I’ve kept coming back to this album for more than 30 years. It’s a complete mess from start to finish and sounds like it was recorded in a club toilet. But it’s also great in its own shambolic way. Shaun Ryder sings out of tune like no one’s listening and there’s something of the everyman in that, he’s not trying to be a rock star. He’s also a great lyricist. The way he uses the rhythms of ordinary (often sweary) language to express meaning and match the melody is extraordinary. For example, the lines from ‘Wrote For Luck’ about his lack of education: ‘I’ve not been trained, I can sit and stand and beg and roll over, I don’t read I just guess’. Ryder isn’t book smart and he can barely sing, but he’s very good with words. He was awarded the NME Godlike Genius award in 2000, and I know they give the award every year but there really is something preternaturally gifted about Shaun Ryder that justifies the genius label.
Best song: Wrote For Luck
It’s difficult not to be influenced by the back-story, but this stumbling search for music seems completely authentic. I felt close to something mysterious and powerful.
I listened to the Jordan Rudess cover of Tarkus and it really helped. Back to the original album again and after a few listens I eventually liked Tarkus and Bitches Crystal.
I like the witty cover of Public Enemy and the Portishead adjacent “Hell is Round The Corner”. The rest is just too evocative of a sinister demi-monde for me. All credit to Tricky for diving into this psychosexual morass, but it's very disturbing. The fact that it’s also really boring to listen to doesn’t help.
The run from 'Red Barchetta' to 'YYZ' to 'Limelight' is great. The rest doesn't grab me in the same way, but I like 'Witch Hunt' enough.
Mr Brightside is a bit annoying after you’ve heard it a zillion times, but I have to concede that the first half of this album is relentless, banger after banger. The second half is pretty good as well, it only seems weak compared to the first half.
An excellent album. Ahead of its time, but great songs in their own right as well.
The blues rock jamming on Disc 1 is nice to listen to, but In Memory of Elizabeth Reed and Whipping Post on Disc 2 take it somewhere else. About 15 minutes in Whipping Post is clinically dead, but I kind of like how they nonetheless persist and keep going, even resorting to Frere Au Jacques at one point. It's the impression of music being formed in real time that draws my attention.
An exhilarating, energising album. It's campy fun, but there's also a raw, primal power.
Classic Northern Soul. Kevin Rowland captures the feel of late 50s/early 60s US soul perfectly. The mannered vocals, the crying/singing is very specific to the music he's evoking, and outside of that context it's a bit of a challenge to listen to.
I liked the drumming, quite a distinctive style. I liked some of the songs: Tonight Tonight, Jellybelly, Zero, Bullet With Butterfly Wings, Love, Galapogos, Take Me Down, Bodies, XYU, By Starlight.
The female vocalist (Exene) really makes this album for me. Her singing is terrible, but that’s exactly what this kind of music needs. John Doe can sing, and the combination of the two voices is just perfect. The lyrics are wonderfully clever/stupid. Great fun.
Beautiful music and excellent lyrics. I like the patterning of words and phrases across the different songs. For example, variations on the phrases ‘come home’ and ‘lay down’. The patterns create strange emotional ambiguities as the phrases are repeated with slightly different meanings.
I liked Words and There Goes The Fear. A bit folky, ethereal, dance beats. The rest was dreary and leaden.
Jaw-droppingly stunning.
The singer sounds like he’s on the verge of laughing at the silliness of it all. Pirate aaarghs!, amateur dramatic society Olden Times accents, a chorus of ‘Get your tits out for the lads!’. It’s such a daft album, lots of fun.
Surprisingly delicate in places, but mostly like being plugged into the mains.
Maybe I'm missing the point with this kind of music, but isn't it supposed to be fun and exciting? Like The Faces and The Rolling Stones. This is mostly a joyless trudge, except for the excellent piano work provided by session musician Chuck Leavell (formerly of The Allman Brothers, keyboardist on Rolling Stones studio albums). I watched the video for Hard to Handle, and the lead singer is a cool dude, he looks a lot of fun. None of that came across listening to the album.
