View Album
Sun Aug 13 2023
Tusk
Fleetwood Mac
The best songs on here are dreamy and chill with Christie McVie & (obvs) Stevie Nicks vocals and her distinctive melodic phrasing.supported by spacey textures, and the bass carrying a lot of the music forward (Over & Over, Sara, Storms, Brown Eyes) or other SN-led songs with a more full chugging along on a groove rock-sound (Angel, Sisters of the Moon). They're experimenting with a lot of other stuff (sounds, tones, genres, instrumentation): there's a Stevie Wonder-style clavinet sound (The Ledge), generic 80s arena rock sound (Thing about me, walk a thin line), 70s country-rock sound (save me a place, that's all for everyone and the synthy I know I'm not wrong, honey hi), some devo-sounding synthy stuff (not that funny). There's some interesting guitar work (messing with reverse tape effects, volume swells and stuff) like on What makes you think you're the one? but the song is too Elton-John mashing a piano in 4/4 staccato to be interesting. Again, best stuff is when the guitar is drenched in reverb nicely compressed, sitting alongside SN vocals. Lots of songs on here - nothing as stand out as their greatest hits and a fair bit of filler - but the best songs highlight the best aspects of the band.
3
View Album
Mon Aug 14 2023
A Hard Day's Night
Beatles
The whole THE BEATLES thing is annoying as hell and I'm always tempted to reactively underrate them because of their obnixious place in the pop cannon, but then you hear the albums and try to forget that stuff and, well, damn... This album is all Jangle and Swagger, incredible melodic and harmonic sensibility combined with propulsive energetic playing, high tempos - like they're impatient with the boundaries of the pop-rock song and about to burst beyond it. Tried playing along on guitar and the changes come so fast, incredibly restless music. The John-led stuff hits hardest of course.
4
View Album
Tue Aug 15 2023
Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music
Ray Charles
Ray Charles is strangely a gap for me, so I'm pleased to sit with this one. With RC's singing and piano at the center of a selection of mostly ballads, this oscilattes between genres depending on the accompaniment from upbeat Swing & Jazz with horns (bye bye love, half as much, just a little loving, don't tell me your troubles) to slow-burning Scmaltz with strings (you don't know me, born to lose, I love you so much it hurts).
It's as if the album was constructed to demonstrate how much better one style is than the other. The schmaltzy stuff is really pretty dire - as good as RC's vocals are they only rarely (I Can't Stop Loving You, I'll Never Stand in Your Way) elevate this tedious plodding chintzy 50s crooner crap. The horns songs really rip though, punctuating the vocal performance with jazz riffs, the odd solo, and lots of energy to go with the walking bass and swinging drums - providing the classic counter-part to the lovelorn ballads. "Worried Mind" brings the two sides together into a cool blues with strings supporting a jazzy piano-forward arrangement.
In a nod to the album's title, "You Win Again" brings a country-inflected gospel sound to support another unbelieveable vocal performance. Another Hank Williams Classic, "Hey Good Looking" is re-invented as a really lively big-band swing, while the childish "You Are My Sunshine" becomes a fully adult motown soul track. His "You're Cheating Heart" is less successful: it's slowed way down and uses swelling strings and thick harmony from the backing singers that takes too much of the honkytonk life and cheekiness out of the original.
No surprise, but the singing really is the star here - reaching and tender but always in control - we hear hints at the latent virtuosity, but always delivered in service of the song.
3
View Album
Wed Aug 16 2023
At Fillmore East
The Allman Brothers Band
Along with Live/Dead this is the best live album there is, capturing the red-hot Allman Brothers giving birth to the jamband. Duane Allman is unstoppable on slide guitar - the phrasing, the rough-fuzzy tone that becomes crystaline as he climbs the neck, the electrifying runs and perfect fills between his brother's lines. Dickey Betts isn't bad either, adding major-key country melodies and jazz sensibilities that bring a joyful climax the blues jams. Gregg Allman's singing is deep and corny and moving; the drummers can't stop and Berry Oakley's bass holds it all together. The only thing wrong with this album is that it isn't the deluxe edition, where Whipping Post fades and those first few gentle notes of Mountain Jam kick emerge. Blues rock should have stopped after this really as what's the point, but don't hold the millions of tiresome blues-dads that followed them against the Allman Brothers, this is an all-timer.
5
View Album
Thu Aug 17 2023
People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm
A Tribe Called Quest
It's amazing how stripped back these songs are: snare, kick & high-hat, some jazz samples for horns, and a bass line - the perfect platform for Q-Tip's hyper-enunciated clean and clear delivery with his classic cadence that itself carries the beat. You see how this that spawned a million cringey mystical-lyrical slam poetry imitators. Playful and conversational, the lyrics here vary between story-telling and abstract - mostly upbeat and bright-eyed. Overall the sound is laid-back and affirmative with a underlying sense of humor. Description of a Fool and some of the other songs with longer instrumental sections hint at what would become down-beat, instrumental hip-hop, and trip-hop.
They're having fun messing around with samples and peicing it all together, could have more restraint sometimes (Why does it start with a 7-minute collage of 4 song-ideas with one good verse between them?! Why the tag 'say rhythm' bit at the end of Ham and Eggs?). These sample-heavy albums can be kind of distracting (where's that from? What else have I heard that in?) but some fun bricolage as they graze on, digest, and renew the archive of 20th c pop rnb soul and rock.
Lots of great tracks: Luck of Lucien, El Segundo, Bonita Applebum, Can I Kick It, Youthful Expression, Go Ahead in the Rain
3
View Album
Fri Aug 18 2023
2112
Rush
Classic case of not for me, dawg. There's just an inante sci-fi looser energy coming from this whole thing - sounds like they're huge fans of all of the worst aspects of Led Zeppelin and learned all the wrong lessons from the Who.
The first four minutes is just a series of intro-riffs, so you're just left wondering when the song is going to actually start, then a bomb goes off, a stupid bible quote, and more intro riffs into the first verse (4:50). Then it ends with a few notes on a lute before burbling water takes us into the next song in the overture. They do the 'chinatown riff' at the start of passage to bangkok. They make the typical prog error of confusing having lots of parts in songs for having interesting song-writing. The songs just seem like cobbled undeveloped ideas, but sound totally sterile. They have a reputation for being super technical complex prog-wizards, but these riffs are just power chords! His voice is powerful, but if you're not into it its pretty grating. The drums are too hyperactive to actually establish much of a beat.
Think of something positive to say...The breakdown at the 19 minute mark of the overture is pretty fun. The bass playing throughout is good. The guitar tone is cool and there are spurts of twin-lead harmonies I liked. The guitar solos are ok, and a respite from the singing. Despite a 20 minute opening track, it's only 38 minutes long...
1
View Album
Sat Aug 19 2023
All Directions
The Temptations
The album opens with three tracks of spacey funk: all wah-ed out guitars and astral synths/keyboard sounds grounded by rock-solid bass grooves and locked-in drums. This peaks with the extended jam on Papa was a Rolling Stone that gets pretty psychadelic. Transitions into a soul ballad with cheesy strings then a jazzy doo-wop story song and then a piano and strings-led ballad - these are really plodding and drag on and on - it's really not helped by coming right after such good funk material. Despite that there are some nice clean guitar tones (perfect reverb/tremelo) hitting the chords and the bass lines are so damn good - that's really the stand out performance on this album. "Mother Nature" has a jazzy-RnB soul sound (think Curtis Mayfield) and though slow, is a lot more interesting than the dull middle - more great bass work, and the best vocal performance of the album. "Do Your Thing" brings us back to the funk with a slow, deep groove, great harmonies and horns that fade out but could go on and on. Overall, The Temptations' 60s pop-soul stuff is much stronger and other artists would take this space funk sound much further in the 70s but this is an interesting transition between the two. And the bass is so good.
Favorites: Papa was a Rolling Stone, Do Your Thing
2
View Album
Sun Aug 20 2023
Medúlla
Björk
Lindisfarne soundsystem represent. Dark techno combined with monastic chanting, complex rhythms and layer upon layer of sound shifting in and out - the music never settles for very long. Definitely more like the soundtrack to a video-art installation than radio music - but that's what she's going for. Between Icelandic lyrics on some songs and Bjork's vocal style there aren't a lot of hooks or memorable melodies to hang on to. Instead, this is about sonic textures, dissonances resolving and harmonies dissolving, poly-vocal stuttering, singing degrading into noise-making...like the voices in your head having it out on a windswept hebridean island. The album is all about the vocals, but there are some fantastic synth parts like the delicate, shimmering and fuzzy marimba-sound pulsing out the rhythm on Desired Consellation.
Favorites: Where is the Line with You; Who is it... ; Desired Constellation; Triumph of a Heart
3
View Album
Mon Aug 21 2023
Faith
George Michael
Amazing combination of dark and honest lyrical contentwith incredibly light-hearted, blissfully corny, and over the top songs. I only knew the hits coming into this, so am surprised at how deep the album goes and how wide-ranging it is. George Michael appropriates huge swaths of the 70s & 80s pop sound pallet: the kitschy achey breaky heart country sounds on Faith, the ghostbusters keyboard laying it down on I Want Your Sex, the Procul Harum-style organ vamp on One More Try, the Parliament space-funk bass on Hard Day; the minor-key Pet Shop Boys synth on Hand to Mouth; the Dire-Straights guitar/horns poprock of Look at Your Hands; the Peter Gabriel response song Monkey. He ends up creating some exuberant pure-pop that's moves across genres and styles - that mix keeps the album interesting from song to song. The coherent strand is his singing/lyrics that really sell it and mean it doesn't come across as ironic pastiche - he's having fun with it, but it isn't a joke. It's pop, so the vocal performance is the star: ranging with tight control from whispered intimacies to wailing lovesongs to anthemic affirmation. The songs are all maybe a minute too long.
3
View Album
Tue Aug 22 2023
(Pronounced 'Leh-'Nérd 'Skin-'Nérd)
Lynyrd Skynyrd
Easy listening blues rock, the best bit is the harmonizing guitar leads and melodic (vs shredding) solos. The songs are overlong - chugging along through one basic chord progression over and over verse chorus chorus chorus solo chorus. Tuesday's Gone is good, the rest is pretty meh and I cannot listen to Freebird one more time. Listen to Little Feat and the Allman Brothers instead.
2
View Album
Wed Aug 23 2023
Led Zeppelin II
Led Zeppelin
Suffers from being over-played when I was a teenager, too much radio play, and an over-hyped reputation so it's impossible to approach with any freshness. This is my least favorite of the first 4 Led Zeppelin albums and the big hits songs (Living Loving Maid, Whole Lotta Love) here are the most over-familiar and least interesting. Heartbreaker still goes though - even if the riffs are all too familiar, the heavily distorted fuzzed out guitar on here still sounds amazing and Page's blistering pentatonic solos still scratch that teenage itch. Ramble On is my favorite track, pointing at the direction they'd go for III and Houses of the Holy (Thank You as well). Driven by an acoustic guitar riff, layered with distorted electric leads, delay and reverse effects, organ adornment, and propelled by the kinetic bassline. The Lemon Song especially is a bass masterclass. Jimmy Page and John Bonham get the plaudits, but John Paul Jones's hyperactive bass playing is really fantastic throughout: ranging, melodic, pulsating under the riffs and holding it together while the guitar and drums are going off.
3
View Album
Thu Aug 24 2023
Southern Rock Opera
Drive-By Truckers
"Anyone who's ever been on it, knows exactly where it's at"
This album is all about the lyrics and the guitars. The sound is traditional guitar rock with the odd country-twinge. When it dials in the three guitar attack is a blistering force of distortion and harmony. The vocals aren't virtuoso or anything but perfect for the songs, raspy and hoarse with a heavy accent. Great songwriting overall, and all tied together through an exploration of 'the duality of that southern thing' and a radical act of self-mythologizing, projecting the band into the southern rock cannon in Skynard's wake. Though the valiant effort to articulate an anti-racist Southern heritage and de-exceptionalize the south as THE site of American racism sometimes comes across as mostly self-exculpatory. The personal songs and family stories are the strongest. I love Cooley's songs on this album: Highway 72's verses, Women without Whiskey's jangly guitars, Zip City's yearning angry vocals and squeaky squirrely solo. A bit too much of a good thing though; the double album drags on a bit even though the quality of the songs doesn't dip, it's a bit samey. Decoration Day would be my pick for a DbT album instead. It makes sense they've released so many live albums, as this is really a band you have to see to believe.
3
View Album
Fri Aug 25 2023
A Walk Across The Rooftops
The Blue Nile
Sparse sythn-driven slow-burning 80s sad-guy pop - a bit like Killing Joke or a less exuberant Peter Gabriel. The vocals are the dominant element; slightly hoarse, plaintive, searching, and introspective, operating within a fairly narrow range but using volume dynamics to shift intensities they convey loneliness, loss, and a sense of life happening elsewhere. There's a lot of lyrical repetation, emphasis on choruses and individual lines rather than extended verses. The synths are more upbeat: shimmering and arpegiatted with bright tambers. The bass and very reverby drum machine tracks are very synth-sounding too, giving the whole thing that pure-plastic post-modern sound. There's the odd bit of very compressed-clean guitar that comes in as an accent in key moments to build up tension (like in Stay). Easter Parade is a slow piano ballad and big change of tone. Heatwave is another ballad, but much more interestingly arranged, with a very layered bed of synth and keyboard parts as chill and inviting platform for the singer to float over.
Favorites: Stay, Heatwave
4
View Album
Sat Aug 26 2023
The Next Day
David Bowie
Nice layering of textures and sounds and creative production. The sound is very full across the band - as the bass/keys/rhythm guitar form kind a driving mush that pulses along while the guitar leads work really well to propel the songs from verse to verse, experimenting with some interesting tones. It's very contemporary sounding. Bowie isn't retreading old sounds, but digested the alt rock and indie sounds of the 90s/00s (that he influenced) and comes out the other side to make an album that's very much in synch with rock of the 2010s. Some signature elements are there: his voice and melodic style, the interstellar lyrics, the squigly reverb-drenched guitar bursts, cheesy synths and noodly sax. It's never quite as anthemic his classics, but has some catchy hooks. In the end though, this is Mid-tempo rock with very tasteful production/arrangement, but clearly carried onto the list by being Bowie.
Favorites: The Stars, Dancing Out in Space, You Feel so Lonely
2
View Album
Sun Aug 27 2023
Permission to Land
The Darkness
This is an album for people's who's favorite band is Spinal Tap. I can't believe this is on the list, I always thought this was a novelty act or the glam Jackie Jormp-Jomp. The Darkness is a mash up of AC/DC and Boston with Geddy Lee on vocals regurgitating every 70s rock cliche. They're good at it (the guitar tones and harmonic leads do replicate the 70s arena rock sound perfectly) and its pretty fun but because the hooks don't have the worn-in familiarity of decades of radio super-saturation the songs don't elicit the begrudging hum-along of even dreck like "More than a Feeling." Could see this being a fun bar-band, but an all-time album? At its best you could put this on while you're painting a wall and forget is on, but when it calls attention to itself its extremely annoying.
Favorites: Growing on Me, the first 20 seconds of Holding my Own
1
View Album
Mon Aug 28 2023
Greetings From L.A.
Tim Buckley
Surprising melding of early 70s country-rock sensibilities with soul/RnB sounds - not what I was expecting at all. The funk bass lines are great: dancey and hypnotic they propel the songs along. Hammond organs and sparse electric guitar build up the jazzy chords, rhythm and vamps. Bongos add more texture on top of the drums and horns come in for quick solos (move with me) in transition and strings appear for dramatic effect (sweet surrender). The vocals are not my thing. Impressive range and strong delivery, but it always sounds like he's doing a bit. So much wailing and the scatting is way too much (get on top). Nighthawkin veers into 70s sitcom theme song territory. Honk Kong Bar is more of the acoustic folk sound I associated with TB. Make it right is a jazzy western.
Favourite: devil eyes, make it right
2
View Album
Tue Aug 29 2023
Led Zeppelin IV
Led Zeppelin
The forbidden riff. 5/8 good songs (even if 1 is ruined by overplay), 1 amazing song (When the Levee Breaks), and 2/8 forgettable fillers (Evermore, Four Sticks). IV sees LZ's transition from proto-metal hard blues rock towards proto-prog, developing more complex song structures, more elaborate instrumentation and production, and goblin-type lyrical content. But don't worry, fans of white dudes screeching "mama", you will not be disappointed. The delicate mandolin/acoustic guitar duet on Going to California is an unexpected highlight. The huge drums on Levee are undeniable. And corny as it is, the solo on Stairway rips.
4
View Album
Wed Aug 30 2023
Electric Music For The Mind And Body
Country Joe & The Fish
Classic bay area psychadelia - more bluesy and less poppy than its UK counterpart (think Buffalo Springfield/Jefferson Airplane rather than 1960s Pink Floyd). The signature sound here is the combination of the swirling whirling organ with the overdriven pentatonic guitar spasms. The bass alternates between a solid motown-inspried bass that keeps a groove going under it all on some songs and on others a more melodic arpegiated textural thing higher up the fret board. The vocals are the staple blues-rock delivery and they sometime edges into a Pig Pen-style RnB rave-up. Songs are mostly conventionally structured. Just the organ, lyrics, and the aesthetics convey psychadelia. Mostly pretty upbeat/uptempo and busy, without the spacier darker sounds other bands were developing. A good album example of the original 'Nuggets'-era style that's always been a pretty limited sound to me - I like the stuff that went more garage rock or more exploratory/improvisational and this is neither nor. This album is mostly interesting as an artifact of a time and place in rock history more than something I want to put on.
Favorites: Death Sound, Sad and Lonely
2
View Album
Thu Aug 31 2023
Boston
Boston
I primarily know this as the arena-rock radio hegemon against which the amazing music of the late 70s defined itself. I certainly didn't need to hear these songs 8000 times and ambiently absorb 40% of the lyrics and its hard not to hold that against them. Not an album of subtle pleasures, this is the corniest rock imaginable. But, Boston, "there is something about you," and somehow I find myself begrudingly enjoying this fun anthemic and melodic album. The guitar tone is the star here - overdriven, over-dubbed, and over the top. And yet, I really am in no rush for the 8002nd time hearing this.
Favorite: Hitch a Ride
2
View Album
Fri Sep 01 2023
Catch A Fire
Bob Marley & The Wailers
This one is all about the Wailers. The ensemble performance on Catch a Fire is perfect and the production/arrangement is amazing. There's so much space within each of the songs, making room for a big band and massive range of instruments who each add something to building up the texture, rhythm, and harmony on each track but never sounds cluttered or overly busy. The root of this is the sparse but bedrock bass that leaves tons of room within its melodic phrasing and big hits on the 2 & 4. This lulls you almost hypnotically while the other parts float around. The clavinet sound throughout is really distinctive, adding funky synchopated counter-melodies and melding in with the edge-of-break up guitar chord stabs. The dirty slide guitar brings an ethereal country sound to Baby We've Got a Date and the wah-wah guitar gives Stir It Up's chill groove a psychadelic edge - both of these are Wayne Perkins overdubs. The reverby guitar parts on Kinky Reggae give it a dub sound as it fades out. Obviously Bob Marley is the star vocalist and his performance on all these is at once richly emotive and smoothly controlled. Peter Tosh brings his own unique, edgier, angrier, delivery and tone to his songs. The the backing singers perfectly occupy the space between the organ and the lead vocal, doubling the downbeats and doubling down on the lyrics. None of the songs on here are as burned out as the mega-hits from Legend so this feels fresher to dig back into.
All bangers, but favorites: Concrete Jungle, 400 years, Stir It Up, Midnight Ravers
5
View Album
Sat Sep 02 2023
The Seldom Seen Kid
Elbow
Some Riot? More like Slow Quiet. Trudging low-tempo rock like Beta Band with the handbrake on or Arcade Fire smothered by a lovely pillow. Some songs have elements of some good 90s bands: Cake, Beck, Tom Waits, Calexico. It's pleasant enough and very unobtrusive, some lush sounds and pretty bits. The yearning vocals are the only thing that captures the attention. They seem to always be advertising a show in town, truly can't see the appeal of this as a live act. It's like the score for a movie about 42-year olds loosing interest in each other while hiking in a fjord. Boring!
1
View Album
Sun Sep 03 2023
Another Music In A Different Kitchen
Buzzcocks
Melodic punk verging into power pop. They do a lot with so little - just some power chords, dead-simple riffs, yelped out vocals, and a guy blasting away on drums at 2x speed. On some riffs the lead guitar has a fantastic chorus-pedal sounding tone - almost doubled up an octave giving a tiny bite of a brighter pop sound. The stripped back sound delivers a 36 minute dose of pure brash energy.
These 70s punk albums sound so much less aggressive and in your face with nearly 50 years of hindsight - this is just old fashioned rock and roll played faster and through crappier more distorted amps. The genre of punk kind of just dissolve into post-punk, proto-punk, power pop, leaving basically just the Ramones and Sex Pistols.
Favorites: I Need, I Don't Mind, Love Battery, No Reply
4
View Album
Mon Sep 04 2023
Ace of Spades
Motörhead
Don't forget the joker! Sabbath mashing the NOS, god damn this goes so hard.
5
View Album
Tue Sep 05 2023
On The Beach
Neil Young
This such a dark thematically consistent album: slow and brooding, desperate and disillusioned, Neil Young is the friend telling hippies they're pissing in the wind at the end of an era. The upbeat opener 'Walk On' is a nostalgic good-time song about yesterdays, but things get real real quick. The wavering tremelo organ on 'See the Sky About to Rain' is the ominous sound of heavy clouds and the lapsteel is the wind of a dew-point drop; they serves the song perfectly. The chaotic bass and angry guitars on 'Revolution Blues' channel the dark vibes from the up Canyon. Vampire Blues slow mesmerizing groove disolves into a deconstructed guitar solo, scratching and scribbling on the stings as the song fades out. Contrast that with the peircing clean tone through the slow reverby minor-key 'On the Beach' - where the guitar perfectly extends NY's voice - thin, faltering, fragile and introspective, but deeply expressive. 'Motion Pictures' & 'Ambulance Blues' close the album with sparse acoustic songs - the violin and harmonica interplay on AB give it an almost raga-drone feel, while the detuned guitar parts on MP make it feel like watching melting film.
Favorites: Revolution Blues, See the Sky About to Rain, On the Beach
3
View Album
Wed Sep 06 2023
Clube Da Esquina
Milton Nascimento
Overall this is a very woozy dreamy album - slow paced and meandering tipsily through different sounds and arrangements.
- Folky/classical acoustic instrumentation: nylon string guitars, pianos, flutes.
- Jazzy psych with drums electric bass and drums and a clean tone electric gutiar strumming.
- crooner strings + 12 string guitar and horns with a melodic jazzy bass lead.
- spaghetti western psychadelic with reverby chords and horns on top.
- gentle bedroom-pop with hushed chords and expressive nylon guitar melodies.
- jangly upbeat indie-pop with a warbling clean guitar chime leading.
- Beatles-eque 'eleanor rigby' strings riffs.
- piano ballads.
