nostalgia; the soundâs 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 Sebadohâs 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.
Itâs 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 Iâm glad itâs here.
Bob Weston of Shellac engineered this, a credit that fits: a sweet man recording a sweet record.
3
Nov 13 2024
One World
John Martyn
âWhat the fuck it this?â 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!
4
Nov 14 2024
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
My awareness of Tom Petty is mostly from the most popular answer to the cruel question âwho was the ugliest Traveling Wilbury?â
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakersâ mission statement could well have been that evinced by Adhewoodâs Nice Pete: âIt will just be good music, played well by men.â
The choruses, apart from âAmerican Girlâ, are polite and colloquial rather than compulsive and rapturous - and this is not a criticism. I canât explain why âAnything Thatâs Rock ânâ Rollâ 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.
4
Nov 15 2024
Floodland
Sisters Of Mercy
The foregrounding of the drum machine and heavy synth strops is confident and charismatic. Apart from the refrain of âThis Corrosionâ, the songs themselves didnât seduce me.
3
Nov 18 2024
From Elvis In Memphis
Elvis Presley
The mores, beliefs and underpinning cultural iconography of the United States are particularly mysterious and prominent right now for unfortunate reasons, and because Iâve been given a rainy weekend to listen to âFrom Elvis in Memphisâ, a record Iâve owned but never spent much time with in the 21 years since I visited Presleyâs grave by his swimming pool, Iâm gnawing at what exactly is this thing.
Bear with me here, Simon. Consensus deems âSuspicious Mindsâ part of this set, so weâre 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 Kingâs 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 thatâs 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.
âWearinâ the loved on lookâ warns against signs of happiness in a beloved.
âOnly the strong will surviveâ tells you to listen to your mum and be ready to crush your lovers.
In âIâll hold you in my heartâ the physical intimacy turns his voice rubbery, his words to nonsense, his assertions becoming mockery.
Here comes God again on âTrue love travels on a gravel roadâ to declare that love, similar to happiness, is only valid through constant suffering.
The Chicago of âIâm the Ghettoâ is a Southernerâs nightmare of the multiracial metropolises of the North, yet this is the liberal song.
âSuspicious Mindsâ 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.
4
Nov 19 2024
High Violet
The National
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.
2
Nov 20 2024
American Beauty
Grateful Dead
Pleasant and harmless, this record evokes the voice of my German friend Lars when I tried to sneak on the stereo some Neil Young - âZumaâ - at a party, and he called it out immediately: âwhat is this hippy shit?â
My instinct is to sacrifice this to my old friend Lazer, whom I havenât seen in years, and likes to watch cars burn. Yet I managed to listen to this four times today, never stirred, but at ease. Thereâs a place for comfort.
3
Nov 21 2024
Technique
New Order
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 itâs music for a lifestyle that is admirable from afar, but for which I would never find the right shoes to wear.
3
Nov 22 2024
Sheet Music
10cc
Inner Beavis and Butthead: âThey call this âsheet musicâ? Hehe heheh heheh I guess they got that right.â
A âbest ofâ 10cc tape did a lot of time in my dadâs car, so âThe Wall Street Shuffleâ and âSilly Loveâ default to the Iâll-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 dadâs 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? âSisterâ by Sonic Youth and âPigpileâ by Big Black. Time is spaghetti thrown against the wall.
10cc produced at least one masterpiece, the eerie âIâm not in loveâ, a freak accidents where studio tinkering created something unlike anything else.
2
Nov 25 2024
Cut
The Slits
âCutâ by The Slits has made a new category in my memoryâs 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 Iâm slotting last weekâs âFrom Elvis in Memphisâ into this category.
Listening to this, the thought that âCutâ is a multimedia experience condensed onto disc emerged and stuck. Thereâs 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 Upâs sublimation of her paternal schlager roots? Her accent immediately did something funny to my brain; Iâve 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 âLove Und Romanceâ 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 theyâre doing and enhances it.
Riot grrl didnât 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 - Iâd never listened to this assuming it wouldnât carry catchy timbres or tunes, but both are abundant; this is a surprisingly polished work.
5
Nov 26 2024
Tago Mago
Can
âTago Magoâ crystallises everything that I have come to value in improvisation-derived music.
Itâs 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. Thereâs an order to the turmoil and an intelligence behind it; the wilder tracks follow a narrative, deranged though it may be. The end of âPeking Oâ means something, though I donât 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 - âAumngâ is not a pleasant listen, but itâs richly evocative, starting like a bad happening deep in one of Central Europeâs 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 itâs hard to avoid wondering if its coloured by the war - the seventies were a big decade for German kids freaking out their parents.
Iâm pleased the list has made me return to this, as this is a record Iâve owned and respected for a while, but never close-listened to until today, apart from to the enormous âHalleluhwahâ.
5
Nov 27 2024
Drunk
Thundercat
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 Thundercatâs face in the superb cover photo.
3
Nov 28 2024
Butterfly
Mariah Carey
Been a while since Iâve quoted my wifeâs reactions here, so Iâll throw in a review-in-progress from the car: âThis sounds like H&M music. Who would go to see this in concert?â
I would buy a reasonably-priced T-shirt to this album. Clearly a painstakingly-machined exemplar of its genre, I applaud Careyâs vocal aerobatics while finding the music vapid.
2
Nov 29 2024
The Nightfly
Donald Fagen
Can you imagine going to a dinner party hosted by Donald Fagen?
â I remember a line of women all in white
The laughter and the steel bands at nightâ
âChrist Donald, weâve heard this one before, move on munch munch munch glug glug.â
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.
âMaxineâ is music for rich people with horrific taste to make out to.
2
Dec 02 2024
Bat Out Of Hell
Meat Loaf
This has a Broadway naffness to it thatâs 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 âprobably should be hereâ.
3
Dec 03 2024
Honky Tonk Masquerade
Joe Ely
What happened here? Put this on early today, noted âplod plod plod country, v wellâ, 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.
4
Dec 04 2024
Kings Of The Wild Frontier
Adam & The Ants
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.
4
Dec 05 2024
Maxinquaye
Tricky
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 donât think Iâve listened to it more than a handful of times since its year of release, and I doubt Iâve heard it in the last two decades. Itâs 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, itâs a continent away from the lounge muzak that term came to signify. Aggressive samples also call back to Public Enemy (the cover of âBlack Steelâ is outstanding) - it is not music to relax to.
This deeply, unnervingly sexual record is named after his dead mother.