Songs that pulsate like living things on life support. Electronic heartbeats, waves crashing, lovely swooshing noises, swirling, enveloping, jangly, surprisingly danceable. A Forest is a great dance track. Part John Carpenter horror movie, part disco for the despondent.
The music changing every 10 seconds made this a difficult album to get a fix on. I really liked Heart of the Sunrise, especially the last sung part. I also liked South Side of the Sky.
An erratic dial up internet connection in musical form. Nostalgic for interference, static and distortion. Stuttering, dark, dystopian, decadent, nihilistic. Also very catchy and accessible.
Alternates between dance tracks and gloomy gothic. I really liked Lucretia, This Corrosion, Flood II and Driven Like Snow. 1959 is pretty good as well.
Definitive late 80s indie pop. Best in class for this kind of thing. Soul and dance beats, funky bass lines, jangly guitar, interlacing melodies, bookish lyrics. A lot of indie disco floor fillers here.
I like the first half. Weirdly aggressive lyrics at odds with the easy-going vibes. Girl is a creepy song. The second half is mostly cowboy songs and 60s pop pastiches, but Rental Car is back in the world of the funky psychopath.
I liked the indie/post-punk tracks: Generation Genocide, Good Enough, Something So Clear, Fuzz Gun and Pokin Around. I didn’t like the full-on metal tracks.
The second half is really rather lovely. It just lifts you up and floats you away. By the end of the final lullaby I was completely relaxed. And it works surprising well with the daftness of the first half. Like you’re loosening up with jokes and a good old sing song first.
Romantic, sexy music for grownups. A great let's get back together album.
So many people saying it's too long, you're listening to Vol 1 & 2! The original album is 40 minutes long and ends with Hey, Good Lookin'...
Outside of the hits, I really liked some of the curios here: That’s Me, Tiger, Arrival. A more eclectic album than I was expecting.
A pleasant, undemanding listen. Ideal music for a nice sit down and a cup of tea. I’m really liking some of the Randy Newman vibes.
I bought the follow up to It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back as soon it was released, and, blimey, if it wasn’t even better. One of the most powerful musical experiences of my life.
Instead of rough, industrial beats for Chuck D to rap over, the music is much lusher, more depth, more funk. It wasn’t the political content that hit me back when I first heard it (because ITANOMTHUB is similar in that regard, although Fear Of A Black Planet does package it up more neatly into discrete topics), it was the new way it was being delivered. It takes the ITANOMTHUB song ‘Party For Your Right To Fight’ and follows through on its promise.
As well as the full-on party friendly funk, another thing that’s different on this album is the use of interludes and snippets. They control the pace, but also provide context and/or make rhetorical points. For example, the ‘They would rather switch than fight’ introduction to Fight The Power and the phone call that abruptly transitions between Anti-Nigga Machine and Burn, Hollywood Burn. You don’t get that kind of thing on It ITANOMTHUB.
On the downside, Meet The G That Killed Me is incredibly crass, and I always skip it. While I’m about it I skip Pollywanacraka as well. The attitude to women in a couple of the tracks is a bit cringe. Chuck D isn’t a convincing feminist, which isn’t surprising really because he’s one of the world’s great mansplainers.
I’d heard of The Slits, thought they would be a challenge, wasn’t expecting this at all. It’s loads of fun, incredibly catchy post-punk/ska.
I like this, but the soul seems like filler to the blues. El Camino is the other way round.
Turn of the century electronica/exotica/cabaret combined with turn of the century singer-songwriter. I didn't find it very interesting. I do like that they did a track with Humphrey Lyttelton though, it’s the best on the album.
Ms Dynamite emerged from the UK Garage scene, but she didn’t have the same global success as Craig David. It’s a decent British R&B album. I really liked it.
