I kind of get the verve thing. They’ve definitely got that j’ne sais quoi, just, ce n’est pas pour moi.
Stephen Railton, one of the world’s foremost Faulkner scholars, asked me one day, as we were talking about some of the Faulkner speeches I spent the previous five hours digitizing as part of the archival research I was doing for him my fourth year at UVa, “Do you have to be as fucked up as he was to make the kind of art that he did?” My 21-year-old self twisted that question into a kind of advice or excuse for the headlong self-destruction I pursued over the ensuing decade, but it still rings in my head today as an open question. And no one epitomizes it more fully than Ye. This album is insanely brilliant, and it’s a sad swing of the pendulum but today I really do feel like maybe you don’t need to be insane to be brilliant, but if you are, you’ll be just that much more brilliant. Maybe the next album will swing my mind again!
Is it too much, too Greil Marcus, to say there'd be no Tom Waits without Music from Big Pink? Not just The Band, but that combination of old-timey Americana and pre-psychedelia that Dylan and Danko brought to this specific collection. Appalachia meets Dali. And what would Joan Baez have even sung if not for them and Dylan? I grew up thinking Tears and I Shall were Baez songs--I can still hear my mom humming through the verses she never learned--and when I discovered they were Dylan songs, and then discovered this album at the 2nd Time thrift shop on Main St. in Ventura in 1995, I thought, "you know, fuck Joan Baez" and I traded her and James Taylor LPs (all three of which were my parents' lol, what a dickhead kid) into Salzers for Before the Flood... Twenty bucks Clapton first hearing Lonsesome Suzie was when he first thought, "I could do this shit on my own." There's a through line directly from that opening organ of Chest Fever to everything Journey ever did. This album has two of the five songs I sing to Margot as lullabyes--Long Black Veil and The Weight--and the only reason you can tell they didn't write Long Black Veil is because it's not quite weird enough. I wrote screenplay 15 years ago based on The Weight. I'M NOT THERE had just come out and I thought shit I can do this. I shiver to think how bad it was and luckily it's long lost to the Great Electronic Recycling Bin in the Sky, but just by way of saying how much this shit means to me. Listening to it this morning, besides revelling in all the universal nostalgia and pure joy of this album that I haven't experienced in over a decade, what sounded most new was Caledonia Mission and that rocking railroad cadence, that sense of looking for a fix for all this craziness but not being sure you really want out of it. Same with We Can Talk--not my favorite still, but "It's that same old riddle, only starting from the middle/I'd fix it but I don't know how" almost killed me this morning and I probably would've just kept driving up to Alaksa if I hadn't needed to get gas and take a leak, by which time the spell--fortunately or un-, we'll never know--was broken.
I guess I “needed” to listen to this album before I die the same way I needed to learn that Santa Claus isn’t real. Murder your darlings and never meet your heroes. My Buddhist name is the Lion of the Three Jewels so I’m gonna like anything about a guy called lion but that’s about as far as my appreciation for any of the first nine songs went. Heroes is fine, as a song. I should at least admit I’m happy to have had cause to listen to the lyrics because I always thought of it as this like, you know, car advertisement song, and it’s heartening to learn that it’s in fact terribly depressing. I liked sense of doubt and moss garden, they were a cool swimming hole in a country stream after the jangling melodies and inaudible and mostly incomprehensible lyrics of the previous songs. I’ve also been getting into soundscapes a lot more recently, so this was my alley to be up. Neuköln was cool too but the sax and synth were more blade runner than Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan. That Arabia song at the end really just brought me full circle to annoyance and regret. I’d rate it a one if it were anyone else but Bowie, but like the unconvinced suicide, I just can’t bring myself to do it. Two stars.
What I like about Rod Stewart is you really get the feeling like whenever he came up with a little riff or a little ditty and thought, “I like this!” he just used it. If it was good enough for Rod, it was good enough for whoever was going to buy the albums. Whether I think Rod rocked or not, Rod fucking knew every second that Rod fucking rocked. Would that I had nine percent of that confidence. Also, give me the steel string on Joe’s lament.
1970! Much respect. Will never listen to you again, but I did enjoy hearing a bit of the through line from Jimmy page‘s guitar to Kiss all the way to Pearl Jam and Live. I think my favorite thing is how they break expectations of what the shape of a song should be.
I used to hate the Beatles. On principle, because I was a wannabe punk and it was controversial—perverse, even antisocial—to hate the Beatles. But what an absurdity. Everything just exactly where it should be in every song.
I was sure I had never heard of MGMT. To be fair, 2007 was the apex of my drug and alcohol use, just before the precipitous and painful slide to a three-year bottom before getting sober. I was living in Medellín, going through an eight ball of first-cut cocaine and a fifth of guaro a day. Blu-ray came out the same year, and when I came back to the US I had to discover what it was. I’m still not sure I understand Blu-ray. Anyway, despite my supposed ignorance, there are three hits on this album that I feel like are still part of my life today. I never bothered to look at the lyrics, of course, and when I did as part of this exercise, I found them both funny and tiresome. If I had known these two guys were northeast liberal arts majors, who were doing this whole thing is a joke, I probably would’ve loved it—for a year, and then been tired of their music. But since I never knew anything about them—I didn’t even know those three songs are by the same group—they just kind of hung around, as has my appreciation for them. I mean, the ironic/satirical space is so dominated by the Beastie Boys it’s really unfair to anyone else. I suppose it takes a certain amount of chutzpah, I would never even get into that space, unable to not compare myself to the Beastie boys. I think that’s one of the realizations I’ve had over the last week, it’s just how fucking confident musicians are. There’s a little bit of that punk ethos in all of them, from Rod Stewart and MGMT. “Fuck it, I can do this too.“
So bad.