Tricky complained loudly that Portisheadâs âDummyâ was a straight extrapolation of âAftermathâ, which has some truth while a disservice to both: Trickyâs piece is more grotesque, less elegant; Portisheadâs record is more ethereal, less bleak. Thereâs a gallows humour clear in the samples and circularity of âAftermathâ, itâs like watching your world fall apart from your armchair, glass in hand.
Iâd 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 donât 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.
5
Dec 06 2024
I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got
Sinead O'Connor
A lovely record as Iâd half-expected. Hadnât 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!
4
Dec 09 2024
Apocalypse 91⊠The Enemy Strikes Black
Public Enemy
Working on the that permanent revolution is an illusion, âApocalypse 91â is the point in Public Enemyâs I never got past as Iâd read they had settled, that this was just another solid PE record.
Itâs solid and Iâm sold: it doesnât have the star turns of FOABP, but itâs 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 âBy the Time I Get to Arizonaâ sounds like Chuck D guesting on a stalwart New Kingdom track, except that it came out a year or two earlier than NKâs first LP. They were still trying new stuff.
Chuck D and Flavour Flav are the most recognisable vocal partnership Iâve heard, and Iâm embarrassed itâs taken me this long to appreciate that.
4
Dec 10 2024
Eternally Yours
The Saints
After parking, will I keep the car running to finish the song? âMemories Are Made of Thisâ passes this test Iâve unconsciously developed, and itâs 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.
4
Dec 11 2024
Nothing's Shocking
Jane's Addiction
Simon, I think youâll deduce the source of this description of Janeâs Addiction without needing any help:
\"I've never heard Rush, but that's exactly what I'd imagine Rush to sound like."
Perry Farrellâs 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.
1
Dec 12 2024
Shleep
Robert Wyatt
Records like this feel like peering into someoneâs peculiar, hermetic consciousness: I see everything and it is quite impenetrable. Wyattâs 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; âThe Duchessâ sounds like a schoolyard sing-song from a nightmare; every track is queasily off-centre in a manner that I associate with British psychedelia. Itâs very personal, disquieting yet compulsive, and I canât 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 Soaneâs Museum where an unrepeatable collection of ancient architectural and art plunder stand in for the mad attic of the collectorâs now-extinct mind.
4
Dec 13 2024
BEYONCĂ
Beyoncé
You could throw me onto the âwhere are the songs?â pile of middle-aged (mostly) white guys reviewing this, but Iâm 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.
2
Dec 16 2024
Savane
Ali Farka Touré
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.
3
Dec 17 2024
Face to Face
The Kinks
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 Daviesâs lyrics.
This hasnât stuck with me as hard as âVillage Greenâ, but some of the shift-ups demand return. âLittle Miss Queen of Darknessâ deals out two cooly ominous instrumental freak-outs that make me want to drop it into a party to watch the reactions, and itâs out of the door in just over three minutes. I havenât read any literature on the band, but Iâd be amazed if no oneâs spent a few paragraphs extolling how the bass-line of âSunny Afternoonâ 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 donât come off as gimmick, but I canât recall any.
4
Dec 18 2024
Crossing the Red Sea With the Adverts
The Adverts
Fast, tuneful, streamlined rock from a band that you could point to if someone asked you to recommend a straight-ahead punk record. Iâd like more strangeness and ambush, but thatâs me looking forward to post-punk. Cute to see this is one of the first albums with John Leckie in the producerâs chair.
I misheard âBored Teenagersâ as âFaulty Agentsâ, which ought to be used.
4
Dec 19 2024
Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley
Pleasures extracted from this groomed karaoke:
Elvisâs voice, its elasticity and the songs like âIâm Counting On Youâ where heâs still working it out, trying a constipated whine thatâs charming in its awkwardness
The fabulous guitar work, that shares Wilco Johnsonâs 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 âSurfinâ Birdâ 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 âI Love You Becauseâ, the chill from really feeling like youâre hearing a long-dead voice from the long-dead past
âBlue Moon - Take 9/Mâ, 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 âTutti Fruttiâ
Enjoying thinking about how contemporary audiences understood the plea for mutual masturbation underpinning âOne-Sided Love Affairâ
3
Dec 20 2024
The Man Who
Travis
âThe 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.â
Wikipedia damns. I remember no specifics of the grey wash that followed Radiohead, but Iâm 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 âDave is sad, O Dave is sad.â
2
Dec 23 2024
Electric
The Cult
Another throwaway to listen to before I die, this time with the image of Rick Rubin rubbing his tummy as he faxes notes, âmore Plant, dial up Young (Angus), lighten the Van (Halen, Eddie), park the cowbell?â
This is fun and the Cult were clearly a strong rock unit, but as weâre almost halfway through the list I fear we wonât have ZZ Topâs â70âs run, or much from the Groundhogs, sprees from bands who made and mastered this mode rather than made a straightforward call-back to it.
3
Dec 24 2024
Beach Samba
Astrud Gilberto
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 âI Had The Craziest Dreamâ is subversively off-kilter. Delightful morsels on a rainy day.
3
Dec 25 2024
Heartbreaker
Ryan Adams
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 Adamaâ involvement, I have no proof.
1
Dec 26 2024
Isn't Anything
My Bloody Valentine
Todayâs decision wasnât the rating - this is top tier - but whether I agree with my skipperâs assertion this is the best MBV album, better than âLovelessâ.
This probably has the better songs; I appreciate âLose My Breathâ and its slippery, seductive regret in a way that I could not in my youth, and theyâve never rocked as hard as âFeed Me With Your Kissâ.
I probably prefer how âLovelessâ sounds though, overfed and sparkly. Itâs a draw, at least until âLovelessâ inevitably turns up here.
5
Dec 27 2024
Protection
Massive Attack
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 Bristolâs convoluted history behind them.
Trickyâs lines were lifted and shifted to âMaxinquayeâ a year later, but itâs 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.
Iâve taken a lot more from this today than Iâd expected to.
5
Dec 30 2024
In Rainbows
Radiohead
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 âI donât want to be your friend I want to be your loverâ.
I almost filled my pants! Fuck out of my boudoir, creep!
1
Dec 31 2024
Nowhere
Ride
âNowhereâ 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 itâs a picnic, bucolic in the Romantic way: if John Constable painted soundscapes, theyâd 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.
4
Jan 01 2025
Blur
Blur
Giving a grump pile of drone and mutter that only just clears the line between âfuck youâ and song the ĂŒber-Blur title âEssex Dogsâ 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, âM.O.R.â joining Nirvanaâs âRadio Friendly Unit Shifterâ in my very short mental playlist of good songs that cock a punky leg against their own tunefulness; âOn Your Ownâ is a go-nowhere track that is perfect just-so; âBeetlebumâ a poppier twin to Sonic Youthâs âBull in the Heatherâ (I donât know why, but that works for me); âSong 2â annoyingly effective in an anyone-couldâve-done-that sense; and âStrange News from Another Starâ my surprise from this playthrough, as I thought Iâd heard all of the good songs on this album, but I guess my mate Andy mustâve 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.