The Temptations are the epitome of classy, the kind of act that if you're in a tight spot you might think, what would The Temptations do? The answer being grab a tuxedo and style it out. Turns out they were in a tight spot with this album. They wanted to keep it classy and not use the n word. On the other hand, they also wanted to keep it classy and not sing a song about an irresponsible father. They weren't happy, but they slid into the tuxedos and went to work.
It’s making me think of ‘My So Called Life’. So many bands sounded like this in the late 80s and early 90s, The Lemonheads don’t really stand out from the rest, but it’s easy on the ears, pleasant enough indie pop.
The proto EDM of Chameleon makes an initial impact. There’s a jittery, nervous energy to side 1 that I found anxiety inducing. The anxiety is resolved about 2 minutes into Sly at the start of side 2. The two halves complement each other perfectly. It's also got a great album cover. Favourite track: Sly.
I thought this was great. It’s got a 60s Happenings vibe to it, part beatnik party, part performance art. The white noise and distortion add to the atmosphere, sounding like the hubbub of a crowd or a poorly recorded bootleg. Favourite track: Sister Ray.
Better than I expected. And it’s trying so hard to be liked, bringing in the guest vocalists and everything. It meets the listener half-way, and I’ll return the courtesy by bumping them up to a 4.
My favourite Bush album so far. The title track includes contributions from well-known animal impersonator Percy Edwards, and well-known didgeridoo player Rolf Harris. Bush herself channels Kenneth Williams’ Rambling Syd Rumpo. She really embraces the music hall tradition, 60s and 70s light entertainment and novelty records. The whole thing is completely bonkers, loads of fun.
It’s all very film noir. The romantic tough guy. The lyrics are strikingly prosaic and domestic. There are a few poetic descriptions of rain falling and whatnot, but mostly it’s easy chairs, empty beds and toothpaste around the mouth.
Absolutely bloody brilliant, like everything by The Fall. The only downside was that I knew I was going to listen to the full 2 hours including extras. This is described as one of the most accessible albums from The Fall, but don't worry, the ‘accessible’ bit just refers to a dance music tilt, other than that it's business as usual.
Favourite lyric from the extras: ‘If I ever end up like Richard Madeley cut my hands off with an axe please’ (A Past Gone Mad, Peel Session 16)
Favourite song: Lost in Music
One of my all-time favourite albums. BB hams it up something rotten, but to say the audience lap it up is something of an understatement. The atmosphere is electric, I’m imagining people being carried out on stretchers.
Meat and potatoes rock, but the horns and Elvis Costello vibes are fun, I might come back to it.
I liked Side 1, and the closer Hey, Hey, My, My.
Favourite song: I Shall Be Released.
I like Bob Dylan, but oddly enough have never listened to Blonde On Blonde. It’s quite poppy, isn’t it? More swinging 60s than the two preceding albums, a bit more continental sounding.
I really liked this, maybe even more than ‘classic’ Maiden. They went off in a more epic and epically silly direction, which was also great, but this is an enjoyable dance rock album. Surprisingly reminiscent of bands like The Jam, The Police, even The Clash, as well as the more expected Status Quo and Gary Glitter.
There’s an ominous sense of dread and foreboding that I don’t enjoy. But Protection (the song) is a real earworm, and I do like the James Bond side of trip hop eg Sly.
I know it’s not a serious aesthetic/political treatise, and that the authority being resisted is more likely your parents telling you to turn it down than totalitarianism. But even so, what a load of rockist tosh.
I’ve never heard of this band before. I really liked the mix of rock and soul/R&B, very smooth The singer has a great voice.
