I came back to this after a long break, and I was a preteen when it came out so didn't really get it at the time. It speaks to me now with adult ears, and reminds me of my own time as a teen where escape from a restrictive set of norms and an abusive parent seemed incredibly important. I think it's sitting with me differently partly because a lot of this is songs about what it feels like to be told who you are by people and a society that prefer to interact with a stereotype than a complex human in a real way.
Take Come As You Are. Simplistically it is come as you are, be yourself. But "as you are, as you were, as I want you to be" is a neatly satirical twist in the tail and, as is common of my experience in repressive situations, is a demand wearing the mask of welcome. Kurt's welcome appears to be real, but reflects a fairly abusive society. Ironically the song seems even more relevant now in the falsity of those personas than it did then, given that both that and the coming "as a trend" line seem to reflect Kurt's distate for curated selves that are not self-actuated but driven by societal norms. This song feels actively relevant to me in an age of performative identities.
Lithium is the centrepiece, and it's bipolar both musically and lyrically to an extent that makes it slightly painful to listen to. It lifts and it kills the energy, and is for me, in the end, an exercise in the remaining black shadow that always undercuts the happy parts even when presenting happiness. It sits really interestingly with so repeatedly saying that it's hard to have real interactions in many of the other tracks.
Then there's Polly, which is the bleakest track on the record both in terms of the humanity and the mundanity of the captor singing softly and self-centredly about his casual approach to abuse.
Territorial Pissings is the blunt instrument. Reading around this, I see Cobain said he saw macho men treating sex and power the way animals mark territory, and he wanted them strung up by their balls with Valerie Solanas stapled to their bodies. It's not subtle, and that's just as it should be. I like that the album has a stance that is not mealy mouthed, just in the same way that In Bloom is a frank rejection of unthinking singing the lyrics without engagement. The production is more poppy rock than punk, but the attitude was still there.
So In Bloom rejects people who sing with a lack of engagement with what's said, Come as You Are reflects falsity and a lack of engagement with the real interpersonally, Polly explicitly presents an abuser who doesn't care about the pain of his captive, and Lithium deals with the ever present pain of depression that is uncomfortable and masked in a wider society. Stay Away is the coda. The poison skin armour is also saying you can't let anyone close, and so there's an isolated prisoners' dilemma where even Kurt keeps people distant due to his own hurt and repeats the cycle somewhat. It is, at heart, a very sad record.
The album, frankly, sounds like like permission to name what's been done to you and how you feel combined with a rejection of people who refuse to engage with the real. It was true to itself, and it remains true because the things it engages with are fairly timeless.
I'm really glad I came back to this, the album is great. And, ironically, it is indeed catchily and relatively commercially produced; like Outkast and In Bloom say, a lot of people don't want to feel it, they just want to dance.
The catchy songs didn't have anything to say, and the frilly songs weren't pretty enough to catch me as folk rock. For me this fell slightly tediously between two stools.
Not terrible. Terrible would imply it was more interesting than it was.
I thought that this had musicianship, and it had musical structure. I technically understand the quality of the solos. But a good album should have a little bite in my view, and this didn't do that. Steve Howe is on occasion strikingly technically good, and I'd have liked to hear a little more complexity from him. I guess I might get that in the later Yes albums when they come up.
I don't know why, but I'd also thought it would be more of a concept album. A Venture is an odd relatively normal single in the middle for unknown reasons, and sticks out.
A slight tech demo of an album, and quite forgettable after the sensation of listening to it passed.
Odd to listen to this the day after Dolly passed. I've heard this many a time in the past.
The first track is just an absolute stone cold cold classic, and the second track is almost a little bluegrassy and fun in the rhythms (and I don't often like a clip clop beat). In general it's a pleasingly pure album in how stripped back it is, and that leaves space for Dolly's really pleasing lyrics and narratives. Oddly, this is so lyric and narrative forward that it felt a little like country beat poetry to me. In, to be clear, a good way.
There's some filler tracks on there; in particular I could take or leave Mystery of the Mystery (strikingly, that and If I Lost My Mind are Porter Wagoner songs, not Dolly).
None of that keeps it from being a five: it's bold, plain about its intent, and confident enough to leave space for her voice and her stories. On some days, and maybe especially on a day like this, that's more than enough.
Also it's Dolly, so suck it.
Listening to this again on headphones before writing, because it's so good. I kept expecting it to feel dated before listening. It doesn't. The production is stripped back, raw, unmistakably early 90s New York, and even with multiple producers credited across the tracklist, it really feels a cohesive sound that's bare enough via the piano loops and drums to ensure that each element serves the lyricism rather than overwhelming it.
I think that makes it feel timeless is, ironically, its specificity. Nothing dates faster than a setting that tries to feel universal by being vaguely contemporary, but this is a record that names specific corners, times, and addresses. Nas isn't trying to speak for everyone, he's telling a story from an exact time and place, and that groundedness is what keeps it from aging. More than the technical brilliance of the verses, which are extraordinary, this feels as authentic as Nas ever sounded. He's done more complex work since, but this will always be my favourite.