3
Jan 02 2025
All Hail the Queen
Queen Latifah
âThe Prosââs 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 youâve heard the first twenty seconds of the song, youâll know how the rest will go. I like Queen Latifahâs voice and wish she sang about more than her rapping prowess.
2
Jan 03 2025
Street Signs
Ozomatli
This could be made for bad film soundtracks, specifically for party scenes needing mild spicing up, nothing threatening, or perhaps a remake of âWeekend at Bernieâsâ.
Itâs terrible, but I did enjoy going down a Wikipedia wormhole about the Brat Pack after this prompted me to look up âWeekend at Bernieâsâ.
1
Jan 06 2025
Iron Maiden
Iron Maiden
The vaudevillian bangers I was expecting - âProwlerâ, âRunning Freeâ and âCharlotte the Harlotâ - 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 theyâre practically locals to my old manor - itâs homemade East London-Essex baroque.
But why does so much heavy metal sound so thin?
3
Jan 07 2025
Ritual De Lo Habitual
Jane's Addiction
This opens with âStopâ. If only.
Simon: I know you hate Thom Yorkeâs voice, but surely Perryâs is more annoying?
1
Jan 08 2025
A Grand Don't Come For Free
The Streets
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 storyâs heard.
3
Jan 09 2025
Want One
Rufus Wainwright
A record must have a killer edge to cut through the kind of ballsache of a day Iâve 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.
4
Jan 10 2025
Jack Takes the Floor
Ramblin' Jack Elliott
I believe that if you listen closely enough, the
intentions of a record will become clear, regardless of genre or proficiency, but I donât 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 Elliottâs voice, but other times I heard an earnest act. I donât 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 heâs posited as Dylanâs 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).
3
Jan 13 2025
Elvis Is Back
Elvis Presley
The third Elvis album to reach us here, I donât 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 doesnât have the spellbinding power of whatever was the last one we had. I canât shake the feeling Iâm hearing each of these songs in a period gangster movie as ironic counterpoint to acts of violence.
3
Jan 14 2025
Shadowland
k.d. lang
An inoffensive album of low-stakes country covers by singer-songwriter k.d. lang was not an encounter Iâd anticipated, but Iâll take it for a Monday.
2
Jan 15 2025
MedĂșlla
Björk
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.
2
Jan 16 2025
Chris
Christine and the Queens
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. Iâd rather just hear Paul Westerberg wail âlook me in my eye/and tell me Iâm satisfiedâ rather than this cold vague vibe.
The better parts remind me of good Japanese City Pop Iâve heard, exceptions to an otherwise austere mood.
2
Jan 17 2025
Toys In The Attic
Aerosmith
The toddler in the back of the car said âI like this musicâ and Iâm surprised to agree. (He also said âwoo!â; Iâll 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 Tylerâs sink into parody. When I last checked, âRocksâ was the cognoscentiâs âgood Aerosmith albumâ, but I think this is better.
4
Jan 20 2025
...The Dandy Warhols Come Down
The Dandy Warhols
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.
2
Jan 21 2025
Scissor Sisters
Scissor Sisters
Iâd 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. Doesnât hold together terrifically well, but I had more fun than I expected.
3
Jan 22 2025
Take Me Apart
Kelela
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.
2
Jan 23 2025
Paris 1919
John Cale
This has the kind of quality thatâs inescapable: one swoons on contact.
5
Jan 24 2025
Joan Baez
Joan Baez
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. âDona Donaâ sounds best to me.
3
Jan 27 2025
Kala
M.I.A.
So far, almost halfway through, this is the most exciting hip hop Iâve heard on this list thatâs unfamiliar to me - in 2007 I was too busy discovering Adornoâs âMinima Moraliaâ, Berlin, D.I.Y. noise and the luxuries of amorous turmoil to notice how great âPaper Planesâ is, which is funny as I can pick up some of all of that on âKalaâ, a record thatâs inconsistent in the trad romance sense, determinedly capricious in what it loots - references to âRoadrunnerâ, âBlue Mondayâ 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. âArt schoolâ, 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, Iâm struck by how modern it sounds.
5
Jan 28 2025
Murder Ballads
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
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 Iâve 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: itâs too comic to titillate, which is fine, but why set it to music?
2
Jan 29 2025
Risque
CHIC
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 âMy Feet Keep Dancingâ I realised that CHIC were near guaranteed to present more than three moments on this record at least as great as the stuff Iâm already familiar with, which is only âGood Timesâ. Unusually, the verse-chorus-verse parts are just the mise-en-scene - itâs the interstitial bass sprints and the sudden, odd grooves that this excels and revels in.
4
Jan 30 2025
Loveless
My Bloody Valentine
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 âLovelessâ from a new angle. Instead, they are âLovelessâ-songs, a one-album genre that not even the bandâs sequel slotted into. Not so much a dead end as a comet or an eclipse. I knew Iâd give it Hi-Score, but I didnât think itâd ignite a more passionate love over the boringly dutiful one Iâd hitherto carried.
Which is to say, the song âHot Shot Cityâ is particularly good.
5
Jan 31 2025
Tarkus
Emerson, Lake & Palmer
Thing is, Iâm 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. âHow did He lose six million Jews?â suggests the Holocaust was an act of absent-mindedness.
2
Feb 03 2025
Slippery When Wet
Bon Jovi
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 letâs pretend that âWanted Dead Or Aliveâ is a Beckettian paean to clarity in existential state.
3
Feb 04 2025
It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back
Public Enemy
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. Ballardâs best contents pages.
I might like this one the best.
5
Feb 05 2025
The Real Thing
Faith No More
The dorkiness is dialled to 11 on this record that shouts the makersâ 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 Dudeâs rug: they tie the album together. Maybe the only record tainted with funk metal that doesnât act as an emetic on me. Who Dorks Wins.
3
Feb 06 2025
Bossanova
Pixies
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.
4
Feb 07 2025
Sticky Fingers
The Rolling Stones
A day ago I told Simon this is my favourite Stones album, as it was one of the first of my dadâs CDs that I gave a chunk of time to, which is all quite funny as I barely remember half of this, yet itâs all still a punch to the heavens. Unusually, I prefer the polished one next to its scruffier sibling, âExileâ. My dad states Mick Taylor was a key force behind their best, and I canât disagree.