Remember when that Big Brother contestant said she was into a new kind of music called indie? (I checked the date and it was 2007). Everyone thought it was the most hilariously stupid thing to say. Because, obviously, indie was a 1980s thing. But reading the reviews on the Wikipedia article, and some of the reviews here, there does seem to be support for the idea that indie started in the 00s. This album, and the Big Brother comment, may mark the start of a cultural fragmentation, alternative versions of reality existing in their own bubbles. Fittingly enough, Arcade Fire address just this kind of problem. Their response is to build tunnels connecting people by returning to childhood. The primary emotion is nostalgia, in its original sense as a kind of homesickness. They’re not the first indie band to do this, REM got there first in the 1980s, obviously. They didn’t invent this kind of music, or this kind of sensibility, but they do it very, very well. And listening to it, you’d be forgiven for thinking that indie did in fact start in 2004.
A more polished version of something like Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs. An interesting combination of unmediated shower thoughts, rhyming doggerel and slippery images.
A mash-up of electronic dance and old school rock ‘n’ roll dance. A style of music that scored several number one hit singles in the 1980s, by artists as diverse in their artistic intentions as Art of Noise and Jive Bunny. But it wasn’t Rockafeller Skank (which samples Art of Noise’s version of Peter Gunn and resembles Jive Bunny’s That’s What I Like) that got to number 1, it was Praise You. And that song remains the standout song on the album. It’s essential to the album, gives it a bit of class.
Good, but also kind of creepy, these guys singing to each other. They sound like members of a cult.
What a beautiful album. The baby talk love songs to his wife are wonderful. They’re so tender and reassuring. The music is noodling, but everyone involved is pulling in the same direction. Ivor Cutler is doing the spoken word parts at the end of each side. (Ivor Cutler was a comedy/folk singer who doesn’t have an album on the list, but he recorded 20 Peel sessions, more than any other artist except The Fall).
I loved my cassette of the Singles 81 – 85, but by 1987 Depeche Mode had dropped off my radar completely. I don’t think I missed much with this ponderously gloomy goth album. It’s interesting that it really took off in the US. Maybe there were fewer bands that sounded similar.
The most 80s album imaginable. Parody isn’t quite the right word, maybe hyperpop? I like the way Green takes on male and female roles, singing duets with himself. He’s a bit of a smarty pants, all the references to Derrida and Lacan, and I like that as well.
I’ve seen the film a few times, but never got much out of the music compared to the visuals (the marching hammers, the children being fed into the sausage machine etc.). Giving it a proper listen today, I’m still not hearing a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. I do like side 3 and all the versions of Another Brick In The Wall, throwing The Happiest Days Of Our Lives into that.
A combination of psychedelic folk, jazz and exotica sung in a lounge style. Buzzin Fly is very reminiscent of The Stone Roses, and that’s something of a way in to the album’s belated contribution to music, via the late 80s resurgence of interest in psychedelic folk.
Very evocative of a 1970s childhood, with musical borrowings from eg Gary Glitter, the theme tune of Whatever Happened to The Likely Lads and educational kid’s show You and Me. The last one I can’t stop mansplaining whenever She’s Electric comes on the radio. No Way Sis’s parody ‘I’d Like to Teach The World To Sing’ really nails what Oasis are about.
Loose, shambolic, Beatleseque, the band this reminds me of the most is The Libertines. I really liked it.
Not as bad as I was expecting from the reviews. Boisterous party music. Cowboy and Wasting Time are fun songs, and there are some hard driving bangers, Devil Without A Cause, I Am The Bullgod and Roving Gangster. If you’d have put this on at a party in 1998 it would have got people bopping around. I’m actually surprised it didn’t have much of an impact in the UK.
Sometimes heartfelt, sometimes impossibly twee medievalism. But more good songs than bad, bumping it up to a 4.
Best tracks: Pleasant Street, I Never Asked To Be Your Mountain, Once I Was, Phantasmagoria In Two, Morning Glory.
It’s a faff to reconstruct the album (spread over 5 separate YouTubes: CD1, CD2, and three missing tracks). Going back to individual tracks (or even identifying them) is also a faff. And it’s got a 2 hours playing time… What a great album, though. All killer, no filler, difficult to single out favourite tracks, but Pharoah/Rings Around Saturn towards the end of CD2 stood out for me.