NYC is a character here; most obviously in NY State of Mind, but in a way oddly similar to Simon and Garfunkel, much of this is about the feeling of being together but alone in the city. NYSoM is almost a documentary in verse. I lose track of time living in the world it's in when listening, especially in the narrative sections. And that documentary quality extends across the record. The production mirrors it: nothing plush, nothing polished past recognition, just the sound of a place captured honestly.
It's also restrained in ways I appreciate more now. He's confident enough not to need to tell you repeatedly that he's good, he just shows you. There's a quiet loneliness in One Love, a hard-won pride in Represent, and a maturity running through the whole thing that I didn't fully register when I was younger and just vibing to the beats and flow (which are, on their own terms, pretty flawless). Coming back to it after years of engaging with denser, more intricate lyricism has been rewarding in ways I didn't expect. Not because this lacks complexity, but because that complexity is woven into something that still feels like it serves a lived experience and story rather than confected puffery.
Nas is also real enough not to have to repeatedly tell you he's real.
I feel like I should be good at finding things to love in this. I like the Beatles, and like some of the folk of the same time. I feel like it's a bit of failure on my side, possibly, but it's ultimately quite fogettable to me.
Starstruck is at least catchy.
Hands down the greatest blues album I've heard. Astonishingly good.
A slightly odd grabbag of songs - you can hear proto-punk and cockney knees-up at the same time as warming up to post-Yellow Submarine. I felt like it's an album best listened to intoxicated, but I'm sure they'd say the same so no complaints there. Too variable in quality to quite be a 4, but an extremely solid 3. Whatever else I'd say about it, it felt fresh and surprised me. I like that.
I feel this really suffered for being given to me the day after BB King Live at the Regal. This is vaguely bluesy soft rock that doesn't compare well to proper blues, rock or pop. I found it quite hard to care about.
I loved the light and shade of these songs and of the album as a whole, and I think it's an album where it's worth looking at both.
Starting at Scarborough Fair/Canticle, the ballad Simon recorded inherits a structure of deliberately impossible demands: the seamless shirt, the acre between the salt water and the sea strand. These are countered in kind, a negotiation with no exit. And the variant he drew from Martin Carthy's arrangement is the one where the tasks stay unmet: permanent stalemate, not resolution. Laid against the Canticle's unremembered dead and released in October 1966, it feels to me like an allegory of an unwinnable war. Soldiers given impossible strategic objectives while the serene surface of the song and the beauty of the landscape continues over the graves.
Patterns feels like the album's most rigorous piece of thinking. The narrator walks a garden at dawn and finds the mind descending grooves cut before it: thoughts follow a pattern "set" years before, love arrives when a random turn intersects the maze's law, and even resistance to the pattern is the pattern. The verse structure enacts the thesis. It is a love song written by someone who believes in determinism and therefore feels like a song about surrender disguised as courtship. As a companion to "Scarborough Fair" it inverts rather neatly: there, desire fails because the tasks are impossible; here, desire succeeds because it was never a choice.
The Dangling Conversation is really a marriage autopsy conducted in real time: they have separate intellectual lives, and the couple mistakes shared furniture for shared life. They are "like a desultory breeze" stirring nothing. The song's daring is that it indicts the literate class by name: cultured people who analyse everything and address nothing (he said, also intellectualising this review). I am struck that it's written by a man in his twenties, which makes its poise a little unnerving when looking at a marriage that mistakes giving a present of oneself for merely giving one's presence.
7 O'Clock News / Silent Night. The album's other Vietnam statement and, I would argue, the climax and the most explicit focus of the album's quiet horror. "Silent Night" sung against a newscast of casualties, riots, and escalating war that means the beauty is steadily overrun. Where "Scarborough Fair" buries its dead beneath a courtship song, this one buries the beauty beneath the telling.
Flowers Never Bend With the Rainfall feels like a bookend to "Patterns": the dreamer who insists on seeing "only what my eyes want to see" while the daylight self watches, faintly appalled. It is, to me, about the cost of idealism charged to the person idealised: the flowers do not bend but break.
A Poem on the Underground Wall is the other highlight. It feels to me like plants managing to grow through the concrete. A scrawler has imposed themselves into the machine's order, demanding humanity from its corridor. It is the shortest song on the album and made me smile at that insistence on expression over top-down order. That insistence is genuinely radical, and unusual for such a pretty record.
The album alternates serene surfaces and sad underpinnings so consistently that the sequencing itself starts to resemble the more explicit messaging of the first and final track. Given how satisfying I found that and how well both the beauty and the creeping dread are executed, it's a plain 5/5.
So great. I oddly thought that Orbital - despite having known various songs from them before this - were going to provide me with the copious use of a high filter and a sudden baseline. To say the stupidest thing possible, this was surprisingly and pleasingly musical. Oddly almost Balearic in spots with how chill it was, but much less commercial and more interesting. It's always a pleasure to be surprised.