- Far out chaotic soundscapes
- fuzzed out guitar over minor7th harmonies and driving bass
Despite the wide variety of sounds, there's a coherent relaxed, intimate, and warm feel across the whole album. The vocals throughout are a breathy and dramatic tenor. Something about the melodic phrasing and harmony in Brazilian music really doesn't work for me - combined with the all the intricate chords and complex voicings it never seems to resolve as I'd expect and feels incomplete - tonal ambiguity. That's decades of harmonic acculturation for you, but I ended up liking this a lot more than I expected because of the chill feel and the combination of sounds and styles.
Favorites: Dos Cruces, Clube de Esquina No 2, Paisagem de Janela, TREM DE DOIDO
3
View Album
Thu Sep 07 2023
Gasoline Alley
Rod Stewart
Rod Stewart : Country : : Billy Crystal : Jazz
There are some good Rod Stewart songs, but these are not them. You're English, stop singing about hobos. Seeing how badly this mash-up can get makes Exile on Main Street look like an even bigger achievement. Why does the guitar double the vocal melody on Gasoline Alley? Why these songs so long? Dylan, Stones, and Elton John? Yeah those guys did okay, but hold my beer...Ronnie Wood's guitar tone sounds good even if he isn't doing much particularly interesting and I do like Rod's raspy voice.
Favorites: Country Comfort (for 2.5-3 minutes, but get out while the going is good!), the violin, 12-string & slide guitar bits on Cut Across Shorty, thinking about how good Young Turks is the whole time
1
View Album
Fri Sep 08 2023
Franz Ferdinand
Franz Ferdinand
This album is fun and pretty consistent with one big highlight: Take me Out is a great song. But its mostly par for the course wake of The Strokes 00s indie-rock.
2
View Album
Sat Sep 09 2023
Marquee Moon
Television
The coolest album there is. They perfected post-punk basically before punk even happened. Two thrilling guitars wrapped around each other like chaotic DNA. All sparse jangly-disorted chords and scattering frenetic leads with an incredible sense of melody and dramatic tension. The bass adds an extra layer of propulsive energy and counter-melodic riffing while the drums drop in and out, sometimes restrained with almost jazzy cymbal work, rolling high-hats, establishing the beat on snare-rim, and tight fills, until breaking into some hyper intense punk verve. Insouciant vocals with the occaisonal pubescent break, brilliant with off-kilter delivery and surpring phrasing. Damn I love this album so much. F. R. I. C. T-I-O-N!
5
View Album
Sun Sep 10 2023
The Yes Album
Yes
"How about no?" - Dr. Evil
Little Britain CSNY. Psychedelic folk prog with lots of ideas - few of them good.The bass sounds like farts, pretty cool! Nice acoustic instrumental on The Clap in a virtuoso folk style. The guitar and bass interplay on Starship Troopers is great throughout, especially the spacey ending. But the vocals are irritating, flutes have no place in rock music, and there're too many parts all jammed together into each song, you're just getting into a groove then here comes a tempo/key/instrumental change. Very taxing to listen to and the whole thing reeks of cider. Oh, 'All Good People' is by Yes? Hadn't realized. I hate that song. I gather this was a very influential album, unfortunate.
1
View Album
Mon Sep 11 2023
Amnesiac
Radiohead
One to sink into and let wash through you. This album captures the anxiety and anomie of the millennium - the dark depths below the shallow sheen of Blairism and Brit-poptimism. Unsettling poly-rhythms, dissonant harmonies, glistening shimmering textures that shift and mutate as instruments come in and out, fade outs where you realize there's been a guitar hiding in the mix that entire time, that warbling thin and piercing singing (I get way it's not universally loved, but it works so well for this music - how insane would this sound if they had a normal rock singer on this?!), the fluttering panning what is that sound snyths, electronica inspired drums and bass, melting horns and washed out strings. Korn for softboys, dance music for shut-ins, this is dismal and alienating exploration of the dismal and alienating feelings of shiny glass cities and the empty boom of the FIRE economy.
5
View Album
Tue Sep 12 2023
Tommy
The Who
What if a band that wrote really good 3-minute rock songs drew out an idea for a 70-minute album? What if that album told a story? And what if the songs were subsumed to telling the story? And what if the story was extremely goofy?
Pinball Wizard is a very dumb idea for song but is way better than it has any right to be. The rest is extremely boring. Random guitar parts throughout sound good and I always love JE on bass - but these songs are such a drag.
1
View Album
Wed Sep 13 2023
Planet Rock: The Album
Afrika Bambaataa
Dudes having fun goofing around with synths and drum machines and keyboards. Hard to imagine this being a massive cultural touchstone and the frontier of cool now since it sounds so corny, especially the rap - the beats sounds and samples are still pretty decent. Perfect Eddy Murphy sliding across the hood of a long car music. At this point more of an artifact than an in the rotation album.
1
View Album
Thu Sep 14 2023
Red Headed Stranger
Willie Nelson
Kind of a nothing album. The 4-6 real songs are good but not great WN songs - his gentle nylon string guitar melodies accompanied by a piano, subtle country bass and very light drums with the odd lonesome harmonica solo. Very minimalist sparse sound throughout. His voice is great, but doesn't do too much with it here. 'Can I Sleep in Your Arms' 'Blue Eyes' and 'Hands on the Wheel are the real stand out vocal perfomances with some emotional depth. Given the way the sparse arrangements emphasize the vocal, you'd want more. There are so many pointless micro-songs - it's like the score for a cowboy movie that does really well setting the mood and fading to the background. The album tells a story but not as well as some of the classic country story songs. They really went nuts with the concept album thing in the 70s and it was not a good idea.
Favorites: Hands on the Wheel, Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain
2
View Album
Fri Sep 15 2023
Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul
Otis Redding
Truth in advertising; Otis Redding does, indeed, sing soul. Fantastic song selection and thrilling performances all across this album. The vocals are warm and honest, with controlled runs and embellishment but also gruff and occaisonly raspy with a break when it all gets too much. The backing musicians are the definition of in the pocket, on cue and on point. The basslines are so smooth, floating things along, the guitars clean light-reverb sound sets a relaxed tone, the drums keep it all moving with quick little fills to pass from section to section, and the horns build and swell to build up the tension and release it when they hit the big riffs just right. Immaculate.
5
View Album
Sat Sep 16 2023
Songs In The Key Of Life
Stevie Wonder
Lots of different iterations of the RnB band sound showing its range. There are jazz fusion tracks like Contusion that are fast, with great riffs and guitar/keyboard tones and tight collective playing through intricate parts. There are funky uptempo style songs lead by the horns and melodic bass playing like Sir Duke that have a motown basis but incorporate a bigband jazz sound with harmonized horn/guitar leads. There are songs like Ordinary Pain that anticipate the galactic funk of parliament. The bass is the star on so many songs, relentlessly grooving through the changes with imaginative lines and perfect anticipation. Lots of good stuff, but the slow songs are really dire, with orchestral strings and horrible overwrought lyrics like 'babies die before they're born infected with disease'. Isn't She Lovely is so sickeningly sachharine I have diabetes now. If It's Magic is a warbly and tuneless 4 minute ballad. I know he's a legendary singer, but I find his voice to be very nasal and almost thin at times and just at the edge of being off key like on Summer Soft - I'm sure it's intentional and has to do with the jazzy chords/modes he's using where he's delaying resolution to the tonic? But still, find it kind of unpleasant at times.
Favorites: Contusion, I Wish, Ordinary Pain, Another Star, As, All Day Sucker
3
View Album
Sun Sep 17 2023
The Band
The Band
Never got the hype with these guys, despite a few real tries. It's all so...fine? Feels like a college project about americana - well thought out, tastefully arranged, and performed skillfully, but without any real gusto it ends up pretty bland and lifeless. I didn't realize the last few songs on the album are so good, but it turned out Spotify was just auto-playing Gram Parsons and Buffalo Springfield.
2
View Album
Mon Sep 18 2023
Either Or
Elliott Smith
Lo-Fi indie centered around the acoustic guitar/vocal with clean tremelo+reverby electric guitar parts adding some color and a drum/bass to give the rockier songs a full band sound. His voice is hushed and breathy, constrained to whispering in a fairly high range. He has a fairly distinctive melodic sensibility that backs away from the big crescendo, building up to deflate and deflect away from the major resolution. The way its recorded sounds like demos or bedroom tapes, which, combined with the vocals and introspective lyrics gives the album an intimate almost parasocial feel.
I've given this album a go so many times, but this time with good headphones, a lyric sheet, and close attention I get it much better - it just disappears as unobtusive kinda boring background music unless you zoom in. Still not the biggest fan of his voice, but this overcast afternoon I appreciated the autumnal moodiness of this much more than I have before.
Favorites: Alameda, No Name No 5, Punch and Judy, Cupid's Love
3
View Album
Tue Sep 19 2023
Seventeen Seconds
The Cure
Dark and moody, bleak and beautiful all the way through. The layers and layers of guitars with open string drones swirl all around drenched in reverb and flanger giving a dense relentless texture alternating with jangly arpegiatted hooks. The bass carries the main riffs, cutting through the whirling texture to drive things on. You can hear their punk beginings and disco leanings in the pummeling the drums get on when the pace picks up. Great drum sound - the snare really pops. All the instrumentation is in service of giving Robert Smith's vocals a platform for lift off. One of the best not obviously good singers, his range isn't great and his tone isn't rich or anything, but the depth from which he reaches to get the words out gives them a sense of edge-of-control desperation. All the elements are pretty basic really, but sound they make together are so good, and the melodic interplay of bass, guitar, and vocals is brilliant. Album was over before I realized it and hit replay immediately.
5
View Album
Wed Sep 20 2023
Queen II
Queen
Cool guitar sounds and some hard-hitting riffs. The vocals are delivered powerfully, with a commanding range - but they're somehow impersonal and technical, compared to the more anthemic stuff Freddie Mercury would sing later. Very hard to take this seriously in a post-Spinal Tap universe. The fantasy-infatuated 70s rock always makes for pretty bad bootleg-Tolkein lyrics about mystical lands of Ogres, Fairies, Queens. Don't Care! The operatic prog aspects of this make for some disjointed over-stuffed songs; just get out of your own way and let Brian May rip in 3-part harmony.
2
View Album
Thu Sep 21 2023
Central Reservation
Beth Orton
Can't think of any other artists at the middle of the electronica( )folk venn diagram, and it doesn't seem like it should work, but this album pulls it off perfectly, setting strummy acoustic guitar singer-songwriter fare to Portishead sounding high-hat dominant electronic beats. Fantastic production overall, each instrument, sample, and effect comes into its own, letting the singing star and tie it all together. Like the best bits of Astral Weeks remade with a 90s pallete of trip-hop, dub & some krautrock. A few songs have some great lead guitar work with mildly-overdriven slides and volume pedals to create a swelling swirling edgeless shoegaze sound. Some tracks are more raw stripped down acoustic songs - forceful vocals, loud/quiet dynamics, finger-picked guitars - these are less distinctive in terms of production, but still have the unique voice. She has a distinctive voice and delivery; she hits the highs but lives in a breathier heady middle range, fading out at the end of phrases, the melodies disappearing into themselves, peaking with emotive variations on the hooks. A beautiful and nearly Sui Generis album.
4
View Album
Fri Sep 22 2023
The Stranger
Billy Joel
You can tell from the cover that this album has a lot of psychology. It's a farily diverse album, some tracks have an interesting combination of a broadway pop sensibility with the sounds of 70s arena rock (Movin Out, The Stranger, Get it Right), there's a Long-Island-Stevie-Wonder jazz ballad (Just the Way You Are), some corny crooning (Vienna, Always a Woman), showtune ethnography (Italian Restaurant), barroom (more like golf club bar and grill) singalongs (Only the Good Die Young) and Hey Jude cosplay (Everybody has a Dream). The whole thing is like a Paul Giammatti fronting a Wings coverband. Somehow this is even more boomer than the Woodstock-era stuff.
2
View Album
Sat Sep 23 2023
In Rainbows
Radiohead
Tension, anxiety, stress, chaos - Radiohead examines and produces negative affect, it's all disonant chords and disjunctive lead lines, unsettled poly-rhythms, and whatever the opposite of soothing vocals are. At times its too much for the songs themselves to handle and it starts to sound pixelated as they burst the seams. They're holding on the electronic excursions of their last three albums while re-introducing a more direct rock sound, like the Bends-era band playing Krautrock. Lots going on in the production with dense textures establishing each songs ambience and the rhythm section kicking it into gear. So many good sounds: The bass rumble on 15 Step. The reverbed-out guitar lead on Bodysnatchers. The groove on Nude. The low-end synth on All I Need. The chiming riff on Reckoner. The gentle thrumming fuzz of House of Cards. The acceleration/decceleration on Jigsaw...
4
View Album
Sun Sep 24 2023
The Wall
Pink Floyd
The only good rock opera. The movie version of this is awesome and really conveys the whole story of childhood in the wake of WW2, English institutional authoritarianism, and the vacuity of celeb life degenerating into a fascist cult of personality. But as an album even this suffers from 70s concept bloat with lots of songs there for the story, but that don't hold up as songs. The 45-minute best-off cut of this would be amazing. Odd that on Roger Waters's definitive statement album the real stand out musical moments are David Gilmour's. An all-time great guitar performance here with precise lyrical phrasing, that slow/fast stuff, his endless sustain, and the purest chrystaline-fuzz strat tone recorded. Fuck. Yeah. And it's not just the solos - the big echoing open chords and bright chimey transitional fills are all great.
4
View Album
Mon Sep 25 2023
Tanto Tempo
Bebel Gilberto
Smooth jazzy advertising music; makes me want to shampoo and have posh ice cream.
2
View Album
Tue Sep 26 2023
Odessey And Oracle
The Zombies
Psychedelic chamber pop. The mood is woozy and vague. Slow paced and ornate - with Beatles-y sounds and beach boyish harmonies. Pianos and big churchy organs are the lead instruments, with a high up the fretboard bass. The guitars are all chime and jangle. Very finicky composition - choir boys messing around with mushrooms. Time of the Season is the epitome of groovy.
2
View Album
Wed Sep 27 2023
Blackstar
David Bowie
Dark and stormy with lots of electronica influence in the bass and drums parts (a bit like Burial) and lots of gothy Cure/Depeche Mode/Nine Inch Nails sounds in the layers of droning guitars and minor-key synth & string parts. Bowie consistenly has the best use of sax in rock music, which continues here, with jazzy parts and solos running under and alongside the vocals, creating a poly-vocal multi-melodic bursting feel to the songs. His voice is distinctively his, but somewhat wispy and injured, fully committed but exhausted. He's giving the last he has singing "I can't give everything away."
3
View Album
Thu Sep 28 2023
Electric Ladyland
Jimi Hendrix
Kind of a pivot from the psych-pop of the Jimi Hendrix Experience to the psych funk of the Band of Gypsies, this album is Hendrix in transition and captures the full range of his powers. Voodoo Chile is an extended jam over a deep base groove with a virtuoso guitar performance while Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) tames the wild exploratory song into a straight-forward rock single, a successor to Purple Haze. The fuzzed out guitar sounds so damn good, even on cheesy tracks like Noel Redding's Little Miss Strange, which has the unfortunate job of following Voodoo Chile. His playing-style -extended pentatonic blues with constant embellishment - remains distinctive despite being universally copied. The solo on Come On is fast and chaotic blues rock guitar taken to its logical conclusion and the wah-pedal wild panning and multi-tracked parts on Rainy Day and Still Raining show how he was incorporating emerging tools into his playing. There's also some late 60s studio experimentation with reverse tape effects, delays, overdubs, and stereo effects features JH as a creative song-writer and recording artist not just an exhilarating performer. The songs don't reach the heights of the Axis album's gems or the perfect pop singles of Are You Experienced, but even so songs like Long Hot Summer Night, Crosstown Traffic, and House Burning Down show his ability to craft a radio-friendly hits. And Watchtower obviously rules. I prefer both the looser live BoG albums that would follow this and the tighter psychedelia and pop songs of the preceding studio albums, but this is far more experimental and has so many unexpected ideas throughout it that it is still an exciting listen.
5
View Album
Fri Sep 29 2023
Odessa
Bee Gees
Weird English guys doing Nashville schmaltz about an old boat and lightbulbs. Not what I was expecting at all, makes me long for disco. Prog adjacent folk with acoustic guitars, lots of strings and bells, the odd French horn - but barely any rhythm section. At best (Marley Purt Drive) they sound like a decent The Band tribute act. Sometimes (whisper, give your best) they sound like a 7th tier Beatles ripoff record playing too slow. Cons: the songs are extremely repetitive and very very boring. Pros: they last forever and there are loads of them.
What is it with this list and tedious British concept albums?!
1
View Album
Sat Sep 30 2023
Sticky Fingers
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones are the best Southern rock band, they even have the best racist song.
This album is full a out country blues gospel rocker - maybe not quite at Exile level, but getting there and more concise. 'Wild Horses' is an all time favorite. On 'Can't you hear me knocking' they're doing a Santana/Allman Brothers thing with a loosely psychedelic blues jam. 'You gotta move' works less well, imitating a zither and stomp blues that relies more on Jagger doing old blues guy voice. 'I got the blues' slows it down for a church organ lament, layered with great horns parts and bright clean guitar line. The acoustic guitar + dirty slide guitar on 'Sister morphine' carries the song through a traditional folky verse chorus into the chaotic descent of the Neil Young style second half. Good as he is, Keith Richards has never been a personal favorite but he really is the star on this one.
4
View Album
Sun Oct 01 2023
Mama Said Knock You Out
LL Cool J
Just a couple steps removed from the "My name is LL Cool J and I'm here to say" era, the production on this album is lean and clean - minimalistic beats driven by boom boom tish drums, funky looped basslines, and sparse synth/sample accentuation that put the vocals front and center. There are just 1-2 beats/parts per song so the sound is fairly repetitive. There are long verses and short infrequent choruses. It's an old-school sound, though rap is pushing into new areas, speeding up a bit with a twisting clever and boastful style that would dominate the early 90s.The delivery on this album is precise and focused - putting an emphasis on the playful wordy verses' stories of love and lust, rivalries and friendships, parties and fights, crafting LL Cool J's smooth bravado persona.
3
View Album
Mon Oct 02 2023
Idlewild
Everything But The Girl
Glossy 80s pop with a heavy dose of smooth jazz. Chimey slowed-down Johnny Marr-wannabe guitars and some bright synth sounds combined with a busy neo-soul bass and Kenny G saxophone. It sort of works? The songs are all lush and slow artifice with a chorus-pedal sound saturating the album. No real distinctions between the songs, it's a mood album that's calm relaxed and upbeat- but that's another word for boring. The sound of the milk aisle in the early 90s.
2
View Album
Tue Oct 03 2023
MTV Unplugged In New York
Nirvana
One of my first CDs and still one of my favorites. The imagery, timing, and performance here is responsible for the corny Kurt as grunge angel thing, but this album itself is untouchable. Stepping back from the loud-quiet-loud super distorted style of their other albums, this performance brings out the quality of Nirvana's songwriting (and their taste in covers). The arrangements - replacing distortion pedals for a cello and adding in a second acoustic guitar, generally quite understated drumming - bring the singing to front and make more space for it to stand out in the mix than usual and Cobain delivers the best rock vocal performance of the 90s. Hoarse and desperate, powerful until it breaks, bleak and vulnerable - his voice is incredible. I've heard it a millions times and it's still magic.
5
View Album
Wed Oct 04 2023
Rip It Up
Orange Juice
Glasgow's answer to Franco & OK Jazz. The bass and drums are the root of the funkiest sound on the Clyde while the two intertwined clean jangly guitars' rhythmic and melodic interplay bring a bright and breezy indie sound. Jazzy sax and keyboards are scattered across the album for a smooth easy going vibe. There's a distinct West African flavour in the harmonies and guitar parts, with the high-life style sweet major-3rd sounds, densley textured Rumba grooves, bongo fills, and cheesy keyboard/synth parts. This is most clear on 'Million Pleading Faces' and 'Hokoyo', which have an 80s Southern African pop meets Fela Kuti feel, but carries through the entire album. I imagine these are marmite vocals - but I like the off-kilter delivery and one-off style. Incredibly fun album.
Favorites: Rip it Up, Louise Louise, Breakfast Time, Tenterhook
5
View Album
Thu Oct 05 2023
Bitte Orca
Dirty Projectors
Warbly vocals over disjointed complicated guitar parts and herky jerky drumming. There are some exciting sounds, including some nice warm fuzz, creative layering of vocal harmonies and instrumentation, and even a few good riffs, but nothing good lasts very long as songs swerve in new directions constantly. It has a very stop-start feel without strong melodic or sonic through-lines. More ‘interesting’ than enjoyable, pretty annoying to listen to really. The synthier soul tracks like ‘stillness is the move’ with more propulsion are good though.
2
View Album
Fri Oct 06 2023
Blood, Sweat & Tears
Blood, Sweat & Tears
Part of that late 60s/early 70s rock turn towards Americana, BS&T looks to Jazz and Big Band as well as the more expected folk and blues, bringing plenty of horns and (unfortunately) flute and strings into a rock band template. The album is all over the place in terms of genre, but the horns sound good and the bass really does a lot of the heavy lifting giving these songs a bit of energy and momentum lost when the main songwriting instrument is the piano. The extended organ noodling is very boring, but the deeper groove jazzy jams with a trumpet/sax lead did draw me in. It doesn't always work, and when it does it isn't really that good - I'd rather listen to folk rock or jazz rather than both at once.
2
View Album
Sat Oct 07 2023
Tracy Chapman
Tracy Chapman
Quiet folk pop acoustic-guitar driven songs that emphasize Tracy Chapman's distinctive voice: kind of nasal/heady nearly yodeling on the highs, rich and warm in the lows, controlled and expressive in a deceptively wide range. The solo acoustic stuff is bit boring, her best songs bring in a backing band to speed things up and have a rich full sound and very pretty accents. Fast Car is such a great song, the simple guitar hook rising and falling restlessley, the call and response vocal urgently optimistic but full of ordinary disappointment, the big chorus's meaning shifting with each iteration of slow heartbreak.
3
View Album
Sun Oct 08 2023
The Visitors
ABBA
There some surprisingly good stuff verging on Krautrock on here (Soldiers, Visitors), but it swerves into cheesy Puttin on the Ritz territory inevitably. The ballads are awful - slow and sickly sweet. Some good bass playing and Steely Dan style jazzy stuff, the harmonies and melodies are undeniable pure pop genius. But there's just a bass layer of inescapable Eurovision corniness.
2
View Album
Mon Oct 09 2023
Vivid
Living Colour
Like a funky Van Halen or if the Red Hot Chilli Peppers didn't suck. Vernon Reid rips all over this album with a huge bombastic 80s tone, shredding solos, some great riffs, and some Nile Rodgers style disco rhythm guitar. The drums are big, reverby as hell, and go at full blast, the bass is busy and propulsive. All that doesn't leave much space for the singer so he creates it by belting out the vocals at the top of his register at film volume. Some prog elements in there, a bit of slide guitar, loads of chorus pedal, a talking heads cover and the all-timer Cult of Personality.