5
Feb 10 2025
The Stooges
The Stooges
On Sonic Youthâs âBad Moon Risingâ, âI love her all the timeâ is preceded by a distorted cassette recording of âNot Rightâ, 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 âFunhouseâ because Albini adored it).
Iâll cop to reading the Wikipedia summaries and despite having loved this album for decades, Iâd never realised how last-minute, riff-thrown-together it is, half-songs slammed into improv. Yet every trackâs a banger apart from âWe Will Fallâ, which should be a bore but I never skip, perhaps for Caleâs viola, as likely for the palette cleanser.
Minatory sex music, donât dream of waking up being spooned by a Minotaur.
5
Feb 11 2025
Stripped
Christina Aguilera
I knew Iâd bought this ages ago, but when my library contains only âBeautifulâ and âDirrtyâ; Iâd dumped the rest during a late-noughties iPod memory shortage. Ominous.
As Iâve written elsewhere, Aguileraâs 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 Iâm 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, Iâve concluded that I donât 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 - sheâs 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 wouldâve 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 âBeautifulâ 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 Iâve ever heard by our friend Howard on asking a couple of Louisiana fishermen where to find the Bayou alligator tour weâd booked, and out came Christopher Walken doing an impression of Stephen Hawking guest-starring in âThe Dukes of Hazzardâ, âso do YâAWWWL know WHERE BOBâS swamp boat tour IS?â
The musicâs compellingly all over the place. Aguileraâs like one of those mischievous spirits from a horror movie that come at you from different forms sheâs possessed, both incongruous and scarily recognisable, and perhaps itâs from the best I managed only a single listen today, as otherwise sheâd have my throat.
3
Feb 12 2025
For Your Pleasure
Roxy Music
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 itâs one of those records that sounds like it was a jolly cabaret, but thereâs a clear tension between the components: fun to listen to, maybe hell to make. I wouldnât be surprised if someone punched someone else face over âThe Bogus Manâ. My moneyâs on Enoâs fist and Ferryâs face.
I shouldâve 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.
5
Feb 13 2025
Frampton Comes Alive
Peter Frampton
This is aggressively normal 70âs 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 swingersâ party for pensioners.
3
Feb 14 2025
The Sensual World
Kate Bush
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.
4
Feb 17 2025
Public Image: First Issue
Public Image Ltd.
âAngry cat guitarâ is how my son describes Levineâs guitar, and I hope heâd find funny this toddlerâs foreshortening of this primeval, post-punk kernel. The album has more actual songs than Iâd given it credit for - another owned for decades and mostly neglected - but only âPublic Imageâ feels more notes for revolution.
Groundâs broken here; I salute the band and manifesto before making my way out.
3
Feb 18 2025
Ellington at Newport
Duke Ellington
My dad, a fan of this performance, says âDiminuendo and Crescendo in Blueâ is the one he returns to, the climax to Ellingtonâs popular story rather than his life, the gig where a chunk of the band donât 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 âFestival Junctionâ sound like a tantrum, either at the bandâs structure or the perception of its obsolescence, its dead economic model: we can blast too. Thereâs 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.
Iâll take my dadâs approach to this one.
4
Feb 19 2025
Tragic Songs of Life
The Louvin Brothers
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.
3
Feb 20 2025
Peace Sells...But Who's Buying
Megadeth
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 âAchilllllleeeess⊠he cut off his dick!â
3
Feb 21 2025
Eliminator
ZZ Top
ZZ Top were a top tier band and this is a gnarly album, but itâs 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. Doesnât feel right to compare it to âTrĂšs Hombresâ et al, as theyâre entirely different set-ups.
4
Feb 24 2025
The Dark Side Of The Moon
Pink Floyd
The LP - the object itself - is very familiar to me from childhood, but I donât 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 âyouâve got to hear it as a suiteâ crowd have a point: itâs a luxurious, pillowy, lie-down and drift-in listen, rich with minute baroque flourishes. Everything sounds clear and gorgeous.
The lyrics match Watersâ reputation for pretension, but are tolerable: the big themes are rubbed, but thereâs enough concrete detail, slang and chewy narrative voice - samples thrown in, but mixed loud enough to matter - that itâs a hang-out with a group of overgrown students. Watersâ mournful stoner voice doesnât quite overstay its welcome.
Makes me wonder what wouldâve been had Can with unlimited time at Abbey Road and Alan Parsons.
4
Feb 25 2025
Let Love Rule
Lenny Kravitz
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 Iâm cruel: good faith, craft and time have been poured into this set. âMr Cab Driverâ 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.
2
Feb 26 2025
The White Room
The KLF
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.
4
Feb 27 2025
Tuesday Night Music Club
Sheryl Crow
Were this shorter, I would listen to it again, but thereâs 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. Thereâs some good material here - singles aside, âNo One Said It Would Be Easyâ has the soft rhythmic push of the quieter VU songs - but thereâs 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 âAll I Wanna Doâ began I sang on reflex âAll I wanna do is scratch my bum.â (Iâve got a feeling Iâm not the only one.)
3. My conclusion from this album is that I should listen to âExile in Guyvilleâ again: same year, some similar circumstances, wildly different results.
2
Feb 28 2025
Smile
Brian Wilson
âSurfâs Upâ is a sparkling title thatâs an odd fit to a song thatâs shambling, hesitant and sluggish, not easy to remember in part or entirety. Itâs 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.
Iâm a âPet Soundsâ-liker, am glad this exists, but I prefer thinking about it to listening to it: âSmileâ 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. âGood Vibrationsâ is masterful, âHeroes and Villainsâ 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.
3
Mar 03 2025
I'm Your Man
Leonard Cohen
Cohenâs letting us in on the joke in this one, and itâs a joy; his humour emerges clearer with the synth, drum machine, and the generously excessive backing vocals. First LC record Iâve found fun rather than duty, and âFirst We Take Manhattanâ is a song Iâm filing away for later.
4
Mar 04 2025
The Man Machine
Kraftwerk
These Kraftwerk records feel liked theyâre tapped from a private little universe thatâs 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.
5
Mar 05 2025
Beautiful Freak
Eels
The ennui, the ostentatious violent images, the touches of trip hop, the quiet-loud guitar eruptions, and the post-Cobain growl encapsulate what I wasnât 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.
4
Mar 06 2025
Autobahn
Kraftwerk
Being assigned two Kraftwerk albums in a week is a joy. Ideas are still being worked out here and aside from âAutobahnâ experiments run without conclude. I like this, but the bangers to come show destination surpass journey. Still, such a happy record.
4
Mar 07 2025
The Seldom Seen Kid
Elbow
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.
