🔸Madagascar Fish-eagle , drums
🔸Crested Serpent-eagle, bass
🔸Spanish Imperial Eagle, lead guitar
🔸Verreaux's Eagle, theremin
🔸Pallas's Fish-eagle, blow
🔸Bald Eagle, passive aggressive notes on the fridge
"Regular concert goers judged that the best sound balance was usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles away from the stage, whilst the musicians themselves played their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stayed in orbit around the planet - or more frequently around a completely different planet.
Many worlds have now banned their act altogether, sometimes for artistic reasons, but most commonly because the band's public address system contravenes local strategic arms limitations treaties."
Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
1980
This album is inextricably linked in my mind to spending weeks painting the walls and ceiling of the house (Resene sea fog, a versatile white with a hint of grey, best used with muted rather than bright colours) with Resene Alabaster trim (a near white with a light blackened edge) to cover up the original greeny brown shades of tahini and drab olive. Seriously, were the former owners colour blind? The interior looked so much brighter and fresher once we'd finished and would still look pretty contemporary today.
The Johnny Cash album didn't make the task any more enjoyable, and yet we kept playing it. If it were just Personal Jesus and Hurt then this would be 5 stars, but some of those other covers are abysmal.
So, 1 🖤 each for those two songs but nothing for the rest.
I hate Frank Sinatra. It doesn't surprise me that he was a swinger.
Yick. These dudes are bad, not in a good bad way, but as in actually bad. I will forget I ever heard this.
I liked it, although my attention wandered in the second half.
The sort of music men in the '70s sang along to instead of talking about how they were feeling. The songs are alternately mawkish and filled with crushing despair, but at a distance of more than fifty years a lot of it sounds like parody.
The ballady ones are the best.
Original recording had another sixteen songs but they were sung so low that only elephants and blue whales could hear them, so they were never released.
Such an iconic cover photo.
What's on Bob's mind? Is he sad? Is he angry? Has he forgotten where he parked the TARDIS?
I believe this is the moment he thought up the line "her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls" and is saying to himself, Bob, that slaps.
Surprisingly, this is pretty good. Half a point off for too much harmonica and another half for going on too long (I'm looking at you Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands - her eyes were sad because Bob just wouldn't stop singing and she had to get up for work in the morning).
I have no idea what these guys are up to, but they clearly do. Smokin'
More than 35 years on this album is still blowing the roof off and busting shit up. In your face politically, poetically and rhythmically.
Truly, it takes a nation of minions
Well that was unexpected. Five or songs of slightly dull tinkly piano jazz and then he whips out the drum machine and launches into a criminally embarrassing white boy rap. Why did no one stop him. Paul, think of the children! Sadly it was pretty much downhill from there.
Marie Kondo says this does not spark joy, so off it goes in a box to the hospice shop.
Unremarkable guitar rock that might work as a soundtrack for a Magnum PI reboot.
I'm not going to listen to this because life's too short. Instead I'd like to apologise to Einstürzende Neubauten for rating their truly awful album so low. I feel that was a knee-jerk reaction and that's exactly what they wanted.
I still don't want to listen to them but I'm giving them ⭐⭐⭐⭐ for fully committing to their uncompromising vision. Respect.
Annoying, pretentious, boring twaddle.
Suffocating.
Amazingly, despite my huge caché of indie hipster cred, I have never listened to a The Fall album.
Aside from a few songs, all I know about them is:
• They were kind of legendary and
• They made about 16 million albums and
• They had more band members than The Chills and
• Mark E Smith's singular voice and phrasing
• Liking The Fall made one unapproachably cool
I really enjoyed this, apart from that one song where he attempted to sing. I don't know what any of it's about or what it all means, but really, one may ask why is the sky blue?*. It seems to hit its stride in the second half of the album but it all sounds like a good time.
*Rayleigh scattering (the predominantly elastic scattering of light, or other electromagnetic radiation, by particles with a size much smaller than the wavelength of the radiation. Thanks, Lord Raleigh)
Yeah, nah. I actually ended up listening to the Datsuns instead.