3
View Album
Tue Oct 10 2023
Pretzel Logic
Steely Dan
For some reason I never gave Steely Dan much of a listen, my loss! This album has so much stuff I like - complex but uptempo compositions, dense jazzy arrangements with all sorts of instruments making quick cameos, close harmonies and memorable melodies, virtuoso musicianship and a bit of a sense of humor. The guitar work is great - a range of cool tones from bright clean and compressed to scuzzy and fuzzy playing tight punchy solos with inventive phrasing. The only knock is that it's so polished, rehearsed, and cleanly produced it ends up a bit plastic - it's like smooth Zappa. It seems like their legacy in rock is mostly in jambands.
4
View Album
Wed Oct 11 2023
Ray Of Light
Madonna
Balaeric dance mashed up with mega-pop, it's somehow simultaneously uptempo, upbeat, anthemic and chill in a trancey way. Liked it a lot more than I expected from only knowing the song Ray of Light previously but it suffers from CD-era bloat. Nothing on here is as aurally infectious as her 80s classics. Basically a solid 90s techno-pop album with some star power.
3
View Album
Thu Oct 12 2023
Fever To Tell
Yeah Yeah Yeahs
There's basically two sounds on this album: Dirty punk songs with fast staccato riffs and fuzzy guitars over snare-banging drums & spacey indie rock with a more melodic lead guitar sound with big reverby toms-banging drums. The vocals are in a high register, alternately yelping and nearly operatic. They were always an ambiently around band listening to indie rock in college but never gave them much of a close listen and I actually though Maps was a Broken Social Scene song for years - that is the standout track on this album, both in terms of quality and aesthetics - it's much gentler, more atmospheric, and anthemic than the rest of the songs, which are tend towards the punk end of the spectrum.
3
View Album
Fri Oct 13 2023
Who's Next
The Who
This is the dawn of the arena rock sound that would take over the 70s. Who's Next has lots of experiments with sounds and production within fairly conventional rock song structures- from the synths of Baba O'Riley to the weird squirty fuzz guitar sounds and panning phaser lazer sounds on Going Mobile, to the recurrent pairing of big overdriven riffs with a bass-layer of folksy strumming acoustic guitars like on Behind Blue Eyes to the alternating close-harmonies and wailing vocal leads. Because so much of this has become classic rock radio cliche it's hard to listen with fresh ears, but Baba O'Riley and Won't Get Fooled Again are still grab your attention demand you turn up the volume.
3
View Album
Sat Oct 14 2023
Ill Communication
Beastie Boys
This album samples lots of jazz and FUNK
Then it goes all hardcore PUNK
Beastie Boys rap in a group of THREE
Pretty corny now, but it works for ME
ok I'll stop. This album is good when it's a hip hop album - the BB's and guests' verses are all at a really consistently high level, with inventive beats and sampling, and distinctive cadence/flow. The punk stuff is like C-tier Minor Threat, the jazz stuff is kind of pointless.
Favorites: Sabotage, Update, Get it Together, Do It
3
View Album
Sun Oct 15 2023
Copper Blue
Sugar
A dense and punchy sound defined by a thick unrelenting guitar. Warm, bright and overdriven, Bob Mould's playing sits somewhere between rhythm and lead as heavy riffs turn into melodic hooks. Sonically they're often like the Pixies, but the songwriting doesn't use the loud/quiet formula so much and there's not as much space in the music, instead it's a dials in the red full on punk approach like Dino Jr, but with added Rem poppyness: harmonies, catchy controlled vocals, and the odd hard strumming acoustic guitar. 'If I can't change your mind' is a power pop song for 90s alt rock radio. It's a good album that starts strong, but I'd rather put on Husker Du or the comp bands.
Favorites: changes, helpless, the slim
3
View Album
Mon Oct 16 2023
The Notorious Byrd Brothers
The Byrds
I always associated them with the annoying jangly early stuff so only recently really listened to the Byrds with any attention after following Graham Parsons' discography backwards, so don't think I'd heard this album (apart from the ubiquitous 60s documentary soundtrack song Change is Now) but there's lots to like: Twangy country licks, baroque harmonies, Beatlesy pop melodies, raga drones, psychedelic production tricks, horns, slides, and synths and the occasional blues rock guitar solo - it all comes together better than you'd think in this controlled concise experiment in hippy indulgence. After the elaborate Sgt Pepper-sounding composition of Artificial Energy, the vibes chill out and we get a more blissed out ethereal California sound. The spacey-drone stuff in particular is really good and genre-setting for more exploratory instrumental psych, garage, and high-desert metal.
4
View Album
Tue Oct 17 2023
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
Lauryn Hill
Amazing recording and production; this album sounds like a top tier Motown band live in the studio with Lauryn Hill - the deep grooves of the bass, funky Stevie Wonder-sounding clavinets, the tight swing of the drums, and the soulful horns throughout build an incredible platform for her vocals - precisely rapped verses weaving together personal stories, sociological observation, and political critique - her delivery slides between rapping and singing as melodies seem to emerge out of nowhere. Other songs have a more PC-built beat feel, with classic 90s production, turntable scratches, and looped samples - good, but not as timeless or distinctive as the more neo-soul stuff. Her voice is a bit nasal and limited to a mid-high range, but has great expressive vibrato that wraps around the backing vocalists and her own overdubs to create a poly-vocal harmonic gospel choir sound. Nice Bob Marley Burning reference on the cover.
4
View Album
Wed Oct 18 2023
Forever Changes
Love
On the folkier pastoral end of the 60s psych spectrum - acoustic guitar songs with strings, horns, harpsichord, etc embellishment. Lots of Major 7 chords and not much a pop sensibility in terms of catchy hooks gives it a floating unresolved kind of listless quality. Some songs have fairly complex compositions with intricate, verging into prog, elements. The few guitar solos are interesting takes on the genre - classic psych fuzz tone, but they never really take off - sticking to kind of stochastic blasts in a pentatonic box, adding rhythm and texture rather than a climax. Overall it has a relaxed cabin in the woods kind of a feel that's undercut by tension/anxiety from the strings - making it an ominous vaguely dystopian album. The main vocal sounds a bit falsetto and artificial - not sure why so many of these late 60s psych/folk bands went for that la la la kids song type singing, it sucks.
3
View Album
Thu Oct 19 2023
3 Years, 5 Months And 2 Days In The Life Of...
Arrested Development
Feelgood Afro-centric 1990s alternative hip hop at its best. Mostly original 'live band-style' jazzy/soul/funk beats with some samples and turntable stuff over the top. Upbeat and uplifting tone combined with dense lyrical content dealing with ISSUES. Sometimes it's a bit cringe, but hard to fault earnestness. The cadence, flow and expressivity of the delivery is great and the vibes are good as hell.
4
View Album
Fri Oct 20 2023
The Contino Sessions
Death In Vegas
Draws widely on 80s/90s British indie & post-punk influences, channelled through an electronica production and song-writing approach. Dark and heavy mostly, with distorted guitar riffs and synth leads on most songs over industrial drum/bass loops. A bit like Big Black of Nine Inch Nails, but with a bit more of a Happy Mondays dance sensibility. Iggy Pop doing a Sean Connery impression on Aisha is a treat, the slow build on the opener Dirge is draws you in, and the spacey garage track Broken Little Sister is a fuzzed out bit of psych. It's pretty derivative, but of good stuff.
3
View Album
Sat Oct 21 2023
Siamese Dream
The Smashing Pumpkins
Is this the thickest guitar album of all time? Layer upon layer of fuzzed out riffs, overdriven leads, detuned chords, crystalline clear intros, and double, triple quadruple-tracked harmonies are all compressed into a warm, oozey and totally distinctive sound. That sound paired with a great sense of melodic phrasing makes for some of the most inventive and memorable playing of the era. The drums cut through the density of the guitars with sharp bright and clear snare, tom and symbol sounds and an almost jazzy playing style that, rather than doubling down on the heavy riffs, elevates them with a more spacious synchopated approach. If the guitars are thick, the vocals are thin and raspy, nasal and heady: the range is more about volume/intensity than anything else, from whispered, gentle and introspective to searching screams and wails. Like the songs. then, heavy or tender. Amazing musicianship and recording is combined with some of the best alt-rock radio song-writing of the 90s on singles like Today, Cherub Rock and Disarm which still stand up after thousands of plays and brilliant album tracks like Soma, Mayonaise, Hummer, and Spaceboy.
5
View Album
Sun Oct 22 2023
The Idiot
Iggy Pop
Proto-industrial sounds with a strong emphasis on dark and moody keys and synths. Some good post-punk lead guitar work on a few tracks but as accent rather than the basis of the songs. The vocals are very Bowie-style: off kilter crooning and high drama. A couple songs at the end are a bit tuneless, extremely repetitive, and go on way too long.
3
View Album
Mon Oct 23 2023
Exodus
Bob Marley & The Wailers
From the fade-in on natural mystic, the deep hypnotic bass groove carries this album everywhere it goes, leaving ample room for funky electric piano, soulful horns, guitar stabs and solos, lively percussion, pitch perfect harmonies from the backup singers, and, obviously, an all-time vocal performance from BM. The album is full of inspired interplay and joyful back and forth between the musicians/singers, all feeding each other and running with each other's ideas creating endless layers of rhythm and melody. I could live without hearing jamming ever again, but the rest of this is a genre reaching its zenith.
5
View Album
Tue Oct 24 2023
Dummy
Portishead
The unique thing about this album is the brilliant sonic construction of space. There's a glossy shimmering surface: pulsating synths and ephemeral keyboards, vibrating tremolo/wah guitar lines, squiggly turntables, and a high hat heavy drum part. The bass is often part of this, high up the neck and melodic, but then drops down low for a big hit in tandem with a bass drum, and all of sudden the depths below the surface reveal themselves - they do this over and over and it's exhilarating in a blissed out chill way. The vocals move across these layers, soaring high and dipping low, breathy and intimate then angsty and ethereal. The exemplary album of a weird shortlived fusion electrorock mini-genre - thoroughly of it's time and place but transcends them and still stands out 30 years later.
5
View Album
Wed Oct 25 2023
Ambient 1/Music For Airports
Brian Eno
The most soothing album there is, I love it. From the first few piano notes on the first track it announces what it is: spare melodies, vibrating textures, slow, calming waves of tranquil sound and gentle dissonance that resolves quickly into the settled swelling of ethereal synths. Tune in or zone out, pay attention or let it course through you, it's reassuringly there, rising and falling like the sky breathing.
5
View Album
Thu Oct 26 2023
Here Come The Warm Jets
Brian Eno
This album is like a mad glam scientist messing around in the synth lab and emerging with a bizarre mixture of sweet pop (Faraway Beach, Some of them are Old, Cindy), haunted saloon player piano (Driving me Backwards), goopy ectoplasm midway to becoming new-wave (Needles, Dead Finks, Warm Jets, Paw Paw), and freaky avant-punk (Black Frank). Baby's on Fire is somehow all of that and more with an anthemic melodic hook, spooky harmonies and synth work, and a Robert Fripp going demented on guitar for a while section - extremely good. The album is restlessly inventive, alternatingly beautiful and bizarre.
4
View Album
Fri Oct 27 2023
Harvest
Neil Young
The two sides of Neil Young - the acoustic balladeer and the electric rocker - share the stage on Harvest, swapping songs, verses, and solos to create a country-rock masterpeice. Harmonicas, close harmonies, exquisite lap steel guitars, and banjos give the album a folksy twang, while the overdriven rhythm guitars and stochastic fuzzy leads bring a heavier, dirtier energy that cuts through the pretty country facade hinting, alongside the gloomy lyrics, of darker depths below. The songs are slow and reflective but the musicianship and vocal performances are so rich it's never dull. NY's voice especially is thin and fragile, almost weak, expressive of a lonely hurt. It's not all brilliant though, "A Man Needs a Maid" and "There's a World" are huge drags, burried under onslaught of ham handed piano and a terrible orchestral arrangement that go for BIG AND SERIOUS but end up sounding like a Disney cartoon.
4
View Album
Sat Oct 28 2023
Hail To the Thief
Radiohead
An album as bleak as 2003, Hail to the Thief captures the ambient dread, malice, and sense of distant violence of the metropole at the dawn of the global war on terror. It kicks off with 2+2=5's synths going off like an alarm. There There is that era's best song, a refusal of the injunction to become a terrorized paranoid freak sensing danger lurking in every corner - "Just cuz you feel it, doesn't mean it's there". The amalgam of electronic sounds and (relatively) raw guitar parts, chaotic techno beats, frenetic synths, close but off kilter harmonies, and bleated vocals ratchet up the tension over and over. Though there is the odd cathartic climax, there's little relief - the songs don't resolve into stable melodies or return to familiar terrain. Drunken Punch Up offers a bit of a groove to sink into, then layers with with discordance. Myxomatosis has a heavy synth riff that's used a platform for more textural experimentation. Sail to the Moon is a disquieting lullaby with its relaxed piano. ethereal reverby guitar parts, uneasy synths and searching vocals. Wolf At the Door is like a nightmare nursery rhyme with a guitar part that's always falling forward into the next arpeggio without resolving as the vocal descends wildly into a frenzy until catching itself at the last minute, fading away deceptively sweetly. This is the soundtrack of a world spinning out of control.
5
View Album
Sun Oct 29 2023
The Queen Is Dead
The Smiths
The interplay between Johnny Marr's jangly hyperactive constantly changing rhythm guitar and Andy Rourke's pulsating melodic bass parts creates the distinctive signature sound of the entire Smiths' catalogue: pulsating overlapping rhythms, bright poppy chords, harmonic leads with droning open high-strings. Morrissey's may be a reactionary clown, but he was a brilliant lyricist and lead singer, crafting unexpected melodies and bittersweet anthemic choruses and delivering them with sui-generis baritone/falsetto operatic flair. It's all so melodramatic I could set myself on fire.
I can never pick a favorite betwen this, Meat is Murder, and Strangeways, and in any case none of their studio albums are as good as the singles compilations which are pure hit upon hit, but there're very few albums I've listened to as many times as this one and am still excited to put on at least every few weeks. A+ material from the best band of the 80s.
5
View Album
Mon Oct 30 2023
Stand!
Sly & The Family Stone
Funk pop that sounds way better on headphones than speakers. At it's best this is a hard rocking wah-guitar workout. The standout track is Take Me Higher, all driving fuzzy bass and energetic horns. Simple Song and You Can Make It have a great NOLA funk sound with organ/guitar riffs establishing the dominant hook, back and forth interplay between singers, and horns for big hits. Sex Machine is a psych-funk wah excursion - fun but a bit repetitive. Everyday People and its B-Side You Can Make it are really awful though - EP is forever tainted from being played to death in a cloying Toyota ad - boring arrangements, slow dragging composition, and a meaningless quasi-political message.
3
View Album
Tue Oct 31 2023
The Fat Of The Land
The Prodigy
Hard hitting big beat/DnB techno with a charismatic lead singer and a band kind of feel that got it out of the rave and onto the radio like few others from the genre. At times it verges into NIN industrial territory but clubbier. Too long and a bit samey as an hour-long album, but the hits, Breathe especially, are great - catchy hooks, head-banging synth riffs, distinctive snarled vocals, and tension/release build ups & drops, and some big bass booms. Surpringly good as a getting stuff done on the computer album.
3
View Album
Wed Nov 01 2023
Back to Basics
Christina Aguilera
Poppy RnB combining fairly traditional 60s motown-style instrumentation and arrangements (lots of good horns) with 2000s elements: hip hop pop beats, chorus-heavy song structures, rap verses, turntables, and self-aware sampling of her own hits. This album is leaning into the gospel diva thing and all the songs function as platforms for big vocal perfomances. She has some pipes and isn't afraid to use them. She's an undeniable talent, terrifying range, astonishing control, surprising tonal variety and this is a virtuoso performance in an style that's not usually my thing, but I liked this more than I expected. The first half is hard to distinguish this from the rest of the generic pop radio landscape of this period and it blurs into the morass of post-boy band American Idol bubblegum. The second half, where she escapes the 2006 hit factory to campily mess around with woozy blues and horny jazz stuff is fucking great (the ballads & orchestral less so though). Why is her dedication to the fans 4 minutes of voicemails of people praising her?
Favorites: Nasty Naughty Boy, I got Trouble, Mercy on Me
2
View Album
Thu Nov 02 2023
Songs Of Love And Hate
Leonard Cohen
Someone gave the guy mumbling at the back of the bus a classical guitar. Turns out he can play a bit and has a lot to say. It's bitter, glum and acrimonious in an undirected kind of way - lot's of ambiguous 'yous' have wronged him. The country-rock adjacent Diamonds in the Mine is a bit of surprise but works really well - soaring lap steel sounds against the dark brooding strum.
3
View Album
Fri Nov 03 2023
Purple Rain
Prince
Pure 80s excess. This album is overflowing with ideas, each song is layers and layers of synths, huge reverby drums, virtuouso guitars, and charismatic vocals popping in and out of every range possible. It all (more or less) coheres around big catchy hooks and memorable choruses, then departs into extra codas, tacked on solos, refrains, and returns. The production and performances are so tight - its bursting at the seams and gloriously excessive without being distractingly busy or chaotic. It's obviously a pop album, but there's something ineffably wierd and singular about the conception and execution of these ideas that transcends genre.
4
View Album
Sat Nov 04 2023
The Stooges
The Stooges
Gloriously juvenile garage rock. Sometimes they sound like a filthy rolling stones tribute act, sometimes they're inventing punk, sometimes they're off on a psychadelic adventure. The guitar is way stripped back and basic, like a kid who just got a fuzz pedal and a wah wah going nuts with it. Some quick and nasty solos and some pretty straightforward but thoroughly effective riffs - I wanna be your dog especially. Iggy Pop is basically a fully formed punk front-man on his debut, a limited singer but all drawling-snarling throat shredding charisma.
3
View Album
Sun Nov 05 2023
Californication
Red Hot Chili Peppers
When I was 14 and this came out I loved scar tissue the first few times I heard it and got the album. I was disappointed in how bad the rest of it was, but that was common with 90s radio bands' albums: full of filler. Then I heard scar tissue 500 times a week on the radio and stopped liking that one song too. Then Californication was played out even more and I can't even here a note of this band without instinctively reaching for the car radio knob. So, it's been a long time since I revisited this album but good to know that my 14 year old self was correct: there's one good song on here ruined by overplay and the rest is boring dreck. Embarrassing little raps, self-parody level slap bass, the most vapid lyrics imaginable, and annoying whiney vocals. Some pretty guitar bits and solid drumming apart there is basically nothing here. BSSM was goofy and fun, this is somehow goofy and self serious. How is this band so big? America's Coldplay.
1
View Album
Mon Nov 06 2023
Appetite For Destruction
Guns N' Roses
There's not a better hard rock album. GnR distilled everything good from 70s/80s rock and channelled it through a world-historical dose of cocaine and ego to put out a record that nobody can top - all written and recorded in like a month or something. So many all-time great riffs, licks, solos, and hooks - incredible songwriting. Slash comes in like a squal - blasting constant leads and squealing pinch harmonics all over the place (even while the verse is going on). His playing is blistering but also that much more melodic and memorable than the 80s shredders and the sound is so huge. The rhythm section is rock solid - Duff Mckagan's punk background means the energy never drops. Axl's range is all over the place, starting with a gruff growl and ending up with a glass-shattering scream. He has a really playful articulation, stretching out words or rampaging through them with almost a rapper's cadence - pure rock charisma. This, not grunge, killed hair metal - why bother with anything else once you've heard this?
5
View Album
Tue Nov 07 2023
Sign 'O' The Times
Prince
Elaborate upbeat funk with a pop sensibility that's the template for tons of the RnB and neo-soul that would follow. Lots of these sounds have become genre conventions (the reverby guitar hits, rising and falling horns, sexual healing-style moaning vocals, bass grooves carrying the song through the changes...) that it's hard not to hear them as conventional 35 years later. But the very 80s sounding bits (amazing synths and drum machines) are certainly signs o the times (not to say they don't sound awesome, just quintessentially 80s) and Prince's vocal style in terms of both delivery and melodic phrasing marks it as uniquely his own - hardly contained to a genre and certainly not generic. Except on the almost power-pop 'I Could Never' he's not in guitar god mode, here he's in sensual song-writer and immaculate vibe curator mode. I've never really listened to this in full before but it sounds really familiar nonetheless - I think because so much 90s stuff was influenced by this. Maybe also because it's a like a hybrid of Madonna, Parliament Funkadelic and Marvin Gaye filtered through the medium that is Prince.
Favorites: Hot Thing, Housequake, The Cross, I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man, got that look
5
View Album
Wed Nov 08 2023
I'm Your Man
Leonard Cohen
Dark brooding stormy synths replace the classical guitar on this very 80s sounding album. LC is playing with a much bigger persona, stepping with some swagger out of the confines of his folky singer-songer writer era into a new phase as a disco-goth front man. It's a bit like Depeche Mode. The lyrics - cynical, jaded, lusty - and vocals - deep hoarse crooning - are still the main thing, but the production and arrangements are totally different than his early work. He's drawing on a pretty eclectic sonic pallette: synths and cheesy keys, drum tracks, gospel choirs, lap steel guitar, and even a bit of the old classical guitar for added flair.
Favorites: First We Take Manhattan, I Can't Forget, Tower of song
4
View Album
Thu Nov 09 2023
Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin
Overall this is one of those iconic touchstone albums with a basically indisputable canonical status that actually isn't as good as I remember it being when I first encountered it... It was very funny to learn that they were considered a Cream/Jeff Beck Group rip off. Guess it's all just heavy fuzzy blues by some English hippies.
Jimmy Page's playing is pretty much untouchable - riffs so ingrained in they're basically default setting on any electric guitar and frenetic blues rock solos that've been emulated for 50 years ever since. The bass and drums are rock solid, big, bold, melodic and deep. The vocals are harder to listen to with every year of hindsight.
Lots of the songs are a overly long and pretty repetitive - relying on a great riff, but just looping it over and over. Good Times Bad Times & Communication Break down are much tighter and quick-hitting with a sound/riff structure verging into punk - though with a way more exploratory bass. Your Time is Going to Come breaks out of the blues template for a more original and anthemic rock sound, with cool instrumentation and overdubbed slide guitar parts giving an uplifting astral kind of sound. Black Mountain Side is a nice rustic instrumental acoustic folk guitar workout with a hint of a raga edge. How Many More Times is a rip-roaring sometimes psychedelic finale with an all-time classic fuzz riff and guitar heroics that breaks down and builds up and breaks down over and over. All good fun, but not one I need to hear in full all that often.
3
View Album
Fri Nov 10 2023
Vespertine
Björk
Euphoric and anxious, this album is a masterpeice of unsettling texture and rhythm. Beats drop in and out, strings swell from nowhere, bells and chanting synthetic vocals echo across vast open spaces, dense synth/drum machine disonance packs in and in and in to create some claustraphobic chaos. Bjork's voice is mostly wispy (breathy, intimate, inviting) but occasionally titanic (powerfully belting out big crescendo as the music swirls around). Quiet tracks like Cocoon crackle and click along with ambient Eno-style synth bedding. Poppier (lol) songs like It's Not Up to You hover in major keys, resolving the album's pulsating tension into blissful choruses. Mesmerizing, absorbing, and stressful - this is an incredible expression/exploration of isolation and romance.
