What a classic to start with. I remember the cassette version on my old TEAC tape deck on my crappy 3-way hifi speakers, borrowed from the local library. Only S&G could get away with El Condor Pasa right after BoTW...
I don't get the cultural significance. Hm, make this project 1000 albums you'll need to listen to.
My love towards Talking Heads came with their first live album collection and I quickly expanded my listening-in to the regular studio records. In my opinion their best album during their formative early years, before they went massively mainstream with "Road to Nowhere" and "Stop making sense".
Yeah, Prog Rock! What a fan I have been in my time in the early 80ies. Always more drawn to the Genesis / Pink Floyd / Yes / King Crimson. I tapped into Rush occasionally but it was sort of too technical for me. Rush always came across like an act where virtuosity came before songcraft. Relistening today just confirmed it, 40 years later.
Growing up in Germany in the 80ies was constantly accompanied by ZZ Top. They first appeared on the radar when they headlined the legendary Rockpalast concert nights in Essen, televised all over Europe. A new style of Blues Rock, celebrated with an unforgiving drive forward. Eliminator then catapulted the band into the MTV area, and you could be sure that every music video delivered. At that time, I was fully into rock myself with my own bands and music startup, and ZZ Top was a band you gratefully stole from, whether it were licks, riffs, titles, stories or sounds. To say it in ABBA's words: Thank you for the music!
Does anyone remember "cut-outs"? Those were deeply discounted longplayers with, well, cut-outs in the covers to mark them as discounted. Instead of shelling over the typical 15 - 20 Deutschmark for standard LPs, you bought the real good ones (say, Supertramp's Crisis What Crisis?) for 10 Deutschmarks (we are beaming back into the late 70ies here). On the low cost end were bands like "Ace" (famous for their "How long" hit and their singer Paul Carrack) and, tataah, WAR. As memory serves me, almost the complete WAR catalogue was on available in the cutout shelves.
They seem to hold a cultural significance to make it onto the 1001 list, but the reasons fail me. In other word, not my type of beer. I'll wait for Marvin Gaye or Isaac Hayes to hand over four stars.
In the early Eighties, there were synth gurus like Keith Emerson, Tony Banks and maybe Jean-Michelle Jarre. And there were synth gods. Kraftwerk showed the world that another world was possible. It took ten years to make it into the mainstream when full electronic bands like Depeche Mode or Heaven 17 broke through. But it all started here, on the German fuxxing Autobahn.
Some artists have not aged well. This is one of them. Sorry to say, but Tim Buckley's presence is overbearing and his singing style theatrical. I had to stop after five songs.
And on the reverse (after calling Tim Buckley outdated), Aretha Franklin shows that a record can spend 55 years on a turntable and still sound fresh. But, man, what about those fades?
I have to avoid writing "classic" in each and every review. This one surely is in the realm of the 90ies Indie music. It's a solid album, has its place in musical history, but for me personally, Beck always was too experimental, inconsistant, and not enough mainstream to really, really like him. Kind of like what Prince was for R&B, he did for alternative music.
One of those albums I put on during a rainy-day's breakfast, playing in the background. And that's a compliment! The Chairman did create a lot of great albums during his creative years in the 50ies and 60ies, but this one surely beats them all.
Smith is one of those artist that everyone seems to love. Everyone except me that is. I got "Miss Misery", but the rest of his oevre sounded to experimental, mish-mashy and wishy-washy to me. I still wait for my Nick Drake moment where I'll discover him and then love him to death.
Green Day has its place in rock's history, but was never one of my favorites (compared to, say, Nirvana, Bush or Foo Fighters). Not my style.
Yeah, she's the real deal. I sometimes put her on non-stop listening for a whole evening and I never grow tired of her voice and intonation.
I am not a big fan of live recordings. Van Morrison's "middle" period is my favorite (around the time of "No Method No Guru") and this one had been a bit before. It's alright in my ears, but not more.
How I loved that album when it came out at the height of the Manchester craze. It aged a little, as it was a product of its time. Well, I reconsider. Compared to, say, Happy Mondays, it has hold up well!
