Bookends
Simon & GarfunkelI do not wish I was a Kellogg's cornflake floating in my bowl. nor do I wish I was an English muffin.
I do not wish I was a Kellogg's cornflake floating in my bowl. nor do I wish I was an English muffin.
One of the few albums that brings back memories of where I was when I was listening to it for the first time: walking next to the Cannon River in Minnesota on a warming spring day, hearing the opening tuba pomp of “Motion Sickness” and being immediately entranced by how familiar and odd it was at the same time. Hot Chip weren’t the first example of a live band doing electronic music I’d ever heard before, but I hadn’t really heard anyone else do music like this. Of course, having listened to infinitely more music in the intervening 12 years (including a *lot* more Hot Chip), the sound itself is less novel, but the presentation seems more novel than ever. Just in the first three songs, you have the aforementioned tuba/arpeggiating synth of “Motion Sickness” leading into the thumping kicks of “How Do You Do?” leading into the bombastic R&B-pop of “Don’t Deny Your Heart”. Everyone loves “Flutes” for being probably one of the best buildups in dance music, and I like it a lot too, but I take greater pleasures in other moments: the slinky vocals of “These Chains”, the unique romanticism of “Let Me Be Him”. Around this time, I got into Hot Chip’s live act, and they still remain my favorite live band even I don’t really believe in my hyperlaudatory stance that they’re the best live band currently working anymore. That live show still influences my opinion of this album…but I still love this album deeply. I’m glad a lot of you really liked it, too.
Worth remembering in 1987 that The Cure was doing moodiness way better and that overseas The Replacements were doing the jangly power pop thing way better. Some nice guitar tones, that's about it.
Dark and morbid but also stands as a singular statement of artistic purpose.
Found a few songs a bit silly (beyond the intentionally silly ones) but I deeply respect this as a showcase of Simon and Garfunkel's abilities as arrangers.
please, please, please for the love of god someone give this a lower rating because I just can't.
It's fun to see the genesis of the quiet R&B ballads that'll be more prominent later in the 70s here; shame I don't like those quite as much.
I get why people like Greta Van Fleet now.
everybody talks about britpop in terms of Blur vs. Oasis but nobody talks about it in the form of Primal Scream vs. Happy Mondays
listening to this, thinking "come on, why haven't the boygenius fans resdiscovered this yet??"
wow I forgot how hard "Candy Says" goes.
important to remind yourself every once in a while that Bob Dylan had *bangers*.
not my all-time favorite by the White Stripes, but perhaps the best demonstration of just how almighty they could sound.
On a relisten, I was struck by how much closer this was to Kraftwerk than I remembered.
new wave is so cool. I wish England was real
Love Spiritualized but never listened to Spacemen 3 so I was taken aback by how straight-up psychedelic this was, but still interesting to hear just a bit of that gospel influence that will eventually really inspire Spiritualized in the back. Last song really sounds a lot like JAMC.
Bob Dylan was 22 when he wrote this. Can you imagine sounding like that at 22? he had no choice but to take the career he did.
look, I'm not a huge Christmas music fan or anything but I can't pretend this isn't without its high points (e.g. the definitive version of "Sleigh Ride"). that being said: what the fuck is going on with the horrifically plodding version of "Frosty the Snowman" on this thing
if there's one thing Kraftwerk fucking loves it's a leitmotif
the title track carries this a lot but also imo if I was the same type of music snob I am today in 1983 I also probably would've been playing this on repeat all the time
I always tend to think of glam as having these two distinct periods where it emerged in the 70s, died out, and the reappeared out of nowhere in the 90s after glam metal got popular with Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, etc. so it's nice to get these reminders that in between it never really died out. Honestly would be interesting to make some connections between this album, glam metal, and the glam acts of our current day (Yves Tumor etc.)
alternates between sounding weirdly formulaic and uninteresting and taking interesting risks that also sound incredibly weird. so, final review: it's weird.
At work I hear a lot of different Pandora stations, and there's one that's just a generic 70s one and when I hear "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone" on it I just think "wow". maybe this is controversial but I think this is maybe the best version of the psychdelic soul sound.
great album. I'll claim it as a Chicago classic. appreciated looking this up on Wikipedia too to be reminded that Bonnie 'Prince' Billy took the photo on the cover
I see this album as anticipating the pan-global musical attitudes that other acts like Gogol Bordello and M.I.A. would adopt later on. Unfortunately, I like both of those two acts better than this.