2
Mar 10 2025
A Rush Of Blood To The Head
Coldplay
Who can doubt this recordâs 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. Itâs a giant, modern mall, muzak included, emptied all for oneself, apart from the meat-craving zombies.
2
Mar 11 2025
Arc Of A Diver
Steve Winwood
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 Martinâs flimsy big vibes style, but while this shares Coldplayâs aversion to actual life detail, Winwood comes off more as a hippy friend trying to cheer you up rather than Bono.
4
Mar 12 2025
Groovin'
The Young Rascals
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.
3
Mar 13 2025
The Predator
Ice Cube
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.
4
Mar 14 2025
Roxy Music
Roxy Music
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 compĂšred by Groucho Marx, the softer songs never relinquishing the arch wobbliness, the barnstormers swathed in sheets of Enoâs 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.
5
Mar 17 2025
GI
Germs
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...
4
Mar 18 2025
Virgin Suicides
Air
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 canât perceive any emotional intention other than to feel something, anything big.
3
Mar 19 2025
Fifth Dimension
The Byrds
âMcGuinn 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.â - 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, â8 Miles Highâ, which Iâll 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 McGuinâs chirping, morse-code solos, which Iâve 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!
3
Mar 20 2025
Here Are the Sonics
The Sonics
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. âThe Witchâ, which is their own, has a sexy menace that I want more of.
3
Mar 21 2025
Moondance
Van Morrison
Flawless genesis of a one-man genre, this could play all day and I doubt Iâd tire. Brings back strong memories of a Van nut friend at university and a lovely insider story Iâve heard involving a grumpy Morrison, an idiotic Donald Trump, a blameless lighting technician, and a tiny dressing room toilet.
5
Mar 24 2025
Rock 'N Soul
Solomon Burke
These cover-saturated singer-showcase albums are a wrestle between A&R conservatism and the juice and individualism of the players. Burkeâs 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 âWonât You Give Him (One More Chance)â deserves credit that the notes donât give them.
However, the songs themselves are unremarkable. A close listen to the makers has its rewards, but the content doesnât excite me.
3
Mar 25 2025
Dry
PJ Harvey
I canât think of a better debut in that decade. I miss âPJ Harveyâ 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 âRid of Meâ tour and they were magic.
5
Mar 26 2025
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
Lauryn Hill
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. Itâs a compellingly lazy listen.
I saw Lauryn Hill play a set at the 2007 Exit festival in Novi Sad, and Iâve 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 Hillâs enormous hat and my drunken friend Dan triggering a 200,000-person roar by shouting âBeachie Boys Woo Woo!â 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 weâve a voice that felt like it was everywhere with everything for a while, but never returned in force. Iâm not sure this record is a repeatable trick.
4
Mar 27 2025
Ragged Glory
Neil Young & Crazy Horse
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 âRagged Gloryâ 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, âthis is his most fucked-up album yetâ or somesuch.
The performance of âFuckinâ Upâ on âWeldâ climaxes with one of the most ferocious, thematically bang-on guitar solos in existence. Also, the B-side to âMansion on the Hillâ, âDonât Spook The Horseâ may be better than anything on here, but this album is still a masterpiece.
This is arguably the best album to come out in Grungeâs 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 âI think they ended that chorus too earlyâ and âMolina sounds like heâs wandered into the wrong pitch-black hotel roomâ; Young at the end cheerfully apologised for their being a little crappy, âbut thatâs who we areâ. They were transcendent!
5
Mar 28 2025
Too Rye Ay
Dexys Midnight Runners
Kevin Rowland builds up song from his voice out, picks his sounds, and we get this turbulent, ecstatic stream of confession, vow and manifesto - âthose guitars are cruel and noisyâ.
5
Mar 31 2025
Something/Anything?
Todd Rundgren
This is annoying good, and I havenât yet figured out the annoying part aside from the fairground music pieces, which are as atrocious as ever.
4
Apr 01 2025
AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted
Ice Cube
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 Dâs framing of hip hop as Black CNN applies here. The overwhelming density of sound and idea reminds me of Tik-tokâs demented #corecore Tik-tok: it pulls so much material into the mix that it defeats understanding and outpaces irony.
4
Apr 02 2025
Cypress Hill
Cypress Hill
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 âBeany Fingersâ - 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 itâs 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 Iâve only ever borrowed this album as a teenager, I could remember almost half of the songs, and found myself muttering âborn to get busyâ as I trundled through Costco, now facing my dotage. Pretty good!
4
Apr 03 2025
Superfly
Curtis Mayfield
Paragon, perhaps flawless in making gilded, sumptuous music around hard lives related, this record makes me feel like Iâm admiring it from the outside, peering into a glass display case.
4
Apr 04 2025
Seventh Tree
Goldfrapp
This is a soothing sweet nothing to me.
2
Apr 07 2025
Rust In Peace
Megadeth
This shed smells of body odour and is packed with moronic rants. Yet unforgivably, itâs soft.
2
Apr 08 2025
Lady Soul
Aretha Franklin
So much of this is canon, I find it easy to miss how much brilliance and labour went into the making.
5
Apr 09 2025
Legalize It
Peter Tosh
This went well with a tired night working session, though this isnât the revelation that would make me seek more reggae.
3
Apr 10 2025
Songs Of Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen
Of the LC records weâve heard so far, âIâm Your Manâ 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 dramatistâs laconicism, and a strong rhythm guitar propelling the machine along. The embellishments crackle: âSo long, Marianneââs accentuating drum rolls at close and the far off warbling below upfront whistling of âHey, Thatâs No Way to Say Goodbyeâ make me want to listen to those songs again as I write.
5
Apr 11 2025
In The Court Of The Crimson King
King Crimson
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 thatâs an unappreciated tradition in English art.
5
Apr 14 2025
Trio
Dolly Parton
âThe Blues Brothersâ parody of this recordâs 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 âRawhideâ and âStand By Your Manâ, 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 â80âs schmaltz on âTelling Me Liesâ. But that song also contains one of those hard bright lyrical flashes that the genre does so well: âYou donât know what a man is/Until you have to please oneâ. âHoboâs Meditationâ lured out my inner commie: itâs a mighty song. As a whole, this is high-class confectionary.
3
Apr 15 2025
G. Love And Special Sauce
G. Love & Special Sauce
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
2
Apr 16 2025
Here Come The Warm Jets
Brian Eno
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 couldâve made a half-arsed thing, but instead we have the divine. God - the good one - put his fingers on the multitrack.
5
Apr 17 2025
Superfuzz Bigmuff
Mudhoney
Murhoneyâs deliberate goofiness belies a tight band loaded with clever, hook-filled songs badged with exaggerated fuzz and wobble. Theyâre a seriously fun live band. âEvery Good Boy Deserves Fudgeâ might edge this on bangers, mind.