NZ 1 - Sweden 0
The eighties called, and it wants to party!
I give this five big beats on the drum machine and a gated snare.
So clean. So efficient. So Teutonic.
So pulsey. So bleepy. And a bit Jean-Michel Jarrey.
It must have been absolute hell to program all those loops, thumps and squiggles into a coherent whole in 1978. Thank Gott they persisted and birthed the next four decades of techno, culminating in the Flight of the Conchords parody/tribute of Die Roboter. The loop is complete.
For the full retro-futuristic effect I highly recommend listening to the German version. So viel Spaß!
I quickly ran out of patience and turned it off early. There's just no weight to any of it.
"MEDIOCRE!"
-Immortan Joe
Not very good. I kept thinking they sound like Fugazi, only worse. So I listened to some Fugazi, and they weren't much better, to be honest. Apart from their song Waiting Room, which is quite fun when performed by those music camp kids on YouTube.
Mostly Disturbingly bland. And then...
Dear god, the falsetto on What Else Could it be? At least it broke up the uneasy listeningness.
Oh god, the falsetto's back on the next one.
Petrified florist (great song title) and butcher boy are far more interesting and now I'm wondering whether the album is actually a cryptic work of genius that exists beyond the understanding of mere mortals.
Was the obviously very sincere Mr Chop playing five dimensional aural chess. What does it all mean? Is there some metatextual greatness underpinning the entire endeavour? Probably not.
Bowie, flaming lips, that Britpop band whose name I can't remember, oh, and let's make everything louder than everything else. Some of it was ok, but mostly just fatiguing.
Yep, it's definitely jazz.
"I yearn for Amsterdam, where killer robots hide in the canals🎶"
I watch approvingly from under my berét, the grey curl of smoke from my Gitanes mingling with the surly waiter's insouciantly smoldering Galuoises, as I signal him over to bring me another Pernôd. The music brings back memories of ma chère douce Aurélie and a single tear trickles down my cheek.
But no matter, who can mourn lost love while listening to such dramatic rolling of the r's! I call for another Côintrèaú and nibble on my bagûette and çamembért and larks' tongues.
The song ends and the crowd roars its approval. I leap to my feet with the others and throw my petanqúe bôulès in the air.
VIVE LA FRANCAIS!
VIVE LA MUSIQUE!
VIVE L'AMOUR!
Top 10 fun facts about Eric Clapton:
1. Eric Clapton steals candy from babies.
2. Eric Clapton stole a time machine disguised as a guitar case and used it to go back to the early 20th Century and claim to invent the blues.
3. He claims his famous "Layla" riff was inspired by a secret recipe for the world’s best nachos, which he stole off an unknown Mexican street food vendor.
4. There’s a comet named after him that only appears every time he releases a new album, and everyone who looks at it goes blind.
5. Eric Clapton regularly holds underwater concerts in a secret underwater venue, where he collaborates with dolphins who provide vocal harmonies before shooting them with a harpoon gun.
6. He reportedly recorded a song with an extraterrestrial being who visited Earth specifically to learn the blues.
7. Eric Clapton once participated in a reality show about rock stars living in a tiny house, where he won by boring the other contestants to death.
8. He holds the world record for the longest sustained D note played on a guitar (16,000 hours and 12 minutes), after which he burned down a retirement home.
9. Eric Clapton auditioned for the part of Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter films but was rejected as being too sinister.
10. His guitar once tried to bite him.
Very much enjoying the Brazilian electronic grooves. I'm surprised this wasn't on high rotate in the cooler Auckland cafes in the late 90's. Or maybe it was and I'm less cool than I thought I was 🤔
4½/5
I tried, but I think I drifted off somewhere around the seven hour mark. Five and a half hours later when I started paying attention again Prince was still bouncing his indefatigable purple booty off all the walls and having marathon sex sessions with everything in sight. The poster child for ADHD and short man syndrome.
While I didn't immediately hate it, by the time it had finished I really wanted to drown them in a bathtub. Definitely not my cup of the hot and steaming.