4
View Album
Sat Nov 11 2023
Mothership Connection
Parliament
Why do they spend 6 minutes demanding the funk?! They are the goddamn funk. Great fun from the most effortless band in show business. Parliament has an amazing combination of exuberant musicianship, total mastery of a genre and complete comitment to goofiness. There's a wide cast of singers chiming in alongside George Clinton for a wild poly-vocal performance, but really this album is all about the deep interstellar bass grooves endlessly adorned with horns riffs, guitar stabs, and an unlimited supply of elecric pianos, organs, and synth licks. The bass tones are so good - clean and precise with a magnificent pop and then suddenly as sythny and bizarrely distorted as a malfunctioning robot melting down at a disco in Spaceballs.
5
View Album
Sun Nov 12 2023
Good Old Boys
Randy Newman
An unfunny comedian doing a Billy Joel impression. What could go wrong?! Everything.
1
View Album
Mon Nov 13 2023
90
808 State
Driving beats, funky riffs, gloriously corny tones, and a catchy sense of melody - it's like a darker harder disco sound played through a Nintendo for a rave in an abandoned train yard.
3
View Album
Tue Nov 14 2023
Highway to Hell
AC/DC
Textbook generic rock by numbers. The guitar tone is the only standout element with a tight bright distortion sound ringing out in the open chords and a generally fun & concise if unoriginal approach to solos. Good clean crisp drum sound too. Otherwise it's just dudes doing rock noises. Pretty stripped back in terms of production. They had a formula and somehow it worked for them for decades, but good God is it tedious. Truly the Top Gear of bands.
2
View Album
Wed Nov 15 2023
Document
R.E.M.
This album has a consistent Americana indie jangle going on (kind of like Tom Petty twang meets the Smiths chime with some U2 bombast). The two huge (The One I Love & End of the World) hits are memorable anthems I'm still happy to hear after thousands of listens and the album tracks are all solid to great. Peter Buck has fantastic guitar sounds, inventive parts, and great hook. The rhythm section is tight and expressive. Michael Stipe's vocals are charismatic, earnestly open and his melodies catchy and engagingly overwrought. The songs are concise pop gems with a just right blend of power-pop bright energy and post-punk snarl. The production is flawless and it all sounds crisp, clear, and perfectly balanced. But for some reason despite liking every component of REM individually their albums have never really clicked with me. I put them on, sing along to the hits, and enjoy the rest in a kind of zoned out way.
Favorites: Oddfellows, The One I Love, Occupation, Disturbance
3
View Album
Thu Nov 16 2023
Urban Hymns
The Verve
Not to be that guy, but it true: their early psychadelic shoegaze stuff was better than their commercial breakthrough album. Sadly this album finds them less as a Slowdive rival or a ladish Spiritualized and more as a proto-Coldplay. It retains elements of their early sound - big spacey reverb-laden ambience, swirling wah-wah & delay pedal guitar parts, trance-inducing slow riffs and looping bass parts, big builds and breakdowns - but it's filtered through a much more mainstream alt-rock, almost Pearl Jam-like, approach with a much bigger emphasis on the balladeering mournful vocals front and center which makes it somewhat more generic. I'm a sucker for the twangy lapsteel accents which give it an extra element of angelic spaciousness - functioning as a blissful contrast to the misery of the lyrics on a song like "Drugs Don't Work"
3
View Album
Fri Nov 17 2023
Bridge Over Troubled Water
Simon & Garfunkel
Pretty and melodic, overall this is a hushed and chill album that either fades into quietly into the background or demands close attention to the masterful song-writing, subtle phrasing, and understated instrumental prowess. Paul Simon loves a bit of the old cultural appropriation: the soaring Andean melodies and harmonies with pipes and charangos on El Condor Pasa are great and woven nicely into the structure of the pop song. Unobjectionable, and I get there's a lot of craft to it, but its never been my thing. Music for coffee shops and used book stores.
3
View Album
Sat Nov 18 2023
Birth Of The Cool
Miles Davis
Swinging drums, tight solos and emphasis on the horns harmony - fairly short compositions. Very jarring when the singer comes in on the last track.
3
View Album
Sun Nov 19 2023
Melody A.M.
Röyksopp
Now that's what I call music for airports Vol 62. I used to put this on a lot when I was working. It's the sound that birthed a million 'chill focus: lofi vibes to study to' playlists - the main virtues are being louder than background noise, pleasant and ignorable. They're good at it, but it's not exactly the highest praise ...
2
View Album
Mon Nov 20 2023
Whatever
Aimee Mann
Jangly 90s power pop with an alt-country accent. Mostly guitar driven sound with dueling leads, high arpegios, and big open chords, though some songs have a piano foundation hinting at the more singer-songerwriter style Aimme Mann would turn to later on. Fairly standard stuff in terms of rock song structures and sounds. The vocal parts are the stand out - she has an engaging accessible sometimes a bit nasal voice, a good sense of pop melody and some very nice harmonies, all of which are in service of delivering a heady introspective and romantic set of lyrics.
3
View Album
Tue Nov 21 2023
Ten
Pearl Jam
Grunge founding fathers or the last great classic rock band? At the time it seemed like the birth of something new with this dirty and heavy punk/metal infused break with the canon but 3 decades of hindsight and radio play make it seem more like the culmination than a rupture. Big 70s Zeppelin style riffs and grandure, Hendrix-inspired wahwah guitar leads all over the place, and Neil Young's chaotic electric intensity combined with a punk sensibility disenchanted with the overblown pomp of 80s rock. There's not a ton of variety on this album and they set the template for 1000s of terrible mid-tempo buttrockers to follow so its hard not to hold that against them, but these songs pretty much all rule. Energetic playing, impassioned vocal delivery, incredible hooks and anthemic choruses throughout.
5
View Album
Wed Nov 22 2023
Thriller
Michael Jackson
3 all time great pop hits, 1 all time abysmal collabo. The production on this album is so good, so many different parts all balanced just right and sounding crisp and clean and perfectly polished. Funky synth tones, tight compressed guitars and a crazy EVH solo, bright horns, energetic bass and an incredibly charismatic vocal performance. Its like the motown sound dragged voguing and screaming through the disco era into a world of soft-focus 80s sheen. Sometimes it's sickening how dripping in cheese it is, sometimes its so gloriously corny you have to embrace it. Lots of references to young things and who owns what babies - yikes!
4
View Album
Thu Nov 23 2023
You've Come a Long Way Baby
Fatboy Slim
He could've just been a good beat producer for some poppy hip hop, but instead had to become the most cursed invention of the 1990s: the celebrity DJ. The beats are pretty good and there are some cool electronic sounds/samples but just repeating the same stupid vocal clips over and over and over and over and over again on so many tracks is incredibly annoying - who is that for? "check it out now it's the funk soul brother" is a sentence too dumb to hear once, and now I've had to hear 475 times? Fuck you. The best part of this album is that it led me to Camille Yarbrough's Take Your Praise.
2
View Album
Fri Nov 24 2023
A Night At The Opera
Queen
I know it says opera in the title so they're intentionally going for this massive sound and songwriting excess, but it just ends up overblown and pompous. Freddie Mercury's vocals are spectacular - what a range and capable of so much stylistic variation. Brian May's guitar sound rules - all squealing barely contained chaos and an amazing combo of technique + melody with creative use of recording tricks for double harmonies. The electric piano(?) sound on Best Friend is funky and fuzzy and the bass is dynamic and lively in a Beatlesy way. '39 is an Irishish folksy jaunt, there are some prog-style tracks, some kind of Elton John piano pop rock. So, lots of interesting elements - but all together its a tedious chore. The songwriting is so maximalist, like just adding more parts, more key changes, more tempo shifts, more tonal breaks is the way to make a song better. The epitome of this, Bohemian Rhapsody, is the most overrated song in the canon - but they also include Love of My Life, a B-grade knock-off of themselves! With a harp fade out followed by a ukelele intro on the next track - stop it. The 70s would be so much better if all these rock dudes had never learned about the existence of opera.
2
View Album
Sat Nov 25 2023
One Nation Under A Groove
Funkadelic
Controlled chaos that's both genre defining and genre bending - bringing elements of jazz, rnb/soul, reggae, and rock together for a 45 minute funk dance party. There's a real house party atmosphere to this - like a performance going with a constantly rotating cast. Each song is loaded with ideas pulling it in different directions - vocalists come and go, guitar shredding fades in and out, the bass sets up the main beat then goes for a melodic wander, there's a guy standing next to the mic just making little comments, synths and horns have cameos for quick riffs and solos - but all it coheres around a rhythmic idea and tonal center, under a groove. The constant guitar solo over the top is such a funny touch, it's like a guy noodling along at home to an album accidentally got overdubbed onto the official release. The party vibe means it's pretty unfocused: the songs are a good time, but also a long time.
3
View Album
Sun Nov 26 2023
Dare!
The Human League
Ive always loved 'don't you want me' but somehow never listened to the rest of this album. It doesn't reach quite the level of earnest anthemic belt-outable pure pop genius of that hit, but is a demonstration of the possibilities of synths for making era defining sounds. Bright and light instrumental tone combined with a dark moody vocal, robotic rhythms and human heartache. 'Seconds' does all that perfectly with a deeply affecting minor key Electro Joy Division dirge. Generally though it's more towards the pop new wave side of the spectrum, it still retains a lot of the energy of talking heads style post punk.
Favorites: seconds, dont you want me, sound of crowd, darkness, love action
3
View Album
Mon Nov 27 2023
Larks' Tongues In Aspic
King Crimson
If the Grateful Dead is the psychadelic outcome of a bunch of talented California hippies dropping acid, King Crimson is the English nerd counterpart. It lets loose and gets exploratory for a while, but returns to a fussy prog version of psych with a stronger emphasis on composition than groove. The first half of the album album goes 'out there' through accumulating layers of overdubs (strings, flutes, horns, wind effects) and tight technical riffs in odd time signatures and songs with lots of different parts then it gets shaggier (and more fun) in the middle. Easy Money is a brilliant track with some amazing guitar work and a long 'jam' sandwiched between a tightly orchestrated head/tail. Talking drum builds slowly from some wind effects into a Soft Machine meets Kraftwerk repeat pattern with more and more lead instruments (violin, Fripp-ed out guitar, synth effects) coming in as the jam builds and builds in energy and tension into a somewhat artificial crescendo that sounds like birds screaming. The bonus track session recordings are more of the really good stuff - looser trance-like tension/release phillip glass + riffs and math rock stuff, deeper bass grooves and more guitar histrionics.
3
View Album
Tue Nov 28 2023
James Brown Live At The Apollo
James Brown
The sounds isn't great the but the performance is pure heat. Incredibly tight rhythm section doing instant switches between soul ballads and funk rave ups so uptempo it sounds like they're playing on 1.5x. The horns and bass carry the songs along, with some subtle guitar counter melodies and syncopation. It's all about the the vocals though: they reach beyond his throat's breaking point becoming raw screams and then dive back to controlled crooning. The songs are mostly short RnB/pop compositions that don't develop into the deeper grooves of later 60s/70s funk. They introduce James Brown and then it's over before you know it.
3
View Album
Wed Nov 29 2023
Honky Tonk Masquerade
Joe Ely
Texas country with a rock influence - particularly in the rhythm section. Great guitars: delicate crystaline steel string acoustics, twangy as hell tele sounds, gorgeous lapsteel and slide solos. The vocals are classic semi-nasal country baritone with the odd yodel and some close harmonies thrown in - lively, engaging, and well suited to the melodies. The titular honky tonk comes mostly from the pianah-based tracks like Fingernails that are just basic I-IV-V blues tunes played fast with a twangy vocal. I could do without the frequent accordian parts with make a lot of the arrangements sound like really corny fake Irish folk music. 4 pretty great tracks, a bit of filler, and 2 pretty bad ones.
Favorites: Because of the Wind, Jericho, Downtown, Masquerade
3
View Album
Thu Nov 30 2023
Chore of Enchantment
Giant Sand
Alt-Country with a Southwestern flair - why does a tremelo pedal sound of the high desert? It just does. Hushed vocals and a generally mellow approach: acoustic guitars, laid back drums, unobtrusive bass and then some 'flourish layers' of electric guitars, synths, and vocal harmonies - then the whole thing is drenched in reverb. Some songs take a harder rock approach with a bit more distortion and some squealing guitars along with a more robust drum part, but their hearts don't seem in it and it fizzles out quickly, returning to more relaxed coffee-shop fare. Somehow I'd never heard of this before despite it being up my alley and only slightly before my era, wierd.
Favorites: Punishing Sun, Shiver,
3
View Album
Fri Dec 01 2023
The Slim Shady LP
Eminem
The beats are inventive and lots of fun. Eminem's delivery is totally distinctive with his unique cadence, internal rhyme schemes, clever word play, and poly-vocal bits. It's a nasty artifact of late 90s shithead suburban white guy culture from the Kidrock and South Park era. He's rapping in character doing misogynist fantasy, but it's not like he has anything interesting to say about that other than repeating and performing it apart from the knowing patheticness of the character. But instead of really developing that he just inserts skits that voice the stupidest possible strawman moral majority critique of his work which he then gets defensive about. But damn he such an annoyigly good rapper and Dr Dre really killed the production on this one.
3
View Album
Sat Dec 02 2023
The Clash
The Clash
Powerful debut album introducing the core elements of the clash sound which they'd take to the next level over the next few albums. I'm always struck at how accessible clean and poppy this album is for being one of the foundational punk records. Garage rock bands were scuzzier than this, which seems relatively mild compared to like the Stooges. The guitar distortion is distorted but tight and compressed with very controlled playing. The songs have classic blues chord progressions and verse-chorus structures. The bass is fast and loud but melodic like an amped up Jamerson. There's some sneering snarling singing but way more harmonies than screaming and there are some really catchy hooks. Between the vocals guitar leads and bass parts the album is overflowing with melody. 3-4 really standout tracks, the rest is a bit generic but in a genre defining way.
Favorites: Remote Control, Police & Thieves, Janie Jones, Deny
4
View Album
Sun Dec 03 2023
Lost In The Dream
The War On Drugs
Autumnal and nostalgic, this album wears it's influences unabashedly and unironically. In 2014 being a rock band is like wearing a vintage shirt, it's inevitably a self-consciously retro enterprise whose success/failure is predicated on having good taste and knowing how to make old stuff fit. So this isn't the most original album you'll ever hear, but they have great taste in what vintage rock elements they borrow and a knack for arranging them all into something that's warm and cozy and fits perfectly. The guitar playing is simple, melodic, and totally effective, focusing on tone and texture over fireworks, it's echoey and washes in and out, sometimes fuzzy or all phaser warble and tremolo tremble, sometimes bright and clear and cutting. His voice isn't spectacular but sits just right in the mix; hoarse mumbly and shy but very affecting, it flits in and out of the layers of keys, synths, sax and guitar. They build tension and energy slowly through repetition of basic chord progressions, lead riffs and drum-machine sounding rhythms that becomes trance-like, peaking and deflating and going again.
5
View Album
Mon Dec 04 2023
Inspiration Information
Shuggie Otis
Loose laid back funk with a jazzy feel and a tropical psych vibe. Busy rhythms with drums, bongos and more percussion doing polyrhythmic stuff and a tight bass sound high in the mix linking that to the array of textural instruments: acoustic guitars, flutes, strings and horns and cheesy keyboards. There's odd fill/noodle but no leads/solos really - like pure background jazz bordering elevator music. The singing is a bit tuneless and flat. Pleasant but dull overall, great for the pre-show music at your next coffeeshop poetry open mic.
Favorites: sweet thang, Island letter, strawberry 23
2
View Album
Tue Dec 05 2023
Hot Buttered Soul
Isaac Hayes
Extended soul funk jams with the smoothest baritone vocals you'll hear, some ripping guitar lines, and a full on set of arrangements. I feel like this one is relatively overlooked and underrated, probably bc the song lengths make it very radio unfriendly and it doesn't have the tight pop song-writing of other soul singers' best work, but the performances are amazing and they really nail what they're going for in terms of setting a mood.
4
View Album
Wed Dec 06 2023
I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got
Sinead O'Connor
Spacey post-new wave sounds, the music is pretty slow mellow minor key stuff with a mix of piano, acoustic guitars strumming, electrics chugging and some synth/keyboard accents. It's all bedding for the wide-ranging and impassioned vocals/lyrics which are the real driving force of the album. Nothing Compares 2 U is an incredible performance but none of the rest reaches those heights - it's not bad, but a bit slow and samey.
3
View Album
Thu Dec 07 2023
Buenas Noches From A Lonely Room
Dwight Yoakam
Very high-production value country with a real compressed studio pop to every twang, the album nonetheless has a neo-traditional sound, highlighting classic folk instruments - fiddle, mandolin, banjo, accordion, lap steel - on the solos paired with a classic bright clean telecaster with dialled in slap echo+tremelo providing in the main licks and a big reverby drum sound. The vocals are straight from the nose in a classic kind of pinched 'high lonesome' style and the lyrics are textbook stuff all about the women that break your heart and the trucks that break your back. The accordion tracks especially bring a Tejano/cumbia sound to the Bakersfield style while the melodic phrasing and harmonies are often straight-up bluegrass. Overall, an odd combination of polished and rootsy that I can imagine annoyed a lot of people invested in the authenticity aura of country but it sounds good and is a musically fun strut through some bleak themes.
Favorites: I Got You, What I Don't Know, Buenas Noches, Pillow
4
View Album
Fri Dec 08 2023
Lam Toro
Baaba Maal
Powerful griot-style vocals and an array of Senegalese instruments like djembes, talking drums, fula flute and kora paired with nylon-string classical guitars, electric bass, full drum kits, the cheesiest keyboard sounds, epic guitar shredding and high-tech production techniques to create a pulsating polyrhythmic ambience. The vocals carry the drama of the songs with classic call and response story singing while the backing music tends to settle into a trancey groove that builds and intensifies then chills out as instruments come in and out to add layers or perform solos.
There's a such a fine line for artists like Baaba Maal before they slip into the lucrative boomer birkenstock and tie-dye 'world music' lane, losing contact with the living musical traditions and youth audiences that actually animated them. Oddly here its the most dated 'inauthentic' keyboard/synth stuff (like Hamady Boiro) that grounds this in actual West African popular music of the 80s/90s and keeps it wierd and interesting enough to be mostly on the right side of that line.
3
View Album
Sat Dec 09 2023
Odelay
Beck
Rappin' Pavement, pretty good. Alt rock with some great guitar sounds, genre-bending songs, warbly off kilter vocal delivery and a very practiced looseness. I both hated this and was intrigued by it when I was like 11 - I always listened closely to figure out why I didn't like it, until I started to actually really like it. One of the the best iterations of the eclictally ironic but earnest postmodern gen-X spirit.
4
View Album
Sun Dec 10 2023
Talking Timbuktu
Ali Farka Touré
Gorgeous interlocking lead lines from the guitars, kora and vocals, a relaxed mostly acoustic palette, and trance inducing drone/rhythm parts made of layers and layers repeating melodic figures and hand drums. There's a totally distinctive approach to guitar playing here that I wonder maybe has something to do with a applying a kora-informed sensibility combining rhythm and lead playing and featuring short expressive runs?
4
View Album
Mon Dec 11 2023
Chirping Crickets
Buddy Holly & The Crickets
Doo-wop harmonies, blues rhythms, country licks on a bright and crisp edge of breakup strat and a great ear for pop melodies make for a catchy and hugely influential album. I liked it more than expected though it's hard to hear it beyond the 'oh this is where the Beatles/beach boys/ventures got it from' reaction.
3
View Album
Tue Dec 12 2023
Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs
Derek & The Dominos
Not even the slide-god Duane Allman can rescue Eric Clapton from his native bland blues-dad territory. Layla is a good song I never need to hear again, but otherwise the best tracks on here are like filler on an 80s ABB album - big broad major-key southern rock chord progressions, mildly funky basslines, and mostly aimless noodle. The best bits are the harmonized gual guitar leads and Duane's slide solos/fills. Clapton's vocals are flat and soulless and, Cream aside, I've never understood the hype around him as a guitar legend - he's just a technically proficient but very mechanical Buddy Guy/BB King impersonator with nothing special about his phrasing, tone, or anything. There are so many licks on here some are bound to be good, so every couple songs there's something ear-catching like a cool descending run, a minor pentatonic->mixolydian transition, or a big melodic line. It's all very mid, but hey, there's a lot of it - real discount bin stuff...
2
View Album
Wed Dec 13 2023
Sister
Sonic Youth
Discordant and tense, these songs whip things up into a frenzy that either all comes crashing down or breaks like a wave into a (relatively) serene plateau. They have some of the best guitar in post punk, detuned drones, dense textures, airless distorted riffs that resolves into roomy crystalline chords, shoegaze use of effects combined with a faster punk energy - there's some really pretty melodic playing buried under the layers of
dissolution. Individual songs don't really stand out to me because the songs all have a couple of pretty different parts that are hooked together by tension/release moments or bridging riffs and there are lots of parts that happen just once rather than verse/chorsus structures: it's rare to return to a familiar place. But the album as a whole is very cohesive sonically and stylistically. One exception is Hot Wire My Heart which is like an oldies rock-n-roll song processed through the SY sound and comes out sounding like a classic punk. Overall though instead of songs there are individual parts that stand out - the amazing slow building part on Pacific Coast, the jangly introductory part of Tuff Gnarl, the break in Pipeline where it opens up and dissolves, lots more - but this feels like an album meant to be swallowed whole.
5
View Album
Thu Dec 14 2023
Bayou Country
Creedence Clearwater Revival
Bay area boomers pretending to be cajun swamp guys - what a wierd premise. The vibrato-tremelo guitar tone is pretty cool, even though it sounds like Austin Powers. Has this band been ruined by pop culture? Probably, but was there ever really that much there to begin with? Not really. It's not that there's anything really to dislike, just that there's nothing there. It's such dull plodding blues rock with no real stand out elements in terms of performance, song-writing, anything. It's like a high school jamband that hasn't learned how to move beyond a vamp + solo. They put out 3 albums in one year - terrible idea. A tight 30-minute 7-song best of CCR album would be a fine 2* entry in over-played classic rock lane, but 2 of their mid hits and 5 tracks of good ol' chooglin' not so much.
1
View Album
Fri Dec 15 2023
Want Two
Rufus Wainwright
Shoegaze Sinatra. A Thom Yorke impersonator with a wider range and maybe a bit more vocal talent but far less songwriting or sonic creativity, this album is all mid-low tempo woozy piano ballads. Some of it is pretty, some of it is pompous, most of it is boring. I never understood why this kind of indie crooning singer was so popular in the mid 00s?
1
View Album
Sat Dec 16 2023
25
Adele
If you're making a list of albums that defined a time period in terms of pure ubiquity, this would have to included for 2015-2017 - but that does tell us what a bleak pop landscape that was. This is very bland music combined with generic EMOTIONAL lyrics and BIG singing. It borrows some interesting sounds from 2007 indie synth pop on Send My Love, but ruins with with the millenial ooOOaaAA. But's its mostly just bleak piano dirge: Coldplay with the range for the tv singing talent show era.