I really liked Even Flow. It sounds very similar to Soho’s 1990 single Hippy Chick, but that’s surely coincidental. Other tracks I liked: Why Go, Jeremy. Anthemic rock with shoegazey stuff going on in the background.
It’s quite physical, fleshy, squishy squashy. I found most of it a challenge to listen to, but it’s probably a grower.
Best tracks: Revolution 909, Da Funk, Phoenix, High Fidelity, Alive.
The Beatle-esque songs are OK, but the soul ballads are really something. Robin is the stand-out vocalist by a wide margin. When Do I is one of the best songs I’ve ever heard.
Best songs: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart, When Do I, Lion In Winter, Walking Back To Waterloo
Two good songs: Ma and Pa and Slow Bus Movin’. A couple of fun, campy numbers: Deep Inside, Mighty Long Way.
I preferred Plastic Ono Band, but some great songs: Imagine, Crippled Inside, Jealous Guy, I Don’t Want To Be A Soldier Mama, Gimme Some Truth, How Do You Sleep?, Oh Yoko!.
Jackson used to be a bit of a joke, a sexless man child pretending to be bad. But now I know he really was bad, the aggressive attack of the music makes more sense. Does that make me bad?
I liked the Bluesbreakers album, I liked the Cream album. This is bland in comparison. I think I understand what he was doing, updating traditional blues for early 70s tastes rather than churning out retro blues rock. The Elmore James cover works well, he takes a rough and sleazy blues number and makes it sound just like some guy talking on the phone.
Favourite songs: Motherless Children, I Can’t Hold Out, Please Be With Me, Steady Rollin Man
A quirky little piss-take band. An unusual set up of guitar, drums and double bass. Watching some of their videos on Youtube, they have an oddball charm that’s missing from the album.
I love the way she drifts in and out of tune, especially on Little Sister and Eulogy to Lenny Bruce. Something hypnotic and tidal about it. The standout track is It Was A Pleasure Then.
Peace and love hip hop in the same ballpark as A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers, Dream Warriors, and the UK’s Ruthless Rap Assassins (who went on to form Black Grape with Shaun Ryder). The Arrested Development album is OK, but the significance is mainly its crossover appeal. In the UK only Public Enemy, De La Soul and PM Dawn had the same album chart success as Arrested Development (leaving aside the more dance orientated MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice). PM Dawn’s Of The Heart… (1991) is something of a forgotten classic in my opinion.
Difficult to overstate the cultural significance of this album for people of a certain age. The slow burn influence was the normalisation of homosexuality. These were gay love songs that nonetheless resonated with straight listeners. It’s one of the all-time great albums because it changes the way you see the world. Not a wham-bang instant revolution, but a gradual integration of gay and straight emotional life. I know it’s currently fashionable to hate on Morrissey, but he created the more tolerant world that we’re now living in.
All the songs are amazing in their own way, but the standouts are: Cemetry Gates, Bigmouth, The Boy With The Thorn In His Side and There Is A Light. If I had to choose a Desert Island track it would be Cemetry Gates, but if I had to pick a single track to encapsulate what this album is all about it would be The Boy With The Thorn In His Side.
In the early 2000s I used to go to a walkdown in Soho that only played classic rock. Very old school, you knocked on the door and small grill opened and a voice barked ‘members only’. Once you’d established you weren’t from the Council or the Police you signed in with an illegible scrawl. This is the kind of music they played, and it was loads of fun. The club still does the ‘members only’ thing, but it’s now a faux speakeasy serving cocktails out of vintage china cups. This album is corny dad rock, but some of the tracks really do the business in a way that cocktails in china teacups just don’t.
Favourite: My Best Friend’s Girl
This is brilliant. Laugh out loud funny. It’s so stupid, the lyrics, the strings, the whole ridiculousness of it all.