Kate Bush has been running with the wolves and sharing her singular vision with them. Powerful and sublime, often deeply odd, never less than a masterpiece.
Take off my shoes and throw them in the lake!
Bit of a mixed bag. Some songs were better than I expected, some were let down by the songwriting. Consistently great singing and musicianship.
Hey Solomon! Get your ass down to the studio and holler into this tin can we've wired to this wax cylinder.
For some reason every time this album gets reissued the number of tracks on it doubles. It's been growing exponentially since 1979 and currently the number of songs is equal to the number of grains of sand on an average length beach. In order to listen to the whole thing before they die of old age, fans have been reduced to listening to hundreds or even thousands of the songs at once on specially adapted gramophones. The good thing is this often produces sounds that you can see and taste and is referred to the Multiple E. Smith effect.
But be warned! It's not a live album despite what the title may suggest. And we never find which witch came top in the trials and carried off the coveted golden broomstick award. Disappointing.
Ah, here we are in Paris. The Great War has ended. Come sit with me in this little bistro just off Rue Américain and tell me tales of German imperialism and la musique de la monde...
Boyz II Menu:
Starter:
▪️John kale soup dragons garnished with Elvis parsley
Main:
🔸k. d. langoustine
Side dishes:
🔹Alan parsnips project
🔹Death cabbage for cutie
🔹My chemical romaine lettuce
🔹Bruce spring bean
🔹Brian Eno ki mushroom
🔹De la salsify
🔹Godley and creamed korn
🔹Fiona Apple Corrs
🔹Nat King Coleslaw
Drinks list:
▫️Coctail twins
▫️Kool-ade & the gang
▫️Flat white stripes
▫️Panic! at the pisco sour
Bon appetit!
At this stage in history, approximately four hundred years after Paul McCartney first picked up a mediaeval bass and plucked the first notes to Love Me Do the Beatles music has become like the Earth's background radiation: ubiquitous, only detectable with specialised equipment, and giving rise to small genetic mutations in fruit flies. Birds use their songs to navigate their way back to the north pole each year. The English have eighty different words to describe the feeling of listening to a Beatles song, whereas the Japanese only have seventeen. Is this the best album of all time? It's impossible to say. It has always been here and will always be here. It is as much a part of us as we are of it.
Sometimes an album deserves more than just a cursory listen, and continues to get better over time. Sometimes you listen to half of the album and then turn it off.
Guess which this is.
He's called Q-Tip because his songs get stuck in your ears. The more I listen to this the more I like it. Jazzy, funky, the mix of in-studio instruments and samples, lyrical and nimble rapping, what more could you want? Groovy bass playing? Check. Phat beats? Check. A good time from start to finish? Check.
Funk as puck 🤘
Yeah, that was fun, but didn't The Buzzcocks do it all twenty years earlier?
One star for sweet child o mine being able to instantly transport me back to 1989, when this song was inescapable. A very Proustian moment.
The rest of it, ugh. All that testosterone, long sweaty hair, preposterous rawk n raunch, oh those LA bad boys. Plus, Axle is a complete arse.
A concept album about being a cool indie L.A. band.
The 1970's were a very fruitful period in Bowie's career. Not only did he, in collaboration with famous NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, solve Fermat's second last theorem and confirm Einstein's conjectures about space-time, he also developed the field of cryptography which would eventually allow him to amass a fortune in Bitcoin.
His future assured, Bowie was able to focus his considerable talents in other areas such as developing pinball machines and science fiction writing. In just six weeks he created the epic pinball game Dune, and the equally epic spinoff book under the pseudonym Frank Herbert.
This album is not the soundtrack for that book. Instead, reading very carefully between the lines, it tells the tragic tale of his doomed 1974 love affair with an East German bagel baker. Sadly, the Wall came between them and Hans the baker was killed when the escape tunnel he was digging with a spatula collapsed on top of him.
I like a bit of chamber music...
torture chamber music!
(ba-dum tish)
Not actually that awful. I was expecting something far worse. After he left the band the lead singer had quite a successful solo career in R&Bbq.