I love the idea of Nick Cave, and the fact of him. I love that he exists, and that he made the music he made, and it had the influences it had. I’m very glad he writes his blog and I’m looking forward to the interview with Rick Rubin, on Tetragrammaton, which, coincidentally also dropped yestersay. But I do not enjoy listening to Nick cave’s music. This was rocking and they rock, for sure, but it’s not for me.
Brutal story. Also, I sang a lot of these songs with Luke Anderson in college so hearing them again was kind of annoying and triggering. I had a dream about Anderson this morning! I guess I’m still not over it, the disillusionment in the wake of his disappearance, the embarrassment of ever having been his fried. But I think I realized this morning that the Anderson thing is part of the reason I don’t really play guitar anymore and that’s sad so I guess I’ve got some work to do thanks Roger Daltry, you fuck.
So much pomp! So much circumstance. The length of these songs and the altitude of emotion and all of them was really just too much for me to bear. I see now, after all these years, where they got their name. They are alive! This is happening! So is that! And the other thing! All of it! Put all the levels up! Every line is building, every chorus is a climax. You can feel it in your veins. Can you imagine the exhaustion they must’ve felt at the end of the show? There’s no “Let’s go grab a quick bite.” More like get me to the hospital for IVs and some incantation‘s to the gods of rock ‘n’ roll to restore their glam prana. Canadians, amirite.
lol I always thought starlight was a Coldplay song. Granted, one of their better ones, but still, sorry, Muse! Didn’t mean to do you like that. Stain on me. Rest of the album was cool.
🙌🙌🙌🙌praise
Cool
If there was a soundtrack to the first half of my 20s, it would just be the guitar on High and Dry. Like when I think of myself in those years cinematically, like a montage, the things I was doing, the women I was seeing, the late nights wandering New York smoking cigarettes at 3 AM at the foot of the Triboro bridge, drinking beers at the end of a lifeguard shift at the beach, driving half hung over and half drunk just as the sun was come up trying to get home and get showered before my girlfriend got home, writing letters to exes and thinking about where they were and how I could get back to them, roofing and tending bar and pawning my electric guitar for coke money and typing on my 1920s Remington… All of it playing under the guitar from High and Dry. And forget about Fake Plastic Trees. All that song does is break my heart wide open and leave me back when I told that blonde girl I was dating in college that it was over and I had to watch her walk away across the lawn and know what she would think of me the rest of our lives. I know now that she probably hardly ever thinks of me and if she does it’s probably just, like, nice, fond memories of what was essentially puppy love, but then—then, I was sure the heartbreak would haunt us both forever. And in a way it does, because Thom wrote this song and recorded it I listened to it then and something got seared into the place these things get seared into and so even if I no longer think of her that way, there’s this visceral memory, this felt sense that gets not just reactivated but relived every fucking time FPT plays. I’m realizing listening to these albums what a fucking sap I am and how not-over so many things I remain. Love the rest of the songs in this album too. They just don’t miss you know?
It’s just the best. I was listening to Dylan freshman and sophomore year in high school. The early stuff, first few albums, the hokey folky stuff and the kind of dizzy, silly stuff and the semi country John Wesley Harding stuff. I walked into my first day of junior year English class with Mr. Mathews, he had a masters in English literature and was the coach of the high school soccer team, and on the wall above the blackboard, he had printed in large type on a 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of paper, that printer paper from the 90s that was connected on the short edge and had the feeder ribbons along the long edge that you would tear off after it came out of the printer, except he hadn’t torn them off, so there was this piece of paper with printer ribbons it taped up well out of square and it said on it, in like 30-point courier, “to live outside the law, you must be honest.“ I told him that I knew this song and he scoffed and asked me yeah but did I know Blood On The Tracks? It wasn’t the last scoff I got that year and it wasn’t the last music recommendation but it was the best and yeah, I would’ve discovered it one or way or another soon enough anyway, but I didn’t, Mr. Mathews recommended it, and so for all his faults, I still feel in his debt because if High and Dry was a soundtrack to the first half of my 20s, Blood On The Tracks covers the whole arc so far and just like Music from Big Pink, two other of the lullabies that I sing to Margot every night come off of this album, and so I’ve got a pretty good feeling it’s gonna hold up for the last couple acts too.
Having only recently come to electronica, I had no clue what an influential album this was. I’d never heard of Leftfield. But reading up on them and how this album was made, and jamming out to it four times over the course of the last 20 hours, I gotta say I really get it. It’s wild! Earl Sixteen, Toni Halliday, Johnny Rotten, Danny Red. Very listenable. Can’t go five stars just because I got a little lost in the back third every time I listened to it and I don’t know that I’ll keep listening to it multiple times a day, but job well done lads.
A joy
One can forget just how long ole Willie can hold a note. And I’d love to hear the way he works out around the ones he can’t get. Like the “to” on “God speed your love to me.” Most people make a roller coaster out of that too. Willie knows he can’t so he just doesn’t sing it until the very end really makes it a part of me, which he can hold. I don’t know man. There’s something so strange about this twangy schmaltz, but also so beautiful, that Willy took the songs and played them the way he wanted to hear them and it turns out it’s really kind of wonderful way to listen to these songs, the very clearly many many many people appreciate, including me. I’m not going around listening to this stuff all day every day but I gotta say I really respect the Willy version of the American songbook.