4
Apr 18 2025
Space Ritual
Hawkwind
These freaks had stamina and while enjoying this all the way through, imagining the light show and weed fog, Iâm unsurprised Lemmy turned to the short form. Still itâs admirable, and more fun than listening to the Allman Bros strain of jam band.
3
Apr 21 2025
Millions Now Living Will Never Die
Tortoise
This puzzled me on release, as did every other post-rock record I sought out back then because someone mentioned âSpiderlandâ. 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.
4
Apr 22 2025
Kenza
Khaled
The album cover is splendid, the rest must be highly effective at weddings, but does not move me in the living room. Itâs happy, unchallenging party music. His voice is great, mind.
2
Apr 23 2025
Bitte Orca
Dirty Projectors
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.)
2
Apr 24 2025
Roots
Sepultura
This is very good thrash metal that lives within the chosen genreâs boundaries: the limited range of low-end distortion, riffs with a playground rhymeâs 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 wouldnât smear against a wall, and in âJascoâ and âItsariâ paired and rare examples of post-Zep metal folk excursion that tower. âCanyon Jamâ could be on a weirder Sun City Girls album, which is both praise and damnation.
The vocals are mostly of the ârargh I just shit my pants/ rargh I just shit my pants/ rargh me too!â school, executed flawlessly. The toddler likes them: âmonster musicâ.
Monotony may be unavoidable in this district
3
Apr 25 2025
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
The Smashing Pumpkins
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 Iâve long-known but never had a name to put against.
Awful, the point earned by the hilarious little guitar squeals cancelled by Corganâs 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!
1
Apr 28 2025
Locust Abortion Technician
Butthole Surfers
I have many room-clearing records, but this uniquely confuses and infuriates guests. A few freakoid bangers - âHuman Cannonballâ and âThe O-Menâ 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 4Chanâs offensiveness into the general assault on rights and dignity thatâs ravaging the States right now. I donât blame the Buttholes. Occasionally the circus switches from spectacle to the specutaculur.
4
Apr 29 2025
Ready To Die
The Notorious B.I.G.
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 Tupacâs broadly contemporaneous record did, though who knows how Iâd feel tomorrow.
Many blunts are mentioned and I wonder about the title, âready to dieâ, 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? Itâs Monday.
3
Apr 30 2025
The United States Of America
The United States Of America
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 âLove Song For The Dead Cheâ, blast it at your next inauguration!
4
May 01 2025
The College Dropout
Kanye West
Heâs 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.
3
May 02 2025
Dirty
Sonic Youth
A fan of SYâs â80âs stuff, I mildly shunned this album, a common error. Thereâs 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 âBad Moon Risingâ and âSisterâ. Second half wanes just a tad, but I think the record is strong all the way through to and including âSugar Kaneâ, and rest blazes often.
4
May 05 2025
21
Adele
I found this album hard to finish as Iâd stop it for some reason - a meal, a cry for the kidâs playlist, a work call, boredom - and when Iâd return I could never remember what song I was on, all indistinguishable in their inert vibe, so Iâd conscientiously go back a title I knew Iâd heard at least part of, usually âSet Fire to the Rainâ because while the conceitâs stupid at least itâs memorable. âHe Wonât Goâ mocks me.
Commonplace sentiments expressed in mundane language, sung with elan, dressed in the clothes of the long dead, talent without imagination: itâs daytime soap opera, âshe was only 21âŠâ
A revelation came with the numbing litany of romantic dejection, the memory of a friend who used to mutter âdonât look at me! Donât look at me!â back when we were going out. I knew it was comedy, but I never thought how until Adeleâs genuine abjection reminded me of my friendâs comic and I suddenly realised that she was imitating Dennis Hopper in âBlue Velvetâ, and retrospectively our relationship has rotated by a few risky degrees - o happy memory!
2
May 06 2025
Here's Little Richard
Little Richard
This feels like Iâm being asked to review the laws of physics: the hits herein set some of popâs rules, how can I challenge that? One imagines what the WW2 generation made of this fever dream of gibberish, raunch, yell and beat - tomorrowâs fun is todayâs end of civilisation.
4
May 07 2025
Cosmo's Factory
Creedence Clearwater Revival
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.
4
May 08 2025
Cafe Bleu
The Style Council
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 âYouâre The Best Thingâ.
3
May 09 2025
Picture Book
Simply Red
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.
2
May 12 2025
Third
Portishead
A leap to obscure instrumentation and the abandonment of simpler, catchier song structures bring out whatâs consistent about Portishead: the spooky, indecisive and menacing mood, its embodiment in Beth Gibbonsâ 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 âWe Carry Onâ, repeating the mantra-like vocals without understanding.
As I treasure many of the sounds and genres being détourned here, this is leng.
4
May 13 2025
Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)
Eurythmics
âLove is a strangerâ, 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.
3
May 14 2025
Introducing The Hardline According To Terence Trent D'Arby
Terence Trent D'Arby
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 shouldâve 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 â4â.
4
May 15 2025
MTV Unplugged In New York
Nirvana
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. Iâll save the reassessment for when the other two turn up.
3
May 16 2025
No Other
Gene Clark
This is colossal, full-commitment American rock, the best of its kind and it feels like the end of âThe Wild Bunchâ with Clarkâs 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 âStrength of Stringsâ forced its way to the front.
5
May 19 2025
The Gershwin Songbook
Ella Fitzgerald
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 Fitzgeraldâs 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. Itâs an uncanny artifact, as the songs were old, popular nostalgia when recorded, already out of time, sold as such.
4
May 20 2025
Arise
Sepultura
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. âRootsâ maybe shows they were getting bored of this prescribed palette, thankfully.
It is a genre that invites the listener to improvise lyrics - âstay off the llama farm!â - which is jolly.
2
May 21 2025
Let England Shake
PJ Harvey
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. âThe Dark Placesâ makes me wonder what the song hides, rather than evoke âSECRETSâ in a comic sans speech bubble.
I like how the record cries out âEnglandâ and âgloryâ and then doses the thing with heavy Commonwealth or - letâs be less polite - Colonial contributions: the references to imperial expeditions, Mick Harveyâs antipodean voice and the reggae.
I bought this when it came out and ignored it until today. A fine record.
4
May 22 2025
Go Girl Crazy
The Dictators
I liked this: a goofier, more glam take on what the Ramones were to perfect, though the tunes donât have that immortality.
3
May 23 2025
Underwater Moonlight
The Soft Boys
Progâs whimsy, the Byrdsâ 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, wasnât sure about the Stone Roses comparisons until âQueen of Eyesâ, which is a two-minute prĂšcis of the later bandâs Olympian debut; and the song that comes after it is odder and even better.