The intro was such a traumatonasty that I couldn't listen to the test of it.
Not bad. Not bad at all, apart from that super creepy last song.
Having the vocals only on one channel was a little disconcerting, like Paul or John was sitting on a little stool in the corner of the room. Ringo, what are you doing way over in the other corner? Are you sulking? Did you boys have another tiff?
Random thoughts:
It amuses me to refer to the album as R. Soul
It's a shame that when the Beatles were dabbling in computer graphics in early 1970 Ringo was in the pub with Keith Moon when they invented the .jpg format.
More like reheated chips. Fairly unremarkable retreads of 80's synth bands a la New Order, Erasure, Depeche Mode et al, only not quite as good and emptier.
Still, it was pleasantly inoffensive music to listen to while weeding the greenhouse. And I discovered where thosev sneaky chickens had been laying their eggs recently. Unfortunately they were well past their use-by date, a lot like Hot Chip.
It was ok, but far too long.
Roger, wilco.
Once we get the big hits out of the way this quickly becomes very very boring and infested with 80's saxophone. Dire indeed.
Gosh, I've had my first genuine "dad" reaction to one of these 1001 albums:
You call this music? You can't seriously want to listen to this rubbish! Play something with a tune!
And stop hanging out with those long haired louts you call friends, wasting your time when you could be doing something constructive with your life! I'm warning you, if you don't shape up pretty smartly I'm marching you down to the army recruiting office. They'll make a man of you!
The Stooges: pissing off the older generation for 50 years.
One day in the late summer of 1976 Julian Cope and his friend Feargal Sharkey (from the Australian band Cold Chisel, not the Irish rock star turned astrophycist) were fishing for Patagonian toothfish on the banks of the slightly rank smelling Mersey when Julian turned to Feargal and said "One day I'm going to be bigger than the Beatles."
Feargal grunted non-committally in an Antipodean way and lobbed another empty spray can at a passing kayaker. "Jumped up tosser", he muttered quietly to himself.
Just then an enormous tug on Julian's line dragged him off the bank and into the murky waters. In his panic he let go of his line and thrashed around near the bottom of the river. When he finally made his way to the top and clambered gasping up the bank he was grasping a strangely gleaming object in his grubby little fist.
Feargal looked around with interest. He felt a strange compulsion to take the shiny thing from Julian. "What is it, Julian my love? Give it to us, precious, it's my birthday."
"It's mine, Feargal. You can't have it" snarled Julian. It suddenly seemed very important that Feargal didn't get the shiny thing. He shoved him hard into the water and reached down to hold Feargal's head under. Feargal grabbed his arms and dragged him in. There was a mighty splashing and thrashing and both men disappeared beneath the greasy film of scum.
After a minute or so one man emerged and hauled himself dripping up the bank. Covered in filthy slime and strangely coloured industrial waste, it was impossible to tell who it was.
Four years later someone calling themselves Julian Cope formed The Teardrob Explodes and recorded the album Kilimanjaro to rave reviews. Mega stardom followed, with all the attendant curses of fame: the groupies, the drugs, the rehab, the excess, the fabulous clothes.
On his death bed he whispered one last thing before he expired...
"My Precioussssss....."
Auto tune
Claire de lune
Dark side
Of the moon
Billy Joel
She's lost control
Corporate rock
Rubber Soul
E-Z-E
The Oh Sees
Napalm Death
Screaming Trees
Blurry Face
Picked up the pace
Rita Hayworth
Gave good face
33 rpm
God bless R.E.M.
sophisticated
Minutemen
Psycho Killer
Album filler
Browser wars
Fake Gorillaz
Deep thoughts
Parquet Courts
Now who's wearing
Denim shorts
Ride on time
Number eight
Come as you are
Don't be late
Nonsense reviews
blue suede shoes
Kacey Musgraves
I give her two
The stage explodes in light as you step out in front of the crowd. The noise swells to a roar, they're chanting U2! U2! U2! They're screaming your name, although that's not quite how you pronounce it. You stride in your godlike leather trousers to the front of the stage and spread your legs in a godlike pose, open your arms wide as if to embrace the heaving masses below, and somehow look even more godlike.