Get past the weirdness and the shouting and there are some decent tracks here. The second half is another album added for the 2002 re-release, it's less experimental, but also less interesting IMO. 3/5 for the re-release, 4/5 for the original album.
Favourite tracks: Kollaps, Abstieg and Zerfall
Behind the snarky banter, it’s a lovingly nostalgic portrait of a night out in a Northern town. The police ignore the back-chat they’ve heard a hundred times before, the bouncers secretly want it all to kick off, but instead you slink away and nothing kicks off. It’s a world where everyone knows their place, and the greatest ire is reserved for posers with ideas above their station. ‘You’re not from New York City you’re from Rotherham’ remains one of the funniest lines ever written. Alex Turner is a top-tier lyricist here, and the cherry on the top is he sings like he’s drunk, he’s really inhabiting the role.
Overshadowed by It Takes A Nation of Millions and Fear Of A Black Planet, I’d completely forgotten how good this album is. Chuck D as ever is preaching from a mountain top, seeing the big picture. Flav is less of a comic foil than usual, more an everyman in conversation with the preacher man. Turning the Anthrax namecheck from ITANOM into a collaboration is the highlight.
I liked the way the songs develop themes from the spoken word interludes. I thought the content was interesting, but I don’t like the way her voice is processed, and the generic R&B backing. I preferred when she was singing with guitar accompaniment, reminded me of Tracy Chapman.
The Kinks show up The Beatles as tetchy and patronising. Which isn’t to say the brittleness of The Beatles doesn’t make them a better band overall, but it’s difficult not to root for Team Kinks as the soul of British music. Ray Davies sings about what the British really care about, class envy and people living in more expensive houses than us. Nice that a song taking the piss out of rich people moaning about paying taxes was released before The Beatles song where they moan about paying taxes.
A very Sixth Form take on the personal/political, but I’d put this on any teenager’s listening list alongside the Offspring or Green Day angry stuff. Big nostalgia for me as a leftie teenager in the 80s.
Favourite songs: My Ever Changing Moods, Strength Of Your Nature, You’re The Best Thing
The best song is Kids, which gives you the queasy, unsettling feeling that you’ve grasped some insight about life but can’t quite put your finger on what it is exactly. Outside of the three big singles, the rest of the album is disappointingly vapid and superficial.
I loved the big band crooner rock of Side 1, and my goodwill carried me through the soft rock on Side 2. The avant-garde guitar solo that begins Side 3 is quite a distance from where the album started out. I liked it. Experimental electronic artists twiddled diodes to get these kinds of sounds, it’s an impressive leap to use an electric guitar in the same way. Then some blues rock and the rock/soul/exotica of I’m A Man. Counter-cultural vibes coming in for Side 4, and we’re also back to the crooner style we started with. I like the use throughout of what we’d now call interludes, the talking and the sound of the protest crowd. I also like the way the loungey exotica weaves in and out.
I’ll throw this on for the laid-back retro mood, but the propulsion and drama surprises me every time. It’s always better than I remember it. I think it’s an understated album, just doing its own thing, but it’s stood the test of time for me. I also like the other TLSP album and the last two Arctic Monkeys albums, which are in a similar style.
Three or four albums from 1977 that I’d put above this. Even within slick soft-rock, I prefer Steely Dan’s Aja. Nothing wrong with it, nice tunes, excellent production, top 5 of 1977 for me, rather than top 5 of every album ever made.
Liked: Firefly, Lonely, Western Sky, Last Harbour.
I remember an interview with Michael Caine where he was saying he liked the band with the old guy in it. The interviewer and the listeners knew exactly who the septuagenarian was talking about. Mid 30s Garvey exudes old man energy, boring, melancholy and slightly menacing.
A triple album with a historical, archival intent, many of the songs are from the 19th century. The best parts (most accessible?) are side 1 of disc 1 and side 2 of disc 3. Disc 2 is crazily frenetic, it’s really exhausting to listen to, but I suspect this is the ‘real stuff’ and the main purpose of the album is to get us to like it, or at least occasionally listen to it. A difficult album to rate, because I’m not sure it’s meant to be listened to beginning to end, but I’m going with 4/5. I’d like to own a vinyl copy.