1
View Album
Sun Dec 17 2023
Wonderful Rainbow
Lightning Bolt
Well I gave Adele 1* yesterday so credit to the algorithm for turning up something that definitely isn't that.
What if you had a hardcore band, got rid of the superfluous high frequency instruments and just cranked up (in every sense) the bass and drums? Stripped down riffs marinaded in terrifying distortion and blasted out furiously. Frenetic noise and untamed feedback played so fast you can feel it slipping out of their hands as they try to wrangle the squal. Having been in bands that wish we could've pulled this off I know it's harder than it sounds. Some cool melodic bits, some almost danceable riffs, some tension/release, a bit of a prog vibe sometimes then some nearly ambient stuff. It's not going into regular rotation, but not everything needs to be 'chillwave folk to study/stare out a rainy train window to.'
Favorites: Dracula Mountain, Longstockings, Wonderful Rainbow, Duel into Deep
4
View Album
Mon Dec 18 2023
Nowhere
Ride
More energetic than I expected with kind of a Stone Roses feel coming especially from the bass and the bright shimmery melodic lead guitar lines. But it isn't as as poppy and does a lot more of the drone shoegaze thing: big washy sounds, lots of delay/reverb on the guitar, vocals are kind of flat and buried in the echo. It seems like they do a lot of things well all at once that other bands took a lot further to be more distinctive - slowdive with the slow contemplative thing, my bloody Valentine the dense intense thing, spiritualized the orchestral psychedelic thing, the verve the pop adjacent accessible indie thing, radiohead the textural anxious tension thing.
Favorites: nowhere, sennen, kaleidescope
3
View Album
Tue Dec 19 2023
Beggars Banquet
The Rolling Stones
After realizing they're crap at psychadelia, this is the start of the best era of the Rolling Stones, initiating a 5-album cycle of country and gospel inflected blues rock. Sure, it's wierd British guys doing Americana cosplay, but they're better at it than any of their US contemporaries and nowhere near as gross as other English bands doing it. It's loose and free and fun throughout so much so that they even pull off a non-annoying honky tonk piano. The lead guitar work is dead simple and perflectly effective with a nasty snarling tone and quicky dirty bursts. The bass likewise is just right, dropping little fills and chord tones to propel it forward and tie it togther harmonically. None of these are my favorite RS songs, but the album as a whole is so consistent and coherent sonically and thematically.
Favorites: No expectations, Sympathy for the Devil, Salt of the Earth
4
View Album
Wed Dec 20 2023
São Paulo Confessions
Suba
Trip-Hop feeling combination of drum-n-bass beats, electro beeps & boops, and jazzy acoustic instruments (lots of piano in particular and some acoustic guitar leads) with that classic airy unresolved almost a-melodic Brazilian singing. The percussion parts are cool: lots of hand-drum fills in between the beats. Wierd that a potentially unique Yugoslav new wave x Brazilian jazz collaboration ends up sounding so generically 90s chill electronica - maybe something lost a move away from synths and into digital production?
3
View Album
Thu Dec 21 2023
Phrenology
The Roots
The mainstream gateway to underground backpack rap, this album is feels like the conclusion of the arc of 'conscious hip hop' that kicked off with the Native Tongues scene in the late 1980s and is the representative of that tradition within the amazing cannon of 2002ish rap. There's fun production and some great (if not especially innovative) beats with a neo-soul psyche flavour - taken to it's furthest in 17minute combo off Break You Off > Water. This isn't a party album with big choruses, anthemic hooks or danceable repetition, instead the emphasis is on the verses' complex lyricism: all densely packed-with allusions, playful and incisive lines and rapid fire delivery.
3
View Album
Fri Dec 22 2023
Murmur
R.E.M.
Jangly and bittersweet poppy alt rock. This is a solid debut that sets out the sound REM spend the next two decades evolving. The best bits are the hyperactive interactions between the bright clean guitar arpegios (great right-hand work here from Green) and the melodic Beatles-y bass lines. The singing and lyrics are in Stipe's distinctive style, but don't reach the heights that would come in later albums.
3
View Album
Sat Dec 23 2023
Garbage
Garbage
Dark and melodic with a surprisingly dancey industrial underpining from the bass & drums that I hadn't really picked up on when this was all over the radio. Dense production ala Smashing Pumpkins - the sound is really full across all the channels - very little breathing room. The hits have really catchy hooks and instantly recognizable line delivery, but the rest is a lot less memorable - fades into the morass of decent mid 90s alt rock.
3
View Album
Sun Dec 24 2023
Joan Armatrading
Joan Armatrading
Folksy soul with jazzy RnB harmonies and arrangements supporting a powerful vocal performance. The singing displays an incredible range - most comfortable in a warm and intimate low-mid range, she drops down into some smokey lows and raises up for alto flashes. It's light and easy going, singing in service of the song not to feature virtuosity. To start, the songs are driven by an acoustic guitar in a classic singer-songwriter mode but fleshed out with strings, horns, piano and some restrained electric guitar along with simple bass parts and swinging drums plus he odd solo from a pretty lap steel, or a smooth jazz sax. Songs are generally slow and atmospheric, wintery Sunday morning fare. In the middle the pace picks up for some funkier tracks like Join the Boys, People, and Tall in the Saddle that combine a bit of Funkadelic fuzz with the artificial sweetner of Stevie Wonder pop. It ends with some hot twangy blues on Like Fire and Saggle that have a rampant bass and astral slide guitar and a bit of country flair. The production is crisp and clear, a full sound but still roomy with lots of space between the instruments. I'd never heard this before but wow.
Favorites: Down to Zero, Join the Boys, People, Like Fire, Tall in the Saddle
4
View Album
Mon Dec 25 2023
Highway 61 Revisited
Bob Dylan
Pretty overrated. More noteworthy than actually great, this one ends up being significant mostly because of some boomer mythology about guys getting mad bc a guy played a new kind of guitar. Like a Rolling Stone is obviously a great song, the star is the organ part, but I never need to hear it again. For all the electro-furore, the rest is surprisingly basic folk blues cowboy chord stuff - high energy and well performed but musically not that creative. The slower moodier and atmospheric Ballad of a Thin Man is a nice change of tone that sounds way ahead of it's time, anticipating dozens of dark balladeers to come. Queen Jane Approximately is another great organ part combined with a busy lead guitar arpeggio part hinting at a surf sound. Tom Thumbs Blues has a woozy feel from the barroom piano and vibrato sweet sixths guitar slides. Overall, the lyrics and distinctive singing are the real featured elements - they're an effective combination and he has some great acerbic lines but there had to benin these endless verses. I've never thought they're worth the detailed parsing that's sustained the Dylan industrial complex...
3
View Album
Tue Dec 26 2023
A Christmas Gift For You From Phil Spector
Various Artists
This saccharine overdose has me reaching for the insulin. The vocalists all deliver brilliant performances, the melodic phrasing remains surprisingly fresh despite the saturation of these songs, and the hit machine soul side of the production/arrangements (horns, swinging rhythms) is in full effect. But I can't stand these damn strings all over every track and, going full Grinch-mode, the songs are truly grating at this point.
2
View Album
Wed Dec 27 2023
Halcyon Digest
Deerhunter
60s throwback whimsical indie rock with a lot of fuzzy chorus-ed out guitar parts. Dreamy power pop psych sounds with busy arrangements and major harmonies mixed with Lo-fi shambly vocals drenched in reverb. Some pretty guitar leads with clean warbly delay tone - prolonged into textural playing like at the end of desire lines. Slows way down sometimes into something with jazzier chords and clean guitar tones and very little in terms of rhythm section for a very bedroom feel - these tracks are kind of boring. Too many animal bands from this era, they all get blurred together.
Favorites: memory boy, helicopter
3
View Album
Thu Dec 28 2023
Bad Company
Bad Company
A thorough response to anyone who ever accused them of denying being bad company, this album is the factory settings of state fair rock.
1
View Album
Fri Dec 29 2023
Darklands
The Jesus And Mary Chain
Combine dark and light to create moody bliss - a dead simple but totally effective formula. A brooding reverby atmosphere pierced by bright melodic lead guitars playing simple major key melodies that soar over gloomy the distortion. Hit a big minor chord to kick off the bridge and release the tension back into a major by the end. The vocals seemingly straining their limits even in a pretty modest range make it somehow vulnerable and poignant. Contains one of only like 4 songs that get away with a 'do do do' chorus. A punk approach to loud stripped back musicianship combined with a pop melodic sensibility, an ear for richly layered guitar texture, unhurried songwriting and the patience to dwell in an atmospheric slow (maybe a bit too one-speed) zone make for a gem of gothy proto-shoegaze near perfection
5
View Album
Sat Dec 30 2023
Heroes
David Bowie
Title track is one of my favorites but the rest not so much - kind of tuneless and searching for a hook in an operatic style. Some cool sounds and production with the synths and stuff, but not put to much effect. The ambient Eno tracks at the end are great though. Best of Berlin Bowie would be a welcome release as in between the hits there's lots of mediocre stuff clogging up these mid to late 70s albums.
3
View Album
Sun Dec 31 2023
Antichrist Superstar
Marilyn Manson
Music for an alienated middle schooler's bedroom or a midwestern kind of racist strip club. Heavy and aggressive metal with enough industrial Trent Reznor influence that the slow sludgy riffs and intensely distorted guitar sounds have a distinctive groove to them. The higher pitch reverby guitar stuff - short phrases or tones repeated as a riff is intensifying - work well to build up an atmosphere and add space to the hyper-compressed mix. The singing is a nasty snarling growl screech that perfectly serves the shock-the-suburban-christians aim of the album, and boy did it. Hook line and sinker. I haven't really heard this since the 90s and in retrospect see how influencial it was on a lot of the screamo punk/metal/grindcore stuff like pg 99. Seems like them and Korn had a couple years head start on the rest more boring Nu Metal they ended up getting lumped in with and sharing a lot of bills with, but that let them establish themselves as a distinct thing. They were the band of choice for my middle school goth friends but even though I liked the songs and videos they were never really my thing. A 2-disc best of Nu Metal compilation could be a 3-4* album, but this is another victim of the late 90s 'CDs are 80 minutes and need to be full' approach to albums. One big hit, a few solid tracks, and probably 40 minutes of filler.
2
View Album
Mon Jan 01 2024
Who Killed...... The Zutons?
The Zutons
Rock revival ala Black Crows but for the post Strokes era. They're pretty eclectic in their influences and have a wide range of sounds/styles on the album - classic rock, funk, folk, ska, balkan jazz, indie pop, and alt country - and to go with that there's very diverse instrumentation. It's an enjoyable but pretty unoriginal album though - they're like a really good local band but with a pretty defined ceiling. Boomer hegemony is when a perfectly fine but nothing remarkable band like this is included in a list of essential albums because of how well they hue to the same preconceived template of guitar-based rock that conservatively defines the cannon.
Favorites: Not a Lot to Do, Remember Me
2
View Album
Tue Jan 02 2024
Violent Femmes
Violent Femmes
Folk sounds, punk approach, pop sensibility - a stripped down and lively album that's all strumming acoustic guitar, melodic bass, simple energetic drums and the odd violin. The vocals are great in the Lou Reed Jonathan Richman style: ironically swaggering and off kilter delivery. Blister in the sun is an all time great feel good radio song and there are few other stand out songs. Incredible that this from 1983, feels really 90s in a way I can't quite pinpoint.
3
View Album
Wed Jan 03 2024
What's Going On
Marvin Gaye
Surely there's nothing left to say about the vocal performance on this one: deeply emotional, sensitive and hyper controlled, fully attuned to the music. The backing band is incredible and the sound is amazing - lush, vibrant, and rich but full of room and atmosphere - some of the best bass playing recorded to go with memorable horns parts (the sax intro to What's Going On has to be the among most recognizable few notes), keys, organ, and the full motown thing. In that vein though, there are couple of schmaltzy string songs where there's an overdose of Maj7 chords and the vocals get a bit too wailing. This always gets a lot of credit as a protest album, but the politics are really pretty anodyne - "won't somebody think of the babies" "why are there so many problems" "who did this?" "save the children" it's all pretty apolitical really especially considering what was happening in Black politics at the time.
4
View Album
Thu Jan 04 2024
Architecture And Morality
Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark
The albums opens with some uplifting major key synth pop with a melancholy undercurrent, like a spiritual New Order. The bass is driving in a hard 4/4 time and the wave patterns on the synths accumulate into mesmerizing rhythmic layers ala Kraftwek, topped off by shimering keyboard melodies. This style alternates with more slowed down bleak introspection with long low drones and drums that clatter out of synch and out of the mix. In 'Georgia' we're back in pure pop territory almost Gary Numan, with a bright high synth lines weaving together more of a groove feel in the bass/rhythm parts. Guitars kick in on Begining of the End with a chiming clean chorus tone arpegio that really rips through the synth pallette. The vocals are classic 80s British electo-pop (a bit like Depeche Mode?) with a spoken feeling that's mostly low but breaks into song and reaches up for the emotional climax. The second vocalist (on Souvenir) has a higher range, but similar slow enunciated nursery rhyme delivery.
I'd heard of but never listened to this band, I guess they barely on the radar in the US in the 90s/00s before the LCD Soundsystem era revival of interest in 80s synth stuff - but this seems like a big step in combining the ambience of Eno and the trancey robo-disco of Kraftwerk with a pop emphasis on catchy melody and radio friendly song structures.
Favorites: She's Leaving, Joan of Arc (Maid), Begining of the End, Extended Souvenir
3
View Album
Fri Jan 05 2024
Penthouse And Pavement
Heaven 17
Funky new wave from the wierdly prolific Sheffield post-punk scene. Lots of that Nile Rodgers-style strat rhythm guitar high in the mix alongside the synths and cheesy keyboard sounds. Sometimes crosses into Talking Heads territory, sometimes into Donna Summer remix land. The very heavy disco influence and a sing-songy vocal style make this feel really plastic and goofy - but the Clockwork Orange reference in their name and the gang of Patrick Batemans on the album cover hint at a level of playful post-industrial cocaine satire going on here alongside the earnest embrace of some of the most excessively silly in retrospect 80s excess that's part of a liberation from the tiresome self-seriousness of authenticity-punk/rock.
3
View Album
Sat Jan 06 2024
Unknown Pleasures
Joy Division
There's nothing complicated or difficult here in terms of musicianship or composition, yet it's absolutely original and genre-defining. Punk slowed down until it becomes atmosphere, a gloomy spacious and echoey void they fill in with a sparse reverby snare, stabbed dischordant guitar chords, searching lead lines, ominous bass riffs, and miserable melody. The sound of a haunted and grim post-industrial winter. Primal, despairing, perfect.
5
View Album
Sun Jan 07 2024
Straight Outta Compton
N.W.A.
"Dre makes the beats so fun-fun-funky" its true. You can hear the roots here of the production that would dominate the 90s emerging from the sparse drum-machine big BOOM BOOM TISH formula with layering samples from a deep well of jazz, funk and soul - taken to an extreme on what's basically a genre-reinvention cover of Express Yourself, but more varied on most of the other tracks that borrow from 4-7 songs at a time to put a rhythm together. Having a bunch of different rappers performing across the album keeps it fresh, but the songs are all too long/repetitve and the album could be trimmed down a bit too.
3
View Album
Mon Jan 08 2024
For Your Pleasure
Roxy Music
Stop trying to make sax happen. I've never gotten the hype with these guys despite giving it a good go a few times. They're like a band made from the most annoying bits of David Bowie's discography and a twist of prog-rock fussiness. The operatic singing doesn't do it for me, the guitar tone is like a beginner dialing a DS1 to 10, the compositions get in their own way and never let any rhythm build up. Somehow the sax ends up being the best bit.
2
View Album
Tue Jan 09 2024
Aladdin Sane
David Bowie
If you'd asked me before starting the 10001 albums if I liked Bowie I'd have given a pretty unequivocal yes - but the more of his albums I listen to closely and completely the more I find him kind of tedious and annoying, with a few amazing songs scattered through a huge and hugely uneven catalogue. He's doing interesting stuff in pop culture, but I don't actually want to listen to most of most of his albums...
This album opens with a Rolling Stones style honky tonk track with that tack piano sound and bluesy guitars. The title track is more distinctive, chaotic pianos and woozy unresolved vocals harmonies flit around a solid groove on the bass. Then there's one of his signature show tune style story-sining tracks. Panic in Detroit sounds like Ziggy Stardust: bright overdrive and hand-drums for an upbeat glam sound that and climaxes with a fun dueling/harmonizing guitars panned left/right section. The doubled guitar lead sound re-appears on Time, another broadway style song with some cool piano/guitar interplay that opens up into an intense gospel meets glam choral outro. Let's Spend the Night Together gets back to the high tempo honky-tonk piano & dirty guitars Rolling Stones sound for a horny high energy rave up. Jean Genie is back to the glam blues formula: harmonica and a I-IV-V chord progression with theatrical singing all about fame and sexuality.
In a way, it doesn't make sense to rate this one as a discrete album. It's part of a whole multi-media project of film/video, stage performance, interviews etc through which he developed and played with this glam persona and carved out a space in pop culture and so much of that was responding to trends, styles, moods etc that would have made more immediate sense to a contemporary audience. It asks the important question, what if Mick Jagger was even more queer coded, but in a kind of space way? This album's meaning is so contingent on that multi-album multi-platform aesthetic project, that taken on its own outside of that context it isn't really that compelling: none of these are among his best songs and the sounds are all pretty familar stuff.
3
View Album
Wed Jan 10 2024
Fifth Dimension
The Byrds
Bright and Jangly guitars doing electrified folk fingerstyle picking arpegios combined with perfect close harmonies, sutbly melodic bass, and some well crafted arrangements mean this album is overflowing with melodies. It's at once exuberant and tightly controlled, exemplifying the style of tight fractal baroque psychadelia that proliferates inwards (vs say the let it all hang out liquid light show psych of 60s Grateful Dead). Eight Miles High gets into more 'freak out' territory with frantic drumming and guitar spasms, but they reign that back in quickly with a tight harmony. The raga-style drone on Why portends a lot of what's to come, but again, even though it emerges nicely from the chorus they confine this to a tightly bracketed segment that ends with an abrupt shift back to the verse, keeping the psych on a leash. Not sure what it means that I think this band is best at arrangments and stuff, but also I prefer the Dead's version of I know you Rider and Hendrix's Hey Joe - I guess it's the looser more improvisatory open approach they take over the tightly structured Byrds versions. The sitars and sitar-sounding guitars all over this album are really great and they're probably the best at that renaissance 9?) sounding melody/harmony in rock.
This list has made me realize that I like the Byrds more than I'd thought, but 5 Byrds albums, 2 Gene Clark, 1 David Crosby Solo (+2 CSNY), and 1 Graham Parsons might make this the most over-represented group after only the Beatles.
Favorites: 5D, Eight Miles High, Wild Mountain Thyme, Why, Psychodrama City
4
View Album
Thu Jan 11 2024
Cheap Thrills
Big Brother & The Holding Company
Sloppy psychadelia, loose let it all hang out acid rock based in blues. The bass provides a solid danceable foundation with some pretty deep grooves, the drummer kicks it along, and then the extremely awesome sounding fuzzy as hell squealing guitar and Janis Joplin take it turns wailing over the top (or not and both just go for it at once). I used to have a licorice-type reaction to Janis Joplin's vocals, but they've grown on me. She's maxing out, pushing her voice into the red: there's something earnest about the hoarse, scratchy delivery where you can hear the effort exceeding the limits of her ability. Nothing complex musically here but its very effective and one of the most enduring artifacts of hippy culture. The guitar on here is really great - that 60s Santana, loud and fuzzy reverby mostly pentatonic thing that gets epic/melodic and then descents into scattered squealing - basic as hell, but so much fun.
Favorites: Oh Sweet Mary, I Need a Man to Love, Ball and Chain, Peice of My Heart
3
View Album
Fri Jan 12 2024
Untitled (Black Is)
SAULT
Industrial soul that's forward looking and deeply rooted. Emerging from BLM, the lyrics are urgently political; at their best they're an expression of pain and rage, at worst it's a ripped from online a mix of sloganeering and irritating self-help affirmation. It's never very subtle, but that's not what the moment demanded of artists - and the songwriting transcends the immediate overt 'relvance' of the content. Overall this is a stylistically rich blend of sounds from across a wide spectrum of genres woven into a cohesive affecting album pushing soul forward.
Stop Dem and Hard Life are haunting church harmonies set against slow brooding grooves that erupt into joyous gospel jazz. Sometimes these transitions feel very forced, like mandatory optimism - they can't end on a down note so have a sudden turn out of nowhere from the deep solemnity of dark techno into kind of vapid 'everything's going to be alright' hippy outro. Wildfires, Monsters, and Sorry Ain't Enough swap the techno-bass for a jazzy RnB bass and more organic arrangements that continues the dark melancholy feel. Bow, the song with Michael Kiwanuka, adds an afro-psych (fuzzy wah-wah guitars + soukous arpegios) sound and pan-African thematic to the mix. Eternal Life floats on a blissed-out synth pop riff that the vocalists orbit around and as the beat rises and falls. Miracles combines a reggae groove and a trip-hop vibe to make a platform for powerful back an forth between the main vocalist and her backing singers. The album closes on the Motown sounds of Pray Up Stay Up, a simple dinky piano+deep bass hook with a southern spiritual refrain looping along - the chant remains even after the fade out.
9 albums in two years does suggest they're a prolific collective, but might benefit from some curation. A trimmed down double album of this and Rise would be really incredible.
Favorites: Wildfires, Sorry Ain't Enough, Bow, Eternal Life, Monsters
4
View Album
Sat Jan 13 2024
Disraeli Gears
Cream
There are a few good riffs and heavy sounds on here that presage what Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin would extend in the following years. There are also some real stinkers (Blue Condition, yikes) too though, and a lot of it just middling. Brave Ulysses is decent, but basically just a first draft of White Room. Plenty of fun guitar playing, but Clapton has to the luckiest right place/right time musician - just being around as a competent blues guy when fuzz and wah-wah pedals came out and plugging into that gives him this reputation as a pioneering wizard. The falsetto vocals are so annoying. I guess they were an exciting live band that jammed these songs out beyond the confines of mid 60s blues rock - the way the bass/drums hit on here I can see how that would work, but as a studio album it doesn't really capture that thrill.
2
View Album
Sun Jan 14 2024
The White Room
The KLF
Hard album to make sense of out of context - made for a party and a parody of the party, it's an artifact of a multi-national european dance scene and chaotic 80s postmodernist dada, it's hard to imagine this was ever intended to be listened to off youtube sitting on a sofa. Though it works unexpectedly well for a sunny Scottish winter weekend afternoon. The first half is hedonistic trance: big beats house music full with a hip hop flair from the samples and the odd rap verse. The second half is the hang over: ambiently melancholy and reflexive with slower tracks, strings and churchy lap steel sounding synths, and a reggae dub feel.