I feel bad but my opinion hasn't changed: no.
Fine, fine.
I do not wish I was a Kellogg's cornflake floating in my bowl. nor do I wish I was an English muffin.
As someone who likes ambient music, it's nice to come back to where it all began. This isn't a terribly interesting insight but like Velvet Underground, it's revolutionary in its approach, but to a completely different end.
I appreciate the progressive musical push that Bowie was going for this time, and on a new listen it's sort of funny he hadn't totally abandoned the soul and funk music he was interested in around this time, but my favorite iteration of this type of Bowie's style is coming later.
I wrote a whole ass Inforoo post about this about various existential crises I have but in spite of all of that this is still a classic.
Ok fine not all ska is bad. Interesting to hear the influence of American R&B on this album of Jamaican music made in England. "I Can't Stand It" sounds like a Stereolab song.
Conceptually very interesting, I liked a lot of the orchestration, but while I respect what they do this is just way too big of a dose of Metallica for me as a single album experience. (on the other hand, this must have been incredible to experience live.)
I don't want to try and bell curve all these albums. These are all classic albums, so hypothetically most of these should get really high ratings. On the other hand...growing up is realizing how much "Elevation" and "Move On" suck. And how little this is an album you have to hear before you die.
Some truly great jammy playing on here accompanied by some truly horrific lyricism.
Very interesting listen. Doesn't sound too dissimilar to me to other artists on the stranger end of the folk/soul spectrum (like Bobbie Gentry, who we're not getting to on this list) but you can also see the seeds being planted for today's singer-songwriters (especially LDR to my ears?) too.
Not my favorite P-funk album but how can I resist anything that makes me shimmy my shoulders this much sitting down?
'Funny' how the repugnant song on here is the one called "Brown Sugar" and not the one called "Bitch".
It's not like there were a huge amount of album-length statements about this kind of Eurotrashy, late 90s dance music that I happen to really like so I'll take it. I wrote about it more elsewhere but I think this is way more noteworthy as an introduction to Stuart Price's excellent pop production work, probably best exemplified by Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor.
A front to back joy, and maybe one of the few times the interludes are what brings the album all together.
Heard War songs here and there of course but never listened to a full album. For some reason I thought they were way dubbier than this? Really enjoyed it though. Enjoyed the meandering, jazzier parts especially on tracks like "The World Is a Ghetto" more than I thought I would.
When GZA said "Iron Man be sippin' rum, out of Stanley cups", he was predicting the future
I knew "Shining Star" going into this and wasn't expecting a whole lot but out of all the funk albums we've been listening to this past week or so this one was by far my favorite. Great upbeat songs to lead off in the beginning before things get stranger towards the end, culminating with a great finale. Fuck it, it's a 5.
A classic? Undeniably. The beats? Amazing. To my ears, the vocal delivery of all 3 Beastie Boys? Still grating.
I've listened to Electric Warrior before, so I was expecting the same kind of crunchy glam rock, but this was way more psychedelic and interesting than I expected it to be. Don't see myself returning to it a lot but still very interesting.
I was expecting pretty straightforward 60s psych, and it's not *not* that but was shocked by the depth on this. The drumming alone stopped me in my tracks more than once! Once it was over, I already found myself returning to those first three songs again, wanting to soak it in again as soon as possible. And if anything, that's a good sign that fuck it, it's a five.
*sighing heavily* I do think I like the Karen O version of "Immigrant Song" better.
I have a tendency to like dense, referential songwriters. I also have a tendency to not like artists who work primarily in overly ambitious epics. Nick Cave is a dense, referential songwriter, and in spite of Ghosteen (which we'll get to) I think this is Nick Cave's biggest epic. It's Spiritualized exaggerated to their logical endpoint...but with more debauchery and more flute parts. Fuck it, it's a 5.
I think this is a great demonstration of Brian Jackson's talents as a keyboardist/pianist and Gil Scott-Heron's talents as a singer/someone who would've posted way too much on Twitter if he had been alive at the right time.
I feel like I wanted to like this way more than I did. However, I think my perceptions have been skewed by the fact we've listened to (relatively speaking) a lot of glam recently and I know who did it better.
Not my favorite by The Cure, but still a fascinating bridge between the chirpy post-punk they'd started with and the romantic goth epics they'd come to embody.