I tried. Again. I really tried. And I’m sorry, Mom, and Erin, and LB, and all the super strong women I know who think of Carole as the troubadour of their girl power, but I’m still just a nope.
Trent Reznor said that as a kid he belonged to one of those cassette subscription clubs, like BMI or something, where you got what they sent you. And he was so broke and hungry that he listened the shit out of everything, even the Billy Joel albums. “It probably made me a better songwriter,” he said, as begrudgingly as one could say anything. I’m very glad to not be a songwriter and never have to listen to this album again. I skipped Only the Good Die Young and it’s been in my head all fucking day. What fucking producer thought “Italian Restaurant” was a winner? I didn’t know The Stranger and thought the conceit and some of the lines were pretty good but why oh why did Billy have to fuck yo some perfectly good lyrics with his… how do I say, nauseating? wretched? approach to melody making? I want to be mad at the record company but honestly it’s the people that bought and kept buying and STILL BUY the records that I’m most mad at. Disappointed in, really.
I liked this! Anyone ever argues with you that all rock n roll, even this second-wave punk/psychobilly stuff, isn't just faster blues with a backbeat, play them Teenage Werewolf. Basically a BB King son--minus the angsty ass lyrics, "NO ONE UNDERSTOOD ME!!!!" lol There was a time--brief, but real--when Kristy/Poison Ivy was a wet-dream staple baby yowzah.
Been ages since listening to this one all the way through. Loved hearing the Country Honk version, even though it’s way worse than Honky Tonk Women. Love that this came out the day before Altamont, the bloody end of what people once thought was going to be an endless summer of love. The Stones, man! I get why Scorcese is so obsessed. I was listening to it on the way to school with the kids and was telling them, “This is The Rolling Stones…” “We know, Dad.” “There a very important band!” “We know, Dad.” “Yeah, I know, but not just like to music, but to me! They’re very important to me.” “Dad, you tell us this every time we listen to them.” “Ok. But you haven’t heard this album! Listen to THIS!”
Okay yes what’s not to like but also this has become such a keystone of a certain kind of rock, a certain kind of not just music but music appreciation, a kind of benchmark against which so much is judged and not to sound like a woke wokerpants wokist but bro the white British dudes doing fast black American blues that have turned into the stodgiest old stodgers, I can’t help but think how many people DIDNT make it in music because “we all” decided at some point that these guys were the baseline? Obviously yes Slowhand is a god—but only *a* god. Not *the* god. And there’s not just a pantheon of gods but a plurality of pantheons. This isn’t fair to Derek and his Dominoes of 1970, and on their own merits, again, what’s not to like? But I can’t unknow all the years since then.
The strings and music generally haven’t aged as well as her voice. Which is obviously timeless and perfect. I’d love to let Rick Rubin choose some backing for her vocal tracks. She had to sing so much schmaltz (obviously strange fruit, etc. exceptions, but of like a very specific kind, that also she didn’t write, Lewis Allen/Abel Meeropol did, a conversation for another day). I’d love to hear the songs she’d write with more modern sensibilities. In heaven I look forward to the Billie Holiday + Amy Winehouse duets.
From day-to-day, whenever I think about Van Morrison, which really is not very much, I think, “man, I really used to like that guy.“ As if I don’t like him anymore. I don’t know why I feel that way. Maybe because i heard brown eyed girl one too many times, and one time I tried to play it on the guitar for Erin and she thought it was so fucking cheesy and cliché it almost ruined our early budding romance and also, like, broke the spell Van had over me for the six or seven years prior that I’d been listening to his albums on my parents’ record player and bootleg CDs. So I just kind of carry around this idea that I don’t love Van Morrison. But then his music plays, and I think “holy shit I love this stuff.” Now, the songs on this particular album are too long by like two or three or six minutes each. I don’t know what combination of Quaaludes and elderberry flower liqueur and marijuana they were on in the studio in 1966 when Van was recording this albums, but I honestly thought Astral Weeks was on single-song repeat, but when I reached down to fix it, I realized it was, in fact, only about a third of the way through. And the lyrics are honestly a bit basic. But that, man. That sound is there. And it moves to me to my soul.
We talk about chickens and eggs, but we never talk about Spike Lees and World Cliques. They weren’t even black but this album sounds like the soundtrack, the very beating heart-vibe, of Spike’s first five joints. Wild that these people got this crazy crew of people together at this one moment in history to do this weird ass dance album and then never really do much again after. I mean shit they got Bill "Chicken on Fire" Coleman to sing backup!!
I was scared of blind people when I was a kid. There was this old dude I don’t know if he lived on our street or was just in the community and like around, but he was totally blind, used the cane, wore those super oversized even by 1980s standards sunglasses that blind people wore for whatever reason, and when he took them off, he had like completely clouded eyes that looked up sideways to the left. He was always looking at a plane flying over your shoulder. I’m sure he was nice enough because my mom stopped and talked to him all the time, and my mom didn’t talk to anyone she didn’t like, she barely even looked at people that didn’t meet her expectations. But to me, he was terrifying. I always thought of blindness as being something wrong, it scared me and honestly I was revolted by physical disability. Not proud of this, kids are assholes, what are you gonna do. What Stevie did was sing his fucking heart out. And I swear Stevie Wonder is the reason I’m no longer scared of blind people. For one thing he wore Wayfarers instead of those ridiculous oversize sunglasses. but obviously he also had an angelic voice. He would sit at the piano and hug himself after getting through a song. Just pure joy coming off of that man, and it did what pure joy does, and entered my cold little heart, and made it just a tiny bit bigger.