Favorites: The White Room, Build a Fire, 3am eternal
3
View Album
Mon Jan 15 2024
Freak Out!
The Mothers Of Invention
The foundation of the songs are fairly standard bluesy pop rock structures gussied up with Zappa's signature baroque doo-wop and jazz approach to composition, zany arrangements and instrumentation, and his satirical view on both the 60s mono-culture and emerging counter culture. Like lots of Zappa stuff, this plays with the boundary between novelty songs and real rock. He's at once one of the most serious, curious, and experimental composers in the rock cannon and one of the goofiest exponents of musical and lyrical silliness. It means his work both rewards careful attention and relistening, but also becomes more tiresome and less exciting the more you hear it. 'Trouble Every Day' for instance is a perfect execution of the California psych blues-rock genre but also demonstrates Zappa's boredom with and scepticism of the scene surrounding it. 'Help I'm a Rock' takes this even further with a Kafkaesque premise for a dissociative freak out anchored in a trance-inducing bass phrase - it's ludicrous but extremely good.
4
View Album
Tue Jan 16 2024
Buena Vista Social Club
Buena Vista Social Club
drowsy and uplifting - it's the feel of an icey cola in the shade on a baking hot day. Afro-cuban jazz combining Spanish guitar, Caribbean rhythms, jazz piano and salsa horns with close vocal harmonies. Loads of harmonic minor/phrygian melody for that distinctive phrasing. Could listen to this all day.
5
View Album
Wed Jan 17 2024
Since I Left You
The Avalanches
Sample heavy and uptempo electronic music - I never really get what this kind of music is for, its not exactly danceable club music and is too busy to work as background music and too stupid to be worth paying attention to. It's what they play in a heist movie during a quick cut montage, or what you have to shout over to have a conversation because someone thought it'd be a good idea to have an annoying DJ at a reception but it's too loud in an echoey venue.
1
View Album
Thu Jan 18 2024
Dirt
Alice In Chains
The most Black Sabbath sounding of the grunge cohort, this album is all about the top of the line sludgy sludgy riffs coupled with some great guitar lead lines that reinforce the main idea before going off course into some wah-wah territory. The chorus-effect on the dirty leads sounds really cool, bringing some bright tone tone the dark moody pallette. The vocals are the star though, soaring and diving they cut through the thick heavy mire of the slow grooves, belting out some massive anthemic lines. How he makes YEAH HERE COME THE ROOTSER sound so badass is hard to explain. They shouldn't held responsible for the Butt Rock that came after them, but you can see the template here - slow distorted and heavy with a hint of groove and a pissed-off sad guy wailing over top of it. They're so good at it you can see why it spawned so many pale imitators.
4
View Album
Fri Jan 19 2024
Chris
Christine and the Queens
Synth pop revival from France in the vein of Future Islands or La Roux. Bright and upbeat tones with a darker minor key mood give it that darkly euphoric bittersweet feel. Tastefully indulgent and skirting the line between earnestness and irony, the album is full of all sorts of corny stuff from the Nile Rodgers disco guitars to the cheesy synth/keyboard patches. Falsetto singing: fragile and introspective until it reaches for the big power lines. It's all pleasant enough, but it sounds like music for a Parisian H&M - trendy and fun presentation of glossy surfaces that suggest a darker understory.
2
View Album
Sat Jan 20 2024
Paul Simon
Paul Simon
Magpie songwriting with bits of reggae, Andean pipes, jazzy folk, Django jazz, overdriven electric guitar, bluesy finger picking, to go along with the main strummy acoustic sound. The recording and mixing is crisp and balanced - every part sits just right and there's a ton of breathing room making this very relaxing and unobtrusive background music verging on boring. That said, there's a lot of subtle songwritery stuff going on in the chord changes, voice leading and all that if you tune in and pay close attention.
Favorites: run that body down, peace like a river
3
View Album
Sun Jan 21 2024
Wild Gift
X
A more eclectic version of The Ramones, X has all the downstroke chugga chugga chugga distorted guitar, but mixes it up with more direct influences from surf, rockabilly, and funk for a slightly less teenage sound that straddles the vintage punk/post punk styles. Seeds of pop-punk and emo here as well as hardcore - fast riffs, (top notch) active melodic bass, catchy singing and even some harmonies.
Favorites: Adult Books, In this house, Universal Corner, White Girl
3
View Album
Mon Jan 22 2024
Bossanova
Pixies
The culmination of the post-hardcore indie trajectory before it's absorption into the majors as alt rock in the wake of Nirvana, the Pixies had forged a wicked blend of aggressive and abrasive punk sounds, slowed it down a tad and mixed in melodic elements from surf, angular guitars from post-punk, and some new-wave beats. Nothing on here is as good as the best songs on Doolittle (or Surfer Rosa) and you can kind of tell it's a band that has already accomplished it's perfect form and is trying to do more of that. But, they are damn good at doing that thing still. The vocals are just at the edge of control, a voice breaking yelling out the lyrics' abstract images. They're obviously most famous for their use of dynamics, mashing the distortion pedal to kick things up and switch intensities on a dime, but on this album they expand how they're doing dynamic juxtapositions. On Ana & Havalina, the bright clean tone on the lead guitars cuts through the dirty mix, highlighting the understated poignancy of the lines, keeping the fuzz at bay until it can't anymore and is overwhelmed. Joey Santiago is the star of this one, playing great melodic lead parts tying these songs together and standing out against the sometimes repetitive riffs.
Favorites: Cecilia Ann, Ana, Havalina, Down to the Well, Hang Wire, All over the world
4
View Album
Tue Jan 23 2024
Brothers
The Black Keys
If we think of classic rock as a genre rather than era, this album is one of the few that makes the case that their is some continued relevance and room for new contributions to the genre in the 2010s beyond bar bands and tribute acts. Part of the early 2000s rock revival indie era, The Black Keys along with the White Stripes, BRMC, Hives etc kept trying to make garage happen again. They're my favorite of that cluster of bands, and this is both their commercial breakthrough and fullest realization of that vision.
If you're going to be a guitar/drum duo, both of those parts need to be top tier, and this album pulls it off with flair. Even if you've never heard this, it feels very familiar: there's nothing super original in it, but the guitar work is a masterful and tasteful display of rock playing that's digested the rock canon - a huge range of tones (fuzzy, overdriven, bright clean, heavy, soaring, jangly, muted), rhythm parts that establish a solid groove and keep things interesting with fills and licks without being distracting or showy, some ripping solos that don't go on too long, total command of the pedal board with dialed in delays/reverb, textural tremelo, whooshing phasers/flange and a bit of wah. There's room left over to fill in with fun bass/organ parts to round out the sound. The drums are similar - nothing spectactular but perfectly in the pocket and committed to a groove. The vocals are played like a guitar on the edge of breakup, pushing into the red for a bit of scuzz around the edges of the verging on falsetto belted out impassioned delivery.
Favorites: Ten Cent Pistol, Sinister Kid, Tighten Up, Black Mud
3
View Album
Wed Jan 24 2024
The Dreaming
Kate Bush
Incredible to think that this was one of the biggest British pop stars of the 80s - even if this didn't sell like her other albums, it's existence speaks to a much higher public demand/tolerance for wierdness and a level of artistic risk taking and experimentation at the top of the charts that no longer exists. The thing about experiments though is that they don't always turn out. This one finds Kate Bush leaning way into some of the most annoying aspects of her sound: the alternatingly fluterring operatic and chimpmonky vocals, the challenging melodic phrasing defined by huge leaps into the high range, and the extremely slow arhythmic compositions, and overuse of cheesy strings. The ornate baroque arrangements are pretty cool, lots of random instruments, synth tones, shimmering effects and textures.
Favorites: Leave it Open
3
View Album
Thu Jan 25 2024
Raw Like Sushi
Neneh Cherry
The scratching and rapping really suck and surely would have sounded old-fashioned even by 1989 standards. The pop RnB stuff, while still incredibly dated (those synths! those drum machines! the keyboard strings! that reverb tone! that rangey breathy vocal belting out the hook over a vaguely house beat!), has much more of a classic enduring quality just for being a lot of fun. Would be better if they cut 1-2 minutes off each song though - nowhere near enough ideas to flesh out all these 5 minute tracks.
Favorites: Inna City Mamma, Love Ghetto, Buffalo Stance
2
View Album
Fri Jan 26 2024
Songs For Swingin' Lovers!
Frank Sinatra
The soundtrack to depressing microwaved ravioli and cloying sentimentality. Musically, this genre for me is primarily associated with Looney Toons and the vocals with comedians using the style as a way to do bits. So its hard to take seriously as real pop and I expected to hate this, but it was better than I thought - there's plenty of swinging big band stuff with energetic horn parts and dynamic bass/piano interplay that makes up for the occasional plodding schmaltzy orchestral ballad. The vocals arent exactly my thing but he is a masterful performer oozing cool confidence and control. The melodic phrasing always has some little surprise like a downward resolution running against the grain or an unexpected modulation.
2
View Album
Sat Jan 27 2024
Electric Warrior
T. Rex
Such a discrepancy between the heavy noise the cover promises and the chilled out woozy grooves of the music. It's a mellow sunny album with it's feet grounded in mid tempo blues guitar rock and it's head in the clouds of excursions into lush & orchestral blissed out psych. Never got the hype with TRex though, it's all very competent and there's nothing I actively dislike but it's pretty plodding and a bit boring.
2
View Album
Sun Jan 28 2024
Back In Black
AC/DC
#1 in bands you'll hear 1001 times before you die whether you like it or not. Probably a 2 on its merits musically, but subtract 1 for how many times I've been subjected to it. The first 30-90 seconds of these songs where they play a catchy little intro lick then run through the main riff are pretty decent - the guitar sound is bright and noisy with the compressed tightness of an overdriven Marshall, pure rock. But then the vocals kick in and it's awful and the guitar just play the same dull riff over and over. So many of these songs sound just like each other. Think about what else was happening in rock and pop around 1977-1980 and this just sounds totally regressive. Music for grandads clinging on to being 14. AC/DC is so tame and rehearsed, lacking the exhilarating thrill and rawness of the actually fun great adolescent bands.
1
View Album
Mon Jan 29 2024
Disintegration
The Cure
They have some amazing songs across their catalogue, but this is the cure's album masterpiece: 70 minutes of lush heartbreaking miserable bliss to wallow in. The washy sort of out of focus synth/guitar textures wash over you in waves and waves of warm beautiful atmospheric gloom. The drum and bass parts draw you further in creating a trance to lose yourself in. But when you're cascading and adrift, the lead guitar comes in, the sweet in the bittersweet brew: jangly and clear but drenched in reverb and delay and phaser, it picks out instantly memorable bright melodic lines that float gloriously above the trance and cut through the gloom, pointing up towards something light and ephemeral (Picture of You, Plainsong). Or it finds a swirling path through a minor key deeper into the bleak darkness (Last Dance, Disintegration). After a few heavy tracks in a row they mix up with a pure pop banger like Lovesong or the groove of Lullaby. Fascination Street brings it all together, a hard-driving pop-industrial beat/riff, a miasma of syths and guitars, and an anthemic belted out vocals. Robert Smith isn't gifted with huge virtuouso range or power, but uses his fragile voice to perfect effect, pushing beyond its capacity into a vulnerable wavering tone that perfectly suits the lyric's mix of pained anger, lovelorn infatuation, and nervous hope.
5
View Album
Tue Jan 30 2024
Let It Bleed
The Rolling Stones
They kick this one off with one of their best songs, and a perfect opener - the fade in, uneasy tremelo as the signature guitar part emerges conjuring a storm and the vocals jump in begging for relief. Like most of their stuff in this period, the rest album finds them doing Southern-face: it's all drawling vocals, slack slide guitar riffs, harmonica trills, honky tonk pianos, and a lot of choogle. This material is loose and fun and fine as it goes, but not as good as the some of the other stuff they put out in this golden era of Rolling Stones Americana. You could condense the best of this, Exile, Goats Head Soup, Sticky Fingers, and Beggars Banquet down into three perfect 8-song albums that'd all be five-stars. It's their best era but still pretty bloated, this album especially. The middle three minutes of Midnight Rambler is a rave up that goes nowhere, fades out, then comes back for no good reason - like they're trying to do a 60s Grateful Dead/Allman Brothers thing, but don't really get how to improvise because Mick Jagger can't not sing for a more than 50 seconds.
4
View Album
Wed Jan 31 2024
Arthur (Or the Decline and Fall of the British Empire)
The Kinks
Bright and jangly up-tempo songs that channels the Beatles and, with a tad harder edge, lays the ground for power pop to come. Great lightly crunchy guitar sound. There's a near constant backing vocal part that takes on the function an organ might have of giving some bedding/continuity alongside the more stochastic guitar/drums parts in addition to being a harmonic counterpoint. A few songs (Mr Churchill, Australia) get a lot looser, delving into a trancey psych jam that has an almost Can feel to it.
3
View Album
Thu Feb 01 2024
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx
Raekwon
Genius pastiche of the Mafia movie genre, appropriating it's poses and cliches to present scenes of a youth spent hustling. Playful, funny, and deadly serious - this album is an endless stream of verses from a hugely talented groups of MCs coming into their prime. Coming in a couple years before the total commercialization of hip hop and it's total take over of pop, there's a lot more room in the wu-tang formula for this expansive wordy delivery with minimal use of refrains. The production is stripped down - basic drum-machine beats, crackling samples, and simple melodic hooks on a loop give a cinematic atmosphere that gives a bare bones rhythmic structure and mood for the rappers to flit around.
4
View Album
Fri Feb 02 2024
Be
Common
Common's delivery isn't lightning speed, but he works his way through some serious verses here - more reflexive and inviting than the relentless 'lyrical mystical' style - smoother and easier going, this oozes relaxed confidence. There's a solid verse/chorus structure to all these songs, bringing the lyrical excursions back to a central hook and thematic idea every minute or so. The production is all Gospel soul and funk woven together for some a rich warm sound over pretty laid back loungey beats.
3
View Album
Sat Feb 03 2024
Definitely Maybe
Oasis
Sometimes the dumbest things are the best things. This is one of those times.
5
View Album
Sun Feb 04 2024
GREY Area
Little Simz
Alternates between heavy industrial brooding beats that set a dark ominous atmosphere and jazzy RnB numbers with a warm relaxed feel. On one of the industrial tracks (Boss), the vocals are pushed into the red, distorting and fuzzing out, matching the intensity and aggression of the delivery. Venom has a tense string part and ride cymbal part that's there to ratchet up the anxiety underneath the heated quickfire verses. On the jazzy tracks (Wounds, Selfish) everything is buttery and smooth, a quick but deliberate unhurried flow taking turns with gospel/soul backing vocals. A real lush vibe from the bass and piano, horns and guitar, even some flute. 101 FM sounds like the hip hop take on the hold music for a Chinese Restaurant. Inflo's production is excellent, lots of live instruments that come through crystal clear and give a real sense of space and presence to the recording. Succinct, self-assured, and coherent without being repetitive, this is a super solid album I wouldnt otherwise have known to pick out from the crop of Little London rappers.
Favorites: Selfish, Boss, Venom, Wounds
3
View Album
Mon Feb 05 2024
Henry's Dream
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
It sounds like the music that a band in a movie about the rise and fall of a shaggy glam rock band with a real bastard singer would play and you'd think, hey that sounds pretty decent for a band from a movie, they really nailed how a band like that would sound.
Some good atmospheric reverb&tremolo guitar sounds. The songs are dark and moody with a driving propulsive energy that suits the histrionic spiraling vocals. He has a very vegemite hit or miss voice, and it's a miss for me. That makes paying close attention to the lyrics - which meant to be the selling point? The storytelling and the characters? - a bit tough since it means focusing in on the most annoying part of the music: his pseudo Jim Morrison goth crooning.
I guess they have a cult following, from decent live shows and lyrical lore, but I wonder if it isn't maybe among people who, in general, prefer movies to music? Even the cover suggests that interpretation.
2
View Album
Tue Feb 06 2024
Get Behind Me Satan
The White Stripes
It's not that its bad, just that it's nothing. They had the crazy idea to make stripped back blues based rock music with some fuzzy distorted guitars and emphasis on big riffs, for some reason this is very exciting to a large number of people and they're treated as important artists. They'd be a fun local band to see live doing throw-back rock, but 7 Nation Army catching on as a stadium rock anthem elevated them way out of their league. I guess being one of the last big bands standing holding a guitar and being very deferential towards rock tradition has meant they're carrying the torch for rock dudes. But they're scrapping the bottom of that barrel and coming up with pretty minimal ideas.
1
View Album
Wed Feb 07 2024
Let Love Rule
Lenny Kravitz
Funkadelic, Prince, Stevie Wonder, Hendrix... he's copying from good source material. But the problem with wearing your influences on your sleeve is that when you're this bad it just reminds everyone how much better music there is they could be listening too instead. Insipid lyrics. "There is a woman who does drugs and has sex for money, ain't that a shame." "What if we like, did a love, instead of like, doing a hate?" It's so embarrasing when dumb rock guys really go for it with the deep social issues songs. Thin grating voice. Slow repetitive songs that just play the one-line choruses over and over again. The sax is good at least and Fear has a a pretty good groove until the boring riff kills it.
1
View Album
Thu Feb 08 2024
Strange Cargo III
William Orbit
This is what the future felt like in the 1990s. There would be two jobs: hacking and making techno to play at the permanent rave happening in the basement of an abandoned factory.
This album serves both ends, mostly chill ambient stuff to put in your ears and hack into the mainframe with the odd harder edge dance track for the rave. It's decent at the latter and good at the former in a boring but pretty way. So it'll get put on a work playlist and listened to much more often than stuff I like more but is too engaging.
3
View Album
Fri Feb 09 2024
Eagles
Eagles
The guiltiest pleasure. There's something that deeply and essentially just sucks about this band, but if you suspend critical judgement and let the cheesy vibes wash over you it's possible to feel that easy feeling, like the warm fading rays of a desert sunset and the chill of an evening breeze. But the you notice how trite it is or remember what creeps they are and it jerks you back to the vacuous reality of sad 70s corporate rock.
2
View Album
Sat Feb 10 2024
The Soft Bulletin
The Flaming Lips
I used to really love this album but can't remember why - good feelings left over from discovering them via Yoshimi and seeing their amazing live show a couple times? It's pretty listless for long stretches. Dreamy slides into dreary. Too many songs never really get going and when they do collapse back into themselves before too long. It feels like inflating a balloon with a hole in it. The strings and elaborate orchestral arrangements kind of bog it down and don't let the riffs really come through. There are some good moments of course. The sense of melody is great and even though its thin, underpowered, and just off key his voice is really affecting in it's wavering faltering earnestness. Some pretty moments of quite reflectivity, some nice little guitar parts...
Favorites: Prize, Spoonful, Superman
3
View Album
Sun Feb 11 2024
Exit Planet Dust
The Chemical Brothers
Those are some pretty big beats you have there, it'd be a shame if something happened to them.
3
View Album
Mon Feb 12 2024
3 + 3
The Isley Brothers
The up-tempo funk/RnB stuff with a full band is great, lots of intricate interlocking parts, Stevie-Wonder level textures/instrumetnation and loads of melodic energy - they jam some of the songs out with a borderline psychadelic flavor to go with the James Brown style rave-up. Their covers really bring their own thing to enliven what are originally some pretty bland soul RnB pap. Fuzzy wahwah guitars over basically a disco song is a surprisingly good combination, I'd never heard the full version of That lady, but it rips! Same for What it Comes Down To & Sunshine & Summer Breeze. The slow smooth ballads are kind of nauseating though - needs some acidic tang to go with the molasses!
3
View Album
Tue Feb 13 2024
Rock 'N Soul
Solomon Burke
What a voice! What songs! What a performance! What harmonies! What a recording! Hot damn.
The plucky little guitar parts on the second half take away from it, giving it a dinky jazz-psuedo-bluegrass sound that distracts from the core strengths of the album. It's like they accidentally left on a track of the engineer noodling along on top of the recordings. Otherwise, this totally nails the arrangements/instrumentation. The bass is great, the clean little guitar stabs are perfect, even the strings aren't too cheesy and I loved the Spanish bolero style horns on Can't Love em All. But that voice, damn!
4
View Album
Wed Feb 14 2024
3 Feet High and Rising
De La Soul
Playful and uplifting, this is an unbridled expression of youthful goofiness and pure creativity combined with a pathbreaking flow and refined taste in the sampling/production. Soul, funk, jazz, country, psych all paired with simple drum-machine parts and scratching give this a party feel of sharing records and swapping verses, roasting each other, doing bits, telling stories, flirting. Somber spiritual moments about love and transcendence flip immediately into teasing each others' gear and BO. Swagger, joy, reflexivity, and unmatched cool - the whole Native Tongues indie Hip Hop thing had it all.
5
View Album
Thu Feb 15 2024
Twelve Dreams Of Dr. Sardonicus
Spirit
70s prog with a goofy sci-fi style title, not an auspicious begining. Randy California is an all time great name so +1 for that. Some of it pretty basic blues guitar rock - fine but boring and done better by others. The more original stuff is more exploratory, combining that ye olde acoustic folk sound that English bands loved for some reason with wierder instruments/arrangements in a vague approximation of Zappa. Some of that stuff suffers from the prog tendency to shove way too many ideas into a song. Some songs are doing that theatrical Ziggy Stardust thing, very annoying. The best parts are the kind of trippy spacey songs that eschew those fussier prog elements and let the fuzzier riffs breathe. But this is basically the turd that you can polish enough to turn into Boston.
Favorites: When I Touch You, Street Worm, Rougher Road
2
View Album
Fri Feb 16 2024
Femi Kuti
Femi Kuti
The 1990s 'world-music' sheen diminishes the forecefulness of the previous generation's afrobeat, buffing off the edges and taming the wildness of the Kuti sound, turning it into something a lot more generic as it circulates primarily for a European/American audience. Femi's band's keyboard tones, super compressed bass sound, and bordering-on smooth jazz sax bits really detract from the hard-hitting funk fury of Fela. There are still some fantastic deep grooves here though and the horn riffs really rip. "No Shame" is a powerful anthem for migrant labor, reminding workers to take pride in who they are despite the degradations they face.
3
View Album
Sat Feb 17 2024
Out Of The Blue
Electric Light Orchestra
Prog on easy mode. Peak 70s bloat. A aliant effort at making a perfectly smooth album. Like using a firehose to fill a half pint glass with Paul McCartney's worst impulses. Or if Andrew Lloyd Weber wrote a musical based on Space Oddity. Once in a while there's a bridge that really hits, but it's a bridge over something you'd want to hear between to things you don't.
1
View Album
Sun Feb 18 2024
Time Out
The Dave Brubeck Quartet
Easy going relaxing jazz. The melodies and solos flit playfully around the rhythms where the beats never hit quite when you'd expect, the distinctive time signatures keep everything slightly and delightfully off kilter.