This was borderline unlistenable for the first few tracks, but it gets more enjoyably woozy as it goes on, and I liked it. Evokes the feeling of being drunk, in a good way.
Favourite songs: Whispering Pines, The Unfaithful Servant, King Harvest
Brett Anderson has an amazing voice, puts me in mind of Robin Gibb and Kevin Rowland. Overwrought and theatrical, slightly ridiculous in a good way.
Richard III is a Brit-pop banger, and the rest of the album really captures the mood of 1997. They throw themselves at ever song, but it does get a bit exhausting, the relentless energy. With regret, I'm marking it down as a Brit-pop also ran rather than a Brit-pop classic. Maybe influenced by getting Dog Man Star yesterday.
I really like Felt Mountain, but this one not so much. Favourite track: Cologne Cerrone Houndini.
One World is a great album, but I think it's less accessible than the folk funk of Solid Air. You have to kind of squint at it. After this one, Martyn made a couple of albums with Phil Collins. It’s a good match to be honest, and Collins’ In The Air Tonight could be a John Martyn song. One World is also considered the prototype for Trip Hop. Which makes Martyn an echoey, dubby, missing link between Nick Drake, Phil Collins and Portishead.
I liked 'Deckchairs and Cigarettes', and One Horse Town was catchy.
I didn’t expect to enjoy ‘noise rock’ at all. But it’s toe-tapping anti-music, flamboyantly baroque and reductive. I can hear the influence on prog rock revivalists Muse.
You can put up all new buildings you like, and the 00’s saw a lot of changes to the way London looked (the London Eye, the Millennium Bridge, the Gherkin, the new Hungerford Bridge etc.), but London remains a marshy, boggy place under the surface (all those underground rivers). The psychogeography of Peter Ackroyd (London: The Biography, 2000) and Iain Sinclair (Lights Out For The Territory, 1997), explored the spirit of place, and this album is explicitly influenced by them.
There’s the risk of flooding: ‘In the flood you’ll be washed away’ from Kingdom of Doom, which evokes London Calling, another song about being submerged. The Thames barrier, protecting London from flooding, was built in between times, but the psychogeography of the place means that the idea of flooding never really goes away, and it recurs through the album.
Another theme is escape. Whales have always been trapped in the Thames, they swim into the estuary and keep going, they don’t turn back. ‘Northern Whale’ is based on one of them, it happens every few years, there are references to them going back to the 17th century. ‘Move to the country, the town has told its tale, you’ll be forgotten’ (The Bunting Song) is very Ackroydian, London has its own agenda, mainly chewing people up and spitting them out again.
One flaw with the album is there isn’t a big London song here to really nail things down, something like London Calling or Waterloo Sunset. The title is great for a state of the nation album, but not this one. The first half is stronger than the second. Some of the reviews here say Albarn’s voice is weak, but it perfectly matches the watery melancholy of London. As does the sub-aquatic dub sound.
Tainted Love is marching robots dreaming that they’re people, people dreaming that they’re robots. It’s an uncanny song, strange, reverberative. Say Hello, Wave Goodbye is also a great track, but there’s some filler as well. The album is interesting in the way it anticipates the direction of UK music in the 1980s. You can hear Sisters Of Mercy, The Communards, The Smiths, The Beautiful South and the C86 bands. I once saw Marc Almond doing a DJ set, and the act he was supporting was a stripper, so bonus points for him remaining a denizen of the demi-monde.
He’s always turning it up a notch. How does he even breath?
Best songs: The Worst Band In The World, Hotel and Clockwork Creep.