Goddamn these dudes really hated women! Loved tail, hated women. Were getting laid like nobody’s business but lord protect the one girl that told Mick “not right now, love,” one Sunday afternoon. I mean, I also got mad when I was 23 girls told me “not right now, love,“ but I don’t think I hated them enough to go write and record songs about them that I would sing on a world tour. But then, no one was expecting me to come up with songs to put on albums and sing on world tours. And no one was providing me with an endless supply of pharmaceutical-grade cocaine and mini-skirted girls in every city I stopped in. And it was 1966, the lads hadn’t exactly been raised by second-wave feminists. So I mean I guess I get how it happened. But it is striking. But anyways the music fucking kicks as always. I just love Keith’s guitar, so simple, so versatile, a sponge of a mind for all the kinds of music that had come before on that humble little instrument, whose fingers could wring it all back out in his incomparable distillate. Good job guys. You rocked.
I wish I could hang out with these guys. I liked the punky folk rockabilly stuff better than the schmaltzy spacejammy stuff. Los Angeles musicians are always so… I don’t know, like they’re missing something. Some vital piece. (Hip-hop mostly aside, west coast rap no joke.) but like is it just too nice here? Is the light too good? Is it something about being so far out on the bleeding edge of the national frontier—but a frontier where it’s no longer possible to even see any dirt? Where we’re all—always already—deracinated? Where roots aren’t even able to gain purchase? Not just the absence of roots, but their impossibility? And so breeds a sense of nihilism, an air not of timelessness but of effervescence? Weeds up through cracks in the sidewalk just until next August, when even the sprinkler runoff isn’t enough to keep them alive. Is it just not difficult enough to motivate the conviction and commitment that engender the edge or depth of feeling or whatever it is that bands from literally everywhere else have? Like, Love is cool but I’m not like “oh yeah another band that TOUCHES MY VERY SOUL” and I think that’s because they’re from L.A.
“Don’t you know, if you want a good life, best look into yourself.” “Look into your inner self, only you know how to be free.” Curtis is what I needed for my Wednesday yesterday. Probably what a person needs every day.
Couldn’t do it. 1997 I was deep into discovering the first ten albums when this came out and I forced myself to listen to it dozens and dozens of times, and there are moments but there’s no sustained magic like the magic of the early days and I felt guilt for not loving the man’s entire oeuvre and so I kept listening and searching and hoping but knowing it wouldn’t come and then at some point just stopped and I thought oh this’ll be fun to go and see what these songs sound like now but it’s not fun, it’s still just, like, empty and sad and me feeling like a jerk for feeling empty and sad and the last thing I need in my life is more reason to feel bad about the ways I just actually feel so sorry Bobby but it’s all pre-1977 for me from now on.
Great smooth jamz. I was carried away. Never heard of her before and I can dig it. I felt like a lot of the time she was holding back the full power of her voice in service to these understated (but evocative!) lyrics and at first I was bummed about that, like I wanted be like ARMATRADING! BELT THAT SHIT! because if I had those pipes I’d be belting everything everywhere but then I realized that this is her third album and obvi she knew what she was capable of so her softshoeing shit is this really impressive choice. She felt in control of herself and her music here. Listened to it in the rain from downtown Philadelphia back to Conshohocken, kids and Erin asleep around me, traffic creeping, so many stiffs working a couple days between Christmas and New Years, dark dark at 5:30 PM. I saw a fluffy white dog, paws black to the elbow and eyes a little wild, trotting the wrong way down the shoulder of interstate 76. Joan’s guitar was like that dog. I won’t listen tot his album all the time but I’m saving it in the library.
Talked a lot about the sun and how heavy it and everything else is, quite a ride, lots of interesting musical shit, but also some pretty dumb angsty lyrics, basically the album made me sad.
Amazeballs
These guys are reading my mail. Clearly, based on what he has to say in “Treason,” that he was involved with Erin’s long-lost English cousin. Big middle-finger energy. “ you’ve got to be wary of people with knives in their back.” Amen, brother. What I find really striking is it these songs predated the cures big hits by seven years “Pictures of You” and “Lovesong” by nine. The Dwyer Brothers may have been dysfunctional or fucks if they were good at the whole music thing and I just feel like Robert Smith must’ve been hanging out with them and they were figuring out their corner of the zeitgeist together and/but when Teardrop continued to be just incapable to get their shit together year after year he was like fuck it man, it’s my sound now. I have so much to say about Rob Smith and the cure but I suppose I’ll save it for when one of their albums comes up because one has got to at some point.