I never like how people use the word 'overrated'. Overrated should never refer to inherent quality; it's a metadiscursive term meant to situate any given piece of media in the context of how other people talk about it. For example, it wouldn't be correct to say "OK Computer is bad". However, it would be correct to say "OK Computer is one of the most overrated albums ever made".
I have a feeling I'm going to overrate the jazz selections because I don't listen to jazz that often, but come on. How could I not give a 5 to something that grooves as hard as this at the beginning and comes down with as lovely of an ambient section at the end at this?
I want to like the music of a guy who's as much of an idealist as this, but unfortunately he's no Woody Guthrie.
The purpose of this exercise isn't really to be objective, but even then I *really* can't be objective about this. "Zero" is one of my all time favorite songs, and as time has gone on I've warmed more and more to the ballads, which I initially didn't like when I heard this album years ago. Sort of funny the YYYs did a synthpop album one time at (what's now) the midpoint of their career and decided to never do that again. What's even funnier is how naturally it worked for them. Fuck it...
It's funny that no matter how boundary pushing the rock album is, if it came out around this time, you'll always hear the blues in it whether it's Sabbath or Stooges.
More focused than The Slider and with better songs. On this listen I get why Nick Cave loves "Cosmic Dancer" so much.
One of the few albums that brings back memories of where I was when I was listening to it for the first time: walking next to the Cannon River in Minnesota on a warming spring day, hearing the opening tuba pomp of “Motion Sickness” and being immediately entranced by how familiar and odd it was at the same time. Hot Chip weren’t the first example of a live band doing electronic music I’d ever heard before, but I hadn’t really heard anyone else do music like this. Of course, having listened to infinitely more music in the intervening 12 years (including a *lot* more Hot Chip), the sound itself is less novel, but the presentation seems more novel than ever. Just in the first three songs, you have the aforementioned tuba/arpeggiating synth of “Motion Sickness” leading into the thumping kicks of “How Do You Do?” leading into the bombastic R&B-pop of “Don’t Deny Your Heart”. Everyone loves “Flutes” for being probably one of the best buildups in dance music, and I like it a lot too, but I take greater pleasures in other moments: the slinky vocals of “These Chains”, the unique romanticism of “Let Me Be Him”. Around this time, I got into Hot Chip’s live act, and they still remain my favorite live band even I don’t really believe in my hyperlaudatory stance that they’re the best live band currently working anymore. That live show still influences my opinion of this album…but I still love this album deeply. I’m glad a lot of you really liked it, too.
Some songs sag in the middle for me but while others have acknowledged the obvious pastiche, it's like the campiest parts of Elton and the Bee Gees dialed up to 11. Or, in other words, I got to the end and thought "well I had a really good time with that!" which is all that matters. "Take Your Mama" is an all timer for me, as is the "Comfortably Numb" cover (idc), but Scissor Sisters wrote probably one of the greatest songs ever and it's not on this one. (and sadly that album is simply not as good.)
I like big, dumb, fun rock music, and this is pretty big, pretty dumb, and pretty fun.
sorry Miles but they can't all be winners for me.
In her 70s, Loretta Lynn embraced contemporary rock sounds from younger collaborators to make arguably the best album of her career. Johnny Cash did 80% of that.
I've been laughing at Teddy's review for like 3 days now but on the other hand........there's so few pure blues albums on this list and ****this**** is one of the ones they go with? I really wasn't sold on this album in general but knowing that this is one of, if not the token blues albums on this list, out of a genre that consciously or not influenced, idk, a solid 90% of the rock albums on this list, feels totally ridiculous. Like I just checked and not even The Fucking London Howlin' Wolf London Sessions is on this list! What are we doing here!
It's weird listening to music on YouTube. It's not like on Spotify or iTunes where the track delineations are part of the medium, differentiated by artist-uploaded 10-second GIFs for each song. It's not like on CD where on any given player sometimes all you see are just the track numbers. And it's not even on like vinyl, where nothing is labelled but the cracks will still you when something new is coming. YouTube albums are you to get lost in. And this is a great soundtrack to get lost in. Fuck it...
one of the biggest surprises for me so far from this project - I did not expect to like this as much as I did! That in spite of the fact that I had never really thought about the fact that "Shout" is fucking six and a half minutes long before!