4
View Album
Mon Feb 19 2024
System Of A Down
System Of A Down
Tight, heavy and high-strung nnu-metal that stops and starts on a dime. Great tension building breakdowns, moody intros, and some pretty huge riffs. Doesn't have the rapping element of nu-metal, but does the bass/guitars perfectly - thick, compressed, down-tuned sludge tone with a bit of groove to the riffs. The vocals are the most unique element, a snarled rapid fire delivery with melodies using the harmonic scales for a slighly exotic flair, they push into the red for some intense operatic belting andlow growling screaming. Not sure why this one got picked over Toxicity, which made a much bigger impact and took their whole sound to its fullest expression...
Favorites: Spiders
3
View Album
Tue Feb 20 2024
I Should Coco
Supergrass
Usually a teenage release is a nasty mess, but this one has some real spunk. 'Alright' on its own makes this worth a listen, an unbridled blast of underage hubris and swaggering world at your feet energy, pure joyous optimism. They won't let you make em like that now of days. The rest of the album is less distinctive, drawing on the familiar pallette of British 90s guitar pop, but they do it as well as just about anyone: bright and crunchy guitars, propulsive bass, hyperactive drums and exuberant vocals. The Arctic Monkeys really stole these fellas' bag and ran with it, huh
3
View Album
Wed Feb 21 2024
...Baby One More Time
Britney Spears
Now a camp classic, but camp is about knowing something sucks and loving it anyway for the lols. I don't understand why we're all supposed to retcon this into being good. bUt ShE's aN iCoNiC pOp KwEeN! Who cares? Does pretending this is good somehow make it worth the abuse we now know she endured bc of it? Celebrating this is just celebrating the abusive corporate monoculture that victimized her. Sure, it was a defining sound of its time, but so was kid rock and the chilli's baby back ribs song. This music sucked in 1999 and it sucks now and nostalgia for pre 9/11 adolescence isn't fixing anything.
1
View Album
Thu Feb 22 2024
A Grand Don't Come For Free
The Streets
Loved this when I first heard it a few years after it came out but assumed that the emphasis on the storyline would make detract from it as a re-listen, but not too much. It's still a very funny and closely observed take on being at a bit of a loose end as an aimless youf all hanging on little details and clever lines expresses the quick escalation of a temper around minor irritations, the sense of purposelessness, being bored of your friends, the desire for something more but easiness of feeling defeated along the way, banal disappointments from everyone around you, the ordinary shitiness and small-mindedness of everyday life, simpe contentment turning into self hatred, the annoyance of going out and not really enjoying yourself but kind of trying, hearbreak and accrimony. The production is simple and effective, basic mood setting beats link the feel and emotions of the story to the rhythms and color of the music - the modal shift in empty cans is perfect, but mostly the music settles back, letting the verses take the lead moving things forward.
Favorites: Blinded by the Lights, Such a Twat, Fit But You Know It, Dry Your Eyes
3
View Album
Fri Feb 23 2024
Technique
New Order
The best part of New Order (apart from the hard-driving bass) is the transition from the dark minor to the uplifting major - but this Balearic inspired album mostly sticks to the majors, which combined with the pure corny synth tones gives the whole thing a very candyfloss feel. Sometimes that sugar rush really hits just right though and a wave of pure 80s cocaine indie disco fever washes through your veins. The bass is just as good as ever and the choruses are really huge. His voice is so limited and he rarely pushes it beyond a very narrow range close to a speaking voice - the melodic phrasing within that is also pretty limited, but very much part of the signature New Order sound.
As much as I love New Order, this isn't one of the albums I would have chosen for this list. But, they're a singles band not an albums band, but I guess you can't just include Substance, even though it really their most iconic release. Listening to it more closely than I had before, and not evaluating for what it's missing (the remants of Joy Division and post-punk), it stands on it's own very nicely and is pretty much a perfect dance rock album from this era alondside albums like Screamadelica. It's an intersting transitional album between the new romantics 80s synth pop sound and the 90s house/techno Ibiza rave thing.
4
View Album
Sat Feb 24 2024
My Aim Is True
Elvis Costello
Lots of the songs are basically genre tributes and so don't feel especially original. You get the sense that this is a performing bar musician comfortable doing a lot of sounds but without a sound of his own. The consistent point is the vocal delivery and lyrical POV - he has a very distinctive and well developed sense of melody and acerbic lyrics. It's mostly all pretty uptempo and driving with a consistently restless feeling and relentless energy. The backing band brings a lot of that, plenty of fun accents and fills to go with the solid bass/drum foundation. He doesn't slow it down too often, and when he does it stands out: Allison is a classic lament to seeing a fleeting crush be with someone else in a deeply disappointing way.
4
View Album
Sun Feb 25 2024
Introducing The Hardline According To Terence Trent D'Arby
Terence Trent D'Arby
A fun blast of 80s cheese - fwompy bass, disco guitars, unabashed synths laying down some funky pop.A great voice.delivers a strong vocal performance and some catchy hits. But it's basically a Stevie Wonder / Michael Jackson / Prince photocopy, so why not just listen to the real deal?
Favorites: who's loving you? Wishing well
2
View Album
Mon Feb 26 2024
Green Onions
Booker T. & The MG's
You know how everyone thinks Otis Redding songs would be way better without the vocals? Well finally an album that's just the band!
3
View Album
Tue Feb 27 2024
The Suburbs
Arcade Fire
Mid-tempo and lushly orchestrated with a massive instrumental ensemble, this is an affecting rumination on having been young from the other side of a kind of disillusioned weariness: "one day they'll see it's long gone." It's an early onset middle age album, and a bit boring at times - partly as a means to produce the feelings its about: uneasiness, tired tension, vague foreboding. But there are some pulsating synths and soaring guitars that whip into a frenzy every so often too. The vocals are searching and warm and earnest, mostly eschewing the massive arena choruses for a breathy 70s singer songwriter sound. They seem very invested in the album as a form, this isn't quite an indie rock opera or concept album, but it is a very cohesive hour thematically and sonically that approcahes its themes from a few vantage points and builds to a big peak. It's got momentum to, like an econoline van rolling down a long hill, but it in a cinematic way. Sprawl II really brings it home beautifully: a synthy neon sound glowing over a dark gloaming.
Favorites: Half Light II, Wasted Hours, Sprawl II
3
View Album
Wed Feb 28 2024
Call of the Valley
Shivkumar Sharma
The combination of drones, complex but lowkey & low tempo percussion, looping recursive melodies, and general spaciousness makes this a very relaxing meditative album. It remains very understated and doesn't work it's way up to an intense peak the way other Indian Classical Music I'v heard does.
3
View Album
Thu Feb 29 2024
Two Dancers
Wild Beasts
Very 2009 indie: in the high end you get shimmering glossy textures from the guitars and synths, in the low end there's a head-bobbing groove but too slow to really get you moving, this leaves middle open for a spacey ethereal feel. The bass keys guitar and vocals swap interlocking melodies in a round in this room. The sense of drama in this spacey pretty vibe comes from the vocals' operatic delivery. Perfectly fine in design and execution but hardly an essential must-hear album.
2
View Album
Fri Mar 01 2024
World Clique
Deee-Lite
As the retro machine recycled flower power for a new generation high on ecstasy and the end of the Cold War, it unleashed some of the most insanely upbeat and joyfully naive music of all time in the early 90s to spiritually balance out the dourness of grunge. There's one idea and it's not that good, but they pursue it to its logical conclusion and its hard to be too curmudgeonly about such a goofy album, all they want is a good beat after all, and they have more than a couple to share. I was wondering where the groove was, now I know: it's in the heart!
2
View Album
Sat Mar 02 2024
At San Quentin
Johnny Cash
The recording sounds like shit, he only knows two chords and the drummer only does the train chugging beat, but the songs rule, his voice is incredible and it's a hell of a performance. The harmonies and playful back and forth with June Carter bring a dose of levity to a set that's mostly dark story songs about dying at work, being on the lam or getting locke dup. This one isn't quite as good as Folsom, but the cover is way cooler.
5
View Album
Sun Mar 03 2024
The Köln Concert
Keith Jarrett
Very meditative - lots of long repetitions of pretty simple vamps to establish a harmonic center and rhythm and then free ranging exploration of the melodic possibilities that affords. Some cool emergent stuff where ideas from one hand feed into the other and impromptu phrases turn into repeated figures and themes. Like a lot of long-form improvisation you can focus in on the details or passively let it absorb you to set a mood. Perfectly suited to the work I needed to get done this morning. I've listened to this a lot over the years without ever knowing the background story behind it.
3
View Album
Mon Mar 04 2024
The La's
The La's
'There she goes' is extremely annoying, just slathered in cloying John Cusack face vibes. The rest is Beatles knock off indie pop for the post-Smiths era with a garage rock twist. It has a nice jangle to it, some psychedelic flair, and the hooks are strong. It gets better and better as it progresses though, dropping the bubblegum pop and getting into more exploratory deconstructed territory with a darker edge.
Favorites: feelin', freedom song, failure, looking glass
3
View Album
Tue Mar 05 2024
Remain In Light
Talking Heads
Pure kinetic perfection that appropriates all the most exciting energies of its era to create something unheard and strangely alien. Relentless grooves, complex poly-rhythms, hyperactive guitars that are at once post-punk and disco, new-wave sythns, funk bass, Krautrock trance, lush gospel harmonies, intriguing imagistic lyrics and off the wall charismatic vocal delivery. Nervous, ferenetic and anxious and yet totally self-assured in vision and delivery. I've listened to this thousands of times and hope to listen thousands more, one of the best albums ever recorded.
5
View Album
Wed Mar 06 2024
Very
Pet Shop Boys
The backstreet boys if you dipped them in glue and dragged them through New Wave. Incredibly glossy production and dandelion light vibes. Ahead of it's time, but the bright lightness is a dark ominous sign of the boyband bubblegum tsunami that the pop factory would unleash a few short years later. A few welcome tastes of the signature pet shop boys speak-sing delivery (Yesterday When I Was Mad) and some nice rise and fall melodies with pretty distinctive phrasing, but for the most part they've moved on from the 80s synth pop sound for a fast Scandi techno pop thing that is really not my thing.
2
View Album
Thu Mar 07 2024
69 Love Songs
The Magnetic Fields
This album is nothing if not a testamanent to the raw human urge to create. There's something inherently self-indulgent and obnoxious about this whole project, but they do pretty much pull it off - it's more twee folk inspired indiepop than anyone could ever need, but hard to begrudge a bit of eccentricity and commitment to the bit. Systematically trying to find so may different approaches musically and lyrically to such a familiar topic does produce some great juxtapositions of perspective and feeling.
Somehow it's both eclectic in its genre borrowing and very samey - inevitable after 3 hours I guess. They're good at powerpop, indie folk, alt country, and that kind of high-desert Leonard Cohen meets Calexico thing (Underwear), but very bad at gospel, piano ballads, euro electopop, and all the kinds of jazz.
Some poignant turns of phrase and disarming melodies, lots of pretty guitar sounds, the odd synth lead, lots of duds and plenty of keepers - again, inevitable after 3 hours. Hard to be negative about an album with so many great songs, but there is SO MUCH FILLER. 20 Love songs would be a nearly perfect album. With 69 songs there's so much opportunity to make terrible decisions, like sticking a flute on the otherwise good 60s psych pop Sweet-Loving Man or the excessive stereo panning on Abigail. The really low pitch singing songs are unbearable, especially when he goes into that amelodic warbling (Cactus, Busby) and the ukelele based songs are as irritating as all ukelele based songs (Pretty Girl is Like, Nothing Matters when we're Dancing). It's hard not to resent them for creating the template for Sufjan Stevens and wave of crooning cloying banjo/ukelele twats who followed suit.
Favorites: All My Little Words, I Don't Want to Get Over You, Sweet-Loving Man, Time enough for Rocking, Grand Canyon, No One Will Ever Love You, Papa Was a Rodeo, Epitaph for My Heart, Underwear, I'm Sorry I Love You, Death of Ferdinand de Saussure, Yeah oh Yeah! How to Say Goodbye
4
View Album
Fri Mar 08 2024
Dr. Octagonecologyst
Dr. Octagon
Love the trip hop production - great beats and nice spacey atmosphere. Few things have ages as poorly as scratching though, and this album has way too much of it. The flow is smooth and playful, building up the stupid character of Dr Octagon and his porno-bio-political universe. It's definitely more rap for rock critics who prefer a dense lyrical concept album over the actually popular hit-oriented party rap.
3
View Album
Sat Mar 09 2024
Stankonia
OutKast
One of the real standouts in the class of 2000 rap golden age, this album is overflowing with musical ideas, huge hooks, kick-ass cameos, hilarious verses, and unstopable energy. Like the rap Prince, Outkast is a sponge steeped in American music from soul and funk to rock and hip hop to disco and house. Electrocute that sponge until it squeezes out an album and you get Stankonia, an eclectic and thrillingly produced 75 minutes (dear year 2000, you don't need to fill up the damn cd!) of otherworldly beats and Atlien rhymes.
5
View Album
Sun Mar 10 2024
Bringing It All Back Home
Bob Dylan
The backing band on the first half has an incredibly loose and relaxed jamming feel, like they're warming up playing a few familiar numbers everyone has known forever and played a million times. So much of the energy in these versions comes from there, and seems to inspire Dylan to deliver the vocals more freely,.with more to play off and a strong beat to work off. Subterranean wouldn't work nearly as well solo acoustic, so it's so funny that that's the part all the folk dorks got mad at. When it's just him and acoustic guitar and there's a lot less to balance out his annoying voice it's pretty grating, Gates of Eden is just verse after tedious verse and 3 chords for like 6 minutes. It's alright ma has a bit more dynamism and variety, but drags on too. The return of the bass and another guitar on baby blue lifts that song: gentle countermelodies and simple harmony giving so much more to latch onto and deepening the feeling. Some songs just fade out or just stop feeling unfinished - great song writer but not a great arranger - which is why he's been covered so well so many times.
4
View Album
Mon Mar 11 2024
Fragile
Yes
Prog dorks are so impressed with themselves for having heard classical music. Who cares?! Get over it. This one is better than the yes album bc there is some cool synth stuff (roundabout) and bc they abandoned the flutey folk sound for something with harder riffs (5%) with bass parts that rip (heart of the sunrise) and even coming close to having a groove (the fish). But good lord this crap is always on the precipice of being extremely annoying. Totally incoherent songs where 30 seconds of a good idea immediately ruined by a hard right turn into some goofy nonsense.
Favorites: the fish, the first couple of minutes of heart of the sunrise, the part of America where they're doing an Allman Brothers parody until he starts singing
2
View Album
Tue Mar 12 2024
Exile On Main Street
The Rolling Stones
The first Stones album I got into, a sprawling masterpiece of loose blues, twangy country, and gospel harmonies. The recording captures something magical in every performance and the production leaves a lot of space for it all to live in. There's a lot going on in every song, and it can feel crowded like a bunch of people jostling around a bar, but then eases up and opens out for an impromptu jam in a shabby living room - a crappy old piano in the corner, a couple of just about in tune guitars noodling along, some tipsy singers chasing the melody, a guy with a sax walking in to blast a few notes, a laconic drummer doing as little as possible, a bassist taking it most seriously and having the most fun of anyone...so good. This is hands down the Stones' best album and along with the Dead's live shows this same year probably the highpoint of the early 70s country-rock thing.
5
View Album
Wed Mar 13 2024
Crossing the Red Sea With the Adverts
The Adverts
Never heard of this, but (even though the album came out once punk was already dead) it's great 1st wave British punk so basically just regular ol' rock played fast and sloppy with a bit of a snarl to it. Classic teenage themes of being bored, rejecting religion, fighting bullies, staying up late and hanging with the fellas. Lots of chaotic energy, a lingering pop sensibility that leads to some very catchy melodies, and despite the adverts, songs with 3+ chords! The Great British Mistake is incredibly prescient for some 70s punks - staring complacently at your own past as history passes you by. Hmm...
Favorites: One Chord Wonders, Bored Teenagers, Newboys, On Wheels, Great British Mistake
3
View Album
Thu Mar 14 2024
Sulk
The Associates
Synth-driven and very atmospheric 80s New wave. Lots of high-tone keys that texture and convey lead/counter-melodies. They get lots of strange and experimental tones/sounds from these keys - like a maxed out chorus pedal sound, a melting song-stopping effect. Vocals are a coy tenor, variously operatic and snapped out (a bit like Bauhaus). There is some swirling textural guitar work creating a stormy unsettling feeling on some tracks. Overall, it's a mixture of poppy major key songs and some dancey tracks but generally more minor key drones/dirges. Reverby drums add a lot of space.
Favorites: Party Fears Two, Arrogance Gave Him Up, Gloomy Sunday, Better This Way
4
View Album
Fri Mar 15 2024
The Genius Of Ray Charles
Ray Charles
The first half is big and bold but sometimes woozy and swoony brass band full of glorious horns just bubbling up. RC delivers a hot vocal performance that brings it to a boil. It's big band jazz arrangments of classic blues. The second half is piano ballads with string adornment that cool it all the way down. This verges more into schmaltz, but the depth and range of the vocals overcomes the corny studio treatment its subjected to.
4
View Album
Sat Mar 16 2024
Doolittle
Pixies
Surf punk from the beaches of, er, Massachusetts. This album induces whiplash in all the best ways: stop-start quiet-loud melodic-chaotic tension-release. Squirmy little guitar leads explode into huge riffs and even doubled up harmonic lines. The culmination of the post-hardcore wave, they also borrow liberally from the poppier 80s college rock sound for a bit of jangle, a knack for an extremely catchy chorus and fun lines to belt out. The band is a tightly coiled device that explodes on a whim. The lyrics are all abstract imagery taken from a world of industrial pollution, disillusioned relationships and dreamy free association. Not every song is a winner, but there are 6 or 7 all time great tracks on here.
5
View Album
Sun Mar 17 2024
The Velvet Underground
The Velvet Underground
The VU's twee indiepop album, they depart from the hard-edge dissonance and dark psychadelic explorations of noise of white light/white heat and instead deliver a of couple brooding and bittersweet love songs, a couple of classic singalongs, some proto-punk spirituals, and an experimental sound-collage story. It's not as a great in total as their other albums I don't think, but the highs are so high. Pale Blue Eyes & Candy Says are as simple and poignant as it gets, while What Goes On and Begining to See the Light are surprisingly upbeat rockers. A great less is more album - there's nothing flashy or complex here in terms of musicianship, performance, or even songwriting, just a stripped back simplicity of vision and commitment to melody and a mood.
5
View Album
Mon Mar 18 2024
Debut
Björk
It’s club night at the fairy-glen. This album is at its best in techno-mode with big house grooves and driving uptempo beats (Big Time Sensuality, Crying) where Bjork plays the role of the disco diva-vocalist over the top, taking that role into spritely and unpredictable elfin directions. The vocal performance is amazing, lines that start as guttural growls rise and rise to soprano fluttering climaxes. The darker slower tracks (One Day) combine moody synth beats with more layered rhythms moving slightly away from the 4 on the floor sound to achieve a kind of bleak trance effect. There’s some cool jazz borrowing (Human Behavior, Aeroplane) with organic horns sounds to cut through the synthetic textures. As wide ranging as this is, it pretty much all hits, the only one that doesn’t work is the really sparse harp+vocal track (Like Someone in Love). Totally unclassifiable, but probably the best electronica with an experimental rock sensibility hybrid stuff to come out of the 1990s.
5
View Album
Tue Mar 19 2024
There's No Place Like America Today
Curtis Mayfield
The king of the wah-wah pedal and the master of the ultimate falsetto, Curtis Mayfield delivers a set of slow-burning funk soul. The bass makes this work - spare and efficient, hitting a few clustered notes to keep the deep groove going and creating a vast opening for the other instruments to gather in and build up the harmonies and rhythms. It's the classic CM combo of a a very laid back and gentle album musically with deep themes. The lyrics alternate between romance and sociology, delving into violence, inequality, and the endurance of hard times in post-Civil Rights America - drawing the two strands together in the end, uplifting loving brotherhood as the way of making it through. So in Love is the only really stand out track though. The entire album is WAY slowed down and relaxed without much variety, like turning on a tap for 35 minutes of pure Mayfield,
3
View Album
Wed Mar 20 2024
The Last Of The True Believers
Nanci Griffith
Tried and true americana songwriting with hokey as hell lyrics and I love it. Inject that bittersweet lapsteel sound straight into my veins. Her voice is great, and the way the other instruments and vocalists float around her melodies, harmonizing and passing the lead back and forth brings an exciting choreographed energy to the arrangements. The little mandolin fills pop in once in a while to kick it up a notch, then the fiddles ease is back down. Very pretty very soothing and a relaxed if melancholy feel. It's extremely faux-rustic tasteful BnB in a converted Vermont cheese barn, but god damn if it doesn't hit you right there in those folksy autumnal feelings.
4
View Album
Thu Mar 21 2024
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
Kanye West
Safe to say, there's a lot going on. This is basically radio-pop from the post-genre hip hop hegemony era. But it's also a concept album that asks an important question: what if an extremely famous guy was also extremely horny? The defining feature here is the maximalist production. There's some incredibly lush gospel stuff, some funny appropriations of black sabbath and king crimson, some dumb skits, some annoying choruses, some tiresome mediations on fame and celebrity (yawn), some attention grabbing verses, some spaced out deep beats, a lot of propulsive forward energy, and oh shit, is that RZA?! Nicki?! Raekwon!? Kanye is a tedious bore and a mid rapper, but also a masterful producer, beat-maker, hook-writer and creator of interesting audio-collages.
3
View Album
Fri Mar 22 2024
Oracular Spectacular
MGMT
One trick ponies with a pretty fun trick - blending high energy electroclash with a chilled out psychedelic sensibly. Some of the best hooks of the decade to go with some fun beats and synth sounds and top tier melodic bass work. The drop on electric feel is so damn good. Kids is destined to be on every millennial nostalgia playlist for eternity. Starts to drag on the 2nd half when they switch from synths to guitars and become a Bowie tribute act - of moons has a cool freakout solo bit and post rock outro though.
3
View Album
Sat Mar 23 2024
Vol. 4
Black Sabbath
Slow, heavy, and enveloped in a thick fuzz, but enough about me! Badoomtish. A bit disappointing since I love the first three Sabbath albums. This one has never stood out to me even though I know it has a big reputation, so I was eager to give it a close listen. But, I was right. Vol 4 is a bit samey and the production isn't great. It sounds a flat and doesn't have the huge sound you'd want from a stoner metal album or the high energy you'd get from metal later in 70s/80s. This album also doesn't have the terrifying sense of dread and foreboding they captured on their debut. There are some great riffs though, Iommi rips some sick solos, and Ozzy wails all over it...but still, kind of Sabbath-by-numbers. It's like they woke up from a binge and forgot how to play Master of Reality, heard it once, and then had to recreate it. I'd take that album over this one 100% of the time.