Too much
Seven stars
When I think of bright lights and candles burning at both ends, Janis will always be the first one I think of. Psychedelic gospel ballad queen. The amount and quality of sound, the sheer power of emotion she conveys on Cry Baby— have I ever given that much of myself, not just in a way that even one other person can feel, let alone the millions that have because of these recordings, but at all? To have been that close to it, whatever you wan to call it, god, the source, the beating, vital heart of existence—what a gift, what an unbearable, painful gift, and the voice to go with it, and the courage to use that voice, to be the vessel, the conduit, the megaphone, to recognize your access and allow for it, not to deny it, or tamp it down, or seal it off, but to expose yourself to the full and raw power of human existence and let it flow through you, it’s just a shattering thing to hear sometimes. And at the same time, ruthless as it is to say, the unbearableness of it, for her, herself, probably spared her, and the rest of us, from decades of her music not being like this. I don’t wish death on anyone and I would never wish death on a young performer, anyone, whether they had access to the source or not, but in this world, and that industry at that time, knowing what happens to people, knowing what happened to me, late in my 20s, and then out of my 20s, past that age where one stops acting completely intuitively, when the invincibility of youth wears off, and one starts to recognize the cost of life. It’s a truism they put on the headstones of children who die, “too pure for this world“ but I think there’s some truth in it. Not too pure for reality itself, for God‘s creation, but very possibly for what we’ve done with it. Impossible to go on in life having been Janis at 23. Anyway, I’m fucking glad she existed.
I love their trademark syncopated lyrics, love Michael Stipe’s lists of things, love how much he hates “business” and bureaucracy and the military industrial complex, love his keening for the death of the American soul—or the very absence, the never-having-been—that, irony of beautiful ironies, helped give us one.
Put her in my veins. The self-awareness, the middle finger, the cringe, the cry, the “here’s my raw nerve, baby. Here’s my beating heart,” the stiletto in the stiletto. What an ear, what a voice. Man, what a woman.
Liked it didn’t love it. I would’ve loved it 20 years ago. Dug Lose It marine the most. Some of the others were catchy too but, I don’t know, a little forced? Maybe they loosened up and cleaned up in later albums.
We’ve all taken ourselves more seriously in life than we should and I suppose I should be happy no one got a musical record of that time in my life but if putting The Trial on the cover of the album doesn't tell you something. Respect to B&S and they matured with age I’ll give them that but then please give me their later stuff.
The man
I’m not gonna claim these guys invented the 14th fret hammer-bend-wail, like the ability to play an entire solo around two fucking elastic strings and three frets, but lord did they perfect it. Obviously rock is the blues yadda yadda but I *believe* it coming from Gregg. Guy didn’t fuck around. And neither did his band. To have seen them at this show, their heyday, *the* heyday—makes the cut for 1001 places to time travel to, for sure.
Tori is the girl in high school who thinks she’s a nine but is actually a six, who thinks she’s edgy but is actually a prude, who draws in her secret journal where she keeps her darkest secrets not dead flowers and daggers but still boys‘ names in bubble letters and unintentionally disfigured anime puppies, sorry not sorry.
The ones that hit, really hit. Rip it up, obviously. Louise Louise. The ones that didn’t hit, really didn’t hit. Mud in Your Eye? Breakfast Time? Are these song a joke? Is this some kind of boomer Scottish humor that is escaping me? But the band is very tight and the songwriting on some of these tracks is very good. It’s too bad the band didn’t have a longer career, I love to listen to their fourth album.
Trent Reznor is an unqualified genius. What’s interesting about this, and I listened to pretty little hate machine a few months ago and same deal, is that it was made just a few years before bass really took over. There was a whole evolution in synthesizers and sound machines and amplifiers and speakers that happened at the late 90s that gave everyone access to another, like, geologic strata of sound. Because of that, in retrospect, Nine Inch Nails early stuff seems kind of tinny. It didn’t back done, because we didn’t know what we were missing, but you can imagine how much more filled out this might be if Trent were to have done it today. But then, maybe it would’ve robbed him some of the things he did here to get the message across anyway. It’s like if painters had never had access to the color blue. Would their paintings be better if they went back and redid them with swatches of blue on their pallet? Or would they just be different?
I feel like one more foot tapper and I could’ve gone a full five, but there’s just something about the troughs of this album just a little too low. But I mean also at the same time they feel like part of my core identity, like remember that movie inside out where all these emotions are inside of this little girl banging around fucking with her memories and personality? I feel like that’s how my mind works with bands and Depeche Mode is definitely one of those bands.
For a few years, a few years ago, I did this thing around the new year where I thought about the 10 people that meant a lot to me previous year, I framed it as people I would like to invite to dinner, and for two years in a row, Jeff Buckley was on that list. A tragedy that he went out for a swim that night. Like John Mayer and Jack White and that kind of cadre of white guys doing blues—though more jazzy in buckleys case—the transmission of emotion through their fingers to the neck of a guitar is just such a pleasure to behold, every time. Also, J*** B******* was listening to him around the same time I was, and around that time I was borderline obsessed with her so a part of the emotion coming off for that fretboard for me has to do with that particular forbidden love. This 1001 exercise is really bringing up a lot of old lovers and making me realize how much of the love and excitement and anger and sadness and obsession and nostalgia of those relationships is steeped music. Like, this is a big part of how I’ve made sense of my life! And tortured myself, but also processed things. And it really says something about me that Jeff Buckley’s Lilac Wine soundtrack to little tiny pieces of my heart.
Clearly couldn’t go less than three stars—can sing, what pipes, etc.—but honestly it didn’t put me in sexy time mood, which was really what I was going for.
They sound like if the guys that did Best In Show or Spinal Tap did a movie about late 60s psychedelic rock this would be the soundtrack. They’re like too perfectly of a type that it’s on the nose.