You pause, drinking in the adulation and the energy. You can feel the planet spinning beneath you at 1000mph and spread your legs even further apart to brace against it. You reach, godlike, into the sky and feel the Earth's magnetic currents sparking off your fingertips. You send your feet, godlike through the stage and into the ground below and speed along the underground networks, growing, dividing, out around the world until you can feel the pull and push of the tectonic plates. You are a god. A seagull incautiously flies above the stage. With a twitch of your eyebrow you send it spiralling into the queue for beer. You feel immortal.
You glance to your right. There stands The Edge, real name Edgbaston Molloy. He looks at you expectantly, like a trained hound ready for his master's nod. To your left, bass guitar slung low and quivering slightly, The Adam, real name Adam. His face tightens as he feels your eyes on him.
Behind you, neck muscles tensing, sits Larry Mullen Jr, real name Laribaldi Mullen, ready to attack the drums arrayed in front of him.
They are your fearsome angels and you are their lord. You are Bongo. You are U2. You are the saviour of rock n roll. You are the dawn. You are the night sky. You are the stuff of the cosmos itself. You were there at the big bang. You can hear the melody of the heavens.
You roar the opening words of the first song. The crowd roars back. They are yours for the next hour and twenty minutes, one ecstatic writhing mass. They are still screaming your name, again with that strange pronunciation.
Two songs in and you notice the crowd's energy waning. They're sitting down and chatting amongst themselves. A small group has gathered driftwood to start a campfire and is roasting marshmallows. One young woman to the side is reading D.H. Lawrence. A group at the back in leotards is having a yoga session. The seagull you brought down earlier has revived and is sipping a guava saison at a pop-up poetry slam. A man wanders on stage and asks if you want a herbal tea.
Edgbaston has unplugged his mighty Fender von Rickenbacker and is quietly strumming an inoffensive tune on a borrowed acoustic. Laribaldi has gone for a wee lie down. Adam sips his herbal tea.
You stop singing and drop to your knees. No-one notices.
Why didn't Sue just change his name?
Butch, Zeus, Odin, Killer, Knuckles, Warlock are all good manly man's names. This ode to toxic masculinity hasn't aged well.
Best thing about this album is it's length.
Psi & G-Funk go punk! Ha, not really, apart from ripping through twelve songs in 28 minutes. And they're not fast songs either, which is a bit of a two finger attitude. So, quite punk after all.
I'm sure there's some sort of narrative to the album, from sipping barley wine at Scarborough Fair to tripping balls and taking to lampposts on 59th Street, meeting Bob Dylan along the way.
An album my mother and I could listen to together, and that's not meant in a derogatory way.
If you need me I'll be over here in the corner clutching my pearls.
Doctor! Ya gotta help me! My legs won't stop twitching! And I think it's spreading to the rest of my body... lookit my fingers!
I see. They appear to have an uncontrollable rhythmic clicking. My goodness me! Your head has now developed bopping motions! This is serious! You have an advanced case of Afro-Cuban jazz! It's highly contagious and there's no cure.
What can I do? I'm too young for Afro-cubanism.
*Sobs*
*bops*
*hops*
*flip-flops*
*scats*
This is the best I can do I'm afraid... Take two Brat Summers and call me in the morning.
Today's lunch: Kumara sourdough sandwich with slices of smoked cheddar, mushroom and red pepper, cooked in the sandwich press until the cheese was melting and oozing out the sides. Could have used some rocket or spinach, but out was delicious nonetheless. 4½ out of 5.
This album though? It's the worst one yet. Awful "singing". Facile, whiny, homophobic, misogynistic lyrics.
-5/5
Can someone please draw me a picture of the band on tour about to be picked up from their hotel. I want to see Eddy Van Halen hailin' the Van Halen van (with apologies to Stephen Fry).
About 18 minutes into the first album