5
May 26 2025
The Idiot
Iggy Pop
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 Iâve had for a while, but had never really put mind and ears to.
5
May 27 2025
O.G. Original Gangster
Ice T
Well-machined noise raised up by Ice Tâs magisterial presence. No tracks stood out, but heâs sharp company, incisive about friends, enemies, fantasies and institutions.
3
May 28 2025
White Light / White Heat
The Velvet Underground
Pleased to report that I can enjoy this at lower volumes in my early dotage. Not as strong a suite as the debut, though thatâs like saying it isnât as bright as the sun. âThe Giftâ is a tidy instrumental behind a story that might not be worth the eight minutes. âLady Godivaâs Operationâ is exquisite as well as unsettling, âHere She Comes Nowâ has a tenderness that no spiteful murk could obscure, and âSister Rayâ is a thunderous brawl filmed by Robert Altman.
Tucker is almost made a Bez during âSister Rayâ: you can barely hear her, but you know sheâs there. You can just about find Sterling Morrison, and his spiky picking has become my favourite part, clawing away at his quarrelling companions.
5
May 29 2025
It's A Shame About Ray
The Lemonheads
Another record that I shunned at the time, this is cake, light, welcome, doesnât hang around or leave much of a trace. Thereâs a place for cake.
I canât remember why I shunned the Lemonheads, or the extent to which I was influenced by whatever I read in Melody Maker, but Dandoâs handsomeness may have had a part, perhaps the bandâs 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.
3
May 30 2025
Strangeways, Here We Come
The Smiths
Mostly playful fragments with a few decent tunes to hold it together. Morrisseyâs spite tilts towards parody. Fun, some jewels among the toys.
4
Jun 02 2025
Hybrid Theory
Linkin Park
There are many worse ways to deal with anger than to yell to Linkin Park, and Iâve 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.
2
Jun 03 2025
Vulnicura
Björk
Three oblique analogies will serve.
Our friends Howard, Matt and Matt saw âDancer in the Darkâ 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 fiancĂ©e, harrowing for one unschooled in dance and primitive in French, left me with respect for the form and the relief of knowing Iâd 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.
2
Jun 04 2025
3 + 3
The Isley Brothers
Laidback on the tunes with two out of the three bangers borrowed, but this is sumptuous and filthy with squelchy fuzz.
4
Jun 05 2025
The Visitors
ABBA
The one true ABBA maven I know stabs his finger at this as their best, the ABBA record for the ABBA cognoscenti. Itâs such a lurker. Listening to it carefully today I was surprised by how catchy most of it is, as Iâve 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 swingerâs 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. âTwo For The Price Of Oneâ would be seedy if it wasnât deranged and earworm.
4
Jun 06 2025
John Barleycorn Must Die
Traffic
Traffic are in borrowed clothes, but theyâre 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 Iâm ambivalent to; one day Iâll get to working out the mystery of British folkâs burst of popularity and subsequent fade-out. Winwoodâs voice is a force of some sort.
3
Jun 09 2025
A Date With The Everly Brothers
The Everly Brothers
Thereâs 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: âLove Hurtsâ opens with a curt prediction of âSoster Rayâ. One genuine revelation: I always thought âCathyâs Clownâ was a Beatlesâ song and performance, which is an indecipherable judgment.
4
Jun 10 2025
All That You Can't Leave Behind
U2
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. âGraceâ is nicely soporific, I concede.
2
Jun 11 2025
The Lexicon Of Love
ABC
Does any song send it further than âAll Of My Heartâ?
This album is the answer to the question that was Britain in the early â80s: of its time in that it helped make it.
5
Jun 12 2025
Coles Corner
Richard Hawley
Worthy, amiable, dull.
2
Jun 13 2025
The Beach Boys Today!
The Beach Boys
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 houseâs bedroom window. Was David Lynch a fan?
Brian Wilson died yesterday, and I now turn to my comradeâs review; Iâve been looking forward all day to watching a friend kick a skeleton. No quarter to corpses, Simon!
4
Jun 16 2025
In A Silent Way
Miles Davis
Davis hit the target on first go here; Iâm glad he moved on, but this encapsulates and surpasses all kinds of smooth that decayed to lounge at speed. Iâll plug again his later, much rawer âA Tribute to Jack Johnsonâ.
4
Jun 17 2025
My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts
Brian Eno
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.
2
Jun 18 2025
Blunderbuss
Jack White
All the right sounds, nothing to raise my pulse: Jack Whiteâs heritage garage rock is closer to Claptonâs 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.
2
Jun 19 2025
Django Django
Django Django
Crack open the craft beer, let the Aperol Spritz flow, weâve a current-millennium, Mercury Prize-nominated album that doesnât sound like a winning round of London A&R bullshit bingo, that diarrhoea. This might be the only click-track proud, indie disco LP Iâve heard so far that lives comfortably within its cyborg, schoolboy choir Brit bric-a-brac cul-de-sac.
4
Jun 20 2025
The Sounds Of India
Ravi Shankar
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.
3
Jun 23 2025
Street Life
The Crusaders
Casually virtuosic easy-listening jazz snapped into bleak majesty by the melody, phrasing and force of Randy Crawfordâs voice: âStreet Lifeâ is the masterpiece that brings us here, the following five a bubbly, forgettable afterparty.
3
Jun 24 2025
They Were Wrong, So We Drowned
Liars
Sardonic, danceable anxiety may be a good fit for the precariat, and I admire a chant of âblood blood bloodâ 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 doesnât have the hooks to be pop, its other leaning, though itâs consistently adequate listening.
Simon, the string of adequate records continues...
3
Jun 25 2025
Viva Hate
Morrissey
I lean in to listen to Vini Reillyâs intricate, sensitive guitar work; Morrissey tosses teabags, sodden and cold, into my face.
2
Jun 26 2025
Disraeli Gears
Cream
Jack Bruce was an occasional titan; Ginger Baker was of a different species of giant, maybe cyclops. Clapton, Iâve written about elsewhere. Simon, while you were educating yourself with âSmash Hitsâ, I was being dosed with Creamâs BBC sessions and the already-cliched âCrossroadsâ solo too many times. âSunshine Of Your Liveâ 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 itâs the also-rans, the off-compilation tracks that surprise me: theyâre fun oddities, toylike throwaways of quick players tasting the latest fancies. Theyâre not great songs, but theyâre stimulating.