I can’t say enough good things about Radiohead
Never not a good ride.
I know I’m down on all the songwriters from the 50s and 60s whose songs these black women had to sing. I mean, taste was different, and reality was reality and I took enough American studies and African-American literature courses in university to recognize the power and revolution still possible from within the constraints of one’s time. but the songs feel me with sadness as much for the unrealized potential of Ella on her own, singing outside these boxes, as I am for the Gershwin heartbreaks she’s giving so much life to. Time was, I suppose, and I certainly hope time will be again, someday.
This is one of those albums that I would love to read the text in 1001 book about. What’s the justification for this one? I like some of the songs, especially Promise Me, very Stones-meets-Dylany, but like was this the author’s second cousin’s band?
Not for me
That’s the first time I ever even paid attention to the fact that song 2 had lyrics besides woo hoo, let alone with they were. I like it! Got some weezer vibes in some of the others, wish I guess isn’t all that surprising, by 1997 irony had become ironic again after its moment in the serious sun earlier in the decade. Like, is she so great? Maybe. Kinda. But also maybe not? There is a wryness to it all that I really like. Also, so many different sounds! Little Depeche Modey on death of a party, some slimmed down punk on Chinese bombs, some nirvana guitar sounds on I’m Just a Killer. And what to even say about Strange News and Essex dogs?! Eclectic. A ride. An eclectic, wild ride. What an album.
Perfection Christ what a woman.
Musical taste is really something.
I could karaoke this whole album without a lyrics screen. And not just the big four radio songs, but Garden and Release too. The first time I went down on a girl, Black was playing (I doubt, looking back, it was probably all that memorable for her, but for me I’ve got a soundtrack!). I remember the texture of the matte silver portable anti shock discman I wore this album out in. And Eddie was just everything a budding surfer wannabe guitarist artistically ambitious kid could want. He embodied the chance we all feel like we have at that age to be on stage in front of an arena crowd. I still get that sense of hunger and pregnancy and possibility listening to this. It still makes me feel like I belong in front of 100,000 people. By the time I started listening to Ten—probably, what, 1994?—there were at least two others out already, but Ten was always my jam. They got better and better, clearly, and Eddie is still getting better, not that Ten is the best, musically, but it’s got the most magic for me.
Absolutely LOVE how weird this is. Ackles’ voice is [chef’s kiss]. It’s funny, strange, so jaunty in places it’s almost Vaudevillian in its tongue-in-cheekiness storytelling. Tender, brutal, raw, heavy as hell—at least on paper. The words are all there. And the frothy emotions are too. That jauntiness. But I don’t *feel* the weight. Maybe it’s just the headspace I’m in listening to it right now but it feels like some connection is missing to the emotional register the lyrics claim to be selling. A specific example. In “Another Friday night,” he says, “I never stayed in one place long unless I was doing time.” But he sings this in his Broadway voice. And that would be fine if all you knew were Broadway voices, but we also have Tom Waits and Willie Nelson, and even if they didn’t actually do time, they sure as hell sounded like they could have. Ackles sounds like he’s in a musical about a guy who went to jail for rustling cattle “out west.” He’s like Carey Grant doing Oklahoma when you could have Johnny Cash putting a gun in your face. And it’s like that for all his stuff. Even the sad alcoholic shit he sings about, Indians blowing their lives up and fathers trading the milk in for gin. All stuff that usually hits real hard for me. But here it feels like an actor walking around with a half-empty pint bottle, taking swigs of weak tea. That’s the only reason I can’t go five on this one. Because honestly I think he’s kind of a genius. Just one without emotions. An Asperger’s Cat Stevens. A sociopath Tom Waits. And probably, honestly, the reason I’ve never heard this album before. It’s all well and good to be a jester Elton John tap dancing on the hood of a player piano in a Charlie Chaplin hat but when you’re competing against the actual Elton John, your market share is gonna be what Bill Ackles’ was.
Holy shit I never knew Brimful of Asha was by these guys. I never knew these guys before. I didn’t even know it said “brimful of Asha.” I don’t even know what that means! All I ever knew was bosom for a pillow obvi. Anyway I’m kind of a Cornershop fan now. Super fun album.
Joe Strummer in these clash days was like some primordial ooze of creativity. Unrefined and unadulterated. He had more style, more character, more personality in the fingernail trimmings he put in the bin every few weeks than most people develop over the course of a lifetime. The amount of shit going on in Wrong ‘Em Boyo belies any notion of this band as just slapdash idiots plugged in to loud amplifier. The ethos of the early punk wave in Britain was so antiestablishment that they even wanted to undermine the idea of musicality, but Joe just couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t contain the bone-deep love he had for every musical note that he had absorbed over his two and a half decades to that point. The scope of his vision, the depth of his empathy—the lightness, the unseriousness with which he carried it all. And this is the beauty of music, that the stuff he created based on that earlier stuff was in the stuff Jack White put into his veins, both of which I’ve put into my veins, and I’m doing my damnedest to put into my children’s. Joe Strummer was just this beautiful, half-wrecked angel walking the world with the rest of us for a few decades. A prophet, meant to remind us of the beauty of song, and that the true Word, however ragged or undistinguished its wrappings may first appear, is unmistakable and universal and, yay, a blessing among the trivialities of this transient world.
I kind of get the verve thing. They’ve definitely got that j’ne sais quoi, just, ce n’est pas pour moi.