3
View Album
Sun Mar 24 2024
This Year's Model
Elvis Costello & The Attractions
I'm not mad, you're mad! I'm just bitterly seething and telling anyone who'll listen I don't even care. His best album by miles. Great combo of 60s pop song writing and new wave sounds, of swirly organ and funky synth. The bass parts are so good, really the load-bearing element here, carrying the groove and ripping lines all over the neck. He'd be way more popular if he'd quit here instead of sticking around being an incredibly boring VH1-style loser for 4 decades
5
View Album
Mon Mar 25 2024
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
David Bowie
Oh cool another rock opera. All these dudes with mountains of drugs convinced that albums need a plot and that writing musicals is some kind of high concept achievement. This one at least has a few good chunks, like the 30 they hit three chords in a fast chugga chugga way that the Ramones would spend their career copying, and some of the sax stuff. But overall, this is pretty annoying and one of the most overrated albums.
2
View Album
Tue Mar 26 2024
Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
80 minutes of this guy?! On a Monday?! "The Lyre of Orpheus"!? Come on man, give me a fucking break. This album has the frantic energy of a mega-church band trying to whip the congregation into a frenzy with an overwhelming deluge of keyboards and big reverby drums and wailing. Sometimes that's pretty fun. The bass is really good throughout - melodic, driving and high in the mix. There's also some nice atmospheric/textural stuff and some cool guitar parts. I just find the songwriting to be very conventional big bland rock but with grand pretensions to it. And I don't like Tom Waits enough to want to listen to a pale imitator. Every song seems like it should be wrapping up, but then there's another verse/chorus, and bou does it start to drag in the moodier slower second half. It has a cool film-noir feel to it, but the whole thing really overstays its welcome.
Favorites: Messiah Ward, Let the Bells Ring, Easy Money
2
View Album
Wed Mar 27 2024
Talking Book
Stevie Wonder
Love the funky clavinet tracks, hate the schmaltzy piano ones. His voice is so weird: he has such control and range and subtlety with it, but he loves these unresolved jazzy minor11th or whatever melodies that mean he always sounds off key. Music theory heads love to figure out all the little modulations and chord voicings and stuff he does, and that's neat and everything, but fails to ask the basic question of it slaps, and too often, this does not. Especially when you have Superstition just sitting there demonstrating how hard he can rock its very annoying wading through all this over-thought wishy washy stuff. That said, there's some really fun synth noodling thrown in there.
3
View Album
Thu Mar 28 2024
Music for the Masses
Depeche Mode
On paper I like all the elements of Depeche Mode - the dark and brooding synths, the deep booming vocals, the goth electro-new wave beats, massive reverby drums, the lush arrangements, the whole miserable gloomy post-pop vibe - and yet somehow they've never really connected with me beyond the really big anthemic songs, none of which are on this album. It's very frustrating, knowing I ought to like it, respecting the craft and performances, wanting to enjoy it and delve in deeply, but just remaining kind of unmoved.
2
View Album
Fri Mar 29 2024
Hearts And Bones
Paul Simon
Opens with a song about having a rash, bold move. Loads of that huge 80s whoompy bass sound, possibly the whoompiest. The next song is more familiar: gentle acoustic guitar with a pitter-patter bongo percussion part and jazzy electric piano chords for a dash of schmaltz - his soft light vocals floating warmly over the mix. The rest of the songs settle somewhere between these 80s disco inflected synth pop and 70s folk singer sounds. It's all smooth and tasteful and pretty dull in a distinctly upper middle class upper middle brow way. Impossible to listen to this without picturing an arena full of Larry Davids vibing out to the musical equivalent of hotel art.
1
View Album
Sat Mar 30 2024
Pink Moon
Nick Drake
Gentle acoustic guitar and a soft breathy voice calmly delivering the guaranteed chillest 28 minutes of any day you put it on, Pink Moon is the aural equivalent of an overpowered boulevardier on a shitty Thursday after work. Sweetly smokey, it really takes the edge off. Perfect.
5
View Album
Sun Mar 31 2024
You Want It Darker
Leonard Cohen
A voice that makes the speakers in your trunk rattle like a trap hit. Paired with sparse instrumentation from across genres (gospel blues, country, jazz, industrial), the voice is front and centre, sultry slow and steady, so low and heavy that it barely raises itself into song. Urgent but not rushed. Weary, but willing to try a near final gasp - an affirmation of the art that made a life. The violins and lap steels and choir all hint at what's next, morbidly uplifting the music soars while the voice remains tethered to the body.
Favorites: traveling light, leaving the table
3
View Album
Mon Apr 01 2024
The Man Who
Travis
If you thought Keane was too 'out-there', if Coldplay gets you too excited, if you love listening to people whinge about the weather, if you can't get enough of that OK Computer thing where Radiohead combined acoustic guitars and ethereal electric ones and electronic textures but for some reason don't have access to the real thing, if you'd like to hear a band beside Oasis explore the idea of a wonderwall, if you wish the Verve had more harmonica, or if you're running a hospice experimenting with new techniques for lulling people to a soft lovely boredom-induced death, then boy, is this is the album for you. Otherwise, stay well clear. Awful.
1
View Album
Tue Apr 02 2024
Reggatta De Blanc
The Police
The Police fall wierdly between being a cool post-punk/new wave and and a massive classic rock arena jugernaut. They're too dorky (smooth, bright, poppy, and jazzy/prog sounding) to be cool, but draw on the same reggae and punk influences as the other British late 70s acts. They fit in better with the synth pop and new wave stuff, even though they have the very classic power-trio instrumentation. The musicianship is through the roof from all three, the light-touch drumming, the melodic Jamaican inflected bass, the gorgeous chorus effect-maxing shimmering guitar hitting those crystalline chords, and the unmimstakable voice and delivery. I guess like U2, they're the post-punk outliers who've become ensconsed in the classic rock radio cannon - though they had the decency to break up on a high note. Walking on the Moon is possibly their best song and Message in a Bottle is great, the rest has some good moments (the radiohead-sounding arpegios on Bring on the Night, the dub bass on Bed too Big), but is less inspired overall. I'd have chosen Outlandos or Zenyatta over this one and Synchornicity, personally. I guess that indicates that they're probably a greatest hits band in the end. Distilling those 5 albums down into 80 minutes of their highest highs would give you a compilation that can stand up next to anyone's with massive hits, a totally distinctive sound, genius songwriting, and pristine recordings of top performances.
4
View Album
Wed Apr 03 2024
Winter In America
Gil Scott-Heron
Relaxed and warm jazz ambience from the piano, with a touch of 70s funk from the keys and electric organs. Woodwinds add a classic 40s element both tonally and to the harmonies - but god I hate flute noodling. The jazz crooning vocals get pretty grating at times. Higher tempo songs with a strong bass parts popping along and melodically connecting the changes are much stronger than the slow ones that just dwell in washy unresolved chords. They're playing with the contrast between the form/content: loungey vibes and funky fusion are the delivery mechanism for GSH's angry portraits of the persistent injuries to Black life post Civil Rights era and poetic condemnations of the failures of the imperial American state. The point of the contrast being that the backing music is drawing from and adding to the deep well of Black creative tradition that expresses that and transforms it to something sustains and inspires nonetheless. A poetry album that paves the way for the wordy native tongues school of 90s hip hop and backpack rap to follow (lets not talk about the thousands of cringe slam sessions too).
Favorites: The Bottle, Peace Go With You, Rivers, H20 gate blues
3
View Album
Thu Apr 04 2024
Eli And The Thirteenth Confession
Laura Nyro
At its best when it's doing a Supremes kind of Motown thing with a horn section, backing singers and some lively bass. At its worst when it verges into Broadway territory with story-telling ballad style, or when it goes all schmaltzy slow and sparse and flutey. An incredible, if kind of nasal, voice with a huge range, but that includes a very annoying piercing high-range she spends lots of time in.
2
View Album
Fri Apr 05 2024
Morrison Hotel
The Doors
This is less irritating than I expected it to be, but it's still just barroom blues with the mildest hint of psychadelia. It's like the Pigpen songs from a 60s Dead show, just with a smoother vocalist. There's some ok blues rock guitar and psych organ stuff - the instrumental breaks have a cool feel to them. But really, it's pretty dull. I don't even like the Doors but this doesn't have any of the stuff that makes them unique, even if that uniqueness is hugely overrated and what I feared would be irritating. They're a greatest hits band at best, and this album doesn't have any of the hits!
2
View Album
Sat Apr 06 2024
Here's Little Richard
Little Richard
It's basically the same song on repeat, but what a song. From the first boo bap a doo wah to the final yeah! it's an incredible performance - an incindiary singer, Little Richard burns through these jumped up blues tracks with a level of intensity, charisma, control and pure heat that you can literally hear pushing recording technology beyond its capacity to capture. The guy's out here basically inventing rocking the fuck out.
4
View Album
Sun Apr 07 2024
The Psychedelic Sounds of the 13th Floor Elevators
The 13th Floor Elevators
A movie needledrop classic that immediately indicates the 60s are happening. It's a great example of the early psych formula: pulsating bass and droning open strings to induce a trance, some swirly whirly organ and very reverby guitars, a bit of fuzz to break from reality and some vaguely heady lyrics to suggest you open your mind and head out there. The songs borrow heavily from surf rock and chuck berry style blues rock, but arranged in the new trippy style. Play it loud and freak out the squares, man! Very funny that Zappa's debut album came out the same year and was already basically a parody of the California psych scene within months of it starting.
3
View Album
Mon Apr 08 2024
Gentlemen
The Afghan Whigs
boring post-grunge midtempo 90s alt rock that never made it to the radio. Imagine a really muddy recording of stone temple pilots' filler tracks with the hooks taken out. A real dirge. Some good guitar parts here and there, and when the vocals veer into screamo territory it's more compelling, same when it slows down and spaces out into a more shoegaze sound.
Favorites: be sweet, when we two parted
2
View Album
Tue Apr 09 2024
...And Justice For All
Metallica
A transition from the epic melodic thrash of Master of Puppets to the all-conquering hard rock of the Black Album, this album has elements of both but isn't as a good as either. Still, it goes very hard - some huge riffs, some gnarly shredding, some awesome harmonic leads, some quiet somber moments that build anticipation, and tight tight playing throughout. One is really the only stand out song though.
3
View Album
Wed Apr 10 2024
The Sensual World
Kate Bush
Lush arrangements combining rich orchestral string & piano sounds with pure 80s whoompy bass, industrial synth, gnarly guitar, and big echoey gated drums tones. She's in Depeche Mode mode here, taking a bit of the edge off her earlier more challenging work for a glossier sound that still retains the darkness and operatic flair. A few songs have a propulsive driving beat pushing verse to chorus to big a climax, building layers and layers of texture and pulsating rhythmic intensity. Others linger in a more structureless slow swelling ambient zone - a bit aimless, but they're effective platforms for her distinctive singing. Alternatingly frail and booming, smokey and piercing, whispered and wailed, the album is all about the vocal performance. It doesn't depend on deliving a central melody, but floating around a mood, rising and falling in and out of the instruments, adorning the songs with short bursts of intensity and signaling shifts in the feeling of the songs. The incredible This Woman's Work is the obvious stand out: the initial sigh is disarming, stripping back the arrangement to piano and some sparkly synth swells lets puts the full spotlight on the forcefully tender vocal and the most memorable combination lyrics/melody on the album.
Favorites: Sensual World, Love and Anger, Heads We're Dancing, Deeper Understanding, This Woman's Work
4
View Album
Thu Apr 11 2024
Life Thru A Lens
Robbie Williams
If you don't think mid-career Oasis is bloated and bland enough you'll love this album. I always thought he was more of a post boy band ballad singer and didn't realize he had this much of a rock sound, but this is basically a low effort brit pop album with a touch of blink 182 and smashmouth. Angels is laboratory engineered to manipulate the mawkish sentimentality English people confuse with emotion.
1
View Album
Fri Apr 12 2024
One World
John Martyn
A mellow album with an original combination of elements from funk, afro-pop, dub, blues and ambient genres. It's extremely laid back even at its most high energy, like JJ Cale in slow motion, like Funkadelic curling up to take a nap, like Steely Dan letting it all hang out. The guitar playing is the highlight, messing around with delays and reverbs to play notes that fade in and swell and fade, doing lots of cool textural stuff, and experimenting with tone. His voice was jarring, almost unnerving, at first but you get used to it. Not one I'd heard before, glad to know it, but unlikely to revisit anytime soon.
2
View Album
Sat Apr 13 2024
Pearl
Janis Joplin
The singing here is much more polished compared to the wildness of her BB&HC era, but still a full throated, impassioned and characteristically hoarse vocal performance that steals the show. The songs are all pretty standard California psych blues numbers, apart from the stand out cowboy-country of Me and Bobby McGee, the best one of all.
3
View Album
Sun Apr 14 2024
Tidal
Fiona Apple
Lush genre defying pop with a deep slow groove and insistent rhythm. Draws on jazz and rock and RnB and trip hop to create a sultry lounge cabaret sound that rises and falls like a deep breathing exercise interspersed with sprints. Her low pitched voice delivers the reflective personal lyrics, ranging confidently from a hushed whisper to a charismatic storytelling, to an almost diva-like whirlwind. Way more musically interesting than her 90s folk singer songwriter contemporaries, the arrangements are so rich: piano driven, drum machines, ethereal slide guitar, xylophones, some sort of overdriven sitar thing? I've heard criminal a million times and it still holds up, the rest I've only rarely listened to, but it's very consistent in sound and quality, though the slower stuff drags a bit.
Favorites: sullen girl, shadowboxer, criminal, child is gone
4
View Album
Mon Apr 15 2024
Safe As Milk
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
A playful romp through the genres, they do a bit of blues soul RnB psych pop surf garage and more - bringing an off kilter but charismatic vocal and a sardonic sensibility to it all. Not as intentionally alienating as their other stuff, it ends up being a kind of fun tongue in cheek 60s tribute act by a talented troll.
3
View Album
Tue Apr 16 2024
The Low End Theory
A Tribe Called Quest
An all-timer, this album has such a distinctive sound and compelling irrepressible energy. Simple but totally captivating beats with a smooth laid back funky jazz flavor keep your head bobbing along gently. The production is clear and crisp and balanced and everything comes through just right, like a live jazz trio perfectly captured laying it down. The vocals are the really stand out part though. Keeping the choruses to a minimum, Q-tip, Phife Dawg, and Busta Rhymes swap verses relentlessly and joyfully, they each have a unique flow, playing around with cadences, going off on wordy excursions, spinning out elaborate stories, bantering, conjuring images, and having fun with the language. It starts and ends on a high and never lets up in between.
5
View Album
Wed Apr 17 2024
Live And Dangerous
Thin Lizzy
Fundamentally pretty boring 70s classic- straightforward arena filling pop rock with familiar chords, predictable structures, and melodies you've basically heard before. Good enough unchallenging music that certainly goes down easy. The only really good bit is how hard they lean into the gimmic of twin guitars harmonizing on the leads - yeah, it's corny as hell, but my god it rips. The sax stuff and new wave-sound tracks (dancing in the moonlight) are pretty fun too. Has there ever been a cover that more succinctly illustrates the idea of cock rock?
2
View Album
Thu Apr 18 2024
Mermaid Avenue
Billy Bragg
California Stars and Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key are two of the best contributions to the alt-country cannon and At My Window Sad and Lonely, Hesitating Beauty, and One by One are just a tier below. The arrangements and performances really sparkle, in different ways they're all sing-along songs with a poignant sense of missing out on a better life going on elsewhere without you, accompanied by a woozy slide guitar. The rest doesn't hit nearly the same level though - competant mid tempo acoustic rock that just chugs along unobtrusively. The idea of turning Woody Guthrie's old lyrics notebooks into 20th century songs is a cool project and this is a very logical pairing to carry out, but I can't help thinking I'd like it more if it was just a Wilco project. The Jeff Tweedy sung songs are the strongest, his voice conveying the tender lonely country feeling works much better than Bragg's more rigid delivery of the propaganda songs.
4
View Album
Fri Apr 19 2024
Surf's Up
The Beach Boys
Not what I was expecting at all. Surf's Up means Surf's time is up. Much looser, darker, and weirder than the classic Beach Boys stuff, this album still has the signature emphasis on thick harmonies and lush production, but it doesn't come at you with the big hooks and 2 minute concentrated blasts of pure pop. Instead, it has a washed out acid hangover feel to it, woozily easing you into a slightly formless psychedelic daze punctuated by fuzzy guitar leads, some bleeps and bloops that sound like kraut-rock before it had been invented, and all sorts of different random instruments sounds.
Favorites: Disney Girls, Feel Flows
3
View Album
Sat Apr 20 2024
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Beatles
The most overrated album in rock history. It's an interesting document of growing experimentation with recording technology and the art of production as part of music composition. It's the beatles, so there are lots of interesting melodic phrases, great sounding little guitar fills, and good basslines (doing a funny tuba oompa boompa thing all over the place), but the lyrics are all pretty insipid and the whole brass band concept album thing is pretty stupid. There are so many joke songs for an album always held up as the pinnacle of serious rock artistry. And somehow Ringo has the 3rd best song and the 2nd best one is George's psychadelic raga. It's just way too much of a Paul cartoon brain album. A Day in the Life is great though, like the wrapped up the concept album thing and realized they forgot to include any actually good tracks so stuck a bonus one on the end.
3
View Album
Sun Apr 21 2024
Shalimar
Rahul Dev Burman
Fela Kuti and Austin Powers go to Bollywood for a funky jazzy set of show tunes. All sorts of 60s pop psychedelic sounds combined with Indian instruments and harmonies, driving rhythms and a swinging 70s internationalism all in service of big musical motifs. Some of it sounds like it's from a noir, some for a james bond, some for a.big dance number, and some like a spaghetti western. The songs are pretty overlong, there's plenty of schmaltz, and it's all pretty cheesy - but a fun album. Not really something I'd plan to listen again, but it piques interest in what was going on in South Asian popular culture around this time and why this soundtrack in particular is featured.
2
View Album
Mon Apr 22 2024
No Sleep 'Til Hammersmith (Live)
Motörhead
Ace of Spades is a 5-star album that rips from start to finish and I'm sure it was a hell of thing to see Motorhead live, but I don't really see what's added by listening to a live recording of these songs - a bit faster and messier, even more energy, but a muddy sound that turns it all to mush.
2
View Album
Tue Apr 23 2024
With The Beatles
Beatles
Though they wear their influences conspicuously with classic RnB and rock and roll covers and a brash surf sound, you can start to see the emergence of their more complex pop song writing to come. But this is them still in full teenybopper mode, jangly and sweet upbeat love songs with a funny playful side. They mastered the genre though, these songs are nearly all pretty perfectly crafted little gems and the recordings are brimming with energy.
3
View Album
Wed Apr 24 2024
Swordfishtrombones
Tom Waits
Such an annoying type of guy - an 80s LA dude pretending to be a beat poet roadhouse bluesman, a middle class Bukowski-wannabe fixated on the down-and-out figures of a previous generation. It's pastiche all the way down. The music is pretty decent though, slow moody and stripped down to drums and a bassline with either jazz horns, bagpipes, or guitars filling it out along with the barroom piano/organ. His vocals though, not so much; he croaks the lyrics like a strung out hermit, he has a voice like a crapped out speaker, but even that seems like part of the affectation.
2
View Album
Thu Apr 25 2024
Cafe Bleu
The Style Council
Live fast, have a mid-life identity crisis young. A rocker's experiment with smooth jazz ballads, this is a genre crossing set of songs that sets a mellow mood with careful production and rich instrumentation. His voice isn't built for crooning, and feels like a sodden blanket drapped over the delicate music. Sometimes you can be so open-minded that your brain falls out, A Gospel is the sound of that happening. It kicks up a notch in the final stretch with a more high energy synth pop sound. Hard to imagine who in mid 80s Britain was the audience for this, but speaks to an interesting eclecticism (or lack of direction) in popular music burning out after half a decade of post-punk and new wave.
1
View Album
Fri Apr 26 2024
Roxy Music
Roxy Music
Very elusive album that I can't quite put my finger on. At times I loose focus, at times it demands full attention. For good and bad its a lot like Bowie - the rockier guitar stuff isn't that interesting, kind of generic blues rock with some powerful sax. The synthier kookier stuff (like Ladytron) is more original and interesting, with cool textures and less predictable structures. The bass is doing a lot of work in both, melodic and leading. I still don't get why they're so hyped and influential - I guess because of what Eno went to do? And you had to be there to get excited by the Ferry glam side of it? But yeah, left feeling like I don't get it and it just passed me by.
2
View Album
Sat Apr 27 2024
In A Silent Way
Miles Davis
Extremely my shit. Mesmerizing bass and organs and some trance inducing drumming set a deep groove as a platform for the guitar, electric piano, and especially MD's trumpet to go off. It settles into some quite contemplative dawn moods with a shimmering vibrato sound and sunrise soloing, then heats back up for some spikey intense jamming. Music dorks in the 60s were really afraid of electricity and it was very stupid.
5
View Album
Sun Apr 28 2024
Rubber Soul
Beatles
Those mop top lads from merseyside have only bloody gone and done it again!
5
View Album
Mon Apr 29 2024
Apple Venus Volume 1
XTC
What? Why? This thing with including late era work from significant artists of the 70s/80s is so silly. XTC have some great albums, but this is not one of them. Trying to get beyond what I hoped this would be, to hear it for what it is... Heavily orchestrated, fussily composed verging into prog, an indulgent tribute to the most over indulgent bits of the Beatles. It's lush and somber, very adult (there's a song about having a shed), but that, as usual, mostly means boring (there's a song about having a shed).
1
View Album
Tue Apr 30 2024
My Generation
The Who
Much more of an early 60s classic "Oneders"-style rock and roll / soul / doo wop than I really realized. Their blues efforts (please please please, i'm a man) are way less compelling than their pure power pop stuff. The emphasis in all of these very tightly constructed songs is on the harmonies and the big bright pop melodies. But they bring a chaotic high energy rhythm section and overdriven guitar loudness that goes harder than the songs really allow, and so the band erupts from the confines of that early 60s pop rock and roll mould.
Favorites: The Good's Gone, La La La Lies, Kids are Alright, Legal Matter, I Don't Mind
4
View Album
Wed May 01 2024
Feast of Wire
Calexico
Laid back rock from the high desert, Calexico has a ecclectic relation to genre, incorporating accordian waltzes, mariachi choruses, atmospheric post-rock psychadelia, jazz drumming and horns, emo melodies, dub melodica, trip hop ambience, some cumbia rhythms, folksy alt-country acoustic and high-lonesome slide guitars to create a sound that encapsulates the borderlands. It coheres perflectly into a spacious cinematic album that winds its way slowly around, settling into the songs gently, quickening the pulse with new instrumental layers, and calming back down with its whispered lullaby vocals. Without being a concept album, it takes you on a journey, like driving through the sprawling outskirts of South Western city, cruising through the strip malls feeling a saturday afternoon evolve into saturday night evolve, catching snippets of what's playing out the car windows, the weddings and bbqs and parties, the bars filling up and spilling out - there's a bit of filler in the in-between moments, but they're taking you to the next place.
5
View Album
Thu May 02 2024
The Village Green Preservation Society
The Kinks
Bright and jangly melodic pop that lacks the force of their best work, but replaces it with a funny observational approach to song writing and richer arrangements. Is this just little England nostalgia though? It's self aware and parodic, but not entirely kidding about yearning to live in the Hot Fuzz town and win the flower prize...Requires a few listens to sink in.
3