âWorld of Painâ wears a cynical jauntiness I donât hear any more, a mode I associate with Cream, a cynicism born of youth before one realises what real bleakness is - thereâs hope here. The most consistent carrier of this callow cheek is Claptonâs guitar - Iâve 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 Bakerâs âBlue Conditionâ, which is as cheerfully relaxed as peak Neil Young and Crazy Horse, disheveled in amp growl.
âWeâre Going Wrongâ is one of the better examples of the vanished sub-genre of droney, psychedelic laments - âWe Will Fallâ by The Stooges slouches to mind - which I donât 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 theyâre trying too hard.
My dad used to sing âMotherâs Lamentâ to me until I cried and my mum told him to stop. She still mentions this, now and again.
4
Jun 27 2025
Parachutes
Coldplay
Sometimes you just have to wet your bed and thatâs ok.
After posting this, Iâll run a search to see how many other reviews write âParashitsâ.
2
Jun 30 2025
Dig Me Out
Sleater-Kinney
Muscular, spidery, bassless guitar duelling and smart, cocksure drumming make this the best riot grrrl-affiliated record Iâve heard, firmly of rockâs jet plane and leather jacket branch, spiked by banshee vocals that, unusually, throttle back and forth, keep coherent.
4
Jul 01 2025
Songs The Lord Taught Us
The Cramps
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.
4
Jul 02 2025
Post Orgasmic Chill
Skunk Anansie
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.
4
Jul 03 2025
Buenas Noches From A Lonely Room
Dwight Yoakam
This doesnât sound true, fatal in a genre where an illusion of authenticity is paramount.
2
Jul 04 2025
I See You
The xx
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 donât 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.
3
Jul 07 2025
Kick Out The Jams (Live)
MC5
I bet all you âthey canât sing oh this is just noiseâ cats really like Radiohead. Five stars, volcanic soul, though Sonicâs Rendezvous Band took this lightning and sculpted it.
5
Jul 08 2025
I Should Coco
Supergrass
Fun and erudite guitar pop that I missed out on due to Britpopâs emetic discourse. Glimpses of other bands, never mimicry, more result of close listening and good taste. âMansize Roosterâ is outstanding in its shifts of mode. âSheâs So Looseâ has a vibe I canât pin down - the title teases the crass, the delivery is moody and unknowable.
4
Jul 09 2025
Our Aim Is To Satisfy
Red Snapper
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.
2
Jul 10 2025
A Hard Day's Night
Beatles
Fabulous album, though nowadays I just listen to the opening chord and skip the rest.
4
Jul 11 2025
Unhalfbricking
Fairport Convention
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.
5
Jul 14 2025
The Next Day
David Bowie
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.
3
Jul 15 2025
We Are Family
Sister Sledge
âLost in Musicâ has an urgency that is utterly convincing: I turn up the volume, ready to march lockstep to whatever revolution itâs 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 âSomebody Loves Meâ doesnât work something on me. The details, the small flourishes are delicious.
5
Jul 16 2025
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx
Raekwon
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 RZAâs 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. âGlaciers of Iceâ is the best song.
The album wouldâve ended more elegantly there. They donât 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 Iâm compelled to return to this addled masterpiece.
5
Jul 17 2025
McCartney
Paul McCartney
This is rather slight. I donât mind that.
Itâs 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.
3
Jul 18 2025
Djam Leelii
Baaba Maal
Fine, but this circular, insistent guitar weave reminds me of fiercer records by Doueh, Bombino and Inerane. This feels muted into the background.
3
Jul 21 2025
Timeless
Goldie
Listening to âTimelessâ 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 Coltraneâs âGiant Stepsâ. I hadnât heard that either, so got it first: pretty good. âTimelessâ mystified me, dauntingly long and alien, but seemingly sparse on the wallop Iâd caught from what little jungle Iâd heard on the radio. Listened to it compulsively for a few months, a little like how I read âNaked Lunchâ, never to return until today. A few years later I strolled into a tiny clubâs 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 Iâd expected.
Thirty years have made this comprehensible and strangely fiercer: the breakbeats and patterns are more aggressive than Iâd 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 â90s was proudly omnivorous, Massive Attack most prominently. âAdriftâ doesnât stir me, âSea of Tearsâ still confuses me with proffered daiquiris, but Iâm glad for them. Goldieâs 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 shouldâve been dropped, though at least theyâre 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 âBlack Secret Technologyâ by A Guy Called Gerald is an adjacent masterpiece.
Requiscat, Diane Charlemagne, âTimelessââs main voice.
5
Jul 22 2025
Pink Flag
Wire
This albumâs cover is Wireâs album manifesto, one of the first to marry aggressive noise and pop: scary earworms. I love the impressionist blobs of guitar (âStrangeââs opening is gold), the startling flips in content, the skipping from bloody drama to sped-up Kinks - âPink Flagâ to âThe Commercialâ - and the cheekiness. âReutersâ is a killer opening. What a band!
5
Jul 23 2025
Rum Sodomy & The Lash
The Pogues
A grumpy day leaves unfair impressions: Iâve 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 Iâm tired of today, but thatâs not their fault.
Placeholder 3, hope for a happy revisit.
3
Jul 24 2025
Black Sabbath
Black Sabbath
Sabbathâs cradle of the Brit blues scene is clearer on this record, but even on the modish improv track, Iommiâs proudly workmanlike, unfussy playing sets out different intentions. The ideas are all present, the opening to âThe Wizardâ is killer, and the title track and âN.I.B.â sit with their best. Uneven, but theyâre a band I wouldâve loved to have seen during this early spree.
3
Jul 25 2025
Club Classics Vol. One
Soul II Soul
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 wasnât 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.
2
Jul 28 2025
Berlin
Lou Reed
Iâve possessed âBerlinâ for three decades, but had spent little time with it apart from the opener and âThe Bedâ, 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 âOh Jimâ before?
5
Jul 29 2025
Second Toughest In The Infants
Underworld
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.
4
Jul 30 2025
Automatic For The People
R.E.M.
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.
4
Jul 31 2025
B-52's
The B-52's
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 donât sate; theyâre not the full lobster.
3
Aug 01 2025
E.V.O.L.
Sonic Youth
âBad Moon Risingâ to âDaydream Nationâ was Sonic Youthâs imperial phase, each album weird, different from the rest, and totemic. âEVOLâ might have the strongest song in âExpressway to Yr. Skullâ (Neil Young seems to think so). The beauty in these records lies in the way that theyâre short, experimental stories - thereâre the bangers, but I never skip the strange ones, which have a mesmeric quality. âIn the Kingdom #19â has Ranaldo invents its own form, race car free jazz, but the band wasnât hanging around, left it sui generis. Iâve memorised this record and its siblings.
5