Goosebumps on every song. Something about white hillbilly heartbreakers really just get me. “Those Memories” especially had that mountain holler kinda ghastly cadence thing. And that flat single note “spare” on “Hobo’s Meditation”? Get out. Powerful shit, man. “At least I could run, they just died in the sun.” 😂😂
Some fucking muscle, these guys. Dang.
London Calling is better but it’s not like there’s lots to hate on this album and honestly I, too, am bored with the USA. I do really like Police & Thieves, probably more than I ever did.
I don’t want to be all “every song sounds the same,” It’s more like the emotional register of all the songs is very similar, like those heavy, emotional ballad with the stretched-out “oooooooooooooo-ooooooo-ooooooooo” dramorama all over the place. I get some real three doors down, I want to call it “faux“ heaviness vibes. I don’t know, just 11 songs seems like a lot for one sitting. Best song on the album is “I Want You.”
A revelation. I am a convert. Os Mutantes pra vida.
This album feels lime the soundtrack to a movie like The Warriors. Not that story but like a semi dystopian low-budget flick that’s hyper local and weirdly specific—I’m imagining a 1983 human-cyborg love story in five blocks on the lower east side of Manhattan, like her meets bientennial man meets the Fisher King except lower-fi and lower-budget—and the producers they didn’t ask Blondie to score the film but instead were like you know what would be a great soundtrack for this movie? this album Blondie already made, we can just lay it on top of everything. And audiences are confused at first but then absolutely love it in a joking-but-not-joking kind of way and it’s part of the reason the flick becomes such a cult classic. Also, how fucking good is Robin Williams in The Fisher King?
Gotta say, BJA can write a melody. It’s weird because I listen to her plunk, and Dookie and insomniac so much but I was already pretty much done with them when Nimrod came out and I didn’t think it was a very good album. That was i was probably making fun of Green Day by the time American idiot came out. Some songs are so much a part of the culture now and his voice is really kind of iconic its own way that when I hear it it’s so familiar and hits that nostalgia for the mid teenage years angsty thing but because I don’t know the lyrics to the songs, there’s an eeriness about it. Except Boulevard of broken dreams. I was coming back from NCAAs in Atlanta our fifth year, I just went down to watch with Mooney and Leo Salinas and maybe a couple other guys. I drove Fran’s Crown Vic down there with a couple people, but they stayed or flew back or for some reason I drove home alone. One of Mooney‘s friends, a girl who knew from Jersey, lived down there and we stayed with her and a roommates last night. I was wrecked and made some bad choices and it was embarrassing and I got up early the next morning and fled. Well, I had to rouse Leo from the backseat of the Crown Vic first because that’s where he had slept. Of course. So I’m driving north back to cville and feeling bad, bad, bad—about the things I’d done, but also physically. I was very hungover. It’d been three days of steady drinking and my liver felt like it was flowing backwards and secreting toxins into my bloodstream instead of filtering them out. And it was an ill-fated journey. I had printed Map Quest maps out because this was flip-phone era still, right, and of course I’d lost the printouts but a) assumed I could just reverse engineer the trip and b) could not comprehend trying to find somewhere to look it up and print out another set—imagine searching blindly for an Internet cafe in rural Georgia on a Sunday in 2005–and it was, of course, absolutely impossible to go back into the girls’ house to figure out how to print my getaway plan. ANYWAY, this song was on like three radio stations between Atlanta and the Blue Ridge Mountains—and was the last song I heard before the radio went out so it was stuck in my head the rest of the trip and was already starting to feel like some kind of fateful punishment BEFORE the snowstorm started. Freak late spring storm that dumped and dumped the higher and higher I climbed. By the time I reached the pass (84?) to get to the east side of the mountains, it had reached blizzard conditions AND THE HEATER HAD GONE OUT so there was no more defrosting the sleet Jack Frost piss raining down from the sky and caking the window in a sheet of blurry ice. Luckily there were very few others on the road. None by time I got to a trucker gas station to get some hot water to melt the ice on the windshield so I could see. “Road’s closed,” dude yelled from behind the counter as I walked in. “You must be the last one they let up.” He told me to wait it out there with him but that seemed impossible, too, and after having listening to Blvd. Broken Dreams 9,000,000 times in my head I figured it was really my destiny to either finish this trip alone or die out there, alone and deserving of all the solitude and lonesomeness the world could devise for me. So on I went, after dumping nine styrofoam cups of boiling water on the windshield and filling the wiper fluid reservoir up with antifreeze on the recommendation from the dude from behind the counter. I also got a six pack of PBR, which I started drinking immediately and which, though I wouldn’t recommend this to my kids, might have saved my life because I stopped worrying so much and just settled into the curves and slides instead of working every inch of that freeway and every tiniest bump to absolute white-knuckle death. Once I’d gotten back down to sea level or whatever level cville is at, and made my obligatory “thanks for getting me outta that foxhole, bro” appeal to the Lord and thawed out my feet, I asked Coop if I should tell any pertinent people about all the bad decisions I’d made. “Do you want to tell anyone?“ “I do not.” He shrugged. “Then don’t.” Also, is “Jesus of Suburbia” a country song?
A menthol 100 for the soul.
Dig the jaunty tunes. Don’t love the schmaltz. But boy can you see where so much of the sixties came from. “Love Hurts” exhibit A of that clean-clean hollow body electric sound and, man, who knew Nazareth didn’t write it?!?