The hard part with the argument you should separate the art from the artist is sometimes the art is about the artist, and in this case hoo boy is it really about the artist. It seems quaint now to think there was a time when Kanye’s biggest sin was disrupting the MTV Video Award to say Beyoncé had a better music video than Taylor Swift (and nobody remembers he did it to Justice for “We Are Your Friends” too! smh), but he was humiliated so badly by the public, the president, and Lady Gaga that he had to decamp to Hawaii to build up an insane mythos with an insane roster of collaborators about this album that’s kind of…well, you know. It’s a maximalist epic of assholery that somehow follows a hero’s journey from Chicago to getting lost in the rest of the world, an album about Kanye’s own narcissism that somehow ends with him *not* getting the last word. It is, as many others will hyperbolically but correctly attest to, Kanye’s best work as a producer and curator, with the grandiose arrangements and huge drums and mental breakdown-induced vocal panning being matched only by how huge the guest list is. (Do you remember that La Roux sings harmony on “All of the Lights”? Now you do!) Lyrically, some of the jokes and references are tired, but there’s still great details throughout: the devil in the Chrysler LeBaron, different exotic fishes, you love me for me; could you be more phony? In the end, Kanye (mostly) takes responsibility for his faults and comes close to something of an epiphany, which makes everything that came afterwards of course more tragic and baffling and angering. Of course, this album didn’t end up being Kanye’s third act, and every move since has been in one way or another a hard right turn. I haven’t really enjoyed Kanye’s music since The Life of Pablo, and I absolutely haven’t enjoyed watching him turn into an avatar of bigotry. But, for better or worse, he made this album I still love about kicking and screaming against forgiveness, and still getting it anyway.
no thanks!
What struck me today was how in retrospect a lot of this album's apocalyptic political messaging becomes a metaphor for the more troubling aspects of Gaye's personal life. I had to stop in my tracks for a moment after really listening to "Don't go talking about my father, God is my friend". The use of uplifting music to mask, misdirect, or emphasize pain (personal or political) is nothing new, but this has to be one of the most consistent, well-executed examples of it.
honestly want to give The Rolling Stones credit for being so brave as to open and close this album with the two platonic ideals of rock songs and then put a bunch of nonsense filler in the middle
I love this album because I too, am waiting for a guy to come and take me by the hand, make me feel the pleasures of another man
It's great that we got Joy Division and The Fall back to back! Joy Division singlehandedly originated all the post-punk of today I love, and The Fall singlehandedly originated all the post-punk of today I hate.
Let's get annoyingly technical. When I've listened to this album in the past, I've just listened to the first two songs since that's what appeared on the original LP version. Easy 5. This time I listened to all 4 songs on Spotify which were on the CD reissue. To be honest, I thought about deducting a point for how long the sax solo on "Observation No Crime" dragged out, but then "Mistake" came on and it's now 5. So, mathematically, where does that leave us? Well, I'm not taking points off of perfection just because a guy played a saxophone just a few seconds too long for my taste.
Every once in a while I like to remind myself I do like folk music that isn't annoyingly drawn out and placid.
why the hell did Salaam Remi want her to sound like Alicia Keys so badly
I said I like big, dumb, fun rock music, and this is certainly that. Loses me slightly near the end but it's also crazy that it opens with an extremely famous guitar solo??
Unknown Pleasures' weirder, somehow gloomier cousin. Absolutely worth it for all time goth banger (?) "The Eternal".
Mazzy Star's whole thing makes sense now.
this guy sucked ass. I enjoyed listening to this a lot. It is very funny to hear people screaming "Jerry! Jerry! Jerry" in the most German ass accents imaginable.
At any given moment, the percussion from "Poor Leno" is just rattling around in my brain.
The greatest artistic achievement ever made by cocaine.
"Reviewing Nothing's Shocking for Rolling Stone, Steve Pond praised Jane's Addiction as "the true heir to Led Zeppelin" and called the album "simultaneously forbidding and weighty, delicate and ethereal", while also distinctly more "hardheaded and realistic" in sensibility than Led Zeppelin's music." bzzt wrong!!
This album still blows my mind a little bit every time I listen to it.
important to remind yourself from time to time that Joni Mitchell does, in fact, have the bangers.
The Beatles were so advanced that "Why Don't We Do It in the Road" predicted everything Electric Six did
This isn't so much a "Fuck it, it's a 5" so much as it is a "I don't give a fuck what anybody else thinks, it's a 5."
It's kind of surprising this came out the same year as Love Changes did because this already sounds like a bridge between 60s psychedelia and the rest of the rock that would come in the 70s. But regardless: the front is a bit less compelling than the first half, but wow "Revelation" goes crazy in about 8 different ways.