The run from Irish Blood, English Heart to How Can Anybody Possibly Know Me makes sense as one of those reflective old guy albums. Keep America Is Not The World at the start as a funny opener, and First Of the Gang To Die as a banger at the end. Let Me Kiss You is a nice ironic love song, but the last three tracks are filler and leave the listener feeling he’s disappeared up his own arse. Listening to this a few times to work out what was wrong with it made me appreciate the middle section more. An older, ruminating Morrissey, seldom breaking out into the way a-heys of his past.
The wiki page mentioned the influence of John Martyn, which I didn’t hear initially, but now I’m aware of it it’s very noticeable. A fusion of American pop/rock singer-songwriters like Alanis Morrisette and the British jazz/folk of John Martyn, and sometimes the lush orchestration of Nick Drake. And the very British electronic dance music tilt. A lovely album in itself, but extra credit for bringing these different elements together so well.
Also, the lines 'The smile on your lips was the deadest thing, alive enough to have strength to die' are taken from Thomas Hardy's poem Neutral Tones, and I really like it when artists reveal that they read stuff. Orton is around the same age as me, maybe she also studied the poem for her A Levels. 5/5 for just using the quote to be honest.
An album that starts with a famous clang and continues with a fair amount of clanking and thumping. Amidst all this bumping around and jostling for space the hidden gem is Paul’s Things We Said Today. I’ll Be Back is another great song. But it’s the thud that starts the chorus of Any Time At All that I like the most. It’s the same sound my washing machine makes when it starts, and if the medium is the message a lot of the album sounds like machinery, trains and factory production lines.
For a while I thought the songs were in Latin. I found it hard work and had this nagging sense as I went on that it sounded like a falsetto Editors. My favourite track was All The King’s Men.
I like the goofing around. The silly voices and the cheeky guitar playing. A bit seedy as well, but mostly harmless, wearing a sock on your winkle daftness.
Favourite track: Desire Lines.
I really liked Rock Bottom and found it quite moving, especially in the context of his accident, and the support of his wife and friends. This 1997 album puts Wyatt’s eccentric whimsy into Britpop’s alternative timeline of British music. The most Britpop song is the one that sounds like Blur (Free Will And Testament). Other songs sound like later Damon Albarn projects. Paul Weller is there in the same way you’d get Eric Clapton to play with a blues legend in the 70s and 80s. There are little snatches of transatlantic influences, Randy Newman and Bob Dylan transposed into a British vernacular. Subterranean Homesick Blues reimagined as Ian Dury or the closing theme of Only Fools And Horses. It all amounts to an interesting reappraisal of Wyatt as a somewhat forgotten artist (not as famous as Weller). I was less keen on the jazzy tracks, but I liked the ones with more words.
Maybe I need more than a couple of listens to get into this.
The London English slang is toned down a bit (compared to, say, Dizzee Rascal), but a lot of the content is about slang. Can you jump on a jet if you’re from the ‘road’? Is the ‘road’ taking the train, walking home in the rain? Is it staying under the radar, switching off location tracking? Or being inaccessible to your girlfriend? The word ‘man’ means ‘me’ and ‘I’ as well as this man, the man and masculinity. The word ‘fam’ means friend, but also family, and man being called fam is disrespectful if it’s used in the wrong context (see the song ‘Man’). Anyhow, it’s the constant interrogation of language that makes this a 5/5 album. One of the top comments here ridicules the album for being incomprehensible (pap pap ka ka ka). Maybe it is if you don’t understand any of the words.
One of the best albums ever made about the militant wing of a sect of dancing druids.
The production might seem overly 80s now, but at the time it seemed raw, minimal and authentic. ‘We started out as friends’ in Sign Your Name, compared to the over-sexed snapshots of American life offered up by, say, Prince. It’s a bit cringe thinking it about it now, but this album, and Sign Your Name in particular, came up a lot in late teen conversations about sex and love. I don’t remember any other album outside of The Smiths being used as a talking point in the same way. Nobody talked about meeting a girl at a five and dime and throwing her over the back of your motorbike.