What do you think the cutoff age is for drum solos? Because I definitely passed it, I’m just not sure how long ago. I had John Mayall’s Blues from Laurel Canyon on LP in high school. I got it at the Ventura College swap meet with Grant Ensminger (a guy who these days makes his living selling oil paintings!). We were high on mushrooms and valium—a very, very smooth and comfortable dreamlike combination—and I bought that album and Cream Live at the Fillmore West. The Cream album was much better. I think John and his pals were eating too many mushrooms too much Valium themselves while making, well, probably all of their albums. But goddamn, do they know the blues.
A goddess among men.
The most enjoyable musical history and political culture less than I’ve had in a long time. This album is like a full sample library for half of the hip-hop songs made before 2009. Usually I start listening to these albums on the walk with Milo every morning and I tell you yesterday I was strutting down the street like the opening scene to a Spike Lee joint, only missing a velvet suit, walking cane, and a very large hat with a very large feather in the brim. Smooth, baby.
Stephen Railton, one of the world’s foremost Faulkner scholars, asked me one day, as we were talking about some of the Faulkner speeches I spent the previous five hours digitizing as part of the archival research I was doing for him my fourth year at UVa, “Do you have to be as fucked up as he was to make the kind of art that he did?” My 21-year-old self twisted that question into a kind of advice or excuse for the headlong self-destruction I pursued over the ensuing decade, but it still rings in my head today as an open question. And no one epitomizes it more fully than Ye. This album is insanely brilliant, and it’s a sad swing of the pendulum but today I really do feel like maybe you don’t need to be insane to be brilliant, but if you are, you’ll be just that much more brilliant. Maybe the next album will swing my mind again!
Really too bad that plane went down.
Mike Skinner is a silly, simple genius. It wouldn’t be my choice of what to write a concept album about, but he executes it perfectly, it’s just this perfect little Jerry Stahl arc.
It’s not them, I’m sure. It’s me. But still.
I was interested to listen to this album 30 years after I first heard it and probably 25 since I last heard it in its entirety. I don’t remember if I ever liked it. I know I was supposed to. I certainly claimed to. I had the t-shirt! And everyone wanted more black guys in punk. Well, not EVERYONE-everyone, clearly, but most of my crew in SoCal mid/late 90s did. There was the general culture-level weird racial (racist?) things about black guys being the coolest, and there was hip-hop, which was cooler and definitely more popular than punk, and there was this stereotypical, not universal, but also not entirely baseless, identification of punk with various kinds of white power. That was far less true inside punk, but I think we were defensive. And we wanted punk to be as demonstrably egalitarian as the early waves of it claimed to be. Bad Brains let us say, “See!” Whether they were any good was besides the point. Which is probably why, ultimately, there weren’t more black guys in punk. No one likes to be a token, but especially not anyone even remotely inclined towards punk ethos. And so, like so much guilt-driven liberal nonsense, we ended up reinforcing the strictures we wanted to change. Anyway, turns out to be a pretty cool album. I will listen to it again.
Four too many songs. 11 would’ve been perfect. But I mean, RHCP a whole vibe, as the kids say.
If I hadn’t relistened I would’ve said five stars. But it’s not a perfect album. Very good. Very heavy on the nostalgia for my weed-soaked early teen years but from my middle-aged vantage point that’s not, it turns out, enough for five whole states.
100% dispels all bad vibes in a 20-mile radius. Pure joy. Me hace feliz como whoa.
A very rich tapestry of sound—that sounds like all the other tapestries hanging on the walls of the psychedelic rock ‘n’ roll era. I know this stuff meant a lot to Todd. You can hear that in every song. But it’s like hearing about someone’s dream, or an acid trip. There’s an entire emotional menagerie that I recognize but feel no connection to. Is that the music? Is it a generational thing? Is it everything that has come since the facade of love and connection the music purported to embody and manifest has crumbled in the—at the very least in my—cultural consciousness? Am I simply turning into a cynical an old man, beyond the receptive powers of even Todd Rungren’s palliative orchestra? I don’t know. And honestly, it doesn’t change my rating.
Le Prince Frais de Bel Air
Transporting. “The perfect album doesn’t exi—” Sinister Kid gtfo what further proof do you need that they made that crossroads deal.
There’s a “one in a hundred” chance I listen to this album again. Nice music, band tight af, Gene’s voice muy bueno, but lord what a snoozefest. Dylan cover’s like Tears of Moderate Annoyance. I don’t believe Gene, is the problem. I’m not buying it.
This had to be the original book editor’s cousin or childhood friend, right? Not awful. They can write a decent song. But the whole album sounds like basically the same decent song? I had to check a couple times to make sure I didn’t have it set to “repeat one.” I guess I’m glad I listened to it, but do I feel like I *needed* to listen to it before I died?
Felt very messy, but I dug the vibes.
Apple Music says the Germs were “America’s answer to The Sex Pistols.” If that’s the analogy we’re running with they should’ve called themselves The Wet Dream Cap Guns. A ppor imitation by every measure. I think the only reason I didn’t go two stars is because I have such an affinity and soft spot for Los Angeles bands.
if this album had come out five years earlier and I’d heard it at 15 or 16 I think I would’ve loved it. But looking back and looking at the timeline, seven years after the Foo Fighters’ first album, it feels completely derivative and, 22 years on, completely uninteresting.